Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(83)

‘Of course!’

The pilot glanced at me.

It’s hard to describe what I looked like. I’m not even sure what I looked like; I covered up the mirror in my room when I got there, and that had been three weeks earlier. No doubt starved; no doubt exhausted, because I still had a lot of trouble sleeping. Probably haunted. My hair was only a little longer than the pilot’s crew cut.

‘I wanted to fly under it, but the plane wasn’t really small enough,’ I said.

The pilot laughed, and asked me in his casual drawl, ‘Ever flown a C-47?’

‘Gosh, no, just light twin engines!’

‘Well, you better give it a try then,’ he said. ‘I reckon if you’re smart enough not to fly under the Eiffel Tower in an Oxford, you won’t risk it in this baby either.’

That is how I got to buzz the Eiffel Tower for the second time in the biggest plane I’ve ever flown.

We had to take the Metro back. I slept on my feet, lulled by the rhythm of the train and clinging to a strap hanging from the ceiling. I was used to dozing standing up, a skill acquired during interminable Ravensbrück roll calls.

It was dark by the time we got back to the Place Vend?me, Arcturus blazing above us. But now Paris too was blazing, lights everywhere, yellow light gleaming in open windows and strings of Christmas lights in balconies and in the trees. It was spring and the war was officially over. Maddie pulled me, half awake, into the glittering, leafy night of the Ritz’s private inner courtyard and found a single chair for us to share.

We held hands. I knew she was thinking about her best friend, who was killed in France a little over a year ago. But it was nice to be there with Maddie – this half-stranger who knew me so well, who didn’t have to be told anything about me.

She said suddenly, ‘Julie would have died there. I read what you wrote. She’d never have made it. She’d have died there.’

She squeezed my hand. ‘But you didn’t.’

Within five minutes a young American civilian presented us with a bottle of champagne. I nearly fell off the chair with shock. It was Bob Ernst, the man who’d driven me to Paris last month.

‘Nice to see you again, Rose Justice,’ Bob said, grinning from ear to ear and holding out his hand. He shook hands with me warmly. ‘Who’s your friend?’

I gulped, and remembered how to be polite. ‘This is Maddie Beaufort-Stuart. She flew with me in the ATA.’

‘You’re a pilot too, Maddie!’ he exclaimed. ‘Never met a flygirl in my whole life, and Rosie knows ’em all.’ He poured and handed out glasses.

‘Victory!’

‘Victory!’

I took a sip – the first sip was awful. The contrast with the months of turnip soup was so extreme, and the last time I had champagne was on a date with the boy who’d got married to someone else while I was in prison – I’d only found this out a couple of days ago. With the first sip my anger at that thoughtless betrayal hit me again like a kick in the ribs, and I made a face like I’d never drunk champagne in my life.

Bob laughed. ‘It’s the idea of the thing.’ He didn’t have a chair. The place was packed. He squatted down next to us.

‘What are you doing here?’ I asked. Bob had picked me up at a refugee centre in Belgium, with Irina Korsakova and Ró?a Czajkowska, the prisoners who had escaped with me.

‘Looking for you, Rose,’ he said seriously. ‘I’ve been looking for you ever since I waved goodbye to you at the Embassy. I thought I’d never forgive myself for not making sure you were safe.’

I put my glass down on the crowded table we were sharing with about a dozen other people. I stared at Bob.

‘Looking for me?’

‘I knew you were here at the Ritz, and you hadn’t checked out,’ he said. ‘They wouldn’t tell me what room you were in – fair enough – and I would have felt pretty underhanded watching the lobby to catch you going in and out. So I thought I’d sit in the bar in the evening, and maybe you’d come down one night. As long as you were still checked in, you might come down. So I waited. And you did.’

I didn’t say anything at first. Finally I asked the only thing that mattered. ‘Did you look for my friends?’

Because that was what I was most upset about: losing Irina and Ró?a. It was mostly my own fault. But a little part of me blamed it on Bob, for taking me away from them without me realising they weren’t travelling with us in the back of our convoy.

‘I did look for your friends,’ he said. ‘I managed to get the unit details of the Red Cross folks we camped with. One of the wounded GIs remembered it. But I don’t know where they are now. Probably still on their way back to Sweden – I think it’ll take them a while because they were stopping along the way to set up field clinics, like the one we camped with. They’re off the US Army’s beat, that’s for sure. I tried contacting their HQ in Stockholm, but I always get blindsided by the girl on the switchboard. And I don’t know your friends’ last names, or how to spell their first names – how are they going to find Russian Irene and Polish Rosie among tens of thousands of refugees they’re relocating? When things settle down we might have better luck. It’s been making me crazy. They can’t just disappear.’

We had their unit details.