Nanée said, “The other documents are complicated, but not impossible.”
In recent weeks, the temporary Czech passports they’d relied on had been shut down. So had the Lithuanian ones they’d spent a fortune to get. The Dutch. The Panamanian. New Spanish and Portuguese rules made it nearly impossible to have transit visas from both countries at the same time too, and Varian’s best guess was that every name telegraphed to Madrid for a Spanish transit visa was submitted to Gestapo agents operating in Spain. That meant refugees now could be sent through Spain only if they weren’t well-known enough to be recognizable, and they had to travel under aliases until they got to Lisbon—another risk. The CAS had gone from sending people to the border on their own to having to escort them, increasing the danger to the staff. And try as Varian might, he couldn’t get people out by ship; the harbor and coast were too closely guarded.
“There’s a path over the Pyrenees that skirts French border guards.” Nanée hoped this was still true, or true again. The escape route from Cerbère along the cemetery wall and over the border was so often watched now that it had become unusable.
Danny turned off the water, and Dagobert hopped up hopefully.
“You’re changing your mind?” Nanée asked. She turned the water back on.
Dagobert let out a small, discouraged yip and settled back to the floor, head on paws.
“Most of these refugees are Jewish, Danny.” The French now had an even broader definition of who was Jewish than the Germans did, and Pétain and Laval were trying to get Hitler’s attention, to show they could contribute to his pet project—they could persecute Jews as well as any Nazi—and win a place for France in Hitler’s Europe. “I know you think I know more than I ought to,” she said, “but Varian hasn’t told me anything. He is strictly need-to-know. You forget what a fine snoop I am.”
“Don’t imagine, Nanée, that you’re a better snoop than the Gestapo, or even Vichy.”
“So you’ll join us.” Not a question; after a decade of persuading Danny to do what she wanted him to, she could read acquiescence in his voice. She turned the tap off.
Dagobert bolted to her side, wagging his tail.
“We need to get T and Peterkin here,” she said. “And we need to find you a place to live.”
Friday, October 25, 1940
THE #14 TROLLEY, MARSEILLE
Nanée, T, and Miriam caught the #14 trolley east from the Noailles station, through the Plaine tunnel and past the Saint-Pierre cemetery; they’d left Dagobert behind lest he scare off potential landlords. Nanée had seen homes with space around them in the hills of La Pomme, a far better place for little Peterkin (now with Danny’s mother near Cannes) than a lousy hotel or boardinghouse room in rat-infested, roach-ridden downtown Marseille. They hopped off the trolley to inquire at a café about rentals, then on a whim ducked through an underpass with enticing glimpses of the hills and valleys of Saint-Cyr, finding themselves on a long winding drive lined with plane trees and boxwoods, marked by brick pillars and a DO NOT ENTER sign. Carved into one of the limestone capitals were the words VILLA AIR-BEL—a name so like Miriam’s fleabag hotel Paradis Bel-Air that they couldn’t resist. It was so quiet. No traffic. No people shouting as they spilled from bars. No police whistles or harbor noise. Nothing but birdsong, the gentle shush of leaves fluttering in the wind, a trickle of water somewhere. It made Nanée a little nervous, as if noise were a drug she’d become dependent on to stave off her thoughts.
Just as they topped the long climb and spied through a phalanx of trees a villa atop the hill, white with green shutters, a voice called out, “This is private property!”
A stooped man was hurrying toward them across two wooden planks over an irrigation ditch. Nanée called to him that they were looking for a place to rent.
Dr. Balthazar Thumin, as the man introduced himself, feigned reluctance—it would be very expensive—but led them up a steep walk to a three-story villa with ivy climbing to a terra-cotta roof. He retrieved a huge key ring from a groom’s cottage, opened a squeaky iron gate, and led them up an untended walk, the gravel poking at Nanée’s feet; she’d had her shoes resoled, but she’d already worn them through again delivering messages for Varian.
The gardens were in disrepair, the oval pond covered in a foul-smelling green mold and surrounded by rangy hedges and geraniums, zinnias, and marigolds long past bloom, the paths distinguishable only by the difference between weeds fighting through gravel and ones thriving in loamy soil. The view from the belvedere, though—just an open gallery flanked by plane trees, but belvedere sounded so much more poetic—was wide and forever, begging for a painter to set up an easel. Sharp-needled pines and the soft silvers and gray-greens of olive trees stretched to the parallel railroad and trolley tracks and, beyond them, a stunning sea and cloud-dotted sky. For the briefest moment Nanée was standing on the belvedere of Marigold Lodge, looking down the manicured lawn-and-willow-tree stretch of Superior Point to Pine Creek Bay and Lake Macatawa.
As the doctor began opening the shutters on the villa’s six sets of French doors, T whispered that even if the inside were as ruined as the gardens, Danny and she could never afford this. It didn’t cost anything to look, though, and what was Nanée’s wealth but an accident of birth, anyway? She might keep her downtown room too, but she wanted, suddenly, to have Peterkin grow up in a house like she’d grown up in, where he might settle into a window seat or the branches of one of these trees with a book about King Arthur or Joan of Arc, reading English with her the way she’d read French with her governess and piecing together a suit of armor from tin foil. She found herself longing to have room about her, quiet gardens to walk in, people she loved and who loved her sleeping under the same oddly meandering roof.
It must be her age—newly thirty-one—or perhaps this moment in time. She’d turned thirty in a world that had declared itself at war without really doing much about it. The Nazis had taken care of that, occupying Paris and half of France and installing their Vichy lapdogs to run the rest of the country. Now, with peace declared, the war seemed so much more real, and only begun. Just that morning they’d woken to shocking newspaper photos of Pétain shaking Hitler’s hand at Montoire. Yet despite her American passport, France had become the only home Nanée knew, the only one she wanted.
“Do let’s have a look,” she insisted. Then more loudly, for the doctor’s hearing, “This reminds me of home, although of course it’s much smaller.”
The doctor took a pack of Gauloises Bleues from his pocket and lit one. He didn’t offer them cigarettes. He was that kind of old-fashioned; he couldn’t imagine any decent woman would smoke.
“There are eighteen bedrooms,” he said. “As I said, it will be very expensive.”