The Tiger Claw (36 page)

“When? How?” Renée had come out of the cellar and was standing in the passage, Monique and Babette behind her.

Noor began picking up fallen brooms and mops and putting them back in the cupboard.

This was not supposed to happen. Arrests happened to others, theoretical agents who didn’t study the
SOE
handbook carefully, or agents with code names like Vidal and Max. Not to people she knew, people in her cell. Not to jug-eared Prosper, who moved in time with the jazz and called her “old girl,” or Archambault, who sang in the choir at his lycée, smelled of Old Spice and was to leave for London as soon as Noor’s transmitters were operating.

Odile took a deep, gulping breath. “Prosper—yesterday morning—they were waiting for him when he returned to Paris from Trie-Château. Plain-clothed, in black Citroëns—definitely Gestapo. Archambault after him, at midnight—but Papa didn’t learn of it till today.”

Odile’s shoulders began to shake. Renée guided her into the drawing room, where the girl dropped into a chair. Though Noor had met Prosper only twice, she shared Odile’s instinctive esteem for him—a man of integrity, responsible for a very large family.

Odile caught her breath and went on in a more coherent flow. “It started on Monday morning. Gilbert didn’t come to meet Prosper at the Gare d’Austerlitz with the two Canadians. So Prosper thought they must all have been arrested. He came to talk to Papa—he was so agitated … Papa agreed he should get out of Paris, till he could find out what happened. Prosper went to Trie-Château. But when he came back …” Odile’s face sank into her hands.

A suspicion crept into the back of Noor’s mind—something Odile had said. “Why didn’t Gilbert meet Prosper at the station as planned?”

Odile looked up. “He said the Canadians arrived late and he was delayed. There’s more. An agent who landed at Rosny the next night was also arrested, but I don’t know where or his name. Another agent left a message at Flavien’s saying all of them are now at the avenue Foch.”

“They won’t talk, you know they won’t. However they are tortured.” Émile smoothed his hair but only succeeded in tousling it further. He turned to Noor. “We must send a message to London at once. The entire network is compromised. London must inform the other cells, other networks …”

Noor nodded. Since her rendezvous with Professor Balachowsky at the Jardin des Plantes two days before, she had concealed one transmitter under her bed at Madame Gagné’s boarding house at Drancy and one in Renée’s cellar, but the third, destined for transfer to the boarding house behind Chez Tutulle, still waited at Grignon.

“They will hold out twenty-four hours. But wait—when were they arrested?
Mon Dieu
! We have only a few hours left and they can speak,” said Émile.

Noor had her own questions for Odile. “Where did the Gestapo catch Prosper?” she asked. “In Trie-Château, on the train, at the station in Paris or at his apartment?”

Odile took a glass of water from Monique and gulped it down. “At his apartment.”

“Where?”

“Gilbert said it was at the Hôtel Mazagran in St-Denis.”

Gilbert. Archambault was right
.

At the Jazz Club last Sunday night, Prosper said only Archambault, Gilbert and herself knew his new address. Archambault had been captured after Prosper. That left Gilbert and herself as informers. And since she had not committed such a crime herself, that left Gilbert.

Tuck away the information. Tell Émile later
.

Aloud, she said, “How did the Gestapo know he would be there?”

“I—I don’t know,” said Odile. “They were waiting for him when he returned, that’s all we know.”

“From Gilbert.”

“Yes, from Gilbert.”

“We must send a message to London,” Émile repeated with an edge in his voice.

“You can’t transmit from here,” said Renée. “The Gestapo might already be watching us.”

Noor could receive without detection, but German vans were on the prowl night and day in hope of intercepting radio traffic to England.

Renée left the drawing room. “Come here, Émile!” came her voice.

She was lifting a corner of the lace curtain above the kitchen sink and pointing. Émile joined her at the window. Renée pointed into the darkening courtyard behind the house. Émile put his arm around her shoulders and their voices sank to a murmur.

Monique placed a bowl of soup and a piece of chocolate on the dining table before Odile.

Babette looked back and forth from one adult to another, then curled up on the chaise longue, lips puckered to match her china-faced doll. She stroked its rose-patterned silk dress and wound a lace scarf about its neck.

Renée returned to pace the drawing room, Émile behind her.

“I don’t think anyone was watching us—you were mistaken, Renée. It’s nothing, just a shadow.”

“If you are not careful, you too will be captured,” Renée said to Émile. “You just go anywhere this fiancée of yours leads you.”

To Noor, Émile’s fiancée seemed to follow more than she led.

“Our wedding was only three days away.” Monique’s voice held tears. She caressed the white silk gown, draped again over the card table.

“Oh, we will have our wedding,” said Émile. “The Gestapo isn’t going to stop us from getting married!”

“You’ve risked so much for her wedding dress, you may as well marry,” said Renée, sitting down at the card table. “But I think
she
must move.” She pointed at Noor. “Your involvement is dangerous enough. Having this woman from England here with us now—
Écoutez
! We may as well ask the Germans to come and arrest us.”

Renée might be right, but Noor couldn’t go to Madame Gagné’s and hope to arrive before curfew.

“
Pas de problème
! I will arrange for you to go to Madame Aigrain,” said Émile. “Her apartment is just a few minutes from here.”

“I will go with Anne-Marie to Madame Aigrain.” Babette was looking up from her doll.

“
Shhhht! Tais-toi
!”

Monique prepared a packet with a cheese sandwich and a bottle of cider for Noor, and Noor packed her transmitter and a few clothes into her valise. It took no more than a few minutes and Émile was back to take it from her hand. Swiftly, he gave Noor directions to Madame Aigrain’s.

He thumbed each side of his moustache. “The Germans are frightened of cemeteries, especially at night. Our information is that they find excuses not to patrol there. The Claude Lorrain cemetery here in Auteuil is too close. Meet me at the Cimetière de Montmartre at 21:00 hours. The sepulchre of the Famille Ginot on the avenue des Polonais will be left open. Remember, Famille Ginot.” Then he left.

Fifteen minutes later, Noor stood at the door with her transmitter suitcase in hand. She looped her lemon scarf about her neck and put on her oilskin. She took leave of Monique with kisses on both cheeks.

“I must see you at our wedding,” said Monique, almost in tears.

Babette kissed Noor formally, then threw her arms around her.

Renée’s rouged cheek was cool against Noor’s. “
A bientôt
,” Renée murmured, as if she would have preferred to say adieu.

A few minutes ago I woke up fighting. The dungeon has not even the straw mattress from my cell, and I had dozed off on the damp stone floor; by now I can sleep with insects crawling over me. This was no nightmare. My chains whipped my shins as I kicked and flailed against a clawing thing. A rat gibbered and squeaked when my clog hit its hide. The sight of Monsieur Durand’s rabbits at Drancy still haunts me; starving rats in my cell and my heart races like a Spitfire engine
.

In the absence of light I no longer read the world, scan its symbols and hidden meanings. I squeeze my eyes shut then open them to know if the blackness lies within my eyelids or is the inside of my cell. Invisible colours surround me, all absorbed into black
.

I can no longer trace the anatomy of letters. I am bereft of pictographs, icons and signs. With no paper, no pen, I commit words and phrases intended for you to memory. For you, ma petite, my unborn audience of one, I rearrange and revise words in my mind. Perhaps I will never see paper or pen again. If so, this is the letter you will never read, letter from my spirit to yours
.

I feel my way across the cold floor to the door, lie down and press my nose to the line of light at its base, suck in a small current of fresh air. I hear moaning and find it comes from me
.

Sometimes I talk to Armand too, but to imagine my beloved for an instant in circumstances like mine, or worse, is to near the dread abyss of insanity; my thoughts flee from the brink. That any of my friends in the Resistance might be in dungeons like this is horror enough
.

Let me remember something beautiful—the sustained strength of breath in a khayal, Debussy’s Afternoon of a Faun. I try to
whistle a Chevalier song, then a Piaf lament, but their words elude me. I play a sonata on the damp, slimy wall, but that reminds me too much of Armand. Then comes defiance. I sing out the Marseillaise, then “Quand Madelon.” But this too reminds me of Armand, and my voice breaks down. I recover after a while, sit up in a corner and sing “We’re Going to Hang Out the Washing on the Seigfried Line” till my throat is sore
.

Light blazes from the open door. I squint. A shadow looms across the walls. My gaoler’s face comes close, face like a Frankish battle-axe. Wordlessly her hand draws back
.

A sharp crack to my face and I am silenced
.

Much later she brings a cup of water, cool and pure as if drawn from the well of Zamzam, and a cup of cold mangel-wurzel soup
.

I try to meet her eyes, imagine her smiling, breast-feeding a child. No image comes
.

She turns away. The metallic slam of the door reverberates behind her
.

The dark is the danger zone where distinctions fade to black and nothing has a name. Here day and night, logic and clairvoyance, reason and madness, objectivity and subjectivity, dream and reality, positive and negative energies are one. Here past and future become present, become visible
.

My leg cramps, I vomit a thin stream of burning stomach juices, vomit out of sheer rage
.

Rage at Vogel for reducing me from the sublime importance of action in service of love and ideals to the scatological—that bucket of feces in the corner whose vile odour keeps me light-headed and nauseated. A few short months ago I had what every woman needs—dignity, vanity, modesty. I want them again, to look and feel and be my best for Armand. I want Armand back. I want the prospect of our life together again
.

Pacing, pacing, on legs jellied in fear of the return of the rats, I measure this dungeon cell. It’s the same size as the room Émile arranged for me at Madame Aigrain’s the night Prosper was
captured. Eight paces long, four paces wide. I know these dimensions well; I spent many hours there, in hiding
.

Leaving Renée’s home the night we heard Prosper and Archambault had been captured, I took a circuitous route to avoid a checkpoint and a Mercedes parked before an épicerie. The concierge took a key from the pigeonholes behind her desk and led me up two flights of stairs to meet a wisp of a woman with a very large face
.

Madame Aigrain—oh, c’est incroyable! Madame Aigrain was the improbable made probable: Tante Lucille come to life. She was old, sickly, and moved with a cane. She had a history of malingering illnesses. She was born in Bordeaux, had lost a son in the Great War. Yes, at Meaux. An old harp stood in the corner of her drawing room, and later I found that her callused finger pads gave it a harsh, edgy tone; each piece sounded like a chorus of insects
.

I felt almost guilty for my preknowledge of her
.

It was so disconcerting to meet a person I had created from a name given by Miss Atkins. I kept comparing, comparing, the way Mother had compared me always to her idea of a perfect daughter, the way Uncle had compared me always to his idea of a perfect niece
.

I had no right to compare Madame to any pre-existing template. She was herself, she was unique and, above all, she was kind
.

Awkwardly I asked her prénom and was relieved to find it was not Lucille, but Solange. And that she collected Lalique perfume bottles, not bone china figurines; and she didn’t mind, indeed positively enjoyed, a new face in her home
.

Madame Aigrain lived alone but for her Siamese cat. She managed a perfumier—which explained her strange smell; she resorted to eau de cologne to mask the scarcity of soap. Her daughter was the couturier who had sewn Monique’s wedding dress, and we became friends when I said her daughter had what every seamstress boasts: “les doigts d’or”—fingers of gold
.

The thimble-size room where Émile had already deposited my valise was windowless and airless, no more than a cupboard. The transmitter I’d brought in that valise was useless here. A folding cot
,
a coarse carpet, a folding chair, a bookshelf. Madame Aigrain brought a pitcher of water and a basin, and set them on the bookshelf above leather-bound volumes of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, pages still uncut. Some comfort; at least Madame Aigrain was storing, if not reading, the works of banned Jewish writers
.

A second shelf held a row of well-thumbed Simenon detective novels—Simenon, author of the Jewish Peril articles, whose name I’d heard on the blacklists aired by both the BBC and Honneur et Patrie, the clandestine Resistance radio station
.

On the third shelf lay a French–English dictionary and a set of Dickens novels in English
.

In English?

Tucked under the carpet I found a map of France. I held it up to the light and found pinpricked holes at Marseilles, Barcelona, Lisbon. They confirmed my guess: Allied airmen shot down over France must have hidden in this room before me. Madame Aigrain was helping smuggle those downed airmen back to England
.