Violins of Autumn (12 page)

“Marie, you are a wealth of information,” I say outside the café, when she finally pauses to take a breath.

“Thank you. Have a seat on the terrace. I will bring coffee to you.”

I’ve barely settled onto the chair when Marie comes rushing back with the coffee.

“I added a tiny bit of sugar,” she says in my ear. She gives me a chipper wave. “Bye for now. I’ll see you back at Grand-mère’s after work.”

“Okay, good-bye, Marie.”

I reach for my coffee. The first sip nearly splatters on my new outfit.

It takes all my willpower to not leap up, waving my arms in the air. I convinced myself that I would probably never see them again. And there they are across the street, one looking bewildered and the other looking even more beautiful than before.

Without trying, I had found Robbie and Denise.

Appearing to be in good health, Denise and Robbie look no different from the last time I saw them, although Denise’s fashionable clothes protest loudly about being seen in public with Robbie’s typical French worker outfit. She knows better than to set them apart.

Where have they been for a week? I’m afraid if I blink, they’ll disappear. I can’t risk losing them again.

Denise holds up one finger to Robbie, says something that makes him wilt, and then she dashes into a clothing boutique across from the café. He slouches against the building, arms crossed. I doubt it’s the first time she’s left him unattended to wait for her.

As I push my chair from the table, six soldiers drunkenly stagger into the daylight from the Metro station across the street, hooting and singing at the top of their voices. One soldier goes out of his way to shove the driver of a passing bicycle taxi to the street. Blood drips from a gash on his chin when he retrieves his
bicycle. He halfheartedly shakes his fist at the soldiers, but not until they’ve moved on to their next target.

Robbie.

Ignoring the soldiers does nothing to stop them. The beret that shields Robbie’s closely cropped hair from view is snatched from his head. His meek attempts to catch the hat as it’s tossed through the group always miss by a hair. I helplessly watch him be made a spectacle of, the humiliation on his face nearly too great for me to stomach.

The beret spins to the ground. Finished with their little game, the soldiers step aside, laughing. I ease back in my chair to wait to them out. My trembling hands raise the coffee to my lips but it splashes like waves battering a boat. Setting the cup on the table, I breathe slowly in and out.

Robbie bends to pick up the beret. The soldier who shoved the bicycle taxi driver sneers. His boot rises. It crashes squarely on Robbie’s hand, grinding fingers on stone.

I hear Robbie cry out.

My chair spins around behind me. I storm to the opposite side of the street. Blood rushes into my face. Guttural German growls up from deep in my throat. “Leave this man alone! My father is Lieutenant General Hausser. If he finds out about this, every one of you will be sent to Siberia.”

The electrifying supremacy of the moment, with German soldiers staring at me as if I could whip them to Siberia myself, belching fire and brimstone from my mouth, is like nothing I’ve felt before.

A soldier tugs on the sleeve of his comrade, motioning for them to get away before I can take names. Every soldier but the worst of the bunch and a cohort take off running like frightened
schoolboys fleeing a tyrannical headmaster after a schoolyard fight. The remaining two soldiers can give me their menacing looks all they want, it won’t match the one on my face. I have reached a point beyond reason.

Our staring match goes on for what seems an eternity. Each pump of my heart, like a grenade going off in a hollow canister, sends blood and shockwaves through my limbs. I am not about to stand down first.

The soldier picks up the beret, dusts it off, and offers it at arm’s length.

Robbie has yet to utter a single word. Reluctantly, he takes the hat back.

Before leaving, the soldier turns to me. With a sly grin, he tips his helmet.

“Adele, what the heck was that?” Robbie whispers.

The effects of all those grenades going off in my chest set in.

“I feel sick.” I lay my forehead against the sun-drenched stone wall. “We’re not supposed to know each other. I shouldn’t be speaking to you in English. You never know who’s watching, and as far as witnesses are concerned, I left the café to help a stranger.”

Robbie grips the beret in his good hand. His wounded hand is rubbed to raw meat in places. I take his wrist to examine the seriousness of the injuries, hoping with all my heart that they aren’t permanent. If that awful German made it impossible for Robbie to play the piano again, I don’t know what to say or do to make it better.

“How does it feel? Can you move your fingers?”

Robbie’s voice shakes when he says, “I’m fine, Adele, really. But how are you?”

“I found the most splendid chenille”—Denise bops out of the store, and we come face to face—“blouse.” Her mouth falls open. “You’re looking green around the gills.”

“Pretend you don’t know me. Meet at the Rue Montmartre station in half an hour?”

She nods.

I pat Robbie’s arm and return to the café.

When I arrive at the Metro station, Robbie and Denise are waiting at the entrance. Denise leads the way past row upon row of parked bicycles to a secluded area in a park.

“Ooh la la, take a look at you,” she says.

Mrs. Devereux’s expensive clothing and perfume feel maddeningly foreign on me, but they reinforce claims that I’m a German colonel’s daughter. Any suspicions the soldiers have now are a waste of time.

“You don’t look too bad yourself,” I say. “Where did you get that new outfit?”

“I bought it.”

“You bought it? With the SOE’s money?”

“I’m in
Paris
. I’m sure they would understand.”

I don’t think anyone at headquarters will understand Denise paying black market prices unless the blouses also shoot bullets and come equipped with grenades.

“Would you like to join me in getting a manicure?” she asks.

Ragged beyond help, my nails look worse off than normal, and that’s saying something.

“A manicure?” I laugh, not about to let her pull my leg. “You’re joking.”

She points to a street adjacent to the park. The electricity is out, as usual, and two barbers and a manicurist busily groom customers on the sidewalk.

“We’ll have plenty of money left. If we need more I’ll send word to London.”

I honestly don’t want to be forced to put my foot down or reprimand Denise. In my eyes, we’re equals. I want it to stay that way.

“We’re here to work, Denise. Let’s get that manicure some other time.”

Her lips purse sideways into an amused smirk. “The voice of reason. Where would I be without you?”

A tight hug squeezes out my breathy reply, “In shops and salons?”

“I’ve missed you so.”

Robbie quietly adds, “We both have.”

Denise tugs on my sleeve, directing me to follow her to the grass as she sits. “So, you got away from the Germans and arrived here in one piece. Tell me every detail. All but the dull parts, I mean.”

I tell them about giving away my bicycle and meeting Dr. Devereux, but conveniently neglect to mention my breakdown beneath the apple tree.

“A doctor!” Denise smacks her forehead. “We heard a vehicle, but I automatically assumed it was Germans coming. We hid in the ditch.”

“I thought so. When I reached the apartment, our contacts had been arrested. I waited for you. Why didn’t you show up?”

“Robbie got a flat tire. I insisted he could ride anyway. He insisted it would ruin the bicycle. We spent the night behind
some hedgerows and walked to Paris in the morning. The concierge warned us too. We should have received an alternate address, but the concierge collaborating with the Resistance was arrested in the roundup.”

“But without a contact, where did you go?” I ask.

“At first we stayed in a hotel.”

My muscles and memory still ache from the time I spent on the trains.

“Then we had the great luck to stumble upon new contacts,” Denise says. “Would you like to visit headquarters for the Paris Resistance?”

I make certain we’re completely alone. “I would. Where is it? Which street?”

“It isn’t on any street. It’s in the empire of the dead.”

From the inconspicuous door to the Underground, we descend a spiraling stone staircase, as if into a bottomless pit. “Are you taking us to hell?” I ask, and Denise answers with an ominous, “More or less.” At the bottom of the staircase, about seventy feet beneath the city, Denise leads the charge down narrow, dimly lit tunnels. Moist gravel crunches softly beneath our feet for nearly a mile.

“What is this place?” I ask.

Denise slows. “Everything you see above was once down here. All that limestone had to come from somewhere.”

I shiver with panic, half expecting Paris to come crashing down on my head.

“Come on,” Denise says. “That’s not the most interesting thing about this place.”

A few minutes later, as my curiosity begins to wane, Denise points to a door between two columns. The sign above reads
ARRÊTE! C’EST ICI L’EMPIRE DE LA MORT
.

STOP! THIS IS THE EMPIRE OF DEATH
.

We pass between the pillars. The beam from Denise’s flashlight roams around the room. Meticulously arranged bones line the walls. The gruesome pile is nearly my height and many more feet than that deep. A thick layer of leg bones, joints set outward, is followed by a row of skulls, and then another layer of bones. The neat row of skulls capping the whole thing off reminds me of the copper studding on my uncle’s favorite chair. Empty eye sockets gaze into me.

“I don’t understand what this is.”

“The Catacombs,” Robbie says. “You’re looking at a few of the six million Parisians who are buried down here.”

None of the remains are complete. Each body was disassembled and rearranged in the most compact way possible. I think about the chicken carcasses my aunt boils for soup. Tiny bones far outnumber large bones, and picking out every last one is a real chore. Were the small bones of six million people thrown behind a wall of skulls and leg bones like rubbish? I suddenly wish Denise and Robbie hadn’t brought me here.

“Why did they do this?” I ask.

“Just imagine how full the graveyards would have been after the plague,” Robbie says. “They ran out of space, so they dug up the cemeteries and moved the bodies.”

The spotlight of Denise’s flashlight illuminates an intact skull. In life, the faces looked so different. In death, everyone looks the same

Robbie clears his throat behind me. “Jeepers, Adele, you’re jumpier than a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.”

“I am not,” I say, though not half as convincingly as I’d like. “How much farther does this go on?”

“A kilometer.”

“You can’t be serious.”

Denise’s flashlight casts a spooky light across her face. “Deadly serious.”

Our tour moves forward. Denise entertains us with tall tales about the bones and their owners. Some were criminals, some royalty, others paupers. Like a circus barker wowing the crowd, she calls, “Death! The great equalizer!”

My teeth clench. Her impulsive shout chips at my confidence in her professionalism. The Resistance is using these underground tunnels. Didn’t she consider that maybe the Germans are using them too?

We come to a stone altar. Robbie and Denise gather closer as I translate the Latin inscription. “Man, like a flower of the field, flourishes while the breath is in him, and does not remain nor know longer his own place. In peaceful sleep rest great people.”

“I don’t know what that means, but it’s lovely,” Denise says.

Tombs link to even more tombs and limestone quarries, some tall and wide enough to fit a church, some a tight squeeze for our single file. How easy it must be to get lost down here below the surface where all the surroundings eventually look familiar. Every so often we come across a street name engraved into a tunnel wall, and I imagine the goings on above us. Water drips steadily, tapping out a nonsensical message in Morse code.

“The tunnels seem endless,” I say.

“If put end to end in a straight line, the quarries would be three hundred kilometers long,” Robbie says. “And Paris is also famous for its sewers. If those two thousand kilometers of tunnels were placed end to end they’d reach Istanbul. Two people
could enter at separate locations and never come across each other. You could walk for months straight and not see it all.”

“Someone paid attention on the previous tour,” Denise says. “At least if I die of boredom we’re in the right place. Robbie, toss my corpse near that lovely monument Adele read to us.”

Under his breath he mumbles, “Let’s go to the bunker.”

“You know I’m only teasing, Robert.”

Denise might not appreciate Robbie’s comments, but I think his knowledge is fascinating.

“C’mon, Denise, leave him alone,” I say, once he’s out of earshot.

“He can’t afford to be thin-skinned, Adele.”

Inside the Resistance bunker, a metal-encased room within the sewer tunnels, Denise introduces me to the SOE circuit leader, a dashing man, code name Martin Cammerts.

His dapper moustache pulls up at one corner when he smiles. “I’m pleased to meet you, Adele. We’ve had a bit of rotten luck with the Paris circuit lately, but we’re still making a go of it. You have a safe address where we can contact you if necessary?”

“I do.” I gave him Estelle’s address.

“As a courier, you will be expected to ride great distances on a bicycle to drop and receive messages. Have your rendezvous in the country whenever possible, and have a lookout, a sign, something to alert the other to danger. When meeting in the city, use your head. If your contact has not yet arrived, don’t stand around in the open like a lamppost. The Germans will have you scooped up in one of their vans and shipped off to Fresnes prison quicker than you can bat an eye. Are you with me, Adele?”