Besides, she told herself, the farm needed men like Victor to work it. She would ignore the vulgar creature.
CHAPTER 8
Looking down, Morgan thought the Seine resembled a twisting winding blue-gray ribbon. It began in the Alps, flowed to Paris, and from there north past Rouen and on to Le Havre, where it entered the English Channel. Even from a distance, the gouges in the earth on the eastern side betrayed the location of enemy positions.
“They just don’t give a shit if we see them or not,” Jeb Carter said. At Jack’s suggestion, several other officers had begun riding as copilot with him. It gave them an opportunity to see what he and his little plane could see and do and, equally important, not see and do. Several officers had found the Piper’s capabilities and limitations to be real eye openers. Snyder, his normal copilot didn’t mind at all staying on the ground where it was safer.
“You gonna get closer, Jack?”
“Nope. Just ’cause I look crazy doesn’t mean I am. We already know that a ton of antitank and antiaircraft guns are dug in there, so there’s no reason to push our luck just to prove it.”
To emphasize the statement, a few black puffs of flak erupted to their front. Jack turned the Piper to the north. They would turn back to base in a moment. “Warning shot,” he said. “They’re saying don’t piss us off by getting nosy and we won’t shoot at you either.”
“Sounds fair,” said Carter. He pulled a pack of letters from his jacket pocket, glanced at them and put them back.
“Your girlfriend?”
“She’s my cousin, and more important, a really good friend. So don’t give me any crappy comments about being surprised that I have relatives who can write. Literacy is not all that unusual in Georgia.”
“It ever crossed my mind. Is she married?”
“Naw, she’s single, cute, and actually she’s from up north in Pennsylvania. I’ve forgiven her for being a northerner. She’s here in France working on some Red Cross project trying to reunite refugee families.”
“Christ, that’ll keep her busy for centuries. Did you say she was cute and here in France?”
“Yes to both, although she’s always putting herself down about her looks. Doesn’t think she’s as pretty as she is. We’ve been friends since we were little kids.”
Jeb recalled a time when he’d thought she was both beautiful and desirable. After they’d both had a few illegal drinks, he’d managed to get her blouse and bra off before she’d stopped him and he’d never done anything like that to her again. Nor had they ever spoken of it, although he had a hard time forgetting just how lovely her breasts were. She had been seventeen and he’d just turned twenty.
Jeb pulled a couple of pictures from the envelopes and handed them to Jack. A young lady smiled at the camera. She was sitting on the ground and wearing shorts. Her legs were tucked underneath her and she had a bottle of Coke in her hand. Other people were in the area. It looked like a family picnic. A second picture showed the same woman playing tennis. Jack thought she had a great figure and outstanding legs. She was laughing and he wanted to laugh with her.
“Perhaps you can introduce me? Maybe you can arrange a blind date?”
Jeb Carter roared with laughter. “Sure thing, Jack-off. There’s nothing easier than arranging a blind date in the middle of a continent at war. I’ll call Ike and have him set up dinner and a movie. Maybe you can get Ike’s girlfriend as a chauffeur.”
Actually Jack thought the idea sounded great. But when did people start calling him Jack-off? Wasn’t Bomber Morgan bad enough? Damn Carter. And who the hell was Ike’s girlfriend?
Monique Fleury was a local Rennes woman in her mid-thirties. Plump, wide-eyed and still pretty, and, most important, she spoke fluent English. She’d found work with the Red Cross where her ability to translate the patois of the area into something Jessica could understand was helpful beyond words.
Monique said her husband was somewhere under German control. That is, if he was alive at all. When he’d first been taken prisoner in 1940, she said she’d gotten a terse postcard allegedly signed by him saying that all was well. The prearranged signal that all was not well was contained in the fact that he’d misspelled his own first name. He was an officer, which meant that the Nazis would be even more loath to release him as they had done with some enlisted men. Rumors said that the Nazis had massacred all the French officers. Monique thought it was likely, and said that this left her with a small child who had never seen his father. He was being cared for by an elderly aunt while Monique went to work.
At the sound of shouts and screams, the two women rushed outside. A local gendarme was herding six distraught young women in their late teens and early twenties, and only half protecting them from a larger group of outraged and mainly older village women. The six younger women had been stripped to their underwear, were bruised about the head and shoulders, and their hair had been roughly hacked or shaved off. Blood from cuts and slashes was beginning to scab on their scalps. Their faces were bruised, apparently from being punched. The young women might have been pretty once, but the looks of terror, the bruises, and the blood denied that.
“Whores!” women in the crowd screamed and chanted, shoveling and jostling the six. The gendarme pushed one villager aside when it looked like she was going to hit one of the prisoners with an umbrella. Slaps and kicks were all right, but no umbrellas. A hand reached out and tore at a woman’s slip, exposing her breasts to the jeers of the crowd. The gendarme shrugged and grinned.
“Collaborators, aren’t they?” Jessica asked.
“They slept with the German soldiers and now they pay for it. The losers always pay, don’t they?”
Jessica hadn’t quite thought of it that way. “Why would they ever want to sleep with the Germans?”
Monique shrugged. “For the young ones, perhaps it was for love and adventure. There were very few young men left here thanks to the war, so a German soldier might have seemed attractive to a lonely young woman. After all, hadn’t the Germans won? And weren’t they going to be in charge here for a thousand years? For others, perhaps they screwed for the food that the German soldier had access to. There was never enough food provided by the Vichy government. Who knows? Maybe they really are whores and they did it for the money. Regardless, their side lost and they must now pay for being on the wrong side.”
Monique spat on the ground to emphasize her point. One of the young women had fallen and the crowd began kicking and jabbing at her while she crawled on bloody knees. It reminded Jessica of a scene from the Crucifixion. But these were French women condemned of whoring with the enemy, not Jesus.
“But this is awful.”
“Don’t judge. What do you think will happen to me if the Boche come back and the villagers suddenly decide that the Germans are their saviors?”
Jessica blinked in surprise. “What do you mean?”
“Jessica, I have a little boy and what I make working with you isn’t enough. Meanwhile there are vast mountains of supplies that well-meaning and helpful American soldiers can get to those willing to pay the old fashioned price.”
Jessica was shocked. “What are you telling me, Monique?”
“I have an American master sergeant who takes care of me and my son. I found him a couple of days after the Americans arrived. His name is Boyle and he has a wife and two children back in Oklahoma, wherever that is, but I’m here and she’s not.”
“And when your husband comes back?”
“Don’t you mean if? I haven’t heard from him in three years. I don’t think he’s alive and, if he is and does return, we will work it out. I will do what I need to for my child, and my husband will understand that or he will move on.”