Petty Magic (18 page)

Simone was nodding with a look of faint amusement.
“Oui,”
she said. “We have a tale like that as well. Only the box is made of sandalwood.”

Before we parted the next morning, she took me aside. “Beware,” she said. “
Les boches
know about us. They’ll shoot at any bird that lands on the windowsill. Especially the black ones. Be smart and stick to pigeon.”

A
FTER THE
fall of France, the Germans positioned their V-
1
storage depots and launch sites in Calais, poised and ready to terrorize the people of London yet again. Before the RAF could bomb the underground storage depots or transit routes, they had to know where they were located. Where, precisely, were they hidden? When and by what routes would the V-1s be transported from their secret testing facilities in Germany? It was our job to find out.

I say Fisher, the demolitions expert, was part of our team, but we only saw him to pass along the maps and schedules. He’d then go off and plant his explosives on the roofs of train tunnels at the appointed hour.

It was the French workers at these storage depots who supplied us with most of the intelligence, though it had to pass through several pairs of hands to reach us. Some knew what they were doing, and others were unwitting accomplices. Messages could be tucked inside bicycle handlebars or toilet-paper rolls; coded directions were written in invisible ink on silk kerchiefs and embroidered on swaths of fine linen. Rendezvous were sometimes arranged via advertisements and memorials in the local paper.

And the commonest place for a rendezvous was a church, though one priest in particular was making it increasingly difficult to escape the notice of the Germans. We attended Sunday Mass once—oh, how it gave me the willies!—and from the pulpit Père Bernard began with the words of their savior:
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’s sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven
. He even went as far as to say that “the agents of evil are in our midst.”

“Good God, man,” Jonah muttered to himself. “You’ll be on a cattle car before the week is out.”

“I am desolated if I have caused you any trouble,” the priest told Jonah behind the locked door of the sacristy after the service. I was listening from a rafter, well out of sight. “But I cannot remain silent.” And Jonah said he understood.

The priest then told him, in not so many words, that he had something for us. “If you do not find me at the church tonight, seek Monsieur Boulanger. He will give you what you need.” He said no more, and I assumed Monsieur Boulanger to be a sexton or custodian of some sort, one who would be there at any time of the day or night.

That evening we made our way back to the church, but I froze when Jonah hopped the graveyard gate. “I’ve got to go round by the front,” I said.

“But it’s quicker this way.”

“I can’t go in there.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“We have our legends, same as you,” I told him. “One of them says that in the darkest corner of every graveyard there’s a portal to Hades. I don’t want to find out if it’s true.”

Jonah stifled a laugh. “Have it your way,” he said. “I’ll meet you at the front gate.”

So I went the long route. The massive oak door gave a terrific creak as I pushed it open, and a little old woman kneeling in a pew at the front of the church turned to glare at me. I smiled serenely as I passed her, and she hastily turned back and bent her head to resume her devotional charade. (I never understood all this Catholic malarkey. They drink the blood of their savior—or like to think they do—and they call
us
heathens? And here’s what really gets me: carving up the corpses of their holy men and distributing heads, thumbs, and earlobes all over the world in boxes encrusted with jewels! Which church gets all the naughty bits, that’s what
I
want to know.) Anyway, I conjured a set of beads out of my pocket and twirled them like a skipping rope as I walked, just to get her goat. From behind me I heard a gasp and an angry mutter, and I grinned to myself.

After a cursory tour of the church and its two small side chapels, and no sign of anyone but the old crone and her rosary beads going clickety-click, I resolved to wait for Monsieur Boulanger in the last pew. Eight, nine, ten minutes went by. The candles on the altar were burning low.

Why hadn’t he come? I was growing anxious. We were never meant to wait for anyone longer than five minutes, though admittedly that rule had been given us as regards assignations in the cities.

I let my mind flit above the battered wooden pews like a moth, past the altar and into the tiny sacristy. Without leaving my seat I could take glimpses of darkened corners and disused rooms, and through a grimy windowpane in a second-floor storage closet I could see Jonah sitting on a stone bench beside the town fountain, seemingly engrossed in whittling a chess piece. He glanced up as if he could sense my eyes on him, though of course I wasn’t actually there; he stood up, pocketed his knife and carving, and ambled toward the side door of the church. I returned my attention to my immediate surroundings, blinking, as Jonah held the door open for the little old woman, her rosary beads still swinging from her fingers.

Still no sign of Père Bernard. Boulanger had to be late—whoever he was. But something was nagging at me; I had the distinct feeling that it was
we
who were missing
him
, and not the other way around. Jonah slipped into the pew directly behind me and whispered, “Let’s go.”

I held up a finger and sprang up from the pew, striding toward the altar.

“Eve—”

“What is it?”

He nodded to the book on the broad high table. “Are you sure you should be touching that?”

I shrugged. “I won’t go up in a puff of smoke or anything.”

He looked at me, brow furrowed in doubt. “Have you touched one before?”

“Sure I have.”

He held his breath as I reached for it. “See?” I held up the heavy book with both hands and waved it about, and Jonah exhaled with an uneasy laugh.

“It’s only a book,” I said as I lifted the gilded cover. “Same as any other.” I felt for an opening along the leather edging, then did the same for the back cover. I paused. “It isn’t here.”

After another moment’s thought I closed the book and hurried back to one of the side chapels I’d only glanced in before. To my left, more kneelers before a gaudy shrine alight with flickering votives; behind a wrought-iron gate to my right, a semicircular alcove with simple stone memorials stacked like filing cabinets up to a round, rather crudely formed hole in the ceiling. The nooks were too small to hold anything but cinerary urns, unless the bones were reinterred here—not that I wished to find out for certain either way.

I tapped the gate lock and it swung open noiselessly, and I stepped into the narrow opening and began to pore over the names on each memorial. The masonry had been scraped away around one stone near the floor, and when I crouched to read the name I sighed with relief. “Monsieur Boulanger,” I said. “We meet at last.”

Carefully I eased the stone from its place, laid it on the floor, and reached a tentative hand into the darkness. “ ‘Dead drop,’ ” Jonah murmured to himself. “Hah.” My fingers met something cold, made of metal, rectangular—a box—and I put my other hand in and pulled it out. I didn’t need to open it to know that what we needed was inside. I tucked the box in my satchel and fitted the memorial slab back into the wall.

As we stepped through the gate and Jonah closed it behind us, I wondered what had happened to the mortal remains of Monsieur Boulanger. Men like him were often more useful than their living, breathing counterparts. After all, they couldn’t betray you.

We never saw or heard from Père Bernard again. I found out much later that they had arrested him that very afternoon and shipped him off to Natzweiler the following week.

T
HAT MORNING
, after we had passed the contents of Boulanger’s metal box along to Fisher, we lay together in the tiny attic room of our safe house.

“Behold, the spear of destiny!” I said in a loud whisper.

He threw his head back and laughed. Then I got quiet for a moment, thinking of the real “spear”—the Lance of Longinus. “It’s hidden underground someplace, a place he thinks is safe …”

“You don’t really believe that old legend, do you?”

“How funny. You men have such a way of saying ‘I believe this’ or ‘I don’t believe in that,’ as if the truth could alter itself to suit you.” He rolled his eyes as I went on. “Anyway, they’ll find it—
we’ll
find it—and on that day he’ll die, just as the legend says.”

“How would you know that?”

I gave him an impish little smile, and he said, “Touché.” Then another pause. “If you can see all that,” he ventured to ask, “can you see when it will end?”

I shook my head. I only knew it might be years yet, but what was the point in telling him so? “I’m sorry I mentioned it. Now, where were we?”

W
E’D HAD
three successful sabotage operations in March of 1944. The consequence of this was, of course, that Lyons was positively infested with Gestapo. It was only a matter of time before we came face to face with them.

Jonah very rarely left his safe house in the daytime, but on this occasion it couldn’t be helped. He’d been betrayed before, remember, and this time he was determined to err on the side of caution in all dealings with his fellow agents. This particular afternoon he was going to confront one whom he suspected of careless talk. He wasn’t carrying his pistol, because in the daytime it was best to travel without anything that might incriminate you. That illusion of innocence would protect you far more than a firearm would. He was driving a wagon full of milk cans, ostensibly to market, and I had made myself a barn cat, sitting on the driver’s seat beside him twitching my tail as if I hadn’t a care in the world.

On the outskirts of Lyons a checkpoint appeared out of thin air. A German officer strode out into the road and held up a hand. “Documents,
s’il vous plaît.”

Jonah nodded and pulled from his breast pocket the sheaf of papers drawn up for him by the C&D office in London. They identified him as Michel Durand, a farmhand from the village of Pérouges, excused from military service on account of a fractured knee. Of course, it was the Gestapo who had given him the bum knee in the first place. The Nazi could find no fault with the documents, but he signaled to two other officers, who forcibly removed Jonah from the wagon. I jumped off the seat and disappeared round the nearest corner, but only to turn from cat to bird. I remembered what Simone had said and stuck to pigeon.

He was handcuffed and put in the back of a truck, and I alighted on the roof and rode with him to the police station. There he was led into a whitewashed room, where they turned out his pockets. They checked for blades in the heels of his shoes, and I prayed they wouldn’t demand he undress. Those scars on his feet were practically a calling card from their comrades in Berlin; they would know at once what he was about. They didn’t strip him in that room, but it was inevitable. I had to get him out of there before that could happen.

Once he’d passed from that prison anteroom I lost sight of him. They were basement cells, with narrow barred windows at street level, though the street was more a dingy alleyway. That would be to our advantage. Thank goodness we hadn’t been rounded up in Paris. Liberating him from this podunk police station would be relatively easy.

I spent the next few minutes flitting from window to window and found him easily enough. He was on the floor in a cell by himself, lost in thought. I flapped my wings agitatedly to get his attention. He got up and came to the window.

Nothing stirred in the alleyway, and there was no one to see me as I resumed my womanly form. I crouched on the cobblestones and could just barely make out the contours of his face. “Here,” I said. “Come closer.”

“Did you get the key?”

“Don’t need it—I’ll make you small enough to fit in my jacket pocket. Come closer.”

I reached between the bars and placed my hand on the crown of his head.

“This is going to feel a bit strange,” I whispered. “Try not to make any sound.”

Half a minute later a field mouse looked up at me in utter bewilderment. I petted him briefly. The mouse skittered up my coat sleeve, and I put my hand out of sight as I came out of the alley onto the street so he could venture out again into the safety of my pocket.

I
SHOULD HAVE
known he would make himself distant over the days that followed. He could no longer go out of the house at any time of day or night, but that wasn’t what was bothering him. Once we were ensconced in one of the safe houses in town and I was able to turn him back into a man, he gave me a long look—grave, tender, and a little resentful. He understood that if it hadn’t been for me, he’d have been halfway back to Gestapo headquarters on Avenue Foch by now, déjà vu all over again. Jonah had managed to free himself once before without anyone else’s help, but fortune might not keep a second appointment. Furthermore, not every man in his situation had a girlfriend who could get him out of it, and it was for their sakes, too, that he resented my help.

“What does it feel like?” he asked once, a few nights before the balloon went up.

“What does what feel like?”

He paused. “Being you.”

How could I possibly answer that?

“Knowing you’ll survive this,” he went on. “Knowing you’ll outlive the rest of us by a hundred years.”

I felt a lump in my throat and a sting in my eyes. “Please, Jonah—please let’s not talk about it.”

“I’ve bested them twice,” he said. “The first time by sheer providence”—I made a noise of gentle derision; “providence” had much less to do with it than his own bravery and good sense—“and I owe you for the second time. From here on I’ll be tempting fate, Eve. No, I mean it.”

He was silent for a few moments and hardly responded to my hand on his arm. “In your file it says you were quite the fortune-teller in Berlin.”