by Fran Baker
ONCE A WARRIOR
Fran Baker
PROLOGUE
Dover Air Force Base, Delaware
After thirty-three years, Johnny Brown was finally coming home.
Cat had dressed warmly this morning as the first breath of winter had blown in during the night, dropping the temperature below the freezing point but leaving the sky a brilliant, cloudless blue. Now she was all bundled up in a black coat, boots and gloves. A wide-brimmed hat shielded her face as much from the cameras as from the cold gold of the November sun.
And yet she shivered as she scanned the sky, watching for the transport plane that was bringing Johnny back to the world and thinking that he would have been the first to say it was a perfect day for flying.
“You okay?”
She glanced sideways at the question, asked in an undertone that was dense with concern. Only someone who knew her inside and out would have noticed the slight tremor that had just passed through her. That someone was the same man whom she had once branded a traitor and claimed to despise. A man whose “badge of honor” served as a daily reminder of how wrong she had been.
“Yes.” She let out a breath she hadn’t been aware of holding, then searched the angles and planes of his strong, scarred face. “And you?”
A trenchant smile twisted his lips as he turned his head, first to the right, then hard to the left, surveying the crowd that was milling about them in the shadows of the hangar. With a twinge of sadness, she wondered if he was reliving his own, very different homecoming. Recalling, perhaps, the way protesters had sneered at him and jeered at him and scorned him as a “baby-killer.”
“Surprised,” he said quietly.
But Cat heard him loud and clear because she hadn’t known what to expect herself. The Vietnam War had ended more than a quarter of a century ago, and Americans now seemed to view it as ancient, albeit painful, history. So at the most, she had anticipated a private gathering of family and friends and a swift procession to the cemetery. Maybe someone from the Pentagon, maybe not, but no ruffles and flourishes and no one who really ranked.
Instead, there was a full honor guard, a military band, and enough brass to launch a major offensive or quell a minor rebellion.
The human-interest angle of the story had drawn the press as well. Still photographers checked their camera lenses. Print reporters surrounded both the American Ambassador to Vietnam and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A video crew from one of the networks’ nightly newscasts made final preparations to film the upcoming ceremony, clips of which would soon be aired in a Veteran’s Day segment.
There was a time when Cat would have jumped at the chance to generate this kind of publicity. But that was yesterday. Today she had a different agenda. She had come to bury Johnny at long last. To complete her role in his life by seeing to it that he received the respect and the recognition he’d earned from a country which had finally learned to distinguish between the war and the warrior. And she was grateful, more grateful than words could say, that she wouldn’t have to do it alone.
She didn’t need to turn around to know that her stalwart old soldier of a father was standing right behind her. Or that her mother, who’d died as gallantly as she had lived, was there in spirit. Even her brother and sister had set aside their radical differences to lend her their support.
Cat’s eyes grew misty when she looked at her four children—her oldest son, who bore such a haunting resemblance to his father in those dress blues and spit-shined shoes; her “twins,” who’d been born five months and a world apart; her daughter, whose delicate beauty was already turning heads—and the reminder of just how much Johnny had missed threatened to overwhelm her.
She shifted her gaze before she lost her composure and saw, like paired mirrors reflecting her own blurred tears, the poignantly-familiar faces of a couple who had lost almost everything they held dear but had found a precious freedom in their adopted homeland.
Heedless then of the curiosity seekers and the cold, she took off her hat and rested her head on the shoulder of the man who had made this mission of closure possible for them all. He responded by putting his arm around her and pressing a kiss into the soft, silvering tangle of her hair. And she knew she was right where she belonged, where she had always belonged, within the shelter of his embrace.
“He’s here.” That deeply beloved voice vibrated in her ear as the big gray C-17 dropped, thundering, out of the sunlit sky and descended steadily toward the tarmac.
Yes, it really was a perfect day, Cat decided. Not just for flying, or even for meeting Johnny’s long-delayed plane. But also for remembering those who had gone before . . .
PART ONE
TIGER LILY
CHAPTER ONE
Ste. Genviève, France; 1944
“Bonjour, Monsieur.” Anne-Marie Gérard spoke calmly even as her heart did a frantic pirouette inside her chest. She had just sat down to lunch with her grandfather when she heard the knock. Thinking it might be one of his patients with an emergency that couldn’t wait, or maybe even her cousin, Henriette, with a special treat to spice up their tasteless meal, she had excused herself from the table and rushed to answer the door.
Now terror whipped into the vestibule on the raw January wind. It curled around her stockinged ankles and clawed its way up her shaking legs. Her palms slickened with sweat, her breath sliced at her throat, and her face grew taut with the dread expectation suddenly coursing through her.
Nearly four years under the Nazi boot had taught her well. The short, stocky man in the pin-dotted overcoat and green fedora standing on the snow-covered step was her worst nightmare come true.
He was Gestapo.
What did he know and how did he know it? Anne-Marie gripped the edge of the door with icy fingers. Had some Judas of a collaborator denounced her? Were the agent’s henchmen waiting around the corner to search the house? Or worse, the garage?
The thought of who they would find out there made her ill with fright. Until she reminded herself that the Gestapo didn’t normally knock on doors. They knocked them down.
As her panic faded, she found her wits. It was better to show no fear or hesitation. That much she had learned in her dealings with the German patrols that routinely stopped civilians and demanded to see their papers. Even a moment’s delay in producing one’s identity card with its photograph and official stamps could result in a brutal beating. What happened to those who’d either left theirs at home or were caught with forged ones was too horrible to dwell on.
“How may I help you?” Keeping her expression as serene as possible, she opened the door a little wider to prove she had nothing to hide.
“Who are you?” The agent’s small round eyes focused on her intently as he grunted his demand in atrocious French. His mouth was thin, his cheeks fat, and his ears came to porcine points at the top. Redness from the cold mottled his pallid skin.
Anne-Marie met his gaze unflinchingly. She refused to cower before this cochon. He and the others of his ilk—sons of sows, every one of them—had dismembered her family, deported her best friend and defeated her beloved France. Someday he would pay for what he had done, she vowed to herself, but not nearly as dearly as he deserved.
“I’m Dr. Gérard’s granddaughter.” She was proud of the composed sound of her voice. “And since he has no nurse to work with him, I’m also his medical assistant.”
He continued to stare at her, his piglet eyes gleaming beneath the brim of his hat, and she found it amazing that he could go so long without blinking. At the curb behind him idled a sinister black Citroen traction avant—the Gestapo’s favorite kind of car. The driver, sporting SS tabs on his collar and a swastika armband, kept watch on the road through rimless glasses.
“I w
ant to see the doctor.” The agent’s hands remained at his sides, hidden in the folds of his overcoat, but his burly shoulders moved menacingly under the heavy wool.
“My grandfather is having lunch, but I’ll certainly tell him you’re here.” She stepped back on legs that were rubbery despite her resolve. “Would you like to wait in the clinic?”
He nodded curtly and pushed past her, into the dimly lit vestibule. His arrogance was such that he didn’t even bother to stamp the snow off his feet. He seemed to assume she had nothing better to do than to clean up after him.
Anne-Marie shut the biting wind outside and grabbed her sweater off the corner coatrack. The brown wool cardigan had belonged to her grandmother and had been mended in a dozen places. The new holes in the elbows aside, it helped to ward off the sudden chill that permeated her grandfather’s home.
“Which way?” he demanded.
She indicated the door on his right. The one to the left led to the living area she shared with her grandfather. Only when the agent rudely gestured that she should open the door to the clinic for him did she notice that he carried a full bottle of Rémy Martin cognac.
“For the pain,” he said in response to her raised eyebrow.
“The pain?” she repeated in a strained voice.
“I have an infected tooth.” Not seeming to notice her agitation, he eyed her accusingly across the narrow entrance hall. “And your village has no dentist.”
Anne-Marie judiciously refrained from pointing out that that was because the dentist and his family had recently been “resettled” in Germany and their house confiscated by the government to pay the “special assessment taxes” levied against all Jews.
The fate of the dentist’s daughter haunted her to this day. She could still see Miriam Blum, with her shiny black curls, ripe-olive eyes and that horrid yellow star she’d been forced to wear on her clothing. And she remembered with fondness all the nights that they had slept over at each other’s house, closeting themselves in the privacy of one or the other’s bedroom to giggle and to gossip and to plan their futures.
But if the rumors about the death camps proved to be true, poor Miriam no longer had a future.
Anne-Marie couldn’t look at the man she held partially responsible for that because she was certain that he would see the hatred in her eyes. Instead, she bowed her head in what she hoped he would interpret as submission and, with an after-you gesture, ushered him into the anteroom. It was empty, as it always was in the early afternoon, so he had his pick of chairs.
“Please, sit.”
“I prefer to stand.”
Seeing him with his back to the wall and his eyes trained on the window that faced the street, she realized that the agent didn’t feel safe from sabotage even in a doctor’s office. Yesterday’s derailment of that train carrying reinforcements into lower Normandy, which had left three German soldiers dead and a number of others severely injured, must have hit close to home for him. What she felt wasn’t triumph, not yet, but simply anticipation of the day when les boches were driven out of her homeland and into the bowels of hell, where they belonged.
“As you wish.” Her wartime wooden soles clunked on the bare floor as she crossed to the door. She left it open in case another patient should arrive before she returned. “I’ll get my grandfather.”
“Tell him to hurry,” Piggy directed. “I have a meeting to go to.”
Her ears perked up at that. “I’m sure he can see you right away.”
In the combination sitting-dining room across the vestibule, Dr. Henri Gérard had just finished his simple lunch of watery bean soup and stale bread and was reaching for his customary demitasse.
The wind rattled the open-shuttered windows, making Anne-Marie grateful for the fire in the hearth that helped to offset the effects of the increasingly severe gas cuts imposed by the Germans. Sick of living in the dark, she had drawn back the silk damask draperies and raised the blackout shade that morning. Then almost wished she hadn’t when she saw the dust that felted the furniture and the lint that covered the fading carpet.
Now, as her grandfather looked up from the medical journal he’d been perusing in the gray light, the shame she’d managed to hold at bay came rolling back.
When his wife was alive, Henri had been as nattily groomed as a Parisian boulevardier. A petite woman with the figure of a pouter pigeon and the fussy energy of a mother hen, Yvonne Gérard had sponged and pressed her husband’s suit every morning, trimmed his snowy hair once a week, and turned his shirt collars whenever they began to look worn. And after his nurse unexpectedly eloped, she’d rolled up her sleeves and added those duties to the cooking and cleaning chores she had taken such pride in performing herself.
Even a long bout with breast cancer hadn’t slowed her down. At least not in the beginning. When the disease finally caught up with her, she fired three maids before finding one who was malleable enough to let her continue ruling the roost from her sickbed.
Her death had so devastated her widower that he scarcely noticed the Germans’ lightning-quick strike against France some three months later. When Anne-Marie first came to live with her grandfather, shortly after the blitzkrieg, she’d been shocked to see that his hair had grown shaggy, his collar frayed, and his suit looking like a remnant of the Hundred Years’ War. Most distressing of all, however, was the resignation—almost a sense of impending doom—which dwelled in his rheumy eyes.
It was no better now. Henri was still a shadow of his formerly impeccable self. The maid, after sweeping the dirt under the rug and setting an overcooked meal on the table, had quit. And Anne-Marie lived with the guilty knowledge that she had failed to meet Yvonne’s exacting standards.
“Merde,” her grandfather cursed after drinking from the small cup. “This exotic ‘coffee’ the Germans are sending us tastes more like one of Hitler’s stupid chemistry experiments every day.”
Giving silent thanks that she had managed to close the living room door before his words took wing and settled in the wrong ears, Anne-Marie walked purposefully to the lace-covered table. “You have a patient.”
“Already?” His bristly gray brows drew together in a confused frown as he glanced at the mantle clock above the blue-and-white tiled fireplace. “Can’t a man even be allowed—”
“May I clear the table now?”
Something in her sharp tone of voice must have alerted him to the fact that this was no ordinary patient. He nodded and sat back in his chair, the nasty demitasse all but forgotten. Seeing the soup stains on his tie, she reminded herself to spot-clean it before he returned to the office.
“Gestapo.” She deliberately clattered the china as she whispered the word.
“Here?” he hissed, his voice filled with dark history.
“In the anteroom.”
“But . . . why?”
“He has a bad tooth.” Ignoring her own growling stomach, she tucked the piece of bread she hadn’t eaten into her skirt pocket for the wounded Royal Air Force pilot whom she was hiding with neither her grandfather’s knowledge nor permission in the garage. “And extremely bad manners.”
“Anne-Marie . . .” Bony fingers which had once been steady enough to perform the most delicate of surgeries but which now trembled with age and fear clasped her wrist with surprising tenacity. “You weren’t rude to him?”
“Of course not.”
When he nodded in relief, she felt a sharp twinge of remorse. Her grandfather had lost so much—even his raison d’être, it seemed—that it was only natural he was afraid. Not for himself, of course, but for her and for the rest of his family.
And perhaps of what was yet to come.
It was common knowledge that the Allies, led by the Americans, were going to invade Europe sometime this coming spring. Summer at the latest. The question was, where would the invasion begin? Convinced that it would come at the narrowest point of the English Channel, the Germans were now concentrating panzer and infantry divisions at the Pas-de-Calais.
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But Anne-Marie believed that the débarquement might well come elsewhere. She had already learned the code name of the operation, Overlord, from the forbidden British radio broadcasts she listened to in the attic late at night. And the pinprick sabotage pattern by French resisters against German communication and transportation systems, while not yet of a scale to unduly alarm them, made her think that the Allies were planning to attack the coastal batteries behind the beaches at Normandy and move inland from there.
Which could eventually place Ste. Geneviéve in the path of their advance, if not in the thick of battle.
“You mustn’t keep your new patient waiting, Grand-père.” She gently extricated her wrist from his grip. “He has a meeting to attend.”
And if she was lucky, she thought, he might just have some important information to impart under the influence of that expensive cognac.
* * * *
Anne-Marie pulled down the blackout shade on the winter-white moonlight flooding into her drafty bedroom, then turned to her cousin with a preoccupied smile. “I’m sorry, Henriette, I didn’t hear what you said.”
From her kneeling position on the double bed that they were sharing tonight, Henriette Bohec’s eyes glittered excitedly in the chamberstick’s flame that had lit their way up the dark staircase. “I said, I’m going to kiss the first American soldier I see!”
The thunderous snores emanating from their grandfather’s room, directly across the hall, precluded an immediate response on Anne-Marie’s part.
Cupping a protective hand around the flickering candle flame, she crossed to the door her cousin had carelessly left open and shut it with a silence born of practice. At twenty, she was only four years older than the giddy Henriette. Given the danger she’d faced of late, however, she sometimes felt one hundred and four years older.
Tonight was one of those times.
