Simple Faith (14 page)

Peter felt like laughing at the ridiculousness of that statement. Mikel was Basque—a foreigner and not a desirable foreigner at that. What could he possibly do to protect Anja’s grandparents? The man might be strong as an ox and know the mountains as Anja had told him, but he was clearly thinking with his heart, not his head. Peter understood that even if Anja escaped she would never forgive herself if that resulted in harm coming to anyone she loved—and that included the people in this room, with the possible exception of him.

“Enough,” he said forcefully. “Schwarz wants me.” Having not yet removed his coat and hat, he headed for the door.

Josef and Mikel both blocked his way.

“Don’t be a fool,” Josef said at the same time that Mikel muttered ominously, “We have no time for this.”

Peter reached inside his collar and pulled out his dog tags. “I will at worst be sent to a prisoner-of-war camp. Anja and the rest of you—”

“I thought I told you to remove those identifiers and sew them into your trousers,” Josef said.

Mikel simply reached up and, with a single jerk, yanked the chain and tags free. Before Peter could form the words to protest, the Basque walked to the wood-burning stove and tossed the tags and chain into the fire.

Peter made a move toward him but stopped when Anja stepped between them. “That’s enough. I need to think.”

Mikel turned away while Lisbeth touched Peter’s arm and handed him a cup of tea. No one spoke while Anja paced in a circle around the square kitchen table. After two trips around the table, she pulled out a chair, sat down, closed her eyes, and rested her open palms on the table. A few seconds later Lisbeth did the same. Then Josef joined them. And finally Mikel sat in the fourth and only vacant chair. With a defiant glance at Peter, he took out his rosary and began silently mouthing the prayers that went with the counting of each bead.

Peter could not believe what he was seeing. This was a time for urgency—for action. He picked up the fire poker from next to the stove and retrieved his scorched dog tags from the fire. He waited for one of the two men to stop him, but no one made a sound. He dropped the metal tags in the sink and poured water over them to cool them; then he picked them up and headed upstairs and on through the fake crates in the storeroom to his hideout.

By the time Anja made her way through the storeroom to him, he had dressed himself in layers of clothing as he’d been taught would be necessary once the time came for him to take the night train to Paris. How he had longed for this day when he’d first arrived at the café. How hard he had worked to regain his strength, to learn enough German to get by, to prepare for his run to freedom. Now he felt the same sadness and sense of mourning that he had the night before he’d reported for active duty—the last night he had spent in his childhood home. He swallowed around the lump in his throat that threatened to make breathing difficult when he heard the door from the storeroom open and Anja’s footsteps climbing the stairs.

“Peter?”

“I’m going,” he said, his voice choked with determination.

“
We’re
going,” she corrected him and pressed her fingers to his lips to stop further protest. “You promised to trust us. We have been doing this for months now. We have moved many men like you to freedom. We know what we’re doing, Peter.”

“This isn’t about me now. It’s you and your family and Josef and Lisbeth and their child and—”

“And that is exactly why you and I must leave tonight. Schwarz will have men watching the farm and the hospital and the café. He believes that I will be at one of those three places. He knows that you are at one of those three places. None of them is safe for either of us any longer.”

Peter had a thought. He would go with her because it was clear that she was not about to back down now that she had set her mind on a plan. No doubt she thought the Light was guiding them. Well, he would go and then at the first opportunity disappear so that if she was captured she would honestly be able to say she had no idea where he was.

“I’m ready,” he said.

Anja arched one cynical eyebrow. “You will follow our instructions without question?”

“Our?”

“Mikel is going with us. He will be on the train. If need be he will create a diversion in the event that you are questioned or get into—”

“I can handle myself.” Peter ground out each word.

To his surprise, Anja reached up and tenderly stroked his cheek. “Whatever happens—and we may not have a chance to say a proper good-bye, Peter Trent, I am so very glad to have met you.” She stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. “Ready?”

When he nodded, she led the way; but not down the stairs and into the fake crates. Rather, she turned in the opposite direction to a second stairway and an alcove where a wooden ladder led to the roof.

   CHAPTER 7   

A
rush of cold air and flying snow hit Anja’s face the minute she opened the trapdoor that led to the roof. Months earlier she and Josef had mapped out this emergency escape route. It had been used at least a half dozen times to move other evaders to safety, but it was dangerous on a different level than the usual process of moving airmen from one safe house to another. Here they were four stories above the street. They would need to climb onto the slanted tiled roof of the café closest to the nearest building and then drop to that roof half a story below. From there they would need to traverse several more rooftops, sometimes having to leap two or more feet of open space between buildings. Certainly not the easiest of feats in good weather. With the snow and wind, it looked pretty close to impossible.

She and Josef had made the crossing several times to test the best points of connection. Up to now Mikel and Josef had trained every evader in the logistics of the route. But none of those men who had used this escape had been recovering from a badly wounded leg. None of them had had questionable strength for making the drops, landings, and leaps required. And they hadn’t thought Peter was yet ready to physically complete the route. They had always planned to take him out another way.

“I can do this,” Peter said as if reading her mind once he’d squeezed through the trapdoor and was standing next to her on the only flat part of the café’s roof. “I can,” he muttered more to himself than to her.

Below them they heard the slam of car doors and knew the Gestapo had arrived to search the premises. She had long understood that if she made it out of this war alive, the sound of car doors slamming would haunt her for the rest of her days. In the weeks that Peter had been hidden in the attic, twice he had had to move temporarily to other safe houses in case the searchers discovered the fake crates and the hideaway beyond. But each of those times they had been able to spirit him away through the café’s kitchen entrance by having him pose as a deliveryman. This was different—for both of them. Anja had no doubt that this time the hunt was for her as well as Peter.

“Let’s go,” she said, her teeth chattering from fear as well as from cold.

She found the rope that Josef had secured to a concealed hook on the landing and threw it over the side of the building, then motioned for Peter to ease his way over the slippery tiles to take hold. The rope—by intention—was not long enough to get them all the way to the lower roof. That would have meant having it dangle outside Josef and Lisbeth’s third-floor bedroom window, and there was always the likelihood that someone would be searching the room. The rope ended a few feet above the window so that the person escaping would “walk” his way to the side of the window, wait for the room to be unoccupied, and then drop the remaining feet onto the lower flat rooftop.

“You first,” Peter said. They had no time for arguments. Even with the trapdoor and all the windows of the house and café closed, they could hear voices—angry and insistent—coming from inside. “Go.” He waited for her to take hold of the rope, and then he turned and brushed away all signs of their footprints before balancing himself against the pitch of the roof, steadying the rope for her in the strong wind that threatened to force her off course. She had barely reached the top of the window when she heard the sounds of ransacking coming from the bedroom. Someone pulled off the blackout curtain, allowing light to spill out into the night.

She looked up at Peter and down at the flat roof on the adjacent building. At the same time she heard the latch turn, unlocking the casement window of the bedroom—heard the squeal of protest the hinge made when the window was cranked open. Anja pressed herself flat against the building and prayed that her dark clothing and the moonless night would keep whoever was about to look out that window from seeing her. She looked up and saw that Peter had disappeared. From below her she heard voices speaking German—terse and impatient men snapping at one another and at Josef. She squeezed her eyes shut tight against the falling snow and waited.

Peter did not know whether to try and pull Anja back up to the roof or leave her there pressed tight to the building. But when he heard the window crank open and saw a man in a black leather coat and fedora lean out, then bark orders to his men, he knew that any movement would only alert the Gestapo agent. So he retreated step by step back to the small flat area of the café’s roof and waited, holding his breath as he strained to hear what was happening below.

In what seemed like hours but was surely only minutes—or even seconds—he heard the snap of the window against its frame and realized the voices were silent. He edged his way back to the slippery tiled peak, held to the rope, and glanced down. The window was closed.

“Anja?”

“
Schnell
,” she hissed even as she agilely walked her way past the window and dropped to the roof below. “Quickly,” she urged.

The rope swung free in the bitter winter wind, and Peter caught it and stilled it before it could swing across the window. He wrapped the rope around his half-frozen hands and started down the side of the building. He had gone only a few feet when he remembered something and stopped. He had forgotten to erase his footsteps from where he’d gone back onto the rooftop.

Too late now
. He continued his descent, past the bedroom window—its light still blazing. The wind caught a loose shutter on a neighboring building banging it against the wall.
What if someone in another building sees us? What if …

He had reached the end of the rope—literally. Now he had no choice but to release it and fall to the roof below. He kicked away from the wall of the café as Anja had instructed and released the rope.
Another loose end
, he thought as he fell. The rope dangling there would tell the Gestapo agent searching the café what he needed to know if he found his way to the roof before Josef had a chance to go there and coil the rope back into its hiding place.

In the same way that the earth had rushed up toward him when he jumped from the doomed plane, now the roof came at him too fast, and this time he had no chute for slowing himself. He landed with a painful thud, and it took him a moment to get his breath. But Anja was there urging him to his feet, grabbing his arm and half-dragging him across the slippery, flat surface to the far edge.