by Amy Stewart
It’s an awful burden to carry around. But tonight, that burden is a little lighter, and I owe it to your sister. She is such a gift to me. I thank you again for loaning her to me for the duration of the war, which I pray will be short.
More as I know it—
Tendrement—
Aggie
P.S. You asked about library books. We do receive a shipment, from time to time, of books and magazines for our patients. Newspapers are also welcomed enthusiastically—you can’t imagine how much a man from Chicago, for instance, cherishes a copy of the Tribune.
The books come through a central depot and are parceled out according to need, so Bessie’s library should just keep doing what it’s doing and we will get our share. She’s right about the books being burned—we must take a quarantine very seriously. As you can imagine, those in a locked, isolated ward are most in need of some way to pass the time and take their minds off their suffering.
But that’s not the only reason we burn them. I need hardly say that in a hospital, with so many wounded and ailing men, the books suffer all kinds of damage that render them unsuitable for further circulation. I can’t put it any more delicately than that, but I’m sure you can picture it. The point is—yes, we can always use more books, and the librarians are doing their part heroically.
Aggie to Constance
September 23, 1918
Dear Constance,
I can hardly believe it happened, but I did, in fact, catch Madame Bertrand in the act. Honestly, I thought my heart would stop. I don’t know how you survived it, chasing criminals around. Truly, I could hardly breathe and found myself, at a crucial moment, dizzy and seeing spots.
She wasn’t all that difficult to catch, once I knew to watch her! She delivers her bread promptly at seven in the morning, so for the last few days I arrived early, lingered about, watched, and waited.
The kitchen is situated at the back of the building, down a half-flight of stairs. It’s wholly inadequate for our purposes, as this place was built as a school for children, not a hospital filled with nurses, doctors, orderlies, and patients, all of varied appetites and all dining according to their particular schedules. The kitchen staff is mostly French, as we are short on American personnel and the villagers turn out to be most skilled at procuring extra potatoes and making every leaf and stem count. They use everything: the woody, pockmarked cabbage stalk, the reptilian feet of chickens, the greens atop a carrot. Did you know you could eat those? We do.
Into this cauldron of French cooks—old women, mostly, and a few boys too young to go to war but old enough to carry coal and heavy iron pots—Madame Bertrand wheels her bread cart every morning. I soon noticed that she summons one particular kitchen boy to help her wrangle it down the stairs. The bread, wrapped in linens and packed in baskets, is unloaded and replaced with a load of empty baskets and used linens. The same boy helps her push the cart back up the stairs, and she wheels it home.
As you can see, she doesn’t even come into the hospital. She barely steps foot into the kitchen. The kitchen ladies don’t want her there anyway—they don’t forgive her for withholding sweets from them, and never did get over the way she dismissed Fernand Luverne when she took over the bakery. In fact, they hardly speak to her. (No one, not even your sister, can hold a grudge the way the French do.)
I might’ve been at a loss to explain how Madame Bertrand could possibly be stealing supplies, when she so plainly comes and goes without ever seeing so much as a roll of gauze. But your sister has turned me into a suspicious person, I’m afraid, and I knew at once who to suspect—young Gilbert, the cook’s helper who carries the cart in and out.
The supplies had to be hidden in that jumble of dirty linens and baskets. I just knew it. But how was I to intercept them?
Should I follow Gilbert and apprehend him in the act of thievery?
Should I find some pretense to rummage through the dirty linens just before Madame Bertrand arrives?
Or should I simply waylay her in the street on her way back to the cake shop and insist on inspecting her cart?
At that moment, I did nothing. I waited until that evening and consulted your sister.
She told me in no uncertain terms what I was to do, which was: none of the above.
“Do not allow yourself to be distracted by the kitchen boy,” she told me. “He’s a petty thief, trying to put a little money in his pocket. That’s not the real crime.”
“Isn’t it?” I asked, still failing to grasp Norma’s idea. The theft, after all, is what cost me my job. I find I often don’t understand what Norma’s driving at (did you ever have that problem with her?), but in this case she explained it clearly enough.
“The real crime is the smuggling of the supplies out of France,” she said. “That’s why we want to catch her. Keep an eye on things at the hospital, and if you can, make sure that the scheme works as you suspect it does. But don’t interfere. We must intercept her on the way to the post office.”
Well! This gave the mission a new dimension. It had not occurred to me to think of the sending of the supplies as the greater crime, as I was still imagining Madame Bertrand shipping medicine to her ailing sister or to an entire ailing village.
Norma, however, had discovered something else.
Actually, it isn’t what she discovered, but what she hasn’t discovered. Norma is the only one among us who speaks French well enough to go around and interrogate the villagers about Madame Bertrand’s deceased brother. She hasn’t spoken to everyone yet—as I said, her duties keep her away from dawn to well after dark—but so far, no one she’s interviewed recalls him mentioning a sister in Belgium or Toulouse, or, for that matter, any relations at all. They had the general impression that his break with his family had been an unhappy one, but none of them even recalled how they knew that much. Monsieur Bertrand was such a light-hearted man, so companionable, and so pleased with his friends and his livelihood, that it simply never occurred to any of them to bring up old unpleasantness and demand to know more about it. Even his old friend and helper, Fernand, knew nothing of his family.
They all admitted to being surprised when Madame Bertrand turned up, but she was so disagreeable that her presence only confirmed, in a general way, what they’d assumed all along about his family—that he’d split from them years ago, for good reason.
None of them recall who summoned her after his death. Norma has several more people to interview. Meanwhile, we are to treat the sister in Belgium as fictitious, and to proceed with the understanding that property of the United States Army and the American Red Cross is being shipped out of France for an unknown and possibly nefarious purpose.
Having settled that, I went back to work. It was not, I’m sorry to say, at all difficult to catch young Gilbert in the act. The only difficult part was in restraining myself from stopping him and turning him in.
I would guess Gilbert to be about twelve or thirteen—young enough to be treated as a child or a younger brother by the nurses, but old enough to put in a day’s work. He carries trays upstairs and sometimes delivers them to the wards when the orderlies are short-handed. He comes again to take the trays away, and of course he does any sort of errand requested by the cooks. In this way he is in and among us constantly. It is a testament to how swift, quiet, and unassuming he is that I had never before noticed him.
This is obviously a very good quality in a thief.
I followed him when I could, and so did Betty (we have decided not to tell the other nurses about Gilbert for fear they’ll bungle our operation—listen to me! I sound like Norma), but as you know we have our duties and cannot trail along behind him all day.
Nonetheless, after a few days of spying, I did catch him pocketing a jar of antiseptic from a nurse’s cart. He thought he was alone in a corridor, but I had ducked into a closet only seconds before, as he came around the corner with his load of used trays and dishes. He was quite some distance away, but there was no mistaking it: he saw the cart, si
dled up to it, and reached out quick as you please to snatch a jar and tuck it under his shirt. Had I been walking by him on some errand of my own, with my mind on my business, I might not have noticed at all, he was so swift and light about it.
I’ve yet to see him hide a parcel among Madame Bertrand’s linens and baskets, but Norma tells me to be patient. We’re so very close.
If I had more news I’d give it, but as you can imagine, I’m consumed with this case every waking hour (and every sleeping hour, for I dream about it most nights). How did you ever turn your attention to anything else when you were in pursuit of a criminal? I find I don’t want to eat or sleep or say a word to anyone. I just want to catch my crook.
Tendrement—
Aggie
Norma to Constance
September 26, 1918
Dear Constance,
Madame Bertrand has been apprehended. I’m sorry that Aggie didn’t get to do the honors herself, but the opportunity was there and I had to act.
The difficulty has been in catching Madame Bertrand on her way to the post office with packages addressed to the so-called sister in Belgium. The obvious solution is one I’m sure you’ve thought of, which is to involve the postal master in our scheme, but we simply couldn’t trust him not to gossip.
Even worse, he might have gone to the town constable, unable to resist the excitement of bringing the police in on this bit of intrigue. I’m quite sure Madame Bertrand would’ve spied the police before they spied her. This is a practiced criminal we’re up against.
So we had to wait until she happened to go out of her shop with her packages. The trouble was that she never went at the same time of day. The post office closes at four, and Aggie and I rarely return from our duties until after seven.
I just happened to have reason to be in town yesterday—some nonsense about the mayor issuing a proclamation thanking our unit for its service. (You can be sure I told him to forget all about it. We want not a word of gratitude until the war is won, and even then, we don’t deserve it, for we’ve done nothing for France that she wouldn’t do for us.) Nonetheless, I was ordered to collect the medal and told not to return without it, so I had no choice.
I made it my business to pass through the town square both coming and going from the mayor’s office, and was rewarded with the sight of Madame Bertrand stepping out of her shop, locking it behind her, and teetering over to the post office with her arms full of packages.
I didn’t hesitate but ran right into her, knocking her down and scattering her boxes. I managed to put a hand right through one of the packages and to roll on top of another, which is to say that I came away covered in cake. Madame Bertrand went down on one hip and might’ve sprained something. Those cobblestones are unforgiving.
This prevented her from jumping up and pushing me away. While she floundered on the ground, groaning and sputtering, I bustled about and did my best impression of a careless and apologetic American. I made it look like I was trying to gather up the packages and put them back together, but of course what I was doing was reaching right inside those cakes and retrieving the stolen bottles and vials.
A crowd had gathered by then, including any number of young soldiers eager to help a pair of ladies in distress. A constable approached, too, and this time I had a use for him.
Madame Bertrand was by now sitting up and accepting the attention of a village girl. It took her a minute to look around at all the faces staring down at her and to see plainly that it was I who had run her down. Her eyes traveled down to my hands, which were outstretched to show her the crumb-covered bottles.
“These rolled right out of the package,” I told her. “Are they yours? They look just like American medicine bottles.” I wiped one clean and saw Aggie’s inventory numbers. “How on earth did you come by them?”
I said all this in English first, as if I’d forgotten that Madame Bertrand spoke only French, but in truth I was doing it to catch the attention of the American soldiers. Then, as if remembering my mistake, I repeated it all in French, for the benefit not only of Madame Bertrand but the town constable as well.
Then I added (stating the obvious, but people can be slow), “They seem to have been buried inside your cakes. Who on earth wants a cake filled with pills and potions?”
“Pills and potions” sounds silly and lacks specificity, I know, but I was trying to pretend that I didn’t already know exactly what was in every bottle.
Madame Bertrand was too flustered to say a word and (wisely, from her point of view) let her eyes flutter and her chin wobble, and then she fell back in a fine imitation of a fainting spell.
A soldier was now rummaging through the other packages. Between the two of us we fished out twenty bottles in all, mostly vaccines and antiseptics, plus the odd bottle of whatever young Gilbert had managed to snatch—aspirins, a packet of sleeping powder. This explains why Aggie found almost everything missing in small quantities: when he couldn’t find what Madame Bertrand had requested, he simply took what he could get.
There was nothing left for me to do but to have a quiet word with the highest-ranking American within earshot, who happened to be a captain in the engineering school. I first told him (and a British officer, for good measure, as the British have been here so much longer and take a proprietary interest in any sort of wrongdoing) that the American hospital was under investigation over missing supplies very much like these. Then I said the same, in French, to the constable. The three of them started haggling over questions of jurisdiction, with me acting as interpreter as they were speaking at cross-purposes and in languages unintelligible to each other.
None seemed to wonder where the supplies were going, so I slipped that question into my translations, to make it appear that they each had thought of it themselves. Suddenly the ruined packages were of a great deal more interest, the mailing labels scrutinized, and the postmaster summoned.
I didn’t want to give them too much more to grapple with—really, the three were having such trouble putting the puzzle together, having originally thought they were coming to rescue two ladies in distress and finding it difficult to turn their minds around to a criminal investigation—but I did manage to drop in a question about the apparent recipient of the supplies.
“Madame Bertrand mentioned a sister in Belgium,” I told the constable, as Madame Bertrand slept on (a doctor had by this time been sent for, and I knew I could count on him to put an end to the play-acting with either smelling salts or a painful injection of anything at all), “but no one seems to recall Monsieur Bertrand mentioning even the sister we have before us, much less a second one in Belgium.”
There. It is now a matter for the police.
As ever,
Norma
Aggie to Constance
September 28, 1918
Dear Constance,
This will be brief, as my days at the hospital are much longer now, but for good reason: I’ve returned at last to my original post! I’m sorry to say that the supply room was in terrible disarray without me. I’ve put it back in good order, but it will take me a while to sort out the disastrous record-keeping my replacement left behind.
The next installment in our little adventure, Norma insists, is mine to tell about, but first I must say that I can hardly believe that Norma tackled Madame Bertrand single-handedly. I will regret for the rest of my days that I wasn’t there to see it. Norma is quite literally the talk of the town: everyone speaks of la petite Américaine culottée and wonders how the Germans must be faring against our boys, if this is what our girls are capable of. When I say that I share a room with her, I am looked upon as a celebrity myself.
Of course her act of daring took place directly in front of the newspaper editor’s window, which is positioned quite deliberately so he won’t miss a thing. And in fact he didn’t. Try to imagine a rotund little man in a battered felt hat and a pipe perpetually between his teeth, rushing out with his shoes barely slipped on (he’s known to pace about barefoot whe
n composing his prose), the laces flapping and the pages of his note-book blowing about in the wind. The newspaper possesses but one camera, and the photographer was out at the train station at that moment to make portraits of some visiting French officers, so I’m afraid the incident is left to our imagination and the colorful prose of the newspaper editor.
I insisted that Norma translate the story for me, and I’ve copied out her translation for you, enclosed. I’m sure you’d have no trouble reading the French version, but I pasted my only copy into my diary before I thought of sending it to you. Norma tells me that you’ve been in the papers hundreds of times, and all over the country to boot. This is but one notice in a village paper, but I know you’ll enjoy it, and it will tell you something of Madame Bertrand’s fate, too.
As for what happened next at the hospital, I will admit this: I don’t have it in me to do any sort of policing. Norma insisted that I point my finger at the boy who aided Madame Bertrand with her thievery, but I just didn’t have the heart to do it. I can only imagine that Gilbert is desperately poor, and eager to please, and surely has no way of understanding the import of what he’s done. To him, it probably seems like the Americans came to town with endless riches, and that a little bottle of this or that couldn’t possibly be missed.
Oh, Constance, I wish you could see him: more child than man, with dark hair in little ringlets around his face, and a soft, shy smile. He’s no criminal, I’m sure of it.