Read Chapter 32: The Broker's Life

The train arrived in Lyon in a gray dusk that smelled of coal smoke and river damp. Elise pressed her forehead to the cold window glass and watched the city appear house by house, streetlamp by streetlamp. Beside her, Julien folded his newspaper with precise, careful movements. He had not asked her again whether she was certain. She had signed the partnership papers on the table of their compartment before the train left Paris, her hand steady even as her stomach churned, and he had simply nodded.

The letters of introduction bore fruit within a day. A warehouse man named Cheval, who dealt in surplus cloth and used uniforms, held Julien's letter up to the light as if testing its authenticity before agreeing to meet. He smelled of mothballs and cheap tobacco, and he spoke around a stub of cigarette.

"A dealer in used clothing, you say. That could be half of Lyon. Black market leftovers, widow's auctions. You need a name."

"We have a pendant," Elise said. "Four leaves, interlocked."

Cheval's eyes flicked. He rolled the cigarette to the other side of his mouth. "You'd do better to walk the market at Saint-Jean. Dawn. The stallholders know each other. Ask for a man who sells mourning clothes cheap and doesn't haggle."

They walked the market for three mornings. Elise studied faces, looked for the pendant on every chest. On the third morning, Julien touched her elbow and nodded toward a narrow stall wedged between a fishmonger and a woman selling buttons. The vendor was manning his stall alone, turning over a coat with patched elbows, examining the seams with a gesture so familiar that Elise's breath caught.

His hair was gray now. His back had rounded with work. But his hands were the same hands. And the pendant hung at his throat against a worn wool shirt.

Pierre looked up. Saw her. And for a moment, the entire market disappeared.

He crossed the space between them in four steps. He smelled of dust and dried sweat and something faintly sweet, and his arms came around her with a strength that made her ribs ache. "Elise. Elise." He repeated her name like a prayer answered.

"Pierre." She pulled back to look at him. His face had lines she did not recognize, a crease beside his mouth and another across his forehead. He was thinner. Older. "I thought you were dead."

"Almost was." He forced a smile. "Several times."

"Your letter stopped coming. Grand-mère's stopped coming."

The smile vanished. He glanced past her shoulder. Behind her, Julien stood a few paces off, his hands loose at his sides, his expression carefully unreadable. Pierre looked from Julien to Elise, then back.

"Who is he?"

"Julien Aubert. My business partner." Even saying the words felt strange, and Pierre's eyes narrowed.

You have a life now," Pierre said, but there was no accusation in his voice, only a flat acknowledgment.

"We have to talk. Somewhere private." He did not look at Julien again, but he gestured with his chin toward a café across the square. Julien discreetly took a table at the far side of the room, turning his attention to a newspaper. Elise sat opposite Pierre at a small marble table, his hands wrapped around a bowl of soup he did not touch. He spoke in a low voice, his eyes on her face as if memorizing it.

"The morning of your departure from the Gare de Lyon, I was arrested," he said. "Not by the Germans. By French police. A neighbor swore she saw me meeting with a man from the Milice. I had done nothing, but she had a grudge, and hell, it was 1944, what did the police care for proof? I spent two months in a basement cell in Montpellier. When the Allied advance broke things open, I escaped with nothing but what I stood in."

"Why did you not come back? Write?"

He closed his eyes a moment. "Because the accusation followed me. The flag. A dossier. My name was on a list. And in the New France, a name on that list appears in all the wrong places. Employers will not touch you. Officials check the registry." He pulled a folded sheet of paper from inside his coat and laid it on the table between them. It was creased a hundred times, the edges soft as cloth. "This is a letter from the army chaplain who took my testimony in 1940. A witness who saw my battalion refuse to cooperate with the Pétainist officers. Proof."

"Then why are you hiding?"

"Because proof takes time." He touched the letter. "This is the only copy. If I present it and they throw it back in my face, I have nothing. There is no second letter. There is no chaplain to testify—he died in 1943. I have one chance. And if I fail, I get deported as a collaborator. No appeal. No witnesses. Gone." His voice cracked at the edge. He drew a breath, steadied himself. "So I stay here. I trade in coats of the dead. It buys bread. It keeps me unknown."

"Come back to Paris," Elise said. "I have a house. I have means now. You will not be arrested on my watch."

"Your watch." He shook his head. "You do not control the prefecture, Elise. You do not control the newspapers. One article and the whole of the country decides I am guilty before I ever see a judge."

"There have to be other witnesses," she insisted. "Other soldiers from your battalion."

Pierre set the letter back in his coat. "If there are, I have not found them. For three years, I have searched in the only place I could exist. Lyon. And I have found nothing."

Elise reached across the table and took his hand. It was rougher than she remembered, calloused from sorting wool and moving crates. "Then we will find them together. In the open, not in the shadows. I did not come this far to leave you behind."

Pierre looked at her hand over his, then up at her face. His jaw worked. "If your house suffers for mine—"

"I will make sure it does not. Julien has contacts. Influence." She let out a breath. "He is on our side. I know it's hard to believe. I did not believe it myself at first. But he gave me letters that led here. He came with me to find you."

Pierre glanced toward the far table, where Julien raised his newspaper slightly, still pretending to read, and for a moment his gaze was calculating. "For a man who owns a fashion house, he travels lightly for someone else's cause."

The statement hung in the air, a quiet question, one Elise did not know how to answer.

"Come with me," she said again. "Please."

Pierre was silent a long moment. Then he nodded, once, and let her help him up from the table. He packed his stall in silence, piling coats into a canvas sack his hands moved over with mechanical skill. The last thing he took was a coat in dark blue wool, he held it up to the light, ran his thumb along the sleeve, and then folded it and pressed it into her hands.

"For your house," he said. "If it is worth anything to you, you will know what to do with it."

Elise folded the coat over her arm. And in the dying evening light of Lyon, she walked Pierre Moreau back toward the train station, Julien a half step behind her, a man whose secrets she still did not fully know.