Satori by Don Winslow Read Free Book Online Page A

and warm brown eyes, and he was intelligent and charming. The son of a prominent city doctor, he was relatively rich but nevertheless a passionate Communist.
    He was also passionate about Solange. He truly cared for her, but could not help but test her virtue as they sat under trees along the banks of the canal, or in the cinema, or even at his house at the rare times his parents weren’t home, or at her apartment when her mother was “out.”
    Mama was terrified at the beauty she had become. Proud, yes, but fearful, and she began to lecture her incessantly on the evils of men. “They only want sex,” she harangued, “and your precious Louis is no different. But don’t give in — only a salope sleeps with men without marriage.”
    One night Louis walked her past a large four-story house.
    “What is it?” Solange asked.
    “It’s a brothel,” Louis said, at the very moment the door opened and Solange saw her mother step out to take a smoke. Her black hair was disheveled, her lips were puffy. She lit her cigarette and turned to see Solange staring up at her.
    “Go home,” she said, her voice breaking. “Please, Solange, go now.”
    But Solange just stood there in shock.
    Finally, Louis took her by the arm and led her away.
    The Nazis came to the south of France later that year, after the Allies invaded North Africa. German soldiers occupied the city, the police helped them locate Jews, La Résistance organized, and the Gestapo came in to track them down.
    The head of the Gestapo in Montpellier was a certain Colonel Hoeger, and one afternoon he stepped out of his headquarters to enjoy the sunshine and ended up enjoying the sight of Solange as well.
    “Look at that creature,” he said to his captain. “How old do you think she is?”
    “Sixteen? Seventeen?”
    “That face,” Hoeger said, “and the body. Find out about her.”
    “She’s a child.”
    “Look at her. She’s ripe.”
    Madame Sette’s had become the brothel of choice for the German occupation forces, and Madame was rapidly becoming a wealthy woman.
    As for Solange, she had become used to her mother’s occupation, having learned the sad lesson that what was once unbearable becomes commonplace with time. She and Mama had a civil if emotionally distant relationship, and Marie even came to feel somewhat relieved that she no longer had to disguise what she did. Solange even went to Madame Sette’s from time to time — to bring her mother a meal, or deliver a lipstick she had forgotten, or some other minor errand. The girls took to calling her Little Miss Prim, but gradually with some affection, and every time Madame saw her, she would importune her to consider coming in to make some real money.
    Solange, of course, always refused.
    She turned more and more to Louis. They spent virtually all their free time together, although Louis was very busy with his studies at Montpellier’s excellent and ancient medical school.
    He was busier with the Resistance, even more passionate about his communism now that he lived cheek by jowl with facism. A messenger at first, he rode his bicycle around the city with coded messages hidden inside his medical texts, but it wasn’t long before his intelligence and courage brought him to the attention of the leaders and they began to give him more responsibility.
    With them came greater risk, and it terrified Solange. She knew of the torture chambers in the basement of Gestapo headquarters, had heard the firing squads, and carefully avoided the scenes of gallows that had been hastily constructed for captured Resistance. She begged him to be careful.
    Of course he said that he would, but he also found the dangers exhilarating, and he returned from missions with an already keen joie de vivre honed to an edge. Louis wanted to live, and that included making love to this beautiful girl whom he did love, very much.
    But she turned him down.
    “I don’t want to become my mother.”
    Solange was bringing her mother a tin of