The Tiger Claw

  Noor glanced up. Everyone seemed to be engrossed in his own work or play. Too quiet, perhaps, but quite as normal as she remembered.

  Zaib would interpret happy endings from her tea leaves; Zaib was so much better at adjusting to the world the way it was. How matter-of-fact Zaib had been the day she accompanied Noor to Madame Dunet’s home. Four years younger, the sixteen-year-old took charge. Somehow she had five thousand francs, all counted and ready in an envelope, for the midwife. More money than Noor had ever seen in her life. Zaib held Noor’s hand all the way across the Bois de Boulogne, held her close as Madame Dunet applied the suction, washed her clothes afterwards.

  Strange how my secret, shared at Madame Dunet’s, brought us closer.

  The warnings, the warnings. What could they mean?

  The red-fezzed garçon who took her order—was he a collabo? Or were the chess players? What if the place she felt safest was the one place she wasn’t?

  Stay alert, stay vigilant!

  Abandoning her attempt to decode the tea leaves, Noor paid the garçon, arranged her headscarf about her neck and made her way across the street, through the tall gates of the Jardin des Plantes, past a wooden signboard that announced No admittance to Jews.

  Inside the Jardin des Plantes, regiments of riotous flowers from all corners of France and many other countries stood upright in their oblong beds, neatly classified and separated beneath the sculptured trees. The Germans had yet to invent a method of transporting these fragile beauties to Germany.

  In the distance, starched white plumage—a nun shepherding a line of girls in neatly pressed, pleated skirts. Noor slowed for a long-eared white rabbit mincing across her path, its leash, then a very old gentleman in a top hat, his face like Monsieur Durand’s abject one. Then past a couple who, oblivious to a barbed wire blockade beside their bench, were entwined in a passionate kiss.

  A pair of cocky young men with slicked-back long hair, long coats and drainpipe trousers passed carrying a bundle: a cat wrapped in a small straitjacket. The poor animal would soon be passing for rabbit in black market bistro tureens. “Lapin rôti au four … au poivre … au fenouil.”

  Professor Balachowsky was bowed over a bed of pensées. Noor murmured the all-clear password as she walked past. The Professor straightened, put his pipe in his mouth. In a few minutes he joined her in the privacy of the gazebo.

  The exchange was to be quick. The map, marked with an X to show the burial spot for the arms canisters dropped two days earlier at Rosny, passed from Noor’s hand to his. She whispered the code words that would authorize release of the smuggled canisters for transfer onwards from Grignon.

  Quickly, Noor pulled the letter she had written to Zaib from her jacket pocket. “I would be obliged, Professor,” she whispered, “if you would give this letter to Gilbert before the next landing.”

  But the Professor was pale behind his unlit pipe. Sweat beaded above his worry lines.

  “What is it, Professor?” said Noor. “Are you not feeling well?”

  He jerked his head. “Max was captured by the Gestapo in Caluire, near Lyons. Go to Phono immediately and tell him. Say it is very possible the great Max is no more.” He turned away, slump-shouldered.

  Max. Jean Moulin.

  “Wh-when was Max captured?”

  “Three days ago—June 21. Hélas! He was tortured horribly. Horribly. But I know he did not speak—why would he speak now? The first time the Boche tortured him, three years ago, you know he slit his own throat with a splinter of glass rather than sign his name to lies. But it is too much to expect that he will resist and survive a second time. Or escape again.”

  Noor laid her hand on the Professor’s arm; a bone-deep tremor went through it. She helped him to a bench in the corner of the gazebo.

  Professor Balachowsky seemed to struggle to master himself. “Je suis fou! We all know this happens but never think it will happen to someone like Max. I only met him once, but …”

  He sat up straight. “When the Germans came, I thought, ‘I’m just an old professor teaching about insects—what can I do?’ Then I heard of Max and I thought, ‘My grandparents came from Poland and bought a vineyard, but I’m as French as Monsieur Hoogstraten.’ Monsieur Hoogstraten’s grandparents were Dutch, you see. So as soon as he returned to Grignon from the POW camp, I asked, ‘Director, what shall I do?’ Little did I know Director Hoogstraten had been in the Resistance for more than a year, since the Battle of France … But it was all because I heard the story of Max.”

  “But you’re not sure Max is dead.”

  “I hope so, for his sake,” said the Professor, looking away. “The Gestapo chief in Lyons put him on display for fellow prisoners—all with the Resistance, so they smuggled out messages as soon as they could. They said he was in a coma. Swollen lips, head in bandages. Knuckles broken, face beaten to an unrecognizable pulp, eyes dug in as though they’d been punched through his head—Oh, please excuse me, mademoiselle! Enfin, it was the last time our Max was seen alive.”

  A cold sickness crawled over Noor.

  “The Germans must be delighted,” Professor Balachowsky said after a silence. “Without Max, the Free French groups will return to sporadic sabotage. Well-meaning, but scattered and uncoordinated.”

  “But it is all fighting the Germans—isn’t that important?” Noor hoped to lead him back to hope.

  The Professor gave a ruptured sigh. “Anne-Marie, it is only in the past few months we began to benefit from working together. If we derailed a train, the network with a well-placed worker made sure phone lines were cut so there was more time to get away. If we planned to blow up a building, another network might verify it would be full of Germans. It’s taken three years to create what we have today—codes, supply lines, maps of secret passages, courier lines, workshops, escape routes and safe houses.”

  He glanced right and left, then spoke even lower. “In the beginning we were just schoolboys playing with matches. Printing newspapers, pouring water into German petrol tanks, making grand symbolic gestures, risking our freedom and our lives just to paint V-for-Victory signs on street corners—pinpricks to the Germans! It’s only now that no German feels safe anywhere in France. Every time they climb aboard a train, mount a truck or a bus, they fear the Resistance will call down English bombs upon them—or set their own charges.”

  “By Resistance, do you mean networks like ours, or the Free French?”

  “Both. I was at a meeting where we all agreed to co-operate—the only time I saw Max, standing there with his white scarf covering the scar. Heard that strange voice.”

  Miss Atkins had said the SOE only co-operated with the Free French “when we have to.”

  “Why would The Firm co-operate with the Free French?” asked Noor.

  “Vous savez, the Free French have gathered information for General de Gaulle that The Firm could only dream of gathering for Churchill. Free French networks extend everywhere in France, and know the right questions to ask and whom to ask in every village, and because they ask it on behalf of a Frenchman, General de Gaulle, people are glad to help. But when people know their answers will be sent to Churchill and the English, they think twice.” The Professor sounded almost envious of the rival intelligence group.

  A sooty pigeon fluttered into the gazebo and pecked about, searching for crumbs.

  Noor reached into her pocket for the tobacco coupons Gabrielle had given her, and held them out to the Professor.

  Professor Balachowsky’s gloom lightened for a moment. Without a word he pulled his pipe out of his mouth and pointed to a tiny hole at its tip.

  A miniature poison dart gun.

  She nodded, still holding out the coupons.

  He took them with a grave “Merci,” then straightened, wiped his brow with a large white handkerchief, then his moustache and grey goatee. “First Vidal, now Max. But we carry on. There is nothing else to be done. We’ll come through this, Anne-Marie.”

  He stuck his thumbs in his vest pocket
s and took a deep breath. “Archambault said your transmitters and suitcase arrived. It was so amusing …”

  In a teasing whisper he recounted that one parachute got caught in a tree, breaking open Noor’s valise and festooning the drop zone with her white lingerie. Archambault and the others had to hunt all over for the clothing. The valise was now strapped shut and taken to Grignon.

  Noor might have been embarrassed except that the jovial tale of her unmentionables was so obviously told to mask Professor Balachowsky’s greater woes.

  “I’m most thankful that the delay didn’t give the Germans time to reach the drop zone,” she said. She and Émile would make separate trips to Grignon to move the transmitters and her personal belongings. Noor would conceal one transmitter at Madame Gagné’s boarding house at Drancy, the other in Renée’s cellar. The last would be transferred from Grignon to the boarding house behind Chez Tutulle.

  The Professor seemed recovered now. Noor kissed him on both cheeks as they parted.

  “Haiya-‘alas-salah! Haiya-’alas-salah!”

  The azaan was ululating from La Mosquée’s minaret as Noor left the Jardin des Plantes. As she hurried down the rue Monge, the full import of Professor Balachowsky’s news rippled up inside her. A tidal wave chased her down the métro stairs and crashed against her solar plexus.

  Allah! If the great Max, the one man who knew every leader of every Resistance network in the country, has been arrested and tortured by the Gestapo, how long can our network last?

  CHAPTER 19

  Paris, France

  Saturday, June 26, 1943

  AT A LITTLE PAST 18:00 HOURS, Émile returned from the couturier with Monique’s white gown of Indian parachute silk looped over his arm. Monique draped it across the card table in the drawing room so Renée, Noor and Babette could admire its delicate lace.

  Suddenly, four pairs of knocks sounded on the front door of the little house on the rue Erlanger. Then again. And again.

  “It’s the right signal,” said Émile.

  Hard and loud enough to be the Gestapo.

  Monique said, “Chéri, were you expecting anyone tonight?”

  Émile shook his head. Forefinger to his lips, he pointed towards the kitchen.

  In a trice Monique had bundled up the wedding gown and was following Renée and Babette through the kitchen, down into the cellar. Noor seized the knob of a cupboard door in the foyer and joined the brooms and buckets inside. The door wouldn’t quite close behind her; she could see through the slit.

  Émile took his time putting on his jacket, deliberately straightened his tie and reached for the latch.

  It was Odile Hoogstraten, a breathless Odile, who flung herself in, leaving her bicycle sprawled on its side on the stone path behind her, wheels still churning.

  “Message for you.” Her whisper verged on tears.

  Noor left the cupboard and joined Émile and Odile.

  “Papa sent me to tell you: Prosper and Archambault have been arrested by the Gestapo.”

  The cupboard burst open behind Noor. An avalanche of brooms plunged into the foyer.

  “Prosper captured? Archambault arrested?” repeated Émile when all the crashing and drumming on the wood floor stopped.

  “When? How?” Renée had come out of the cellar and was standing in the passage, Monique and Babette behind her.

  Noor began picking up fallen brooms and mops and putting them back in the cupboard.

  This was not supposed to happen. Arrests happened to others, theoretical agents who didn’t study the SOE handbook carefully, or agents with code names like Vidal and Max. Not to people she knew, people in her cell. Not to jug-eared Prosper, who moved in time with the jazz and called her “old girl,” or Archambault, who sang in the choir at his lycée, smelled of Old Spice and was to leave for London as soon as Noor’s transmitters were operating.

  Odile took a deep, gulping breath. “Prosper—yesterday morning—they were waiting for him when he returned to Paris from Trie-Château. Plain-clothed, in black Citroëns—definitely Gestapo. Archambault after him, at midnight—but Papa didn’t learn of it till today.”

  Odile’s shoulders began to shake. Renée guided her into the drawing room, where the girl dropped into a chair. Though Noor had met Prosper only twice, she shared Odile’s instinctive esteem for him—a man of integrity, responsible for a very large family.

  Odile caught her breath and went on in a more coherent flow. “It started on Monday morning. Gilbert didn’t come to meet Prosper at the Gare d’Austerlitz with the two Canadians. So Prosper thought they must all have been arrested. He came to talk to Papa—he was so agitated … Papa agreed he should get out of Paris, till he could find out what happened. Prosper went to Trie-Château. But when he came back …” Odile’s face sank into her hands.

  A suspicion crept into the back of Noor’s mind—something Odile had said. “Why didn’t Gilbert meet Prosper at the station as planned?”

  Odile looked up. “He said the Canadians arrived late and he was delayed. There’s more. An agent who landed at Rosny the next night was also arrested, but I don’t know where or his name. Another agent left a message at Flavien’s saying all of them are now at the avenue Foch.”

  “They won’t talk, you know they won’t. However they are tortured.” Émile smoothed his hair but only succeeded in tousling it further. He turned to Noor. “We must send a message to London at once. The entire network is compromised. London must inform the other cells, other networks …”

  Noor nodded. Since her rendezvous with Professor Balachowsky at the Jardin des Plantes two days before, she had concealed one transmitter under her bed at Madame Gagné’s boarding house at Drancy and one in Renée’s cellar, but the third, destined for transfer to the boarding house behind Chez Tutulle, still waited at Grignon.

  “They will hold out twenty-four hours. But wait—when were they arrested? Mon Dieu! We have only a few hours left and they can speak,” said Émile.

  Noor had her own questions for Odile. “Where did the Gestapo catch Prosper?” she asked. “In Trie-Château, on the train, at the station in Paris or at his apartment?”

  Odile took a glass of water from Monique and gulped it down. “At his apartment.”

  “Where?”

  “Gilbert said it was at the Hôtel Mazagran in St-Denis.”

  Gilbert. Archambault was right.

  At the Jazz Club last Sunday night, Prosper said only Archambault, Gilbert and herself knew his new address. Archambault had been captured after Prosper. That left Gilbert and herself as informers. And since she had not committed such a crime herself, that left Gilbert.

  Tuck away the information. Tell Émile later.

  Aloud, she said, “How did the Gestapo know he would be there?”

  “I—I don’t know,” said Odile. “They were waiting for him when he returned, that’s all we know.”

  “From Gilbert.”

  “Yes, from Gilbert.”

  “We must send a message to London,” Émile repeated with an edge in his voice.

  “You can’t transmit from here,” said Renée. “The Gestapo might already be watching us.”

  Noor could receive without detection, but German vans were on the prowl night and day in hope of intercepting radio traffic to England.

  Renée left the drawing room. “Come here, Émile!” came her voice.

  She was lifting a corner of the lace curtain above the kitchen sink and pointing. Émile joined her at the window. Renée pointed into the darkening courtyard behind the house. Émile put his arm around her shoulders and their voices sank to a murmur.

  Monique placed a bowl of soup and a piece of chocolate on the dining table before Odile.

  Babette looked back and forth from one adult to another, then curled up on the chaise longue, lips puckered to match her china-faced doll. She stroked its rose-patterned silk dress and wound a lace scarf about its neck.

  Renée returned to pace the drawing room, Émile behind her.

/>   “I don’t think anyone was watching us—you were mistaken, Renée. It’s nothing, just a shadow.”

  “If you are not careful, you too will be captured,” Renée said to Émile. “You just go anywhere this fiancée of yours leads you.”

  To Noor, Émile’s fiancée seemed to follow more than she led.

  “Our wedding was only three days away.” Monique’s voice held tears. She caressed the white silk gown, draped again over the card table.

  “Oh, we will have our wedding,” said Émile. “The Gestapo isn’t going to stop us from getting married!”

  “You’ve risked so much for her wedding dress, you may as well marry,” said Renée, sitting down at the card table. “But I think she must move.” She pointed at Noor. “Your involvement is dangerous enough. Having this woman from England here with us now—Écoutez! We may as well ask the Germans to come and arrest us.”

  Renée might be right, but Noor couldn’t go to Madame Gagné’s and hope to arrive before curfew.

  “Pas de problème! I will arrange for you to go to Madame Aigrain,” said Émile. “Her apartment is just a few minutes from here.”

  “I will go with Anne-Marie to Madame Aigrain.” Babette was looking up from her doll.

  “Shhhht! Tais-toi!”

  Monique prepared a packet with a cheese sandwich and a bottle of cider for Noor, and Noor packed her transmitter and a few clothes into her valise. It took no more than a few minutes and Émile was back to take it from her hand. Swiftly, he gave Noor directions to Madame Aigrain’s.

  He thumbed each side of his moustache. “The Germans are frightened of cemeteries, especially at night. Our information is that they find excuses not to patrol there. The Claude Lorrain cemetery here in Auteuil is too close. Meet me at the Cimetière de Montmartre at 21:00 hours. The sepulchre of the Famille Ginot on the avenue des Polonais will be left open. Remember, Famille Ginot.” Then he left.

  Fifteen minutes later, Noor stood at the door with her transmitter suitcase in hand. She looped her lemon scarf about her neck and put on her oilskin. She took leave of Monique with kisses on both cheeks.