Chapter 28
TWENTY-EIGHT
MARGOT
Margot tensed as she heard Felix Lauterborn’s heavy knock against the bookshop’s door. She didn’t want to let him in, but as he knocked again, she saw in her mind the moment he and his thugs had smashed through Esther’s front door.
Isabelle had woken and gazed up at Margot with wide eyes. She’d have to leave her alone in the flat. Her heart in her throat, she dotted a kiss to Isabelle’s cheek, then hurried downstairs. She went through the empty shop, her hands shaking as she unlocked the shop’s door.
‘Monsieur?’ she asked as she opened it. The bombastic orchestral music playing from the bar across the street was even louder now.
‘Madame.’ Lauterborn swept off his cap. He clicked his heels together and bowed his head. ‘I wish to talk to you on a matter of maps.’
Margot swallowed. She reluctantly stepped back to let Lauterborn into the shop, and gestured towards the shelves where the maps were kept.
There were atlases of the world that schoolchildren loved to buy and which would need to be updated now that the Nazis had torn up so many borders.
And next to them were the local maps for hikers.
‘Of course I sell maps.’ She tried to reply as if Lauterborn were just any other customer making an enquiry. ‘What kind do you need?’
‘We have plenty of maps,’ he said with an indulgent smile. ‘But I have to ask you, Madame, have you had anyone buying maps whom you might not have expected to need them? Any interest at all that seems out of the ordinary?’
Margot shook her head and tried to appear calm. ‘No, I haven’t. No one really buys them any more. Sometimes your soldiers buy them – I suppose they go for walks along the coast on their days off. But no one else has bought them.’
Above their heads, she heard a single, small cry.
She’d been a fool to think that she could keep a baby secret. Did he hear it too?
‘If anyone does, I would appreciate you letting me know,’ Lauterborn replied as, from upstairs, Margot heard the sound of the piano begin.
Her lodger was playing along to the orchestral music that could be heard from the bar.
Lauterborn glanced up and gave an expansive smile.
‘My brother has moved in, I understand? An appreciation of Wagner is one of the things we share. Do you know Rienzi?’
‘Oh, yes, I know Rienzi,’ Margot replied.
Lauterborn’s smile grew warmer. ‘I remember the first time I heard it at Nuremberg, to open the rally for our Führer,’ he reminisced, closing his eyes as the music washed over him.
‘It was like… a new world dawning right before us. And indeed, here we see that world.’ He opened his arms wide. ‘Our Thousand-Year Reich.’
Margot was suddenly hot with fury. A thousand-year Reich of oppression and violence, of innocent people being dragged out of their homes, and shot on their own doorsteps. Bombs cascading from the air and fires that raged and burned.
A world where books burned.
‘Well, I won’t keep you from your book.’ Lauterborn replaced the cap on his head as the music and its piano accompaniment ended. ‘Good day, madame.’
Margot opened the shop door for him. Her hands were shaking again, this time with anger as well as fear. ‘Good evening, Monsieur,’ she said as the man who’d murdered her friend walked out of her shop.
She waited a moment to see that Lauterborn had returned to the bar, before she ran back up to her flat.
Her heart was pounding. Was there a chance that the Professor hadn’t heard Isabelle over the sound of his piano?
She couldn’t hear Isabelle crying now – she must’ve calmed herself and perhaps fallen back asleep.
In her haste, Margot almost lost her footing at the top of the stairs, but she ran on. She went into her flat and straight over to Isabelle’s basket.
She froze, overwhelmed with cold panic, her heart rushing in her chest.
Isabelle had gone.