“Listen to me.” Ferrand’s urgency was intense. “Claude will take you to our cousin’s farm. You won’t stay there long, and then he’ll take you farther southeast. We’re trying to keep you out of the way of the German advance and the crowds of refugees.”
As he spoke, Amélie stared at him. “And you, you’re coming with us.”
Ferrand shook his head and shoved a set of papers their way. “These are your new identity documents. We prepared them while you slept. Study them carefully. You must become Monique Perrier, and your sister is Blanche.”
“And you?” Amélie asked stonily.
Ferrand inhaled deeply. “I won’t be coming, my dear daughters.” Tears filled his eyes. “We are in a war, and my place to fight is here.”
Next to them, Chantal let out an anguished cry. “No, Papa. You cannot stay.” She lunged toward him and threw her arms around his neck, her body trembling. “I won’t go. If you don’t come, I won’t go.”
Ferrand held her and guided her toward the stairs. “You must. I have a job to do, and I’ll do it better if I know you’re safe.”
Amélie, who had moved with them, fixed her gaze on him. “What job?” Then she stopped and looked around the cavernous cellar. Tables from the restaurant had been brought down with chairs and set around the room as worktables, and furtive figures hovered over them, deep in conversation. “What are those people doing?”
“Today was traumatic for both of you,” Ferrand said without replying. “Chantal was nearly raped and—” He looked deep into Amélie’s eyes. “You protected your sister, and a man is dead, a German soldier.”
“And now we lose our father,” Amélie cried, wiping away tears.
Ferrand closed his eyes, breathed in deeply, and exhaled. “You’ll never lose me, but you can’t stay here. The Germans will come looking for you. I need for you and your sister to take care of each other in a safe place. I can work better then.”
Amélie looked around again, gestured at the people moving about, and locked her eyes back on her father’s face. “You’re building an organization. To fight back.”
For a moment, Ferrand only returned her gaze. Then he nodded grimly. “No one is coming to save us. We have to save ourselves. You have to go.”
13
Two days later, June 17
Hauptman Bergmann strode into the morgue, his eyes fixed in anger. A nervous French policeman hurried to keep up. German soldiers stood guard inside and outside each entrance while a stooped, white-haired man wearing thick spectacles waited at a set of swinging doors. Bergmann swept past him without so much as a greeting and walked directly to a single gurney in the room. On it, a covered corpse lay flat.
Bergmann pulled back the sheet and stared. Then, he dropped the cover and addressed the white-haired man who now hovered over the body on the opposite side of the gurney.
“Are you the medical examiner?”
The man nodded.
“How long has he been dead?”
“At least two days. Maybe three. He was in the water for most if not all of that time, so it’s hard to be sure.”
Bergmann turned to the policeman. “Where was he found?”
“On the north end of the beach.”
“Were there any rocks there?” As Bergmann asked the question, he spun around to a German sergeant. “Send out a patrol to search the area.” Then he focused his attention again on the French policeman. “Well?”
“There are no rocks to speak of, sir. Not in that area.”
Bergmann stared down at the dead man’s mangled head. “Then how,” he asked without looking up, “did he get this flat bruise on his forehead and this long one on his neck?” He threw a withering glance at the medical examiner. “What was the cause of death?”
Before the man could reply, Bergmann added, “I will have your work checked by our own medical examiner when he arrives. Meanwhile, I want this body kept well preserved. Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir. I’ll see to it,” came the nervous response. “The cause of death appears to be blunt-force trauma, but I have yet to perform an autopsy.”
“Not drowning?”
“I believe not. No water drained from his lungs. I’ll know for certain when I open him up.”
“On second thought, just store him,” Bergmann snapped. “I need competence. Our own pathologist will perform the autopsy.” He wheeled about and walked briskly out of the room.
“Take me to the jail on Rue Henri Terquem,” he ordered his driver as he climbed into his vehicle. “They call it the maison d'arrêt.” Meanwhile, he radioed his headquarters. “Arrest everyone from that row of houses where Kallsen was last seen. Bring them to the jail at Terquem.” He listened a moment. “I said everyone,” he barked. “Men, women, children. We can’t have people thinking they can kill a German soldier without consequences.”
He fumed as the vehicle rolled through the streets. His commander had pressed him for details pertaining to Kallsen’s disappearance, and he had been unable to provide any. The situation had been complicated by the Boulier family having vanished.
When he had arrived at Claude Boulier’s dairy farm on the night Kallsen went missing, it had been recently and hurriedly abandoned, with unwashed dinner plates still in the sink, beds stripped of blankets, and empty hangers lying on the mattresses. In the hay barn, his men found a root cellar, its trapdoor left wide open. In another barn, the milk cows stirred restlessly, their udders full. Bergmann ordered that they be confiscated for German army use.
Over the next two days, investigations conducted by the feldgendarmerie, the German equivalent of the US Army’s military police, revealed that Ferrand Boulier’s extended family had uprooted hurriedly, and even some of their close friends had vacated their homes. Bergmann ensured that he was informed of developments in the investigation as they occurred. Meanwhile, news trickled up from the south of acts of resistance by the populace. At Normandy, partisans had reportedly blown up fuel-oil tanks
