The Postmistress of Paris(103)

“We’re looking for Jean and Lise,” she said, the code names they’d been told to ask for, and she handed him the scrap of torn paper Varian had given them.

The Fittkos were meant to produce the other half of the paper, but the man only handed the scrap back to Nanée. Perhaps they had the wrong man? He fit the description Varian had given them, but so many men would have, just as Edouard conveniently fit the description of the dead Henri Roux. Medium everything. Medium age, thirty years old, give or take. Hair enough for his age, but no more, in a typical brown. A sharp wedge of nose under a sturdy brow. If there was anything unusual about Hans Fittko, Varian had said, it was his ears. But then it was better to be nondescript in France these days.

This had to be the right house, though, three stories on the sea, right across from the public toilets. And the man didn’t seem surprised by their presence or the paper scrap. He seemed simply exhausted.

“My wife is in hospital,” he said.

“I’m so sorry,” Nanée said. “What’s happened?”

“She’s jaundiced,” the man said. “Her fever kept climbing,”

Edouard looked uneasily to Nanée. They ought not to say a thing until they saw the matching scrap of paper. But Nanée was saying nothing about them. She was simply showing the kind of sympathy anyone would.

“The doctor wouldn’t come because the boy told him we were German,” the man continued. “Thank the lord for Hermant.”

“I’m so sorry,” Nanée said again, relaxing a little at the sound of Hermant’s name, as Edouard himself was. Hermant—Beamish—was one of them, long trusted by Varian with couriering refugees.

“I’m sorry,” Hans said. “Forgive me. Do come inside.”

Still, Nanée hesitated.

“Again, my apologies,” Hans said. “I forget myself. Wait a moment.”

He disappeared into the house, coughing again. A quick moment later he emerged with the companion paper scrap, and he again invited them in.

“But I cannot take you over the border,” he said. “Even under the best of circumstances, I couldn’t make the trek alone with you.”

Nanée handed Pemmy to Luki. Edouard grabbed his suitcase, glad to get Luki out of the wind and cold. Nanée reluctantly allowed the exhausted Hans Fittko to carry her case. She took Gussie’s book, carrying it in her left hand.

THE HOUSE INSIDE was room after room of fine wood paneling and beautiful fireplaces and views right on the sea, with not a single bathroom. “I’m afraid we don’t even have running water,” Hans Fittko apologized, “but there are the public toilets across the street.”

The place didn’t belong to the Fittkos, but to a doctor no one had seen or heard from since he went off to war. The mayor himself—Azéma, the old mayor—had suggested the Fittkos take it over. It had plenty of rooms in which to house refugees until they could get across the border. He’d given the Fittkos handwritten statements on his letterhead, certifying that they were residents of Banyuls, too, and entered them in the town register so that they didn’t have to use the fake identity cards Varian had gotten them in Marseille. He’d even issued them ration cards and given them extra food stamps for the refugees. Those days had ended, though, with the new, Vichy-installed mayor.

“Please,” Hans Fittko said, “just choose whatever rooms you like. I’ll get you something to eat, although I’m afraid our larder is less full now than it once was.”

Edouard suggested Luki and Pemmy might explore the house and choose a room, but Luki hesitated.

“You can choose a room where you can hear the sea,” he said.

“Like from the dreaming log.”

“But don’t go outside without me. Choose a room for you and one right next door to it for me. That way, you won’t have to hear me snore.”

Luki grinned, that tooth she’d lost while he was on the boat a reminder of so much he’d missed, and she said she didn’t mind his snoring, but it woke Pemmy and Joey. “We can leave our doors open? And you’ll be right here all the time, so I can come find you?”

“I will be right here,” he assured her.

“Can I choose a room for Tante Nanée too?”

“Perhaps I could have the room on the other side of yours, just like at Villa Air-Bel?” Nanée replied.

After Luki set off to explore, Edouard and Nanée shed their coats and hats. Hans poured them glasses of wine, along with one for himself, and offered them a bit of stale bread.

“There are linens and blankets in the cupboards in most of the rooms,” he said. “I would help you, but . . .”

“You must be exhausted,” Nanée said.

“You cannot stay here long,” Hans said. “It isn’t good for the child. My Lisa, she washed her hair in the cold, and now . . . She needed to be taken to the hospital in Perpignan at once, but if I took her myself, without travel papers, they would have arrested me. Hermant arrived just then, as if he knew we needed him. He took her to the hospital, and returned to tell me she was there, but that it would be three days before the doctor came.”

Edouard listened to Nanée assure him that it wasn’t his fault or his wife’s, that jaundice came from poor nourishment, and she was sure they were too generous in giving their food to refugees.