Marcel didn’t press her, but narrowed his eyes slightly in thought, then shook away whatever was in his thoughts and waved for her to follow him. “Come, let me show you how to operate the printing press.”
ELEVEN
Ava
Ava was not the only one thrilled with the discovery of the clandestine French newspaper. Mr. Sims’s glower had lightened to a frown, and he informed her a month later that DC wanted more. She and Mike were to share the duty of photographing all the periodicals and publications, and she was to put extra effort into obtaining as many underground newspapers as was possible.
In the months that followed, she accompanied James to Estoril on enough occasions that she eventually acquired her own dinner party dresses and had Peggy teach her a few new hairstyles. Lamant met Ava often, providing her not only with French clandestine papers, but occasionally ones from Holland and Poland as well.
“There is an art to these,” he explained after handing her a small stack to tuck into her handbag at a soiree at the Estoril bar one night. “It is resistance among oppression, words rivaling heavy artillery, seemingly insignificant and yet still efficacious. This is strength in its rawest form. It is beautiful.”
Lamant was a rare soul who saw some element of magnificence in most things. She smiled at his assessment. “That’s poetic.”
“You must look beyond the page.” He lifted his drink but paused before taking a sip. A sliver of lemon bobbed in the clear liquid. “To the men and women who worked so seamlessly together. Not only the author who wrote it, but the typographer who meticulously assembled it, to the person manning the complexities of the printing machines, to the courier who delivered it and the citizen who smuggled it from French soil to end up here in Portugal.”
This was one of the things she enjoyed about the rare moments she spent with Lamant. Never had she considered more than the authors or the piece itself. But he was correct in his appraisal, at the string of involvement to bring these clandestine papers to her hand.
“Even you.” Lamant gestured to her with his glass, his cheeks slightly reddened from spending too much time by the ocean. “Those papers would die here in Lisbon. They would become rubbish over time, tossed out with the rest of the trash. History discarded. But you are sending them on to America. You are preserving these moments in time so all will look back on them later.”
With that proclamation, he put his drink to his lips and drained the contents so only the lemon twist remained. He held up his glass as a waiter passed to summon another. Again. As if catching her assessment, he winked at her. “This is better than the pills most refugees take for their nerves.”
Regardless of what he said and the luxurious surroundings he enjoyed, the wear of waiting so many months began to whittle at his appearance. He remained slender despite the abundance of canapés and heaping plates of meats and pastries and delicacies from around the world. Most of which he didn’t touch. Instead, his attention swung to what could be splashed into a crystal glass. And though he said it settled his nerves, the slight tremor in his hands never seemed to abate, and the lines around his mouth and on his brow appeared to be etched deeper every time they met.
A man and woman walked by the table, their conversation in German apparent. Lamant’s hold on the cup tightened until his bony knuckles went white.
“Are you all right?” Ava asked when the man and woman passed.
He swallowed, appearing pale beneath his light sunburn and offered her a wan smirk. “Forgive me, German being spoken nearby never ceases to rattle me.”
She nodded. While she would never understand on the level Lamant had experienced, she understood about the shift in emotion hearing German elicited. “My father was fluent in German. And French,” she added with a smile. “Once hearing German reminded me of him.”
“Now it is sullied,” Lamant finished for her.
“Precisely.”