hidey-hole?” His voice sounds terribly close, but it’s hard to know for certain in a place so congested with echoes. She can feel Madame Ruelle’s loaf pulsing on her back like something alive. Lodged inside it—almost certainly—is a coiled-up slip of paper. On which numbers will spell out a death sentence. For her great-uncle, for Madame Ruelle. For them all.
She says, “My cane.”
“It has rolled behind you, dear.”
Behind the man unspools the alley and then the hanging curtain of ivy and then the city. A place where she could scream and be heard.
“May I pass, monsieur?”
“Of course.”
But he does not seem to move. The gate creaks lightly.
“What do you want, monsieur?” Impossible to keep her voice from trembling. If he asks again about the knapsack, her heart will burst.
“What do you do in there?”
“We’re not allowed on the beaches.”
“So you come here?”
“To collect snails. I must be getting along, monsieur. May I please retrieve my cane?”
“But you have not collected any snails, mademoiselle.”
“May I pass?”
“First answer a question about your father.”
“Papa?” Something cold inside her grows colder. “Papa will be here any moment.”
Now the man laughs, and his laugh echoes up between the walls. “Any moment, you say? Your papa who’s in a prison five hundred kilometers away?”
Threads of terror spill through her chest. I should have listened, Papa. I never should have gone outside.
“Come now, petite cachotière,” says the man, “don’t look so frightened,” and she can hear him reaching for her; she smells rot on his breath, hears oblivion in his voice, and something—a fingertip?—grazes her wrist as she jerks away and clangs the gate shut in his face.
He slips; it takes longer than she expects for him to get to his feet. Marie-Laure turns the key in the lock and pockets it and finds her cane as she retreats into the low space of the kennel. The man’s desolate voice pursues her, even as his body remains on the other side of the locked gate.
“Mademoiselle, you made me drop my newspaper. I am just a lowly sergeant major here to ask a question. One simple question and then I will leave.”
The tide murmurs; the snails teem. Is the ironwork too narrow for him to squeeze through? Are its hinges strong enough? She prays that they are. The bulk of the rampart holds her in its breadth. Every ten seconds or so, a new sheet of cold seawater comes flowing in. Marie-Laure can hear the man pacing out there, one-pause-two one-pause-two, a lurching hobble. She tries to imagine the watchdogs that Harold Bazin said lived here for centuries: dogs as big as horses. Dogs that ripped the calves off men. She crouches over her knees. She is the Whelk. Armored. Impervious.
Agoraphobia
Thirty minutes. It should take Marie-Laure twenty-one; Etienne has counted many times. Once twenty-three. Often shorter. Never longer.
Thirty-one.
It is a four-minute walk to the bakery. Four there and four back, and somewhere along the way, those other thirteen or fourteen minutes disappear. He knows she usually goes to the sea—she comes back smelling of seaweed, shoes wet, sleeves decorated with algae or sea fennel or the weed Madame Manec called pioka. He does not know where she goes exactly, but he has always assured himself that she keeps herself safe. That her curiosity sustains her. That she is more capable in a thousand ways than he is.
Thirty-two minutes. Out his fifth-floor windows, he can see no one. She could be lost, scraping her fingers along walls at the edge of town, drifting farther away every second. She could have stepped in front of a truck, drowned in a puddle, been seized by a mercenary with foulness on his mind. Someone could have found out about the bread, the numbers, the transmitter.
Bakery in flames.
He hurries downstairs and peers out the kitchen door into the alley. Cat sleeping. Trapezoid of sunlight on the east-facing wall. This is all his fault.
Now Etienne hyperventilates. At thirty-four minutes by his wristwatch, he puts on his shoes and a hat that belonged to his father. Stands in the foyer summoning all his resolve. When he last went out, almost twenty-four years ago, he tried to make eye contact, to present what might be considered a normal appearance. But the attacks were sly, unpredictable, devastating; they sneaked up on him like bandits. First a terrible ominousness would fill the air. Then any light, even through closed eyelids, became excruciatingly bright. He could not walk for the thundering of his own feet. Little eyeballs blinked at