Silver Stars (Front Lines 2)

You’ve done your part, she tells herself.

More than your part.

Home to her mother and father. Home to New York. Home to life and ease and safety and maybe romance and . . . But it’s all sour, all of it impossible, there is no going home, there is no going home until . . .

Until what, Rainy?

Until what?

Until she no longer feels empty? Until she is herself again? Because she can’t go home yet, not like this, not as this person.

She can’t go home, because there are no Krauts in New York. The Krauts are here. The Gestapo is here.

A staff sergeant calls her name and holds a door open for her before hurrying past her to turn a plush wingback chair that slides easily on the polished parquet floor.

The ceiling, far above her, is an arch painted with cherubs and men and women in Renaissance clothing. No doubt it is a scene from the Christian Bible, but she cannot decipher the symbology and doesn’t care to try. The headquarters is in a seized villa of some magnificence, and this is but one of the many floridly decorated rooms.

A captain sits to her left, a colonel sits behind the desk, and it takes her a few beats before she realizes he is her former captain and now Lieutenant Colonel Herkemeier. He still checks his creases compulsively, but his eyes are full of compassion and . . . and respect? Regret? Pity?

What is clever, kind, decent Jon Herkemeier seeing when he looks at her?

There is also a female corporal taking notes, seated tactfully off to Rainy’s right and slightly behind. All three are Army Intelligence, but Rainy quickly intuits from the start that her mission is seen differently from here than it was from Colonel Corelli’s office in New York.

She gives a stripped-down account of her mission, her escape from Positano, her flight from Rome, her time in Genazzano. She takes a pause before going on. She wants to give a controlled, professional account, knowing that if she lets herself become emotional she may be unable to go on.

Even the barest retelling takes her thirty mi

nutes, all accompanied by the scratch of pencil on paper from the corporal stenographer. The questions begin.

“And there was no plan of action, no plan of withdrawal after you completed your mission?” the captain, an older man named Fraser, asks.

“No, sir,” Rainy says tightly.

“I find that hard to believe,” Fraser says, and Rainy’s eyes flare, a warning.

“How then did you decide how to proceed once you had delivered the document? The very useful document,” Herkemeier asks gently, sending a significant look to Fraser, who takes the hint and sits back, looking abashed.

“I started walking. I knew the gangsters might come after me for alerting Father Patrizio. And of course the Krauts. The Germans, sir.” She turns away slightly, and it is only the stenographer who sees her grimace of hatred and for a moment the stenographer is so startled she loses her place. “I walked out of Rome, not knowing where to go, but I figured the countryside would be safer than the city.”

“You simply walked? But surely it was many miles?”

“There are plenty of refugees on the roads, sir, some fleeing Rome in expectation of our arrival. I kept to myself, spoke as little as possible, slept at night in barns or under bridges. Three days and I reached a little village called Genazzano.”

Herkemeier snaps his fingers, and Fraser unfolds a map. “Here it is, sir, almost due east of Rome.” The captain points.

“My God, that must be forty miles!” Herkemeier says.

“Yes, sir. I hadn’t eaten much, and the countryside was picked bare. I had to steal a chicken from a farmer. Then I found a cave. And I got sick, and some children found me . . .” Her voice trails away as she remembers the chicken. She’d wrung its neck, a far more difficult task than she’d imagined. Then she’d made a mess of butchering it, using a sharp-edged piece of tin roofing as a knife.

“Anyway, some sisters, some nuns, took me in for a while until I was better. But I couldn’t stay there without endangering them, so I walked until I found an abandoned farm. I meant to wait there until our forces arrived.”

“Yes, well, our forces are all hurry-up and very little planning, I’m afraid,” Herkemeier says with savage disapproval. “Rather like your mission.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Please go on, Sergeant,” Herkemeier says with a frown of worry.

“I guess someone gave me up,” Rainy says. “One night a staff car pulled up. I ran, but . . . but not fast enough.” Then, feeling obscurely as if this was disappointing, added, “I shot at one of them. But I missed, at least I think I did.”