Page 50 of The Librarian Spy

She ought to decline but found herself intrigued. “I think I’d like that.”

His grin grew a little wider. “As would I.” He offered her his arm. This time, she slid her hand into the warm crook of his elbow, allowing him to lead her from Alfama and hopefully away from the watchful glare of the PVDE.

Though why the police suddenly followed them that night made no sense, not when they left her alone since that first week after her arrival. But she couldn’t cast off her suspicion that it had something to do with Lukas.

TWELVE

Elaine

The task of learning to operate the printing press proved to be far more complicated than merely rolling the great flywheel of the Minerva and pumping the foot treadle.

The ink needed to be dribbled just so over the flat, circular disk that fed the rollers. Then the placement of the paper on the platen had to be perfectly aligned where it would be stamped with the plate. Once completed, the paper would then be shifted to the delivery board and replaced with a fresh page. It was all a careful dance to coordinate at once.

Elaine’s movements were clumsy and slow at first, the shift awkward with paper slightly askew, the print either splotchy and dark or barely visible. But she was stubborn in her efforts, and over the course of the next several months, her body found a rhythm to the smaller of the two presses. Her feet and hands did their own sort of waltz, moving with alacrity and freeing her mind from being so diligently focused on the task.

Once she’d mastered the art of creating newsprint on the manual press, Marcel trained her on the operation of the automatic machine to tend to in his absence. The larger of the two machines, however, possessed a cold distance that never appealed to Elaine—not like the intimacy and skill of the Minerva.

It wasn’t uncommon for the light of day to dim into night, long past the curfew, rendering her unable to make her way to Manon’s. While arduous and taxed with work that followed her into her dreams, Elaine never begrudged the effort. She relished it, craving the need to put to paper the power of effective words and being part of something larger than herself.

Even sleeping in the small makeshift bedroom from a converted office on those long nights didn’t bother her. What she found disconcerting, however, was the quiet once the machines went still and one’s imagination was left to spin terrifying explanations for every pop and creak.

One night, as the cold seeped up through the concrete floors and the banging and whirring of the mountainous machine faded to a hum, indicating the final pages had been printed, silence sifted over the warehouse like freshly fallen snow. Elaine breathed a sigh of relief.

The agony of a pulsing headache lingered since that morning and still had not abated. While the sounds usually blended into the background, that day each slam of the printing plate seemed to strike against her tender skull.

Elaine turned the machine off and gathered the newsprint, careful not to hug them to the pressed front of her pale pink blouse. Ink did not come out easily, and soap was impossible to find. It was yet another one of life’s former conveniences once taken for granted, never appreciating what had previously been so readily available.

After setting the newspapers on the desk, the silence pressed at her, heavy and seemingly eternal. She cleared her throat to minimize its weight. The sound echoed back at her.

The room was cavernous, its emptiness threatening to swallow her whole. A shiver rippled down her back. She strode to the door, flicked off the lights, and made her way down the corridor toward the kitchen. A cup of roasted barley and chicory always calmed her before bed.

An audible thump carried down the hall.

Elaine froze.

The building was only sighing into its old bones, no doubt. Nothing to work into a panic over.

With a shake of her head at her own foolish paranoia, she pushed into the dismal little kitchen and put a kettle onto the stove to boil the water. Something down the hall banged, the noise audible over the gush of the faucet.

Elaine squeezed her eyes shut and hissed out a breath, refusing to let her mind play vicious tricks.

Then came a sneeze in the distance.

Chills raced from her heart to her skin so the small hairs on her forearms stood on end. No natural sound of a building settling could mimic a sneeze.

Antoine and Jean left several hours before, and Marcel was in Grenoble. Fellow Resistance members sometimes took shelter with them when safe houses were unable to be located, but in such an instance, Elaine and the others were notified.

To her knowledge, no one should be there now.

She quietly slid a drawer open and pulled out a butcher knife. The weapon would be ineffective against a gun, of course, but the heft of the cool handle against her palm offered some semblance of security. However false it may be. She toed off her shoes and crept toward the door, straining to listen in the silence for evidence of where the intruder might be.

A whistle pierced the air and made her startle with such force, she nearly parted with her own skin. Heart racing and hands trembling, she wrenched the kettle from the stove with her free hand and turned off the heat from the burner. The shrill cry immediately cut short.

It was too late. Whoever was inside would know exactly where she was. She crept out of the kitchen, her entire body tense as her brain screamed at her to run.

But where would she go? It was past curfew, and she was barefoot, her identity papers in her desk within the warehouse. Not to mention the damp chill as the October rains consumed Lyon. Outside, she would be even more vulnerable. At least in here, she knew where to hide. Or possibly sneak up on the intruder. If she could take the person by surprise, she might have a fighting chance.

She slipped down the hallway, her feet cold against the bare floor. The door to the bedroom remained closed, but a nagging suspicion told her the sound had come from there.