“Wait!” Nanée said as faint music crackled.
Danny tuned the radio more carefully, and cranked up the volume. Big band music. “In the Mood,” by Glenn Miller and his orchestra. But where was it coming from?
Charlie Fawcett, who played the jazz trumpet, stood and with delightful enthusiasm pretended to play Miller’s trombone. Leon Ball joined him on the air saxophone.
Nanée stood and grabbed Gussie. “You know how to dance, kid? Come on!”
Varian scooped up Dagobert, took one of his paws in hand, and began to dance too. Then everyone was dancing—forbidden in Vichy France, as was jazz. They danced to Duke Ellington’s “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart” and “Frenesi” by Artie Shaw—Charlie playing air clarinet even as he danced with Nanée—and Judy Garland singing “I’m Nobody’s Baby.”
“That gal singing about nobody wanting to love her?” Charlie said. “That fits her like socks on a rooster.”
He and Ball had a fine time joking about being more than happy to have Judy be their baby as Nanée wondered, as Garland did in the song, whether anyone other than good old Dagobert would ever take a chance with her in love, or she with them.
The music came, astonishingly, from a Boston shortwave radio station. On clear nights out here in the open countryside, they could get music all the way from the United States.
When they called it an evening, far later than they ought to have, Ball said he and Charlie would drop Varian on their way—evasive about where exactly they might be headed.
But Nanée said to Varian, “Why don’t you take the blue room? We can get your things from Marseille after work tomorrow. But Dagobert sleeps with me.”
Monday, October 28, 1940
THE PANIER DISTRICT, MARSEILLE
Nanée walked up a winding alleyway lined with decrepit brothels and bars, too close to the stinking muck in the sewage drain running down the middle, but she was determined to be seen disappearing if she was to disappear. A rat ambled along closer to the buildings, then climbed up onto a garbage pail and inside, less threatened by her than she was by him. Another crossed one of the lines of laundry strung from windows, dingy undergarments improbably mixed with brightly colored children’s clothes. Nanée wished she’d brought Dagobert, but he would be yanking on his leash to stick his nose in the open sewer and racing off after those rats, running headlong into the garbage pail. She regretted too leaving her pearl-handled pistol back on the high armoire shelf in her new bedroom at the villa, thinking it would be incriminating if the police stopped her on her way to deliver this message whose meaning Varian would not even share with her. She’d understood without Varian having to say it that she couldn’t be tortured into disclosing what she didn’t know.
It was nearing evening, the sky as gray as the street. Old ladies on chairs in the doorways were wrapping their yarn around their knitting needles, preparing to go inside, while young whores emerged to shop their wares. At place des Moulins, a square with a café in which people sat sipping a last something before the chilly damp of the night settled in, a table of already-drunk men called out to her for her price. She swallowed back a smart retort and headed up the alley to the right, repeating the message to herself: I’m afraid there will be no news from Paris. She was to deliver it from outside the door. She was not to see who the recipients were. She was to leave immediately. Not another moment beyond what you need to deliver the message, for their safety and your own.
The hill crested to a view of the newer docks of the industrial port, filled with barrels and crates and massive dirty mounds of coal meant for Britain but going nowhere due to the blockade. A light drizzle began to fall on the coal and on the filthy street and on Nanée.
And there was the house she was looking for. The shutters Varian had described as pink were the color of the Pepto-Bismol her daddy used to take. A chunky woman in a high-slit skirt and wide-necked blouse adjusted her garter in the doorway, leaning low so her breasts were visible. Nanée glanced over her shoulder to see the whore’s mark—one of the men from the table. Was he following her?
Poor Daddy. He was rolling over in his grave. But it was a sign of Varian’s growing confidence in Nanée that he’d given her this delivery.
She pretended to search her pockets for something to keep the rain off her head as the man passed her. He slowed for a free look at the woman’s breasts. After he carried on, Nanée slipped past her and through the door into a front room full of scantily clad women and attentive men. She found the stairway at the back, climbed dirty, deteriorating steps to the fourth floor, and knocked at the second door to the left, twice, then three times, then once.
The door creaked open, a chain affixed to keep anyone from barging in.
“Postmistress?”
“Indeed, yes,” Nanée said. “I’m afraid there will be no news from Paris.”
“No!” the woman wailed, a heart-wrenching sound. A low moan from behind her, a man’s grief. Still, Nanée made herself turn back toward the nasty stairway.
“Please don’t go.” The woman was sobbing now. “Please don’t leave us. We can’t bear this.”
Nanée hesitated at the rattle of the door chain. The poor woman was trying to open the door, so frazzled she didn’t realize she had to close it to get the lock off.
“My husband can’t bear this.” The woman was sobbing even harder, the man keening.
Nanée longed to turn back to comfort her. Whenever she’d delivered bad news before, she’d been able to talk to the recipients, to assure them that it wasn’t that they would never get their papers, never get over the border, but simply that there had been a delay.
Did this mean something more—“No news from Paris”? Not just that there was no help for these refugees now, but that there never would be? That a parent or a child or some other loved one they’d expected to escape with would have to be left behind? That someone was dead?
Could Nanée really not spend even one moment comforting this poor couple?
But already a nearby door was opening, drawn by the commotion even here in this place where nobody wanted to be seen. And Varian’s voice was in her head, the look on his face when she’d asked him what the message meant. Not one extra moment, Nanée. Not one word more. You deliver the message and you get out.
Thursday, October 31, 1940
CAMP DES MILLES
Edouard pulled a sprig of crabgrass from a crack in the courtyard, the first bit of green he’d eaten in weeks. It was evening, the internees out for a last bit of fresh air, only Max still underground, chipping away at another brick as if art dug out of manufactured stone might save him.
“All indoors!” the bugler called.