Escape From Paris Read Online Free Page A

car faced toward the front. She drove slowly, dust rising behind her. Her shoulder muscles were rigid. If anyone had been looking down from a window in the back an alarm would be raised. Surely to God, not every window could have been empty. But those windows belonged to the wards and these were sick and wounded French soldiers, not German.
    Still it would take only one voice to stop her and there were many Frenchmen now who hated the English. They heard the German broadcasts blaming the English for the French defeat and believed them. It was easier to blame defeat on others. But the car passed the end of the wing now and no one called out. She drove on to the gate and stopped.
    The sergeant stepped out of the sentry box. “Your papers, Mademoiselle.”
    She opened her straw purse and reached for her identity card and the passes. He had seen all of them earlier but he looked again, reading every one.
    She and the sergeant became aware of the smell at the same moment. His nostrils flared and he looked past her, into the car.
    The leather seat beside her was empty except for her straw purse. Empty cartons and the picnic basket filled the tiny back seat.
    Would he remember the back seat had been empty this morning? She had switched the cartons to make room in the trunk.
    The sergeant craned his head to look down at the floor of the back seat. It was the smell, that reek of hospital disinfectant that puzzled him.
    The smell clung to the Englishman, the odor of dirt and carbolic acid, and was seeping now from the trunk into the car, worsened by the heat. It would be very hot in the trunk.
    The sergeant stared at her right arm.
    She looked down and saw the reddish-yellowish streaks on the pale blue cotton.
    â€œYou have blood on your dress, Mademoiselle.”
    â€œOne of the soldiers, he was very ill, and when I tried to help him, I suppose his wound must have been bleeding.” Overlaying the smell in the car, she remembered the thick sweet stench from the chest wound of the boy who had lost his brother. “His bandage was old and . . .”
    The sergeant wasn’t listening. He had satisfied himself about the smell. He closed her papers with a snap and handed them back.
    She turned the key, pressed on the accelerator. The engine turned over, once, twice, then died. If the car refused to start altogether, someone might open the trunk. She turned the key again. She excluded everything from her mind, the giveaway smell in the car, the thick suffocating heat as the sun streamed through the windshield, the presence of the sergeant just a foot or so away. She reached out, pulled on the choke button. Just a little. “Don’t drown the poor damn car. Just give it a little bit.” She could hear Jay’s voice, across the years and thousands of miles. Sunshine then, too, but the soft silky sun of California with, always, a touch of coolness beneath the warmth. Jay had taught her how to drive in his old Austin. He had been so proud of that car, the ramrod straight seats, the high roof, the dashboard of tortoise shell. He had shown her, his hand over hers, just how far to pull out the choke, “See, like this, then give the pedal a slow steady push. That’s it, that’s it, baby, you’ve got it, hey, you’re pretty, you know that?” and his hand had slipped from hers to tilt her face toward him. Sunshine and the smell of roses and her first kiss.
    The engine turned over, caught, held, roared, she slammed the car into first and it bolted up the road. She looked in the rearview mirror. The young sentry was watching after her. The sergeant had turned away, to step into the shade of the sentry box.
    Linda reached for a cigarette. Funny, she had only smoked occasionally until the Germans occupied Paris. Now that cigarettes were so hard to get, she smoked more and more. Maybe she smoked because she was afraid. She drew deeply on the cigarette. Afraid. Yes. She was afraid but she couldn’t