The Room on Rue Amélie(33)

The man eyed him and then, surprisingly, switched to French too. “You French are imbeciles. Don’t you know German will be your national language soon enough?”

Thomas was too startled to reply right away. It took a few seconds to register that the man hadn’t stopped him because he believed he was an RAF pilot. He believed him to be a Parisian. “Right,” Thomas finally managed to say in French. He knew his accent was lousy, but he suspected the German wouldn’t notice, since his own accent was even worse. “Excuse me.”

The man snorted. “Now, as I was asking, where are you going?”

Thomas hesitated. “To an art gallery.”

The man looked him up and down. “What sort of art gallery?”

“One that specializes in ballet-themed art.” Thomas felt foolish.

“You? A laborer? What could your business there possibly be?”

“I’ve been, um, hired to clean it and help them hang some paintings.”

“You waste your time with ballet and art in the middle of the war?” The soldier was still blocking his path. “And you call yourself a man?”

“It’s only a job. I’m hungry and out of work.”

The soldier looked him up and down again with an expression of disgust. “Well, you are heading in the wrong direction.”

Thomas didn’t say anything.

After a moment, the soldier sighed and pointed to a street two blocks behind Thomas. “La Ballerine is just there. Rue Amélie. Midway down. I’d better not catch you wandering around after curfew.”

“No, you certainly won’t.”

“Well?” The soldier still hadn’t moved. “Aren’t you going to thank me for my help?”

“Thank you,” Thomas muttered, hating himself a little for being cowed by the Nazi bastard.

“In German,” the man said with a smirk.

Thomas searched his memory and managed to spit out one of the only German words he knew. “Danke.”

The soldier looked pleased. He smiled icily and stepped aside. Thomas hurried away without looking back, a foul taste in his mouth. That had been a narrow miss.

A few minutes later, Thomas’s heart lurched in gratitude as he passed a doorway with a plaque that identified it as La Ballerine. The doors and windows were pasted over with paper, and he wondered if the place was even open, but it didn’t matter. He wasn’t going there anyhow. To the left of the shop was an apartment building with a huge red door, just as Harry had described.

Thomas swallowed hard and hurried past the building. He circled the block twice, just in case the Nazi soldier was following him. On his third loop, finally confident he hadn’t been tailed, he ducked into the shadows and, glancing around once more, pushed the red door open. He had expected that it might be locked, but luck was seemingly on his side as he tumbled into a dimly lit hallway with a broad spiral staircase leading up at least five flights. He paused and drew a deep breath. Harry had said the man with the limp lived on the first floor, but he had never specified which apartment, and now Thomas wasn’t sure what to do.

There was a discarded, rickety-looking chair in the corner near the front door, and as Thomas stood in the hall paralyzed with indecision, he suddenly realized how very exhausted he was. He hadn’t eaten in more than a day, since his carefully rationed parcel from Claude and Henriette had run out, and walking for three days straight without a safe place to rest had taken its toll. His ankle was throbbing, and he felt parched and shaky. “No, Thomas,” he said to himself sternly. “You’ve come all this way. Hold it together for a little longer, at least.” But the chair in the corner looked so inviting, and after a moment, he sank gratefully down, relieved to be off his feet, if only for a moment.

“Think, Thomas,” he murmured, fighting off the tide of sleep that was threatening to roll in. The encounter with the Nazi soldier had spiked his adrenaline, and now that his fear was receding, he felt more depleted than ever. “Think, lad. There’s got to be a way to find Harry’s man.”

He was startled, a moment later, to hear the click of an apartment door opening across from where he sat. Could it be the man with the limp? But the figure who appeared in the doorway was an ancient, tiny woman bundled in a woolly sweater over a frayed dress.

“Can I help you?” she asked in French, looking Thomas up and down suspiciously.

“Oh, no, thank you, madame,” he replied, speaking slowly and trying his best to speak French without a telltale British accent.

“Pardon?” The woman cupped a hand to her ear, and Thomas realized she was deaf or nearly so.

“I’m just waiting for a friend, madame.” He raised his voice and then immediately felt far too exposed as it echoed through the building. She still looked skeptical.

“I am the concierge,” she said. “I know everyone in this building, and none of them would have a friend in such foul clothing. Be on your way, vagrant, or I will call the authorities.”

She slammed the door, and he shook his head. He’d been more conspicuous than he’d intended, and now he would have to work quickly in case her threat to report him hadn’t been an empty one.

“Okay, then,” he said to himself. He needed to go door to door. His cover would be that he had just come in from the northern coast—which could help excuse an accent that didn’t sound quite right—and that he was desperate to find his wife’s cousin. It was the only way he could think of to explain why he didn’t know the man’s name. Yes, that was it; his wife had recently died, and the only relative he knew of was a man who lived here and walked with a limp, but he’d never met him. It seemed an odd story, he knew, but it was the best he could come up with. Why hadn’t he used his days hiking through the woods to invent a solid cover story? Instead, he had let his mind wander to happier times, before the war came, when his mother was still alive and the future was wide open. The memories had propelled him forward, but now it felt as if he’d wasted three full days.