I reach for one of the documents, a certificate of birth, but Anson catches my wrist. “Don’t touch,” he hisses. His eyes, stripped of color in the cold light of the overhead bulb, send a chill through me.
My thoughts skitter to those suddenly empty beds, seemingly recovered men dying without warning in the middle of the night and with greater and greater frequency of late. To the rumors of a traitor in our midst—a spy reporting back to the Gestapo. We’ve all feigned ignorance, because it’s safer than admitting what we all suspect, that those men hadn’t died at all, that somehow they’d been smuggled out of the hospital right under our noses. That Dr. Jack is somehow at the back of it all, and the Germans know it and are just waiting for proof before they make their arrest.
Is that what Anson is doing in the basement? Helping Sumner Jackson smuggle Americans and Brits out of France and using forged papers to do it? If so, why not tell me? Surely he knows I can be trusted. A wave of dread washes through me as another thought occurs—a terrible thought. What if Anson is the spy we’ve all been worried about, and he’s actually been helping the Gestapo gather evidence? The possibility makes the back of my neck go clammy. Has he been working for the Nazis the whole time, pretending to be a hero? Pretending . . . everything?
“Those papers,” I say, nodding toward the table. “Please tell me you’re not doing anything wrong with them, that you’re not . . .” I let the words trail, unable to finish the rest.
He studies me, his expression unreadable. The moment spins out, and we stand eye to eye as I wait for his answer, as if we’re poised at the edge of some terrible precipice, waiting to see who will jump first.
“Just tell me you’re not working for them,” I say thickly. “Please.”
A muscle begins to tick in his jaw. “That’s what you think?”
“I don’t know what I think, Anson. You’re sneaking around down here with a flashlight, raking through papers that clearly aren’t yours.” I’m talking fast now, hating the words as they leave my mouth. I want so badly to be wrong, but what if I’m not?
When he reaches for my hand I pull away. He stares at me, astonished. “You’re afraid of me?”
“There’s been so much talk. And you’ve been acting so strangely . . .”
He takes a step back, raking a hand through his hair. “You think I’m the spy? And now that you’ve stumbled onto my little secret, I’ll be forced to—what? Strangle you? Slit your throat?” His eyes are flinty as they lock with mine, but there’s hurt there too, as if I’d drawn back my hand and physically struck him. “After all this time,” he says finally. “After everything we’ve shared, that’s who you think I am?”
“Anson . . .”
“I think I liked it better when you suspected me of going behind your back with Elise. I think she’d prefer it, too, to being called a Nazi.”
“I didn’t call either one of you a Nazi. But what am I supposed to think?”
“You’re supposed to trust me.”
I lift my chin. “The way you trusted me?”
He blows out a long breath, and I suddenly see how tired he is. “It’s got nothing to do with trust,” he says wearily. “It’s to do with being careful. If I’m caught . . . I couldn’t put you in that kind of danger. I never meant for you to know any of this.”
“But I do know. Or at least I think I do. So you might as well tell me the rest.”
He shakes his head. “No.”
“The men,” I press, determined to confirm what now seems plain. “The ones who died so suddenly. All those empty beds. They didn’t die, did they?”
“Leave it alone, Soline. Please. Go back upstairs and forget you saw any of this.”
I shake my head, refusing to be put off. I need to know it all, about the work he’s doing and the risks he’s taking. “It was you,” I press again. “You helped them get away. Using papers like these. It was you.”
He blows out a breath, annoyed by my persistence. “It was a lot of people. An entire cell risking their lives to save a handful of men. Airmen mostly, along with a few friends of the Resistance who managed to get themselves into the Gestapo’s crosshairs. There’s a man who does the papers, an artist turned forger, if you can believe that.” He pauses, pointing to the documents on the table. “This is his work. We give them new names and get them across the border into Spain, then on to England, even to the States now and then. Sometimes we need a guy’s bed before we can safely move him down the line, so we hide him—down here.”