Petty Magic

by Camille DeAngelis

  YOU COULDN’T think about how useful your work might have been in ending the war, or how many lives were spared through your intervention, because then you’d have to face the truth of all you couldn’t do. Millions of people suffered and died all over the world, and to think that without us perhaps we might have lost a million more is no comfort. This magic, these powers—what good were they?

  A lot or none at all, depending on the day. Even at my age I can recall that first heady thrill of my adolescence, discovering my birthright: growing wings for the first time and flying all the way to the sea and back, which from Blackabbey is a good forty minutes’ drive; and even then I was rather preoccupied with looking older or younger. On one occasion I convinced my mother (for a good three minutes anyway) that I was the headmistress of my day school, an ordinary woman sixty years of age, come to recommend me for early promotion to the eighth grade.

  Being what we are makes our limitations all the more frustrating. You come to the realization, on the brink of womanhood, that you’re just a bird in a larger cage.

  THE SECOND mission to France was probably the happiest time I spent in SOE. This time there were four of us: Jonah, the organizer; Marcel, a radio operator recruited from the Free French; Fisher, an American demolitions expert who knew all of about five words en français; and yours truly, the “aider and abettor,” a girl Friday and the other six days as well. In those months just before the liberation Jonah and I devoted ourselves to sabotage, demolition, and arming and training the local Maquis.

  And in the very early morning, in haylofts and attic rooms, we devoted ourselves to each other. I hadn’t paid all that much attention the first night we were together—isn’t it always the way?—but the more nights we spent together, the more I wanted to know the stories behind the strange scars I kept finding all over him. I don’t mean the thick bands of scar tissue round his wrists and ankles where the irons had cut into his flesh, or the lash marks on his back, although he had those as well; they had shattered his right kneecap, and there were mottled red protrusions all over his feet, from shin to sole. I thought of our first meeting, how he’d shown no discomfort at the knee injury, but now that I’d seen the full extent of it I was amazed he could walk without wincing.

  When he finally told me what had caused those marks on his feet, I felt foolish for not having guessed. The scars were almost perfectly round—just as if someone, or several someones, had used his feet to put out their cigarettes.

  “How would you know?” he asked. “It would never occur to a normal human being to do a thing like that.”

  “Did it hurt very much?”

  He paused. “I don’t remember.”

  “Was this in Avenue Foch?”

  He nodded. Then he didn’t speak for a while, and I thought perhaps it would be easier for him if he told me just what he was remembering. So I asked.

  “I got delirious. It was almost as if I’d stopped caring what would happen to me. I thought of Patricia, I thought of my mother, but they were distant thoughts … their faces flashed before me, but I felt no emotion. I was aware of the pain, but it had become something separate from me. The only clear thought in my head was that I must not talk, and yet I had an acute awareness of the absurdity of my situation. I started thinking mad thoughts, utterly mad thoughts …”

  “What kind of thoughts?”

  “I remember wishing I could treat him like any schoolyard bully.”

  “Kick ’im in the goolies and run the other way?”

  He laughed softly. “And I would have, too, if they hadn’t chained my feet.”

  “The cigarette burns … do you know who ordered it done?”

  “It doesn’t matter now.”

  “It matters to me,” I said. “I’ll cut out his tongue.”

  He smiled faintly. “I thought you weren’t supposed to use your powers for violence.”

  “What powers? All I need is a good sharp knife. Or a rusty one, better yet.”

  He pulled me into his arms then, stroked my hair and kissed my forehead, and when he pulled away a bit and looked down at me fondly I could see a thought of Patricia flit briefly across his face. Revenge wasn’t something that ever would have occurred to his wife, not in a hundred lifetimes.

  This was something I wasn’t used to: growing as familiar with someone else’s body as I was my own. I could put out my fingers in the darkness while he was sleeping and feel his wiry biceps, find that funny little knob of flesh behind his right ear.

  Not that he ever really slept—sometimes I’d wake up and find him in a trance, dozing with his eyes open.

  THERE WAS a blur of safe houses, so many that I couldn’t possibly remember them all. Some who sheltered us were more willing than others. A few times we spent the night with the maquisards, the guerrillas of the French Resistance, and I much preferred it to the farmers’ grudging hospitality. The mood in their camp was much the same as it was in the Ossuaire Municipal: the better your jokes, the more your comrades respected you and appreciated your company.

  When they played cards Jonah sometimes bet his pocket watch—which had belonged to his father—and he never lost. Once the game was over, he might challenge one of the losers to pick a card out of the deck, and he always knew which one it was. Like any self-respecting magician (save Neverino, who told me everything), Jonah only ever responded with a wink when I asked him how he’d done it.

  Our freedom fighters were headquartered in a “haunted” château ten miles from Lyons. It looked thoroughly uninhabitable from the road, which I suppose was why the Germans hadn’t requisitioned it. The elderly couple living in the gate lodge would have given them up in a heartbeat had they known, but fortunately they were so superstitious that any sounds or lights in the middle of the night were taken for paranormal activity. The maquisards had come up with an ingenious method of redirecting the smoke from their kitchen fire through an old sewage pipe that stretched to the woods behind the house, so that they were able to have hot food at night.

  Our friend Simone had fallen hopelessly in love with one of the young Frenchmen, and as a consequence the men knew more about us than I would have liked. It was Maxime and his twin brother, Pierre, who had jury-rigged the chimney pipe. They had also built a series of oubliettes in the woods, wide and deep enough that escape was nigh hopeless. It was a wonder neither of them ever fell for their own trick.

  They handed us tin mugs of grog they’d distilled themselves. I took a polite sip, gagged, and spat it back into the cup. “That will put the hair on your moles!” Maxime cried merrily.

  I eyed him with distaste, and when I met Simone’s eye she gave me a small sheepish smile.

  “Do you know the reason you were called away from Paris?” he asked. “The reason all those officers were found dead in the brothels?”

  I looked at him.

  “They say a girl, a young Breton girl, called them back.”

  “Called who back? Back from where?”

  He leaned in and said, in a stage whisper: “The girls.”

  “For heaven’s sake, what girls?”

  Simone reached over and pinched Maxime’s lips together. “I will tell you.”

  What happened was this. A ship was dispatched carrying Parisian girls for the entertainment of German soldiers stationed on the isle of Jersey. There was a storm, and at the island’s southwesterly point, La Corbière—a treacherously rocky headland where black birds gather—the ship capsized, and all on board were drowned.

  Four days later a French beldame, a Breton girl not more than seventeen, passed the lighthouse on foot and climbed down the jagged rocks to the shoreline. She said a few words, and within moments dark heads began to break the surface of the water. Their skin was pale as putty and the light had gone out of their eyes.

  It is possible for a beldame to revive the dead, but to restore them to life it must be accomplished within three hours of the last breath. If you say the words after those three hours are up, what comes back to yo
u won’t be human.

  So the dead girls made their way back to Paris by boat, by train, on foot, and by donkey cart, and everyone who encountered them wanted nothing more than to be removed from their presence posthaste. They stank of mold, and water dripped from their skirts long after their clothes should have dried.

  They could still speak, and remember, and reason—to a certain extent—but when they slept they looked like the corpses they were, and they required no sustenance besides revenge. When they returned to their former houses of employment, the madams were too afraid to turn them away, and so the girls retreated to rooms with heavy curtains and used even heavier perfume. Attracted by the aura of mystery thus acquired, the German soldiers would venture into their darkened boudoirs. Those few soldiers who lived to speak of it told of rotting flesh in intimate places and were convinced to the point of madness that they had contracted some horrible new venereal disease.

  And I would have been afraid of them, too, had I ever encountered them; calling the undead is a mighty tricky business. Even if you bring them back for the noblest of motives, they’re liable to turn on you.

  Jonah had been riveted all the while Simone was talking. “What a tale,” he said when she was finished.

  “Oh, but it isn’t a tale,” she said. “The girl was a cousin of mine.”

  “Was?”

  “Is, was.” She shrugged. “I don’t expect to see her again, in any case.”

  “So,” said Pierre, turning to me. “Do you fly your broomstick every night, or is it only on special occasions?”

  “That’s a myth, Pierre. We don’t fly on broomsticks.”

  “No?”

  “No.” I tried to give Simone a dirty look, but she wouldn’t meet my eye.

  “Then how do you travel to your black Sabbath?”

  “Let’s get this straight once and for all, shall we? I do not traffic with the devil. We are not on a first-name basis. Indeed, I have never met him, nor do I wish to. I do not fly a broomstick, I don’t have warts, and I don’t eat babies. Got it?”

  “Got it,” Pierre echoed. For a moment he looked lost in thought. “All the same, I think your powers will be very useful for us. Aerial reconnaissance. Hah!”

  I glowered at him.

  “What happens when someone makes you angry? Do you put a pox on them?”

  “Don’t tempt me.”

  Pierre let out a nervous titter, and the rest of them laughed outright.

  “Answer me this, then …”

  “Yeah?”

  “Who’s Hitler got?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “What kind of spooks has he got?”

  “I’m not a spook,” I said frostily.

  “Yes, yes, you are not a spook. But I have heard they have werewolves.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Do they have witches?”

  “No such thing as witches.”

  “What about you, then?”

  “I’m—well, never you mind what I am. I’m a lady and that’s all you need to know.”

  “And what about you, Renard?” (Among the maquisards, Jonah was known as “Fox.”)

  Jonah took a swig of grog from his dirty tin cup. “What about me?”

  Pierre leaned in closer. “Are you a he-witch?”

  “A he-witch?!” Jonah laughed and laughed.

  But oftentimes they could put their vivid imaginations toward entertaining rather than irritating us. Pierre told a story about a city at the bottom of the sea where every drowned sailor and frogman wakes up and discovers he’s grown a set of gills and webbing between his toes, and that each of them marries a mermaid—not a fanged mermaid, mind; those are a separate species altogether—who shares a face with the girl he left behind.

  In turn, I told them another of our old legends, one of those classic cautionary tales your mother related in your adolescence hoping to scare you from making the same mistakes she had made. Cordelia Wynne, who had resided in Harveysville at some nebulous point in the distant past, had such an obsessive love for her poor husband that when he contracted scarlet fever she absolutely refused to let him die. He was positively ghastly to look at, and when he finally did die—through no consent of hers—she cut out his heart and put it in a rosewood box, and every day she would open the lid and talk to it. The coven had tried to talk some sense into her, but she eventually shunned them entirely. In the end some concerned beldame had found her on her kitchen floor, a good week after she had died; the open box had toppled over onto the floorboards, and an unspeakable stench permeated the whole house.

  Simone was nodding with a look of faint amusement. “Oui,” she said. “We have a tale like that as well. Only the box is made of sandalwood.”

  Before we parted the next morning, she took me aside. “Beware,” she said. “Les boches know about us. They’ll shoot at any bird that lands on the windowsill. Especially the black ones. Be smart and stick to pigeon.”

  AFTER THE fall of France, the Germans positioned their V-1 storage depots and launch sites in Calais, poised and ready to terrorize the people of London yet again. Before the RAF could bomb the underground storage depots or transit routes, they had to know where they were located. Where, precisely, were they hidden? When and by what routes would the V-1s be transported from their secret testing facilities in Germany? It was our job to find out.

  I say Fisher, the demolitions expert, was part of our team, but we only saw him to pass along the maps and schedules. He’d then go off and plant his explosives on the roofs of train tunnels at the appointed hour.

  It was the French workers at these storage depots who supplied us with most of the intelligence, though it had to pass through several pairs of hands to reach us. Some knew what they were doing, and others were unwitting accomplices. Messages could be tucked inside bicycle handlebars or toilet-paper rolls; coded directions were written in invisible ink on silk kerchiefs and embroidered on swaths of fine linen. Rendezvous were sometimes arranged via advertisements and memorials in the local paper.

  And the commonest place for a rendezvous was a church, though one priest in particular was making it increasingly difficult to escape the notice of the Germans. We attended Sunday Mass once—oh, how it gave me the willies!—and from the pulpit Père Bernard began with the words of their savior: Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’s sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. He even went as far as to say that “the agents of evil are in our midst.”

  “Good God, man,” Jonah muttered to himself. “You’ll be on a cattle car before the week is out.”

  “I am desolated if I have caused you any trouble,” the priest told Jonah behind the locked door of the sacristy after the service. I was listening from a rafter, well out of sight. “But I cannot remain silent.” And Jonah said he understood.

  The priest then told him, in not so many words, that he had something for us. “If you do not find me at the church tonight, seek Monsieur Boulanger. He will give you what you need.” He said no more, and I assumed Monsieur Boulanger to be a sexton or custodian of some sort, one who would be there at any time of the day or night.

  That evening we made our way back to the church, but I froze when Jonah hopped the graveyard gate. “I’ve got to go round by the front,” I said.

  “But it’s quicker this way.”

  “I can’t go in there.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “We have our legends, same as you,” I told him. “One of them says that in the darkest corner of every graveyard there’s a portal to Hades. I don’t want to find out if it’s true.”

  Jonah stifled a laugh. “Have it your way,” he said. “I’ll meet you at the front gate.”

  So I went the long route. The massive oak door gave a terrific creak as I pushed it open, and a little old woman kneeling in a pew at the front of the church turned to glare at me. I smiled serenely as I passed her, and she hastily turned back and bent her head to resume her devotional charade. (I never u
nderstood all this Catholic malarkey. They drink the blood of their savior—or like to think they do—and they call us heathens? And here’s what really gets me: carving up the corpses of their holy men and distributing heads, thumbs, and earlobes all over the world in boxes encrusted with jewels! Which church gets all the naughty bits, that’s what I want to know.) Anyway, I conjured a set of beads out of my pocket and twirled them like a skipping rope as I walked, just to get her goat. From behind me I heard a gasp and an angry mutter, and I grinned to myself.

  After a cursory tour of the church and its two small side chapels, and no sign of anyone but the old crone and her rosary beads going clickety-click, I resolved to wait for Monsieur Boulanger in the last pew. Eight, nine, ten minutes went by. The candles on the altar were burning low.

  Why hadn’t he come? I was growing anxious. We were never meant to wait for anyone longer than five minutes, though admittedly that rule had been given us as regards assignations in the cities.

  I let my mind flit above the battered wooden pews like a moth, past the altar and into the tiny sacristy. Without leaving my seat I could take glimpses of darkened corners and disused rooms, and through a grimy windowpane in a second-floor storage closet I could see Jonah sitting on a stone bench beside the town fountain, seemingly engrossed in whittling a chess piece. He glanced up as if he could sense my eyes on him, though of course I wasn’t actually there; he stood up, pocketed his knife and carving, and ambled toward the side door of the church. I returned my attention to my immediate surroundings, blinking, as Jonah held the door open for the little old woman, her rosary beads still swinging from her fingers.

  Still no sign of Père Bernard. Boulanger had to be late—whoever he was. But something was nagging at me; I had the distinct feeling that it was we who were missing him, and not the other way around. Jonah slipped into the pew directly behind me and whispered, “Let’s go.”

  I held up a finger and sprang up from the pew, striding toward the altar.

  “Eve—”

  “What is it?”

  He nodded to the book on the broad high table. “Are you sure you should be touching that?”