“They’re making a game,” Nanée told him. “A card game which I suppose André will insist we play—after he makes up the rules to suit himself.”
She smiled that way she did, softening her challenge, and sat down and took up that beautiful pen, moss-green agate with a gold clip and a gold band and bite marks at the end of the barrel. The pen he’d used to draw the face that wasn’t Nanée’s, that he’d boxed up in a hand-sketched birdcage; the eyes that weren’t hers either, that he’d hidden behind her flight goggles as if his grief might so easily be captured and contained.
She set the pen to paper. “Now, let’s find Luki, shall we?”
Tuesday, November 6, 1940
VILLA AIR-BEL
Edouard lingered over Madame Nouget’s grape-juice-sweetened polenta pudding in the Grand Salon, needing to eat slowly what everyone else thought were meager rations, as Danny manned the radio dial and interpreted the BBC announcer’s voice he alone was able to make out through the crackle. Roosevelt had won a third term in the States. The Germans had sunk the British merchant cruiser the Jervis Bay, while Ireland refused to allow Britain to use its ports. Jews from southwest Germany were being given thirty minutes’ notice before being shipped to camps here in the French free zone, the French protesting they shouldn’t be a dumping ground for Germany’s Jews. This French need to label him, Edouard thought. An excuse to turn away. Before France lost the war, the label was “German,” with the suggestion that he might sympathize with or even be a spy for the Nazis. Now that France aligned itself with Hitler, the label was “Jew.”
“Now,” André said, “the Murder Game.” He’d already pulled out a jar filled with paper slips and was offering them around.
“See, this is the thing about André,” Nanée said to Edouard. “He refuses to believe the whole world might not want exactly what he wants.”
But already Jacqueline and T were taking the children up to bed, Peterkin with Dagobert, and Danny and Gussie were pulling the drapes to block out the moonlight.
The game was simple. Each of them imagined and wrote down an assassination scenario (a weapon or means of death and a motive), then drew slips from one jar to determine the assassin and the inspector, and from a second jar to determine the victim. Only the assassin knew who he and the victim were. They would turn off the lights and the assassin would make his way to the victim, to mimic his murder scenario in some appropriate way.
“A finger pistol to the head if your murder is by gun,” Nanée explained. “Tap their lips if you’re a poisoner.”
“If you prefer to strangle, hands on the neck, yes, but please don’t squeeze too hard,” André said.
T, rejoining them, said, “Then the poor victim dies and the inspector begins the interrogation. True-or-false questions.”
“There are no winners, no losers,” André explained. “Only an exploration of the mind.”
“We play to the death,” Nanée said. “Then we keep playing.”
Even Edouard laughed, though he found this unsettling. He wrote down a quick idea and put it in his pocket, then took his turn pulling a slip from the assassin/inspector jar: The Assassin. He folded the paper back up without, he hoped, giving himself away. The victim jar was offered and he drew from that: Nanée. Already, he felt exposed by this new game of André’s.
As André hit the lights, Edouard noted Nanée standing beside the huge fireplace with its fat brass andirons, the foggy gilt mirror over the mantel, the untimely clock. They milled around in the darkness for a few minutes, until he reached her and tapped her on the neck, on the scarf at the dip in her collarbone where the nib of the pen his assassin wielded would go.
He backed quickly away from her as she fell, melodramatically screaming, to the floor.
Someone reached the light switch and turned it on. They all froze, everyone already laughing as André strode across the black-and-white marble to Nanée, pretending to be handing her a telephone receiver, saying, “Nanée, Hollywood for you.”
He observed the room from his position standing over her.
Damn, Edouard thought. No one ever escaped André’s inquisitions, in games or otherwise.
André offered a hand to Nanée, but she shook her head. “I’m too dead to get up.” She coughed and gurgled, and was again dead.
Edouard considered André considering the room: Danny by the light switch. T a few feet away, with Maurice. Varian sitting casually on the couch, looking guilty, perhaps enjoying it for a change since in life he always had to play innocent. Jacqueline, too, looked guilty, but then beautiful women were always portrayed as angels or devils, with no room in between. And Gussie was, as he was so often, not far from Jacqueline.
“Edouard,” André said, “you look even guiltier than normal. You’re the assassin.”
Edouard said, “You’d think you studied with Freud himself.”
“You’ll soon learn to be watching the others rather than the sleuth. It gives away your guilt.”
The interrogation began.
“There was bloodshed?” André said.
“True,” Edouard answered.
“Surely you see it there on the tiles, dear,” Jacqueline said. “Perhaps we ought to mop it up before it stains the marble?”
“A knife?” André said.
“False.”
“That level of cliché is mine alone,” Varian said.
“I’d guess he bashed her head in with one of his cameras,” André said, “but that would require he pick one up.”
Edouard set a hand on the mantel, cool and steadying, as he watched the muddy, pitted reflection of André’s face in the mirror.
“André,” Jacqueline scolded, “Edouard hasn’t even had time to gain his strength back, and he doesn’t have a camera here.”
Edouard looked to the bad landscapes covering the walls of the room, remembering the plays and sketches the internees had written and performed at Camp des Milles, the art made on the brick walls, the music they composed to play on whatever instruments they had. An artist was driven to create art even in the worst of times. Perhaps especially then.