Free Mannequin by J. Robert Janes Page A

place with her gracefulness and fluidity. Tall and willowy, she had an absolutely gorgeous figure. The hair was not blonde but the soft, soft shade of a very fine brandy, the eyes not just blue but an exquisite shade of violet.
    She clasped her long, slender hands before her as a schoolgirl might and shyly smiled, then broadly grinned and shrugged as if, having suddenly made up her mind about them, she could now accept them into her heart. ‘Mes cher amis, I have a song for you of love. Of lovers who have been separated by trouble and now do not know if each still has in them the love for the other that was once there. They meet in a cinema under the cone of light from the projector. Cigarette smoke filters up into this light but the film, it means nothing to them. Nothing, you understand. They are sitting side by side, not even daring to hold hands, not knowing what the other is thinking.’
    She sang. She gave herself to it totally and the song brought tears to every last man in the place. She held them in the palms of her outstretched hands which implored them to understand the tragedy of life, of war, of hardship and separation.
    A breath was caught, a note was kept until her lungs threatened to burst and all at once there was a collective sigh and then a single shout, the voices of men who knew of the battlefields and wept for home. She brought the house down.
    â€˜Louis … Hey, Louis, sorry I’m late.’
    It was Hermann. ‘Your arm? What’s happened, please?’
    â€˜It’s nothing. A punk called Péguy.’
    â€˜Fortune? Ah merde, did you …?’
    St-Cyr saw that Oona and Giselle were with him. He touched his lips with the tip of a troubled tongue and plucked nervously at his moustache. ‘Fortune isn’t to be trusted, Hermann. Exactly how well did you destroy him in the eyes of his friends?’
    â€˜Completely.’
    St-Cyr turned swiftly to the barman and hissed, ‘A table. Quickly!’
    There were objections from the troops. Even the chanteuse had to wait while they were seated but laid the soft down of a pacifying voice over the ruckus by asking the displaced to join her on stage.
    She put her arms around them. They grinned shyly and stood with her like great dumb drunken blockheads not knowing what to do.
    With her fingers trailing in their departing hands, she smiled at each of them, then sang as they left the stage, mollified and coddled in the cocoon of her generous nature.
    Giselle le Roy could only remember standing naked before men such as these, hearing their hoots and thrusting catcalls, their hush as her bruised and battered body had been exposed to them by the gangsters of the rue Lauriston.
    Hermann had covered her. He and Jean-Louis had come to the rescue, but now it was as if those two didn’t even remember what had happened here not long ago and were oblivious to her feelings.
    I am a whore— putain, fille de joie, cunt—she said to herself. It is expected of such women that they should have no feelings. It is part of the profession.
    Yet they had just spoken of an engraver’s son. Hermann had leaned closely to Jean-Louis and had asked, ‘Could the boy do some work for me?’ He had given a nod towards herself and Oona, so they were not unaware of her after all.
    In return, Jean-Louis had grimly understood and said, ‘Let’s see about it. A good thought.’
    False papers. Laissez-passers, the ausweises of the Nazis. A little trip somewhere. Escape from Paris and the only place she had ever known.
    Two tears fell, blurring her vision so that the lights became as the last of a sunset and she saw herself on a tropical island walking alone along a beach beneath tall palms, waiting for the night to come and trying to believe she was safe from the coming storm.
    Unlike Giselle, Oona van der Lynn watched her ‘protector’— what else could she, an illegal Dutch immigrant from Rotterdam, call Hermann