The Room on Rue Amélie(67)

“Don’t talk like that, Charlotte,” he said softly. She loved it when he called her by her real name. He and Ruby were the only ones who did; the handful of others who knew her, including Monsieur Savatier and his wife, knew her only as Hélène.

“Lucien, I can’t help it. There’s no place in this society for people like me.”

“Well,” he said after a moment, “I have no desire to be part of a society that would turn its back on you. So that makes two of us who would find it impossible to make a home here.”

She blinked back tears. The strange thing was that she knew he was telling her the truth. Lucien was complicated, but he never lied. Not to her, anyhow. “Thank you,” she said. “But there’s no point in us talking about that now. We need to talk about how we can make things better. Ruby and I need to help.” She had abandoned calling Ruby by her code name when speaking with Lucien. Charlotte had discovered a few weeks ago that Lucien’s father had been the one to forge Ruby’s new identity papers when she started working with the line, so he’d known her name all along.

Lucien didn’t say anything. After a moment, he got up and began to pace. “Charlotte,” he said at last, “it is very dangerous. The Nazis don’t have morals. Do you know they sent the police to arrest children at an orphanage this week? Children, Charlotte, some as young as five!”

Charlotte went still. “That can’t be. What reason did they give?”

Lucien laughed bitterly. “They needed some more Jews to fill up their train cars.”

Charlotte looked at her hands. Reports like that terrified her; she’d been mostly sheltered from the news about the Jewish arrests because her main link to the outside world was Ruby. And of course it made sense that Ruby would try to protect her, but Charlotte wanted to know the truth. She wanted to be aware of the horrors. “I need to help.” Her tone was resolute this time, and she hoped that Lucien could hear that she wasn’t frightened. “The Allies have to win, Lucien. They have to. I can’t do nothing while the Germans take everything.”

He sighed and sat down beside her again. This time, their knees were touching. “I’ve heard rumors of a new escape line, but it’s not operational yet. They’re still trying to work out the details. In the meantime, some of the pilots are simply being held in place, mostly in the countryside. If someone were to be sent here, he might be with you for a very long time.”

“We could handle that.”

“And we don’t have extra ration cards now.”

“That’s fine.” Charlotte smiled at him. “I know a forger who might be able to help us with that.”

Lucien smiled. “Sounds like he’s a good person to know.”

Charlotte held his gaze. “He’s the best.”

The air around them seemed to freeze. Then he leaned in and his lips landed softly on hers. When he pulled away—too soon—his cheeks were splotched with red. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not.”

“I—I have to go.” Lucien stood up. His face was still flushed, and he looked nervous. “I’ll see what I can do.” He kissed her once more, on the cheek, and then he was gone, shutting the door quietly behind him.

Charlotte sat in the living room long after Lucien had departed, thinking about a future that would quite possibly never come. She knew she couldn’t tell Ruby; Ruby would say she was too young to be having these feelings for a boy. Ruby still saw Charlotte as a child, no matter what Charlotte did to prove otherwise—and she was wary of Lucien. “How would your parents feel about you getting involved with a forger like him?” Ruby had said once.

“I’d like to think they’d be proud,” Charlotte had replied.

But the truth was, Charlotte didn’t know what her parents would think. Lucien wasn’t Jewish, and she knew that both Maman and Papa had always imagined she would follow in their footsteps, marry a good Jewish boy, raise good Jewish children.

Then again, the world Maman and Papa had dreamed of was long gone. Maybe the only thing to do was to follow her heart.



ONE NIGHT IN LATE JULY, Charlotte and Ruby were sitting on the small terrace of the apartment on the rue de Lasteyrie. Charlotte’s parents had been gone for a year, and there’d been no word of their whereabouts since they departed from Drancy. The roundups in Paris had slowed, and the city had fallen into a strange rhythm of false normalcy. Parisians went about their daily business, heads down, while the Nazis lounged in cafés and strolled the grand avenues as if the city had been theirs all along. Just last week, though, Lucien had brought news that twenty-one Jewish families had been arrested on the Boulevard Beaumarchais for no reason at all; the police had simply swept in and carted them away, sobbing and screaming, children and all. Charlotte knew such things would continue to happen, and that even with her cover as Ruby’s Christian cousin, she was always in danger.

The risks had made Ruby into a bit of an oppressor, actually. Charlotte knew that her friend was just worried about her, but it was difficult living with someone whose protection felt so burdensome. Ruby forbade her from going out at all now, insisting that Charlotte was much safer in the apartment, where no one could see her and get suspicious. But it was summertime in Paris, and Charlotte longed to stroll the streets, smell the flowers, feel the grass beneath her feet. Then again, it wasn’t the Paris of Charlotte’s childhood anymore. And as long as Ruby was protecting her—and as long as Ruby herself seemed so miserable—Charlotte felt she had no choice but to respect her wishes, even if the confinement filled her with loneliness and longing.