The head of the Gestapo in Montpellier was a certain Colonel Hoeger, and one afternoon he stepped out of his headquarters to enjoy the sunshine and ended up enjoying the sight of Solange as well.
“Look at that creature,” he said to his captain. “How old do you think she is?”
“Sixteen? Seventeen?”
“That face,” Hoeger said, “and the body. Find out about her.”
“She’s a child.”
“Look at her. She’s ripe.”
Madame Sette’s had become the brothel of choice for the German occupation forces, and Madame was rapidly becoming a wealthy woman.
As for Solange, she had become used to her mother’s occupation, having learned the sad lesson that what was once unbearable becomes commonplace with time. She and Mama had a civil if emotionally distant relationship, and Marie even came to feel somewhat relieved that she no longer had to disguise what she did. Solange even went to Madame Sette’s from time to time – to bring her mother a meal, or deliver a lipstick she had forgotten, or some other minor errand. The girls took to calling her Little Miss Prim, but gradually with some affection, and every time Madame saw her, she would importune her to consider coming in to make some real money.
Solange, of course, always refused.
She turned more and more to Louis. They spent virtually all their free time together, although Louis was very busy with his studies at Montpellier’s excellent and ancient medical school.
He was busier with the Resistance, even more passionate about his communism now that he lived cheek by jowl with facism. A messenger at first, he rode his bicycle around the city with coded messages hidden inside his medical texts, but it wasn’t long before his intelligence and courage brought him to the attention of the leaders and they began to give him more responsibility.
With them came greater risk, and it terrified Solange. She knew of the torture chambers in the basement of Gestapo headquarters, had heard the firing squads, and carefully avoided the scenes of gallows that had been hastily constructed for captured Resistance. She begged him to be careful.
Of course he said that he would, but he also found the dangers exhilarating, and he returned from missions with an already keen joie de vivre honed to an edge. Louis wanted to live, and that included making love to this beautiful girl whom he did love, very much.
But she turned him down.
“I don’t want to become my mother.”
Solange was bringing her mother a tin of hot soup – Marie had a slight cold – and Colonel Hoeger was sitting in the parlor. His face was flushed with drink as he looked at her with delighted surprise. “Do you work here?”
“No.”
“That’s a pity.” He looked her up and down, slowly and lasciviously, not troubling to disguise his want. “Do you have a name?”
“Yes.”
Hoeger’s tone sharpened. “What is it?”
“Solange.”
“Solange,” said Hoeger, tasting it as he wished to taste her. “A lovely name for a lovely girl.”
Three days later, Hoeger made a direct approach. He waited outside until he saw Solange coming across the square, and then approached her.
“Bonjour, mademoiselle.”
“Bonjour, monsieur.”
“Is there something fascinating on the sidewalk, Solange?”
“No, sir.”
“Then look at me, please.”
She looked up at him.
Apologizing for his rude behavior at the brothel, he now made a direct offer. “Civilized,” he called it. She would not be a whore, but his mistress. He would provide her with a suitable apartment, a budget for clothing and some luxuries, and appropriate – really quite generous – gifts from time to time. In exchange, she would… well, certainly she knew what she would provide in exchange, certainly they didn’t have to go into such details, did they?
Solange slapped him.
Hoeger had not been slapped since he was a boy and he actually glanced around the square to see if anyone had noticed, then remembered himself and said, “You are very rude.”
“As opposed to yourself- sir – who has just made an immoral proposition to a seventeen-year-old girl.”
“You are free to go.”
“Bon après-midi.”
“Bon après-midi.”
Solange was home before she gave in to her terror. She trembled for a good ten minutes, made a cup of tea, and sat down at the kitchen table to compose herself. Louis came over, but she told him nothing of the encounter, lest he do something foolishly gallant.
Two days later, Louis was arrested.
“It was a week from a Zola novel,” Solange told Nicholai now, lying with her head in the crook of his arm. “One of the bad ones.”
She said it ironically, dismissing the possibility of self-pity, but Nicholai heard the deeply buried hurt in her voice as she continued her story.
They caught Louis red-handed – stopped him on his bicycle and found the coded messages in his anatomy text. They hauled him to the cellar of Gestapo headquarters, where Hoeger went to work on him. The handsome boy was quickly handsome no longer. Unfortunately for Louis, he was brave, loyal, and committed, and would not reveal names.
Solange heard about it that afternoon. She went to her room and sobbed, then washed her face, combed her hair and put on the prettiest dress she owned, examined her image, and undid the top two buttons to reveal a deep décolletage. Sitting in front of the mirror in her mother’s bedroom, she applied makeup the way she had seen the whores do it.
Then she walked to Gestapo headquarters and asked to see Colonel Hoeger.
Shown into his office, she stood in front of his desk, made herself look him in the eyes, and said, “If you release Louis Duchesne, I will give myself to you. Now and anytime that you wish. In any way.”
Hoeger looked at her and blinked.
Solange said, “I know that you want me.”
He burst into laughter.
Hoeger laughed until tears ran down his fleshy cheeks, and then he took a handkerchief from his pocket, wiped his eyes, and got up. “Get out of my office. The nerve of you. Do you think I would risk my career, betray my country, just for the honor of breaking your cherry for you?”
Solange stood her ground. “Can I see him?”
“Certainly,” Hoeger answered. “You can see him hanged. Thursday noon.”
In the square around the gallows where five ropes dangled from the crossbeam, a crowd formed and stood in sullen silence until a German army truck pulled up. Soldiers jumped out the back first, then hauled out a group of prisoners, five in all, who had been sentenced to death.
Louis was the last taken out.
There was nothing romantic about it, nothing heroic. Louis looked badly beaten, limp and in shock, his hands tied behind him as they dragged him up to the gallows. Standing there in just a bloodstained white shirt and dirty brown trousers, he peered out at the crowd uncomprehendingly, and Solange wondered if he was looking for her.
I should have given myself to him, she thought. I should have loved him completely. I should have taken him inside me, wrapped myself around him, and never let him loose.
A soldier went down the line. He finally came to Louis, jerked his head back roughly, put the noose around his neck, then bent down and tied his ankles together. At the colonel’s orders, they put no hoods over the condemned heads.
Louis looked terrified.
Other soldiers formed a line between the crowd and the gallows, lest anyone try to interfere or run up and pull on the legs of the hanged to break their necks and abbreviate their agony.
Solange forced herself to watch.
An officer shouted an order.
There was a crack of metal and wood and Louis dropped.
His neck jerked and he bounced. Then he hung there twisting – his legs kicking, his eyes bulging, his tongue obscenely thrust out of his mouth – as his face turned red and then blue.