It was Gustave Beauchamp.

I ducked back into the undergrowth. I could see very little of what was happening now, but I was aware of Reinette grabbing what was left of her blouse and running whimpering back along the wall to the road. I might have joined her then but for curiosity and the sudden elation that washed over me as I heard the familiar voice calling through the pandemonium, “It’s all right! It’s all right!”

My heart leaped.

I heard him push his way through the little crowd-others had joined the fight now and I heard the sound of old Gustave’s stick connect twice more with a sound like someone kicking a cabbage. Soothing words-Tomas’s voice-in French and German: “It’s all right now, calm down, verdammt, calm it, can’t you, Fränzl, you’ve done enough in one day.” Then Hauer’s angry voice and confused protests from Schwartz.

Hauer, his voice trembling with rage, shouted at Gustave, “That’s twice you’ve tried it with me tonight, you old Arschloch!”

Tomas shouting something unintelligible, then a great cry from Gustave cut off suddenly by a sound like a sack of flour hitting a stone granary floor, a terrible thwack against the stone, then silence as shocking as an icy shower.

It lasted thirty seconds or more. No one spoke. No one moved.

Then, Tomas’s voice, cheerily casual: “It’s all right. Go back into the bar. Finish your drinks. The wine must finally have got to him.”

There was an uneasy murmur, a whisper, a flutter of protest. A woman’s voice-Colette, I think: “His eyes-”

“Just the drink.” Tomas’s voice was brisk and light. “An old man like that. Doesn’t know when to stop.” His laugh was utterly convincing, and yet I knew he was lying. “Fränzl, you stay and help me get him home. Udi, get the others inside.” As soon as the others had returned to the bar I heard the piano music begin again, a woman’s voice lifting in a nervous warble to the tune of a popular song. Left alone, Tomas and Hauer began to talk in rapid, urgent undertones.

Hauer: “Leibniz, was muss-”

“Halt’s Maul!” Tomas broke in sharply. Moving to the place where I guessed the old man’s body had fallen, he knelt down. I heard him move Gustave, then speak to him a couple of times softly, in French.

“Old man. Wake up, old man.”

Hauer said something rapid and angry in German, which I did not catch. Then Tomas spoke, slowly and very clearly, and it was more from the tone of his words than the words themselves that I understood. Slowly, deliberately, the words almost amused in their cool contempt.

“Sehr gut, Fränzl,” said Tomas crisply. “Er ist tot.”

10.

Out of pills. She must have been desperate. That terrible night, with the scent of oranges all around her and nothing to which she could cling.

I would sell my children for a night’s sleep.

Then, under a pasted-in recipe clipped from a newspaper, in writing so small my old eyes needed a magnifying glass to make out the words:

T. L. came again. Said there had been a problem at La Rép. Some soldiers got out of hand. Said R-C might have seen something. Brought pills.

Could those pills have been thirty high-dosage morphine tablets? For her silence? Or were the pills something else entirely?

11.

Paul came back half an hour later. He wore the slightly sheepish expression of a man who expects to be scolded, and he smelled of beer.

“I had to buy a drink,” he said apologetically. “It would have looked odd if I’d just stayed staring at them.”

By then I was half soaked and irritable. “Well?” I demanded. “What’s your big discovery?”

Paul shrugged. “Maybe nothing,” he said reflectively. “I’d rather…ah…wait till I’ve checked a few things before getting your hopes up.”

I looked him in the eye. “Paul Désiré Hourias,” I declared. “I’ve waited for you in the rain for ages. I’ve stood in the stink of this café watching for Dessanges, because you thought we might learn something. I haven’t complained once-” He gave me a satirical look at this point, which I ignored. “That makes me practically a saint,” I said sternly. “But if you dare to try to keep me in the dark-if you so much as think about it-”

Paul made a lazy gesture of defeat. “How did you know my middle name was Désiré?” he asked.

“I know everything,” I said, without smiling.

12.

I don’t know what they did after we ran away. A couple of days later old Gustave’s body was found in the Loire by a fisherman outside Courlé. The fish had been at him already. No one mentioned what had happened at La Mauvaise Réputation, though the Dupré brothers seemed more furtive than ever and an unusual silence hung over the café. Reinette didn’t mention what had happened, and I pretended I’d run off at the same time as Cassis, so she didn’t suspect what I’d seen. But she had changed in some way. She seemed cold, almost aggressive. When she thought I wasn’t looking she would touch her hair and face compulsively, as if checking for something out of place. She avoided school for several days, claiming she had stomach ache.

Surprisingly, Mother indulged her. She sat with her, mixing her hot drinks and talking to her in a low, urgent voice. She moved Reinette’s cot into her own room, something she had never done before for either me or Cassis. Once I saw her give her two tablets, which Reinette took reluctantly, protesting. From my spy place behind the door I caught a snatch of their conversation, in which I thought I caught the word curse. Reinette was quite ill for some days after the pills, but recovered soon enough, and no more was said about the incident.

There is little relating to this in the album. On one page my mother writes R-C fully recovered under a pressed marigold and a recipe for wormwood tisane. But I’ve always had my suspicions. Could the pills have been some kind of a purgative, in case of an unwanted pregnancy? Could they have been the pills to which Mother refers to in the journal entry? And was T. L. Tomas Leibniz?

I think Cassis might have guessed something, but he was far too absorbed in his own affairs to take great notice of Reinette. Instead he learned his lessons, read his magazines, played in the woods with Paul and pretended nothing had happened. Perhaps for him, nothing had.

I tried to talk to him about it once.

“Something happened? What do you mean, something happened?” We were sitting at the top of the Lookout Post, eating mustard sandwiches and reading The Time Machine. It had been my favorite story all summer, and I never tired of it. Cassis looked at me, his mouth full, his eyes not quite meeting mine.

“I’m not sure.” I was careful what I said, watching his placid face over the hard cover of the book. “I mean, I only stayed a minute longer, but-” Difficult to put it into words. There were no words for that kind of thing in my vocabulary. “They nearly caught Reinette,” I said lamely. “Jean-Marie and the others. They…they pushed her down against the wall. They tore her blouse,” I said.

There was more, if only I could find the words. I tried to recall the feeling of horror, of guilt that had come over me then, the feeling that I was about to witness some ugly, compelling mystery, but somehow everything had become unclear, grainy, like images in a dream.

“Gustave was there,” I continued desperately.

Cassis was getting irritable. “So?” he said in a sharp voice. “So what? He was always there, the old tosspot. So what’s new about that?” And still his eyes refused to meet mine, lingering on the page, skittering to and fro like dead leaves in the wind.

“There was a fight. A kind of fight.” I had to say it. I knew he didn’t want me to, saw his fixed gaze deliberately avoiding me, concentrating on the page, the page, and wishing I’d shut up.