Danny said, “What do you have in mind for getting refugees out of the camps, Nanée?”
“How did you know that identity card was forged?” she insisted.
“It won’t be as easy as sweet-talking a single guard, if that’s what you think,” he said. “These camps come with fences and watchtowers and men with guns.”
“The identity card, Danny.”
He frowned. “It wasn’t the card. It was the look on Fry’s face when I picked it up.”
Dagobert, hopeful, stood and wagged his tail as Nanée stepped to the sink, but she only idly dipped her fingers into the running water.
“Even if we could get these men out of the camps,” Danny said, “they need passports, French transit and exit visas, Spanish and Portuguese transit visas, a final destination visa, and proof of passage out of Lisbon. Portugal doesn’t want to be overrun with refugees when the music stops.”
“For proof of passage, the venerable old Cook travel agency will provide false transatlantic tickets for two hundred francs,” Nanée said. “For entry visas, the Chinese sell ones that say, ‘It is strictly forbidden for the bearer of this document, under any circumstances and at any time, to set foot on Chinese soil.’ Fortunately, neither the French nor the Portuguese read Chinese.”
Dagobert lay down on the bathroom floor, head on paws. This was going to take some time.
Nanée said, “The other documents are complicated, but not impossible.”
In recent weeks, the temporary Czech passports they’d relied on had been shut down. So had the Lithuanian ones they’d spent a fortune to get. The Dutch. The Panamanian. New Spanish and Portuguese rules made it nearly impossible to have transit visas from both countries at the same time too, and Varian’s best guess was that every name telegraphed to Madrid for a Spanish transit visa was submitted to Gestapo agents operating in Spain. That meant refugees now could be sent through Spain only if they weren’t well-known enough to be recognizable, and they had to travel under aliases until they got to Lisbon—another risk. The CAS had gone from sending people to the border on their own to having to escort them, increasing the danger to the staff. And try as Varian might, he couldn’t get people out by ship; the harbor and coast were too closely guarded.
“There’s a path over the Pyrenees that skirts French border guards.” Nanée hoped this was still true, or true again. The escape route from Cerbère along the cemetery wall and over the border was so often watched now that it had become unusable.
Danny turned off the water, and Dagobert hopped up hopefully.
“You’re changing your mind?” Nanée asked. She turned the water back on.
Dagobert let out a small, discouraged yip and settled back to the floor, head on paws.
“Most of these refugees are Jewish, Danny.” The French now had an even broader definition of who was Jewish than the Germans did, and Pétain and Laval were trying to get Hitler’s attention, to show they could contribute to his pet project—they could persecute Jews as well as any Nazi—and win a place for France in Hitler’s Europe. “I know you think I know more than I ought to,” she said, “but Varian hasn’t told me anything. He is strictly need-to-know. You forget what a fine snoop I am.”
“Don’t imagine, Nanée, that you’re a better snoop than the Gestapo, or even Vichy.”
“So you’ll join us.” Not a question; after a decade of persuading Danny to do what she wanted him to, she could read acquiescence in his voice. She turned the tap off.
Dagobert bolted to her side, wagging his tail.
“We need to get T and Peterkin here,” she said. “And we need to find you a place to live.”
Friday, October 25, 1940
THE #14 TROLLEY, MARSEILLE
Nanée, T, and Miriam caught the #14 trolley east from the Noailles station, through the Plaine tunnel and past the Saint-Pierre cemetery; they’d left Dagobert behind lest he scare off potential landlords. Nanée had seen homes with space around them in the hills of La Pomme, a far better place for little Peterkin （now with Danny’s mother near Cannes） than a lousy hotel or boardinghouse room in rat-infested, roach-ridden downtown Marseille. They hopped off the trolley to inquire at a café about rentals, then on a whim ducked through an underpass with enticing glimpses of the hills and valleys of Saint-Cyr, finding themselves on a long winding drive lined with plane trees and boxwoods, marked by brick pillars and a DO NOT ENTER sign. Carved into one of the limestone capitals were the words VILLA AIR-BEL—a name so like Miriam’s fleabag hotel Paradis Bel-Air that they couldn’t resist. It was so quiet. No traffic. No people shouting as they spilled from bars. No police whistles or harbor noise. Nothing but birdsong, the gentle shush of leaves fluttering in the wind, a trickle of water somewhere. It made Nanée a little nervous, as if noise were a drug she’d become dependent on to stave off her thoughts.