Clash by Night (6 page)

“I have discovered that I need your advice,” Becker said in his slightly ironic manner, studying her face.

“My advice?” Lysette replied, startled into speech.

“Yes, that’s right,” Becker continued in his formal, stylized French. “Your name is?”

“Remy. Lysette Remy.”

“Madame, or Mademoiselle?”

“Madame.”

“Well, Madame Remy, I find myself with time on my hands these days,” he stated with a hint of sarcasm, “and I’m not very familiar with your French writers. I would like you to select something for me.”

Lysette didn’t answer for a moment, aware that he was playing with her. She could believe that he was bored; he’d obviously been bred to a more active, interesting life than was his lot in Bar-le-Duc. He must have decided to amuse himself by baiting the local librarian.

“We have no German volumes,” she said quietly, her gaze meeting his and locking with it.
 

Becker nodded, as if she had parried his thrust. “I read French tolerably well, Madame. Why don’t you choose what you yourself would like to read? I’ll wait.”

He continued to look at her. His eyes were brown, and arresting, with thick black lashes and heavily marked brows. She’d only seen him at a distance before today, but heard that he was forbidding, frightening. Yet she wasn’t afraid, she discovered with a sense of wonder; she had been when he first arrived, but not now. It was curious and a little thrilling. Why wasn’t she afraid?

“
D’accord,”
she agreed, inclining her head, and slipped out from behind the desk. She made her selections quickly, returning to place them on the wooden counter between her and the German officer. Becker studied the stack in silence: Proust, Stendahl, Flaubert’s
Madame Bovary
, Zola’s
Therese
Raquin
, and the short stories of de Maupassant. He looked up at Lysette, impressed.

“Perhaps you have already read some of these?” she murmured meaningfully, and Becker couldn’t help smiling in response.

“Certainly,
Madame
, but it will be a pleasure to reacquaint myself with such greatness. Allow me to salute your good taste.”

“I like to think that we have some to compare with Goethe and Remarque,” Lysette said quietly.

Becker eyed her sharply. “Remarque’s work has been burned in my country,” he said, watching her reaction. “Anti-government sentiments.”

“I have a copy in French translation, if you would like to re-examine his ideas,” Lysette replied, and his lips twitched.

Kurt Hesse watched the byplay in amazement. Becker never unbent with any of these people, he treated them all with same stiff propriety. Yet here he was, smiling at this little librarian with genuine amusement. Becker turned his head suddenly, and Hesse wiped his face clean of any expression.

“Take these for me,” Becker said in German, gesturing to the pile of books, and Hesse stepped forward smartly to obey.

Becker looked back at Lysette. He examined her more closely, intrigued with her handling of the situation. Thirties, light brown hair in a bun, fine lines around mouth and eyes, navy blue cotton dress with cloth belt and short cap sleeves. Nondescript, really, and too slim for his taste. He liked them
zaftig
, buxom; his wife was a statuesque Brunhilde. Still, there was something about this one: her obvious intelligence, the downcast eyes and folded hands which managed to convey alertness and repose at the same time.

Becker signaled for Kurt to wait at the door. The boy moved away and Becker took a step closer to Lysette.

“Do you have other duties besides this...” he gestured impatiently at the walls.

“I run the school with Madame Duclos,” Lysette replied evenly.
 

“Ah, yes,” Becker said, as an image of the mouthy redhead with the American passport flashed across his mind. He could well imagine that the two women were friends; the Yankee was probably giving this field mouse impertinence lessons.

“And your husband?” he asked, aware that he was overstepping the bounds of necessary information and entering the realm of curiosity.
 

Lysette hesitated a beat. “Missing in action. Presumed dead.”
 

“I see.” The whole area had been decimated by the short war with his country. No wonder these people hated their conquerors. Becker tried to imagine his wife in this woman’s situation, and could not.

“I will exchange these for others when I am finished,” he announced, rousing himself from the unproductive reverie. “Good day.”

Becker whirled for the door and Kurt fell in behind him. As the younger man passed into the hall Lysette sagged against her desk, releasing a long breath.
 

So that was the commandant. Not exactly what she’d expected, but then, she didn’t share the local prejudices against his kind. To the other villagers the Germans were the oppressors, the hated, vilified boche. But to Lysette they were the source of her liberation and the solution to her problem: they had released her from the tyranny of her husband.
 

She filled out a slip for the books Becker had taken, humming under her breath. She had not caused the war and she couldn’t help rejoicing in its result for her. She shared these thoughts with no one, aware that they were selfish, but they colored her attitude toward Becker. She saw him as just a man, like any other. As she placed the “out” card in her file box she wondered when he would be back and shook her head slightly, as if to clear it.
 

* * *

Four weeks later, while Dan Harris was at Parris Island preparing for his upcoming mission, Laura sat in the kitchen of the house in Fains waiting for Alain to return. She was supposed to be correcting papers, but the copybooks lay piled on the kitchen table, undisturbed, while she listened for the faintest sound that might indicate his arrival. The windows were open to the summer night, and she could hear the crickets out shouting each other in the hydrangea bushes and Henri’s horse chomping grass in the field behind the house. Every half hour, like the tolling of a bell, the sound of the German staff car making its slow, careful way along the road was discernible. It grew late and still the boy did not come. She drained her pot of tea, and the last cup of it, stewed too long in the leaves, was the color of iodine. She drank it anyway for something to do.

The waiting was awful, and she would much rather be a participant on this night, as she’d been on others. Their involvement with Vipère, named for the venomous snake which strikes quickly and with deadly effect, was supposed to be a secret. But Laura guessed that both Brigitte and Henri knew and merely pretended ignorance. Their frequent nocturnal absences were not discussed, and on a couple of occasions when Alain had returned home injured Brigitte had patched him up without asking any questions. Henri was doubtless terrified that his German cohorts would find out what he was harboring in his own house. Henri had always been the type to avoid controversy if he could, so he closed his eyes and did nothing. Thus Alain was free to continue his covert activities, and it had reached the point where he regarded his job at the factory as a mere cover for his real vocation, driving the Germans out of France.

 
Laura usually went with him on his nightly rounds, translating what they overheard, gathering intelligence. But this time he had left her behind, saying that what he had to do was best done alone.
 

She got up and looked out the window. She couldn’t see anything except the yellow glow from the oil lamp hanging on a hook outside Pierre Langtot’s barn. She sat down again. Curel had said that he would have a special job for her soon, and she was looking forward to it. Alain’s hit or miss tactics were wearing her down. She wanted to be focused on something in particular, to do something significant, something that would make a difference.

She opened one of the student books, looked at the jumble of scrawled answers on the first page, and closed it again, rubbing her forehead with her free hand. How could she care about teaching the principles of long division to a bunch of remedial, summer session students, when Alain might be found lying dead in a ditch? If nothing else, the invasion had put the world in perspective for her. Before the war, her life had been simple: love from her family during childhood and adolescence, and after that love from Thierry. Each day had begun with the knowledge that she had a base, a center, supporting what she did. And underlying all of it was the certainty that she was free and could make of her future what she chose. That was gone now, and the grief at its loss was mutating rapidly into a consuming, yet nurturing, desire for revenge.

She had not realized how very much she would want to fight back. While in the United States she had taken her American liberties for granted, but she appreciated them now, when she saw what it was like to live without them. The grinding, daily oppression worked on Laura until her very genes rose up in a silent scream of revolt. The Randalls were descended from people who had braved an ocean in a pitch and timber boat to find religious freedom, and then fought off unfriendly natives and an even unfriendlier climate when they reached their destination. She was Pilgrim stock, by God, and she wasn’t going to submit to this sort of thing without a struggle. For years she had watched the Nazi evil develop like a cancer in neighboring Germany, her outrage at its unprincipled leadership and unconscionable practices growing until the invasion had turned it into something close to hate. And when she thought that the occupation could go on for years, might even become permanent, it made her more determined than ever to end it.

She heard a sound at the back door and shot out of her seat. Alain stumbled inside and collapsed into the chair she had vacated. He looked exhausted and his left arm was covered with blood.

Laura ran to the front of the house, drawing the living room curtain. She looked out at the street to see if anyone had observed him arriving home in this condition, but the roadway was deserted.

She quickly gathered supplies, and when she returned to the kitchen Alain was slumped on the table, his eyes closed.

“Sit up,” she barked, frightened that he might faint, and to her vast relief he obeyed. She worked the pump above the sink to start the flow of water and said, “What happened? It was supposed to be a simple survey of the grounds, how did you get hurt?”
 

“Got caught in the barbed wire outside the camp,” he replied wearily, wiping his perspiring forehead with the sleeve covering his uninjured arm. “I was trying to sneak a look at the storehouse and the searchlight almost found me.”

“Do you realize that this is the third time this month you’ve come home in this condition? Every time you go out without me you return carved up like a goose. Fat lot of good you’re going to be to Curel, or anyone else, if the Germans pick you up. Blood always attracts their attention very quickly.”

“Don’t lecture me,” he said, sagging with fatigue, and he looked so young and vulnerable that Laura didn’t have the heart to continue. She loaded a shovel full of their precious allotted coal into the stove and filled the kettle at the pump, setting it on top of the cover to heat.

“Why were you so close?” she asked him in a milder tone. “You weren’t supposed to go beyond the road. You should follow Curel’s orders and stop trying things on your own.”
 

“I made it back, didn’t I?” he asked indignantly, already recovering enough to argue with her.

“Just barely, by the look of you,” Laura replied. He winced as Laura ripped his ragged sleeve down to the wrist and examined the cut.

“Very nice,” she said grimly. “You’ll be lucky if this doesn’t infect. And I wonder how you’ll explain that to your ‘advisors’ down at the factory. I think they’ll notice a cutter with a bum arm, don’t you?”

“What am I supposed to do, go to drinking parties with them like my father?” he burst out, and Laura was sorry she’d been so hard on him.

“I’m not saying you should stop scouting the garrison,” she clarified gently. “You know I don’t want that at all. I’m only asking you to be careful. You take too many foolish risks.”

“I do what I have to do,” he said stubbornly, and she sighed. She inspected the jagged edges of the wound silently.

“How does it look?” he asked tentatively.
 

“I don’t know if it needs stitches,” Laura observed. “Brigitte should be doing this.”

That reminded Alain of his sister’s presence in Bar-le-Duc and he said, “I don’t like her being at that hospital all the time, with the boche night and day. I wish she’d come home.”

“She wants to finish her training and I think that’s very wise,” Laura said, removing an old sheet from the bureau next to the door and tearing it into strips. “The Germans have disrupted our lives enough.” She got a bottle of antiseptic and poured some into a basin, setting the bowl on the table. “Now hold still while I try to clean this up.”

Alain submitted to her ministrations, allowing her to wash and dress the wound. As she was finishing he asked in a low tone, “Where is Papa?”

Laura looked at him closely for a moment, and then answered just as quietly, “Sleeping upstairs.”

“Are you sure?”

“He was a little while ago.”

“Go and check. I have something to tell you.”

Laura obeyed. When she returned and nodded that he might speak, Alain whispered excitedly, “The American is coming.”