As she set off for the ablutions, she heard a strange noise, a rending of the pall of night with a sound that was at once incendiary and keening. She kept walking, flashlight on, until the familiar smell of latrines told her she was going the right way and she found the fabric flaps that screened off a shower.

She pushed open the flaps and the smell assaulted her first: base and foreboding. And then she saw. She dropped the flashlight instinctively, knowing she couldn’t face any more brutality.

The sound came as she dropped to her knees—a cry so loud and so long and so excruciating that she thought at first it must have come from the man slumped in the shower stall, gun drowning in the pool of blood at his side, face smashed through by the bullet, but still unmistakable as Sparrow.

Twenty

As dawn touched the sky the morning after Sparrow killed himself, Jess took a jeep, stopped at the press camp to write her story and parcel up her film, and then Marty drove her to Paris. On the way, her mind played ceaselessly over the peacock, the guard, the bodies in the boxcar, the women’s eyes, and Sparrow, resplendent in his patriotic dress the night of the party in Reims. Sparrow, his bloodied head in her lap when Dan and a group of others heard her god-awful cries and found her. Dan ordering someone to lift her up and take her away. A glimpse of Dan sitting where she had sat, cradling Sparrow like a brother.

What time I am afraid, I shall trust in Thee. The words, one of many prayers from the U.S. Army Prayer Book, words that were supposed to provide comfort to a man like Sparrow when he most needed it, echoed mercilessly in her head. Where had God been when Sparrow had needed him, when he’d made his way to the shower, when he’d felt more frightened of living than of anything else? Jess shut her eyes but the tears pressed mercilessly through her lids.

One day and one unsleeping night back in the Hotel Scribe was enough to convince her that she couldn’t go on that way. Marty suggested a party and in her voice Jess heard the same fatigue, the same enervation, the same fracturing sound of a person pushed so close to their breaking point that anything, even a mistimed smile, might cause them to snap.

So a party they would have the following night. She made sure the word was spread out to the hotels used by the GIs—everyone who’d been at the camp had been given several days’ leave and most had come to Paris.

When it was time to dress, she dismissed her pinks. She was going to wear a damn normal dress—no Chanel, no Schiaparelli; she refused to wear anyone who’d run from the war. She’d wear the dress she’d been carrying in the bottom of her bag since she’d arrived in Europe, the dress she’d left in London and then in Paris for safekeeping. The dress she’d had Estella Bissette make for her before she’d left America, before she understood that war was not a noun but a wretchedness imprisoned inside a smiling face.