Nanée hesitated, then scooped up Luki and settled her on her hip. What the devil was she doing? She took Gussie’s book in her left hand.
“Robert,” she repeated, pronouncing the name in the French way rather than the German. “Of course you are.” She seemed to gather herself somehow, then said, “Are you an honorable man, Robert?” Repeating his name again as if it were French.
She said to Luki, “Sweetheart, I wonder if this man has a chocolate for you?”
Luki fixed a shockingly steady gaze on the man.
“Schokolade?” the German repeated. “Nein ich . . .”
He called ahead to his Gestapo friends who were circling the bowlers on the square. “Hat jemand Schokolade für das Kind?”
Not a single bowler looked up. They continued studying the little silver balls intently, no one making a sound. But the German’s friends laughed at him and told him to come along.
Nanée put Gussie’s book in Luki’s left hand, took up her suitcase, and walked on, still with Luki on her hip. A mother and daughter headed home from the train station, perhaps.
The Gestapo toured the square and returned to their cars. They pulled forward only a short way, to the nicest hotel in town.
Sunday, December 8, 1940
BANYULS-SUR-MER
Edouard knocked on the door of a well-kept three-story house directly on the beach just across from the public toilets, not far enough away from the hotel the Germans had stopped at for comfort. The place looked even more deserted than the train station, but Varian had warned them that this might be the case. Maurice came every couple weeks to let the Fittkos know who would be coming and when, but matters had been complicated by the change of mayors. In the event that Hans and Lisa weren’t there, Varian had told Edouard and Nanée to take Luki down to the beach and watch for their return.
They left their suitcases and Gussie’s book tucked up against a wall by the door, enough out of sight, and carried on along to the beach, away from town; they didn’t want to be visible to a Nazi looking out his hotel window. They found a suitable bench and settled in to wait. Just a family on an evening stroll, stopping at a bench to watch the sea. In wintertime. In the dark. In a cold wind. But at least they now didn’t have the suitcases to give them away.
“I love you, Father,” Luki said, practicing that line of English Nanée had taught her.
“I think you can call me ‘Papa’ even in English,” he said.
“I don’t want to say it wrong,” Luki said. “Reverend Mother told me I mustn’t use any of Mutti’s words. I mustn’t even call Mutti Mutti. I must use the Lady Mary’s language. I must call her Maman.”
Edouard looked around. There seemed no better option than this for waiting. He pulled Luki into his lap and stroked her hair.
He said to Nanée, “The Virgin Mary speaks French?”
Nanée laughed a little, and Edouard laughed with her. It felt good to laugh off the tension.
“My understanding is the Lady Mary speaks to us in whatever language we prefer,” Nanée said.
Luki said, “When the bad men use Mutti’s words, does the Lady Mary understand what they’re saying like I do?”
Edouard looked to the crashing sea, searching for a way to help her understand something he didn’t understand himself. He took her face in his hands and met her direct gaze. “The German language isn’t bad, Moppelchen. Understanding it and being able to speak it doesn’t make us bad. It’s the men who use the words badly who are bad. Bad men are bad in any language.”
“So I can still use Mutti’s words?”
“You can, only you have to understand that . . . that most of the people you’ll speak to now won’t understand those words. And . . . and some people think anyone who speaks German is bad. They’re wrong, but it’s what they think.”
“So it’s better if I use the other words, like Reverend Mother said.”
“Yes, I think I have to agree with the Reverend Mother on this one.”
“I like it when you call me Moppelchen, like Mutti used to.”
She yawned and closed her eyes, and in a moment she was sleeping, lulled by the steady rhythm of the crashing waves.
He sat with Nanée, looking not to the sea but to the door of the three-story house. “You wanted to ask me something?”
When she didn’t answer, he said, “Back in Perpignan? But then the train came.”
“It was nothing,” she said. “I was just . . . I was thinking about Nude, Bending. How I thought it was a man’s body. A man doing a push-up.”
He studied her in the darkness, the moonlight reflected on the sea. Did she remember the photograph from the exhibition, or had she seen all those prints of that single image in the bathroom at Sanary? Hung to dry facing the wall so Luki wouldn’t see them, or perhaps so he wouldn’t have to face them himself.
“Nude, Bending isn’t its title,” he said. “That was André’s title for it.”
“What is it meant to be called?” she asked.
“It isn’t,” he said. “That photograph was never meant to be shown.”
The words harsher than he’d meant them.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “That wasn’t . . .”
She waved him off. No offense taken. And yet he sensed in her stiffer posture that he had again offended her.
They sat quietly together for a long time, watching the house while trying to appear not to be doing so, Edouard now unable to shake that photo, that morning he took it.
He spotted, finally, a sorry-looking man walking in the dark toward the house. Was that Hans Fittko? He half hoped it wasn’t. The man paused, apparently struggling simply to walk down the road, and not just because of the wind. How could he hike a mountain?
The man turned in at the house, now coughing so hard he had to pause even before keying his door. As he straightened again, he saw the suitcases.
He looked first in the other direction, then toward Edouard and Luki and Nanée.
Edouard rose, lifting Luki to his shoulder.
“Salvation,” he said to Nanée. “I call it Salvation.”
Sunday, December 8, 1940
BANYULS-SUR-MER
Edouard hurried to join the man at the door, Luki waking in his arms with the motion. Nanée followed with Pemmy and Joey.
“We’re looking for Jean and Lise,” she said, the code names they’d been told to ask for, and she handed him the scrap of torn paper Varian had given them.
The Fittkos were meant to produce the other half of the paper, but the man only handed the scrap back to Nanée. Perhaps they had the wrong man? He fit the description Varian had given them, but so many men would have, just as Edouard conveniently fit the description of the dead Henri Roux. Medium everything. Medium age, thirty years old, give or take. Hair enough for his age, but no more, in a typical brown. A sharp wedge of nose under a sturdy brow. If there was anything unusual about Hans Fittko, Varian had said, it was his ears. But then it was better to be nondescript in France these days.
This had to be the right house, though, three stories on the sea, right across from the public toilets. And the man didn’t seem surprised by their presence or the paper scrap. He seemed simply exhausted.