"Rue de Passy," he repeated stubbornly.
And Noelle suddenly understood. Even then, she would have done nothing about it if she had not seen the two Gestapo agents waiting for her across the street. To be followed around like a criminal! The two men were in conversation. They had not seen her yet. Angrily Noelle turned to the concierge and said, "Where is the service entrance?"
"This way, Mam'selle."
Noelle followed him through a back corridor, down a flight of stairs to the basement and out to an alley. Three minutes later she was in a taxi, on her way to meet Israel Katz.
The bakery was an ordinary-looking shop in a rundown, middle-class neighborhood. The lettering on the window read BOULANGERIE, and the letters were flaked and chipped. Noelle opened the door and stepped inside. She was greeted by a small dumpling of a woman in a spotless white apron.
"Yes, Mademoiselle?"
Noelle hesitated. There was still time to leave, still time to turn back and not get involved in something dangerous that was none of her business.
The woman was waiting.
"You--you have a birthday cake for me," Noelle said, feeling foolish at the game-playing, as though somehow the gravity of what was happening was demeaned by the childish artifices that were employed.
The woman nodded. "It is ready, Miss Page." She put a CLOSED sign on the door, locked it and said, "This way."
He was lying on a cot in the small back room of the bakery, his face a mask of pain, bathed in perspiration. The sheet twisted around him was soaked in blood, and there was a large tourniquet around his left knee.
"Israel."
He moved to face the door, and the sheet fell away, revealing a sodden pulp of mashed bone and flesh where his knee had been.
"What happened?" Noelle asked.
He tried to smile but did not quite make it. His voice was hoarse and strained with pain. "They stepped on Le Cafard, but we're not easy to kill."
So she had been correct. "I read about it," Noelle said. "Are you going to be all right?"
Israel took a deep painful breath and nodded. His words came in labored gasps.
"The Gestapo is turning Paris upside down looking for me. My only chance is to get out of the city... If I can get to Le Havre, I have friends who will help me get on a boat out of the country."
"Can't you get a friend to drive you out of Paris?" Noelle asked. "You could hide in the back of a truck--"
Israel shook his head weakly. "Road blocks. Not a mouse can get out of Paris."
Not even un Cafard, Noelle thought. "Can you travel with that leg?" she asked, stalling for time, trying to come to a decision.
His lips tightened in the rictus of a smile.
"I'm not going to travel with this leg," Israel said.
Noelle looked at him, not understanding, and at that moment the door opened and a large, heavy-shouldered, bearded man entered. In his hand he carried an ax. He walked up to the bed and pulled back the sheet, and Noelle felt the blood drain from her face. She thought of General Scheider and the hairless albino from the Gestapo and what they would do to her if they caught her.
"I will help you," Noelle said.
CATHERINE
Washington-Hollywood: 1941
7
It seemed to Catherine Alexander that her life had entered a new phase, as though somehow she had climbed to some higher emotional level, a heady and exhilarating peak. When Bill Fraser was in town, they had dinner together every night and went to concerts or the theater or the opera. He found a small, charming apartment for her near Arlington. He wanted to pay her rent, but Catherine insisted on paying it herself. He bought her clothes and jewelry. She had resisted at first, embarrassed by some deeply ingrained Protestant ethic, but it had given Fraser such obvious pleasure that finally Catherine had stopped arguing about it.
Whether you like it or not, she thought, you're a mistress. It had always been a loaded word for her, filled with connotations of cheap, slinky women in backstreet apartments, living out lives of emotional frustration. But now that it was happening to her, Catherine found that it was not really like that at all. It just meant that she was sleeping with the man she loved. It did not feel dirty or sordid, it felt perfectly natural. It's interesting, she thought, how the things that other people do seem so horrible, and yet when you're doing them they seem so right. When you are reading about the sexual experiences of someone else, it's True Confessions, but when it's you it's the Ladies' Home Journal.