by Tracy Groot
“What did he say?”
Michel traced his fingertip through the breath on the window. “Nothing.”
“I do not judge you, Monsieur Rousseau,” Rafael said, in a gentle tone Michel had never heard. “We know who did it to Jasmine. I swore at her side, he will pay. But if you . . . if . . . if you . . .”
Rafael had a hard time saying it out loud, but Michel knew what he was thinking: If you’ve lost your nerve. If you can’t stomach one more torture. If you’ve given up, if you’ve lost heart . . .
It wasn’t right to confide in this young man. One month ago, the Gestapo had infiltrated Michel’s Resistance cell, Flame, leaving one agent dead and one sent to a concentration camp in Neuengamme. Perhaps things had gone so well for so long that dangerous pride had set in: Flame was invincible. Flame was protected because of the rightness of its cause. What should not happen could not happen—a mentality that had plunged France into a stupor from which she did not arouse until jackboots sounded on the Champs-Élysées.
Other than continuing to help other groups move downed airmen down the line in a series of safe houses to Spain, this brothel scheme was Flame’s first initiative since Jasmine’s death. What was left of Flame still needed leadership. Michel could not afford to speak his first self to Rafael any more than he could to Braun. Yet, from some cursed weakness, words continued to pour out.
“When I made the slip to Braun, I realized how very much it taxes the soul to go along with foolishness, when the heart longs for the simple freedom—” his hands made fists, and he drew them to his stomach—“to say out loud, it is foolish. We are born for truth, Rafael, we are miserable for it, and it makes a misery of us.”
How he despised Hauptmann Braun, his arrogance, his conceit. He could bear it if Braun were overtly so. His superiority came through in ways that Michel recognized had once belonged to himself, the privileged son of a prosperous businessman, head above the rest, secure, confident, untouchable, and above all, correct. He could bear it, if he hated him. He hated him all the more because he liked him, the righteous, hateful man.
He became aware of the ticking clock on the mantel.
He lowered his fists, smoothing his suit coat. “Everything is all right, Rafael. We are doing good.” He cast about for something else just as worthless, innocuous. “It is sometimes hard, because we do not see it.”
“Listen to me, Monsieur Rousseau,” Rafael said. “You told me this wasn’t your idea, it was someone else’s. Perhaps that someone can take over and—”
“No,” Michel said sharply, half-turning from the window. “It is impossible. He is not with Flame.” If a Resistance cell was infiltrated, and an agent broken, he could only tell of the people in his own six-man group. Cells could operate next to each other daily and never know it. But François belonged to no group. And Michel would not have him involved.
Everyone knew François Rousseau to be Michel’s partner in the family cement business. They knew the Rousseau Cimenterie had been requisitioned by the Todt Organization to provide cement for Hitler’s Atlantic Wall. They knew the brothers were no collaborators; had they been, they would have made a fortune early on by queuing up with other businesses to sell cement to the Nazis.
Rafael had known it was safe to go to François when the pilot was shot down in Cabourg because he was no collaborator. He was a businessman, and had done business across the Continent; he would know if a German was a German, or an American an American. Rafael probably figured François for many a Frenchman, just a man trying to survive this war without undue risk to keep his family safe, without undue collaboration to keep his conscience intact.
For a moment, Michel thought of the young woman on the train. Humming “La Marseillaise” was the first time in a long time he had been happy. He closed his eyes. He wanted to be back in that sacred moment, to feel as if the angel had stirred the water and he had only to fling himself in, and then all would be well, and France would be free, and . . .
She was never coming back.
She’d never burst through that door again, breathless, unwinding her scarf, throwing it on the rack as if she owned the place. She’d never—
Michel opened his eyes.
He turned from the window to his desk. He drew out his chair, his father’s chair, and sat down. He looked at the mantel over the cold fireplace. Father’s habit was to keep any current books of interest on the mantel, and Michel had kept it up. Mein Kampf lay atop a short stack. He tried to remember when it had first appeared on the mantel. Maybe ’36 or ’37. He wouldn’t have noticed, then. While Father and his cronies worried about the rising ideology of Adolf Hitler, the new chancellor of Germany, Michel worried about catching the eye of an American model on holiday, visiting her aunt in Cabourg. Funny. He couldn’t remember her name.
The day the cement works was requisitioned, in the spring of ’41, had been the worst day of Michel’s life.
His secretary, Charlotte, the honest and guileless woman, couldn’t stop quietly weeping. Hauptmann Braun, inspecting the office, had acted as if he did not notice. Finally he said to her, “Please, madame; why don’t you make us some tea. Perhaps coffee?”
Charlotte, aghast, was startled into protesting that she had no ration coupons for coffee or tea.
Roland Braun was a tall man in his forties, nice-looking and nicely dressed, the sort of decent German who seemed a trifle uneasy, or unhappy, with what his presence did to a room. He tried to make up for it with a briskness that did not seem natural to him. The heartiness waned once he relaxed.
“Not from your personal stores, madame,” Braun had said patiently. “Surely your employer . . .” And he looked at Michel, who shook his head. No, Michel had thought bitterly, until this moment, we have not worked for the Nazis—why should we have extra coffee and tea lying around? And forget about sugar. Michel hadn’t tasted sugar on his porridge in a year. Any sugar coupons he got, he saved for François and Marie. They had three children.
“Ah,” Braun had said, with discretion worthy of a Frenchman, as understanding came. Then discretion turned to cheerful vigor worthy of a German. “Well, Monsieur Rousseau, things will change for the better around here. You will see. Soon your little cement works will expand. Soon it will make more money than you have ever dreamed.”
When the hauptmann left, Michel went to his office, closed the door, and did as Charlotte had done: he wept. His only consolation that day was knowing his beloved father, who had fought the Germans at Verdun in 1916, was dead.
The next day, Michel received a package from the hauptmann. A half pound of pure, real, intoxicatingly fragrant coffee. Not an ounce of burnt, roasted barley. Charlotte wept again.
Rafael turned in his seat to see what Michel was looking at. “Do you actually read that trash?” he said, his lip curling when he saw Hitler’s book.
“Know your enemy.”
“What’s it like?”
“Sometimes it puts me to sleep. Sometimes, because of it, I cannot sleep. It’s a lot of things, Rafael. It’s tedious. It’s grandiose—at times, unbearably so. It is also frightening.”
“How so?” Rafael said, intrigued.
“Because sometimes, on different subject matters, I agree with him. When I do, it depresses me stupendously. I think to myself, Did I just agree with Hitler?” Michel gazed at the book, and a small smile came. “But all I have to do is keep reading. Before long, sometimes only a sentence or two, I am in my right mind again when I read a statement so preposterous it is actually splendid entertainment.”
Rafael grinned. “I wish I could read German.”
“Braun told me it was a great way to brush up on it. He thinks it’s good for my soul. Now I wonder if he isn’t so sure. It was a stupid mistake, Rafael, that slip to Braun—made long before Jasmine died.” He looked at Rafael, whose brown eyes lowered after a moment.
There, my brave young Marius; what do you think of your leader now?
Rafael glanced at the mantel clock. “I’d
better be going.” He rose.
“We don’t have the car today. Get as far as you can by rail, then hire a bicycle or cart if need be. Braun wants these designs by three. If approved, they’ll go into production right away. Rommel needs his cement.”
“Anything else going?”
“No, but you’ll have a pickup for the way back. A fellow who went down over Belgium. He’ll be at Clemmie’s by now.”
“Clemmie” ran a safe house on the outskirts of Cabourg. At any given time the aging widow, whose reputation in the local Resistance rivaled that of Jean Moulin himself, housed as many as five downed Allied airmen. Rommel’s recent fortifications of the Atlantic Wall in Cabourg meant a dangerous increase in personnel—mostly conscripts for slave labor, it was true, but also more Germans to supervise them. Try and warn Clemmie about the increased danger. Once her “boys” arrived, the woman acted as if they had crossed St. Peter’s gate with hell’s breath on their heels and had found immutable sanctuary.
“Good. Another chance to see Jenison,” Rafael said, pleased. At Michel’s inquiring look, he said, “The American. It’s the city he’s from in Michigan. I try to visit him when I can. He’s loosening up, probably because he’s getting bored.”
“Any news on how the war is going?”
“He says he’s just a pilot; they don’t tell them anything. Whatever he gets, he gets from Stars and Stripes, and it’s old news by the time he reads it. I’m not sure he completely trusts us yet. I don’t know what it is with the Americans. You don’t get that from a Brit.”
“Anything on the invasion?” Michel was part of a friendly pool putting odds on the date of the invasion. He’d consulted an almanac and put twenty francs down on May 8, the day of the full moon for May. Daringly, he asked Braun if he wanted in; Braun put down fifty for May 15. He said the Allies would not attack on a full moon, it was too obvious.
The German seemed to like Michel. “You’re not afraid to be yourself, Rousseau,” he’d once said quite earnestly, as if he were thankful he had at least one Frenchman with whom he could let down his guard a bit.
Rafael shook his head. “Nothing we don’t know. Personnel and matériel buildup, supplies buildup. He said he saw a huge stack of coffins, piled in the corner of some camp in England. They’re planning, all right. I wish it was now!”
“It will come, Rafael. We have to be ready when it does. How is his head?”
“Mending. Took some stitches, but there’s no infection. Doctor says he’s not sure he didn’t crack his skull.” He shrugged. “He’s a big boy, and I mean big. He’ll be fine.”
“By the way,” Michel said, pulling open his desk drawer to avoid Rafael’s eyes, “I have decided to train the American myself. Make plans with Clemmie to have him moved here in a week, if he’s up for travel by then. He’ll stay at my apartment.”
Michel rummaged in the drawer for nothing in particular against Rafael’s wordless objection. The mantel clock ticked.
“What is this?” Rafael finally demanded.
“What’s what?”
He spread his arms. “Monsieur Rousseau, this is my job. Don’t tell me you don’t trust me. This is what I do. I’m good at it.”
“This is what I do.” Michel slammed the drawer shut. “This is what I have done for four bloody long years, before Flame even existed.”
“You don’t trust me?” Rafael asked, horrified. “What is this?”
“The American’s best hope of getting out of this scheme alive is me.”
“Scheme?” Rafael protested. “What do you mean, scheme? I don’t understand. Monsieur Rousseau, you told me something once: Devotion to the objective will answer every detail. The bridges are the objective, and we are devoted. Wilkie and I will train the American with the same—”
“I will train him. I will let you know when we’re ready to go.”
Michel took a piece of tissue paper from the bottom drawer and positioned it over the designs. He rolled them up, tapped the edges for alignment, and carefully inserted them into a cardboard tube. He sealed the tube and handed it to Rafael. Rafael, his face stony, took it without a word and headed for the door.
“André.” This, because Rafael had the door open and Charlotte could hear. He eased the door shut and looked back, face belligerent.
What could he offer? He owed Rafael something. Then, quietly, he said, “Jasmine was her favorite flower.”
Rafael held his gaze a moment, his face softening a fraction. Then he left.
Rafael slid the tube into the leather satchel he’d left in Charlotte’s office, touched his beret to her, and strode to the Caen train depot.
It was Monsieur Rousseau who had saved Rafael from the labor draft that had stolen thousands of young Frenchmen from the soil of France and sent them to Germany to work in munitions factories. Vichy, the puppet government set up by the Nazis at the time France fell, had lied; they promised the workers good wages, good living conditions. Reports began to filter back, and there was nothing good about it. People starved there just as they starved here. Far better for a Frenchman to starve on his own soil than in hated Germany.
He shook his head in grim admiration. How could Rousseau act so calm when the German officer pulled the name G like the pin of a grenade? So cool and suave in a moment like that, vintage Rousseau . . . yet things weren’t right.
Greenland knew his agents, knew what they could do; he was a great leader in that he trusted those he led to act as they were trained. Rafael had an idea that whenever a person clamped down with more control, that person was in fear of losing it. Never before had Michel commandeered an operation the way he’d just done.
He purchased a ticket to Cabourg and swung aboard a car. He dropped into a seat, put the satchel between his feet, and settled in to stare out the window.
He loved fighting for his country in the under-the-table way he did, and wondered, at times, if he didn’t love the fight more than he loved his country. Yet, he had no fear of becoming a zealot. Rousseau made him a patriot, Flame made him a resistant, and through it all he was André Besson and André Besson he would remain.
When Rafael was a fresh recruit to the Resistance, Rousseau once made him take a walk all over Caen before a training session. It took half the day. When he came back, Rousseau said that was the training session and sent him home. For another session, Rafael had to visit a farm, a butcher, a restaurant, a church, and a beauty salon. He had resented such exercises as frivolous.
“What did you notice about these people?” Rousseau had asked the next day.
“The usual. Suspicion. Resentment. Bitterness. Starvation.”
“Is that all? What else?”
“What do you want to hear? That I found good French values worth fighting for? I didn’t see any of that. I saw people as suspicious of me as I was of them. I will not be the man to die with ‘Vive la France!’ on my lips.”
He was irritated with Rousseau, who wore a small mysterious smile that irritated him more. He didn’t want to waste time with stupid patriotic exercises. He wanted to learn about secret codes and transmitters. He wanted to blow things up.
A few months later, when escorting two crewmen from a downed B-24, a word came to his mind: overthrow. The things he saw the day of Rousseau’s exercise—the resentment, the hunger—they came from people surprised by overthrow.
It set other words spinning in his mind, and one day he asked Rousseau if he could borrow a dictionary. He looked up words like overthrow and conquer. Words like democracy, republic, and parliamentarianism. He had a vague grasp of what they meant, but he needed to be sure. He looked up Nazism, but it wasn’t in the book. He tried National Socialism, but the term was too new for the edition. He asked Monsieur Rousseau to write out the definition. Rousseau thought it through, even consulted Mein Kampf at one point, and wrote it down carefully. On the same piece of paper, under Rousseau’s definition, Rafael copied the dictionary definitions of democracy, republic, and parliamentarianism.
; He carried the paper around for a week. He studied the meanings, he worked them over in his mind, he set them against what his country used to be and what it was now, and what it might yet be underneath, dormant, until the aggressor was kicked out. He thought about the aggressor, about Hitler and his ideology, and what they meant to France. He came to a stunning realization.
He burst into Monsieur Rousseau’s office and rushed up to his desk. “I believe!” he had cried.
Monsieur Rousseau laid down his pen. “What do you believe?”
He was trembling all over. “I believe in a republic, monsieur! I believe in democracy! But it is not so much what we fight for—we have no idea what we fight for, to each his own. It’s this: I had nothing in common with the people you sent me to. This troubled me because how could we unite against Hitler?”
He paced the office. “You sent me to see what we fight for. But I needed to know what we fight against—there, Monsieur Rousseau, there we are united! Whatever our beliefs, they are incompatible with Hitler’s.” He felt a rush of fevered joy. “This unites us!”
Such a smile came to Rousseau’s face.
The train car jerked. Smoked-over brick walls began to slide past.
He thought back to the day Wilkie, another Flame agent, tracked Rafael to a shop in Caen to tell him Jasmine had been dumped in the street in Bénouville. The townspeople had taken the dying woman to one of the river cafés. Someone had recognized Jasmine as a worker at the Rousseau Cimenterie’s Ranville plant and had summoned her employer from Caen, ten kilometers away. Rafael had arrived shortly after Michel. By then, it seemed the whole town had turned out. By then, Jasmine was dead.
He came upon the scene, stomach awash in dread, to find his employer sitting on the ground in his impeccable suit, next to the body. Rousseau’s face was like nothing Rafael had ever seen. It was as a beach in December—white, cold, deserted.