Final impact

He watched a couple of them who were hiding at the end of the pinched, cobblestone alley that ran between Rue Houdon and the Villa de Guelma, beneath his window. A man and woman, both wearing German helmets but otherwise dressed in civilian clothes. Some sort of fascist militia, he supposed. They nervously checked their weapons and ammunition at a small sandbag barricade. They had just one rifle between them, an 1898 vintage Mauser, but had somehow managed to find a whole box of Stielhandgranate, long-handled grenades. The man was sitting on a chair he’d obviously stolen from a nearby cafй or strip club, his head resting in his hands, his body completely still. The woman, clothed incongruously in a thin cotton dress, odd socks, tennis shoes, and a black bucket helmet, seemed animated by all the energy that had left his body. She held the rifle, checking the load every few minutes, poking her head around the corner into the main street, whipping it back like a frightened deer, and spinning around nervously as though someone had just snuck up behind her. She would start to crouch, then stand bolt upright, back away from the sandbags, then shuffle toward them again. The only sign that her companion was still alive was an occasional shake of the head.

Brasch was sure they would both be dead by the end of the week, if not the day.

The cease-fire among the Resistance, the few functioning elements of the French state, and the German rear guard had frayed as the Allies pushed toward the city. Some fighting had flared as individual units of SS engineers had tried to set off demolition charges at selected sites around the city. The Louvre was a smoking ruin, its artworks looted before the building had been destroyed. Gone, too, the Arc de Triomphe. But attempts to bring down the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame had failed when the engineers were attacked by an odd alliance of Communist guerrillas and paramilitary gendarmes. Most of the city’s police force was on strike, probably working on their excuses for having cooperated so closely with the Germans, and the Communists were in a frenzy of excitement at word of the return of the Soviet Union to the fray. As Brasch had slipped through city, just ahead of his pursuers, he had seen dozens of posters calling for a workers’ uprising in solidarity with the approaching Red Army.

As far as he could tell, most Parisians were only too glad that the Americans and their own Free French forces would arrive long before the Reds.

The whores in the sitting room downstairs swapped rumors concerning the advance, some of them insisting that the Americans were already at the edge of the suburbs. But Brasch knew far more than they did. He could hear the percussion of artillery and heavy bombing in the distance. Probably around Chartres, an hour away. And he’d been able to access Fleetnet via his flexipad for most of the past twenty-four hours. Drones had taken up station above the city, probably in support of Special Forces already inside, some of whom were coming to extract him. He could follow the battle quite closely, and he knew for certain that the Free French First Armored under Leclerc was punching through the last line of defense, and should enter Paris within hours.

His problem was that he might not have hours left. Even though the occupying German troops were almost gone, he’d been chased across half the city by at least six separate squads of Gestapo. They must be desperate to capture him, he reasoned, because the tipping point was fast approaching when the Parisians’ fear would give way to a savage hunger for revenge. It would be made all the worse by self-loathing as the French came to terms with the last two years. Time could not be reversed like a vid file. Many had not just served the interests of Nazi Germany but done so with great zeal, especially in the prosecution of the Reich’s genocidal Final Solution. There would come a heavy reckoning for that.

“Monsieur Brasch. Monsieur!”

Brasch turned away from his vantage point. The room behind him was dark. The few hours a day of unreliable electricity the city had recently enjoyed were over. The lights had been out for two days now.

Madam Colbert stood in the doorway, her modesty protected only by a moth-eaten bathrobe.

“Do you think it will be long before your friends come?” she asked. “They will come won’t they? It is just that…well…”

She trailed off, unable to speak the truth of it. She owed him. He had saved her daughter from rape at the hands of two drunken Wehrmacht men a month earlier. She didn’t need to know that he had done so on purpose, to establish a connection with a suitable local and a safe house for the flight he’d always known was coming. As far as Colbert was concerned, he was simply a man on the run from the Boche who had done her a great service.