The boy appeared in her view, just feet away. He continued on a few yards, then stood waiting at the stop for the trolley to downtown Marseille.
After a moment, the boy, sensing Nanée’s presence, glanced back over his shoulder. She fumbled for her keys as if she lived there, hoping the man tailing her wasn’t looking in the boy’s direction. Hoping he might have gone the other way.
She heard the clang of a trolley coming from the other direction, bound back to Marseille center.
She listened to the grind of it slowing.
Watched it pass her.
Watched it stop, the entire trolley now in her view.
Watched, still from her hiding place in the doorway, as an old woman with a young girl got off.
The boy alone got on.
She heard footsteps, now hurrying toward her just as the trolley began on its way again.
She ran for it. Hopped on just in time.
Too late for the tail to catch the trolley.
She did not look back. She didn’t wave to him, tempting as that was.
At the address, finally, Nanée gave the code knock, two, three, one, at a hotel room door. It opened slightly.
“Postmistress?”
“Indeed, yes.”
The door opened wider, her invitation into the room.
Two people looked expectantly at her—two people anyone with any interest in art would know.
“Your Czech passports are ready,” she whispered.
Varian now had a deal with Vladimír Vocho?, the Czech consul in Marseille. Vocho? would provide a passport to any anti-Nazi Varian recommended, and Varian would supply funds to have them printed in Bordeaux, right under the Nazis’ noses. The consul was entitled to have passports printed in France, which came with pink covers rather than green, but the pink Czech passports had become so common that the legitimate green ones were as likely to be questioned as the illegitimate pink ones, or more. Twice each week, Varian joined a friend of the Czech consul for breakfast in the friend’s room at the train station hotel, where he exchanged an envelope of photographs, descriptions, and cash for one with the passports for prior applicants. Varian didn’t give Nanée the passports themselves to deliver, out of concern for her own safety. If she were caught with forged documents, even her American passport would be no protection.
She said to the two artists, “Come to the office tomorrow morning to collect them.”
They thanked her profusely, as if they believed their danger were ended rather than just begun.
Sunday, October 20, 1940
THE CAS OFFICE, MARSEILLE
Danny picked up an identity card from Varian’s desk. Varian, alarmed, grabbed it back. This was not, Nanée thought, an auspicious start for a job Danny needed, since he and T and Peterkin hadn’t been able to survive on the income from selling his uncle’s grapes in the Languedoc markets.
“It’s a forgery,” Danny said.
Varian took him by the sleeve, pulled him into the bathroom, and turned on the tap. Nanée, with Dagobert right behind, followed and closed them in.
“How can you can tell the cart d’identité is a forgery?” Varian demanded.
“When Danny was working with the police in Paris before the Germans invaded,” Nanée answered, “he quietly expedited naturalization papers and residency permits for German refugees. He can translate your correspondence into French officialese that will pass the authorities. He knows how to get permissions no one wants to give. And he knows where to find the people you’re looking for.”
Danny said, “Vichy doesn’t advertise, of course, but I hear through the refugee underground that most are at an internment camp near N?mes or back at Camp des Milles.”
Obtaining American visas for people in the camps was complicated. US authorities suspected them simply for having been arrested, and yet if Vichy or the Nazis released them, that raised concerns they might be Nazi sympathizers or even spies. But Varian already had authority for visas for those on his list.
“Do you think you could get them out?” Varian said.
The whole scene struck Nanée as comic. The toilet. The sink. The sad little mirror. The murmur of voices from beyond the door. Most of the people who worked in the office now had no idea of the illegal activities of the CAS; Varian had built up quite a staff of legitimate volunteers helping refugees in legal ways, as cover for his illegal rescue work.
“Oh, sure,” Danny answered finally. “I’ll just walk in and ask who is there and if they could leave with me.”
Varian’s eyes lit for a brief moment before he registered that Danny was being flip.
Nanée said, “If someone can find out who’s there, I could try to get them out.”
They both eyed her dubiously.
“You underestimate me, both of you,” she said.
AS VARIAN LEFT, Nanée held Danny back and opened the tap Varian had closed. Dagobert, with an impatient groan, sat dejectedly.
“How did you know that identity card was forged?” she asked. Gussie bought real cards from the tabacs, and Bill Freier, who doctored them, could imitate the official rubber stamp with just a few brushstrokes. Freier, who’d been arrested in Austria for anti-Nazi cartoons and caricatures and later escaped the French Le Vernet internment camp, lived under an alias in Cassis, creating forgeries in order to help fellow refugees and to keep his fiancé and himself alive while Varian tried to arrange US immigration for them. No one—no one—could tell Bill Freier’s identity cards without a magnifying glass, and often not even then. His signature was awfully good too, and he did it for the CAS for fifty cents a card when others would charge three hundred times that.
Danny said, “What do you have in mind for getting refugees out of the camps, Nanée?”
“How did you know that identity card was forged?” she insisted.
“It won’t be as easy as sweet-talking a single guard, if that’s what you think,” he said. “These camps come with fences and watchtowers and men with guns.”
“The identity card, Danny.”
He frowned. “It wasn’t the card. It was the look on Fry’s face when I picked it up.”
Dagobert, hopeful, stood and wagged his tail as Nanée stepped to the sink, but she only idly dipped her fingers into the running water.
“Even if we could get these men out of the camps,” Danny said, “they need passports, French transit and exit visas, Spanish and Portuguese transit visas, a final destination visa, and proof of passage out of Lisbon. Portugal doesn’t want to be overrun with refugees when the music stops.”
“For proof of passage, the venerable old Cook travel agency will provide false transatlantic tickets for two hundred francs,” Nanée said. “For entry visas, the Chinese sell ones that say, ‘It is strictly forbidden for the bearer of this document, under any circumstances and at any time, to set foot on Chinese soil.’ Fortunately, neither the French nor the Portuguese read Chinese.”
Dagobert lay down on the bathroom floor, head on paws. This was going to take some time.