“Of course,” Nanée said. “I . . . Why don’t I get some stationery and a pen, and I’ll meet you in the library?”
So simple. So easy. They would compose a letter together, one woman who’d lived in Paris writing another who still did, like old friends. No one would suspect. This was how he could reach out to Berthe without putting Luki and her at risk.
But how would he get Luki out of the occupied zone? The Nazis would shoot them on sight.
One step, he thought. One step, then another, the way he’d survived the camp. Find Luki. Maybe she was already safely out of France.
He followed Nanée out to the library, where André and Jacqueline sat drawing at the little table in the corner. As Nanée went to fetch her stationery, Edouard studied the playing card Jacqueline was creating—bright red and yellow and blue triangles and swirls that might have been painted by Miró.
“It’s Baudelaire,” she explained.
Nanée, rejoining them, said, “And I suppose, André, that octopus is some ‘marvelous’ personage too?”
The tentacles so much like the drawing André had done that night in Paris, André’s octopus body wedged between the head Edouard meant to be Nanée and his own legs she had drawn.
How had André come to be living here in Nanée’s villa? With Jacqueline, but it wouldn’t be the first time a Surrealist indulged in a ménage a trois.
“They’re making a game,” Nanée told him. “A card game which I suppose André will insist we play—after he makes up the rules to suit himself.”
She smiled that way she did, softening her challenge, and sat down and took up that beautiful pen, moss-green agate with a gold clip and a gold band and bite marks at the end of the barrel. The pen he’d used to draw the face that wasn’t Nanée’s, that he’d boxed up in a hand-sketched birdcage; the eyes that weren’t hers either, that he’d hidden behind her flight goggles as if his grief might so easily be captured and contained.
She set the pen to paper. “Now, let’s find Luki, shall we?”
Tuesday, November 6, 1940
VILLA AIR-BEL
Edouard lingered over Madame Nouget’s grape-juice-sweetened polenta pudding in the Grand Salon, needing to eat slowly what everyone else thought were meager rations, as Danny manned the radio dial and interpreted the BBC announcer’s voice he alone was able to make out through the crackle. Roosevelt had won a third term in the States. The Germans had sunk the British merchant cruiser the Jervis Bay, while Ireland refused to allow Britain to use its ports. Jews from southwest Germany were being given thirty minutes’ notice before being shipped to camps here in the French free zone, the French protesting they shouldn’t be a dumping ground for Germany’s Jews. This French need to label him, Edouard thought. An excuse to turn away. Before France lost the war, the label was “German,” with the suggestion that he might sympathize with or even be a spy for the Nazis. Now that France aligned itself with Hitler, the label was “Jew.”
“Now,” André said, “the Murder Game.” He’d already pulled out a jar filled with paper slips and was offering them around.
“See, this is the thing about André,” Nanée said to Edouard. “He refuses to believe the whole world might not want exactly what he wants.”
But already Jacqueline and T were taking the children up to bed, Peterkin with Dagobert, and Danny and Gussie were pulling the drapes to block out the moonlight.
The game was simple. Each of them imagined and wrote down an assassination scenario （a weapon or means of death and a motive）， then drew slips from one jar to determine the assassin and the inspector, and from a second jar to determine the victim. Only the assassin knew who he and the victim were. They would turn off the lights and the assassin would make his way to the victim, to mimic his murder scenario in some appropriate way.
“A finger pistol to the head if your murder is by gun,” Nanée explained. “Tap their lips if you’re a poisoner.”
“If you prefer to strangle, hands on the neck, yes, but please don’t squeeze too hard,” André said.
T, rejoining them, said, “Then the poor victim dies and the inspector begins the interrogation. True-or-false questions.”
“There are no winners, no losers,” André explained. “Only an exploration of the mind.”
“We play to the death,” Nanée said. “Then we keep playing.”