“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.