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Eleven

The birds had gone silent. It took Corinne half of her walk to pinpoint what was wrong—to realize that when she cut through the park nearest her flat, there’d been no cooing pigeons flocking her, that none fluttered overhead, that the birdsong usually filling the air was absent.

It made the already quiet city eerie in a way she’d never experienced, not even in the two and a half months since the invasion.

On every new street she turned, she looked for them. The most she saw were a few carcasses in alleyways, making her stomach go tight. Making her nose and mouth burn with the memory of the choking clouds of noxious fumes when the fuel reserves had burned.

She’d already experienced Paris without its artists. Paris without its readers. Paris without its students. But Paris without its pigeons? That, more than all the others, somehow said “Paris without its freedom” to her.

A shiver overtook her despite the heat, and she checked again the address she had scrawled into her book.

She’d visited many of the regulars of the German library at their home over the years, but Josef Horowitz lived a bit further away than the others.

And had always come to the library so regularly that she’d never needed to visit him at home.

And then after his grandson arrived from Germany last year, she’d known he was spending all his spare time with the lad and hadn’t wanted to intrude.

This was the right building though, assuming she’d read the messy scrawl correctly when she’d copied it from one of the library’s record books before the government locked everything up.

She still got twitchy when she thought of the books locked away next door that she hadn’t had a chance to gather before the place had been shut down.

At this point, though, she had to think that Bauer hadn’t found them.

He surely wasn’t flipping through each and every volume.

And if he had, he wouldn’t know what it was.

Who, after all, would expect encoded instructions for espionage to be in the pages of random books?

Even so. She strode toward the front doors of the building and studied the numbers on the board within, so she knew which floor to go to.

She should have used her own books, like Oncle Georges had suggested.

Approved books. And she was, now—if the parcels were opened, those were less likely to be confiscated.

The poetic justice had been irresistible though, when they devised the plan. And she hadn’t thought Paris would fall, that France would fall so soon. She hadn’t thought those books would be a red flag to the enemy, just a rude gesture to them from afar.

There—number 42, J. Horowitz. Knowing she was in the right place made her shoulders relax. Not that he was likely back in Paris—Abraham was fairly certain he meant to keep his grandson out of occupied territory if at all possible—but she couldn’t stand having his name on her list, not checked off.

She didn’t mount the stairs quite as jauntily as she was forced to do when Liana was with her, but still she reached the fourth floor in good time. A glance at her watch told her it was still only seven, giving her two full hours before she had to be safely back inside her own building.

A brass 42 pulled her toward the right door, and she knocked, humming a bit of “Parlez-moi d’amour” that Liana had been singing earlier. She jumped when the door swung open, plastering a hand to her chest.

Josef filled the doorway, his gray hair perfectly combed, his gray eyes twinkling at her reaction. “Expecting somebody else, Corinne?”

She grinned, dropped her hand, and leaned in to kiss his cheeks. “Expecting no one, honestly. What are you doing back in Paris?”

He smiled, pressed a finger to his lips, and motioned toward a closed door as he ushered her in. “My grandson just went to bed.”

“So early?” The moment she said it, she called herself a dunce.

Was seven early for a boy of...however old his grandson was?

She’d yet to meet him, which had given her no few opportunities to complain to Josef before the invasion.

But now? “Sorry,” she whispered, eyeing the closed door.

“I won’t stay long. I’m only checking on everyone I can. ”

“No, please. Come in, sit.” He motioned for her to put her things on the entryway table. “We’ve had a long few days.” He sounded weary enough to want to be in bed himself. “We just got home last night—and dodging the checkpoints was quite an adventure, I might add.”

She squeezed his elbow and followed him to the sofa.

“You shouldn’t have returned.” It was true that he wasn’t Jewish, wasn’t communist, but he was still an enemy of the Nazi Party—first because his grandfather had been Jewish, and that was enough to make a man inferior, apparently, and secondly because he’d been rather vocal in his criticisms of the Party back in Germany, and it had landed him on the banned list.

“I know but...” He glanced toward the closed door to his grandson’s bedroom and sank onto the couch beside her with a smile.

The smile he mustered looked frayed around the edges, but still he reached for her hand and gave her fingers a squeeze.

“It’s good of you to come and check on us all, but you know you shouldn’t, schatzi . ”

He’d been the first of the German exiles to start calling her his “little treasure,” like he would his own children or grandchildren.

She’d certainly not been a child when she met him seven years ago, but since he was old enough to be her father and she missed hers so, she’d accepted the endearment with a smile.

She smiled again now, hearing it from his lips after months of silence.

“It seems life is full of shouldn’t s, isn’t it?

Yet here we both are. Although...” She’d already been whispering in deference to the sleeping child, but she pitched her voice even lower and leaned in a bit.

“You need to be careful. There’s a Nazi sonderführer who has been charged with interrogating everyone associated with the library, and he’s been making house calls too, according to Abraham. ”

Panic lit, banked, sputtered. He nodded. “I should expect nothing less. But it is, I hope, all right. I managed to secure false papers, and I will be moving flats soon. I do not know how well our documents will hold up, but hopefully enough. New names, new history. Much as I hate to lie—”

“There is no shame in guarding your grandson’s life. Thus far they are only making foreign nationals register and banning them from employment, but there are whispers that soon they’ll start arresting whomever they like, for whatever they like.”

“They have been doing the same in Germany—I don’t know why they’d stop now.” He leaned into the cushion, the lines on his face so much deeper than they’d been when she’d last seen him in May.

Her every instinct said to fret. She made the effort to smile instead. “Don’t forget to change your name on the placard in the lobby, if you’re going to be going by a different name altogether. If you intend to be here more than a day, at least.”

“Ah. Yes. I’ll be getting that new flat next week, but in the meantime, I made a new name plate. I just haven’t had time—”

“I’ll change it out for you when I leave.”

He patted her hand where it rested on the cushion between them. “You’re a good girl.”

She wanted to ask where he’d gone, how he’d found someone to give him false papers, why he’d decided to risk coming back and how he’d managed the journey with a child, yet remained undiscovered.

She wanted to ask if he meant to reestablish communication with the others, if he’d intended to let her know he was back.

Before she could ask any of them, another knock sounded on the door.

Josef sighed and pushed back up to his feet. “I saw Mathilda at the grocer’s today. She said Abraham would be by later—I assumed it was him when you knocked.”

The shoulders that had gone instantly tense at the knock relaxed a degree. Even so, she was going to suggest a quicker move than next week the moment he’d let Abraham in and greetings were out of the way.

She glanced toward the bedroom door. The little one must have been exhausted indeed to be sleeping through all this knocking and not coming to investigate.

When she was a child, Maman had always teased that she had the ears of a wolf, capable of hearing even the faintest of whispers if they said anything interesting.

She’d all the time gotten out of bed to greet late-arriving guests or interject herself into a conversation that was meant to be just between her parents.

Ciel , it was a wonder they hadn’t lost their tempers with her eight times a day.

The door squeaked open again, and Josef’s sharp inhale not only brought her head back around, it brought her to her feet. “Chris?”

The name meant little to her. But the gray of the uniform, the shape of the hat had her stepping forward. It was a Nazi at the door, not—who was Chris ?

She saw in the next moment, when Christian Bauer stepped around Josef, consternation on his face.

“What are you doing back here?” He didn’t sound like a Nazi officer as he said it—he sounded like an outraged friend, his gaze locked on the older man’s face.

“You were supposed to be on your way to England. America. Anywhere but here.”

There were too many pieces coming together at once.

They knew each other, these two. Josef called the professor by a nickname. Bauer chastised him like a friend.

And with concern . The same concern she herself had felt, had expressed.

It made sense, in a way. Josef was part of the Berlin contingent. The University of Berlin contingent. It wasn’t unthinkable that he and Bauer had crossed paths, or even that they’d once been friends as well as colleagues.

But their friendship clearly wasn’t past tense. Not if Bauer had known that Josef had left Paris and was “supposed to be” bound for England or America.