This Week’s Prompt was: Write a story where a character's late arrival sets something in motion.

Assassin, Wife, Cuckolder, Spy

Yvette stood at the window hardly feeling the cool October breeze, nor hearing the little clatter of silverware in the pantry as Mimi finished closing the kitchen.  The smell of the cold channel in the distance and the warm coffee on the counter likewise found no purchase amid the singular thoughts of Mme Yvette Artois.  Though at that time of night the closing of Café Artois, the securing of the doors and fulfilling the last requests of their regular guests, usually occupied her entirely, tonight Yvette watched the blackness outside and listened to the sound of bombs falling on London.

The town of Paluel, in Normandy, upon the river Durdent, had passed through the Battle of France relatively unscathed.  Four months previously, the Germans drove by in their tanks and their half-track trucks and flew south to Paris, leaving only a small force at the airfield outside of town.  For the residents, it was unreal but peacefully so: one day, their businesses were frequented by their neighbors, the next by Nazi soldiers.  There were, of course, curfews and frequent patrols; the local commandant would take no chances with the small though vital airfield under his governance.  It would take little to disrupt air operations against England, if guerillas should one day appear in France.  As of October, 1940, no such resistance was met by the occupiers.

“Madame?” Mimi said suddenly at Yvette’s shoulder.

Yvette jumped but did not turn until she had taken a breath.  In her plain blouse and tweed skirt, she looked more English than French in dress: however, it took only a second’s glance at her down-soft hair the color of café au lait, her high cheekbones and emerald-green eyes, to know that she was a daughter of France.

“Yes?” she said quietly.

Though cured of her Gascon loquaciousness by the heavy-handed cook, Mimi wrung her hands before her short rounded body with all the eloquence of a shout, saying, “Madame, there are Germans come into the café and they wish to see M. Artois.”

Yvette took a deeper breath, her features freezing into an unfriendly mien, and asked, “How many?”

“An officer, I think,” Mimi said, “and two soldiers.”

“Ask the officer to join me,” Yvette said, shooing away the waitress.  She took quick stock of her surroundings as the door between the kitchen and the salon swung on its hinges.  Behind her was the open window, overlooking the woods that led to the airfield; around her, the wooden counter scrubbed clean, adorned with the tools of the cook’s trade; before her, a table bearing two covered plates, underneath which lie her and her husband’s dinners, a bottle of Burgundy wine, a bottle of brandy, glasses, silverware.  To her left—she would not allow herself to look, even for a moment, fastening her eyes to the salon door—was the door to the cellar.  In the cellar, concealed poorly behind sacks of flour or onions or other provisions, were three members of the French Resistance.

“Mme Artois,” Hauptmann Strohm said as he strode into the room, kicking open the door as he passed through it, ignoring Mimi’s attempt to precede or announce him.  In his highly polished boots, impeccable grey uniform and black coat, he looked as all German officers looked to Yvette: unwelcome.  There was something in his eyes, however, that made her exert more effort than usual to appear impassive.  “Where is your husband?”

“M. Artois has gone to Orleans,” Yvette said, “to a vineyard west of the city, of which he is part owner.  It supplies much of our wine and he has gone to inspect the harvest.  I expect him tonight, Monsieur.”

Hauptmann Strohm made a dismissive noise in his throat and then turned his chin to one shoulder, addressing himself through the doorway to the salon.  “Search the café,” he told his two soldiers.  “Including the rooms upstairs and the out buildings.”  His two soldiers saluted and immediately began prying into every crevice, no matter how small.  Returning his unsettling gaze to Mme. Artois, Hauptmann Strohm took a slow step forward and placed a hand on the back of a chair.  He looked expectantly at Yvette.

“As your men conduct their search,” Yvette said, straining to keep her suddenly dry throat from cracking significantly, “perhaps you would care for a brandy, Monsieur?”

Strohm inclined his head slightly, his coal-black eyes unmoving.  He studied her as she poured a large measure of Armagnac from the glass decanter into her husband’s glass and set it upon the table.  Strohm did not move to take it, did not move at all and yet seemed to exude impatience.  Yvette looked between glass and decanter for a moment and then, understanding, lunged forward and raised the glass, handing it to the Hauptmann.  The smallest trace of a smile pricked the corners of his mouth as he made her wait a full minute before accepting her brandy.  Without being asked, he sat.

“Your name is Yvette Artois,” Strohm said.  “A thoroughly French name.  Turn around.”

Yvette caught herself about to ask why and then complied.  If she had read it in a book six months before, she would have expected to virtually feel the eyes of her assailant as they crawled down her body.  Not so now.  On the counter under the window were the racks of knives the cook used: having helped her husband run the café for the whole of their fifteen years together, she knew the dimensions of the kitchen instinctually.  Half a step, she thought, take the knife, turn on the heel, slash as I spin and—and the two soldiers upstairs ransacking our bedroom or Mimi’s would discover their murdered Capitan, search further, and discover the Resistance in the cellar.  She willed her body to a peace not present in her mind.

“Face me,” Strohm said.  He made no attempt to disguise his leering, viewing her as if she were a statue in a garden.  His leer widened his smile until his thin lips nearly disappeared.  “It never ceases to amaze me that your country has such beautiful women.  How can this be so?  Your armies crumble like dry leaves and fly as if before a stiff wind, your government is prostrated after mere weeks of war: how is it that all the beautiful women have not been carried off by wave after wave of conqueror?  You must spring from the very earth.  Sit!”

Yvette pulled back her chair but Strohm stopped her from taking it, instead having her drag it off to one side, so that the table might not be deprived him of the sight of her legs as they waited.  He took a sip of her brandy and continued his visual inspection, absently circling a finger on the time-polished wood of the table.

It was not always so, Yvette thought.  Before the Armistice of Pétain, our soldiers were known as the bravest in Europe, you German dog.  Only one country has ever conquered all Europe and that was France under Nepoleon!  Where did that spirit go?  I remember the day the tanks roared down the Rue de Veulettes.  René stood at the closed door, peering through the Judas window with his fouling piece to one side and a cleaver in hand.  He said that if you came as guests, we must feed you, entertain you as any others.  He did not say what we must do if you attacked us.

“You are very quiet, Madame,” Strohm said.  He had finished the glass of brandy.

“What should I say?” Yvette asked, refilling his glass.

“Anything,” Strohm said.  “Make your lips move.  Say my name.”

“I have not had the privilege to know your name, Monsieur,” Yvette said.

“Strohm,” the Hauptmann said resonantly.  “Hauptmann Strohm of the SS.”

“It is a pleasure to meet you,” Yvette said, “Hauptmann Strohm of the SS.”

“Such voluptuousness,” Strohm said.  “Your lesser race seethes with voluptuousness.  What is beyond that door?” he demanded, indicating the door behind Yvette with a tiny motion of his eyes.

Yvette turned to look, perhaps only for a moment’s respite, before saying, “Nothing of interest, M. Strohm.  The cellar.”

“It has been my experience,” Strohm said, “that the French cellar is always the most interesting room in the house.  After the attic.  And that is saying quite a bit, considering the French bedroom.”

“I would be happy to show it to you,” Yvette said, feeling her heart begin to pound if not faster, more powerfully.  She hoped it did not beat visible in the side of her throat.  “But first, Monsieur, please: at this hour, you must have had a long and tiring day, allow me to offer you a meal.”

Knowing he only half-listened to what she said—his remaining attention split between admiring her body and admiring his imagined power—she slowly uncoiled her legs and came to her feet.  Standing unnecessarily far from the table, she bent forward provocatively and removed the cover from her husband’s plate.  If she had any doubt of the Hauptmann’s libertine nature before, it was erased by his reaction to the smells that issued from the hot dinner thus revealed.  The leer deepened to rapacious, his eyebrows arched and his nostrils flared; he swiveled in his chair to fully face the meal.

With a flick of his fingers as fast as a striking snake, he broke the topmost button of her blouse and ordered, “Sit.”

Startled backward, Yvette gathered her nerve and brought her chair back to its place opposite Strohm.  She sat but did not eat, afraid of what it might symbolize to the Hauptmann, knowing he needed no encouragement, wondering if there were any other way.  But the soldiers, as long as they are in the house . . .

“Hauptmann Strohm,” one of the soldiers said as he appeared in the doorway.  “We have searched the house as ordered.”

“Contraband?” Strohm asked without turning.

“Nein,” the soldier said.

Strohm cut a piece from the cider-basted pork loin, pausing to savor its scent before pulling it from the fork with his teeth.  He chewed slowly, seeming to enjoy the texture as the meat disintegrated between his masticating jaws.

Raising his dark eyes from his plate, tracing the curves of the bottles, gliding across the table’s cloth, grazing Madame’s arm, glittering at her breasts, contracting about her neck, he looked boldly into her eyes before speaking to his soldier.

He extended his arm back without turning and said, “Give me the keys to the command car and return on foot to the airfield.”

The soldier hesitated in confusion before driving a hand into his pocket and hastily producing the demanded keys.  Stamping his heels together and hailing their führer, the soldier left; the Hauptmann might as well have been alone with Madame for all the notice he took of the formality.  “Pour the wine,” he said to her.  With a smile thin as a scalpel, he added, “And you will have some, too.”

Yvette returned his smile with a warmth she did not feel, though a heat suddenly sprang to life within her.  And now that your soldiers are gone, Herr Nazi, she thought and her mind began to, once again, take in her surroundings, her assets, the conditions and how they might be used.

The Resistance had existed for only a matter of weeks.  Mostly criminals and artists, adventurers who had fought in Spain or Ethiopia, the Resistance had no centrality at that time, no leaders and no purpose other than to resist.  Weapons were few and civilian in nature, organization was impossible, and suspicion epidemic: those were their assets.  Their liabilities: the Gestapo and the SS had oppressed the greater part of Europe for years and had crushed resistance in Czechoslovakia and Poland, Sweden and Hungary, and overseen the slaughter of civilians in Spain.  Their techniques were exceeded only by their brutality.  The bravest in Europe, Yvette and countless others had told themselves, and I will not yield.

And what of the soldiers of The Great War?  Yvette had first met a man from The Resistance four weeks ago and in that time she had learned much: how to shoot, where to stab, the uses of dynamite, the necessity of secrecy.  But of all she had learned in that time, one thing shocked her: her husband, a veteran of Verdun, would not fight.

“And why should we fight?” he had said when she first told him of the man from The Resistance, who needed desperately to hide in their cellar.  “What difference will that make?”

“So we should let these barbarians, these butchers take our country?” she cried.  “They slaughter our soldiers, censor our newspapers, proscribe gatherings, monitor the telephones and radios, make France and her children a subject people and you would have us do nothing?”

“Yes,” he had said.  “It does no good to fight.  We fought in the last war and what did it accomplish?  Slaughter.  Slaughter and betrayal.”

“Whose betrayal?” she had asked.

“Mine!” he shouted.  “Was it for the glory of France that we went to war?  Did the death of some petty duke in the hinterlands concern me?  France?  And what of our government, our generals?  They took the loyal soldiers and threw them into a meat grinder.  They wasted us, used us as raw materials in a great work of blood.  And for what?  Alsace and Lorraine?  They could have given the Germans all of Picardy and we would have been better off than to have fought that war!  And then afterward, with a scar of destruction torn from the English Channel to the Swiss frontier, they haggled like fishwives for foreign territories and money.  Money!  As if we, the soldiers, asked for remuneration for our lives, for our bodies blasted to pieces, buried alive in mud, our minds trapped forever in the trench.”

“That was the last war,” she said without irony.  “I’m not asking you to join us to fight for the France written upon a map, for the borders contained in a treaty, but for the people of France!  How can you stand by while they seize whatever they desire, at whim, reducing us to—”

“Oh, what difference does it make?” he shouted.  “What difference if it is that coward Lebrun or my old general Pétain or Hitler?  The government will take its taxes or whatever else it wants: who cares whose hand does the taking or at what whim?”

“And if their whim is to take your wife?” she had asked.

Hauptmann Strohm’s legs encircled Yvette’s under the table and she awoke out of memory.  He seemed to be applying more of his attention to her face.

“I have seen such distracted looks before,” he said.

The knife is nearly in my hand now, she thought as she drew the utensil toward her with a slow-moving finger.  Only a half a second and I could swipe it across his throat.  It shouldn’t be difficult to gain that half second.  She moved her shoulders as if to relieve a strain and watched as his eyes dove into her blouse.

“For most,” he said, “it is because they have concealed some contraband about their homes and fear its discovery.”

But how to get rid of the body, she thought.  I wonder if one of the men in the basement knows of a way.  If Herr Nazi simply disappears, someone will eventually search for him and those two soldiers are bound to say this was the last place he visited.

“And fear is the correct response,” he said, cutting through the last of the pork loin so vigorously that the china plate beneath his knife screeched.  “The penalties for possessing contraband are severe.”

And the window is open, she thought.  What if he does not die quickly, what if I miss his jugular and he cries out?  It could mean a struggle.  I would have to leap upon him and stab him to death.  The blood could be explained, if any survived a thorough cleaning, because this is a kitchen, we butcher meat here.  But the screams?  The screams.

“You needn’t tremble so visibly,” he said.  Yvette could not feel herself trembling but did not doubt she gave that impression.  “There are,” he said and paused for effect, draining his glass of wine, “alternatives.”

If I get him upstairs, she thought, the windows are closed and the walls thick.  But the blood will be harder to explain.  And still, there is the matter of someone coming to look for him later.

“I have nothing to conceal, Monsieur,” she said, taking a few drops of wine into her dry mouth.

But if I kill him, having a safe place for The Resistance to hide will be lost.  It is a precious thing to lose, this place.  Oh ,what is one night of disgrace?  Many have had worse?  What will you sacrifice for France?  That is what Bertrand asked me.

“So you are ready to show me the cellar?” Strohm asked as silkily as a serpent moves.

Yvette rose from the table, leaving the knife where it lie, and backed to the counter under the window.  She undid the next button on her blouse and said, “If that is where you wish to go, Monsieur.”

Strohm wiped his mouth with the edge of the tablecloth and gained his feet, his eyes never leaving hers.  He shrugged out of his coat and draped it across his chair.  Step by slow step he approached until he was pressed bodily against her, looking down with all traces of his earlier leer eradicated by a mask akin to fury.

What will I sacrifice for France?  For this brutality I will gain safety for The Resistance, possibly intelligence stolen from this SS dog.  Will I sacrifice for them?  But, oh, it will mean sacrificing my husband as well, for I could not keep it from René and it will kill him to hear how I suffered.

“Although, Monsieur,” she said suddenly, putting both hands against his chest.  “I am expecting my husband at any moment.  Perhaps tonight is not the best night.  Let me arrange something more deliberate.  A proper, engrossing entertainment for you another time.”

The clock in the salon chimed.  Strohm smiled with viscous amusement and said, “It is eight o’clock, Mme. Artois.  Your husband has undoubtedly stayed another night at Orleans.  Or he was foolish enough to be out after curfew and has been arrested by a patrol, in which case he will be taken and interrogated.”

“Yes, you must be correct,” she said breathlessly as his arms surrounded her.

Sacrifice, sacrifice: no!  I will gladly give my life for liberation but I will not submit to this.  France may ask for my life—and have it—but not this.

“Shall we go upstairs?” she asked: shall you turn your back on me?

“No, I will not bother,” he said, pressing his lips to hers, not noticing as her hand slid across the counter to take hold of a long, thin filleting knife.

The door kicked open and René walked in, his large arms filled with a hamper of wine bottles.  At forty-two years of age, the manual labor of his profession and a fondness for rowing on the river had kept his large body from going entirely to fat.  He had the profile of a gorilla.  And yet, despite the horrors of Verdun, the disillusionment of the postwar years, the grinding inevitability of facing terror each night, yet there was an innocence that still pervaded his face whenever he saw Yvette.  Ten years his junior, he had met her when the second great tragedy of his life—the Great Depression—had threatened to devour what little happiness he had made in the world outside of the trench.  And she had made struggling through lean years a feast: of love, of delight, of anticipating the day for something other than a cessation of darkness.  And another man now grasped her in his arms and pressed his lips to hers.

“Can’t you see you’re interrupting?” Strohm roared.

The wine hamper still in his arms, his dusty cap still on his head, René said, “I am M. Artois.”

Strohm laughed.  He loosened his embrace of Yvette enough to face René fully and then said, “Which does not answer my question: do you not see that you are interrupting?  Go away!”

René placed the wine hamper on the ground, his cap falling onto it, and then straightened.  His two steps toward the Hauptmann were so deliberate, so moderate, that the Nazi had ample time to release Yvette and prepare himself to meet her husband.  Arms raised as a boxer, feet spread as his instructors had taught, Strohm was nevertheless unprepared.

Yvette snatched the fillet knife and drew back to plunge it into Strohm’s kidney but her husband saw and sprang at the German.  His right hand seized the man by the throat; his four inches of superior height providing him a reach impervious to counterattack.  He then encircled Strohm’s waist with his left arm and bent him backward until bone cracked.  Strohm writhed and tore at the hand that strangled him, his arms thrust impotently toward his attacker’s face but never reaching.  Panicked beyond any fear he had ever felt, his resistance was useless and he knew it; the huge Norman’s muscles were of iron, his visage merciless.  As his vision began to dim and his death became inevitable, Strohm flailed in a last animal effort to preserve his existence, reaching for Yvette’s arm in a gesture of pleading.  She moved away without seeing him, her eyes fixed on René.

When the Nazi’s body was an inert weight, René let it fall to the floor.  With a gentleness to match his recent implacable violence, he stroked Yvette’s cheek.  Relief and anger and pride and question after question shone in her eyes as she looked back.  He said in a whisper, low and soft but firm, “I will not let them take you.”

He would have kissed her then but she stayed him with a touch and went to the table.  After she rinsed out her mouth with wine—spitting the taste of her assaulter onto his corpse’s face—she returned to René’s arms and kissed him with a passion bordering onslaught.  After a moment, he asked her to call up the men of The Resistance.  When they came into the kitchen and saw what lie in a heap on the floor, they were not without concern, Francois mopping his brow in a sudden sweat.

“Well, well, M. Artois, it is good to see you have made your decision at last,” Michelle, a lean man in his late twenties and a onetime armed robber, said.  “More so that it was not my neck with which you chose to make it.”

“Oh but this is bad,” Yvette said.  Then, seeing her husband turn suddenly to her, quickly added, “No!  It is wonderful, wonderful!  But we must flee now.  It won’t be safe here.   They will come looking.”

“Rubbish,” he mumbled.  “It can be dealt with.  That is his staff car outside?  He sent his soldiers back to the barracks so he would not have an audience—and so he would not have to share.  Hmph!  Our officers did the same—and to our own people!—during the war that was not last.”

“But how, Monsieur?” Francois asked, his voice the sound of a cough from his work in the mines.  “When he does not return, the SS will investigate.  The soldiers will say they left him here.”

“There will be no investigation because we will give them an explanation for his death,” René said.  “We have extra petrol in the shed.  I will put Monsieur Nazi in his car, drive it outside of town and down a ditch and into a tree.  I will then put him behind the wheel, douse the whole thing with petrol, and set it aflame.  The fuel tank will eventually explode, attracting soldiers from the airfield, who will find their SS Hauptmann burned to a crisp with an empty bottle of wine beside him.  The fire will erase the marks of my fingers from his throat and all will be well.”

“Bravo!” said the third man of The Resistance, a man whose name none knew.  “That will preserve us and rid the world of one more Nazi.”

“Truly it is good to have a man of your imagination on our side, Sergeant Artois,” Michele said, slapping a hand on his enormous host’s shoulder.  René glared first at the hand and then at its owner: Michele snatched it back.

“I am simply René now,” he said.  “I am not fighting for France, but for the French, for Yvette.”

Francois cleared his throat violently and then said, “That is good enough, M. René.  But then, what next?”

“Then?” René said.  “Then I will reconnoiter the airfield and tomorrow night we shall attack it, ignite their fuel depot and magazine.”

The three men of The Resistance smiled to one another; René walked to the hamper of wine and withdrew a bottle.

“My love, bring us glasses,” he said to Yvette.  Withdrawing the cork with the expertise of a café owner, he raised the bottle as Yvette pushed a glass into each man's hand, holding the last herself.  “And now to create the prop indispensible to our fiction of M. Nazi's death: an empty bottle of wine.  Viva la Resistance!”

 I hope you enjoyed reading this short story.  I also have a few novels published through Amazon’s Kindle Store, the newest being The Parnell Affair.  Thematically, not very similar to the above but hopefully a good read, too; it’s a political thriller about a betrayed spy, a relentless journalist, and the hidden truth behind a President’s demand for war.  Don’t have a Kindle?  No problem: Amazon provides free apps to view all of the great—and inexpensive—Kindle content on your phone, PC, or Mac, here.  Thanks and happy reading!