Max tried to think of a plan. He tried at the School of Happiness, as he now thought of it, in between writing the dictée words that came so much easier now. He tried at Scouts (Scoots now, in his own mind), as he and Oscar practiced Morse code in the woods. He tried in bed, as he waited till it was late enough to visit Ahmed in the wine cellar. He tried at recess, now récréation, as he helped Oscar and the other boys lift Ahmed triumphantly onto their shoulders after a goal.
After school the following Friday, Max found an old soccer match on one of the Belgian sports channels and flopped onto his parents’ bed to think some more. There was something calming about the announcer’s patter, the smallness of the players on the large green field, the dull murmur of the crowd. But just when Max had begun to relax, Madame Pauline raced in and grabbed the remote. The soccer game vanished, replaced by a blurry image of police officers with helmets and assault rifles dragging a man in a white hoodie down the street. A news scroll in Dutch ran below it.
“What’s going on?” Max asked.
“They’ve caught him!” Madame Pauline said, plopping down beside him on the bed.
“Who?”
“Abdeslam, the terrorist they’ve been looking for since Paris. They finally found him, here, in Molenbeek.”
The fugitive terrorist had been caught! He’d been the whole reason for the lockdown, the whole reason for the police raids. Perhaps now that this bad guy was in custody, everyone would calm down. Perhaps they would even start feeling sympathy again for refugees like Ahmed.
“Took long enough!” Madame Pauline continued. “He was right under their noses for months, but of course the police and security forces do a terrible job of sharing information. That’s what happens when you have nineteen police forces, one for every commune!”
“How’d they get him?” Max asked.
Madame Pauline snickered. “A pizza! The police were eyeing a suspicious apartment and then the woman there ordered too much pizza just for herself and her kids. The police realized that there was someone else staying there and raided the apartment.”
“He was staying with this woman the whole time?”
Madame Pauline gave Max a hard look. “Of course not. He was hiding out all over the city. For four months! There’s no way he could have done that by himself. I bet half of Molenbeek knew.”
“It probably doesn’t take that many people to keep someone hidden,” Max said quietly.
“Have you been to Molenbeek, Max? It’s like you’re not even in Europe anymore.”
Max almost mentioned that Farah lived there before he decided that Madame Pauline might take this as proving her point. She didn’t know that Farah was the kindest person in his class, only that her mother wore a headscarf.
“I hope that woman and all the rest who helped him are sent to prison,” she continued, “or better yet, back to where they came from!”
“But it isn’t always wrong to hide someone from the police, right?” Max asked before he could stop himself.
“Of course not,” Madame Pauline agreed. “Look at Jonnart. He not only hid that Jewish boy, he helped him escape.”
Max looked at her, dumfounded. “Wait, Ralph escaped?! I thought the neighbor betrayed them, and that the Gestapo—”
“Yes, the Gestapo arrested Jonnart and Ralph’s parents too in a separate raid the same night. But Jonnart knew it was them—who else would pound on his door at five in the morning?—so before he opened it, he sent his son Pierre—”
“The one who was Ralph’s classmate?”
“That’s right. He sent Pierre upstairs to wake up Ralph and tell him it was time for their emergency plan—”
“Hide in a secret attic?”
Madame Pauline paused dramatically. “Ralph climbed out the window and ran across the rooftops before climbing down to a neighbor’s garden.”
“But they still arrested Jonnart?”
“The Nazis weren’t stupid. They searched the house and found an empty bed on the very top floor that was still warm. But by the time they realized this, Ralph had fled, so they could only arrest Albert. Pierre ran to the house of Jacques Breuer, the father of a friend from Scoots, told him what happened and asked him to help Ralph. Jacques was an archaeologist at the Cinquantenaire Museum, and he hid Ralph in the basement of the museum, as well as at his home, until the German occupation ended.”
Max couldn’t believe that he hadn’t heard this exciting part of the story until now. It seemed to change everything.
“So Ralph survived the war!”
“Thanks to Jonnart and his family, as well as the Breuers.They were true heroes. But there’s a big difference between hiding an innocent school boy and a terrorist.”
Max felt a funny grin spread across his face. Madame Pauline was absolutely right. A boy like Ahmed deserved sympathy and help. Max knew, as surely as Albert Jonnart must have known, that he was doing the right thing. But he wouldn’t have known this if he’d just called the police when he’d first found Ahmed or turned him away—if he hadn’t had the courage to listen.
Later that afternoon, up in his bedroom, Max opened the window and stepped over the guardrail and onto the asphalt roof that stretched over the back of his parents’ bedroom. He stayed close to the window, with one hand on the guardrail—he’d never liked heights—but he could see how the roofs of the town houses connected. It wasn’t hard to imagine Ralph scrambling across them.
But with the last of the Paris terrorists finally in custody, Max was hopeful that Ahmed’s story could end differently.
* * *
“ANY IDEAS?” Max asked Ahmed later that night as he sat down on the camping mat and handed Ahmed the tote bag. It had become their customary greeting ever since Madame Legrand had brought up the parent-teacher conference.
“No,” Ahmed said. “You?”
Max cocked his head at the tote bag. “Open it. I brought good stuff: hummus, olives, bread—not too stale—and a piece of chocolate cake for dessert. You may have to share that, though.”
“With who?” Ahmed asked innocently.
“You better share … I also have some good news.”
Ahmed’s eyebrows rose hopefully. “An idea?”
“We’ll get to that,” Max said. “But first, they caught the terrorist, the one they’ve been looking for since Paris!”
Ahmed gave such a full and genuine smile that Max wondered if he was already thinking along the same lines as he was. “This is very good.”
Max grabbed his arm. “It’s better than good! Now that they’ve caught this guy, everyone’s going to be less worried. Less scared. Remember when I told you last fall that you couldn’t hide forever? Maybe you no longer have to.”
The smile dropped off Ahmed’s face. “This your idea?”
Max knew he couldn’t back down now. “Everyone at school likes you! They know you now. And we can choose who to tell, which is a whole lot better than Inspector Fontaine or some other police officer catching on.”
Ahmed pulled away and hugged his knees. Max worried that he’d pushed too far.
“It’s up to you,” he said carefully. “I’d never say anything if you didn’t want me to. It’s just that … You know I’m moving back to Washington at the end of the school year. That’s just three months away. You’ll have to tell sometime—”
Ahmed glared at him. “Of course, I know this! I am tired to lie. But you think so much will change because they catch this one man? What about next one? One man, two man in million is bad, so all refugees will again be bad. I want to tell, Max. But I do not want to leave yet—”
“Bonheur, I know,” Max said. “But Madame Legrand likes you. She’ll fight to keep you. I’ll fight—”
“Not only school. You!”
A lump formed in Max’s throat. “Maybe you can stay with us. My parents could take you in—?”
But Max knew his parents’ reaction when they found out that Ahmed had actually lived with them for the past half year was not likely to end in adoption—unless it was Max’s own adoption after his parents gave him up. From Ahmed’s listless shrug, Max could tell he didn’t really believe him either.
“Hey,” Max said, meeting his eyes. “No matter what, I’m not going to abandon you.”
“No one can say this, Max. No one is so powerful.”
Max felt the lump in his throat thicken. This was the horrible truth; Ahmed had lived it. You couldn’t always be there for the people you loved. You couldn’t always save them, just as they couldn’t always save you.
But you could try.
“I mean it, Ahmed. I’ll make sure nothing bad happens.”
Ahmed shook his head, like he didn’t believe him, but his gentle smile told Max he was touched.
“I think about it.”