Fry eyed her differently now, but said, “I don’t believe you appreciate the effort it takes to obtain American visas for people we don’t—”
Miriam opened the bathroom door to the room crowded with refugees Fry was already trying to help, even though they weren’t on his list.
Fry watched them for a long moment, then improbably stooped to Dagobert’s level, looked into his face, and whispered, “Hitler, Hitler.”
Dagobert barked so enthusiastically that Fry recoiled before carefully offering the back of his hand. Dagobert sniffed it, then licked it.
Fry rubbed Dagobert’s ears. “You aren’t a bad fellow after all, are you?” he said.
He stood, adjusting his glasses as he frowned again at Nanée’s suit. “We’ll start a second list,” he conceded. “People for whom we don’t yet have the promise of visas.”
“In honor of Nanée,” Miriam said, “we’ll call it the Gold list.”
“I won’t disappoint you, Mr. Fry,” Nanée said.
“Varian,” he answered, and he nodded to the open bathroom door, inviting them to leave first.
And already Miriam was introducing Nanée to the whole merry gang: Monsieur Maurice, a Romanian doctor, was Varian’s consiglieri. German-born economist Beamish Hermant specialized in fake passports and black-market money swaps. Heinz Oppenheimer organized the interviews and kept the books. Charlie Fawcett, an American sculptor who spoke French with a thick Georgia drawl nobody could understand, allowed refugees entrance to the office while watching for Vichy police. Lena Fischmann took shorthand in French, German, and English, spoke Spanish, Polish, and Russian too, and was a master at hiding illegal expenditures. And Gussie, nineteen and Polish and Jewish, looked so like a skinny fourteen-year-old Aryan boy that he could carry coded telegrams to the central post office and go from tabac to tabac to buy blank identity cards for their forger without ever being stopped.
“We’re moving to new space tomorrow,” Miriam told Nanée. “A Jewish leather goods maker is vacating a floor of a building before the Vichy seize it, and he’s given it to us. Number sixty rue Grignan. We interview from eight till noon, take lunch, then conference as long as it takes to decide which of the day’s interviewees we might help.”
Wednesday, September 11, 1940
THE CAS OFFICE, MARSEILLE
The new CAS office—up a dark stairway at the back of the building to a floor split into two rooms, with Varian’s office at the back—still smelled of leather goods. On the wall across from the windows, in place of the shelves of handbags and briefcases and wallets, now hung an American flag. The rest of the front room was dedicated to square wooden tables and hard wooden chairs like the one from which Nanée was interviewing a charming young Austrian artist, hoping to get him through the bureaucratic nightmare that was the first step for a refugee escaping France.
“Do you have a usable passport?” she asked him, the next question from the script. With Austria now part of Germany, an Austrian passport got you exactly nowhere, and all German Jews had been stripped of their citizenship. But sometimes refugees had managed passports from other countries. “Other travel documents?” Sometimes a country issued a document in lieu of passport. “An overseas entry visa, preferably to the United States or Mexico?” “One to anywhere else?”
Well, that saved her having to ask discreetly if his documents were genuine. She marked the answers down in their code.
“Anyone in the US who might sponsor you?”
The artist had an agent who represented his work in New York. That was something.
Spanish and Portuguese transit visas? A temporary French residency permit? A work permit? Money? Again, no and no and no. He’d had a residency permit, but he’d destroyed it. He’d been on the ghost train from Camp des Milles, one of the two thousand refugees who’d nearly reached the Spanish border before the train turned back on news of a train of Germans arriving that might take them prisoner. They’d all destroyed their papers, better not to have proof of being a refugee of the Reich, only to learn that the rumored Germans were, ironically, their own refugee train. A few, like this fellow, had managed to open a boxcar and jump somewhere near Arles, but most stayed aboard to be returned to the camp, afraid that jumping would lead to being found and shot on sight by the invading Germans.
“All right. Can you tell me about anything you’ve done to oppose the Nazis?”