The Bell and the Blade, page 8
Omloop squeezed his hands together. “London contacted me,” he said. “I don’t know what’s going on, but . . .”
Charlie’s skin crawled with dread and exhaustion.
“Don’t go into town anymore,” Omloop said. “They’re searching for your flower truck.”
“Great,” she said, lowering her head even deeper. What was her poor father going to do? She had legitimate business in Antwerp—delivering his flowers.
“London said to hold fast. Help is on the way.”
“Great,” she repeated. Help me, guide me, save me, have mercy on me.
“They asked if the man was safe. Very important that he is kept far from the Germans, they said.”
“Radio them back immediately, Omloop, tell them he’s not remotely safe. Tell them he’s the opposite of safe.”
“Did he tell you anything?”
“He said to find Miguel Silva,” said Charlie.
“I know him,” Omloop said. “And tell him what?”
“La jonquille est morte,” Charlie said.
Omloop was taken aback. “That’ll tell Silva what he’s supposed to do?”
“Apparently. That’s the phrase that’s been sending everyone into a frenzy.” She couldn’t get the image of Robert Capelle’s crushed face out of her head when she said those words to him at Bonaventure Market two days ago. Tall, aristocratic, utterly composed, Capelle looked ready to collapse upon hearing those words. Don’t look at me, he said, turning toward the berry stand. Stand next to me and tell me what happened. And after she told him, the only thing Capelle said was, Is Ngomo still alive?
“Just hold the line till they get here, Charlie.”
“Who’s they?”
“Whoever’s fixing whatever this is.”
“Oh? And when are these fixers planning to get here?”
“After the thing.”
She opened her eyes. She and Omloop stared at each other. His gaze was steady and solemn. Meaningfully, he raised his brows—and nodded.
Charlie lowered her head until it rested on the hard wooden pew in front of her. She was so tired. The resistance cells had been muttering about the Allied invasion for months. “And when do you think that will be?” she said, barely able to string words together.
“Very soon,” Omloop said. “As in full moon soon.”
Charlie recalled the nearly full moon from three days earlier, before her life had come apart. “When is it full?”
“Tonight,” Omloop replied.
It was Monday, June 5, 1944.
11
BEAUTY AND THE BEAST
“LOUISE . . .”
“Don’t Louise me. Did you see Omloop?”
“Yes. I’m so worried about everything.”
“Well, you should’ve thought of that before you saved a black man’s life,” Louise said. “Next time maybe you’ll think before you act.”
“Omloop said the Allied team is supposed to come soon.”
“Yes, they’ll ride in on their white steeds to save us. Wait—what? Did you say Allies?” Louise couldn’t believe her ears. “So what I’m hearing, Charlie, is you’re going to need safehouses for another six, seven, twelve men? Yes, that’ll make everything easier.”
“Once they’re here, the ship—and Ngomo—will be their problem. We just have to hang on till then.”
“Their problem, I see. And let me ask you,” Louise said, “who is going to help them?”
“They won’t be African,” Charlie said guiltily.
“At least your Congo man speaks French,” Louise exclaimed. “The jokers who are coming to save the day, are they fluent speakers?”
“Clearly I don’t know!”
“Don’t get ticked off at me, princess,” Louise said. “My way, we wait it out, keep our heads down, and then have our lives back. Your way, we’ll all be in the tulip fields with the rest. In five minutes, you’ll be standing over the graves of the dead.”
“At least I won’t be kneeling over them,” snapped Charlie.
“And won’t that be a fine difference,” said Louise.
A fed-up Louise sped three kilometers down Albert Canal to Zvart Haus to bring lunch to Saul Grunfell.
She had first met Saul a few years ago when Charlie asked her to ferry him letters from his wife. He was detained in a country house in Olen, and the wife, with their two children, lived in a shack in Leuven. While delivering flowers, Charlie would pick up the letters from the wife and pass them to Louise, who would ride her bike to Zvart Haus with a basket of blueberries and fresh bread, the missives from his beloved buried at the bottom.
The letters from the wife got shorter and shorter until they stopped altogether, but the lunch food had become more elaborate. Now Louise brought flowers too.
She smiled at the guards waving to her from the front gate, and biked around the property to the side entrance.
There, two new low-level Polizei stood leaning against the posts. While she was waving to the gardener inside and hopping off her bike, Louise assessed the two guards. The younger one was smiling, but the older one was humorless and higher ranked—and therefore more dangerous.
“Bonjour, Brigadier!” she said to the younger man, bumping him up a rank to corporal.
He flushed with pleasure. “Bonjour, mademoiselle!”
The older guard snorted. “Brigadier? Hah! Then, I’m a—”
Smiling guilelessly, Louise interrupted him, bumping him up a rank too. “Bonjour, Sergent!”
The guard shut his mouth with an audible click and squared his shoulders.
The young guard turned to his partner. “You were saying, Remy?”
Remy scowled, busying himself with her papers. “You’re the Louise Aubel who brings lunch for Grunfell?”
“I’m the one.”
Having established the purpose of her visit, he opened the gate to let her through. “You know where he is?”
“Where he always is,” she said. “Upstairs.”
“He’s not always upstairs . . .” the young guard began before Remy elbowed him in the ribs.
“Careful over the cobblestones, mademoiselle, they’re uneven near the steps,” Remy said. “Would you like me to carry the basket upstairs for you? Looks heavy. What have you got in there?”
She opened it to show them. Wine, a sandwich, potato salad, lemon poppyseed cookies and peaches. “Would you like to try a peach?” she said brightly. “They’re tasty. The cookies are even better. But just one each, or our poor Professor Grunfell will have nothing to sustain him.”
“Saul,” she said. “Saul.”
He didn’t hear her, didn’t even look up.
Upstairs in the large, disorganized, book-lined room he had fashioned into his study, Saul sat at the table by the window, buried in his notebook, a pencil behind each ear and one in his fingers. In his left hand he held a burned-down cigarette. Louise had never actually seen Saul light it or smoke it. It was always just ash in his blackened hand.
Saul Grunfell had arrived at Zvart Haus in 1941.
He’d been a professor of something or other—possibly math; he told Louise, but she forgot—at the University of Brussels. In 1940, after the Germans stampeded over Belgium, he and other Jewish professors had been relieved of their posts. He wasn’t deported out of the country like other Jews. Instead, he and two colleagues were sent here, to a spacious and attractive house in the country.
One professor died of dysentery last year, as though it was the 15th century and not Belgium in the civilized 20th. The other, Henri Weissmann—the senior man at Zvart—died just a few weeks ago, from an “unfortunate industrial accident,” as Saul put it without elaborating further. So now only Saul was left, surrounded by four lowly guards and the June azaleas.
Saul was a sullen, deeply internal man. He lived so far inside his head that he paid no attention to his physical appearance or his diet. He lost weight in the time Louise knew him, which made her feel even more guilty for the days she was too busy with her other duties to come. His jackets and trousers, never particularly fashionable, looked especially ill-fitting and crumpled lately. He shaved sporadically and didn’t like to cut his thinning hair. Unless he was gripping a pencil, his fingers always trembled slightly, either from stress or an undiagnosed ailment. His hands were a war zone. Blackened at the tips, they showed burn marks and scars.
He had a good face once, Louise thought; good eyes. Now the eyes were dimmed, and he was pale. No healthy glow for Saul. There were days he seemed more ghost than man. Louise wasn’t entirely certain the professor was sane. Sometimes he spoke to her in such abstractions, it stymied her natural ability to communicate with him. Louise prided herself on being the kind of young woman that most people responded to strongly and warmly.
Not Saul.
Often when he spoke to her, in a slow, rolling, lecturing cadence, as if explaining difficult things to an idiot, she would just nod and smile, but every once in a while, Saul would adjust his black-rimmed glasses and interrogate her. “What do you think of what I just told you?” he’d say in a voice that suggested he was testing her comprehension.
Today, when she walked into his study and greeted him once, twice, and then a third time, he jerked up, stared at her unblinking for a few moments, then blurted, “There’s no such thing as isolation below the Planck length, Louise. Entanglement mocks even the dead!”
She was a beautiful girl living in a mad world.
“The dead are not easily mocked, Saul,” she said, setting her basket at his feet because there was no room on the table, and showing him a bright bouquet of yellow daisies. She liked to bring him flowers—not only to beautify his study, but also to mask the brassy smell that seeped into the wood and the furniture, despite the windows being open all day, a smell like metal in sour milk. She looked around for the vase she’d found last week.
“What did you do with the green vase, Saul?”
“What vase?”
“The green one.”
“Never seen it.”
She placed the daisies into a tall glass instead and set them on the table, shuffling aside his books and notebooks.
“Careful, don’t touch anything. Everything is arranged.”
She glanced over the far-flung chaos.
“Why are you upset?” Saul asked. This was what professors did. They noticed things. They were observationalists by nature.
“I’m not upset,” said Louise.
“You’re less smiley than usual. Also, you shouted at me.”
“I called your name twice and you didn’t answer.”
“And you’re upset why?”
Louise didn’t tell him. Where would she even start? An in-over-her-head Charlie, a heartbroken Fitz, a niggling, needling mother, a mess with Jews and Africans. Saul had his own problems, obviously. No one wanted to hear about other people’s.
She served his lunch and sat in a chair by his side, nibbling on a lemon poppy cake while he ate in silence, reading a multi-page precis in tiny type, making minute calculations with his free hand.
“You should go outside, Saul,” Louise said. “Look how beautiful it is. Sunny. Warm. It’s good for you. It’ll bring some color to your face.”
“A slowly drowning man cares nothing for the sun or what’s good for him,” said Saul.
“Why are you drowning?”
“I’m just a rat in a wheel, Louise,” said Saul. He gave a brusque, resigned wave. “You don’t know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean, Saul,” said Louise with a faint sigh.
“The wheel is spinning faster and faster,” Saul said, “and I can’t keep up. Sometimes I don’t even want to. It’s all so pointless.”
“Maybe go out in the sun, Saul,” she said quietly. Usually her dazzling smile brought out the best in people. “So, whatcha working on that’s giving you trouble?” she asked, trying to take an interest.
“You don’t care.”
“Of course I do. Tell me. Maybe I can help.”
Saul almost smiled at her audacity. “I’m trying to create something. Build something. And I’m failing.”
“Build what? A box?”
“Yes, Lou. A kind of box.”
In good humor, Louise scanned the room, taking in the overflowing shelves of books, notebooks stacked floor to ceiling, four or five desk lamps, broken pencils across every surface, a half-dozen rimmed glasses, empty teacups. There were no workbenches, no chisels, no mallets, no handsaws, not even a whetstone for sharpening a blade. There was nothing to indicate that any building had ever gone on in this jarringly quiet, slightly malodorous house.
He took in the kindly expression she fashioned just for him. His face softened. “Imagine we’re trying to build this box not out of wood or stone or metal,” he said, “but out of gossamer thread, like spider webbing, which is thin and fragile and breaks easily.”
“Not easy to make a box out of that.”
“Some might say impossible. To make it stronger, we lay the gossamer threads one on top of another, nearly to infinity, hoping that the sheer quantity will make the walls of the box sturdy enough.”
“I have a question, Saul,” said Louise, munching slowly on her lemon cake. She was trying to make it last. “If you really need a box, why don’t you make it out of metal or wood? Why do scientists always have to complicate things?”
Saul actually reached out to pat her arm before stopping himself. “The box is an analogy, Lou. It’s a magic box. So, let’s take it as fact that the box needs to be built out of spider webbing. Do you want to hear the real complication? Imagine that one of these strands takes a single spider hours, sometimes days, to make. And the box we’re aiming for must be this size”—Saul held his hands about twenty centimeters apart—“but instead, what we have, after years and years of effort, is a box about this size.” He pressed his thumb and forefinger tightly together and emitted a despondent wail.
“Shh. It’s okay,” Louise said. “Why does it have to be spider thread?”
“Because spider thread is the only thing in the universe that will build a magic box. Everything else will create a regular box. We have plenty of those. We need a spider box.”
Louise paused a moment and then hit herself on the forehead. “I got it!” she said, offering him her biggest smile. “You need more spiders. You’re waiting for one spider to spin you a thread at a time. That’s the problem. Go get a thousand spiders, Saul. Or a million. Then you’ll have your box.”
This time, Saul did reach out and pat her arm. “That is exactly what I need, dear girl,” he said, brimming with impressed affection. “Look how smart you are. A million spiders. And the tragedy of my useless life is I’ve got just one.”
12
INVASION
“HUBNER, DON’T INTERRUPT ME when I’m speaking.”
“Sir, I have news . . .”
“I don’t care what you’ve got to tell me. Listen to what I’m telling you.”
“Yes, mein Herr, but—”
“I need the ship emptied. Why is that so hard to understand or accomplish?”
“It’s not hard, sir, but I have questions.”
“We haven’t the time for questions.”
“That’s true, sir, the clock is ticking. But normally the dockworkers remove the cargo from the ships.”
“Thank you for explaining to me how a port works, Hubner.”
“And then the cargo gets loaded onto trucks or trains and delivered to the people who have ordered it,” Hubner said.
Rheinhardt sat. “No, no, you’re right,” he said. “We have infinite time to ruminate on all stages of port work. Let’s discuss the intermediary stage next. What happens to the cargo when it must be offloaded, but the trains or trucks aren’t ready?”
“It’s transferred into company warehouses.”
“Very good, Hubner! Do that.”
“The cargo has been contracted by Miguel Silva’s company, sir.”
“And I care about this why?”
“Silva has skipped town,” said Hubner. “He hasn’t answered his phone for two days, so I drove to his office this morning with a contingent of Gestapo officers, and found it padlocked. The note on the door said: ‘Away on urgent business. Back in six weeks.’”
“Six weeks! He employs no one else?”
“Also gone. The two warehouses he owns on Bonapartestraat are locked—and full besides. No room in either of them to transfer the contents of La Fortuna to.”
Rheinhardt spun a pencil between his fingers. “How many crates on the ship?”
“Seven hundred and ninety-four individual crates spread across fourteen categories.”
“Total value of insured goods?”
“Five million, four hundred thousand francs, mein Herr.”
Rheinhardt shrugged. “Hubner, I’m not saying we shouldn’t be holding daily conferences on how to resolve Silva’s cargo fiasco. What I’m saying, and I don’t know if I can be any clearer, is—it’s none of our fucking business!” Rheinhardt’s booming voice made Hubner jump.
“Here is where it becomes our business, mein Herr,” Hubner said, standing firm. “Seven hundred and ninety-four crates must go somewhere. And if they’re not leaving the port on Silva’s trucks, and there’s no room in his padlocked warehouses, perhaps his Exzellenz would care to suggest what we’re meant to do with them.”
Rheinhardt lapsed into a rare silence.
“We can’t leave nearly a thousand crates sitting on the docks, mein Herr,” Hubner went on. “That’s bound to draw the very kind of attention I assume you’re trying to avoid. A thousand crates spread out on Glaskaai? Brandt’s first question will be about the cargo. If there was no one to take possession of it, why did we take it off the ship in the first place?”
“There’s something on that ship, Hubner,” Rheinhardt said. “And we can’t find it with the crates packed into the cargo hold like sardines.”
“Is there a chance Silva is smuggling diamonds?” asked Hubner. “They could be easily hidden in the coffee crates. He could’ve become alarmed by your refusal to sign off on the manifest. And then, even more alarmed,” Hubner added evenly, “by the subsequent massacre of dozens of men aboard his ship. He took his diamonds and vanished.”
