She jumped back. “I didn’t mean to-”
All of the women watched now, curious and uncertain.
“The portal only works for me. I don’t know what would happen if you tried.” He lied. After the incident with the dog…
Deborah picked up the last compacted boat in line and held it out to Hiram. “I can help then.”
Hiram relaxed and knelt back down on the ground beside the pack. “Yes, of course.” He accepted Deborah’s offering and slid it through the portal.
She then handed him the smaller kayak.
“Let them know,” he closed his pack. “No one touches my pack.”
Deborah nodded and said a few words in French to the women.
One of the others, a short woman with a dark brown braid that swept across her lower back, asked a question. Hiram looked at Deborah, hoping she’d translate for him.
Instead, Deborah looked to the short woman and as she spoke, the woman shook her head and seemed to slump at the retort. Then Deborah looked at Hiram, waiting for the next direction.
“Let’s get moving,” he said.
None of the women questioned the order. They nodded, looked away from the water, and began climbing the small, rocky incline.
He led the group into the woods, following a deer trail cut into the overgrown vegetation, urging the women to duck under the low-lying branches. Once the group entered the thick cover of the trees, he returned to erase any sign of their passage. He dragged a heavy branch along the shoreline, spreading loose pebbles and erasing footprints. He covered the marks left by the climb up the embankment by moving around a few leafy vines and a fallen tree branch. Not perfect, but good enough. He made his way back to the maids, covering his tracks along the trail.
“We’ll spend the night here,” he announced once he rejoined the women. Deborah translated. No one argued.
“I’ll need to go through the portal for supplies,” he said to Deborah.
She signaled for Danette to join them. “We’ll watch your pack,” Deborah said.
After Deborah translated, Danette nodded and aligned herself on the opposite side of Hiram’s pack, which he had placed on the ground.
Hiram looked around at all of the women who stared at him. Each one weary from the long journey.
“Go on,” Deborah said. “It’s your turn to trust us.”
When Hiram returned from setting the motion detectors up around the camp, he found all thirty women huddled in a circle around the dull glow of the heat unit he had procured from the pod. Some held blankets over their shoulders, others reached out to touch the phantom fire before them. They talked amongst themselves. Deborah and Danette sat side by side, Hiram’s pack on the ground between them, just as he’d left it.
He took up a place on the ground beside them, thanked them for protecting his gear. A woman brought Hiram a serving of pot pie in a metallic bag, then returned to her spot in the circle.
The short woman, shortest among them, he had observed, said something to him in French.
Deborah looked at him. “She wants to know who you are. They all do.”
He hesitated. “You can call me Hiram.”
Deborah translated for the others.
Danette spoke and Deborah translated her words for Hiram. “He knows my family. The ones in America.”
“You are an American?” Deborah said.
“Not exactly. I grew up in the Sinai but immigrated with my family to America in 1936 when the Society of Muslim Brothers began harassing Jews living on the peninsula. Right after the Arab Revolt started in Palestine.”
Deborah shortened his response for the benefit of the group. The women’s eyes moved from Hiram to Deborah to Danette, curious and uncertain.
“I spent some time in America when I was young. My father taught biology at Brandeis University,” Deborah said.
“I –” Hiram started.
The short woman spoke again, Deborah translated. “Barbara wants to know why you came for us.”
Hiram looked at Danette and back to the short woman Barbara, her eyes dark, almost black.
“I was sent by a man named David Wiseman,” he said. “A journalist in Washington.”
“His family is taking care of my son,” Danette confirmed. “He’s my cousin.”
“Wiseman’s got a source in Army Intelligence with the American War Department. The Americans intercepted communication about a Nazi plot to exterminate all the Jews in Europe, not to mention a few other supposed undesirable groups. From what they’ve gathered, Hitler’s calling it the Final Solution.” A few understood his words, Deborah translated for the rest. Heated conversation broke out among them. Disbelief. Fear. Anger. A few began sobbing.
“The camp you were headed back to◦– Camp Joffre, is caught up in this mess. The prisoners in F and J Blocks are to be shipped out in August. The plan is to move the group to an SS run camp near Paris and then to an extermination camp in Poland.” He stuck as close as possible to the truth. When Deborah completed her translation, Barbara stood with fists clenched and rattled off a few fiery accusations.
Danette talked back to her this time, almost spitting her retort. For two minutes, the two women barked at each other.
Finally, Hiram stood up, put a hand on his great-great-grandmother’s arm. “I am here to help you, and to help your families. I need you to trust me.” It sounded wrong. He was already hiding so much.
Deborah took a moment to translate.
“I need your help. Together, we are going to rescue them all.”
“We have no weapons,” someone said.
Yet another woman addressed her. She said something about a “porter.”
“Portal,” someone corrected.
“He has to have more guns?”
“We don’t know how to fight,” said another.
“He’ll teach us,” Danette said.
For a time, the women continued the discussion. They talked, they argued, and, more than once, they even laughed. Deborah continued translating the statements of importance and Hiram offered words of agreement.
He had formulated a plan, the start of one at least.
Despite the energy the women around him mustered, Hiram felt the day’s activity wearing him down. He settled back down to the ground and leaned against the tree behind him. On his wrist, the C2ID2 monitored the motion sensors. As he drifted off, his great-great-grandmother laid a blanket over him.
5
2130 hours, Monday, July 6, 1942, Pyrénées-Orientales Department, Vichy France
Sarah Mandelson, former professor of physics at the University of Paris, watched from the other side of the campfire as Danette laid a blanket over their would-be savior. Everything Sarah understood about the physical universe contradicted Hiram’s technology. His portal seems impossible, yet it exists.
She had to accept what she had witnessed. She had touched the ground where Hiram laid his pack, thinking◦– no, hoping◦– for evidence of a magician’s trick. Whatever kind of science explained his magic was well beyond anything published before the damn war. Necessity is the mother of invention. The Nazis have certainly provided the impetus.
So here she sat, in the middle of the forest, with twenty-nine women and a strange man, being hunted by the police. And, if they believed Hiram’s story, all marked for death. She was relieved that her brother had taken a position in a bank in Switzerland a month before the roundup began. His wife and young son had relocated with him. Sarah had been offered a place in their new apartment, but she refused to abandon the family home. A ridiculous choice now that she thought about it. She believed Hitler and his Gestapo wanted to destroy the Jews, but she doubted Vichy cooperation in the mass murder of millions of men, women, and children. They all found it hard to believe. Still, they rounded us all up and stuck us in that camp. To what possible end? And if I hadn’t returned to my family home in Narbonne after being dismissed from the University, I’d probably already be dead. She would never forget the day the department head stepped into her lab and told her the Jewish were no longer allowed to hold academic titles. She missed teaching.