She looked in the mirror again. It was his shame, not hers. Robe Heir.
She took the blouse out and set it on the fire, watched it slowly catch. Dagobert sat beside her, watching too. She added the panties, the brassiere. She took the silk stockings still attached to the garter out of the case next, tossed them too into the fire. Good silk stockings. Impossible to get these days. They seemed to shrink from the flames, giving off an odor of foul charred meat.
She stared at the suit. Somehow, the suit was the worst of it.
She’d just taken the jacket in hand when someone tapped lightly at the door.
“I’ll be down in a bit,” she said.
The door creaked open. T cautiously peered in. “Nanée, don’t forget Miriam is leaving tomorrow.”
Nanée tried to say of course she hadn’t forgotten, but of course she had. This was Miriam’s last night before she left for Yugoslavia, to try to get her fiancé back to the States.
“Nanée?” T said, registering the blouse in the fire, the stockings.
“I’ll be down to help get ready for the party in a minute.”
T took the suit jacket gently from Nanée’s hands. “Wait, Nanée. Just wait.”
“I’ll never wear it again.”
Even she could hear the anger in her voice.
T held the jacket out and examined it, the diamond brooch still on the lapel. She looked to Nanée—that frank, assessing gaze.
“Edouard wasn’t there,” Nanée said.
“Oh, Nan.” T moved toward her, but Nanée stepped back. She couldn’t bear to have anyone touch her.
T collected the skirt from the case and folded the two pieces carefully. She stood there holding them, watching the blouse and the stockings burn. “Do you want to tell me about it?”
Obsession. Anxiety. Fetish. But Nanée would never tell anyone. She couldn’t have even T imagining this.
“What’s to tell?” she said, embracing her rage. “I failed.”
T set the suit aside and took Nanée’s hand the way she did with Peterkin. Nanée wanted to object, but she didn’t want to explain. She let T lead her to the little chair and sit her down.
“You’re exhausted,” T said. “Of course you are. It was a long trip, and you never have been any good at not getting exactly what you want. But you tried.”
She picked up the suit.
“I won’t ever wear it again,” Nanée repeated.
“But someone else can. It’s a convincing suit. At a time when so many people need to appear convincing. The suit of a woman of substance. At a time when we need so many more of you.”
When Nanée didn’t object, T looked at her oddly, differently. “Nanée?” She looked to the things in the fire again, then back to Nanée. “Oh, Nan.”
Nanée looked out the window, to the long stretch of green and the train and trolley tracks, the sea.
“Are you sure you don’t want to tell me about it?” T asked gently.
In the distance, a trolley crept across the tracks.
“I’m going to draw a warm bath for you down in the kitchen, okay?” T said. “A warm bath and a glass of something strong.”
“Not cognac.”
“I think there’s some Calvados. Give me a few minutes, then . . . No, I’ll come get you.”
She stopped at the door and turned back. “You did a good thing, Nan,” she said.
Sunday, November 3, 1940
A BROTHEL CELLAR
Edouard sat silently, his back to the wall, the cold wet of the cellar floor thick in his bones now. The bits of scamper in the dark no longer alarmed him, but the unfamiliar footsteps above now did. He quickly folded Luki’s letter, words he couldn’t see in the darkness but knew by heart, and tucked it back into his shirt pocket with the letters he’d written her. He wrapped his fingers around the knife he’d stolen from the upstairs brothel’s kitchen early that morning, after the last of the clients left and the house quieted, just before the dawn.
Reluctantly he removed the iron grille over the hole in the cellar floor and climbed in, his feet instantly soaking in the foul water as he breathed in the underground stench.
The door at the top of the stairs creaked open. Light spilled down the rickety stairs. Not the cook come to get potatoes; the woman’s hacking cough would have alerted him.
Edouard couldn’t see the feet, but he could hear first one heavy step, then another.
He had the advantage, he told himself. His eyes were accustomed to the dark. If no second person followed, he had the advantage. He’d long ago given up the notion that he might not be able to kill another man.
He waded as quietly as he could through the low tunnel, away from the grate so that if it was opened, he wouldn’t be visible from above. He emerged in an abandoned underground chapel, a small cavern at the other end that the brothel owner hiding him said dated from the Reign of Terror, when French revolutionaries visited the kind of violence on Roman Catholic clergy that the Nazis now visited on French Jews. It was odd, the things the mind turned to, to stave off fear. The bare stone here would have been the altar. Jesus on the cross behind it. He’d seen them when the madam sent him down with a flashlight so he would know where he was to hide if anyone came. No one unwilling to climb into the flooded well could know about the chapel. The only other person who knew it existed was the Russian Communist who’d hidden there before him.
Quiet, careful footsteps now in the basement. No light that Edouard could make out, but he wouldn’t be able to see it from here unless it was pointed right down at the grate.
What could Edouard do if someone did climb into the well, if they did come down here to search? He might just submerge himself here. But better to wait at the edge of the tunnel, to have surprise on his side. Even if there were more than one of them, only one person at a time could emerge from that narrow tunnel.
Could hiding in this shit hole be better than Camp des Milles? What had he been thinking when he’d snuck onto Tater’s truck as it carried away their garbage to feed to his pigs? He’d thought it his good luck when they stopped beside another truck loaded with wine, the two drivers sharing a friendly smoke and chat. He used the moment to slip from one truck to the other, with no idea where it was headed, only hoping it would take him farther than Tater’s farm before he was discovered missing.
He ought to have waited for something he knew would take him toward Paris rather than away. That was his big mistake. He was farther from Luki now, not closer.
But in truth he didn’t even know that; he didn’t know where Luki was.
He had no money. No ration card for food. No papers at all. If he was found anywhere in France, he was doomed.