“Glass of cognac, my dear?” said Grandmère. “You look as if you need one.”
“No, thank you.” Daisy lowered herself on the sofa, taking care to avoid the small, warm hollow left there by Monsieur Legrand. “I can only stay a moment. The children will be home from school.”
“Yes, the children. And there is this dinner party to prepare for, no?”
“That too.”
Grandmère pressed her lips together. She was a slight woman, shorter than Daisy by several centimeters, topped by a mass of fluffy hair that had recently—and rather abruptly—turned from its original ash blond, without a strand of gray, to a luminescent white. That was Grandmère for you, all or nothing. As always, she was a little overdressed for the occasion, in a long dress of emerald silk topped by a short quilted jacket of aquamarine satin, a combination of colors that could never have worked on any woman except Grandmère, who had been born Minnie Gold of New York City and wore whatever the devil she liked. Now she stood in a rustle of silk and went to the liquor cabinet. “Cognac you must have, my dear, whether you want it or not. Actually, I suspect you do want it, only you don’t think it’s ladylike to ask.”
“Oh, Grandmère . . .”
“Here. I’ve saved you the trouble.” Grandmère returned with a snifter, which she handed to Daisy. The lamp made her rings glitter. The jewels used to be real, but Grandmère had sold them off, one by one, and replaced them with paste, which everybody pretended not to notice. Anyway, you couldn’t tell unless you were up close and happened to know a great deal about gems. They were excellent fakes, the best. Grandmère would accept nothing less.
Daisy stared down for a moment or two at the amber circle between her thumb and forefinger. Grandmère resumed her seat on the opposite sofa. Daisy sipped. A very small sip, and then a larger one. Oh, the burn! But it was a nice burn, a good, expensive burn, a familiar burn that tasted of home. From the sofa cushions came a whiff of pipe tobacco.
“I need your help,” said Grandmère.
Daisy glanced at the books on the sofa table. “I’m already helping you, aren’t I?”
“It’s not enough.”
“You know I can’t. It’s risky enough, what I’m doing. Carrying your stupid books back and forth.”
“There’s no risk at all. Nobody knows what you’re really carrying. Nobody would notice if they looked.”
“They might. Germans are like bloodhounds. Have your new fellow do it. That’s his job, isn’t it?”
“My new fellow?”
Daisy nodded at the door. “Monsieur Legrand. He’s one of your little army, I can smell it on him.”
“That? That’s just his pipe, my darling. He’s a poet, as I told you.”
“Oh, of course. A poet. Who just happens to have found work at your favorite bookshop.”
“Well, Jacques needed someone to replace dear Émile, who—as you know—had to leave so abruptly because of his poor mother in Brittany. Someone with enough skill and knowledge to—”
Daisy held up her hand. “I don’t want to know what he does. I don’t care. I don’t want to get mixed up in your crazy plots. I have a husband and children to think of. I’m just delivering books to my grandmother, that’s all.”
“Your mother would have—”
“My mother is dead.”
She said this a little more sharply than she meant to, and Grandmère winced at the noise, or the sentence, or both. Daisy looked away, to the fireplace, where the familiar Rodin twisted its black, sinuous limbs on the left-hand side, just as it had in the old apartment. She set the empty glass on the sofa table and rose. The cognac was already making her dizzy.
“Stop,” said Grandmère. “Please.”
“I can’t help you, Grandmère. I’m sorry, but I really can’t. You’re right, I’m not like Maman, I’m not brave or defiant or cunning. I can’t do what she did. I’m just Daisy. And my children will be home soon, and my husband, and we’re having some important people to dinner tonight, people who can help Pierre in his work—”
“Exactly, and—”
“And that’s all I can do. I can’t risk getting into trouble, helping somebody else’s family. I’m sorry, but I can’t. To protect my children, to keep my children safe, that’s all I care about.”
“Well,” said her grandmother. “Well.”
Daisy couldn’t bring herself to look at Grandmère. That look of pity and frustration, she couldn’t stand it this time. Instead she dragged her gaze along the wall until she found the curio case in the corner, old-fashioned not in the elegant way of the rest of Grandmère’s furniture, but brown-legged and lined in faded burgundy velvet. She stared for a moment at the little halo of light on the glass cover. “I know I’m disappointing you. I know you wish I were like her.”
“Like whom?”
“Like my mother. But I’m not a heroine. I am not capable of doing miraculous deeds. I just want to stay alive. I want my children to stay alive.”
“And your husband?”
Daisy shrugged and returned her gaze at last to Grandmère’s face, which was more tender than she expected. Maybe she was getting soft in her old age. Then Daisy caught the books with the corner of her eye and thought, Maybe not.
“Pierre works to protect us,” she said. “Everything he’s doing, he does to protect us.”
Grandmère put her hand on the arm of the sofa and hoisted herself upward, and it occurred to Daisy that this everyday action seemed to cost her grandmother a little more effort than it used to. But there was nothing stiff or measured about Grandmère’s movements as she walked down the room, following the exact line of Daisy’s earlier gaze, until she came to the display case. Instead of unlocking the glass lid, however, and taking out the talisman within—something an astonished Daisy had seen her do only a handful of times, her entire life—she stuck her hand underneath the case, palm upward, and pulled open a small, unmarked drawer.
“What’s that?” Daisy asked.
Grandmère drew out a piece of paper and walked back to the sofa. She set the paper on the table and resumed her seat, without saying anything, until Daisy felt morally obliged to sit down, too. She looked at the paper, and at Grandmère, and her eyebrows rose.
“My dear Daisy,” said her grandmother, straightening her dress around her knees, “we are none of us safe, don’t you realize that? When they come for one of us, they come for any of us, all of us.”
“Grandmère, my heart breaks for the Jews, it does. Why, Madame Halévy and her sweet children, across the street, it doesn’t bear thinking of. The Nazis are monsters, worse than monsters—”
“Darling,” said Grandmère, “darling, don’t you understand? Haven’t you ever guessed?”
An icicle seemed to have found its way inside Daisy’s stomach, where it melted slowly and leached its coldness throughout her middle. “Guessed what?” she whispered.
Grandmère nodded to the paper that lay between them atop the sofa table. “Did it never occur to you? Minnie Gold of New York City, rich as Croesus, weds the Comte de Courcelles of Picardy, France. Are you really so naive?”