“Why can’t you say where you’re going?” Julien complained, feeling left out, as if he were still a child when he was almost as tall and as strong as his brother.

Victor grabbed him in a rough embrace. “You don’t need to know.”

Privately, he believed he did know, and once Victor had gone, Julien searched the bureau. Sure enough, the rucksack was gone. He worried about his brother, driving like a madman with a bag full of explosives, but he envied him as well.

“Time for you to get to work,” Monsieur Félix told him as he was moping around.

Julien was taught to do chores on the farm and took a liking to the little goat, Bluebell, who followed him around. He wasn’t yet allowed to collect the honeycombs from the beehives.

“For that you need an experienced beekeeper,” Félix told him. “You’re not ready.”

But Julien had the sort of fearlessness a person needed to tend bees, and soon he’d convinced Monsieur Félix to let him try his hand. As they worked, Félix explained what happened here at the farm. Identity documents would arrive with a man who traveled from town to town, the papers hidden in the frame of his bicycle. He was a postman, therefore no one thought to stop him as he made his rounds through the mountains. Monsieur Félix was to give the documents to Marianne to use in transporting children across the border.

The postman came, a quiet, skinny fellow who had no problem bicycling throughout this rough terrain. Julien saw him give Monsieur Félix an envelope before he rode on. Félix disappeared into the dusk. When Julien went outside to look for him, he was coming back from the barn. He asked about the papers, but the old man shrugged.

“Hidden away so no one would ever find them. I’m smarter than I look. The Germans could send a thousand soldiers, and search for a thousand days, they still wouldn’t find them.”

“Maybe you should tell me, in case you’re not here and Marianne needs them.”

“I’ll always be here.” The old man continued to limp after his encounter with the Germans, still he was fast, and Julien had to struggle to keep up with him when they went to collect the chickens, who were let free during the day. “Anyway,” he went on as they walked, “I couldn’t tell you. They could torture it out of you, but with me it’s different. I’ll never talk. I’ve done this transaction thirty-three times, which means thirty-three souls are alive.” He slapped Julien on the back. “Now that you’re my helper, the next soul who is saved can be yours.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THE MESSAGE

ARDÈCHE, SEPTEMBER 1942