The Blackbirder by Dorothy B. Hughes Page A

the Guilles found her. She hadn't taken them for that reason. It had been in order that the pride, the ancestral treasure, of the Guilles, wouldn't fall into the desecrating hands of the Nazis. Frozen with fear, trembling through the darkened upper stories of the house, she had halted Tanya while she slipped into Aunt Lily's room, filched the necklace from the familiar blue velvet box. Paul had brought it home from the vaults the day war was declared. Stealing? Not then. She who was escaping would act as their custodian. That was before, peering through the banisters, she saw that scene she could never forget. Emeralds in the gilt of Aunt Lily's hair, the gold green of her Patou model. Paul's waxen toupee, waxen mustache, above his white tie. Nazis in dress uniform and grating medals. The acrid scent of champagne. The shame of laughter.
    She turned on Jacques fiercely, as if he had spoken. “Certainly they supported me. They kept me. I was their kept child. I thought I had everything. I had. Everything but freedom. I could say and do and go any place and anything I wanted as long as it was what they wanted. I didn't know it then. They kept me stupid, ignorant, so that I wouldn't know. I've learned in three years.” She halted her words. This personal problem couldn't interest him— more important things had laid their weight. She demanded, “Paul gave Tanya over to them?”
    “I didn't know,” Jacques said. “I came back to Paris. I went to the Duc again. For work. I didn't know he was searching for Tanya.” His voice was iron. “I killed her. I led them to her.” He didn't ask sympathy; he told Julie, “I killed her.”
    “No.”
    “They put her in a concentration camp. They tried to find out where you were. She didn't know. They didn't kill her right away. They didn't kill her until— until she was dying.”
    She whimpered, “Jacques. How do you know these things?”
    His mouth was vicious. “The Duc told me. When he was trying to convince me I should do a task for him.”
    “That is why you are here. To find me.”
    He said simply, “You were Tanya's friend. I would not hurt a hair of your head, Julie. You were kind to her.”
    “I?”
    “Don't you remember? You protected her from the Duc's anger?”
    She hadn't remembered. It wasn't kindness; it was what anyone would have done. When Tanya first came to work for the Guilles. Julie had stepped between Paul's cane and the girl. Julie hadn't been more than fourteen years at the time. She hadn't thought of it in years. The cane had left a red wedge on her face for days. Her fear of him must have come after that scene; there was none in her when she threatened she would leave his house forever, go to the trustees in America, if he dared touch Tanya again. Julie had won. He wasn't going to let her money escape him. But he had held hatred since that day for a child's defiance of him. There had been residue of that hate when he gave Tanya to torture.
    She said now, “It was I who killed Tanya.” And she knew with certainty one thing: she herself would see that he answered for Tanya's death.
    Jacques shook his head. “She helped many to escape. She knew the risk. That was her work, what she remained in France to do. They called her a Communist. They said that was why she was arrested. She wasn't. She'd never even been to a Popular Front meeting. She was a Frenchwoman.”
    Jacques and Tanya had been married just before he went away to war. They hadn't known the war would be so short. They hadn't dreamed he would be the one left to mourn.
    Julie was deliberately matter-of-fact. “Paul sent you to find me.”
    “No. He sent me to help Fran.”
    “He knew that Fran was in prison?” But of course he would. Fran would write his father for help. Fran didn't know that Paul's allegiance was to the Axis. Fran should have known as she should have known. The Croix de Feu meetings in the Guille ballroom. Later the Francistes. The dark oily little man with blubber lips.