Varian sent Lena directly back to the office to fetch Danny, and Nanée was again taking notes as Varian talked with Edouard, when T called up as calmly as if she were announcing lunch, “Nanée, police.”
Nanée, her every nerve buzzing, asked, “For me?”
“At the door. They say we’ll all need to show them our papers.”
Nanée set a hand on Edouard’s arm, then put a finger to her lips. T had directed her comment to her so as not to alert the police to Edouard’s presence. Could they slip him out? Gussie too would be at risk as a Polish Jew, but he did at least have identification forged by Bill Freier.
She hurried to her room and looked out the window. Down beyond the green gate, a squad car and a paddy wagon waited. Police surrounded the house.
She signaled to the gang in the library, which now included André and Jacqueline. Varian, with only the slightest hesitation, set into the flames in the porcelain stove his address book with the records of everyone he was trying to help, everyone trying to help him, and every illegal money exchange they had made. Nanée did the same with her notes.
André indicated with a gesture that he and Jacqueline would go downstairs and stall for time. Nanée tried to stop him; with his writings banned by Vichy, was he the best face to present? But he did have his charming way, and he was French and not Jewish, and Varian and Nanée and Gussie needed time to destroy everything.
Nanée grabbed her Webley from the armoire and hid it in the chamber pot in the washstand. She gathered a few bits of paper that would be better not found. She pulled the little drawing she’d tucked up behind On Being an Angel and opened it, that drawing from the first game of Exquisite Corpse she’d ever played: a head in a birdcage that might or might not be hers, the octopus body holding the bloody Hitler head, the knobby knees and kangaroo. She tore off the top third, the birdcage head Edouard had drawn, and tucked it again behind the frame, then hurried back to the library to add André’s Hitler-head-holding octopus to the fire, the legs and kangaroo she’d drawn going with it.
She poked Varian’s journal deeper into the flames.
“Even Bill Frier,” Varian whispered to Edouard, “who disdains everyone else’s work, thought the papers Nanée got for you were authentic.”
“The papers are real. I . . . I bribed the camp commandant,” Nanée insisted quietly. Varian would assume she had used money, even if Edouard might know better.
“The chaos of Pétain’s visit will work in our favor,” Varian said to Edouard. “With so many arrests, they can’t be looking very closely at anyone. Stay near me. Follow my lead.”
André came up the stairs and calmly announced that the police requested everyone’s company in the Grand Salon, indicating with a subtle shake of his head that he could put them off no longer. But perhaps Edouard’s papers would be honored. They were real papers, if gotten under false pretenses. Had the guard at the camp kept Nanée’s secret? If he hadn’t, would the commandant see it was in his own interest to let Edouard remain free? The papers did include the commandant’s legitimate signature. But if the police didn’t see it that way, everyone at the chateau would be at risk.
She whispered to Varian, “Anything else in your briefcase?” Focusing on what they could do something about.
Varian was flipping through his own papers when Gussie noticed on the writing table André’s manuscript in his elegant lettering and trademark bright-green ink—no more flattering to Vichy than his octopus drawing that Nanée had just burned. But a plainclothes policeman appeared at the top of the stairs just as Gussie was collecting it. Varian took the pages from the boy and set them in his briefcase as if they were his. The decision whether the greater risk was to leave the briefcase behind in hopes it wouldn’t be searched or to take it with them was made by the officer, who instructed him to hand it over.
“WHAT’S THIS ABOUT?” Varian demanded to Nanée’s relief as they descended the stairs with Edouard and Gussie and their police chaperone. His words put the oversize commissaire and his companions on the defensive, the only way to manage these bullies.
T, with André and Jacqueline, waited on the black-and-white marble of the entryway, along with Madame Nouget and Rose. After some discussion, the police decided they could wait to fetch Maria and Luki and Peterkin from outside. That accounted for everyone save Danny, who had not yet returned from the office, Maurice, who was “traveling”—taking refugees over the border, Nanée suspected—and Aube, who was at school.