The Tiger Claw (39 page)

For once even Odile was quiet.

Noor was losing track of direction. How far had they walked; surely they should be near or under number forty by now? Air pressed at her eardrums, she could almost hear ethereal music. This was how Abbajaan’s buried soul-energy must feel.

Just then Noor trod on Monique’s white satin heels. Madame Meignot had stopped suddenly. Émile held the lantern as she unlocked an arched wooden door. A groaning creak echoed down the passage to Noor, and the lantern showed a glimpse of Émile’s workshop.

Madame Meignot whispered, “I’ll go back through the passage and enter through the front door. If those Boche bastards are hiding inside, waiting for you, I will say I came for cleaning.”

“Wait!” Émile whispered directions on how to find and enter the cellar from Renée’s kitchen.

Noor crept into the cellar behind everyone else, and straightened. Émile moved past his workbench to the wall, lit a lantern and turned the crank to raise the camouflage canvas screen.

Noor’s gaze swept the cellar with the boarded well at its centre. The workshop was intact. The rope-locked chest had fooled the Gestapo—or they were waiting upstairs for Émile to return and be caught with the incriminating evidence. If so, Madame Meignot had volunteered to test the trap set for Émile.

Minutes passed, interminable minutes of silence, waiting for Madame Meignot. Renée took to the bench, her head in her hands. Odile whispered to Babette, stroking and re-braiding her hair. Émile and Monique moved around the work tables, deciding which items to leave, which to take. Noor helped collect and classify.

Her dress felt as if it were sliding over her skin. She dashed her sleeve across her forehead.

A creaking and scraping above, and the rope-loop loosened then began to descend. Madame Meignot had returned. The trap door slid back and Madame’s sky-blue turban nodded above. “
Vite! Vite!
The Boche aren’t up here, but they could be watching the outside.”

Noor was last out of the passage, behind the rest, as a low, doleful sound broke from Renée.

“What happened, what happened?” Odile wriggled forward.

Cast iron pots and pans were scattered everywhere in the kitchen. A shelf of crockery had been thrown to the floor. Blue-flowered white fragments were everywhere.

Renée sank to a stool. “My grandmother’s Gien!
Sales Boche!
”

Noor reached instinctively for her own grandmother’s memento, her tiger claw—then remembered where it was now. Broken china didn’t cause Renée’s tears; it was the wanton destruction of her final link to her grandmother.

“And my cake! They took the cake.”

“Which cake?” said Émile. “Is this the time to think about cake, Renée?”

“Renée made us a chocolate wedding cake,” explained Monique.

What barter, wheedling, saving and sacrifice it must have taken Renée to find chocolate, eggs and flour for that cake, and yes, it was a terrible waste; but there was no time to cry for a missing cake, not now.

“
Vite! Vite!
” hissed Madame Meignot.

Émile sidestepped stealthily to the front window and parted the blackout curtains a crack. “Black Citroën. Yes, at the far end of the street.”

Noor peered into the ravaged drawing and dining rooms. Houses in London had looked like this during the ’40 and ’41 Blitz when they took a direct hit. But bombs didn’t pull open every drawer in the sideboard, slit the flowered chaise longue upholstery down the middle, pull the stuffing out of cushions or tear back the green felt of the card table. And where there were bombs, there were clouds of plaster dust. Here, the ceiling was intact.

Black Bakelite circles were strewn around the room like platters; each gramophone record had been taken from its jacket. Even the curtains over the side windows overlooking brick walls had
been torn down, their hems slit. A hard object had split the telephone receiver and its cradle in two. A decapitated lamp had rolled off the table in search of its shade. Babette, lower lip trembling, held up her china-faced doll—face smashed, eyes rolled back in its head, ribbons of rose-patterned silk hanging from its waist.

A frisson of fear rippled through Noor, despite the summer heat, at the thought of what could have happened had the wedding party returned earlier.

Speculating about Gestapo motivations led rapidly nowhere, but Renée headed in that direction. Monique had wanted white silk for a wedding dress, which had caused Émile to meet parachutists at Rosny, which had attracted the Gestapo.

“
Non, non, non!
” Émile said.

“Then they must have been looking for Anne-Marie’s transmitter,” reasoned Renée. “When they didn’t find it, they became enraged and destroyed everything.”

Highly improbable as there was no receiver, English or German, that could detect the presence of a transmitter without it sending, and Noor’s transmitter had never been activated at Renée’s home. But it was no time to correct Renée, not when she was so upset.

“
Vite! Vite!
” Madame Meignot stomped her foot in the kitchen.

Émile snatched up a cardboard suitcase and dashed back down into the cellar. Monique and Renée began filling another: a photograph album, a jewellery case, a wallet, Renée’s ledger book and ration coupons, a few clothes, tins of food.

“Hurry up! Change!” Monique threw Odile a powder-blue dress and tossed a pair of black slacks, a maroon blouse and a beret at Noor.

“I can’t decide what to take!” Renée’s cheeks were glistening. “We go too fast, too fast—I’ll leave something important behind.”

Noor fumbled with the side zipper of her slacks and her blouse buttons, but changed in record time.

“You look like a man,” Odile said with a nervous giggle, turning her back towards Noor.

“And you look ten years older,” Noor whispered, zipping her up.

A severe-looking Renée met Noor in the drawing room—all the pins, fruit and flowers out of her hair. Monique had changed into a black dress and flat ballerina shoes.

Noor followed down the spiral staircase as everyone joined Émile in the cellar. Émile’s upper lip was rash red, his moustache gone; he did look different. He was closing the suitcase full of wires, welding torches, trigger devices, rubber stamps and forged papers. He cranked the mural down. Madame Meignot was already waiting. The passage door squealed shut behind them.

“Monique, Renée, Babette and I will leave immediately by train for Le Mans.” The lantern illuminated Émile’s worried face. “We’ll be safe there for a few days.”

“Do we need new identity papers?” asked Monique.

Émile hesitated, then said, “We have blank ones if necessary, but I don’t want to rouse suspicion. We’re on our honeymoon—
c’est vrai?
”

Monique managed a wan smile.

“Now leave singly, and meet at the Gare Montparnasse,” said Émile.

“
Vite! Vite!
”

The lantern swung and bobbed away down the passage in Madame Meignot’s hand, but Émile stayed the little group for more instructions. “Odile, you return to Grignon immediately and tell Monsieur Hoogstraten what happened here. Tell him to move every bomb, gun and bullet from Grignon—I don’t know where, just somewhere else. And warn Professor Balachowsky.”

“Didn’t the Professor take his students touring for new insect species?” asked Monique.

“Yes,” said Odile. “Waste of petrol—he could have brought his students here and they would have found a new Boche species of insect right here in Paris.”

“Shhhh! Make contact with his wife, then. Warn her.”

Odile was nodding like a marionette.

“Warn Gilbert,” continued Émile.

Warn Gilbert? Of what he knew already? He must have led the Gestapo to search Renée’s home. Intuition? No, logic. Should she warn Émile?

“Viennot must be told—maybe he can find out what made them search here.”

But maybe it was Viennot who had led the Gestapo to Renée’s home. Noor wasn’t as comfortable with the idea of Viennot’s Gestapo contacts as Émile seemed to be.

Wait
.

“Monsieur Viennot has a telephone—I’ll call him,” said Odile.

“From a call box,” Monique reminded.

“And leave him a message at Flavien’s,” said Émile.

“Anne-Marie,” said Émile to Noor, “Gilbert has urgent messages to be sent to London tomorrow. I said I would be meeting you today and would ask you to transmit for him from Grignon tomorrow. So, meet him at the institute at 10:00 hours. But tell him this will be the last time—it’s too risky now. If the Gestapo came here, they may know about Grignon. Remove Archambault’s transmitter and your own. Take them with you after your transmission.”

Noor followed as the little group, stumbling, suitcases bumping against passage walls, retraced their steps all the way to the
brasserie
cellar. Here, Madame Meignot embraced Renée and Monique quickly and patted Babette on the head. She waved to Émile and Noor in silence.

The pre-arranged sequence of knocks on the door to the courtyard brought the owner. He did not ask where they had been or if their mission was successful.

“Follow me. A man who finished his lunch has not moved from behind his newspaper. I can’t believe anyone finds the newspaper interesting these days.”

Émile, Renée with Babette, Monique, Odile and Noor headed for a side door in the courtyard. The owner motioned each person through, singly, carefully.

In her turn Noor peeked through the side door into a carriage lane. To her left, a parked vélo-taxi like the bicycle rickshaws in India. Brightly coloured, though. A horse hitched to a cart, feeding from its nosebag, swivelled his eyes at her. To her right, a few bicyclists and some children running away, chasing a bicycle wheel. She slipped into the sun-washed lane, feeling more agile in her newly acquired slacks and blouse.

A woman darted out behind the horse. Noor shrank back against the wall. The woman collected the horse’s dung in a dustpan, like fuel-gathering women in India. Noor waited till the woman took her pan back inside.

Noor drew in a lungful of fresh air, looped the handle of her handbag over her arm and set off on a circuit that would eventually take her to Madame Aigrain’s, back into hiding.

CHAPTER 22

Grignon, France
Tuesday, July
1, 1943

A T
RENET SONG
blared from a megaphone as Noor cycled past the toylike train station of Grignon and the swastika-draped
mairie
building and rode into the village square.

Two weeks before Bastille Day, the town was celebrating the feast of Saint Martin under a sunny sky embellished with a few puffs of teased wool. And under the eagle eyes of Marktpolizei circulating and watching the crowd. In one corner of the square, balls clicked in games of boules. In another, painted horses whirled children about a carousel. Puppet knights slew infidels on the Guignol stage; a little girl tugged at her mother’s sleeve, begging to join the watching crowd. A young man snapped his suspenders, flexing his biceps for the oblique glance of a passing shopgirl. Stilt dancers whirled like dervishes. A rag man cried, “Chiffons! Chiffons!” extolling the merits of his well-used wares. Girls and women carried baskets, buying and selling unrationed apples, turnips and Jerusalem artichokes at trestle tables, talking, listening, walking, their elders resting in the shade of willow trees. Boys in short pants dodged their mothers.

On any other day Noor would have stopped before the glove puppets or bought an apple for Babette. But after her narrow escape with the Garrys the day before, it seemed a dread flood
was rising to drown everyone. The tightness in her chest said England, the
SOE
, friends she’d trained with, agents she had come to know in the
PROSPER
network, relatives of whom she was always aware—everyone she knew seemed more remote than India.

Monique’s borrowed slacks and blouse were more comfortable for cycling than any skirt.

If only there were some way to know that Monique herself, Émile, Renée and Babette had reached Le Mans safely.

And if she could have received one, just one, word of news from Drancy, just one word that Armand had received her tiger claw and message; but there was none. If it was selfish to think of Armand when Prosper’s arrest had endangered more than fifteen hundred resistants across northern France … so be it. Each of the fifteen hundred resistants in Prosper’s network had a raison d’être. Armand was hers.

Crossing the square would attract the attention of the Marktpolizei, so she detoured through a web of streets and alleys that predated Cartesian geometry; and each turn delayed her further. At last she was out of Grignon, pedalling down the bumpy country road towards the Institut National Agronomique, standing as she pedalled as if straining to remain above water.

A quarter past ten—Gilbert, wait for me!

Sparrow hawks chattered—
kyow-kyow
—from fir branches. Wagtails
tchiked
, flicked their white tails and fluttered away as she rode by vineyards. Her blouse clung to her back, her hands slipped on the handlebars. She stopped, took her beret from her handbag and tucked her ponytail into it. A welcome breeze cooled her neck.