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Six

“Professor Bastien,” Christian said for the third time, following the frazzled secretary as she opened yet another filing cupboard. He was beginning to wonder if perhaps he’d lost his capacity for French—but even if so, the name ought to have been recognizable.

“Doctor Bastien?” the woman asked, thumbing through files.

“I...don’t know her degree. I only know that I’m looking for Yvonne Bastien.”

“Oh, she’s on sabbatical.” The woman pulled out a file and marched back to the desk with it.

Christian barely reined in an exasperated huff.

He’d been relieved to see life at the university again, had thought to ask a few quick questions so that he could have an excuse for marking the woman off his list, but getting answers from anyone here was proving as effective as trying to herd kittens.

“I am aware of that. Do you know where she went? Or when she’s expected back? ”

“Went?” The woman blinked at him. “I only know she has no classes on the schedule for the next year. But if you want to speak to Doctor—”

“No. Thank you. Never mind.” He was already running late for his next appointment—he shouldn’t have detoured here.

Frankly, though, he dreaded his next appointment and had ever since the note had arrived that morning from one of the dozens of checkpoints around the city. Abraham Cohen has reentered Paris. He has been detained and is awaiting you.

Dread coiled in his stomach. He’d hoped that the Jewish writers, exiled to Paris seven years ago from Germany, wouldn’t return to the city when they’d had the good sense to flee.

Hadn’t Abraham Cohen a shred of common sense?

He knew that the very people who had run him from his homeland had now taken over Paris. Why would he return?

Christian strode along the pathways, dotted now with the students and faculty who had been absent upon his arrival in the city, toward the car Kraus had kept idling at the curb.

The young man leapt to open his door for him, dragging his gaze off a few pretty students who were pointedly not looking his way.

Christian slid into his seat in the back.

“Any luck?” Kraus asked as he checked for traffic and pulled into the street.

“No. Just confirming what I knew from Mademoiselle Bastien. I think I ought to assume she’s not in territory we hold and leave it at that.”

“Once you get the books back, you mean.” Kraus shot him a raised-brow look in the rearview mirror. They’d spotted Corinne entering her building the other day, and Kraus had drawn the connection between their intruder and the Bastiens. “Today’s the deadline you gave her for that, isn’t it?”

And he’d been expecting her knock on the library door every day. Well, not yesterday. She’d be at Mass, observing the Lord’s Day, not searching for missing books or expecting him to be at the library. And he wasn’t about to tell Kraus that he’d seen her Saturday evening...twice. “It is.”

“What will you do if she fails to deliver? Arrest her?”

“For a few missing books checked out to someone else?” He met Kraus’s reflected gaze in the mirror, striving for the same disdain he’d give a student angling for an extension on a paper because he wanted to take the week off for a holiday.

“You are too eager to see that young woman punished for her associations, soldat . You told me the story of convincing your father to get rid of books on the banned list—would you want to be punished for him ever having had them to begin with? Or what if you’d gone searching for those children’s books and found them gone, and your parents were not there to question?

Would you want to be arrested for that? Or would you assume the books had been got rid of already? ”

Kraus’s eyes had returned to the road, but his fingers tightened on the wheel. “It’s entirely different. Madame Bastien couldn’t have just got rid of library books.”

Christian snorted. “She could have returned them ages ago, though. You’ve seen their abysmal recordkeeping. Perhaps they aren’t in the fraulein ’s flat because they’re back in the collection already and simply not marked off. Perhaps they’d misplaced her card.”

The library used no record system like any he’d ever encountered.

Instead of a master register, they had cards for each patron, on which they listed the titles checked out and, in theory, the dates of both borrow and return.

But they were a mess, dates missing all over the place and occasionally with question marks in their place—likely because the cards had been misplaced when the books were returned.

Some people had multiple cards, though the previous ones weren’t full—again, evidence of bad filing.

Frankly, he was surprised to even find a date stamp at what passed for a circulation desk. They might as well have scratched “whenever you feel like returning it” on the due date line.

There clearly wasn’t a librarian among the directors.

Nor, it seemed, anyone who cared to learn a quick system of organization.

No, there were only writers and philosophers who deemed their time better spent on thinking and recording their thoughts than on worrying over how anyone could find a blasted thing in their library.

From the front seat came a grunt that wasn’t a granting of his point so much as a recognition of the futility of arguing with his superior.

A month in this city, in this boy’s company every day, and Christian was exhausted with watching his every step, his every word, his every thought .

He hadn’t dared let crowd his mind the things that mattered most—the memories, the prayers, the soul-deep ache for all he was missing.

If he dared, outside of the dark of his hotel room barracks, someone would find out.

Someone would know. Someone would find those precious things and destroy them, just as they’d done with everything else that mattered.

He was exhausted already—what would he be like in a year? Two? He would be forced to watch the Parisians shrink and fade, and he’d shrink and fade along with them.

His eyes slid shut for a split second. He needed a friend—just one friend in this lonely city. And though he couldn’t imagine Kraus being that person...perhaps he could be something, anyway. Something more. Quietly, he asked, “Why do you hate that girl so?”

Though he could see only the upper sliver of the young man’s head in the mirror, the tension around his eyes was enough to let Christian guess that his mouth had gone tight, his jaw clenched. Perhaps Kraus would refuse to answer.

But after a long minute of silence, he finally said, “She is the most dangerous kind of enemy, isn’t she?

Beautiful. Young. Compelling. She could lead people astray so easily.

But she is an enemy, we know that. Her presence in that place proves it.

She is a lover of contraband, raised by a woman who was one of the library’s most dedicated patrons. ”

Christian let the words hover in the warm air of the cab, let them ring in Kraus’s ears as surely as they did in his.

He considered his response carefully, weighing it out gram by gram.

“Those books were not contraband here , not until we arrived. The Bastien women were breaking no law, no rule, no guideline even by reading them. Just as you weren’t when you read the poetry of Heinrich Heine as a child.

You didn’t know the ideas or the author were undesirable, my friend, until someone taught you. ”

“Always the teacher.” Kraus laughed through the words. But then he went silent again for a beat. Two. “You think you can teach her?”

They drew to a stop at an intersection, giving Christian a chance to gesture toward one of the infinite propaganda posters tacked about the city.

“Is that not what our every effort is striving to do in France? We replace their philosophy with our own. We shout it from every radio station. We put it up on every wall, so that wherever they go, this is what they see. When their own government speaks, this is what they say—not ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,’ but ‘Work, Family, Homeland.’ Our motto, in their words.”

He hated the fervor he could put so easily into those words, from years of practice at exciting students to care, even when he’d gone numb inside.

When loss stacked upon loss, and all he’d wanted to do was stop fighting.

Stop caring. Stop breathing , because every breath hurt too much in his silent world.

Kraus eased onto the gas again, the eyes in the mirror gone thoughtful. “You really think these French people will sway to our side?”

He thought some already had, because there were always those who valued being on the winning side above sticking with whatever beliefs were convenient in times of peace.

He thought others would, because resisting took energy that would fail as the food did, as the heat did in winter.

Because anything could become normal, given enough time.

He thought some never would. That they would die before they gave up, because they believed just as he did that the true heart of a nation couldn’t be invaded, couldn’t be overthrown, couldn’t be stamped out by madness, not completely.

That as long as even a few held fast to that heart, there was hope for them all.

“I think,” he said slowly, “that the words we hear, the words we read, the words we sing along to on the radio and study in the papers with our morning coffee, become our thoughts. I think our thoughts become our beliefs. And I think our beliefs become our actions. That is why Goebbels sent us here, Kraus. Because words form the foundation of society. Ideas create culture. Control them, and you can control...everything.”

Truth, however unfortunate. And yet not, solely because it was impossible.

No one, not even Adolph Hitler, could control every word, every idea. And the more he tried, the more the world would see his madness, and the harder they would fight.