Nightingale (11 page)

“It's all of those.”

“But not love,” she said.

Her tone saddened him. As if he deserved better, or as if he was throwing himself away, or as if he didn’t know the value of true love. He’d never really encountered it, that folly that made life only worthwhile when two souls joined.

He knew all the clichés, about not wanting to breathe without the other, being willing to die for the other. He’d never felt that and was half curious and half horrified that this madness might one day afflict him. He had other things to worry about. Heinrich was a safe bet, the devil he knew.

“Of course it’s not love,” he said in a rushed, hasty exhale. “He’s a German.”

She touched his cheek, then kissed him. “Do visit me again when you find the time.”

“Or you me.”

She smiled, and they both knew that her next words would be a lie. “Of course.”

Yves glanced at the German and buttoned his coat. “Soon,” he promised and then turned toward the waiting car.

Chapter 17

They might have spoken more if not for Heinrich’s driver. With him present, conversation was limited to the affairs of artists and film stars and other celebrities haunting Paris’s curtailed nightlife. Once, Heinrich mentioned bombings of the industrial suburbs, but Yves shook his head and refused to listen. Returning to a city under attack by the British was nearly as bad as returning to a city in the hands of the Germans. Between the English and the Germans, it seemed too much like the French didn’t matter. On their own soil.

For the last half of the journey, he pretended to be asleep, and then hated himself for it when Heinrich spread a heavy blanket over him, as if in unspoken apology. Eventually, though, the ruse turned to truth, and he only woke when Heinrich placed a hand on his shoulder.

“We’re back,” he said.

Yves straightened, rubbed his stiff neck, and stayed under the blanket. But there was no doubt about it, though the city lay dark and silent before him. The streets were even eerier from the windows of a car; a hush had settled over the city like winter over a harvested field.

By the time they pulled up to his building, frost had silvered the street and sidewalk, and smoke streaked into the dark sky.

“Will you be all right?” Heinrich asked.

Yves nodded vaguely. Von Grimmstein couldn’t possibly be waiting for him, and as long as he hid and didn’t give his return away, he should be perfectly fine. Hadn’t Heinrich promised he’d be safe?

“Yes, I’m just tired.” He pushed the blanket aside and waited for the driver to open the door. “Thank you,
monsieur
.” Always keeping up appearances. Away from his own kind in so many ways, he was as vulnerable as he was weary.

Leather suitcase in hand, Yves hurried across the empty sidewalk to his door. When he found the hallway dark, all the horror of that last time washed over him.

We like it that way.

He shuddered when his fingers touched the light switch, expecting something horrible to snatch his hand and maul it.

And the light turned on. A near-sob came from his throat, and Yves stood, shaking, collecting himself against the memory of terror.

The elevator was out of service. He dragged himself up the stairs, suspiciously keeping an eye on the path before and behind him, listening for attackers.

Maybe he should move—deny von Grimmstein the insignificant triumph of keeping him scared in his own house. And yet, as long as he appeared on any bill in Paris, anywhere at all, Gestapo—and von Grimmstein—could find him whenever they wanted. They’d take him from his dressing room. No place within Paris was safe. Not now, not ever.

He pushed his door open and briefly leafed through a few notes and letters somebody, likely his neighbor, had pushed under the door.

A tidy little note caught his attention:

Monsieur Lacroix,

You are being missed by your friend, FH.

It was unsigned, but Yves suspected it had been written by the war widow who lived across the hall.

Falk. Just him, not von Grimmstein, not even Édith, just this strange young German soldier who thought they were friends.

Yves placed the papers on his desk, then put the suitcase down on the couch. He would deal with those things tomorrow. For the moment, he was bone-weary and couldn’t collect a rational thought. For the first time in his life, Paris felt like it wasn’t his city anymore.

* * *

He’d intended to start early on the next day, catch up with Maurice, maybe join him at
Madame
Julia’s that evening, but Yves struggled to wake up at all and then lounged in bed, not particularly interested in either food or company.

When he did get up, it was a passing thing. He only left the bed to fetch a pencil and some empty music sheets so he could write down a shred of a melody trapped in his ear. Whether it was something he’d caught from Vandio’s records, he couldn’t rightly say, though it seemed to want to take the shape of a swing number. So he worked, slept again at noon, then woke up hungry, the sun already dying outside his window.

A sound. Yves sat up straight in bed. The sound repeated. Somebody knocking on the door. Torn between fear and curiosity about who’d seek him out when he wasn’t officially at home, he eventually got up and took the dressing gown off the hook, belted it on the way. He glanced through the peephole and recoiled at the vision of the gray uniform, the black collar with the silver runes.

It wasn’t von Grimmstein.

He unlocked the door and cracked it open, surprised when Harfner smiled at him. He’d have expected recrimination of some sort, maybe worry, but the German seemed genuinely pleased to see him.

“Can I come in?”

Yves swallowed and opened the door wider. “By all means.”

The soldier stepped in and took his hat off, glancing around. “How are you?”

“I had to leave the city for a few days.” Yves remembered to speak slowly for the man’s benefit.

“Where did you go to?” The sentence was neatly made.

“I visited my mother in the countryside.”

The soldier nodded and looked around. This was the moment where Yves should invite him to sit, offer him a drink, make sure he was comfortable as a guest while he himself got dressed. “You were sleeping?”

“Working, actually. I was writing a song.” Yves smiled, though it seemed like an odd thing to do. He wasn’t talking to Maurice or any of his friends or colleagues. But the song had been going well. He couldn’t wait to pick up his notes and work them out at the piano.

“What is it about?”

All songs are about love.

“I don’t know yet. It’s not done.”

The tall German still looked out of place, but keeping him standing now was on the brink of rudeness. “Would you like something to drink?”

“Yes. It is cold outside.”

It was. Winter was creeping in, the setting sun bleeding through the windows like it only did in winter. It was even chilly in the apartment; after a sunny day that had warmed the stones, the impending evening seemed to suck that warmth back out.

“Please have a seat.” Yves invited him into the living room, then left for the kitchen. There was some leftover coffee, though no cream or sugar. He boiled the water on the stove, pushing back the wide arms of his dressing gown, and set about making coffee. He poured the dark liquid into two cups and carried them into the living room.

Harfner leaned forward on the couch, a pencil in his fingers and a notebook open on the table. Yves gave pause. Was Harfner reporting on him?

“I’ll just . . .” He set the cups down, one in front of Harfner, another before the single armchair opposite the couch. He gestured over his dressing gown. “Change.”

Harfner nodded, his hand flat on the notebook. “Thank you.”

“Oh, for the coffee. It’s of no importance.”

Harfner smiled, and Yves wondered if they were speaking about the same thing. Yves hurried off to his bedroom, tempted to lock the door behind him. He quickly changed into proper clothes, ran a hand through his tousled hair, and opened the door again.

Harfner sat where he’d left him; even the coffee was seemingly untouched. He looked up, then closed the notebook and slid it into his uniform tunic.

“Are you very busy?” Yves sat down in the armchair. Of course he wasn’t or he wouldn’t be sitting here in Yves’s flat, but it was one way to open the conversation, though not the most elegant. Elegance was sadly wasted in this case.

Harfner withdrew his hand, pulled the notebook back out and threw it across the table in an arch that held no anger or accusation. He kept the pencil in his fingers.

The brown, carton-bound thing that looked a lot like a cahier he’d used in school. He reached for it, paused, looked at Harfner’s eyes. The man nodded to him, so he touched the notebook and drew it closer. Then opened it. The first page held Harfner’s name and an address in Germany (a small city or town—Yves had never heard of it), some numbers and a few letters that seemed to refer to his unit. Possibly.

The second page, then, filled three-quarters with short lines that were neatly arranged, apart from meticulously crossed-out words. German. It looked like poetry, but Yves could only make out the occasional word. The spiky gothic script didn’t help. He leafed further, but all of the entries seemed to be poetry.

“You do not like it?” Harfner asked.

Yves realized he was frowning. “Oh. No. I can’t read . . . German very well.”
As you know
. “I’m sorry.” He was about to close it, but Harfner made an encouraging gesture to go on. Better humor him. Yves kept turning pages, looking at words as neatly arranged as troops on a parade ground. Some entries were longish poems of two or three pages, some just couplets, like they were waiting for a poem to be built around them. He could tell the structure of the rhymes, and it seemed Harfner used them in the strictest possible sense. He looked up, but Harfner was intently focused on his face and nodded, again, prompting him to go on.

Yves was relieved when he got to the last page. A poem Harfner had been working on, he assumed. A loose sheet lay in the cahier, the writing on it an exact mirror of the German poem. It was French, written in an even neater hand he recognized as
Monsieur
Benichou’s. He shuddered at the thought that the German had made the Jewish teacher translate his blood-and-soil-and-heroic-death poetry.

“Read it?” Harfner said.

Yves turned to the translation of, apparently,
The
Nightingale and the Hawk
. One line of it struck him:
She trembled in his grasp as if her heart were to give out, not knowing he’d caught her with love.

Yves looked up, shocked to find that sentiment coming from a German soldier, and Harfner smiled. His heart thumped in his chest, while his mind fought the implication. He looked back at the German version.
Die Nachtigall und der Falke.

Falk.

Yves’s heart stuttered.

He closed the cahier and pushed it back, then reached for his coffee. Quick, he had to think of something to say. Something that made sense and was entirely deniable. He cursed Maurice for having pegged this man and his desires just right, and cursed Harfner for crossing the line of propriety. The last thing he needed was another unwanted lover.

“You found a nice French girl, then. Congratulations.” He didn’t look the man in the eye.

Falk pulled the cahier to himself, took the loose sheet out and left it on the table.

Don’t do this. Please.

“Girl?”

“Yes. A Parisian woman.” He pointed at the cahier, now tucked away in Harfner’s tunic.

Falk’s gave a short laugh. “It’s a lie.”

“What do you mean?” Curse the man for his French and his short, near-meaningless sentences.

“The bird . . . the
Nachtigall
. She’s not female. It’s not a girl.”

“
Le rossignol
,” Yves helped. And, no, in French, the bird was male. The teacher had clearly labored over how to express this in French, but the word itself was masculine.

Harfner nodded. “Yes, that.”

“Well, congratulations, in any case.” Yves took a long drink. The coffee wasn’t hot anymore, but it gave him something to hold onto. He found he couldn’t look the man in the eyes and had a sinking feeling that Harfner wasn’t the kind of hunter to let the quarry slip through his hands, as it were, as scared as “
she
” was.

Harfner set his cup down with the soft sound of china against china, then stood.

He’s going now. He’ll accept I turned him down, and he’ll go and leave me alone.

Yves hunched in his chair, heard Harfner’s footsteps,
please, God, make him go,
and almost jerked when the man touched his shoulder from the side. A brush, and Yves turned his head, noticing he was only touching him with the tips of two fingers.

“Your voice . . .” He broke off, likely wrestling with his French again. His fingers lingered, then trailed toward Yves’s neck. Yves remained frozen, fully empathizing with a songbird nearly dying from fright in the claws of a hunter.

Harfner then took his hand away and crouched near Yves’s armchair. Yves pressed his lips together and dared look at him from the corner of his eyes. Harfner still smiled, subdued, gentle, even affectionate.

Caught her with love.

“
Je t’adore
,” Harfner said. The French expression sat oddly with him—it was the last thing he’d have expected Harfner to say. Maybe he’d looked the sentence up, too, unaware how little it suited him. “I will never hurt you.”

Yves swallowed, but didn’t react. If he didn’t, Harfner would just lose his patience and leave. And that would be that.

But nothing happened, so he looked at the man, still crouching there as if in supplication, hands on his armrest, folded peacefully, easily within reach.

“Thanks,” Yves said. He had to say something, and he believed Harfner, despite the silver skull on his cap and the SS runes on his collar. It was just that he couldn’t give the man what he wanted, and, by all rights, thanks to Heinrich, he shouldn’t have to.