“Your passport shows you came just weeks ago, to help refugees. Mine shows I’ve lived in France for a decade. Which of us do you suppose can more easily move around France to, say, courier messages or even people?”
With the Marseille docks now closely watched by the Vichy police, the Spanish border was for most refugees the only way out. But to get to the border, refugees needed French transit visas, which they could not get without notifying Vichy of their whereabouts and making themselves vulnerable to a roundup. And to get across that border into Spain, they needed French exit visas, which Vichy no longer granted to former citizens of the Reich lest the French offend Hitler by allowing his critics to escape his wrath. Sometimes the border check at the Cerbère train station would look the other way. Some refugees used a map of a secret path over the Pyrenees. But stateless persons caught traveling without safe conduct passes risked imprisonment in France, or deportation to a German labor camp and the starvation rations and brutal work routine of a place like Dachau, or even a firing squad. Anyone, stateless or not, caught leaving France illegally risked the same, as did those caught helping them.
Nanée fingered the diamond brooch on her suit lapel and gave Fry her best attractive-heiress-who-might-convince-anyone-of-anything look. She lightly pulled Dagobert’s leash so he stood pertly, and she took Miriam’s arm. She pulled her own single set of documents from her handbag and offered them to Fry as if she were holding two sets of papers.
“Our transit visas, Officer,” she said.
She’d meant to make him laugh. He did not.
“So you want to be our postmistress?” he asked.
What Nanée wanted was to feel useful, to have a purpose. “Perhaps your postmaster. That would be terrific cover. The Nazis never imagine a woman can do anything at all.” She smiled meaningfully at Fry. “So few in the world do.”
Miriam shot her a look. “Nanée wants to help bankroll our effort too.”
“But any amounts I contribute would be used to save ordinary souls,” Nanée said.
Fry frowned. “The refugees on my list have contributed—”
“I can take messages anywhere you need them taken,” Nanée interrupted. “I can help your friends who don’t have French transit visas get to the border. I can even help you change money without using the French mafia, but—”
“Really, you cannot—”
“The people you’re helping—some have francs they want to change into dollars when they get to the States. They can leave that money here with you, to fund your operations, and I’ll provide an equal amount in dollars for them from my accounts at home. Voilà. We effectively bring my money over from the States to fund your effort, without any transfer trail to alert Vichy.”
Fry eyed her differently now, but said, “I don’t believe you appreciate the effort it takes to obtain American visas for people we don’t—”
Miriam opened the bathroom door to the room crowded with refugees Fry was already trying to help, even though they weren’t on his list.
Fry watched them for a long moment, then improbably stooped to Dagobert’s level, looked into his face, and whispered, “Hitler, Hitler.”
Dagobert barked so enthusiastically that Fry recoiled before carefully offering the back of his hand. Dagobert sniffed it, then licked it.
Fry rubbed Dagobert’s ears. “You aren’t a bad fellow after all, are you?” he said.
He stood, adjusting his glasses as he frowned again at Nanée’s suit. “We’ll start a second list,” he conceded. “People for whom we don’t yet have the promise of visas.”
“In honor of Nanée,” Miriam said, “we’ll call it the Gold list.”
“I won’t disappoint you, Mr. Fry,” Nanée said.
“Varian,” he answered, and he nodded to the open bathroom door, inviting them to leave first.
And already Miriam was introducing Nanée to the whole merry gang: Monsieur Maurice, a Romanian doctor, was Varian’s consiglieri. German-born economist Beamish Hermant specialized in fake passports and black-market money swaps. Heinz Oppenheimer organized the interviews and kept the books. Charlie Fawcett, an American sculptor who spoke French with a thick Georgia drawl nobody could understand, allowed refugees entrance to the office while watching for Vichy police. Lena Fischmann took shorthand in French, German, and English, spoke Spanish, Polish, and Russian too, and was a master at hiding illegal expenditures. And Gussie, nineteen and Polish and Jewish, looked so like a skinny fourteen-year-old Aryan boy that he could carry coded telegrams to the central post office and go from tabac to tabac to buy blank identity cards for their forger without ever being stopped.
“We’re moving to new space tomorrow,” Miriam told Nanée. “A Jewish leather goods maker is vacating a floor of a building before the Vichy seize it, and he’s given it to us. Number sixty rue Grignan. We interview from eight till noon, take lunch, then conference as long as it takes to decide which of the day’s interviewees we might help.”
Wednesday, September 11, 1940
THE CAS OFFICE, MARSEILLE
The new CAS office—up a dark stairway at the back of the building to a floor split into two rooms, with Varian’s office at the back—still smelled of leather goods. On the wall across from the windows, in place of the shelves of handbags and briefcases and wallets, now hung an American flag. The rest of the front room was dedicated to square wooden tables and hard wooden chairs like the one from which Nanée was interviewing a charming young Austrian artist, hoping to get him through the bureaucratic nightmare that was the first step for a refugee escaping France.
“Do you have a usable passport?” she asked him, the next question from the script. With Austria now part of Germany, an Austrian passport got you exactly nowhere, and all German Jews had been stripped of their citizenship. But sometimes refugees had managed passports from other countries. “Other travel documents?” Sometimes a country issued a document in lieu of passport. “An overseas entry visa, preferably to the United States or Mexico?” “One to anywhere else?”
Well, that saved her having to ask discreetly if his documents were genuine. She marked the answers down in their code.
“Anyone in the US who might sponsor you?”
The artist had an agent who represented his work in New York. That was something.