Chapter Twenty-Three
Twenty-Three
The news bulletin weighed like lead in his pocket as Marcel tromped through the night, flashlight in hand but not switched on.
He could just make out the darker shadows of the rest of the ground crew ahead of him, and he followed them carefully, as he knew his young pianist, René Faye, was following him.
He knew, vaguely, which fields Alliance used for the Lysander landings. But he’d never been one of the people to greet the plane before. It had never been his job, not in his purview.
His purview was likely to change soon. So it was either learn something new . . . or become obsolete.
Maybe that would be for the best. Maybe he should leave a message for Zelie saying he was joining his brother in Pau and then do exactly that. Maybe that would be wiser than finding ways to remind her of his love.
Maybe he would, if she stopped showing up outside the Alliance-owned bistro every Wednesday night to listen to him play from the alleyway.
Or if, every time she did see him, she didn’t somehow end up in his arms, even though she always fled again.
Or if his heart didn’t break into a million scattered notes at the mere thought.
It was one thing not to see her. Another altogether to remove the possibility.
She cared for him. Maybe it wasn’t love, only attraction or affection. He didn’t dare ascribe to her anything more. But what if it wasn’t him holding her back—his background, his inability to provide the life she was used to, his relative unimportance in this work? What if it was fear?
He only knew of one remedy for fear: perfect love.
Well, he was far from perfect . . . but he couldn’t help but try. Her parting words in January kept echoing in his mind like a musical phrase cut off too quickly. Unresolved. Dissonant.
But I’m still like me.
He ducked under a branch before it could smack him in the head. He hated that she thought being herself was an argument against lasting love. And wanted to show her that me was exactly who she was meant to be. That he didn’t love her despite who she was, but for it.
For every strength. Every ounce of courage. Every hard choice, every risk, every sacrifice. For every doubt, every prayer, every song in her heart.
“Are we almost there?” René’s voice came in a low murmur from behind him, along with the rustling of the leaves the young man shoved aside.
“I think so.” Usually, it would have been Rivière and a few of his most trusted deputies making this nighttime trek through the countryside, but the man had come into the bistro tonight and whispered to Marcel as he played that there was an emergency he had to attend, along with those two deputies, and someone else needed to take their place in tonight’s reception committee.
Marcel hadn’t asked what the emergency was—that was one of the new rules of Alliance. You didn’t ask for details, you didn’t ask for names. You did only what you were assigned, with the information you were given.
Smart, yes. But it was too easy now to feel isolated in what had once been a community, and for that, he mourned.
But he’d assured the man he’d bring a few able bodies to the rendezvous point at midnight.
Hence René behind him. He’d thought he’d have to ask others from the orchestra too, but he’d run into Blanchet briefly in Marseille to pick up more supplies from MI6 in the drop, so had instructed him to meet the group at the field instead.
A few more moments and they emerged into a clearing.
“Flashlights on,” Henri said. He’d given up his position with the Vichy government to be on hand for Zelie lately and had ended up taking over Lucien’s duties on the radio, rebuilding their network and redrawing the map they’d had to burn in the raid—a process that had taken months, and which was never-ending as they added more transmitters in the hands of more agents, all of whom had to be kept straight on said map.
“Form an L along the edges of the field.”
A few flashlights as the only direction for an airplane flying through the dark seemed risky at best, but this was far from the first rendezvous for the Royal Air Force pilots. They’d been doing so at least once a month, often every fortnight or even weekly, when weather permitted.
No telling if the plane would actually come, though. Weather here was fair, but that didn’t mean it was in London. Rather than risk radio transmissions for such information, Alliance simply came out night after night when a landing was impending, until the plane showed up.
Marcel took his place in the line and turned on his flashlight, tilting his face upward as everyone else was doing to search for the plane.
First came the rumble of its engines in the distance, growing louder by the second. “There!” someone shouted, moving their beam to a particular point in the sky.
Marcel followed the lead of those around him and flashed his beam toward the plane once, then turned it ninety degrees to the ground and swept it in a slow arc along that axis. Drawing a line through the air, as it were, for where this improvised runway was supposed to be.
His stomach went tight as the Lysander approached, but it touched down without incident and made its bumpy taxi along their lit-up L, positioning itself for takeoff again as they all switched off their lights, shoved them into pockets, and ran for the plane.
The bulletin crinkled in his pocket as Marcel’s flashlight pushed it down, but he paid that no mind. Someone was already throwing open the door to the aircraft, moonlight catching on his smile.
“Cheerio, chaps!” the man said in cheerful English, waving a hand. “Fine night for flying, isn’t it?”
Bonjours rang out from the men among their crew who were used to this, smiles on their faces too.
The Brits had boxes in their hands a moment later, and Marcel joined the queue to move them from plane to ground, motioning René to take the spot behind him.
Crews from both ground and plane joked with each other in a combination of French and English during the ten minutes it took to unload all the supplies and pass along a few things Zelie apparently wanted sent to London.
One agent who looked vaguely familiar but who Marcel knew neither by name nor call sign climbed into the plane too.
They all manned their flashlights again for the takeoff, and then the Lysander was gone.
Marcel grabbed a box and followed the others back into the trees.
They soon emerged onto a little dirt track where a lorry was parked.
Silent now, they all slid their boxes inside the back and then returned to the clearing for more.
Once they had the last of it, Henri motioned for them to hop in alongside the supplies.
Marcel took his seat on a box between René and Blanchet, nodding to the Englishman he hadn’t seen in months, before today. “How has Normandy been?” he asked softly.
Blanchet smiled. “Loveliest place in the world, despite it all.”
“Any trouble crossing the demarcation line?”
“Not this time.” Blanchet angled toward them a bit. Lifted his brows at René. “New? Are you a friend of . . . ?” He motioned toward Marcel.
Marcel pursed his lips. They’d never actually given Blanchet his name, had they?
He’d first thought him Navarre, and they’d only corrected that assumption without telling him who Marcel was.
He hadn’t been around for any of Blanchet’s training, and then the Englishman had left for Normandy. Their paths had rarely crossed since.
René smiled. “Warbler.” The lad’s chest puffed a bit.
He’d only gotten his call sign that evening, when Marcel had let Zelie know that the two of them would be taking the place of Rivière and one of his men.
He’d told her as a courtesy, since they would have to accompany this group back to headquarters with the boxes, in case she wanted to make herself scarce, given his presence.
Better a thirty-second exchange in the alley with Marguerite at her side to provide a buffer, he assumed she’d think, than what could turn into prolonged exposure to him tonight. It also gave her the chance to tell him to defer to someone else and stay away.
She hadn’t. That was something, right? Or maybe he was, as already decided, a fool for hoping. Chasing. Wishing.
Blanchet’s face twisted for a moment, then cleared. “Right. Apologies. Still not quite used to this Noah’s Ark that has taken the place of the men I once knew.”
Chuckling, Marcel held on when the lorry lurched into movement and let the conversation fade.
It was too hard to hear over the combination of engine noise and creaking and bumping of springs as they jostled their way along the rutted road, otherwise he would have added his own call sign to the conversation.
Twenty minutes later, the lorry pulled to a stop. Henri jumped down and said, “Put a fire under it, boys, so the lorry can disappear again.”
Within five minutes, the boxes had all been unloaded at the back of the hotel, the lorry trundled off, and they set about carrying the supplies inside under cover of darkness.
Not so dark once they got beyond the blackout curtains though. The hotel’s drawing room might have looked nothing like the one at the villa, but it felt the same, with its agents bustling about, directing boxes into piles and then quickly distributing the contents.
Zelie was nowhere to be seen. He expected as much, but still his heart sank.
He worked steadily along with the others until the room once more looked like the shabby-but-clean hotel space, then caught René’s eye and nodded.
The other men were already vanishing, either up the stairs to the rooms or back out into the night.
He waved a farewell to Blanchet as the Englishman left, a box of transmitters in his arms.
“Greenfinch, could you come here, please?”
He froze at her voice, his nerves jangling like a trill between joy and anxiety. When he turned from the back door he’d been approaching, he saw Zelie standing on the stairs, halfway down, hand resting on the railing.