Varian said, “I’d like to get you used to making deliveries first.”
He handed her an address at Prado Beach, on the opposite side of Marseille from the Panier, and told her the message. “You’ll knock, twice, three times, then once. If you’re in the right place, with the right person, and it’s safe to deliver a message, they’ll respond, ‘Postmistress?’ to let you know, and you’ll respond, ‘Indeed, yes.’ If they say nothing, Nanée, or anything but that single word, postmistress, you leave immediately. Do not enter. Do not try to help them. Get word back to us as fast as you can, preferably to Lena or me. But don’t do anything yourself. Is that clear?”
“‘Indeed, yes.’”
“The fact that you’re entitled to be here in Marseille won’t protect you. Again, the people you’ll be delivering messages to are not.”
“I understand,” she said. “I can’t afford to be caught helping them.”
And I won’t be, she thought. But she didn’t say the words aloud, not wanting to tempt fate.
“Memorize the addresses I give you. Don’t take them with you when you go. Don’t take anything that suggests what you’re doing.”
“‘Indeed, yes,’” she repeated.
He smiled a little despite himself. She was rather proud of that. Prying a smile from Varian’s lips was one of the hardest tasks in Marseille.
“You won’t always be able to take Dagobert with you. You’ll have to strike a balance between when he makes you look innocent and American and when he draws attention. If you need to leave him behind, he can stay with me.”
Nanée, not sure how to respond, knelt to Dagobert’s level and rubbed his ears.
Varian said, “You will likely be followed sometimes.”
“The Postmistress motto: If you can’t lose a tail, don’t deliver the mail.”
Varian actually laughed. It was such a surprising sound that she was sure half the office had turned to the closed bathroom door. It was a surprisingly warm laugh.
“All right,” he said. “Thank you.”
She and Dagobert were already through the bathroom door when Varian said, “You’re not, it turns out, quite the typical American heiress I expected.”
She turned back, astonished.
“Point to you,” he said. “Good luck and Godspeed, Nanée.”
NOT AN HOUR later, Nanée was climbing from a trolley at Prado Beach, the Saint-Pierre cemetery behind her and Dagobert at her side. She knocked twice, then three times, then once, her heart beating like that of a horse in the starting gate at Churchill Downs.
If a boy like Gussie could do this, certainly she could, she told herself.
She waited. Was she in the wrong place? Was she being watched?
She glanced around her. No one. Just Dagobert sitting ever so politely beside her.
It seemed such a long time to wait. Should she leave?
The door opened slightly, stopped by a chain. An eye peeked through the crack.
In a whisper, “Postmistress?”
“Indeed, yes.”
The eye retreated. The door closed.
The sound of the chain sliding. The door opened slightly wider.
An old woman bent in half over a cane pulled her inside, into a room cluttered with art and antiques.
“He’s arrived safely in Lisbon,” Nanée said. “He’ll be on the ship to New York tomorrow.”
Not, she didn’t think, a very dangerous message, since the protégé was already safely out of France. A trial run. But the woman wept with relief.
WITHIN TWO WEEKS Nanée was on the trolley for her thirteenth delivery, and on October 13 too, shrugging off the sense she ought to pull the plug this time. Was it just superstition? She chanced a glance at the man she thought had been following her all the way from the CAS office—watching the office or watching for her; it didn’t much matter which. This message was for two refugees in strict hiding, the police far too interested in the couple for them to risk being found. She uncrossed and recrossed her legs, feeling the man’s gaze on her, watching despite the inconspicuous gray trench coat she wore over her secondhand skirt. No, it wasn’t just any man’s admiring glance at a woman’s legs. She wasn’t mistaken. He was definitely following her.
If she had a little more nerve, she would manage to casually chat with him, to charm him. Put him off his guard. But she did have a plan.
She watched out the trolley as they reached the outskirts of Marseille. Varian hadn’t yet sent her on a delivery to the Panier, but she’d ridden this route to Prado Beach so many times now that she knew every stop and doorway. She had managed to deliver every message Varian entrusted to her, and this one was urgent. Urgent good news. Not the best news. She never did get to bring the very best news: that someone was to be included in the next small group headed to the border. She liked to imagine doing so. She liked to imagine whispering through one of those cracked doors that it was someone’s turn to escape. Would they throw their arms around her, or would they be so terrified now that the moment was upon them that they might begin to change their minds? She liked to imagine leading the mad dash over the border to Spain too, but only those directly involved in the convoys were allowed even to know when they were going, and that wasn’t a task with which Varian entrusted her.
The trolley passed her stop, but she stayed on. She saw in her peripheral vision the man still watching her. She pretended to be absorbed in reading her book—Gussie’s lucky book he’d loaned to her since it was her thirteenth delivery, and on October 13.
She had nothing incriminating on her, she reminded herself. The man might take her in for questioning, but anyone in the Vichy police would be daunted by her American passport. No one wanted to be the one whose actions toward an American might be the excuse for Roosevelt to shrug off the thin veil of neutrality and join the British in fighting this war. Roosevelt wouldn’t, of course, make any decision based on what the French did or didn’t do to Nanée—but what was logic in a war that began with a phony Polish attack on a German radio station, staged by Hitler’s thugs so they had an excuse to invade?
After the trolley had completed its next stop, just as it was setting off again, she closed the book and hopped off as if just realizing she was missing her stop.
The tail, caught off guard, had to negotiate around a stout woman with shopping bags.
Nanée used the distraction to duck into the doorway she’d been waiting to pass.
Had the tail managed to get off? Had he seen where Nanée had gone? She chanced a peek around the edge of the portico. He stood in the street, searching as the trolley clanged away.
A woman from the trolley lumbered away down the street, briefly greeting a teenage boy who continued in Nanée’s direction.
Nanée stepped farther back, watching the trolley tracks.