A few more bits of gravel spilled downhill.
Was that a man in the shadow of that overhang above, near the top? Near the vineyard they needed to reach? He quietly turned so that Luki would be hidden behind him, protected, albeit with her legs still wrapped at his waist.
Yes, Nanée too had seen the man. She’d seen him first and was already moving, motioning him silently to follow.
More rocks spilled from above, less cautiously now. The man was headed for them. His cap appeared over the top of a boulder, then disappeared again.
They started as the man spilled down onto the path in another spray of rock. A lean, sun-worn man with packages tied all over his body.
“What are you doing here?” the stranger demanded, taking them in. They were not professional smugglers. They were no threat to him, just an opportunity.
The smuggler glanced to Nanée, standing with the kangaroos in one hand and her other in the pocket of her flight jacket. She looked like she might spring at the man.
“I can show you the way over the mountain,” he offered—for a price, he meant. “No one knows these paths like I do.”
He saw Luki then. “You’re taking a child over the mountain?” He backed away.
Edouard adjusted Luki and told her to hold on to him tightly, then returned his attention to the climb. The smuggler, reaching for one of his packages, moved toward them. Eduard turned to fend him off.
The smuggler stopped where he was. Put his hands up to show he meant no harm. “For the girl,” he said.
He untied one of his packages and unwrapped a length of dried sausage, the smell of it mixing with the faint scent of thyme and rosemary and lavender that must be strong here in summertime. The man didn’t hand him the sausage, though. He offered him the length of dirty cloth that had held it to his body.
“For the girl,” he insisted. “She’ll be safer.”
Edouard hesitated.
“Like that,” the man insisted, pointing to the kangaroos Nanée still held, Joey fallen out of Pemmy’s pouch but still pinned to her.
The cloth flapped once in what was now more breeze than wind.
Edouard took it from the man and used it to tie Luki to him at his waist.
“A child. Bon chance.” The smuggler shook his head as he set off down the path they’d come up, the sausage still in his hand.
Edouard reached for one of the rocks above him, set a foot on a low one, and began to climb.
Monday, December 9, 1940
THE PYRENEES
They were close to the road now, on a narrow path between a cliff edge and a wall of rock, not easily visible from the road thanks to the overhang but close enough that they might be heard. They were moving as silently as possible, listening intently. Edouard held tightly to Luki’s hand, worried with each step that he might slip, or Luki might. He would have kept her tied to him the whole rest of the way if she allowed it, but she was her mother’s child, she had her own mind.
They followed Nanée, he and Luki. He and Luki and Pemmy and Joey, Luki might have said. How thankful he was for Madam Menier sending the kangaroos. How thankful he was for her helping Nanée get Luki out of occupied France. For the foreman and the housekeeper and the chauffeur who helped her. For the nuns who kept her safe before that. For Berthe. For everyone who had protected Luki when he couldn’t.
Nanée stopped. She stood absolutely still. He heard what she heard then. Not voices but something lower, something that quickly took shape as the sound of footsteps. Not just one person but several, it sounded like.
Nanée backed away from the cliff edge, to the wall of rock, for the protection of the overhang.
He did the same, pulling Luki with him, wishing the awful howl of the wind would return so they wouldn’t be heard.
A small, muted note sounded.
Edouard listened in fear, horrified to see that Pemmy and the little musical joey had fallen onto the ground on the other side of the path. An inch or two farther, and they would tumble into the chasm.
“Was war das?” a voice above them demanded. What was that?
Monday, December 9, 1940
THE PYRENEES
Nanée squatted carefully, silently. The footsteps overhead had stopped, the voices so close that she could reach up and pass them a canteen for a sip of water. She didn’t think they could see Edouard and Luki and her, but if they looked over the edge, they would see the kangaroos.
Voices responded to that first familiar voice, Robert’s voice—the German from the Kundt Commission who’d tried to charm her the night before in Banyuls-sur-Mer. The soldiers spoke among themselves, German she couldn’t begin to understand.
Could she get the stuffed kangaroos before the Germans caught sight of them? Her flying scarf around Pemmy’s neck was so close she could almost reach it from where she was.
“Musik,” Robert said. “Ich h?re Musik.”
Nanée grabbed the kangaroos. She tried to move carefully, but still the music sounded again, a single note from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, “Waltz of the Flowers.” Nasty creatures always get their comeuppance in the end, Daddy had assured her.
But that had been pretend. This wasn’t pretend.
Another quiet metallic plink sounded.
“H?rt ihr das?” Robert insisted. “Musik.”
The soldiers went silent just above them.
Nanée held her breath and listened, thinking Robe Heir. Thinking little Bobby and imagining this Robert too as she’d imagined the commandant, as a pathetic little boy playing dress-up in a ratty old robe that had been his grandmother’s. Are you an honorable man?
Several of the men on the road above were talking at once now, all looking for the source of Robert’s music.
She racked her mind for a plan. She had an American passport. Luki had an American passport. But Edouard was a stateless refugee, with one set of documents that were forged and another under his own name, which was on the Gestapo list for deportation to Germany.
How many of these men had there been the night before? In their black boots and their black uniforms, their black limousines, their black hearts. Were they all there now?
She fingered the kangaroo’s mohair ear the way she so often fondled Dagobert’s. Would she ever see him again?
What a brave girl you are. You don’t even cry.
“Die Musik ist in deinem Kopf,” one of the other Gestapo above them said. Not Robe Heir.
There was much hilarity in response.
“Die Musik muss aus der Tiefe der H?hle kommen. Mach weiter, Robert. Springen!”
They laughed and laughed at that.
Voices again, and the sound of scrambling above. One of them climbing down?
Nanée looked about, but there was nowhere for Edouard and Luki and her to hide, nowhere to escape. Just the narrow, rocky path in either direction, and the long drop off the cliff ledge.
More scrambling. A tussle?
More words. More laughter.
Boys taunting each other, like they had when Robe Heir had stopped to flirt with her last night. Like Dickey and his friends had taunted her that time she went dove hunting with Daddy and them.