Etienne shuffles downstairs.
“What does it say, Uncle?”
“It says, Monsieur Droguet wants his daughter in Saint-Coulomb to know that he is recovering well.”
“She said it’s important.”
“What does it mean?”
Marie-Laure removes her knapsack and reaches inside and tears off a hunk of bread. She says, “I think it means that Monsieur Droguet wants his daughter to know that he is all right.”
Over the next weeks, more notes come. A birth in Saint-Vincent. A dying grandmother in La Mare. Madame Gardinier in La Rabinais wants her son to know that she forgives him. If secret messages lurk inside these missives—if Monsieur Fayou had a heart attack and passed gently away means Blow up the switching yard at Rennes—Etienne cannot say. What matters is that people must be listening, that ordinary citizens must have radios, that they seem to need to hear from each other. He never leaves his house, sees no one save Marie-Laure, and yet somehow he has found himself at the nexus of a web of information.
He keys the microphone and reads the numbers, then the messages. He broadcasts them on five different bands, gives instructions for the next transmission, and plays a bit of an old record. At most the whole exercise takes six minutes.
Too long. Almost certainly too long.
Yet no one comes. The two bells do not ring. No German patrols come banging up the stairs to put bullets in their heads.
Although she has them memorized, most nights Marie-Laure asks Etienne to read her the letters from her father. Tonight he sits on the edge of her bed.
Today I saw an oak tree disguised as a chestnut tree.
I know you will do the right thing.
If you ever wish to understand, look inside Etienne’s house, inside the house.
“What do you think he means by writing inside the house twice?”
“We’ve been over it so many times, Marie.”
“What do you think he is doing right now?”
“Sleeping, child. I am sure of it.”
She rolls onto her side, and he hauls the hem of her quilts past her shoulders and blows out the candle and stares into the miniature rooftops and chimneys of the model at the foot of her bed. A memory rises: Etienne was in a field east of the city with his brother. It was the summer when fireflies showed up in Saint-Malo, and their father was very excited, building long-handled nets for his boys and giving them jars with wire to fasten over the tops, and Etienne and Henri raced through the tall grass as the fireflies floated away from them, illuming on and off, always seeming to rise just beyond their reach, as if the earth were smoldering and these were sparks that their footfalls had prodded free.
Henri had said he wanted to put so many beetles in his window that ships could see his bedroom from miles away.
If there are fireflies this summer, they do not come down the rue Vauborel. Now it seems there are only shadows and silence. Silence is the fruit of the occupation; it hangs in branches, seeps from gutters. Madame Guiboux, mother of the shoemaker, has left town. As has old Madame Blanchard. So many windows are dark. It’s as if the city has become a library of books in an unknown language, the houses great shelves of illegible volumes, the lamps all extinguished.
But there is the machine in the attic at work again. A spark in the night.
A faint clattering rises from the alley, and Etienne peers through the shutters of Marie-Laure’s bedroom, down six stories, and sees the ghost of Madame Manec standing there in the moonlight. She holds out a hand, and sparrows land one by one on her arms, and she tucks each one into her coat.
Loudenvielle
The Pyrenees gleam. A pitted moon stands on their crests as if impaled. Sergeant Major von Rumpel takes a cab through platinum moonlight to a commissariat and stands across from a police captain who continually drags the index and middle fingers of his left hand through his considerable mustache.
The French police have made an arrest. Someone has burglarized the chalet of a prominent donor with ties to the Natural History Museum in Paris, and the burglar has been apprehended with a travel case stuffed with gems.
He waits a long time. The captain reviews the fingernails of his left hand, then his right, then his left again. Von Rumpel is feeling very weak tonight, queasy really; the doctor says the treatments are over, that they have made their assault on the tumor and now they must wait, but some mornings he cannot straighten after he finishes tying his shoes.
A car arrives. The captain goes out to greet it. Von Rumpel watches through the window.
From the backseat, two policemen produce a frail-looking man in a beige suit with a perfect purple bruise around his left eye. Hands cuffed. A spattering of blood on his collar. As though he has just left off playing a villain in some movie. The policemen shepherd the prisoner inside while the captain removes a handbag from the car’s trunk.
Von Rumpel takes his white gloves from his pocket. The captain closes his office door, sets the bag atop his desk, and pulls his blinds. Tilts the shade of his desk lamp. In a room somewhere beyond, von Rumpel can hear a cell door clang shut. From the handbag the captain removes an address book, a stack of letters, and a woman’s compact. Then he plucks out a false bottom followed by six velvet bundles.
He unwraps them one at a time. The first contains three gorgeous pieces of beryl: pink, fat, hexagonal. Inside the second is a single cluster of aqua-colored Amazonite, gently striated with white. Inside the third is a pear-cut diamond.
A thrill leaps into the tips of von Rumpel’s fingers. From a pocket, the captain withdraws a loupe, a look of naked greed blooming on his face. He examines the diamond for a long time, turning it this way and that. Through von Rumpel’s mind sail visions of the Führermuseum, glittering cases, bowers beneath pillars, jewels behind glass—and something else too: a faint power, like a low voltage, coming off the stone. Whispering to him, promising to erase his illness.
Finally the captain looks up, the impress of his loupe a tight pink circle around his eye. The lamplight sets a gleam on his wet lips. He places the jewel back on the towel.
From the other side of the desk, von Rumpel picks up the diamond. Just the right weight. Cold in his fingers, even through the cotton of the gloves. Deeply saturated with blue at its edges.
Does he believe?
Dupont has almost kindled a fire inside it. But with the lens to his eye, von Rumpel can see that the stone is identical to the one he examined in the museum two years before. He sets the reproduction back on the desk.
“But at the minimum,” the captain says in French, his face falling, “we must X-ray it, no?”