The Paper Girl of Paris

by Jordyn Taylor

  “I’m serious!” I playfully poke his shoulder. “I want to plan a fun day for us.”

  “Oh yes? What do you have in mind?”

  “It’s a surprise.”

  I half expect him to protest, but he doesn’t.

  “Okay,” Paul says, “I trust you.”

  Chapter 12

  Adalyn

  Shortly before midnight, on a chilly March evening without any moonlight, four Frenchmen crouched by the side of the train tracks in a village near Limoges. While two of them kept watch, and another pressed his ear to the ice-cold rails, the fourth secured the explosive in its place. When the train was just a few kilometers away, which they knew by the vibrations in the tracks, the men backed away into the trees.

  They heard the train coming. Chugga chugga chugga chugga. Then they saw it, slithering around the corner like a great black snake. The Frenchmen knew exactly what the train was carrying: tons upon tons of guns and ammunition on its way to supply the German war effort in North Africa. They waited for the perfect moment, when the freight cars were over the explosive.

  Then they cranked the detonator.

  A few of the cars were blown clean off the tracks in a burst of flame. A dozen more were knocked over onto their sides, their contents spilling out onto the rail bed. The Frenchmen didn’t have time to sit around and revel in their achievement; they grabbed what they could of the weapons and took off into the night.

  What happened that night near Limoges was the result of Geronte’s intelligence network passing information to a group of guerrilla fighters in the south. And it happened because a German officer named Ulrich Becker III was fooled into sharing his train schedules with a nineteen-year-old Parisian girl.

  Clacking down the street in my annoying wooden clogs, I make my way to the latest safe house Geronte has been using for meetings. He told me to come as soon as I could, whenever I finished collecting rations for the day. The four Frenchmen who carried out the attack are in town for a few days before they have to go back to the countryside, and apparently, they want to meet the girl who procured the pivotal scheduling information.

  Along the way, I try to shake off the run-in I just had with Chloe. As I descended the last flight of stairs to the lobby, she was shouldering her way through the front door and carrying a shopping basket. Food—it was a safe enough topic. I halted on the bottom step so she would have to face me to get by.

  “What were you able to get at the market?” I asked her.

  Even a single word would have been something. We’d never gone so long without speaking to each other. But Chloe didn’t say anything—she didn’t even look up.

  “Chloe?” I asked.

  With her eyes fixed on the floor, she shouldered past me the same way she pushed through the door. I had the sensation of being winded, even though I wasn’t, and had to reach out and steady myself on the banister. Behind me, Chloe marched up the stairs, and every pounding footstep felt like a brutal beating.

  But I mustn’t think about it any longer, at least not in this moment. Right now, I should feel proud of myself for helping pull off the attack. All the evenings spent by the fire at Madame Marbot’s parties actually led to something important in the fight against Germany.

  It’s impossible not to think about it, though.

  When Geronte opens the door of the ground-floor apartment, I immediately sense that something is different about him. He doesn’t sniff me like a hound; his weathered face seems softer somehow.

  “Come in, come in,” he says. “It’s excellent to see you.”

  It’s almost as if he’s welcoming me into a dinner party. Who is this Geronte?

  “You seem to be in a good mood,” I point out.

  “Well, I’ve decided to allow myself a little time to rejoice at our success,” he says in an uncharacteristically upbeat voice. “Come, now, I have four young Frenchmen hiding out in the study who’ve been awfully eager to pass along their thanks.”

  I follow him through the apartment to a door at the back of the dusty drawing room. He taps out a series of knocks, then steps back to give me space. There’s rustling on the other side of the door. Oh, I am excited to meet these valiant strangers!

  “Remember to keep the noise down,” Geronte warns.

  The noise? What kind of noise does he think I’ll be making?

  The knob twists, and the door opens. I can hardly believe my eyes. The man standing in the doorway isn’t a stranger at all.

  It’s Luc.

  I run to him. I throw my arms around his shoulders and he lifts me into the air and spins me around again and again. Am I imagining this? No, it’s real. He’s here—he’s real—he’s alive.

  “Luc, it’s been so long!”

  His lips are next to my ear, and only I can hear his reply.

  “It’s been too long. . . . I think about you every day, Adalyn.”

  When he sets me back down on the ground, it still feels like I’m flying. I step back so I can take a good look at him—the first time I’ve seen him in six months, since our goodbye in September. The schoolboy I met in the fall of 1940 is nowhere to be found in the man standing in front of me. He’s dressed in a black beret and a grubby wool blazer that doesn’t seem warm enough for the weather. His messy black hair is even longer, reaching his chin, and there’s dark stubble cropping up on his perfect jawline, which is more pronounced now. He’s lost weight. But underneath it all, I still see him, and I still see the fire behind his eyes. My Luc.

  I glance at Geronte, who’s plopped himself down in an armchair with stuffing poking out at the seams. For the first time in all the months I’ve known him, I see the old man smile.

  I turn back to Luc.

  “You derailed the supply train,” I say in amazement.

  “Well, it was all thanks to you,” he says. “And, actually, it was the four of us.”

  In the excitement of seeing Luc, I completely forgot there are three more men waiting to come out. Now that I know who the first one is, I have a sneaking suspicion as to who two of the others might be.

  Sure enough, Marcel and Pierre-Henri emerge from the study, joined by a thin-faced blond boy who I’ve never seen before. I embrace Pierre-Henri first; then Marcel, who must be six inches taller now. He introduces me to the blond boy, Raphael, who greets me with a firm handshake.

  “Pleasure to meet you,” Raphael says in a voice smooth as honey. “I’ve heard all about you from the others.”

  “Good things, I hope.”

  “The very best.”

  My sister would certainly beg to differ, but for now, I’m not going to think about that. It will only mar the pleasure of seeing my dear friends again. We sit down at the kitchen table, and Geronte brings out six dusty glasses and a bottle of red wine he’s been saving for a special occasion. He gives the glasses a perfunctory wipe-down with the end of his shirt, which isn’t especially clean to begin with, and fills each one halfway.

  We raise our drinks in a toast.

  “To a job well done,” Geronte says.

  We spend time catching up on the last six months of each other’s lives. Shortly after Luc and I said our goodbyes, he, Marcel, and Pierre-Henri went south to join a rural band of resistance fighters in Limousin. These groups are known as the maquis, and Luc says they’re growing across the southern part of the country—mostly made up of other young people avoiding forced labor in Germany.

  It was in Limousin that the boys met Raphael, who’d left Paris shortly before them.

  “I showed them the ropes around camp,” Raphael says. “Taught them everything they know!”

  Luc and Pierre-Henri laugh and roll their eyes, but Marcel nods enthusiastically. “It’s true!” he insists. “You showed me how to aim the Sten properly. My shots were going straight into the ground before.”

  “It’s been so long—I want to know everything about . . . everything,” I tell them. “Even the little things, like where you sleep!”

  “Well, we sleep in
tents . . . or in abandoned barns . . . or sometimes just outside,” Luc says.

  “That must be uncomfortable.”

  “It isn’t too bad,” he says with a shrug. I know he would never complain about the conditions, even if they were absolutely unbearable.

  “And what do you maquisards eat?” I ask, eyeing the boys’ thin frames. They all look to be wearing clothes that are two sizes too big for them; Luc’s cheekbones are more pronounced than ever before.

  “We eat whatever we can find,” Pierre-Henri says. “Sometimes we get rations from people in the villages nearby, if they’re feeling generous.”

  “And I can hunt,” Raphael adds.

  Still looking at Pierre-Henri, I notice something different about him. “Where is your camera?” I ask. It’s strange to see him without it hanging about his neck.

  “I had to leave it with my baby sister,” he replies. “That camera wasn’t meant for maquisard life.”

  The boys answer everything I want to know about life in the maquis, until there’s only one question left for me to ask. I’ve been putting it off for as long as possible, but I’ll have to find out at some point, and it might as well be now.

  “When do you all go back?”

  “Tomorrow,” Luc says, sounding sad. We lock eyes.

  But then it’s my turn to tell stories. I paint a picture of the stressful journey to Chartres with the American airman, and the disastrous way it ended on the train platform. I tell them all about Madame Marbot’s salons at the Hotel Belmont, and how I spent night after night pulling details out of Ulrich and filing them away in my mind. It’s a relief to at last be able to express just how much I despise these parties and nearly everybody who attends them.

  Geronte drains his glass and sets it down with a thud. He clears his throat. Just like that, the mood in the room shifts. The lively conversation peters out. It’s time to get down to the first order of business, and he’s looking at me.

  “Since you were so successful this first time around, I have a new German target for you,” Geronte says.

  I sit up taller in my chair. “Who is it?”

  “Walther von Groth. SS lieutenant-colonel and newly appointed chief of Gestapo in Paris. They promoted him because he . . . went above and beyond, shall we say.”

  A chill goes down my spine. “What does that mean, exactly?”

  Geronte pauses before he speaks again.

  “There is torture, and then there is what von Groth does to his prisoners,” he says. “If you die early on, you are lucky, they say. . . . And then there’s the retaliation. Von Groth has ordered the massacres of entire French villages as punishment for resistance activity. Six months ago, in one town, he ordered the women and children to assemble in the church, and then he locked the doors and lit the place on fire. When three people managed to escape, his men shot them. Nobody survived. Von Groth is the worst of the worst of them. It is impossible to say how many hundreds or thousands of people have died at his hands.”

  “And you want me to . . . to get information out of him?”

  “Yes,” Geronte says plainly. “If you are willing.”

  My heart is pounding. I picture the atrocities this man, von Groth, has already committed, and what more he might do if he ever found me out. Across the table, Luc looks frightened, but he doesn’t say anything that might sway my decision one way or the other. This is up to me, and I know my answer.

  “I am willing,” I tell Geronte.

  “Good,” he says. “I’m getting information on where he spends the majority of his time. I will update you as soon as I have a clearer picture.” And then, as if nothing terrifying has just transpired, he picks up the wine bottle and squints into the opening. “There’s enough in here for a few more sips. Who wants them?”

  Nobody objects when I hold out my glass.

  For the next little while, Geronte and the boys meticulously compare the Sten submachine gun, the weapon of choice among the maquis, to the MP40 guns they stole from the train bound for North Africa. I lose track of the conversation, thinking of nothing but my new mission, and sipping my wine to keep my nerves at bay.

  Suddenly, I notice Luc standing next to my chair. The others are yawning and stretching in the late-afternoon light coming through the window. Raphael has his feet up on the table.

  “Would you like to go for a walk?” Luc asks.

  “A walk?” I ask him.

  “Yes, along the river.”

  “Is there someone we have to meet down there? Or something we need to drop off?”

  Luc laughs sheepishly and looks at his feet. “I just thought it might be nice to spend some time alone.”

  It takes a moment before I can make sense of his request. For two and a half years I’ve been living this secret life where nothing is as it seems. I’m so entrenched that when a fellow resistance fighter asks if I’d like to go for a walk, it doesn’t occur to me that that’s all it is—a walk.

  Together.

  Me and Luc.

  “Yes—yes, of course,” I stammer. “Although, isn’t it dangerous? If the Germans see you?”

  “The sun is setting soon,” he says. “We’ll stay hidden.”

  He holds out his hand, and I take it.

  We go down to the Right Bank of the Seine, keeping in the shadows. The city around us is dark and gray, but the sky is a deep pink that reminds me of the cherry blossoms on our street. After another frigid winter, I think I finally smell spring in the air.

  Down by the water’s edge, in the dark space under the Pont de la Concorde, Luc interlaces his fingers with mine. It sounds so silly, but I’m overwhelmed with emotion as I try to take in these simple pleasures: the brilliant sunset; seeing Luc again; the way our hands joined together so effortlessly, as though they were always meant to be that way. A memory comes to me with startling clarity, of lying in bed with Chloe and listing every single thing we wanted to do when the war was over. Isn’t this one of the activities we named that day?

  “Are you crying, Adalyn?”

  We stop walking. I don’t know what’s come over me. Tears spill down my cheeks and collect in my scarf. Perhaps I didn’t realize what a toll my work has taken. Hiding and pretending are all I know these days. But walking with Luc, I suddenly remember what real life is like—life without the Nazis forcing us all into the ground.

  “It’s just that I’m happy,” I say feebly.

  We both laugh at the ridiculousness of it all—oh, how wonderful that feels, too! It isn’t the fabricated trill of dinner party laughter but true, pure joy.

  Luc wipes away my tears with his free hand.

  “I’m happy, too,” he says.

  I pull him by the hand to a stone ledge underneath the bridge. Through the wide archway, we have a perfect view of the Eiffel Tower on the opposite bank, silhouetted against the sky.

  “I was just remembering how my sister and I used to dream that one day we would stroll down the river with a boy and look out at the lights over Paris.”

  “I’m sorry we can’t have the lights,” Luc says.

  “You know what?” I wiggle closer to him and rest my head on his shoulder so there aren’t any gaps of air between us. “I don’t think I need them.”

  His fingers find my chin. Gently, he guides my face toward his. I stare into his eyes, the eyes that pulled me in from the moment I met him. I could swim inside them and never need to come up for air. I could make them my home. It isn’t fair that he’s leaving again so soon.

  His hand slides to the back of my head, and he pulls me in until our lips meet. My whole body turns to liquid and melts into his. I have never kissed anybody before, but somehow, I seem to know what to do. I brush my tongue against his lips, and he opens them for me. He knots his fingers deep into my hair, like he’s holding on for dear life. Maybe he is. Maybe we both are.

  I pull away and kiss him along his jaw, that beautiful line that looked so pronounced in the dim light of his parents’ shoe store. How I used to think
about caressing it! When my lips reach his ear, I brush his hair to the side and make my way down his neck. Luc moans with pleasure. At his collarbone, I switch directions and make the same glorious trip in reverse. Soon, I’m back to his mouth.

  “Wait,” Luc says. He takes my face in his hands. “I just want to see you.”

  We stare into each other’s eyes for a few moments, sharing things that neither of us can express in words. Then he kisses me again. And so we pass the next hour, although it feels like a matter of minutes.

  It isn’t until an elderly woman shuffles by and warns us about getting home before curfew that we break apart and find that the sun has gone down. If the Germans discover us out here, there could be trouble.

  “I suppose we should get going,” Luc says as he tucks a strand of hair behind my ear.

  “I wish we didn’t have to.”

  “I want to walk you home, but we mustn’t be seen together.”

  “Walk me until we get close.”

  He takes me by the hand and leads me away from the river, onto a street that takes us north toward my home and Geronte’s safe house. As we traipse down the dark and empty sidewalk, our senses on high alert for the presence of Germans, Luc asks, “How are you feeling about the new assignment?”

  “Scared,” I admit. “But I know I can do it.”

  He squeezes my hand. “I know you can, too.”

  “You know, the hardest part isn’t having to trick les boches. That part is almost easy, if you can believe it. They never suspect me, not even for a second.”

  “What’s the hardest part, then?”

  I think back to yesterday morning, when I brewed a pot of wretched chicory coffee and carried a cup to Chloe, who was reading by herself in Papa’s study, away from the rest of the family. She didn’t look up from her book when I entered the room, and she didn’t say a word when I set the drink down on the table beside her. It felt like being invisible.

  “It’s having to trick everybody else,” I tell Luc. “Like my sister. She thinks I’m a true collaborator. She hasn’t spoken to me since December. She won’t even make eye contact if we’re in the same room.” I can still feel the spot where her shoulder collided with mine earlier today, can still hear her feet stomping up the stairs. “And there’s nothing I can do to fix it, because I can’t tell anyone the truth.”