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THREE YEARS LATER – PARIS, 1990
When the wind changes and you are standing on the corner of Rue Cardinet and Lumercier, the scent of cooking stops passers-by in their tracks: rich cream and port and roast chicken. Whispers swell of how well the new restaurant is doing, and about the woman who once owned it during the Occupation.
There was a group of people standing outside, speaking about it, just as Gilbert made his way onto the street. He caught snatches of their conversation and shook his head.
‘They say she single-handedly took down a whole group of Nazis.’
‘Sacrificed herself to a firing squad, so I heard.’
‘Infiltrated Hitler’s private circle – and it was poison that finished him off in his bunker…’
This last was new, and was, of course, ridiculous. The rumours had begun to grow again, but they were different now. This time they didn’t anger him.
He made his way to the clean window; the glass was clear now. The words that been scratched into the glass – collaborator and murderer – were long gone. He went inside to savour the smell of fresh paint mixed with the mouth-watering aroma of roast chicken.
In the kitchen, he could hear Antoine humming.
He’d brought the champagne from ’68 that he’d been saving for the day he sold the ugly American first edition of Lolita,which he finally had, but that wasn’t what he wanted to celebrate – it was this.
He saw Sabine at the back, dusting a row of framed photographs, her hair in her customary top knot. As he neared, she turned to him and smiled, and he saw the now familiar subjects in the pictures – the ordinary men and women who had helped to sabotage the efforts of the Nazis. One stood in pride of place, with a framed article about the restaurant that they now were in – Marianne Blanchet – along with other photos of her and of Henri and Gilbert that they had managed to find when they decided to re-open the restaurant to cook her grandmother’s recipes.
As Sabine came forward to embrace him, he caught a glimpse of the restaurant’s new sign reflected in the glass of the frame.
Even backwards he could make it out.
It brought a lump to his throat. But this time it was because of pride.
Café de Resistance.
