Allies

by Alan Gratz

  And assassinating German officers. Like the one for which the Nazis had been rounding people up in revenge. It was the Maquis’s fault Samira’s mother and the other families had been taken prisoner. That’s why they had to help.

  The little white dog from the house still jogged along with Samira, half following, half leading her, and always tripping her up if she wasn’t watching carefully.

  “Go. Scat,” she whispered at the dog. “I need to hurry.”

  Samira didn’t have a watch, but she knew it must be close to the time she and her mother were supposed to meet up with the Maquis in the woods. Any later than that, and the Resistance fighters would be gone. They were always on the move so the Germans couldn’t find them. They would be at the rendezvous point for fifteen minutes. No more.

  The dog made Samira trip again, and she huffed in frustration. She picked up a stick from the side of the road. “Go on. Get,” she said. She threw the stick into the trees as far as she could, and the little dog tore off after it.

  Samira had made it only a few steps before the dog came bounding back with the stick, happier than before.

  It was going to be harder to get rid of this dog than Samira thought.

  “All right. You can come along,” she told the dog quietly. “I suppose both of us need to get our families back.”

  Samira adjusted her mother’s kerchief around her head, sticking to the hedgerows just off the road in case a German car happened past. There was a time back in Paris, Samira remembered, when she had always covered her hair with a headscarf.

  Algeria was a colony of France, but they wanted to be their own country. That was why Samira’s parents had come to France in the first place—to learn all they could about medicine and law and then return to their homeland and work for independence. Samira believed in the cause too, and to show her own nationalistic and religious pride, she had worn a headscarf to her all-girls school in Paris.

  But some of the other girls—French girls—hadn’t liked her independent streak, and one day their taunting had turned into a full-on fight. Samira was called to the headmistress’s office, where she expected to learn the other girls were going to be punished. Instead, she found herself in trouble while the French girls got only a slap on the wrist.

  “But I didn’t start it! They did!” Samira had protested.

  “You brought it on yourself, wearing that headscarf,” the headmistress said. “From now on, headscarves will no longer be permitted here at Marie Curie, do you understand?”

  “But there’s no law against it!” Samira said.

  “There is now. I am the law at this school, and I forbid it,” the headmistress said. “And if I may say so, this is precisely why you and your kind continue to be held back. Because you attempt to maintain your own identity rather than integrate into French society.”

  Samira’s fists clenched in her lap, and she shook with anger and frustration. Everyone in France said this, but how were Algerians supposed to be French when French landlords wouldn’t let them live in their buildings? When French shopkeepers wouldn’t hire them? When French policemen harassed them in the streets? Algerians weren’t Algerian, because there was no Algeria. But they weren’t French citizens either. They were caught in a no-man’s-land, neither one nor the other, and it was no different for Samira here at school.

  “How can I ‘integrate’ when the school won’t let me?” she asked.

  “ ‘Won’t let you’? Nonsense,” said the headmistress. “Every opportunity open to the other girls at Marie Curie is open to you.”

  “But is that really true?” Samira asked. Years of pent-up frustration were finally bubbling over, and she picked just the latest indignity she had suffered. “I am the best actress in my class by far, and yet I have never once been cast in the school play. Why? Because I’m Algerian?”

  “Of course not,” the headmistress said. “There are just no parts for a girl who is …”

  “Brown?” Samira finished for her.

  The headmistress’s face seemed to grow darker before Samira’s eyes. “I cannot help it if all of the great works of theater in the last two millennia have been written by Europeans,” the headmistress said coldly.

  “There are girls playing the parts of boys,” Samira pointed out, “but a brown girl can’t play a character whose skin color isn’t even mentioned?”

  The headmistress lowered her eyelids at her. “Perhaps, Miss Zidane, you didn’t get a role in the play because you are not quite the actress you think you are.”

  Samira broke down in tears, blubbering about her insecurities and failings. The headmistress’s tone quickly shifted to one of sympathy and regret, and she hurried around her desk to comfort Samira.

  “I’m so sorry, my dear,” the headmistress said. “Perhaps I could speak to Ms. Dumont. Find a small role for you somewhere.”

  Samira stopped crying as suddenly as she had begun, her face snapping back to normal. She had only been acting upset.

  “No thank you, headmistress,” she said, rising calmly to leave. “I think I will wait for a part that matches the level of my talent.”

  The little dog growled, bringing Samira back to the present and the dark, cool Normandy night. Her furry friend had sensed them before Samira had seen them.

  Two Nazi soldiers, guarding the bridge up ahead.

  Samira picked up the dog and backed into a hedgerow on the edge of a cherry orchard. German soldiers? Here on the bridge? It was a short bridge, but it was the only way across the swift, deep river.

  Samira’s mind spun. She had to meet with the Maquis. Tonight. She had to get them to free her mother and the others from the German prison before they were killed. There wasn’t time to walk along the river, looking for another bridge. But she couldn’t just walk past the guards either.

  Samira spied an abandoned cherry basket at the base of a tree, and an idea came to her.

  “I’m going to need your help,” she told the dog. “But you’re not going to like the first part.”

  Samira hurriedly stashed the dog beneath the basket and found a medium-sized rock to put on top of it. The dog leaped around underneath the basket, almost knocking the rock off, but it held.

  “It won’t be for long, I promise,” Samira whispered. She picked up a stick and hurried down the road toward the bridge.

  Samira burst into tears—an old trick she was good at by now—a few seconds before the first of the two soldiers saw her and raised his rifle.

  “Halt! Who goes there?” he said to her in passable French. And then, when he saw it was a sobbing little girl, he said, “Why are you out past curfew? Where are your parents?”

  If she could only tell him where her parents really were—one of them in the ground and the other in a prison, both thanks to soldiers like him. But she kept up the act.

  “I’ve lost my dog,” Samira blubbered. “I opened the door just for a moment, and he ran away. Have you seen my dog?”

  “No,” the soldier said, “and you need to go home right now. It’s dangerous to be out after curfew. Go home. Your dog will come back tomorrow.”

  “No! He’ll get lost and never find his way back!”

  The second soldier rolled his eyes at the first one. Samira could sense their patience wearing thin. It was time for the dog’s part in this little play. All she had to do was call him, and—

  —and suddenly Samira realized she had no idea what the dog’s name was.

  Samira needed the dog to come to her rescue—but what was his name? She would just have to make one up and hope he still came when she called him. But what to call him? Her mind went blank as she struggled to come up with something.

  “All right, that’s enough now,” the first soldier said. He took her arm. She was caught. Trapped. She kept trying to think of a name to call for the dog. All she could see in her mind’s eye was the tiny dog, dancing around the fallen soldier, barking bravely as he took on a challenge a thousand times greater than himself. Suddenly, she
had it—the name of a similarly brave and talkative character from one of her favorite plays.

  “Cyrano!” she called as loudly as she could. “Cyrano! Come! Come on, boy!”

  “Let’s go,” the first soldier said, pulling her away. The second soldier started for a portable two-way radio.

  “Cyrano!” Samira cried, her desperation real now. Soon they would be asking to see her papers, and if they discovered they were fake—

  There was a thump and a crash from the hedgerows, and a little white dog came tearing up onto the bridge. Samira broke free of the soldier’s grasp and went down on one knee to scoop up the little dog—Cyrano now. She hugged him as he licked her face.

  “Oh, Cyrano! It’s my dog!” she told the soldiers. “I knew he was out here!”

  “All right, you’ve found your dog,” the first soldier said. “Time to get you home.”

  He looked up to say something in German to the other soldier, and Samira quickly tossed the stick far into the darkness beyond the other side. Cyrano leaped from her arms and chased after it.

  “Cyrano! Come back!” Samira cried, running to catch him.

  “Here, wait!” the German soldier called. “You can’t be out after curfew!”

  Samira sprinted across the bridge, immediately ducking into the sharp, tangled hedgerow along the side of the road. Twigs and limbs scratched her, but she pushed through, running for all she was worth to put distance between herself and the bridge. As though he had never been gone, Cyrano appeared beside her, yipping as they ran pell-mell through another orchard.

  “Not quite the actress I think I am? Ha! Take that, headmistress,” Samira muttered.

  Chak-chak!

  The sound of a handheld machine gun cocking brought Samira up short, and she fell backward into the dirt as a shadowy soldier stepped out from behind a tree.

  Samira put her hands up. “Wait! Don’t shoot! I was just looking for my dog,” she lied.

  “Yes, well, you’ve found something else,” said a smooth French voice.

  “The Boches have given up and gone back to their guard post on the bridge,” said another French voice. Boche was French slang for Germans. It was from a word that originally meant “cabbage head.”

  More shadowy figures emerged from the trees all around her, stepping into the moonlight where she could see them. They wore a motley hodgepodge of clothes, from dirty shirts to stolen German military boots to blue overalls. One or two of them wore the torn remnants of British military jackets, probably “borrowed” from pilots who hadn’t survived their desperate jumps once their planes were shot down. They all wore white silk scarves cut from parachutes, and each of them carried a weapon of one kind or another—old hunting rifles, stolen German machine guns, British Sten guns dropped into France for the Resistance. One man had a bandolier of bullets slung over his shoulder, and almost all the soldiers had pistols tucked roguishly into the tops of their trousers.

  And one of them, the soldier who had first spoken to Samira, wore an armband with the French red, white, and blue tricolor and the double-barred Cross of Lorraine on it—the symbol of Free France, the French government in exile.

  Samira hadn’t found the Maquis. They had found her.

  “I’m Sa—” Samira began, but the man with the Free France armband cut her off.

  “No real names, please,” he said quietly.

  Right. Of course. Samira remembered—the Maquis all used code names, to protect the others and their own families if they were caught by the Germans. Her mother even had a code name within the organization, since she was a messenger for them.

  “I’m Hippolyta’s daughter,” Samira said, using her mother’s code name.

  “Yes, I recognize you,” said the Maquis leader. “My name is Odysseus.” He didn’t introduce the others. “Do you have a message for us? Where is your mother?”

  Where should Samira begin? With the thing that mattered most to her, she decided.

  “My mother’s been captured by the Nazis,” she said. The tearful quavering that came into her voice wasn’t an act this time, but she tried to put on a brave face. “We were coming to tell you—‘The dice are on the carpet. It’s hot in Suez.’ ”

  The men stirred excitedly. They all knew what the code words meant—that the invasion of France was happening, at long last. They clapped each other on the back and hugged, then happily got busy loading themselves up with the gear they had hidden away nearby.

  Their leader was all business though.

  “Your mother, she knew this, and she was captured by the Nazis?” Odysseus asked.

  “Yes. But she wasn’t captured because she was delivering the message,” Samira explained. “She was captured trying to help a family escape one of the Nazi roundups. Retribution for the assassination of Major Vogel, we think.”

  The happy mood of a moment ago was dispelled at the mention of retribution. They all knew what that meant to the French people. How many people would be murdered.

  “They’ll have taken her to Bayeux,” one of the men said. “That’s where they take all the prisoners around here.”

  “But they don’t know that she knows about us,” Odysseus said. “They won’t even know to interrogate her.”

  “You still have to help me get her out!” Samira said.

  “Get her out?” said a man with a southern French accent. “Impossible. The Bayeux garrison has at least forty soldiers in it.”

  “But you have to!” Samira begged. “She’ll be shot in the morning!”

  “Not if the English and the Americans do their jobs,” Odysseus said. “If what you heard on the radio is true, the Germans will have far more to worry about in a few hours.”

  “But … what if the invasion fails?” Samira cried.

  “It’s our job to make sure the invasion doesn’t fail,” Odysseus said. One of his lieutenants nodded that they were ready to go. Samira couldn’t believe what was happening. They weren’t going to help her get her mother back!

  “Please,” she begged.

  Odysseus shook his head. “I’m sorry. Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t defeat an entire garrison of German soldiers. And those code words you brought to us, they mean more than just the beginning of the invasion. They are specific instructions to us. We are to enact Operation Tortoise and Operation Green: stop the Germans’ trains and slow down their trucks so they can’t respond to the invasion with full force. I’m afraid that’s the only thing we can do to help your mother and the others survive.”

  They were already leaving. The Maquis were Samira’s last, best, and only chance to free her mother, and they were walking away. She choked back a sob.

  “Then I’m coming with you,” Samira said.

  “I don’t want the girl here,” said the Maquis with the southern French accent. “Send her home.”

  Now that they were moving, sticking to the shadows again, all the Resistance fighters looked like big black shapes against the gray night. Samira followed on their heels, and Cyrano followed on hers.

  “I’m not some useless kid,” Samira argued. “I can hold my own.”

  “You should have heard her lay it on for those two Boches on the bridge, Perseus,” one of the others said.

  “No. Not because she’s a child,” the southerner code-named Perseus said. “Because she’s Algerian. She doesn’t care about France. None of them do. Just Algeria.”

  “I’ve never been to Algeria,” Samira told him. “I was born and raised in Paris. But either way, we’ve got a better chance of getting our independence from France, not Germany.”

  “See?” Perseus said. “It’s always Algeria first.”

  “Sounds like the kid is saying get rid of the Nazis first,” the other Maquis replied.

  “I don’t trust her, is all,” Perseus said.

  Samira felt her face flush hot at the insult, but all that mattered was that they did whatever they could to help the invasion succeed. Every second the Nazis were distracted, that was another se
cond her mother and the others survived.

  “I’m Jason,” the friendly Maquis told her. “Of the Argonauts. That’s not my real name. If you’re coming along, we’re going to need a code name for you too. I don’t remember Hippolyta having any daughters in her story. How about Atalanta? She was a hunter. Good one too.”

  “I like Atalanta,” Samira said. “You know a lot about Greek heroes. Were you a teacher?”

  “Oh, I couldn’t say,” said Jason. “Not supposed to share too much personal information, you know. But we’re quite a troop here. Shopkeepers and soldiers, guttersnipes and the well-to-do. All former shopkeepers, soldiers, guttersnipes, and well-to-do, that is. Now we are all Maquis, and Maquis is all we are.”

  The little dog sniffed at a hole in the ground.

  “That’s Cyrano,” Samira said. “That’s not his real name either.”

  “Enough chatter,” Odysseus whispered back at them. “We’re getting close.”

  It still took them a long time to get where they were going—a stretch of train track that ran along the steep embankment of a rock-filled river. Samira and the others walked parallel to the line for another couple of kilometers until they came to a small railway building beside the tracks. Right outside the house, the single line split into two before both sets of tracks disappeared beyond a bend. It was a little single-story switching station. Inside, an electric light illuminated a tiny room and a single old man sitting by a woodstove reading a book.

  “We’ll have to kill the old man,” one of the Maquis said.

  “We can’t kill him,” said Perseus. “He’s French. He’s just doing his job.”

  “Doing his job for the Germans,” said another.

  Samira knew that there were some French people who worked for the Germans because they had to. Others did it because they liked the Nazis and what they stood for, and wanted to be a part of it. Or at least thought they could profit from it. The Maquis hated willing collaborators even more than they hated the Germans. Samira hated them too. Collaborators were French who had betrayed their own.