The lock rattled open and Henri looked slowly round. The pain never stopped now. Whippings and beatings hour after hour, day after day, his injuries never allowed to heal, meant his only emotion for weeks had been exhaustion and a longing to be done. Hope had gone, and in the bright white light of the pain sometimes so had love and faith and his own self.
Sometimes something Böhm said reminded him he had once been Henri Fiocca, a rich and happy man with a beautiful wife living day after day in sunshine and luxury. It was just a dream. The door swung open. Henri was expecting the rat-faced torturer with the glasses at the door—astonishing how the man managed to ring fresh waves of pain out of him, out of the rag of a man he had become—but it was Böhm.
“Monsieur Fiocca, you have a visitor,” Böhm said in his careful, English-accented French.
Böhm had studied psychology at Cambridge before the war, Henri remembered, and had waxed lyrical about the great buildings and great men he had encountered there from time to time during their chats. Böhm was never in the room for the whippings which left the skin hanging from Henri’s back. He’d just come in afterward.
A visitor? That meant the world outside these walls still existed. How strange. He thought of Nancy. If they caught her, would they be cruel enough to bring them together? Yes. They would torture her in front of him. No doubt Böhm’s studies had taught him a meeting like that might break him at last. If Böhm had Nancy, proved that he did, Henri would give him the names of every Resistance member, every escapee who had eaten at his table, every safe house bought for cash at the beginning of the war, to save her a moment of this pain. They would not release her, of course not. They had worked out she was the White Mouse. Böhm had made that clear in their chats. But if Böhm brought Nancy in and said, “Tell us everything you know and we will simply shoot her, no torture, no rape,” Henri would take that bargain.
Böhm brought a pair of fold-up metal chairs in from the corridor and set them by Henri’s cot.
“My apologies, Monsieur Fiocca, I should say two visitors.” He looked over his shoulder. “Monsieur, Madame…”
A shuffling of feet and Henri’s father and sister edged into the room. Gabrielle gave a little shriek and put her handkerchief over her mouth and nose, then edged toward him with her hand outstretched. His father hung back next to the door, his jaw slack and his shoulders trembling.
“I shall leave you to catch up,” Böhm said with a warm smile, and closed the door behind them.
Henri could not move, did not feel like speaking.
His sister tottered to his bedside then collapsed to her knees with a wail. “What has she done to you? Oh God, have mercy on us!”
His father collapsed heavily onto one of the chairs. Henri studied Gabrielle with his remaining good eye. She lifted her hand again and managed, briefly, to touch his shoulder. Henri was not sure if he was clothed or not. They always stripped him before they beat him, sometimes they redressed him afterward, at other times they did not. He’d long since ceased to care.
“Tell them what you know, Henri.” That was his father’s voice, a cracked version of it anyway. “Böhm says he has already captured most of the Resistance network in Marseille. He just wants you to talk about Nancy, where she might be, what you know of her plans.”
“Then he will let you go!” Gabrielle squeaked. “He will let us take you back to the house and nurse you. God, Henri, haven’t you suffered enough for her?”
Henri licked his lips, finally understanding. They blamed Nancy. They thought it was her fault that he was lying here, barely conscious, torn by the whips, his fingers broken, his fingernails gone and his face hardly recognizable. They thought it was her fault. How could he have sprung from such people? The Gestapo had done this to him. The power lust of a group of deluded zealots who had somehow managed to poison their own nation, then spread that poison abroad. The Nazis who had used fear and flattery to hold France, his beloved glorious France, under their jackboot.
He did not have the strength to explain this to them. He’d leave that task to other men and women, or to God.
“Leave me alone.”
Gabrielle twisted round to look at their father. She looked half crazed.
“Papa! Make him see! What does it matter anyway now that whore has run away?”
“Henri, you must think of your family,” his father said.
She had escaped, then. Henri had not been sure when Böhm had told him she’d slipped through his net. He thought it might have been a trick to make him talk, tell him Nancy’s secrets. And God knew, he did want to talk about her. But Gabrielle could not have played a trick like that, she was not an actress. Nancy was free.
The pain was still there, but Henri felt something else. Peace perhaps. Yes, that was it. He had never been much of a one for religion, and Nancy loathed any mention of God, but Henri sensed something beyond his pain now, a place cool and quiet which would welcome him when the time came. And perhaps that was close enough.
“You are not fit to touch the hem of my wife’s skirts,” he said. He hoped that was what he said—it was getting harder and harder to form any intelligible words. “Now leave me, both of you, leave me in peace.”
Gabrielle cried, his father raged and pleaded, but it meant nothing to him. He observed them from a great height, their words muffled and meaningless.
He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, they were gone. Böhm was sitting on one of the metal chairs, staring at him.
“Disappointing!” he began. He was leaning forward, elbows on his knees. “Your family, I mean. I had hoped they’d manage to break you down at least a little. I told them to talk about the soft bed waiting for you at home, how Nancy would want you to talk to me, what harm can it do now? She’s escaped after all.”
Henri’s eyelids flickered, hungry for any crumb of news.
Böhm wrinkled his nose. “Yes, she made it to London. I hear she’s been recruited by a bunch of amateur saboteurs and criminals. Her official job is with the nursing auxiliary core, but she sounds like just the sort of woman the British army is sending over here to do their work for them. Dirty terrorists.” He sat back in his chair and crossed his legs. “Are you smiling, Monsieur Fiocca? It’s difficult to tell. I wouldn’t be pleased if I were you. Do you know what we do to the female spies we capture? They are begging to be shot in the end. I have seen it myself, many times.”
He stared at the blank wall above Henri’s cot as he spoke. “They last a few weeks behind enemy lines at the most, cause us at most a slight inconvenience, then we pick them up and squeeze them until they vomit up their secrets. That is what will happen to your Nancy.”
The last words came out too fiercely, too much venom. For a moment the mask cracked and with distant interest Henri observed the man behind it. Böhm hated Nancy, hated her for what she did, who she was, what she represented. A woman who did what she wanted and what she thought was right.
Nancy.
Böhm leaned forward eagerly, too hungry, too eager.
“What was that, Henri?”
“I said,” Henri managed to articulate each word with great care, “that you’ll have to catch her first.”
Böhm stood up so fast the metal chair was knocked over and collapsed behind him. This struck Henri as very funny.
Böhm strode to the door and called into the corridor. “Heller! Monsieur Fiocca is ready for you!”
That struck Henri as funny too, so he was still laughing through his broken teeth when Böhm had left and two of Heller’s men had picked him up off the cot and dragged him along the corridor to the cellar. Some of the other prisoners must have heard him, because behind him faint and croaky he heard a voice starting to sing the Marseillaise, then another, then another.
Heller grew red in the face. “Silence! Silence all of you!”
The voices continued, raw and ugly as drunks when the bars closed and just as unstoppable, and Henri laughed again. He could still hear it as they slung him into the yellow room. He lay on the blood-washed tiles, still laughing, and listened to them, the voices of his ragged angels.