His expression makes my knees wobble. “He’s dead?”
Travert nods. “There was never a chance.”
“But I held him together,” I whisper.
“There was never any chance, Marthe.”
To hell with these German boys, I’d thought. If the boy had been blown up by RAF planes, or riddled by American bullets, or crushed under Allied tanks, what could be the difference?
The difference is that I’ve never seen anyone murdered before . . .
“I want to report that officer. I thought Germans prized correctness!”
“Only in the Wehrmacht. Wolff is Gestapo. Reporting him won’t do any good.” Travert puts a heavy hand on my shoulder. “Let’s go. Try to put this out of your mind. I’ll rent a hotel room; we’ll stay the night.”
He’s being thoughtful, but I pull away. “I want to go home.”
He nods. “Okay. I have a little bread at my house, some tea.”
That’s his home, not mine. “I mean Chavaniac.”
It’s still daylight when we set out for the castle, and in the front seat of Travert’s police car, I open my handbag to inspect the signature I’ll have to copy to save Monsieur Kohn. Instead, I find myself fingering a photograph. Travert turns the steering wheel as we pull onto the road home, and asks, “What’s that?”
“A picture of Maxime Furlaud.”
“Furlaud? Like the brand of cognac?”
Cognac. Not my drink, but that’s where I recognized the name from. “The baroness tells me he was a banker, but I don’t know much about him.”
“Then why do you have his picture?”
“Because he might be my father.”
It’s the first time I’ve voiced that suspicion, and Travert slants me a glance. But my attention is now riveted on the smooth texture of the snapshot. The way Madame Beatrice wrote Furlaud on the back, first in smudged pen, then in pencil as she realized the ink would take too long to dry on the coated paper. Photography paper. Why didn’t I think of it before? “I might have just figured out how to duplicate a stamp without having to carve one . . .”
When we get to the castle—which is now crowded with beds—I leave it to Travert to explain to everyone why my clothes are stained with blood, and Anna rushes to me in sympathy. “Mon Dieu. You must be so shaken. Let me put you to bed.”
“I can’t sleep,” I murmur.
She nods sympathetically. “I’ll sit with you. I’ll read to you until you nod off, if you like.”
What I mean is that I won’t sleep. Not yet. She’s already tugging me gently to the stairs, and I want to go with her. I want to put my head on her shoulder, and curl up in bed nose to nose, and be lulled to sleep by her voice. So it’s hard for me to pull away, but I do. “Travert can stay with me.”
Anna looks as if I’ve slapped her. I wish it were jealousy, but I know it’s just the natural hurt when a close friendship must make way for marriage, and because I need to accept a deeper hurt and get over it, I let Travert lead me upstairs. While I strip off my bloodstained clothes, Travert doesn’t seem to know what to do with himself in this frilly, feminine tower room with its crystal chandelier.
“I just need you to keep everyone away.” I explain that as long as he’s here, I’ll have privacy, because no one will want to walk in on a married couple. “I have to make Monsieur Kohn’s permit. We may be running out of time.”
At first, Travert sits in Madame Beatrice’s armchair, laces his fingers, and holds them between his knees. I know he’s thinking Uriah Kohn could already be on his way to Auschwitz. Still, we have to try. I turn away, wrap myself in a bathrobe, and switch on the desk light. To test my theory, I quickly trace the stamp with a little pencil. Then I turn the tracing paper over to transfer it onto the back of Maxime Furlaud’s photograph and fill it in with ink. A different sort of paper would lose shape and ruin the impression, but photography paper might just be firm enough.
Please work. I don’t even breathe as I press the still-damp ink onto a piece of paper, but I can hear Travert breathing over my shoulder as he watches. With the side of the pencil, I gently rub the impression, then check my work.
“Sacrebleu,” Travert mutters. “It’s perfect.”
“A little blotting paper and it will be!” I want to throw both my fists in the air with triumph. This is an amazing discovery. I can forge stamps this way in a fraction of the time, without the incriminating evidence of a wood carving.