“What made today so difficult?”
He presses his lips into a single, razor-sharp line. “People not doing what I tell them to do.”
Sometimes, the people who get dragged in for questioning by the Gestapo miraculously get released, and through them, we learn how von Groth treats prisoners who refuse to give him information. Word travels among resistance networks of vicious beatings, of ice-cold bathtubs and near drownings, of bottles forced into people’s mouths until their lips split from the pressure. I pretend that I know none of this, suppressing my fiery hatred of him, as I always do.
“I would never disrespect a lieutenant-colonel,” I purr in response.
“I know that,” von Groth says. “But unfortunately, not all the French are like you, Miss Bonhomme.”
He places his hand on my thigh. I can handle this; I feel nothing. Sometimes, if I’m wearing one of my divided skirts, he slides his fingers in between the buttons and massages my bare skin. This I can manage, too, for when von Groth lays his hands on me, he seems to calm down, and when von Groth is calm, he tends to let loose more details. If he gets information through cruelty, I get it through feeding his ego.
I rub his shoulder. “Will you have to deal with these misbehaving people again tomorrow?”
“No,” he growls. “I’ve been dealing with them for weeks. I don’t want to see them anymore. They’ll go to Pithiviers the day after tomorrow.”
So there’s going to be a prisoner transport from Paris to the Pithiviers internment camp on Thursday. I make a mental note.
A man from von Groth’s table approaches us and clears his throat. “I must be going,” he informs the lieutenant-colonel in German. As usual, I listen in without them knowing.
“Ah, Goehr.” Von Groth folds his hands and turns to the man. “Back to Toulouse so soon?”
“I am afraid so,” says the man named Goehr. “The resistance is giving us more trouble than I would like. . . . Railway attacks have gone up, and it seems the Allies are dropping more and more weapons from their planes . . .”
“Then we must shoot them down,” von Groth spits. “Snuff the resistance out.”
Goehr nods curtly. “So I will see you back here for our next dinner? It is scheduled for May, yes?”
“May 31,” von Groth replies.
“I shall not miss it.”
There’s going to be a meeting on the thirty-first of May. I make another mental note. The two men shake hands, and Goehr leaves the restaurant. Von Groth and I chat for a little while longer—mostly about his family, whom I feel like I know by now. His wife, Erna, lives with her sister back in Berlin. The couple’s only son, Klaus, was killed by the Allies in Belgium. Eventually, I tell von Groth that I must be getting home, for my parents are waiting up for me. Like always, he is sad to see me walk out the door, and like always, I am relieved.
Back at the apartment, Maman lays out sausage and cheese she purchased on the black market. Then she joins me at the table with a glass of water, which she cradles between her hands.
“Were you out with the lieutenant-colonel again?” she asks, her voice a little higher than normal. Even though she’s trying to conceal it, I can tell that she’s worried.
“Yes, Maman. And you don’t have to be nervous. It was perfectly fine,” I insist.
“I—I’m sure it was, darling. I just want to know that you’re safe.”
“I am, Maman. I promise.”
I wolf down my dinner as fast as possible to avoid having to answer too many of Maman’s questions. The less we have to talk about this, the less I have to lie to her. When I’m finished, I thank her for the food and head down the hall to bed, past Chloe’s door, which happens to be open. Sitting on her bed, she looks up as I pass—the way an animal detects a sound—but when she sees that it’s me, she scowls and returns to the book in her lap.
I crawl under the thick stack of blankets, wishing she were lying next to me and not hating me in the bedroom next door.
The next day, after I make the tedious rounds at the market, I bundle up to face the harsh winds again and rush to the safe house in my slippery wooden shoes. Geronte told me to come by this afternoon, so I told Maman and Papa I had schoolwork to do at the library.
Sure enough, his gnarled face appears in the doorway after I knock. When he opens the door all the way, I see there’s somebody in the room with him: Luc. I haven’t seen him since we said goodbye outside my building last spring. I run to him and throw myself into his arms, breathing in his scent of grass and earth and burying my face in his ragged clothes. Because Geronte is standing right behind us, I don’t go to kiss him, even though every fiber of my being wants to feel the touch of his lips again.
“What are you doing here?” I ask incredulously. I run my hands along the outline of his body, in complete disbelief that after all these months apart, Luc is standing in front of me again.
“I’m in Paris to drop off a few messages from contacts in the south,” he says. “I can’t stay too long, but I figured a night wouldn’t hurt.”
I notice dried blood and a cut above his left eye. “What is this?” I ask, touching it lightly with my fingers.
“Don’t worry, looks worse than it is,” he says. “We had a brutal run-in with the milice.”
The milice are the Vichy militants whose job is to quash resistance efforts. “Are you sure you’re okay? What happened?”
“I’m sure. Raphael jumped the gun and started firing before we got the all clear. Got himself hit in the shoulder. I had to drag him out of the way. Bullet grazed my forehead. I’m fine, and he’s fine, but it was a close call. . . . Anyhow, I’m just so glad to see you.”
I hold him close to me again, grateful he’s alive. “I’m so glad to see you.”
“Ahem.” Geronte clears his throat in a very loud way. I almost forgot he was here. “Let’s talk, because I have to be on my way sooner rather than later.”
We sit around the same table where last spring, the three of us—along with Marcel, Pierre-Henri, and Raphael—celebrated the attack on the Limoges train. Geronte smacks the surface in front of me with the palm of his hand. “Okay, you,” he grunts. “Tell us what you got out of him.”
“They’re transporting prisoners to Pithiviers tomorrow night.”
Geronte nods. “Luc, you’ll take that news south when you leave. See if your maquis can intercept it. Anything else?”
“Yes, there was one more thing,” I reply. “Von Groth mentioned a dinner with other Gestapo men on the thirty-first of May, in the same restaurant where I’ve been meeting him all this time.”
“Interesting,” Geronte says. “You know anything else about it?”
Why is he being so impatient today? I think back to that brief conversation between von Groth and Goehr. They didn’t give away many details . . . except for one more thing. “One of the guests is stationed in Toulouse,” I remember. “If he is coming back to Paris for a dinner, then it must be a fairly significant gathering, no?”
“Interesting,” Geronte says again.
“. . . It shouldn’t be any problem for me to get an invitation from von Groth, and then I can go and listen to their whole conversation. They still don’t know that I understand them.”
Just then, Luc mumbles something so softly, I can’t make out a word. He’s looking down, and his words go right into his chest.
“Speak up, boy,” Geronte commands.
Luc seems surprised, as though perhaps he didn’t realize he spoke out loud at all. He chews his lip. “I said . . . we should bomb it.”
There’s a moment when nobody speaks. It’s complete silence, save for the blood pumping in my ears. How strange this all is. Four years ago, my life revolved around schoolwork and piano lessons and going to dinner parties with my friends. Now I’m contemplating plans to take people’s lives.
What is even stranger is that I want to do it. I want to stage an attack, like with the train in Limoges. I know it would be dangerous—extraordinari
ly dangerous. Any kind of attack on the Germans is risky enough, but to do it right across the street from Gestapo headquarters seems like we’re asking to be killed if anything goes awry. But if we pulled it off, we would kill Walther von Groth, and who knows how many of his men?
I can see Geronte mulling it over, his jaw muscles chewing on the information. “It’ll most likely get you killed, but otherwise it’s a good idea,” he says eventually. “I’ll need some time to think about how it would work. I can take care of logistics, but you’ll have to handle the explosives.”
“I’m sure we can do that,” Luc says.
“Okay. I will speak about this to Boivin. Until you get my signal, you will mention this to no one else.” Geronte’s chair legs scrape across the floor, and he gets to his feet. “I have to leave now. There’s something important I must attend to.”
“Is it anything we can help with?” I offer.
“Afraid not. It has nothing to do with our work,” he replies. Then his face softens, in a way I haven’t seen before. “My daughter just gave birth,” he says. “I’m on my way to meet my first grandchild.”
I watch the old man leave, my heart bursting with happiness for him. And then I remember I don’t even know his true name. As the door closes behind him, I suddenly feel like I might cry.
“Sometimes I forget that we’re real people with real lives,” I tell Luc.
“I know exactly what you mean,” he says.
“You do?”
“Of course I do. I haven’t seen my family in over a year now. I’m always in hiding. Every conversation is in some kind of code.”
Luc and I are alone in the safe house now, just me and him in this barren apartment without any other furniture. He stands up and walks around to my side of the table. Then he takes me by the hands and pulls me to my feet. “Most of the time, I have no sense of who I really am,” he whispers to me. He looks at me with the intensity of a lightning storm. “But then I see you again, and I remember.”
I can’t hold back any longer. I kiss him with every fiber of my being, like he’s the oxygen I need to breathe. For the first time in what feels like forever, I don’t turn myself off. I sink my fingers into his hair and let his hands explore my body, from my chest down to my hips. His touch doesn’t make me flinch; in fact, I long for it. I want him to feel me everywhere, and myself to do the same to him.
I pause for a minute, so I can lead him down the hallway to a room where the setting sun casts its magenta rays through the window. There’s nothing in here except for us and the fading light. Luc thankfully finds some blankets in a closet, and we spread them out across the floor. Once we undress each other, we wrap them around our two bodies like a cocoon. I’ve never been this close to another person before. At first, when it happens, I’m surprised by the fullness. I forget how to breathe and recall it again in the span of a single second. Then I want more. More of Luc; more of us; more of this real, beautiful life.
By the time it’s over, the sky has gone from pink to black. It’s after curfew—too late to go home now. Under the gray blankets in the empty apartment in this city infested by rats, Luc and I fall asleep wrapped in each other’s arms, remembering who we are.
It’s over a month until we see each other again. On a cool almost-spring morning, the five of us gather round the table in the safe house: me, Luc, Marcel, Pierre-Henri, and Raphael. As we wait for Geronte to come and lay out the plan for us, the room crackles with nervous energy. Luc keeps running his hands through his long hair, Raphael (his shoulder healed, but still stiff) drums his fingers on the tabletop, and Marcel makes empty observations about the weather, to which nobody responds. I imagine we’re all thinking the same thing: that what we’re doing is so dangerous and so powerful, it hardly seems real.
There’s a precise series of taps on the door, and Pierre-Henri rushes over to open it for Geronte, who comes in like a strong gust of wind. Everybody looks up expectantly, and maybe even with some fear in their eyes.
“I’ve just been to see Boivin,” he says. “The plan is set.”
Underneath the table, I squeeze Luc’s knee. He puts his hand over mine and squeezes back.
“First things first,” Geronte continues, looking specifically at me. “Bonhomme, you’re going to have to stay far away from this one.”
“Why?” I demand. “I’m just as capable!”
“Nobody doubts that you’re the most capable person here. But the explosive will be in a suitcase, and that suitcase will be placed in the dining room during von Groth’s dinner. If you’re there as his date, you’re toast. And if you—”
“If I am the one to deliver it, he’ll recognize me.” I understand now. I’ll have to keep my distance and pray that it goes according to plan.
Geronte spends the next half hour relaying the intricacies of the operation, and the four boys volunteer for their various roles. Raphael, who seems intent on proving his skills after his mishap against the milice, volunteers to deliver the bomb to Boivin inside the restaurant. Privately, I am relieved, because this means Luc will just be standing watch out back. Marcel and Pierre-Henri will be stationed at other points around the outside of the building.
By the time the meeting breaks up, I’m desperately impatient for May 31st to be here. I want von Groth to suffer; I want to punish him for what he’s done to our people. But until then I need to keep up the ruse, so I must accompany him to another luncheon, this one in the nearby village of Auvers-sur-Oise.
I ride out with von Groth in the back seat of a German staff car. He seems different today: tense, but also distant. Normally, he’d want to reach over and touch me in order to relax, but today, he stares straight ahead with his hands folded neatly in his lap. His facial muscles protrude from his clenched jaw. He’s even scarier when he’s quiet.
“Berlin was bombed again the other night,” von Groth says, breaking the heavy silence as the car trundles over the rocks and pebbles in the road. “I have received word that my house was destroyed—my house, which has been in my family for more than a hundred years.”
I don’t have a care in the world for von Groth’s house, no matter how old it is, but nevertheless, I let him know that I’m devastated on his behalf. “That is terrible to hear, Walther. I hope your family is okay.”
“My family is fine. But you French . . . you don’t know how lucky you have it. We could have destroyed Paris if we wanted to, but we didn’t.”
Yes, you did. And soon you’re going to pay for it.
“I am so sorry, Walther.”
“The goddamn Allies won’t rest,” he says bitterly, as though he didn’t even hear me. “They’re bombing Pas-de-Calais, and we hear they might invade there in June. We also hear Norway.”
My heart skips a beat at the thought of an Allied invasion of France. Geronte seems certain that it will happen eventually, although he hears the Allies are deceiving Germany about where exactly they’ll attack.
“What do you think will happen, Lieutenant-Colonel?”
I expect him to champion Germany’s military superiority, as he usually does in conversation with his men, but instead he sighs and gazes out at the horizon.
“I do not know, Miss Bonhomme.”
He stares off to the side for a long time. A full minute, maybe.
Then he says, again, “I do not know.”
“But you have always been so confident. I . . . I admire that about you.”
He pauses. “I am going to confess something to you, Miss Bonhomme.” He speaks very softly, so that the sound of crunching stone all but completely obscures his voice. I have to lean over if I want to make out anything he is saying. Von Groth looks down at his lap. “I fear for the Fatherland,” he mutters, almost imperceptibly.
A large bump in the road shakes von Groth from his spell. He rolls back his shoulders and straightens his spine, as though he’s neutralizing the admission he just made.
“Ah,” he says, “that must be the village there.” He points to a
cluster of medieval buildings off in the distance. “There had better be enough food to feed us all. I’m ravenous.”
It’s the end of April, nearing May, and the weather is warm enough that we can eat outside. A few of the Germans have brought French women with them, too. We sit at a group of tables arranged in the yard of what appears to be an ordinary cottage—not an official building, but a person’s home. There’s a vegetable garden just over there, and laundry hanging on a line round the back.
“You are staying here, Essig?” asks von Groth to a broad-shouldered man at our table.
“Yes, this is where they placed me,” says the man named Essig, who didn’t come with a date. “It is nothing to write home about, but it has its charms.”
He jerks his head in the direction of the cottage, where a woman is struggling to make it through the front door with a large platter of meat and potatoes. Of the two dozen men, no one gets up to help her. I want to, but I can’t. It’s something the real Adalyn would do, but not the one I’m pretending to be.
She serves our table first. From farther away, she looked like she was Maman’s age, but up close, she seems to be a young woman who has been aged by the last few years of war. She is very thin. Her dull gray clothes hang off her body as though they’re two sizes too big, though I expect they fit her once. When she reaches out to drop a potato onto my plate, I see the space behind her collarbone is as deep as a well. I recognize the expression on her face. She is exhausted and angry but doing her best to push it all down.
“Come sit on my lap, darling,” barks Essig in French. “I’ll let you have some of the food.”
“No thank you,” she answers, her voice even. The men snicker as she goes off to serve the other tables.
I don’t want a single bite of food that the Germans forced this woman to cook for us. I’ve eaten too well in this war, and it shows. I still have a figure. But there are so many families who must rely on the rationing system and nothing else, going days without a proper meal. I wish the woman would take my plate for herself, but if I gave it away, it would arouse too much suspicion. Racked with guilt, I cut into my round potato coated in precious butter.
The Paper Girl of Paris Page 22
