The Nightingale

Lévy sat back in his chair and pulled a Gauloises from his breast pocket and lit it up, studying the airman. “There are others that we know of in the city, and more who escaped from German prisons. We want to get them out, but the coasts and the airfields are sewn up tight.” He took a long drag on the cigarette; the tip glowed and crackled and blackened. “It is a problem we have been working on.”

“I know,” Isabelle said. She felt the full weight of her responsibility. Had she acted rashly again? Were they disappointed in her? She didn’t know. Should she have ignored MacLeish? She was about to ask a question when she heard someone talking in another room.

Frowning, she said, “Who else is here?”

“Others,” Lévy answered. “Others are always here. No one of concern to you.”

“We need a plan for the airmen, it is true,” Anouk said.

“We believe we could get them out of Spain,” Lévy said. “If we could get them into Spain.”

“The Pyrenees,” Anouk said.

Isabelle had seen the Pyrenees, so she understood Anouk’s comment. The jagged peaks rose impossibly high into the clouds and were usually snow-covered or ringed in fog. Her mother had loved Biarritz, a small coastal town nearby, and twice, in the good days, long ago, the family had vacationed there.

“The border with Spain is guarded by both German and Spanish patrols,” Anouk said.

“The whole border?” Isabelle asked.

“Well, no. Of course not. But where they are and where they aren’t, who knows?” Lévy said.

“The mountains are smaller near Saint-Jean-de-Luz,” Isabelle pointed out.

“Oui, but so what? They are still impassable and the few roads are guarded,” Anouk said.

“My maman’s best friend was a Basque whose father was a goat herder. He crossed the mountains on foot all the time.”

“We have had this idea. We even tried it once,” Lévy said. “None of the party was heard from again. Getting past the German sentries at Saint-Jean-de-Luz is hard enough for one man, let alone several, and then there is the actual crossing of the mountains on foot. It is nearly impossible.”

“Nearly impossible and impossible are not the same thing. If goat herders can cross the mountains, certainly airmen can do it,” Isabelle said. As she said it, an idea came to her. “And a woman could move easily across the checkpoints. Especially a young woman. No one would suspect a pretty girl.”

Anouk and Lévy exchanged a look.

“I will do it,” Isabelle said. “Or try it, anyway. I’ll take this airman. And are there others?”

Monsieur Lévy frowned. Obviously this turn of events surprised him. Cigarette smoke clouded blue-gray between them. “And you have climbed mountains before?”

“I’m in good shape” was her answer.

“If they catch you, they’ll imprison you … or kill you,” he said quietly. “Put your impetuousness aside for a moment and think on that, Isabelle. This is not handing over a piece of paper. You have seen the signs posted all over town? The rewards offered for people who aid the enemy?”

Isabelle nodded earnestly.

Anouk sighed heavily, stabbing out her cigarette in the overflowing ashtray. She gazed at Isabelle a long time, eyes narrowing; then she walked to the open door behind the table. She pushed the door open a little and whistled, gave a trilling little bird call.

Isabelle frowned. She heard something in the other room, a chair pushing back from a table, footsteps.

Ga?tan stepped into the room.

He was dressed shabbily, in corduroy pants that were patched at the knees and ragged at the hem and a little too short, in a sweater that hung on his wiry frame, its collar pulled out of shape. His black hair, longer now, in need of cutting, had been slicked back from his face, which was sharper, almost wolflike. He looked at her as if they were the only two in the room.

In an instant, it was all undone. The feelings she’d discounted, tried to bury, to ignore, came flooding back. One look at him and she could barely breathe.

“You know Ga?t,” Anouk said.

Isabelle cleared her throat. She understood that he’d known she was here all along, that he’d chosen to stay away from her. For the first time since she’d joined this underground group, Isabelle felt keenly young. Apart. Had they all known about it? Had they laughed about her na?veté behind her back? “I do.”

“So,” Lévy said after an uncomfortable pause, “Isabelle has a plan.”

Ga?tan didn’t smile. “Does she?”

“She wants to lead this airman and others across the Pyrenees on foot and get them into Spain. To the British consulate, I assume.”

Ga?tan swore under his breath.

“We need to try something,” Lévy said.

“Do you truly understand the risk, Isabelle?” Anouk asked, coming forward. “If you succeed, the Nazis will hear of it. They will hunt you down. There is a ten-thousand-franc reward for anyone who leads the Nazis to someone aiding airmen.”

Isabelle had always simply reacted in her life. Someone left her behind; she followed. Someone told her she couldn’t do something; she did it. Every barrier she turned into a gate.