The Librarian Spy(73)

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.”