Justine was watching the big clock on the factory wall, the one that ruled the lives and paychecks of hourly workers. As its minute hand cruised toward twelve, she timed her work so that the crate of carbon parts filled at just the right moment. When the time came, she closed the crate, hefted it, and said, “Be right back,” to Nelle, knowing that she wasn’t coming back. Then she hauled the crate where it needed to go, which was near the assembly area just inside the loading dock. And that was exactly where she needed to be.
When Sam-the-Timekeeper blew the whistle, she was in place. Its shrill sound wasn’t marking lunchtime or going-home time. It was calling Mr. Higgins’s employees to walk in an orderly fashion through the main plant and line themselves up with the other workers for his speech. There wasn’t a ghost of a chance that anyone would notice Justine wasn’t with them.
Instead, she was hiding behind the temporary stage. Behind her was the open maw of the loading dock. As her coworkers filed out into the main plant, she crept to the ramp leading down to the pavement and, from there, outdoors.
It wasn’t noon yet, so she felt confident that she would be alone when she reached the bottom of that ramp. She would be in place to watch Martin as he walked her way. More critical to her plan, she would be in place so that she could watch the German-speaker she presumed was the saboteur as he strolled—or rolled—out to the trash pen.
Justine waited beside the ramp. The green-stamped crate where she’d been sitting when Jerry brought her a Coke was still there. Now, another just like it sat on the other side of the loading dock. She stepped into the shadows beside the nearest crate and waited.
***
Georgette didn’t mind watching Andrew Higgins speak once, but she was not excited about hearing him speak twice. Especially today, when she really just wanted to find a quiet place to be sad in peace.
When the whistle blew, she’d taken a few steps in the same direction as everybody else, then she’d given up. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t clap her hands and cheer over a rah-rah speech, and she certainly couldn’t come back into the Carbon Division in a little while and do it all over again.
A moving hank of orange frizz caught her eye. It was Justine’s ponytail, and it swayed with her determined stride. Justine and her ponytail were headed in the wrong direction.
Georgette turned around and followed the ponytail before she even gave the matter any thought. There was nothing to think about. She needed to patch things up with Justine. Even if Justine thought she was too stupid to breathe, Georgette valued her friendship. Justine was generous, she was funny, and she was kind. Georgette had known those things about her since they’d cobbled together a meal out of two cans, a bag of macaroni, and a tea bag, and they hadn’t changed. If she needed to humble herself to make amends for the water bucket incident, then so be it.
***
Jerry sat in his assigned position, hidden behind the trash pen. His role was to be the lookout, only stepping in if needed. He hoped he wasn’t needed, because he cared about Justine, and he didn’t want anything to happen to her.
***
Martin saw Justine before she saw him. She was loitering in the shadow of the loading dock, looking away from him. He could see that she had presumed he’d be approaching from the back door of the plant nearest to the trash pen, so her eyes were fastened on that door. He liked to subvert expectations, so he’d exited early and waited on the far side of the loading dock.
He gave her a moment to get nervous, then began walking her way. He hoped this encounter went according to plan. He would soon be walking away from the Michaud plant forever, and he hoped that Justine was at his side when he went.
***
Charles executed his part of the plan, exiting the factory building through the same door that he’d walked through with Justine when he was courting her by carrying her trash. Or when he’d been pretending to court her. Even he wasn’t sure what he’d really been doing.
And he wasn’t sure what he was doing now. He had no reason to believe that Justine would be meeting him today, because he had no reason to believe that she’d decoded his message. But surely she had been able to read the note he’d left at her house. It had been encoded, because that was protocol and he followed protocol, but its content should have been crystal clear for a woman who knew both German and braille.
And yet she hadn’t called, so he hadn’t been able to warn her that he was being pulled off this assignment, despite the fact that he was sure an enemy agent was at work. And despite the fact that he was sure she was on the trail of that agent. Why else had she taken the coded screen home with her? Why else would she have made that midnight trip to consult Gloria Mazur, the only person left in New Orleans who could make sense of the goings-on in the Carbon Division?
Charles knew in his gut that the acetylene leak that could have killed Justine was no accident. And he couldn’t even warn her, because she hadn’t called. Or perhaps she had called. Jerry had told him about the hang-up call he’d taken that morning, and for this he kicked himself. He hadn’t told his housemate not to pick up the phone, because why wouldn’t Justine speak to kind, friendly Jerry?
It was mistakes like this that cost lives. It was mistakes like this that lost wars.
***
Justine didn’t know how able she’d be to rise to a crisis, and she wouldn’t know until the moment came. When Martin came into view, carrying a box and emerging unexpectedly from her blind side, she felt herself losing control of the situation.
Still a dozen feet away, he said, “Hey, Justine,” and there was nothing in his voice to make her trust him or doubt him.
The surprise of seeing him in the wrong place caused her to give herself away by letting her head whip back in the other direction. Now he knew that she was looking for someone else. His eyes followed hers, and Jerry’s position was given away by the light glinting off his chair. They both saw him hiding behind the trash pen at the same instant, out of view of anyone coming toward him from the factory door.
In that instant, that door opened, and Charles passed through it. He made his way toward the trash pen and took his position at its gate, presumably so Justine would see him waiting for her. Now she knew who had sent her the message in the screen, and probably the message in German that morning, and it wasn’t Jerry. But did Charles know that Jerry was behind him? Was Jerry hiding from Charles or from her?
Remembering the two men exiting the same car that morning, she thought that she understood one thing. She’d always known that they were friends, but it had never occurred to her that they were also roommates. This did not, however, mean that they were both spies or even on the same side. Maybe Jerry had sent the message, but it was just as possible that Jerry had merely picked up a call not meant for him.
Did this mean that Jerry was innocent of the sabotage? Her letter to Mr. Higgins would probably get him executed, so she had to know the truth before she delivered it.
Jerry certainly looked guilty as he lurked in a spot where Justine assuredly wouldn’t have seen him if she’d been where Charles expected her to be. A woman might ask another woman to wait out of sight nearby when she met a man, just for safety, but she was no danger to Charles. Why would he post Jerry as a lookout?
Martin shot her a look that she couldn’t read, but she guessed that it was jealousy. He did have cause to be jealous, and it was surely obvious by the way she was staring at Charles.
At least one of these three men had to be the saboteur who was threatening the work of the Carbon Division. Maybe two of them were in on it. And perhaps even all three of them had been working to cover their tracks by confusing her.
What did she know for certain? Random facts struck her like thunderbolts.
Fact One: She’d just seen Charles and Jerry getting out of a van. Jerry had been sitting on the passenger side, so it was presumably Charles’s car. Whoever owned the car, Charles had been dishonest when he suggested that he was dependent on buses to get around.
Fact Two: She remembered Jerry’s red-capped thermos sitting on the top shelf in his shed just a few minutes after he’d poured her a cup of coffee. A few minutes later, he’d held that cap in his hands, and there was nobody nearby to fetch it for him. He could never have reached that shelf while sitting in his wheelchair. Now she knew that Jerry was lying about his physical condition.
Fact Three: Jerry or somebody who lived with him had sent her an emergency message asking her to call. Seeing the two of them get out of the same car suggested that they might be roommates, so the message-sender wasn’t necessarily Jerry. It could have been Charles. There was no way to know.
Fact Four: The saboteur would likely be working for an enemy nation. Charles spoke German, and that made him a strong candidate. One or more of them could be a Japanese spy, but the German language was cropping up too often to make this likely.
Fact Five: Gloria had believed that Justine would be in danger if the saboteur learned of her suspicions. Gloria had emphasized the danger by saying, “If you think your parents’ deaths were an accident, then you are a fool.” Justine believed that she was in the presence of the saboteur. If Gloria was right, then she might be in the presence of her parents’ murderer. Or murderers.
Based on these facts, her thoughts focused on a single goal: How would you go about identifying a German spy? An idea for answering it burst out of her subconscious, a shot-in-the-dark idea that might just show her who she was dealing with.
Loud and clear, she shouted, “Proletarier aller Länder vereinigt Euch!”
Charles’s head whipped her way, as she had known it would. She knew he spoke German, and she knew that he knew the Communist Manifesto. He would absolutely react when she shouted, “Workers of the world, unite!” She half expected him to respond, “You have nothing to lose but your chains!” but he was just staring at her, slack-jawed.
Jerry’s reaction, however, was different. His head turned a fraction of a second slower than Charles’s had, and his expression was not shock. It was confusion.
Jerry didn’t speak German. Justine was sure of it. He had not been shipped over from Germany to sabotage the war effort, despite the stereotypical Aryan whiteness of his hair, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t an American collaborator.
Charles spoke German and Jerry didn’t, so Charles was likely the one who sent the coded messages. If so, he was also the person who wanted her to run away with him…who wanted her to change the world with him. Did spies think of themselves as world-changers? Justine supposed that they did. Was he trying to recruit her to work for the enemy?
But she couldn’t waste time on these questions because Martin’s reaction to her German rally cry was the real revelation. He was stalled in his tracks, staring at her.
“I heard you say that you spoke German,” he said, “but I dismissed it as a butchered schoolgirl thing. What can’t you do?”
She watched Martin as, slowly and gently, he lowered the box in his hands to the ground. She didn’t like the way he was lowering it. He was taking too long.
Martin had consistently presented himself to her as a man consumed by sexual passion. That man would have dropped the box with a thunk by now and hurried to her. Now, at this moment, that box was the most important thing in Martin’s life, not Justine. This man was not what he wanted her to think he was.
And, she was thinking, neither was that box.
She stole a glance at Charles and Jerry, both of them moving her way at top speed. They had both lied to her. They weren’t the men they pretended to be, either. She had no one to count on but herself.
She took a careful step back and then another.
Martin said, “You’re not afraid of me, are you? You didn’t seem afraid of me the other night. It seemed like you liked me a lot.”
He reached out a hand, one of the hands that had held her so tight, roaming so freely over her body. It was aimed at her shoulder, but it missed, because her shoulder was no longer there. She had taken another step backward and dropped to a squat beside the box that had appeared since she last stood in this spot, a box with the same green stamp she now saw on the one he’d just put down.
Without thought, Martin yelled, “No!” This told her that she was in the right place, doing the right thing. She opened the box that he very much wanted her to leave closed.
Lifting its lid, she saw a mechanical device and the unmistakable shape of a stick of dynamite. Worse, she smelled some kind of petroleum-based fuel. Gasoline? Kerosene?
It hardly mattered. The person who built this bomb had known what to use.
Justine was a soft-spoken woman who had grown up with soft-spoken parents. She hadn’t let out an untrammeled shriek since she was a toddler. If asked, she wouldn’t have been sure she still knew how. But she did know how, and the sight of a timed explosive device gave her voice all of its power.
“Bomb!” she cried out. “Bomb! Firebomb!”
She had no idea if anybody inside the plant could hear her. They were all on their way to Mr. Higgins’s speech. Charles and Jerry could hear her, but she didn’t even know whose side they were on. All she knew was that the man in front of her had set bombs that threatened her friends Georgette and Nelle and Nadine and Mavis and Candace and Darlene and Betty and Shirley and, yes, even Della and Sonny. His bombs threatened Andrew Higgins and his son. They threatened thousands of other people filling the Michaud plant. Right now, at this moment, she was looking at her enemy.
Not the Germans. Not the Japanese. Martin. Or whatever his name really was.
Martin was her enemy.
As for Charles and Jerry, the jury was still out.
***
Georgette peered over the edge of the loading dock. She’d gone looking for Justine, hoping to patch things up with her, but she couldn’t do that when her friend was in the middle of a romantic tryst. There she stood with Martin, who was not Georgette’s favorite individual. As far as Georgette was concerned, he wasn’t even her favorite man trying to get Justine’s attention, but that was Justine’s decision to make.
She didn’t like leaving Justine alone with a man who had Martin’s temper, but Justine had chosen to slip out of the plant with him. She was going to have to take care of herself.
As Georgette backed away from the loading dock’s open bay toward the temporary stage waiting for Andrew Higgins, she heard Justine’s voice, and she wasn’t whispering sweet nothings in Martin’s ear. First, she called out something in a language Georgette didn’t know. Then she started screaming that there was a bomb. Specifically, a firebomb.
Georgette spun and ran for the door where a huge crowd of her coworkers waited for Sonny to tell them it was time to go. Georgette dodged them as easily as she’d once dodged alligators in her pirogue. When people refused to get out of her path, she stuck out a stiff arm and shoved them out of her way like her brothers had done when they’d played on their school’s football team back home.
Being strong, long-legged, and determined, she made it to the door ahead of most of the crowd, where she paused just long enough to break her stride. Standing in the entranceway where she could be heard both inside and outside the Carbon Division, she yelled, “Get out, all of you! Get out! There’s a bomb. A firebomb!” She knew that this was true because her friend said so.
And then she was running again, but not for the doors. The Carbon Division workers were stampeding for the front entrance nearest them, but Georgette had someplace else to be.
***
Justine flung herself toward the ramp, trying to put distance between her body and the man who had planted the bomb at her feet. Probably he had planted more of them, including some in the other green-stamped boxes she could see. Others could be anywhere in the plant, which was stuffed as full of people as it could possibly be.
The small-time sabotage of the Carbon Division—the broken lateral guides, the broken tool rest, the punctured acetylene hose—had been leading up to this. It made sense for a spy to try to slow down production until everything was in place for a full attack. Timing the explosions for the day that Andrew Higgins was onsite was a stroke of genius. Higgins had designed the boats that made the landing at Normandy possible. Killing him would be a true act of revenge.
Justine stumbled as she tried to climb the ramp, bloodying both palms on the rough concrete, but she didn’t stop moving away from Martin—or whatever his name was. She reached up with both hands, crawling on all fours, and she was doing it. She was nearing the top. But then her whole body jerked to a stop. Martin’s big hand was wrapped around her ankle, and it was all she could do to hold her ground as he pulled her down toward him. She had nothing to hold on to—no banister, no ledge, no handhold at all—and she knew she only had seconds before his strength overpowered hers. She cut that time in half by letting go with one hand to fumble with her pocket buttons.
The worn, often-washed twill of her coveralls’ buttonholes yielded easily, allowing her to unbutton the front right pocket and reach for her pocketknife. Papers flew. The wind took some of them skittering across the pavement toward the grassy marshland. Others were ground under Martin’s feet as he struggled for purchase against the smooth blacktop at the bottom of the ramp. Justine couldn’t be bothered about the loss of all that work, and it didn’t matter anyway. The information was in her head. To preserve it, all she had to do was survive. Maybe she would, if she could only find that knife, but there was nothing at the bottom of her pocket.
Giving up on the knife, she reached for her right rear pocket, drawing her adjustable wrench out and raising it high in her right hand. She didn’t have physical strength on her side, but the wrench was heavy, it extended her lever arm by six inches, and she had the high ground. Gravity was working in her favor. Surely, she could bring the wrench down on Martin’s head hard enough to stun him, at least.
She let go with her other hand, knowing that she would immediately go into downward motion from the force he was exerting on her ankle. This downward motion would be added to the downward force when she swung the wrench, so she let it happen. As she started to slide, a flying piece of graph paper reminded her that she’d moved the pocketknife to a rear pocket, the left one, to make room for papers in both front pockets. She reached her left arm behind her back, yanked the pocket’s button clean off, thrust in her hand, and grasped the knife.
The hand holding the wrench was beginning its downswing when Martin said, “Don’t be stupid.”
It was only then that she felt the muzzle of his handgun pressing into her abdomen.