A Troubled Peace (9 page)

Henry caught her as she swayed and almost toppled off the piano bench. Gently he lifted her. She didn't weigh more than a couple bags of feed. As he settled her on the sofa, François came in with a tray—soup for Henry and a tiny portion of thin, oatmeal-like gruel for Madame.

Gratefully, Henry tasted his vegetable soup. Madame's stories of her deprivation had made him hungry. François was right. He wasn't a very good cook. But Henry was happy to not be eating Spam for one night anyway.

François pulled up a footstool to sit in front of his mother, intently watching as she lifted the spoon. She looked so resigned, uninterested. Henry was sure if the soup was poor, the gruel was terrible. So he was surprised
to see her reaction as she slipped the teaspoon past her cracked lips. Madame brightened and flushed. She rolled that mouthful around and around before swallowing.

Her son beamed.

“I tasted that little bit of cherry, my darling.” Even though painfully soft and low, her voice was playful, like she was sharing a secret. “It tasted like…like…a miracle. Like seeing you—a miracle.”

“I remembered that if I begged hard enough that you would give me cake for breakfast sometimes, Mother. How could I refuse you the season's first cherries?
Je t'aime, Maman.
Now, there are two cherries in this bowl. Cut up very small. But you must eat all this gruel to have them.” François said the last in a singsongy voice parents used to coax children to take medicine.

Madame responded with a tiny chortle that resonated in the room as beautifully as the piano music had. Her son was radiant. All over a few teaspoons of gruel and a thimbleful of cherries.

Henry tiptoed out.

 

The next morning, early, as the sun was just beginning to reach over the garden walls to warm the sanctuary inside, Henry finished weeding. He'd been out since five
A.M.
or so, awakened earlier by the sound of violent coughing, doors opening and shutting, someone knocking loudly on
the front door, feet running up the stairs. Something had happened.

Weeding kept his dread in check.

When he was completely done, he plucked a lily of the valley to press into the Camus book. He wanted Lilly to see what her song was about. He flipped the pages. The writing was short, but in highfalutin French. It would take some doing for him to puzzle it out. But Madame thought he should, so he would.

François found him. “Henri, come here.”

He looked exhausted. Henry approached him warily.

François pressed one of Madame's delicate scarves into Henry's hand. It was a deep forest green, etched with ferns and flowers. Henry recognized it as the one she had worn when he had pretended to be her chauffeur.

“Oh, no,” Henry shook his head. “She has given me way too much already.” He tried to give it back.

François closed Henry's hands around the beautiful silk. “I insist. She wanted you to have this. To take home to your
maman
.”

Want
ed
? Henry tried to push away the word's implication, the feeling of a chord of music resonating and then fading away. He forced cheeriness: “I am going to follow her advice and go to Paris. May I say good-bye to her?”

But François's face told him before he said it. Madame Gaulloise was dead.

O
n the train to Paris, Henry ached. The hurt spread from his heart, through his breathing, to every inch of his being. Madame's mischievous delight in outwitting the Nazis had made her seem invincible. But war wasn't a game, was it? No one—not even the bravest, the most resilient, the most clever and idealistic—was untouchable. Henry tried to cling to the fact that the Nazis had not sullied Madame's spirit—that had remained indestructible.

François's plea that Henry make himself worthy of Madame's sacrifice hounded him. Clearly, the beginning of answering that tall order was to snap-to.
“Straighten up and fly right,”
as the Nat King Cole song went.
“Cool down, papa, don't you blow your top.”

That and to find Pierre. If Pierre's mother were in the same shape as Madame, he would desperately need
Henry's help. Saving that small life would have made Madame happy, Henry knew. And at least that might be a small counterweight to the heft of her loss.

Without hesitation, Henry shelled out twenty-five dollars for the train ticket. He had to hurry. He couldn't waste a week hiking or hoping to hitch a ride. Every day trains pulled into Paris that could carry Pierre's mother or the news that she was dead. Henry's heart told him that Paris was where Pierre would be, waiting, looking, if he were…Henry shut down that thought before his mind could whisper the doubt that Pierre was alive.

Henry refused to do the math of his finances or worry about the cost of a Paris hotel. At least he had nine days of Spam left. Right now he was just living day by day, making things up as he went along. There wasn't any flight plan for this journey.

To distract himself, Henry pulled out Madame's book. It was short—only four chapters—but hard going. He'd never before read much French literature. His teacher, Miss Dixon, had given him a copy of
Le Petit Prince
when she learned he had joined up to be a pilot. She'd said it would be good luck for her “prize French student,” since a little prince from a faraway asteroid guarded a pilot who crash-landed in the Sahara Desert. Henry had muddled through it, translating a sentence or two per page so that he got the gist of the story. The watercolor illustrations
helped, he had to admit. After reading it, though, Henry had left it at home, feeling that a book about a pilot going down, even to crash-land safely, was
bad
luck.

Le Petit Prince
had been poetic and simple. This book by Camus was dense and philosophical. Still, Henry managed to understand that Camus felt life was absurd and meaningless and that hoping for a better tomorrow only made it more so. Science and logic could not explain the world. Henry agreed with that. But, gee whiz, how depressing could you get? He closed the book and stuffed it back into his bag.

Blasting whistles told him that the train would soon pull into Lyon. Henry shifted in his seat, cramped by the bodies packed in the enclosed riding compartment. His knees touched the man's sitting opposite, and he was sandwiched between two older, very round, country women. The man and the women seemed to know one another and gossiped nonstop. Henry drifted in time, their voices swirling around him, as he listened to the memory of Madame playing the piano.

It was the smell that stopped his daydreaming. A horrible smell.
What the heck was that?

Henry sniffed, wrinkling his nose in disgust. He looked around the compartment, to the lady to his left, the one to his right, the man across, wondering if they could smell what he did. They looked back. Their faces seemed to
carry a sudden, put-on innocence. Like the look he and his friends had masked themselves with when one of them hit their peevish seventh-grade teacher in the back of the head with a spitball.

Henry took another good whiff and fought off a gag. It almost smelled like Mr. Campbell's barn back home when he slaughtered pigs for market.

The smell came from above. He glanced up at the suitcase rack over the window, scanning the pile of hatboxes, cardboard suitcases, and carpetbags. Was he seeing straight? One of those bags had a dark red splotch in its bottom corner. As Henry studied it—
jeepers!
—a large drop of blood oozed out of it and slid down the wall.

Henry jumped up. “Do you see that?” He pointed.

Everyone in the car looked at him blankly.

“Aw, come on, people. Don't you see that? Don't you smell it? It's blood.
Du sang
.” Henry's mind reeled. Given all that he'd heard about in the past few days, he imagined a chopped-up body inside the tapestry bag.

When Henry reached for it, the man across from him stood and slapped his arm away, telling him to keep his hands off.
“Sinon on va penser que vous êtes un voleur.”

“Thief? I'm no thief, mister. What's in there?”

The man glanced nervously at his companions. Henry realized everyone else in the compartment was in on whatever was concealed in the bag. The situation felt like
a scene in a Hitchcock suspense film, where the one character who wasn't in the know was quickly disposed of or framed to seem the insane one. Well, that wasn't going to happen to him.

Henry lunged for the bag. But the man knocked him back to the bench. One of the women grabbed his arm. She held her finger to her lips. “Shhhhhh.”

Shush? You've gotta be kidding!
Henry was about to shout out, when the compartment's glass and wooden door
swooshed
open. The conductor entered, accompanied by two French policemen, one short and pudgy, the other tall and muscular.

“Hey! Over here!” Henry pointed to the blood, but the policemen were way ahead of him, as if they knew exactly what to look for and where. One pulled down the bag and opened it. Henry held his breath to look, half expecting to see a decapitated head. Massive shanks of lamb were inside, pooled in blood, recently butchered. The other officer undid the hatboxes to reveal stacked wheels of cheese.

“Des porteurs de valise,”
the police muttered and nodded. Henry's compartment-mates were black marketers, “suitcase-bearers.” The policemen prodded them and Henry with thick sticks.
“Vous êtes tous en état d'arrestation. Venez avec nous!”

“Wait, you can't arrest me,” Henry said. He pushed
back, prompting the brawny policeman to grab him up under his armpit, lifting him to his toes. “Listen, I had nothing to do with this. I don't know these people. I was just sitting here.”

“Ah, oui
? Open your bag for inspection.” The portly policeman switched to English.

“Gladly.” Henry untied his duffel bag, without thinking about its contents. Out spilled his SPAM, his cigarettes, and the ration card for bread.

Henry felt his face turn red, then ashen. “I can explain those,” he started.

“No need.” The fat policeman smirked. “These”—he pointed to the Spam and Camels—“U.S. soldiers steal from their army to sell to our people, exploiting our hunger.” He pushed the ration card with his stick. “As an American, this you could only have if you are in the company of black marketers. You are under arrest,
monsieur
. Come along.”

“No, wait, you don't understand. I've got to get to Paris.”

“Paris? You go to jail,
monsieur
. Then we will call your army's military police to send you back to the United States. We do not want your kind in France.”

C
hink-chink. Chink-chink.

The jailer rattled a large ring of keys as he passed Henry's cell. He stopped at the next cell to lecture the “suitcase-bearers” on their
crise morale
. If it were up to him, he jeered, peasants trying to become princes by selling their wares through the black market would be hanged. One of the women started to cry.

Chink-chink. Chink-chink.
The policeman walked on, pausing at the next cell to ridicule an old man who was serving eight days for picking his neighbor's carrots because he was hungry, then two teenagers jailed for having a fistfight over a precious box of matches. The prisoners swore at him, then became silent.

“Jerk,” Henry muttered, “having fun taunting these poor people.”

The jailer had labeled Henry a
“sal Américain.”
It'd twisted Henry up inside. How could a Frenchman call him “filthy” with the same tone in which he'd heard the
maquis
curse the Nazis?

If the French saw him that way, what would the American police, the MPs, do with him? Henry had seen MPs break up enough fights in the base canteen to know they didn't stop to ask questions. If they believed that he was a black marketer, the least they would do is send him home, without his finding Pierre, without his getting himself right for Patsy—a complete disaster.

The Army might even throw in jail time for behavior unbecoming to an officer. Was he still subject to that? Henry concocted a dozen defenses about why he was in France. Somehow he just couldn't see the MPs buying that he was looking for Pierre. From the sounds of it, too many American soldiers had tried to turn a profit off French misery. His stash of American canned food and cigarettes and the counterfeit bread card certainly suggested Henry was in the game as well.

 

Henry rubbed his forehead along the bars of his cell, trying to squash his growing sense of failure and the memory of the last time he'd been in a French prison cell, waiting—when his French guide had turned him over to the Nazis, who in turn hurled him into an unlit, windowless cellar in
a prison-chateau. That dark cage had been his introduction to the brutal manipulation of a Gestapo interrogation. The hours in utter darkness were designed to rattle him so he entered questioning already vulnerable with fear born of his own imagining of what was to come. “It's not the Gestapo, it's not,” Henry mumbled to himself once again, desperately trying to push back the curtain of memory closing him in, shutting out the light of present day.

But his mind betrayed him and threw Henry back into pitch-black dark, into the Nazi hole:

 

Six feet by five feet
. Henry's fingertips ran along the dank, dirt walls as he counted the room's perimeter.

Ten hours. Maybe a day since the Gestapo locked the door
. Henry couldn't keep time straight in complete darkness.

Pray for me, Ma. God listens to you. Pray that I will be brave. Pray that I won't tell anything to save my own skin.

Screams from the next room. Footsteps. A door groaning open. Blinding light.

“Your turn, American.”

 

“Stop it, Forester,” Henry berated himself aloud. “It's not happening. Feel this.” He wrapped his fingers around the bars of his cell. “Bars, not a dirt wall.” He crammed other voices into his head to replace the Nazis' to pull himself out of the flashback. Think of what other people have survived
and carried with them as they managed to walk, Forester, one foot in front of the other, like the Vercors's
patron
, like Madame, like François. “Listen to them,” he ordered himself. “Be worth Madame's sacrifice. You have work to do.”

As painful as the thoughts were, Henry made himself hear Captain Dan and the conversation they'd had the morning of their last flight, when Henry had preflight jitters:
Don't get flak-happy on me, Hank. You're the steadiest copilot I've ever seen.

I'm with you, Captain.

Dan's confidence in him had made Henry feel strong, like someone Dan could trust. Henry could be that person again. It would be like flying a raid: Grit your teeth and focus on getting to the target; don't be distracted by things blowing up all around you.

Henry steeled himself, as he had countless times before takeoff, his mind free of the cloud cover of its own torment, prepped for flight. Locate Pierre, help him, and get back home—mission accomplished.

Come back to me, Henry.
Patsy's voice—sweet, beckoning—called to him.

I'll find a way, Pats. I will.

Henry shoved the Gestapo back into the dark and waited for the MPs.

 

“This him?”

Two huge men in khaki, combat boots, and the telltale armbands and white helmets marked
MP
stood in front of Henry's cell.

“
Oui
, this is the scoundrel.”

“Let's go, soldier.”

“I'm not a soldier anymore,” Henry answered.

“Yeah, yeah, save it for our CO.” The MP waggled his thumb toward the exit.

Henry stepped out of the jail cell. “I need my gear.”

“Right.”

At the door, the fat French policeman handed Henry's bag over the counter. As the Frenchman lifted it, his blue coat swung open. Henry spied an unopened pack of Camels in the
gendarme
's breast pocket.
Hey now!
Henry started to open his bag right there, to confirm his suspicions that the guy who arrested him for black-marketing had stolen the very things that had gotten Henry in trouble. But the MPs hustled him along.

In the jeep, Henry confirmed it—all his Spam, the cigarettes, and the bread card were gone. He was now down to $145 and he had no food backup or bartering items. He scrambled through his things again, looking for Madame's scarf. He'd be sick if they'd taken that. His fingers grasped silk. He kept digging to find the Camus book. There, too.
Thank goodness.
Madame's gifts had become as important
to him as that good-luck marble had been on his bombing raids.

The jeep jolted along Lyon's cobblestone streets, the MP driving quickly. Sadly, Henry noted the irony that his quest to find and help Pierre, the child warrior of the Resistance, would end in a city that had been a center of
maquis
uprising and a Gestapo stronghold to squash it.
Hold on a minute.
If the French had stolen Henry's things, there was no evidence left to use against him. Henry sat back in his seat, working to contain his excitement, centering himself with the sound of Dan's voice.
Steady. You're not completely clear of the flak yet, Hank.

Henry had never mastered a real poker face. The boys on his crew could always call his bluff during cards. Now was the time for Henry to stop being a naïve farmboy, so trusting, so open, so easy to read. He would just have to figure out how to mask his thoughts and play the fact of the missing items at the right moment, in the right way. It was the only trump he had.

Ready, Hank? Keep sharp for bogeys.

Ready, sir.