Page 28 of The Librarian Spy

Her husband weighed on her thoughts constantly now—the worry at how much longer he would be kept at Montluc, the anticipation of seeing him once more. Even as she climbed into the pillowy bed that night and folded the thick blanket over herself, she begrudged her own warm safety as she imagined what he must be enduring.

Denise claimed Elaine didn’t have the training to manage a way to liberate Joseph. Unfortunately, she was not wrong, but surely Etienne would. Once Elaine had finished whatever task awaited her the next day, she would reach out to demand he do anything necessary to expedite Joseph’s freedom. And she would be there to help.

SEVEN

Ava

The PVDE did not come for Ava, but nor did her neighbor return after his arrest. The next day stretched into one week and then another and then another still. Unfortunately, no movement ever came from the apartment across the hall.

Light caressed her shutters, squeezing in through the cracks to inform her of the coming of dawn. Before she even so much as dressed, she crept to her front door and glanced out the peephole as she did every morning and strained to listen.

Yet again, no sound came from her neighbor’s apartment.

There was an aching need in her to ask after him. However, the fear of having her folly laid bare, especially to the likes of Mr. Sims, made her hold her tongue. Her boss’s foul disposition had not brightened in the past weeks of their acquaintance despite her finally realizing what necessary publications were being sought after by their department to aid the war effort.

The stillness of her apartment was maddening and worried at a thread of guilt she could not cut away. For the first time since having read Crime and Punishment, she now had a modicum of understanding how Raskolnikov’s fugue state could stem from the burden of his misdeeds, chipping away at the back of his logical mind until he was desperate to tell someone.

Anyone.

Even the likes of James.

Ava straightened away from where she leaned over the peephole. James hadn’t been about since that first day, and she longed to inquire as to any suggestions he might offer in unearthing her neighbor’s whereabouts. And just how culpable she was in his disappearance. However, now that she actually wanted to see James, he was nowhere to be found.

With a resigned sigh, she backed away from the door and readied herself for the day. In her time in Lisbon, she had fallen into something of a routine with her morning list of tasks and set out into the city with a messenger bag slung over her shoulder for her literary haul. The PVDE’s curiosity in her faded several days after her neighbor’s disappearance, having finally lost interest in her boring habits, and she did not mourn the absence of her unwanted entourage.

She approached the kiosk near her apartment first and waved at the young man behind the counter. “Bom Dia, Alfonso.”

The newsstand owner grinned at her and asked how she was doing in Portuguese. It was with him she practiced her fledgling grasp of this new language. Her answers still came out slowly and with great concentration as happened with a new tongue, but experience taught her that once those new words began to seep into her thoughts, fluency would soon follow.

Not only did Alfonso let her cut her teeth on her rough Portuguese with him, he also saved the best papers for her. Like many in Lisbon, his memory ran far back to the Great War when Portugal had not been neutral, and the Germans were their enemy. A Royal Air Force pin glinted beneath the lapel of his jacket when he leaned forward, a show of support for the Allies that many wore, though not all had to hide it from their patrons as he did.

There was always a multinational crowd waiting for Alfonso to pull up his shutters, not only to grab the newsprints of their enemies, but also to sweep away any reading material they did not want their adversaries to see.

Once there was a lull in his customers, Alfonso pulled a stack of papers from beneath his register. She accepted the pile and hastily pushed them into her messenger bag, but not before catching sight of the newest edition of Das Reich stating “The Most Dangerous Enemy” in a headline across the top with a picture of Jews peacefully holding up a Star of David and what appeared to be the list of commandments. Disgust for the Nazis curdled in her stomach.

“Obrigada, Alfonso.” She passed over a wad of escudos, carefully precounted and folded neatly in half.

He put two fingers to his right eyebrow and offered her a mock salute as she strolled toward Rossio Square. As she walked, she jostled her messenger bag in an attempt to wriggle the pile in better. The thing was an inch too small, and nothing ever seemed to fit in correctly.

The owner of a kiosk beside the ever-popular Nicola’s café was a curmudgeon who scowled at every nationality and disposition, equal to all in his displeasure for humanity. But he had a knack for somehow procuring Der Angriff, a licentious German publication laden with anti-Semitism that ironically and sadistically claimed to be “for the oppressed against the exploiters.” Ava had stopped skimming that paper for possible war details and did not envy those whose jobs it was to scour the mendacious text for clues on Nazi war tactics.

She thanked the owner who grunted in return and strode back through the narrow doorway edged in lovely white and blue tile work that appeared to be from another century. Already café tables and chairs were pulled out into the warm sunshine where men and women lounged beneath a fine, opaque mist of cigarette smoke. Though she had only been in Lisbon for just under a month, it was easy to discern the refugees and guess what stage of their flight they were in.

The newly arrived were initially rigid, vigilant, their gazes darting this way and that. Then, caught in the pull of the waiting cyclone, they relaxed back into their seats, resigned to the interminable drag of time looming ahead of them. And then there were the agitated, lucky few whose fingers drummed with impatience, their visas in order and tickets for passage secured as they watched the calendar for the day creeping ever closer of a ship that may or may not arrive.

When she had grudgingly flown on the plane to Lisbon, she had not appreciated what a luxury it was. The prices to depart from Lisbon were so exorbitant that even some of the wealthy refugees could not afford them.

Regardless of which circle of hell they found themselves twisting through, the story of their struggles was written on every person. It was in the gauntness of their cheeks and the slender, frail appearance of their limbs. It was in how the children were too quiet, made solemn by the witness of images none should be subjected to regardless of age. It was in the clothes they wore, some too fine for the setting, others threadbare but clean, washed and worn daily without any other alternatives. And it was in the jewelry that adorned the women with ropes of necklaces dripping from their slender necks, bracelets layering their bony wrists and heavy jeweled ear bobs tugging at their lobes.

A few of those children perked up as Ava arrived, remembering her from her previous interactions with them. She pulled four books from her bag, purchased with her own money from Livraria. There was a Polish children’s story with brightly colored drawings of animals in a forest, a similar one in French and two larger texts in French and German for slightly older readers.

The gifts were received with a joy that was echoed in their mothers’ watery thankful smiles that superseded all language. Though small, Ava knew the importance of those stories. They were a friend in a foreign, lonely place, a liberation of one’s mind from the prison of circumstance, an escape from life’s most brutal blows. Losing herself in stories had gotten Ava through leaving her world behind to live with Daniel after her parents’ deaths, following Jo March’s lead with the example in Little Women of finding solace in the written word.

Her final stop was the Livraria Bertrand where she basked in the musty scent of old books that tickled the edges of her memories of the Rare Book Room. There were always treasures to unearth within the homey Portuguese shop—German manuals, a Hungarian map, a pamphlet of some kind in Japanese, all items she quickly purchased.

Once her publications were properly acquired, she leaped aboard a tram that traveled the carved grooves in the street toward the American Embassy. The lines of refugees were always there, just as Mr. Sims had mentioned, and each time, those pleading faces struck Ava anew. The only difference between her and those queued was that she had been born an American. The visa in her desk had been a right of her birth and to the refugees in Europe, it was such a glowing privilege.

The unfairness of it dug into her every time she saw them. The worst part was, there was nothing she could do to help.