I tilt my head. “I can’t help you with that.”
“Yes you can,” he replies. “We’re already storing guns at the preventorium.”
I almost choke on a cherry, then slug him in the shoulder.
“It wasn’t my idea,” he protests, holding up his hands. “It was the boys’。 Oscar, Daniel, some of the others—they’re hiding weapons for us under the floorboards in the solarium of the boys’ dormitory. When the nurses are asleep, our night patrols come, we get the weapons, then put them back before morning.”
“You’re entrusting weapons to kids?”
“Only because the Germans are killing kids, Marthe.”
I sigh, because he doesn’t have to tell me that. Nor does he have to explain that French militia—the leaders of which have sworn allegiance to Hitler—are recruiting boys and girls to be part of their so-called Avant-Garde. Kids are victims and soldiers in this war whether I like it or not. “Just tell me what you want me to do.”
“Make sure the boys don’t touch the guns unless they need them.”
Unless they need them . . .
I grimace. “How long? You can’t keep guns in the preventorium forever.”
“Hopefully the Americans invade soon and we won’t have to. Almost the whole village is for the Resistance now but the mayor. Even the gendarmes are on our side.”
Travert’s gendarmes, he means, and I feel a flare of pride.
“We have sixty fighters, maybe more. And you . . .”
“I’m not—”
“Oh, put a sock in it. You’re part of the club, like it or not.” Sam leans against the tree trunk. “Speaking of . . . don’t use Madame Simon’s old mailbox to pass messages anymore. I kept watch, and I think the mayor saw you. Now that something big is happening, let’s not take chances. To get word to me, leave a message under the floorboards at the boys’ dormitory, and leave a chalk mark on the floor. I’ll do the same.”
Something big is happening. After I walk away from Sam, I can’t stop thinking about those words.
Especially when, on the twelfth of the month, I hear from Monsieur Kohn. “The OSE is desperate this time,” he says, telling me about fifteen Jewish girls they’re evacuating from a Catholic convent where they’ve been hiding. “The Gestapo is planning a raid any day now.”
The girls need not only new papers, but also false school and medical records that can get all fifteen admitted to the preventorium. And they need it on two days’ notice. “Fifteen girls. In two days? It’s too much.”
“You’re their only hope, Marthe. They have nowhere else to go. If you don’t do this, they’ll be killed.”
I stare at Monsieur Kohn, a once-respected soldier who now lives mostly in the woods as an outlaw, hunted like an animal. I don’t know where he’s getting the strength to go on, but I can’t complain to a man like him that my nerves are shot—even if it’s true, and it is. “All right, I’ll do it.”
To protect these Jewish girls, it might be safest to steal the identities of Catholic children. Travert could get me a list of names; he’s done it before. In the end, though, I don’t want to ask my husband for help, because he’d try to stop me. He’d say it’s become too dangerous. But who else will do it if I don’t? In my tower room, I spread the passport-sized pictures out under the light and try to think up new identities. Fourteen-year-old Rachel will become Renée. Twelve-year-old Esther will be édith. Ten-year-old Sarah will become Stéphanie. For the younger girls, to keep it simple, I’ll change only their surnames.
What’s not simple for me is that these girls can’t all be from the same place, or it will trigger suspicion. I make one from French Algiers, where the Americans are now. Another from the Italian border, where things remain confused. I give another girl a British father, because the Nazis bloody well can’t cross-check references across the English Channel, can they?
Then it’s a matter of using French towns without records or with town hall clerks willing to lie. Sam has been wooing a mademoiselle from Langeac—a sympathetic clerk at the mayor’s office—so I make twin sisters from there. The OSE provided me with a few notes on plausible medical conditions, but I need more details. What if the girl I made half-English has a Polish accent? There are a thousand mistakes I can make, especially working this quickly . . . and with so little sleep. Up all night hunched over the table in my tower studio, I pray Anna doesn’t see the light on and knock on the locked door. By the time the rooster crows in the pasture, I’m sick with exhaustion. Parched. Hungry. Badly in need of a break.