The Tiger Claw

  “Resistance activities” could mean more sabotage operations or the dispatching of Gilbert; Major Boddington didn’t need to be told everything.

  Afterwards, Josianne used Noor’s code book to garble each word into clear text blocks, incomprehensible to anyone without a corresponding code book.

  Noor placed her wristwatch beside the transmitter. Right forefinger ready to tap, like a horse at a starting line, the message copybook open like sheet music before her. Her left hand touched her throat. Habit. Habit of touch for luck and courage, though it was more than three months since she had worn her tiger claw.

  Deep German voices outside the apartment door. She tensed, listening for tone, threat, a change in mood. Closer, then boots thumped past on the landing. A laughing response moved past. She took a deep breath.

  Centre your mind.

  At precisely 17:00 hours, she opened the channel between her pre-assigned kilocycles and identified herself as Madeleine. Then into the dream-space of transmission.

  By 17:15 she had finished requesting the Lysander.

  She waited with intense and total focus, transmitter set to receive. Wiped her brow, flexed her fingers, listening for a crackle. At last the acknowledging letter sequence came.

  Noor moved to the foyer and lifted the earpiece of the candlestick telephone off its hook. The switchboard operator came on the line. Noor asked for the telephone number provided by Odile.

  “Odile.”

  “Tell Phono to keep in touch with Uncle Marc,” she said in a calm, friendly voice. She depressed the telephone hook.

  Back at the transmitter, her hand was steady. The second message was longer than the first. Tap-tap-tap, the bass crackle sounding inordinately loud in the still, empty rooms. Pounding at the single key like the pounding in her heart, because the apparent randomness of the letters she was transmitting was not random at all. Pounding in her heart because these blocks disguised the fate of flesh and blood. Excepting Yolande, she didn’t know the true identities of these captured resistants any more than they knew hers. The code names she was beginning to send stood for the complexity of each life, connections with friends and relatives and fellow resistants, their past, all reduced to a name on a list saying they’d failed to remain in play, saying they had been at the wrong place at the wrong time.

  What would happen when London received these code names? Would they now stop sending agents and munitions into the open arms of the Gestapo? Émile had thought they would stop after the arrests of Prosper and Archambault, yet London kept sending more. And this was the result: five names, ten, fifteen, twenty code names, including Yolande’s.

  One du’a with each name, to ask the comfort of Allah for wives and husbands who would receive we-regret-to-notify-you letters from the War Office. Sending, sending one block of encrypted text, then her double security check, then another block and the security check again, sending as fast as she could possibly tap.

  Almost finished now. Tap-tap-tap.

  Finger turning to icicle, just three names to go. Noor glanced at her wristwatch: 17:27 hours.

  Too long, too long on the air.

  The round dish above a German detection van might be turning at this moment, cocking like an ear in the direction of the one transmitter it couldn’t recognize, now all others were German-controlled. She tried not to imagine it, but once that dish had flashed to mind, there was no stopping its image … She transmitted the last three names.

  The operator came back with “Security check not received. Be more careful, Madeleine. Re-send please.”

  Some schoolmarm, probably. With a pince-nez on her large, sniffy nose. Now she’d have to repeat her transmission of the last three names. But at least someone was minding security.

  Footsteps creaked on the floorboards outside.

  Noor’s tapping stopped. The pace of the footsteps didn’t alter, then faded away.

  Back to the last two names, and Archambault’s words streaked across her mind. “Some messages, they might be worth one person’s freedom, tu sais, Madeleine?”

  The pounding in her heart turned to a machine gun firing in her head, then an artillery barrage at the door. The door burst open. Over her shoulder, it filled with the contour of her ever-present fear: a trench-coated man beneath a large fedora, moving towards her with feral speed.

  PART SIX

  CHAPTER 33

  Pforzheim, Germany

  July 1944

  BRAIN, HEART AND PEN—not one will rest. My hands were occupied all day today, stringing tickets and more tickets. Thoughts rushed like the trains that set my cot vibrating at night. When I finished stringing tickets, my pen called me to you.

  A piping mezzo-soprano swells and ebbs down the corridor. I stop and listen: someone tried to assassinate Hitler, but our newswoman sings in French that he still lives. Stuttgart has been bombed, she sings. Paris is still waiting for the Allies, poor occupied Paris.

  What do these events mean for Armand? What do they mean for me? Tell me, if you know.

  The song communiqué begins again, this time in Polish. I hear the guard’s baton strike the newswoman’s cell door.

  Screams, weeping.

  Must my heart harden to survive? To feel deeply about a stranger when I can do nothing about her pain takes its toll on my courage. I write, trying not to wonder what our newswoman’s silence means.

  I go back to the instant my own transmissions fell silent, the last that London operators heard from Madeleine.

  The man standing in the doorway—to how many had he come, in warning, in nightmare or in person?

  Agile with fear, I overturned both chair and transmitter and made a dash for the open window. My feet met the ledge and I was out in the cold, hair whipping into my eyes, sidling out on stone, plaster wall against my back.

  The man stopped at the open window. “Fais gaffe!” he shouted. “Tu vas tomber.”

  His accent: French as French can be. A milicien dressed in a Gestapo trench coat, a Gestapiste. He lit a cigarette and sat down on the sill to wait till I fell as he predicted, returned to the room or jumped.

  Jump! Jump! I urged myself.

  Three floors—I might have survived with a few broken bones, maybe even run away. But I looked down and my legs turned to stone. Grey mansard roofs stretched down the boulevard on one side, and on the other the milice gendarme sat smoking at the window.

  Even had I a parachute, I couldn’t have jumped. Even if I had completed my parachute training, I couldn’t have moved a muscle. Your uncle Kabir might have flown like Superman, your aunt Zaib might have laughed in the milicien’s face. Mother would have offered the Gestapiste fifty francs or a bottle of cognac to disappear, Dadijaan could have fed him an earful that would make him remember his own grandmother. But your own mother’s legs turned numb. My chest heaved with angry tears, with anger at myself for cowardice.

  Terror pushed me out on that ledge, but a far greater fear stopped me from letting go that day, from plunging down for the instant it would take to embrace death.

  Do you know what it was, my darling? Today I see the reason, though I couldn’t then.

  I saw myself teaching you enough Arabic to read the Qur’an, Armand teaching you enough Hebrew to read the Torah for yourself. I felt myself drawing a tiny hand through bangles, dressing you in a vest with appliquéd flowers, presenting you my tiger claw to wear, as Dadijaan had worn it before us. I was picking peonies for your hair, singing for you, teaching you the veena, writing nonsense stories to make you laugh. I was learning to laugh again. Armand’s blue eyes came before me, piercing my soul. He held you in the crook of his arm. I pressed my lips to his cheek and yours.

  All this in a flash, looking down.

  Do you see how powerful you are, ma petite? You, the hope of your return, stopped me from jumping. Then as now, your need to use my body gives it an obstinate desire to live.

  Jump! I urged myself forward an inch.

  But I couldn’t.

  I hated m
y body for being so weak, for clutching at life so greedily. For fearing death, reuniter of all souls.

  The moment passed and I understood myself anew, understood I was the sum of my every obligation and attachment. If I jumped, I’d never know if Armand still loved me. I had failed your father twice, I could not fail him again.

  If I jumped, I’d never know: would Émile really kill Gilbert? Would Monique, Renée and Babette be lifted to safety? I’d never meet Mother and Kabir again to ask why they betrayed the tolerance our family preached to others. I’d never know if the Allies would arrive to liberate France, never see Zaib become a doctor, see Kabir become Pir.

  So when a man who was my enemy reached out to save me, I gripped his hand. For a moment I was suspended in mid-air, with only a strange man’s arms supporting me, then I climbed back over the sill.

  But once back on firm ground, I didn’t leave that apartment without a fight. The scuffle brought Wehrmacht soldiers onto the landing, cheering as if betting on a cockfight. More milice gendarmes came and overpowered me. They called the man in the trench coat Cartaud. Pierre Cartaud.

  Arms jerked behind my back, my hands were cuffed. I stumbled downstairs, out of the building, into twilight. Cartaud sucked his hand where I had bitten him and said to his men, “This one is a desperado, a dangerous terrorist.”

  I recognized that sandy brown beard and moustache now—he was the chauffeur at Grignon, who knocked me sprawling into the ditch, who stood by the Citroën as the megaphone blared. I had focused my binoculars on that face all the way down the hill when he led the maid back with Monsieur Hoogstraten’s suitcase.

  A Black Maria rolled up, took me away. It wasn’t far to Gestapo headquarters at the avenue Foch. A cinema reel reverses and I see myself entering a mansion without invitation from its true owners.

  CHAPTER 34

  Gestapo Headquarters, avenue Foch

  Paris, France

  Wednesday, October 13, 1943

  NOOR SAT BOUND in a chair in a chambre de bonne, a maid’s room on the fifth floor of the Gestapo-occupied mansion, Cartaud’s unbandaged hand clenching the tangle of her hair.

  “Where are the arms dumps? Tell me! Where are your other transmitters?”

  Shouting, shouting.

  Mock interrogator. Mock interrogator with Uncle Tajuddin’s face.

  Neck jerking, scalp distending, follicles screaming.

  Cartaud’s hand twisting again. “Locations, passwords? Guardians? Names?”

  Gargoyle face; interlaced capillaries on nose. Half an inch closer and she’d sink her teeth in him again.

  Hair releasing, rope-bite saying she couldn’t rub her head.

  “Everyone talks. Prosper, Archambault, Hoogstraten—whatever their names are. All of them screamed, ‘Enough!’”

  Left shoulder exploding beneath his truncheon.

  Eyes opening, opening wider than their sockets. Never forget, never forget his snarl of enjoyment.

  Nose trickling blood yet registering his sour breath over her as he loosened the ropes that bound her. Testing communication with her left arm—the truncheon had stopped just short of break or shatter.

  He wants screaming; I will not.

  I am more obstinate than I knew, my body tougher than I thought.

  Cartaud’s head blocking the ribboned light from the barred skylight sloping above, his eyes colder than vichyssoise. Lips barely moving though his voice filled the tiny room.

  Pain ejecting her from observation. Sensation demanding attention, excluding reason. Maggots seething in her head.

  Falling, falling a great distance to the floor. The racket of sound as both chair and she hit the floor.

  Remember Al-Hallaj, Jeanne d’Arc, Max, soldiers who have fought their way across the deserts of North Africa, the jungles of Burma, men at sea.

  A snap inside her. The cavern in her shoulder pleading for the ball of her arm. Ligaments snagging on a bone crack in her collar.

  Swelling, swelling ridges of oncoming agony. Flying towards the wall like a husk blown on the wind, ground falling away.

  Colliding with a crack that resounded in her skull. Brain rocking like a vessel at sea.

  A blow to the belly. Noor folded in two.

  Drowning, drowning in air.

  Chin rising, lifting on the tip of Cartaud’s boot.

  Blink, blink swollen eyes. See. See suited figure slanting from the floor at an obtuse angle. See corpse-pale face, round glasses, words falling from slash in face.

  Kick-start of memory: the voice on the megaphone at Grignon. The interpreter’s voice. Voice pulling Cartaud away, releasing the ropes that bound her hands.

  Palm on solid floor. Trying to rise. Everything crumbling, even the walls.

  “You interrogate, I’ll hit, Herr Vogel,” said Cartaud, as if proposing a compromise.

  The maid’s room turned uterine red. Then black.

  _______

  Ting-chck-chck-chck-chck … ting.

  A man with a swastika arm band hunched over a skipping red-and-black ribbon. The typewriter bell tinged again as it approached the end of the line.

  A jigsaw resolved into the interpreter’s face. Grey suit coat, white shirt, brown felt bow tie. All wallet-scale by contrast with the oversize portraits—Hitler, Goebbels and Göring—behind his gilded desk.

  Al—inwards—lah—outwards. Allah.

  Breath, separator of the living from the dead.

  Noor struggled upright from her slump in a chair. Pain raged from her neck down her shoulder, down her left side.

  Hands and feet no longer bound. Wet, wet—face and neck wet. Skirt chilling her thighs.

  Cold like a sock to the face.

  The interpreter set an empty carafe on his desk.

  Vaginal muscles clenching, testing—no pain there.

  Her gaze dropped to her blouse—bloodstained, rumpled, but yes, it was buttoned. The fractional movement jarred every ounce of brain. The back of her head was larger than it should be.

  “My colleague is sometimes overzealous. Cartaud’s emotions overcome him. He was unemployed so long before he joined the militia—now he tries very hard to please. But it takes time to train Frenchmen in German security methods.”

  Chords crashed in rhythm on a faraway gramophone. Tannhäuser. Chair legs grated on floorboards as if they grated in her head. The typist was gathering his papers, closing the door behind him.

  The interpreter rose and came around the desk. He flicked a lighter, lifted a cigarette to his lips, lit it, held it out to her.

  Noor turned away.

  “We have not been introduced, it’s true. I am Ernst Vogel, SS interpreter for you and Herr Kieffer. I have been asked to translate certain questions we have for you, and the consequences if you do not answer. Let us begin.”

  He wasn’t shouting. He sounded more like a disappointed schoolteacher.

  “I want your true name.”

  “Anne-Marie Régnier.” Voice unwavering as a single note struck upon a piano.

  “That is a lie.”

  The next questions, according to the ritual scenario visited upon her, should have been her rank and serial number, the only information she was required to give under the Geneva Convention as an officer. She was ready to deny she had either.

  But Vogel led away from these with “A Mark II suitcase radio—that’s SOE. But you don’t look English. So—how long were you taken to England? A month? A year?”

  Speech sealed itself tight in her cranium.

  “To whom do you report in England?”

  Silence.

  “At what hours did you transmit? Name your accomplices.”

  Silence.

  “Your accomplices have already confessed—we know who you are,” he said in a you-weary-me voice.

  Anger flooded in. “Then you know more than I,” she mumbled.

  He stopped and gave her a long look. She hadn’t reacted as he had expected. “You are a British spy, a foreign terrorist. An officer, I hear?
??Grüss Gott! The SOE has learned to inflate its titles in the hope that we will treat its captured agents better. And your true name is Noor.”

  His tone said he had solved a riddle that led to another.

  She said nothing, mind racing. This man knew the SOE’s internals. He knew she was an officer; that could have come from torturing poor Prosper or Archambault. But how did he know her name? Prosper? Archambault? But if Archambault had revealed her name, Vogel would have learned the surname Khan as well. But he hadn’t said that; he said, “Your true name is Noor.” Could he have read her letters to Kabir and Zaib?

  That salaud Gilbert! Fool, for trusting him with her letters! Such a fool, for not urging Émile to kill him straight away. What had she written to Kabir and Zaib?

  Her brain was a bowl of mashed lentils. Vision shifted and blurred.

  “Now”—Vogel shot Noor a glance like chilled metal—“if I am to help you, I must first establish your nationality and origins. What kind of name is Noor? I do not recognize it, but it is not a Jew name. I can smell a Jew for a mile—I see very well you are not a Jew.”

  He was waiting. Noor let silence lengthen.

  He shrugged and continued. “Then I must know why do you fight for the Communists, the capitalists and the Jews? Do you need martyrdom? Is it ideology? Money? Out of fear? I can only represent you to Herr Kieffer if you help me understand you.”

  The obstinacy of love, anger at tyranny, concern for the world her child would inherit—such reasons for a woman to gird herself for battle were off Vogel’s list. Noor’s shoulder throbbed with anger.

  “I think we will find that you are an innocent victim of terrorists, pressed into service by foreigners—the British.”