Nanée wasn’t sure she believed in any lord, but then her childhood had been marked by no real trauma. It was hard now to see what she had been running from when she left Evanston.
She chose her words carefully so that anything she said could be explained as something less illegal than coming to smuggle a Jewish girl over a border even Nanée herself wasn’t permitted to cross.
“We call her Luki.” Not Luki Moss, but we call her Luki, leaving open the possibility of a nickname that had no bearing on an actual name.
“This girl would know you?” the nun asked.
“I have something her father thinks she’ll recognize, although what such a young child remembers and what she forgets after so long is hard to know.”
The nun again waited.
“A drawing of a stuffed animal the girl had when she left.”
“When she left? But you suggested they were separated.”
Nanée again simply met her gaze.
The nun said, “You will know the name?”
“I’m sorry,” Nanée said. “Did I not say? Luki.”
“The name of this stuffed friend?”
Nanée considered what harm might come from disclosing this fact. “Professor Ellie-Mouse,” she said.
“And the child’s father . . . ? You’ll tell me at least how you mean to get the child to him?”
Nanée waited.
The Reverend Mother fingered the heavy rosary that hung underneath the white cowl almost to her waist, then rang a bell on her desk, calling in another nun.
“Sister Amélie,” the Reverend Mother said, “I have word the chateau wishes to contribute some greenery for the altar this Sunday. I’d like you to collect it from the chateau’s farm, and tell the foreman I’ve set aside two places in the chapel, but I would appreciate knowing whether we should expect his friends tomorrow or later in the week.”
The Reverend Mother spoke as if this was nothing more than a chore she’d forgotten to discharge, but Nanée suspected it was something more, a coded message. And so many of the chateaux in the occupied zone had been confiscated by the Germans that she couldn’t help but feel alarmed. In Paris, they’d taken over all of the buildings at 82, 84, and 86 avenue Foch, nearly next door to her own apartment. She’d heard that 84 was being used for “interrogations,” that passersby could hear people screaming in French, and in English too.
Wednesday, November 27, 1940
VILLA AIR-BEL
Edouard, at the table in the Grand Salon, made his way through the negatives Nanée brought from Sanary-sur-Mer, looking for a self-portrait he’d taken a decade before, the night in November 1929 when Germany voted the Communists and the Nazis into power. The Berlin police had stood ready for mass riots that didn’t materialize, but there were rock throwings and arrests enough for Edouard to capture on film. And here it was—his own face leaning so closely into the lens that the shot was of nothing but one eye with the mole he hated, his nose, and part of his mouth and chin.
“Edouard?”
Edouard looked up from the negative to Varian joining him, Dagobert at his heels.
“The American consulate has granted you an interview,” Varian said. “And you’re in luck. The consul general has taken a few days’ leave. Vice Consul Bingham will see you Friday.”
As Edouard absorbed this news, Varian leaned down to pet Dagobert. If I don’t return, he’s yours, Nanée had told the man just before she left for Amboise, making light of it, but the words had echoed in Edouard’s mind half the night. Had she made it safely over the border into Occupied France? And how in the world would she get back out?
“We’ll have to send you through France and Spain under an alias,” Varian said. “Even if what Nanée says is true, that your camp release is legitimate, if it was issued under the false belief you were still in the camp, it’s . . . compromised at best. And it won’t protect you if your name is on a Gestapo list. Again, even without a young girl—”
“Luki is awfully competent despite her age.”
Was she? He knew so little about her now. He hadn’t seen her in more than a year. And her memory of her mother had faded so quickly; he’d kept a photograph of Elza beside Luki’s bed and talked about her all the time, and still what Luki remembered was the smell of her mother, “like caramel and the white flowers in the garden, and also bread.”
He ought to have gone for Luki himself, the risk be damned. But it wasn’t just a risk to him; it was a risk to her if she were caught with him.
“Maurice is meeting now with a German couple, Hans and Lisa Fittko, who are rumored to be getting refugees out over the Pyrenees on an ancient smuggler’s route from Banyuls-sur-Mer,” Varian said. “It’s ten steep and perilous miles, often in freezing temperatures and fierce winds—too difficult for many refugees—but with the gardes mobiles watching the Cerbère cemetery route so closely now, there’s no alternative.”
Edouard looked down at the stack of negatives, work that had put them all at risk, that had already caused Elza’s death. Perhaps Luki was safer wherever she was than she would be with him. But to leave France without her would be to dig his own heart from his chest and set it out on a rocky path over the border, to dry up and die.
“She needs a father. She needs you,” Elza had said when she first placed Luki in his arms. “Now, what shall we name her?” And when he didn’t answer, “I think we should name her Lucca,” binding this child to him through his art, through his arrogance. “We’ll call her Luki,” Elza said. Luki. This child Edouard had struggled to embrace. Elza had understood that, even as Edouard refused to. She’d written in that last note, explaining why she, rather than he, had to rescue her sister from Germany, If anything happens to you, Edouard, your daughter and I will be left destitute. Not Luki but “your daughter.” Not “my daughter.” Not “our daughter.” His. And this new child too, she’d written, as if she knew how often he imagined this new baby she was carrying would be a son with his eyes or nose or jaw. How horrible was he to have thought that? How much must it have grieved Elza to know what a horrible man he was. If anything happens to me, promise me you will keep Luki with you and take care of her, always, she’d written. Promise me you will put her before everything else, and make her know how very much she is loved. A promise Elza ought not to have had to ask of him. If he were a better man, his love for Luki would have been something Elza could count on, and not the last thing she’d needed to ask of him in her life.
“Edouard?” Varian said.
Edouard stared at him blankly.
“I was suggesting we might send Luki out by train, given her American passport. We do worry that applying for a French exit visa under the name Moss might draw attention to you, but—”
“You’d have us go separately?” Remembering Berthe holding Luki up to that train window more than a year ago. “No. I’ll carry her over the border.”
Varian adjusted his glasses. “We dress those we send over the border as day laborers. A man doesn’t cart his young daughter on his back all day as he harvests grapes.”