The Tiger Claw (58 page)

In a few months, when the Allies release me and things are better, ma petite, I will work for Radio France. I’ll tell you stories on the air, using my own clear voice in place of code. Armand always said I have a beautiful voice, untrained but beautiful. I’ll take singing lessons, we’ll write a children’s newspaper together—we’ll call it Bel Âge
.

Silence in my unaired cell now. In the distance a woman screams, “If there is a God, hear me!” Another responds with the Lord’s Prayer. The Latin words return us to our atavistic urge to believe, believe the crucial moment will come
.

I hear the guard tramping towards my cell
.

Allah hafiz for now, ma petite
.

CHAPTER 31

Paris, France
Tuesday, October 12, 1943

T
HE QUEUE OUTSIDE
L
A
P
AGODE
, the cinema designed like a Japanese pagoda on the rue de Babylone, was short. A matinee show—and who had money for cinemas these days? Or maybe the interest of Parisians had run its course, but the Germans still considered
The Life of Mozart
required viewing. The film did have a foreign following; a few callow-faced soldiers stood before Noor in the queue talking loudly in German. An accordionist serenaded French and Germans alike with “Sous les ponts de Paris.” A few voices joined the chorus, but only one bought the sheet music when the song ended.

Noor’s coat, tailor-made green jacket and skirt were the same she’d worn for her landing in France, a reminder that her three-week assignment had now stretched to seventeen. What must Mother think had happened to her—no more letters since the ones she’d sent to Kabir and Zaib in mid-June. And Gilbert probably hadn’t delivered those.

The early afternoon air was chill and dense on her skin. Soon she would need to borrow warm clothes from Josianne. To engage a
petite couturière
, even Madame Aigrain’s daughter, would be too expensive.

Before her in the queue, Odile Hoogstraten’s strained young
face turned to the afternoon sun. Odile’s eyes were her meter of suspicion; she could proceed.

Daily fear and tension were now as familiar as the ten-pound pole of worry and fear for Armand she’d carried across her shoulders in London and all the way to Paris. She had become like Odile and the Parisians entering the theatre, asking every moment: Who was listening? Who was watching? What would she find behind a locked door? When she received or delivered messages, who might be there—the Gestapo?

She chose an aisle seat with a pillar at its back; Odile slipped into the one beside her. Shadows danced across the blank screen and the walls as people took their seats. A German soldier clumped past, his stride muffled by the carpet but still sure.

A few polite inquiries in case anyone was listening, then Odile began whispering.

Noor cautioned, “Wait till the lights are switched off.”

“They won’t be,” said Odile. “Sometimes they switch them off after the newsreel, but now they’re too afraid, they want to watch us all the time.”

“What can we do to them here?”

“We can applaud when they show the damage to hospitals bombed by the
RAF
. We hiss when they show Hermann Göring. It means we can’t see the film very well. But,” she sighed, “still I love the cinema!”

The assurance Noor had felt moments earlier siphoned away. She should have known the Germans wouldn’t allow films to be shown in the dark so people could actually see them. She should have expected it; perhaps someone had mentioned it in training and she had missed it. How easy it was to make mistakes!

What could be so important that Odile had decided they should meet in person? And in a well-lit cinema?

The propaganda newsreel began and Odile twittered at Noor’s shoulder.

“Phono and Monique have returned to Paris. With Renée and Babette.”

Muscles tightened in Noor’s neck. “Returned? Not to Renée’s house?” she whispered.

“No, of course not. But it was
la rentrée
last month and Babette had to return to school. Phono said I should tell you he has taken an apartment in Neuilly. He said not to tell you the address, but I think he only said that because Renée doesn’t want you to know where they are.”

Too penetrating an observation; Odile had only a few opportunities to experience Renée’s attitude towards Noor.

“Why do you think that?” Noor asked.

“Because when I went to meet Phono in Neuilly, she was arguing with him. She was so surprised to know you are still in Paris, and so angry. And you know, she is
never
angry at him! But she found out he was going to contact you. She said if you had returned to London, the Allies might have stopped their bombings.”

Noor sighed. “She must believe I have great power. I assure you, Allied bombings will continue with or without my transmissions. Is there any good news?”

“Of course—here is good news: Renée said she was going out for a walk, to calm down after all her shouting. I was going to leave, because I’d picked up my messages for you, but Monique suggested I stay for lunch, so I did.”

“And then?”

“Then Phono and Monique were at the card table playing belote, I was playing with
Babette
—it was a few hours. And then Renée came back. She had some good news. Guy—you remember her husband, Guy?—Guy will soon come home.”

“
Magnifique!
“ whispered Noor.

“Shhhh! Yes, it is. But …”

“But what?”

“She came back after walking in the Jardin d’Acclimatation and said she had a feeling. How do you just have a feeling?”

“When you love someone so much, you can have a feeling,” said Noor. “It happens.”

“You get a feeling about your fiancé—the navy officer?”

“I feel sure he is alive somewhere. I have faith.”

“Maybe that’s the feeling I get for my friend—you remember I told you about de Grémont? I don’t know if he has the same feeling for me. But this feeling like Renée’s—without even a letter, a telegram or a telephone call—I want to have it about Papa. Maman is desperate, telephoning everyone she knows. She even went to the avenue Foch to see the Gestapo. We heard he was sent to Fresnes, so we went there with clean laundry and a parcel. But now they told us he is no longer there, and they will not tell us where he is gone.”

“Poor Madame Hoogstraten! I wish there was something I could do …”

“Maman should try and get this ‘feeling.’ Papa has to be alive, he has to be. I had a feeling, remember, when he was at Verdun and I learned later that I thought of him at the very moment of his capture? Even if he did smuggle arms from England, they can’t just execute him. Don’t they have to appoint a judge, then prepare for a trial?”

No, they don’t. Occupiers—German, English, French, Dutch—consider trials for the colonized a singular favour to be suspended at will for civil disobedience. And your papa, Monsieur Hoogstraten, was planning armed resistance
.

“We have news about everyone but Papa. You know the students we believed the Germans had executed at Grignon? They are at Fresnes! A translator and a prison chaplain smuggled their messages out of the prison—their families were so glad.”

Subhan-allah!

Noor renewed the vow she’d made while watching the roundup at Grignon, to read the Qur’an from cover to cover and give a month’s salary to the immigrants at La Mosquée, now it turned out the two students were alive. How much might she need to give at La Mosquée to pay for the two SS men who might be dead from her bullets? And for not feeling guilty enough about it?

“But the messages also said their punishment is to be sent to a work camp in Germany. What have they done? Nothing.
Quel
dommage!”
Odile stopped for a passing uniform and then resumed. “Maybe the translator and the chaplain are behind bars too, by now. But at least those students’ families now know they are alive. Whereas we … I told Maman we must get a lawyer for Papa, and send the lawyer to Vichy.”

A liquid shine appeared in Odile’s eyes. She looked straight ahead at the screen.

Monsieur Durand’s comments about the uselessness of lawyers came back to Noor. Vichy was a marionette of the Gestapo … but it would be cruel to kill hope in Odile or Madame Hoogstraten.

“I told her I’ll volunteer to work in Germany—they can trade me for Papa.”

Noor held out her handkerchief. Odile took it.

Ushers in feldgrey moved past, the projector whirred and
The Life of Mozart began
.

Why did anyone come to see a film about a person whose life story was so well known? Rumi once said any tale, fictitious or otherwise, illuminates truth, but what could
The Life of Mozart
offer Odile and Noor in a cinema in 1943, with the whole world at war, with husbands and fathers disappearing into prisons and camps?

When you love someone so much, you can have a feeling
. But at this moment the feeling of which Noor had spoken felt like some half-remembered dream. She should be glad for Renée, believe her intuition might be right. But Renée hadn’t shown any respect for Noor’s intuition about Gilbert.

Mozart’s incomparable music. Phrases washed over Noor like a stream of coded personal messages from Armand. Eyes closed, she saw his fingers roaming the keyboard till the piano stormed and breathed.

She checked from beneath her eyelids; the uniforms had moved out of sight.

“
Alors
,” said Odile. “These messages must go to London tonight. The first one, unfortunately, is not good news.”

A folded paper met Noor’s fingers.

“A list. More arrests, all over the north.”

Black-and-white images from
The Life of Mozart
blurred before the intensity of Noor’s sudden anger.

Gilbert again! This is all Gilbert
.

She pulled her jacket close as if blown into a draft.

“But there is another, more urgent.”

“More urgent than this?” Noor was still taking in the news, her mind racing ahead.

“Oui, to Phono it is. He was very particular that I memorize this and say it to you: ‘Monique needs, as soon as possible, to hear the messages we arranged in Le Mans.’”

Noor knew the messages meant by Émile, the BBC messages that would signal that his family would be flown out of danger, to England. He could have left such a coded message at Flavien’s letter drop, like all the others, but by requesting Odile to deliver it in person, he had raised its urgency above the rest. Even above the list that lay folded in Noor’s hand.

“Would you like me to be your lookout?”

Odile was volunteering to perform the service Marius the Master of the Greenhouse had provided Archambault before—well, before. Another signal of urgency.

Noor whispered, “No.”

“A telephone number is written on the back of the list. Call me as soon as you have transmitted, so I can confirm it to Phono.”

“Tell him I understand,” said Noor, slipping the list into her handbag.

The film seemed to raise Odile’s spirits. Afterwards she chirped away about the newsreel, decoding its propaganda statements to assess events for herself: the Germans had retreated from the Russian steppes—
bien
, but then they occupied Rome—was that
bien ou pas bien?
good or bad? And their omissions! They hadn’t reported any
real news
, for instance that resistants had, a few days ago, killed the head of the forced-labour organization, the
STO
; that one second the man Ritter was alive and the next he was dead, bang-bang, falling down dead just like a Red Indian
shot by a cowboy in a film. And his wife was probably crying in Germany. Oh no, they wouldn’t show that, because people would be glad someone had done something about the
STO
. Odile was so very happy the Italians had come to the side of the Allies, but did Noor think the Holy Father was in any danger from Hitler? Surely not! What had really happened in Naples and Corsica, did Noor know?

“What can it mean, what will it all mean? What will it mean to
us?
”

On her way back to Suresnes, the omnibus took Noor as far as Le Moulin overlooking the racecourse in the Bois de Boulogne, where it stopped for the good reason, announced its resigned conductor, that the
gazogène
cylinder had run out of
gazogène
. Noor disembarked with the other passengers to wait for the next bus or a new cylinder, whichever came first.

The conductor tramped away.

Noor unfolded the scrap of paper Odile had given her. Her eyes travelled down the list—twenty-three code names this time. Mariette. Oh, no! Mariette! Yolande of the tweezed eyebrows and late night stories was arrested. Yolande with whom she had run up and down Glory Hill.

She bit a trembling lip. If Yolande had been arrested in the last twenty-four hours, she might be undergoing torture at Gestapo headquarters on the avenue Foch by now, perhaps at this very moment. And then … prison at Fresnes, like Monsieur Hoogstraten? Perhaps even Drancy or some other camp? Something large seemed lodged in Noor’s throat.

Bon courage, chère amie!