What I do know is that the toddlers’ screams have become a lot more bearable since Sketchbook Guy arrived, because now, every time one of them shrieks like a banshee, he looks at me and winces dramatically, and I have to stifle a laugh. We go on and on like this in secret—our very own inside joke—until the family eventually packs up their things and exits the bakery like a traveling circus.
“Now we will at last be able to focus,” he says to me.
“Yes, finally,” I reply.
But a few seconds go by, and neither of us returns to our work. We just keep looking at each other. I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to feel awkward to stare at a stranger like this, but it doesn’t—not at all. His gaze makes me feel comfortable. It says, Make yourself at home.
“I’m Alice.”
“Paul,” he says.
When we shake hands, a tingling sensation dances up my arm.
“Your artwork is incredible.”
He seems to be genuinely surprised.
“This?” He surveys his latest creation like he’s seeing it for the first time. “This is just a random drawing. I wasn’t really thinking about it.”
“Well, it’s a very good random drawing.”
“Thank you,” he says, the redness creeping up his neck again.
From the corner of my eye, I see the girl behind the counter dust the flour from her hands. Then, out of nowhere, she skips over to the table and greets Paul with a kiss on the cheek.
She might as well have dumped a bucket of ice water over my head.
The two of them start chatting in French at much too fast a pace for me to keep up. The girl keeps saying things that make Paul laugh, and it isn’t lost on me that she’s incredibly pretty. Well, now I know why Paul came back to the same bakery two days in a row. I go back to my reading for real this time, feeling deflated.
“Would you like something to eat?”
Silence.
I look up to see what’s going on, only to discover that the girl is addressing me. Paul is staring at me, too.
“You should get something,” he says. “My sister, Vivienne, is the best baker in all of Paris.”
She’s his sister! Even though Paul and I barely know each other, I won’t pretend I’m not relieved. Now that I see them side by side, they clearly have the same auburn hair and green eyes. They even have the same patch of freckles dotting their noses.
I squint in the direction of the counter. The croissant I had yesterday was amazing, but there are at least a dozen other glistening pastries that look just as good.
“I think it may be impossible to decide,” I tell them.
“Which are you deciding between?” Paul asks.
“I think the pain au chocolat and the tarte tatin.”
He fishes for change in his pocket and hands it to his sister.
“Les deux, s’il vous plaît. Merci, Vivi.”
Vivienne winks and skips off to the counter, and before I even realize what just happened, she’s back with both pastries: the pain au chocolat and the tarte tatin. I can feel myself blushing.
“Merci beaucoup. You didn’t have to do that.”
“Well, I didn’t want you to miss out.”
“I think you might have to help me finish these.”
I’ve never struck up conversation with a random person in public before—and definitely not with an extremely good-looking boy—but it ends up being easy to talk to each other, even with the language barrier. Paul’s English is good enough that I only have to dredge up the occasional vocabulary word I learned in French class. He’s from Lyon, but moved to Paris last year for school. He just finished his first year of university—not college, as I mistakenly call it, which turns out to be the French word for middle school.
“Are you an art major?” I ask, nodding at his sketchbook.
“No,” he says. “Graphic design.” He smiles wistfully and looks at the window. “I was accepted to an art school, but my parents said they wanted me to have a job after graduation.”
“What do your parents do?”
“Both are heart surgeons.”
“Whoa.”
Paul laughs. “I know. I think maybe Vivi and I were switched with other babies at the hospital.”
He changes the topic, asking me all about my life in New Jersey. Of course, he also wants to know why I’m in Paris for the summer, so I tell him all about Gram’s perfectly preserved apartment and the mystery of why it ended up that way. I tell him I’m trying to learn what I can through Adalyn’s diary, but I leave out the part about the photo I found in her mother’s vanity. It’s too shameful.
“If I were you, I would want to know very badly what happened to my family,” Paul says, sliding the edge of his fork into the last piece of tarte tatin and dividing it in half. We each take a piece.
“That’s why I’m doing all this research,” I reply through a mouthful of baked apple.
“Have you found anything useful so far?”
“I’m off to a decent start,” I tell him. “I know my grandmother and her family fled the city with millions of other people shortly after the Germans invaded France. I know they camped out in a town called Jonzac while they waited to see what the government would do. And I know that this old military hero named Pétain became prime minister all of a sudden, and he signed an armistice with Germany—and after that, France was split into Occupied and Unoccupied Zones. Pétain still ran a French government out of Vichy, but he essentially did whatever the Germans wanted him to do. My grandmother and her family ended up going back to Paris after the armistice. That’s about as far as I’ve gotten.”
“I wonder . . . is it possible your grandmother’s family got into trouble with the Nazis? Many people were arrested and deported in this time, and they would simply disappear.”
I pick at a spot on the table, picturing the photo of Adalyn.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
Paul clears his throat, and when he speaks again, his voice wavers.
“Just so you know . . . I am working this summer in a little bookstore near here,” he says. “We have a very good history section, and many books on this particular time period in France . . . if you ever wanted to come by and look at them.”
Oh my god. I think Paul just asked me to hang out again.
My fear of him finding out about Adalyn is completely trumped by nervous excitement. My palms start to sweat. I think I might be having a heart attack. Play it cool, Alice. But I have no idea how to play it cool! So I blurt out the first thing that comes to mind: “Wouldn’t they all be in French?”
Where did that come from? Oh god, why did I say that? Paul’s beautiful face falls. He looks embarrassed. He busies himself with stacking our empty plates and cutlery.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbles. “You barely know me. . . .”
“No!” I need to turn this around, and fast. I want to see him again more than anything. “I only ask because I’ll probably need you to help me translate.”
Paul looks up at me. A beat passes, and then he grins.
“I definitely can do that. We have some in English, too.”
I smile back.
“I can’t wait.”
Chapter 6
Adalyn
Luc told me once that the trick isn’t trying to hide from them—it’s not trying.
It was hard to follow this advice in the first year or so, and even now, it isn’t easy. Walk down the street with a stash of illegal flyers printed on a mimeograph machine hidden in your friend’s attic, and all you want to do is leap into the shadows whenever les boches appear. It’s human instinct to want to hide; the Germans have executed scores of resisters since the start of the Occupation. They print their faces on posters and hang them around the city as a threat. One of them, a Communist named Guy Môquet, is said to have been just seventeen years old when he died.
I can hear Luc’s words as my bicycle crests the hill and a checkpoint comes into view up ahead. My chest tightens. There ar
e two soldiers standing in the middle of the road, examining people’s papers and inspecting their belongings before letting them pass through. I can’t turn back now. They’ve surely spotted me, and if I look like I’m trying to avoid them, I’ll give them all the more reason to be suspicious.
My palms almost slip off the handlebars as my wheels grind to a halt on the gravel. Stay calm. My eyes flit to the basket on the front of my bike, where underneath a checkered cloth and a few books sit two things: a spool of thread, and an envelope stuffed with the flyers we printed at Marcel’s on Monday. They won’t know what to make of the spool, but if they find the tracts, there will be no way to explain them away. All of them either have de Gaulle’s cross or a big letter V for victory, two symbols you always see scrawled across German posters in Paris.
I need to think fast.
I mustn’t look scared.
But I am scared.
There’s another piece of advice Luc gave me: Always play the role of the person I am in the fashion magazines. Be the pretty young socialite who goes to parties—who has money—who isn’t troubled by this silly Occupation.
“Nobody will ever suspect that girl,” he said.
The first soldier waves me forward. He’s a young man with smooth skin and a patchy blond beard that doesn’t connect to his mustache. The second one—the handsomer of the two—can’t be much older. As I present my identification card to the first soldier, I can’t help but notice his partner eyeing me hungrily, from my divided cycling skirt to my red lips and my hair twisted into a chignon at the nape of my neck. At last, I have an idea.
“Where are you going today?” the first soldier asks.
I flash what I hope comes off as a flirtatious smile.
“To find a nice place in the grass to read my books.” I run my fingers along my exposed collarbone. “Why? Do you care to join me?”
The second one laughs. He sidles over to my bicycle, his chest puffed out like a rooster’s, and peers into the basket. He takes a closer look at my reading material and clucks approvingly. Not a banned book in sight.
“Goethe and Miegel,” he says, raising his eyebrows. “Two fine German authors.”
“I must have good taste,” I reply.
The soldier smirks. He seems to be enjoying this coy little game we’ve started playing. He slings his rifle over his shoulder, hooks his thumbs into the waistband of his pants, and juts out his hips.
The first man, blushing now, clears his throat.
“That is a large basket, mademoiselle,” he says. “What else are you carrying with you today?”
My heart thuds. But it’s clear that the second soldier still can’t take his eyes off me. So I say, in as facetious a voice as I can muster, “Oh, terrible things. Lots of highly illegal propaganda.”
Silence. This must be it. I’m going to be the next condemned resister pictured on a German poster. But then, miraculously, both soldiers erupt into fits of laughter. The first one hands me back my identification card, and the second one pats me on the small of my back.
“I’ll tell every man in the Wehrmacht to watch out for you,” he says.
“You should notify the Führer himself!” cries the other.
I’m so relieved, I laugh along with them.
“Have a wonderful day, gentlemen,” I say to them, and they step aside to let me pass. I pedal away in a daze, amazed at my own quick thinking—and dumb luck. I cannot wait for my next Monday-night “piano lesson,” when I can tell the group what just happened. Arnaud will probably stage a reenactment of the whole thing, with Marcel and Pierre-Henri’s help. Luc, in his serious manner, will probably tell them to knock it off, as I could have been killed.
Luc. I’ve been successfully sneaking off to my “piano lessons” for a year and a half now, and each of our encounters still shines in my mind like a dream I can remember in the morning. His perpetual intensity—his determination to do as much as we possibly can—keeps the fire stoked in my chest, even as the Germans crack down on resisters. And he’s broadened the scope of our work, so we’re not just disseminating tracts anymore.
We’re couriering secret messages.
Around six months ago, at his cousin’s birthday party, a trusted aunt of Luc’s pulled him aside for a private conversation in the study. Already well aware of his feelings toward the Germans, she said she could introduce him to a man running an intelligence network out of Paris, if he was interested. Speaking in a hushed voice so the other guests wouldn’t hear, she explained that the network’s goal was to ferry information between resistance groups throughout France, and also back to London, where Charles de Gaulle was leading his Free French Forces. Luc’s aunt wasn’t personally involved, it being too great a risk for a mother of four with a husband detained in Germany, but the man running the network was a personal friend of hers. He went by the code name “Geronte.”
Since then, we’ve had so much more to do. Through Geronte, Luc brings us messages to deliver, each one concealed in a cleverer way than the last.
“I need you to deliver this pencil,” Luc said to me at one of our recent meetings. “He’ll be wearing a brown beret on a bench by the river, just east of Pont Neuf, under the poplar trees.”
I stared at the writing implement he handed me, perplexed as to what its purpose could be. The others looked on, equally confused.
“Watch this,” Luc said.
Our hands touching, he unscrewed the metal piece that held the eraser until it popped right off. The pencil turned out to be a hollowed-out cylinder with a message rolled up tightly inside. Arnaud’s jaw was about an inch from the floor.
I can tell the new resistance work is taking its toll on Luc, though, even if he won’t admit it. Last Wednesday, when I stopped by the shoe store to pick up another delivery, I noticed creases in his forehead that hadn’t been there before—worry lines that were cast into sharp relief by the single bulb dangling from the ceiling. We’ve all been busier than ever, and in that moment, it showed.
“You look exhausted,” I remarked.
“I’m okay,” he replied with a weak smile. “I just haven’t been sleeping much.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t stop thinking. I run through the deliveries we all have to make the next day, and I obsess over every detail.”
He sighed. Then he added, “It’s that, and the fact that I’m constantly starving.”
“My sister and I play this game where we fantasize about the food we’re going to eat when the war is over.”
He looked at me curiously. “How does it work? You just list the foods you miss the most?”
“You make a plan of it,” I tell him. “Like, ‘I’m going to eat a warm baguette with butter and a big wheel of Brie.’ Or, ‘I’m going to drink real coffee, not hot liquid that tastes like dirt.’”
Luc smiled again, bigger this time. “I love that,” he said. Then he rubbed his chin. “Let’s see . . . I’m going to make my grandmother’s duck à l’orange recipe. You can have some, if you like.”
“How kind of you.”
Something stirred in my chest, perhaps because he had dropped his guard for once, or perhaps because the two of us were in there alone, which was rare. But I pushed the feelings aside as I got down to business.
“So what do you have for me today?” I asked him.
This time, Luc pulled a wooden spool out of his pocket. We’d used these before; the message was curled around the center, then concealed beneath layer upon layer of thread wrapped around it. You would only know the paper was there if you unwound the whole thing. The messages were always written in codes I didn’t understand. The fewer people who could give up vital information if captured and tortured by the Gestapo, the better, apparently.
Luc said, “I know Mondays and Wednesdays are best for you, but we need to get this to one of Geronte’s contacts in Créteil on Saturday. It should take you about an hour each way by bicycle, and the handoff itself will be quick. Do you think you can manage?�
��
“I’ll find a way,” I replied. I would have to invent a lie about shopping for rations, and pray Chloe didn’t try to come along with me. (That wasn’t likely to happen, given how much Chloe hated standing in the food lines.)
He placed the spool in the center of my palm, then curled my fingers around it. For a moment he cradled my hand, as though he was hesitant to part with it—or perhaps he just wanted me to keep it safe. Neither of us acknowledged the physical contact, and a few seconds later he let go of me, reached back into his pocket, and produced something unexpected: half of a train ticket.
“Take this, too,” he said quickly. “Geronte says your contact will have the other half. Hold your ticket against hers, and if the numbers match up, you can proceed with the delivery.”
“That sounds easy enough.”
I opened my book bag and tucked away the spool, the train ticket, and another envelope of tracts. The meeting was over as soon as it began; in what felt like no time at all, Luc was showing me to the door. I didn’t want to leave him—not with the stress lines deepening across his forehead again. He looked like a teenage boy with the weight of the world on his shoulders.
“I’m okay, Adalyn,” he said, as if he could tell what I was thinking. “I want you to worry about yourself. You’re the one cycling an hour out of the city on Saturday.”
“I’ll be fine,” I insisted.
“I know.”
I still can’t believe I got past the checkpoint. How those Germans underestimated me! I speed along the country road, grateful for the sunshine and the fresh spring air on my face. It was another brutally cold winter, with hardly enough coal to go around. The stores ran out of warm winter clothing, but thankfully, Chloe and I still fit into our coats from last year. We were the lucky ones; I saw plenty of women padding their old overcoats with newsprint to keep warm. Arnaud said he and his younger brothers all slept together in one bed. These are the kinds of adjustments that have to be made nowadays; at their store, Luc’s parents are selling clunky wooden clogs, because rubber is impossible to find.
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