Philbert stood watch outside the forge at the windswept crossroads; the hot shoeing of Gaubert’s horse would serve as a cover if the Germans came to enforce curfew. Gaubert’s nerves were frayed; the Germans controlled all of France now—even if eighty-six-year-old Maréchal Pétain, hero of WWI, remained a figurehead leader of the puppet Vichy government—and he ached for his Fanny and little Gaby. Perspiration dripped down Gaubert’s neck as he stood in the smoke-filled forge. Transfixed, he watched the Nazi gold brick glow and soften inside the conical melting crucible. Alain and Bruno shoveled coke into the blazing brick furnace. Shadows snaked up the forge’s arched brick walls. The anvil bore a worn engraved date of 1781, the year Minou’s ancestors went into business. Nothing had changed since Gaubert’s childhood, when he’d brought his mother’s soup pot to mend; the rods, bellows, piled charcoal, and tongs had hung in the same places decades earlier.
