Clash by Night (31 page)

“Take me,” she murmured. “Take me now.”

He lifted her with one swift surge, locking her body to his. She wrapped her legs around him as he entered her and found her ready.

He gasped something in German and then said, in French, “You are amazing.”

“Love me,” she said.

“I will,” he muttered. “I do.”

They fell onto the bed in a tangle of limbs as his mantel clock chimed the hour once again.

* * *

Kurt Hesse blew on his gloved hands and stamped his feet. It was just his luck to draw the late guard shift on Christmas Eve. After delivering the colonel’s lady he had returned to his barracks for a nap before reporting for duty. He yawned. It hadn’t helped much. He was still tired. And restless, and cold. Thinking of Becker, warm in bed with his little French pastry, only irritated him more. The privileges of rank were getting on his nerves lately. He had to sneak meetings with Brigitte in closets while Becker entertained his librarian in style, with wine and food and a bed with clean sheets. The widow came to him in comfort in a car, while Brigitte had to hide from her friends and make excuses to see Hesse.

But he had to admit that all the subterfuge was worth it. He was besotted with the French girl. He wanted to marry her, not just to bed her. He wanted to spend his life with her.

Brigitte wouldn’t even consider such a notion. She got annoyed when he mentioned marriage and refused to see him again until he promised to stay off the subject. But he was not discouraged. He was young and he had time. He could sense that she wanted him as much as he wanted her, but wouldn’t admit it. He would force her to see the truth and in the end she would follow her heart.

He shifted his rifle to his other shoulder and began to plan their next meeting.

* * *

The church of Saint Michel Archange was one hundred and fifty years old. Its wooden floor was warped, its ceiling low, its pews rickety, the kneelers liable to leave splinters in the shins of the faithful. But it was much beloved by its devout congregation, who had financed what improvements they could over its long history. New statuary had appeared in the early thirties, and second hand vestments, still glorious in their rainbow colors and fine stitchery, had been purchased from a more affluent church in Nancy. The same source also supplied the altar vessels and linen, the chalice and pyx, patens, and lawn napkins—all the wares priests used at mass and other services. The result was that even though the town was something less than prosperous, especially in this time of war, Saint Michel’s could boast a Christmas midnight mass the equal of any other in the Meuse.
 

Laura entered the church through the carved double doors and dipped her fingers into the holy water font on her right, blessing herself as she nodded to the familiar faces surrounding her. She genuflected in the aisle and slipped into a rear pew, clasping her hands in front of her and bowing her head as if in prayer. But from beneath her lowered lids she scanned the church, noting the placement of the armed German guards, two at the back near the entrance, two more at the front on either side, one right near the sacristy. Her heart sank. She had been planning to go up in the communion line and then veer off to use the sacristy exit. Unless the guard moved she would have to march right past him.

She raised her head and looked around the church for Lysette as she absently considered the problem. Her fellow teacher did not appear to be present but that wasn’t really a surprise. Lysette was in her own world these days. She hummed to herself and smiled into space, possessed of some inner peace that Laura observed and applauded, and also suspected that she understood. She hated to ascribe her friend’s contentment to the death of her husband but that certainly seemed to be the case. Laura had long suspected that the man was abusive, but Lysette was so private, so self-contained, that Laura had hesitated to talk to her about it. And now the occasion had been removed, by the war that had changed so many lives for the worse, but Lysette’s clearly for the better.
 

The ancient, wheezing pipe organ in the choir loft favored the assembly with Gounod’s
Ave Maria
as they waited for mass to begin. The center altar was ablaze with lighted candles, flanked by eight foot evergreens and wreathed in holly. The ladies of the altar society didn’t mind mixing their pagan symbols with their Christian ones. The side altars featured life sized statues of Saint Michael crushing a serpentine Satan under his victorious heel and the Virgin Mary. She was robed in celestial blue, veiled in white trimmed with silver, cradling the infant Jesus in her arms. New brides and pregnant women often left bouquets at her feet. Some recent ones were still there, flowers shriveling, ribbons gone limp, testament to the hopes that outlived such earthly offerings.

Laura resisted the temptation to drum her fingers on the seat in front of her, wishing that mass would begin. She had converted to Catholicism when she married Thierry, more as a concession to his family’s tradition than from any conviction of her own. She had been raised in a non-sectarian household and didn’t care much one way or the other. Her father, vaguely Methodist, had never practiced, and her mother’s people were Quakers. Neither parent imposed anything on her but she had attended some Friends’ Meetings with her grandmother when she was small. The plain, undemonstrative observances of her maternal relatives had hardly prepared her for the unashamed ostentation of the Catholic Church.

Not that she was shocked; she loved it. The gorgeous vestments in scarlet and purple and gold, the jeweled chalices, the theatrical quality of the services, had appealed to her from the first. The veneration of the saints had seemed to her the just adulation of icons, the reverential hymns the outpouring of souls steeped in ecstasy. And the Latin was a joy. With her linguistic bent she had readily absorbed the Roman tongue and made it her own. She had studied grammar and translation with Father Deslourdes along with the prescribed catechism, to better appreciate her new religion. He had been suitably impressed, never realizing that the beauty of the language itself attracted her, not merely its application in the mass. It was the communication tool of a people who had conquered three-fourths of their known world, a language of power and range and exquisite precision. With its colorfully defined genders and five cases (one of them devoted largely to the idioms of command), Latin covered everything.

Laura reveled in all of it. While engaged to Thierry he had taken her to Sunday afternoon Benediction at the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris, and she had been stunned by the almost hedonistic quality of what she had seen. The priest (actually a bishop), magnificently robed, had lifted the gilded, sunburst monstrance containing the host high into the air as he intoned the blessing. The red gowned altar boys had surrounded him, swinging pomanders which distributed the sensual perfume of incense throughout the church (gold, frankincense and myrrh, she thought now, recalling it). But what impressed her most was the ritualistic behavior of the massive congregation, bowing their heads in unison as the monstrance ascended into the sign of the cross, touching their breasts with the clenched fists of awe, of contrition, like Incas prostrating themselves before Atahualpa. She’d told Thierry afterward that she’d half expected a blood sacrifice and he had laughed.

She smiled to herself as she thought of her husband. His attitude throughout her “conversion” had been one of amused tolerance. When Father Deslourdes had complimented him on Laura’s dedication, Thierry had repeated the comment to her with a wry smile. Thierry knew his woman. It was the form that Laura liked, not necessarily the substance. She brushed over the thorny problems of immaculate conception and virgin birth, resurrection and ascension, to concentrate on translating the missal responses into English and learning the stories and songs. She could have embraced Judaism, with its rich tradition of heroism and miracles, its even more ancient language and equally impressive rites, with like fervor. Laura enjoyed the drama.

She looked up as Father Deslourdes entered and paused at the foot of the altar, his attendants flanking him.

“
Introibo ad altare Dei
,” he intoned. “I will go up to the altar of God.”
 

“
Ad Deam qui laetificat juventutem meam
,” the altar boys responded. “To God, who gives joy my youth.”

The mass had begun.

Laura folded her hands.
 

 
She spent the next forty minutes following the service dutifully, reading her missal (Latin with a French pony), and wishing that the sacristy guard would suffer a heart attack. He looked far too young for that fate, however, and by the consecration she had not come up with an alternative route to the one that would take her past him. The altar boy rang the bell and the worshippers bowed their heads as the priest raised the host.

“Take this and eat of it, for this is My Body,” he said in Latin.

Laura glanced at the guard. He had lowered his head with the rest.

“This is My Blood, which shall be shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins,” Father Deslourdes declaimed, his back to them, holding the chalice aloft with both hands.

The guard moved his lips silently and Laura felt an abrupt surge of hope. Was the boy Catholic?

The congregation stirred restlessly now that the solemn, all important moment of the consecration had passed. Laura waited for her opportunity. Faith, she thought, remembering where she was and why. Have faith. You will figure this out. Something will happen. Something always does.

The communion had finally arrived. The choir began to sing
Adeste Fideles
, the Latin Christmas hymn, and people rose to leave their pews in orderly progress, filing up to the altar to receive the host. Laura waited to see what the guard would do, holding her breath. She wished she didn’t have to make herself so visible at the mass but she knew Curel was right. If Becker learned anything of Vipère’s doings this Christmas Eve, as he surely could, he wouldn’t have to think hard about who might be involved. Curel worked behind the scenes but Laura was the sister-in-law of the saboteur Alain Duclos, and automatically under suspicion. Unless she was seen parading around the church in full view of hundreds of people on the night in question. She sighed and chewed her thumbnail, her mind racing.

And then, to her inestimable relief, the sacristy guard got into the communion line. He was going to receive! She slid out of her pew at once, thanking God, Thierry, the spirit of the French Republic, whoever had been responsible for this break. She hung back until several other people had preceded her and then walked up the center aisle, joining in with the hymn.

“Natum videte, Regem Angelorum,” she sang loudly, causing Odette Giradot to glance over her shoulder at her.
 

“Venite adoremus,” Laura caroled, the picture of jubilant piety. It was, after all, the festival of Christ’s birth. Cause for celebration.

Odette kept on walking.

“Venite adoremus, Dominum,” Laura yodeled. She was nearing the altar. She could hear Father Deslourdes saying, “
Corpus Christi
,” (the Body of Christ) to each communicant. She kept her eyes on the gray uniform in front of her. When the German knelt, closing his eyes as the altar boy held the paten under his chin, Laura turned sharply to the right.

Odette felt the movement and glanced at her. Laura held her finger to her lips and shook her head. After a timeless moment Odette nodded almost imperceptibly and then turned her eyes back to the altar.

Laura glided by St. Michael, stepping carefully around the rack of votive candles which burned continually at his shrine, and then bolted through the open door of the sacristy.

She didn’t pause to wonder if anyone other than Odette had noticed her departure. She raced past the folded piles of embroidered chasubles and racks of vestments, hoping that she wouldn’t encounter Jean Resnais, the sacristan, polishing a chalice at this unlikely hour. Hiding behind a closet door she changed her clothes, stuffing her dress into her bag, and then proceeded without interruption to the outer door.

Which wouldn’t budge.

She banged her fist on it in frustration, thinking of Curel waiting for her in the cold, cursing her descendants for the next three generations. She thought about the injured serviceman who needed their help. She swallowed and took a deep breath. Calm down, she instructed herself. There’s a way out of here. There must be.

Then she noticed that the door was bolted at the bottom, three inches from the floor. Amazed at her own stupidity she knelt and threw the bolt, gasping as the door popped open and she was assaulted by a frigid draft. She pulled her scarf up around her ears and stepped outside, yanking the heavy door closed behind her.
 

She could see Curel in the distance across the cobbled courtyard.
 

Langtot’s horse was reined to the buggy in which he sat; the animal’s breath became plumes of steam as the bay pawed the ground, seeking activity. Laura ran full out, arms pumping, as if rounding the bases while playing softball. She reached the buggy in seconds and clambered up beside the old man, out of breath.

“Where the hell were you?” he greeted her.

“I had to wait until almost everyone else had received,” she explained.

“That was the longest mass since the last supper,” he grumbled, clucking to the horse and slapping the reins on his back. The animal ambled forward and Curel waited until they were away from the church to prod him into going faster. They turned onto the northern road and the horse broke into a brisk trot.