Edouard looked out through the grated window to the villa behind them, the belvedere empty now, Luki mercifully inside and no longer able to see him again abandoning her.
Monday, December 2, 1940
THE éVêCHé, MARSEILLE
The paddy wagon entered the évêché police station in the old Bishop’s Palace through a surprisingly beautiful courtyard not far from the cellar where Edouard first hid here in the Panier. They pulled into an old stable that had been converted into a motorcycle garage. The gate clanged shut behind them, eerily like the gate at Camp des Milles, and they were herded across a courtyard and up a creaky old staircase into an overcrowded, low-ceilinged attic room. Chalked on a board at the front: VIVE LE MARéCHAL.
Already Nanée was sweet-talking a young clerk. No, please, she and T didn’t want to be separated from their friends, but she did need to use the restroom. She was gone an awfully long time, but returned with a smile that Edouard took to mean that André’s incriminating green-ink manuscript had been torn up and flushed away.
The commissaire flew into a rage on learning that Varian had the briefcase. Varian merely handed it to him.
They were held all day, Edouard growing increasingly alarmed. He knew as well as anyone that an hour of questions could stretch into days or months or years in a camp. How could Varian hold on to his American naivete even now?
He pulled Nanée aside, finally, not wanting to ask but needing to know. “Nanée, the release and my papers. I . . . It’s hard to imagine how you could have gotten them.”
She looked across the crowded little room. “The camp commander didn’t know you’d escaped,” she said finally. “I didn’t know you’d escaped.”
A newsboy interrupted with the evening papers, the headlines announcing the upcoming visit by Pétain, “Victor of Verdun.” Varian bought several, and handed him one to share with Nanée, then offered the boy money with the promise of more if he would fetch them some sandwiches and drinks.
Edouard studied Nanée’s face, her head tilted toward the newspaper. “I . . . If I understood . . .” He made himself say it as directly as he could. “The commandant isn’t a man who releases prisoners just because a pretty woman asks him to.”
Nanée smoothed her hand over the newsprint as if the gesture might make the news disappear. “I entertained him,” she said, not looking up.
He looked away, but already he was seeing in his mind Nanée bent forward, in grief and shame. Edouard’s own shame, his unworthiness.
Nanée, still focused on the newspaper, whispered, “It wasn’t like you’re thinking. I did stay the night, yes, but only to . . . I got him drunk so that . . . So he wouldn’t remember. So he would imagine he owed me something.”
He longed to tip her chin up the way he had Elza’s after he’d photographed her, before he touched her bare cheek and her shoulder, before he made love to her because he could not let them succeed in taking everything. He wanted to see in Nanée’s eyes the truth of what she was saying. But he was afraid to touch her. He was afraid to see in her eyes that this was only a story meant to ease him into the reality he was left to live with, only tolerable if left unvoiced.
They were interviewed one at a time, pro forma conversations after which T was allowed to leave. Varian pleaded Edouard’s case as Luki’s only parent, and the interviewer said he would take the request to the commissaire. The clock kept ticking. The man didn’t return.
At seven, knowing Luki would be terrified if bedtime came and he wasn’t back, Edouard implored Varian to inquire again.
The commissaire had gone home for the day.
They’d been moved to a bigger, equally crowded room on the ground floor, and it was nearly ten o’clock, when a detective approached Edouard, saying, “We have more questions for you.”
“Me?” Edouard said, shifting his Leica to his side to be less obtrusive.
“You are Monsieur Breton?”
André reluctantly identified himself, and permitted the man to take him to a table in the corner for further questioning. Something in the still confidence of André’s lion head moved Edouard to photograph the two of them walking away through the crowded room.
André returned not much later, having gotten more information than he gave up. “They’re taking us to the SS Sina?a,” he said.
Varian said, “I came to Europe on that very ship some years ago.”