The Nightingale

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.

*

A dead body hung from every streetlamp in the town square.

Vianne came to a stop, unable to believe what she was seeing. Across the way, an old woman stood beneath one of the bodies. The air was full of the whining creak of ropes pulled taut. Vianne moved cautiously through the square, taking care to keep away from the streetlamps— Blue-faced, swollen, slack bodies.

There had to be ten dead men here—Frenchmen, she could tell. Maquisards by the look of them—the rough guerrilla partisans of the woods. They wore brown pants and black berets and tricolor armbands.

Vianne went to the old woman, took her by the shoulders. “You should not be here,” she said.

“My son,” the woman croaked. “He can’t stay here—”