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“So why would we do any differently? This little library is not a French institution, Kraus—it’s German, populated entirely by those who fled the Reich, filled exclusively with the writing that got them exiled, as well as what they’ve written since.

Do you not think we should know what that is?

Their new writings? Should we not be aware of what work they’ve done from that library?

Should we not examine how many Frenchmen have been borrowing its titles? ”

Enlightenment flashed in Kraus’s eyes. “Ah. Yes. Very wise.”

Wise. It didn’t feel wise—it felt wretched.

Wisdom was all a man like him ever hoped to achieve, but something he’d had infinite cause to question over the last decade.

Were any of his life’s decisions what one would call wise?

If so, how had he ended up here ? Wearing a uniform he despised?

Working for the very thing he hated—the suppression and destruction of knowledge?

Alone, but for a young man assigned to be his helper who could never, never know who Christian really was?

He’d always fancied himself what Voltaire had styled a “man of letters.” Now, though?

What man of letters hid behind one with a gun?

Soon enough they were back in the car, and Kraus was using a Parisian map to navigate them to Boulevard Arago. He had no trouble doing so, clearly skilled at orienteering.

At least the Hitler Youth taught something worthwhile.

Christian made an effort to regulate his breathing as they finally pulled to a halt on the empty street, in front of the building with a metal 65 on the wrought-iron gate separating it from the pavement.

Sweat trickled from temple to jaw. He swiped it away, then curled his fingers into his palm to keep from reaching for the door handle.

The men who ran the library wouldn’t be here. He was supposed to locate and question them, but it wouldn’t be as easy as strolling inside and finding them all huddled together.

Kraus opened his door, and then the gate, which was latched but not locked.

Christian stood on the pavement surveying the building for a long moment, but Kraus slid past him and moved to one of the windows, cupping a hand to peer through the glass into the darkened interior.

“I see books—but it doesn’t look like any library I’ve ever known. It’s a mess.”

Interesting. Had the directors tried to remove anything incriminating?

Christian stepped up beside Kraus and peered in too.

He nearly laughed at his own question. This didn’t look like a room that had been emptied of anything.

Rather, it looked like one trying to hold three times the number of books it could rightly fit.

They were jammed everywhere, stacked three deep on sagging shelves, horizontal as well as vertical, with boxes upon boxes besides.

If there were any system of organization, it certainly wasn’t visible from out here.

This was clearly not a building meant to be a library—just a rather small house poorly converted and not nearly large enough for its collection. “‘Mess’ is an understatement, I think.”

Kraus sent him a concerned frown. “Are you sure about this?”

In answer, Christian took a step back and motioned to the door. “Let’s see if we can get inside without going to headquarters for the keys the French government promised. I don’t suppose you know how to pick locks?”

The young man shrugged and moved to the door.

“I’ve had to open a few on the farm when we couldn’t find the keys.

Although those weren’t very sophisticated.

” He tested the knob, and his eyebrows leapt upward.

Sending his startled gaze to Christian, he demonstrated its cause by pushing the door open.

Christian frowned. “How very odd. I wonder...” Was it possible? Were some of the men who ran this library still here? Blast, but he hoped not. Detaining and questioning the authors was not what he wanted to do on his first afternoon in Paris.

He rushed through the door, ignoring Kraus’s objection. “Wait! Sir, you’re supposed to let me go first so I can make sure there’s no threat.”

Christian snorted and reached for a light switch. As the golden glow came up, it showcased the true understatement of Kraus’s choice of words outside.

This was no mere mess . This was complete chaos. He couldn’t decide if it made him want to weep or rub his hands together in glee.

Chaos meant days, weeks, months of bringing order—a process that sounded like absolute heaven just now. Because it was something he knew how to do. “I think,” he said, “the only threat here is of those shelves giving way and toppling.”

Even so, the unlocked door was curious. “Bonjour?” he called out, careful to keep any German accent from his French. “Il y a quelqu’un?”

He didn’t honestly expect an answer to his question of whether anyone was there, and he was relieved not to get one.

All was silent in the building. Kraus relaxed behind him, and Christian blew out a breath as he looked around.

“They must have simply forgotten to lock up in their haste to evacuate.”

“You...just need me to guard the door while you’re working, right? You don’t expect me to...” Kraus waved an illustrative hand at the stacks and piles.

A chuckle warmed Christian’s throat. “Books not your favorite things?”

Rather than answer directly, Kraus moved to the circulation desk piled high with them and picked one up, grimacing.

“We used to have a copy of this. I remember my father trying to defend it, to say it was a good book, full of wonderful ideas—or harmless ones, anyway. Completely overlooking that it was written by a Jew.”

The chuckle turned to a knot. It sounded very much like one of the children’s stories that had been produced in a magazine for schools— “Gift im Bücherschrank” or something of the sort.

In which the Reich-minded youth helped his father see the error of his ways and purge their home library of the “poison on the shelves.”

Kraus tossed the book toward the rubbish bin. Christian snatched it from midair, knowing his frown was back in place. “Did I not make myself clear, soldat ? We are not getting rid of these books yet. We—or I, at least—will be studying them.”

The look on Kraus’s face of pure, disgusted torture made a shiver run down his spine.

In another setting, another decade, it would have been amusing or pitiable.

Here, now, it was a warning. Because this young man may only be enlisted, but Christian had read several news articles already of “heroic” young soldiers informing on superiors who weren’t Nazi enough.

“You can’t mean to read all these books. ”

Carefully, he chanted to himself silently. Carefully. He must not only convince Kraus now to trust his future actions, he had to somehow instill confidence in his qualifications. Make Kraus believe Christian was exactly who the Ministry wanted him to be.

Sadly, he had years of practice at that.

His eyes scanned what titles he could see.

“I daresay I already have—or most of them, anyway.” At the alarmed look the young man sent him, he arched his brows.

Just a professor instructing his pupils.

That was all. “How do you think the Ministry knew which books to put on the banned list, Kraus? Why do you think they sent me to deal with them?”

His assistant relaxed. “Of course.” He moved farther into the room, flipping open covers here and there. “Did you know any of the professors who refused to help? Who condemned the book burnings? Spoke against the Reich and defended the Jews?”

“Several.” Their faces haunted him at odd moments—friends, once.

Old men who had been his mentors. Young men who had been his confidants.

Men with wives and families depending on them.

“Many were forced out of the public universities and found positions at small, private institutes. A few were arrested.” Their families had been reduced to near poverty, forced to leave their city homes and seek refuge in obscurity.

He knew of only one who continued to speak out—and he managed it only because he had friends in high places who covered his tracks for him.

And because his speaking was too far over the heads of most of the party officials supposed to keep an eye on such things for them to realize he was a dissident.

A thought that always tried to make Christian’s lips twitch into a smile.

When society deliberately cultivated ignorance, they paid the price.

Refuse to read anything that might be distasteful, and one soon lacked the ability to understand it.

Christian wondered not for the first time if it was his own friend in high places who had gotten him this position. Why else would he have been chosen, given everything?

Kraus swiped another slender book from the stacks. This time a wistful look crossed his face. “Mama used to read this one to us children—before it was banned, I mean. Before we understood the dangers of its ideas.”

Christian bit back all his thoughts on those supposed dangers. “How many siblings do you have?”

“Three. A brother and two sisters. I’m the second eldest, behind Erna.”

“Do you miss them?” He must. One didn’t just leave a house so full of family without a few pangs along the way.

But Kraus shrugged. “I intend to make them proud.” He arched a brow Christian’s way. “What of you, Professor? Did you leave a family behind in Berlin?”

“Only my books.” He reached for a copy of The Time Machine , translated into French.

He’d read a German version when he was a boy, and then in its original English as he was learning the language.

It wasn’t anything in the book that had landed it on the Reich’s forbidden list, it was simply that H. G. Wells was vocally anti-Hitler.