Vermilion spots open and close in his vision.
“Marie-Laure—”
“She is not—?”
Before he can shake his head, Madame Ruelle is lifting the hinged counter and ushering him out; she has him under the arm. The women in the queue are muttering, intrigued or scandalized or both. Madame Ruelle helps him onto the rue Robert Surcouf. The face of Etienne’s watch appears to distend. Forty-one minutes? He can hardly do the math. Her hands grip his shoulder.
“Where could she have gone?”
Tongue so dry, thoughts so sluggish. “Sometimes . . . she visits . . . the sea. Before coming home.”
“But the beaches are closed. The ramparts too.” She looks off over his head. “It must be something else.”
They huddle in the middle of the street. Somewhere a hammer rings. War, Etienne thinks distantly, is a bazaar where lives are traded like any other commodity: chocolate or bullets or parachute silk. Has he traded all those numbers for Marie-Laure’s life?
“No,” he whispers, “she goes to the sea.”
“If they find the bread,” Madame Ruelle whispers, “we will all die.”
He glances again at his watch, but it’s a sun burning his retinas. A single side of salted bacon twists in the butcher’s otherwise empty window, and three schoolboys stand on a bench watching him, waiting for him to fall, and just as he is certain the morning is about to shatter, Etienne sees in his memory the rusted gate leading to the crumbling kennel beneath the ramparts. A place where he used to play with his brother, Henri, and Harold Bazin. A small dripping cavern where a boy could shout and dream.
Stick-thin, alabaster-pale Etienne LeBlanc runs down the rue de Dinan with Madame Ruelle, the baker’s wife, on his heels: the least-robust rescue ever assembled. The cathedral bells chime one two three four, all the way to eight; Etienne turns down the rue du Boyer and reaches the slightly angled base of the ramparts, traveling the paths of his youth, navigating by instinct; he turns right, passes through the curtain of swinging ivy, and ahead, behind the same locked gate, in the grotto, shivering, wet to her thighs, wholly intact, crouches Marie-Laure with the ruins of a loaf of bread in her lap. “You came,” she says when she lets them in, when he takes her face in his hands. “You came . . .”
The Girl
Werner thinks of her, whether he wishes to or not. Girl with a cane, girl in a gray dress, girl made of mist. That air of otherworldliness in the snarls of her hair and the fearlessness of her step. She takes up residence inside him, a living doppelgänger to face down the dead Viennese girl who haunts him every night.
Who is she? Daughter of the broadcasting Frenchman? Granddaughter? Why would he endanger her so?
Volkheimer keeps them out in the field, roving villages along the Rance River. It seems certain that the broadcasts will be blamed for something, and Werner will be found out. He thinks of the colonel with his perfect jawline and flared pants; he thinks of the sallow sergeant major eyeing him over the top of the newspaper. Do they already know? Does Volkheimer? What can save him now? There were nights when he’d stare with Jutta out the attic window of Children’s House and pray for the ice to grow out from the canals, to reach across the fields and envelop the tiny pit houses, crush the machinery, pave over everything, so they’d wake in the morning to find everything they knew was gone. This is the sort of miracle he needs now.
On the first of August, a lieutenant comes to Volkheimer. The demand for men on the lines, he says, is overwhelming. Anyone not essential to the defense of Saint-Malo must go. He needs at least two. Volkheimer looks them over, each in turn. Bernd too old. Werner the only one who can repair the equipment.
Neumann One. Neumann Two.
An hour later, both are seated in the back of a troop carrier with their rifles between their knees. A great change has occurred in the countenance of Neumann Two, as though he looks not at his former companions but into his last hours on earth. As though he is about to ride in some black chariot at a forty-five-degree angle down into the abyss.
Neumann One raises a single steady hand. His mouth is expressionless, but in the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, Werner can see despair.
“In the end,” murmurs Volkheimer as the truck heaves away, “none of us will avoid it.”
That night Volkheimer drives the Opel east along a coastal road toward Cancale, and Bernd takes the first transceiver out to a knoll in a field, and Werner operates the second from the back of the truck, and Volkheimer stays folded into the driver’s seat, his huge knees jammed against the wheel. Fires—perhaps on ships—burn far out to sea, and the stars shudder in their constellations. At two twelve A.M., Werner knows, the Frenchman will broadcast again, and Werner will have to switch off the transceiver or else pretend that he hears only static.
He will cover the signal meter with his palm. He will keep his face completely motionless.
Little House
Etienne says he never should have let her take on so much. Never should have put her in such danger. He says she can no longer go outside. In truth, Marie-Laure is relieved. The German haunts her: in nightmares, he’s a spider crab three meters high; he clacks his claws and whispers One simple question into her ear.
“What about the loaves, Uncle?”
“I will go. I should have been going all along.”
On the mornings of the fourth and fifth of August, Etienne stands at the front door mumbling to himself, then pushes open the gate and goes out. Soon afterward, the bell under the third-floor table rings and he comes back in and throws both dead bolts and stands in the foyer breathing as though he has passed through a gauntlet of a thousand dangers.
Aside from the bread, they have almost nothing to eat. Dried peas. Barley. Powdered milk. A last few tins of Madame Manec’s vegetables. Marie-Laure’s thoughts gallop like bloodhounds over the same questions. First those policemen two years ago: Mademoiselle, was there no specific thing he mentioned? Then this limping sergeant major with a dead voice. Just tell me if your father left anything with you or spoke about carrying something for the museum.
Papa leaves. Madame Manec leaves. She remembers the voices of their neighbors in Paris when she lost her eyesight: Like they’re cursed.
She tries to forget the fear, the hunger, the questions. She must live like the snails, moment to moment, centimeter to centimeter. But on the afternoon of the sixth of August, she reads the following lines to Etienne on the davenport in his study: Was it true that Captain Nemo never left the Nautilus? Often I had not seen him for weeks on end. What was he doing during that time? Wasn’t it possible that he was carrying out some secret mission completely unknown to me?