Otto mumbled a reply, without looking at her. He wished she were not around. He wished she were not here at all. He wished she would not speak to him. She made it increasingly difficult to be Nils, because he could not take the pleasure in her existence which any young man must take in so attractive a cousin; any young man, that is, except Otto Falken. If only Gertrud did not so irresistibly remind him of the girl in Paris; the girl whose eyes had blazed fierce and contemptuous and unreasoning hatred; the girl who, for some obscure and infuriating reason, he knew he would never be able to dismiss from memory.
He went upstairs, telling Aunt Kirsten he would only be a moment. He found a clean blouse and pulled it on. He brushed his damp hair violently and was pleased that the wiry blond curls seemed darker and more orderly than usual. He dusted his heavy shoes, which bore a Norwegian trademark, and even polished with a handkerchief the heavy brass buckle of the belt which held up the working trousers of felt-like blue cloth. He did all these things as Nils would do them—and yet, all the time, that Parisian incident was running through Otto’s mind.
It had been so—so weirdly unlikely a thing to happen, especially in a country such as France, whose people had seen the light in time and saved themselves and were happy in the New Order and safe in the protection of the Reich. It had happened during those seventy-six hours of pleasantly lionized leave he had enjoyed in Paris after he had safely landed the British plane in Calais, mercifully saved from anti-aircraft fire by the fact that the Channel fight had been witnessed and his nationality guessed. He had been fêted and complimented by an Air-Marshal, and taken to Paris and shown the sights, and dined and wined, and had songs sung to him from the stage of a theatre, and been presented to a lovely chanteuse whom he had come to know well and who had been very, very nice to him. He had had, indeed, the time of his young life. Until the morning when, his leave expired, he ceased with automatic suddenness to be a hero and became again a young Flight Commander under orders to proceed immediately to Berlin and report himself. He had, it turned out, the whole forenoon to himself, for the plane that was to carry him to Berlin did not leave until the early afternoon. He determined that it would be interesting to see Paris, or some of it, unheralded, unescorted and afoot. He realized, not without a twinge of well-earned headache, that he had not, really, seen any Paris at all. So he left his hotel, and sent his newly acquired baggage to the Air Field, and went out into the streets and drifted—a common enough sight in these days, a tall, beautifully built young Aryan warrior, very smart in his uniform, very military in his carriage.
He was passing the Madeleine when it happened. There was a high curb, and a little press of people, all natives, in front of him. They surged forward—and the girl, twisting her foot in its high-heeled shoe upon the edge of the curb, collapsed in front of him and would have fallen had he not, very quickly, put an arm around her. It was an instinctively helpful act and one impossible to construe in any other way. She was a very pretty girl, literally alight with the quality to which her countrymen gave the word
In the attic room of the house of Axel Christensen, Otto Falken stared with unseeing eyes at his reflection in the spotted mirror on the dresser and raised a hand to his face and rubbed at his cheek just as he had done as he stood by the curb near the Madeleine—and as he always did, though he never wanted to, he saw vividly in his mind the beautiful little face again, twisted with that deep, utterly irrational, soul-shaking hatred.