Except she didn’t have a choice.
Maybe ... what if he didn’t have a choice either?
Nonsense. She licked a bookplate and stuck it insideHamlet.There was a world of difference between selling a book and selling hundreds of vehicles. He did it for money. She did it because refusing a sale would mean ... what? They wouldn’t arrest her. But they could shut down her store.
The door opened, and a young man entered, the one who kept leaving notes inside books. He returned Lucie’s greeting, passed Wattenberg without flinching, pulled a book from the nonfiction section, and settled into a chair.
Lucie stuck a bookplate insideOthello, flicking glances at the two men. Wattenberg, skimming a novel. Mystery Man, absorbed in his book.
She’d sneaked a look at his notes—although it wasn’t sneaking if he left them inherbooks. Other young people fetched the notes, sometimes buying the book and sometimes slipping out the note and leaving.
Always, Lucie pretended to be oblivious.
But she wasn’t. They were part of the resistance, and ideas spun in Lucie’s head.
Wattenberg came to the cash register. “Have you books from Ernest Hemingway?”
“Hemingway?” She had a dozen of his books in her hideaway behind the mural.
“Ja.Years ago I readThe Sun Also Rises. It was...” He pressed a fist to his chest and got a faraway look. “Good. The language was straight. I understood the English.”
Straight. Not the most poetic way she’d heard Hemingway’s prose described, yet it fit.
“It is why I come to the Latin Quarter. I feel him here.” Wattenberg’s eyes shone silver.
An impulse burned inside her to return his kindness. To tell him she’d met the author many times in this very store. To free a novel from banishment to give to a man who talked of arts and literature, never of ideology or conquest.
Intuition overrode impulse. She only sold those books totrusted customers. What if Wattenberg meant to trap her into committing a crime?
Lucie affixed a bookplate into a volume of sonnets. “Your nation has banned the sale of Hemingway’s books.”
Wattenberg’s face scrunched up. “Hemingway also?”
“Hemingway also.” Along with a thousand books on the Otto List published by the German Embassy where Wattenberg worked.
“May I be honest?” The officer leaned closer, his elbows on the counter.
Lucie drew back. “Of course.”
“I was in Berlin that night—big fire, books burned. I cried like a child.”
Yet he still put on the Wehrmacht uniform.
Wattenberg straightened up. “I will buy this instead.”
An Ellery Queen book,The Greek Coffin Mystery. Sadly appropriate as his fellow German soldiers trampled Greek soil.
At last he left.
From a table in the fiction section, Lucie picked up books discarded by three gangly boys from the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. She left some behind to keep the homey atmosphere.
Then she rounded the bookcase to nonfiction.
Mystery Man slipped a book onto the shelf and left the store.
Lucie straightened chairs until he closed the door. Then she snatched up the book. Another note. The wordPlacidefaced page 13. Then a letterJwith an arrow pointing down.
Impulse and intuition danced in harmony, with conviction thumping in rhythm.
