The Nightingale(152)

Frozen. Dark. Humming. Small …

A refrigerator.

She panicked, tried frantically to wrest free, to topple her prison, but all her effort did was wind her. Defeat her. She couldn’t move. Not anything except her fingers and toes, which were too frozen to cooperate. Not like this, please.

She would freeze to death. Or be asphyxiated.

Her own breathing echoed back at her, surrounded her, a shudder of breath all around it. She started to cry and her tears froze, turning to icicles on her cheeks. She thought of all the people she loved—Vianne, Sophie, Ga?tan, her father. Why hadn’t she told them she loved them every day when she had the chance? And now she would die without ever saying a word to Vianne.

Vianne, she thought. Only that. The name. Part prayer, part regret, part good-bye.

*

A dead body hung from every streetlamp in the town square.

Vianne came to a stop, unable to believe what she was seeing. Across the way, an old woman stood beneath one of the bodies. The air was full of the whining creak of ropes pulled taut. Vianne moved cautiously through the square, taking care to keep away from the streetlamps— Blue-faced, swollen, slack bodies.

There had to be ten dead men here—Frenchmen, she could tell. Maquisards by the look of them—the rough guerrilla partisans of the woods. They wore brown pants and black berets and tricolor armbands.

Vianne went to the old woman, took her by the shoulders. “You should not be here,” she said.

“My son,” the woman croaked. “He can’t stay here—”

“Come,” Vianne said, less gently this time. She maneuvered the old woman out of the square. On rue La Grande, the woman pulled free and walked away, mumbling to herself, crying.

Vianne passed three more dead bodies on her way to the boucherie. Carriveau seemed to be holding its breath. The Allies had bombed the area repeatedly in the last few months, and several of the town’s buildings had been reduced to rubble. Something always seemed to be falling down or crumbling.

The air smelled of death and the town was silent; danger lurked in every shadow, around every corner.

In the queue at the butcher shop, Vianne heard women talking, their voices lowered.

“Retaliation…”

“Worse in Tulle…”

“Did you hear about Oradour-sur-Glane?”

Even with all of that, with all of the arrests and deportations and executions, Vianne couldn’t believe the newest rumors. Yesterday morning the Nazis had marched into the small village of Oradour-sur-Glane—not far from Carriveau—and herded everyone at gunpoint into the town’s church, supposedly to check their papers.

“Everyone in town,” whispered the woman to whom Vianne had spoken. “Men. Women. Children. The Nazis shot them all, then they slammed the doors shut, locked them all in, and burned the church to the ground.” Her eyes welled with tears. “It’s true.”

“It can’t be,” Vianne said.

“My Dedee saw them shoot a pregnant woman in the belly.”

“She saw this?” Vianne asked.

The old woman nodded. “Dedee hid out for hours behind a rabbit hutch and saw the town in flames. She said she’ll never forget the screaming. Not everyone was dead when they set the fire.”

It was supposedly in retaliation for a Sturmbannführer who’d been captured by the Maquis.

Would the same thing happen here? The next time the war went badly, would the Gestapo or SS round up the villagers of Carriveau and trap them in the town hall and open fire?

She took the small tin of oil that this week’s ration card had allowed her and walked out of the shop, flipping up her hood to shield her face.

Someone grabbed her by the arm and pulled her hard to the left. She stumbled sideways, lost her footing, and almost fell.

He pulled her into a dark alley and revealed himself.

“Papa!” Vianne said, too stunned by his appearance to say more.

She saw what the war had done to him, how it had etched lines in his forehead and placed puffy bags of flesh beneath his tired-looking eyes, how it had leached the color from his skin and turned his hair white. He was terribly thin; age spots dotted his sagging cheeks. She was reminded of his return from the Great War, when he’d looked this bad.

“Is there somewhere quiet we can talk?” he said. “I’d rather not meet your German.”

“He’s not my German, but oui.”

She could hardly blame him for not wanting to meet Von Richter. “The house next to mine is vacant. To the east. The Germans thought it too small to bother with. We can meet there.”