The Nightingale(68)

*

I can’t stomach being hovered over.

Apparently what this really meant was that her father couldn’t stand to be in the same room with her.

Funny that she hadn’t noticed it last year, when she’d lived with him for those weeks between her expulsion from the finishing school and her exile to the country.

True, they’d never sat down to a meal together then. Or had a conversation meaningful enough to remember. But somehow she hadn’t noticed. They’d been together in the bookshop, working side by side. Had she been so pathetically grateful for his presence that his silence escaped her notice?

Well, she noticed it now.

He pounded on her bedroom door so hard she released a little yelp of surprise.

“I’m leaving for work,” her father said through the door. “The ration cards are on the counter. I left you one hundred francs. Get what you can.”

She heard his footsteps echo down the wooden hall, heavy enough to rattle the walls. Then the door slammed shut.

“Good-bye to you, too,” Isabelle mumbled, stung by the tone of his voice.

Then she remembered.

Today was the day.

She threw back the coverlet and climbed out of bed and dressed without bothering to turn on the light. She had already planned her outfit: a drab gray dress and black beret, white gloves, and her last pair of black slingback pumps. Sadly, she had no stockings.

She studied herself in the salon mirror, trying to be critical, but all she saw was an ordinary girl in a dull dress, carrying a black handbag.

She opened her handbag (again) and stared down at the silk hammock-like lined interior. She had slit a tiny opening in the lining and slipped the thick envelope inside of it. Upon opening the handbag, it looked empty. Even if she did get stopped (which she wouldn’t—why would she? a nineteen-year-old girl dressed for lunch?) they would see nothing in her handbag except her papers, her ration coupons, and her carte d’identité, certificate of domicile, and her Ausweis. Exactly what should be there.

At ten o’clock, she left the apartment. Outside, beneath a bright, hot sun, she climbed aboard her blue bicycle and pedaled toward the quay.

When she reached the rue de Rivoli, black cars and green military lorries with fuel tanks strapped onto their sides and men on horseback filled the street. There were Parisians about, walking along the sidewalks, pedaling down the few streets upon which they were allowed to ride, queueing for food in lines that extended down the block. They were noticeable by the look of defeat on their faces and the way they hurried past the Germans without making eye contact. At Maxim’s restaurant, beneath the famous red awning, she saw a cluster of high-ranking Nazis waiting to get inside. The rumor was rampant that all of the country’s best meats and produce went straight to Maxim’s, to be served to the high command.

And then she spotted it: the iron bench near the entrance to the Comédie Fran?aise.

Isabelle hit the brakes on her bicycle and came to a bumpy, sudden stop, then stepped off the pedal with one foot. Her ankle gave a little twist when she put her weight on it. For the first time, her excitement turned a little sharp with fear.

Her handbag felt heavy suddenly; noticeably so. Sweat collected in her palms and along the rim of her felt hat.

Snap out of it.

She was a courier, not a frightened schoolgirl. What risk there was she accepted.

While she stood there, a woman approached the bench and sat down with her back to Isabelle.

A woman. She hadn’t expected her contact to be a woman, but that was strangely comforting.

She took a deep, calming breath and walked her bicycle across the busy crosswalk and past the kiosks, with their scarves and trinkets for sale. When she was directly beside the woman on the bench, she said what she’d been told to say. “Do you think I’ll need an umbrella today?”

“I expect it to remain sunny.” The woman turned. She had dark hair which she’d coiled away from her face with care and bold, Eastern European features. She was older—maybe thirty—but the look in her eyes was even older.

Isabelle started to open her handbag when the woman said, “No,” sharply. Then, “Follow me,” she said, rising quickly.

Isabelle remained behind the woman as she made her way across the wide, gravelly expanse of the C?ur Napoléon with the mammoth elegance of the Louvre rising majestically around them. Although it didn’t feel like a place that had once been a palace of emperors and kings, not with swastika flags everywhere and German soldiers sitting on benches in the Tuilleries garden. On a side street, the woman ducked into a small café. Isabelle locked her bicycle to a tree out front and followed her inside, taking a seat across from her.