When his footsteps slowed, near the Gare du Nord, I should have, too. He lunged from a corner shadow, the flash of a knife in his fist. I dodged, catching myself on the side of a building. My mask clattered to the ground.
“Why are you following me?” he said in French.
I picked up the mask and stepped into the light. “Retribution.”
“How did you—” he began, before correcting to: “You are mistaken.”
“I know you.” I held it up to my face. I watched his drain of color. “And you know me.”
“Crépet,” he said, and I knew I hadn’t mistaken him. He cleared his throat. “Didn’t think I’d see you again.”
“Didn’t think I was alive, did you?”
“It was war. I didn’t know what to think.” He shifted his suitcase from one hand to the other. “Didn’t know if I’d be alive one moment to the next, did I?”
“Neither did Michel Chaffre.”
“Who?” he asked, and then, “Oh.”
I had years of vitriol, of blame and censure. I wanted to ask him why. Why me, why Chaffre, why anything that took him from a life in France to a life against France. But I lowered my mask again. “This is what you gave me.” I bared my face and I said, “This was my souvenir.”
His eyes traveled up along my scar, along the pits and grooves, along the puckered skin. Finally he said, “Crépet, I didn’t mean…” Exposed in that moment of honesty, in that almost-apology, he turned away. When he turned back, it was with his cocky smile. “You mean to make a battle out of everything?”
“What?” I had to ask.
“The war is over now. And yet you can’t move on. You are still looking for a grand adversaire.”
“You’re wrong. I did.” And, if it wasn’t true before that moment, it was now. “You left me for dead, but I came back to life.”
He shrugged, but took a step backwards.
“And do you know who else moved on?” I slipped the mask in my bag. “Clare.”
He squinted. Either he didn’t remember her or wanted me to think so. “Oh, the fräulein?” he asked dismissively. “She had nothing to move on from.”
“Betrayal doesn’t only exist in war.” I slipped my bag from my shoulder. “Sometimes it comes from a trusted companion on a train or in a whore’s house.”
He flinched and I knew I’d guessed right.
“You haven’t said, Bauer. What are you doing here, in Paris?”
He didn’t even pause before throwing out a lie. “I never told you, but I had a girlfriend here.” He rubbed his nose. He didn’t know I’d followed him from Lili’s. “And…and a little daughter. I came for them.” He lifted the brown suitcase. “See? They’re meeting me at the station. We’re returning to Berlin.”
But I was finished believing his lies. His carefully set up drop shots.
“A girlfriend?” I took a step towards him. “You mean one you don’t have to pay for?”
At my advance, he stepped back. “Why is that so hard to believe?”
I moved closer.
He hesitated just for a second, and I swung my shopping bag. It wasn’t full and it wasn’t heavy, but enough to throw him off balance so that I could get a fist in his stomach. Like with Martel, it was a lucky shot. His knife clattered to the ground and his suitcase sprang open. A camera and bundles of photos tumbled out. Gasping for breath, he lunged at the suitcase, not the knife. I grabbed the latter.
“Keep back or I cry ‘Boche.’ ”
He glanced back over his shoulder. The street was quiet, but he kept his distance.
I pulled up a handful of photos, wondering why they kept him here on the street. He could have turned to run the moment I took the knife. Instead he waited.
As I sifted through the handful, I saw. Each one showed Paris in shambles. A city as shattered by war as I was. They were photos of tumbled buildings, of boarded windows, of craters in the street where bombs had fallen. They showed trees, splintered and leafless. They showed mutilés on the corners in ragged uniforms, begging. The photos, they were specific. They were intended to show Paris vulnerable.
“You once loved France.” I flipped through the photos. The buildings destroyed, the citizens depleted, the shops still shuttered. “You betray more than the people in your life.”
He hovered just out of reach. “The war is over, Crépet.” He tried to put a sneer into it.
I’d only seen the city’s wounds here and there as I passed down the streets, but to see them put together in photos, to see Paris looking so crippled and broken still, now, months after the armistice. To see it looking so exposed, it made me furious.
I snapped the suitcase shut. “But the battle’s not.” Though I had the knife in my hand, I swung a fist, the way I should have that night in the cellar. The way I should have years before that, when I stood in the dormitory as he promised that he didn’t know what had happened to Clare. One punch and then another and another and he was doubled over on the street.
But he didn’t stay down long. Bauer had always been faster than me, and he hadn’t spent the last year of the war recovering in a Paris garret. He drove up with his shoulder. I stumbled back, but kept my grip on the knife. He brought up his arms, trying to shake my grip. For a moment I thought he would. He was always more vicious.
But when he struck me, something kicked in. The same instinct that had led me to track him through the dark streets. I knocked his arms away and shifted the knife to my other hand. Bauer lunged again, but I did, too. The blade caught him on the back of the wrist. He didn’t flinch.
“You think you’ll even the score?” He bared his teeth in a grin. “You?”
All of my training came back. My movements were automatic. A year away from the lines didn’t erase the three years in them. He used his fists. I used the knife and my hatred. I drove him back towards the wall along the pavement. This close fighting, the smell of sweat and blood, it was familiar. I swung and my muscles remembered.
On the battlefield, we fought over an uneven landscape. And yet it was a loose cobble that brought Stefan Bauer down on that Paris street. He lifted an arm crisscrossed with cuts.
