At the Edge of Summer (33 page)

On the battlefield, we fought over an uneven landscape. And yet it was a loose cobble that brought Stefan Bauer down on that Paris street. He lifted an arm crisscrossed with cuts.

“My mistake was always trusting the world.” I leaned down over him, knife in hand. “Yours was underestimating it.”

T
hat night I dreamt of redemption.

Luc had found it, it seemed, in his mask, in my arms. He'd gone to fetch me breakfast that morning and, while he was gone, I read his note, worried, and then left. But later I dreamt that he forgave me, that we talked, that he told me we'd cross the world and back hand in hand. I dreamt that we walked to Mille Mots and he kissed me under the poplar. I wondered if things could work.

I went to his apartment, to apologize. But Luc, he wasn't there.

At his building, the suspicious fish-eyed woman frowned, but let me into his apartment when I mentioned that I was with the Red Cross. “Apologies. When you came the other afternoon, I didn't realize you were a nurse.”

I didn't correct her. “There are many people looking after his recovery.”

She turned the key with a grunt.

Nothing had changed from the last time I'd been there. The parrots rattled the cage beneath their cover. The sweater I'd left was still folded on the bed. A flash of relief that he hadn't just avoided me was quickly replaced by the realization that he'd been gone all day and night. “When did you last see him, Madame Girard?”

“The morning after you brought that mask.” She jiggled the door handle. “I was leaving to take my ungrateful sister a parcel of fish. He left at the same time.”

Something had happened, before he left or before he returned. Something that kept him from his apartment. I paced the room, but nothing was out of place. “Did he say where he was going?”

She shrugged. “Why would he tell me, mademoiselle?”

That night, he'd been nervous and reluctant to talk about what had happened during the war. I'd been worried about all those tomorrows, but Luc, he still worried about yesterday.

“Madame, please. When Monsieur Crépet left, how did he look?”

“He said something about a fresh start. I've never seen it before,” she said, “but for the first time, he was smiling.”

I turned from her so she wouldn't see the sweep of fear on my face. The smile meant he didn't abandon me or our night together. He must have left with the intention of coming back to me. Whatever kept him from the apartment these past twenty-four hours, it wasn't himself.

I went to the birdcage and pulled off the cover. The larger parrot cocked his head. “Summer,” he said, then in English, “Fuck it.”

I pushed grapes through the bars and pieces of crumbled cheese. “Would you feed the birds until I return?”

She gaped at the parrots. “These brutes?”

“And call the
policier.
”

She straightened.

“I am going to find Luc.”

T
his time, I didn't knock on the front door of Mille Mots.

I walked around to the back, to the kitchen, where I knew the Crépets were staying. But I didn't go in. In the kitchen yard, with my hand on the door, I spotted them down by the river.

Monsieur, I'd recognize anywhere. He perched on a stool in front of an easel. His beard, shot through with new gray, bristled over the front of his smock. When he was melancholy, it was nothing but blues and purples. I couldn't tell what he was painting today, but saw oranges and yellows and bright melon greens.

But he wasn't alone by the riverside. Madame, her battered picnicking table covered over with a canvas cloth, sat. Her smock spattered, her face content, Madame was sculpting. The clay was the rich red found all over in Picardy. Her arms streaked in it, she was reborn.

Both looked so utterly content, I hated to intrude. Indeed they scarcely noticed me walk up. Not until I came right up to the table and cleared my throat did Madame start and Monsieur set down his palette.

“Bonjour,” I said, then: “Has he been here?”

Madame blinked and Monsieur tugged on his beard. He left a smear of viridian. “He?” he asked, but she sat up straighter. I knew then that she'd been the one to change her mind. She had been behind his reappearance in the studio.

“Luc. He…” I inhaled. “I can't find him.”

“You two, you have a habit of losing one another.” He laughed and wiped his hands on his smock.

“Claude, hush,” she said. I'd never heard Madame speak with anything less than adoration to her husband. She set down her knife. “Clare, he came to the studio?”

“Yes. Didn't he write to you?”

“He doesn't.”

“He came and I made him a mask.” I pressed my fingers together. “I thought he was happy.”

“Ma chère.”
Monsieur stood from his stool and brought it to me. “He's gone far since that summer you knew him. So have you.” I let him take my arm and lead me to the stool. “All that you've given him, but what he needs most of all is time.”

“But if he's in danger…”

“Do you not think Luc is used to danger?”

Madame's breath caught and she put a hand to the wet clay in front of her. I saw then that she sculpted a young boy.

“So what do I do?” I asked.

“What we've been doing all these years,” she said. She ran a finger down the clay boy's cheek. “Wait.”

I
sat in the Gare du Nord with my head in my hands. I'd stood over Bauer with the knife in my hands. If that milk cart hadn't come by when it did, I would have killed him. I would have. But he scrambled up and away, and I was left with the battered suitcase and blood on my hands.

I brought it into the train station. I cleaned up as best I could in the lavatory and dropped the knife through the tracks. And then, not knowing what else to do, I sat on a bench in the departure court, sitting on my shaking hands.

Bauer was bleeding and bruised. He was without his camera and suitcase. Did that mean he wouldn't finish his mission? I knew him too well. He'd lay low until he could get another camera. He was probably at Lili's, licking his wounds. Wondering what had given him away on the streets of Paris.

I sat all day, watching trains come and go, watching people pass, not quite knowing what to do. I walked from the departure court into the station, pacing the edge of the tracks. Would he come here? Would he try to leave Paris? I leaned against the wall, tired and watchful, and bought strong black coffee. With all of the refugees crowded in the station, one more itinerant didn't matter.

Gare du Nord was crowded and buzzing. Suitcases and trunks were piled higgledy-piggledy on the platforms, overflowing from the baggage rooms. People clustered, holding tight to cloth bags and parcels and the odd treasure saved when they fled. Clutching wedding tickings, Bibles, or gilt-framed paintings, they complained to each other in county patois. Most were refugees who had come into Paris years ago; only now were they looking to leave.

Their nightmares were over. I thought that mine were gone, too. That other night, that night Clare kept watch, I'd slept soundly, for the first time in a long while. Maybe it was her lingering perfume, maybe the pad of her bare feet, maybe the way she couldn't help but touch the side of my face when she thought I was asleep. But I'd dozed, for once at peace.

Now, crouched in the station, slipping in and out of that half sleep, the nightmares returned. Nothing specific; not the kind of dreams Chaffre's Austrian doctor could find anything in. Sharp, shapeless shadows, screams that burrowed into my brain, aching pain in each limb. I woke sweating and buried my face so no one could see it. Through my haversack the mask dug into my hip.

It was exhausting, this remembering. My shoulder throbbed, and again and again I heard that thump as Chaffre fell next to me. I closed my eyes, to summon up memories of the other night, of Clare in the candlelight, of Clare touching my face, but all I could think of was Bauer, taunting, telling me nothing had changed. He had said “battle,” and, like an infection, the word had brought up every blood-slick battle there'd been, until I was afraid to close my eyes.

I could end it all. I could take the suitcase to one of the
policier
on the platform. It's what I should have done the moment I entered the station. Passed on the suitcase and said there was a spy in Paris. He'd probably slunk back to Lili's or else was lurking around the station the way I was, watching for a train to Berlin. They could find him.

But he was right. The war was over. The only one left was my own. My battle was with the past and what it left me with. I wasn't alone. I saw it in the shattered, spent faces of the refugees in the station. All we wanted to do was sleep, not because our bones were weary, but because our hearts were.

“Monsieur, are you hurt?” It was a young girl, a refugee, with red-brown curls falling from beneath a knit cap. “You look tired.” Though she looked too old for it, she had a faded rag doll tucked into the front strap of her knapsack.

“Tired.” I rubbed the corner of my eye, remembering I wore no mask. But she didn't flinch. “But why, of everyone in the station, are you speaking to me?”

She shrugged. “I thought you were lonely.”

“Where's your family?” No one came to shoo her away from the monster. No one came to shake a finger at me for talking to this girl who looked so like Clare. “Mademoiselle, I could be a bad man.”

A sadness crept into her eyes and she touched the doll at her shoulder. “I don't think there are really bad men anymore.” Behind her, a train whistled. “Only scared ones.”

Once I'd been scared and my best friend had died. I stood. I couldn't look the other way while Stefan Bauer hurt someone else again.

A
policier
strode the platform in his dark uniform. I approached with the battered suitcase. “Monsieur.”

His hand went to his belt as he turned. I ducked my head.

“What is it?” He tapped his heels impatiently.

I wondered if I was making too much of it. In my hands, the suitcase looked innocuous. And maybe it was. The Paris I saw every day, shedding its mourning, wasn't the defeated city of Bauer's photos. Maybe he had nothing in the suitcase.

The refugee girl stood by the bench with her knapsack. Though she'd lost her home, she still refused to see the bad in the world. She didn't know that it stalked the streets of this very city.

I lifted my chin. “Monsieur, I've seen a spy.” I opened the suitcase. “And I think I know where he is.”