She climbed the stairs to her room with a policeman, Dagobert at her side. As the man pawed through her drawers, she listened to Varian in the hallway chatting up the man accompanying him, commiserating with him as the fellow confessed that, yes, the commissaire was always this unpleasant. The bathroom door clicked closed. A moment later, the toilet flushed.
Varian emerged again, saying he needed to get a handkerchief. Nanée was just about to whisper “Hitler, Hitler” to Dagobert, to set him barking and distract everyone from whatever Varian meant to do, when she heard the fellow assure Varian there was no hurry. A single set of steps entered Varian’s room.
While her police escort examined the books stacked around her room, she again looked out to the paddy wagon parked beyond the gate. “We must be awfully important to merit our own van,” she said, making noise to cover whatever Varian was doing and distract the man from his own search, but also hoping the fellow would assure her the paddy wagon wasn’t for them. No assurance came.
He approached the washstand, where she’d hidden the Webley. She had never used the chamber pot there, but she feigned mortification, saying, “I’m sorry. I’m not sure my chamber pot from last night has been emptied.”
She was back in the dining room before the typist asked for Edouard’s papers and confirmed the information on his French residency permit. Luki sat in his lap now, snuggled into his chest as if to put as much distance between that typewriter and her as she could.
“Your home is in Sanary-sur-Mer?” the clerk asked Edouard.
“Yes,” Edouard answered without offering anything about the fact that he hadn’t been there in a year thanks to a stay at Camp des Milles, compliments of the French.
“Sanary-sur-Mer,” the clerk repeated.
“Yes,” Edouard answered again.
“My brother-in-law is on the force there. Perhaps you know him?”
“I mean no offense,” Edouard said cautiously as Nanée too tried to gauge whether this might be some kind of trap, “but I hope you’ll understand that I try not to make a habit of becoming acquainted with police.”
The clerk laughed easily, then offered a name.
“Ah,” Edouard said. “A fine man, I’m sure.” Hedging his response so that if there were no such man, he would not have claimed to know him.
Just then, the policeman searching the kitchen emerged waving a piece of paper. “Hidden between two of the plates!” he exclaimed.
Dagobert, startled, barked and barked at him.
It was a drawing from the prior day’s salon games, an Exquisite Corpse rendering that had particularly amused André. He’d labeled it “Le Crétin Pétain,” the Moron Pétain. It must have been underneath one of the plates Rose put away that morning.
“This,” the commissaire said, “is treason.”
“Le Crétin Putain?” André replied nonchalantly, suggesting the French leader’s name clearly written in André’s careful green ink was instead the French word for “whore.” The Moron Whore. It had never before struck Nanée how close the spellings were.
Monday, December 2, 1940
VILLA AIR-BEL
Edouard stood on the belvedere, Luki in his arms. It had been a grueling few hours, with nothing but a tray of coffee and stale bread for lunch, as Madame Nouget had been detained from her morning shopping. Luki hadn’t left his side since she’d been brought in with Maria. He’d spent every possible moment attending to her so that, if anything happened, her last memory of him would not be of his scattered attention, as it had been when he’d put her on the train to Paris, but of nothing in the world being more important than her.
“I talk to the Lady Mary even though she isn’t here in stone,” she was saying. “I ask her if she could ask God to put Pemmy and Joey on the princess train, like Tante Nanée and me, to come here.”
Edouard looked out to the mist over the valley, the sea nowhere to be seen today. The fact that the police had left them on the belvedere for the moment, the staff watching from behind the French doors, allowed him a small hope that he was wrong about where this police business was headed. He still had his camera too. But he sure could use a Lady Mary to believe in himself.
“Everyone into the van now,” the oversize commissaire said.
Edouard tried to appear calm for Luki’s sake as André protested that he and Jacqueline were French, and everyone’s papers were in order. Anger directed at men who knew what they were doing was wrong was invariably met not with acknowledgment or apology but with anger; he’d seen that time and again at Camp des Milles.