“He will take care of you, like I take care of Papa and he takes care of me.” Looking to him now.
“Yes,” Nanée agreed.
“But you will watch over us, like the Lady Mary?”
Nanée touched a finger to Luki’s cheek, then trailed it down her arm to Joey and to Pemmy, to her scarf around Pemmy’s neck. “I will always be thinking of you, Luki,” she said.
Luki began to unwrap Nanée’s white silk scarf from her kangaroo’s neck, but Nanée stopped her.
“You keep it,” Nanée said. “I would like you to have it, so Pemmy won’t get cold.”
“But you can’t fly without it.”
Nanée pulled Luki to her then, and hugged her desperately. “You keep it for me, Luki,” she managed. “You keep it for me, and someday when this madness ends, I’ll find you and I’ll take you flying with me.”
Luki said, “And Papa?”
Edouard looked to the hawk floating on the wind, lest Nanée see his devastation, lest Luki too see it.
“And your papa,” Nanée said, “if he wants to come.”
“But not to heaven,” Luki said. “We would come back to earth.”
“I’m afraid we always do come back to earth.”
Nanée stood then, and said to Edouard, “Be careful. The rest of the way, be careful. The Gestapo are in Spain too.”
“Let me . . .” He looked to the pocket of her flight jacket, where she had the pistol. “You don’t want to be found with it.”
“You can’t show up armed at the Spanish border check.”
“There’s that foul pond up ahead that Hans warned us not to drink from.”
Nanée stooped to Luki’s level again and pointed to the sky. “Look,” she said. “I think it’s a golden eagle. The most elusive of creatures. They can spend hours or even days perched in a tree. Motionless. Impossible to spot.”
As Luki peered up to the bird, Nanée slipped the pearl-handled pistol from her pocket.
He took it from her, and slid it into his own pocket.
Nanée said to Luki, “They’re the best flyers, golden eagles, but they also build nests high up in the cliffs, which they return to year after year.”
She kissed the top of Luki’s head and stood again. “I really am going to miss you something terrific, Luki Moss.”
Edouard picked up her nearly empty canteen and his musette bag with the stale bread hiding his film, awash now in what he was leaving, what he was losing: the world he knew, the places he’d shared with Elza, and with this woman who, improbably, had taught him to love again.
Nanée smiled sadly, a lovely smile without the least trace of coquetry in the arch of her brow or the curve of her cheek, her slightly impish mouth.
He raised his Leica and took the shot: Nanée standing on the mountaintop with the two seas behind her that were the same sea, the bird swooping toward her that was not the hawk he’d thought, he saw now, but rather the golden eagle Nanée told Luki it was.
He took Luki’s hand, his daughter’s hand. He managed, finally, “Goodbye, Nanée.”
“In France, we say au revoir,” she said. “Until we see each other again.”
Tuesday, December 10, 1940
VILLA AIR-BEL
Nanée held Dagobert for a long time there in the entry hall, letting him lick her hands and her neck and her face, and saying over and over again that she’d missed him too as Varian and the others congratulated her on her successful trip. Varian had received word from his contacts in Madrid that Edouard and Luki had made it that far, and ought to reach Lisbon the following day.
She gave Gussie back his book, and kissed him once on each cheek, bee kisses, and told him it was awfully lucky and she might ask to borrow it again. Then she pleaded exhaustion and headed up to her room, Dagobert at her heels.
T followed.
Nanée set her traveling case on her bed. Dagobert hopped up and sat beside it as she opened it, took out the suit, and handed it to T.
“Don’t bring it back to me this time,” she said.
T didn’t answer.
“I really will burn it if—”
Nanée saw it then, what T had already seen. Propped up on her dresser, against the wall beside the photograph of the naked woman swimming up through murky water: a man’s face, photographed in three-quarter profile and so close to the camera that the first time she’d seen it, as she helped Danny hang it from a tree for that Sunday salon, it took her a minute to make out that that was part of a chin in one corner of the print, an earlobe in the corner above it. One eye. One eyebrow that looked more like a silverfish than anything else. Part of a nose. Part of two lips. Eduard’s solarized photograph of himself as a young man.