Miriam proposed they invite the Bretons to take two of the villa’s extra rooms.
“Easy for you to say, since you’re leaving,” Nanée said, remembering André that night at her Paris apartment. You spied on your father? Did you spy on anyone else?
“André makes Nanée nervous,” Danny said.
“Pffft, I don’t even know him,” Nanée protested.
“André has that effect on anyone with any sense,” T said. “But he’s French, and he isn’t Jewish, is he?”
“The Vichy government finds his writings contrary to their ‘révolution nationale,’” Varian said.
It would be only for a few weeks, until Varian got him out of France.
After dinner, they gathered in the Grand Salon over the newspapers—not the French collaborationist rags but the Swiss, which provided more information （although even they didn’t criticize Vichy）， and the single-sheet resistance newspapers like Aujourd’hui. Danny turned the chipped knob of Nanée’s radio, searching for the signal-jammed BBC news.
“Wait!” Nanée said as faint music crackled.
Danny tuned the radio more carefully, and cranked up the volume. Big band music. “In the Mood,” by Glenn Miller and his orchestra. But where was it coming from?
Charlie Fawcett, who played the jazz trumpet, stood and with delightful enthusiasm pretended to play Miller’s trombone. Leon Ball joined him on the air saxophone.
Nanée stood and grabbed Gussie. “You know how to dance, kid? Come on!”
Varian scooped up Dagobert, took one of his paws in hand, and began to dance too. Then everyone was dancing—forbidden in Vichy France, as was jazz. They danced to Duke Ellington’s “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart” and “Frenesi” by Artie Shaw—Charlie playing air clarinet even as he danced with Nanée—and Judy Garland singing “I’m Nobody’s Baby.”
“That gal singing about nobody wanting to love her?” Charlie said. “That fits her like socks on a rooster.”
He and Ball had a fine time joking about being more than happy to have Judy be their baby as Nanée wondered, as Garland did in the song, whether anyone other than good old Dagobert would ever take a chance with her in love, or she with them.
The music came, astonishingly, from a Boston shortwave radio station. On clear nights out here in the open countryside, they could get music all the way from the United States.
When they called it an evening, far later than they ought to have, Ball said he and Charlie would drop Varian on their way—evasive about where exactly they might be headed.
But Nanée said to Varian, “Why don’t you take the blue room? We can get your things from Marseille after work tomorrow. But Dagobert sleeps with me.”
Monday, October 28, 1940
THE PANIER DISTRICT, MARSEILLE
Nanée walked up a winding alleyway lined with decrepit brothels and bars, too close to the stinking muck in the sewage drain running down the middle, but she was determined to be seen disappearing if she was to disappear. A rat ambled along closer to the buildings, then climbed up onto a garbage pail and inside, less threatened by her than she was by him. Another crossed one of the lines of laundry strung from windows, dingy undergarments improbably mixed with brightly colored children’s clothes. Nanée wished she’d brought Dagobert, but he would be yanking on his leash to stick his nose in the open sewer and racing off after those rats, running headlong into the garbage pail. She regretted too leaving her pearl-handled pistol back on the high armoire shelf in her new bedroom at the villa, thinking it would be incriminating if the police stopped her on her way to deliver this message whose meaning Varian would not even share with her. She’d understood without Varian having to say it that she couldn’t be tortured into disclosing what she didn’t know.
It was nearing evening, the sky as gray as the street. Old ladies on chairs in the doorways were wrapping their yarn around their knitting needles, preparing to go inside, while young whores emerged to shop their wares. At place des Moulins, a square with a café in which people sat sipping a last something before the chilly damp of the night settled in, a table of already-drunk men called out to her for her price. She swallowed back a smart retort and headed up the alley to the right, repeating the message to herself: I’m afraid there will be no news from Paris. She was to deliver it from outside the door. She was not to see who the recipients were. She was to leave immediately. Not another moment beyond what you need to deliver the message, for their safety and your own.