Rainy nods. She feels as if her body has been replaced by a cold, marble statue. She can barely force the words out through a jaw clenched so tightly her teeth might crack. She wants to throw up. She wants to yell, It’s all a mistake, all a terrible joke, I’m going home to New York, to my room, to my things, to my mother and father, to my brother, to the world where people do not kill each other. In a choked, grating voice she says, “Why don’t you take a look outside and have a smoke, Philippe.”
“What? What are you talking about, you fools? Are you mad?”
“No,” Philippe says dully, a man trapped in a nightmare. “I am French.”
He rushes to the door and disappears into the night.
Marie turns her lovely face, now streaked with tears, to Rainy. “I can save you. I can tell Dieter you helped me to escape!”
“And will you tell him also that I am a dirty Jew?”
“You cannot hurt me, you . . . You cannot . . . No! No!” She rises from her chair, hands like claws ready to scratch at Rainy.
Rainy says, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to kill you. Relax.”
Marie relaxes back into her chair and sighs heavily. There is even the slight curl of a smile at the corner of her lips.
Rainy says, “It’s not Cohen or Silberstein, mademoiselle. It’s Schulterman.”
She raises the Walther and fires once. Bang! A neat round hole appears as if by magic in the center of Marie’s forehead. She slumps to the floor.
Rainy stands trembling over the body. The sound of the shot, magnified by the close quarters, seems to echo on and on. But the sound of the shot will not carry to the Germans, not from within the shed.
“No other way,” Rainy whispers to herself. At her feet the body of the pretty young Frenchwoman releases its urine and feces. Blood forms a pool in the shape of a leaf.
No other way.
She finds Philippe outside, smoking and weeping silently. “I loved her,” he says.
“Let’s get out of here.”
She leads the way, following the tracks that Philippe has assured her will take them close to his old hometown where he can hope to find shelter for them.
They hear the German patrol long before it reaches them. But the voices are not speaking German—more pressed, unmotivated Eastern Europeans who dutifully follow the tracks through the forest but do not bother to patrol through the trees where Rainy and Philippe silently watch them pass. Had they been SS, the search would have been far more efficient.
Dawn shows pink before Philippe speaks again.
“It had to be done,” he says.
“Yes.”
“This war is cruel.”
“Yes.”
“We cannot reach Oradour during daylight,” he says. “We will have to sleep rough.”
Rainy nods, though she is not at all sure she can sleep. The image of a small round hole in a girl’s forehead will follow her for many days. Perhaps for the rest of her life.
This war is cruel.
“Is it true that you are a Jew?”
Rainy nods.
Philippe looks pained. “I am sorry for . . . Well. You understand. Some people listen to the voices of the church or Vichy when they speak of Jews.”
Rainy is about to say that she isn’t much of a Jew, that she does not attend shul, rarely goes to temple, and does not keep kosher. But the words won’t come. There are times to draw distinctions between the Orthodox true believers and the more liberal, more secular Jews. But Nazi-occupied France is not the place, and mere hours after she has executed a Jew-hating collaborator is not the time. In the world of the Nazis and their allies, there is no distinction between this sort of Jew and that sort of Jew.