by Lou Cadle
Ahead, in front of a house, there was a truck, a German military vehicle. And standing there was an officer, Gestapo. One soldier was sitting high on the truck’s roof, his rifle in his hands, scanning the crowd. Another stood in front of the door to a house.
She wasn’t sure what this was, but it was trouble.
She heard a word. “Meyer,” someone said. Had that been the name of the head Gestapo man that Genevieve had mentioned? This was the man? He was compact, tidy, and normal-looking.
But he was not a normal man. No Gestapo officer would be.
Behind her, the crowd had closed in around her. If she backed away now, she’d make herself more conspicuous. So she glanced at the crowd on the other side of the semi-circle and mimicked their expressions and posture. Their expressions were hard to read, in fact, schooled to not expressing fear or anger by their years of dealing with the Germans.
Something glass broke inside the house, and there was a shout, neither French nor German, just an inarticulate noise.
The crowd watched the officer, and Meyer watched the upper windows of the house. The soldier on the truck watched the crowd, looking for trouble. No one on the street was armed but the Germans.
And me. The thought came unbidden. But her little knife up her sleeve was nothing against a long gun like those the soldiers had.
More noises of a struggle came from the house, and then something crashed through an upper window, and glass shattered on the street.
Without moving a step back, Meyer shouted something up at the window. He’d been spared so much as a cut, it seemed, proving once again to Antonia that if there were a God, He wasn’t paying strict attention to life here on Earth.
A soldier emerged from the doorway and stood in the street. He spoke to the officer.
A fourth soldier came out, pulling a woman by her arm. She was dressed in an apron, still clutching a dish towel. He pushed her ahead, toward the truck. She stopped and turned, and he pushed her again, barking an order.
When she didn’t move, he yelled at her. Antonia recognized a word. Juden. The family were Jews? She didn’t know there were any left in the city. These had escaped notice somehow. And now they were being dragged from their home. Or maybe not their home. Maybe someone else’s who had kept them safe out of friendship. She didn’t know, would likely never know their story.
Yet another soldier came out, dragging a second, younger woman by an arm. In the other arm she clutched a baby, maybe a year old, maybe a little older. Just getting to the point where it could walk, perhaps.
A soft grumble went through the crowd.
The woman was begging the man in French, and in broken German. She pulled back, trying to get away, but he tugged her toward the truck. She lost her footing, or maybe just sank to her knees on the pavement in despair, Antonia couldn’t tell which.
The soldier yelled at her. The soldier standing nearest Meyer yelled even more loudly. That one came forward, red-faced, and lifted his rifle, swinging it around so the barrel remained in his hand. He aimed the stock at the woman, or so it seemed at first, but the crack when it hit the baby’s head told her that was what he intended to do.
The sound was dull, but the impact to Antonia’s heart was like a hundred rifle shots. Her mind froze, ceasing to send up words and judgments. She could only witness.
The woman on her knees screamed, and then she curled herself around the baby, too late to protect it. After a long, deathly quiet moment, where neither she nor the soldiers nor the crowd made a sound, she put it down gently. She stroked the face of her baby, spoke to it, and when the child did not respond, she jumped up, faster than a tiger, and launched herself at the soldier who had cracked it over the head, screaming out her grief and defiance.
He pushed her back, and she came at him again. He pushed her again, harder, and she fell onto her back. He reversed his rifle, and he shot her in the face. Then he turned the gun on the baby and shot it in the head. It was already dead, Antonia thought, but the shot made its skull fly apart. Pink shards ricocheted off everyone standing near.
“Juden,” the soldier said, and spat on the dead family.
Meyer gave a quiet order to the shooter. And then he turned and called another order at the man on the truck, who jumped to his feet and brought his rifle to bear on the crowd, which had suddenly grown vocal in expressing its anger.
The officer yelled in French, “Anyone interfering will be arrested. Go home!”
Antonia turned and pushed back through the crowd. She should have left earlier. Behind her, she could still hear a grumbling, the crowd not leaving as ordered. A riot might break out, and she could not be caught in it. She pushed at people, shoving them aside, and when she broke free, she ran for the next corner. She darted around it and slowed to a brisk walk. She kept up the rapid pace.
Halfway back to the safe house, her mind shook off enough of its shock to realize she was taking too direct a route. She turned at the next corner, turned again, ducked into a magazine shop, stood for a moment looking at covers of fashion magazines without really seeing them, and watched the window for any followers. She saw nothing that suggested she was being tailed, and she had no reason to believe she was, but her training had kicked in as her shock was fading.
She left the store and walked back the direction she had come, stopping to look in another shop window so that she could see if anyone had reversed direction to follow her. No. It was the last counter-surveillance technique she used. She wanted to get back to her cellar quickly, safe from the Nazis and safe from bearing witness to what they could do.
Keeping her eyes fixed on the street ahead of her, she forced her mind away from re-playing the shooting scene. The goal here was to keep herself together, not appear in any way upset or suspicious, and get to safety. She could not help that poor baby or its mother now. She had to help herself.
The green door of the safe house appeared, and she opened it, and then closed it, leaning hard against it, her hand damp on the doorknob. Then she saw the empty plate on the table. The owner was home, perhaps in the water closet. He had made it clear to Claude he did not want to see his guests.
Hurrying past the table, she made for the cellar door. Only when she was on the other side of it did she think to reach inside her blouse and feel for the paper. Still there. Halfway down the stairs she saw the Canadian. She had forgotten that he would be here, stupidly enough.
“Glad you’re back so early. Did you—?” He stared intently at her. “What happened? Did something go wrong?”
She shook her head, but suddenly, it seemed as if she was walking through a fog, suspended in it, her feet not touching the stairs. She made it to the third step from the bottom and sat, hard.
He came over and squatted before her. “Did someone get captured?”
Again she shook her head. And then the image of the baby being clubbed and then shot came back to her mind. At half speed it played out, the long arc of the soldier’s back-swing, the impact of the brown rifle stock on the soft curls of hair. Her memory was playing tricks. The sounds were gone in the recollection. The mother’s face came into sharp focus, the sweet caress of her hand on the dead baby’s face. And the shots fired, silently in her memory, the supine mother jerking and then going still. And the last, the baby’s head flying apart, pieces spinning, the other soldier flinching as one of them flew toward his face. Details she hadn’t known she had seen were there, trapped in her memory. The face of the Nazi officer, showing no emotion at all.
“Beatriz!” a voice said.
She wondered who Beatriz was. Then she remembered it was she. She tried to speak but could not. She closed her eyes and shook her head.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost. I’ll fetch you some water.”
Closing her eyes made the memory more vivid. She opened them again, and she tried to focus on something real, something in the present, in this cellar. The blanket she slept in. There, spread on a short piece of oilcloth, rolled into a neat cylind
er.
He—Bernard, yes, that was his name—appeared again, holding a cup of water in the chipped teacup they’d been using to drink from. “Here. Drink this.”
She couldn’t seem to raise her arms to take it.
He set it on the step above her and sat by her, forcing her to scoot over and make room. “Tell me what’s wrong. You’re scaring me.”
Upstairs, a chair scratched along the floor. Then water ran—the homeowner, tidying up after his meal. In a moment she’d hear the door close as he left. She looked at the ceiling, waiting for it to happen, focusing on that noise, something real and concrete and now.
When the main door shut, she felt herself relax fractionally.
“Now talk to me,” Bernard said.
She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. How to put into words what she’d seen? And should she speak of it anyway?
He put a hand tentatively on her arm. “You’re trembling.”
Was she? Yes, she was, and as he tightened his hand on her arm, it increased. Soon she could feel it from the inside, a shudder that took hold of her and shook her harder and harder. She felt his arm go around her shoulder.
“Shh,” he said. “It’s all right. You’re safe.”
She was. But two people were dead. The baby’s head, exploding again in her mind, caught her off guard. She shut her eyes tight against it. It exploded again, like a film on the inside of her eyelids.
“There, there,” he said. “You’ll be fine.” His arm tightened.
She shook her head. She would never be fine again. Her parents’ death, she did not witness. Her husband’s had happened hundreds upon hundreds of miles from her, and she’d never seen his body and likely never would. But this she had seen. A sound escaped her.
“Talk to me. Tell me what’s wrong.”
She took a deep breath and forced herself to speak. “A Nazi. A Nazi kill—” But no, she didn’t want to describe it. It wouldn’t transfer her burden to him; it would only give him a new burden and leave her with her own. “No. I can’t say.”
“It might help.”
“I’ll never be free of it,” she said, realizing that this was so. And she remembered that her forever was, statistically, only going to be four more weeks. She began to laugh, bizarrely in the face of this, to laugh.
He frowned at her. “You’re crying and laughing at the same time. Do I need to slap you?”
“Please don’t,” she managed. “Or maybe yes.” She forced herself to regain control. The laughter had been shrill. No wonder it had worried him. “Sorry I frightened you.”
“I’m not frightened of you. I’m frightened for you.” He raised his hand and touched her face, pushed a piece of hair that had come loose behind her ear.
She found herself leaning into the touch. And then pulled away from it, remembering how the mother had touched her dead baby. “Don’t,” she said, pleading. She didn’t want to be held. Didn’t deserve it. “Please. I know you’re being kind, and I appreciate it, but don’t.”
“If you could talk about it, whatever it is….” His eyes were full of sympathy.
Her heart twisted at his kindness. She wiped her eyes and managed a wan smile. “I am doing my best to forget it. An ugly thing I saw. Nothing to do with the circuit or our operation.”
“Nazi bastards,” he said, but his tone was still gentle as his eyes searched her face.
“I have something for you,” she said. She needed physical distance from him. A part of her wanted to throw her arms around him and sob into his chest, which was the worst idea possible in these circumstances. She reached inside her blouse and pulled the rolled paper out. “This is an agenda of a meeting with Hesse and local officers. In German.”
“My German isn’t very good, I’m afraid.”
“Claude thought you might see some technical language that meant more to you than it might to him.”
“That’s about the extent of my reading in the language. Technical papers published before the war, and I relied a great deal on the maths in those to grasp their content.”
“No formulas here that I can see.” She glanced at it again before handing it to him. She was gaining control of herself. Her hand hardly shook at all as she extended it.
Holding the paper, he moved over to one of the windows where the light was better and spent a long time studying it. “‘Film’ is the same in German, it seems. They have a visual recording of a test?”
“Seems so,” she said. Her mind kept trying to replay the horror she had witnessed, and it was work to stop it from doing so, but for now, she was winning that battle.
“I would love to see that.”
“I knew you’d say so.”
“You’re getting to know me, despite your rigid security measures.”
“Yes,” she said. “Claude says we have the personnel to run only one operation, the kidnapping, so I don’t think we can steal the film as well.”
“Maybe he’ll have it on his person—Hesse, I mean.”
“Seems a lot to hope for,” she said.
“Pulling off a kidnapping in a foreign country seems a lot to hope for all on its own.”
“Claude says he’ll need you. You’ll need to be an operative, a working member of the circuit to get it accomplished. We’ve had some temporary attrition for a different reason.” Because of her, she realized, a thought that was rather late in coming.
“If Hesse sees me ahead of time, he’ll recognize me, and he’ll alert his handlers.”
“I’m sure Claude understands that. Perhaps you’ll work as lookout. Something safe, I would think, for you are the only one who can try to turn him, and who can understand whatever secrets you can pry out of him.”
“I may need help with the prying,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about that. I don’t think I have it in me to torture anyone.”
“I do.” She might not have this morning, but after today, she definitely did. Once she settled down, she could take these feelings of horror and grief and mold them, turn them into anger and then into violence. She’d done it before. She would do it again. That was for later. To Bernard, she said, “But the priority is to try and coax information from him, right?”
“Yes, turn him, talk to him. Coax him into speaking. Only then, if he does not, try to force him. And kill him if everything else fails. Put a stop to what he might do in advance of his doing it.”
“If they have a film of a test, they must be far along, no?”
“Correct. But he can always improve and refine what he has. They may not be in production yet.”
“How many others do you think they have working on it?” She couldn’t remember if she’d asked before.
“I was asked that in England. At his level, the number might be zero. There are surely technicians, and there are surely records, but no one else would be likely to take his research much farther once he is gone. That’s why this one man is so important.”
“Claude will have a good plan.”
“You trust him.”
“Yes, absolutely. He has shown me nothing but calm competence. He keeps his people safe somehow. Except the woman I replaced.”
“She was captured?”
“Shot fleeing.”
“I’m sorry, if she was a friend.”
“I don’t think I knew her well. I can’t be sure, of course. We don’t talk about our assignments. We aren’t told who goes where.”
“So in training, people you know just—what—disappear?”
“Exactly. They are there one day, gone the next, and you never know where. You don’t know what happened to them, if they lived, came back, or were reassigned. If they were injured but evacuated, captured and tortured, shot in the back, or managed to take the L-pill. In some cases, we’ll never know, I would venture.”
“They’ll just fall out of history?”
“And make it on the way.” She realized that sounded arrogant. “Or so one hopes, to make a tiny mark at the edges of the history book
s.”
“A footnote,” he suggested.
“Not even that. Between the lines, where it says Hitler was defeated in late 1944.” She realized her tremors had finally stopped.
“You seem better.” He was observant. And he seemed to care.
She wasn’t sure how she felt about that. Part of her longed for more human connection, especially now, on the heels of this terrible day. A larger part of her knew she was safer—physically and emotionally—without it. “I am. I thank you for your sympathy. And I apologize for falling to pieces.”
“There is no reason to apologize for being a human being. These are hard times. You’re in a terrible situation, operating in enemy territory.”
“Most of the time, I’m bored,” she admitted, wishing the walk back from her assignment had been boring instead of what it was. “Sitting around waiting is a large part of this.”
“You are preaching to the choir,” he said. “All I’ve done is sit down here in this cellar.”
“In a few days, you’ll have your chance. And then it’s back to England for you, and continuing whatever work you were doing before this.”
“Yes.”
“Is it important, the work you are doing?”
“I thought we weren’t supposed to talk about such things.”
“I’m sorry. You’re right. My mind is not as sharp as it should be this afternoon.”
“I hope I can be of use in this—this operation. I have very little training.”
“Are you frightened?”
“I am, of course. I would prefer to not lose my life this week.” He smiled, and his tone made it a joke.
“I am willing to die for this. Aren’t you?” Harsher than she meant to be.
He frowned. “Of course. I took an oath, just as you did.”
“People are dying every day,” she said, embarrassed to hear the catch in her voice. She wanted to yell, “Babies are dying!” She did not.
Instead of being offended, he looked sad. “I wish you’d talk to me. Something is eating at you, that much is clear.”