Josianne tucked her hair behind her ears, as if demonstrating how Noor should listen. “Anyone can be arrested for any reason, and without reason. Even Henri Sellier. He’s still at Compiègne.”
Something shrank within Noor. The mayor of Suresnes—popular, progressive, even powerful. The similarity to Armand brought no comfort. Unless—
“When was he arrested?” she asked.
“Oh, about this time last year—no, the year before. Yes, the summer of ‘41.”
“And he is at Compiègne? Still there? Not sent to Germany?”
“Oui, oui. You remember his wife? He sends her a label every month, and she sends him a parcel.”
Someone Jewish was still in a camp, still able to send word to his wife.
Noor felt light enough to dare anything. She placed her suitcase on Josianne’s bed and thumbed it open.
“This is what women are wearing in London? It looks just like our lingerie,” said Josianne, holding up a frothy satin slip.
“It’s French. A soldier ordered me to open my suitcase on the métro this morning. I told him it was a cinematograph—he believed me! Mon Dieu, when I thought what could have happened, I was so nervous! I stopped at Galeries Lafayette to buy this as camouflage—my own went to England by mistake a few days ago. Josianne, may I borrow some clothes?”
“Toujours, mon amie.” Josianne pointed to a chest of drawers in the corner.
She gazed at the dials and wires of the transmitter, then looked up at Noor. “You know how to make this work?”
Josianne declined, positively refused, to understand anything with levers, dials or switches. She probably still couldn’t drive a car, and even had trouble using a telephone. The transmitter was of no interest, but the code books and encryption keys intrigued her. Noor explained they were like the Rosetta stone.
“You want to learn how to decipher the messages?” said Noor. “I could teach you—it wouldn’t take you more than a few hours to learn. You could assist me.”
“Bien sûr! You remember, non? I love secret messages.”
“Shhh!” said Noor, as if Uncle Tajuddin had some special hearing device that could listen all the way from India.
But yes, Josianne had carried messages between Armand and Noor, to and from Afzal Manzil, right under Uncle’s nose. What would Josianne, her closest friend, say today if she knew the truth about Noor’s “stomach operation”? If she suspected it, she had never said so. What would she say if told of Madame Dunet, and five thousand francs, and Noor’s years of shame and pain? Josianne would no doubt keep her secret, but—
“Shhh!” said Noor again, more for herself.
Josianne moved her nightstand against the window. Noor placed the transmitter on it, stringing her aerial out, twining it through the ivy. The fragrance of quince at the edge of Afzal Manzil’s garden mingled with Josianne’s Chanel.
Afzal Manzil was just her house, not really a home.
Mother often said of Afzal Manzil: when people give you gifts, you have to live with their choices. It had wounded Dadijaan’s pride to learn the house was donated by a benefactor, a bourgeois woman who found peace in Sufism and the comfort of a direct relationship with a universal God.
Branches and weeds tangled on the stone walls between the adjoining gardens. A rusty barbed wire was strung along the top—by the Germans, Josianne said. A riot of colour clustered around the oak tree; Abbajaan’s transplanted flowers were holding their own.
The garden grotto. Abbajaan standing there again in a long cream-and-gold kaftan. The guests were there again. The music, the clapping. Abbajaan unfolded a man-size pashmina shawl for everyone to see. Embraced ten-year-old Kabir. Drew back. The shawl remained, draped across Kabir’s shoulders. Twelve-year-old Noor sitting in the audience between Mother and Zaib. Kabir looking down at her, his changed expression. Something had reversed who was elder, who was younger, who gave permission and who must ask.
Behind her a chair scraped, distracting her momentarily.
Back to looking at the garden. But Abbajaan, Kabir and all the guests had vanished into the present.
Her gaze climbed to the door set at the top of its walrus-moustache staircase. She saw herself at thirteen, fourteen, seventeen. Standing again at the mouth of its darkness.
Noor closed her eyes and let imagination turn the walls of Afzal Manzil to glass. On the ground floor the rooms flowed around a central courtyard.
Remember happy times.
She was back in Abbajaan’s recital room, sitting cross-legged on frayed kilims as Abbajaan taught her to play the veena, though he’d long since given up performing and composing himself. “Dil mein Ali, mere man mein Ali Ali.” She was listening to Amir Khusrao qawallis sung over the ripple and pulse of the harmonium by visiting singers from India. She was at the chess table across from Abbajaan, she was playing hide-and-seek with Kabir and Zaib, she was learning namaaz along with Mother, she was pulling on white stockings and gloves to attend church with Mother.
But other memories came unbidden. She had opened the front door for an unrelated man and she was confined in her room, crying. She was wearing a pair of red shoes borrowed from Josianne; Uncle was shouting, she was kicking them off, running to her room. She was reading in an upstairs room and Uncle Tajuddin was standing at her bookshelf, and her books were flying like birds from the window, fluttering, slapping down into mud.
Discovering love, perhaps not enough love for Allah but certainly love for Armand. Like Dom Pérignon discovering champagne—as if she were drinking stars. She was tiptoeing downstairs to sneak out without Uncle seeing her, she was slipping in unseen, she was standing by the telephone, whispering. She was standing in the bathroom looking into the mirror, wondering what in the world to do, where could she go, how could she start the bleeding again.
Back through Madame Dunet’s recent revelations, back to now. Noor’s eyes opened wide.
Downstairs, the gardener came in with a basket of newly dug beets, and the same mouse of a maid who had worked under Madame Prénat’s thumb for years greeted Noor as if she had never left, and washed the beets for lunch.
In honour of Noor’s return, Madame now took over the kitchen. Josianne helped her cut the tops and bottoms from the purple bulbs, and a caramel fragrance filled the house as Madame Prénat roasted them over a gas flame, then tossed them in sour cream, dill and lemon juice to balance sweet and sour. Once grace was said, they tasted like the concentrated sweetness of the earth. Josianne declared the bread a little dry and paste-soft in the middle—the firewood could have run out beneath the baker’s oven, she said—but when served with wedges of Camembert and a bottle of Domaine Suresnes, it was delicious.
Neck and shoulder muscles relaxed, breathing came easier. Gilbert didn’t know she was here, no one of the SOE knew either. She could receive and transmit here. She could trust Josianne and Madame Prénat—far more than Gilbert and Major Boddington, anyway.
She had made the right decision to contact Josianne, though it ran counter to Miss Atkins’s instructions. It felt right, even if the SOE handbook might someday list contacting old friends while on assignment under “Where Operatives Go Wrong.”
CHAPTER 29
Paris, France
Tuesday, July 20, 1943
A MESSAGE LEFT FOR ODILE, asking her to “keep in touch with Uncle Viennot,” arranged a rendezvous at Madame Millet’s pâtisserie. Here, Viennot pointed out, the three tiny tables were wiped clean every hour and it was still possible to find sugar cubes with one’s café filtre, and even sometimes—though not today—a cup of Ceylon tea. A few streets away, afternoon light played on tea-brown waves, and bridges hunched, catlike, from Left Bank to Right. Over the embroidered half-curtains Noor could see but not hear a restaurant tout outside, tantalizing passersby.
“The food may be expensive, but you can talk freely—as freely as you can anywhere in Paris.” Viennot laughed as if amused by lunatic times.
He had addressed her as tu, a familiarity she did not reciprocate.
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A honey-coloured toy poodle rested its head on its paws and listened to an animated discussion between its owner, an elderly gentleman in a polka-dotted bow tie, and a little girl of about five sitting with her mother at the table beside Viennot. The poodle’s leash lay in artistically arranged coils beside the gentleman.
A sailor or a retired navy man.
The gentleman closed a leather-bound copy of Candide to show the little girl his knitted purse.
A scholar of the Enlightenment.
The girl danced around Noor and Viennot to ask her mother if she could knit one like it. The prospects of holding a whispered conversation were nil.
Noor pulled a fringed lace stole close about her shoulders and sat erect, responding to the finery she’d found in Josianne’s dresser drawers.
“I remember this pâtisserie when ribboned bonbons perched on every shelf and filled baskets, when white, dark and milk chocolates clustered on trays. Madame Millet made the best chocolate éclairs in Paris. But now!” Viennot’s bushy black brows wagged; he shrugged his disgust. “Everything is just beyond reach.”
She wasn’t sure whether he was discussing prices or the prospects for liberation from the Germans.
“Why couldn’t they invade France?” he muttered.
He meant the Allies, who, instead of invading France “before the leaves fall,” had invaded Sicily. The BBC was now using the word “conquered.” Paris Soir had reported German “difficulties” in Russia, while the BBC said the Germans were almost in retreat from Kursk.
“I want this war over soon,” he said.
Noor had an urge to suggest his schedule for the war be published in Paris Soir. “They could still invade France,” she said.
“It’s enough. Too many celebrities in Paris—the Abwehr, the Wehrmacht, the STO, the Gestapo, the Gestapistes. And you, Phono’s celebrity from London. Anne-Marie, code name Madeleine.”
Madame Millet patrolled the passage behind the counter like a German sentry on guard, though the labels—pâté de canard à l’orange, fond d’artichaut saint-fiacre, pâté de veau au jambon, ballottine de lapin au foie gras et aux pistaches—all described empty shelves.
“It’s too difficult,” said Viennot. “I can’t remember real names, and now everyone who is anyone has a code name the British call a nom de guerre. If a writer has a nom de plume, does anyone try to remember his real name? Forget your real name, I’ll call you Madeleine.”
Noor ordered only a café noir because Viennot said the heart-shaped palmiers and the few petits fours on display looked far better than they tasted. Her SOE funds had dwindled now that she had reimbursed Madame Aigrain and begun paying rent at Madame Prénat’s.
“And it’s not only names! Every project has fifteen passwords, and if I forget one, I could be shot by my own friends. I’m going to change my business after the war, Madeleine. If it ends by 1950, I’ll give some money to the Church. Maybe I’ll even go to confession.”
After eating a hundred mice, the cat makes a hadj to Mecca.
“And I’m going to have fewer customers,” Viennot continued. “I’ll still be an intermediary—but for cars. Bugattis, when the Italians return from their holiday with Herr Hitler. Monsieur Bugatti never sold to just anyone, tu sais? He interviewed each potential customer before he sold a single car. I’m just like him. Very discriminating about my customers—and the resistants I work with. No English—except for working with Phono.”
Viennot, in sultry July, still affected his trademark brown silk scarf, black onyx brooch and beret, complete with ribbon tassel. Noor’s soapy coffee arrived, and for him a crème caramel with a biscuit planted in it like a sword in stone. He removed the biscuit and presented it to her with a “Mange bien, mademoiselle,” urging her to eat.
“You’ve lost weight,” he said with a disapproving look at her breasts.
Viennot knew of the arrests of Prosper, Archambault and Professor Balachowsky. And he had received a message from Odile about the Gestapo search of Renée’s safe house, and later another about the Grignon roundup.
“I thought by now our pretty little war tourist would have gone home.”
“I have not, though I was ordered to leave.”
Viennot’s bushy black brows rose into question marks. “It is one thing to know events, another to be told the details.” He drew his chair closer than she would have liked. “Alors, commence!”
Noor lightened her coffee with a powder of substitute cream and began speaking low, trimming and editing her analysis of events as she went. The story of the roundup at Grignon was told without the shooting but with her suspicions of Gilbert. She told of her meeting with Phono without mentioning she had given him her pistol. In telling Viennot of her refusal to return on the Lysander, she had to discuss Gilbert’s suspicious chess notation habits and his reading her letters, but she didn’t mention foiling Gilbert’s post-dinner plans in case Viennot decided on plans of his own. What she left out was almost as important as—perhaps more important than—what she told.
Cigarette in one hand, spoon in the other, Viennot asked only a few questions.
The gentleman at the next table produced a pack of cards, shuffled and fanned them out, and the little girl selected a king of hearts. The mother left her table and joined them, to watch as the magic began.
“Odile tells me you are anxious to resume transmissions. For us. One question: why?”
Beside them, the little girl began counting to ten.
“You need a radio operator. I have a radio. I’m trained for it. And I have a safe house from which to transmit.”
“Where?”
“In Paris,” she said, deliberately vague. Her current addresses at Mesdames Aigrain, Prénat and Gagné’s would remain secret, along with the location of the apartment at the boulevard Richard Wallace.
“Is it secure?”
“As secure as any other place.”
“We need money.”
“Yes. My information is that London has resumed drops.” She told Viennot of her meeting with “a highly placed man from London” and his reassurances, without mentioning that she was almost positive the Germans, with full knowledge of the British, were using captured transmitters to request arms and money from the Allies.
“Do you have enough money?” His tone seemed to hold genuine concern.
“Yes.” She wouldn’t say how much. If she really needed a loan, she would ask Josianne.
“Then buy yourself some clothes. Dowdy clothes make any woman your age look German or English. The Gestapo will pick you up and send you either to Berlin or Besançon if they see you walking around dressed like that.”
Noor flashed him a look of annoyance. “This is a new hat. New slacks. Both are French.”
“The hat is très chic. The slacks make you look American. The blouse—too masculine. You need some jewellery. Perhaps it is your hair—you should get a permanent. Put on more powder. Your lipstick is a shade too light for your colouring. Ma fille, when you need money, you come to Jacques Viennot, d’accord?”
She would throw her hat at him. But no. Instead, she wouldn’t say a word about the diamonds she had secreted in her valise at Madame Aigrain’s. At this rate Viennot might tell her to sell them and use the money for clothes and a permanent. He’d tell her to go shopping as her contribution to the welfare of the country.
Viennot puffed to the left, licked his spoon to the right.
“Never mind my hair and clothes,” said Noor. “You haven’t commented about anything I’ve said. Is it not terrible?”
He gave a great sigh. “Everyone knows what can happen. In my experience one is usually suspicious of the wrong person.”
“In your experience! You’re only a few years older than me, I think.”
“Yes, but I have a lot more experience, mademoiselle. You’re a little too beautiful to be intelligent as well.”
She opened her mouth.
He held up his spoon. “Oh, excusez-moi if I hurt your tend
er feelings, but as for me, I begin from not trusting a person, and then he—or she—must prove to me that I should trust him—or her. We tend to trust those in our tribe, but from what you say, I begin to believe Gilbert is a tribe of one. If you’re arranging drops, make sure you don’t send my money to him!”
Said as a joke, but Viennot was perfectly serious.
“Well, I never trusted Gilbert,” said Noor.
Viennot waved his cigarette at her. “No, no. You wouldn’t be so angry if you hadn’t trusted Gilbert. Why shouldn’t you? He is handsome. Like Maurice Chevalier—the same smile.”
“It wasn’t his smile. London trusted him, Prosper and Archambault trusted him. And I only trust you because Phono does—he said your grandfathers were brothers.”
“It’s true our grandfathers were brothers, but my Garry relatives don’t invite Jacques Viennot to their homes. My mother’s relatives only remember me when they have a task that might soil their hands. Always I have a perverse desire to tear down their complacency. But Phono—he’s different. He hasn’t changed from the cousin I admired. Every time Phono has said he will do a job for the Resistance, it is done. Done well, too. And it will be done exactly when he says it will be, or under the conditions he specifies. Prosper is—was—the same. The two of them along with Archambault are the reason the Germans can no longer sleep at night.”
“‘Was’? You think Prosper and Archambault have been executed?”
“Or sent to a prison camp, if they are lucky.”
The little girl gave a curtsey, clasped her hands and began to sing “Savez-vous planter les choux.”
“When we were children,” said Viennot, “Émile would fall down and never cry. Renée—oh la la! She cried and complained about everything. Tiens, I just remembered Archambault knew you at your lycée.”
“Yes, but not very well. He was in my brother’s class, I was in the girls’ school. He sang in the choir.”
“So? That makes him holy? He told me some things about you.”
She gave in to an urge to tease. “Why did you want to know?”
“I wanted to know how much he knew. He said you’re yet another kind of celebrity—an Indian princess.”