The Nightingale (50 page)

“I am fine, my friend.”

“And that handsome man of yours?”

“Still bombing depots and derailing trains. I saw him just before the invasion at Normandy. I could tell something big was up. I know he's in the thick of it. I'm worried—”

Isabelle heard the distant purr of an engine. She turned to Madame. “Are you expecting anyone?”

“No one ever drives up here.”

The airmen heard it, too. They paused in their conversation. Smythe looked up. Foley drew a knife out of his waistband.

Outside, the goats started bleating. A shadow moved across the window.

Before Isabelle could yell out a warning the door smacked open and light poured into the room, along with several SS agents. “Put your hands over your heads!”

Isabelle was hit hard in the back of the head by a rifle butt. She gasped and stumbled forward.

Her legs gave out beneath her and she fell hard, cracking her head on the stone floor.

The last thing she heard before she lost consciousness was “You are all under arrest.”

 

THIRTY-THREE

Isabelle woke tied to a wooden chair at her wrists and ankles; the ropes bit into her flesh and were so tight she couldn't move. Her fingers were numb. A single lightbulb hung from the ceiling above her, a cone of light in the darkness. The room smelled of mold and piss and water seeping through cracks in the stone.

Somewhere in front of her, a match flared.

She heard the scratch of sound, smelled the sulfur, and tried to lift her head, but the movement hurt so much she made an involuntary sound.

“Gut,”
someone said. “It hurts.”

Gestapo.

He pulled a chair from the darkness and sat down, facing her. “Pain,” he said simply. “Or no pain. The choice is yours.”

“In that case, no pain.”

He hit her hard. Blood filled her mouth, sharp and metallic tasting. She felt it dribble down her chin.

Two days,
she thought.
Only two days.

She had to last under questioning for forty-eight hours without naming names. If she could do that, just not crack, her father and Gaëtan and Henri and Didier and Paul and Anouk would have time to protect themselves. They would know soon that she had been arrested, if they didn't already know. Eduardo would get the word out and then he would go into hiding. That was their plan.

“Name?” he said, withdrawing a small notebook and a pencil from his breast pocket.

She felt blood dripping down her chin, onto her lap. “Juliette Gervaise. But you know that. You have my papers.”

“We have papers that name you as Juliette Gervaise, true.”

“So why ask me?”

“Who are you, really?”

“I'm really Juliette.”

“Born where?” he asked lazily, studying his well-tended fingernails.

“Nice.”

“And what were you doing in Urrugne?”

“I was in Urrugne?” she said.

He straightened at that, his gaze returned to hers with interest. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-two, or nearly, I think. Birthdays don't mean much anymore.”

“You look younger.”

“I feel older.”

He slowly got to his feet, towered over her. “You work for the Nightingale. I want his name.”

They didn't know who she was.

“I know nothing about birds.”

The blow came out of the blue, stunning in its impact. Her head whipped sideways, cracked hard against the chair back.

“Tell me about the Nightingale.”

“I told you—”

This time he hit her with an iron ruler across the cheek, so hard she felt her skin break open and blood spill.

He smiled and said again, “The Nightingale.”

She spat as hard as she could, but it came out as a dribbling blob of blood that landed in her lap. She shook her head to clear her vision and wished immediately that she hadn't.

He was coming toward her again, methodically slapping the red-dripping ruler into his open palm. “I'm Rittmeister Schmidt, Kommandant of the Gestapo in Amboise. And you are?”

He is going to kill me,
Isabelle thought. She struggled against her restraints, breathing hard. She tasted her own blood. “Juliette,” she whispered, desperate now that he believe her.

She couldn't last two days.

This was the risk everyone had warned her about, the terrible truth of what she'd been doing. How had it seemed like an adventure? She would get herself—and everyone she cared about—killed.

“We have most of your compatriots. There is no sense in you dying to protect dead men.”

Was it true?

No. If it were true, she would be dead, too.

“Juliette Gervaise,” she said again.

He backhanded her with the ruler so hard the chair toppled sideways and crashed to the floor. Her head cracked on the stone at the same time he kicked her in the stomach with the toe of his boot. The pain was like nothing she'd ever known. She heard him say, “Now, Madamoiselle, name the Nightingale,” and she couldn't have answered if she wanted to.

He kicked her again, with all his weight behind the blow.

*   *   *

Consciousness brought pain.

Everything hurt. Her head, her face, her body. It took effort—and courage—to lift her head. She was still bound at the ankles and wrists. The ropes chafed against her torn, bloodied skin, cut into her bruised flesh.

Where am I?

Darkness surrounded her, and not an ordinary darkness, not an unlit room. This was something else; an impenetrable, inky blackness that pressed against her battered face. She sensed a wall was mere inches from her face. She tried to make the smallest move of her foot to reach forward, and pain roared to life again, biting deep into the rope cuts on her ankles.

She was in a box.

And she was cold. She could feel her breath and knew it would be visible. Her nostril hairs were frozen. She shivered hard, uncontrollably.

She screamed in terror; the sound of her scream echoed back at her and was lost.

*   *   *

Freezing
.

Isabelle shuddered with cold, whimpering. She could feel her breath now, pluming in front of her face, turning to frost on her lips. Her eyelashes were frozen.

Think, Isabelle. Don't give up.

She moved her body a little, fighting through the cold and pain.

She was seated, still bound at the ankles and wrists.

Naked.

She closed her eyes, sickened by the image of him undressing her, touching her when she was unconscious.

In the fetid darkness, she became aware of a thrumming noise. At first, she thought it was her blood, pulsing in pain, or her heart, pounding a desperate beat to stay alive, but it wasn't that.

It was a motor, and nearby, humming. She recognized the sound, but what was it?

She shuddered again, trying to wiggle her fingers and toes to combat the dead feeling that had overtaken her extremities. Before there was pain in her feet, and then a tingling, and now … nothing. She moved the only thing she could—her head—and it thunked against something hard. She was naked, tied to a chair inside a …

Frozen. Dark. Humming. Small …

A refrigerator.

She panicked, tried frantically to wrest free, to topple her prison, but all her effort did was wind her. Defeat her. She couldn't move. Not anything except her fingers and toes, which were too frozen to cooperate.
Not like this, please.

She would freeze to death. Or be asphyxiated.

Her own breathing echoed back at her, surrounded her, a shudder of breath all around it. She started to cry and her tears froze, turning to icicles on her cheeks. She thought of all the people she loved—Vianne, Sophie, Gaëtan, her father. Why hadn't she told them she loved them every day when she had the chance? And now she would die without ever saying a word to Vianne.

Vianne,
she thought. Only that. The name. Part prayer, part regret, part good-bye.

*   *   *

A dead body hung from every streetlamp in the town square.

Vianne came to a stop, unable to believe what she was seeing. Across the way, an old woman stood beneath one of the bodies. The air was full of the whining creak of ropes pulled taut. Vianne moved cautiously through the square, taking care to keep away from the streetlamps—

Blue-faced, swollen, slack bodies.

There had to be ten dead men here—Frenchmen, she could tell. Maquisards by the look of them—the rough guerrilla partisans of the woods. They wore brown pants and black berets and tricolor armbands.

Vianne went to the old woman, took her by the shoulders. “You should not be here,” she said.

“My son,” the woman croaked. “He can't stay here—”

“Come,” Vianne said, less gently this time. She maneuvered the old woman out of the square. On rue La Grande, the woman pulled free and walked away, mumbling to herself, crying.

Vianne passed three more dead bodies on her way to the
boucherie
. Carriveau seemed to be holding its breath. The Allies had bombed the area repeatedly in the last few months, and several of the town's buildings had been reduced to rubble. Something always seemed to be falling down or crumbling.

The air smelled of death and the town was silent; danger lurked in every shadow, around every corner.

In the queue at the butcher shop, Vianne heard women talking, their voices lowered.

“Retaliation…”

“Worse in Tulle…”

“Did you hear about Oradour-sur-Glane?”

Even with all of that, with all of the arrests and deportations and executions, Vianne couldn't believe the newest rumors. Yesterday morning the Nazis had marched into the small village of Oradour-sur-Glane—not far from Carriveau—and herded everyone at gunpoint into the town's church, supposedly to check their papers.

“Everyone in town,” whispered the woman to whom Vianne had spoken. “Men. Women. Children. The Nazis shot them all, then they slammed the doors shut, locked them all in, and burned the church to the ground.” Her eyes welled with tears. “It's true.”

“It can't be,” Vianne said.

“My Dedee saw them shoot a pregnant woman in the belly.”

“She
saw
this?” Vianne asked.

The old woman nodded. “Dedee hid out for hours behind a rabbit hutch and saw the town in flames. She said she'll never forget the screaming. Not everyone was dead when they set the fire.”

It was supposedly in retaliation for a Sturmbannführer who'd been captured by the Maquis.

Would the same thing happen here? The next time the war went badly, would the Gestapo or SS round up the villagers of Carriveau and trap them in the town hall and open fire?

She took the small tin of oil that this week's ration card had allowed her and walked out of the shop, flipping up her hood to shield her face.

Someone grabbed her by the arm and pulled her hard to the left. She stumbled sideways, lost her footing, and almost fell.

He pulled her into a dark alley and revealed himself.

“Papa!” Vianne said, too stunned by his appearance to say more.

She saw what the war had done to him, how it had etched lines in his forehead and placed puffy bags of flesh beneath his tired-looking eyes, how it had leached the color from his skin and turned his hair white. He was terribly thin; age spots dotted his sagging cheeks. She was reminded of his return from the Great War, when he'd looked this bad.

“Is there somewhere quiet we can talk?” he said. “I'd rather not meet your German.”

“He's not
my
German, but
oui
.”

She could hardly blame him for not wanting to meet Von Richter. “The house next to mine is vacant. To the east. The Germans thought it too small to bother with. We can meet there.”

“In twenty minutes,” he said.

Vianne pulled her hood back up over her scarf-covered hair and stepped out of the alleyway. As she left town and walked along the muddy road toward home, she tried to imagine why her father was here. She knew—or supposed—that Isabelle was living with him in Paris, although even that was conjecture. For all she knew, her sister and her father lived separate lives in the same city. She hadn't heard from Isabelle since that terrible night in the barn, although Henri had reported that she was well.

She hurried past the airfield, barely noticing the aeroplanes that were crumpled and still smoking from a recent bombing raid.

At Rachel's gate, she paused and glanced up and down the road. No one had followed or seemed to be watching her. She slipped inside the yard and hurried to the abandoned cottage. The front door had been broken long ago and now hung askew. She let herself inside.

The interior was shadowy and limned in dust. Almost all of the furniture had been requisitioned or stolen by looters, and missing pictures left black squares on the walls; only an old loveseat with dirty cushions and a broken leg remained in the living room. Vianne sat down, perched nervously, her foot tapping on the rush-covered floor.

She chewed on her thumbnail, unable to be still, and then she heard footsteps. She went to the window, lifting the blackout shade.

Her father was at the door. Only he wasn't her father, not this stooped old man.

She let him into the house. When he looked at her, the lines in his face deepened; the folds of his skin looked like pockets of melting wax. He ran a hand through his thinning hair. The long white strands rearranged themselves into spikes, giving him a strangely electrified look.

He moved toward her slowly, limping just a little. It brought her whole life back in an instant, that shuffling, awkward way he had of moving. Her maman saying,
Forgive him, Vianne, he isn't himself anymore and he can't forgive himself … it's up to us to do it.

“Vianne.” He said her name softly, his rough voice lingering over it. Again, she was reminded subtly of Before, when he had been himself. It was a long-forgotten thought. In the After years, she had relegated all thoughts of him to the closet; in time, she'd forgotten. Now she remembered. It scared her to feel this way. He had hurt her so many times.