Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Sixteen

The civilians looked tired and dirty. They wore everyday clothes, as if they had been snatched from their jobs or whatever they had been doing without warning. Some of them stumbled as they walked. They had suffered injuries: one clutched an apparently broken arm to his chest, another’s leg dragged, a third’s shirt was black and stiff with what Genevieve was sure, from his bruised, swollen face, must be blood. As they drew nearer, forming a line down the middle of the square facing the crowd at the soldiers’ direction, her mouth tasted sour with fear. Her gaze darted along the line. Quickly she scrutinized each one. They were all men. Her mother was not among them.

Her relief was so profound that she actually felt light-headed.

An officer stepped in front of the line of prisoners. From his uniform she knew that he belonged to the SS, and her skin prickled with foreboding. Facing the crowd, he lifted a bullhorn to his mouth. His booming voice drowned out every other sound.

“I am Sturmbannführer Walter Schmidt. It is my unpleasant duty to inform you that several days ago some of your fellow Cherbourgeois participated in a crime against the Third Reich and all loyal French citizens. They attempted to rescue and smuggle out of the country a downed British aircrew. The British pilot has already been captured. Most of the traitors who assisted him have likewise been taken into custody. Our interrogation of them has already yielded much fruit. Two members of the British aircrew and the remaining French traitors who assisted them are still being sought. They will, I assure you, be found. The city of Cherbourg has been judged guilty of harboring such traitors. For that, there is a punishment, which will be visited upon these men, who have been selected from the population at random, as a lesson to your community. They will be shot.”

The silence after Schmidt finished speaking was electric. It reminded Genevieve of the charge in the air right before a thunderstorm hit.

“No! No!” The outburst from the depths of the crowd came as Schmidt turned and gestured to the soldiers behind him, who responded by shoving the condemned men to their knees. A woman, middle-aged and thin, dressed in a ratty overcoat, with graying hair flying from an untidy bun, burst through the wall of soldiers lining the square to dart toward the prisoners. “You cannot! He has done nothing! I beg of you—”

“Maman—” One of the prisoners staggered to his feet. He was gangly and tall but clearly very young, with long dark hair straggling around a face that was all bones and angles. A soldier standing behind him clubbed him brutally in the back of the neck with his rifle butt. With a cry he fell to his knees again before keeling over onto his side, where he curled moaning into a fetal position.

“Karl! Karl!” The woman, wailing, had almost reached the prisoner before two soldiers, who’d broken out of the line surrounding the square to give chase, grabbed her and started dragging her away. “Please! He has done nothing, I tell you! In the name of common decency, you cannot! He is only thirteen!”

Mingled pity and horror clutched at Genevieve’s chest. Thirteen! A child.

Schmidt snapped, “Fire!”

The bang of thirty sidearms discharging almost simultaneously made Genevieve jump and clap a hand to her mouth. The echoing crack was loud enough to hurt her ears, to scatter, screaming, a flock of seagulls flying overhead, to wrench the most heartrending cry she had ever heard from the throat of the now bereaved mother, still being dragged away.

The rest of the prisoners pitched forward to lie sprawled alongside Karl in the withered grass. In that first terrible instant, a fine red mist hung in the air above the fallen bodies. Then it fell, covering the inert forms with a lacy pattern in vivid scarlet, disappearing into the darker red puddles beginning to roll across the ground.

A collective gasp from the crowd preceded the most awful silence Genevieve had ever experienced. A smell—gunpowder, raw meat, other things too awful to contemplate—was borne toward them on the wind.

My God. But she didn’t say it aloud. Instead she hung on to the handlebars as nausea roiled her stomach. If she hadn’t had the bicycle to cling to, she didn’t think she could have stayed on her feet.

Schmidt faced the crowd again, lifted the bullhorn to his mouth.

“That is all. You are dismissed,” he said.

Under the watchful eyes of the soldiers, the crowd began to melt away. The noise that would have been expected as part of the breakup of such a large gathering, the chatter, the calling out, the slapping of shoulders and shaking of hands, all that was absent. Except for the rustle of clothing and the clomp of many feet on pavement, a heavy silence prevailed. It was composed, Genevieve thought, of equal parts shock and shame.

Without a word Vartan turned the bicycle around and, with her beside him, walked it back the way they had come. They walked because operating a bicycle seemed almost unbearably frivolous now, and besides the crowd was too dense to permit anyone to ride. Head lowered, she trudged along among the shuffling mass of her mute fellow witnesses to the horrific slaughter of innocents. Were they complicit, in their silence, their lack of action? But what could they have done? There was nothing, she knew. But still.

It was all she could do to continue to put one foot in front of the other, to keep from looking back at the limp, bloodied bodies that were now being thrown with sickening thuds into the back of one of the trucks that had been driven onto the grass to collect them.

When they were out of sight of the square, Vartan was approached by another man and stopped to talk, heads together, the conversation low and grave. Shaken to her core, Genevieve sank down on some nearby steps that led to the stoop of one of the pretty stone houses lining the street and clasped her hands tightly together in her lap.

The crowd streamed past. The weight of what they’d witnessed rode visibly on slumped shoulders. Sorrow and despair hung in the air like the salt smell of the sea.

Vartan finished his conversation and came to stand in front of her.

“They are monsters,” Genevieve said. Her voice, thin but clear, hung in the air. Vartan’s brows snapped together in quick alarm. Reminded by his expression of the danger of speaking out, she clamped her lips together lest another unwary word escape.

“We must go.” There was a strain in his voice that hadn’t been there before. “Come, we will walk together to the train station.”

Genevieve stood up. The train station was not far away. Despite her fear for her mother, despite the bone-deep horror of what she had just witnessed, there was no choice: she had to go. She had to return to Paris, and she had to be there in time to take the stage. To miss her show was unthinkable. It would raise too many questions. There would be such an uproar—she grew tense thinking about it. She had never missed a show. She could not miss a show, especially not now. To do so would be to focus a pitiless German spotlight on herself and her troupe—and Max and his activities.

They walked with the bicycle between them, without speaking, until the crowd had thinned enough so that there was no chance they would be overheard. The station—a low stone building with a green tile roof—was within view. A train waited rumbling behind it: her train, the 2:10 to Paris, she was almost sure. Another train whistled a warning as it chugged in. The plume of gray smoke from the engine stretched back over the long line of passenger cars. The sulfur-like smell of burning coal that accompanied it made her grimace.

Vartan cleared his throat, slanted a look at her. “Mademoiselle Genevra...”

His voice triggered the angry, hushed words she’d been choking back. “You heard that bastard. My mother is one of those he was talking about. They are interrogating her. Torturing her. I must go, but you must launch your rescue. Perhaps Emmy will come in time. Whether she does or not, you must go ahead, do you understand? With the SOE or without them. If you can get her away and hide her, I will come back in the morning and—”

He shook his head. “No. It is too late. The baroness—she is not here. That is what my friend told me just now.”

“What?” She stopped walking, frowned at him.

He stopped, too. “The gestapo came for her. They have already taken her away. We think perhaps to Paris, to Fort Mont-Valérien or Cherche-Midi or even to eighty-four avenue Foch.”

“Oh, no.” Genevieve’s breath caught. The prisons Fort Mont-Valérien and Cherche-Midi were bad, but 84 avenue Foch! It was the gestapo headquarters in Paris, and the most dreaded address in the city. The interrogations that took place there were notorious for their cruelty. Few prisoners left the premises alive.

“Are you sure?” Her voice cracked.

“That she was taken? Yes. About her destination? Not so much. Although Paris is what we hear.”

“Dear God.” She swallowed hard. “When did they leave?”

“About an hour ago. In a convoy of three cars. My friend saw them go. They may have suspected we were planning something.” He glanced around, his expression furtive. “There are wagging tongues everywhere. Come, we must walk.”

They were already the object of curious glances from some of those who were quickly forming queues in front of the reopened shops in hopes of using their coupons to obtain a baguette or bit of meat for supper. Up ahead, a group of soldiers who’d been manning one of the barricades blocking traffic into Old Town were taking it down. The last thing she wanted was to attract their notice. Heart pounding, trying to look as though the most important thing on her mind was the lack of fresh vegetables, she moved over to walk closer to the buildings with Vartan as the streets reopened to what were mostly military vehicles. Her hands trembled, she discovered, and balled them into fists.

All too conscious of the proximity of the shoppers, she kept her voice scarcely louder than a breath. “What of those who were captured with her? Were they taken away as well?”

“They are dead.”

“Killed—during interrogation?” Genevieve’s blood ran cold.

“That is what we think.”

“And my mother? What kind of shape is she in?”

“The baroness had to be carried to the car.”

She felt as if she were choking. “How long do you think she can survive?”

“I don’t know. They will do their best to keep her alive. Until they get what they want.”

Anguish twisted her stomach. “In the end, they will kill her.”

“I am afraid—yes.”

So many thoughts ran through her head in such rapid succession that it was impossible to untangle them. She had to force herself to stay calm, to try to think, to keep moving steadily past the watchful soldiers toward the train station. A bus pulled up in front of it, disgorging a full complement of passengers, who walked up the steps to the terminal.

She said, “When we get to Paris, there are people you can go to for help, are there not? They can tell you where—”

“I am not going to Paris.”

“What do you mean? You have to! You can’t simply abandon her!”

“She will not be abandoned. But I must disappear for a while. My friend warned me—at this moment there is a search party on its way to my house.”

“Oh, no...”

“It may mean nothing, a routine search like many others, but it may mean I am betrayed. I dare not chance it. I should have gone with—” he almost said a name, caught himself; she knew he meant in the truck with the newcomer “—the others. I stayed only to help the baroness, but I can do nothing for her now.”

Incipient hysteria bubbled to life inside Genevieve. In the final analysis, she was a singer, not an agent, not an SOE operative. To have all the responsibility thrown back onto her—fright galvanized her. Lillian would be killed and there was nothing she, alone, could do to stop it.

“But what of my mother? Is there someone else who can come with me? Your friend you were talking to, perhaps?”

He grimaced. “You have to understand there are rules. Even if there was no search party, I wouldn’t be going with you. I don’t operate in Paris. Neither does my friend. I have no knowledge of the cells there. Each group of us works within our own area. For security’s sake, we know only the identities of those in our own cell, and perhaps an outside contact or two. That way, if one is arrested, the whole network is not destroyed.”

“But my mother—”

“There are other people who know about this, and now it is up to them to decide what course is best regarding her.”

“What other people?”

“Higher up the chain of command than I.”

“They don’t know her! They might not—”

“When she left Cherbourg, the decision was taken out of my hands. I am sorry.”

“You said yourself she must be rescued.”

“Let us pray that is what happens.”

“Pray. We need to do more than pray!”

His voice roughened. “Listen to me. You’ve put yourself in grave danger already. Merely knowing my identity and something about the cell here makes you a threat in the eyes of some. I have vouched for you, here, but that is all I can do. I am telling you, for your own sake, out of the respect I bear your parents, do not meddle further in this.”

The finality of his tone told her that continuing to argue with him would be useless. They were halfway across the paved open area of iron benches and café tables that separated the last of the shops from the street in front of the station. Others were crossing the open area, too, heading for the station. She was glad of their presence to offset the occasional sweeping glances of the soldiers who were now loading sections of the barricade onto a truck. The incoming train had stopped at the station, and its disembarked passengers were beginning to stream out of the building and down the steps. An anxious glance at her watch told her that it was almost time for her to board her train. With the minutes ticking inexorably down, panic rose in her throat. Taking a deep breath, she beat it back.

Think. I must think.

She felt as if she were drowning and trying to save herself by grasping at the flimsiest of straws.

“Emmy—if Emmy comes. How can I get a message to her?”

“I can do that for you. If you will write it down.”

What she picked up from his tone was that once he had done it, he felt he would have discharged any obligation to her.

“Yes. Yes, I will.” Paper—a pencil or pen—did she have one? Please...

Stopping at one of the small circular tables, she set the shopping bag down on it, rummaged quickly through the contents, and came up with an envelope and a stubby pencil.

Tearing off a piece of the envelope, careful to make sure that it bore no identifying information, she started to write, then hesitated as it occurred to her that letting anyone, even such a longtime family loyalist as Vartan, know that she was staying at the Ritz might be dangerous. If her note should fall into the wrong hands, putting her address down in writing could prove utterly disastrous. With what had happened to her parents, the specter of betrayal had become terrifyingly real. Whether as Genevieve Dumont or Genevra de Rocheford, she could be arrested as quickly as anyone else if she was suspected of helping the Resistance.

“Be quick,” Vartan said. Despite the day’s breeziness, beads of sweat dotted his forehead and upper lip. He shot stealthy glances all around, down the length of the open area, over the queued-up shoppers, toward the train station, at the soldiers.

His fear fed her own. Gripping the pencil so hard her knuckles went white, she bent over the table and scribbled her message.

I need to see you. I’ll be at the place where I dropped your birthday necklace, 9 in the morning for the next few days.

There. Only three people left in the world would know where that was, and she was one of them.

On her sister’s never-to-be-forgotten fifteenth birthday, when they had been staying at the Ritz, their parents had presented Emmy with a pendant composed of five diamonds positioned around a large central pearl to form the shape of a star. “Because you are our shining star,” Lillian had told Emmy with the tender, proud smile she always reserved for her elder daughter. It was the end of the evening in which they had seen Josephine Baker, the four of them were riding in the specially hired horse-drawn carriage taking them from an après-theater dinner back to the Ritz, the girls were in the filmy white jeune fille–appropriate evening dresses selected by their mother, the air was warm, the lights of Paris twinkled magically against a midnight velvet sky sprinkled with stars. After they stepped down onto the cobblestones of the place Vendôme, while the carriage clattered away, she had asked to see the necklace. Emmy had lifted it out of its presentation case and handed it to her, and she had held the lovely thing up by its chain to admire its sparkle by the flickering gaslight of the streetlamps—and promptly dropped it. To her horror, to everyone’s horror, it had slithered through the grates of a storm drain and been lost forever.

“Finished?” Vartan’s impatient mutter warned her time was up. On the impulse of a moment she dashed off a final word: Bébé. Using the once despised nickname as her signature would both conceal her identity from outsiders and leave no doubt in her sister’s mind that the message was indeed from her. Then she folded the paper into a small square and handed it over.

“You will make sure she gets it?” Anxiety creased her brow as he shoved it into a pocket.

“Yes.” The increased tempo of his breathing coupled with the restless movements of his eyes left her in no doubt of how eager he was to be gone.

“What if you don’t see her?”

“I don’t need to. I will leave it where she knows to look.” Vartan straddled his bicycle and touched his forehead to hers. “Good luck to you, Mademoiselle Genevra. And to the baroness.”

“And to you,” she said, but he had shoved off and she wasn’t sure he heard. A moment later he pedaled unchecked past the watching soldiers. Feeling equal parts bereft, vulnerable and frightened now that she was well and truly on her own, she turned and hurried toward her train.

It was huffing and puffing its way out of the station before something dawned on her: the slim hope she was clinging to that Emmy might show up and know what to do was not her last, best chance of saving their mother after all.

She had someone else she could turn to. She had Max.

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