The Postmistress of Paris(67)

Nanée asked if the nun could point her to the school.

“The school?”

The nun took Nanée to the Mother Superior of her order, a bull of a woman dressed, like the younger nun, in heavy black robes with a simple black drape of fabric over her head, her face and shoulders encased so tightly in white that all you saw was her guarded face, surprising clear skin, and plain-brown-paper eyes. Her face in all that fabric was disconcerting. Face Floating in White and Black, Eduard might name the photograph he might take.

“I’m looking for a girl I believe to be at school here, a five-year-old,” Nanée said. “The child of a friend. They were . . . separated. Her family are frantic to find her.”

The Reverend Mother stood and calmly closed her door. “You are not the girl’s mother?” She blinked long lashes the same faded brown as her eyebrows and eyes. Could Nanée trust her? Was Luki here, and if so, did they know her as Luki?

“I come at the request of her father,” Nanée said.

“And he is where?”

Nanée simply met her gaze. She was in occupied France. She couldn’t assume anyone here was on her side, much less anyone in a position of authority in the Catholic Church.

“It is complicated to trust in this moment,” the nun said. “I find that if I put my trust in the Lord, he guides me. Perhaps we could start with this missing child’s name?”

Nanée wasn’t sure she believed in any lord, but then her childhood had been marked by no real trauma. It was hard now to see what she had been running from when she left Evanston.

She chose her words carefully so that anything she said could be explained as something less illegal than coming to smuggle a Jewish girl over a border even Nanée herself wasn’t permitted to cross.

“We call her Luki.” Not Luki Moss, but we call her Luki, leaving open the possibility of a nickname that had no bearing on an actual name.

“This girl would know you?” the nun asked.

“I have something her father thinks she’ll recognize, although what such a young child remembers and what she forgets after so long is hard to know.”

The nun again waited.

“A drawing of a stuffed animal the girl had when she left.”

“When she left? But you suggested they were separated.”

Nanée again simply met her gaze.

The nun said, “You will know the name?”

“I’m sorry,” Nanée said. “Did I not say? Luki.”

“The name of this stuffed friend?”

Nanée considered what harm might come from disclosing this fact. “Professor Ellie-Mouse,” she said.

“And the child’s father . . . ? You’ll tell me at least how you mean to get the child to him?”

Nanée waited.

The Reverend Mother fingered the heavy rosary that hung underneath the white cowl almost to her waist, then rang a bell on her desk, calling in another nun.

“Sister Amélie,” the Reverend Mother said, “I have word the chateau wishes to contribute some greenery for the altar this Sunday. I’d like you to collect it from the chateau’s farm, and tell the foreman I’ve set aside two places in the chapel, but I would appreciate knowing whether we should expect his friends tomorrow or later in the week.”

The Reverend Mother spoke as if this was nothing more than a chore she’d forgotten to discharge, but Nanée suspected it was something more, a coded message. And so many of the chateaux in the occupied zone had been confiscated by the Germans that she couldn’t help but feel alarmed. In Paris, they’d taken over all of the buildings at 82, 84, and 86 avenue Foch, nearly next door to her own apartment. She’d heard that 84 was being used for “interrogations,” that passersby could hear people screaming in French, and in English too.





Wednesday, November 27, 1940





VILLA AIR-BEL


Edouard, at the table in the Grand Salon, made his way through the negatives Nanée brought from Sanary-sur-Mer, looking for a self-portrait he’d taken a decade before, the night in November 1929 when Germany voted the Communists and the Nazis into power. The Berlin police had stood ready for mass riots that didn’t materialize, but there were rock throwings and arrests enough for Edouard to capture on film. And here it was—his own face leaning so closely into the lens that the shot was of nothing but one eye with the mole he hated, his nose, and part of his mouth and chin.

“Edouard?”

Edouard looked up from the negative to Varian joining him, Dagobert at his heels.

“The American consulate has granted you an interview,” Varian said. “And you’re in luck. The consul general has taken a few days’ leave. Vice Consul Bingham will see you Friday.”

As Edouard absorbed this news, Varian leaned down to pet Dagobert. If I don’t return, he’s yours, Nanée had told the man just before she left for Amboise, making light of it, but the words had echoed in Edouard’s mind half the night. Had she made it safely over the border into Occupied France? And how in the world would she get back out?

“We’ll have to send you through France and Spain under an alias,” Varian said. “Even if what Nanée says is true, that your camp release is legitimate, if it was issued under the false belief you were still in the camp, it’s . . . compromised at best. And it won’t protect you if your name is on a Gestapo list. Again, even without a young girl—”