Flame of Resistance

by Tracy Groot

  “He is. Gives my folks a heck of a time. Teachers, too. I was a good boy.”

  “I don’t believe that.” She grinned.

  “I was,” he protested. He was about to say something else, but his face gained a curious expression, and he went quiet.

  “What is it?”

  He didn’t answer for a time.

  “I controlled my patch of sky,” he said quietly. “I was in control. I had firepower, with my girl. Now I got nothing. This gun?” He leaned sideways to show the Walther P38 on his hip. “No bullets. That’s me.”

  Brigitte handed back the photo. “Did you name your plane?”

  He put the picture carefully back into the booklet. “A name never came. She was just ‘my girl.’ We have a couple of RAF pilots in our squadron. You should hear them talk about their Spitfires. One guy told me it was the most charismatic plane ever built. Charismatic, what a word. Well, he never flew a P-47.” He dropped the booklet into the pocket. “Twenty-three missions with my girl. She took care of me, then took one right in the heart. I couldn’t watch her go down. I couldn’t bear it. They were beating a man today, Brigitte.”

  The needle and thread stilled.

  “His father came running. He was an old man, and one of them hit him in the mouth, and in that second, I was caught between Kees and Cabby and Tom. My name is Tom.”

  “Which of you won?”

  “Tom.” His shoulders came down. “I could have killed him. Greenland told me how stupid I was. There were a lot of people watching. But I couldn’t just watch. Did I give away who I am?”

  “Yes!” Brigitte exclaimed, setting the sewing aside. “I am glad that is who you are.”

  “I don’t want anything to happen to Greenland,” he said, gloom filling the blue eyes. “I can’t stop who I am. I’m no spy. I—reacted instinctively, like a pilot, like I’m trained. What was I thinking? I was so arrogant, thinking I could pull this off. Who am I kidding? I’m a pilot, and that’s what I’m good at, and that’s where I want to be. I want to be back where I belong, with the guys, fighting from the sky.” He noticed he still had the button in his hand. He pocketed it. “I’m worried about Greenland. There he sat, powerless. I never saw him powerless. It’s like it drained right out of him. The stuff he’s seen would unhinge—”

  A tap came at the door.

  Her eyes flew wide. She stared in alarm at Cabby. No one ever knocked with a customer inside. That’s what a closed door meant.

  Cabby swiftly unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it off. Brigitte pushed the pillows from the bed, swept aside the workbasket, and jerked back the bedspread. In two strides, Cabby was in the bed and under the covers.

  Brigitte mussed her hair, then went to the door, complaining loudly in French, “Someone better be dying.” She opened it a crack, standing behind it as if she were not dressed.

  It was Marie-Josette. She came close to the crack in the door and whispered, “Claudio is here. I thought you’d want to know.” She slipped away.

  Brigitte eased the door shut. She turned to Cabby.

  “What did she say?” he whispered, throwing off the covers.

  “Claudio is here. Why would she warn me?”

  “What do we do?”

  Brigitte put up her hand in warning and went to the door. She laid her fingertips on it, then her ear. Soon she heard Colette and Claudio quietly bickering as they came up the stairs. It stopped when they reached the top. All was silent. Then a creak of floorboards as they continued down the hallway, until Colette’s door clicked shut.

  “You must leave.”

  She tossed him his shirt. While he put it on, she grabbed his jacket and held it at the ready. He slipped into it. She handed him his hat. She went to the door, ducked out, and waited motionless as she stared down the hall at Colette’s door. Then she beckoned Cabby. He went down the stairs before her, trying to be quiet. They slipped into the hallway at the bottom of the stairs, and she saw him to the back door. He gave her a fleeting look in good-bye, then was gone.

  She hurried to the front room, where the phonograph played Glenn Miller. The front room was directly under Colette’s.

  She heard Cabby’s motorcycle start and listened very hard for any movement upstairs, tilting her head toward the ceiling. There it came—a quick trample to Colette’s window, where Claudio surely watched Cabby drive away. Brigitte’s fingers crept to her stomach.

  Marie-Josette sat on the sofa, paging through a magazine.

  “Thank you,” Brigitte said quietly.

  “Don’t mention it.”

  Brigitte’s mind raced. Why should Marie-Josette warn them? She wondered what to say, if she should say anything at all.

  “I overheard them last night,” Marie-Josette said softly, flipping pages. “They were in the kitchen. Thought everyone was asleep. Claudio was excited about something, I don’t know what. But I heard him say the name Cabby.”

  Brigitte clutched a handful of her skirt.

  Marie-Josette raised her large eyes to Brigitte. “I don’t know what you’re involved in, and I don’t want to. But I know you don’t have sex with him.”

  “How do you—?”

  “Please,” Marie-Josette scoffed. Then her face became more serious than Brigitte had known, showing the lines of humanity she had longed to see in Colette, because she thought Colette was deeper, smarter, more able for it; here it was in Marie-Josette. She had silenced all traces of silliness and frivolity and joie de vivre. It left her grave and forlorn, and somehow prettier than ever. “Oh, Brigitte,” she whispered. “Be careful. Whatever you are doing, please be careful. You’re all the family I have.”

  Brigitte sat beside her on the sofa. She put her arm around her shoulders. “Marie-Josette, I am finally happy. I am doing something. It’s not much, but it is something. I’m in secret accord with the unseen force about us. It’s a force for our good, that wants our freedom, and I am moving with it.”

  Marie-Josette’s eyes filled with tears. “I want to move with it, too. But I am so afraid. What will happen to us? Is there no saving who we were? I am so tired, Brigitte.” The tears spilled. “I’m tired of hunger. I’m tired of men. I grieve for the children who have lost their papas. I grieve for the Jews. I grieve for us, who have turned them out. I grieve for good people who have become what they don’t want to be.”

  “The invasion is coming, Marie-Josette.” The words felt worse than useless; they felt like a parody. Oh, God—please. Help her to see what I saw! Help her to believe! “Look at me. They are coming. Men, guns, a force like you wouldn’t believe. Thousands of them, tens of thousands, right on our doorstep! Any day. Any moment.”

  Tears mingled with Occupation mascara and left a dusky trail on Marie-Josette’s face. She brushed a hand under her nose. “He told you that?” she asked, dubiously hopeful.

  “I have seen it with my own eyes.” She cleared the coffee table. She took a stalk of dried flowers from a vase, broke off two stems. She snatched Colette’s workbasket, rummaged for buttons. Then she laid a stalk on the table and opened the world to her friend.

  “This is England. And this France. . . .” She held up a button. “This? Ten thousand men! . . .”

  Michel sat motionless at his desk, hands folded over papers.

  He should have never listened to François. He had to pull Tom from the Bénouville mission. The lad was too thinking, too feeling.

  He did not know how the young pilot would react. He did not know what Rafael would think. It did not matter, he would leave them to it. He should never have listened to François.

  With the decision came clarity. He’d contact London and arrange for a pickup in a small Lysander plane. Downed airmen didn’t usually rate a Lysander; they reserved those dangerous midnight flights for British SOE agents and other spies, for either insertion or extraction. But it was too risky to get him out through the usual channels for downed pilots. He attracted too much attention.

  He opened the lower drawer and took out the al
manac. Lysander flights needed to be scheduled around moonlight for navigation.

  Wilkie would transmit the message tonight: Agent needs extraction. Michel felt no apology. Tom had become an agent the moment he put on that uniform. They’d have an answer in the next few days through the coded “personal messages” at the end of every BBC broadcast.

  It had been some time since G had received a message. His contacts in London knew he was lying low after the infiltration of their group, through Jasmine’s death. They’d likely think the agent would be himself.

  He paused and made a mental note to also have Wilkie relay the rumor of Rommel’s Twenty-First Panzer Division. Was it true? Was it en route to Caen?

  He was paging through the almanac with the eraser of his pencil when the door opened.

  “Hauptmann Braun,” he said, surprised. He laid aside the book and rose. Behind the man she’d just let in, Charlotte’s face showed a quick glimpse of alarm before she closed the door.

  Michel had not seen him since the day Tom hid in the cabinet. He had been called away to Berlin because his wife had health problems. Something about her kidney. He tried to recall the details. It always pleased Braun when Michel remembered personal things.

  “How is your wife? Did the operation go well?”

  “Yes, yes, excellent,” he boomed in French. “She had the best physicians, the most excellent care. She is convalescing at a wonderful château on Lake Geneva. It was hard to leave. Did you enjoy the olives I sent?”

  “We certainly did. Charlotte cried every time she ate one. I wept in private.”

  Normally, Braun would have laughed. Instead he declared, “Good, good. A pleasure. I am glad you enjoyed them.” He strode to Father’s end of the room. This part of the room always seemed to interest him. He liked to look at the book titles on the shelves. He liked the jumble of maps and magazines on the desk. He liked the whimsical display of suitcases and safari hats. Michel saw him glance at the carpet, where the chair’s claw feet rested, and he clicked his tongue. “The Jew is no longer there, eh? What a pity,” he murmured. He put his hands behind his back and looked at the stack of books on the mantel. Surprised, he glanced at Michel.

  “Where is your book?”

  “My secretary borrowed it.”

  “How goes the reading?” He had switched to German, unconsciously or not, Michel was not sure.

  “That’s a difficult question for a Frenchman to answer.” Michel smiled, as if making it light. “I’m sure you understand. Were I Jewish, it would be very difficult.”

  “Do not be too free with me, my friend,” Braun said, briskness fading. He picked up a book and looked it over. “Already, this is difficult.”

  Michel’s stomach lurched. “What is difficult?”

  He did not answer for a long moment. Michel became aware of the tick of the mantel clock, the soft staccato of Charlotte’s typewriter.

  “I like my job. That job is cement, the way I make it stay in the air, the way I make it conform to the picture in my mind. I like to make Rommel happy. He is a hero to us Germans, Rousseau. A brave man, a good leader. I wish you could see him not as a German, but as a man. Then you would know my admiration for him is just.”

  This wasn’t Braun at all. Rather, it was exactly what he expected out of Braun’s first self.

  Braun replaced the book and started for the business side of the room, hands behind his back, face deeply thoughtful.

  Michel lowered himself into his chair. “What is this about, Braun?”

  “They made me part of their investigation because I know you best.”

  Michel drew a concealed breath and let it out slowly, just as concealed. “This is news to me,” he said affably. “I had no idea I was being investigated.”

  “For some time now, since the death of one of your workers. Claire Devault.”

  “What about her?”

  “You were with her when she died.”

  “Yes. In Bénouville. I was summoned because I was her employer.”

  “Were you her lover?”

  “No.” No, not soon enough. I was too obtuse. Too busy. Too late.

  “She was a known Resistance operative. If you were not her lover . . . what were you to her?”

  “Her employer.”

  “Is it usual for an employer—? I am told she was in your arms when she died.” Braun stopped in front of the desk. Penetrating gray eyes looked down into Michel’s.

  Anger rustled, and he rose. “I wanted her last moments on earth to be safe.” He wasn’t as tall as the German, but he felt his ire equalize the difference. “What is wrong with that? It was human decency. Something she was grossly denied.”

  “What did she say to you? She said something to you.”

  Michel studied him. “I thought it odd there were no Germans about.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Do you know what they did to her?”

  Braun’s steady gaze faltered. “She was Resistance.”

  “She was a woman! A small, delicate woman. Did they tell you what they did?”

  “I don’t want to know,” Braun said quickly, his face settling into unhappiness. He sat in the chair in front of the desk. After a moment, Michel sat too.

  Braun traced his fingertips on the wooden armrest. “What will we do when the war is over, Rousseau?” he finally said. “Will we be friends? In Germany, I think you and I would have been friends. Two years ago, I was certain Germany would win the war. Now it feels fifty-fifty. A fifty-fifty chance the world will speak German a hundred years from now.”

  Michel let him talk while he considered his answer. He would ask again; it was why they had sent him.

  Truth was best whenever possible. But how could he tell Jasmine’s last words? I didn’t talk. Why should she say that to her employer, Michel Rousseau?

  Make it close to the truth, and beat him to it.

  “She said, ‘I did nothing wrong.’” That was truth, too, in the broad scope, and in the time it took for Braun’s faraway gaze to come to Michel, he devoted himself to the trueness of those words. It wasn’t hard to feel the indignation of them. She had done nothing wrong; on the contrary, she had done what was right. Many of his countrymen simply put their heads down to wait out the war, to stiffly ignore anything and everything unpleasant, to determinedly live in an ever-shrinking sphere of unreality. Not her. She looked full on and would not look away.

  “Between us? Man-to-man? What they did to her could turn me into a resistant.” Michel let some teeth show. “What they did was unholy. You have made a terrible name for yourselves.”

  “I am not of the Nazi movement,” Braun said, and something strong flickered in the gray eyes. “You know I am not. Not every German is. There are different parties, you know. I am not of that party.”

  “I know.”

  “You cannot know how it is. You cannot understand. You do not know what it’s like to—” He broke off. “We are two men from very different nations. Yet I feel kinship with you. I felt it the moment I walked into this room, and not because I wanted to feel it, not because I—”

  Braun looked down at his hands for a moment, then looked up. “I have found you to be honest. Someone with whom I can be a little of myself. I’ve told my wife about you. We could be friends when this war is over.”

  “Yes? Well, Hitler is doing his best to turn me into a racist. I don’t want to assign you with the Nazis, I don’t want to hate you because you are German, and I don’t think I do. But . . . he makes it hard.” His throat tightened. “She was a lovely girl, Braun. She did nothing wrong.”

  Surprisingly, a tired smile broke over Braun’s face. Michel couldn’t read it. “These things I will remember years from now, Rousseau. Whatever the language, and whether or not we are friends.”

  They rested in a less tense silence.

  Braun rose, put on his hat, adjusted it. Some briskness returned. “I will tell them the truth. You know nothing. And the girl said nothing of consequence.
”

  He played it to the end, because Braun would expect him to: “Nothing of consequence to a Nazi, perhaps. But if she said, ‘I did nothing wrong’ and suffered the death she did . . . it means a great deal to a Frenchman.”

  Braun inclined his head. Then, not looking into Michel’s eyes, he said quietly, “Leave revenge alone. Nothing good comes of it. God will take care of it, in the end.”

  “What do you know of revenge?”

  “Are we not living it?” he said sadly.

  Michel tilted his head a little, unready for such words. He waited, hoping, daring to believe for more.

  “Such times might not have been,” Braun said, “if the nations had not cast upon defeated Germany reparations too humiliating, too impossible for her to bear. We were not shown mercy in our defeat, and such a thing from once-noble adversaries was unbecoming. One man’s pride could not bear it. One man’s rage came to represent my nation. I couldn’t finish the book, Rousseau. There is too much truth in it. Too much ugliness. No decent German wanted to see these horrifying unconcealed places of the heart. Once the man laid bare these places, we did not need someone to lead us into the revelations; we needed someone to save us from them. I couldn’t finish the book. Not every German can.”

  “Charlotte didn’t borrow it,” Michel impulsively replied. “She took it from me. She said it wasn’t good for my soul.” And he saw enough in the gray eyes to know that if they survived, they would be friends when the war was over.

  Braun started for the door. When he got there, he paused.

  “It may interest you to know they arrested the woman’s grandmother. It turns out she has been housing Allied airmen. Perhaps it was the grandmother they were after all along. They believe she’s a ringleader. They’re still trying to sort it out. Who knows—perhaps she is the great G.” He touched the brim of his hat, then turned to go.

  Under the wash of suddenly rushing blood, Michel drew another concealed breath.

  “Yes, I met her once,” he said quickly. “She was at the Rousseau Cimenterie picnic last summer, with Claire. Hard to believe, an old woman a Resistance leader.” Then he made the next words sound newly thought, and spoke them with the fresh concern he made to appear on his face. “Hauptmann. I hope for the sake of decency she is treated well. You can understand my concern.”