Night Soldiers

coming. The remainder of the maquis and the new recruits took the arms and ammunition and moved up the mountain. Alceste Vau was not told of his brother’s wound; he would have demanded to accompany them to Epinal and there were already too many of them for the old truck. When Lucien returned, they carried the wounded down the path, across the road, and loaded them carefully into the back of the truck. They covered themselves with a canvas tarp while Gilbert drove, alone in the cab.

The ride down the mountain road seemed to go on forever. The brakes were virtually useless on the steep curves and every time Gilbert downshifted, the flywheel screamed and threatened to blow the transmission all over the road. The truck swayed and bounced, Khristo lay on his side in the darkness beneath the tarpaulin and tried to keep La Brebis’s head from moving with the truck’s motion, but it was a losing battle. In the beginning, she cried out when they were jolted by a downshift, but as they went farther down the mountain she made no sound at all, and Khristo could feel her skin growing cold. Let her die, he thought. His training told him to sacrifice one in order to save another-and to stop might put all their lives in jeopardy.

But this was Lucien’s decision, he realized, and finally he shifted over next to him and, raising his voice above the truck’s roaring motor, said, “Lucien, Brebis is asphyxiating. She won’t make it.”

Lucien’s voice answered a moment later. “Are you sure?”

“No. But feel how cold she is.”

“It could be shock.”

“It could be, but I think it’s her windpipe closing up.” When there was no immediate answer, he tried to help Lucien make a decision. “We can still save Daniel, if we continue.”

“No,” Lucien said. He crawled along the truck bed, then reached out from beneath the tarp and pounded on the rear window of the cab. Gilbert slowed-they could feel him pumping the brakes gingerly-then pulled off the road onto the grassy shoulder. The truck was canted at a dangerous angle, and Gilbert raced the engine so it would not stall. On the other side of the road a German staff car and a truckload of soldiers tore past, but they paid no heed to the truck by the side of the road.

“Hold her head,” Lucien said.

Khristo cradled her head in his lap and pressed his hands against the sides of her face. Fusari crawled over next to him and raised the edge of the tarp to let in some light. Lucien reached into his pocket and brought out a cheap fountain pen. He unscrewed the two halves, then broke off the nib end and cleaned up the shattered edge as best he could with a knife. He pulled his shirttail out and wiped ink from the open tube he’d fashioned. Khristo could see that his hands were shaking.

“Ready?” Lucien said.

Khristo nodded.

“Open her mouth.”

Khristo pulled her teeth apart. He could see Lucien sweating in the cold air as he pressed Brebis’s tongue down with his left index finger. When he forced the tube down the back of her throat, the pain brought her back from stupor and she screamed, a hoarse, choking sound that made Khristo shudder. When Lucien withdrew his hand there was blood on it.

Lucien wasted no time. He pounded on the cab window again, and Gilbert moved back out on the road while Fusari resettled the tarp and they were in darkness once again. La Brebis tried to move her hand to her mouth, but Khristo held tightly to her wrist. “Just breathe,” he whispered by her ear. “Can you?” After a moment, she moved her head up and down to tell him that she could.

In Epinal, they heard the sounds of other vehicles and bicycle bells and the truck slowed, bumping along the cobbled streets. At last, Gilbert made as if to park, swinging over toward the curb. Then, suddenly, he took off quickly, with all the acceleration the old engine could muster. Khristo let go of the wounded girl and found the grip of his machine pistol.

But nothing happened. They drove for several minutes, then rolled to a stop. Khristo peeked beneath the tarp and saw the Epinal railroad station. At Lucien’s direction, Fusari checked out the other side and reported that Gilbert was entering the Hotel de la Gare, which was, Khristo knew, to be found across the street from virtually every railway station in France. Some minutes later Gilbert appeared at the back of the truck and spoke in an undertone. “There was a geste car parked in front of the doctor’s office-they know there’s been a gunshot wound. I’m going to drive around to the back of the hotel. Once we get there, move quickly and get them inside.”

The truck inched down a narrow alley, cornered, and stopped. They threw the tarp off and saw two men in dark suits with pistols in their hands. Khristo immediately armed his weapon and covered them.

“What’s this?” Lucien asked.

“Pimps,” Gilbert answered, climbing up on the truck bed to help with the wounded. “We’re at the Epinal whorehouse. It’s the only place in town where the doctor comes-and no questions asked. They’ve already sent one of the girls to get him.”

They carried Brebis and Daniel through the small bar that adjoined the lobby, then upstairs to a dingy room with faded wallpaper. A mustached man in long underwear jumped out of the bed when they entered the room. “See here,” he said.

“Take a walk,” one of the pimps answered, showing the man his pistol, “this is for France.”

A heavy woman in a dressing gown appeared as they lowered the wounded to the rumpled bed. Without a word she handed the customer a sheaf of ten-franc notes. He, in turn, drew himself up to his full dignity, baggy underdrawers and all. “Never!” he said, with great solemnity. Slapped the money back into the woman’s hand, saluted crisply, and marched from the room.

February, in the mountains, was like a white island. Cut off from time, lifeless, inert. A place where snow showered from the pine boughs, a place where the wind died and the water froze to perfect crystalline ice.

In Cambras, Khristo Stoianev kept to himself. He lived, like the rest of the village, on turnips and rutabagas. Sometimes there was bread. Most of the recruits had been sent home-with instructions to return after the March thaw-because the village foodstocks could not support them. But Khristo and the Corsican, Fusari, were asked to stay.

The shooting of La Brebis and Daniel Vau continued to reverberate in Cambras and not in comfortable ways. They had both survived, for which everyone was thankful. But Daniel had been wounded in the spine, would never walk again, and Gilbert’s young wife had taken this very badly. She had been, everyone supposed, Daniel’s lover, and her broken heart showed for all to see. This situation oppressed Gilbert’s domestic life to a painful degree and he was rumored to have shifted his sleeping quarters to the bed of the strange servant girl who lived in the house.

The doctor had arrived within minutes that day at the Hotel de la Gare, a white-haired professeur of a man who wore an old-fashioned silk vest beneath his suit. He had patched up La Brebis as best he could, then ordered both wounded removed to a convent near the town of Vittel, some twenty miles distant, and there operated on Daniel Vau. Both had remained and were said to be recovering as well as could be expected. The family of La Brebis-the Bonet clan-muttered continually of revenge on her behalf. Gilbert and Lucien resisted, reluctant to attack the Germans in this way, fearing what they would do to the village in return. The murder of an individual German soldier had elsewhere in France been repaid by the killing of more than a hundred civilians. A high price for the Bonet honor.

But the stalemate could not last indefinitely and late one afternoon an aristocratic Frenchman appeared in Cambras: tall, hawk-faced, silver-haired, even in February wearing a fine topcoat over his shoulders like a cape. He was accompanied by a bodyguard called Albert, a watchful man with lank brown hair parted in the middle, a cafe waiter’s mustache, and eyes the color of the winter sea. He carried a shortbarreled pump shotgun, a weapon never before seen in the village-what birds you could get with that-and wore a Walther pistol in an armpit holster. The Killer, they called him, when he wasn’t around to hear. He reminded Khristo of his past.

Which now, in February, seemed like another life lived by another man. With war in Russia, he thought, they must all be dead by now. Sascha, Drazen Kulic, all the others from Arbat Street. Perhaps not Ilya. Ilya would always find a way to survive. And he rather thought Voluta was alive somewhere; he was like air, hard to get hold of and thus hard to kill. What, he wondered, would they think of this American who called himself Lucien. For he was surely not French, no Frenchman ever walked like that, free-striding, body leaning forward. And he was not British. He did not have the British face, that odd, speculative stillness. He was, apparently, what Khristo had been. An