The Keeper of Happy Endings

by Davis, Barbara

  Now he’s back from wherever he’s been, wearing that furtive expression again as he slips down the murky flight of stairs that leads to the cellar. I know where he’s going—and why. It’s the perfect place for a rendezvous, dark and secluded with its maze of crates and boxes. The thought of him meeting Elise there, catching them together, turns my limbs to jelly. And yet, I can’t help myself. I wait a few seconds, then follow him down.

  I hold my breath, watching as he moves to the bottom of the stairs, then disappears into the murky warren below. After a few moments, he switches on a pocket torch. The beam makes him easier to follow, and I keep to the shadows, winding through the labyrinth of crates and cartons. Cabbages. Turnips. Potatoes. Ersatz coffee. Even crates of cheap red wine. Finally, his footsteps go quiet and I hear the faint jangle of keys, then the groan of dry hinges.

  I creep forward again, close enough to see a dingy slice of light appear between the open door and its frame. I can’t see much through the opening, a naked bulb overhead and a small cot with a blanket folded at the foot.

  Anson’s shadow looms against the bare stone wall. In the quiet, I hear the zipper of his jacket and then a rustling sound, like clothes being stripped off. I take an abrupt step back, then another. I thought I wanted to know the truth, to see it with my own eyes, but suddenly I find I can’t bear it.

  I feel sick to my stomach and ashamed. I’ve been such a fool, such a stupid, lovesick fool. I turn to go back the way I came, but in the dark, I blunder into a stack of crates. The sound echoes like a shot in the quiet.

  I see Anson’s shadow go still, then straighten. An instant later, he appears in the doorway, briefly silhouetted. “Who’s there?”

  He waits, head cocked. I cover my mouth with both hands, willing myself to be silent. Part of me wants to confront him, to tell him I know what he’s up to, but I can’t bear the thought of being caught skulking in the dark.

  “Show yourself,” he growls. His voice is strange, wary and thick with menace. “Now.”

  I’ve never seen him angry, and it frightens me to think of his reaction should he discover me here. I squeeze my eyes shut, willing myself to be invisible as the scuff of his boots moves closer. I’m wedged between two stacks of crates, caught like a rabbit in a snare. I release a sigh of relief when I hear him move past. But seconds later, he reverses course and I feel the bite of his fingers on my arm.

  He yanks me from my hiding place, a wine bottle clutched in his fist, raised high and ready to strike. I’m stunned by the look on his face, his features contorted with a mix of fear and rage. He’s almost unrecognizable.

  He clamps a hand over my mouth and yanks me backward against him, still poised to wield the wine bottle. I can feel the energy in him, coiled, lethal. A sob bubbles up in my throat.

  The muscles in his arms go slack, but his grip remains firm as he jerks me around to face him. Seconds tick by as we lock eyes in the darkness. Eventually, I feel the tightly coiled energy in him begin to unspool. He lowers the bottle, then holds a finger to his lips, commanding me to be silent.

  I’m half marched, half dragged to the small room he’s just left. It’s not much bigger than a closet and is furnished as a crude kind of living space. In addition to the cot, there’s a small sink and a cracked mirror, a narrow chest of drawers, and a battered leather case fitted with what looks like a homemade radio. But it’s the empty leather pouch and the scattering of official-looking documents on the table that hold my attention. Cartes d’identité—French identity papers, birth certificates, ration cards for both food and clothing.

  A dozen questions crowd into my head, but before I can open my mouth, Anson’s fingers bite deeper into my arm and I’m pulled around to face him. “What are you doing down here?”

  I stare at him, stunned that he can ask such a thing of me when he’s the one sneaking around in the dark. But the glint in his eyes withers me, and I find myself explaining. “I saw you with Elise, whispering in the hall. I saw her slip a note into your pocket, and I thought . . .” I swallow the rest, letting my eyes slide away. “I needed to know if it was true.”

  He eyes me with astonishment. “That’s why you followed me down here? Because you thought I had a date with Elise?”

  I look away, shocked to realize there might be something worse than catching Anson with another woman. I shift my gaze back to the papers on the table. Most are yellowed with age and deeply creased. A few are marred with stains, splotches, the occasional torn corner. Who do they belong to, and what are they doing down here?

  I reach for one of the documents, a certificate of birth, but Anson catches my wrist. “Don’t touch,” he hisses. His eyes, stripped of color in the cold light of the overhead bulb, send a chill through me.

  My thoughts skitter to those suddenly empty beds, seemingly recovered men dying without warning in the middle of the night and with greater and greater frequency of late. To the rumors of a traitor in our midst—a spy reporting back to the Gestapo. We’ve all feigned ignorance, because it’s safer than admitting what we all suspect, that those men hadn’t died at all, that somehow they’d been smuggled out of the hospital right under our noses. That Dr. Jack is somehow at the back of it all, and the Germans know it and are just waiting for proof before they make their arrest.

  Is that what Anson is doing in the basement? Helping Sumner Jackson smuggle Americans and Brits out of France and using forged papers to do it? If so, why not tell me? Surely he knows I can be trusted. A wave of dread washes through me as another thought occurs—a terrible thought. What if Anson is the spy we’ve all been worried about, and he’s actually been helping the Gestapo gather evidence? The possibility makes the back of my neck go clammy. Has he been working for the Nazis the whole time, pretending to be a hero? Pretending . . . everything?

  “Those papers,” I say, nodding toward the table. “Please tell me you’re not doing anything wrong with them, that you’re not . . .” I let the words trail, unable to finish the rest.

  He studies me, his expression unreadable. The moment spins out, and we stand eye to eye as I wait for his answer, as if we’re poised at the edge of some terrible precipice, waiting to see who will jump first.

  “Just tell me you’re not working for them,” I say thickly. “Please.”

  A muscle begins to tick in his jaw. “That’s what you think?”

  “I don’t know what I think, Anson. You’re sneaking around down here with a flashlight, raking through papers that clearly aren’t yours.” I’m talking fast now, hating the words as they leave my mouth. I want so badly to be wrong, but what if I’m not?

  When he reaches for my hand I pull away. He stares at me, astonished. “You’re afraid of me?”

  “There’s been so much talk. And you’ve been acting so strangely . . .”

  He takes a step back, raking a hand through his hair. “You think I’m the spy? And now that you’ve stumbled onto my little secret, I’ll be forced to—what? Strangle you? Slit your throat?” His eyes are flinty as they lock with mine, but there’s hurt there too, as if I’d drawn back my hand and physically struck him. “After all this time,” he says finally. “After everything we’ve shared, that’s who you think I am?”

  “Anson . . .”

  “I think I liked it better when you suspected me of going behind your back with Elise. I think she’d prefer it, too, to being called a Nazi.”

  “I didn’t call either one of you a Nazi. But what am I supposed to think?”

  “You’re supposed to trust me.”

  I lift my chin. “The way you trusted me?”

  He blows out a long breath, and I suddenly see how tired he is. “It’s got nothing to do with trust,” he says wearily. “It’s to do with being careful. If I’m caught . . . I couldn’t put you in that kind of danger. I never meant for you to know any of this.”

  “But I do know. Or at least I think I do. So you might as well tell me the rest.”

  He shakes his head. “No.”

&n
bsp; “The men,” I press, determined to confirm what now seems plain. “The ones who died so suddenly. All those empty beds. They didn’t die, did they?”

  “Leave it alone, Soline. Please. Go back upstairs and forget you saw any of this.”

  I shake my head, refusing to be put off. I need to know it all, about the work he’s doing and the risks he’s taking. “It was you,” I press again. “You helped them get away. Using papers like these. It was you.”

  He blows out a breath, annoyed by my persistence. “It was a lot of people. An entire cell risking their lives to save a handful of men. Airmen mostly, along with a few friends of the Resistance who managed to get themselves into the Gestapo’s crosshairs. There’s a man who does the papers, an artist turned forger, if you can believe that.” He pauses, pointing to the documents on the table. “This is his work. We give them new names and get them across the border into Spain, then on to England, even to the States now and then. Sometimes we need a guy’s bed before we can safely move him down the line, so we hide him—down here.”

  I glance around the tiny room again, the sparse furnishings and contraband radio, the crude facilities. All this time, Anson has been risking his life to help others escape the Nazis—soldiers fighting to pry France from Hitler’s grip, agitators and fellow resisters in danger of arrest.

  My thoughts wander to Erich Freede, the man my mother had loved but let go, of the family he might have gone on to have in Germany. A wife, children with whom I share blood and history, and I find myself praying that someone like Anson helped them get out in time.

  “You could have told me,” I say softly. “I would have kept your secret.”

  “Except it isn’t just my secret to keep. It belongs to all of us, Soline. Everyone who works for the Resistance. And it’s up to all of us to keep it.”

  “Well, now it belongs to me too,” I say flatly. “But I want to do more than just keep the secret. Let me be a part of what you’re doing, Anson. Let me help.”

  “I can’t let you do that.”

  “Please. I don’t know what I can do, but there must be something.”

  “No.”

  “I’ll go to Dr. Jack, then,” I tell him. “I’ll ask him to let me help. And you needn’t pretend he doesn’t know about all of this. Nothing happens here that he doesn’t sanction.”

  Anson’s face remains stony. “Soline, I won’t—”

  I press the flats of my fingers to his lips, cutting him off. “Don’t tell me no, Anson. Tell me what I can do.”

  TWENTY

  SOLINE

  Without faith, even our work is doomed to fail. Faith is everything.

  —Esmée Roussel, the Dress Witch

  27 August 1943—Paris

  I’ve been stunned to learn what a handful of brave men and women has been able to accomplish under the watchful eyes of the boche. While Paris crawls with Göring’s Gestapo, Dr. Jack and his staff have been quietly waging their own war against Herr Hitler. And I have become a part of it.

  If anyone had ever hinted that I would be involved in such a thing, I would have accused them of drinking too much wine. But I find it gives me a fresh sense of purpose, a way to feel less a victim while the Nazis overrun our city. And I fancy Maman looking down on my clandestine activities with approval, if only for the sake of Erich Freede.

  It also helps me feel closer to Anson, to know his cause is my cause, that we’re passionate about the same things. We talk more and more about the future these days. We do not speak of forever—the war makes such talk feel imprudent—but we talk about our tomorrows. Places we mean to go and things we mean to do. And in these sweet, silly musings, we are always together. For now, it is enough. As Maman used to say, the work must come first.

  I’ve received quite the education since that day in the cellar, about the various specialties within the Resistance: clandestine radio operations, sabotage of supply transports, printing and distribution of underground newspapers, even the movement of weapons and explosives. Each cell operates independently of one another. Our work is less daring than the blowing up of bridges and railroads, but it’s no less dangerous. To smuggle downed Allied airmen out of France requires intricate planning and many hands.

  The process begins with falsified death certificates and carefully forged identity papers for each escapee and employs a vast network of couriers—many of them women like me—and a series of safe houses along a carefully guarded route over the Pyrenees, into northern Spain, and then on to the port of Lisbon.

  That is Anson’s work, transporting the men when moving day finally arrives. I dread those nights when he kisses me goodbye and promises to return safely, because we both know he can’t guarantee anything of the sort. We all seem to be living on borrowed time these days, daring fate to catch us out, wondering not if our time will come but how and where. It doesn’t help that the hospital gates stand directly opposite the German headquarters and that guards are posted day and night.

  But I have work of my own now—as a courier. Finally, after nearly two weeks of training, I’m being given real assignments. I’ve never thought of myself as particularly brave, but what I’m doing feels right. Not just for Paris but for Anson. Helping the cause, even a little, means helping him.

  He was adamant that I not report to him, and so I’ve been assigned to Elise, whose fiancé, I’ve learned, has been sent to work in a German munitions factory as part of the forced-service edict. She’s brusque and all business, but not unkind, and she has trained me well.

  I work as a liaison, conveying information to other members of our cell: a rendezvous schedule hidden in a tin of coffee, a drop-off point scribbled on a scrap of paper used to wrap a wedge of cheese. Sometimes the exchange is verbal, a seemingly innocent inquiry about an aunt’s recent bout of flu or a question about the Métro timetable. I’m to recite the line exactly as given, memorize the reply, and report back to Elise. I never know what any of it means, but that’s by design. In the event that I’m picked up and questioned, I can’t reveal anything because I don’t know anything.

  But today, I’ve been trusted with something new. I’m to collect a pouch of papers from a man Elise referred to only as The Painter. She told me to fill a basket with wine, bread, and cheese and then pedal Maman’s bike to a garret in the Rue des Saints-Pères.

  I’m nervous as I pull up in front of the dingy apartment building. My instructions are to appear as if I’m meeting a lover for an afternoon assignation. I take out a compact and a tube of lipstick, as I’ve been taught, and make a show of primping, all the while using the mirror to make sure I haven’t been followed.

  It’s the first thing they teach you: how to make sure you aren’t tailed and what to do if you are. What to look for on the street. How to melt into a crowd. How to get rid of anything that might tie you back to the cell. But nothing looks out of the ordinary.

  I chain up my bike, loop the basket over my arm, and climb the skinny flight of steps to the third floor. Three sharp knocks on the door. No more. No less. There’s the clicking of locks, and the door cracks open, revealing one eye and a heavy brow.

  “J’espère que tu as faim,” I say, precisely as instructed. I hope you’re hungry.

  The door inches back. Three-quarters of a face now. The eye narrows as it runs over me. Eventually, the door opens enough to let me in.

  It’s a tiny apartment, two rooms crowded with tables and lamps, made even more claustrophobic by heavy blackout curtains, which are closed though it’s the middle of the day. There is a distinct reek to the place. Chemical fumes mixed with unwashed male bodies, scorched acorn coffee, and cigarette smoke.

  I remember my instructions while I wait. I’m to say nothing unless specifically addressed, to make no comment or question anything I see. The less I know, the better. But it’s hard to curb my curiosity about what appears to be a kind of assembly line. There are small tables set up along the far wall, stocked with an assortment of inks, writing implements, seals, stamps, an
d glues.

  I count four men in all—the one who answered my knock and three others bent over various tables. No one speaks, and yet it’s clear who’s in charge. He’s seated at the farthest table, surrounded by the tools of his trade—The Painter. There’s something almost desperate in the way he hunches over his work, stained fingers twitching with small, frenetic strokes, inventing human beings with paper and ink.

  He lifts his head, craning his neck to work out a kink. Our eyes lock briefly. He’s surprisingly young, not much older than I am, with a long face, round wire spectacles, and a chin full of dark stubble. The moment is over quickly. He returns to his work, and the man who let me in returns, handing me an oilskin pouch. I don’t look inside or say a word. I simply tuck the pouch into the back of my skirt and cover it with my cardigan. No money changes hands. The Painter takes nothing for his work. Like the rest of us, he cares only about the cause.

  When enough time has passed, I empty my basket, leaving the wine and food behind, and muss my hair and lipstick a little, in case anyone happens to notice me leaving. And then I’m outside in the sunshine again, pedaling away with a packet of forged documents tucked into my waistband.

  It’s a relief to get back to the hospital and finally hand off the smuggled pouch to Elise. She’s matter-of-fact in her praise, which isn’t unusual. She’s not the effusive type, but there’s something unsettling about the way she won’t meet my eyes. And then she tells me. Anson has failed to return from last night’s mission.

  The news nearly knocks me to the ground. Elise makes me sit down and brings me a cup of coffee. There’s no pretense that Anson and I are merely work colleagues. She’s just a woman, comforting another woman, and I’m grateful. She tells me it isn’t unusual—a hundred things could have happened—and she’s sure he’ll be back anytime now. But I can hear in her voice that she’s worried, and as I go back to my duties, my mind runs to worst-case scenarios, to Anson shot dead or herded onto a train bound for one of the camps.