The Baker's Secret

by Stephen P. Kiernan

  Monkey Boy dropped a bit of bark through the branches, watching it tumble. He had spent hours in certain trees, keeping watch, exercising his facility with numbers. Five hundred and five, that was how many dead bodies he had seen so far that morning. Before that day he’d seen only four, bringing his lifetime total suddenly to five hundred and nine. Meanwhile an average of thirty-eight men per landing boat, the ramp dropped and out they poured, the first wave falling from gunfire almost as one, others spilling over those bodies into waist-deep water, and on average eleven of them making it out to the sand.

  The astonishing thing? The thing which he did not understand? Behind every landing boat, despite all those bodies lolling in the surf, more landing boats waited, foam at the bows as they surged forward. The ramps dropped and their men fell, and yet the next ones poured in immediately like an unstoppable tide of humanity.

  Of ships, he had observed them left to right and out to the horizon more than a thousand, which was as high as he could count, and more. But there was a sense to it: behind the boats that carried soldiers, warships blasted away with their big guns. From time to time a detonation came from the distance, some even bigger battleship too far out to see, which flung missiles inland high over his head. The projectiles were huge. It was as though they were firing Jeeps. Long after the shell had passed overhead, there came a roar like a giant opened furnace, like a detonation of the planet itself, the sound of the shell’s firing delayed by distance, and Monkey Boy cupped his hands over his ears.

  Still the sight remained, extending from the beach below him all the way to the horizon. It was the most elaborate, terrifying, beautiful thing he had ever seen. Someone else needed to witness this, and explain to him what it meant. Monkey Boy clambered down his special sycamore in search of someone to tell. But who?

  Fleur pulled a quilt over the shoulders of her mother, who lay in bed facing the wall and shivering. Outside the world snarled and convulsed, as if the house sat on a strategic bombing target rather than in a small meadow away from the village center. A fly buzzed into the room; every window in the house was already shattered. Fleur had spent the hour after daybreak with tweezers, picking splinters of glass first from the skin of her mother and then from herself. She had learned patience with instruments from her father, the outspoken veterinarian who hushed while treating the animals. Now Fleur sat on the edge of the bed and rubbed Marie’s quaking back as a breeze blew straight through their house. The torn curtains rose and fell like a sigh.

  The priest awakened to feed his chickens and prepare for seven thirty Mass. His right leg was worse than ever, almost useless as he dragged it along behind him. There was nothing wrong with his body, he felt sure. The fault lay in his faith, which could no longer be reconciled with the world around him. He prayed constantly now. But the gap between heaven and earth had grown too large.

  As if to prove the point a nearby bombardment rattled his house, interrupting his Ave Marias. On such a day, would anyone come to St. Agnes by the Sea? If someone did, what strengthening of faith could he offer? What vision of salvation remained?

  Pirate lengthened his neck to crow with all of his might. There was a body rolled against the chicken coop. A person. It smelled unfamiliar, and therefore unwelcome. The rooster declared his discontent, but the body did not obey. Hopping down from the coop roof, Pirate noticed that the barnyard door had been left ajar. Beyond lay a world of potential threats, but a universe of possible meals. Bobbing his head with each step, glancing sidelong, he dashed across the open space and out the door. There was a well, and beyond it a wall of green. Freedom at last.

  Mémé snored away on the couch, exhausted after a long night of nursing her granddaughter. Emma stood in the doorway, angling her heel back and forth to put on her shoe without bending over. Pain flared down her right arm, but she only winced and gritted her teeth, then dragged herself out to the baking shed. The Kommandant’s aide would arrive at 7:40, which meant she was behind schedule and he did not like to wait.

  For once, Pirate failed to make his ruckus around her ankles, but Emma was numb to that information. Pain occupied the full of her attention, forehead to ribs to shins, so that she tossed barley kernels underfoot without noticing the barnyard’s silence. One thing halted her, though—the place where the Goat’s blood had stained the earth. It made an odd, curved blotch. How much rain would it take to wash the mark away? It did not matter. Emma memorized the shape, in order to keep it forever, before shuffling on into the barn.

  In the shed the rounds of dough had grown fat under their cloth covers. Emma set her kneading board onto the table just so. She ran her palm over the smooth wood of what had been Uncle Ezra’s execution tree, then lifted the cover from one bowl and with her left hand punched the dough. Her aim erred, though, caving in one side, the other half still risen and rough. She struck again, and the mound fell into itself. As she went to turn the bowl over, the dough nearly slipped and she had to jerk her hip against the table to prevent a spill. Pain shot through her arm and the side of her face like an electric charge, and she had not even begun kneading yet.

  Emma took deep breaths, calming herself, trying to bring her right arm forward. But it would not obey, dropping from the board back to her side. If only she had stabbed the captain upward, as Guillaume had instructed. If only she had shot those officers when they stood in a row. She might be dead, but they would have been stopped. Emma started kneading with her left hand, it began well enough, until the board tipped. She jerked forward again, but too late. The dough fell to the shed’s dirt floor, the kneading board toppling after.

  Emma was on her knees instantly, fumbling the board against her chest and back into place. She scooped the empty bowl under the dough but its white skin was marred with dirt. When she tried to brush it away, the brown spread. A spot of red, her chin cut reopening, dropped onto the mess.

  “All right,” Emma said, wiping her good hand on her dress. “It’ll be nine loaves today. And if he doesn’t like it, he can take it up with Thalheim.”

  Dabbing her chin with her sleeve, she reached for another bowl.

  “What is your name?” Odette asked the boy.

  He stiffened on the stool. “I am not to speak to you.”

  “I am jailed and you have a gun. What danger are you in?”

  As if her mention of it had reminded him, the boy stood the gun on its stock so that it aimed at the ceiling. With bayonet, it reached past his shoulder. “Kreutz told me you were a witch. He said you would put a spell on me.”

  Odette sat up on her bunk. “Does this feel like a spell?”

  “You are speaking my language. That makes me nervous.”

  “I am from your country,” Odette said. “It is all a mistake that I am here.”

  “You were arrested for spying.”

  Odette let that one go. “Where is your home?”

  Deliberating whether he should answer, the boy ran his thumb around the tip of the gun barrel. “Grainau.”

  “At the foot of the Zugspitze?”

  He stood. “You have been there?”

  Odette shook her head. “I have only seen pictures.”

  “It is the most beau—”

  A bomb landed closer than any before, exploding in the street outside the town hall. The building shook and they both heard the sound of falling stone. Odette could not see the boy any longer. She rushed to the front of her cell, knowing that his injury meant her freedom. He was curled in a ball on the floor.

  “Are you all right?” she called to him.

  For more than a minute he did not answer. “I was conscripted,” the boy from Grainau said at last, and she could tell that he was crying. “I didn’t want to come. They made me. And now I am going to die here.”

  Odette rolled up her sleeves. “Here is what you do,” she said. “Take your gun and get away from the village, and if anyone asks, you have a message to deliver to a major. No one will interfere. Once you reach the open fields, get rid of your rifle an
d present yourself at any farmhouse. They will give you work clothes to replace your uniform. Follow the river upstream to Caen, to the monastery of St. Stephen. It is easily found, watch for the six spires. They will hide you safely.”

  “You see?” The boy stood, dusting himself off before lifting his rifle from the floor. “A spell, exactly as they warned me.”

  “Don’t you understand, Private Zugspitze? I am not the danger. I am nothing at all. The thing you should fear is the order they gave you to stay, when they have all moved to somewhere safe. The thing to fear is out there, falling from the sky.”

  As if she had conjured it, another shell struck, this time hitting the town hall directly. The northern half of the building was sheared away, caving into itself as though its ancient stones were cubes of sugar. The basement jail, located at the opposite end, nonetheless shook as if in an earthquake, flinging Odette to the floor. She lay there, arms shielding her skull, waiting whole minutes for debris to stop falling and the air to go still. When at last she found the nerve to lift her head, she saw that the explosion had bent the cell door, its base had gouged an arc in the cement floor. Now it stood wide open.

  Odette considered it a favorable omen that the door would never close again. She poked her head into the damaged hallway, walls buckled and light fixtures shattered on the floor. The boy, her guard, her captor, was gone.

  Chapter 33

  “No,” Mémé said, arms crossed, feet planted in Emma’s path.

  “People are expecting me,” Emma said, adjusting the wagon harnesses, her right arm now in a splint. She had given up on the bread that day, unable as she was to knead with one hand, but the Kommandant’s aide had not come for the loaves anyway. Still, there were eggs to be gathered and given. “I cannot sit idle while our neighbors go hungry.”

  “No,” Mémé said.

  “With respect,” Emma said, lowering her head, then raising it again with effort. “I understand the dangers. But Odette sits in the same jail that held your son-in-law, my father. We did not act to help him soon enough, and I will not repeat that mistake.”

  Mémé scowled on, her face cragged with age and determination. “No.”

  “Look at me,” Emma whispered. She could well imagine, with her closed eye and swollen lips, what her grandmother saw. “Would you have me wait here till the captain returns?”

  Mémé’s lips began to tremble, but she pressed them hard together, wringing out any room for sorrow. “No Gypsy.”

  “Dear one.” Emma laid her good hand on the old woman’s crossed arms. “I am stubborn, like they say my mother was. I am almost as stubborn as you. Helping others may keep me alive.”

  Mémé turned away. “No.” But this time she said it quietly.

  “I’ll return by midday.” Emma gave her grandmother a kiss on the cheek. “Noon, and no later. I promise.”

  Mémé held still as Emma pulled the wagon around her and through the barnyard doorway. Though the straps chafed her shoulders, she felt a measure of relief. If she found the captain somewhere along her route, perhaps he would spare Mémé.

  A few steps past the well, however, Emma stubbed her foot on a stone, and a whip of pain cracked from her heel to the back of her head. She stood reeling for a full minute before shuffling on again. Perhaps this plan was a mistake. Either way, she would not be suffering for much longer.

  Monkey Boy ventured toward the beaches only as far as the bend in the road, where he could see the mansions on the cliff. The one on the left, with those flags of the occupying army flapping in the wind, looked dead. No one entered or departed, no soldiers appeared outside at all. The one on the right, with wires coming from every corner to reach in seemingly every direction, was fully engulfed. Flames poured from the upper windows, and no one was attempting to put them out.

  The center house, where the young Argent couple lived, was gone. Its crumbled stones sat in heaps or lay tossed onto the lawn, as a bored child might scatter his blocks. Two signs indicated what the rubble had been: First, a downstairs corner remained undamaged; the place two walls met and a bookshelf hung gave evidence that this pile of rocks had once been a dwelling place. Second, the chimney remained somehow intact, rising by itself into the sky. Monkey Boy thought it resembled a finger pointing: here; once upon a time people lived here.

  The Monsignor was well along in the seven thirty Mass, celebrated that morning for three hardy souls who came to spend the warring hours in the presence of God. The priest was moments away from elevation of the Eucharist, when a soldier no taller than a child burst through the main doors. He ran halfway down the center aisle before slowing, then coming to a complete stop.

  “You there,” the priest called from the altar, interrupting a prayer. “No guns are permitted inside the church.”

  “You had better run for it,” the soldier said, pushing the rifle behind his back. His face was smudged with dirt and his pronunciation crude. “No one will be spared.”

  The Monsignor limped down from the altar, leaning on his cane. Was this soldier a child? His voice sounded unusually high.

  “They’ve blown up town hall,” the private continued. “And I hear they are winning at the beaches. They will kill everyone.”

  “You have no authority here,” the priest said.

  “Leave this place,” the soldier cried. “Save yourselves.”

  The Monsignor felt a swell of power, as if a moment had arrived for which there had been years of preparation. Uncertainty fell away, and he now knew his role for that day’s conflict, and for the rest of the war. The waiting and doubting had reached its zenith, faith and reality reconciled at last.

  Throwing aside his cane, he strode to the Communion rail and raised both arms high. “This is not a place of men and their wars. This is the house of Almighty God. You may stay, if you adopt an attitude of humility and prayer. Otherwise begone, sinner, and may God have mercy on your soul.”

  The tiny soldier ran before the priest had finished. He left the door wide, and the noise of combat spilled buzzing and snapping into the church. But the Monsignor returned to his place at the altar, hands trembling with the power and the glory. He glanced at the Mass book to find his place. Yes, the elevation.

  He faced the crucifix, while with both hands he lifted Emma’s one third of a loaf as high as he could, crying out in Latin: “Do this in memory of me.”

  Then the priest bowed his head, two of the three other heads in the church replicating his motion exactly.

  The third head, in the front pew, belonged to Pierre. He inclined in the opposite direction, eyes raised to the heavens. His hands were folded in prayer, and his fingers—as worn as old leather, but strong like ropes from a lifetime of milking—were interlaced and extended, so that anyone from above could see that they made a V.

  The town-hall stairway survived the explosion, but Odette had a difficult time climbing them with no railing and a wide opening on one side. Parts of the building dropped randomly from above, keeping her snug against the wall.

  The hallway to DuFour’s office remained intact, and the door closed. He had always made such a show of locking and unlocking, probably he was cowering in there right now. Out the window he would go, that was her thought. For all he had done to her, to Guillaume, to all the people of the village, DuFour must go out the window. But when she touched the door it swung back on its hinges, and there was no office on the other side. Just open air, and a smashed desk amid the rubble below.

  She held the doorframe, scanning the debris. Was DuFour buried in there? One could hope. Odette spat with satisfaction and began to make her way back down. She considered her good fortune at surviving a bomb so near, at being free.

  The contentment did not last. As she reached the street Odette could see, despite the litter of downed trees and broken buildings, that the blue bicycle was gone. The scoundrel had run before the bombs fell. Frustration redoubled her anger.

  She straightened her clothes and decided: next stop would be the cotta
ge of that whore Michelle. The day before, Odette had listened on her illicit radio to reports from Rome, where the occupying army fell, the Allies gained control, and the people took it upon themselves to punish some of their neighbors’ conduct. Yes, Odette hurried across the square to the concealment of the hedgerows. She knew exactly what to do with a collaborator.

  Chapter 34

  Emma stood before town hall, stunned. The right half of the building was gone, flattened, a jumble of rock with pipes and wires protruding like some industrial monster was buried beneath. The left half was intact, but with a gray coating of dust. It was an odd joke, that the building’s damage mirrored her own, but she slipped out of the wagon straps and, leading with her open eye, ascended the rubble. From above, she could peer unimpeded into the basement, and see for herself that no prisoner remained in the cell below. Nor, Emma was reassured to note, was there any bloodstain on the floor or walls.

  She returned to street level with care, holding her splinted arm out for balance, and pulled her wagon toward the village green, and Odette’s café.

  When Emma wheeled onto that street, however, she noticed something else first: Uncle Ezra’s bakery. A continent of time had passed since she’d last stepped inside. Now the door was broken open, all the windows smashed, and as she saw the shelves tipped against one another, the walls stained with mold, the giant mixer on its side, Emma felt a thousand years old. Her body hurt, Thalheim would shoot her at the first opportunity, the invasion had come too late. An armored truck rattled down the side road, its gun pointed ahead, its smokestack billowing black. Emma considered sitting down right there, accepting whatever might come, inviting the eternal rest that she suspected was not a great distance away.