Page 11 of The Secret Librarian
They were lying in the dark, whispering so their parents couldn’t hear on the other side of the paper-thin walls, just as they had since they were girls.
‘I wish I was as brave as you, Avery. I could never consider leaving home and flying halfway around the world.’
Avery felt tears prick her eyes. ‘I’m going to miss you.’
She heard Charlotte stifle a cry. ‘Not half as much as I’m going to miss you.’
Chapter Four
Lisbon, 1942
Camille
Camille turned the little sign at the front of the shop to ‘Open’, pausing to look out at the morning sun and the people going about their lives outside. She smiled at two young girls skipping side by side – their long hair bouncing around their shoulders – as if they didn’t have a care in the world. Camille watched them until they disappeared around a corner before turning away, hoping it wouldn’t take long for her bookshop to fill with customers. It was when she was alone that it was hard to keep her memories at bay, which had made her busy little shop the place she loved most. She always had an eclectic range of people coming through the door, from Jewish refugees to locals, and walking along the shelves and tracing her fingers across the spines of books with her customers kept her mind occupied, for which she was grateful.
Camille had barely returned to the counter when the bell above the door jingled, and she looked up to see an older gentleman walking in.
‘Good morning,’ she called out, noticing the way he leaned heavily on a cane.
He nodded and started to browse the books she’d arranged at the front of the store that morning, and Camille went back to checking her inventory. She was careful to mark off which books she’d sold on her list each day, but sometimes she found herself too busy to double-check her own notes, and so she wandered around the store to check some of her most popular titles. Orders were sporadic at times, but she did her best to keep the shop full of new stock.
‘Is there anything I can help you with?’ she asked.
‘I’m told you know what books people like me might want to read,’ he said gruffly, but loudly enough for her to detect his French accent.
Camille smiled, immediately sympathetic towards him. ‘Well, many of my customers have thoroughly enjoyedFor Whom the Bell Tollsby Ernest Hemingway, although it’s not the lightest of reads,’ she said, looking over the row of books as she gave him a little nod to tell him that she understood what he was referring to. ‘I doubt I’ll be able to get any more of his books, so it’s somewhat of a collector’s item now.’ His eyes met hers, the words unspoken between them. This man was a Jew, and the Nazi book burning and banning wasn’t something that needed to be explained to him. He was testing her to see if she was who he was looking for, and she was doing the same to him.
‘I want to read books that no one wants us to read anymore,’ he muttered.
Camille looked over her shoulder, as if expecting someone to be watching her. But the bell had only jingled once, and no one could enter without it making at least a small noise. It didn’t stop her heart from beating just a little bit faster though.
‘I have to be very careful about what books I stock these days, even though I don’t approve of censoring what my customers can purchase.’
The way he looked at her, his eyes glistening, told her that there was no chance he was with the PVDE, Portugal’s secret police. This was a man who’d experienced loss – she could sense the depth of his pain – and she beckoned for him to come with her. Portugal might not be at war, but their policies and policing were anything but neutral. Camille often wondered if the rest of the world truly understood that, far from being a shining beacon of neutrality, Portugal was in fact brutally sympathetic to fascism.
‘I do have a book I think you might like,’ she said. ‘It’s by a British author by the name of Graham Greene, and it’s quite something.’
The man hobbled along behind her, and within minutes she was wrapping a copy ofThe Power and the Gloryin brown paper for him, having taken it from its hiding place in her office out the back. In exchange, he passed her a scrap of paper with information written on it, and she quickly ran her eyes over the words, her hand hovering over her cash register. To anyone else, it would have looked as if she were counting money, but this exchange was far more important. The paper contained the names and personal information of a woman and two children – this man had come to her shop under the guise of shopping for books, when in fact he wanted her to create false visa documentation for him.
‘Not one for you?’ she asked, glancing up from the paper.
‘I don’t care about myself, only them,’ he said.
She shook her head. ‘No. I will do it for all of you.’ Camille lowered her voice. ‘Quickly, write your details down, too.’
He grunted and begrudgingly gave them to her, and she slipped the paper into the register quickly in case anyone should walk in. With the book tucked under his arm, he told her where she’d beable to find him, said his thanks and left, and Camille found herself busy for the next hour with a trickle of customers looking for all manner of things. Some wanted volumes of poetry, others were looking for a newspaper, and even more were simply browsing as a way to fill time or to stave off the breeze outside. But it was the regular customers who brought the most joy to Camille; she forgot all about the memories that haunted her at night as she welcomed an elderly lady who visited every day with her tiny dog tucked under one arm, and the young teenager who always smiled shyly when Camille offered her a cup of coffee to sip as she browsed, guessing that she perhaps had nowhere else to go.
Camille spoke to all who came, letting them know she was always ready to help anyone find the right book. She paid for the day’s newspapers when they arrived, and opened the shipment that had come from overseas, which was always a treat. Camille tucked those ones behind the counter, knowing there would be a handful of foreigners looking for them before the day’s end. Foreign newspapers always seemed to be in high demand these days – almost as much as the secret visas she forged late into the night by candlelight, using her expensive black ink so that it closely matched that used by Portuguese officials. She was only thankful that she didn’t need photographs for the visas, which would have made them so much harder to create.
This time when the bell jingled, though, Camille was sitting behind the counter, her head bent as she glanced over a crumpled clandestine French newspaper that she most definitely shouldn’t have been reading so openly. She glanced up, expecting it to be another local, but instead she saw a very tall and very handsome man striding towards her.
She quietly tucked the paper away, not wanting to draw attention to what she was reading, before standing and running her hand down her skirt to smooth out any creases. Camille fixeda smile and stepped forward, holding out her hands in greeting. If he asked her, she’d tell him she was filling the hours by keeping up to date with the news inAvante!
‘Kiefer!’ she said, trying to sound bright. ‘What a lovely surprise. You should have told me you’d be calling in.’
He took her hands, leaning in and kissing her cheek. ‘If I’d told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise now, would it?’ His German accent was thick, so there was no mistaking where he was from despite the lack of uniform. He was tall and blond, his skin kissed by sunshine and his eyes blue – a shining example of Nazi perfection if ever there was one.
She kept hold of one of his hands, and led him to the back of the store. ‘Let me make you a coffee,’ she said. ‘Or I can put up a sign for the door and we can go out for a late lunch?’
