The Baker's Secret(28)

She saw a group of soldiers, half a dozen with their rifles lowered, staring at the ground and shifting their weight from foot to foot. Two were smoking to pass the time. The station was crowded with villagers, as though someone famous were due to arrive.

Then Emma spied her father, hustled into the waiting area by two more soldiers. He had a long beard, tangled and gray; his clothes were in tatters.

“Papa,” she called out, waving her arms. But he did not respond. “Marcel,” Emma cried, using his name for the first time in her life. Yet it caused him to lift his head and scan the crowd.

But Guillaume had placed himself in the way. “You should not be here,” he growled. “You are in danger, too. And you cannot help your father now.”

Somehow she squeezed past the giant veterinarian and Emma and her father saw one another across the mayhem.

“My dear girl,” he called, the soldiers pulling him toward the train. The chubby man began to weep. “My beautiful girl.”

An officer with a pencil-thin mustache came with a truncheon from behind, and clubbed him between the shoulder blades. Marcel fell to his knees, but the officer gave the soldiers a command, and they dragged him toward the train.

“You are a good man,” Guillaume called out. “A good man, Marcel.”

He turned his head as the soldiers hoisted him into a cattle car. “Emmanuelle, my love.” They slammed the sliding door shut.

“Father—” Emma rushed forward, but Guillaume caught her, pulling her away. The crowd surged toward the train as he took her arm, half carrying her down the lanes toward home.

They did not pause for more than two kilometers. When Guillaume stopped beside an orchard, Emma was panting. While she caught her breath the veterinarian checked up and down the path. He returned with a grim expression. “Do you want to know why your father was sent to a labor camp?”

“Because I inquired,” Emma said, her throat raw. “The captain warned me, but I was a fool and made him ask.”

“No,” the veterinarian said. “It’s because he was one of us. He was a member of the Resistance. A great leader.”

“Then I spit on your Resistance, and your deadly games.”

“He knew this could happen someday. Emma, your father was nothing less than heroic.”

“He was a farmer,” she snapped. “A good man, but simple. And lonely since his wife died. Did you snare him into this war business?”

Guillaume lowered his voice. “Actually, he was the one who recruited me. We could use your help now, too.”

“I am not interested.”

“Did you know that our Kommandant is considered one of the lenient ones? The policy in other places is that if one of their soldiers is killed, thirty citizens are rounded up and shot.”

“That has nothing to do with my father. And today they hit him with a club because of me.”

“There is a town south of here,” Guillaume continued, “Oradour-sur-Glane, where someone kidnapped an enemy captain. No one knows who or why, the occupying army could not find out, nor make anyone confess. So they killed everyone, Emma. Man, woman, child, all. Six hundred and forty-two of them. All.”

“I despise you.” She pushed the man’s huge chest with both hands. “You have sent my father to die.”

Emma burst away under the archway of trees, dodging through hedgerow shortcuts to reach home before anyone else could infuriate her.

Odette was there, mopping Mémé’s brow with a damp cloth. Somehow the news had managed to outrun her.

“What is your name?” the old woman murmured, pivoting back and forth on the couch as if the room contained a crowd. “What is everyone’s name?” But gradually her energy ebbed, and Mémé curled into herself, sniffling. The only other sounds were Odette dipping the cloth in a basin, and the water falling when she wrung it out.

People gathered in the courtyard, which for once was quiet because Odette had thrown a basket over Pirate. But no one dared enter the home. Guillaume found a place by the barnyard wall. DuFour narrowed his eyes at the veterinarian, who did not so much as notice, before slinking away up the lane. Eventually the Monsignor arrived, and they parted to give him a path.

He wore black vestments, with a white stole that hung from either side of his neck, and he strode slowly, as though he were leading a long procession. The priest paused outside the house, shaking holy water on the open door. “May the soul of Marcel be protected by the Almighty so that he arrives in a place of peace.”

Emma glared at him from the floor, where she sat at Mémé’s feet. “Peace? Do you actually believe they are taking him to a place of peace?”

“God understands suffering,” he answered. “Because He sacrificed His only begotten Son.”

“Are you actually saying this to me?”

“Emmanuelle, I hope you will draw close to the comfort of the Lord. There is peace through prayer.”

“Go mount yourself.”

Everyone in the room gasped. A murmur passed through the people outside as her curse gossiped outward like rings from a stone hitting a pond.

“God forgive you,” the Monsignor said, making the sign of the cross.

“Thank you, but I decline,” Emma said. “All I want now is to help our people survive.” She wiped her face, though it lacked a single tear. “All I want now is to make the occupying army die.”