“Not despair? There’s nothing we can do. They will be deported to Germany, they’ll be interned in those terrible camps.”
“What do you know of these camps?”
“From my grandmother. How many do you think, in this roundup? Hundreds?”
“Thousands, possibly. Some of our agents are picking up terrible rumors. The Germans have got something up their sleeves, and they’re pushing the French to demonstrate their loyalty by cooperating.”
“Like Pierre.”
“Like Pierre. Like a great many officials in occupied France, many of whom have no love for either the Jews or the British. You cast your lot with the victors, it’s the way humans have survived and thrived through the centuries.”
Daisy drove her fists into the table and rose. “But what can we do? Isn’t there anything we can do? If I could just—just . . . stick a bomb in Pierre’s briefcase . . .”
“That would be brave and stupid and solve exactly nothing, besides killing the father of your children.”
Daisy made a noise of agony and sat. She put her head in her hands. “There must be a list of names. He must have a list somewhere.”
“Of that, I have no doubt at all.”
Daisy turned to look at him. Legrand sat back in his chair, perfectly relaxed, one curl snoozing over his forehead, undone by the heat. Only the whiteness of his knuckles, clenched around the pipe, betrayed his anxiety.
He continued in that reasonable voice of his, as if discussing the weather. “In fact, it’s likely what he’s been working on all these weeks. Compiling a list of Jews and their places of residence, so his masters can strike on the appointed day.”
“And if we had that list in advance . . .”
“We could save a few. Not all, not even most, but a few.”
“It’s so little. To save a few? It’s nothing, it’s a raindrop in a thunderstorm.”
Legrand had been staring at the window that—when not concealed by a curtain—opened into the courtyard. Now he turned to her and drew the pipe out of his mouth. His hand moved to cover hers on the warm wood of the table’s surface. “It’s not nothing. Not to those we save. To them, it’s everything. Each identity card I create—each one you deliver—represents a unique and singular life, a person, an airman or an agent or a Jew who has another chance to survive. Don’t ever forget that. Don’t ever lose yourself thinking of the ones you couldn’t save. Think instead of the ones you did.”
Daisy’s eyes were so full, she was afraid to blink. The tears would just overflow if she did, and once she started weeping, they were both in trouble, because she wouldn’t be able to stop. Tears for the war, for those in hiding, for those already dead, for those about to die. For the family in whose home she now lived, God forgive her. For her marriage, for her children, for her own unique, singular life that was probably doomed. And she had not yet begun to live! She was only just now glimpsing what was possible! And she would die. Sooner or later, they would get her. That was inevitable. Yet she had never wanted life so much.
Underneath Legrand’s hand, she curled her thumb around his thumb.
“To get this list from Pierre,” she said. “You understand what I must do.”
There was no answer. She couldn’t look at his face.
She went on. “I think sometimes that I hate him. My own husband. I can’t even remember what it was like to love him, to care for him at all.”
“Daisy—”
“I look at him and feel nothing but disgust. I loathe every hair of him. He kissed me this morning, before he left for work, right on the lips, and I wanted to vomit. Do you know what that’s like? To submit to the kiss of somebody who disgusts you?”
“Almost as hard, I think, as to be unable to kiss somebody you adore.”
“No.” Daisy stared at her thumb, entwined with Legrand’s thumb. “Because there is some pleasure in denial. There is some hope. When you give your body to the use of somebody you loathe, there is nothing. Nothing. Your soul is black and empty.”
Legrand moved his thumb against hers. She thought, Say something! Say you want to kill him for me, tell me you can’t stand the thought of him touching me, say that you would rather die than let Pierre kiss me again, have me again. But maybe he was saying it. Maybe that small movement of his thumb contained it all, every word.
“What does this make me?” she whispered.
“What does it make me?” he answered. “To let you do it.”