The Baker's Secret(12)

“Not as long as that tree wears its badge of cruelty,” she declared that afternoon to the locals gathered at Odette’s café—by which she meant the reddish-brown blot on the light gray trunk. She had come to deliver a beef reduction which had low-boiled on her home stove the entire night, a bucket of gruelish bone juice concentrated down to one jar of fat and flavor. “I don’t care who is responsible for the V.”

“It must be Monkey Boy,” Odette told her customers. “No one else can climb that high.”

“Oh yes,” Emma scoffed. “Our clever young rebel. He is the linchpin of the Resistance.”

Four days after Uncle Ezra’s execution, Emma had yet to venture back inside the bakery. Sympathetic neighbors had boarded up the front window, which the soldier’s rifle butt had shattered. They had cleaned up the glass. Otherwise the place remained untouched. The cake that soldiers had knocked from the shelf lay yet on the floor, its frosting mottled with mold. Rolls on the counter had staled into stone.

People were already making inquiries, however, not out of heartlessness but because Easter was coming and thus the need for hot cross buns—however gritty they might taste with low-quality flour and without Uncle Ezra’s trusted touch.

“Now, Emmanuelle,” Odette said, wiping a table. “Be gentle with us.”

“He is highly skilled in symbolism,” Emma continued. “For a boy who cannot write his own name.”

She strode off into the street. No one spoke for some time. At nightfall, when Odette went outside to light the torch—her café now crowded with officers from the occupying army, their booming songs and well-fed gusto, their ruddy skin and strange currency—she spied a light across the way. With the bakery’s front window boarded, Odette could not snoop. But a woman with no family bears extra concern for her neighbors. In a reconnaissance farther down the lane, through the side glass she saw Emma with a broom, sweeping flour from the floor into a trash bin, slowly as if it were a sacred act, slowly so as not to raise a cloud.



Early the following morning Emma stood at the barn table kneading loaves for the Kommandant, when she heard boot heels clack together.

She startled, whirling to see Captain Thalheim in her barn. The man who had murdered her teacher raised one boot to rest it on a chunk of wood, as if he were posing for a portrait, helmet low to conceal his eyes, his face shaved as smooth as a grape.

What means of retaliation did she possess, other than insolence? “Yes, Sergeant?”

He bristled. “I am a captain.”

He spoke her language, but clumsily and with his chest puffed out.

“Of course,” she said. “Sometimes I am as dumb as my feet. What brings you here?”

“You are the one baking for the Kommandant.”

In response, Emma raised her floury hands like a surgeon awaiting gloves.

“So possibly you might be a reasonable to help me.”

Inwardly Emma boiled with rage, but the pistol remained on Thalheim’s hip and she contained herself enough to shrug as if unconcerned. “Possibly.”

“Who owns tallest of ladder in this town?”

“I don’t know,” Emma said. “Why do you ask?”

“I do not explain my reasons.”

She turned back to the kneading board. “I have no idea . . . Sergeant.”

The captain opened his mouth to speak, then paused, weighing his options. At last he started for the door.

“Wait,” Emma drawled. “I know.”

Thalheim paused at the doorway. “Yes?”

“I should have thought of it immediately.” She dawdled, picking a clod of dough off her thumb. “Silly me.”

“Yes?” he said, tapping his foot. “Out with it, then.”

“The Monsignor must have the tallest ladder. How else would he change the lightbulbs in the nave of his church?”

“Thank you,” the captain muttered. A moment later she heard his motorcycle start with a rattle, then growl as he rode away.

Emma seized the dough and kneaded as though it had disobeyed.



If she had intended to throw suspicion on the priest, however, she did not succeed. Instead the private obtained a means of reaching the most recent V, higher in the tree, to carve it out of existence. Now the poplar bore three large squares carved in the bark, all above a splatter of brownish red. Two guards stood sentinel that night, with a light trained on the tree as though it were a prisoner who might escape.

For several days there was no change, until the Kommandant overheard two soldiers complaining about the tedious guard duty. He sought Thalheim personally, finding him in the square outside Odette’s café.

“There is work to be done,” he snarled at the captain, who hung his head like a scolded schoolboy.

“Yes, sir. But the people must also be made to respect—”

“Real work, Captain. War work.”

Nearby, Odette wiped a table indifferently. Although her mother’s family hailed from Mainz, and she had grown up in a household that spoke the occupying army’s language, she concealed her fluency. By eavesdropping she learned about troop activities, the contents of railcars, and when a senior officer might be visiting.

Odette recounted the conversation to her neighbors the next day as they lined up outside the schoolhouse for rations.