Nightingale (7 page)

Chapter 13

“Where were you last night?” Heinrich asked by way of conversation.

Yves glanced around the hotel restaurant, resentful that the staff had placed them dead center. To see and be seen. His reputation was probably already ruined, though; everybody had to know he really had no choice when invited by a high-ranking officer. What he resented more was that most of the restaurant had been taken over by Germans. Several officers billeted here and made use of the facilities for lunch. It was just around the corner from the Wehrmacht headquarters, and, thoughtfully, had been decorated throughout with swastika flags. It probably ruined business in terms of foreign visitors (those that hadn’t been expelled as enemy aliens) and French guests.

He even resented drinking the coffee, although it was real beans and brewed perfectly—an increasingly rare thing if you didn’t wear a German uniform.

“I stayed over at Maurice’s. I had no hope to reach my flat before curfew.”

Heinrich wiped his lips with a serviette. “Next time, you can call on my driver.”

“I was just spending time with a friend.”

Heinrich nodded and glanced to the side for a moment. His face closed down, and Yves followed his gaze. Sure enough, von Grimmstein had entered, his gray uniform and dark collar immaculate. He was joined by two friends of equal or similar rank who nevertheless gave him wide berth.

“Ah, Captain Ahab,” Heinrich remarked dryly to Yves. “Ignore him. Maybe he’ll leave us in peace.”

Yves concentrated on his coffee and lowered his voice. “Ahab?”

Heinrich chuckled without real humor. “He’s obsessed with
Moby-Dick
. Even went whaling with a Norwegian crew to study the feasibility of industrial-scale whaling to make up for the scarcity of petroleum. The madman thinks we can run our tanks on whale oil from the Arctic.”

“Really?” Yves looked up and saw Heinrich shake his head.

“Madman, I tell you.” Heinrich leaned closer. “True to form, he told everybody who couldn’t help but hear it what a feeling it is to, quote ‘kill something so big and sentient,’ which, I rather suspect, is the true attraction for his proposal. There are men who simply enjoy killing.”

Yves couldn’t suppress a shudder. “Surely, that’s a good thing for a soldier.”

Heinrich scoffed. “A soldier works toward an objective. Killing is not a military objective in and of itself.”

Yves couldn’t hold his own in that kind of conversation. He didn’t think Heinrich had ever killed with glee; he simply wasn’t the kind of man who charged, wild-eyed, across trenches and barbed wire to bayonet an enemy. Yet, according to stories he’d heard, that hadn’t been rare in the Great War. He didn’t want to think of him as somebody who killed for a strategic or tactical objective. His own ties to soldiering had been tenuous at best, and he’d shed his uniform with nothing but relief.

Maybe his cowardice was one of the reasons the Germans hadn’t been stopped
this
time. Maybe the accusations that his generation simply lacked the courage and vigor to defend the fatherland were true after all. Certainly, the thought of facing something like von Grimmstein in battle made his heart stutter. If one people produced such men, and another didn’t, what did this spell for Europe?

“But let’s not speak of that.” Heinrich waved the waiter over. Yves watched him pay, acutely aware of von Grimmstein holding court at his table. Quite likely Heinrich was avoiding him too—and von Grimmstein was trying to attract his attention. To what end, Yves couldn’t guess. Besides, he didn’t want to get pulled into any maneuverings the Germans were doing amongst themselves. As far as he was concerned, the less attention, the better.

He received his coat and belted it while Heinrich exchanged a few words with the maître d’. Heinrich’s hand between his shoulder blades didn’t feel like an imposition; more like protection. They both seemed to breathe a sigh of relief when they left the hotel. “I would very much like to come visit you after duty,” Heinrich said, as his driver idled at the curb.

Yves nodded. “I’ll be at home.”

“No show tonight?”

“No.” Yves dug into his pockets for a cigarette. “I’ll be writing.”

“Music?”

“Maybe. I don’t know yet. There’s an . . .” He pulled a cigarette out of the pack and gesticulated with it. “Unrest. An electric charge. I don’t know how to explain it, but I think there’s a new song coming.”

“What is it about?”

“All songs are about love,” Yves said without thinking, and then was glad he could hide his face behind lighter, flame and folded hands. He inhaled, immediately wishing he’d not used that word. Heinrich’s face was immobile. “The audience loves to hear about it. That, or jokes.”

Heinrich nodded. “I’d wager people would listen to anything from you.”

“Ah-ah. No. Whenever I get too serious, people still laugh. I’m apparently even funny when I’m completely earnest. I think they just don’t believe me.”

Heinrich nodded to him and pointed toward the car. “I’ll be over at eight. My driver will take you home.”

Protest wouldn’t get him anywhere—Heinrich worked just a few minutes away, and turning down his generosity could lead to questions. He’d accepted the first rides; refusing now would look strange. So he slid into the car and allowed Heinrich to close the door behind him.

The driver briefly turned. “Home?”

Yves had no idea how good the man’s French was, but he did note that he left out any title or address or name. Was that disdain for him or insolence toward Heinrich?

He pushed into one of the corners, tried not to think about it. He’d rather start work on the song, the mood first, the opening keys of the melody. Once the first few pieces came together, he could build the rest around them. But wrestling that core of the song out of the vague potential for a song, actually crystallizing it into something tangible (well, more or less), was the hard part. Much like forcing rain from a heavy sky.

When the car stopped, the driver opened the back of the car first, pulled something out, and then opened Yves’s door.

“Oberst von Starck requests you keep hold of these,” the driver said. “He said you know what to do.”

His French was passably fluent. And he was holding something large and flat and square, wrapped in paper and held together with twine. More canvases. Yves had examined the others in their brown paper, and the wooden frame and weight and size gave them away. Paintings.

Yves glanced into the man’s eyes, but the driver merely lifted the paintings with one hand and with the other closed the door after Yves, just this side of rude.

“Thank you.”
For the ride if nothing else.

He took them upstairs and placed them gently on the table. He sat down, the lunch heavy in his stomach. These were worse than Harfner’s skull-adorned hat that had slept in his wardrobe like a time bomb. With the hat at least, he’d known how it had come into his possession, and to whom it belonged. With these canvases, nothing was clear.

He wished he could simply pick up a cognac or whiskey to settle his nerves, but opted for water. He gulped down a glassful, then returned to the living room and stared at the squares wrapped in brown paper. Misshapen puzzle pieces that would never fit.

“Unless you open them,” he muttered, clenching and unclenching his hands.

Spoken out loud, it made sense. Heinrich wouldn’t mind. They might be paintings he’d picked up in any of the galleries, paid for after the vastly inflated exchange rate of reichsmarks to francs. Yves wouldn’t have touched any of the packets if there had been just one or two. But now he had five.

They’ll be cheap views of the Eiffel Tower. Watercolors. Something any street artist could put together in an hour.

Yves picked up the sharp letter opener from the desk and sat down, pulling the largest canvas closer. He cut the twine and balled it up, then placed it to the side. His hands were surprisingly steady, although he felt like a thief as he unfolded the paper. He then gently turned the canvas around.

And almost dropped it.

It was an oil painting. Expressionist. Jagged lines, flat, two-dimensional colors. He had to put it down, because the flat blotches of color made no sense from this close. He propped it up against the couch and stepped away. It became clearer.

The brown flats were meant to be earth. The black lines, intense like Japanese calligraphy, formed barbed wire fences. The pale blue—not unlike von Grimmstein’s eyes—was sky reflecting in water. Black scrawls looked like swastikas, but upon closer inspection, they were people. Soldiers, more twisted than the landscape, and more barren and hopeless too. The title was scratched into the paint in the corner:
Still Life 1916
. The artist’s name scrawled underneath. It looked like
J. Brasche.

Yves stared at the painting. It was so primal and raw it felt like a frozen scream in his living room. There was nothing pretty about it, nothing calm or quiet, despite the name.
Still Life
. Who could bear to make something like that? He breathed against the pressure from the painting, then took it, put it face down on the table, and wrapped it again.

Above all, why had Heinrich acquired this? He’d been there. Dug himself into that same loamy brown earth—God help him—hung in that barbed wire. Been twisted like any of the other human figures in the distance. On the canvas, none of them had had a face. They’d become just irregular patterns in a landscape that defied all patterns, that had been reduced to non-shape, something worse than a desert, and much less pure. It was a landscape that shouldn’t exist, couldn’t exist, because that was clearly madness.

He lit a cigarette, trying to chase the painting from his mind. And what it said about Heinrich, who kept it. Why would anybody do that?

He returned to the table, not wanting to risk looking at another one of the paintings, but unwilling to leave it at
Still Life 1916
.

He opened the next one, turned it slowly around. His first impression was a riot of colors—blues and reds clashing, blending. It looked like abstract fire and waves, but the blue was jagged and the red smooth and wavy. It was enthusiastic, energetic. Still raw, but much less like a gut punch, more a gust of fresh air driving into a furnace, leading to sparks and a sudden whoosh of heat. It, too, was signed
J. Brasche
, but the title was
Les Amoureux
. The lovers. Yves smiled. Yes, it looked like the first flush of love, when attraction was still dangerous.

Well, two Brasches. Whoever the man was. He wrapped that painting again and felt strong enough to open the third.

Again one from the battlefield. The same brown, tortured earth, torn and sprayed and completely without root or structure, the only shapes those of stones. In the foreground was a bomb crater filled with muddy water, the surface restless. No. Yves’s eyes struggled to force sense from those blurred shapes. Again, he had to take a couple steps back, at which point the untidy shape in the water became horrifyingly clear. The shape of a soldier, face down, mostly submerged. Those were shoulders, the curve of a steel helmet. Arms outstretched somewhat, just enough to suggest the slackness of death. He was the same shade of muddy brown, impossible to tell the color of the uniform.

Signed,
Brasche
. Titled:
Le Baigneur
. The Bather.

Yves folded the brown paper back around the canvas and went into the kitchen to fetch new twine. No doubt, the other two canvases were Brasches, too. Just, right now, he didn’t want to expose himself to another. He wrapped up
Le Baigneur
and just finished tying him off like a prisoner of war, when his doorbell rang. It was only four in the afternoon, so unless Heinrich had skipped his duty—which he never did—it wasn’t him.

He considered shoving the paintings under the couch or dropping them off in the bedroom, but if it did happen to be Heinrich, that would lead to questions. He glanced through the peephole and spied Harfner, and next to him an old man he’d never seen.

Yves frowned, considered not opening, but Harfner must have heard his steps, because he now knocked. He glanced back at the canvases, then opened the door.

“Good afternoon,” Harfner said in French, bright and happy like a star pupil. “Can we come in?”

Yves nodded, exchanging glances with the old man, who wiped his face nervously and smiled at him with the wide-eyed stare of pure terror. Harfner was holding the man’s elbow rather like a prisoner’s, and Yves was half-hysterically considering telling him that he couldn’t keep his prisoners in Yves’s flat.

Harfner closed the door. “Please,” he offered and nodded toward a chair. “Sit,” he commanded the old man.

The involuntary guest scurried to a chair and sat down, stiff and still, like a man about to be executed.

Yves looked from one to the other and back. “Would you like anything to drink?”

“Water, please,” the old man said. He was French, clearly.

Harfner shook his head. “Nothing. Thank you.”

Yves went into the kitchen and filled a glass with water. He didn’t tarry, and saw the relief in his guest’s eyes. They were in this together. Yves nodded at him, trying to calm the man, although he felt anything but calm himself. “What does this mean?”