THE NEW APARTMENT WAS IN a nice building on the rue de Lasteyrie in the Passy district, a thirty-minute walk across the river. The neighborhood, though close to both the busy Avenue Foch and the bustling Avenue des Champs-élysées, was quiet and residential. In fact, the street had much the same feel as the rue Amélie.
The landlord, a man named Georges Savatier, was there to greet them when they arrived. “You must be our new tenants, Fleur and her cousin Hélène,” he said, smiling brightly. “Come, come, we must get you settled.” He was perhaps a decade older than Ruby, with a deep voice, a substantial waistline, and a big, bushy black mustache, which seemed at odds with his very bald head. His smile was wide and jolly, and Ruby liked him immediately.
He showed them to an apartment two flights up, explaining, as they walked, that the building didn’t have a lift but that he knew they were young and healthy and hoped they’d be comfortable. “Our second floor is also our quietest,” he said, giving Ruby a meaningful look. “You have no neighbors.” He stopped in front of apartment C and smiled. “This will be you. Apartments A, B, and D are vacant.”
“What happened to the people who used to live there?” Charlotte asked.
Monsieur Savatier frowned as he turned the key and opened the door. “They left some months ago in the middle of the night. Perhaps to the countryside.” He gave Ruby a quick look. Had the previous owners been rounded up in the recent raids too?
Ruby and Charlotte followed him inside. It was immediately obvious that the apartment was half the size of the place they’d come from, but it had a nice terrace that overlooked a private courtyard.
“My favorite part of the apartment,” Monsieur Savatier said, beckoning toward one of the two doors in the back. “Come, I will show you.” He led them into a tiny room with one small window. “This, I think, will be the master bedroom,” he said.
Ruby was about to protest that it would hardly fit a bed when his smile widened and he pointed toward the wall on the left. “I understand that you are in need of some discreet storage space.”
He put his hand on a panel of the wall just above waist level. He pushed gently up and in, and the wall slid open, revealing a crawl space large enough for a man to sit up comfortably. “Voilà,” Monsieur Savatier said. “In case you need to store anything here.”
“It’s perfect,” Ruby said, exchanging looks with Charlotte. It was larger than the hall closet in the old building, and it was also a more secure hiding spot, concealed within their own apartment. It would be much easier to slip pilots in and out without being observed. The wall space above it was filled with cupboards and cabinets; it was designed in a way that made it appear the entire wall was used for storage.
“Yes, I thought so,” Monsieur Savatier said. “I built it myself. I cannot do much to help; I manage several buildings, and I’m sure there are eyes on me. But this, in a small way, is my contribution.” He pointed up and added, “I live just two floors above with my wife. We are both here to help if you ever need us. Below you, the apartments are mostly deserted too, so you won’t have to worry about prying eyes. And of course there’s no concierge.”
“I don’t know how to thank you,” Ruby said.
“Don’t thank me yet. I haven’t told you the bad news. The building next door, which I also manage, has several Nazi officers as tenants. So you are living very close to them. But I think they do not suspect a thing.”
BY LATE EVENING, AUBERT’S FRIENDS had delivered their furniture and belongings, and Charlotte and Ruby had begun to make the cramped new apartment feel like home. There were more boxes to unpack, but Ruby could see Charlotte’s eyelids drooping. “Why don’t you go to bed?”
Charlotte yawned. “But there’s still so much to do.”
“It will all be here in the morning. It’s been a long day.”
Charlotte nodded and headed into the larger bedroom. They had determined it would be hers; having her stay in such close proximity to young pilots wouldn’t be appropriate.
“Thank you,” Charlotte said, pausing at her doorway and looking back to the living room, where Ruby sat at the small table in the corner.
“You don’t need to thank me for anything.”
“But I do. You didn’t have to bring me with you.”
“Charlotte, you’re my family now,” Ruby said firmly. “I wouldn’t have it any other way. Now get some sleep. Everything will look better in the morning.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
January 1943
By the beginning of 1943, food was scarcer than ever, but Ruby and Charlotte were surviving. They had helped eight pilots since moving into the new apartment, and though there was still no word about Charlotte’s parents, the girl seemed to have reached some kind of peace within herself.
At night, Charlotte and Ruby would sit together with an oil lamp burning between them and talk about the pilots they’d saved, wondering how many had made it back to England or America, how many had returned to the skies. They made up vivid stories of the men they’d known only briefly. An American fighter named Earl Johnson, for example, had stayed with them in August, and now they imagined him flying missions over western Germany, shooting Nazi aces out of the sky. A British bomber named Jay Cash had been their guest for almost a week in October, and they had convinced themselves that he was now the one dropping bombs on Nazi-run factories in the Paris suburbs.
In the first week of the new year, they hosted an RAF pilot named Jon Payne, who stared long and hard at Ruby on his first night with them. “I’m sorry,” he said when she caught him looking for the third time. “You just remind me of someone.”
“Who?”
He cleared his throat. “It’s rather foolish, but there’s a fellow in my squadron who was shot down a little over a year ago and helped by an escape line through Paris. He and I roomed together for a little while. He’d have these nightmares, and he’d yell out a name over and over again. When I finally asked him about it, he said he couldn’t talk about the specifics of the escape line—of course that’s one of the rules—but that there was a woman in Paris who had helped him. He told me a bit about her; he thought she was extraordinary. He didn’t realize he was calling out her name, of course. But the way he described her, she sounded just like you.”
“Like me?”
The pilot nodded. “Yes. She was American too, just like you are, and beautiful. But of course you go by Fleur.”
“And what name was he calling out?”
“I’m not sure I should say.”
Ruby nodded and waited. Surely there were other women around Paris helping on the line. And wasn’t it far more likely that the pilot in question was calling out the name of the gorgeous Laure?
“Well,” Jon said after a moment, “all of you go by code names anyhow, don’t you?”
“You’re right, of course.”
“It was Ruby,” Jon said. “The name he said over and over was Ruby.”
Ruby felt her whole body go numb. She reminded herself that the pilot could have been anyone, but she hadn’t used her real name with anyone else, with the exception of Dexter, the first refugee to show up at her door. “Who was the pilot?”
“I suppose I’d better not tell you his surname. But no harm in telling you his first name. It was Thomas. Do you know a Thomas?”
Ruby swallowed hard. “Perhaps.”
That night, Ruby lay in bed, wide awake and staring at the ceiling. The man Jon had mentioned had to be Thomas, her Thomas. But did this really mean he was thinking of her the way she was thinking of him? Or merely that she’d played a role in the most terrifying ordeal of his life? Still, the fact that he’d described her as extraordinary and beautiful, well, that was something.