The prayer ended. The eyes opened on him, too many eyes. Mama caught him as he rose on shaky legs, and steered him to the kitchen where she gave him two sips out of a small blue bottle she said was tincture of valerian she’d grown herself. It smelled like damp earth, and burned going down. “Now bed. Go. I’ll be up in ten minutes.” He was too tired to tell her not to. Did he really want her not to? He didn’t see her when she came, only felt a second blanket laid over him where he shivered under his, and heard her low voice. “You’re not a child anymore. Don’t think I don’t know that. But just for a minute, pretend.” Her low, sweet voice singing in Italian, the lullaby she had sung to them always in the long, soft nights of childhood, that time that would never come again. Stella, stellina. Then the kind darkness took him, for a while.
Albrecht came to the door of Les Genêts in full dress uniform, a row of medals shining on the right side of his thick chest. The good side of his mouth went up at Julien’s stare. “You like them?” he murmured, his sharp eyes at the same time running up and down Julien. After a moment he gave a firm nod. “Let us go.”
The stares in the street were just what he might have expected. Julien ignored them. Albrecht’s eyes swept the street, narrowed and casual, missing nothing. On the platform Julien paid for their tickets, returning the stationmaster’s gaze without flinching, then turned toward the hills at the sudden far cry of the train whistle, feeling relief and terror.
La Galoche was on time.
The seats in the passenger cars were only long benches where people sat facing inward; Albrecht took his place in a corner, his back to both windows and wall. He returned the brief stares of the handful of French country people in the car unwaveringly, and continued to watch them after they looked away. They all sat in silence, feeling the rattle of the train on its rails as the green hills passed by—till Tence, where two of the other passengers got off and the other two seized the chance to quietly switch cars. In the suddenly empty train car Albrecht shifted his weight, leaned back against the wall, and lifted his chin at Julien. “Sit there, boy,” he said. “Where I can see you.”
Julien moved down the bench to the spot he’d been ordered to, and sat still as Albrecht’s eyes ran over him again. Albrecht reached into his pocket and brought out a silver cigarette case, took one out, then leaned forward and held the open case out to Julien.
Julien stared at it.
“Cigarette?” said Albrecht. “Really. Feel free.”
“I, uh—don’t smoke. But—uh—thank you, monsieur.” Julien looked down at the mended knees of his trousers as Albrecht snapped the gleaming cigarette case closed.
“Wise man.” The German smiled, fished out a heavy silver lighter, flicked it open, and lit up. He inhaled deeply, his eyes going suddenly inward, and let out a long sigh. “I have to say, though”—he drew again—“there’s nothing like one after battle.”
Julien looked away.
“Perhaps it would relieve your mind, boy”—Albrecht’s voice was touched with irony—“if I told you these bits of metal on my chest were won on the eastern front? A wise choice on the part of high command, as you can see by my fluency in the local language.” Julien looked at him. The man’s lopsided mouth went very wry. “I don’t speak Russian. Nor Polish, nor any of the other tongue-twisting languages the Slavs have seen fit to inflict on Europe. French, on the other hand, I’ve studied since I was six. My mother had a sort of love affair with France.” He drew on his cigarette again. “But she’s dead.” He glanced out the window. The peak of Lizieux stood in the distance, ancient and green.
“Now,” said Albrecht suddenly. Julien jumped. The German was looking at his watch. “We have an hour, presumably alone. So. Tell me more about this girl of yours.” He settled back in his seat and folded his arms.
Julien’s mind was blank with panic. “She’s not—not really mine, sir,” he said.
Albrecht’s eyebrows went up. “Truly?” His eyes went sharp on Julien’s face. “What’s the obstacle? You’re easy enough on the eyes.”
“Looks aren’t everything,” Julien got out, looking down at his shoes.
“Someone ought to have told the girls back home.” Albrecht’s tone was so edged that Julien looked sharply up at him. The German barked a laugh. “What? Did you think you were looking at the ruin of a formerly handsome man? Look again.”
Julien looked, but saw nothing. “Monsieur,” he said, “I—I don’t …”
“My face is not the part of me you’re interested in? Indeed. This is usually the case. I’m quite a useful man.” He inhaled and blew smoke away from Julien. “Once I became an officer, even the girls looked at me.” He studied the glowing tip of his cigarette morosely. “I have a wife at home.”
Julien watched him in the short silence that followed, watched his dark-brown eyes as they lifted to the far hills. The glow of the cigarette as he drew on it again looked strange so near the red wreck of his cheek and jaw.
“So. I’m to understand the objection is on her part? Is this correct?”
“Yes, monsieur.”
“And it’s what?”
His heart stuttered. “She didn’t say exactly, monsieur.”
“Hmm. So tell me what she’s like. Her name. How old is she?”
“Sixteen, sir. Her name is Élise. Élise Fournier.” He tried to breathe evenly as the man’s eyes studied his face. “She turned sixteen last September. She plays the piano. She’s really good. You should hear it, she—she …” he looked up into the man’s expressionless face and faltered, then lifted his chin, his voice coming out almost angry. “The music is alive when she plays it. It has a soul.”
Albrecht’s eyebrows went up, slowly. “And where did she come from, this musician?”
“Lyon,” said Julien, trying to keep his eyes on the officer’s, his heart pounding.
“Is that so.” Albrecht drew on his cigarette. “Does she have any family?”
The clouds over the northern hills were like towers, snow-white and huge beyond measure, unmoved by anything beneath. Julien spoke through his dry throat. “She lost both her parents last year.”
There was a brief silence. The sickness rocking in Julien’s belly subsided slowly, second by second, as Albrecht did not ask.
“Tell me what you like so much about her, then,” Albrecht said finally. “Looks, as you say, are not everything. What is she? Sweet and kind? Charming and witty? Brave and loyal?”
“Brave and loyal.”
Albrecht was nodding. “That was my impression too,” he murmured. “What else?” he said abruptly. “What did you see in her? What was she doing when you first realized she was the moon and stars and assorted celestial bodies?” He gave his lopsided smile and gestured vaguely with his cigarette, trailing smoke. “I was young once too, you know. So? What was she doing?”
“Playing the piano.”
“A true music lover! Should she keep you away from concerts played by women?”
“It wasn’t the music.” He looked out the window, his stomach coiling in on itself. The clouds were white blurs. “It was her face. The look on her face. Like—like she saw something other people couldn’t see. Just for a moment. Something real. Like that was what she played the music for, to chase after—whatever it was. Is.”
“The sun above the clouds,” said Albrecht’s soft voice, and Julien turned and stared at him. The cigarette was dangling forgotten between his fingers; his eyes in his ruined face were like dark earth. The instant their eyes met they both looked away.
“You’ve never been up in an aeroplane, have you, boy?” said Albrecht in a loud voice. “It’s quite a sight.” He took a drag on his cigarette and leaned forward. “That fellow we spoke to at La Roche, who is he? What does he do?”
“He’s the assistant pastor of the Reformed church, monsieur.”
“And is he anything to you?”
“My father.”
“Hmm.” Albrecht inhaled twice before speaking again. “You know, I li
ke your town. It’s my habit to be on my guard and I don’t plan to change that, but you’ve got a good record in spite of the other week.” The right side of his mouth quirked up. “You understand, from my point of view, the idea that the local church instructs people not to shoot me is quite pleasant. A state of affairs one takes for granted till it is suddenly not the case.” His eyes flicked for a split second to Julien’s right hip, and it went through Julien in a belated flash what those quick eyes had been looking for all this time. That wasn’t my plan, sir. “Beyond that, though, I see the wisdom in it. Truly salutary, in your position. Men keep their pride, order is maintained, all without useless loss of life on both sides.”
Julien drew himself up. “That’s not the idea, sir,” he said in a low voice.
“Don’t growl at me, boy. I know it’s not. It doesn’t work if you don’t believe in it. But listen.” He stabbed his cigarette in the air, his eyes gone hard. “When I’m at the front, I hold the lives of over five hundred men in my hands every day. I make decisions that mean life or death to them, again and again. That’s what a leader does. Don’t you wave your hand and dismiss strategy. It’s what keeps my men’s blood in their veins. It’s what cost you your country. Maybe your father does believe in all that. Tell me he doesn’t, I’ll say he’s a good officer, and he has my respect.” He took a sharp drag on his cigarette. “This girl. Is she in your church?”
Julien stopped breathing.
“The truth now, boy. I hate liars.”
“No, monsieur.” Try as he might, he couldn’t get above a whisper. The words She’s Catholic battered at his shut teeth, trying to get out. He swallowed them.
There was a long silence, Albrecht pulling slowly on his cigarette, his eyes all over Julien’s face. Finally he spoke, quietly and plainly.
“I like you, boy,” he said. “You’re a loyal man. You might be officer material, even. It’s a loyal thing you’re doing. A risk like this, for a girl who won’t have you. You know she probably still won’t, even if it works?”
“She definitely won’t,” said Julien tightly.
Albrecht sighed, and nodded. “What you’re doing, I understand. But her. Can you tell me”—the brown eyes met his now, direct and clear—“do you know why this Élise did what she did for me?”
Julien looked back at him. “The truth is I don’t know, sir. She never even told me she’d done it. I only heard it from my sister.”
“Hmm.” Albrecht studied the end of his cigarette. “I don’t understand it. She had no kind of duty toward me.” His eyes flicked to Julien, sharp and considering. “Quite the reverse would be my guess, though you’ve been very careful not to say.”
Julien drew a slow breath.
“It was my guess before I met you, boy. She never spoke a word to me. Pulled me out of that river, at no small risk to herself, and then ran.” Albrecht looked out the window. “It was my guess even before that,” he murmured, half to himself. “You should have seen her eyes.”
Her eyes. Julien kept his eyes on the far high clouds, and gripped the bench beneath him till his hands hurt.
Albrecht looked at his cigarette for a long moment, shook his head, and lifted his eyes slowly to Julien’s. “Both her parents, you say.”
Julien nodded.
Albrecht shook his head again. There was silence, and the rattle of the train.
“I wouldn’t have done it,” the German said finally. “No one would do it.” He looked at Julien. “Would you?”
Julien opened his mouth, his mind gone white.
“Don’t answer that, boy. I only asked it to see the fear in your eyes.” Albrecht’s lips drew back from his teeth, and he crushed out the stub of his cigarette savagely on the wooden bench beside him. “You see? That’s the way things are. People like power. If you knew. If you knew what it feels like when you win.” He took a deep, slightly ragged breath, and sat suddenly poised again, his calm, piercing eyes meeting Julien’s. “Listen. If there’s any way I can, I’m going to protect your girl. She saved me from a very stupid death, though I don’t know why, and when she did that she made herself one of mine. I do right by my own. You have my word on this.”
Julien looked at him, his heart lifting slowly, very slowly, as if drifting up from fathoms deep under the sea. “Thank you, sir,” he said.
“I’ve commanded men in battle,” said Albrecht. “I know people. You live with your illusions till you come up against death. And then you learn to deal in reality. You learn that sweetness and mercy won’t protect your own from the horrors. Everyone who’s faced the gun knows this.”
“Yeah,” breathed Julien.
Albrecht looked him in the eye. His mouth quirked up, but his eyes were dark again, earth under stone. “You’d like to know why she did it too,” he said. “Wouldn’t you, boy?”
Julien closed his eyes, and tried to breathe, and nodded.
“Yes,” said Albrecht. “We’ll see what we can do.”
The Gestapo headquarters was a blank-faced box on the Rue Saint-Pierre, Nazi flags laid over its windows like coins on a corpse’s eyes. Albrecht fell silent when they came round the corner and saw it. Julien’s stomach contracted. A young woman hurrying down the other sidewalk gave them a swift stare, her face twisting for a moment with loathing before she turned sharply away. His right fist clenched. She must have thought she was seeing Duval, seeing what he’d seen in Duval. Till the end, when he’d seen blood and meat. The swastikas crawled above him. Albrecht rang the bell.
Albrecht turned to him. “Don’t speak unless you’re spoken to. I’m hoping we won’t need your testimony at all. If they ask questions, don’t lie, and whatever you do don’t claim she’s Aryan. They won’t take that well if they know otherwise.”
Julien nodded. The door opened.
A huge blond man in an ink-black uniform, a man Julien had once seen on the street in Tanieux. The officer looked him over from head to foot, listening to Albrecht’s swift German, then motioned Julien to put his hands against the wall. He submitted to the search, taking shallow breaths, looking away into the narrow hallway beyond—straight-backed chairs along the wall, office doors, the foot of a flight of stone stairs, a dark stain on the lowest one; beyond it a dark space, the other stairs, down. He caught a faint whiff as if from a sewer as the Gestapo officer pointed them to two chairs and walked into an office. They sat.
In the silence that fell then, he began to hear it, the sound that had been lurking in his mind since entering this hallway. It was coming from below, quiet but constant.
Footsteps. The squeak of a shoe or the creak of a chair on a concrete floor, here and then there. A hollow knock on a pipe. A muffled voice, two voices, more. A sharper, deeper voice, and silence.
There were people down there.
The stairs moved and shifted before Julien’s eyes, shadows in the woods, beasts crouching. Up and up they went, and down, down into the dark. Faces came to him, and he shut his eyes. Jacques, Édouard, Rudy. You can’t save them. They are beyond your power. He could not even think her name. He couldn’t dare.
The office door opened, and they were beckoned in.
The two men shook hands over the broad oak desk: Albrecht in his gray uniform, his medals swinging a little, and the cold-eyed one in black with the swastika on his arm. He heard them, as if in a dream, say “Anton Albrecht” and “Gerhard Haas.” Was he really here? He was sweating. At Albrecht’s gesture he sat. There was no window. There was a picture of Hitler on the wall. There was nothing he could bear to look at. Haas’s armband, his hunter’s eyes, the file cabinets, full of names. His stomach churned. Albrecht was speaking.
Julien caught the word Tanieux, the German for life, river, ask. Albrecht’s voice was slow and measured, polite; his head dipped every now and then, just a fraction. Haas asked a question, then another. Julien lost the thread, saw only that Haas’s eyebrows went up; that a small smile appeared on his carved face; that Albrecht went on smoothly till Haas interrupted him with a
question like a lash.
Somewhere below them someone cried out.
Albrecht answered, and the calm power in his eyes made Julien breathe again. Haas smiled on, and made some airy remark with the word girl in it. Albrecht’s eyes turned cold, and he repeated himself, slowly and quietly.
Haas asked a question.
“Élise Fournier,” said Albrecht.
Haas’s face tightened. He gestured at Julien, asking something, shrugged at the reply. Then said something brief, shuffled some papers on his desk, looked at the door.
Albrecht leaned forward, his eyes not leaving Haas’s for a moment, and asked a question. Haas snapped out a reply.
Albrecht sank back in his chair. He opened his mouth, and said nothing.
The room shifted around them. Ending was in the air. Danke, and some courteous phrase, and Albrecht shifting his weight to stand. The air was thick as blood, the weight of stone above Julien pinned him, struggling like a roach underfoot. The room smelled like death; he was breathing it in. From below him came the voices of the dead. He opened his mouth, and Albrecht’s hand closed over his wrist in a crushing grip. He closed his mouth. Wrenched himself upward and out of his chair. He did not feel his feet carrying him to the door. Haas’s eyes were on him, calm, cat’s eyes. If I had a gun you’d be Duval. Blood and meat. If I had a gun I couldn’t save her, not even then. Not from the lords of creation. But I’d see you in hell. Albrecht still had him by the arm. They were walking past the staircase, that dark mouth. The front door was open, sunlight falling on the stoop. He almost recoiled. Albrecht dragged him, step by step, out into the free and choking air.
The door closed behind them. Julien almost fell to his knees on the stoop, nausea rising in his belly, but Albrecht did not loosen his grip, and they staggered on together. Five or six numb paces, the hand on his arm like a vise. Then Albrecht bent down to him, his eyes blazing in his ruined face. “They cannot release her,” he whispered, “because she has escaped.”
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