Elza, bending before him, understanding somehow what he could not imagine, that taking this photograph would free him to touch her again, to take her into his arms, into their bed.
They stayed in Germany. He thought it was the right thing to do, to use his camera to fight to save his country, even still. That was his worst guilt until they murdered Elza and her sister—that he had stayed, that he continued to put her in danger. They never talked about the photo. He never developed the film, much less printed it, until he came home one evening to find Nazis in his own sitting room, Elza serving them beers, because what choice did she have? Luki watching, wide-eyed and afraid. He took them to Austria the next day. Fled to Vienna. He thought they would be safe there. He developed the negative and printed the photograph only then, Salvation, reclaiming Elza’s love.
Thursday, November 14, 1940
THE AMERICAN CONSULATE, MARSEILLE
I knew your father, of course,” Harry Bingham said.
“Did you?” Nanée responded to the American vice consul, trying to provoke a bit more detail and reexamining her story in light of this fact.
He sat observing her through round wire-rimmed glasses, more her own generation than her father’s, his wavy light hair, straight nose, and round cheeks friendly-looking despite his small, thin-lipped mouth.
“My brother Dickey’s daughter is here in France and in need of a passport,” she said.
Bingham registered surprise. “I didn’t know he was married.”
She feigned the awkwardness a proper girl from Evanston would feel in making the suggestion that a brother might have an illegitimate child. “You can imagine what a great surprise this daughter was for us.”
“I see,” Bingham said.
“But his child is of course entitled to an American passport.”
Bingham waited. She waited him out.
He said finally, “And the mother isn’t American, I gather?”
“The mother has passed away,” she said, sticking with the truth to the extent it could fit and even benefit her story.
Bingham said, “That’s—”
Convenient, she thought, but she said, “You’d like to offer condolences, but the cold fact is that my brother is happy to be able to put his daughter into better care, if you understand what I mean.”
The implication being that a man who took responsibility for his illegitimate child was honorable in some way the mother who bore the child would never be. Nanée hated the double standard of the wealthy, or perhaps of the entire world.
“I see,” Bingham said. “And this daughter is . . .”
“Yes, unfortunately, she’s in the occupied zone.” Nanée had no idea where Luki was, but it would take Bingham time to get the child an American passport, if he would.
“You have a birth certificate?”
She extracted a baptismal certificate Father Pierre Marie-Beno?t had provided, with Luki’s real name and date of birth, listing her mother as Elza Moss and her father as Dickey.
“Ah, Père Barbiche,” Bingham said, using the Capuchin friar’s nickname, born of the man’s long beard. The Catholic Church supported Pétain, who offered the possibility of restoring France to more “traditional” values that required women to stay home and be good wives, supporting their husbands, and assumed only Christians could have good values. The Vatican, being authoritarian itself, wasn’t much bothered by Hitler; they’d reached a concordat with him only months after he was made German chancellor. But there were good people everywhere, including in the Church.
“I suppose the good friar must have been on a visit to Paris when the child was born,” Bingham said. “He was at an Italian monastery until he fled Rome earlier this year.”
“He’s a friend of the mother’s family,” Nanée said, as the friar had suggested, should this question come up.
Bingham steepled his fingers. “You’ll have to apply to the Germans, of course, to bring the girl out of the occupied zone.”
“If I don’t take her home directly from Paris,” Nanée said, skirting the issue of the documents she would indeed need to apply to the Germans for to legitimately enter the occupied zone herself.
Bingham apparently appreciated the cleverness of this little twist, subterfuge being more likely to succeed when carefully planned. “It would be better if your brother applied from Chicago for this passport,” he said.
“Dickey has no photograph of her, and with the post being what it is now . . . I rather hope to get her home quickly, and Varian tells me you occasionally expedite passports for friends.”