Victor grinned then. Ettie amused him. She liked to win every argument, and was especially scrappy with men, perhaps to prove she could be fiercer and more willing to do battle. Still, Victor was hesitant to bring her into a mission where the object was murder. And now he cautiously let her know that there might be certain circumstances where she would have to allow the captain to do as he liked.

“You think I didn’t understand why my hair was cut? Why I was given beautiful clothes to wear? I know I’m not pretty, but you made me so. I understand I may have to draw him to us. So now, go ahead, make me hate him.”

“You hate him already,” Victor said.

“I want to hate him more.”

So he told her more of what he knew, that their target liked torture as much as he loathed Jews.

“How so?”

The captain had ingratiated himself with the Nazi commanders, including the commander and chief of the secret police, Klaus Barbie, who had sent two thousand five hundred Jews to extermination camps and had executed eight hundred others, personally torturing and murdering them. When Jews were picked up and taken to the prison in Lyon, Barbie allowed the captain to stand outside their cells, built for two, but often packed with fifty people or more, men, women, and children, so that he could delight in their misery. The captain was known to carry a Star of David made from the flesh of a Jew in his pocket, a gift from Barbie.

Ettie shot Victor a look of disbelief.

“What?” he said. “You don’t believe in evil?”

“Oh, I do. But now you’ve done your job and I hate him more. That will help.”

She thought of her sister holding her hand as they leapt from the train, her face focused on Ettie with absolute trust. How could her beautiful sister exist in the same world as this monster they were to kill? There in the woods, Ettie began to recite a section of the Amidah, the standing prayer that is to be recited three times a day by Orthodox men. It was the twelfth benediction, which deals with the fight against enemies. May all evil be destroyed in an instant.

“May you be abundantly manifest as one who breaks enemies and humbles deliberate sinners,” Ettie recited.

“You’re Orthodox,” Victor said, surprised. He himself had not been bar mitzvah and had never learned Hebrew.

“Not anymore. By now, I’ve offended God in every way possible. I’m amazed I’m not dead already.”

Victor grinned. “What could a girl like you do that would be so terrible?”