At the Edge of Summer (32 page)

I
almost walked straight past him.

His hair was longer than he'd ever worn it and he had a mustache now, like a Frenchman. He slouched at a café table, nursing a cup, collar turned up against the morning chill. In his short jacket, soft scarf, felt cap, and indifferent expression, he looked like any Parisian.

But, despite his almost casual pose, I noticed an alertness to his spine. The watchfulness of a soldier. I slowed and, as I drew close, I knew him.

It's the little things that give us away sometimes. The way Papa always pulled on his beard when he was worried. The way Maman pinched inside my wrist when she wanted me to pay attention. The way Clare touched my face. For the man sitting at the café table, it was the way he tossed his roll back and forth between each hand.

It was a small movement, one that only confidence could bring. He always did it with bread rolls. Tossed it once, twice, three times, before he broke it open to eat. It looked almost like he was palming a tennis ball.

I stood out on the pavement I don't know how long before he noticed my stare. He started, ducked his head, dropped a handful of change and stood. I didn't think he recognized me, but I pushed against a shop window, out of the way.

He slipped past with a battered brown suitcase in hand. Not his usual stride, but an almost furtive skulk. He shouldn't be in Paris; I wondered why he was. The peace talks might have begun, but Europe was far from peaceful. Germany hadn't been invited. Bauer had no reason to be here. If the Parisians on the Rue du Louvre knew a German walked in their midst, someone who could've held a gun on their husbands and sons during the war, they wouldn't let him pass. Cries of “Boche” would echo to the Seine and back.

But I didn't tell them. Call it curiosity, call it fear, call it the desire to look him in the eye before spitting in his face. Pressed against the window, I held my breath until he passed. I'd dropped the violets, and Bauer trod straight over them.

He continued down the Rue du Louvre, but still I stood, motionless. Sweat pooled at the back of my neck. I could follow. I could confront him like in the scene that always played in my mind, the one where I didn't trust him as I had last time. The one where Chaffre lived. Or I could let him slip away and I could go back to Clare and wait for the nightmares to pass. Across the street an automobile started with a growl that made me jump and cover my head. Everything was suddenly louder. The glass behind my back rattled. It was only after a woman stopped with a “Monsieur, are you well?” that I lifted my head.

“Monsieur?” she asked again.

I waved away her hand and shook my head in reply. The street was bright, too bright, too crowded. Where had he gone? My memories of him were in moonlight. Then I spotted his light hair, high above the crowd, and I knew I couldn't go home.

I followed him. I walked close to the buildings, head down. The stealthy march came back to me. That advance against an enemy. My hands itched to be holding a rifle, so I pushed them into my pockets. Still, they twitched on an imaginary trigger.

I don't know how far he walked, but I recognized the building when he stopped. It was Lili's, a whore he used to visit. He'd sometimes bring girls there, when he had no place else to go with them. Very likely, I thought, girls who were alone in the city.
Though he tried,
Clare had said.

I waited there, watching the building, as the shadows lengthened. I took the
ficelle
from inside my jacket and ate it in the doorway across the street. Through the upstairs window, I caught movement. I brushed crumbs off my hands and settled in. He shouldn't be long.

At the end of the day, that was when we'd prepare for an attack. We'd be checking our weapons, tightening our laces, saying one last prayer. Then we'd head out, creeping from shadow to shadow, tracking an enemy we couldn't yet see. This time I had mine right in my sights. I felt more at home in this dimming dusk than I had in the bright light of morning. Evening was when I was used to prowling.

But Lili came out of the building by herself, dressed in pearls and silk. Though I waited until I heard another clock chime, Bauer didn't reappear. He was staying the night.

I paced to the end of the street. I counted the hours. The night deepened and the streetlamps flickered. Lili returned with a gentleman, then the building went tight and dark. At one point I slumped in the doorway across the street in that soldier's half doze. I thought of the nightmares I used to have, half expecting them to return. But the source of all my nightmares, he was right across the street.

I wasn't prepared for an ambush, yet I was afraid to leave my post for supplies. In this battle, there was no reserve. I'd tracked him all day, but I didn't have anything beyond the fruit and cheese in my bag. I'd almost forgotten it in my relentless advance. I took out an orange, peeled it, and, suddenly, in the scent of the peel, remembered. Fruit, cheese, bread, chestnuts. The little breakfast I'd meant to surprise Clare with.

And now it was nearly a day later and I'd left her alone in the apartment, waiting for me. Probably, now, thinking I wasn't coming back.

I almost turned around right then and there. Walked back to the apartment. Walked to the studio on the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. Found her and promised to never leave again. But down the street, the front door of Lili's opened and Stefan Bauer stood silhouetted in the doorway with his suitcase.

It wasn't only me who had been hurt. It wasn't only—I felt for the little lead Madonna—Chaffre. Even before someone handed Bauer a gun, he threatened.
He tried,
Clare had said. I shouldered my bag.
He tried.
Her words in my head, I followed.

Just before dawn, the streets were empty. It wasn't as easy to hide the fact that I was tailing him, and as my footsteps echoed, his quickened. He was too smart to turn and look over his shoulder, but he ducked through alleys and around buildings. I didn't lose him. I knew Paris as well as he did.

When his footsteps slowed, near the Gare du Nord, I should have, too. He lunged from a corner shadow, the flash of a knife in his fist. I dodged, catching myself on the side of a building. My mask clattered to the ground.

“Why are you following me?” he said in French.

I picked up the mask and stepped into the light. “Retribution.”

“How did you—” he began, before correcting to: “You are mistaken.”

“I know you.” I held it up to my face. I watched his drain of color. “And you know me.”

“Crépet,” he said, and I knew I hadn't mistaken him. He cleared his throat. “Didn't think I'd see you again.”

“Didn't think I was alive, did you?”

“It was war. I didn't know what to think.” He shifted his suitcase from one hand to the other. “Didn't know if I'd be alive one moment to the next, did I?”

“Neither did Michel Chaffre.”

“Who?” he asked, and then, “Oh.”

I had years of vitriol, of blame and censure. I wanted to ask him why. Why me, why Chaffre, why anything that took him from a life in France to a life against France. But I lowered my mask again. “This is what you gave me.” I bared my face and I said, “This was my souvenir.”

His eyes traveled up along my scar, along the pits and grooves, along the puckered skin. Finally he said, “Crépet, I didn't mean…” Exposed in that moment of honesty, in that almost-apology, he turned away. When he turned back, it was with his cocky smile. “You mean to make a battle out of everything?”

“What?” I had to ask.

“The war is over now. And yet you can't move on. You are still looking for a
grand adversaire.
”

“You're wrong. I did.” And, if it wasn't true before that moment, it was now. “You left me for dead, but I came back to life.”

He shrugged, but took a step backwards.

“And do you know who else moved on?” I slipped the mask in my bag. “Clare.”

He squinted. Either he didn't remember her or wanted me to think so. “Oh, the fräulein?” he asked dismissively. “She had nothing to move on from.”

“Betrayal doesn't only exist in war.” I slipped my bag from my shoulder. “Sometimes it comes from a trusted companion on a train or in a whore's house.”

He flinched and I knew I'd guessed right.

“You haven't said, Bauer. What are you doing here, in Paris?”

He didn't even pause before throwing out a lie. “I never told you, but I had a girlfriend here.” He rubbed his nose. He didn't know I'd followed him from Lili's. “And…and a little daughter. I came for them.” He lifted the brown suitcase. “See? They're meeting me at the station. We're returning to Berlin.”

But I was finished believing his lies. His carefully set up drop shots.

“A girlfriend?” I took a step towards him. “You mean one you don't have to pay for?”

At my advance, he stepped back. “Why is that so hard to believe?”

I moved closer.

He hesitated just for a second, and I swung my shopping bag. It wasn't full and it wasn't heavy, but enough to throw him off balance so that I could get a fist in his stomach. Like with Martel, it was a lucky shot. His knife clattered to the ground and his suitcase sprang open. A camera and bundles of photos tumbled out. Gasping for breath, he lunged at the suitcase, not the knife. I grabbed the latter.

“Keep back or I cry ‘Boche.' ”

He glanced back over his shoulder. The street was quiet, but he kept his distance.

I pulled up a handful of photos, wondering why they kept him here on the street. He could have turned to run the moment I took the knife. Instead he waited.

As I sifted through the handful, I saw. Each one showed Paris in shambles. A city as shattered by war as I was. They were photos of tumbled buildings, of boarded windows, of craters in the street where bombs had fallen. They showed trees, splintered and leafless. They showed
mutilés
on the corners in ragged uniforms, begging. The photos, they were specific. They were intended to show Paris vulnerable.

“You once loved France.” I flipped through the photos. The buildings destroyed, the citizens depleted, the shops still shuttered. “You betray more than the people in your life.”

He hovered just out of reach. “The war is over, Crépet.” He tried to put a sneer into it.

I'd only seen the city's wounds here and there as I passed down the streets, but to see them put together in photos, to see Paris looking so crippled and broken still, now, months after the armistice. To see it looking so exposed, it made me furious.

I snapped the suitcase shut. “But the battle's not.” Though I had the knife in my hand, I swung a fist, the way I should have that night in the cellar. The way I should have years before that, when I stood in the dormitory as he promised that he didn't know what had happened to Clare. One punch and then another and another and he was doubled over on the street.

But he didn't stay down long. Bauer had always been faster than me, and he hadn't spent the last year of the war recovering in a Paris garret. He drove up with his shoulder. I stumbled back, but kept my grip on the knife. He brought up his arms, trying to shake my grip. For a moment I thought he would. He was always more vicious.

But when he struck me, something kicked in. The same instinct that had led me to track him through the dark streets. I knocked his arms away and shifted the knife to my other hand. Bauer lunged again, but I did, too. The blade caught him on the back of the wrist. He didn't flinch.

“You think you'll even the score?” He bared his teeth in a grin. “You?”

All of my training came back. My movements were automatic. A year away from the lines didn't erase the three years in them. He used his fists. I used the knife and my hatred. I drove him back towards the wall along the pavement. This close fighting, the smell of sweat and blood, it was familiar. I swung and my muscles remembered.