Without a father. Orphaned.
Everything in him said go home, get out of danger, leave the pain behind, take the easy path.
But words niggled in his brain, his father’s words. “Nothing of any worth lies on the easy path.”
“As a citizen of a neutral nation, you can leave whenever you want.” Duff gestured toward the door. “You could try this for a while. If it isn’t helpful, or if you’re in any danger, sell and go home.”
Paul closed his eyes. Duff’s voice. Simone’s voice. His father’s. He needed to seek a higher and wiser voice, and he needed time to make a decision. “I’ll think it over and get back to you.”
“Thank you.” Duff stood, shook Paul’s hand, and departed.
Paul shut the office door and leaned his forehead against it. Why did he have a funny feeling the Lord would guide him to the difficult path? He usually did.
3
PARIS
TUESDAY, APRIL 1, 1941
In the storage room upstairs from Green Leaf Books, Lucie rummaged among the books. Thank goodness Hal Greenblatt had built the false wall when the war began in 1939, a perfect place to hide titles on the German “Otto List” of books banned from sale in occupied France.
There was the book Alice Young requested—Escape from Munich by Evelyn Lang.
Lucie backed out, flipped off her flashlight to conserve the precious battery, and closed the door with its cunning hidden latches and hinges.
To camouflage the false wall, Hal had installed a barre where Lucie could practice each evening, and Lucie was painting a black-and-white mural. The doorway to the hiding place had become the side of an upright piano, with an elderly man at the keyboard. Today Lucie imagined he was playing “Spring” from Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons.
Over time, the wall was filling with ballerinas practicing at the Palais Garnier.
“I shall finish you soon,” she said to a sweet-faced young dancer whose body needed fleshing out over the pencil sketch.
Lucie fished in a case of German-English dictionaries, removed a dust jacket, and wrapped it around Escape from Munich. Then she tucked the dictionary into the wood box to serve as kindling.
She trotted downstairs to the store. Erma Greenblatt had warned that if the Germans occupied Paris, Lucie would no longer be able to order books from Britain. So Lucie had used the store’s petty cash and her own to buy English-language books from fleeing Britons and Americans.
In the bleak days of the exodus, to stave off worries about the approaching German army, Lucie had hidden books by Jewish authors or books that criticized Hitler. After saving them from Nazi bonfires, she discreetly sold or lent them to her most trusted customers. Her tiny way to nourish an oasis in the cultural desert the Germans had created.
The store ran long and narrow with bookcases dividing the space into three bays, each with a table and chairs. In the nonfiction bay sat Lucie’s friends, musician Charles Charbonnier and painter Jerzy Epstein, a refugee from Poland, along with two young men from the Sorbonne. Lucie greeted them warmly.
If it weren’t for the students at the lycées and universities in the area, the store would have failed long ago. Only a few thousand Americans remained in Paris, and the Germans had placed the British civilians in internment camps.
The store assistant, Bernadette Martel, sat reading in her favorite armchair near the counter across from the nonfiction bay. The widow wore her gray-streaked dark hair in a loose bun barely clinging to the nape of her neck.
“Any new customers?” Lucie asked her.
Bernadette pointed to the front bay without raising her head from her book.
Alice Young, wife of a physician at the American Hospital in Paris, perused the fiction.
Lucie kissed her friend on the cheek. “Alice, darling.”
“Sweet Lucie.” In her forties, Alice wore a perfectly cut gray suit and a stylish hat angled over silver-and-gold hair. “How are you today?”
“Lovely now that you’re here. I have the book you wanted.” She held out the book cloaked in a dictionary’s dust jacket.
Alice frowned. “That isn’t—”
Lucie opened the book to the title page.
A smile bent Alice’s red lips. “Clever. How much?”
“You’re a paid subscriber. You can borrow it.”
“I’ll buy it. It’s for Bentley’s birthday.”
After Alice paid at the cash register, Lucie saw her friend to the front door. “See you Sunday.”
“Yes, Sunday.” Although Dr. and Mrs. Young lived on Paris’s bourgeois Right Bank of the Seine River, they had Left Bank sensibilities and attended the American Church in Paris rather than the more prestigious American Cathedral.
Alice raised her umbrella, stepped out into the light rain on rue Casimir-Delavigne, and passed a man in a field-gray German army overcoat.
Lucie sucked in her breath and ducked inside the store.
Too late. Lt. Emil Wattenberg grinned at her through the window. The man worked at the German Embassy in Paris, the institution responsible for promoting German culture in France, censoring French culture—and publishing the Otto List.
She turned to the bookshelf to . . . straighten books? Although jumbled shelves were part of the store’s charm.
The door swung open. Bother. She hated having German soldiers in her store.
“Good morning, Miss Girard,” he said in heavily accented English.
She took great pains not to learn German, and Wattenberg’s English was worse than his French, so she always spoke English with him. “Good morning, Lieutenant,” she said with the elegant indifference Parisians affected with the city’s occupiers.
Wattenberg removed his peaked cap and tucked it under his narrow arm. Dimples creased his not unhandsome face. “I would like a book. What do you recommend?”
“Pick what you’d like.” She rounded the bookcase to the bay where her friends sat.
“I would like a book to . . . to build my English.” The lieutenant followed.
Jerzy Epstein shot him a quick, dark look.
Lucie turned and gave the blond officer a sympathetic gaze. “What a shame that your trip to England has been delayed.”
A snort of a laugh from Charles Charbonnier, but Lucie maintained her innocent expression.
Wattenberg smiled as if amused, but what German would be? After months of bombing London, they’d failed to break Britain’s will.
“I’d rather be in Paris. This is the city of art and culture.” Wattenberg’s gray eyes shone.
With any other person, Lucie would have plunged into conversation. Instead, she entered the children’s section.
Hobnailed footsteps followed. “Ach! Die Brüder Grimm.” Wattenberg pulled a volume of Grimms’ Fairy Tales off the shelf. “I know these stories. They will help me learn. I will buy it.”
Lucie fought off a grimace. To refuse a sale was unwise, so she led the man to the cash register. Over the pale green bookplate that read “Borrowed from the subscription library of Green Leaf Books, Paris,” she glued a new one that read “From the Library of . . .” with space for the owner to inscribe his or her name, and “Purchased at Green Leaf Books, Paris” at the bottom. A dark green vine edged the bookplate.
Lucie took Wattenberg’s money, and he took his leave.