by Lynn Sheene
Claire smiled, a slight nod. “How about breakfast first? And a drink?”
He shrugged, stepped down beside her, one hand slid down her backside. “Pourquoi pas?”
She slipped her free hand around him, her other hand still clenching the pistol. He cupped her hip and pulled her close. She smelled alcohol mixed with stale tobacco. Together they went down the last stairs to the lobby, the man between her and the Gestapo. A cold sweat pricked at her neck. She giggled softly, staggered as if she were drunk, ran a hand through her short brunette hair. One of the Gestapo glanced at the couple once, frowned and turned back to the clerk. If you see her, she heard, and then they were out the door.
A half block later, the street opened up to an alley. Claire pulled them around the corner. The man reached for her, she pushed his hand back. “Merci, monsieur. But I don’t smoke.”
She turned and ran.
Cold rain dripped down Claire’s neck as she turned off rue de Tocqueville. The street was nearly empty in the early morning rain. No tables were pulled out onto the sidewalk at Café Raphael. Across the street, the theater was dark, the dentist’s building looked closed.
Gusts of wind tore at yesterday’s Le Figaro Claire held over her head. She clenched the message in her pocket, took a deep breath and walked toward the drop. A moment spent below the theater marquee to examine the poster, a woman planning her evening, then she walked past the dentist’s window. Her hand slipped into her pocket, the paper palmed in her hand. A glance at the dentist’s door, her hand moved toward the mail slot.
The door was boarded shut. The dentist was gone.
She forced herself to keep moving. A few more steps and she paused, as if to adjust her shoe. She glanced back for a better view. The heavy wooden door had been shattered, twisted hinges dangled from the broken doorjamb.
Claire let the newspaper fall to the pavement as she strode away. She didn’t notice the rain running down her face. Who could she turn to? She broke into a trot as she turned the corner. She didn’t slow down until she stood across from 22, rue d’Artois.
The lights were on in Laurent’s apartment, the curtains pulled. She remembered standing out here when she first got to Paris a lifetime ago. Claire wiped the rain from her face. She knew she looked like hell, but Laurent had to understand.
Her heels clicked against the cobbles as she crossed the street. Inside the lobby, she stopped and stared at the mailboxes. Laurent’s name had been scratched off the plate.
A harried-looking maid passed, barely more than a girl, her arms full of boxes.
“Who lives in number 4?” Claire asked.
“Kommandant Klein,” the maid said and turned to climb the stairs.
Claire’s legs were shaking as she hurried down the street. It wasn’t possible. They couldn’t all be gone. There was only one person left who might know. Claire had to talk to her without getting killed first.
The city was dark under the heavy clouds, with the streetlights blued out. Rats scurried in the darkness of the alley behind La Vie en Fleurs. Claire had watched and waited until the streets emptied after curfew. Now she picked her way through the trash to the doorway she knew so well. Her searching hands found the key still hidden beneath a rusty iron flowerpot. The door opened with a familiar squeak.
The shop interior was inky black. The air was musty, the rains had leaked through boarded windows. Claire moved carefully. The floor was slippery in a layer of dust. The broken glass, scattered flowers and tins were gone.
She felt her way to the counter, pulled open a drawer and reached in for a box. He buys the best flowers he can afford for his women. He has spent a great deal of money here, Madame Palain said of Laurent so long ago. Claire had never looked through the receipts. Now she needed to know.
A match flared, Claire bent low over the open box. Olivier, Sylvie.
Sixty-seven, rue de Lisbonne. A tall grey building, ornate stone façade, not far from parc Monceau. Oversized wooden doors with an archaic lock. Claire reached for a hairpin. A quick flick into the lock and she was inside. Climbing the grand staircase, she stepped out into a dimly lit hallway and paused in front of Sylvie’s entry.
Her ear pressed to the door, she heard nothing inside. What were the odds, Claire wondered, Sylvie was home, much less alone? Gripping the Walther in her pocket with one hand, Claire took a deep breath and knocked.
The door opened a crack. Eyes flashed wide with surprise and the door swung open another inch. Sylvie frowned at Claire. As good of a reception as Claire could hope for.
“Are you alone?” Claire said.
“Yes, why?”
“We need to talk.”
“About what?”
“Not in the hallway.”
Sylvie scanned the corridor behind Claire. “Come in, then.” She wore a luminous green silk robe, an immense emerald cocktail ring. She eyed Claire’s hair.
Claire fought the urge to smooth her curls. She met Sylvie’s gaze. “The Nazis have taken over Laurent’s apartment. Where is he?”
Sylvie turned away. She shook her head as she lit a cigarette. “Bold of the mistress to ask his wife, isn’t it? Just like une Américaine . Gauche.”
Claire stared at Sylvie. Of all the reactions Claire expected, how could Sylvie be so cavalier? “Your husband is missing. You can find out where he is, what happened to him. Ask your Kapitän.”
Sylvie turned to Claire. Her thin lips stretched into a smile. “Why? What have you done, lost your Sturmbannführer?”
“Yes.”
“So you want my husband back, eh?”
“I want to know where he is. I would think a loving wife would be the least bit curious. What do you know, Sylvie?”
Sylvie frowned, seeming to mull over her words. “We’ll find out together. I will make a call.” She reached for her phone.
Claire crossed the room to the window and stared out at the street. Nothing moved in the darkness. She moved away from the window and looked at the painting over the mantel. Children picking over a harvested field. The same painting she’d seen in Laurent’s apartment.
Her skin prickled as she heard Sylvie’s smooth voice. “Claire Harris is in my apartment. Of course. Tell them to hurry, won’t you?” The phone clicked against the cradle as she hung up.
Claire whirled around. Sylvie held a pistol in her hand.
“Beautiful, isn’t it? Pearl handled,” Sylvie said. “A present from my Nazi. My grateful Kapitän.”
Heat blossomed in Claire’s body as she put it all together. “It was you? You’re the traitor?”
“Laurent thought I couldn’t see what his little gang was up to. They thought they were so smart. They weren’t.”
“Why, Sylvie?”
“There is a new world order now. I intend to enjoy it.”
Claire stared at Sylvie’s mouth, her hard eyes, the perfect hair, the silk robe, the emerald on her finger. My God—how Laurent had underestimated her. Laurent and Grey had thought they were using her. Sylvie had destroyed them all. Claire jerked the Walther from her pocket. They faced each other, guns drawn.
“Ah, you truly are a Resistánt, aren’t you? Liberté and vengeance and all that,” Sylvie said.
Engines roared on the street below. Doors slammed and voices shouted.
“They must really want you.” Sylvie sneered. “I knew you were gutter trash the moment I saw you. So common. My husband had you. The Englishman? How many others?”
“Better that than a whore to the Reich’s gold.”
Sylvie’s mouth twisted. She fired. A bullet burned Claire’s cheek as her ears recorded the shot. The Walther jerked twice in her hands. Two bullets tore through Sylvie’s chest. The fabric of Sylvie’s silk robe turned dark as blood flowed through her grasping fingers. She gaped at Claire, her face slack with shock, then crumpled to the floor.
Claire examined the body slumped at her feet. Sylvie’s face was blank; the set of the mouth and the discreet canniness in the eyes bled out on the rug.
All that deception and greed wrapped up in silk and jewels. Paid for with the lives of everyone Claire loved. The heat inside Claire died away to ashes.
Heavy boots thumped up the stairs. Claire rushed for the door. She yanked the handle open. A rifle butt met her in the face. The world went black.
Chapter 13
THE CHOICE
11, rue des Saussaies, Paris. August 19, 1944.
Soft keening woke her. Her eyes closed, she didn’t move, trying to find her way back to the formless darkness and a reprieve from pain.
A sob echoed from across the cell. The girl was crying again. Maybe she was still crying. Claire couldn’t be sure; she had drifted between sleep and unconsciousness throughout the night. Her breath hissed between clenched teeth as she pushed herself to a seated position against the cold stone wall. Hot pokers pierced her ribs and stomach. After a couple of tries, she managed to open her eyes. In the dim morning light, the girl was just a lump across the cell.
A faint rumble caught her ears. “Did you hear that?” She winced as she sat forward, her ear cocked to the high barred window. “Quiet,” she said, toward the sobbing.
Weeks had passed, how many she couldn’t say. She had heard a shout one morning, when was it? It had come from down the hall, amidst the noise of a scuffle. The Allies are coming for you, boche. They are coming soon. It ended in a scream, then silence. Claire prayed it was true. She turned to scratch a line on the wall behind her to mark the day, to track it. Soon. Her hand dropped as she stared at the wall, to the right of the words she had read countless times, I, Francois, die tomorrow. Her nine short vertical scratches.
She knew that wasn’t right. The days she spent in a cold sweat, waiting to be taken to the room where they bored into her mind, scouring for details about the Resistance. She forced herself to forget the names she knew they wanted. Beatings, countless days lost afterward when she didn’t know where she was, her mind floating above the pain. Two or three trips to a makeshift doctor’s exam room one floor up. A ten-by-ten room with a long metal table, a room to shower next door. A female Nazi stripped her down. Claire was pushed beneath a cold shower, then on the table to be poked and prodded. She watched as the doctor made notes, then she was handed another dress and led back to her cell.
Marks on the stone meant nothing. Time meant nothing. Life only existed out there. The rumbling in the distance stopped. Now there was only silence.
The door swung open and banged against the wall. Claire squinted at the light spilling in from the hall.
“Sie kommen.” The guard yanked her to her feet.
Claire bit her lip against the pain as he pushed her into the hallway. The walls spun around her as she was marched down a long corridor. She stifled a shudder as they passed the heavy locked doors, the occupants the source of the moans that drifted the hallways at night.
The guard was in a black mood today. Not bothering to speak, he ground the point of his baton into her ribs every few steps. At the end of the hall, he shoved her down another dim corridor.
More doors lined this hallway. The scent of antiseptic, urine and fear assailed her. She nearly stumbled as she realized she was going back to the interrogation room. Her stomach churned like it was being stirred from within. She felt cold sweat run down her back, her dress stuck against her crawling skin.
Two guards dragged a man out of a door. His head lolled to the side at an impossible angle. She turned to catch a glimpse as he passed. Though battered and swollen, his face was long and thin, his mustache neatly trimmed. He wore a worn wool suit, a conservative cut. His hands, dangling in front of him, were covered in ink. He was a backroom academic, she thought, who got caught publishing what he knew. And then died for it. His guards glanced at Claire, their faces bored.
She swallowed the bile rising in her throat, pulled her shoulders back and straightened. She wasn’t going to leave rue des Saussaies alive, but she would hold out another day.
The guard opened a door and pushed Claire inside. A bathtub sat against the wall with a wooden slat on top. She shook with relief when she saw the water had been drained, the lungripping choke of repeated drowning had been escaped today. She was shoved toward the single wooden chair in the middle of the room. A lightbulb dangled from a broken ceramic fixture over the chair, creating a spotlight, as if a show was about to begin. Claire knew it was.
An officer stood in the far corner, his face hidden. He barked a short dismissive command. The guard turned on his heel and left. The officer stepped under the bulb’s glare, gripped the back of the chair.
“May I offer you a seat, Claire,” von Richter said, in English.
The rush of adrenaline kept Claire upright. She pursed her lips, sighed and arranged the expression of a bored socialite. “Hello, Alby darling. I think I’ll stand, if you don’t mind.”
“Suit yourself.” He examined her, a disappointed shake of his head. “I must say I am displeased with how things have turned out.”
“No more than I, I’m sure.”
He let go of the chair. “But you only have yourself to blame.”
Her body tensed, her fists closed. He likely ordered Madame’s death. He certainly arranged for Grey to die. Claire imagined leaping at him, ripping that smirk off his face. But she could hardly stand and wasn’t about to fall at this bastard’s feet. She shrugged.
Von Richter walked around the chair and planted himself in front of her. “Really, Claire. You are no more of a patriot than I. Your naive rebellion accomplished nothing.”
“Really?” Claire raised an eyebrow. The Oberons and girls had left Paris and were, she prayed, safe. Sylvie was dead.
“The Kapitän’s woman, you mean?” He snorted. “The shrew’s usefulness had come to an end. You saved us the trouble of dealing with her. We have moved on to fry the bigger fish.” He smiled at the term. “I believe you know the Comte de Vogüé?”
Claire kept the bored expression. Inside she crumbled a little bit more. Hold on another day.
The room rattled. It was an explosion outside. The lightbulb swung lazily overhead; the spotlight traced a circle over the worn, bloodstained bricks. The same noise she had heard earlier. She smiled. “The Allies are coming.”
“Just overeager patriots with very misplaced expectations. All the little poodles out there who have decided to nip at our heels are, in fact, going to face a harsh reality.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“It doesn’t matter.” His face was inches from hers. “I own you either way.”
Claire stared into his eyes. His perpetual sneer was gone, his gaze serious.
He pressed her against the wall. “End the charade, tell me what you know. Paris is my oyster. It can belong to us, together.” He stroked her cheek, let his fingers trail down over her breasts to her hip. “You and I are the same. I’ve known that since we met in New York. We are cut from the same cloth. When others fall, we succeed, we thrive.”
Claire sighed. She was so damn tired of loss and despair. What he offered was all she had once dreamed of. Claire traced the scar on his chin with her fingertips. Couldn’t she go back to being that woman, if it meant the pain stopped, if it meant a real life?
He dug his fingers into her hip, a triumphant smirk on his lips. “You’re a smart woman, Claire.”
She closed her eyes, let herself sag against him. “Smart,” she whispered.
Sylvie’s cold eyes flashed in her mind. That was what smart was, the price of accepting his offer.
“We were the same when we met,” Claire said, her gaze met his. “But not anymore. All that Paris offers someone like you means nothing to me. Its beauty can’t touch you, Alby. You aren’t thriving. You aren’t even really alive.” Claire pulled herself up straight, chin up. “I chose to live. Truly. Deeply. At least for a while.”
Von Richter’s palm cracked across her face. Her head snapped back against the wall and she slid to the floor. He closed his fist, cocked it to strike. Claire stared up at him, her face e
xpressionless.
The muscles in his jaw bulged as he bit out his reply. “You chose to die, my darling. We are making a strong statement about traitors. At noon, the guards are going to line up all the criminals here and shoot them.” He tapped the crystal of his gold watch. “You have about two hours left. Try to savor the beauty of your Paris with Lieutenant Holtz.”
He shouted out a command. The door opened and he stalked from the room.
Claire let out a long breath. It felt like she’d been holding it for months. She rested a hand on the cold floor. There it was, then. Not so surprising, after all.
A soldier walked in flanked by two guards. He took up half the room with his wide shoulders and barrel chest; the guards at his side barely reached his shoulder badge. It held the designation of a specialist. It wasn’t hard to guess his specialty.
The guards lifted Claire and pushed her into the chair, binding her arms and legs. He dismissed them with a word, his meaty hands carefully rolled up each sleeve, showing corded arms crisscrossed in scars. He looked up and spoke in grammar-school French. “I am Lieutenant Holtz. You must have made Sturmbannführer von Richter angry. He made a special request for you.”
Claire glared at him, straightened against the chair. “I won’t talk.”
He rolled his massive shoulders and clenched his fists. “I won’t listen.”
Claire’s heart charged like a frightened horse.
The first blow lifted the front feet of the chair off the ground and snapped her head back. Bright lights splintered inside her closed eyes. Her mind curled inside her like fingers closing into a fist as the chair teetered back. She floated away, only dimly aware of her body shaking from the blows, the chair sliding backward across the uneven bricks. She puzzled at the howling of the wind in the distance. Is winter here already? As the velvety gloom closed in around her, she recognized the cries of her own raw voice.
It was the scent of roses that called her. She felt the cool breeze on her neck, the sun warming her face. She opened her eyes. Behind her was pain; in front of her was spring. Grey’s garden bloomed around her in deep greens and soft pastels. The apple tree showered blossoms onto the statue. Palest pink roses tumbled down a stone wall.
