The man handed over a crumpled carbon copy of a general order to search any premises suspected of Communist activity. Not even André, a committed Marxist, had belonged to the French Communist Party since Stalin’s Moscow show trials five years before.
“We protest and reserve all rights,” Varian said, which sounded like a line he’d rehearsed at the urging of some lawyer somewhere just in case this very circumstance arose.
“You may take that up with the judge,” the commissaire replied.
Nanée suspected any judge they might see would be days or weeks away.
The commissaire said, “We know there has been a suitcase brought from the train station. We will search this place from top to bottom until it is turned up.”
“But that’s my sister’s suitcase,” Jacqueline objected. She explained to her friends, “She’s just come down from Paris. She left her bigger bag here while she looks for a place to live.”
“And what is in the suitcase?” the commissaire said surprisingly politely. Beauty had its privileges.
“Her clothes, for heaven’s sake,” Jacqueline said. “Her toiletries and jewelry and perfume.”
Nanée felt a little relieved; if this was just about a suitcase, it would soon be over.
A plainclothes officer ushered Jacqueline upstairs to get the suitcase, the appreciative gaze of the other officers following her. The police herded the rest of them into the dining room, where a clerk had already set up a typewriter on the dining room table. He set out printed forms beside it and asked T to take a seat.
“Me?” T replied.
“Your papers,” he said.
She handed them over to him. She did not sit.
He began putting questions to her as she stood beside him, straight and proud. He typed her answers into the form.
The officer and Jacqueline returned with the suitcase, which was opened to reveal women’s clothes.
“What did you expect to find?” Jacqueline demanded.
The officer, startled, said, “A bomb.”
“A bomb? Don’t be ridiculous.”
“It is not ridiculous,” the man objected. “It was right here, at the end of Dr. Thumin’s property—right where the Maréchal’s train will pass—that an anarchist tried to murder the Prince of Wales by—”
“I promise you, we have no bombs here,” Nanée said, wondering why in heaven’s name all of France was so obsessed with a single bombing nearly a decade ago.
“We will see for ourselves,” the officer said.
“Again, we protest and reserve all rights,” Varian said.
The officer took André up to search his room.
Madame Nouget and Rose were allowed to return to the kitchen, but directed to collect Maria and the children and send them in.
“The children! For pity’s sake,” Nanée said. But it was Maria they were interested in. Maria was a foreigner.
“I’m sure Madame Nouget would stay with the children,” T suggested. “Surely there is no need to subject them to this.”
Her suggestion was ignored.
One of the police went with the staff to search the kitchen. You could hear him rattling through the cupboards as André returned, the search of his room having produced his service revolver, which seemed to bring the fat commissaire satisfaction. Nanée was pretty sure it was legal for André to have it; he’d been in the French army.
Varian talked his way upstairs on the excuse of using the toilet. Nanée supposed this was a ploy to destroy something else; the nearest bathroom was off the kitchen. She had no idea what Varian might need to get rid of, only that it would be too easy for the only remaining incriminating material in the whole house to be the manuscript in his briefcase, which was already downstairs.
Maria came in with Peterkin and Luki, who clung to their parents, and Dagobert.
Nanée said, “Perhaps you could search my room next?” She meant to buy Varian time and to be up on that floor to help him if she could. “I’m sure you’d like to get through this as quickly as we would, and there are quite a few rooms upstairs.” She’d be back in the dining room before the typist finished with T and André and Jacqueline and moved on to Edouard and Gussie—not that there was anything for her to do to help them except to hold her breath with everyone else.
She climbed the stairs to her room with a policeman, Dagobert at her side. As the man pawed through her drawers, she listened to Varian in the hallway chatting up the man accompanying him, commiserating with him as the fellow confessed that, yes, the commissaire was always this unpleasant. The bathroom door clicked closed. A moment later, the toilet flushed.
Varian emerged again, saying he needed to get a handkerchief. Nanée was just about to whisper “Hitler, Hitler” to Dagobert, to set him barking and distract everyone from whatever Varian meant to do, when she heard the fellow assure Varian there was no hurry. A single set of steps entered Varian’s room.
While her police escort examined the books stacked around her room, she again looked out to the paddy wagon parked beyond the gate. “We must be awfully important to merit our own van,” she said, making noise to cover whatever Varian was doing and distract the man from his own search, but also hoping the fellow would assure her the paddy wagon wasn’t for them. No assurance came.
He approached the washstand, where she’d hidden the Webley. She had never used the chamber pot there, but she feigned mortification, saying, “I’m sorry. I’m not sure my chamber pot from last night has been emptied.”
She was back in the dining room before the typist asked for Edouard’s papers and confirmed the information on his French residency permit. Luki sat in his lap now, snuggled into his chest as if to put as much distance between that typewriter and her as she could.
“Your home is in Sanary-sur-Mer?” the clerk asked Edouard.
“Yes,” Edouard answered without offering anything about the fact that he hadn’t been there in a year thanks to a stay at Camp des Milles, compliments of the French.
“Sanary-sur-Mer,” the clerk repeated.
“Yes,” Edouard answered again.
“My brother-in-law is on the force there. Perhaps you know him?”
“I mean no offense,” Edouard said cautiously as Nanée too tried to gauge whether this might be some kind of trap, “but I hope you’ll understand that I try not to make a habit of becoming acquainted with police.”
The clerk laughed easily, then offered a name.
“Ah,” Edouard said. “A fine man, I’m sure.” Hedging his response so that if there were no such man, he would not have claimed to know him.
Just then, the policeman searching the kitchen emerged waving a piece of paper. “Hidden between two of the plates!” he exclaimed.
Dagobert, startled, barked and barked at him.
It was a drawing from the prior day’s salon games, an Exquisite Corpse rendering that had particularly amused André. He’d labeled it “Le Crétin Pétain,” the Moron Pétain. It must have been underneath one of the plates Rose put away that morning.
“This,” the commissaire said, “is treason.”
“Le Crétin Putain?” André replied nonchalantly, suggesting the French leader’s name clearly written in André’s careful green ink was instead the French word for “whore.” The Moron Whore. It had never before struck Nanée how close the spellings were.
Monday, December 2, 1940