Read Chapter 15: A Child's Riddle

The blood on the courtyard stairs had dried to the color of rust by the time Élise finished scrubbing. Dawn came gray and indifferent, the kind of light that made even the bookshop feel like a stranger's room. She had left Jean asleep in the basement, wrapped in an old wool blanket, his breath shallow but steady. The boy had asked for nothing but water and a name to pray to. She had given him both.

Now the morning bell over the door chimed, and she looked up from the counter to find the street urchin standing in her shop. He was small, all elbows and grime, with a cap pulled low over eyes that had learned to count coins before they learned to read. He held something in his fist.

The locket caught the light. Philippe's face, pressed forever against the inside of that silver oval, seemed to stare at her from across the room.

"You," she said, keeping her voice even. "What do you want?"

The boy took a step forward, wary as a stray cat. "You know what this is, madame." He opened his palm just enough to show the chain looped around his fingers. "I found it. Where they dropped it. The night the soldiers came."

Élise's throat tightened. She had given that locket to her brother the day he left for the army, a small absurd gesture, a piece of her childhood pressed into his keeping. When Antoine had returned it to her, she had worn it against her chest like a wound. Then, in the chaos of the safe-house raid, it had come free from her coat—she remembered the snag, the clatter, the impossibility of stopping to retrieve it.

"How much?" she asked.

The boy's eyes flicked to the shelves. "I don't want money. I want a book."

"A book." She almost laughed. "You can't read."

"I can learn." He jutted his chin. "My sister—she reads to me. From the library that was. Before it burned."

Élise studied him. He was perhaps nine, thin in a way that spoke of too many skipped meals and too few reasons to hope. The locket dangled from his fingers, and she felt the weight of it in her chest like a second heartbeat.

"Come here," she said.

He approached slowly, and she reached into the shelf behind the counter and pulled out a copy of *Les Misérables*, the old illustrated edition with the crumbling spine. It was too advanced for him, but she had a feeling he would grow into it, or grow out of it, or simply hold it until it fell apart in his hands.

"This is yours," she said. "In exchange for the locket."

He clutched the book to his chest and pressed the locket into her palm. His fingers were cold and quick, and when they touched she felt a tremor run through her—not from the boy, but from the rush of memory. Philippe laughing on the platform at Gare de l'Est. Philippe pressing this same locket into her hands and saying, *Keep it for me. I'll come back for it.*

She would have to give it back to him in person. She would find him. She would.

The boy hesitated at the door, turning back with one hand on the handle. "Madame."

"Yes?"

"The German officer. The tall one with the gray eyes." He spoke quickly, as if the words wanted to escape before he lost his nerve. "He was on the rue this morning. Asking about you. About the bookshop."

Élise's blood went cold. "What did he look like? Was he in uniform?"

"Civilian clothes, but you could tell. The way he stood. And he had a paper with your name on it—I saw it when he opened his coat." The boy shifted his weight. "I told him you only sold books. That I'd never seen you do anything else."

"You lied for me."

"I didn't lie." He shrugged. "I just didn't tell him everything."

Before she could respond, he slipped out the door and was gone, folded back into the waking street like a trick of the light.

Élise stood motionless, the locket cold in her palm. A German officer with gray eyes. That description fit Brandt well enough—Antoine's Abwehr handler, the man whose signature she had seen at the bottom of a travel pass that had saved her life and damned her conscience. But it could also be someone else. Someone from Gaspard's world, sniffing around her because she had failed to deliver his papers.

Or Antoine himself, sent to watch her, to measure her loyalty against the silence she had kept since the raid.

She opened the locket with a click of the worn hinge. Philippe stared up at her from the photograph inside. He was younger there, still grinning, still full of the unearned confidence that had made him volunteer for a war he believed would end by Christmas. His hair was too long, his collar askew. He looked like a boy playing soldier.

She pressed the photograph to her lips and felt the paper grow warm with her breath.

The train manifest said he was being transported from Châlons-sur-Marne. Four days. She had four days to find a way out of Paris, to reach him, to be standing on whatever platform they marched him onto when the doors slid open.

But Gaspard's papers were due in two days. Her savings were nearly gone. Her shop was being watched. And in the basement, a wounded Resistance courier lay hidden, dreaming of the comrades who had died while she had stood in a café arguing with Marcel about loyalty.

She tucked the locket back inside her blouse, the metal settling against her sternum like a small, insistent compass. The boy's words circled in her mind. *A paper with your name on it.* That was not the work of a random patrol. Someone had asked for her specifically.

She needed to know who.

Gaspard was dead weight she could not afford to cut loose, not yet. He was also the likeliest source of the leak that had killed six resistants—and he was blackmailing her on top of it. If he had heard that she was sheltering anyone, if he had heard about Jean, he would use it. He would dangle the threat over her like a blade.

Fournier. The old man who had been arrested in the raid. Marcel's friend, a courier for decades. If Fournier had cracked under interrogation, if he had given the Germans her name, then the officer asking about the bookshop was the first tendril of a net closing around her throat.

She could not stay still.

She crossed to the back room and pulled on her coat, checking the window for movement. The street was quiet. A bread line was forming outside the boulangerie, women in dark coats clutching ration tickets and gossip. No one was watching the shop now, but that meant nothing.

She knocked twice on the basement hatch before lifting it. Jean's eyes found her from the corner where he sat, propped against the wine rack, his bandaged shoulder held carefully still. He had been handsome once, she thought, in the way of men who had not yet seen what they had seen. Now his face was a map of exhaustion and something else, something harder.

"The boy came back," she said. "He had my brother's locket. He also told me a German officer was asking about me this morning."

Jean's jaw tightened. "Did he say what he wanted?"

"He asked about the bookshop. My name was on a paper." She lowered herself to the floor across from him, feeling the ache in her knees from scrubbing. "You were in the safe house. You saw what happened. Did you see Fournier talk to anyone? Did he leave the house before the raid?"

Jean was quiet for a long moment. His eyes searched the ceiling, as if the answer were written in the water stains.

"Fournier was the only one who knew the courier route that was hit," he said slowly. "The only one besides Marcel. And I never saw him leave, but I saw him arguing with a man two days before—a young man, dark hair, nervous hands. They met in the courtyard behind the house. Fournier was angry. He said, 'You've said too much. They'll kill us all.'"

Élise's heart stopped. "What did the young man look like? Would you recognize him?"

"I'd recognize his voice." Jean's hand curled into a fist. "He answered in a friend's tone. Like he had known Fournier for years. He called him 'Uncle.'"

The word landed like a blow. Fournier had no family in Paris. Everyone in the network knew that. But Gaspard—Gaspard called everyone "uncle" when he wanted something. It was his opening move, the false warmth he used to lower a man's guard before he slipped the knife in.

"Was it Gaspard?" she demanded.

Jean shook his head. "I don't know any Gaspard. But if the man you're describing finds out I'm here—"

"He won't." Élise stood, steadying herself against the wall. "But I need to find out who the officer was. And I need to know if Fournier broke."

Jean caught her wrist with his good hand. His grip was surprisingly strong. "When you talk to whoever you're going to talk to," he said, "ask them where they were when the lights went out at the Théâtre de l'Atelier. Last Tuesday. If they say they saw the whole play, they're lying."

"What?"

"Allied plane dropped a bomb on the rooftops of the street behind the theatre. We lost power across the block for an hour. No one saw anything." He held her gaze. "Anyone who claims they did is a traitor's witness. You use that, and you'll know who's lying."

Élise pulled her arm free. The locket sat warm against her chest, Philippe's face pressed over her heart.

"I'll be back," she said.

The door of the bookshop closed behind her, and she stepped out into the gray Paris morning, her brother's photograph burning against her skin like a promise she intended to keep.