Colette LaPonsie had a boyfriend. Brigitte Durand did not. Colette believed Claudio could keep her safe. Brigitte didn’t care if Claudio was Milice, the French equivalent of the German Gestapo—Brigitte knew who was in charge of France, and it wasn’t the French. Not that the Milice couldn’t make miserable the lives of their fellow French. Sometimes they out-Germaned the Germans.

“Where is Claudio?” Brigitte asked, suddenly aware she hadn’t seen him in a few days.

“In Paris. On business for the oberkommandant.” Colette could make a Milice thug sound like a respected diplomat. She was hemming the frayed edge of a kitchen towel. She bit off the thread and smoothed the towel on her lap, as satisfied with her work as she was with her man.

What sort of man would allow his girlfriend to sleep with other men?

Jean-Paul wouldn’t have believed she was doing it, for one. Then he’d have killed every man who touched her, German or not.

You told me to survive, Jean-Paul. She had, but Jean-Paul had not.

He died in the spring of 1940 at the Maginot Line, the place that was to stop the Germans from getting so far. She found out in July of that year, on a hot sultry day when she stood in front of a list taped to a building in Paris. He had occupied her heart, and now he occupied a grave. So this German occupation was nothing to her. It was hunger, it was fear, it was loss of freedom, and it was so very cold, but she saw his name and the world became a different place. The bullet that took Jean-Paul’s life did not end one fate; it ended two.

She was hungry. In Paris, alone, and hungry.

The food had had a strange rallying effect. Strange in that, once it brightened and revived, it also filled her with shame for the act that obtained it. Yet days later when the brightness left and hunger came again, no shame remained, only some primitive desperation, and she showed up at the same place she had met the German soldier, at the bench along the Seine near the Notre Dame bridge. He was there, for the bridge was his, and once off duty he came to her again. He didn’t say a word. Not that he had any French. He stood with his gray overcoat fluttering in the November breeze, and had the grace, as he had before, to stare at the flowing Seine until she stood and followed him to where he was billeted, at a home on the rue d’Apennine.

The soldier whispered things in German. When it was over, and she waited, eyes out the window, for a handful of francs, she slipped down the staircase and out the kitchen door, past the disgusted glare of the old woman who owned the house.

Paris had fallen. Jean-Paul was dead. And she slept with a German for food. One of those things she never could have conceived, but all three? Three belonged to someone she did not know. Three were a different fate.

“What are those?” Colette asked of the books in Brigitte’s lap.

“A Baedeker’s and a French-English dictionary. I’ve decided to be a travel book writer when this is over.” She held up a piece of notepaper. “This is the first page of my book. I start out with Ireland.”

“How can you write a travel book about a place you’ve never been?”

Brigitte shook her head at Colette’s utter lack of imagination. She held up the Baedeker’s. “This is misrepresentative. It tells of the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland, but says nothing of the patrolling angels.”

“What angels?” Colette scoffed.

“The German officer told me. The expressive one. To speak of the Cliffs of Moher but to say nothing of the angels that press you down before you get to the edge . . .” She lowered her voice to ghost-story stealth. “It’s an ordinary day, right? And you’re an ordinary tourist. You start for the cliffs, little suspecting what you are about to encounter. You approach . . . and suddenly sense a phenomenon of caution in the air. Then it is dread, and then—impending calamity. You creep toward the edge . . . and then you feel the actual weight of the beings themselves. You are pressed down and filled with a holy sickness to stay alive. Thus you are preserved, not by what your eyes can see but by what your soul can feel . . . the Angels of Moher.” She held Colette’s transfixed gaze a moment longer. Then, hushed: “This is not in Baedeker’s. Who would go for the cliffs? I’d go for the phenomenon of caution.”

Colette stared at Brigitte as she sometimes did, with a softened look on the verge of beguilement. It seemed that Colette sat on a fence, and Brigitte always felt the urge to give her the tiniest push and she would topple backward into a far more habitable place—a place, Brigitte fancied, she truly wanted to be. Brigitte long awaited Colette’s conversion to humanity.

Colette came out of her daze with more self-consciousness than usual, and contempt fast replaced interest. “You are stupid, Brigitte.” She gathered the hemmed towel and the sewing things and shoved them in her basket. “It’s your turn to wait in line for eggs today. And if you take any more to the château, I’ll make myself an omelet and eat the entire thing.”

Colette rose with her basket and left the sitting room.

Brigitte called after her, “You are hopeless, Colette. You have no imagination.”

“You’re the hopeless one. That German officer was killed by the Resistance last week. So much for ‘expressive.’” Colette slammed the sitting room door, rattling a few pictures on the wall. The venom was high today; she must have been close to conversion.

Brigitte regarded the books. So Colette noticed the missing eggs? Colette was a counter. If Simone or Marie-Josette received potatoes or beans for payment, every potato and bean was inventoried with German precision and doled out between the four of them. Colette once broke two beans in half to make sure all was scrupulously equal. Brigitte would have understood her better, and liked her better, if she’d just danced the two beans in the air, out of reach of the others, and then popped them in her mouth.

Maybe it was wrong for Brigitte to take eggs from the others. She had taken the four precious eggs to the Château de Bénouville, the maternity hospital up the road, run by Madame Léa Vion. She brought them not for the women or children, but for the downed Allied airmen Madame Vion hid on her property. She’d left them on the step of the little stone chapel by the river, the place it was rumored Madame hid the pilots. She also left a note: For the Friends of France. From a Grateful Patriot.

Brigitte had discovered Madame’s secret one day while walking the château grounds, the closest thing Bénouville had to a forest. A few acres of towering trees and bushes and flowers gave grand illusion; no German occupation existed within its silent green realm. At least, not until Brigitte came across the startled British evader. She knew him for British the moment she set eyes on him, and she instantly knew she had to act as if she’d never seen him—Germans were everywhere, and informants, besides. One could be pruning a tree for all she knew. So she gave him a wink and a tiny nod and strolled on, neither slowing nor increasing her pace.

The rumor was true, as she’d hoped it was. Brigitte never told the girls, not with a Milice about. She let Colette think she brought the eggs for Madame Vion, but what did she care about the madame? She’d snubbed Brigitte once in the village. The snub came as a surprise, knowing they were both French, both against the Germans—though the madame would never believe it—and both hungry.

Rolling in baubles and finery, is that what everyone thinks? She’d take a nice Camembert over francs any day. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a decent Beaujolais.

Brigitte was just as surprised as the madame at what she had become.

Madame Vion had snubbed her as had the man at the café, a French politician who had spit on Brigitte in front of his wife and daughter. Did Brigitte not see him with Marie-Josette last week? Did she shout out what he had done? She did not. She could not hurt his daughter; she was only twelve.

“Brigitte!” Colette called, and when she called like that, there was a customer at the back door.

Brigitte set aside the books and waited a moment before she lifted the needle from the Vera Lynn record. There’ll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover . . . tomorrow when the world is free . . .

She did not know the man at the back door. He was either scrounging for food or, despite the sign, didn’t know this brothel was for Germans only—or for occasional French politicians. This man was no politician; he wore the clothing of a day laborer. He certainly wasn’t German.

He pulled off his hat. “Bonjour, mademoiselle.”

“Bonjour, monsieur,” Brigitte said with a little smile. Such politeness. It reminded her of better days. “Regrettably, we have no food and this establishment is a Germans-only business.” She pointed to the sign nailed to the door: Nur für Wehrmacht. Only for armed forces. “Perhaps you can try Caen.” She started to close the door, but the man put his hand on it.

“You are Brigitte?” he asked quietly. “You are the grateful patriot?”

She stared for a moment, speechless, and whatever she did say, Colette mustn’t hear it. She slipped out the door and pulled it shut behind her. She drew her sweater close against the March wind.

“What do you want?” she asked in a low tone.

“I’ve been sent to see if you are truly a patriot.”

“Sent by whom?”

The man leaned against the house and pulled out a package of cigarettes—Lucky Strikes. American cigarettes. It certainly wasn’t the stuff they smoked around here, and whatever that was, it was likely more rolling paper than anything else. Occupation tobacco, they called it. Same as Occupation coffee or Occupation tea, shabby imitations of the real thing.

She stared at the package until he pocketed it. He lit a match and cupped his hand around it, lit the cigarette and gratefully pulled it to life. He shook the match dead and tossed it, then offered the cigarette to her. She shook her head, but knew in a moment it was the real thing. It didn’t smell like nasty Occupation cigarettes. He smiled and looked appreciatively at the cigarette.

“They came from an American. I like them better than Player’s. The British have Player’s. The fellow you saw in the château woods was a British pilot.”

Brigitte did not answer. The man did not have the same feeling about him that Claudio did. He didn’t feel like Milice. He was likely with the Resistance. She felt an odd little tremor of excitement.

“Why do you feed them?” he asked.

She nearly answered with “Because I don’t know how Madame Vion can do it with ration coupons assigned only for maternity patients and workers.” It would have been a stupid mistake. He could be anybody. Instead, she said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Mademoiselle, if I were going to denounce you, I would have done it already.”

“What do you want?”

“Help.”

“Help from a brothel. I’m sure you realize brothels are state-run.”

“Not this one.”

She stared at him. “How would you know that?”

“I know it is not registered. It is unlicensed.”

“A matter of paperwork. It is fully licensed by the Germans, and in case you haven’t noticed, the Germans are in charge.” How could this man know her home was not legally registered with the local French government? Brigitte had seen to that. She’d fought to keep it unlicensed. Somehow it kept her unlicensed. “We follow the law. We pay taxes. What business is it of yours?”

All of the girls had to be free of disease. Any German soldier who turned up with a sexually transmitted disease was sure to be sent to the Russian front, and the prostitute who gave it to him would be jailed. Brigitte found it ironic. Maybe ironic was the wrong word, but even hypocritical was too weak a word for a system that would legitimize a brothel but punish any evidence of its sanctioned acts. As with any licensed Parisian brothel, Brigitte saw to it that she and the other three were checked weekly and prescribed fastidious hygienic treatments and preventions. She found these appointments more humiliating than those first “appointments” with customers; the doctor was a kind man. Kindness sometimes shamed her more than any guilty act.

Her eyes narrowed as she thought of the doctor.

“What kind of help do you need?” She said it with enough frosty indifference that the man would not mistake her. This conversation was dangerous. The tremor of excitement now felt more like fear.

“The kind that would mean torture and death if you are caught. Whatever you have in mind when I say torture, make it ten times worse.” He pulled on the cigarette, then smiled a rather chilling smile. “I’ll never recruit anybody without putting it all on the table.”

“It’s a wonder you recruit anyone.”

“You would be surprised.”

Brigitte thought again of the doctor. “You never know who is with the Resistance,” Claudio once told her. “Those Communist pigs are everywhere.”

“Are you a Communist?”

“Most are not, some are. Do you have a problem with that?”

She couldn’t believe this conversation was taking place. She couldn’t believe she’d let it go on this long.

“Are you Jewish?”

“Most are not. Some are.”

He’d said enough for her to denounce him herself. He could not be an informant, unless he was trying to trick her into betraying her political views. But who would care about the political views of a prostitute? Prostitutes slept with the enemy; therefore prostitutes were collaborators. “Horizontal” collaborators, the joke went.

“Well, are you French?”

The man grinned, and it was a lively grin. “Yes I am, and everyone with us. Whatever else they are, they are French. And they want their country back.”

“This help you want.” She glanced at the house next door. Anyone could be watching from a curtained window. “Will it make a difference?”

“If you are not caught—and the last woman was—yes.”

“Then I’ll help.” The words were out of her mouth before she knew they were there. The tremor became something she hadn’t felt since Jean-Paul was alive.

“Then you are a resistant.” He took the cigarette from his mouth and made a wry little ceremonial sign of the cross. “The cross of Lorraine, by the way. Our symbol.” He held up the cigarette. “Do you know the Americans smoke them only to here?”

“Every nation should have a little taste of occupation, yes?” She folded her arms tightly against the chill, inside and out. “What do you want me to do?”

“On Friday at 2 p.m., you will meet someone at the north café by the Caen Canal Bridge. You will sit at the northeast corner table, closest to the river. You will say not a word of this to anyone—not to your best friend, not to a priest, not to God.”

“Who will I meet? A man or a woman?”

“A woman. You may recognize her. Do not act surprised. She will ask if coupon J has been issued for the month. You will say, ‘I have no children, I wouldn’t know.’ When she answers, ‘Lucky you, I have three’ . . . you will know it is safe. If it doesn’t go exactly as I have said, leave the café as quickly as you can, as discreetly as you can. Repeat it to me.”

“Coupon J. I have no children. Lucky you, I have three.”

“Good. She will give you your instructions. The operation itself will begin in a few weeks.”

“What happened to her? The woman who was caught?”

He flicked away the cigarette. “She died.”

“What is your name?”

“My nom de guerre is Rafael. Someday, when this is over, I will tell you my real name.” He glanced up at the house. It was a two-story brick home, built by her grandfather. A little smile attended his inspection, and he shook his head. The smile soon left. “We know of Claudio Benoit.”

“I can handle him.”

“I do not doubt. But he is Milice. He may as well be SS. Do not change how you act around him. If you treated him with contempt before, continue. If you treated him with respect, continue. One more thing, mademoiselle. I had a friend who served under your fiancé. Jean-Paul Dubois was a good man. He would be proud of you.”

“No, he would not,” she fired back.

He caught her hand and kissed it. “Yes, mademoiselle. He would.” A little louder, he declared, “Such a face, such a body—wasted on the Germans!” He kissed his fingertips and tossed the kiss to the sky. “Say good-bye to a real man, m’selle!” He bowed low, replaced his hat, and lifted his chin in affected pride. He gave a quick wink and was gone.