The Nicotine Chronicles Read online

  Cries of pain, the Germans shouting, the crack of gunshots.

  The partisans should have surrounded the uncoupled supply train blown off the track. By now they should be recovering munitions, opening fire on the soldiers. But she saw only German troop trucks pulling up, heard gunshots but no returning gunfire.

  Someone tipped off the Germans. Her mind went back to Azores . . . the train engineer. Both would identify her.

  So terribly wrong: innocent children killed and her alone with a pistol to battle the arriving troops. She’d deal with them later. She had to get to the convent, recoup, and salvage this botched mission.

  But her legs didn’t work. Head down, she worked her way, straining to pull herself along on her elbows. Trying to half crawl through the crackling brush, grass, with dirt in her mouth. Angry tears streaked her face. Her scratched arms bled, her legs useless and trailing heavy behind her.

  Shouts in German. Keep going, she had to keep going. Burning pain lanced up her legs. With her hands out she gripped a tree sapling as the forest appeared.

  She pulled with all her might. Pull by pull, grabbing rocks and anything to move herself forward. Perspiring and panting, she kept at it. Finally she stuck a thick twig between her teeth and bit down. Otherwise she’d scream as her raw skin was scraped off her bleeding legs. Tree to bush through the green dappled forest for she didn’t know how long. Then she passed out.

  * * *

  Mila came to struggling for breath. A hand covered her mouth. The hand belonged to a black bird towering over her. Cloying scents of antiseptic mingled with damp. Her legs throbbed in pain.

  The bird leaned closer, removing her hand, whispering in French, “We found you at the gate.” This black bird, Mila realized, was a nun, her pale face framed by a stiff black wimple. “You were on the train, non?”

  She tried to sit up. Her elbows stung, her legs were bandaged. “Felicité,” she said, gasping her code name.

  “Valentine,” the nun responded. The code for the convent contact.

  She had to trust this nun. No other choice. “Where are the partisans?”

  “Shh.” The nun put a finger on Mila’s lips. “No idea. The Abwehr’s here investigating the sabotage.”

  Already. Azores had betrayed her. Or the engineer.

  “What happened?”

  Gray gothic arches loomed above her. Cots with moaning figures, blood-soaked blankets, ringed what she took for a cloister.

  “You bombed a train with little children.”

  “Things went wrong.” Mila pulled the nun close, winced at the pain, and whispered, “Someone betrayed our plan. Our target was the supply cars going to the front.”

  She saw horror in the nun’s eyes.

  “You have to believe me,” said Mila. “This wasn’t meant to happen.” Her legs throbbed with pain. Around her came more groaning and moans.

  “Give me your papers,” the nun whispered.

  Mila shook her head. “Gone.”

  Not only had she tossed her forged identity papers into the flames, she’d lost her gun somewhere on the embankment near the teacher’s body. Not only had she failed her mission, she prayed to God the false papers with her photo had burned. The little boy’s torso swam in front of her eyes.

  “Schwester? Kommen sie hier bitte,” a German voice barked.

  “Oui, monsieur, un moment,” the nun said, and leaned down. “The Germans threaten reprisals.”

  She had to trust the nun. What else could she do? “They’re looking for me.”

  Alarm filled the nun’s pale face.

  “Hide me.”

  She felt the nun’s arms behind her back, helping her sit up. Her legs hung from the cot. When she tried to stand up she tumbled back. She couldn’t feel any strength in her legs. Only the lancing pain. She couldn’t walk.

  “Bandage my face,” she whispered to the nun. “Please, now.”

  The nun bandaged her face, hung sheets around the makeshift cot. Put her finger to her lips and stole away.

  Mila fought the pain tossing and turning. She heard the cries of the wounded punctuated by a pumping of a hand-operated oxygen tank. Behind the sheets lay the makeshift operating area under the arches.

  Darkness fell. Kerosene lanterns lit the temporary clinic. Intermittent shots rang out in the night.

  German reprisals?

  She shuddered and felt herself reaching for something to shoot the bastards. But her legs were useless. Her arms ached and defeat seeped into her bones.

  On and off she dozed, her dreams filled with the young woman’s lifeless gaze. The nightmare of the German work camp she’d escaped from with the partisans’ help.

  The morning, cream-yellow slants of sun, penetrated the shadows through the break in the sheets. Birds twittered in the courtyard above the tramp of boots. Through the eye slits in the bandage she saw gray-green uniforms walking among the wounded.

  Looking for her. The sheets parted.

  “Name?” a voice demanded beside her bed. She could see the pistol glinting at his hip.

  Ice filled her veins, she cleared her throat. Mumbled “Marie” in a hoarse voice.

  “Your papers?” The soldier smelled of tobacco, sweat.

  “Lost? I don’t know.”

  “Remove your bandages.”

  Now she was caught. Her hands itched under the sheets to grab his pistol. She could just reach it . . . her fingers were touching the leather holster, sliding up to the metal . . .

  “Désolée, monsieur,” said the nun. “The doctor insists she stay bandaged to avoid infection of her burns.”

  The black flash of the nun’s habit. Coarse wool brushed her knuckles. Seething inside, she pulled her fingertips back under the sheets.

  “Show me her identification.”

  “We’ve got so many patients. I want to help but I’m not aware of her identification.”

  “We’re ordered to look for saboteurs,” he said.

  A swish of the nun's habit, the fabric brushing the sheets. “Of course, please check with Mother Superior.”

  Finally, she heard his boots shuffle away.

  “Never do that again,” said the nun, her voice close to her ear.

  The nun had seen her hand.

  “My job’s to take them out.”

  “And risk the life of every patient here? Cause our convent to be burned to the ground and more reprisals out in the village?”

  Why not? died on Mila’s lips.

  “At least you didn’t say you wanted to save his soul,” said Mila. “None of these soldiers have one.”

  “Killing brings more killing.”

  Mila wanted revenge. She’d bide her time.

  * * *

  What good was she? Hiding, her legs useless. The Allies were coming and her partisans were supposed to damage the supply lines to Bastogne.

  Behind the rigged sheets her eye caught on a sagging, half-broken wheelchair. Wincing, she pulled herself onto the old-fashioned cane seat, World War I vintage by the feel of it. Fighting the pain, she grabbed the worn wheels, concentrated on rolling them over the uneven stone pavers and cracks.

  Two soldiers headed her way. Sweat dripped down her neck under the bandages, her useless toes dragged on the stone. As fast as she could, she turned the wheels to the right. The chair glided down a ramp into a refectory with long wooden tables, a stone fireplace filling one wall.

  Keep going. She had to keep this chair moving. Summoning what strength she had, she rolled the wheels down a hall. Then into a vaulted storeroom lined with sacks of flour and barrels of sea salt. Wanting to rest, she forced herself to keep going, drawn by sweet yeasty smells of baking bread. Heaven.

  A figure fed wood into the fire below a huge wall oven.

  Baking bread at a time like this?

  Candles sputtered, throwing shadows on the damp stone. In the corner her eyes made out the white coat of a doctor. As her eyes accustomed to the flickering light, she gasped. The doctor bent over a man in blood-s
oaked blue overalls lying on flour sacks. Max, the train engineer.

  The traitor?

  A wizened nun, older and thin, straightened up, wiped her brow, and ignored Mila. She took a set of surgical instruments glistening in the light from a blue-and-white-checked towel.

  “All sterilized, docteur.”

  “Will he live?” Mila said. Live long enough to get the truth out of him?

  “Ask me tonight if the Abwehr don’t find him,” the nun said. “Hand the doctor the instruments when he asks.”

  “But . . .”

  “It’s only your legs that don’t work,” she said.

  * * *

  In the following days, Mila made use of the order and convent routine: the baking, her anointed role as nurse to the wounded engineer. But she couldn’t stomach the morning prayers, only pretending to avoid the Germans’ notice.

  She watched for the soldiers and crouched, hiding under the huge rough-hewn wood flour table when they made the rounds. Her plan was simple: hide here, recover enough to walk, and join the partisans.

  An old woman from the village brought the nuns potatoes from her farm. Mila traded the old woman cigarettes for gathering yarrow, red clover, wood sorrel, and yellow dock from the forest. Mila ground these into a paste using the kitchen’s mortar and pestle. During her childhood, Mila had helped her grandmother make medicinal salves to treat burns, cuts, skin lesions. She winced applying her herbal salve, smelling of plants and the forest, on the raw, singed flesh of her legs. Even applied her ointment to the engineer’s wounds.

  Each day, Valentine, the nun, joined her—wrapping bandages and sterilizing surgical instruments. Sister Valentine, as she called her, was around the same age as Mila.

  “Your salve is healing your burns,” said Sister Valentine. “You’re good with patients. A natural healer.”

  “My mother was a nurse,” she said. “But that’s not my calling.”

  “Why not? Your mother taught you well, obviously. Wouldn’t she be glad to know how you’re helping?”

  Mila looked at the birds in the courtyard, the green canopy of trees. Cast back into the past for a moment, she struggled to explain. “My mother treated fellow prisoners at a women’s camp. One of the guards accused her of stealing. The Boche beat her to death. My father disappeared in a roundup. Me, I’m getting them back . . .” Mila stopped rolling a bandage. “But you wouldn’t understand.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “What do you know of that hell? Your family gone. You just pray for everyone’s souls.”

  “I took my vows last year. It released me to let the past go.” A tranquility showed in Sister Valentine’s eyes. “I’m guided by God’s vision in how to help those who need help.”

  Mila took a pinch of tobacco, papers, and rolled a cigarette from her hidden stash. Lit it, trying to think of a comeback. But at that moment a soldier walked through the cloister ward. Mila put her head down before he could glimpse her now-unbandaged face. His heavy boots clomped on the stone coming toward them.

  Had he recognized her? Matched her face to a Wanted poster? Her hand trembled, the cigarette smoke in a crazy spiral.

  Her nerves rattled even after he’d passed by.

  * * *

  A day later the nuns brought in a bandaged young woman for Mila’s help. The woman lay semiconscious. Mila removed her jacket and felt something heavy in the pocket.

  A wallet with fifty francs, ration coupons, and her carte d’identité. Sylvie Villon, age twenty-four, a teacher in Rouen. But the photo on the card startled her. This was the young woman from the train, the dead woman whose blue scarf with butterflies she’d found on the embankment by her severed arm. This injured young woman only had a vague resemblance to the dead teacher. The teacher whose death she’d caused.

  By mistake the dead woman’s papers had gone into this young woman’s pocket. Mila thought quick. When no one looked she hid them.

  Her burns itched less now. Her burned skin was shedding on her legs revealing spots of new pink skin. She chopped off her braid with the surgical scissors so her hair more resembled the teacher’s photo on the ID. She forced herself to stand, put weight on her legs. Using a broom, she made herself take a step. Then another. Mila planned and envisioned her escape to the forest and to finding the partisans. At night by the oven, as the loaves baked, the engineer spoke rambling disconnected words. She understood little, not knowing if he expected replies. A monologue punctuated by eh voilà, compris? She’d nod.

  She found Sister Valentine in the chapel. Praying on a kneeler. The smell of melting wax from the votive candles.

  “You have to help me,” she whispered to the nun.

  “Of course, we will pray. Together.”

  “Prayer won’t help this situation.” Mila heard the wounded. Those moaning in pain outside in the cloister. “Help me fight back.”

  “This is fighting back.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “So tell me.”

  “My mother treated injured women in the camp. But that wasn’t good enough. A guard accused her of theft. The commandant rewarded her with special treatment and beat her to death. My train to a work camp derailed and I escaped thanks to the partisans.”

  “I’m sorry.” Sister Valentine reached into her pocket and pressed something in her hand.

  In the flickering light of the votive candle, Mila found a pack of Gitanes cigarettes. French ones. Inside a message on a cigarette paper. She unrolled it. Evacuate the patients slowly to the post office within two weeks.

  “The Allies are coming.” Mila pulled her closer. “Did the partisans give you this?”

  “Days ago. Nothing more.”

  “You must get them a message. Tonight you have to help me.”

  “To do what?”

  “Help me contact them so they know the Germans’ movements. Tell them I’m here.”

  “I’ll try but I won’t help you take lives.”

  “What do you know of war? Losing your family?”

  Sister Valentine took out her rosary. Made the sign of the cross. “My brother and father were hanged in the village,” the nun said, her voice low. “Left to hang from the lampposts as a warning. They’d done nothing but the Germans demanded ten lives for every German killed. My mother and grandmother were in the fields harvesting the wheat when a plane strafed and killed them.”

  Mila had no idea. “That’s why you’re helping the partisans, I understand.”

  “Do you? I forgave those men. Left the heaviness of revenge to concentrate on good. Do you think killing will solve anything? I find peace in trying to heal people. To save lives. I think you do too.”

  “Never.”

  “You’re afraid to let goodness in and you feel guilty for not taking revenge for your mother. Ask yourself what she’d say.”

  Mila didn’t want to think what her mother would say. Or about the past. But the honeysuckle vines in the cloister brought her back to her family’s kitchen, scents from something bubbling on the stove, reminded her of the honeysuckle draping the wall by her mother’s laundry tub, simple things yet the warm feelings of home.

  Mila woke up in the night racked by dreams of her mother. The last thing her mother had told her: Don’t let the demons win.

  * * *

  As Mila washed the engineer’s wounds she began to understand his rambling words. He spoke about his pigeons, his treasured roost on the rooftop of his mother’s farmhouse, the gray-spotted pigeon who carried messages. The slow dawning of his meaning came clearer to her every night. He’d communicated with the partisans by carrier pigeon. Yet every time she tried to talk with him, his answers made no sense.

  She battled impatience at her slow recovery, chafing to move on. Disappointed at the few steps she managed. Every day she forced herself to take more, until one day a week later she walked the perimeter of the vaulted cavern. Once, twice, and then she’d ventured to the courtyard entrance.

  She longed to walk out past t
he old stone covered by flowering honeysuckle to the courtyard. It looked so peaceful, so calm now since most of the wounded had been sent to a hospital in Rouen or evacuated. Tempted for the millionth time to walk out the nunnery doors to the dirt road, find her way back to the partisans.

  This morning she saw no French police, no German soldiers. Why not? she thought, breathing in the perfumed honeysuckle. But a prickling in her heart held her back. Nursing the wounded had begun to feel important, vital, and a tranquility seeped into her from the nuns.

  What if she stayed?

  Just then she heard the rumble of a car engine, slamming doors. She saw a parked black Mercedes with small swastika flags on either side of the hood and a Wehrmacht driver accompanying a man entering the nunnery gate.

  Mila stepped back behind a stone arch.

  Chills rippled her spine. Obviously familiar with the cloister, the man headed to the head sister’s office in the convent rectory.

  She couldn’t make out the uniformed driver’s features but the man with him looked innocuous—rumpled brown linen suit, round sunglasses, blond thinning hair, on the slight side, reminding her of an academic. A professor.

  A French collaborator? But he was speaking German to the soldier. He looked familiar.

  The wizened nun stepped out to greet him at the cloister’s door.

  “We know the saboteur’s here. She’s the last of the partisans,” he said now in French.

  The last of the partisans.

  He took off his sunglasses to reveal a darting gaze. Those gray eyes . . . where had she seen them?

  Then it came back to her. Her heart raced. The man in the café when Azores passed her the message.

  Behind him was Azores. The traitor.

  No wonder they’d found the partisans. As fast as she could, she hobbled back to the oven room.

  “Trouble, you’re just trouble,” the old nun shook her finger at her. The wounded engineer was nowhere in sight. “He’s conducting another search.”

  Mila saw the panic on the nun’s face. “Who’s he, that man in the brown suit with the soldier?”