“If they catch you, they’ll imprison you … or kill you,” he said quietly. “Put your impetuousness aside for a moment and think on that, Isabelle. This is not handing over a piece of paper. You have seen the signs posted all over town? The rewards offered for people who aid the enemy?”
Isabelle nodded earnestly.
Anouk sighed heavily, stabbing out her cigarette in the overflowing ashtray. She gazed at Isabelle a long time, eyes narrowing; then she walked to the open door behind the table. She pushed the door open a little and whistled, gave a trilling little bird call.
Isabelle frowned. She heard something in the other room, a chair pushing back from a table, footsteps.
Gaëtan stepped into the room.
He was dressed shabbily, in corduroy pants that were patched at the knees and ragged at the hem and a little too short, in a sweater that hung on his wiry frame, its collar pulled out of shape. His black hair, longer now, in need of cutting, had been slicked back from his face, which was sharper, almost wolflike. He looked at her as if they were the only two in the room.
In an instant, it was all undone. The feelings she’d discounted, tried to bury, to ignore, came flooding back. One look at him and she could barely breathe.
“You know Gaët,” Anouk said.
Isabelle cleared her throat. She understood that he’d known she was here all along, that he’d chosen to stay away from her. For the first time since she’d joined this underground group, Isabelle felt keenly young. Apart. Had they all known about it? Had they laughed about her naïveté behind her back? “I do.”
“So,” Lévy said after an uncomfortable pause, “Isabelle has a plan.”
Gaëtan didn’t smile. “Does she?”
“She wants to lead this airman and others across the Pyrenees on foot and get them into Spain. To the British consulate, I assume.”
Gaëtan swore under his breath.
“We need to try something,” Lévy said.
“Do you truly understand the risk, Isabelle?” Anouk asked, coming forward. “If you succeed, the Nazis will hear of it. They will hunt you down. There is a ten-thousand-franc reward for anyone who leads the Nazis to someone aiding airmen.”
Isabelle had always simply reacted in her life. Someone left her behind; she followed. Someone told her she couldn’t do something; she did it. Every barrier she turned into a gate.
But this …
She let fear give her a little shake and she almost gave in to it. Then she thought about the swastikas that flew from the Eiffel Tower and Vianne living with the enemy and Antoine lost in some prisoner of war camp. And Edith Cavell. Certainly she had been afraid sometimes, too; Isabelle would not let fear stand in her way. The airmen were needed in Britain to drop more bombs on Germany.
Isabelle turned to the airman. “Are you a fit man, Lieutenant?” she said in English. “Could you keep up with a girl on a mountain crossing?”
“I could,” he said. “Especially one as pretty as you, miss. I wouldn’t let you out of my sight.”
Isabelle faced her compatriots. “I’ll take him to the consulate in San Sebastián. From there, it will be up to the Brits to get him home.”
Isabelle saw the conversation that passed in silence around her, concerns and questions unvoiced. A decision reached in silence. Some risks simply had to be taken; everyone in this room knew it.
“It will take weeks to plan. Maybe longer,” Lévy said. He turned to Gaëtan. “We will need money immediately. You will speak to your contact?”
Gaëtan nodded. He grabbed a black beret from the sideboard, putting it on.
Isabelle couldn’t look away. She was angry at him—she knew that, felt it—but as he came toward her, that anger dried up and blew away like dust beneath the longing that mattered so much more. Their gazes met, held; and then he was past her, reaching for the doorknob, going outside. The door clicked shut behind him.
“So,” Anouk said. “The planning. We should begin.”
* * *
For six hours, Isabelle sat at the table in the apartment on rue de Saint-Simon. They brought in others from the network and gave them tasks: to gather clothes for the pilots and stockpile supplies. They consulted maps and devised routes and began the long, uncertain process of setting up safe houses along the way. At some point, they began to see it as a reality instead of merely a bold and daring idea.
It wasn’t until Monsieur Lévy mentioned the curfew that Isabelle pushed back from the table. They tried to talk her into staying the night, but such a choice would make her father suspicious. Instead, she borrowed a heavy black peacoat from Anouk and put it on, grateful for the way it camouflaged her.
The boulevard Saint-Germain was eerily quiet, shutters closed tightly and blacked out, streetlamps dark.