True, they had not been able to create false papers for everybody on the list in Pierre’s safe. They had not been able to find many of them, for one thing, or to forge enough identity cards, even though Kit worked day and night, even though Daisy ran her feet off carrying messages and delivering the finished papers. But because of their efforts, fifty-two Jewish families had safely left Paris before the terrible dawn of July 16, when the French police started banging on doors and dragging people from their homes, over thirteen thousand in total; nearly eight thousand of those Jews were packed into the Vélodrome d’Hiver and left to swelter in the heat for days, before they were loaded onto trains and sent into Germany, where they disappeared into night and fog.
Thank God, her grandmother was not among them.
Daisy had sobbed without control when the magnitude of the roundup became clear. She still remembered how Kit had held her, how they had clung to each other in the stifling air of the workroom. She had tried to think only of the names and faces of those they had saved, those for whom their efforts meant everything, meant life itself, but her mind kept returning to images of the horror in the stadium, the individual terror each person must have felt, multiplied thirteen thousand times. It was evening, and Pierre was in the office or out celebrating his success or something, and Justine was minding the children as they slept. Daisy had mumbled something about going to see her grandmother and just left. Now Kit and Daisy sat and cried together. Then they got drunk and made love, over and over, because what else could you do in the midst of such darkness? You couldn’t just sit there facing this horror; you needed oblivion, you had to cling to something, some scrap of hope.
Anyway, the next day Daisy’s eyes were dry and her body exhausted, but her soul had turned to steel. I want to do more, she said to Grandmère and to Kit, and they had brought her into contact with a network of French agents, whom she knew only by their code names, which were all various kinds of animals. She had begun as a courier, but as existing agents were captured or killed, and Daisy’s own reputation for daring and resourcefulness began to spread, she started gathering intelligence herself. She encouraged Pierre to give more dinner parties, she learned how to open his safe and raid his papers. She kept her ears open and her face carefully innocent; she was just some pretty, brainless Paris housewife to whom it was a pleasure for a self-important Nazi officer to brag indiscreetly. Every crumb of information that came her way, she passed along in reports that became legendary among both the British and American intelligence services. She continued to courier forged identity papers to downed airmen and to agents and saboteurs dropped in from Britain, to recruit safe houses and escort fugitives.
You are like a new woman, Kit said to her. Or rather like the real Daisy had finally stepped out of the old skin.
Daisy, drunk with risk and passionately in love for the first time in her life, could not have agreed more. Yes, the situation in Paris was bleak, the occupation more brutal by the day, agents picked off one by one, radio sets going ominously quiet, but Daisy had never felt more purpose, had never taken so much immediate, visceral pleasure in food and drink and sex and fresh air. She was alive, she told Kit, she was finally alive.
Only take care to remain so, he would reply, drawing her into bed, as the days turned cooler and the children returned to school. Remember I would die to lose you.
And I would die to lose you, rosbif, she whispered back, kissing his warm skin, curling her body around his, so if we must fall, let us fall together.
That was October. Now the trees were all bare, and the air had turned dark and cold. The Germans, enraged by the success of the Allied invasion into North Africa earlier that month, had seized back control of the Vichy free zone and cracked down ruthlessly on Resistance networks everywhere, but especially in Paris. And now Daisy was beginning to worry about Pierre.
Of course she could not have banished her husband from her bed, just because she’d taken a lover. She refused Pierre as often as she dared, but sometimes she allowed him his carnal rights, in order to keep his suspicions at bay, and also in order to chip little pieces of information from him. She treated these episodes like chores, like cooking dinner or polishing the silver, unpleasant but necessary. After all, you could think about something else while the unpleasantness was going on down below; you could simply imagine yourself elsewhere, in bed with someone else, or else occupy your brain by working out the logistics of a message drop.
Now, Daisy and Kit didn’t speak of any of this, hardly spoke of Pierre at all, in the way a prostitute doesn’t discuss her clients with her lover. But since October, Pierre hadn’t even attempted to have intercourse with her. He’d slept on his side, his back to Daisy, and moreover he spent most of his time at the office, anyway. Was he simply committed to his work? Or had he begun to entertain some inkling of what his wife was up to in her spare time? She tried to ask, but Pierre always answered her with some noncommittal remark, some evasive change of the subject.