Gone to Soldiers (79 page)

He leaped up. “The stuff is coming!” he announced to Lev.

“You've been saying that for months,” Lev said with a yawn.

“I've been saying that I wanted it, that I asked for it. This is an official message. They're sending two planes over at the next full moon. Tuesday, right? Weather permitting. Same spot as last time.”

“The last drop was you. We haven't had a sou from them since, not a bullet, not a firecracker.” Lev paced, his hands knotted behind his back.

“It sounds as if they're making up for the wasted time. Two planeloads could give us a decent amount of firepower.”

“Unless they just drop some more wise guys,” Lev muttered. He was not as friendly since Jacqueline had become Jeff's lover. Everyone disapproved at least a little, but mostly they minded that until now, no weapons had come, no explosives. He had had Raymond send message after message requesting, begging for arms, but until now, nothing.

Daniela came in with her arms full of newspapers. “
Quand Même
is out again,” she announced jubilantly. “Fat new issue. I mean fat for a clandestine paper.… Lev!” Her voice rang out. “What happened?” She dropped the bundles, bolting forward.

His hand shot up to his face, as if surprised. “This? We took care of that double agent Gilles. We know he fingered Larousse for the SS. He's been running back and forth, back and forth between the railway workers and the Gestapo, playing both sides and selling us to keep himself in good.”

Daniela touched Lev's slashed face with her fingertips, then ran for her bag to dress it. “But how could you be sure? Justice is not something to dispense like water when you turn on a tap.”

Jeff intervened. “When he realized we had come to shoot him, he confessed. He said he could get us information. He tried to bargain.”

Lev spat, then rubbed out the spot on the floor with his sabot. “The heart of a worm.”

“Even when he was dying”—he turned to Jacqueline who was undoing the wire-binding bundles of the underground Jewish paper—“he was still trying to bargain. He still thought if he offered enough, he wouldn't have to die, even with the blood bubbling out of him.”

Lev took a flask of marc from the cupboard and poured little cups for everyone, including Daniela who never drank anything stronger than wine. “If he hadn't been so greedy, turning in those peasants who were hiding the German boy, we wouldn't have suspected him. But he had gone there with us, and hardly anybody knew about them.” The cut on his cheek where Gilles had slashed him was livid but looked worse than it was, bloody but shallow.

Jeff had then disarmed Gilles, as he had been taught, and felt a jolt of surprise when the knife dropped neatly from Gilles's broken hand to stand upright quivering in the floorboard. It had worked. Had he never really believed in the methods they had taught him in Washington and again in Kent and Sussex? Had he always suspected they were only playing? Indeed, he had felt primarily astonishment as he first disarmed Gilles and then knocked him down, with three precise blows of hand and foot.

Jeff saw the two boys again, Theo bounding like a goat in the dark, Alain exclaiming over the fireworks of the explosion. Dead? In a camp?

“I don't want that poison.” Daniela waved it away. “Only the goyim drink that. You'll give yourself ulcers.”

“Drink it.” Lev pushed the old blue cup back across the table. “Listen to me, and drink it.”

“Why? What's wrong?” She cleaned out the cut on his cheek, carefully.

“Drink it and I'll tell you.”

Daniela stared into his face and drank off the cup like medicine, wincing. “So now tell me. What is it?”

“Now another one.” Lev poured.

“Lev, no more. Tell me. Who's been deported? Who's dead? I see you, I see my Jacqueline. Who's missing?”

“Your brother was a brave man,” Lev said. “We heard the news today.”

“That was Daniela's brother?” No one had bothered to tell Jeff that; he felt like an outsider.

“Nathan was on a housetop in Neuilly. When a German patrol was passing underneath, he threw two grenades and got the officers. They surrounded the roof and he ran out of ammo. He had one grenade left. He blew himself up.”

Obviously so that he would not talk under torture; the same reason OSS had given Jeff a cyanide pill in a false filling. He had not really listened to the story the courier had told. His mind had been fixed on the coming confrontation and his own desire to believe Gilles innocent in spite of the strong but circumstantial evidence convicting him. He found Gilles gentler, friendlier than Lev, and had preferred him. He did not want to give up the Gilles of his experience for the Gilles who sold people to the Germans to save his own skin, to protect his family and to provide them creature comforts. To Lev the shocker was that a Jew would turn in other Jews, that a resistant would hand in other resistants; to Jeff, the sticking point was how much he had liked Gilles. He did not want to be proved a poor judge of character. Therefore he had paid minimal attention to the courier and the news she had given Lev.

Daniela was sitting rigidly upright on the car seat beside Jacqueline, who held her. The blue cup lay broken at her feet. The raw smell of spilled liquor cut into the reek of gasoline and oil. Daniela stared ahead. She did not speak or move. Finally Jacqueline led her upstairs.

Lev slumped at the rolltop desk, scowling. “He was twenty. What kind of shitty world is it where a kid of twenty has to face a choice like that and die, torn into shreds on a rooftop? He should be thinking about going to school and getting laid.”

“Yet it's kids who do the killing in wars, always.”

“I don't mind the killing when I'm doing it. It's easy. You just forget they're human too.”

“Like anything else,” Jeff said. “The first time is hard and the next time less hard.” He was not about to remark that he had never killed anyone. Lev had shot Gilles point-blank.

“You were fast,” Lev said reluctantly and got to his feet. He came over and smote Jeff on the shoulder. “You saved my hide—or at least my beauty, nu? Maybe it hurt my pride, that I walked right into his knife, but pride heals faster than flesh. If I've been short tonight, I regret it. I didn't want to tell her.”

“Lev, let me make you angry again. You're attracted to Daniela, she's attracted to you. What's holding you back?”

“I'm a married man, Vendôme. Daniela is engaged. Nothing is possible.”

“How do either of you know the one you're waiting for is still alive or will want you back? Years have gone by.”

“If Vera—that's my wife—can survive, I can wait,” Lev said quietly with a dignity that impressed Jeff in spite of himself.

“Tomorrow we all may die quite hideously like Daniela's brother. What a waste, then.”

“Look, copain, I'm myself till I die and then I'm just a stain on a wall. But while I'm myself, I control how I act. Sometimes I act well and sometimes I don't make it, but it's me, trying.” There was a sound from overhead, a sharp cry and something falling. Lev reached for the bottle and filled their blue cups, Prussian blue, actually. “L'chaim.”

Jeff raised his cup and they clinked them, elbows linked.

“Someday this will end,” Lev said. “We'll have the bricks of our lives to pick up and fit together however we can.”

“I met you as a fighter. I can't imagine your life before.”

“Me, I'm a mason. I build. Now I just tear down.… My wife Vera's a doctor. I think sometimes even those assholes wouldn't be so stupid as to kill a doctor. It's the sort of little lie I like to believe day to day. You understand?”

“I try to.”

A thin eerie cry came down through the floorboards, sustained, piercing as a note on a violin. Both men looked upwards. Lev poured another drink.

“You can't protect me. It's absurd for you to try. I was in this long before I met you.” She put her hand against his face palm out, a gesture of affection and reproach at once.

“It's far more absurd for you to take chances as a courier. The Milice and the Gestapo have your description. Anybody can be a courier, ginger cat. You have no special skill at running errands.”

“You're wrong.” She let him pull her down on his lap. “It takes a trained alertness. I have that. It takes caution when caution is needed, boldness when boldness is needed, and the sensitivity to situation to guess which.” She brought her face directly up to his, her eyes wide open staring into his. “Why can't I see into your brain through your eyes?”

“You'd see it sweating with anxiety.” He often thought that Jacqueline had cooler nerves than he did. Mostly he acted by not allowing himself to consider the consequences, the dangers. She was conscious and finally braver. Yet he knew such comparisons would never arise for her. She did not consider herself brave, but living on borrowed time, time she had stolen, time she continued to steal, day by day.

Her hair had grown out, still lighter toward the ends, but with all its metallic colors and glinting hues back, running between his fingers. A pulse ticked in her throat. He thought of dragonflies, of hummingbirds for the glints in her, for her speed, her hovering, her pouncing, her fierce nature. Lily, he called her, for her skin, like the pinkish trumpet lilies his mother had grown with intoxicating perfume. She accepted his names without sentiment, without self-consciousness. She seemed to have few preconceptions about being in love. Her love was cool, crystalline, leaving her mind clear. She could be, she was, judgmental toward him. She held him to standards almost as high as she held herself.

She had not come to him, she had added him to her family, to the distant sisters, to the mother, even to the father she had not quite forgiven, to Daniela, her adopted sister. In bed she was surprisingly uncoy, direct. She liked her pleasure, she liked making love with him. If he came too soon, she would yell at him, as if he had dropped a plate on her toe. When he got drunk with Lev and could not achieve an erection, she scolded him as for any other small sin. She did not seem to divide off sex mentally from the rest of her life and to feel he needed to be handled in any particular way. He would have liked to have asked Zach if making love to boys was like that, because none of the other women he had ever been with had been so simply demanding and so lacking in manipulative behavior. Sometimes he missed being coddled, being handled, being arranged for, but he only grew crazier for her. Compulsively he sketched her, changeable as a field.

“You're not a woman,” he told her as they lay bare flank to flank under the feather bed in his room. “You're an intelligent cat. You have a human intellect, but not a human soul.”

“Is that a compliment or an insult?”

“Merely an observation.”

“Tais-toi,” she said gently, putting her hand over his mouth, and mounted him. He liked having her fuck him. He could control his erection better and watch her breasts bounce if she held herself up or feel them bounding against his chest if she lay more closely. He liked the luxurious feeling of making her do most of the work.

Sometimes he felt as if she were exploring her sexuality more than giving herself to him; sometimes he could even feel used. But he also felt her love, passionate, fiercely loyal. She never made him jealous; she never glanced at any other man with sexual interest. She never flirted, but seemed convinced he embodied sex for her. She pored over his body with minute attention. She caressed his inner elbows until he declared them a major erogenous zone. She discovered exquisitely sensitive spots between his asshole and his balls and on the inside of his ankles and between his big and second toes.

She scavenged food for him; she fed him and mended his clothes and darned his socks. Those female things she did with a concentration and zest that made him feel cherished. Yet she did the same for Daniela. If anything, she and Daniela had drawn closer. Daniela accepted him without enthusiasm but without rancor. Jacqueline shared her body with him and parts of her mind closed to him with Daniela, such as her problematic relationship with Judaism. Daniela and she had long involuted discussions of how their religion could be rendered more responsive to women. She was so rational a creature, she seemed to him quintessentially French, a female Voltaire, and yet she carried around her religion like a pet porcupine, he thought, caressing its quills and addressing it in passionate tones. It was a paradox he could not resolve.

She viewed his art as self-indulgence, and yet she was a decent critic. She looked at his sketches and pointed at once to a shoddy line or something superfluous or accidental. He would not lose her to another man, because she paid no attention to them as sexual beings, but he could lose her because he fucked up; he could lose her to the Gestapo. Every time she went off on a dangerous errand without him, he suffered excruciating images of her body bleeding, torn, impaled. He could not swallow. His stomach clenched to a metal fist. Only her safe return released him. In front of the others he managed to seem only normally concerned, but he knew that he was crazy while she was gone, and that any decisions he made then should be reexamined with the return of ease and sanity, when she reappeared.

The drop came on Tuesday, near the ruins of a château. It was supplies, the little parachutes opening, cartons and crates floating down in the light of the full moon but scattered over several miles. The pilot in the lead plane had been nervous and began to release before he was over their triangle of fires, so they were up all night collecting every last crate. In the nearby town of Vabre, a textile town with a fish hatchery, they opened the rubbish dump, steaming a little on the icy night air, to hide extra ammunition and plastique in the old trash.

“We won't be able to use that site again,” Lev said. “We messed up the snow for two square miles. There's no way the Boches won't see it. They'll know we had a drop. They'll be looking for our weapons house to house. Your radioman Raymond had better move farther up into the mountains tomorrow.”