The Postmistress of Paris(54)

As André hit the lights, Edouard noted Nanée standing beside the huge fireplace with its fat brass andirons, the foggy gilt mirror over the mantel, the untimely clock. They milled around in the darkness for a few minutes, until he reached her and tapped her on the neck, on the scarf at the dip in her collarbone where the nib of the pen his assassin wielded would go.

He backed quickly away from her as she fell, melodramatically screaming, to the floor.

Someone reached the light switch and turned it on. They all froze, everyone already laughing as André strode across the black-and-white marble to Nanée, pretending to be handing her a telephone receiver, saying, “Nanée, Hollywood for you.”

He observed the room from his position standing over her.

Damn, Edouard thought. No one ever escaped André’s inquisitions, in games or otherwise.

André offered a hand to Nanée, but she shook her head. “I’m too dead to get up.” She coughed and gurgled, and was again dead.

Edouard considered André considering the room: Danny by the light switch. T a few feet away, with Maurice. Varian sitting casually on the couch, looking guilty, perhaps enjoying it for a change since in life he always had to play innocent. Jacqueline, too, looked guilty, but then beautiful women were always portrayed as angels or devils, with no room in between. And Gussie was, as he was so often, not far from Jacqueline.

“Edouard,” André said, “you look even guiltier than normal. You’re the assassin.”

Edouard said, “You’d think you studied with Freud himself.”

“You’ll soon learn to be watching the others rather than the sleuth. It gives away your guilt.”

The interrogation began.

“There was bloodshed?” André said.

“True,” Edouard answered.

“Surely you see it there on the tiles, dear,” Jacqueline said. “Perhaps we ought to mop it up before it stains the marble?”

“A knife?” André said.

“False.”

“That level of cliché is mine alone,” Varian said.

“I’d guess he bashed her head in with one of his cameras,” André said, “but that would require he pick one up.”

Edouard set a hand on the mantel, cool and steadying, as he watched the muddy, pitted reflection of André’s face in the mirror.

“André,” Jacqueline scolded, “Edouard hasn’t even had time to gain his strength back, and he doesn’t have a camera here.”

Edouard looked to the bad landscapes covering the walls of the room, remembering the plays and sketches the internees had written and performed at Camp des Milles, the art made on the brick walls, the music they composed to play on whatever instruments they had. An artist was driven to create art even in the worst of times. Perhaps especially then.

He considered Nanée, still lying on the black-and-white floor where she’d fallen, a sickness in his gut as if he might really be seeing a dead body lying there, the pen with the bite marks at the end of the barrel not lodged in the long stretch of her neck because of course a good assassin would not leave it there as evidence, he would carefully wipe it clean and put it back in the desk. She was unscarred, though, except in his mind. It was Elza who was dead. Elza found on a street in Berlin, beaten to death by Nazi thugs. Her sister beside her, beaten to death too. Why had he let Elza return to Germany for her sister? They’d been in Vienna, in a country that was safe, although Hitler had been eyeing Austria too by then.

But of course he hadn’t let Elza do anything. Elza wasn’t a woman anyone controlled. She had promised to let him arrange to get her sister out of Germany, but she grew impatient. One afternoon, Edouard left to photograph a woman he saw leaving the Opera matinee in a red cape, and returned to find Luki having her dinner with the hired girl and Elza off to Germany. A woman will be less likely to be questioned and suspected, she’d written in a note for him. The Nazis know who you are too. And I have no way to make a living here; if anything happens to you, your daughter and I will be left destitute, and this new child too.

This new child.

Elza found her sister, only to have the Gestapo murder them both before they could get out of Germany. Edouard, still reeling, sent a telegram to André that same day, saying he would come to France immediately, with Luki and as much of his art as he could carry. If the Nazis would kill his wife and her sister because of the photographs he’d taken, they would kill Luki. It was their most hideous torture, to murder those you loved while leaving you to live.

Death was not a thing to be played at. Death was not an evening’s amusement.

But there was Danny, laughter lingering still at the corners of his eyes. Danny, who’d watched so many die. Soldiers. Friends.

“You think this is cruel, Edouard,” André said. “This pretending to violence. But it is in play that we access our own reprehensible depths, and unburden ourselves.”

“André!” Jacqueline said.

Nanée too was rising, but André put a foot on her, to stop her.

“No, no, André is right,” Edouard said. The cruelty was in his own imaginings, the violence inside himself, and it was a beautiful thing to hear Danny laughing. Danny, who needed to laugh as much as Edouard did. Even at Camp des Milles, there had been laughter. In laughter, you survived.