As Time Goes By by Michael Walsh Read Free Book Online Page A

"Richard Blaine. He is an American from New York."
    She went on to tell Inghild everything, starting with how she had met Victor. About their brief life together in Paris. About the report of his death. About how she met Rick.
    "I was in the Deux Magots one spring day, reading the newspapers. Talk of war was in the air. My newspa per got caught in a gust of wind. A man at the next table retrieved it for me before it blew into the street. 'I believe this belongs to you, miss,' he said in English. I thought he might be an American. He sat down at my table. I didn't invite him, but he did anyway. Then I knew he was an American. "The view is much better from here,' he said, and ordered us both coffee in the worst French I ever heard. It made me laugh to hear him speak. 'Which is funnier,' he asked me, 'my ac cent or my face?' After that, how could I ask him to leave?"
    "When a man makes a woman laugh," Inghild said, "it is the first step to winning her heart."
    "My heart!" exclaimed Ilsa. "I thought it was gone, dead, along with Victor. I was alone, and very lonely. I didn't know what to do or where to go. I couldn't go home to Olso, not after ..."
    "Not after Quisling handed our country over to the Germans," supplied her mother.
    "Not after you had left," Ilsa corrected her. "Not after Father died." Her voice trembled with barely sup pressed grief. "He suggested dinner that night, at La Tour d'Argent. I said yes. It seemed safe. We dined. The next day we danced. We went for a drive in his motorcar, and sailed along the Seine. We visited his nightclub, La Belle Aurore. We watched the dawn come up together, and it was very beautiful."
    "You fell in love," said Inghild.
    "I fell in love," Ilsa concurred. "Not with an idea this time, but with a man. Richard opened up for me a world I never knew existed, a world of romance and passion, and..."
    "The physical love between a man and a woman," said Inghild.
    Ilsa nodded. "Rick brought me back to life. And then Victor came back from the dead."
    "How?"
    Ilsa felt herself growing agitated and steeled herself. When an exhausted and emaciated Victor suddenly reappeared on that rainy, wrenching day in Paris in June 1940, their life together became little more than des perate camouflage and unending flight as the Gestapo hunted them the length and breadth of France. If it hadn't been for that brave Algerian fisherman, who had smuggled them in his sloop across the Mediterranean from Marseille to Algiers, hidden under a load of stink ing fish ... She shuddered at the memory.
    "The Germans were approaching," she said. "Every body knew it was only a matter of time before they took Paris. The Czech government-in-exile had re moved itself to London. Richard didn't want to leave, although I begged him to. I knew he was not the unfeel ing cynic he pretended to be. I knew he had fought against Mussolini in Ethiopia and against Franco in Spain. The Germans knew his record, too; if he stayed, he would certainly be arrested. I couldn't let that hap pen to another man in my life. He wouldn't go without me, though. We decided to flee, together."
    "But you didn't."
    "I couldn't," said Ilsa, casting her eyes down. "The day before we were to leave for Marseille, I got word that Victor was still alive, hiding in a boxcar on the outskirts of Paris. He was ill and needed me. Oh, Mother, how could I not go to him? He was my hus band."
    Ilsa was crying now, the tears she had so long sup pressed flowing freely. "I knew Victor had returned when I saw Rick for the last time. We were in his club, drinking the last of his champagne so the Germans wouldn't get it. I made some excuse to leave and prom ised to meet him that evening at the Gare de Lyon. I never showed up. Richard boarded the train for Mar seille with only a note from me, telling him I could never see him again. I couldn't tell him why. I couldn't tell him anything. It was the hardest decision of my life. But what else could I do? Our work was more important