Eighteen

Elaine

The Citro?n sluiced through an onslaught of rain with Elaine tensely sitting on the hard leather rear seat with the officer and the young Nazi in the front. They spoke in German, which she could not understand, but she did recognize a single word that made her blood go cold: Montluc.

By some miracle, she managed to maintain a calm demeanor. Beneath the surface, however, she was a torrent of fear, worry, and doubt. If the Germans found the stack of newspapers under the filthy box, if those who were arrested gave away a name, if her identity card was spotted as a fake—she might never leave.

Upon her own inspection, the identification appeared to be an exact replica of the ones that were officially issued. But it had never been subjected to scrutiny before. Would the integrity of it hold up?

The car came to a stop, and she was yanked from the back seat into the deluge. Rain whipped at her from all directions, slashing into her eyes and leaving her momentarily blinded. The officer shoved her toward a small building, barking orders she didn't understand. Her handbag was snatched away, her identity card ripped out for examination. Thankfully her basket with its damning false bottom lay behind on the street where she had dropped it upon her arrest.

Even as she was whisked in the confusing whirlwind, some part of her mind remained calm enough to offer pithy protests declaring her innocence, claiming to be a mere housewife visiting a friend. Even when no one bothered to acknowledge she had spoken, she continued her objections.

They set aside her identity card with disinterest, and she breathed a discreet sigh of relief. She was shoved once more, urged through another door, out into the driving rain. A sound, like the opening note of a siren, blared from all around her with such suddenness, she flinched.

In that moment when she froze, wet and chilled and more frightened than she cared to admit, they grabbed the shoulders of her coat and half dragged her to a larger building, stopping in a small antechamber.

Her dress clung wetly to her legs, and her shoes had doubled in weight. An icy current ran through the high-walled room and left her skin needling with goose bumps. The officer passed her to a guard without any emotion, as if she were little more than a parcel being delivered.

The guard led her to a hallway filled with numerous doors on either side.

"I am innocent," she stammered.

The man ignored her pleas, continuing to push her onward with a force that made her stagger.

"Please, I—"

A smell hit her like a physical blow—unwashed bodies and the musty sweet odor of sickness. The fetid air crawled with low-toned conversations that vibrated in the echoing halls and buzzed in Elaine's brain.

A deep tremble settled in her bones, cold and fear clashing together until neither was discernible from the other.

"I am simply a housewife," she said in a voice that lacked any strength.

The guard hauled her up a flight of stairs, their footsteps reverberating from the hard walls. A cutout in the floor ran the length of the rows of doors, reflecting the level below and the one above—mirror images of one another. He led her down the aisle to a door on the right and wrenched it open.

Two frightened faces stared at her from within. Before Elaine could even register the color of their hair and eyes, she was shoved through the gaping doorway. The door slammed shut behind her with a bang that rang out through the pit of hell she had been manhandled into. A light from overhead illuminated the space, casting a sickly yellow pallor that revealed a small square of a room with a narrow window at the back and a metal flap at the bottom of the front wall beside the door.

The two strangers eyed her with apathetic curiosity.

"Why were you arrested?" the taller of the two inquired, her red hair as dull as the flatness of her hazel eyes.

Elaine folded her arms over her chest to allay the chattering shiver racking her body as her brain scrambled to process what had occurred in the last several minutes. Was this how it had been for Joseph?

Had he been as confused, as frightened, and overwhelmed by it all as she?

"They think I am with the Resistance," she said at last through her clenched teeth.

"Are you not?" asked the other. She was brunette with sunken eyes and cheekbones that jutted over the hollows of her face, giving her a skull-like appearance in the weak light.

"No, I am not." This time Elaine spoke without hesitation. She owed these women no explanation, no truth. For all she knew, they were collaborators, placed in the cell to ferret out Resistance members.

She studied the skeletal visage whose blue eyes were wide and luminous against her gaunt features. It had likely been some time since she had consumed a decent meal.

Even those with the Resistance might sell secrets for a bit of food in a place such as this.

No, Elaine could not put herself in a position where anyone could disprove her story. It was far too great a risk.

"Are you a collaborator?" The redhead's eyes blazed.

"Collette, that is enough," the skinny brunette said to the other. "Would she be here if she was?"

"I'm a housewife," Elaine began.

The skinny woman's brittle smile cut her feeble explanation short. "We all are."

A small door at the bottom of the cell opened and a tray was roughly propelled inside, almost sloshing the watery soup over the rim of the single bowl. The bit of moldy bread rolled from the thin metal side and fell onto the floor.

It was hardly enough food for one person, let alone three women. The two eyed Elaine, but she shook her head. They clearly needed it more than she. Their hands trembled as they ate, snatching the meal back and forth rather than passing it to one another. The greedy gulps were followed by the sweep of their tongues over the bowl to lap up anything remaining. The scene was reminiscent of starving animals more so than humans.

This was what the Nazis had reduced them to, starved to the point of primitive, bestial behavior. Was this what Joseph had become?

The ache of pain simmered into rage at everything the Nazis had stolen from them. Lives, careers, loves, humanity. The French had lost everything under their brutal occupation. Elaine had lost everything too.

Not long after the foul meal, the lights clicked out, smothering them in darkness.

"It is time to sleep, housewife," the brunette said, the malice gone from her voice.

Perhaps the refusal of their scant food garnered Elaine some favor with them after all.

"Where?" Elaine whispered.

There were no beds in the concrete cell that was barely large enough to fit if one laid out completely straight. In order to rest on the ground, the three of them lay side by side, their bodies nesting together with their knees bent.

"This is a luxury compared to what the men have, housewife," Collette said in a quiet voice. "They sometimes have nine men to a cell like this one."

Elaine's thoughts reeled to imagine how nine men could even stand in a room this size, let alone lie down. "How do they sleep?"

"In shifts."

The warmth of the body behind Elaine ebbed the chill, and the jacket she was thankfully left with offered some cushion for her protruding hip bones against the unforgiving floor. But she still found no rest.

It wasn't the gnaw of hunger at her empty belly, the unnerving tickle of bugs creeping over her skin or even the incessant blaring alarm that kept her eyes from falling closed. It was the need to witness what Joseph had lived through in his time at Montluc.

Through experiencing the desolate despair in person, haunted by the sobs that echoed ominously through the open area, Elaine connected with Joseph in the only way she could. Suddenly she was grateful for those previous nights she went to bed hungry so she could save him an extra crust of bread or a cooked rutabaga or even an egg. If her gifts had ever made their way to him at Montluc.

She had to think they had. To consider otherwise was too dark a consideration and filled her with such despair, she could hardly draw breath around the squeeze of pain in her chest.

The morning did not come quickly.

At last a sharp rap of a truncheon on the metal door sent a clang reverberating through the small space and snapped Elaine from sleep.

Bleary-eyed with exhaustion and rumpled in clothes still damp from the storm, she was forced from the cell with the other two women for morning ablutions. A large sink ran along the back wall of the prison, like a trough where livestock might be fed. It was there they received a splash of water so cold it took their breath and so short-lived, they all had water dripping from their chins. Several of the more seasoned inmates walked away with dirty faces, and cupped hands filled with water that they tipped into their eager mouths to slake their thirst.

Watching them made Elaine's parched throat burn and had her licking at the droplets lingering on her own lips.

Her two cellmates did not try to speak with her further, and she did not bother to strike up conversation. It was best not to know anyone as even acquaintances could leave one vulnerable.

An indiscernible amount of time later, the door swung open again to reveal a guard as miserable to be minding them as the prisoners were to be there. "Elaine Rousseau," he barked. "Come."

The other two women cast their gazes downward to avoid any unintentional association. Elaine didn't blame them. She had been guilty of a similar act when she met them.

Her blood prickled as she recalled Etienne's exclamation of how people sent without baggage were to be killed and the ones with baggage were relocated to a work camp. Like Joseph had been.

But really, none of them had luggage of any type. It was merely a code for living or dying.

That bone-deep tremble began again, the one that shook the core of her soul and made her grit her teeth to endure the rush of anxious energy.

"Where are you taking me?" she demanded with more bravado than she could physically muster.

The guard mutely led her outside where the rain still dripped from the thick gray clouds overhead. Her feet felt clumsy, her knees weak. The unknown stretching before her weighed with a maddening pressure that left a silent scream knotting in her chest.

Elaine was placed in the Citro?n once more with another prisoner, a man whose face was mottled with bruising. His dark hair fell over his brow as his head lolled forward, and a sour, unwashed smell adulterated the enclosed space. It was then she noticed a wound on the end of his finger, angry and raw where a nail might have been. He shifted his hand, and she realized every digit appeared thus, each nail savagely removed.

Bile burned up her throat, but she swallowed it down. In its place remained something strange and metallic she had never tasted before, and yet could somehow innately recognize: terror.

She did not know how much time passed as they drove, the once familiar sights of Lyon now blurring into a dizzying rush. But she knew the building as they turned onto Avenue Berthelot—école de Santé Militaire—formerly used as a medical school for the military and reclaimed as the Gestapo headquarters.

Using every drop of strength within her, she kept her gaze from creeping toward the man's missing fingernails. Such a fate might soon be hers.

She had seen accounts in the newspaper of how the Gestapo extracted secrets from people, their cruelty unimaginable.

This was the exact path Joseph had been down, yanked into the dark unknown, led on a tether of fear and uncertainty.

Would she be strong enough to endure torture? Would she be the vital thread that snapped and sent all her fellow Resistants to a similar fate? She'd once tried to imagine what torture might feel like, but even then, she had not accounted for the poignancy of her own panic.

In her imagination, she kept her head lifted and back straight. But her knees were too weak and her stomach too bunched with dread.

She was led up the stairs with the man and made to wait in a hall alongside several other prisoners. They were all silent, heads bowed, bodies revealing various signs of trauma. Behind the closed doors came noises that filled in the gaps of the unknown in ways Elaine did not want to see realized.

Crunching and cracking, splashing and gasping, screaming and sobbing. The sounds of nightmares. Those involuntary cries wrenched from the victims were by far the worst—primal and raw and utterly helpless.

Would she be strong enough?

Elaine closed her eyes and willed her strength into place, like a wall being assembled brick by brick. But before the mortar of her newly constructed fortification could dry, her name was called once more.

She rose on legs that wobbled. However, she managed to stiffen her back with the consideration of all those who would suffer if she spoke. Jean with his ready smile, Antoine whose sage wisdom always came when needed, Marcel whose wife was due to deliver their new baby any day now. But not only them—Josette and Nicole. And Manon, Sarah and little Noah.

Those names swelled in a power greater than any brick and mortar. They had become a family to her, one she would die to protect.

The room she was led to held the tinny odor of a butcher's shop, which was made worse by the underlying aroma of urine and sweat. A man in a crisp Gestapo uniform waited for her, a silver medal with an iron cross glinting from his breast. There was an iciness to his gray eyes, which she knew immediately from accounts she had read.

Werner.

A light-headedness swept over her, and for a horrifying moment, she sensed she might faint.

"Sit." He nodded to a single wooden chair placed in the middle of the room. Moisture darkened the seat and the floor around it. Still, she sank slowly onto the hard surface and tried not to think of what the liquid dampening her clothes might be.

Joseph had likely been in this very room at one point, facing this very man.

He had been strong enough. She would be too.

Werner closed the door and approached his desk with a maddeningly casual air as he lifted a file. "Elaine Rousseau. That is you, yes?" he asked in French.

Elaine nodded. "Though I do not understand why I am being held."

"You were seen leaving a building known to be associated with the Resistance." His gaze was cold and lacking any empathy as he set the file down. "You were told this already."

He strode toward her with slow, deliberate steps that made her pulse throb faster.

"But I am not part of the Resist—"

His hand flew across her face, smacking her with enough force to jerk her head to the side. The coppery saltiness of blood tainted her mouth, and her mind swam for a moment to catch up with what had just happened.

She blinked against the disorienting pain.

"Do not lie to me," Werner said. "Who were you visiting?"

"Lisette Garnier." The name was one she pulled from the air, one not associated to anyone she knew. She prayed there was truly no one in all of France by that name.

Werner lifted the file once more and scanned the contents. "She is not on the list of those who lived there."

"She stayed with her aunt, a woman I never met." Elaine fabricated the lie with a smoothness that surprised even her. "I do not recall her name."

"Try harder." Something glinted in his predatory stare that sent chills crawling over her skin.

Nicole's advice rushed forefront to Elaine's thoughts, to use the masculine assumption of women against them.

"I am just a housewife." She let her eyes widen so he could see the depth of her fear. "Lisette and I were in lycée together. She had been ill several months back, and I wanted to ensure she was recovered."

He narrowed his eyes. "Are you with the Resistance?"

"I would never," Elaine gasped in feigned offense.

At this, he remained silent for a while, as if deliberating over everything she had said. He glanced down to the silver iron cross on his chest and rubbed at a dull spot with his fingertip until it shone. "I think you are lying."

He untied a leather bundle on his desk and unrolled it to reveal a series of glinting metal objects. Her imagination staggered in wonder at each of their purposes, and she could not stop the image of the man she sat beside on the ride over. The way his fingernails were little more than open wounds.

The light-headed sensation returned.

"I can tell you how to wash without soap," she said abruptly. "How to collect enough breadcrumbs to make a proper meal that will fill you, or how to ensure your white clothes always remain so, or even how to preserve green beans to last into the next year."

"That is not the information I want."

"But that is all I can tell you," Elaine pleaded. "I know how to run a house, that is all."

A knock sounded at the door, urgent and insistent.

Werner flicked an irritated glare toward the interruption before saying something in German. The door opened and a young man entered, his cheeks flushed.

Elaine could not understand their conversation, but she did not mistake the look of regret that crossed Werner's face as he regarded her. He stalked toward her, his expression hard with malice. "Leave."

The word was so startling, she almost froze. Except she was not so foolish as to squander the opportunity. She leaped from the chair, practically tripping in her haste, and followed the other man. Downstairs, he led her to the entryway where a woman waited in a familiar navy skirt.

Nicole turned as they approached, her red lips parting in a smile. "Elaine," she cried. "I was so worried about you when you did not come for dinner." She turned her attention to the Nazi and batted her long, sable lashes. "Merci, monsieur. You are my personal hero."

"It was my pleasure, mademoiselle." The man gave her a sloppy, besotted grin.

"Let us get you home, ma chérie." Nicole threaded her arm through Elaine's and pulled her close where she whispered, "You may lean on me if you need to."

"I would not give them the satisfaction," Elaine replied.

They walked toward the door together. Even as they neared the exit to freedom, the action seemed surreal.

Could it have been so easy to escape? Would they be stopped and sent back, another nasty jest by the Nazis? They were, after all, known for such cruel tricks.

But no one curtailed them as they made their way through the doors. A shadow lingered by a window upstairs, watching them as they departed. Despite the involuntary ripple of unease, no one called to them. They continued in silence for several minutes, threading their way down the street before Nicole turned into a building and led Elaine into a safe house. It was one Elaine had stayed at in her early days with the Resistance, an abandoned home with no tenant.

No sooner had the door been locked safely behind them than all the strength bled from her body, draining away with the fear that had held her captive for the last night and day. She sagged into the chair's sturdy frame, her skirt still cold and damp.

Nicole busied herself in the kitchen, moving about with a comfort that spoke of familiarity.

"You should not have come for me," Elaine said when she had gathered herself enough to speak again.

"That is a terrible way to say thank you." Nicole filled a kettle with water and put it on the stove.

"Thank you," Elaine said from the very depths of her soul. "Thank you for risking yourself to save me."

"Thank you for sticking with the story of being a mere housewife," Nicole responded. "Had you not, we both would be in Werner's office now." She sat down across from Elaine and, with gentle fingers, turned Elaine's face to the side. "If you play to what they expect of you and apply a little flirtation, you can get nearly anything you want."

"I think I forgot the flirtation," Elaine murmured.

Nicole gave a soft laugh through the tears shimmering in her pale blue eyes. Elaine tried to join her, but the movement at her tender cheek made her wince.

With a tsk, Nicole handed Elaine a cold cloth and draped a clean dress over the chair. "Put this to your face to keep down the swelling. I can help you change when you are ready, if you need me to." Nicole drew in a soft breath. "Did they do anything else to you?"

The memory of those tools in the leather case rushed back to Elaine. She had been saved from such a fate, but Joseph likely had not. Tears swam hot in her eyes.

"What did they do to you?" Nicole demanded, her expression hardening.

Elaine shook her head. "Nothing like they did to Joseph."

Nicole's face softened and she pulled Elaine to her. "I know, ma chérie. I know."

Elaine melted into the comfort of Nicole's arms and, in the genuine affection of that embrace, allowed the torrent of her powerful emotions to spill over. When she had no more tears left to cry, she asked after the newspapers she had dropped off moments before her arrest. By a miracle, they had been salvaged, each delivered to the appropriate location without issue.

Which was why they had not been mentioned by the Gestapo. Elaine would never begrudge a filthy receptacle again.

They remained in the safe house through the next day before relocating to another and then another to ensure they were not being followed. In that time, Elaine continued to listen to Radio Londres, trying to make sense of the messages, unable to keep from wondering if any one might pertain to Sarah and Noah.

Almost a week later, she finally returned to the warehouse with Nicole at her side. It was strange how something that once felt so cold and utilitarian had somehow become home. She missed the room where her bedroll and box of clothes remained, as well as the small kitchen and the constant hum and bang of the automatic press. Antoine, Jean, and Marcel rushed to embrace her, the familiar velvety smell of ink on all of them, and she was grateful to be returned to her Resistance family.

"Have you heard news from Radio Londres?" Elaine queried as soon as the frenzy of welcome wishes died down.

While in those arduous days of waiting, thoughts of Sarah and Noah buzzed in her brain, the only reprieve she had from her tortuous imagination of Joseph and what he likely endured at the hands of Werner.

Antoine's eyes slid toward Marcel.

"I did," Marcel replied.

Elaine pulled in a breath. "And?"

He nodded slowly with quiet approval. "You did it, Elaine. They will be coordinating a pickup with the Maquis."

The victory of her impossible task surged through her. In that moment, she was grateful she had defied Marcel. It appeared he was glad as well; the buoyancy of his exuberance stripped away the years and stress on his features.

Nicole gave a whoop of excitement and beamed at Elaine.

"They're going to America?" Elaine asked.

"That we do not know," Antoine interjected.

"But you still are helping them escape France." Jean's eyes crinkled at the corners. "At the very least they will presumably be in England where they can be safe."

Safe.

Was such a thing even possible? In the days of slinking through shadows and hiding explosives and arranging words for a powerful impact, the notion of safety felt as elusive as a full stomach.

"And now that you are back," Marcel said, reverting to his businesslike demeanor, "we have much work to do." He lifted the stack of newsprint he had recently gathered and strode across the room as Antoine returned to his desk with a wink.

Jean's gaze lingered on Nicole with an endearing bashfulness before he slipped away to the Linotype machine. As she turned to stroll away, Elaine caught her friend's hand. "He's in love with you, Nicole." She spoke softly to avoid embarrassing Jean.

Nicole's pleasant expression went blank as she considered the man. For a breath of a second, a wistful look crossed her face.

They would be a handsome couple—young and full of joie de vivre. A spark between them might be just the thing to dim the brilliance of danger and desolation.

But before Elaine could anticipate Nicole offering favorable encouragement, her friend's demeanor frosted over, blue eyes going cold as a winter sky. "There is no room for love in this war."

The fierceness on her face was one Elaine had only glimpsed before, one of stark hate, of determination to make the Germans pay for what they had done to France, to Nicole's family.

It was gone as soon as it had come, melting effortlessly into a brilliant smile Elaine now understood was little more than a mask. "Au revoir, ma chérie. Be safe."

Elaine embraced her. "And you as well."

Nicole flicked away the wishes for safety with a wave of her hand and click-clacked from the room, leaving Elaine to ponder over what she had said.

There was no room for love in this war.

And she was not wrong.