All the Ways We Said Goodbye Page 22

“I can’t say. It’s very secret, very important.” He leaned forward and whispered, “It will take care of this Jew problem once and for all.”

  “I didn’t know we had a Jew problem in Paris.”

  He laughed. “My dear little wife, who doesn’t read the newspapers! Never mind. It’s for your husband to take care of these matters for you. Goodbye, now. I must be off.”

  Then he kissed her again—again!—and swept out the door.

  On the day Pierre had returned home from work, not long after the May dinner party, and announced that (as he had foretold) a beautiful new apartment had been found for them, an apartment fit for their new exalted place in the world, Daisy had protested vehemently. Daisy had said she would move with the children to the Ritz, to live with Grandmère, but Grandmère herself had blocked this plan. Grandmère had said she must put up with this grotesque arrangement, living in somebody’s confiscated apartment, because Daisy would be perfectly placed in such an echoing place to hear whispers from the very inner circle of the occupation. Grandmère was right, of course, but Daisy still hated herself for giving in. Wherever she went in that house, she felt the ghosts of the former occupants staring at her, whispering J’accuse! Every chair, every wardrobe, every lamp, every bed and sheet and pillow seemed to recoil from her touch, to recognize that she was an interloper, a thief.

  The only thing Daisy couldn’t help appreciating about this new apartment was its location. Years ago, she had fought Pierre to put the children in the École Rousseau, one of the best primary schools in Paris, for which they couldn’t afford the fees. For once, she’d put her back into it, and Pierre had finally relented. Grandmère had paid the fees, naturally, and Daisy had gladly walked the daily two kilometers with Madeleine and Oliver, back and forth from their apartment in the less-fashionable environs of rue Portalis. As the years passed, she had walked them not so gladly. A half kilometer was a pleasant morning stroll, time to chat with the children and enjoy the sights and smells of Paris. Two kilometers was just plain tedium.

  But this new apartment, this grand and guilty new abode the Villon family now called home, lay only a few streets away from the école. Daisy hated that this was a relief to her, but it was. A quick jaunt past the heavenly smells of the boulangerie, the café that served mostly German officers, the tidy facades of the fashionable shops, and there they were. She could bustle the children inside and hurry down the Champs toward rue Volney, to the bookshop. To Monsieur Legrand.

  In her own defense, Daisy reminded herself that this shortened distance allowed her more hours to do her work, to deliver more forged papers to more hidden airmen, more intelligence agents, more Jewish families facing deportation to Germany. Still, as they reached the steps and the open door, the mothers and children streaming inside, she had to swallow back her own shame, as always, and concentrate her attention on Madeleine and Olivier. She knelt to kiss them and remind them about the presents for their teachers.

  “Of course, Maman,” said Madeleine.

  “Good morning, Madame Villon!” It was the headmistress, Madame Duchamps, who had developed a habit in the past few weeks of addressing Daisy personally, each morning and afternoon, in a manner you might call obsequious. “And how are my sweet children this morning, eh?”

  Olivier said, “Wonderful, madame! It’s the last day of school!”

  Madame laughed. “Well, well. Very sensible! And you, Mademoiselle Villon?”

  Madeleine, it must be said, hadn’t trusted this recent mood of Madame Duchamps’s from the beginning. She looked up and said coldly, “Not quite so well as my brother, thank you.”

  Madame didn’t know what to make of this. She moved her jaws like she was chewing on an especially tough cut of meat.

  “Ah yes. Well,” she said at last. “Clever child.”

  “Madame Duchamps,” Daisy said, as the children hurried through the door and into the courtyard, “I’ve been meaning to ask you something. I need to speak to Madame Levin about the mothers’ committee next year, but I haven’t seen her at all this week. Perhaps you can give me her telephone number?”

  The doughy, pleasing face of Madame Duchamps turned to stone. “I’m sorry, madame. I’m afraid the Levins are no longer enrolled at this school.”

  By the time Daisy turned the corner of rue Volney and saw the familiar signboard—Le Mouton Noir in dignified Roman letters, set around a faceless black sheep—the July air had already grown oppressively warm. The heat brought out all the smells of the bookshop, leather and wood and binder’s glue, and especially the scent of pipe tobacco. Daisy paused in the doorway and gathered these flavors at the back of her throat. Her dress stuck to her skin. Her heart hammered in her chest, but of course that was just because of the long, brisk walk from École Rousseau. Wasn’t it?

  “Hello?” she called out.

  A dusty silence answered her. She stepped forward and closed the door behind her. Her gaze went to the shelf of English novels, where the brown-and-red spine of The Scarlet Pimpernel sat in perfect alphabetical order on the shelf of English-language books, between the O. Henry and the Ovid. Daisy let out a long breath and brushed back her damp hair with her fingers. A small object hurtled across the room and struck her middle.

  “Philippe!” she gasped.

  “There you are, madame! I have been waiting all morning!”

  Daisy laughed and unwrapped the little boy’s arms from her waist. “I am not so late, am I? Where is your grandfather?”

  Philippe shrugged. “Out. I am minding the shop.” He said this proudly, straightening himself to his full hundred and fifty centimeters.

  “Very good.” She took her pocketbook from her shoulder and opened it. “Do you know what I have for you?”

  “Sweets?”

  “Not today, I’m afraid. Something else.”

  Daisy put her hand inside the pocketbook and drew out a small stuffed rabbit. Philippe shrieked.

  “For me?”

  “Yes, for you! What other little boy is named Lapin? You must take very good care of him, do you hear me? There are not so many such rabbits to be found these days.”

  Philippe drew the furry toy reverently from her hands and stroked its back with his finger. “He is just like Mademoiselle Madeleine’s rabbit.”

  Daisy smiled and knelt down, so her head was on the same plane as Philippe’s dark head, all peaks and angles, eyes like the glossy chocolates they served on tiny, exquisite plates at the Ritz. “Not quite. Hers is spotted, and yours is brown all over. Like you, my little lapin.” She rose and kissed his hair. “Now, tell me what . . .”

  Her words trailed away, because there on the other side of the room, where there had been nothing but shelves, Monsieur Legrand now stood in his shirtsleeves, damp with heat, a pen dangling from one hand and a book from the other. Staring at her.

  Daisy went again to brush her hair from her forehead, but of course she had already done this, and there was nothing to brush. She tucked a few strands behind her ear instead. “Good morning, monsieur.”

  “Good morning.”

  “A little hot, isn’t it?”

  “Miserable. Especially in that stuffy little hidey-hole of mine.”

  “Is there somewhere else you can work, perhaps?”

  “You can work in my room!” said Philippe.

  Legrand gave the little boy a kind look. “No, no, my good man. We wouldn’t dream of intruding. We’ll just find a way to bear it, that’s all.” He stood back from the entrance to the hidden office. “Madame?”

  Legrand was right. It was terribly hot in their workroom, almost intolerable. “I open up the window at night, to let in some air,” he said, “but I’d rather not take the chance during the day.”

  “It wouldn’t help, anyway. The air’s no cooler outside.”

  Legrand put the pen behind his ear and held out the book. “There are two more on the desk, still drying. Addresses are right here.” He squinted at her. “Is something wrong?”

  “Yes. Pierre
was in a very good mood this morning.”

  “And this is bad news?”

  “He wants to take me to dinner tonight. He wants to celebrate, he said.”

  “Celebrate what?” Legrand said sharply.

  “I don’t know. He wouldn’t say, exactly. I tried to draw it out of him, but he only admitted it was something to do with work, some big project that’s about to come to fruition and—one presumes—further advance his standing among the Germans.”

  Legrand swore. “For a man working in the Jewish Affairs office, that can only mean one thing.”

  “The rumored roundup?”

  “What else could it be?”

  Daisy pulled out a chair and sat. “The Levins have disappeared.”

  “The family at school?”

  “Yes. I asked the headmistress this morning, and she told me the children were no longer enrolled, that’s all. And her expression when she said this, it was like . . . it was like marble.” Daisy looked up at Legrand’s grim face. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything?”

  “Nothing. I can only hope the move was of their own planning.” He sat down in the chair next to her and lifted his pipe from the tray where he kept it. From his pocket he took a matchbook and lit a match, which he stuck carefully in the pipe’s bowl until the tobacco inside had caught and the rich perfume seeped into the air. Daisy had watched him perform this ritual at least a hundred times by now. It meant that he was thinking about something, turning over some problem in his head. She tried not to stare at his fingers, or the play of tendons in his forearms, which his rolled sleeves exposed. But it didn’t matter, did it? Each shape of him, each bone, each color and shadow and hair of him was like her own. She could close her eyes, she could stare at the wall, she could bury her head in the thickest pillow and still she would know what he was doing, what he looked like at any particular moment, from any particular angle. Now he settled the pipe in his palm, wrapped his fingers around the bowl, set his mouth at the end.

  A hundred times, and more. A hundred hours, possibly two hundred—who counted? Day after day they had met, they had labored without speaking, they had labored while speaking. It was a charity project, she told Pierre. For residents of Paris in these hard times, when paper was rationed and nobody could afford a new volume, the Mouton Noir had a kind of lending library, and Daisy delivered books and brought them back again. Which was true. The soundest lies, as Legrand told her, were the ones built on a foundation of truth. So she could look at Pierre and tell him, without blinking, how she spent her days. Not that Pierre really listened, or even cared. Pierre was too occupied with his own work.

  Madame Levin. A handsome woman, a little reserved, dignified and correct in all her manners but sometimes funny, when you least expected humor. Daisy knew her in the way she knew any or all of the other mothers at the École Rousseau. They were more than acquaintances, less than friends. Still, Daisy had always liked Madame Levin. Her children were clever and maybe a little boisterous, but always polite in a genuine, unaffected way. Now they were no longer enrolled at the école. Daisy pressed her fingertips together and inhaled the smell of Legrand’s pipe and tried not to imagine the police—the French police, the shame of it!—pounding on the Levins’ door, dragging away Madame Levin and the two little girls, Marie-Rose and Geneviève, in their pinafore dresses and brown curls. Their pale, innocent skin.

  A hand landed gently on her shoulder. “Now, then. Don’t despair,” said Legrand.

  “Not despair? There’s nothing we can do. They will be deported to Germany, they’ll be interned in those terrible camps.”

  “What do you know of these camps?”

  “From my grandmother. How many do you think, in this roundup? Hundreds?”

  “Thousands, possibly. Some of our agents are picking up terrible rumors. The Germans have got something up their sleeves, and they’re pushing the French to demonstrate their loyalty by cooperating.”

  “Like Pierre.”

  “Like Pierre. Like a great many officials in occupied France, many of whom have no love for either the Jews or the British. You cast your lot with the victors, it’s the way humans have survived and thrived through the centuries.”

  Daisy drove her fists into the table and rose. “But what can we do? Isn’t there anything we can do? If I could just—just . . . stick a bomb in Pierre’s briefcase . . .”

  “That would be brave and stupid and solve exactly nothing, besides killing the father of your children.”

  Daisy made a noise of agony and sat. She put her head in her hands. “There must be a list of names. He must have a list somewhere.”

  “Of that, I have no doubt at all.”

  Daisy turned to look at him. Legrand sat back in his chair, perfectly relaxed, one curl snoozing over his forehead, undone by the heat. Only the whiteness of his knuckles, clenched around the pipe, betrayed his anxiety.

  He continued in that reasonable voice of his, as if discussing the weather. “In fact, it’s likely what he’s been working on all these weeks. Compiling a list of Jews and their places of residence, so his masters can strike on the appointed day.”

  “And if we had that list in advance . . .”

  “We could save a few. Not all, not even most, but a few.”

  “It’s so little. To save a few? It’s nothing, it’s a raindrop in a thunderstorm.”

  Legrand had been staring at the window that—when not concealed by a curtain—opened into the courtyard. Now he turned to her and drew the pipe out of his mouth. His hand moved to cover hers on the warm wood of the table’s surface. “It’s not nothing. Not to those we save. To them, it’s everything. Each identity card I create—each one you deliver—represents a unique and singular life, a person, an airman or an agent or a Jew who has another chance to survive. Don’t ever forget that. Don’t ever lose yourself thinking of the ones you couldn’t save. Think instead of the ones you did.”

  Daisy’s eyes were so full, she was afraid to blink. The tears would just overflow if she did, and once she started weeping, they were both in trouble, because she wouldn’t be able to stop. Tears for the war, for those in hiding, for those already dead, for those about to die. For the family in whose home she now lived, God forgive her. For her marriage, for her children, for her own unique, singular life that was probably doomed. And she had not yet begun to live! She was only just now glimpsing what was possible! And she would die. Sooner or later, they would get her. That was inevitable. Yet she had never wanted life so much.

  Underneath Legrand’s hand, she curled her thumb around his thumb.

  “To get this list from Pierre,” she said. “You understand what I must do.”

  There was no answer. She couldn’t look at his face.

  She went on. “I think sometimes that I hate him. My own husband. I can’t even remember what it was like to love him, to care for him at all.”

  “Daisy—”

  “I look at him and feel nothing but disgust. I loathe every hair of him. He kissed me this morning, before he left for work, right on the lips, and I wanted to vomit. Do you know what that’s like? To submit to the kiss of somebody who disgusts you?”

  “Almost as hard, I think, as to be unable to kiss somebody you adore.”

  “No.” Daisy stared at her thumb, entwined with Legrand’s thumb. “Because there is some pleasure in denial. There is some hope. When you give your body to the use of somebody you loathe, there is nothing. Nothing. Your soul is black and empty.”

  Legrand moved his thumb against hers. She thought, Say something! Say you want to kill him for me, tell me you can’t stand the thought of him touching me, say that you would rather die than let Pierre kiss me again, have me again. But maybe he was saying it. Maybe that small movement of his thumb contained it all, every word.

  “What does this make me?” she whispered.

  “What does it make me?” he answered. “To let you do it.”

  “Is it so hard?”

  Legrand lifted
her hand and kissed it.

  Daisy stared at her fingers, which he continued to hold, not far from the lips that had kissed them. Then she looked at the lips, and finally up at his eyes, which were warm and very blue, and seemed to be communicating something important to her. It was terrifying, looking at someone like that, eyes meeting eyes, but Daisy forced herself to hold Legrand’s gaze. He had to know, he had to understand, just in case. What if the Gestapo swooped in, the next moment? He had to know that she prayed for him, she dreamed of him, she thought of him every moment, she was in love with him, she loved him.

  “I don’t even know your real name,” she said.

  Legrand rose to his feet and pulled her up with him. They stood face-to-face, mere centimeters between them. Daisy felt his breath on her skin. She smelled his sweat, his soap, his tobacco. She thought, We’re going to kiss. At last, I am going to kiss him. And then what? But there is so much work to do.

  He took her other hand and leaned forward. Daisy closed her eyes.

  But the kiss, when it arrived an instant later, met her forehead. He held his lips there for a moment or two, while the heat of the July air melted them both, and Daisy was disappointed and grateful, both at once.

  “You have the strength of a lioness,” he said. “My brave, beautiful Daisy. You must be strong enough for us both.”

  In the whole of Daisy’s life, nobody had ever called her strong or brave, not even after she gave birth to Olivier, who was four and a half kilos and nearly split her in two. It gave her strength. It made her feel as if she actually were as brave as he thought her.

  She stepped back and released his hands. “I’ll deliver the books,” she said, “and I’ll find that list. Whatever it takes.”

  Whatever it takes. It was an easy thing to say, an old cliché. A promise you made before you really considered what you might be called upon to do, and how hard it would be.

  In the scheme of things, it wasn’t that hard to put on a pretty dress and go out to Maxim’s with your husband and make cheerful conversation with him, to flatter and flirt with him. Yet to Daisy it was agony. It was torture, each word dragged from her lungs, each smile pinned on by brute force, the performance of her life, sustained only by the thought of Legrand and the sensation of his hands holding hers, his lips on her forehead, telling her she had the strength of a lioness.