“You had nothing left to live for?”
“My family had been taken away by the Gestapo.” His tone was matter-of-fact, but his mouth twisted slightly as he stared at the nonexistent fire in the hearth.
Cady tried to think of some response adequate to the situation, but words failed her. Then she remembered the people who felt compelled to say something about Maxine’s death, and decided to hold her tongue, to sit silently and share the moment, however uncomfortable.
“I would like to go back to Fontaine-de-Vaucluse,” Fabrice said suddenly. “I would like to see it one more time, before I die.”
“Would you like me to take you?”
He got up and started to walk out of the room, but at the doorway he turned and said: “Yes. In a day or two, when my ankle is better, we’ll go to Fontaine-de-Vaucluse. And... if you still want, I’ll show you that damned carousel.”
“Really? Now?”
“Your little friend Johnny is due any minute. You deal with him, and take this dog out, and then make dinner, and if I still feel like it, we’ll look at it after a whiskey.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
1944
PARIS
Fabrice
A blue scarf hung in the window of Dr. Duhamel’s office.
Fabrice spotted it at the last moment and ducked into the entrance of the apartment building next door, pretending to search the buttons for a name, as though he were visiting a friend.
His heart hammered in his chest. This was like being searched on the train, but worse. Fabrice had come to think of the doctor’s office as not so much his sanctuary as his escape from the boredom and grueling sameness of living under Nazi occupation: It was the source of glamour and intrigue and romance.
Slowly, very carefully, trying to regulate his breathing, he peeked out from the doorway. He prayed that he’d gotten it wrong, that perhaps his eyes were fooled by a trick of the golden evening light glinting off the window.
He was not wrong. The maid Carine had hung her blue scarf in the window. It was the prearranged signal of a mousetrap. The Gestapo would descend upon the headquarters of a cell, then remain within, quietly waiting for others to appear: couriers, messengers, anyone related in any way to the others in the cell.
What now? The instructions were clear: If you saw the signal, you were to melt back into the non-shadow world. And wait.
But he had to find Paulette.
He ran to Claude Frenet’s home. They had grown closer through their shared goals, but nonetheless they remained more colleagues than friends. Still, for want of someone else to share with, Fabrice had confided in Claude his love for Paulette.
Claude’s mother tearfully informed Fabrice that Claude had disappeared; she hadn’t seen or heard from him since the night before. Now Fabrice was pierced by another fear: Would Claude betray Paulette? And the rest of them? Had he already? For all Fabrice knew, Claude might have been an infiltrator all along; he might have been the one to turn the cell in, to reveal the work of the doctor and his wife.
And Paulette? Had she been taken? Fabrice didn’t even know her last name. The reality chafed him, the fear stabbed. He should have insisted, should have forced her to tell him. He should have foreseen the possibility of something like this.
Frantic, Fabrice searched Paris for her: from cafés to bookstores to the neighborhood he had followed her to once, where he thought she lived, near the Moulin Rouge. Nazis flirting with Parisian women outside the nightclubs made him sick, but he smiled and waggled his eyebrows at them to avoid suspicion. People said the prostitutes were guilty ofcollaboration horizontale, essentially collaborating on their backs. But what choice did they have? Fabrice was doubly disgusted by the bankers and businesspeople becoming wealthy under the German occupation. And the ones who moved, cowlike and docile, into the new Nazi reality.
Fabrice spotted a red beret on short, honey-colored hair. In a spasm of relief he grabbed the woman’s arm and spun her around, but it was not Paulette.
The German officer with her berated him, but Fabrice hardly registered the words. He wandered off and headed to the only other possible rendezvous point he could think of: the printshop.
• • •
The shop had been ransacked, the door left ajar, the precious machinery destroyed. Fabrice stood in front of the broken printing press, defeated, then heard a footstep behind him.
He turned to find Claude pointing a gun at him.
“You?”Fabrice demanded. “You’re the traitor?”
“No,”Claude insisted, shaking his head vehemently. “It wasn’t me. I barely escaped with my life. I can’t go home, I—”
