A/N: This one's shorter (hence the early update), but next chapter is extra long to make up for it! Don't forget to review.
Haruki Murakami: "Precipitate as weather, she appeared from somewhere, then evaporated, leaving only memory."
Two days later Alice stood center-stage at the Théâtre Mogador in a lavender gown with trailing gossamer sleeves, near blinded by the stage lights as she sailed her way through Nessun Dorma. Not the most popular choice of song in Paris given that it was Italian, but beyond the dazzling lights she sensed that every single person in her nearly two-thousand strong audience sat spellbound.
Listen, she coaxed with her voice, lilting one hand with the rise of a note. She closed her eyes. Let me break your heart.
The orchestra came in before the final rise and she opened her eyes, taking in what she could see of the front row. Seven men in Nazi uniforms sat front and center. One of them had tears in his eyes.
Alice closed her eyes again a moment before she opened her mouth for the final aria.
She'd arrived in France only that morning, and had barely had time to change after the train ride before she was being shuffled backstage at the theater. Paris was much the same as the last time she'd visited; people walked quickly down the streets with their heads down. Soldiers seemed to wait at every corner. It seemed the new law forcing Jews to wear yellow stars had been enforced here as well as in Austria, as she'd glimpsed a few men and women scurrying past with fabric stars on their coats. Alice felt a strange pressure between her eyes when she saw them, as if halfway between crying and screaming.
At the train station she'd noticed a large V graffitied over one of the station boards. She'd seen the same letter carved into the sidewalk outside the theater. She couldn't puzzle out a reason.
Curiouser and curiouser.
A smile quirked Alice's lips a moment before she let out her breath in the soaring, earthshaking final lines of the song:
"All'alba vincerò!" [At dawn, I will win] Her hands rose by her sides and her sleeves rose off the floor like wings. "Vincerò, vincerò!" [I will win, I will win].
Just watch me.
Standing under a streetlight on a Parisian boulevard a few hours later, Alice self-consciously wiped the corner of her sleeve at the side of her face, grimacing when it came away with a smudge of makeup. She'd finished at the theater, dressed in her 'Al' getup, and come straight to Rue des Rosiers. She'd never worn these clothes in daylight before, but no one passing by gave her a second glance.
She'd tucked her hair into a worn grey cap, bound her chest under a loose white shirt tucked into brown trousers, and an oversized coat hung over her shoulders. She looked like a young man in clothes a size too big for him. She'd worked out how to alter her bearing and facial expression to further fool people – she slouched more, clenched her jaw, swung her arms when she walked. Oftentimes she found herself mimicking her memory of Steve. It made her feel braver.
Fifteen minutes later, Alice had just noticed a small V etched into the side of the streetlamp when a light voice spoke in French behind her:
"Georg! How wonderful to see you again, how is your mother?"
Alice turned with a pleasant smile on her face to see a woman, maybe in her mid-forties, with grey-streaked dark hair and a wide face with deep-set eyes. The woman was smiling at Alice, but her eyes flicked over her with an intensely perceptive look.
"Louise," Alice said in a soft voice, dipping her head. The woman's eyes became razor-focused. "My mother has a slight fever, but she will be well in no time."
Code phrases exchanged, the woman took Alice's arm. "Come, let's speak somewhere more comfortable."
Alice let the older woman steer her down the street and around the corner, their footsteps in time and their mouths shut. To anyone else they appeared to be a woman and her younger male acquaintance taking a stroll. The woman's hand was warm on Alice's arm. Her heart thudded when they turned down a quieter street and came to a green door.
The woman knocked six times, and after thirty seconds a man about her age cracked the door open, peered at them both, and then let them in.
"We'll be in the sitting room," the woman curtly told the man, then steered Alice in. She got a glimpse of a small, sparsely decorated home before she was bundled into a stuffy room with the curtains drawn. A sofa had been pushed all the way up against the wall and there was a bookshelf in the corner, but not much else in the room other than that.
Alice's contact shut the door behind her then turned to face Alice. Her eyes flicked over her.
"You are not a man," said the woman. Her voice was even.
Alice swallowed. Great disguise, Moser. "No, I…" she reached up and took off her cap, straightening into her natural posture as her hair fell loose to her shoulders. She held the cap in both hands and watched the woman's eyes narrow. "I'm not."
The woman eyed her. "I recognize you." She cocked her head, thinking. "How do I know you?"
Alice drew in a deep breath. Moment of truth. "My name's Alice Moser."
The woman's eyes widened. Alice got the sense she didn't often show surprise. "La Sirene." She crossed her arms and shot Alice another evaluating look. "Well, that is a surprise. Tell me why the Siren's in France dressed as a man and seeking out resistance?"
"I think Hugo's sister – Marie – I think she wrote to you-"
The woman waved a hand. "I know Marie well, and I trust her, but she can be impulsive." She took a step closer. "I want you to explain yourself."
Alice lifted her chin. "I'm here because I want to help. We… we have a small group in Vienna, of people trying to help-"
"Help who?"
"Anyone who needs it. Jews. Romani. The sick. People who speak out." Alice ran a hand through her hair. "To be honest, anyone who's not a Nazi." The other woman's eyes flashed, and Alice continued. "I'm not going to pretend there's a lot we can do. Most of us are kids, students, plenty are in hiding themselves. But we learned that we're not alone in Vienna, and we… we think we might be stronger together."
The woman's eyes darkened. "How can you help?"
"We've been keeping people safe. We have some money, we can offer it if you're in need. We know people at the borders of most central European countries and we have access to forgers. We can help people flee east, if that's what they want. In return, we want to help people flee west – eastward is a long journey through occupied countries, but we've heard of people fleeing across the Channel to England." The woman's eyes flashed again. "And we learn things. We want to share those things." Alice sensed the woman's question before she spoke it. "New policies. Police movements. Where people will be, when."
"How."
"Rumors and gossip mostly." Alice swallowed again. "And I… my uncle's well connected, we go to a lot of parties. I hear things."
"Hm." The woman finally tore her eyes away from Alice and paced the length of the room. Up to the closed-off window, then back, her eyes on the ground and her hands folded behind her back. Alice stood with her hat in her hand, barely daring to breathe.
Finally the woman looked up again. "Why should I trust you?"
Alice spread her hands. "I don't expect you to. Not fully. But I…" she met the woman's eyes. "I've told you my name. I've been plain about what I've been doing and what I want to do. You could destroy me if you wanted to. Hell, you could make me disappear right now and no one would know where I've gone."
The woman's eyebrow lifted. "We're not in the habit of murdering young women, Ms Moser."
That's a relief. She shrugged. "What I mean is… I'm in this. My name on the line, my life on the line. I want this war to end, and beyond that I want the Nazis to end. I don't know how, but I want it more than anything else." Her voice cracked. "That… that has to be enough."
The woman's dark eyes took Alice in. Alice had never felt so… judged before in her life. She'd stood on a stage in front of almost two thousand people only an hour ago, but this made her gut churn and her head swim. In the woman's eyes she saw the promise of ruin.
The game of trust and suspicion.
Alice let out a breath.
A moment later the woman held out her hand. "It's nice to meet you, Alice Moser. My name's Vera Izard. Welcome to the OCM."
Alice spent the rest of her week at performances, parties, and dressed as a man as she followed Vera Izard around the secret places of Paris. The OCM, she'd found out, stood for the Organisation Civile et Militaire, and… that was about all Vera would tell her. Alice met some other members, and from what she could tell they were a mix of conservatives who didn't like the Germans, and socialists – they worked as bankers, lawyers, scholars, laborers, and soldiers.
Alice learned from Vera, taking note of how she only gave away as much as she needed to, and in return passed on some tricks of her own: how to hide keys and letters on your person if you didn't have a bag, how to set up a food network (get the grocers to set aside a portion of food, and if anyone comes asking imply that it was the Nazi generals taking more than their fair share. If the generals came asking, blame it on the troops).
Only Vera knew Alice's real name. Everyone else came to know her as Al, the soft-spoken young man with a perfect Parisian accent and a host of handy tricks up his sleeve.
Vera said nothing explicitly, but Alice figured that the OCM had connections to Britain and British agents in France, as well as to the resistance groups carrying out sabotage and attacks against German troops and assassinating German officials in France. Vera pressed a brochure titled Manuel du Légionnaire into Alice's hand and explained 'this was published to educate French people who wished to join the Germans fighting on the Eastern Front'. Alice read it that night and smiled when she realized that this information was intended to spread no further than France itself: the manual explained how to make bombs and shoot guns, how to carry out sabotage against various military installations such as factories, and how to avoid detection. Alice committed the information and diagrams to memory and then put the manual in her fire grate.
Alice and Vera established a set of ciphers so they could exchange letters once Alice went back to Vienna, without fear of censorship. On the second last day they walked past a German truck with a giant chalk V drawn on the side.
"What's with the Vs?" Alice asked.
Vera turned her head slightly and gave Alice a funny look. "What do you mean?"
Alice didn't point at the truck, as there were soldiers looking. "I've been seeing it everywhere."
Vera smiled. "It's a symbol we picked up from our British neighbors."
"And it means…?"
Vera spread her index and middle finger in a V and shot Alice a small smile. "La Victoire." [Victory].
A thrill went down Alice's spine.
Excerpt from 'The "Refus Absurde": Life in Nazi Occupied France, 1940' by Pierre Montague (1997), p 24
In the face of immense force and racial segregation from their new oppressors, French citizens began to amass a resistance (La Résistance). Individuals began recruiting others for resistance and arranging counter-German activities such as sabotage, passing information to Britain (to the newly-founded intelligence Special Operations Group), and assisting code breakers from Poland and Britain. Many of these individuals would later become important leaders when many individual resistance cells mass organized in 1943 (the United Resistance Movement).
…
The early resistance cells included… 4) The Organisation Civile et Militaire (OCM), with just a few hundred members in late 1941 which ballooned to over forty thousand within two years. Four thousand of these were to give their lives for the resistance.
After her last performance in Paris, a morning concert at the Salle Wagram, Alice decided to stroll around the 8th Arrondissement before a scheduled lunch with her uncle at the hotel before their 1pm train.
It felt strange to be sightseeing when so much of her time in France had been spent working; either performing or creeping through back streets and meeting strangers. From here she could see the Eiffel Tower stretching into the sky, and when she crossed a road she looked up to see the Arc de Triomphe at the end of it. She could almost pretend she was a normal tourist, but then she spotted a roadblock of German trucks and a tank at the end of the road and her smile soured.
She turned left down a shopping street and tried to lose herself. The autumn air in Paris smelled like fresh cooking bread and engine exhaust, and despite the crowds on the street the atmosphere felt muted. Like a photograph that hadn't quite come out right in the darkroom. Alice huddled further into her coat.
The subdued quality to the air shattered when gunshots rang out.
Alice froze for a moment, instantly recognizing the loud cracks for what they were; she might not be a soldier, but she'd fired guns before out the back of the old church in Brooklyn. Never anything of this caliber though.
She unfroze when the crowd screamed. She ducked, staggered back, and then as the gunshots kept shattering the air the people on the street started running. Alice was forced to run with them down the paved street back the way she'd come, her elbows knocking against others and her pounding footsteps jarring her jaw as she ran. She saw a sign on the side of the street shatter as a bullet zinged through it. She ducked her head. She thought the gunshots were coming from behind, firing off every few seconds, but she wasn't sure what was going on. We're in the middle of Paris, she thought numbly as a man barged into her side and nearly knocked her over. This isn't meant to be what war is like.
"Saboteure!" shouted a man in German, followed by more shots. A woman next to Alice screamed.
A dark alleyway yawned open to her right and Alice shoved sideways into it. The crowd was panicking, running in any direction they could, and a few others darted into the alleyway along with Alice. They pelted down the street with their shoes slapping on the pavement.
Then Alice heard the loudest gunshot yet. It seemed to erupt from right behind her so she dove sideways, behind a metal trash can outside someone's back doorstep. Her shoulder banged against the wall as she scrambled for cover.
Alice hunched into a ball behind the trash can and gripped her knees, her heart pounding so loud against her ribs she thought it must be audible and her breaths coming short and sharp down her ragged throat. She heard screams and running footsteps in the direction of the main street.
After a few seconds of mind-numbing, paralyzing fear, Alice peeked around the side of the trash can. The crowd of people running down the street had thinned, and she caught a few flashes of terrified faces as they sprinted past.
"Saboteur Verbrecher!" [Saboteur criminal!] came another deep shout. A moment later a young man in overalls with a cap pulled low over his face dashed into view, glancing over his shoulder as he ran.
Crack.
She thought the man had tripped, but when he fell to the ground his head smacked against the pavement and bounced twice before falling still. His face was turned toward the alley. Alice saw his eyes go dead.
Alice felt as if ice had crept into her heart as she stared at the dead man lying on the street. She blinked, her eyes burning, and saw the scarlet glint of blood pooling around him.
A second later thudding footsteps approached and Alice caught a glimpse of a German soldier's uniform before she whipped back behind the trashcan.
"Du hast ihn," [You got him,] she heard a man's voice say, with a Berlin accent.
There was a pause, and Alice heard the sound of clothing rustling, a boot scraping pavement. "Französischer Bastard," [French bastard], came a second voice. "Es wird Tage dauern, bis der Panzer repariert ist." [It'll take days to fix the tank].
The roadblock, Alice realized. She heard more movement and shoved her fist into her mouth.
She crouched behind the trashcan for what felt like hours, listening to the German soldiers curse the dead man and drag his body away. When she couldn't hear them any longer she counted to one hundred, then crept away the alleyway. She didn't look over her shoulder, but she pictured the empty street with the cooling pool of blood on it all the same.
She emerged from the alleyway onto another street. It was empty. Heart in her mouth, she walked as fast as she could back through the now deathly quiet streets, past the Arc de Triomphe, back to the hotel.
"There you are," said her uncle when she appeared in the dining hall. He had pulled his pocketwatch out of his breast pocket and frowned at her when she arrived. "Hurry now, we'll miss our train if we don't eat quickly."
Alice followed him to the table silently. Her knees felt wobbly as she sat down across from him, and her hands shook when she reached to pick up her waterglass.
"Alice?"
She flinched and looked up at her uncle, who was still frowning at her. His deep-set eyes looked impatient.
"What's the matter?"
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Took a sip of water and opened it again. "Nothing," she breathed. "I'm fine."
"Hm." His eyes slid away from her and he picked up his menu.
Alice stared at her empty plate, her ears ringing, as her uncle called the waiter over and ordered for both of them. She was looking at white, spotless china, but all she saw was the blank, blue eyes of the young man lying in the street.
Excerpt from article 'La Marseillaise: History of a Song' by Henri Marcelle (2004)
Following the swift defeat of France in 1940, the Nazi powers quickly banned any French citizen from singing their national anthem (it had previously been banned by French rulers three times before). An understandable decision, given that the song is a seven-versed war cry, but this led to the secret singing of the anthem becoming a rallying call for the budding French resistance.
…
Verse 4:
'Tremblez, tyrans! et vous, perfides, [Tremble, tyrants! And you, traitors,]
L'opprobre de tous les partis, [The disgrace of all groups,]
Tremblez! vos projets parricides [Tremble! Your parricidal plans]
Vont enfin recevoir leur prix. [Will finally pay the price.]
Tout est soldat pour vous combattre. [Everyone is a soldier to fight you.]
S'ils tombent, nos jeunes héros, [If they fall, our young heroes,]
La France en produit de nouveaux, [France will make more]
Contre vous tout prêts à se batter. [Ready to battle you.]
When the towncar from the train station dropped them at the house in Vienna, Alice rushed upstairs to put her trunk away, dressed, and rushed back down again.
She tried not to break into a run as she made her way to Jilí's apartment, her mind abuzz with la Victoire and the OCM and their interesting connections. She still wasn't sure whether or not to tell Jilí about the shooting she'd witnessed. She wanted to tell someone but it would only make Jilí worry more.
She climbed up the stairs of the narrow apartment building two at a time and tapped her fist against Jilí's door.
The door creaked open under her knuckles.
Alice's heart dropped so hard and so fast that she was sure it would bring her to her knees. She paused a moment to let out a shaky breath.
The gap in the doorway widened at a push from her fingertips, and Alice's chin trembled when she saw that the apartment within was dark. And cold. She paced in, holding her breath. Her footsteps creaked on the floor.
The apartment looked just like it had when she left: chairs pushed neatly against the bare table, the kitchen filled with the necessities for living. A glimpse of Jilí's cot in the tiny bedroom. The windows were still papered over.
Alice walked the perimeter of the room, her eyes on everything for some sort of sign. But there was nothing here – not even a bootprint or a scuff mark to give her some idea. Jilí's coat was gone. Cans of food rested on the table, ready to be packed.
After looking around for a few minutes, Alice went into Jilí's bedroom and pried up the loose floorboard under her cot. There, in the gap in the floor, rested Jilí's secret things: the drawing of her and Franz from Steve, some papers relating to their work (not much, they wrote down as little as possible as a rule), and some money. Untouched.
When Alice walked out of the apartment a minute later with Jilí's secret possessions in her coat pocket, her stomach churned. She knew what this meant.
She went straight to Jilí's cousin Vano's place. He lived in a loft apartment with seven other men, who all looked up when she opened the door without knocking.
Alice stood in the doorway, her heart pounding and her breath short, and her focus zeroed in on the dark-haired Vano. "Where is she," she said flatly.
Vano sat at the table, holding a pen over a single piece of paper. He looked up at Alice with big, distraught eyes, and Alice felt her heart turn to stone.
"I was just writing to you," he said softly. The entire apartment was silent, like the hush in a library or a graveyard. Alice felt seven pairs of eyes on her. "I didn't know when you were getting back. She's…" he swallowed. "No one's seen her since Wednesday."
It's Sunday. Alice grasped the side of the door jamb and let out a breath. "What's… where have you looked?"
A tear spilled down Vano's cheek. "Everywhere."
Alice spent the next week searching. Vano helped her, as did Hugo and their other friends. She asked everyone she could, everyone she could possibly think of. The last anyone saw of Jilí she was delivering food and clothes to the Steiners, who were hiding in the back room of an abandoned church. After that… no one knew anything. Alice warned the Steiners to be on their guard just in case.
She found out quickly that there'd been another round of deportations of Jews from Vienna, along with everyone else the Nazi's didn't like. Like the Romani people. She learned of other friends of hers who'd gone missing, but people had seen their arrests, they knew where they'd gone. Jilí was just… gone.
Alice visited families who wore yellow stars on their clothes and looked at her with fear in their eyes.
She walked the streets from one lead or idea to another, her face calm and her strides purposeful. She barely came home, and that was only to sleep. She walked the streets at night, alone more often than not. She went back to the alley where they'd found Franz almost three years ago.
The glimpses she caught of herself in darkened windows or puddles reminded her of the stories her mother used to tell her about the Druden, the nightmarish wraiths and witches who haunted the night and went screeching through the streets on the Wild Hunt. The only difference was that Alice was completely and utterly silent. Her screams stayed in her own mind.
On her sixth day of searching Alice went in her desperation to a man she knew in the police force and tried to coax him into telling her if anyone had been arrested lately. He responded eagerly to her flirting, but gave away nothing. She even asked her maid Julia if Jilí had come to the house for some reason. Julia just shook her head mutely.
Finally she found herself in the basement dwelling of Noah, a Jew who had fled from a train packed full of terrified people headed east two months ago by squeezing out of a tiny gap in the window as the train was going sixty miles an hour through Czechoslovakia. He'd broken both his legs, but eventually made his way to Austria and hid right in the heart of Vienna.
Alice had heard his story briefly when she first met him last month, while delivering food. He lived up to his story: he was rail-thin, with arms like sparrow bones and a prematurely grey beard concealing the lower half of his face. He had bright, suspicious eyes that gleamed out of his face.
As Alice explained why she'd come and who she was looking for, his eyes slowly turned compassionate. She recalled that he'd been a father, once.
"I know you made part of the journey," she said in a shaky voice. "Do you have any advice for how I can find her? Where to look? If… if she did end up on one of those trains."
She fell silent, twisting her fingers together.
Noah leaned over where he sat on a paint can and looked into her eyes. "Wherever Jilí is," he said frankly, "there is no saving her, Alice. She is dead."
Alice sat down hard, as if she'd had her strings cut, and a cry bubbled up her throat and escaped her lips before she could stop it. She doubled over and gripped her hair in her hands.
Noah didn't move from where he sat but he made a low, shushing sound as if trying to quiet a baby.
Alice stared into the darkness as she pressed her face to her knees and felt her whole body shake.
She is dead.
There was no way to know if Jilí was gone because of who she was – Romani, other – or because of what she and Alice had been doing. No way of knowing if Alice got her killed.
"Shh, shh," murmured Noah.
Noah had only gone part of the way on that train. And he was one of so many who'd vanished with no clear idea of the destination. Even Alice with all her whispers didn't know. But she knew it must be so much worse than here, and that terrified her.
Maybe Jilí hadn't even made it to a train.
Alice gripped her head on her hands and rocked herself where she sat on a creaking crate in a dusty basement, as a man who'd lost everything shushed her into silence.
Excerpt from article 'The Vanished' by Sarah Lille (1999)
Throughout history there are stories of people vanishing without a trace, leaving little sign as to their fate. Explorers who never came home, children who left nothing but their bike behind on the sidewalk, men and women who simply dropped out of their lives without a hint as to where they have gone. Sometimes whole civilisations and entire airplanes full of people simply disappear, no matter how hard we search for them. Lists of missing people grow by the hundreds each year.
To this day they live in a perpetual limbo of unknowing: not dead, not alive.
Just gone.
Alice didn't remember walking back home from Noah's basement. She remembered feeling cold, so cold that she shoved her fingers into her armpits for fear they'd fall off like she'd seen happen to some people in winter. But it was only September. Their first snow wouldn't fall for months.
She remembered opening the door to her uncle's house, shivering so hard her teeth chattered. She remembered a flustered Julia appearing before her and yanking her out of her coat.
"You've been gone all day!" Julia chided. "Herr Huber has been leaving notes for you since Tuesday, did you get any of them?"
"Notes?" Alice asked. Her lips felt numb.
"We're having a dinner party this evening, with some generals visiting from the Italian front and a man from Herr Goebbels' department…" Julia chattered on, hastening Alice out of her boots and upstairs, and Alice could only blink at her. "Let's get you dressed and ready, you've only got twenty minutes-"
Alice let Julia push her into her room and sit her down at the dresser. Alice's eyes fell to the second drawer, which had the false bottom with her letters from Steve and Jilí's possessions.
Dear Steve, she thought. Everyone around me dies. Yours, Alice.
Her heart did a strange flutter-jump-crash which brought a tear spilling from her eye. She looked up at herself in the mirror and stared at the wet trail down her cheek.
Julia came back from the wardrobe with her arms full of dresses, still talking, and Alice swiped away the tear.
You must hide.
The thought shimmered to the front of her mind like an illusion in a frozen desert. Alice drew in a hiccupping breath and stared back at her own wide, glittering eyes. You must hide every part of your true self from the world.
The thought felt like Jilí. It felt like her mother and her father, loving each other and hiding it away. It felt like Tom. It felt like Bucky, and Steve, and everyone else she loved and had ever loved.
The thought sounded like herself.
"Which dress for the dinner?" Julia asked, breaking into Alice's reverie. Alice carefully brushed tears out of her eyelashes and looked up at the two dresses her maid held up: a bright white frock with lacing, and a dark navy. I don't care.
"The navy," Alice said. She turned back to the mirror and waited for Julia to start fixing her hair.
Alice didn't pay any attention for the first twenty minutes of the dinner. Her uncle had invited eight men and two women, all of whom arrived in some form of uniform or expensive outfit. Alice smiled when spoken to and nodded when asked a question, but she couldn't bring herself to speak. The chandelier hanging over the dinner table was too bright, the clink of glasses and cutlery sounded like screaming in her ears.
Her whole body was rigid, her face felt tight. She could feel her uncle casting glances her way but she couldn't look at him.
As Julia and the manservant took away the salads, Alice looked up and finally registered the faces around her. Her shock ebbed as they all sipped white wine. When Julia brought out the main courses, Alice's shock faded away and she realized that all that was left under it was howling, ice-cold rage.
It took her by surprise and she spluttered as she took a sip of her wine. She waved off the concerned looks and the offer of a napkin. She set a hand to her chest, sure that the freezing anger cracking inside her would chill her fingers, but all she felt was her own heartbeat.
She looked up.
Eleven people sat around a finely-arranged dinner table with her, laughing at her uncle's joke. Alice stiffened in her seat.
She wanted to scream at them. She wanted to tear the medals off the generals' uniforms and smash their glasses over their heads. She wanted to throw her uncle through the double-glazed panes of his mansion windows.
She wanted to scream at these men for taking Jilí from her, for coming in with their hate and fear and tearing the world apart. How could they sit here and drink and smile?
But Alice didn't scream at them. She sat perfectly still and took small bites of her meal, smiling politely when her neighbor spoke. She looked around and took in the laughter, the faces, the uniforms.
And she thought: I will do everything in my power to bring you to your knees.
The thought straightened Alice's spine and turned her face into marble.
The Army general sitting across from her cleared his throat and looked at her. Alice met his gaze. "You look very pretty tonight, Fräulein Moser." He held up his wine glass.
Alice leaned over and clinked her glass against his. "Thank you." Her lips parted and she bared her teeth in a pretty, dazzling smile.
~ Sing to me of grief and pain,
I know them well,
I know their names. ~