The Shadow War

by Lindsay Smith

  “I stopped by your office to bring you coffee this morning,” he said. “We got a new shipment at the headquarters, and I wanted to share.”

  “What terrible timing!” Evangeline said, not missing a beat. “It must have been when I stepped out to fetch my sweater from home.” She rubbed her arms and tried not to cringe at how dry and scaly they’d become without her usual regimen. “This weather’s turned so suddenly, hasn’t it?”

  “A pity. You should tell someone where you’ve gone next time. I’d hate for you to miss something important.”

  Evangeline hovered over his phrasing longer than she should have. He couldn’t possibly have hidden a double meaning in it. He couldn’t possibly know what she did—the games she’d been playing since that awful April night. It was a casual remark, not the scalpel incision of a man trying to pry back her flesh. But even if it was . . .

  She played it casual too, smiled prettily, and sipped her bisque.

  “Well?” Stefan asked, pushing his emptied bowl away. “How was work, then? Once you were suitably warm.”

  She set down her spoon as well, her appetite quickly leaving her. “Oh, the usual. This province upset we haven’t set aside enough rations for them, that politician running out of excuses to give the Americans.”

  “Such a precarious position you occupy,” Stefan said. “You must still be friendly with our enemies, even as they snatch at lands that have willingly joined the Third Reich.”

  “Well, it’s that damned de Gaulle, running his mouth on the radio.” She batted her lashes. “Or so I’ve heard.”

  Stefan leaned over the table, and one hand fell on top of hers. He’d removed the buttery leather gloves, leaving only rough, caustic skin as it closed possessively over hers. His hands were always so dry. They had to be, she supposed. How many times a day did he have to scrub away blood? How many electrodes had he applied that morning to some poor Frenchman’s balls? When he closed his eyes and hummed Wagner, was it to drown out the echoes of screams or to bolster them? She tried not to flinch.

  “Please, my dear. Don’t play foolish with me. Some men may appreciate it, but I am not one of them.”

  Evangeline’s pulse rushed in her ears. He was exactly one of those men.

  “You are a beauty, it is true. But it is not only for that that I admire you.” His thumb scraped over her knuckles. “A Sorbonne woman, learning the art of diplomacy at her father’s side for all her life. Such a rare intellect is unmatched behind a face like yours, hmm?”

  It wasn’t the Sorbonne, though, that had taught her what she knew. And it certainly hadn’t been her father. She let a blush rise on her cheeks; Stefan didn’t need to know the shape of the face that put it there. He didn’t need to know about the girl who’d slapped her out of her stupor and compelled her to act. And he certainly didn’t need to know how she acted—how once she’d started, she couldn’t stop.

  “I must confess. While I waited for you, coffee turning colder, I couldn’t help but glance at some of the figures on your desk. It was the most curious thing, though—I could not seem to make them add up.”

  Something shattered in her chest, sharp as glass. “Are you sure you were reading them right?”

  The waiter arrived with their next course, roasted leg of lamb, and Stefan reluctantly drew his hand back. Evangeline’s stomach groaned at the mere smell. For all her father’s scrabbling and bowing to the occupiers, they still never got meat at home. Not anymore.

  “Well, perhaps I was not. Perhaps you can explain it to me, yes?” Stefan said. “I don’t fully grasp your job with the Vichy.”

  Evangeline took a sip of champagne to buy herself a moment to think. She had a speech perfectly memorized for whenever a supervisor or colleague questioned her. She’d run through it a dozen times. But all that flew through her mind just then was a memory like a blade through her ribs: the look of betrayal on Simone’s face, that moonlit face, those dark eyes so full of pain.

  You were right, she wanted to scream at that girl. I’m not cut out for this. I’ll never escape this cage.

  She was trying. Dear God, she was trying. But it couldn’t do anyone much good if she got herself killed.

  “I must approve requisitions to the Reich’s forces within the Occupied Zone.” She smiled sweetly, the way a schoolteacher might while explaining simple arithmetic. “We have our inputs, we have our outputs. So I must allocate where it all goes.”

  “I understand that much.” Stefan waved his fork, irritated, and a fleck of juicy lamb’s blood splashed her dress. “I mean that they are asking for enough to feed our men and keep the electricity churning at the command posts, yet you are not requisitioning it for them.”

  “Well, that is the funny thing about occupations. A system that kept one country running cannot instantly be made to accommodate two.”

  The warning flashed in Stefan’s expression, his genial mask gone in an instant. But she couldn’t be cowed by him. If she backed down now, he’d know she was bluffing. It was better to keep up the indignant front, even if it meant a smack on the wrist, than retreat too easily and reveal it all for a sham.

  “Well, I suppose you understand it better than I do,” he said at last. “I just want to make sure nothing is being sent awry, is all.”

  Like entire warehouses full of rifles, dispersed to the Libération-Nord in the dead of night. Like half a shipment of grain bound for a German marshaling yard that wound up in the hungry village of Lyon. Like a careful inventory tracking how requisition requests moved across the Occupied Zone, the spikes indicating where German forces were building up and when, the sort of information that was so easily tapped out in Morse code and bounced off to London and even further.

  It had been so easy. So easy to make the contacts she needed—so easy to misfile paperwork, lose correspondence, copy ledger pages. The hardest part had been convincing the Resistance network that she wasn’t a plant. Spying was the easy part. Not getting caught was still a work in progress.

  “If I could produce supplies out of thin air,” Evangeline said calmly, “then I gladly would have done so by now.”

  “Funny you should mention that.” Stefan spoke with his mouth full of meat bright as rubies. “There was a crate of Wehrmacht ammunition that turned up in a partisan bunker we raided yesterday.”

  “You see? It’s hard enough trying to stretch our resources for our own forces without these idiot Resistance fighters picking off our transports.” God, she hoped he couldn’t hear her heart knocking against her ribs right now.

  “Very few people are privy to those transport movements,” Stefan said. “And you are one of them.”

  Evangeline bit back her first instinct—to deny it. Instead she rolled her eyes, like this was a fight they’d had many times. “You said yourself I’m too smart to play such a stupid game. Would I really let a Gestapo officer court me if I had something to hide?”

  “Remind me,” Stefan said, “how we met again, ma chèrie.” He smiled, a scrap of flesh stuck around his left canine.

  “You were in my office, questioning all our employees.” Looking for the person who’d given away troop positions for a secret convoy that the Brits promptly blew to bits. “I was one of the last you called for questioning.” I’d gotten sloppy. Stupid. I’d been everything Simone thought I was, and worse. I couldn’t even do the right thing properly. “After you asked me about my daily routine, places I frequented, friends I kept, you asked me if I was seeing any fellows.” Easy enough to say no to that.

  His lips spread, slick with champagne, though she didn’t dare believe the test was over. “I liked your demeanor. Your unwillingness to back down.”

  “I don’t like having my work disrupted, that’s all.” Too late she thought to add, “And you are a rather fetching fellow, aren’t you, mein Herr?”

  God, her hubris. Thinking she could play a Gestapo interrogat
or for a fool. He’d offered her very little in the way of solid intelligence, anyhow—only the vaguest hints that she could send out, half of them likely to be traps. But men like him didn’t know how to be denied.

  “And you,” he purred, “are a divine prize, indeed.”

  Her stomach curdled as she smiled at him. She’d strung him along this far. Meals, strolls through the Tuileries, nights at the opera watching that insufferable Götterdämmerung. But he was circling her closer and closer, and the closer he got, the more perilous everything became.

  “It would be a dreadful shame if you got too clever for your own good.”

  Evangeline could practically feel Simone glowering at her when she answered, “I’m clever enough to know my place.”

  There was a commotion at the front of the restaurant then: Gestapo officers storming in from the rue Royale. The maître d’ scrambled back, flattening himself against the Tiffany stained glass to keep out of their way. Numbly, distantly, Evangeline’s thoughts blared with a warning: that it had all been an elaborate setup, a monthlong game, and now, now when she was finally about to get the information out of Wewelsburg that her network desperately needed, now that cells in Hallenberg and other command points were finally coming online, it was all going to crumble around her and crush her in the rubble. And yet she felt the oddest sense of peace, a buzzing sensation that permeated all of her limbs. Perhaps, if her remains were ever recovered, Simone might know that she’d been wrong. That Evangeline had tried to do right by her.

  “Obersturmführer Neumann.” The men stopped at their table, and the leader spoke: a lowly Scharführer by the look of his insignias. “You are required immediately.”

  It wasn’t for her. Evangeline forced herself not to collapse with relief. They hadn’t come for her.

  But they must have captured someone else.

  “A pity.” Stefan wiped his mouth, tossed his napkin onto his half-full plate, and stood. “Perhaps you would like to accompany us, Mademoiselle Gaturin? You might find this enlightening. And afterward, we can have a drink and a laugh at La Coupole, ja?”

  “Obersturmführer . . .” the soldier said, gaze darting toward Evangeline.

  “Don’t be silly. She’s one of us. Isn’t that right, Mademoiselle Gaturin?”

  “Sieg heil,” she said bitterly.

  Stefan led her to the waiting Mercedes, and they rode through the heart of Paris, her Paris, to 84 avenue Foch. The Gestapo’s counterintelligence headquarters. It was far too beautiful a building, steep Beaux Arts roofline, marble columns blossoming all over its façade, to be used for such an ugly purpose.

  She kept her eyes to herself as they climbed to the fifth floor, though she couldn’t help but note that the second floor housed an unusual amount of radio equipment. She’d long suspected too high a percentage of supposed Resistance chatter was coming from just such a source, but now, seeing it for herself, she felt ill all over again, wondering just who she’d been telling the wrong sort of secrets to.

  How long would it take for her to break? Would she break even now as Stefan delivered this warning, this test?

  “You can wait right here.” Stefan ushered her into a cramped closet-size room where a metal grate offered a glimpse of the room beside them. She barely swallowed back her gasp at the sight of the man on the other side, bound to a chair, one eye swollen shut and ringed in blood.

  Then Stefan entered the interrogation room and smiled at the man. “Possession of illegal radio electronic devices in addition to the crate of Wehrmacht ammunition we discovered on your property.” He clucked his tongue. “You have been a busy man, Georges-Yves Sauvage. Let’s find out what more you’ve been up to.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  DANIEL

  “You’re always one to burn the ships,” his mother once said. She was reading—always, her evenings filled with stacks and stacks of books in three different languages that disappeared at alarming rates—and this time, she was drumming her fingers against a copy of Homer’s Odyssey.

  Daniel frowned at her from behind the sheet music he was studying. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You force yourself to move forward by taking away your escape route. Burning the ships you arrived in so you can’t sail back to safety.”

  Daniel twiddled his pencil, uncomfortable with his mother’s stare. Besides, she didn’t have it quite right. He didn’t sabotage things so he was forced to be brave. He just ruined whatever he touched.

  The thing about playing viola was that not every great composer knew how to write for it. Sometimes you played Vivaldi, who teased beautiful harmonies out of every part, fitting them together like architecture, scaffolding. Bliss. Then other times you played Pachelbel. Wagner. Haydn, even. Those composers who didn’t know what else to do with you, so they slapped you on an ostinato line, sawing back and forth like the metronome for other, more important roles.

  In a sense, then, it was Pachelbel’s fault that Daniel had time to stare off into space, to start memorizing the lines of the second violinist’s face. Daniel was fourteen, and he was overflowing with yearning, a fire in want of a wick.

  Ernst—that was the second violinist’s name in the youth chamber orchestra. Like the flamboyant late leader of the Sturmabteilung—the stormtroopers—Ernst Röhm, the other chamber orchestra members would darkly joke. In the windowless practice hall, Ernst was sunlight, never serious, never satisfied, wearing his superiority and glibness like a suit of armor. (Daniel didn’t know, then, the difference between true light and a false, furiously stoked glow.)

  He should have recognized the warnings. He should have done the calculations. The snarky utterings after their practice sessions as Ernst smoked and chatted with Liesl and Rudolf, the way they would cut their eyes toward Daniel and change their posture whenever he approached.

  Sometimes Ernst was like all the rest, dropping hints that soon there’d be no place for Jews like Daniel in chamber orchestras or anywhere else. But not always. He could be funny—though usually when making fun of someone. He could be brilliant at the violin—but that, too, was often an effort to show up Liesl, to compete for her seat. Daniel didn’t care. He was smitten, and Ernst paid him attention from time to time, not all of it bad. Daniel had so much to learn.

  And so he burned the ships, not even realizing the torch that was in his hands.

  It was after a performance at the Youth Activities Hall, the sort of casual venue that people like Daniel weren’t yet barred from. Their quartet had woven flawlessly together into the flow of Chopin, sweat dripping from their noses as they played, their breathing aligning into a single lung, in and out. Daniel had never felt closer to his quartet mates—never felt closer to a greater power. If they could play this well at the championship, the prize was surely theirs.

  He was confident. It made him reckless and foolish.

  At the beer hall afterward, he drank three beers, four; Liesl’s cheeks burned bright red, and Ernst’s voice carried with a resonance Daniel felt in his bones. He leaned into Ernst’s words like they were a warm spring breeze. Liesl and Rudolf left to dance, and suddenly it was only Ernst and Daniel, facing each other, an unspoken vastness heavy and present between them.

  “So,” Ernst said. A smile played at his lips.

  Daniel took a step toward him.

  The corner was dark, shielded from everyone. Ernst’s hand reached out, caught Daniel’s elbow. When their eyes locked, Daniel saw—later he would swear he saw—Ernst had been waiting for this, too.

  When they first kissed, it was with an exhalation of air. Then another. Ernst moaned—Daniel was certain of it. Leaned back, inviting Daniel closer.

  But then Ernst was shoving him away and shouting and cursing, calling him every filthy name he’d ever heard, for Jews, for homosexuals, for soft boys with too much music in their hearts to wield a butcher’s knife the way their fathers hoped. And
of course Liesl and Rudolf manifested from out of nowhere at the commotion, they heard Ernst’s furious shouts as he described Daniel’s “attack,” and in that moment, that look, that moan, Daniel lost everything. His love, his quartet, his songs.

  In the end it didn’t matter. They’d already taken his citizenship; next they forbade him from concert halls. The stormtroopers marched through the streets and shattered windows and dragged his neighbors away. The Eisenbergs abandoned their shop for Luxembourg. But because he hadn’t been careful with his trust, because he hadn’t fully grasped the world and all its dangers—he’d only made things worse.

  It was his gift. More than music, more than murder. His gift was to destroy.

  Liam was still holding his hand in the dark, cool silence of the chalet. He’d unraveled his story of Pitr’s betrayal and the rift opening to accept its first sacrifice. It should have terrified Daniel; it should have warned him away from this angry, hungry boy. Instead it made him fall harder.

  “You found out how to control it better, though. Afterward.”

  Liam hunched his shoulders. “I got better at opening rifts on my own—by digging my nails into my palm, mind you, not by any more sacrifices. I wasn’t about to look for him, though. I’d seen how twisted the creatures on the other side were—some dark, horrible, hateful version of our world. Always figured that if Pitr survived, he’d end up that way.”

  “Hard to believe that’s even possible,” Daniel said grimly.

  “They were . . . corrupted. Sicarelli stole their energy away, and it destroyed their civilizations. Left behind those hungry, ravenous monsters.”

  “And now Pitr has learned how to control them. He’s working with Dr. Kreutzer to imbue soldiers with that energy. You’re certain?”