The Librarian of Burned Books, page 27
Hannah stared at her with a wounded expression that sliced into Althea deep and permanent. She could live to a hundred and never forget the way Hannah looked at her in that moment.
The weight of Hannah’s betrayal leaned so heavily on her shoulders that Althea’s legs finally gave out. It happened so quickly that Althea wasn’t even aware she was falling until her knees hit pavement. There would be bruises, and she wished they were visible now.
“I didn’t,” she whispered one more time, not able to look up to where they stood over her, Otto an avenging angel, Hannah a destroyed one.
“Save your lies for someone who will believe them,” Otto said, and then he tugged at Hannah. “Come on, she’s not worth it.”
“No,” Hannah agreed softly. “She isn’t.”
Chapter 42
Owl’s Head, Maine
July 1944
Viv did end up riding the bicycle back to the village. When Joe saw her coming, he laughed so hard he had to rest one hand on the hood of this truck.
She imagined she looked a sight and must be covered in yet another layer of dust.
He gave her a room above the pub, and she used the bicycle the next morning to ride out to Althea’s little cottage. And then the next morning and the next morning.
Viv figured she had a little less than two weeks before she had to be back in New York City to prepare for the event with Taft. She was going to use all the time she had.
On the fifth day Althea brought her a cup of coffee. She then proceeded to shut the door in Viv’s face once more, but Viv took the victory anyway.
She gloated that night at the pub, and Joe just shook his head at her. But he smiled a little, too, and she took that as another good sign.
On the eighth day, Althea stepped outside as the afternoon was properly setting in. When Viv stood up from where she’d been reading on the little garden bench, Althea jerked her head toward the cliffs. “Walk with me.”
Viv managed to contain her grin, but only just.
They strolled along the cliffs in silence, Viv somehow knowing not to push it.
After twenty minutes, Althea nodded to the paperback Viv had forgotten about under her arm. “What are you reading?”
“Vanity Fair,” Viv rushed to answer, thrilled that Althea had initiated conversation. “It was in our June series for the ASEs.”
“Along with mine,” Althea mused. “Is it any good? I haven’t read it.”
Viv considered that. “I think so. The subtitle for it is A Novel Without a Hero, which feels like an apt warning.”
“A cast of unlikable characters?” Althea asked.
“Or at least flawed,” Viv said after a moment of consideration. “I find flawed characters so much more interesting, though. I imagine you do, as well.”
“You’ve read my books.”
It wasn’t a question. “I have.”
“Well, where’s the endless flattery, then?” Althea prodded, her expression twisting into something unpleasant.
“I think you’ve probably had enough of that to last a lifetime,” Viv guessed, and Althea’s brows rose.
“When you’re asking for a favor, it’s good advice to butter up the person first,” Althea said, and despite the words, it felt like agreement.
“Flattery won’t work for you.”
Curiosity would, though. And Viv was proven right when Althea asked, “And what, pray tell, do you think you know about me?”
Viv’s heart beat fast. If she got this wrong, it would be her one shot, lost. “You write not for flattery, but as a penance.”
Althea stopped short, her arms wrapping around herself, her eyes big and nearly wounded as she studied Viv’s face.
When she didn’t say anything, Viv continued. “People don’t want praise for penance. They want to be forgiven.”
Althea’s mouth opened once, shut, pressed into a thin line. And then she whirled, leaving Viv standing on the cliffs, a metaphorical door slamming.
When Viv recounted the conversation to Joe that night, asking if she should give up, he watched her, thoughtful. “Try one more day.”
“Are you sure?” Viv asked, going for light and not certain she hit the right tone. “I don’t want to end up on the wrong side of a shotgun.”
“She finds you interesting,” Joe said, shaking his head. “It’s been a long time since she’s found anything interesting. Try one more day.”
The next morning, Althea was waiting by the gate for her. Without saying anything, she jerked her chin toward the path, and Viv nearly wept with relief.
“You want me to come to New York,” Althea said, a half hour into the otherwise silent walk. Viv had been enjoying the salt-laden breeze and was startled from the trance she’d half dozed into.
“Yes, I’ll pay, if that’s an issue,” Viv said, then winced. Althea James did not need anyone to pay for anything.
Althea looked like she wanted to laugh, but didn’t. “What do you want me to say? To this senator.”
“Whatever you want,” Viv said. “Perhaps something about the dangers of government censorship?”
“Why do you suppose I know enough to talk about that?” Althea asked.
Viv wondered if this was a test. “Because of An Inconceivable Dark.”
“And not because I was in Berlin for the book burnings?”
“Well, that, too,” Viv admitted.
“I thought so.”
“It’s not just on you,” Viv said. “I want you there, because I think Americans will connect with your story. But if you say no, I’ll leave.”
“A door in the face wasn’t direct enough?” Althea asked, though there was something teasing in her voice.
“I’ve been told I’m . . . persistent,” Viv admitted. “I wanted you to know what you were saying no to.”
Althea eyed Viv and she felt a test coming. “What’s your favorite book?”
“That’s my line,” Viv said, more to herself, but Althea hummed a curious little sound. “I always ask people that. It’s my barometer.”
“What do you consider a bad answer?” Althea asked, for the first time sounding truly engaged.
“That they don’t like to read,” Viv said, with a small smile.
“Ah, but it’s not their fault. Some people simply haven’t found their books.” Althea nodded to a stone bench overlooking the waves and Viv took a seat quickly before the woman could rescind the invitation.
“I think the ASEs help soldiers find theirs,” Viv said.
Althea’s mouth pursed in humor. “Quite on message.”
“A dog with a bone.” Viv shrugged. “But truly, that’s partly how we got the publishers on board. We’re creating a generation of men who understand what it is to read for pleasure. Whereas before they might never have been exposed to books that they could actually like and not just be forced to read for school.”
“You’re trying to convince me your cause is just. But I don’t worry that you’re like the Nazis,” Althea said, a finger tapping on her leg. “I worry that others will be.”
“And once you’ve been featured in newspapers across the country, people won’t stop hounding you,” Viv said, getting it now.
“I like my hermit life on the cliffs,” Althea said, and she almost sounded apologetic. “It keeps me out of trouble.”
“But it keeps you away from the good things, too, doesn’t it?” Viv asked.
“There might have been a time where I cared about that,” Althea said, staring out to sea. “Now I think sometimes the best we can do is protect the world from ourselves.”
Viv studied her, wondering how she would take what Viv was about to say. “I think you give yourself too much credit.”
Althea’s eyes snapped to Viv’s face and for one horrible second Viv thought she’d lost Althea completely. And then the woman threw her head back, her laughter cutting through the rhythmic slap of waves from below. After a few moments she swiped at the corner of her eye with her thumb. “I’m sorry. You reminded me of someone just then.”
“Who?” Viv asked.
Althea’s smile slipped, though it didn’t disappear. “Someone who never pulled her punches. She said that the Nazis taking power wasn’t about me. And that thinking it so made me incredibly self-centered.”
“Oh, I didn’t—”
“You did, it’s all right,” Althea interrupted gently. “I think I’ve once again made myself the protagonist of a story that isn’t really mine to star in. You’ll have to forgive me, I do live quite an isolated life.” She paused. “But it’s always been my greatest flaw, I suppose.”
“Isn’t it all of ours?” Viv asked, with a little huff. “I’m sitting here on a grand quest thinking I’m going to make all the difference in the world if I can just convince you to come to New York.”
Althea tipped her head in acknowledgment and then pierced her with a look. “You didn’t say. What is your favorite book?”
“I’ve always answered Frankenstein to that,” Viv said, weighing the words. “And I adore Mary Shelley. She was so ahead of her time and surrounded by all these men who the world deemed brilliant, and yet, I’m sure her legacy will outlast all of theirs.”
Althea cocked her head. “Is that not your real answer?”
“I would be a terrible critic,” Viv said, shrugging one shoulder. “I always feel like the book I’m reading is my favorite, even if it’s not technically better than others that I adore.” Viv smirked. “But I like the question anyway.”
“So, you can instantly tell if you won’t like someone?” Althea asked, sliding her a look. “You do know Hitler’s favorites include Dante and Jonathan Swift. Liking reading isn’t synonymous with being a good person.”
“You’re right,” Viv said, with a little bow. She hadn’t expected that argument from a world-famous author, but Viv liked Althea better for it. Too often there was a snobbery in the literary world that kept people from finding what they enjoyed reading. Viv didn’t care if that was comic books, or murder mysteries, or happily-ever-after romances. There was no real right answer to her question, because they were all the right answer. “What’s your favorite?”
“Book?” Althea asked, though it seemed rhetorical, so Viv just waited. “I have different ones for different stages in my life. My mother had a beautiful version of Grimms’ Fairy Tales that I loved when I was younger. Then it was Ivanhoe, and then Alice in Wonderland.” She grimaced at that. “Now? Tender Is the Night.”
“F. Scott Fitzgerald,” Viv noted absently. “Not his most popular.”
“Fitzgerald always looks better a few years out. It’s a bit dark,” Althea said dryly. She turned back to the sea. “He talks about loving a person in one particular moment in their lives. Not about loving them forever, but remembering that there was and will always be something once upon a time that made the person love the other.”
“That’s romantic,” Viv said, as neutrally as possible, sensing somehow that the ice beneath her feet was paper thin.
“He wrote it when Zelda was in the hospital for her madness,” Althea said, again with that same almost sarcastic tone. “But, yes, it is.”
They both watched the waves for a long time after that, long enough for the sun to slip low in the sky behind them.
Finally, Althea slapped both hands to her legs and stood. “All right, I’ll be your dancing monkey.”
“Surely, you at least rank as a lion jumping through flaming hoops,” Viv said lightly, though a tangle of emotion fluttered like a bird’s wings against her rib cage at the agreement.
Althea laughed, looking alive and bright and beautiful for the first time. “I’ll settle for roller-skating hippopotamus.”
They started back toward the cottage, and Viv knew, she knew, she shouldn’t push it. But if Althea had a fatal flaw, then so did Viv. “What made you decide?”
“I may not have it in me to be the hero of anyone’s story,” Althea said, wrapping her arms around herself. “But this time, it’s within my power not to be the villain.”
Chapter 43
Paris
March 1937
The air on the roof of the Hotel Majestic was crisp enough for Hannah to shiver as she held the pistol on Deveraux.
It wasn’t nerves, she told herself. It was the cold.
Dev reached into her evening bag and withdrew a slim cigarette case, all while leaning indolently against the balustrade. Her eyes didn’t once flick down to the weapon.
“Of all the luck in the world,” Dev mused as she watched her own smoke dissolve into nothing. “You had to end up in Paris. I had to end up in Paris.”
Hannah didn’t say anything. Dev had known she was here. It wasn’t like she was the one who was the surprise.
“True, I knew where you were,” Dev agreed, as if Hannah had spoken out loud. “But Paris is such a big city.”
“Not in our circles,” Hannah managed, her tongue thick and clumsy. But she thought she might have come off as unruffled.
“The Nazis and those fleeing from them.”
“And which are you?” Hannah asked.
“You haven’t already made up your mind on that?” Dev shot back, and for the first time since they’d stepped onto the roof she gestured toward the pistol. “About what side I’m on.”
Hannah had stopped trusting people a long time ago, right around the moment Althea had emerged from that Nazi building, tearful and unharmed. But she also knew sometimes answers were more complicated than they looked. “You tell me.”
Dev was a consummate actress, but even she couldn’t hide the surprise on her face. It came and went, a lightning flash that Hannah might have missed had she blinked. The woman stubbed her cigarette out in what looked like a careless gesture, but one that also allowed her to turn away from Hannah, allowed her to hide.
When she looked back, the mask was firmly back in place. “I told them where Adam was.”
It shouldn’t have felt like a punch, but the force of the admission almost knocked Hannah back a step. Until this very moment, Hannah hadn’t been convinced, had thought herself crazy for even suspecting Dev had been involved. “Why?”
“Being a Nazi whore isn’t enough?” Dev asked, throwing the truth between them like a grenade. And Hannah might have believed her, had she not heard that exact tone so many times years ago. Dev had hated the Nazis nearly as much as Hannah had, back then.
Could it really have all been an act?
While Hannah knew plenty of people who despised the Nazis and then joined their cause—because of fear, because of exhaustion, because if they didn’t their own lives would fall apart—the fact remained that Dev had never needed to.
She could have gone home.
“No,” Hannah said, as steady as she could.
Once again, that shock, come and gone. Dev took out another cigarette, didn’t answer.
“He died, you know,” Hannah said. “In November.”
A muscle in Dev’s jaw ticked. Still she didn’t say anything.
“They must have tortured him first, though,” Hannah continued, feeling detached, as if she were watching the scene instead of participating in it. “Johann said he was so small by the end.”
Dev wouldn’t look at Hannah.
“That was your fault,” Hannah said, twisting the knife. “Do you even care?”
“Of course I care,” Dev gritted out, then exhaled heavily like she hadn’t meant to admit that. “You think he wouldn’t have been caught without me?”
Hannah laughed, though it was bitter, disbelieving. “You turned him in.”
“On a suicide mission. You know that better than I do. He wouldn’t be talked out of it, wouldn’t listen to reason,” Dev said, her composure cracking. “He would have been killed on the spot.”
“Please don’t tell me you gave him up to the Nazis to save his life,” Hannah said. “Even you couldn’t be that stupid.”
Again, Dev crushed out her cigarette, and this time Hannah noticed her hands shook.
“Why?” Hannah repeated softly, not with sympathy but with a gentleness that the moment called for if Hannah wanted answers.
The question hung between them, a heavy thing that dragged both of them toward it. The world held its breath.
“I had to give them something,” Dev finally said, the words wavering. “I’d given them too much wrong information.”
And the world inhaled, Hannah along with it. The noise rushed back in, the birds, the chatter on the streets below them, a far-off engine sputtering. Hannah’s arm dropped, the pistol pointing to the ground, her limbs no longer obeying her commands.
“You’re a spy,” Hannah whispered.
“An amateur,” Dev corrected, with a crooked, self-deprecating smile. Hannah recognized the loathing there. “At least back then. Now I’m better.” But then she looked at the ground, shook her head before her eyes flicked to the pistol. “I thought I was.”
“I knew you when,” Hannah muttered, then lifted the weapon once more. “Tell me.”
Dev didn’t flinch. “I didn’t go to Berlin expecting anything. I was an actress, a screenwriter, a director. That was it.”
“You saw an opportunity,” Hannah guessed.
“Almost immediately,” Dev agreed. “Not many in our government saw a problem with the Nazis back then, but a few did. I asked around, offered myself in case it might be useful.”
“Even if they didn’t care about the Nazis, I’m guessing they cared about inside information on competing nations,” Hannah said.
“Right on the money,” Dev agreed. “But my handler was persuadable. His bosses might not have recognized the threat, but he did once I started detailing what was happening behind the pretty walls the Nazis put up for the rest of the world.”
“So Adam was what?” Hannah asked. “An unfortunate casualty to your need to stay informed?”
