The pilot closed his eyes and nodded. With practiced hands, Estelle removed the man’s coat. She felt for his papers in his coat pocket and retrieved them, holding them up toward the light. They were good, she acknowledged. Whoever was putting together the papers on the Belgian end these days was talented. Blue-eyes had been assigned the name of Jean-Phillipe Brossoit, born in Bruges. And they’d used proper Belgian photos this time, not the photos that the Allied air forces provided their pilots with. The Nazis were getting smarter about details like that.

“Where are you from?” she asked, setting his papers and coat aside.

“Nova Scotia. Canada.”

Estelle gently pulled the hem of his shirt from the waistband of his trousers and frowned. The bottom of his shirt, along with the side of his trousers, was soaked in blood. She shoved his shirt up his torso. He’d been bandaged crudely, a length of linen wrapped around his hips, and blood had saturated the entire side. She loosened the waistband of his trousers and peeled the bandage to the side.

“Jesus.”

“That bad?” The airman tried to sit up.

She pushed him back down, still frowning. What had Jerome been thinking? The wound was deep, and blood seeped from a tangle of torn stitches that looked as though they had been executed by a child. More blood had run down his leg and soaked into his trousers, and only the dark color had prevented her from noticing earlier. There was very likely damage to one or more of the significant vessels that ran through his groin and into his leg. He needed a doctor. A real one. “This is a mess.”

“You should see the plane,” he joked feebly.

“You’re not ready to travel. The journey from here to the Spanish border only gets worse.”

Again, she wondered what had happened that had made Jerome feel like he had no choice but to travel with a wounded airman. With Jerome back and forth between Belgium and France, she barely saw him anymore, other than brief glimpses like the one just outside the train station. There was little chance she’d get any sort of explanation, but she’d have to let the network know that the man in her apartment would not be ready for further travel for a while. Provided he didn’t die on her first.

Estelle was certainly adept at basic first aid but this was beyond her. A wound like this if not dealt with properly…infection or gangrene would be quick to follow if he didn’t simply bleed to death first.

“Did they say anything to you? Before you got on the train for Paris?” she asked.

He grimaced. “I didn’t understand much of what was being said, but there seemed to be a rush to leave Brussels. I couldn’t stay.” He looked up at her. “Can you fix it?”