The Lyon Affair: A French Resistance novel Read online

  The Lyon Affair

  A French Resistance novel

  Ellie Midwood

  Contents

  Book two in the Indigo rebels series

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Epilogue

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  Book two in the Indigo rebels series

  1

  Lyon, November 1940

  The air was full of electricity. Etienne stepped from the train to the platform and narrowed his intelligent, gray eyes which rivaled the color of the mist settling over his hometown in the early hours of the hazy morning. His hand, encased in a tailored black glove, clenched the handle of the patent leather valise he carried, guarding the secret possessions carefully concealed in its double bottom. His young, narrow face with its chiseled features didn’t betray any emotion, just like it hadn’t when the uniformed, beady-eyed men, who entered the train one station away from the Demarcation Line, spent several minutes in his compartment checking his papers with envious thoroughness. Tall, collected, elegantly dressed – he simply didn’t fall under their definition of a criminal. Yet, soon he would become their worst enemy. Etienne’s lips barely twitched at the thought, and a permanent mask of aloof detachment settled in place once again.

  The mist thickened as Etienne made his way out of the Gare de Lyon-Perrache, threatening to burst into a late autumn storm and drench him to the bone. He quickened his pace, determined to get his precious cargo home intact, and excused himself before a man, who he had almost run into while pushing the station door open. Etienne stepped onto the curb of the sidewalk and raised his arm, throwing yet another concerned glance at the clouds gathering above, heavy with water. A taxi cab pulled over at once, sensing a generous tip from an obviously wealthy traveler, and Etienne slipped inside, only now releasing the tension from his shoulders. He leaned back onto the seat, fixed his fedora hat in a practiced gesture, and grinned inwardly, restraining himself from showing any emotion to the unsuspecting driver. Free Zone or no Free Zone, here the policy of the collaboration thrived as strongly as ever, and more than anything he didn’t need to raise any suspicion.

  Having arrived at the door of his family house, Etienne handed the driver his money and hurried inside, into the safety of the familiar walls within which he had grown up. Only after extracting his punishable-by-prison contraband from its secret compartment, still dressed in his gray cashmere coat, did Etienne allow himself to laugh victoriously, smoothing out the pages of the paper with his hands. The first trip was a success. Now, he only needed to put the whole scheme to work.

  Dijon, November 1940

  Blanche was putting four more beer mugs in front of the uniform-clad patrons who frequented Monsieur Morin’s Bistro, invading the tight, smoke-filled space with their banter, when she felt a hand insolently sliding from the small of her back to her behind. Barely containing herself from slapping the sneering offender, who didn’t seem deterred in the slightest by the manner in which she straightened at once, almost spilling the beer on the grease-stained wooden table. Blanche willed herself to keep her anger at bay and forced a lopsided grin on her face instead.

  “Would you like anything else?” she asked through gritted teeth, seething at the very nature of being in such a humiliating situation.

  Swallowing her anger and repulsion was the only thing that she could afford to do; losing her job at Morin’s was not a possibility. After the rationing had been imposed in September, everyone was struggling to keep their belly full. Here she could at least collect scraps after the feasts, in which the Germans indulged almost every evening, and take them home to her mother and two young sisters - not that they showed any gratitude for her efforts. Sometimes Blanche wondered why she exerted herself to please them at all.

  The bitter truth was that Blanche had been a stranger in her own home since the day she was born, on a rainy October evening in 1917, much to her mother’s displeasure. A small, pale and watery-eyed newborn with a down of ash-blonde hair on the top of her head, she had been scoffed at from the early days of her miserable existence, first by her mother, Anne, then by her father (who grudgingly allowed her to call him Papa, even though it was common knowledge that Blanche was a product of her mother’s infidelity with some Boche, from whom the girl had inherited her pale looks and tall stature), and lastly her sisters, who were born after her father’s return from the war.

  Anne, a gaunt, weary woman with dull black eyes, and hands that were invariably red and rough from working as a washwoman claimed that the German had forced himself on her. The neighbors appeared to be skeptical of her mother’s account of events of years long gone and smirked while debating whether Anne had voluntarily gone with the same Boche more than once, hardly minding all the bread and cheese he had brought her during that time. Whatever the truth, Blanche, named after her pallid, almost translucent skin and milky-white hair, was constantly reminded of her dubious parentage both by her family and any willing outsider. And so, she grew, quiet and subdued, yet watchful and resentful, until the past came to haunt both her and her whole country, with the cursed Germans whom she had learned to loathe since her early years.

  Blanche held the gaze of the pale-blue eyes, much like her own, of the sneering man sitting in front of her and considered how wonderful, how satisfying, it would be to take that dagger hanging on his belt and plunge it right into his throat so he would choke on his blood together with his beer.

  “Anything else?” she demanded again, a tone louder than before after he didn’t deign to grace her with a reply.

  “Ja.” His drunken leer grew wider as he deliberately outstretched his arm to place it firmly on her behind once again. “You.”

  His comrades broke into boisterous laughter as Blanche stepped away, squeezing her hands into fists. With inhuman willpower, she forced herself not to pick up one of the fresh beer mugs and splash it into his red face, glistening with sweat.

  “Pig,” she muttered under her breath, then she turned around on her heels, tore the apron from her waist and headed to the kitchen with the sudden resolution to collect her daily pay.

  The following morning, in the glow of the rising sun, Blanche gathered her meager possessions, which all fit into a small rucksack. She counted the money that she had been saving for quite some time as if anticipating that something would soon force her out of her childhood home, and headed straight to the railway station. Upon reaching the Demarcation Line, it turned out to be rather simple to find a man who would take her across the border for the right sum. In less than two days she reached her final destination – Lyon.

  The morning she stepped off the crowded train in Lyon, it smelled of rain and electricity. Blanche shivered in her worn-out overcoat as she stood just outside the entrance of the Gare de Lyon-Perrache and pondered her options. A tall, elegantly dressed man almost stumbled into her in his hurry to hail a taxi cab, anticipating the approaching storm as well, no doubt. Blanche slid her gaze over him with a surge of bitter jealousy, at his polished shoes, warm gloves and the patent leather valise t
hat he carried. Handsome, groomed and rich – everything that she was not. She drank in his features with puzzling greediness while he, oblivious to her scrutiny, disappeared inside the cab and out of sight… But not out of her life, of that Blanche was strangely and inexplicably certain. She raised her gaze to the dreary, leaded clouds gathering above, inhaled a full chest of the wet air which was interlaced with traces of grease and the coal of the train, and started making her way into the heart of the city. She would figure something out. She always did. The cruel world had taught her that skill all too well.

  Father Yves pressed an old, leather-bound Bible to his lips and opened it to the page which contained the subject that he’d been pondering for quite a while now. In his days in the seminary, he was taught to always deliver his sermons to the parish on topics not only relevant to recent events but, more importantly, to always speak of what touched his heart personally. It was drilled into him that every subject matter that concerned the priest must be transferred from him to the parish, for the priest is still a man, though he is a servant of God first, and therefore his conscience is the ultimate litmus test reflecting the conscience of the community entrusted to him. The issue was that Yves had lied to get into the seminary, so his conscience was far from being clean.

  His strawberry-blond hair reflected the liquid gold pouring onto his imposing frame from the tens of candles around him, forming a halo above his temple with their radiant light. His palm and graceful fingers gently caressed the lines of the passage that he had prepared for Sunday Mass a day ago. The gaze of his gray eyes, with silver specks in them, was downcast, his brows drawn in concentration. Father Yves cleared his throat and looked over his parish again. The chief of police sat in the front row, as expected, together with his wife and their two children, who always fidgeted despite their mother’s constant attempts to hush them. Next to him was the butcher, who never ceased to wipe his round, red face with a handkerchief even in the coldest months of winter, and his spouse and their little clan of five, as rosy-faced and plump as their parents. More civil servants occupied the pews behind them, all solemn, well-fed and thoroughly trying to muster a pious air as if competing with their neighbors. The unfamiliar face of a pale, white-haired girl caught Father Yves’s eye just before he returned to the passage in his Bible. He gave himself a mental note to welcome her to his church after the sermon was over. Apart from the mysterious newcomer, Father Yves recognized everyone in his charge, after ten long years.

  “Psalm 37:1-6. Do not fret because of those who are evil or be envious of those who do wrong; for like the grass they will soon wither, like green plants they will soon die away. Trust in the Lord and do good; dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture. Take delight in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the Lord; trust in Him, and He will do this: He will make your righteous reward shine like the dawn, your vindication like the noonday sun.” Yves’s assertive voice reverberated around the marble columns and the statues of the saints, bowing their heads in their everlasting prayer.

  The chief of police shifted in his seat, throwing a quick glare at the priest.

  Yves noticed his shuffling and opened another page of his Bible. “Deuteronomy 31:6. Be strong and courageous. Do not fear or be in dread of them, for it is the Lord your God who goes with you. He will not leave you or forsake you.”

  The butcher cleared his throat rather loudly. Yves suppressed a grin, sensing both men’s discomfort, and continued nonetheless.

  “Psalm 57:6. They set a net for my steps; my soul was bowed down. They dug a pit in my way, but they have fallen into it themselves.” Yves raised his gaze to his parishioners, some of them fidgeting uncomfortably; some staring at him with unconcealed apprehension creasing their foreheads. “Today I want to speak to you about our enemies. I have been reflecting for quite some time on this subject, and the conclusion that I have come to is that even the most pious of people have always had enemies. Even the Lord our God Himself. This doesn’t reflect on the pious people, though, but more so on those very enemies, who are base and vile to such an extent that they can’t recognize the light of the good, upon whom they wish malice. They aren’t powerful on their own, and therefore their power is in numbers. They deceive and lure more and more men into their rows to conquer the good. They try to confuse the conquered and spread their venom even among the righteous. They refuse to recognize the light and succumb to the darkness instead. And that, as our Lord said, will be their downfall. I was asked by some of my parishioners a few months ago, before they set out on their perilous journey to defend our land from the enemy, if killing in a time of war is considered a sin and which duty they should choose, of the two most sacred ones: the duty of a Christian or the duty of a soldier? I admit that I didn’t have a proper answer for them then, so I advised them to act by their conscience and pray to the Lord so He could give them a better answer than His humble servant. Today, I have an answer for those young men. Jesus Christ, our Lord, was not a pacifist. In fact, He sent Israelis to war Himself, but the war was justified, a war that would prevent bigger evils from happening. We aren’t always meant to love our enemies if such enemies are so consumed by darkness that it starts threatening our very existence. And in cases like this, it is our sacred duty to defend the light, even with lifting a sword and taking a life. To the former soldiers, who have been returned to us recently and some of whom are present here today; do not torment yourselves over your deeds, for you are the righteous ones. Do not be afraid, for you carry the light within yourselves. Trust in the Lord our God and remember his wisdom: ‘Do not fret because of those who are evil or be envious of those who do wrong; for like the grass they will soon wither, like green plants they will soon die away.’ Amen.”

  A chorus of subdued voices murmured Amen together with Father Yves; he turned away to prepare the wine and bread, though he didn’t fail to notice the doubtful glares of the parish that once used to be so indifferently compliant. At least there was still something that could stir their apathetic souls, even if it was outrageously against everything that their new leader, Maréchal Pétain, preached. Only, unlike Monsieur Maréchal, Yves didn’t believe in collaboration. Or, to put it more precisely, he’d witnessed firsthand what happened when invaders came to one’s land, and ardently believed that they had to be stopped before more blood would be shed. Yves was among the righteous who had stopped them once already, during the Great War; only, he had hoped to escape from his past once and for all, hiding within the solemn walls of the church, from the demons who seemed to laugh at such wishful thinking. Far too many lives were on his unclean conscience; too many nightmares that could not be banished with a few Psalms. Eventually, Yves had become used to their presence, and even welcomed it, as a means of some twisted, self-imposed penance. Naturally, neither the ministers in his former seminary, nor his own parishioners were aware of any of those things, and Father Yves preferred to leave it this way.

  The chief of police faltered on the steps when Father Yves was seeing his small parish out, blessing their day with a sign of the cross and a parting smile. The priest had expected the man’s response.

  “A rather… interesting subject you chose for Mass today, Father,” the chief remarked. A prominent man of forty with an unnaturally straight back and a narrow, penetrating gaze, he only spoke once his wife and children had been sent on their way down the stairs.

  Yves simply cocked his head, waiting for more words to come.

  “It is not my place to advise you on such matters bien sûr," the man continued, slightly unnerved by the priest's silence, “however, I feel it to be my duty as a civil servant to warn you that such speeches, if overheard by an ear that is not familiar with you and your good nature, a nature that I am personally fortunate to know, might lead to rather… unfortunate consequences.”

  The chief of police narrowed his dark eyes further as if attempting to better drive his point across. Yves nodded, acknowledging the advice and yet discardin
g it at once without uttering a word.

  “We were fortunate enough to end this war relatively unscathed,” the chief went on. “The Germans were kinder to us than we could expect, to be truthful. We happen to live in the Free Zone that they left us, and the only thing they ask of us is to collaborate with them. Why muddy the waters – and young, impressionable people’s minds – with such speeches? Leave it to the government, Father; they know better the affairs of the state. Why not preach the good old ‘love thy neighbor and forgive your enemies instead? It would be more relevant nowadays.”

  He tipped his hat and turned on his heel to walk away in a strange hurry, the taste of his own words apparently still sour in his mouth. Yves watched him disappear into his car, wondering whether he rushed to hide from the priest’s gaze or his own conscience.

  The white-haired girl was still inside, shuffling through the Bible indecisively when Yves stepped back into the dim light of the church. He approached the pew that she occupied, her well-worn rucksack hidden under her feet, and tilted his head curiously.

  “You’re new here, aren’t you?” he inquired in a mild voice.

  The girl offered him a somewhat guilty grin and a half-hearted shrug.

  “I’m Father Yves,” he introduced himself, sensing her reluctance. “Please, feel free to stay as long as you wish. We aren’t closing anytime soon. And don’t hesitate to ask if you need anything be it a confession or a piece of bread. We’ve had a lot of displaced people here since the Exodus, and your situation is not new to me.”