The Tiger Claw (28 page)

“So many laws—one cannot obey all of them.” Monique’s coaxing tone held a smile.

“You mock me?” said Renée. “We could at least try to obey.”

“But remember, Renée, since I was a little boy I have been chronically unable to obey,” Émile said in a jesting tone. “And now that I’m a vicious criminal, it’s even more difficult!”

Babette put her arms about his neck. “
C’est vrai, Oncle Émile?
”

“Huh!” said Renée. “Don’t let your uncle fill you with his ideas.”

Babette withdrew.

The candle guttered in its own smoke. A second flame rose from Émile’s cupped hand.

“Oh! What have I in my pocket for Babette?” he said. “
Tiens!
”

Babette’s laughter warmed the cellar. Tension melted.

“Chocolate? Say ‘
Merci, mon oncle
.’ Share it with everyone,” chided Renée. “One piece for each of us.”

Noor’s body shouldn’t betray her by enjoying chocolate when Armand could not share it. Under cover of the dark she slipped it back into Babette’s hand.

Monique said, “I’ll save mine for Odile. She loves chocolate.”

Voices rose and fell around Noor, arguing the merits of dark chocolate over light, Swiss over Belgian. The best chocolate éclair
she had ever tasted, said Monique, was from Madame Millet’s
pâtisserie
.

“What’s a chocolate éclair?” Babette interjected.

Startled silence all around. It was a question any child in India might ask.

Monique explained. Then, to Babette’s giggling delight, she told a tale of a
mousse au chocolat
so light, it slid from its mould and floated right up into your mouth. Émile added one of a chocolate fondue from Fouquet’s so creamy that each strawberry dived in of its own volition. Noor told Babette the adventures of a little poached pear in chocolate syrup searching for his love, a pear in vanilla syrup.

“
Très bizarre!
“ came Renée’s brittle voice. “Don’t fill the child’s head with such lies. She’ll think everything she swallows has feelings like us.”

Émile’s cheek shone gold with sweat. Noor touched her collar—too tight. And damp. Dust trickled down over her head—another explosion.

Now Émile reminded Renée of the chocolate gâteau she had made for Guy, when Guy came to court her. No cake she had made since equalled it. Warmed by his compliment, Renée promised to make such a cake as soon as chocolate returned to the shops, or for Émile’s wedding if that came first.

“I am a realist, my dear sister—our wedding will come first. Monique, tell me, is your wedding dress ready yet?”

Monique hesitated, then said, “
Non, chéri
. There is no material to be found for a wedding dress. But it’s no problem, I have some very nice dresses.”

“Oh, no, no. Tell the couturier she will have fabric. Tomorrow parachutes are landing at Rosny.”

The all-clear signal sounded before dawn. Émile led the way up the spiral stairs.

Noor ventured out with Émile and Monique. Babette squeezed past, evading Renée’s restraining hand, running to the
rue Erlanger. People from the apartment buildings were gathering there, looking up, looking south. Orange and red sparks flickered like fireflies in their eyes—reflected, Noor saw once she was standing beside them, from fires gorging themselves on Paris.

A hot prong of smoke drove into Noor’s lungs. A man beside her shook his fist at the sky. Behind her, a woman’s moan rose to a cry, fell away to sobbing. Ambulance bells—far away, getting farther away.

The crying of babies and coughing of children in the crowd now rose above the distant crackle and hiss. Renée pulled Émile back indoors. Noor glanced at Monique, who shrugged her helplessness and went in as well. Noor followed, shutting the front door.

The chest was pushed back against the wall, its rope-lock pulled tight and knotted, the linen rearranged to hide its false bottom. Renée flounced to the card table to continue her game of solitaire; sleep, she said, was beyond her now. Monique and Noor helped Babette to bed. Then Monique curled up on the chaise longue under a blanket to snatch three hours of sleep before work. Émile was soon snoring in Guy’s bedroom.

Noor stretched across the spare bed in Babette’s room, but a gramophone needle seemed to snag on a groove in her mind, repeating Renée’s words over and over.

Renée was at odds with herself, her hospitality at odds with her words. She said she desired Hitler’s defeat, yet she was angered by Allied actions that could lead to eventual victory and a free France. But didn’t Mother often say, after Abbajaan’s departure, to appraise a person’s actions, always, not words. Renée had opened her home to Noor and other agents. Such hospitality to strangers was part of life in places like India but not usually exhibited by Europeans.

Did the
SOE
reimburse people like Renée for board and lodging for its agents? She should have asked Miss Atkins, even if it meant discussing money.

Why did she distrust Renée’s hospitality, paid or not? It seemed to rise from Renée’s love for Émile, not from a conviction
that resistance was critical or that the three-year German Occupation could be ended by an Allied victory.

She wouldn’t stay with Renée again if she could possibly help it. But Émile and Monique needed her services as soon as the transmitters arrived; that resolution wasn’t one she could keep.

Forget about Renée. What of Armand
?

Armand might not remain for very long at Drancy but could be sent to work in Germany. Why had she not thought of this? Émile said, the day she arrived, “Many are being sent east by train—some say to be resettled, some say to work.” But he had not said when. Odile’s voice replayed: “All Jews are being sent east to work now, even the children.” But Odile too had not said when. Did she mean immediately, soon after they were arrested or … when?

How long will the Germans keep Armand and Madame Lydia at Drancy? They have already been in the camp more than eight weeks. How can I know if they are still there?

Noor was as divided as she had judged Renée to be. There was Noor Khan who needed news of her love, fearful of making some terrible mistake that might send Armand and everyone in her network deeper into the clutches of the Germans, and who must not contact a single friend who knew her or Armand before the war; and Nora Baker, alias Madeleine, trained operative—detached, careful, logical, cool. Both would return to Madame Gagné’s boarding house as Anne-Marie Régnier and somehow, insh’allah, find Armand before the Germans sent him away to work in the east.

CHAPTER 16

Pforzheim, Germany
January
1944

A
KEY RATTLED
in the lock, bolts drew back. I barely had time to hide these papers under the mattress before Vogel entered
.

Gloves in hand, coat over his arm, gull-egg blue eyes squinting through round glasses. The same brown felt bow tie upon which I fixed my gaze through hours of questioning at the avenue Foch, a new suit of worsted navy blue wool. Leather boots wet with snow. In spite of myself, I welcomed the scent of pine and fresh air he brought to my cell
.

I retreated to my cot. Rattle of chains as I sat down. Red-raw ankles extended, manacled fists in my lap
.

The former bank clerk’s pallid face loomed over me
.

He rode in a staff car from Munich. Came out of his way just to see me, having told Kommandant Kieffer that more information was needed from Princess Noor. Was I not pleased to see him?

I closed my face and looked away. I don’t know what I look like, but it can no longer be my “exotic” features that attract Vogel. My cheekbones have edged to the surface. And my hair! Its sheen is long gone. It’s long, matted and crawling with lice. The clothes I am allowed to keep—two blouses, this skirt and a sweater—hang at chest, hip and thigh. My hip bones fit in the groove of my cupped hands. My stomach has flattened as if to meet my spine. What is my body, which
the poet Kabeer called “but a skin sheet stuffed with bones,” worth to this man? He sees something in me or what I represent that brings him here each month, longing in his gelid eyes. He never touches me and comes only to talk in measured tones to his audience of one
.

“
Writing paper is scarce, yet I authorized it for you. What have you written?”

“
A children’s story,” said a rasp with little resemblance to my voice. I speak in French to Vogel; his English is not as fluent as he believes. So it was not really a lie, because the word for my “history” and my “story” is the same in French—“histoire.”

He thought it a harmless pursuit, like a game of solitaire. Something womanly to while away my time. Maybe it is. When I write to you, I am no Scheherazade performing for her life. Forgive me for not telling a happier tale, the kind of tall tale of American cowboy derring-do Mother loved inventing, or some Sufi fable replete with turtledoves, fountains, talking animals in deserts imparting wise sayings we forget to follow
.

“
What stories were you told as a boy?” I asked, trying to imagine him smaller
.

“
The usual ones … Hansel and Gretel,” he said in a musing voice. He was predictably flattered by my slightest curiosity about him. “Every night of ’39 in the POW camp I dreamed I was Hansel and couldn’t find my way home. I dropped breadcrumbs and the birds had eaten them.”

Vogel spent almost a year during the phony war he calls the sitzkrieg with other German nationals in a French POW camp, until his countrymen invaded. I think that year changed him from a cosmopolitan francophile to a rabid follower of Hitler, fanatically German as only an expatriate can be
.

He mused on in his soft voice. “I would search and search, believing I would find the end of a ball of twine that could be unravelled to lead me home. But I never found it—Why am I telling you this?”

Because I listen, I answered mentally. Vogel and I have met many times for my “interrogations,” and if I begin by asking questions instead of answering, I learn more
.

“
I ask the questions. Kommandant Kieffer says compassion is making me soft.” He stood over me—stood too close—cleared his throat and began with the usual ones. “State your true name.”

“
My true name is Noor. Princess Noor Inayat Khan.”

You know I am no princess, but Mother taught me well to spin a yarn, though she could never teach me how to knit. My trumped-up title brought stupid Vogel, ignorant of the Orient, importance in his Kommandant’s eyes, as if a little royalty rubbed off on them. Both are comically feudal, like so many Europeans once the veneer of National Socialism, Fascism, Communism or Democracy scratches away
.

“
Why don’t you join us, fight against British imperialism?”

“
I do not want to follow Germans into Fascism.”

“
But, Princess, the triumph of the Aryan can be yours as well—but if we cannot establish beyond doubt that you are Aryan, I have to regard you as non-Aryan. Perhaps even a Jew.”

A hoarse hack of a laugh burst from me. I am Rapunzel, Rapunzel who can let down no blonde hair, nor can spin straw from my flea-infested mattress to gold, for the fair skin he perceives before him results from a tangled bloodline. Isolating the Caucasian blood of my mother would mean disavowing the Pathan and the Persian, the Dravidian, Maratha, even African strains in my past
.

“
There is no room in your Aryan heart for people like me. You said yourself: I am the ultimate threat, the mischlinge—the mixed breed.”

“
Listen to me—Germany was a great power until the Jews made us their target. Poor Germany! Jews in every country finance our enemies. But we will resist them, we will drive them from the world …”

On and on—words that sickened my soul, set my teeth chattering with anger. Who is victim, who the perpetrator, who is the oppressor, who the oppressed? Today his fulminations pinned me in a paradox: he sustains me in this cell even as he presses inexorably forward, turning my beloved to demon
.

“
Do you know a single Jew?” I said at last
.

Vogel waved the question away. “You, the English, the Americans—I do not understand how you think. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, not the Germans. Americans should be fighting with Germany, against the Bolsheviks. Why, why do you hate us Germans so much?”

Vogel asks about Germans, but he wants to know if I hate him. He wants my hate; he would like it better than my indifference. Fear and respect come parcelled with hatred. I answered Vogel once only—that it is not Germans who are hated everywhere but their rabid nationalism, their forcible occupation and rapacious plunder of other countries, their bombing of innocent people, their acts of barbaric cruelty
.

Strange that I rely on Hitler’s purist orders for protection from Vogel’s ardour; I should have been silent, the way I used to be whenever Uncle shouted at me, years ago. But the peace of silence is only temporary; something reckless rose in me that moment
.