At dawn, Suzanne steps outside her apartment at 52 boulevard Voltaire and realizes she might never walk back in. More than the daily Nazi nonsense, it is today’s appointment she dreads. She’s thirty minutes late. They’re waiting for her. All the way up Montmartre. She has thirty minutes to make the hour’s hike. The directions had been clear. Sept heures. Don’t be late. Don’t bother knocking if you are. We will not answer.
Her plans had been perfect. Get up before everyone else. Quietly kiss Geneviève while she slept. Tiptoe to the front door. Flirt with the German. Pass by the checkpoint. Continue on to the rendezvous.
But it was that good-bye kiss that woke up her three-year-old, who cried until her mother left, and half the building complained. Even now, from outside, Suzanne can still hear Geneviève’s muted cries from the apartment.
“How can you leave her like this?” Uncle Felzen had asked.
“C’est pour la Résistance,” she’d answered, feeding his sense of patriotism.
It’s a humid July day. Odors seem sharper than usual as if liquefied in the air. Gasoline exhaust. Seine brine. Cigarette smoke from the cafés.
Suzanne looks left and doesn’t like what she sees. Or rather what she doesn’t see. The German soldier from yesterday. Instead, she sees Jews. Two of them. Near the Oberkampf métro checkpoint. Two judenpolizeiasking residents for identification, looking quite Aryan in their wool shirts and armbands. Where was the German soldier? Young and handsome and away from home. Now, that was something a twenty-seven-year-old woman can work with. Suzanne had been very nice to him, wearing her long curly black hair...
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