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francs,” he said with a sigh. “I could not cook them for you if I had them. Electricity is rationed aussi . It is turned on for only one hour midday so we may cook dinner.” Instead he had given Henry a hunk of bread and cold coffee—the worst tasting coffee Henry had ever tasted. Thinking of the crow soup,Henry didn’t ask of what the coffee was made.
    He kicked himself for not sticking a can of instant coffee into his bag before leaving home. He could have made a small fortune off that, he bet. The thought shamed him. But the price of eggs panicked Henry. GIs were getting 50 francs to the dollar, a great exchange rate for Americans. But that still meant the price of an egg could be a whopping 60¢. Back home the Richmond grocer who sold their eggs charged customers 58¢ for a dozen. Henry only had $196 with him—$150 from taking care of the livestock, $5 from working the short sail from Trieste to Marseille, and $41 from the tin can of “mad money” that Lilly painstakingly saved a penny, a nickel at a time. How long would that last him if he had to pay for a single egg what a dozen should cost?
    Henry’s stomach rumbled loudly. So did that of the man squashed next to him.
    Henry was in a pickle, for sure. It wasn’t like he could just find work here in France. All its people were desperately trying to make do, laboring for centimes. The café owner’s little girl had left at dawn to work as a queutière, a placeholder. There was a rumor that a poultry shipment was due into town sometime in the next few days. Women were already queuing at butcher shops, counting out their ration points. The café owner’s daughter would stand in line all day for someone else to earn a penny.
    Thank goodness Henry hadn’t had to pay for his train ticket. The café owner had whispered into the conductor’s ear and pressed three packs of Camels into his hand and Henry was waved into line. Henry wouldn’t have to buy a ticket, he explained, out of respect for the late President Roosevelt. Henry wondered how far the French deference for FDR and lust for American tobacco would get him.
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    Henry was glad to have the windowpane to lean against. Many of the train’s travelers were forced to stand, swaying with its rocking, keeping upright mainly because of the press of so many bodies. The train from Marseille to Lyon to Paris was one of the few running. Half the rail lines still weren’t open, bombed by the Allies or cut by the maquis the previous June to make it impossible for Hitler to reinforce his troops fighting on the Normandy beaches after D-day with fresh soldiers from Germany. The Resistance had blown up thousands of locomotives and train cars and torn apart miles of tracks.
    Inside the sitting compartment, wooden benches that typically held three or four were crammed with six. But the French were so thin, they easily packed themselves like sardines. Sadly, Henry noted how quiet they were. There was a grayness to their faces. Their clothes showed signs of multiple mendings. They didn’t looklike a liberated people. But that would come, wouldn’t it? Once Hitler surrendered?
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    The trip dragged as the train limped along slowly on diesel instead of coal-fueled steam. It chugged away from Marseille, passing marshes and white beaches to the west. The sight of them triggered memories of the truck ride he and Billy had taken toward the Pyrenees—the vast mountains bordering Spain they had to cross to freedom—where everything had gone wrong.
    Now there was something he had meant to do—write Billy’s mother and sisters in Philadelphia and tell them how brave Billy had been in the end. He needn’t let on what a pain in the neck Billy’d been before that. How much he’d whined about food when the maquis fed them what little they had. Well, there’d be time for that, Henry reassured himself. Nothing would change the fact