Red Rainbow by G Johanson (top books of all time TXT) 📗

it was higher quality than most of their stuff. The songbird, a beautiful ash brunette, had whispered in the pianist’s ear before launching into a perfect rendition of Who’s Sorry Now? She left afterwards, nobody having a clue who she was. Kalle wanted to book her as a regular and scoured the building for her without any luck.

Kalle was still trying to find out who the lady was postshow despite all of his earlier questions establishing that nobody knew who she was. Patience went to see Kalle before leaving to congratulate him on the show, catching him in the corridor. He gave her a lip service response, too fixated on the potential leading lady that had slipped through his fingers to fully engage with her. A couple of Patience’s co-workers were waiting for her in the lobby to go out for drinks. Patience had bonded with the other new starters, particularly Henriette – Alexia was pleasant but far too fixated on their boss. Patience cut the one-sided talk short so as to not keep them waiting, finishing with, “Deveral would be proud of you.”

“Deveral would have tapped her up on the spot.”

“Mmm... she might come back,” Patience said weakly. She saw a little tabby cat in the corridor ahead of her and she crouched down to stroke it, turning back to Kalle to say, “Another tabby. There must be something about this place that attracts them.”

“I bought it. The other one died. I found the body under the stalls.”

Kalle walked off after saying this, unaware of the bombshell he’d just dropped on her. She even killed the cat. Patience had never viewed the massacre as a good deed. It was an act of war performed at a time of war and as such was hard to judge evenly. Learning that the cat died too was further evidence that Florence was as cruel as any of their enemies. Even Kalle must have known this looked bad, hence why he tried to pass off a ringer as the original stage cat. He walked off and she scooped up the cat, which she would be taking home with her. She had wanted to help bring the theatre back to life, restore it to a happy place, but she realised she could not tie her future to the theatre, not even parttime. Bad energy was here now.

Patience wished the theatre well, Kalle too or whoever took over, but this was not the place for her to spend her time in. What had happened here was something to remember, but celebrating it seemed distasteful. The truth that nobody wanted to hear (and she didn’t want to say it out loud either) was that Deveral did not go out in a blaze of glory, he just went out in flames. That had been his choice, which could not be said for the others engulfed by them. Patience had learnt sympathy for her enemies a long time ago, realising that hating every bigot she encountered would be more harmful to her than them, consuming her and turning her into somebody she didn’t want to be, bitter. And she had never viewed every German soldier as an enemy – conscription was as indiscriminate as Florence’s killing hand and selected the good and the bad. She had seen the photos, heard the stories of the men, the personal impact of those wasted lives.

Even if she hadn’t known what had happened here, Patience still fancied she’d feel something in the air every time she revisited the scene of the crime. Darkness had overtaken the light here. She would see things in the shadows that weren’t necessarily there – or maybe were. There were plenty of other ways she could spend her weekends in Free Paris that weren’t backward steps. There was no upside to looking back at horrors.