The Bells of Times Square

by Amy Lane

  Nate grimaced at him. “When the sun rises, Walter, the SS will be all over this place—bedroom, bathroom, beneath the house. I think our time here is at an end.”

  Walter’s mouth twisted in what Nate would later think of as grief. “That is too damned bad,” he said, his face pinched and unhappy. “I could have played make-believe here my entire life.”

  Nate closed his eyes. “The bells,” he said, hoping Walter would remember. “The bells, they will chime for both of us.”

  Walter nodded, a wistful smile on his face. “Yeah, well, I guess that’s the best we can hope. C’mon, Nate, we need to get this guy back in his slick officer duds so nobody thinks he got lucky.”

  Dressing a dead body was a ghastly business. The flesh was warm but cooling and flaccid—it had give but no life. They struggled, and when they were done, they realized they’d forgotten his undershorts. Ouida found them stuffed between couch cushions and told Nate she’d use them to clean the blood off the floor. Perhaps the man’s state of undress wouldn’t be noticed, or, if it was, would be considered a sign of a perversion.

  “He deserves to be reviled,” she said viciously, and Nate wouldn’t argue with her.

  He grabbed under Horst’s arms, and Walter grabbed his hastily laced boots, and together they hauled him out of what had once been their home.

  The trip through the woods was miserable—not quite chilly, but there was no path, no light, no landmarks. Nate found a constellation in the sky he recognized and guided himself by that star. When they had labored until they were sweaty and breathless and the house was out of sight, they dropped the SS officer’s body without comment, then turned and made their way back, grimly. No prayer for this man.

  Even the most wicked spent very little time in Gehinnom; this man would get no help from Nate to venture to the gates of Gan Eden.

  The trip back was faster, making Nate wish they’d gone a little farther in disposing of the body, but the night was getting on. Sighting the clearing with the rutted path and almost invisible road to the summer cottage made them both stop. In the moonlight, the house looked eerily familiar, as though they had lived there for years rather than camped out there for a month and a half.

  “I’ll miss it,” Walter said quietly. They were still standing in the shadows thrown by the moon, and Nate seized his hand and pulled him behind a tree out of sight from the house. Walter’s usual self-sufficiency was temporarily missing, and he looked up at Nate with the trusting expression of a lost child.

  “We will have a home,” Nate promised him, almost desperately. “We will survive the war and find each other in New York on New Year’s Eve. We will get a small house and make a living, and people will think, ‘Oh, what nice men. It’s a shame they never married. A Jew and a gentile—what good friends they seem to be.’”

  Walter grinned wickedly, and for all the years after, that was the picture in the album Nate pulled out most often. Wicked and hopeful, ready to have faith in a dream when, as far as Nate could tell, he’d never had faith in anything at all.

  “Only you and me’ll have to know what happens when the lights go out, right?”

  “We shall keep a separate bedroom,” Nate assured him soberly. “And tell everyone it is yours.”

  Walter cackled, the sound ringing in the moonlight like church bells, and Nate captured his mouth then, hopeful, oh so hopeful, that he could make it happen. Walter responded, warm and wet, and welcoming, and for the first time, Nate fell into him, trusting that Walter had caught him and that they were falling together. They separated at the same time, and Nate touched Walter’s cheek, and then they turned toward the house.

  The hope kept them going.

  Ouida was washed and dressed when they returned, and if she had found anything in the house that she disapproved of, nothing about her demeanor showed it.

  Nate used the old blankets to bundle a change of clothes for each of them, the playing cards, and the most recent batch of bagels and crackers, slightly stale, which he wrapped in a torn strip of linen first. The film he pocketed in his flight jacket, which he rolled up in the pack with the shaving kit, and his sidearm he shoved into the back of the slacks he’d borrowed from the castoffs in the garage.

  He was double-checking the entire thing when Walter came in, looking forlorn.

  He had the book in one hand and the doll in the other.

  “I don’t suppose . . .”

  Nate was going to say yes. He wanted them both—their book, their doll, their pretend life—but Ouida walked into the bedroom in that moment and rolled her eyes.

  “Are you defective? We’re tramping through woods for at least five miles if we don’t want to waltz through the barracks. The flight jacket, I can understand, but a child’s book!”

  Walter looked at Nate sickly, apparently reading Ouida’s tone if not her actual words. He dropped both things so quickly, they slithered off the bed, and Nate winced when he heard the tinkle of porcelain.

  New Year’s Eve, he mouthed, wondering if Walter could do this. His unit, the trainload of prisoners, his lover—they’d all been taken away. Could he leave this place too?

  But Walter had always been tough. Nate would remember that in later years when he pulled these mental pictures out like a worn love letter, all of them—the good and the bad, the pouting, the coldness, the reluctance to believe. All these snapshots would be precious, perfect in their imperfection, because they were all Nate had.

  In this moment, Walter glared at Ouida with some serious dislike, and then, face hard and determined, nodded at Nate.

  “We don’t got any alcohol or gas or anything. I’m gonna drag some dry brush in, and we can torch the place that way.”

  Nate nodded. “Good thinking.”

  “New Year’s Eve,” Walter said briefly, and like that, it was their code.

  He turned and stalked out, and Nate bent, ignoring Ouida, and picked up the doll. Her face and head were not, in fact, damaged. Only her foot, which might easily be repaired. Glaring at Ouida, he tucked the doll into the pack.

  “She doesn’t weigh much,” he said quietly. “I would very much love to bring her.”

  Ouida shrugged, indifferent. “We are going around the village, and I am stowing you in a barn near the field where they make their drops. If they send a plane for you, it can land there. You two will have to stay in the barn during the day and hold your water until the small hours of the dark. The old man will come and go, but he relies on his son for the top loft, and François won’t be by until after the operative calls down the plane. You should be safe. But the barn is very visible in the light, and animals make noise.”

  Nate nodded. “The OSS operative will be picked up with us?”

  “I am not sure.” Ouida shrugged. “Perhaps not. His cover is safe.”

  “Food?”

  “I can bring you some but not often. I will leave you with water, but the old man has cows. I suggest you make do.”

  Nate grimaced at the thought of the poor cow being subjected to his ministrations, but it was sustenance and shelter when, very shortly, they would have none.

  “Do you think the forest will catch around the house?” he asked, suddenly fearful. He was relieved when Ouida shook her head.

  “The ground is moist, and you’ve seen the runoff streams. A few leagues to the north, those get bigger—they’ll control any burn. Besides, there’s enough ventilation in the house itself. It will burn fast and hot, but localized. Don’t worry. We had planned to burn it down when Horst had outlived his usefulness anyway.”

  “We?” he asked, and abruptly the thought of putting his and Walter’s fate in this woman’s hands frightened him.

  “Me, my brother Everard, and my lover, Emile.”

  “A lover?” Nate looked at her, shocked. It was one thing to do what she’d been doing with Horst as an agent of the resistance but quite another when your lover knew.

  “How many members of your family have the Nazis killed?” she asked, vo
ice dripping with venom.

  “My uncle’s family, I assume,” Nate told her, his blood running cold. He had forgotten, hadn’t he? In his moments with Walter, in the quest for the healing at the end of the war, he’d forgotten about what the war had taken away, was taking way, as every minute passed by and he frolicked in the woods.

  “Well, then you know,” she said dismissively. “Emile will give anything to destroy them. Even me.”

  Nate grunted in assent, but he didn’t understand. He wouldn’t have given Walter. They had never used the word desertion, but he knew that he’d at least thought about giving his freedom, his liberty in his home country to keep things with Walter as they were.

  Love, he thought. I have more in me than hate.

  Simplistic. And not true. He would learn that hatred was a matter of the things that had been taken away. Once there was nothing left to love, hate was all that was left to feel.

  He folded his makeshift pack then and slung it over his back. When he and Ouida reached the bottom of the stairs, Walter was standing in the sitting room by a pile of brush, trying hard not to look at the SS officer’s spattered blood.

  “We ready?” he muttered.

  Walter nodded and struck a match from the book he’d been using for the stove. A whiff of sulfur, a flare of light, and the tinder caught. Walter and Nate met eyes once, and then Walter turned around and started down the stone steps and into the clearing, Nate and Ouida on his tail.

  The glow of the burning house illuminated their way for a couple of miles, but that was the only break they caught. When the warm yellow light of their destructing home had faded behind them, they discovered that woods by moonlight were lovely and dangerous. As when they were depositing the body, every step was a struggle around underbrush, clumps of vegetation, and holes of rinsed away earth with root structures rising above to trip the unwary. More than once, Nate steadied Ouida or Walter as their shorter legs made negotiating the terrain more difficult. More than once, Nate found himself falling back to walk side by side with Walter, only to respond to Ouida’s request that he come forward and talk to her.

  Asking for Nate’s opinion was one thing, but as of yet, she hadn’t so much as looked Walter in the eyes or acknowledged his presence. Nate wasn’t sure if it was the officer distinction, or Walter’s diminutive height—or even the bright orange of his hair. At their first rest stop, she called Nate forward and offered him a drink from a canteen that she’d apparently stolen from Horst. Nate turned to offer it to Walter, and she tried to snatch it out of Nate’s hand.

  Nate jerked it away and gave it to Walter, ignoring her sniff of derision.

  He’d hoped that had been the end of it, but apparently Walter decided to deal with it in his own inimitable way.

  “Officer,” she called softly as the darkness around them softened, “come see.”

  Nate grimaced at Walter, who glared at the back of Ouida’s head.

  “She speak English?” he asked, his voice gritty.

  “I don’t know,” Nate answered, suddenly wondering. She could very well know but be keeping the conversation in French to exclude Walter. “But I think she thinks I’m in command.”

  “Does she know I think she’s a vicious murdering bitch who has her sights on my man?” Walter spat, and in front of them, Ouida stopped abruptly and gasped.

  Nate turned to Walter and stared, shocked that he would risk, well, everything, in a spate of jealousy, and he realized that Walter wasn’t seeing him at all.

  Walter and Ouida were locking eyes, and Nate realized that Ouida, indeed, must know some English.

  Instinctively, Nate took a step in front of Walter and intercepted Ouida’s glower.

  She flushed under his defensive gaze.

  “I understand more English than I speak,” she conceded. “Tell him that I was talking to you as an officer. I assumed you were the leader.”

  “I am,” Nate replied. “An officer, that is. Walter is very much his own man.”

  She looked away. “According to him, so are you.”

  Nate didn’t pretend not to know what she was talking about. “If I am, does that mean we don’t get your shelter and the plane? Because I assure you, the film I need to bring to Naval Intelligence is still very much as relevant as it was when you thought I could be yours.”

  Ouida raised her eyebrows. “For all I know—”

  “We have proven ourselves nothing but trustworthy,” Nate said shortly. “The same can’t be said for yourself.”

  He didn’t like this. She was frightening and unpredictable, and they were relying on her because she claimed to know the OSS operative that Nate knew was here. He had no idea who it could be, and he didn’t blend in well enough to ask. Neither did Walter. But oy! The sight of her, naked, in front of a dead man, costing him and Walter their only shelter in hostile territory because she couldn’t maintain for one more week the charade she’d started—that was hard to shake.

  And he didn’t like the way she treated Walter.

  Nate stared at Ouida for a few more moments, refusing to back down. Finally, she bit her lip and broke eye contact.

  “You were very kind,” she said into the silence. “Forgive me if I misinterpreted.”

  Nate shrugged. “You wanted to show me something? Dawn is breaking—if we’re to be hidden before the farmer gets here, we need to hurry.”

  She nodded and swallowed. “Yes. This stream here. It will be your source of water.” Stooping, she filled the canteen and passed it back to Nate. “Take care of that. You won’t get a chance to fill it up again until tonight.”

  “Thank you,” he said, remaining slightly suspicious.

  Ouida grimaced. “I am not going to have you shot for being queer,” she said after a pause, seemingly ashamed. “I truly am grateful.”

  Nate sighed, letting it go. They would live or they would die—he was exhausted, his chest hurt, and Walter had stumbled more than walked for the past few miles—and he would have to trust Ouida because they had no choice. He would have to let her be human to them, and believe in sanctuary and succor, or wander the countryside behind enemy lines.

  “And now, so are we,” he said with a weary smile. “So the farmhouse . . .?”

  “Follow this stream, for a league. You should make it before Monsieur Gaubert arises to feed the cows.”

  “Where will you be going?” Nate asked, concerned.

  Ouida bit her lip, appearing every bit as tired as Nate felt. “I need to tell Emile and my brother about Gerard. And we need to find another way to distract the soldiers in the barracks in five days. Horst was a pig, but he was right. He was the most competent officer in the compound. If they are stirred up like a hornet’s nest, or too suspicious, keeping them away from the drop zone will be much more difficult.”

  Nate remembered what Horst had said about stomach difficulties and moved outhouses. “Where did you get the idea to distract them with diarrhea and mysteriously moving outhouses?”

  Ouida stared at him as though he were mad. “Why, from the operative at the OSS, the one who broadcasts from the plane. He said they have a room full of people just coming up with things to do that will terrorize the Nazis!”

  Nate laughed shortly, and she pointed toward the stream again. “Follow the stream, and be quick about it. Either Emile or I should be here tomorrow morning, about this hour, in this place. You can stretch your legs, get food and water, and then go back to hiding. God be with you, Officer.”

  Nate nodded at her. Brave girl, no matter where her loyalties lay. “And you. Good night, Ouida. We shall see you again.”

  Without a look back, Nate and Walter resumed their side-by-side trudge along the stream.

  Nate had been born in the city and needed Walter’s reassurances that the cows in the field they walked through would not hold grudges.

  “Never seen cows before, city boy?” Walter asked, shoving aside a massive flank.

  “Not quite this personally,” Nate conceded. There was
a small roan who thought Nate was her particular friend. He found he needed to push at her fine-boned face more than once.

  “Well, this farmer’s lucky it’s so warm this year. If there was still dew on the grass when the cows were out, he’d be risking worms, and that’s a horrible thing. My daddy lost half his herd to them fuckers one year.”

  “So many things I didn’t know about,” Nate said, smiling. He tripped on a hummock of grass and caught himself on a cow. The cow didn’t bear any ill will.

  The barn was as big as Ouida had promised, and it loomed in front of the sunrise. Nate could see the door in the side. In spite of the awfulness of the night, he was suddenly loath to venture into the promised shelter.

  “We saw the sunset last night,” he said, not sure which moment was the illusion.

  “Yeah. That feels weird as all hell, you know that?”

  “Most assuredly. Your life can change in a night, in a minute, in a month.”

  “In a plane crash,” Walter said grimly, and Nate, chest aching, breath coming almost too hard to talk, had to smile.

  “Let us hope we don’t need another plane crash for it to change for the better,” he muttered, and the two of them dragged their ragged persons into the barn and up the ladder into the loft. Nate had the presence of mind to unfold the blanket so they were not lying on straw, and they pillowed their heads on his flight jacket, which was only nominally better than being flat.

  Sleep claimed them so brutally, it was the next best thing to death.

  The next few days were uncomfortable, claustrophobic, and terrifying.

  They were also sometimes filled with quiet wonder.

  They awoke late in the afternoon of the first day to the sound of old Mr. Gaubert talking to his cows. At first they were frightened—afraid that he was talking to someone in the barn who represented danger—and then Nate heard something that sounded very like, “Get your big tit-bag out of my way, you misbegotten bovine!” and had to stifle laughter against Walter’s arms.

  They waited in breathless silence until the old man stomped out of the barn, slamming the door behind him. Nate leaned over and whispered a translation in Walter’s ear, and the feeling of Walter laughing silently against his chest charmed a moment that should have been fraught with fear.