Clash by Night (29 page)

The military car taking Harris to the base glided to a stop at the curb. A small American flag flew from its hood and the Marine Corps emblem was emblazoned on its door.

Harris raised her fingers to his lips and kissed them.

“Go,” Laura said, dangerously close to breaking her vow. “They’re waiting for you.”

“I love you,” he said, and released her hand.

Laura turned away and ran back into the hotel, unable to watch him depart. But once inside the door she whirled for one last glance when she was sure he could no longer see her.

Harris was standing next to the car door, looking in the direction where she had vanished. His hands were in his pockets, his raincoat collar turned up against the chill wind. Then he pulled out a cigarette, putting it unlit between his lips, and got into the car.

Part Two:

THE FORTUNES OF WAR

Winter, 1942

Chapter 9

It was the coldest Christmas Eve that Laura could remember. Even back in Massachusetts, which was not known for its mild winter climate, she had never experienced such a biting wind. It tore through her clothes as she walked past the post office in Fains, closed early because of the holiday. She glanced at the German flag flying from its stone facade, snapping smartly in the continuing gusts, and remembered that before the war she had talked to her family once a year on the telephone there. On the 24th she would wait all day for the call to come through. When it did someone would be dispatched to the Duclos house to fetch her. She had run, coat flapping, oblivious to the weather, to snare the heavy black receiver from old Dupre’s hand. Then she would hear, through the crackle and hum of long distance, her mother’s beloved voice.

Dupre the postmaster was dead now, replaced by a German puppet. And there would be no further phone calls from her family. Laura tried to imagine them at home this evening, her mother mixing eggnog, her father trimming the tree with Sara, her youngest sister. Ellen and her husband would visit, and the neighbors would come for a drink. Maybe Ellen had a baby by now...

Laura’s vision blurred. She ascribed the tears to the temperature, refusing to admit that she was feeling sorry for herself. She had made her choice. She was useful here. In Boston she would be reduced to saving the tin foil from candy bars and going to bond rallies. She belonged in Fains.

Laura turned into the lane for the Duclos house and let herself in through the back door. All was silent. Brigitte, now a graduate nurse, had the evening shift at the hospital. She frequently stayed over at a friend’s apartment in Bar-le-Duc when she worked late, and Laura did not expect her until the next day. She glanced toward the back of the house, and then decided it was not necessary to go upstairs and check on Henri. He would be in bed, swathed in blankets, sleeping or staring at nothing. He led his vegetable life in growing isolation, as absent from human discourse as if he were dead.

Laura unbuttoned her coat and went to build up the smoldering fire on the kitchen hearth. Left untended, it was going out quickly. She bent to stir the embers, which shot flame when she uncovered them, and the chain around her neck swung forward and glittered in the flickering light like a talisman.

She fingered the tiny wings Harris had given her and wondered if he were safe, if he were even alive. She’d had no word of him in a long while. In the beginning after their parting in London she’d gotten letters from one of his sisters in Chicago, whom he’d commissioned to write to her. But they had trailed off over time. Since Pearl Harbor had brought the United States into the war a year earlier they’d stopped. All communication from her native country had been cut off with the sudden, awful finality of a saber slash, leaving Laura to worry and wonder in vain.

Her memories were still vivid. Quick, sensory impressions had lasted more than two years with the force of their original impact. The crisp, starched smell of Dan’s uniform blouse, the flash of white teeth in his bearded face, the soft, husky chuckle which was as far as he’d let himself go in laughter. Laura missed him with the intensity of pain; she missed everyone she’d lost. Her work with Vipère sustained her.

That afternoon she had gone to the graveyard behind the village church. She’d fashioned twin wreaths to put on the graves of her dead husband and his brother. Thierry’s stone, a slab of gray granite, bore his name and the years of his brief life. At the bottom was etched the phrase signifying how and why he had died:
Chevalier de France
. Alain’s, next to it, had been delivered at cost from the stonemason. It had been inscribed free of charge with the lines Laura and Brigitte chose from the Bible: “Greater love than this no man has, that he lay down his life for his friends.”

When the fire was blazing again Laura arranged the logs carefully and then steeled herself for a trip out to the shed. If she waited it would only become colder later, and she had to bring in enough wood to last through the night. Since Brigitte was rarely there and Henri refused to budge from his upper room, Laura had taken to sleeping on a cot in the kitchen to stay warm. She turned for the door and belted her coat again, passing the
sapin
, the small Christmas tree she’d cut from Langtot’s woods a few days earlier. She reminded herself to relight its candles when she returned. It had seemed almost silly to decorate it with only herself and Henri, who was incapable of appreciating it, in the house. But she’d been unable to part with the tradition. Still moist and fresh and running sap, its green perfume filled the kitchen. She touched the paper decorations she’d made with Thierry for their first Christmas together, fading now, and then turned up the collar of her coat as she went outside.

She stopped abruptly and stifled a scream as a hand snaked out of the dusk and grabbed her arm. She relaxed, sighing, when she saw that it was Curel.

“What are you doing here?” she hissed, glancing around furtively. Then she remembered that curfew had been suspended for the holiday.

“I just got a message,” he replied. “There’s an American pilot hiding out in a convent on the Lorraine border. We’re going to get him tonight.”
 

Laura’s heart began to beat faster. This was not the first time they’d been called upon to smuggle an Allied serviceman out of France. Since the destruction of the glass factory Vipère had been forced deep underground, and had confined its activities almost exclusively to rescuing escaped POWs and pilots shot down behind enemy lines. They’d spirited an assortment of British, Canadian, and American soldiers through occupied territory and into neutral Switzerland. They were now able to move with such efficiency that the other resistance groups often deferred to them when such an effort was required.

“Where on the border?” Laura whispered.

“Côtes de Meuse,” Curel answered, naming a hilly region just north of Fains. “He was shot down over Rouen and interned in a camp in Germany.”

“How did he get to the convent?” Laura asked.

“He escaped and tried to make his way on foot, but he collapsed near Neuilly. Partisans found him and brought him to the nuns. The Sisters have hidden people for us before and the Maquis knew he’d be safe there. He needed a place to lay up for a while. I guess he was in pretty bad shape.”

“Is it all right for him to travel now?” she inquired.
 

“It must be or they wouldn’t have contacted me. He’s been there a couple of weeks. Tonight was chosen to transport him for the obvious reasons.”

Laura nodded. “What do we do?”

Curel inclined his head toward her in the confidential manner that indicated he had already thought this out. “Go to midnight mass tonight with the rest of the village so you’ll be seen. Slip out at the communion and meet me behind the church. We’ll take Langtot’s buggy and travel north during the night. Nobody will miss us over the holiday and we’ll have time to pick him up and get him on his way.”

“Sounds good,” Laura said. Going to mass was a brilliant touch. The Germans tolerated religious observances but always kept a close watch on them, lest they escalate into a patriotic display. She would certainly be noticed.

“I’ll see you tonight,” Curel said in farewell, and disappeared into the gathering darkness.

Laura hurried out to the woodshed. She grabbed an armload of logs and returned to the house, calculating madly. Brigitte and she had worked out a code so that if either took off on Résistance business the other one wouldn’t worry. Laura dumped the bundle she was carrying and scribbled a note to the younger woman, pinning it to the kitchen table. If she wasn’t back by the time Brigitte arrived the next day she would read it and know why Laura was gone.

Then there was the matter of Henri. Laura assembled a quick meal for him and went upstairs with a tray, knocking softly on his door. When he didn’t answer she pushed it open with her shoulder and walked inside.

Henri sat up, blinking at the intrusion.

“Laura,” he said.

 
Laura sighed with relief. At least he recognized her today.

“I have something for you to eat,” she said quietly.

“Not hungry,” he replied vaguely.

“Maybe you will be later so I’ll just leave it here.” Laura placed the tray on the wooden table next to the bed.

“Is my meeting tonight?” he asked. Henri often thought he was still the mayor. Once the Germans saw his mental condition and determined that he would be of no further use to them, they’d replaced him with a sympathizer as they had the postmaster.

“No, Papa, you just rest.”
 

“Where’s Alain?” the old man asked querulously. “Isn’t he back from work yet?”

“No, he’s not here,” Laura answered, trying to pinpoint where Henri was in the past; apparently after Laura had arrived in France but before Alain was killed. He drifted back and forth like an aimless barque on the river of time.

“Well, you tell him to build up the fire in here when he gets home. It’s cold,” Henri said sternly.

“I’ll do it,” Laura replied. The fire in the small grate next to his bed had, like the kitchen blaze, burned low while she was out.

Henri turned in the bed and hitched his quilt above his shoulder. Laura bent over him and kissed his forehead. “
Bonne Nöel
, Papa,” she said softly.

But Henri was already asleep.

Laura added a sizable log to the fire in his room, one that would burn slowly and keep the room near an even temperature. He would be fine even if she were gone until the next day. Brigitte would tend to her father when she got home.
 

Laura went into her room and found thick slacks and a heavy wool sweater to change into after the service. She packed them into a shoulder bag and added the pistol Harris had given her, just in case. Then she put on the dress, with hose and shoes, that she would wear to church. The villagers dressed up for such an occasion and she didn’t want to look out of place.
 

She had several hours to fill before church. There were no theme books to correct or papers to grade, because school was out of session until the new year. She went into the front room and turned on the radio, which was filled with the usual propaganda interspersed with French and German Christmas carols. She hummed along with “
Un flambeau, Jeannette, Isabelle
,” and then switched the dial to the “off” position when an operatic soprano led the way into “
Stille Nacht
.” She much preferred the familiar, Americanized “Silent Night,” and sang it to herself as she selected a book from the shelves under the window. It would help to pass the time.

She glanced at her wristwatch and settled in to wait.

* * *

Lysette Remy smiled as she finished wrapping the gift she had selected for Becker. It was a first edition of Goethe that she’d found buried in the stacks of the library, which she knew he would appreciate. It wasn’t exactly stealing, she reasoned, because she planned to replace it with a copy as soon as she found one. No one in town knew the value of the original and it would be wasted on them in any event. She had inscribed the flyleaf with a line from the author which she knew was one of the colonel’s favorites. She was very pleased with herself.

She glanced in the mirror above her bedroom bureau and patted her hair. She always wore it down now, swinging free to her shoulders. She couldn’t imagine why she used to scrape it back into that unattractive bun when it looked so much better this way.

Her affair had worked a significant change in her appearance. Her features, while physically the same, now glowed with a confidence and assurance that transfigured them. Men who had once looked through her as if she weren’t there now turned to stare at her on the street. She didn’t notice, however; the whole of her attention was focused on the man who had so radically improved her life. When she wasn’t with him she waited to be with him again, doggedly going about the daily tasks that merely occupied her time in a dream state. Her life was counted in the hours she spent with Becker.

What thrilled her most was that he actually seemed to need her as much as she needed him. His hunger for her, both physical and spiritual, staggered her imagination; she had never imagined herself the object of such desire. His somber face, so permanently expressionless when she first met him, lit up when he saw her. He trusted her with his thoughts, confided in her in a way no one before him ever had. When she saw him in public and had to pretend indifference, even hostility, it was a secret between them that strengthened their bonds. And sometimes, after they’d made love, he held her so close that she could believe her deepest feelings were truly reciprocated.