At the Edge of Summer

I sat in the Gare du Nord with my head in my hands. I’d stood over Bauer with the knife in my hands. If that milk cart hadn’t come by when it did, I would have killed him. I would have. But he scrambled up and away, and I was left with the battered suitcase and blood on my hands.

I brought it into the train station. I cleaned up as best I could in the lavatory and dropped the knife through the tracks. And then, not knowing what else to do, I sat on a bench in the departure court, sitting on my shaking hands.

Bauer was bleeding and bruised. He was without his camera and suitcase. Did that mean he wouldn’t finish his mission? I knew him too well. He’d lay low until he could get another camera. He was probably at Lili’s, licking his wounds. Wondering what had given him away on the streets of Paris.

I sat all day, watching trains come and go, watching people pass, not quite knowing what to do. I walked from the departure court into the station, pacing the edge of the tracks. Would he come here? Would he try to leave Paris? I leaned against the wall, tired and watchful, and bought strong black coffee. With all of the refugees crowded in the station, one more itinerant didn’t matter.

Gare du Nord was crowded and buzzing. Suitcases and trunks were piled higgledy-piggledy on the platforms, overflowing from the baggage rooms. People clustered, holding tight to cloth bags and parcels and the odd treasure saved when they fled. Clutching wedding tickings, Bibles, or gilt-framed paintings, they complained to each other in county patois. Most were refugees who had come into Paris years ago; only now were they looking to leave.

Their nightmares were over. I thought that mine were gone, too. That other night, that night Clare kept watch, I’d slept soundly, for the first time in a long while. Maybe it was her lingering perfume, maybe the pad of her bare feet, maybe the way she couldn’t help but touch the side of my face when she thought I was asleep. But I’d dozed, for once at peace.

Now, crouched in the station, slipping in and out of that half sleep, the nightmares returned. Nothing specific; not the kind of dreams Chaffre’s Austrian doctor could find anything in. Sharp, shapeless shadows, screams that burrowed into my brain, aching pain in each limb. I woke sweating and buried my face so no one could see it. Through my haversack the mask dug into my hip.

It was exhausting, this remembering. My shoulder throbbed, and again and again I heard that thump as Chaffre fell next to me. I closed my eyes, to summon up memories of the other night, of Clare in the candlelight, of Clare touching my face, but all I could think of was Bauer, taunting, telling me nothing had changed. He had said “battle,” and, like an infection, the word had brought up every blood-slick battle there’d been, until I was afraid to close my eyes.

I could end it all. I could take the suitcase to one of the policier on the platform. It’s what I should have done the moment I entered the station. Passed on the suitcase and said there was a spy in Paris. He’d probably slunk back to Lili’s or else was lurking around the station the way I was, watching for a train to Berlin. They could find him.

But he was right. The war was over. The only one left was my own. My battle was with the past and what it left me with. I wasn’t alone. I saw it in the shattered, spent faces of the refugees in the station. All we wanted to do was sleep, not because our bones were weary, but because our hearts were.

“Monsieur, are you hurt?” It was a young girl, a refugee, with red-brown curls falling from beneath a knit cap. “You look tired.” Though she looked too old for it, she had a faded rag doll tucked into the front strap of her knapsack.

“Tired.” I rubbed the corner of my eye, remembering I wore no mask. But she didn’t flinch. “But why, of everyone in the station, are you speaking to me?”

She shrugged. “I thought you were lonely.”

“Where’s your family?” No one came to shoo her away from the monster. No one came to shake a finger at me for talking to this girl who looked so like Clare. “Mademoiselle, I could be a bad man.”

A sadness crept into her eyes and she touched the doll at her shoulder. “I don’t think there are really bad men anymore.” Behind her, a train whistled. “Only scared ones.”

Once I’d been scared and my best friend had died. I stood. I couldn’t look the other way while Stefan Bauer hurt someone else again.

A policier strode the platform in his dark uniform. I approached with the battered suitcase. “Monsieur.”

His hand went to his belt as he turned. I ducked my head.

“What is it?” He tapped his heels impatiently.

I wondered if I was making too much of it. In my hands, the suitcase looked innocuous. And maybe it was. The Paris I saw every day, shedding its mourning, wasn’t the defeated city of Bauer’s photos. Maybe he had nothing in the suitcase.

The refugee girl stood by the bench with her knapsack. Though she’d lost her home, she still refused to see the bad in the world. She didn’t know that it stalked the streets of this very city.

I lifted my chin. “Monsieur, I’ve seen a spy.” I opened the suitcase. “And I think I know where he is.”