The Girl from Vichy

by Andie Newton

  A pink welt puffed on her cheek and her hair had been pulled from its bun and lay unkempt in a tousled mess. ‘Help,’ she said, voice shaking unlike anything I’d ever heard before. ‘This man needs help!’

  ‘I’m on to you, Claire,’ Marguerite said, cocking the trigger.

  ‘Please,’ Claire said. ‘I—’

  ‘Arrêtez!’ Marguerite blasted.

  Claire backed up further, this time with bloody hands in the air. ‘I don’t understand. I found him while on a walk. I’m trying to help.’ Her voice was weepy, and she looked to me for help. ‘Mademoiselle?’

  ‘What’s going on?’ I cried, but she kept walking backward until her heels met the pebbly edge of the stream, where water rushed over large boulders and white foam pooled in the eddies. ‘Claire?’ Tears welled in her eyes and then spilled over her cheeks, her gaze rolling over the both of us and the man who lay dying, drowning in his own blood.

  ‘I… I…’ Claire’s voice was garbled and nearly inaudible next to the rushing stream behind her.

  I reached out for her even though I was many feet away.

  ‘Claire’s the spy,’ Marguerite said, and I pulled my hand back.

  ‘What?’ I said, looking at Marguerite and then to Claire. ‘No, she can’t be…’

  Marguerite closed one eye, the other locked on Claire, looking straight down the barrel of her gun.

  Claire bent to her knees, weeping. Then her face went white as a sheet, and the tears streaming down her face evaporated right from her skin. ‘Ihr seid beide verrückt!’ she said in perfect German. ‘I’m the one that got away!’

  In the blink of an eye, Claire threw a dagger she had hidden in a sheath under her arm, but Marguerite’s bullet hit her first and square in the chest. Pop! The knife cut through the air, missing Marguerite by a hair and me by a foot, landing somewhere behind us.

  Claire fell effortlessly backward, her face frozen in a waxy expression, her lips half smiling with a bullet-hole spot of blood soaking into the thin fabric of her peasant dress. The rolling rapids took her away, her torso riding bubbling whitecaps.

  ‘She’s gone!’ I clutched my chest, frantically searching the whirling water for signs of life as she floated away, but all that was left of her were the imprints of her knees pressed into the pebbly embankment of the stream.

  Marguerite stepped back, shuffling at first and then scrambling to see about the man in the truck. She looked at him with arms long at her sides, the gun shaking in her hand against her thigh.

  I stumbled toward her with legs of jelly, peering into the cab of the truck. His head had flopped back and a knife stuck straight out of his chest like a blunt stick. She turned him toward her by the chin and then burst into tears when she saw his face, crying his name. ‘Philip… Philip…’

  I gasped. ‘Your fiancé!’ I said, only now he was dead.

  She brushed a tuft of dark hair from his eyes, which were blue and glassy, her fingers trembling from one last touch of his cheek.

  ‘Marguerite… I… I…’ I’d only seen dead people at funerals, in their coffins. Not in a truck with a knife sticking out of their chest. ‘I don’t know what to say…’

  She shook her head for me to stop talking, moaning with her head down, her hands on his body. And I stood there for a minute or two, not sure what to do, watching his blood drip off the floorboards and into the dirt. I touched her arm, and she broke away in a panic, wiping her face of tears.

  ‘We need to get him out of here.’ She sniffed. ‘Clean it up.’

  ‘Don’t you want more time with him?’ I said.

  ‘We don’t have time.’

  She moved away, and I caught a whiff of warm blood wafting from his body. I was reminded of meat Mama sometimes left on the counter on a hot day. My belly roiled and I felt faint, grabbing the side of the truck to hold myself. ‘I think I’m… I’m…’ Mucus coated my throat like off-milk and then vomit spurted from my mouth and all over the truck’s back tyre.

  Marguerite waited for me to finish heaving, crying into her sleeve, when I looked up at her, wiping the remains of last night’s soup from my lips.

  ‘Welcome to the Résistance, Adèle.’ The sun had crested over the foothills and beamed a shiny white light onto the water that glistened behind her like fallen snow.

  She wiped her red eyes. ‘Now, get up.’

  *

  We hid Philip under a blanket and pushed him up against the door, putting his arm over his head as if he was sleeping. ‘If the police stop us, tell them he’s drunk and that he’s passed out,’ she said, and then commanded me to drive the truck out of the birch forest and down a dirt road dotted with covered gypsy wagons and laundry hanging from trees.

  She had found a tan duffle bag stuffed as fat as a pig in the truck’s bed and had been rummaging through it since we left the stream. ‘Keep driving until I tell you to stop,’ she said through the back window, which had been busted out.

  ‘Why would we get stopped?’ The wheel spun loose in my hands, and my arms ached from trying to keep the truck steady. I lifted my eyes from the road just long enough to glance over my right shoulder.

  Marguerite’s head bobbed up from the back of the truck. ‘Because you’re driving like a juvenile!’

  I stepped on the accelerator.

  We stopped at a cottage at the edge of a wheat field that hadn’t been ploughed in years. ‘Don’t say much,’ she said, reaching for the duffle bag to carry inside. ‘They get paid to help us.’

  I nodded.

  I got out of the truck and followed Marguerite up to the door. She went to knock, but the door opened before her knuckles hit the wood.

  ‘Zut alors!’ The same bald man who drove us to the convent stood in the doorway, which surprised me, though I wasn’t sure why, not after seeing Claire get shot in the chest or riding in a truck with a dead man.

  He threw his hands to his head, and yelled for his wife.

  The wife scolded us with her eyes, but me more so, probably wondering what I was doing with Marguerite. They drove the truck around the back of the cottage where weeds and tangle grass grew up like flowers. We watched them from the screen door in the kitchen with the duffle bag at our feet.

  ‘What are they going to do?’ I said.

  They lifted the body out of the truck. Marguerite turned away when she saw them take him by his limbs, each grabbing a foot and a hand. ‘What do you think they’re going to do?’

  She paced the room, holding her stomach, looking visibly ill, but then dropped to her knees and prayed, murmuring prayers I’d heard at the convent. I put my hand on her shoulder when she sobbed into her hands. The sound was gut-wrenching.

  Marguerite stood up after crossing her chest, and wiped her eyes, moving to the duffle bag.

  ‘Are you going to be all right?’ I said, though I wondered how she could be.

  ‘We knew this might happen,’ she said, sniffing. ‘He died doing what he believed in. There’s some comfort knowing this.’ She paused, giving her eyes one last wipe. ‘And that I killed the German bitch who did it to him.’

  I pointed outside where the couple was preparing the body. ‘But… But…’

  Marguerite looked at me from the ground as she opened the duffle bag. ‘I have to carry on because that’s what Philip would want. We must honour the dead’s wishes.’ Marguerite unzipped the duffle bag and sat on her knees, spilling thousands of loose francs out onto the floor.

  I watched the couple outside prepare for the burial as Marguerite counted the francs on the floor. The bald man pointed a finger around his property after they laid the body on the ground. The wife nodded, hands planted on her hips, her lungs huffing and puffing from having lifted something heavy.

  I closed my eyes, thinking about Claire. Her body would wash ashore eventually, waterlogged and bleached from the sun. Maybe someone would bury her, maybe not. I’d never know. At least this man would get a burial.

  Marguerite had pulled an envelope from the bag and
paced around the room in quick bursts, feverishly reading the note inside, still wiping her tears. I got worried.

  ‘What does it say?’ Marguerite ignored me, and I asked again. ‘What does it say… Marguerite!’ But still she wouldn’t answer, and I could tell it was something serious. I reached for the paper. ‘What does it—’

  We stood staring at each other, tugging on the piece of paper between us. ‘Sometimes it’s better to be kept in the dark,’ she said, and then snatched the letter away with a quick jerk, only the part I’d grabbed tore between my fingers.

  Marguerite struck a long match she snagged from the fireplace mantel and set it to the paper. Just before the flame reached her fingers, she threw it into the cold ash of last winter’s fire. ‘You’ll have to trust me.’

  A young girl riding a bicycle rode up from the field. Marguerite went out to talk to her, alternating a pointed finger at me through the screen door and the couple by the tree before bringing her inside.

  ‘She’s going to the convent to get some things. Do you have any possessions you want her to bring back for you?’

  ‘You mean… we’re not going back?’

  ‘Is there anything you want?’

  I opened my mouth, but I couldn’t form any words. I had to think. Did I have anything? ‘My pocketbook. It’s under my cot.’

  The girl set out on her bicycle and rode away, disappearing behind the derelict wheat field.

  ‘What do you mean we’re not going back?’ I tried to hide my disappointment; I was good with the delinquents. Sister Mary-Francis told me so.

  ‘I am,’ she said. ‘You’re not.’

  ‘You’re leaving me here? Alone?’ My head pained instantly, thinking about spending my days on the farm with the bald man and his wife. I reached into my pocket for a cigarette, but then threw the case across the room out of frustration. ‘You can’t leave me.’

  Marguerite took a deep breath. ‘The nuns can’t know what happened to Claire. Killing her wasn’t part of the plan they agreed to. Now we must cover it up. The delinquents will ask questions. So will the nuns.’ Marguerite glanced outside where the couple was burying the body, but then quickly turned her face away. ‘I need your help somewhere else.’

  ‘But I was good there,’ I said. ‘At the convent. With the girls.’

  ‘Are you a keeper of delinquents, or a member of the Résistance?’

  ‘Why can’t I be both?’

  There was a long pause. Marguerite stared at me, her lips dry and cracking, and I could tell she was struggling with what to say. ‘You want to know what was in that letter?’

  ‘The one you just burned?’

  Marguerite held her breath as if she was about to deliver something big before exhaling with a groan. ‘Claire thought you were the leader, understand? Someone who gave guns to the Free French—the mastermind behind the guns in the crypt.’

  ‘She thought I was involved?’

  ‘She didn’t believe you were just involved. Claire believed you were the Chameleon—that’s my codename.’ Marguerite pointed a finger at her own chest. ‘She thought you were me.’

  ‘Why does that matter?’ I said, shaking my head.

  ‘It means the convent’s not safe for you. We don’t know exactly what she’s told her superiors. It’s all very uncertain.’ She paused. ‘But one thing I know for sure. Claire was a professional and probably has killed before. If she had pinned me with that knife, she would have pulled it out and stuck you with it too.’

  I shook my head, though I knew she was telling the truth. Claire was the one who wanted to go to the crypt that day of the speech, and then showed up without permission. She had taken my journal, and now that I thought of it, Claire was the one who brought up the idea to jump through Marguerite’s window after I wanted to give up. She had used me to gather information about the guns in the crypt. The thought made me feel small, and in a flash the sadness I felt for Claire’s unburied body drifting among the cattails vanished from my heart and my mind.

  ‘Now do you understand why you can’t go back?’

  ‘I understand.’

  I watched the couple from the screen door as they argued over Philip’s body. The bald man traced the outline of a coffin in the dirt while the wife wiped sweat from her chest with a hanky she pulled from her cleavage. She shook her head from shoulder to shoulder and he threw his hands in the air. He laid down in the dirt next to the body, scooting close to it, ravens circling over both as the wife compared their sizes with a squinted eye.

  ‘Are they almost done?’ Marguerite said.

  ‘I think so.’

  Marguerite walked a few steps away, her eyes welling with tears. Turning away seemed to help, and after a few moments of deep breathing, her face got straight again, though I could tell she wanted to weep, and weep good, but by the grace of God was somehow able to hold it in.

  ‘I’ll tell you when it’s done,’ I said, and she nodded.

  The wife struggled to bend the man’s legs, which looked like they had started to stiffen. She grabbed him by the foot and made chopping motions with her hand. The bald man nodded and then disappeared into a shed.

  Oh, Christ.

  ‘Adèle,’ she said, from the other side of the room. ‘There’s something else.’

  I walked away from the screen door when the bald man reappeared from the shed with a hatchet in his hands, and went to zip up the duffle bag on the floor—something to keep my mind off what was going on outside. I swallowed hard.

  ‘What is it?’ I said.

  ‘Remember when Mother said there was a reason God had sent you to us?’ she said. ‘We need you somewhere else. Somewhere other than Lyon, this farm.’

  I felt some relief—no farm. I thought maybe she’d say Paris or Calais, or maybe someplace very far away like Carcassonne. ‘Where?’

  ‘You’re going back to Vichy,’ she said, and I looked up.

  ‘What?’

  ‘And back to Gérard.’

  I bolted to a stand. ‘You’re mad!’

  Marguerite squeezed both my shoulders. ‘You must!’

  ‘I came to the convent to escape from Gérard,’ I huffed. ‘Now, I’m supposed to go straight back to him? Absolutely not. I thought the police came to the convent to drag me back.’

  ‘Be realistic, Adèle. You have the contacts. We need the connections.’

  ‘Contacts?’ I scoffed. ‘I have contacts in the hair business, if you can call them that. Other than that, I’m not sure what you mean.’

  ‘You don’t know…’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘Gérard. He’s working for the regime at the Hotel du Parc.’

  ‘I already know he’s a collaborator. That’s one of the reasons why I didn’t marry him.’

  ‘He’s more than a collaborator, Adèle. We have word that he’s behind the recent overhaul of the regime’s witch-hunt on the Résistance. In some cases, he’s the one making decisions for the Vichy police.’

  My shoulders had gotten tense when she put her hands on them and then got tenser when she told me of Gérard’s escapades. ‘You’re forgetting one thing, Marguerite. Gérard hates me. He must. I left him the day before our wedding to join a convent. Humiliation isn’t something Gérard takes lightly.’

  A bird flew in from the wheat field and landed on the windowsill. He pecked at some crumbs that had flaked off an apple tart the wife had put there earlier to cool. Had the bird been any smarter he would have gone for the whole tart, which sat just inches away with no tea towel to cover it.

  Marguerite used a delicate finger to scoot the tart closer to the window. ‘That’s your first test,’ she said, as the bird moved toward it. ‘Get him to trust you.’

  I scoffed. ‘And forgive.’

  ‘Adèle, you must have a way about you that’s attractive to him. He won’t be able to resist you if you’re yourself.’ She looked at me just as the bird dug into the tart. ‘From what I heard, he’s a man who doesn’t like to lose, especiall
y not to a woman. He’ll forgive you because he wants to win.’

  Be myself. ‘You make it sound so simple,’ I said.

  I thought about Gérard’s bulging muscles, his condescending voice and feeling hands. He had a taste for women, and if I’d learned anything from my time with him, it was that he definitely didn’t like to lose. As much as I hated to admit it, Marguerite was right. I was in a unique situation—a situation that could benefit the French Résistance—if I allowed myself to be put back in it. But I’d be taking a chance, a big chance, which hinged on Gérard’s feelings toward me, which I had no way of knowing unless I went back.

  ‘I can’t marry him, Marguerite.’ I gulped.

  ‘Think of a way to postpone,’ she said. ‘You already ran away. It would be normal for you to ask to take things slow.’

  I closed my eyes briefly. Gérard take things slow. ‘What then?’

  ‘Inside his office is a cigar box. Underneath is a set of numbers—a combination. Memorize them.’

  I had worried Marguerite was going to get me sent back to Vichy, but in the end, it wasn’t her I needed to worry about. It was me. I nodded.

  She exhaled after holding her breath. ‘Thank you, thank you, Adèle.’ She held my hand. ‘There’s a flower cart in front of the Hotel du Parc that only sells flowers out of tins, never baskets. Ask for a single daisy. Then leave a coded message with the old woman that you’re ready to meet, and I’ll be in touch.’

  ‘When will I leave?’

  ‘Tonight. After the girl comes back.’

  Out the window, I saw the couple drag Philip’s body over to a hole they’d dug and push him in—Marguerite had no idea the pair had just sawed his legs off at the knees. I closed my eyes briefly, praying for Philip, the man who died doing what he believed in. ‘Tonight it is.’

  The wife took hold of a rusty shovel, scooped up some dirt and tossed it into the hole.

  10

  I waited inside the cottage as the sun set, watching Marguerite kneel under the oak tree next to the mound of dirt piled on top of Philip’s grave. She blew kisses from her fingers at the ground. A mournful cry followed, and she clutched her stomach before collapsing onto the ground. It was in that moment, when I saw Marguerite crying in the dirt, that I wanted to get the numbers for her and not just for the Résistance.