Nancy knocked at the door again.
“Come on, come on…”
It opened, just a crack, and a thin sliver of light fell onto the roughly cobbled road.
“My name is Nancy Fiocca,” she said. “Marie Dissard sent me; she worked with Garrow. I worked with Antoine. I’ve two men with me and we need to get out over the mountains.”
She had nothing but hope. Hope that the right man would open the door, hope that he’d know the names and help.
It had taken two days to make it this far. They only dared to move at night, spending the daylight hours in deserted barns or huddled under hedgerows. Every day they’d seen patrols passing by them, inches away one time, but they hadn’t been spotted. Once they’d walked straight into a local farmer heading out to his fields before dawn and just stared at him on the track, too surprised to run, until the old man had taken his pack from his shoulder and given them his lunch of bread and cheese and a flask of watered wine. It was the only food they’d eaten since they’d left the flat in Toulouse.
When they got to the outskirts of Perpignan they’d discussed their next move. The redhead, whose French turned out to be fluent, went first, like the raven out of Noah’s ark, to see what the chances were of meeting a friendly face at the original rendezvous point. He came back thin-lipped and discouraging.
The word in the café was their contact had gone dark. Three men from the train had been recaptured or killed. Their contact had now skipped town and headed over the mountains himself with the two remaining escapees. They had managed, cunning buggers, to double back to the train during the search of the vineyard and retake their seats as if nothing had happened. They had wanted to wait for Nancy and the others to reach them, the redhead reported, his voice dripping with sarcasm, but the contact was spooked, and insisted he wasn’t hanging around waiting for the Gestapo. He forced them to choose and they chose to leave with him.
Now it was Nancy’s turn, going out to find a safe perch, like Noah’s dove, on the basis of a half-remembered address and hoping whoever looked at her face would know, somehow, that she wasn’t lying.
The door opened a little wider. She didn’t know the man who greeted her, and he looked afraid, but he also looked like a friend.
“You’d better come inside.”
Nancy was counting again. Her steps this time. The route was steep, heading over the highest peaks because the dogs the Germans used on the lower slopes couldn’t smell them through the thin air at this altitude. The track was so uneven that it was impossible to get into a rhythm, one two… one… two. She missed the bloody coal truck that had taken them out of Perpignan and into the special zone that extended twenty kilometers into France from the Spanish border. Funny that. She hadn’t been a fan at the time, but even jolting along the back roads under one coal sack and lying awkwardly on another had been bliss compared with this.
She needed a holiday, she thought idly as she counted, then giggled. She could see it so clearly: Henri waiting round the next bend in his car, ready to whisk her away to some health resort. She could imagine falling into his arms, complaining about what a terrible time she’d been having. Washing prison clothes in a bathtub, shot at, starved, thrown in the back of a truck. She could imagine his sympathy, his warm chuckle of laughter, his promises to make it all up to her.
She started telling him the story in her head, making it big, comic, ridiculous, pouting and swearing her way through the tale until he made her stop because his ribs ached with laughing so hard.
“What are you so fucking happy about?” The redhead.
She didn’t bother replying. She missed Brutus. He’d shipped out of Perpignan a day before them. His clothes were in better shape and his shoes were still in decent nick. The redhead and Nancy had been forced to wait until the last shreds of the Resistance network in Perpignan could gather warm clothing for them.
The redhead took her silence as an invitation to talk. Not talk so much as complain. They were going too fast, this was a stupid route to take, why hadn’t the Resistance managed to get him more socks? Two pairs wasn’t enough.
Nancy ignored it, tuned him out and listened only to the sound of her internal voice, counting. He didn’t seem to notice.
“We rest now,” Pilar said.
Pilar and her father were their guides. They didn’t talk much, and didn’t rest much either. Ten minutes every two hours, and that was it. The paths twisted and snaked over the peaks, and sometimes in those ten-minute pauses, Nancy looked around her in wonder. They were caught among the snowy peaks like travelers in some fairy tale, like pilgrims, staring out over this exuberant feat of nature, the endless parade of mountain tops disappearing into the bluish spring air. And it seemed Pilar wanted to make sure they climbed every damned one of them.
Onward again, up tracks only Pilar was able to see. This was mountaineering, not walking. Nancy saved her breath and kept moving. The redhead wittered on. Now he wanted to know why they hadn’t brought more food, how they were expected to keep going through the cold as the snow began to deepen around them. His voice became shrill.
“I can’t go any further. I won’t.” He stood stock still on the track.
Pilar broke her usual silence, turning to Nancy and muttering under her breath. “Tell him to shut up and keep moving. Doesn’t he know how far sound travels up here?”
“What’s she saying?” the redhead said plaintively. “Tell me.”
Nancy did. The redhead didn’t budge.
“I can’t go any further today, and no one is going to make me.”
And that was it. The pleasant warming dreams of Henri disappeared, Nancy had lost count of her steps, and both Pilar and her father were looking at her with unmistakable “Deal with this shit, will you?” expressions. So she did.
She pushed the redhead, hard, so he stumbled backward off the path and into a fast-running stream of ice-cold mountain water that drenched him up to his knees.
“What the hell?” he shrieked at her, scrambling back out onto the snow. “You crazy bitch!”
He didn’t make a move to strike her though. Probably knew the old guy would knock him on his arse if he did. Pilar grinned.
“It’s your choice now,” Nancy said very calmly. “If you stay still you’ll freeze to death in half an hour. So walk. And shut up.”
“Bitch,” he muttered again, but he kept walking. Nancy started to count again.
They reached the border the next morning. Pilar pointed them down a clear and steeply sloping path toward Figueras, shook hands with Nancy, and then she and her father simply turned round and headed back into the mountains. A Spanish patrol picked them up an hour later, and Nancy thought them the most delicious human beings she had ever encountered in her life. She was out.