Escape From Paris (15 page)

The message was clear. No warning of trial or imprisonment. No, it was simpler than that. Anyone hiding a soldier will be shot.

Linda's eyes slipped from the poster to the impassive faces in the car. No one looked at his fellow traveler. If glances crossed, eyes moved quickly on. It wasn't safe. That was the way it felt in the hot close carriage. Who knew who stood beside him? A Gestapo agent? A fugitive? Look down, look all around, but stay aloof.

She hurried out of the car at the next stop, jostling her way through the crowd, and on to the street. She stopped at the end of the line at the control. She had her green identity card in her hand. The line moved quickly enough, the soldiers asking questions of only a few.

The man in front of her wore work clothes, a heavy cotton shirt, dark blue pants. But the hand that held out his papers was unexpectedly smooth, the nails clean and cropped short.

Linda looked up at his face.

So did the German soldier.

It was suddenly very still in the line. No one moved but the circle of space around the man in work clothes seemed to expand. His hair was curly and ginger colored, his face sensitive with deep-set intense eyes. Linda saw him swallow and knew, sickeningly, that he was afraid, though his face still held a sullen impatient look, as any man might when delayed for no good reason.

The soldier's French was thickly accented but serviceable. “You are Jacques Delarue? Your papers say you are a truck driver.”

The man grunted assent.

The soldier looked down again at the man's hands and they began to tremble ever so slightly. The German gestured with his head. Two young privates stepped forward and took Delarue by either elbow. He tried to shake free. “My papers are all right,” he said loudly. “What's wrong with you? Let me go. I'm a Frenchman going about my business, you don't have any call to stop me.”

The control officer ignored him and was already reaching for Linda's card.

She tried not to listen as they pulled him away because she could hear, behind the bluster, the thin note of fear. Oh God, would this happen to her one day? Would strong hands take her arms, hold her helpless, lead her away to . . .

“Oh, you are American, Miss?” The control officer was smiling at her and she managed a stiff smile in return. His English was better than his French. “You are from California?”

Linda nodded.

“Have you ever been to Chicago?”

She shook her head.

He looked disappointed. “I have two cousins in Chicago, Hans and Emil Holtzendorff. I visited them in '36. You have a very beautiful country, Miss.”

“Thank you,”

“Have you ever been to Germany?”

Again she shook her head. “I didn't come to Europe until last Christmas, and by then travel was . . . difficult.”

He shrugged. “Ah well, this war will soon be over, Miss. Then you must go to Germany.” He looked around the dingy crowded platform. “It is clean in Germany,” then he handed back her card and she was moving on toward the steps.

It was clean in the Metro until you came, Linda wanted to say. Clean and there weren't any posters, black on white, warning of death by firing squad.

They wouldn't shoot Robert. Surely they wouldn't shoot a little boy. Of course not. The poster said there would be death for anyone harboring English soldiers. A child couldn't harbor anyone. That would be Eleanor and her. Linda stopped on the street, clutching her straw basket.

The leaves rustled gently above her and a squirrel dashed the length of a thick limb, paused with statue-like stillness, then, abruptly, leaped to the next tree and disappeared. So ordinary and everyday. The leaves were beginning to fall now, lying thick and crunchy along the walks, turning reddish and brown, signaling the beginning of fall. The first week in September—and they still hadn't found a way to the Spanish border. No one yet had responded to Eleanor's careful inquiry, “I've a package I need to get across the Demarcation Line. Would you have any idea who could help me?” Three weeks ago today Linda had smuggled Michael out of the hospital. It had become routine now, Eleanor still making trips for the Red Cross, visiting hospitals and prisons, Robert going to school, the Germans in their wisdom had decreed there would be no vacation this year, and Linda every day taking food to Michael, varying her times of visiting and always following a little different route.

Each day Michael looked up hopefully when she came in then the light in his eyes died. He never complained even though this past week she had not had a bite of meat to take to him. None of them had eaten any meat. It was getting harder and harder to find food. Even the vegetables were all gone and there were angry whispers that all the potatoes had been shipped to Germany. Potatoes were second only to wine on a Frenchman's table. They began to call the Germans “polydore” after the little potato bug that could decimate a harvest. The butcher told Eleanor that the Boche had put his second cousin in jail for a week because he shouted out, “Look at the polydore,” when passing a café filled with Germans.

Linda paused uncertainly, looking up at the government buildings ahead of her. She wasn't exactly sure where she was going. Elise Barnard had told Eleanor of this café, “It's deep in the Left Bank, my dear, in a narrow little street off the rue de Varenne. The Petit Chat. You just go in and say you are looking for Jean of Amiens. I actually got two chops.”

There were German uniforms everywhere. Linda walked briskly, wishing that her chest didn't ache every time a German officer looked at her. Then she missed a step. The Swastika flag snapped in the breeze from the staff of a beautiful pale yellow building, an elegant building with ancient green gates, another public building taken over by the Germans. God, they were everywhere. Every day German military units absorbed more buildings. The Hotel Crillon, across from the American Embassy, was now the headquarters of the local German commander. The Hotel Maurice had been taken over, the Palais-Royal, the Ecole Militaire, the Petit Palais, the Hotel Majestic, all serving as offices for the Occupation Army which every day tightened its grasp on Paris.

She grew nearer the blood red flag with its circle of white emblazoned with the crooked cross. The sentries beside the gate stood at stiff attention. Linda was even with them when she realized she was the only pedestrian on the street. She was the only person the length and breadth of the avenue. She walked in sunlight but the curtains were drawn at every window and no one paused in the shade of a tree or hurried up apartment house steps. Only a Gestapo headquarters could empty a street like this.

She turned off into the first cross street, never mind its name, never mind where the street went. Midway up the block, she found the dark and narrow street she sought and the little café. She pushed in the café door. The solitary waiter, polishing glasses behind the bar, looked up. “We don't open until twelve, Mademoiselle.”

Linda held out her basket. “I am looking for M. Jean. From Amiens.”

There was a long silence while he studied her, his dark eyes cold and suspicious. “You aren't French,” he said finally.

“I am American. I live with my sister whose husband is French. My nephew, Robert, is thirteen and he is very thin. We need meat, M'sieur.”

“American.”

She nodded.

“Back there.” He pointed to a narrow hall just to the right of the bar.

She slipped through the beads that separated the hallway from the dining room. The passageway was very dark. The hall ended at a closed door. Linda took a breath, knocked.

An unexpectedly cheerful voice called for her to enter.

She smelled meat when she stepped inside. Each wall held shelves, stacks of plates and glasses and kitchen implements along one wall, the other three filled with food-stuffs. It must originally have served as the pantry for the kitchen. Now the full shelves indicated another kind of business entirely. Three beef carcasses hung from hooks near a butcher's block. A huge man, he must have weighed almost three hundred pounds, was working on a fourth carcass on the bloodied wooden surface.

“M. Jean. . . . from Amiens?”

“I've heard the name.” He rumbled with laughter. “And what would a pretty young lady like you be doing asking after Jean from Amiens?”

Linda felt absurdly at a loss. She had never in her life dealt with someone breaking the law. But she didn't want to think of him as a crook. That brought up different pictures in her mind, dark-cheeked gunmen with tommy guns holding up sleepy small town banks, Bonnie and Clyde laughing with empty eyes, laughing and killing, a blood-spattered sidewalk outside a theater in Chicago. So she swallowed and nodded toward the meat. “May I buy some beef?”

The big man's massive face drooped. “Ah, I would like to help a pretty young lady, but I have my regular customers. Every bit of this,” and he slapped the muscle-sheathed ribcage, “is already spoken for.” But he looked at her expectantly.

Linda cleared her throat. “Perhaps there would be just a piece from one of those,” she nodded at the other carcasses. “I would be willing to pay generously,” and she began to fumble in her purse, pulling out a wad of francs.

The big man's face creased again in a smile, but his eyes were cold and calculating.

They settled on a sum finally. She paid twelve times as much as her purchase would cost in a shop. But the shops were mostly closed and those that opened sold out while lines of shoppers stretched the length of the block.

Linda hurried out of the little restaurant. It was open now and two or three diners looked up curiously as she passed. She felt conspicuous as if everyone must know what she carried in her basket.

On the street, she turned right. It would be closer to go back to the rue de Varenne. But she didn't want to be on that street again. She would walk more than a few blocks out of her way to avoid those rigid soldiers and that empty street. Nearby, ash cans clattered. A boy shouted to a friend. Then, everything happened so fast, she scarcely took it in.

Running feet pounded up the sidewalk behind her. She swerved against the wall to make room. A tall, thin priest was coming slowly toward her. He walked with a slight stoop as if he had become used to entering doorways with low lintels. He wore a broad floppy straw hat to shade his face from the September sun and carried an open book in his right hand, reading as he walked. He heard the running steps at the same time that Linda began to step aside and he looked up.

She saw his face clearly, a high forehead half hidden by a drooping shock of black hair, a beaked nose, thin ascetic lips, a firm blunt chin. He was looking behind her and she saw a flicker in his intensely blue eyes. He tucked his book under his arm, reached up and took off his floppy straw hat and thrust out his other arm.

Gasping for breath, the man plunging past Linda was caught up by that long thin arm, swung around to face the way he had come, the straw hat plumped on his head and the priest's wire-rimmed glasses slipped on his face. Then, the priest reopened the book and held it out in front of them and they walked down the sidewalk, the way the running man had come. As they passed, Linda recognized the man in work clothes picked up by the soldiers at the Metro control. He struggled to breathe, his face flaming red from exertion. He ducked his head to look at the book.

The priest pointed to the page. “It isn't as if Savonarola didn't know, my son, what he was doing. It's clear from this passage.”

Two soldiers pounded into the narrow street from the rue de Varenne. Their heads swung this way and that, their eyes searching the street and the people, the plump young mother with a baby in arms, the bricklayer on a scaffold, the teenage boys rolling a cigarette, the priest and his companion, Linda, an old lady with a cane.

Everyone continued to walk or work. No one looked at the soldiers. The older one, a sergeant, asked the young mother if she had seen a man running. It took her a moment to understand the question, then she raised her hand. Linda held her breath. The pointing finger reached the priest and his companion, reached them and swept past to stop at an alleyway. The soldiers called, “
Danke
,
danke
,
merci
, Madame,” and ran toward the narrow cobbled alley.

The priest and the fugitive began to walk more quickly. Linda turned and followed them. Two blocks, three, then near the Rodin Museum, the two men paused. The priest spoke quickly for a moment. The ginger-haired man shook his head. He lifted off the straw hat and the glasses. They talked for a moment more, then the fugitive turned and hurried away. The priest did not look after him but clapped the hat on his head and set off briskly in the opposite direction.

Linda continued to follow, almost breaking into a run at times to keep pace with that swift long-legged stride. Once, twice, she almost gave it up. Did she dare, after all? Then a stubborn almost unformed hope drove her on. The priest had taken a frightful chance on that narrow street. He couldn't know that the other pedestrians would turn blind eyes. But he had taken the chance nevertheless.

He was a half block ahead of her, not quite to the end of the street, when he swerved to his right and disappeared, almost as if he had been swallowed from view. Linda broke into a run. He hadn't turned the corner, she was sure of it. As she grew nearer, she saw worn bricked steps leading down from the street a half level to a heavy oak door. It didn't look like the entry to an apartment house. Puzzled, she looked up. Oh yes, of course. This was a church on the corner, a small church with worn gray stone steps leading up to an arched Gothic entrance. High above, sunshine glistened on the rose and misty blue of the stained glass.

She had come this far.

There was a clatter of footsteps coming around the corner, a bevy of German nurses, chattering and giggling, strode nearer.

Linda gave them one quick look, their soft gray uniforms and windblown hair, and rushed down the steps to the basement door. She was, she realized, becoming almost paranoid about German uniforms. She didn't want to be seen by the Germans. She didn't want to see them.