white paint and seen it loaded inside a train car where it sits under twenty-four-hour guard.
Waiting to be sent to high command. Waiting for more.
This particular summer afternoon, in a dusty geological library in Vienna, Sergeant Major von Rumpel follows an underweight secretary wearing brown shoes, brown stockings, a brown skirt, and a brown blouse through stacks of periodicals. The secretary sets down a stepstool, climbs, reaches.
Tavernier’s 1676 Travels in India.
P. S. Pallas’s 1793 Travels Through the Southern Provinces of the Russian Empire.
Streeter’s 1898 Precious Stones and Gems.
Rumor is that the führer is compiling a wish list of precious objects from all around Europe and Russia. They say he intends to remake the Austrian town of Linz into an empyrean city, the cultural capital of the world. A vast promenade, mausoleum, acropolis, planetarium, library, opera house—everything marble and granite, everything profoundly clean. At its core, he plans a kilometer-long museum: a trove of the greatest achievements in human culture.
The document is real, von Rumpel has heard. Four hundred pages.
He sits at a table in the stacks. He tries to cross his legs but a slight swelling troubles his groin today: odd, though not painful. The mousy librarian brings books. He pages slowly through the Tavernier, the Streeter, Murray’s Sketches of Persia. He reads entries on the three-hundred-carat Orloff diamond from Moscow, the Nur-al-Ain, the forty-eight-and-a-half-carat Dresden Green. Toward evening, he finds it. The story of a prince who could not be killed, a priest who warned of a goddess’s wrath, a French prelate who believed he’d bought the same stone centuries later.
Sea of Flames. Grayish blue with a red hue at its center. Recorded at one hundred and thirty-three carats. Either lost or willed to the king of France in 1738 on the condition that it be locked away for two hundred years.
He looks up. Suspended lamps, rows of spines fading off into dusty gold. All of Europe, and he aims to find one pebble tucked inside its folds.
The Boches
Her father says their weapons gleam as if they have never been fired. He says their boots are clean and their uniforms spotless. He says they look as if they have just stepped out of air-conditioned train cars.
The townswomen who stop by Madame Manec’s kitchen door in ones and twos say the Germans (they refer to them as the Boches) buy every postcard on every pharmacy rack; they say the Boches buy straw dolls and candied apricots and stale cakes from the window of the confectionery. The Boches buy shirts from Monsieur Verdier and lingerie from Monsieur Morvan; the Boches require absurd quantities of butter and cheese; the Boches have guzzled down every bottle of champagne the caviste would sell them.
Hitler, the women whisper, is touring Parisian monuments.
Curfews are installed. Music that can be heard outdoors is banned. Public dances are banned. The country is in mourning and we must behave respectfully, announces the mayor. Though what authority he retains is not clear.
Every time she comes within earshot, Marie-Laure hears the fsst of her father lighting another match. His hands flutter between his pockets. Mornings he alternates between Madame Manec’s kitchen, the tobacco shop, and the post office, where he waits in interminable queues to use the telephone. Afternoons he repairs things around Etienne’s house—a loose cabinet door, a squeaking stair board. He asks Madame Manec about the reliability of the neighbors. He flips the locking clasp on his tool case over and over until Marie-Laure begs him to stop.
One day Etienne sits with Marie-Laure and reads to her in his feathery voice; the next he suffers from what he calls a headache and sequesters himself inside his study behind a locked door. Madame Manec sneaks Marie-Laure chocolate bars, slices of cake; this morning they squeeze lemons into glasses full of water and sugar, and she lets Marie-Laure drink as much as she likes.
“How long will he stay in there, Madame?”
“Sometimes just a day or two,” Madame Manec says. “Sometimes longer.”
One week in Saint-Malo becomes two. Marie begins to feel that her life, like Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, has been interrupted halfway through. There was volume 1, when Marie-Laure and her father lived in Paris and went to work, and now there is volume 2, when Germans ride motorcycles through these strange, narrow streets and her uncle vanishes inside his own house.
“Papa, when will we leave?”
“As soon as I hear from Paris.”
“Why do we have to sleep in this little bedroom?”
“I’m sure we could clean out a downstairs room