If our constitution was to survive, we had to instill trust. Thus, I decided to remain at Chavaniac.
And that was among the most fateful choices of my life.
THIRTY-EIGHT
MARTHE
Chavaniac-Lafayette
September 1942
Sergeant Travert ushers me into the empty boys’ dining hall and closes the door, while another gendarme waits outside to prevent my escape. Then Travert drops his visored policeman’s cap onto the table. “Why don’t we sit down like friends, mademoiselle?”
I try to hide my fright behind insolence. “When did we become friends?”
In answer, with the toe of his boot, the gendarme kicks a chair out for me. Glaring as if my insides weren’t going to jelly, I slide into the wooden chair, keeping my back straight. “What can I do for you?”
“It’s what I’m going to do for you, mademoiselle! Let me start by telling you a story about an armed man I arrested in the woods this morning. Goes by the name of Beaufort. Are you acquainted with the monsieur?”
I stiffen. My first instinct is to lie—to say I don’t know any Monsieur Beaufort—but Travert wouldn’t be here questioning me if he didn’t know something. “Maybe. The name sounds familiar. I can’t be sure.”
“Perhaps this will refresh your memory,” says Travert, pulling some papers from his coat pocket, laying them on the table between us. He unfolds them, very carefully, revealing the papers I forged for the Kohn family.
And I go from stiff to rigid.
I’d say that everything is quiet as Travert watches me for a reaction, but the sound of my own breath roars past my ears as I struggle to keep it steady.
“These are false papers,” Travert says conversationally, as I wonder how he got hold of them. “We see them every day at the gendarmerie these days. Artists are the usual culprits—we have to take a second look at every cartoonist or painter in the Haute-Loire, because they can make remarkably convincing forgeries. But these? No. These were done by an amateur.”
Despite the steady ticktock of the clock on the mantelpiece, time itself slows. Do I confess and throw myself on his mercy or try to bluff? In the end, bravado wins out. “How can you tell?”
Travert actually smiles. “Glad you asked. According to these papers, Monsieur Beaufort was born in this little town,” he says, pointing to my improvised stamp. “Probably the forger believed an obscure birthplace would make it difficult to confirm. In fact, it is as easy as a phone call to the mayor’s office there to cross-check birth records.”
What an idiot I am! Even as I think this, I force myself to feign a yawn. “Interesting.”
Travert arches one bushy brow. “It’s the kind of mistake a small-town person makes; someone who hasn’t seen much. And then the name, of course. Beaufort. It made me think.”
It’s making me think too. I’m thinking: I’m going to jail.
I won’t do well in jail. I hate feeling trapped more than anything.
In the face of my panicked silence, Travert continues, “What are the chances, I wonder, that I would arrest a man who has forged papers that evoke a pretty castle, and that he’d be wearing the missing red hat of an artist I know. An artist who also just happens to live in a pretty castle?”
Merde! That damned red beret. A lump of fear for Monsieur Kohn and loathing for Sergeant Travert makes it almost impossible to speak, so my voice comes out as a rasp. “Are you accusing me—did this Beaufort fellow say I had something to do with this?”
“He refuses to say anything.” Travert takes out his cigarette lighter and holds the flame between us. “I don’t think his silence will last, do you? Our new German friends say it’s easy to make people talk if you hurt them . . .”
I watch his lighter flicker and go cold and clammy. Travert wouldn’t burn me, would he? Not here, where children might hear me scream . . .
If he does, can I keep quiet? I just don’t know! Even Saint Joan cried when they burned her, and I’m no saint.
Travert leans forward, and by instinct, I bolt for the door, but he grabs me by the wrist and yanks me back into the chair. Between clenched teeth he says, “It occurs to me I could burn these, mademoiselle, and erase all evidence of the crime.”
So he’s offering a way out, and my heart leaps at the possibility, but nothing is free in this world. I remember the way he touched me when he caught me with contraband in my bicycle. The way he gave me cigarettes after finding me at the side of the road and drove me home, telling me, A pretty girl like you is worth the bother. So it’s going to be blackmail.