The Postmistress of Paris(26)

“Edouard Moss would vouch for me,” the refugee suggested.

Edouard Moss. The photographer who’d held his daughter in his lap that entire night at her Paris apartment, even as he drew the head in flight goggles and a gilded birdcage that both was and wasn’t her. She kept that sketch even still, tucked behind the art photo on her dresser at the hotel, of the woman swimming—the photograph she bought when the Edouard Moss photograph she’d so loved, the push-up man, wasn’t for sale.

Dagobert hopped up from under her chair to greet Gussie, who said Varian wanted a moment when she was free.

“I’ll be there in just a minute,” she said, offering Gussie her best smile. The boy had such a crush on her that Varian mercilessly teased him, leaving her sure it would kill the poor kid’s spirit and with it any chance he might have for love. But Varian insisted nobody had any real chance for love, so they might as well have some fun.

Nanée asked the refugee, “Is he in the States? Edouard Moss?”

“He was at Camp des Milles with me before the armistice.”

“He took the train with you?”

“The ghost train? I don’t know. He wasn’t in my boxcar.”

Edouard Moss could be anywhere, then, or nowhere at all.

“Anyone else who could vouch for you?”

“Maybe Danny Bénédite? He got me my residency permit.”

“Great,” she said. “We know Danny.” She’d just gotten word that T had found him, thank heaven. He’d been evacuated from Dunkirk, but returned to France to carry on the fight with six hundred men from his division. He was in a railroad station in Poitiers when Pétain asked for peace, so he laid low in Meyrueis, avoiding the German roundup of French soldiers until word of T’s whereabouts reached him through someone who knew someone who knew someone else, the way anyone knew anything in Vichy France. They were now quietly settling with Peterkin on an uncle’s Languedoc farm.

Nanée finished with the interviewee and put everything properly in the file before making her way, Dagobert beside her, to Varian’s office—a smaller room crowded with everything that had been cleared of the front room: empty shelves, packing cases, and stray inventory, briefcases and handbags and wallets. Varian, at an oversize desk spread with papers, nodded to Lena, who closed her steno pad without being asked and left, closing the door.

Nanée supposed she was in for it. But she wasn’t the source of the rumors. She’d heard Varian was going to Portugal from the irreproachable Lena, who wanted to enlist her in convincing him to bring back soap; even honest Miriam had taken to visiting the American consulate for the sole purpose of nabbing bars from their ladies’ room, there being no decent soap to be bought in all of France.

She stood waiting, Dagobert mercifully quiet beside her.

“I’ll be away from the office for a few days,” Varian said.

It was true, then, unlike most rumors circulating through Marseille: the Emergency Rescue Committee back in the States was insisting that Varian’s time here was up and he needed to go home. He couldn’t leave, but nor could he detail in a letter his reasons for staying, as the Vichy government read all their mail. So he was going to Portugal to argue his case. She wondered if the rest of the rumor was true too, that on the way he would personally escort four of his “protégés,” as he liked to call the refugees he helped, over the border, and check on five who’d been picked up by the Gestapo in Spain. He would be risking imprisonment, a labor camp, a firing squad.

“I’m leaving Maurice in charge,” he said. “Can I count on you to help him keep things moving along here?”

“Of course, Varian,” she answered evenly. “Anything you need.” Thinking he wasn’t so very different from the new “work, family, homeland” French government, leaving one of the men in charge. But no, that wasn’t fair. Varian was a prince compared to the disgusting den of defeatists that was Vichy. He was married to a woman who’d been an editor at the Atlantic Monthly. He gave both Lena and Miriam plenty of responsibility. It was only her he didn’t trust with the details of what he meant to do—never mind that she’d already committed five thousand dollars to be swapped for refugee francs to fund this effort, never mind that she showed up each morning as early as anyone, and sat in the office all day doing interviews, and never once suggested that her freedom to move about on account of her American passport was being underutilized, even though it was.

“All right, then,” he said. “Thank you.”

“But it will be Friday the thirteenth,” she said. If Varian left tomorrow, he and his protégés would arrive in Cerbère that evening and try to cross the border the next day, Friday.

“Gussie is coming with me as far as the border,” he said. “No doubt he’ll carry his copy of L’envers et l’endroit to keep us all on the right side of luck.”

Nobody ever did stop Gussie, but Nanée chalked that up to his jacket and tie, his strawberry-blond hair, and his sweet young face rather than that lucky book of Camus essays.

“Why you, Varian?” Nanée asked on impulse.

Varian set down his pen and studied her. “You mean because I’m nothing more than an American journal editor, with no apparent qualifications for spiriting people wanted by the Nazis out of France? But I do speak French and German, and my very lack of skills leaves me unlikely to be the subject of a Gestapo file. And you, Nanée?”