‘Sleep,’ Martel ordered. ‘Sleep, damn you.’
He retreated back into his own straw nest and quickly settled into silence, but her skin still bore the imprint of his thumb, and in a way she didn’t understand, it was a comfort. She had been touched by men all over her body, but never there. Never like that.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
‘A plane!’
Romy screamed the word.
‘Wake up! Martel! Wake up!’
She hit him flat on the chest.
He reacted fast. On his feet, cursing, and over to the stable doors in the dark before she’d reached them herself. He swung them open. The drone of engine noise immediately grew louder. It had come at Romy out of nowhere, spiking into her disturbed sleep and jerking her awake. Her breath was still ragged from the grip of her dream, but she knew an aircraft engine when she heard it, even on the other side of the mountain.
She stepped outside. Into the greyness of that moment just pre-dawn when the day starts to elbow aside the night.
‘Two of them,’ she said.
Martel nodded agreement. ‘A Messerschmitt 109 by the sound of it.’
A German fighter plane. The Condor Legion.
There were no planes for it to fight here. So why . . .? No planes. Except her own.
A sense of dread kicked at her heart. She didn’t waste time on words, but started to run, hurtling through the grey mist, skidding on the cobbles. She heard Martel call her name but she didn’t stop. She raced down the street of the small town while its inhabitants lay in their beds, asleep or fumbling their wives, unaware of what was bearing down on them.
‘Alto!’
Ahead of her a soldier on patrol duty loomed out of the gloom, his rifle raised and pointing straight at her chest.
‘Quick!’ she shouted. ‘Vite! It’s coming. Listen to the plane. Warn people to stay indoors or . . .’
The soldier shouted back at her in Spanish. Dear God, he didn’t understand. She racked her brain for a Spanish word.
‘Rápido.’ She gestured skyward. ‘Messerschmitt.’
He looked up. The whites of his eyes shining and startled as he scanned the night sky. But then he heard it. The growl of the Daimler-Benz engine that sounded like low thunder rumbling among the mountaintops. Immediately he fired off three rifle shots into the air to warn his comrades and all hell broke loose.
Romy laid a hand on her Gipsy’s flank. The fabric skin felt ice-cold to the touch. She could almost believe it was fear. The biplane was tucked away in an open stretch of ground at the back end of town and Romy ran to the spot where a fence marked its boundary. On the other side of it, the black shapes of two cars lay hidden under tarpaulins. She had noticed them yesterday. No one in Spain had petrol for cars, not these days. It all went to the military.
Her fingers worked quickly. She untied the tarpaulins from the cars and dragged them over to the Gipsy Moth where she draped one over the tail fin and one over the propeller and engine cowling. There wasn’t anything she could do about the high wings, but at least from the air and in this grey mist, the outline now looked much less like an aircraft.
The growl had become a roar as the enemy fighter sank into their valley. Suddenly the spit and crack of machine-gun fire ripped through the town and Romy heard screams. She raced back to one of the houses and flattened herself against its wall for cover. The thoughts in her head were buzzing with wild confusion. Odd ideas. Strange sensations. A firm conviction that the plane had come for her.
Tracking her down. Scenting her father’s blood on her hands.
Because in the end you cannot run forever. So she stepped out into the open street where everything was grey and shadowy. Maybe this way the killing would stop. No one else need die.
She could see a plane at the far end of the street. The roar of its engine bombarded the air in her lungs as it flew low, coming directly for her, as though it had smelled the blood on her. Its guns were strafing the street, ripping into the soldiers’ billets, shattering windows, kicking up chunks of rubble from the buildings.
She stood still in the road. Waiting for the bullets.
Around her she was aware of screams, shouts, gunfire from the ground, but the world receded into a dim backdrop and all her focus was on the Messerschmitt that grew huge and black above her, like the Hand of God. But something hit her like a truck from one side, sweeping her across the road and slamming her into a doorway. The force of it sent lights cartwheeling through her head so that for one split second she thought it was death that had come for her.
‘What the hell are you doing? Are you crazy? Standing in the path of . . .’
It dawned on her that it was Martel. His voice blurred. She pulled back her hand and slapped him across the face, again and again. But he didn’t release her. The plane roared overhead and passed on down the street, its guns finding fresh targets. Others would die instead of her. She slumped against the door behind her and would have slid to the ground but Martel held her on her feet, his grip on her unrelenting. She wanted to shout at him but had no words.
A new sound reached them. Far higher in the sky. They both recognised it instantly as the heavy grinding engines of a much larger aircraft. They couldn’t pick out its silhouette in the greyness that billowed around the mountain ridges, but they knew what it was.
‘A bomber.’
No sooner was the word out of Martel’s mouth than the first bombs hit. Their impact shook the ground beneath Romy’s feet and tore at her eardrums. The front wall of the house opposite her collapsed, exposing a man and woman sitting up in bed, naked except for a second skin of cement dust that turned them into statues.
More bombs hurtled down, explosions rocked the town and fires started to rage from one shop to another. The air shuddered and turned solid. Romy’s lungs filled up with dust and smoke, but far worse was the fury inside her that made her want to claw the aeroplanes out of the sky and watch them crash and burn. Throughout it all, Martel held her there in the doorway. Not letting her run. Paying no heed to her screams of anger, not until the bombs stopped raining from the sky. Only then did he take his hands off her. She twisted away from him and ran to help the injured.
Side by side they worked, as they dug through masonry with bare fingers, lifted fractured beams from limbs and bathed blood from faces. The military swung into action with discipline and efficiency, soldiers extracting people from the ruins, dousing fires and shovelling aside the debris that blocked the roads.
At one point, just when the first finger of dawn slid like a spill of oil over the mountain and painted one end of the valley golden, Romy retreated back past the severed telegraph lines that writhed like black snakes on the ground. Back to the plot of land where her own plane was hidden away, but she knew what she would find.
Her Gipsy Moth lay in a thousand pieces. Its wood and metal carcass was ripped apart, its guts spread out like a sacrificial offering on the black earth, and a child was already stealing its magneto. Romy stooped blindly, picked up a chunk of its shiny wooden propeller and cradled it in her shaking arms, unable to let it go. She had no idea she was crying as she made her way back up the street to the church. They’d need her help. More than ever now in the makeshift hospital there.
But the church had taken a direct hit. Nothing of it or those inside it remained.
‘What happened, Martel?’
‘We were betrayed.’
‘By whom?’
‘We don’t know for certain. But I told you, there are eyes and spies everywhere.’
‘Surely you must have some idea who could have—’
‘If we did, he would be strung up by his balls from the nearest tree with his throat slit wide open by now.’ He said it quietly but cold rage was threaded through each syllable.
They were riding in the back of a dilapidated van that was wheezing its way through a mountain pass, its gears skidding into each other at random so that progress was slow. A Spanish partisan fighter huddled on a blanket
on the far side of Martel, eyes cold and suspicious as he cracked his knuckles doggedly and dragged on a cigarette between his lips. He wore dark clothing and spoke no French. Across his knees was slung a rifle because he was their bodyguard.
But who wants a stranger as a bodyguard when you’ve just seen a town slaughtered and trust is as slippery as a fish between your fingers?
The van shook and juddered. The road was rough. Though Martel said little, his face was grim and he kept one eye on the bodyguard at all times. They were heading for the train station in Marseille, but first they had to find a way over the Spanish border back into France. The sun was beating down on the small van, it was hot as hell in the back and the air was thick with cigarette smoke. But to Romy it felt cold. Cold and crowded. Because she had brought with her the spirit of her shattered little plane and the ghosts of all those slaughtered in Santa Casilda. They lay at her feet and their cold hands touched her skin.
Could she forgive him for saving her life?
The question stung inside Romy’s head. And then there was the reverse side of it, like flipping a coin. Could Léo Martel forgive her for making him risk his life?
Having someone try to murder you is personal, really personal. Maybe that fighter pilot had checked her name off a list or maybe he hadn’t, but still he had looked straight at her standing there in the middle of the road and moved his thumb to press his fire-button. If Martel hadn’t barrelled into her, she would be dead. Her limp body would be one of those, beset by summer flies, piled up in the cemetery.
What about Florence? Her twin. Would she feel it? Would she know the moment that Romy’s heart stopped beating?
‘You’re muttering.’
Romy’s eyes shot open. Martel was leaning over her, his dusty hair silhouetted against an arc of silver-blue sky, and he was smiling, as if she had just made him laugh.
‘I’m not muttering,’ she insisted.
‘Then who is Florence?’
She felt colour rise in her cheeks. Had she said that bit out loud? About her heart stopping.
She blinked herself fully alert. She was seated at the edge of a field of tufty wheat, her back propped against a gnarled old hazel tree, the air shimmering in the heat. Had she drifted into a doze? She stared up at Martel. What else had she muttered? He kept his eyes on her with an intensity that made her want to look away.
She held up her hand to him. ‘Thank you, Léo Martel. Merci.’
‘For what?’
He was surprised, as though a thank-you was the last thing he’d expected from her, but he folded his large clever hand around hers.
‘For my life,’ she said.
‘Nonsense.’
She didn’t argue. If he wanted it that way.
They were resting. The van was abandoned back up in the mountains and they had come down on foot into France using goat trails at first, their bodyguard acting as guide. He was still with them, sitting twenty metres away, chewing on a strip of dried pork, eyes like a hawk on every tree or fold in the terrain where an enemy could conceal himself. Martel had walked, hour after hour, his limp growing more pronounced with each kilometre. Neither he nor Romy mentioned it.
She was the one who had called a halt in the wheat field. From her canvas bag she’d extracted a bottle of vile gut-stripper they called red wine and had proceeded to pour it down her throat. Martel did not comment, but neither did he share it. He was wearing a plain dark shirt and grey trousers but his suit jacket had gone missing. She looked around her. The wine bottle had gone missing too.
‘Romaine, I have watched you trying to kill yourself for years, and today you almost succeeded. Tell me why. What are you running from?’
She fired a look of alarm at him. He still held on to her hand.
She shook her head, her short curls showering cement dust on her lap. ‘No, Martel, you’ve got me wrong. I like taking risks, that’s all, just as you did in your stunt days. That need for excitement, it’s in our blood. That’s all it is.’
She jumped to her feet and shouldered her bag, but he still didn’t release her hand, so she was forced to look at him straight.
‘What is it?’ she asked and stepped closer.
So close she could see deep into his grey eyes. To the core of him. Could see the steel girders it was made of.
‘I’m not wrong about you,’ he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
FLORENCE
I am uneasy.
My feet cling to the pavement as I walk in my tan heels, so that each step requires an effort. That is a bad sign.
She has gone. My sister. Gone missing. She came to see me but I wasn’t there and she spoke with Roland. Now she is nowhere to be found. What did he say to her?
What? What?
No lies. Not this time.
I am walking down rue Bascome and as I pass Dominique’s café, the aroma entices me. I could take coffee there, a brief refuge, the tables tempting in the shade. Or the Coq d’Or with its virginal white napery. The cocktails there are magnifique. My sister would sell her soul for one.
But no. No. I don’t. I keep walking. Despite my feet.
It is a pretty street. But Paris has so many pretty streets, we are spoilt for choice. Like we’re spoilt for whores. Such an abundance of tree-lined boulevards and handsome buildings, all a regulated height to emphasise the towering glory of our churches. I like that. I love to promenade in Paris in my latest Schiaparelli. It soothes me. To stroll among the lovers along the embankment by the River Seine and listen to the whisper of its waters lapping on the low quais. To be serenaded by accordion players. It is so seductive. So normal. It is what other people do.
Isn’t it?
Yet I am uneasy today.
What is Romaine up to?
I have watched my sister. I know something is burning inside her, something that sends up shoots of scalding molten terror when I least expect it. Like at Monico’s nightclub. In the powder room. I fear it will spill down us both and melt our flesh beyond recognition, fusing us to each other.
What then?
When she flies that plane of hers, she flees from whatever it is down here that terrifies her. Every second she is up there, she is in mortal danger. Yet she laughs at it, like a child playing with fire, though each flight changes the person she is. I see it. Each flight hones her. Like a blade on a whetstone. I watch the edges of her growing sharper and more dangerous.
She will cut herself.
Or she will cut me.
I walk into Hotel Farrelle. He is there. I knew he would be, just as I know he has no idea that I am here. I spot him through the glass doors that open into the salon. As I enter, the room stretches away from me in a sea of blue carpet and gilt mirrors and I head for a seat by one of the arched windows, as far away from the piano as I can get. The instrument is startlingly white, new-tooth white, but the keys are being coaxed into something barely resembling a tune by hands the colour of coffee beans. Jazz is all the rage now in this city. You can’t go anywhere without tripping over it, though I have to say that Chopin is more to my taste.
I order coffee. My eyes drift to the man leaning one elbow on the piano. A sharp suit. Pinstriped and expensive. An oyster-grey silk tie and beautiful shoes. I approve of good shoes on a man. It shows integrity. He is tapping the flat of his hand against the piano’s shiny white skin, relishing the syncopated rhythm. His blond hair is thick and full of energy but precisely parted on one side. A good-looking face, regular features, saved from being dull by the amusement that hangs around his mouth and by the intense blue of his eyes. The kind of blue I only see in Chloé’s paintbox. His expression is open. No secrets, it says.
It lies. I know otherwise.
I turn my head away and wait for him to notice me but after several minutes he still has eyes only for the ivory keys, so when my coffee arrives, I jog the tray and it slithers to the floor with a crash of crockery. He looks straight at me then. He strides towards me, hand outstretched.
‘F
lorence, what an unexpected pleasure. What are you doing here?’
I accept his hand and his small Germanic bow. ‘I am supposed to be meeting a friend here but she cancelled.’ I regain my hand. ‘You may join me instead, if you like, Horst.’
It is Horst Baumeister, my husband’s German associate. He slips into the chair beside me with a broad smile and summons fresh coffee, once the mess is cleared away. I am wearing my hair loose over my shoulders and my pale blue dress with razor pleats and a white collar. It makes me look innocent.
‘Are you meeting someone?’ I ask.
‘No, I’m staying here at this hotel.’
‘Really?’ As if I don’t know. ‘What a coincidence.’
Then the conversation falls into one of those holes of silence that, when they open up, are hard to fill.
‘You like the music?’ I try.
‘Yes. A wonderful Count Basie arrangement.’
I raise an eyebrow. ‘I thought your Führer called jazz primitive and depraved. Goebbels regards it as degenerate music.’ I smile sweetly. ‘It is banned in Germany, I believe. Do you disagree with them, Horst?’
There is a moment, so brief it is almost not there, a moment when his lips whiten and his irises widen into black tunnels. And then it is gone.
‘Ah, Florence, it is not jazz music itself we object to. It is very popular in Germany.’ He leans forward and lowers his voice. ‘It is the jazz musicians who concern us, the Negroes and the Jews who play it.’
His eyes fix on mine. Then the smile returns.
‘Florence, you and I think alike. We may have different taste in music, but that is allowed.’
I laugh. I cannot resist.
‘You are right, Horst. We both know that the only way forward for Europe is to tear up the ridiculous map that the Treaty of Versailles created. Hitler has a vision that will rebuild the economy of France as well as Germany, if we work together.’
Horst is pleased. I see it in his blue eyes. We sip our coffee and drift into applauding the stance of the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. He is putting pressure on France to persuade Czechoslovakia to accept Hitler’s demands for Sudetenland. To be amenable. Both of us like the word amenable. It is delightfully civilised.
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