Chapter Twenty-Three #2
René motioned toward the door. “I’ll wait outside. Too hot in here.”
“I don’t imagine I’ll be long,” he muttered toward his musician. He turned toward the stairs, more than a little surprised when Zelie pivoted and climbed back up them rather than tell him whatever she needed to tell him there in the public space.
But she led him to the third floor—the heat rising with every step, despite the transoms open to allow air to flow—and into one of the rooms.
Office, not bedroom. Whatever furniture had once been in the chamber had been replaced with desks, tables, a corkboard, and filing cupboards.
He expected her now to motion him toward the bare wooden chair shoved against the wall, but again she surprised him.
She closed the door behind them, moved to stand in front of him .
. . and wrapped her arms around his middle, pressing her cheek to his shoulder. “I’m so sorry. Why didn’t you tell me?”
Because his arms always had a life of their own where she was concerned, they closed around her, even as his mind scrambled to make sense of it—the embrace, her words, something.
No such luck. “Ah . . . tell you what?”
She tilted her head back to meet his gaze. One note of amusement sang out its high melody in her eyes, but beneath it was a chord low and somber. “Gabriel.”
Reality crashed through the momentary haze of perfection.
He saw again Anne’s form, shaking with sobs in the corner booth of a bistro he’d never visited before, where neither of them would be known.
The newspaper clipping she’d passed his way, proclaiming that the “traitorous opera singer” had been executed.
He heard her quiet agony. The recriminations in his own mind.
The sound of his best friend’s laugh, his voice calling out a tease to a pretty girl or going deep with a line of music. Gabriel. Perhaps the most talented baritone of their generation. Gone.
Gone because Marcel had involved him in this fight. Gone because Marcel’s cousin had chosen himself over the rest of them. Gone because they hadn’t known how to free him from the Gestapo prison in Paris. Gone, because that was what happened to spies caught by the Nazis.
Marcel’s hands flexed against Zelie’s back, his gaze sweeping to the side and dropping. “I did tell you.” In the report he’d given Rivière when he’d returned from Paris. Via a letter, exactly like she’d told him to do with all his news.
She pounded a fist softly against his chest but didn’t step away. “You think I wouldn’t want to hear that in person?”
Resentment flared momentarily. Then it banked into the all-too-familiar sorrow. He met her gaze again. “Zelie, if every loss was given to you in person, you’d have a constant stream of agents in this room, and you’d be so devastated you wouldn’t be able to function.”
She had to insulate herself. Had to, because none of them could afford for her to be out of commission.
And successful as Alliance was recently, their numbers soaring over a thousand with the new structure that let anyone bring in other agents, there were always arrests.
Always raids on one location or another.
Always news coming of someone being caught or killed.
Her eyes sparked. “This isn’t just one more loss, Marcel.”
“Because you met him? Or because he’s the first to be executed because of Emile?”
Now she pushed away, out of his arms. She paced two steps before running into her desk chair and then spun back, eyes blazing now. “Because he’s your best friend!”
Does that even matter to you? He didn’t say the words, not aloud. But she must have read them on his face. Must have answered Yes, because she strode right back over and embraced him again.
Taking comfort or giving it? Or were the two so intertwined it was a useless distinction?
He rested his cheek against the top of her head and accepted the offering, prayed that giving it was a solace for her.
She cared. Even if not like he wanted her to, she cared.
She mourned with him, not because of what Gabriel’s loss meant to Alliance but because of what it meant to him.
“He used to infuriate the conductors at the conservatory,” he whispered into her hair.
“They placed him in the baritone section because it was his strength, but he could sing tenor and bass as easily. Such a range! He’d always lower some lines by an octave.
Or raise others. Just to see them glower at him. ”
What was that little breath? Laughter, tears? Or was that another useless distinction? “I wish I’d been there with you. Accepted the offer to come. I wish I’d known him longer, met you then, before . . .”
Before she’d met Jacques and given up her dreams for the ones he told her she should dream instead?
Marcel stroked a hand over her hair. “I wish you could have been too, but still somehow turned out exactly as you are now, complete with those two amazing children. With this role. You were born for more than a music career, mon amour. For more than me. You were born for this.”
Her fingers bunched in his shirt. “Why do you always do that?”
“Do what?”
“Love me?” She pressed her face into his shoulder, hiding it from him. “I don’t deserve it.”
“Oh, mon étoile. None of us deserves love—not until love has already done its work in us. It’s why we must rely on the blessing, the mercy of God loving us first.”
She shook her head, but at least she lifted it again so he could see her face. “You deserve better than me. And yet I selfishly want to keep you close, because you make me better.”
Did she? Most of the time it seemed she wanted to push him away. “You know very well I want nothing more than to be near you. But I am not the most important thing right now. I know that. And am likely soon to be altogether useless.”
Her brows puckered. “What are you talking about?”
“Have you not seen the bulletin yet?” He pulled one reluctant arm away so he could reach into his pocket and fish it out. “Arrived in the post today.”
She smoothed the paper out—against his chest rather than turning away, which made him smile despite it all.
“On 4 September 1942, Philippe Pétain, Marshal of France and Chief of State of Vichy France, signed into law the Service du Trevail Obligatoire, requiring all able-bodied men between the ages of eighteen and fifty and single women between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-five to be subject to do any work that the Government deems necessary. Marcel.” She looked up, her gaze horror stricken. “What exactly is this any work?”
“Deportation to Germany. The orchestra is exempt . . . for now. But Von Eberstein had to fight to get those exemptions, and he was warned that they wouldn’t hold for long.
” There were a few members still under eighteen, but not many.
And not for long. The youngest of them had turned seventeen over the summer.
And without the orchestra, Marcel’s pass would be revoked. No more traveling all over France, no more reason to meet up with the agents he’d recruited all over the country. His choice would be to go to Germany or join the Maquis.
“How long?” she asked. He expected to hear the voice of la patronne, even and aloof, as she worked through it. Instead, she sounded shaken. Distraught.
“Hard to say.” His fingers reached up to brush a wave of dark hair from her cheek before he could think better of it.
“It could be weeks, months. I want to think years, but Von Eberstein didn’t find that likely.
His guess was six months at the outside.
Quite likely sooner, because we all know how our neighbors will respond to this.
” He tried for a smile and touched a knuckle under her chin to lift her face.
“The Maquis is about to grow exponentially.”
“No one wants to grow like this.” She let out a long breath, eyes skimming over the rest of the announcement. “Your musicians?”
“All the ones of age received them too. We got very little practicing done today, I’m afraid.” He could still see the joint outrage, the guilty relief, the looming fear on their faces.
What will we do? his first chair violinist had asked, instrument in hand. When our exemption runs out, what will we do? I don’t want to go to Germany.
We don’t go. Rather than sit at his piano, René had stood beside it. We fight instead.
“They’re already making plans to join the Maquis, when it comes down to it. Vivi’s taking names. I imagine she’ll come to see you soon, with a list of young men who need some fake papers.”
“I’ll tell our forger to expect an influx of requests.” She sounded resigned, a few bars away from defeated.
Of course she did. So much of their work would be undone, so many inroads laid waste.
Marcel rubbed a hand over her back. “I’m sorry.
I wish I could go on serving you—and I will as long as I can.
But you’ll have no use for me after I lose my pass.
I’ll have to throw myself on the mercy of Gustave or Raoul. ”