Vince Calabrese, the waist gunner from the downed B-17, reminded Tom, after a few days, of all the things that irritated him about living in close quarters with a bunch of guys.

“You got a girl back home? I got a girl. She’s some honey. How many Krauts you taken out? You nail any of them 109s? You fighter pilots, you got some slick deal. You go up in a bathroom. Just you and your business. Me? I go up in a living room. Boy, oh boy, you got it made.”

Yet it wasn’t bad irritation.

“Clemmie says that little guy’s gonna pick me up in a few days once they got a route figured out. She says they’re gettin’ me back through the Pyrenees. Spain. Can you beat it? South enough for a suntan, with England in eyeshot. That’s a slow boat to China right there.”

It made Tom miss the guys all the more. The way Smythe clacked his dental bridge to drop his front fake tooth—it was funny the first time. The last thing he remembered saying to Smythe was if he did it again, he’d need another bridge. He did it on the spot, face frozen in that gap-toothed grin, and for some reason, instead of making Tom mad, it made him laugh.

He missed Captain Bill Fitzgerald and his annoying ability to drive the English girls nuts with those aw-shucks Gary Cooper looks. He missed Burke and his stupid corny jokes. Missed Markham, how he shared anything he got from home. He missed Oswald’s perpetual good humor, and the way he shouted, “Guts and glory!” before any mission.

He missed the swagger, the sweat, the lousy music some of them liked.

“Yeah, well, sometimes I wonder what it’s like to go up with a living room full of guys. Some days I’d like that.” It was a generous thing to say, and Vince knew it. No fighter pilot would ever swap seats.

“Nah. You guys are the cream. But I was glad to switch to a B-17. Used to be a waist gunner on a B-24.”

“B-24’s a beast,” Tom agreed.

“Froze my lovin’ keister off. Waist gunners had it worst. Open windows at the waist. You’d freeze over just like your guns.” Calabrese tapped the arm of the chair, and his knee began to bounce up and down. When next he spoke, it was softer.

“Lost my best buddy on takeoff in a B-24. Turret gunner. I was watching ’em go—the thing was headed down the runway like normal, just gettin’ off the ground, then all of a sudden the nose goes up, tail goes down, and just that quick you know she ain’t gonna make it. Pilot cut the throttle, the thing nosed over, and that’s all she wrote—flips over, blam. Blew ’em to pieces. Two thousand gallons of fuel. Five bombs. They didn’t suffer.” He nodded, and the knee bounced. “They didn’t suffer.”

After a moment, Tom murmured, “Sorry, Calabrese.” He wouldn’t have had to say anything if it was one of the guys. Silence worked for them. But he didn’t know Calabrese well, and he had a feeling that even if he did, he’d still need to say it.

A brisk three knocks came at the door, and it opened.

“Uh-oh. Here she comes, Tommy boy,” Vince boomed. He put his hands behind his head and his feet on the bed. “She’s got that light in her eyes, Tommy. She’s goin’ after them stitches and it ain’t gonna be pretty.”

Calabrese really wasn’t a bad sort. But Tom resented how he acted as though he’d been staying at Clemmie’s for two months instead of two days. He treated her with a familiarity that had no basis. Clemmie was Tom’s. Not Vince’s.

Clemmie took it all in good humor.

She patted Vince’s head as she went past with her tray of medical supplies. “We four have the light in our eyes.”

“Four?” Vince asked with a grin. “You got some mice in your pockets?”

“Me, and Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.” She put down the tray. “You should fear me too, Mr. Waist Gunner, with your burn. What a silly thing—waist gunner. You gun from the waist?” She struck a pose, holding her hands in the shape of guns at her waist, face screwed into a scowl that all enemies should fear. She looked like a grandma gunslinger at the O.K. Corral. Tom and Vince laughed. She broke the pose to pull back the sleeve of Vince’s pajamas. The scowl returned after she peeked under the soiled dressing. She adjusted her glasses. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”

“My mother would say that’s swearing,” Vince said.

She glared at him. “You will know when I am swearing. Then I will speak French so I do not damage you. That was—oh, what is the word . . . ?”

“An invocation?” Tom suggested.

“I do not know invocation.” Her finger came up as her face cleared. “It is a calling upon. Not a swearing.” She flicked Vince upside the head. “Telling an old lady she is swearing. Your mother will give me words if I send you back a bad-mannered cochon.” She flicked him again, more gently. “Say, I have news for you. That fellow made it.”

“Posey?” Hope bloomed in Vince’s face. He took his feet off the bed.

“He stays in Montebourg. It is too dangerous to move him right now. He broke his leg. But he is well.”

Emotion passed over his face. After a moment, he cleared his throat. “His was the only chute I saw, you know, and then comes the antiaircraft fire. You should see what that does to a parachute. Talk about Swiss cheese. Didn’t see any others. They didn’t have a chance ’cause they cut the beast in half, you know, like a giant kid broke it over his knee. Seventeen missions with those guys.” He rubbed his hands together. “I didn’t think he had a hope in the hot place. Good old Posey.”

Clemmie adjusted her glasses as she took Calabrese’s forearm and examined the burn. The mole mightily disapproved. “Some animal put grease on this. Grease is twice as long to heal. What happened to ‘you wrap it, then you soak it’?”

But Calabrese didn’t hear. His face was far away. Tom was glad for the talkative fellow.

It was another benefit of being a fighter pilot. Sure, you got tight with the guys in your squad, but not as tight as the guys on the bombers.

Clemmie wadded up the old dressing and used it to gently wipe grease from the edges of the livid burn, wincing a little, muttering all the while in French. She rewrapped it with cut strips of bedsheet. Then she flicked him upside the head. “You, waist gunner. Go downstairs and see Aunt Tatia. Tell her, J’ai besoin de le tremper dans l’eau froide. Comprehend?” She repeated it slowly and made Calabrese say it.

When Vince left the room, Tom said, “He gets to go downstairs.”

It was Tom’s turn for the head flick. “Old Man Renard is gone. What is more, I need to talk to you.”

He had a feeling he knew what it was about.

“We get those stitches out, we free your head.” She motioned to the chair, and Tom took it. She rummaged on the tray, selected tweezers and a razor blade, and went to work.

Presently she said, “You can say no to Rafael.”

Tom didn’t answer.

“He is a good boy. But his business is rough.”

“Isn’t your business rough?”

He hoped she would not speak of her granddaughter. He didn’t know what he would do. A ripple of panic brought the image of his mother next to the stove. He tensed and finally realized it hurt to have stitches out.

“Ouch.”

“I take out four, this is your first ouch.”

“I wasn’t thinking about it then. Ow!”

“Five more. Stop being a whine baby.”

“Crybaby.”

“Whine, cry, what difference.” Clemmie carefully cut through the next stitch with tiny brushes of the razor blade and tugged. New skin had grown into the threads. Tom could feel a sweat begin. The gentle tugging drove him nuts, he wanted to push Clemmie’s hand aside and just yank the things out.

She laid a stiff, bloodied thread on the cloth next to the others. “Four more.”

“You gonna miss me?”

“Not the whining.” Her lips twitched, and the mole lifted. Soon, however, it descended. “I miss all my boys. I want them to come see me when the world is safe. But they will have different lives.”

“Clemmie—”

But Tom wasn’t used to telling people how he felt. He had been raised by a quiet woman, with the help of a man who believed that to speak of private things was weakness.

“I’ll come back,” he said with resolve that he hoped she believed.

“Pfft. You will not even remember me.”

“No one could forget you,” he said quietly. “I’ll come back, Clemmie. I promise.”

She pulled back to look at him. “Is a promise in America the same as a promise here?”

“Do people keep them here?”

Her face clouded. She put her head over her task again. “They try, Tom Jaeger.” She tugged another stitch free and laid it on the cloth.

If she said a word about her granddaughter, he’d have to kill another Nazi. Rage would overrun the dike. He had control because she had control. She muttered in French over the next stitch. He held his breath.

This Jasmine had been tortured to death, a woman from the bloodstock of one who now fussed that his hair was not long enough to hide the wound. Ever since Rafael mentioned it, he had done his best to wall off thinking of it. Yet it moved along the edges like a silent serpent, and every now and then a fearsome thought got through. How could they torture a woman?

Women were supposed to be protected. They were to be taken care of, looked after. This was the job of men; that’s what he learned from his father, from his uncles, from the men in the town of Jenison, from Michigan, America, his world. Yet men here had tortured Clemmie’s granddaughter. It was unthinkable. What could they have—?

More unthinkable thoughts tried to take shape, and he repressed them with an effort that made him sweat.

“Ouch,” he said absently.

“Yes, that one hurt.” Her voice was gentle this time, and she put a cloth to the wound. “Two more. I do more damage taking them out than leaving them in.” She hesitated. “He will be here anytime. You can say no. I ask you to say no, Tom Jaeger, for your mother.”

Oh, Clemmie . . .

“I want you to get married, have babies, and tell them you helped an old lady win a war. You mix with Rafael, you don’t know what could happen.”

A tap at the door, and Rafael came in. He touched his beret to Clemmie.

“Ready, Cabby?”

Clemmie pulled back to stare down at Tom. The mole towered in high accusation. “You have taken a name.”

“Yes, Clemmie, I have taken a name. We won’t win the war without doing something.”

“You fight in the air!” she stormed, shaking a finger at the sky. “That is where you fight best!”

“I can also fight with my feet on the earth!”

They glared at one another. Then she went back to work, and this time the tugging was not gentle.

“Clemmie, listen to me . . .”

“Stupid youth. Stupid youth!”

He could not say, I’ll get even for you. I’ll make them pay for what they did. He could only vow it in his heart.

Clemmie dropped the razor and tweezers onto the tray. She reached into her dress pocket and took out a button. She rolled it between her thumb and finger, then took his hand and put it on his palm. She gave a last frown at the wound, checked more closely with her glasses, and blew some debris from it—then she paused, and laid her hand on his head. She gave it a gentle caress.

She took the tray and left the room, pulling the door behind her.

“That was good-bye,” Rafael said.

“What do you mean?”

He nodded at the button in Tom’s hand. “It is all the good-bye you will get. She will hide in the back of the house until we leave. Do not try to find her.” He handed him a brown-papered parcel. “Put this on. A pig farmer wore it. We have to bury everything else.”

Tom looked at the black button on his palm. “I have to thank her.”

“She knows, Yank.”

He took the crinkly parcel. “We have to bury everything? What about my gun?” He hated to part with anything in his pack. The Benzedrine tablets, the compass. The malted milk tablets—those he could leave for Clemmie.

“It is illegal to carry a gun in France, unless you’re a gendarme or a German; and they wonder why we starve, when we can’t even shoot game. If we are stopped, not even false papers will save you if you have a gun. We will retrieve your things later and put the gun to good use. We have a beautiful weapons cache. It will make a gorgeous addition.”

“My phrase book, in case we get separated . . .”

“Nothing could say ‘I’m a downed pilot’ more.”

Tom said nothing about the picture of Ronnie, lest he lose that, too.

“I have to tell her good-bye.”

“Good-byes are too hard for her.”

“I have to thank her.”

“I won’t let you.”

“Then get me paper! I’ll write her a note.”

“No. If her home is raided, they will find it.”

Tom was silent. “Listen, will you—”

“I will, Yank.”

After a moment, Tom put the button in his pocket and said, “Cabby.”

“Cabby.” Rafael nodded at Tom’s pocket. “She has a match for every man she’s helped. Keeps them in a jar. It is your photograph to her.”

It was the first time Tom had been out of doors in days, not counting the times he sneaked out to pee on the side of the house when it was dark. A man could bear someone taking away his sloshing bedpan only so many times.

“Stop looking around,” Rafael said.

They waited in a busy market area, moving around when Rafael got nervous. They were to meet the gentleman he’d met the day he was shot down, François Rousseau. The man was going to pick them up in an automobile, a vehicle commissioned for his cement factory by the Wehrmacht. It was decided not to take the train to Caen. It was too risky since they had not been able to get false identification for Tom. He was far too Nordic for any photographs they had available, a problem they’d never had before.

He put his hands in his pockets, and Rafael told him to take them out.

“You will kill us both,” he hissed. “I’ve never escorted someone who looks like he should be escorting me—to Gestapo headquarters. See how everyone stares? See the woman over there, in the beauty shop? The mean-looking vache looking right at us? She doesn’t know what to make of you.”

Tom felt like a different person, getting a look like that. Though it was a glance quickly subdued when she found Tom looking back, it was one of unveiled hatred. Though he knew better, he felt it personally.

“We’re on the same side, lady,” he muttered.

It could have been his keyed-up imagination, but as he surreptitiously studied this French neighborhood, he could feel the tension as palpably as the shoes he stood in. Everybody constantly watched everybody else, openly or with quick, thorough glances. The group of men putting in a storefront window, the man selling newspapers, the woman in the beauty shop across the street, who watched more obviously than the others outside, thinking perhaps the window offered less scrutiny of herself—everyone watched everyone.

“Feels strange here,” he murmured. “I’m standing in the street at the O.K. Corral.” Any minute Clemmie would appear with her waist guns.

“Hurry up, Monsieur Rousseau,” Rafael said under his breath. He glanced at Tom. “Will you stop staring at everything?”

“It’s what everyone else is doing. What’s that?” Tom couldn’t help gazing at a metal boxlike contraption affixed to the grille of a truck, which drove slowly past. Holes at the top of the box showed glowing embers below.

Rafael growled between his teeth, then muttered something in French. He took out a pack of cigarettes—Tom’s cigarettes—and lit up. “The Germans take all the gasoline. We burn wood and coal to run the cars.”

“You’re kidding. How does it work?”

“The engines are adapted. Burned coal makes a by-product that goes in the carburetor. The result is rubbish. The engines have no guts.”

Tom just barely kept himself from whistling, something Rafael had all but clubbed him for not five minutes earlier. “So this is the embargo on Spain. I wanna get back just to tell the higher-ups it’s working.” France could no longer get gasoline from Spain, with the embargo on fuel that Congress had slapped on it. Strange to see things he’d only half listened to in action. “Pretty ingenious. Run your car and have a barbeque at the same time.”

“I do not know barbeque, but it is a pain in your keister. The engines do not run well, and you must forever stop to stir the coal or wood. The worst is this: whatever they burn to run trains and cars is not burned to heat homes. France is very cold, mon ami. And no one cares. They don’t care if we freeze or starve.”

“I care,” Tom muttered, low enough so Rafael could not hear.

“What if Canada wanted Michigan, hmm? And came and took it? What if all this, in your Jenison—this suspicion, this fear, this hunger? What if Canada turns your Jenison into such a place? Canada steals your food, your gasoline, your men to fight their war or work in their factories . . . what would you do?”

“Same thing I’m doing now.”

Rafael nodded grimly. “You would resist. You would be incompatible. You would fight to turn things back to the way they were, even if those things were not perfect. You would know they were far better than this. And you would come to love your country, though you did not love it before, or did not know you did.” Relief came to his voice. “Merci Dieu, here he is.”

Michel slumped at his desk, his father’s copy of Mein Kampf in front of him. He idled with a corner of it, riffling the edge over and over.

He was supposed to be working on a new gallery design for Braun, who was planning a subterranean command post in Fontaine-la-Mallet, not unlike the one recently completed in Caen for General Richter. He wondered why Braun didn’t simply duplicate the Caen design. The Todt Organization typically showed its efficiency in endless duplication of what worked the first time, from bunkers to radar stations.

This particular edition of Mein Kampf was the Volksausgabe, the people’s edition. It contained both volumes. It was navy blue, no dust jacket, a gold swastika embossed on the cover. It was in German, of course. Michel wasn’t sure whether it had been translated into French. Not that he wanted it in his native tongue.

Father had been a scholar at heart, and he’d left the running of the business to François once he was back from university. Michel was no scholar, nor did he have any interest in business, family or otherwise. He’d wanted to be an artist of some sort: an actor, a poet, a novelist, maybe all three. He reluctantly fell in at the Cimenterie to make money to fund his dreams. Somehow, he’d never left. Somewhere along the way, he stopped wanting to leave.

When Hitler came to full power, what had been merely another dusted book became Father’s companion. While Michel sat at the desk, directing Charlotte, experimenting with new designs for casting and composites, reviewing production and labor reports with François, he’d often hear the mutterings on the other side of the room fan to full-blown diatribe. This he did for the benefit of his sons, Michel privately thought, and it annoyed the sons to distraction.

“Mon Dieu! I give up, I tell you. How did this shoddy workmanship make it to print? A work of art, they tell me? Ha! Some work of art! The portrait is nearly as disgraceful as the frame! The grammar, the phraseology . . . his style sickens me. If I must read heresy, for heaven’s sake, let it be well-written heresy. I hate him all the more because he wrote his puke so poorly.”

Father would snatch off his reading glasses in theatrical display of his contempt, and, protestations to give up notwithstanding, presently replace the glasses in the slow, haughty protest of a thinking man subjected to such a book.

Michel smiled a little. For all the times Father declared he was giving up on it, he never did. He’d read every word. Now the book was Michel’s, and the going was hard. He glanced at the bookmark placement; he was only one-third through.

His thumb riffled the edges of the pages again. Hitler’s deeds began to match his writings. One man. One wrath. What an absurd horror that Hitler had pulled off all he had so far. One man, and he got thousands to fall in behind—this, the centerpiece horror.

He thought of her at times like these, when all he could think of was escape. The last time he’d seen her as herself, before the Nazis got to her, it was here in this room. She had spoken things he had not known, things he never dared hope for.

She and Charlotte had stood in the doorway to his office, in hushed consultation, occasional looks thrown his way. He tossed down his pen.

“Feminine collaboration,” he remarked dryly. “What is it this time? A blanket drive for the POWs? Let’s see. We already have boxes at the plants for your book drive, your clothing drive, and your soap drive. Any more boxes and . . .”

But they ignored him. Charlotte whispered something emphatic to Jasmine; Jasmine whispered emphatically back, complete with arms-flung gestures. Charlotte folded her arms, lifted an eyebrow, and with a tiny move of her head, indicated that Jasmine should go in. At that point, Michel got a funny little flutter in his stomach. He suddenly wished there was another exit.

Jasmine set her shoulders, turned from Charlotte, and came into the room. Charlotte, with a long, unreadable look at Michel, slowly closed the door.

At that point, Michel began to perspire.

He rose a little more hastily than intended and started for Father’s end of the room, until he saw that was where she was headed, too. He detoured for the windows, made it look like that was where he intended to go all along. He pulled out a pocketknife. He began to chip at a sealed window casement. “This paint . . . it welded the window shut . . .”

She came beside him. She slipped the pocketknife from his hands and set it on the windowsill. She’d never stood so close to him. Her nearness spiked his heart rate.

“I would say that it is time for us to stop fooling ourselves,” she said, gazing up at him while he gazed helplessly back. “Charlotte says it is time for you to stop.”

“Jasmine,” he protested gently. “You know I cannot afford to—I run a—large . . .” He was terrified. He couldn’t think straight. It couldn’t all break down now. He had been strong for so long, enduring all the times he had to send Rafael and Jasmine on assignments as a couple, wondering, heartsick, if they would become a couple. “I run Flame. And a business. And I have to—fix this window . . .” She was looking into his eyes as she had never looked before, and he lost speech.

Finally he said, quietly, “Don’t do this to me.”

She smiled at last, joy lighting her face. “So charming and humble with Braun. So deferential with the Milice. So complying with French officials. They all think they have you in their pocket, when you have them in yours. And all it takes to shake your composure is just an ordinary girl.”

“You were never ordinary,” he whispered.

“I will tell you when I fell in love with you. We were going over a mission to raid the commissioner’s office for ration books. And Wilkie was quiet. It was when his sister and her husband were sent to Neuengamme. Everyone knew they would be executed. Such despair was upon him . . .” Jasmine’s green eyes brightened with tears. “And when you finished the details of the mission, you looked straight at him and said, so commanding, ‘You are not powerless.’ You held up a ration book, and it was then, Michel; that was the moment.”

Michel touched her cheek. She caught his hand.

“You told him he had to do something, anything—it didn’t matter what it was. You shook that little booklet like it was a ticket to freedom, and you said, ‘Any act, however humble or bold, will strike at the same evil that holds your sister in her cell.’ You said if to defy evil were to simply stand in front of it, you would do it. Wilkie changed after that; do you remember? You gave him courage.”

She kissed the hand she held. “You taught us not that we should fight evil, but that we could. You taught us not to do something, but anything. You taught us that the smallest action raised against wrong has dignity, how in raising a hand to save, we are saved. Michel—you taught us what it means to resist.”

“You’re teaching me not to,” he said, eyes traveling her face.

She smiled. “Charlotte won’t open the door even for Braun.”

And because he was weak, or maybe because he was finally strong, he pulled her close, lips barely touching, and hesitated for a long moment, giving himself one last chance to push her away. Then he kissed her.

He buried his face in her neck and held her close. Someone to share the monstrous burden, someone to share the fear. Even if he never spoke a word. In that moment, he was no longer alone. In that moment, he was no longer one.

And now he was one. And now he was alone. He would be alone for the rest of his life, whether in chains, whether free.

“I remember when your father read it,” came Charlotte’s soft voice. Her eyes were on his thumb, riffling the edge of Mein Kampf. “How he adored reading that book.” Any rare reference to his father was always in soft tones. “I don’t think anything gave him greater pleasure.”

“Pleasure?” His thumb stopped. “Hardly. He hated it.”

“Did you ever see him more alive?” Charlotte sat in the seat across the desk. In living memory, she had never done that. She had worked for the Rousseau Cimenterie since he was a boy, over thirty years, and if she ever sat in the office, it was in the tiny fold-up chair she pulled over from the corner.

He pushed the book aside. He did not change his position, however; he remained in his lackadaisical slump, another action that had not occurred in living memory. Not in front of Charlotte.

The look on her face was one he had not seen directed at himself. That motherly anxiety had belonged to his father. Charlotte took care of him until he died in ’39.

“Do you like your job, Charlotte?” he suddenly wondered aloud.

The question startled her. She began to rise.

“No, no!” Michel said quickly, motioning her to stay put. “Oh—please, that’s not what I meant.”

“I like my job,” she said a bit warily, easing back in place.

“Good,” Michel said. “Good. You do it well. Always have. I don’t think I tell you enough. It should be said.” Posture restored, his hands sought small details on his desk. He aligned Mein Kampf with the desk blotter, he repositioned Rafael’s favorite paperweight. “Is anything on your mind?”

“Yes. I don’t want you to read that anymore.” She looked at Mein Kampf as if it were about to sprout hairy black legs and scuttle off the desk.

Good, forthright Charlotte. He firmly resisted a smile. “Why not?”

“I see what it does to you. It does the opposite of what it did to your father.”

“I’m not my father.”

“No, Monsieur Rousseau. You are not.” It was carefully said, and he couldn’t guess at what she meant. Her steady gaze gave nothing away.

“Why do you suppose it did that to him?” he said, forgetting himself, wondering aloud again. His hand sought the edge of the book, and his thumb resumed riffling. “It made him angry. It doesn’t do that to me.”

“I wish it would.”

“It is a cheat, you see. I have a fair amount of trust when I sit down to read a book. Some pact with the author, I suppose, a pact I didn’t realize existed until this book. With this the mind tries, as it normally does, to latch on to something. There is nothing to latch on to—not quite, not quite, and circling for it doesn’t find it. No place to rest. No pact. It is maddening. It makes me uneasy. It makes me—I feel like a caged animal when I read it.”

“Then why do you read it?” she asked.

The question surprised him. “Same as my father. I am a leader, a businessman. I am responsible to know the truth of my times.”

“You are quite right, Monsieur Rousseau.” Charlotte rose, looking down on him with that steadfast gaze. “I have decided you know enough.” She picked up the large book with both hands, tucked it under her arm, and left the room.

A few moments later Michel realized he was still staring at the door.

He noticed a few sketches on his desk, a few photos of the Caen underground post, a list of Braun’s ideas for the new one. He touched a photograph.

He took his pencil and sharpened it. He looked in his coffee cup and wished for more coffee. Then he went to work.

An hour later he looked up into the face of a young man for whom Hitler would have shaved his mustache—an immense, blond-haired, blue-eyed German Viking. He put his pencil down, sat back in his chair, and thought for the first time since he’d heard it that perhaps François’s scheme wasn’t such a bad idea after all.