The Cost of Courage Read Free Page A

ends a few minutes later, when he is dumped off at La Salpêtrière, which the Germans have taken over as a prison hospital, where his wounds will be operated on.
    For the moment, the Gestapo men prefer to keep André alive because they won’t be able to torture him unless they first make an effort to nurse him back to some semblance of health.
    Despite his promised reward, Jacques is soon shipped off to Germany, where he will die in a concentration camp.
    FOR JUST ONE HOUR , the Gestapo leaves the secret apartment unoccupied and unwatched.
    Forty-five minutes have passed since the first German team has departed with André and his betrayer. Now Jacqueline, André’s sister and confederate, is at the apartment’s front door. She is there to make dinner for everyone, because — naturally — the women are expected to cook. (In prewar France women don’t even have the right to vote — a privilege de Gaulle will finally bestow upon them after the Liberation.)
    Jacqueline performs the secret knock. Hearing no answer, she lets herself in with her own key. At first, the empty apartment doesn’t make her anxious. Gradually, she senses a certain disarray, but if there is blood on the floor of the hallway outside, she hasn’t noticed it. She walks into the kitchen and begins to peel some potatoes. Then she strikes a match to light a fire beneath them.
    Suddenly, she realizes she is missing a vital part of the meal. One immutable fact of Parisian life has not been altered by the Nazi Occupation: Frenchmen still require wine with their dinner. So Jacqueline leaves the potatoes simmering on the stove and walks out the front door.
    She skips the elevator and bounces down five flights of stairs to the street. Then she walks around the corner to the neighborhood
épicerie.
There she buys a few more groceries and the vital bottle of
vin rouge.
    She will always remember this as the best-timed shopping trip of her life. When she returns to the apartment house, she notices something out front that had not been there four minutes earlier: another black Citroën Traction Avant.
    Jacqueline tiptoes into the apartment house. The passengers from the car out front have just closed the door of the elevator behind them. Now it is only one floor above her. Her body stiffens as she watches the wooden cabin rise slowly through the narrow open shaft. Second, third, fourth … finally, it stops at the fifth floor.
    Where her potatoes are cooking.
    Later, she will wonder what the Gestapo men think when they discover her potatoes on top of the kitchen stove.
    But right now, she is already sprinting toward the Métro.
    I have to save my sister.
That is her only thought.
    Most of the time, Jacqueline and Christiane don’t tell each other where they will be during the day. But today Jacqueline happens to know that her little sister has taken the afternoon off to listen to some Bach at the Palais de Chaillot.
    But the concert hall is on the Right Bank, at Trocadéro — fourteen Métro stops away.
    Jacqueline sprints eight hundred yards to the Métro Glacière. She is pretty enough to turn heads anytime, but the sight of her racing through the Métro, her arms full of groceries, makes her uncomfortably conspicuous.
    She is out of breath when she reaches the platform — just as the train DIRECTION ÉTOILE pulls into the station.
    The train’s doors close behind her; then the trip seems to take forever: Denfert-Rochereau, Raspail, Montparnasse, Pasteur — still seven more stops to go.
    Jacqueline is hardly religious, but she is praying anyway — praying that she will somehow be able to intercept her sister before she returns to the secret apartment, where the second wave of the Gestapo is now waiting to capture both of them.
    But can she possibly get there before the concert ends?
    And even if she arrives before the final notes, how will she ever be able to pick her sister out of the crowd? She has no idea where Christiane is sitting, and the Palais