The man dropped to the ground.
Nicholai knelt beside him, felt his pulse, and cursed himself for striking too hard. His skill had not returned to the point where he could precisely calibrate the force of a blow, and the man was dead. This was unfortunate, because he would have liked to question him to find out who had sent him and why.
Clumsy, Nicholai told himself, clumsy and imprecise.
You will have to improve.
He went back into the house and used the telephone to dial the number that Haverford had given him for emergencies. When the American answered, Nicholai said, “There are two corpses in the garden. I imagine you will want to remove them.”
“Stay inside. I’ll have a cleanup team there right away.”
Nicholai hung up. Solange was standing in the doorway, looking at him. She wore a simple white silk robe, held in place by a wide silk belt tied in a bow that begged for tugging. A kitchen knife was clutched in her right hand, held low by her thigh, and her amazing green eyes blazed. She looked to Nicholai as if she were indeed ready to kill someone.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“I’m fine. A bit more winded than I’d like to be, perhaps.” He wondered at his lack of emotion, then decided that the adrenaline surge had yet to recede and was masking whatever he might feel about his close call, and the killing of two men.
Nicholai looked at the knife in her hand and asked, “Were you going to use that?”
“If I had to,” she answered. “Are they dead?”
“Yes.”
“You are sure.”
“Quite sure.”
Solange walked into the kitchen and came back with two squat glasses of whiskey. “I don’t know about you, but I need one.”
Nicholai took the drink and knocked it back in one swallow. Perhaps, he speculated, I feel a bit more than I thought.
“You are trembling a little,” she said.
“Perceptions to the contrary,” Nicholai answered, “I am not a practiced killer.”
It was true. He had killed Kishikawa-san out of love — something a Western mind would struggle to understand. But that act of mercy could not inure him against the professional dispatching of two sentient beings, who, despite the fact that they tried to kill him first, were still human. As the adrenaline faded, he felt an odd, contradictory mix of elation and regret.
Solange nodded her understanding.
The “cleanup” crew arrived before Nicholai and Solange could finish a second drink. Haverford, uncharacteristically dressed in an untucked shirt and blue jeans, came in through the kitchen door. “My God, are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Nicholai answered.
“What the hell happened?” Haverford asked.
Nicholai told him about the assault, omitting the details of his counterattack, only saying that he was sorry to have killed the second man. He could hear the soft sounds of the crew working outside, removing the bodies, wiping up the blood, restoring the pebbled paths to their pristine order. As if, he thought, nothing had ever happened.
The head of the crew came in, whispered something to Haverford, and left.
“They were Japs,” Haverford said.
Nicholai shook his head. “Chinese, or at least in the employ of the Chinese.”
Haverford looked at him curiously.
“The Japanese don’t use hatchets,” Nicholai explained. “The Chinese do, and only Chinese tongs, typically. Besides, no Japanese assassin would have fallen so easily for “The Angry Monk Paints the Wall.” Someone in China wants me — or Michel Guibert — dead.”
“I’ll get on it,” Haverford answered. “And I’ll increase security around here.”
“Don’t,” Nicholai said. “Security will only draw attention. The interesting question is, How did they know where I was.”
Haverford frowned and Nicholai enjoyed his discomfiture, a welcome crack in the wall of his confidence, almost worth a near death to see. The agent said, “We should probably move you.”
“Please don’t,” Nicholai answered. “It’s pleasant here and there’s really very little danger. If the assassins were Japanese, they would try again and again until they succeeded. But the Chinese think differently, they would never repeat a failed stratagem. I’m safe until I leave here.”
Haverford nodded. “Could I have some of that scotch?”
After Haverford and the cleanup crew left, Nicholai and Solange went to bed but did not make love. Neither of them felt particularly sexual after the events of the evening. They lay in silence for a long time until Nicholai said, “I am very sorry. Please accept my apology.”
“What for?”
“For bringing bloodshed into your home.”
Solange could see the shame on his young face. Truly, it was the end of youth, this killing business. She knew that any decent person who still had a soul felt revulsion at the taking of life. And she knew that she couldn’t remove his pain, only share it with him, make him know that he was not a monster, but a flawed human being trying to exist in a flawed world.
“Do you think,” she asked, “I have not seen bloodshed before?”
Her head on his chest, his arm around her, she told him her story.
She was a beautiful child, the pride of the quartier. Even as a little girl her skin, her eyes, her hair, the perfect bone structure of her face made her a treasure. As she grew into adolescence, the men of the neighborhood stole shamed, sidelong glances while strangers in the city at large were not so polite, verbally expressing their desires in graphic terms.
Mama guarded her daughter’s virtue zealously. She gave her a cultured, religious education with the sisters, took her to church every Sunday and on all days of holy obligation. Most of all, she went to great lengths to keep from Solange the knowledge of how her nice clothes and new pairs of shoes were paid for.
There was sometimes a little money left over for Solange to go to the cinema, and she would sit in the lovely, cool darkness, watch the silver fantasies play in front of her, and dream of one day becoming an actress herself.
Everyone said that she was certainly pretty enough.
Her mother disapproved — actresses were little better than whores.
Solange met Louis at a formal dance held between their two schools, and she found him distressingly attractive. He was tall and thin, with wavy brown hair and warm brown eyes, and he was intelligent and charming. The son of a prominent city doctor, he was relatively rich but nevertheless a passionate Communist.
He was also passionate about Solange. He truly cared for her, but could not help but test her virtue as they sat under trees along the banks of the canal, or in the cinema, or even at his house at the rare times his parents weren’t home, or at her apartment when her mother was “out.”
Mama was terrified at the beauty she had become. Proud, yes, but fearful, and she began to lecture her incessantly on the evils of men. “They only want sex,” she harangued, “and your precious Louis is no different. But don’t give in — only a salope sleeps with men without marriage.”
One night Louis walked her past a large four-story house.
“What is it?” Solange asked.
“It’s a brothel,” Louis said, at the very moment the door opened and Solange saw her mother step out to take a smoke. Her black hair was disheveled, her lips were puffy. She lit her cigarette and turned to see Solange staring up at her.
“Go home,” she said, her voice breaking. “Please, Solange, go now.”
But Solange just stood there in shock.
Finally, Louis took her by the arm and led her away.
The Nazis came to the south of France later that year, after the Allies invaded North Africa. German soldiers occupied the city, the police helped them locate Jews, La Résistance organized, and the Gestapo came in to track them down.
The head of the Gestapo in Montpellier was a certain Colonel Hoeger, and one afternoon he stepped out of his headquarters to enjoy the sunshine and ended up en
joying the sight of Solange as well.
“Look at that creature,” he said to his captain. “How old do you think she is?”
“Sixteen? Seventeen?”
“That face,” Hoeger said, “and the body. Find out about her.”
“She’s a child.”
“Look at her. She’s ripe.”
Madame Sette’s had become the brothel of choice for the German occupation forces, and Madame was rapidly becoming a wealthy woman.
As for Solange, she had become used to her mother’s occupation, having learned the sad lesson that what was once unbearable becomes commonplace with time. She and Mama had a civil if emotionally distant relationship, and Marie even came to feel somewhat relieved that she no longer had to disguise what she did. Solange even went to Madame Sette’s from time to time — to bring her mother a meal, or deliver a lipstick she had forgotten, or some other minor errand. The girls took to calling her Little Miss Prim, but gradually with some affection, and every time Madame saw her, she would importune her to consider coming in to make some real money.
Solange, of course, always refused.
She turned more and more to Louis. They spent virtually all their free time together, although Louis was very busy with his studies at Montpellier’s excellent and ancient medical school.
He was busier with the Resistance, even more passionate about his communism now that he lived cheek by jowl with facism. A messenger at first, he rode his bicycle around the city with coded messages hidden inside his medical texts, but it wasn’t long before his intelligence and courage brought him to the attention of the leaders and they began to give him more responsibility.
With them came greater risk, and it terrified Solange. She knew of the torture chambers in the basement of Gestapo headquarters, had heard the firing squads, and carefully avoided the scenes of gallows that had been hastily constructed for captured Resistance. She begged him to be careful.
Of course he said that he would, but he also found the dangers exhilarating, and he returned from missions with an already keen joie de vivre honed to an edge. Louis wanted to live, and that included making love to this beautiful girl whom he did love, very much.
But she turned him down.
“I don’t want to become my mother.”
Solange was bringing her mother a tin of hot soup — Marie had a slight cold — and Colonel Hoeger was sitting in the parlor. His face was flushed with drink as he looked at her with delighted surprise. “Do you work here?”
“No.”
“That’s a pity.” He looked her up and down, slowly and lasciviously, not troubling to disguise his want. “Do you have a name?”
“Yes.”
Hoeger’s tone sharpened. “What is it?”
“Solange.”
“Solange,” said Hoeger, tasting it as he wished to taste her. “A lovely name for a lovely girl.”
Three days later, Hoeger made a direct approach. He waited outside until he saw Solange coming across the square, and then approached her.
“Bonjour, mademoiselle.”
“Bonjour, monsieur.”
“Is there something fascinating on the sidewalk, Solange?”
“No, sir.”
“Then look at me, please.”
She looked up at him.
Apologizing for his rude behavior at the brothel, he now made a direct offer. “Civilized,” he called it. She would not be a whore, but his mistress. He would provide her with a suitable apartment, a budget for clothing and some luxuries, and appropriate — really quite generous — gifts from time to time. In exchange, she would … well, certainly she knew what she would provide in exchange, certainly they didn’t have to go into such details, did they?
Solange slapped him.
Hoeger had not been slapped since he was a boy and he actually glanced around the square to see if anyone had noticed, then remembered himself and said, “You are very rude.”
“As opposed to yourself— sir — who has just made an immoral proposition to a seventeen-year-old girl.”
“You are free to go.”
“Bon après-midi.”
“Bon après-midi.”
Solange was home before she gave in to her terror. She trembled for a good ten minutes, made a cup of tea, and sat down at the kitchen table to compose herself. Louis came over, but she told him nothing of the encounter, lest he do something foolishly gallant.
Two days later, Louis was arrested.
“It was a week from a Zola novel,” Solange told Nicholai now, lying with her head in the crook of his arm. “One of the bad ones.”
She said it ironically, dismissing the possibility of self-pity, but Nicholai heard the deeply buried hurt in her voice as she continued her story.
They caught Louis red-handed — stopped him on his bicycle and found the coded messages in his anatomy text. They hauled him to the cellar of Gestapo headquarters, where Hoeger went to work on him. The handsome boy was quickly handsome no longer. Unfortunately for Louis, he was brave, loyal, and committed, and would not reveal names.
Solange heard about it that afternoon. She went to her room and sobbed, then washed her face, combed her hair and put on the prettiest dress she owned, examined her image, and undid the top two buttons to reveal a deep décolletage. Sitting in front of the mirror in her mother’s bedroom, she applied makeup the way she had seen the whores do it.
Then she walked to Gestapo headquarters and asked to see Colonel Hoeger.
Shown into his office, she stood in front of his desk, made herself look him in the eyes, and said, “If you release Louis Duchesne, I will give myself to you. Now and anytime that you wish. In any way.”
Hoeger looked at her and blinked.
Solange said, “I know that you want me.”
He burst into laughter.
Hoeger laughed until tears ran down his fleshy cheeks, and then he took a handkerchief from his pocket, wiped his eyes, and got up. “Get out of my office. The nerve of you. Do you think I would risk my career, betray my country, just for the honor of breaking your cherry for you?”
Solange stood her ground. “Can I see him?”
“Certainly,” Hoeger answered. “You can see him hanged. Thursday noon.”
In the square around the gallows where five ropes dangled from the crossbeam, a crowd formed and stood in sullen silence until a German army truck pulled up. Soldiers jumped out the back first, then hauled out a group of prisoners, five in all, who had been sentenced to death.
Louis was the last taken out.
There was nothing romantic about it, nothing heroic. Louis looked badly beaten, limp and in shock, his hands tied behind him as they dragged him up to the gallows. Standing there in just a bloodstained white shirt and dirty brown trousers, he peered out at the crowd uncomprehendingly, and Solange wondered if he was looking for her.
I should have given myself to him, she thought. I should have loved him completely. I should have taken him inside me, wrapped myself around him, and never let him loose.
A soldier went down the line. He finally came to Louis, jerked his head back roughly, put the noose around his neck, then bent down and tied his ankles together. At the colonel’s orders, they put no hoods over the condemned heads.
Louis looked terrified.
Other soldiers formed a line between the crowd and the gallows, lest anyone try to interfere or run up and pull on the legs of the hanged to break their necks and abbreviate their agony.
Solange forced herself to watch.
An officer shouted an order.
There was a crack of metal and wood and Louis dropped.
His neck jerked and he bounced. Then he hung there twisting — his legs kicking, his eyes bulging, his tongue obscenely thrust out of his mouth — as his face turned red and then blue.
Finally — it seemed like forever — he was still.
Solange walked away through the crowd.
She heard a man’s voice say, “He was a hero.”
 
; “What?”
It was Patrice Reynaud, a railway conductor who had been a friend of Louis. Patrice kept walking, but repeated, “He was a hero, your Louis.”
“Your Louis,” Solange thought. If only I had let him be my Louis.
That night she walked over to La Maison de Madame Sette and went into the woman’s little office.
“I am ready to begin work,” she said.
Madame looked at her skeptically. “Why now, chérie?”
“Why not now, madame?” Solange answered. “Why delay the reality of life?”
“Your mother will not like it.”
Marie didn’t. She yelled, she lectured, she wept. “I didn’t want this kind of life for you. I wanted something better for you.”
So did I, Solange thought.
Life decided otherwise.
Madame Sette, of course, was delighted and decided to make an event of it. She spent an entire week promoting the auctioning off of Solange’s virginity. The girl would fetch a very high price.
“I will give you half,” Madame told her. “That is more than I usually give.”
“Half is fine,” Solange answered.
Put it away, don’t squander it, Madame advised her. Put your savings in the bank, work hard, and someday you can open up a little shop of your own. A woman should have her own money in this world, her own business.
“Yes, madame.”
The big night arrived, and the parlor was packed with German officers. Most of the local Frenchmen would have nothing to do with this, and those that would had been intimidated by word from the Resistance that it would not treat gently any man who bid for the virtue of a martyr’s girl.
Solange let Madame dress her for the occasion.
A crude mockery of wedding garb, the white diaphanous gown concealed little, her white lace headpiece was set gently on her hair that fell freely and shining down her back, adding to the image of virginity. Her makeup was slight and subtle, a little pencil to widen her already beautiful eyes, and just a shade of blush appropriate to a young bride.