“Capt—”
“Yes.” He threw Emma’s head back. “Yes.” He stood, brushing dirt from the knees of his pants. “Lucky for you I am called to important duty.” Thalheim took out his pistol-cleaning cloth, pressing where she had cut his shoulder. “Now you listen: when this air attack has passed, and failed as it is certain of fail, Captain Thalheim will return, and he will take his pleasure from the clever bitch. Yes he will. Then he will finish of her, and of her idiot grandmother, and burn this filthy peasant place to ashes.”
Emma shook her head, gurgling, but the captain had stepped away. He lit a match, and she could smell tobacco. Thalheim put on his helmet, neatened his gloves, straightened his uniform to perfection—taking his time, the pride of his kind. Emma lay unmoving.
Eventually he ground the butt out in the dirt. “Consider it kindness, that I give you longer than the others,” he said. “Contemplate your mortality.”
With the final word he stomped again on her wrist, all of his weight. It made a snapping sound like kindling for the fire, a lightning bolt of pain and Emma knew that a part of her was damaged inside, though to her numbed mind it seemed to be somewhere far away.
Thalheim climbed aboard his motorcycle and roared off, a spout of gravel thrown in her swollen face. Emma lay there, her mouth full of blood and dirt. It tasted like dread.
Chapter 31
Odette paced the rectangle of her cell, corner to corner to corner. She was dismayed to learn how much confinement galled her. Life was all about constructive use of time: minutes left in a recipe’s broiling, hours till the café opened, days till the beet greens sprouted. Before the occupation, when women wore tight belts and dandy hats, she had favored blousy aprons and a big watch on her wrist. She was a person of activity, working every waking moment. Between the café, caring for older villagers, and relaying information gleaned from overly talkative soldiers, Odette had not experienced a stationary moment in years. This forced idleness felt like claustrophobia.
Now that she had passed the better part of a night, inactivity goaded her like five too many cups of tea.
Worse, the basement contained neither window nor clock. Odette knew by the grumbling of her stomach that the dinner hour was long past, and she shook her head to think of all the hungry customers arriving at her café to find the windows dark, the lost revenue, the lobster now spoiling in its pot. At home she slept by the window, and waking at any hour could estimate the time by the light in the sky, and where the moon hung. But in that cell, night stretched long. Dawn might come in a minute, or two weeks. With the air rumbling from bombs, the ground trembling, Odette felt like she was being held in a tomb.
Yet the guard seemed nothing other than bored. He inspected every inch of his rifle, polishing certain favored spots with the cuff of his sleeve. He examined his fingernails. When the lights flickered after certain bombs, his reaction was limited to raising his eyes to the fixtures. Once the light stabilized again, he wagged his boot side to side while observing closely, as if trying to decide which angle showed it to greatest advantage.
“You aren’t quite the army’s brightest, are you?” Odette asked him at last.
“You speak my language.”
“You noticed.” She crossed her arms. “And they had told me you were as clever as a cow.”
He did not answer. It was difficult to appear strong while caged, but Odette felt power rising from the soles of her feet. This war seemed a decidedly amateurish affair: the guard was present, for example, because the cell lacked a proper lock. From a certain point of view, he was as imprisoned as she. “My mother’s people were from Düsseldorf.”
“Ah.”
“Yes, a conversationalist of rare ability,” she muttered. “Where is your home town?”
He remained on his stool, sliding a hand up and down the stock of his rifle. “Munich.”
“I’ve been there. Lovely cathedral.”
He shrugged.
“Not a churchgoer? Well, I also remember a square flooded with ice, and my grandfather rented me a pair of skates.”
The soldier stood. “How about you stop talking?”
“I think your Kommandant wants me to do a great deal of talking.”
The guard wandered down the hall. “Save your chatter for him.”
The lights went out, simultaneously with the roar of a bomb quite close. The building shuddered. Odette felt dust fall from the ceiling onto her face. Something in the manner of the darkness gave her a sense that this outage would not be temporary.
The soldier remained in place, waiting. Odette watched his gray silhouette. When the lights did not return for several minutes, she heard the knocking of his heels on the floor. A door whined on its hinge, then his boots clanked up the stairs.
He returned carrying something metal, she could tell by the sound it made when he set it down. The soldier poured papers out onto the floor, crumpling some. There was a metallic scratching sound, twice, then a small flame. He brought a cigarette lighter to the paper, and it filled the hall with a cheery orange light. The guard held the crumpled page as long as he could before releasing it into the basket. A glow remained, and he tossed another crushed sheet in on top.
Odette leaned on the bars. “DuFour will burst into flames himself when he finds out you touched his papers.”
The guard raised an eyebrow at her, then returned to feeding the fire. For a while the corridor brightened as he burned page after page, but smoke began to roil along the ceiling. Odette found it growing difficult to breathe, yet she did not make any complaint. She felt she was being tested, so she sat on her bunk and kept her head low. The soldier remained upright on his stool. Although he had not said anything, she knew they were in a contest to see who could endure the smoke longest.
Soon her eyes hurt. Her throat pinched. Her nose began to run. The guard rubbed his hands together over the flames. Odette leaned lower, trying to catch the good air below. The guard dropped in several pages at once, his fire tonguing higher than the wastebasket’s brim, billows of gray rising and curling down the ceiling. As they clouded around his head, the soldier sneezed.
“Yes,” Odette hissed, but he only stood, passed his eyes over her with reptilian indifference, and strode to the hall’s far end. There he pushed the door wide till it held, providing the smoke with the chimney it desired, while Odette felt cooler air pour in around her feet.
“What do I get for winning?” she said.
The soldier trod back down the hall. “We will soon see.”
Odette stood. “What did I do to deserve this treatment? Serve the Kommandant undercooked eggs?”
“It has nothing to do with deserving.”
“Where’s the justice in that?”
He lowered himself back on the stool. “Making you people obey is more important than justice.”