Joanne Harris - Five Quarters of the Orange

She writes about them in her album, her first glimpse of them.

Filthy Boches and their whores. Looked at me in my smock, smiled behind their hands. I’d like to kill them. Looked at them watching me and I felt old. Ugly. Only one has kind eyes. The girl beside him bored him, I could tell. Cheap stupid girl, stocking seams drawn on in grease pencil. I could almost feel sorry for her. But he smiled at me. Had to bite my tongue to stop myself from smiling back.

Of course, I have no proof that it was Tomas she wrote about. It might have been anyone in those few scrawled lines. There is no description, nothing to suggest it might have been him, and yet somehow, I am certain that it was. Only Tomas could have made her feel that way. Only Tomas could have made me feel that way.

It’s all in the album. You can read it if you want to, if you know where to look. There is no sequence to events. Other than with the details of her secret transactions there are scarcely any dates. But she was meticulous in her fashion. She described La Rép as it was, so clearly, that reading it years later I felt a thickness in my throat. The noise, the music, the smoke, beer, voices raised in laughter or drunken ribaldry. No wonder we were not allowed near the place. She was too ashamed of her own involvement, too afraid of what we might learn from one of the regulars.

On the night we crept over there, we were to be disappointed. We had imagined a secret den of adult vices. I’d expected naked dancers, women with rubies in their navels and hair down to their waists. Cassis, still feigning indifference, had seen Resistance fighters in his mind’s eye, black-clad guerillas with hard eyes beneath their night camouflage. Reinette imagined herself, rouged and pomaded, with a fur stole around her shoulders, sipping martinis. But that night, looking through the murky window there seemed to be nothing of interest. Only a few old men at tables, a backgammon board, a pack of cards, the old piano and Agnès with her parachute-silk blouse open to the third button leaning against it and singing… It was still early. Tomas had not yet arrived.

May 9. A German soldier (Bavarian). 12 high-dosage morphine tablets against one chicken, sack of sugar and a side of bacon.

May 25. German soldier (fat neck). 16 high-dosage morphine tablets against 1 bottle calva, sack of flour, packet coffee, 6 jars of preserves.

Then a last entry, the date deliberately vague:

September. T.L. Bottle 30 high-dosage morphine tablets.

For the first time she fails to write her own contribution to the deal. Perhaps it is merely carelessness-the writing is barely legible, scrawled in a hurry. Perhaps this time she has paid more than she cares to write. What was the price? Thirty tablets must have seemed a prize of almost unimagined riches. No need to return to La Rép for a while. No more bartering with drunken louts like Julien Lecoz. I imagine she might have paid a great deal for the peace of mind those thirty tablets gave her. What exactly did she pay for that peace of mind? Information? Something else?

We waited in what later became the parking garage. In those days it was no more than a dumping area for rubbish where the bins were kept and where deliveries-barrels of beer or occasionally merchandise of a more illicit nature-were made. A wall ran halfway along the back of the building, then disappeared in a tangle of elders and blackberry bushes. The back door was open-even in October it was stifling hot-and a bright yellow light fanned across the ground from the taproom. We sat on the wall, ready to drop down onto the other side if anyone came too near, and waited.

As I said, it hasn’t changed much. A few lights, some machines, more people, but still the same Mauvaise Réputation, the same people with different hairstyles, the same faces. Going in there today you might almost imagine yourself back there, with the old sots and the young men with their girls in tow and the smell of beer and perfume and cigarettes over everything.

I went there myself, you know, when the Snack-Wagon came, Paul and I hiding-just as Cassis, Reine and I hid the night of the dance-in the garage. Of course, there were cars in it then. It was cold too, and raining. The elders and the blackberry tangle have gone, and now there’s only tarmac and a new wall behind which lovers go, or drunks when they want to piss. We were looking out for Dessanges then, our Luc with his sharp handsome face, but waiting there in the dark with the new neon sign going blink-blink against the wet tarmac, I might have been nine again, and Tomas in the back room with a girl on each arm… Funny tricks time plays on you. There was a double row of motorbikes in the garage, gleaming wetly.

It was eleven o’clock. I felt suddenly stupid, leaning against the new concrete wall like a silly girl spying on the adults, the world’s oldest nine-year-old with Paul next to me and his old dog in tow on its inevitable leash of twine. Stupid and beaten, two old people watching a bar from the dark. For what? A burst of music from the jukebox, nothing I could identify. Even the instruments are alien nowadays, electronic things with no need for mouths or fingers to play them. A girl’s laugh, high and unpleasant. For a moment the door fanned open and we saw him clearly, a girl on each arm. He was wearing a leather jacket that might have cost two thousand francs or more in a Paris shop. The girls were silky and red-mouthed and very young in their thin-strapped dresses. I felt a sudden cold despair.

“Look at us.” I realized that my hair was wet, my fingers stiff as sticks. “James Bond and Mata Hari. Let’s go home.”

Paul looked at me in that reflective way he always has. Anyone else might not have seen the intelligence in his eyes, but I did. Silently he took my hand between his. His hands felt comfortingly warm, and I could feel the rows of calluses on his palms.

“Don’t give up,” he said.

I shrugged. “We’re doing no good here,” I said. “Just making fools of ourselves. Face it, Paul, we’re never going to get the better of Dessanges, so we might as well get that into our thick stubborn heads right now. I mean-”

“No, you don’t.” His voice was slow and almost amused. “You never give up, Framboise. You never did.”

Patience. His patience, kind and stubborn enough to wait out a lifetime.

“That was then,” I told him without meeting his eyes.

“You haven’t changed so much, Framboise.”

Maybe that’s true. There’s something in me still, something hard and not necessarily good. I still feel it occasionally, a hard cold something like a stone inside a clenched fist. I always had it, even in the old days, something mean and dogged and just clever enough to hang on for as long as it took to win… As if Old Mother had somehow got inside me that day and, going for the heart, had instead been swallowed by that inner mouth of mine. A fossil fish inside a fist of stone-I saw a picture of one once in one of Ricot’s dinosaur books-eating itself in its stubborn spite.

“Perhaps I ought to change,” I said softly. “Perhaps I should.”

I think that for a while I really meant it too. I was tired, you understand. Tired beyond anything. Two months on and we’d tried, God knows, we’d tried everything. We watched Luc. We reasoned with him. We built elaborate fantasies-a bomb under his trailer, a hit man from Paris, a shot from a sniper’s rifle at the Lookout Post. Oh, yes, I could have killed him. My anger exhausted me, but my fear kept me awake throughout the night, so that my days were broken glass and my head ached all the time. It was more than simply the fear of exposure; after all, I was Mirabelle Dartigen’s daughter. I had her spirit. I cared about the restaurant, but even if the Dessanges put me out of business, even if no one in Les Laveuses spoke to me ever again, I knew I could fight it out. No, my true fear-kept secret from Paul, barely acknowledged even to myself-was something far darker and more complex. It lurked in the depths of my mind like Old Mother in her slimy bed, and I prayed no lure would ever tempt it out.