THIRTY-THREE
Isabelle woke tied to a wooden chair at her wrists and ankles; the ropes bit into her flesh and were so tight she couldn’t move. Her fingers were numb. A single lightbulb hung from the ceiling above her, a cone of light in the darkness. The room smelled of mold and piss and water seeping through cracks in the stone.
Somewhere in front of her, a match flared.
She heard the scratch of sound, smelled the sulfur, and tried to lift her head, but the movement hurt so much she made an involuntary sound.
“Gut,” someone said. “It hurts.”
Gestapo.
He pulled a chair from the darkness and sat down, facing her. “Pain,” he said simply. “Or no pain. The choice is yours.”
“In that case, no pain.”
He hit her hard. Blood filled her mouth, sharp and metallic tasting. She felt it dribble down her chin.
Two days, she thought. Only two days.
She had to last under questioning for forty-eight hours without naming names. If she could do that, just not crack, her father and Ga?tan and Henri and Didier and Paul and Anouk would have time to protect themselves. They would know soon that she had been arrested, if they didn’t already know. Eduardo would get the word out and then he would go into hiding. That was their plan.
“Name?” he said, withdrawing a small notebook and a pencil from his breast pocket.
She felt blood dripping down her chin, onto her lap. “Juliette Gervaise. But you know that. You have my papers.”
“We have papers that name you as Juliette Gervaise, true.”
“So why ask me?”
“Who are you, really?”
“I’m really Juliette.”
“Born where?” he asked lazily, studying his well-tended fingernails.
“Nice.”
“And what were you doing in Urrugne?”
“I was in Urrugne?” she said.
He straightened at that, his gaze returned to hers with interest. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-two, or nearly, I think. Birthdays don’t mean much anymore.”
“You look younger.”
“I feel older.”
He slowly got to his feet, towered over her. “You work for the Nightingale. I want his name.”
They didn’t know who she was.
“I know nothing about birds.”
The blow came out of the blue, stunning in its impact. Her head whipped sideways, cracked hard against the chair back.
“Tell me about the Nightingale.”
“I told you—”
This time he hit her with an iron ruler across the cheek, so hard she felt her skin break open and blood spill.
He smiled and said again, “The Nightingale.”
She spat as hard as she could, but it came out as a dribbling blob of blood that landed in her lap. She shook her head to clear her vision and wished immediately that she hadn’t.
He was coming toward her again, methodically slapping the red-dripping ruler into his open palm. “I’m Rittmeister Schmidt, Kommandant of the Gestapo in Amboise. And you are?”
He is going to kill me, Isabelle thought. She struggled against her restraints, breathing hard. She tasted her own blood. “Juliette,” she whispered, desperate now that he believe her.
She couldn’t last two days.
This was the risk everyone had warned her about, the terrible truth of what she’d been doing. How had it seemed like an adventure? She would get herself—and everyone she cared about—killed.
“We have most of your compatriots. There is no sense in you dying to protect dead men.”
Was it true?
No. If it were true, she would be dead, too.
“Juliette Gervaise,” she said again.
He backhanded her with the ruler so hard the chair toppled sideways and crashed to the floor. Her head cracked on the stone at the same time he kicked her in the stomach with the toe of his boot. The pain was like nothing she’d ever known. She heard him say, “Now, Madamoiselle, name the Nightingale,” and she couldn’t have answered if she wanted to.
He kicked her again, with all his weight behind the blow.
*
Consciousness brought pain.
Everything hurt. Her head, her face, her body. It took effort—and courage—to lift her head. She was still bound at the ankles and wrists. The ropes chafed against her torn, bloodied skin, cut into her bruised flesh.
Where am I?
Darkness surrounded her, and not an ordinary darkness, not an unlit room. This was something else; an impenetrable, inky blackness that pressed against her battered face. She sensed a wall was mere inches from her face. She tried to make the smallest move of her foot to reach forward, and pain roared to life again, biting deep into the rope cuts on her ankles.
She was in a box.
And she was cold. She could feel her breath and knew it would be visible. Her nostril hairs were frozen. She shivered hard, uncontrollably.
She screamed in terror; the sound of her scream echoed back at her and was lost.
*
Freezing.
Isabelle shuddered with cold, whimpering. She could feel her breath now, pluming in front of her face, turning to frost on her lips. Her eyelashes were frozen.
Think, Isabelle. Don’t give up.
She moved her body a little, fighting through the cold and pain.
She was seated, still bound at the ankles and wrists.
Naked.
She closed her eyes, sickened by the image of him undressing her, touching her when she was unconscious.
In the fetid darkness, she became aware of a thrumming noise. At first, she thought it was her blood, pulsing in pain, or her heart, pounding a desperate beat to stay alive, but it wasn’t that.
It was a motor, and nearby, humming. She recognized the sound, but what was it?
She shuddered again, trying to wiggle her fingers and toes to combat the dead feeling that had overtaken her extremities. Before there was pain in her feet, and then a tingling, and now … nothing. She moved the only thing she could—her head—and it thunked against something hard. She was naked, tied to a chair inside a …
Frozen. Dark. Humming. Small …
A refrigerator.
She panicked, tried frantically to wrest free, to topple her prison, but all her effort did was wind her. Defeat her. She couldn’t move. Not anything except her fingers and toes, which were too frozen to cooperate. Not like this, please.
She would freeze to death. Or be asphyxiated.
Her own breathing echoed back at her, surrounded her, a shudder of breath all around it. She started to cry and her tears froze, turning to icicles on her cheeks. She thought of all the people she loved—Vianne, Sophie, Ga?tan, her father. Why hadn’t she told them she loved them every day when she had the chance? And now she would die without ever saying a word to Vianne.
Vianne, she thought. Only that. The name. Part prayer, part regret, part good-bye.