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said no, that they’d made an experiment that had failed.
    “Bon. Si la fusillade a enfin arrêté, peut-être mes voisins seront de retour.”
    He set a plate on the rough kitchen table in front of her, and began rummaging for something to put on it, wondering how she would manage until someone showed up to help. She had lost everyone. He asked her if she knew how to read.
    “J’étais la première dans ma classe,” she said, throwing her head up.
    In a cabinet in another room he had found a small library, and he brought a few books out for her, setting them next to her plate. She brushed her dark hair back and picked one of them up. There was a translation of Dickens and another of Twain, and editions of Flaubert and Stendhal, names he didn’t recognize. “Peut-être ceux-ci peuvent t’aider à passer le temps.”
    She opened the book with her bloody hand. “Monsieur Chanceux, ma mère m’a dit que le temps passe sans notre aide.”
    * * *
    THAT EVENING he rode the bay back to his unit, arriving well after dark and reporting what he’d discovered, that he’d left a child with candles and eight shriveled potatoes and some rations from the horse’s saddlebags. The men were glad the stray shell hadn’t done even more damage, but Sam saw nothing to be happy about. His uncle had taught him that what he did in life, good or bad, could seldom be undone.
    The lieutenant pulled from his tunic a packet delivered a half hour earlier by motorcycle courier, then bent next to the truck out of the wind and tried to read a message by matchlight. “We were so busy waiting for you and sharing the excellent brandy with the poor motorcyclist that I forgot to read this.” After a moment, his head snapped up. “Well, it’s over.”
    “What we got to blow up now?” Sam asked, holding his cup out to Robicheaux’s jug.
    “Nothing.” The lieutenant threw the packet into the ruined truck and smiled all around. “Most teams have been ordered back to Paris. All cleanup has been ordered stopped, and for some reason our little group’s being sent to the south of France. Makes me wonder why they exiled us out here in the first place.”
    “They had this fancy idea in their heads,” Sam said, feeling the brandy burn in his throat.
    “What? An illusion, you mean?”
    “Is that what they call it? I meant some general who’s never been out here had a fancy idea we could sweep up this place with a whisk broom and a dustpan. When you think about a problem for thirty seconds instead of a week like you should, you come up with one of those illusions you’re talking about.”
    “Oh, sit down and have a drink,” the lieutenant told him.
    Sam held out an open hand toward the battlefield. “Do you think I can come back and check on the little girl?”
    “No, absolutely not. We have our orders.”
    “What about later? On my leave?”
    “We’re going a long ways away, and I’d bet straight home after that.”
    “I have to see about her.”
    The lieutenant took a swallow from a tin cup. “You’re not exactly a tourist over here. And you can’t pop some French kid into your knapsack for the trip home.” The brandy was making the lieutenant talkative and bold. He drained the cup. “I’m sorry, but she’ll have to take her chances like the rest of us.”
    Sam leaned back against the truck and ran his hand along the enormous hole in the hood. The piece of shrapnel could just as well have crashed through him. “The little French girl called me Lucky. Like a name.”
    “Why’s that?”
    “For getting here the day the Armistice was signed. For missing everything.”
    “There’s worse nicknames,” the lieutenant said, walking over to where the other men were huddled in blankets, passing the huge jug.
    Sam stared at the moonstruck wreckage around him that extended from the North Sea to the Mediterranean and beyond, understanding that Amélie’s lot was but one particle of the overall catastrophe, that mothers from Nebraska to