Outside, past the vine-draped wrought iron fence, boulevard Suchet lay wide and empty. Paul and Simone used to go walking, driving, dancing. They’d gone to the races and the museums and the opera. They’d dined with friends. Always lots of friends.
So long ago.
He hauled in a breath. “You are a wise woman, Madame Coudray.”
Paul strolled down a path in the Luxembourg Gardens between rows of chestnut trees grown together and pruned so they looked like giant hedges on stilts.
Josie chattered from her perch on Paul’s shoulders. “Feenee stomped up to the big, ugly rock-monster. ‘Get out of my house! You can’t be here, Mr. Rock-Monster. It’s my house.’ Then the rock-monster ate Feenee’s toes. Then it ate her feets. Then it ate her knees.”
How macabre. Paul twisted his head to see his daughter. “What a sad story.”
Her brown curls danced in the breeze. “No, Daddy. I’m not done.”
“All right. Go on.” The parallel paths and lawns and tree hedges opened up to a garden edged by statues.
“It’s not sad. Feenee grew wings and flew away from the monster.”
Paul tightened his grip on his daughter’s ankles. “But she lost her legs.”
“She had to,” Josie said as if Paul were daft. “As long as she had legs, she couldn’t have wings. She can’t have both, Daddy.”
Paul frowned, but three German soldiers neared, carrying Der Deutsche Wegleiter für Paris guidebook. A frown could be interpreted as hostility, and he erased it.
“I want wings.” Josie flapped her arms. “Wings are better than legs.”
Childish fantasies that would soon be gone. Soon had better be before she started school. He could only imagine how teachers and children would react to Feenee.
“Down, please.” Josie patted Paul’s hat.
“Sure thing, gumdrop.” Paul squatted, helped her to the ground, and pulled her dress and coat back down over her underpants.
Josie slipped her hand in his and skipped as they passed a lawn ringed by pink flowers. “I can skip now. See me skip?”
“I do. I’ve never seen such good skipping. Sometimes legs come in handy.”
Josie looked up at him, and he winked. She grinned, flashing tiny white teeth.
A white board fence and armed guards blocked the pathway leading past the reflecting pool to the Luxembourg Palace, which was draped with red-and-black swastika flags. The German Luftwaffe used the former home of the French senate for their headquarters in France. Even after a year of occupation, the foreignness, the sense of violation remained. Like a panzer racing in the French Grand Prix. And winning.
Paul turned right to leave the gardens. He hadn’t visited Paris’s 6th arrondissement on the Left Bank of the Seine in ages, but the Odéon Métro station couldn’t be far to the north. Certainly closer than the station south of the gardens where he and Josie had arrived.
Two familiar figures approached. Dr. and Mrs. Bentley Young, and Paul’s chest tightened. “Good day, Mrs. Young, Dr. Young.”
They didn’t even meet his gaze.
How many lively evenings had the Youngs and the Aubreys spent together?
The tightness grew and darkened. In his first thirty years, Paul had never lacked for friends. In his thirty-first year, he’d lost them all. After a month or two comforting Paul after Simone’s death, his friends had turned their backs on him for selling Au-ful trucks to the Germans.
Never mind that his trucks were for civilian use. Never mind that he sold just as many to the French. Never mind that those trucks helped deliver food to Paris. In his friends’ eyes, he was a collaborator. And he had to remain a collaborator in their eyes so he could remain a collaborator in German eyes. That’s why they trusted Paul with information. Information he fed to the US military.
Paul tromped north on the boulevard Saint-Michel.
The only American expatriates who would see him socially were an unpleasant assortment of opportunists, socialites, and fascists. Paul had even stopped attending church, tired of the whispers and glares.
The Odéon Théâter rose in the distance. The Métro station couldn’t be far.
Josie’s skipping turned to walking, and the stories stopped as she gawked at unfamiliar cafés and publishing houses. He’d never taken her to the Left Bank, home to the bohemian crowd—artists and writers and theater folk.
Paul passed the theater, built of creamy stone, and he paused. No sign of a subway station, and half a dozen streets ran off the plaza in spokes.
He flagged down a middle-aged woman and asked directions. She waved toward the spokes and went her way.
“Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.” Paul headed down the closest street.
“Feenee?” Josie said.
Paul laughed. “No, it’s an old rhyme.” He recited it and told her how children used it to choose things.
“Like books?” Josie pointed to a store.
In the window display books with titles in English lay surrounded by spring leaves. By the door, a red US Embassy certificate labeled the store as owned by a neutral American, protecting it from German requisition. Overhead, the sign read Green Leaf Books.
“That’s right,” Paul said. A friend had once mentioned an English-language bookstore in the Latin Quarter. As a subscriber to the American Library in Paris, he’d never needed to go elsewhere.
“Can we go in, Daddy? Please?” Brown eyes melted him like chocolate on a warm day.
Madame Coudray had said Josie didn’t have many books for a girl her age.
“Let’s look inside,” Paul said.
Josie hopped a few times, and Paul opened the door.
The store smelled of old books and woodsmoke. A counter stood on the wall to his left, flanked by bookshelves and magazine racks. Photographs hung over the counter—pictures of authors, it looked like. Bookcases jutted out from the wall to his right, and bookshelves covered every wall, even under the windows.
On the shelf before him, books ran in a proper row for half a shelf, then a stack of books on their sides. More books rested in front of the row, on top, wherever they fit. New books with crisp dust jackets stood beside older titles with spines shiny from wear.
More books covered a table by the window, circled by two mismatched wooden chairs and a stuffed armchair.
“I like it here,” Josie said in a hushed voice.
“Bonjour, monsieur—ah!—et mademoiselle!” A petite young lady with light brown hair approached wearing a green suit. She clapped her hands together and beamed at Josie.
Josie shrank behind Paul’s legs.
He removed his fedora. “Bonjour, madame.”
“Miss Girard is my name. Is this your first time visiting my store?” she asked in flawless English. “I haven’t seen you before.”
“It is.” Paul smiled. Pretty lady. And smart. She’d pegged Paul as an English speaker in two short words.
“Please make yourselves at home. Green Leaf Books has been a light in Paris for twenty years.” Her hand fluttered toward the shelf, her fingers like feathers on a bird’s wing. “May I help you find something?”
“Yes, for my daughter, Josephine—Josie for short. She’s four.”
Josie’s head rubbed against Paul’s trouser leg as she nodded.