“Look, let me lay this out for you as clearly as I can,” Varian said, getting testy. “When we started this, yes, it might have been possible to get you out on the train with your daughter. But border guards willing to look the other way can no longer be counted on or even hoped for. And the Gestapo in Spain are checking every request for a Spanish transit visa, and picking up refugees with no apparent resistance from Franco.”
Edouard went to the window, to the long empty stretch to the sea in the distance, no one coming. He knew he and Luki had to leave as soon as they could. Escapes were increasingly dangerous, and might soon end altogether. Captain Dubois of the Marseille police, a connection Vice Consul Bingham had made for Varian, had just days earlier let Varian know the Marseille police had now been charged with gathering evidence enough to eject Varian himself from France. Varian’s passport was good until January, but his French visa had expired, and he had no ability to get it renewed for want of a letter that the American embassy refused to give him. “How many times do we have to tell you there is nothing we can do for you?” the embassy insisted. “Even your wife wants you to go home.” And the CAS’s own Charlie Fawcett had just been arrested in Spain, and with a secret list of refugees who needed visas too. The list was hidden in the third valve of Charlie’s trumpet, on which he’d learned to play songs that didn’t need that valve. Other documents were sealed inside plaster heads that appeared to be works of art in progress. Neither the list nor the documents had been found on Charlie yet, as far as anyone knew. But everyone at the CAS office now meticulously destroyed anything incriminating once it was no longer needed, and Varian brought the remaining documents back to the chateau each night.
“Luki can cross the border on foot with me,” Edouard said to Varian.
“I’m not offering you this alternative, Edouard,” Varian said. “I’m telling you that if you wish to leave France, this is the way we will help you do so. We’ll provide you documents under an alias to get to Portugal—”
“Forged documents.”
“Yes. Ones that will not match your daughter’s name. The two of you traveling together in France—that’s not a risk we’re willing to take. There will be some risk with you traveling together through Spain too. Once you get to Portugal, you can use your real name and your American visa.”
Edouard fingered the window glass, the view as limited as that through the lens. Whatever he did put Luki and everyone else in danger. He was a watcher, and he was watched.
Thursday, November 28, 1940
CHTEAU DE CHENONCEAU
Nanée tried to appear as meek as a servant girl to the Germans. “To decorate the house,” she said again. Haus—that was the word in German, but would a servant girl know that? She pointed to the chateau, the servants’ entrance just across the forecourt, if only they could reach it. Luki, mercifully quiet, only stared at the soldier on the moat and his gun.
“Du arbeitest hier?” the German demanded.
“To decorate the chateau,” she repeated, not knowing what else to say.
A woman appeared at the servants’ door, calling, “You’d best hurry! The mistress is impatient!”
The Germans conversed with each other, but didn’t lower the gun.
Nanée said to Luki, “Come, sweetheart.” She nodded toward the woman standing there. She might just walk on if she were sure the child would follow, but she couldn’t risk leaving her standing there alone.
Luki looked to her, then walked on across the bridge.
What a brave girl you are.
Nanée hurried after her, wishing they could enter through the closer main door and hoping even a German wouldn’t shoot a child in the back.
Nanée tripped on the servants’-door threshold, sending the flowers flying as she sprawled onto the hard stone floor, but already the woman was kicking her feet out of the way and pulling the arched wooden door closed before the German soldiers fired that gun. She helped Nanée stand again, then scooped up the flowers and shepherded Nanée and Luki farther into a kitchen, which was warm and dry and smelled of yeasty bread.
Nanée was startled by a bell rung just above her. Six bells hung from the wall there, much like back in Evanston, each to summon staff to a different part of the house. The woman whispered for them to wait and disappeared, leaving them in a kitchen with arched stone ceilings, a huge fireplace with a smaller oven built into the wall beside it, and cabinets full of brass pots and pans and crockery, with more hanging on the walls, along with garlic and herbs. There was a water pump in one corner, a wide butchering table against a wall studded with all sizes of cleavers, and a side room filled with cabinets of china and food. In the center of it all stood a black iron oven four times the size even of the one at the house back in Evanston, where her parents threw parties for a hundred or more. Nanée wondered where the cooks and maids and other staff who must usually bring the place alive were now.
A clock ticked. A leaded window gave a view through a narrow stone arch to water. Was it the moat? The river itself? It was barely below them. Anyone who drew near in a boat could see right inside.
Luki looked up at her, still silent.
“Whisper,” Nanée whispered as quietly as possible.
Luki whispered, “Pemmy likes castles.”
The woman returned and hurried them up a staircase, past an extravagant gallery with a black-and-white marble floor and perhaps twenty huge arched windows all stretching across the river Cher. The dark doors at the far end were the doors to the free zone.
They continued on, though, up to a higher floor, where the woman tucked them into a hidden room not much bigger than a closet, with a single window crossed with iron.
“Talk in whispers,” the woman cautioned. “Stay away from the window. I’ve put your pretty bag in here so you can change your clothes. We’ll come get you when it’s safe to cross.”
Nanée nodded, already helping Luki out of the peasant clothes and into more appropriate attire for the niece of a wealthy American woman traveling to Marseille.
“You’ll walk fast as you can away from the river,” the woman said. “Don’t linger on the riverbank. If there are Germans, they’ll like as not shoot. A narrow footpath leads to the tomb of Madame Dupin, who they say enlisted Rousseau to help her write down the history of womankind, and perhaps she did and perhaps it’s here somewhere or perhaps some gentleman burned it up two hundred years ago, but her tomb—that’s what you’re looking for. Madame Dupin will be your guide to a path to the right that will take you to a farm. They won’t be surprised to see you. If it’s early in the day, they might be able to take you straight on to the train, but there’s no telling till it’s told.”