“Wouldn’t you like to tell me your name?” she asked.
“I’m . . . I’m Paul,” the boy stammered.
“Paul,” she repeated. “You’re quite adorable, Paul. Has anyone ever told you that?”
The boy answered, “My mother.”
Nanée smiled gently as those watching the interchange worked hard not to laugh.
“Paul,” she said, “I don’t suppose you have any idea how long they mean to keep us here?”
Paul shook his head.
Nanée thanked him, and returned to join them.
“That went well,” Danny said. “You didn’t want to ask him to find out?”
“The sad sacks are the easiest to bamboozle, but you can’t do everything on the first hello,” she said. “I did learn from voices overhead, though, that Pétain is about to come by in a coast-guard cutter.”
André said cheerily, “Can’t have the old man faced with the prisoners taken on his behalf.”
WHEN THEY WERE let up to the deck again, Varian wrote a message for Vice Consul Bingham, wrapped it around a ten-franc coin, waited carefully until it seemed no one was looking, and tossed it onto the dock, toward some delivery boys. “Maybe one chance in ten that some boy doesn’t pocket the coin and toss the note,” he said.
“What an optimist you are,” André replied. “I wouldn’t take that bet at a hundred to one.”
But a few hours later, a package arrived, addressed to Varian—a good number of decent sandwiches, with Bingham’s calling card.
“What exactly did you tell him in that note, Varian?” André asked.
“I said, given a choice between freedom and a good roast beef and tomato on rye, I’d take the roast beef, of course. What did you think I would write?”
André said, “Next time, make clear you need a fifth of good whiskey with that, would you?”
Edouard laughed with them. Laughter was, like art, a way to survive.
Wednesday, December 4, 1940
VILLA AIR-BEL
Luki wanted to cry with Peterkin as the men put the rope around Madame LaVache’s big neck, but Aube wasn’t crying and Luki was bigger than her. For two nights now, Papa had been gone, and Aube and Peterkin’s papas too. Peterkin’s maman, who’d gone with Papa but then came back, was like Sister Therese. She poured Luki milk and tucked her in at night and sang to her, and when Luki woke to the bad men coming, she came into her room—with Dagobert too—and promised her the bad men weren’t real. But Peterkin’s maman wasn’t Papa. Luki wished Papa would come back. Papa had promised he wouldn’t go away again, and now he was gone.
She fingered the ribbon Aube’s mother had put in her hair, a green one she’d picked because it was almost the color of the ribbon at Pemmy’s neck and of Papa’s eyes. She wished Pemmy would grow tired of being a princess and ask the queen to send her to Luki. She wished she could ask the stone Lady Mary to bring Papa back, and Mutti too. She wished they could all sit together on the dreaming log and sing.
She blinked, trying to make the tears go away.
Cold fingers intertwined with hers, Aube’s maman’s hand. Madame Nouget took her other hand as Peterkin’s maman hugged him. Rose and Maria too watched the men make the cow walk up the plank onto their truck.
“Goodbye, Madame LaVache-à-Lait,” Luki whispered. “You’re a good cow.” She would have waved to her, but she didn’t want to let go of the hands holding hers.
Wednesday, December 4, 1940
ON THE SS SINA?A
On their third day, Nanée managed to persuade the poor pock-faced, gawky boy-guard to take a note to the captain. To their astonishment, she and Varian received in response an invitation to the captain’s cabin. He poured them beer, apologizing that he didn’t have anything better, nor any way to help them.
“The administration has requisitioned my boat,” he said. “The matter is not in my hands.”
Nanée, even after days on board with no real opportunity to clean up, didn’t fear this captivity, exactly. She didn’t imagine they would send an American woman to a camp. And no one relied on her except Dagobert, who would be well cared for by T and loved by Peterkin and Aube and Luki, although he must be as confused as when she’d left him in Brive with T just before France fell. How much more horrible it must be for Edouard, to have a five-year-old daughter missing him.
Really, she didn’t see why this captain couldn’t at least let them send word to the consulate, and she was just suggesting that when the cabin boy showed up at the door to announce a visitor, and Harry Bingham entered as if Nanée had miraculously summoned him.
“Varian,” the vice consul said, “how the devil did you get caught up in this mess?” He registered Nanée, and chuckled. “Nanée,” he said as they exchanged kisses despite her disreputable state. “The last time I saw you, you were off to Paris. I thought you meant to go home directly from there.”
“Pffft. And leave this extraordinary hospitality?”
“Hospitality,” the captain said, unlocking a cupboard and extracting a bottle of good whiskey and four crystal glasses. So much for having nothing but beer. “A votre santé,” he said.
Bingham had been trying to find someone with authority to release them since Gussie came to him with the news they’d been arrested. With so many arrests, it was impossible to determine where they’d been taken, though. And even after he got Varian’s note, his influence was limited, as the French were falling all over themselves to avoid blame for anything that might go wrong while Pétain was in town. The Vichy leader was leaving the next day, though, and Bingham hoped to have more luck come morning.
“Couldn’t you move my friends up to decent first-class cabins in the meantime?” he asked the captain.
Alas, there were not enough guards to accommodate that. But at least someone now knew they were here.
DETECTIVES ARMED WITH files took up residence in the first-class lounge the next morning, and soldiers on deck began calling names. One by one, the prisoners were being let go, with only a few sent into the lounge for some further indignity, all of them foreigners.
Danny said to Edouard, “Take my papers. Pretend you’re me. They don’t seem to be doing anything but checking names to a list.”
They were huddled, quietly discussing whether it would be safer for Edouard to take Danny’s French passport or use his own residency permit, which Nanée again assured them was authentic, when Danny’s name was called and a decision had to be made.
Danny went off to present himself. They watched as the boy-guard Nanée had befriended scanned his list, found Danny’s name, and checked it off. But rather than sending him down to shore, the guard sent him in the other direction, into the lounge.
Nanée was already trying to devise some intervention—surely she could sweet-talk this boy Paul—when he called out Edouard’s name.