The Tiger Claw (35 page)

But the constraints Uncle spoke of were those of his childhood in Baroda, not Paris, and the customs he wanted to re-create were the idealized feudal life of the fifteenth century, customs no longer practised even in India except in the courts of nawabs. By twelve, Noor had read and discussed the Qur’an enough with Abbajaan to know that restraints on women’s conduct and marriage were inventions not of Allah but of the mullahs who succeeded the Prophet. And so from the age of fifteen, when Uncle arrived, Noor’s creativity, and that of Zaib, lay in finding detours around his limits.

Noor sipped her tea almost to its dregs.

For instance, when, to Uncle’s horror, Zaib “expressed herself” on her eighteenth birthday, in the
hammam
behind this café, by henna-dyeing her hair auburn, Uncle promptly punished Noor for “allowing” it. Reprisals were always his way. But the corner of Noor’s mouth rose recalling how Zaib stubbornly kept to her auburn hair, even in London, long after Uncle had returned to India. Putting it in Christian terms for Mother, Zaib said her disobedience was a sin but one Noor had already redeemed on her behalf.

Noor and Zaib would chat for hours in the steamy women’s
hammam
and afterwards order tabouli, lamb kebabs and flaky honey cakes. None were available today—not only because of the war, but because of Ramzaan.

Noor swirled the tea leaves gathered at the bottom, then decanted the dregs into her saucer. The clumped, dark leaves were supposed to guide, but assigning meaning to their random shapes required a gymnastic imagination. Letters referred to names of people. Was there an A? Not that she could find. All she could see were flags or squares—warnings. But warnings of what? When? All in a clockwise spiral: events were coming towards her, around her.

Noor glanced up. Everyone seemed to be engrossed in his own work or play. Too quiet, perhaps, but quite as normal as she remembered.

Zaib would interpret happy endings from her tea leaves; Zaib was so much better at adjusting to the world the way it was. How matter-of-fact Zaib had been the day she accompanied Noor to Madame Dunet’s home. Four years younger, the sixteen-year-old took charge. Somehow she had five thousand francs, all counted and ready in an envelope, for the midwife. More money than Noor had ever seen in her life. Zaib held Noor’s hand all the way across the Bois de Boulogne, held her close as Madame Dunet applied the suction, washed her clothes afterwards.

Strange how my secret, shared at Madame Dunet’s, brought us closer
.

The warnings, the warnings. What could they mean?

The red-fezzed
garçon
who took her order—was he a collabo? Or were the chess players? What if the place she felt safest was the one place she wasn’t?

Stay alert, stay vigilant!

Abandoning her attempt to decode the tea leaves, Noor paid the
garçon
, arranged her headscarf about her neck and made her way across the street, through the tall gates of the Jardin des Plantes, past a wooden signboard that announced
No admittance to Jews
.

Inside the Jardin des Plantes, regiments of riotous flowers from all corners of France and many other countries stood upright in their oblong beds, neatly classified and separated beneath the sculptured trees. The Germans had yet to invent a method of transporting these fragile beauties to Germany.

In the distance, starched white plumage—a nun shepherding a line of girls in neatly pressed, pleated skirts. Noor slowed for a long-eared white rabbit mincing across her path, its leash, then a very old gentleman in a top hat, his face like Monsieur Durand’s abject one. Then past a couple who, oblivious to a barbed wire blockade beside their bench, were entwined in a passionate kiss.

A pair of cocky young men with slicked-back long hair, long coats and drainpipe trousers passed carrying a bundle: a cat wrapped in a small straitjacket. The poor animal would soon be passing for rabbit in black market bistro tureens. “
Lapin rôti au four … au poivre … au fenouil
.”

Professor Balachowsky was bowed over a bed of
pensées
. Noor murmured the all-clear password as she walked past. The Professor straightened, put his pipe in his mouth. In a few minutes he joined her in the privacy of the gazebo.

The exchange was to be quick. The map, marked with an X to show the burial spot for the arms canisters dropped two days earlier at Rosny, passed from Noor’s hand to his. She whispered the
code words that would authorize release of the smuggled canisters for transfer onwards from Grignon.

Quickly, Noor pulled the letter she had written to Zaib from her jacket pocket. “I would be obliged, Professor,” she whispered, “if you would give this letter to Gilbert before the next landing.”

But the Professor was pale behind his unlit pipe. Sweat beaded above his worry lines.

“What is it, Professor?” said Noor. “Are you not feeling well?”

He jerked his head. “Max was captured by the Gestapo in Caluire, near Lyons. Go to Phono immediately and tell him. Say it is very possible the great Max is no more.” He turned away, slump-shouldered.

Max. Jean Moulin
.

“Wh-when was Max captured?”

“Three days ago—June 21.
Hélas
! He was tortured horribly. Horribly. But I know he did not speak—why would he speak now? The first time the Boche tortured him, three years ago, you know he slit his own throat with a splinter of glass rather than sign his name to lies. But it is too much to expect that he will resist and survive a second time. Or escape again.”

Noor laid her hand on the Professor’s arm; a bone-deep tremor went through it. She helped him to a bench in the corner of the gazebo.

Professor Balachowsky seemed to struggle to master himself. “
Je suis fou
! We all know this happens but never think it will happen to someone like Max. I only met him once, but …”

He sat up straight. “When the Germans came, I thought, ‘I’m just an old professor teaching about insects—what can I do?’ Then I heard of Max and I thought, ‘My grandparents came from Poland and bought a vineyard, but I’m as French as Monsieur Hoogstraten.’ Monsieur Hoogstraten’s grandparents were Dutch, you see. So as soon as he returned to Grignon from the POW camp, I asked, ‘Director, what shall I do?’ Little did I know Director Hoogstraten had been in the Resistance for more
than a year, since the Battle of France … But it was all because I heard the story of Max.”

“But you’re not sure Max is dead.”

“I hope so, for his sake,” said the Professor, looking away. “The Gestapo chief in Lyons put him on display for fellow prisoners—all with the Resistance, so they smuggled out messages as soon as they could. They said he was in a coma. Swollen lips, head in bandages. Knuckles broken, face beaten to an unrecognizable pulp, eyes dug in as though they’d been punched through his head—Oh, please excuse me, mademoiselle!
Enfin
, it was the last time our Max was seen alive.”

A cold sickness crawled over Noor.

“The Germans must be delighted,” Professor Balachowsky said after a silence. “Without Max, the Free French groups will return to sporadic sabotage. Well-meaning, but scattered and uncoordinated.”

“But it is all fighting the Germans—isn’t that important?” Noor hoped to lead him back to hope.

The Professor gave a ruptured sigh. “Anne-Marie, it is only in the past few months we began to benefit from working together. If we derailed a train, the network with a well-placed worker made sure phone lines were cut so there was more time to get away. If we planned to blow up a building, another network might verify it would be full of Germans. It’s taken three years to create what we have today—codes, supply lines, maps of secret passages, courier lines, workshops, escape routes and safe houses.”

He glanced right and left, then spoke even lower. “In the beginning we were just schoolboys playing with matches. Printing newspapers, pouring water into German petrol tanks, making grand symbolic gestures, risking our freedom and our lives just to paint V-for-Victory signs on street corners—pinpricks to the Germans! It’s only now that no German feels safe anywhere in France. Every time they climb aboard a train, mount a truck or a bus, they fear the Resistance will call down English bombs upon them—or set their own charges.”

“By Resistance, do you mean networks like ours, or the Free French?”

“Both. I was at a meeting where we all agreed to co-operate—the only time I saw Max, standing there with his white scarf covering the scar. Heard that strange voice.”

Miss Atkins had said the
SOE
only co-operated with the Free French “when we have to.”

“Why would The Firm co-operate with the Free French?” asked Noor.

“
Vous savez
, the Free French have gathered information for General de Gaulle that The Firm could only dream of gathering for Churchill. Free French networks extend everywhere in France, and know the right questions to ask and whom to ask in every village, and because they ask it on behalf of a Frenchman, General de Gaulle, people are glad to help. But when people know their answers will be sent to Churchill and the English, they think twice.” The Professor sounded almost envious of the rival intelligence group.

A sooty pigeon fluttered into the gazebo and pecked about, searching for crumbs.

Noor reached into her pocket for the tobacco coupons Gabrielle had given her, and held them out to the Professor.

Professor Balachowsky’s gloom lightened for a moment. Without a word he pulled his pipe out of his mouth and pointed to a tiny hole at its tip.

A miniature poison dart gun.

She nodded, still holding out the coupons.

He took them with a grave “Merci,” then straightened, wiped his brow with a large white handkerchief, then his moustache and grey goatee. “First Vidal, now Max. But we carry on. There is nothing else to be done. We’ll come through this, Anne-Marie.”

He stuck his thumbs in his vest pockets and took a deep breath. “Archambault said your transmitters and suitcase arrived. It was so amusing …”

In a teasing whisper he recounted that one parachute got caught in a tree, breaking open Noor’s valise and festooning the drop zone with her white lingerie. Archambault and the others had to hunt all over for the clothing. The valise was now strapped shut and taken to Grignon.

Noor might have been embarrassed except that the jovial tale of her unmentionables was so obviously told to mask Professor Balachowsky’s greater woes.

“I’m most thankful that the delay didn’t give the Germans time to reach the drop zone,” she said. She and Émile would make separate trips to Grignon to move the transmitters and her personal belongings. Noor would conceal one transmitter at Madame Gagné’s boarding house at Drancy, the other in Renée’s cellar. The last would be transferred from Grignon to the boarding house behind Chez Tutulle.

The Professor seemed recovered now. Noor kissed him on both cheeks as they parted.

“
Haiya-‘alas-salah! Haiya-’alas-salah
!”

The
azaan
was ululating from La Mosquée’s minaret as Noor left the Jardin des Plantes. As she hurried down the rue Monge, the full import of Professor Balachowsky’s news rippled up inside her. A tidal wave chased her down the métro stairs and crashed against her solar plexus.

Allah! If the great Max, the one man who knew every leader of every Resistance network in the country, has been arrested and tortured by the Gestapo, how long can our network last?

CHAPTER 19

Paris, France
Saturday, June
26, 1943

A
T A LITTLE PAST 18:00 HOURS
, Émile returned from the couturier with Monique’s white gown of Indian parachute silk looped over his arm. Monique draped it across the card table in the drawing room so Renée, Noor and Babette could admire its delicate lace.

Suddenly, four pairs of knocks sounded on the front door of the little house on the rue Erlanger. Then again. And again.

“It’s the right signal,” said Émile.

Hard and loud enough to be the Gestapo.

Monique said, “
Chéri
, were you expecting anyone tonight?”

Émile shook his head. Forefinger to his lips, he pointed towards the kitchen.

In a trice Monique had bundled up the wedding gown and was following Renée and Babette through the kitchen, down into the cellar. Noor seized the knob of a cupboard door in the foyer and joined the brooms and buckets inside. The door wouldn’t quite close behind her; she could see through the slit.

Émile took his time putting on his jacket, deliberately straightened his tie and reached for the latch.

It was Odile Hoogstraten, a breathless Odile, who flung herself in, leaving her bicycle sprawled on its side on the stone path behind her, wheels still churning.

“Message for you.” Her whisper verged on tears.

Noor left the cupboard and joined Émile and Odile.

“Papa sent me to tell you: Prosper and Archambault have been arrested by the Gestapo.”

The cupboard burst open behind Noor. An avalanche of brooms plunged into the foyer.

“Prosper captured? Archambault arrested?” repeated Émile when all the crashing and drumming on the wood floor stopped.