AMBOISE
It took Nanée all of Tuesday to get the nearly five hundred miles from Marseille to Tours, where she caught the first bus Wednesday morning to Amboise, the easy part of this journey to find Luki. She came alone, traveling on a valid French transit visa, with more francs than she would need in her pocket but without the German-issued ausweis or passierschein necessary to enter the occupied zone. She did, though, still have a Paris apartment, as she explained to the nice young border guard to whom she handed her American passport with a bribe discreetly tucked inside. Monday night Varian had helped persuade Edouard that she ought to be the one to find Luki and bring her to Villa Air-Bel. Then after they turned the radio off and everyone went to bed, Edouard tapped lightly at her door, and climbed into her bed, and made love to her again. She woke Tuesday before dawn to him still beside her, wanting to tell her more about Luki, to share with her his love for this child he’d been separated from for so very long.
The bus dropped her in a rubble pile of a town, mansard roofs collapsed into crumbling facades, or intact but hanging out over lopsided walls and shattered windows, or in heaps of nothing that would ever be anything again. All that remained of what had been a church—perhaps the église Saint-Denis of Luki’s school?—were high pillars of unroofed stone. Yet along the Loire here a winter market offered the last of the fall produce spread on tables, stalls of tablecloths and napkins, and plenty of local wine.
Nanée hadn’t eaten much since she left Marseille, but the attention she drew in the market made her uncomfortable. No one trusted a stranger these days. So she asked the woman at the first market stall to point her to the school.
“The school?” The woman frowned suspiciously and pointed back across the main road, mercifully away from the bombed-out church. “église Saint-Denis is two blocks up and to the right. White-and-brown Tudor. But there is no school.”
Nanée held herself hard against the tears threatening. “The school was destroyed?”
The old woman stepped back and, with fear in her eyes now, repeated, “There is no school.”
NANéE STOOD LOOKING up at the stone and slate and mercifully unbroken stained glass of église Saint-Denis, trying to imagine what Edouard’s friend could have meant to send them looking for Luki at a school that didn’t exist. But the interzonal card form left little room for providing information. She was just about to pull the church doors open when a young nun emerged, as startled by Nanée as Nanée was by her.
Nanée asked if the nun could point her to the school.
“The school?”
The nun took Nanée to the Mother Superior of her order, a bull of a woman dressed, like the younger nun, in heavy black robes with a simple black drape of fabric over her head, her face and shoulders encased so tightly in white that all you saw was her guarded face, surprising clear skin, and plain-brown-paper eyes. Her face in all that fabric was disconcerting. Face Floating in White and Black, Eduard might name the photograph he might take.
“I’m looking for a girl I believe to be at school here, a five-year-old,” Nanée said. “The child of a friend. They were . . . separated. Her family are frantic to find her.”
The Reverend Mother stood and calmly closed her door. “You are not the girl’s mother?” She blinked long lashes the same faded brown as her eyebrows and eyes. Could Nanée trust her? Was Luki here, and if so, did they know her as Luki?
“I come at the request of her father,” Nanée said.
“And he is where?”
Nanée simply met her gaze. She was in occupied France. She couldn’t assume anyone here was on her side, much less anyone in a position of authority in the Catholic Church.
“It is complicated to trust in this moment,” the nun said. “I find that if I put my trust in the Lord, he guides me. Perhaps we could start with this missing child’s name?”
Nanée wasn’t sure she believed in any lord, but then her childhood had been marked by no real trauma. It was hard now to see what she had been running from when she left Evanston.
She chose her words carefully so that anything she said could be explained as something less illegal than coming to smuggle a Jewish girl over a border even Nanée herself wasn’t permitted to cross.
“We call her Luki.” Not Luki Moss, but we call her Luki, leaving open the possibility of a nickname that had no bearing on an actual name.
“This girl would know you?” the nun asked.