Daisy, her mouth dry, her stomach cold, wished for another glass of cognac. Instead she reached out and grasped the corner of the paper and held it before her, fluttering until she took the other side with her left hand to hold everything steady, hold the world steady. She didn’t read it, however. She didn’t need to. She was not so naive, not really.
“You’re a Jew?” she whispered.
“Naturally I am. I haven’t been to synagogue since I was a girl, I confess, but you see the family tree before you. And there is nothing on that page, dearest Daisy, that an industrious public official couldn’t discover for himself, if he had the curiosity.”
Daisy set the paper back down on the table and looked up. “Pierre can save you. Pierre—”
“Pierre is interested in nothing but his own neck, my dear, which is something I tried to tell you from the beginning. If Pierre can secure his own standing among his masters, he will happily sell his wife’s grandmother to them. With a red bow tied on top of my head.”
“But he can’t! To accuse you would be to accuse me, his own wife. His own children!”
“Ah,” said Grandmère. “You’re beginning to see the situation.”
“He wouldn’t do it.”
“Maybe he wouldn’t. But I doubt he’d be able to stop those who would. He’s a minor official, nobody important, no matter how much he thinks he ought to be. And the Nazis have begun to get serious about this business of hunting down the Jews in France. Maybe they’ve run out of prey in Germany and need their sport, I don’t know. But we’ve heard that—”
Daisy put her hands over her ears. “No, don’t say it.”
“But you must hear, Daisy. You must.” Grandmère went to the edge of her seat and reached across the table to grasp Daisy’s elbow. “We are none of us safe, do you understand me? None of us. This Madame Halévy, I know her. Do you know why she was arrested? Because Émile was caught with the papers he’d forged, and they never got to her, she couldn’t escape with her children. We lost Émile and we lost the Halévys, and time’s running out. They’re planning something more, something bigger. Not to pick us off one by one, but all of us at once. To round up everyone. So you must help me, Daisy. You must. If not for others, then for yourself and the children.”
Daisy stared at her. The coldness had faded, and now she was just numb. For nearly two years she had lived with fear, ever since the Germans had first marched into Paris, and her husband, Pierre, had been arrested in his office, his stupid little post in the civil service of which he was so proud. Then the Nazis let him go, which was a relief, and he went back to work, but this time under the supervision of the occupiers, in a new bureau they had set up for agriculture and supply, managing the rationing of food, exactly the kind of petty lickspittle rule-enforcement he relished. So the fear remained, only at a low simmer, and also this terrible sick feeling of dependency on Pierre, this knowledge that her entire existence and that of her children relied on her husband’s ability to remain in the good graces of the Nazis who ran Paris. And meanwhile her neighbors were being deported, her friends and acquaintances arrested at night without warning, so that her street and her arrondissement and all of Paris, really, existed under this suffocating atmosphere of terror, of panic just barely suppressed. What would she do, Daisy wondered, almost absently, if the numbness left her and the panic took its place?
“But there’s nothing I can do,” she said. “I don’t have any skills. I can’t forge papers or—or listen through keyholes—”
“Of course not. But you have a husband who is climbing his way up the Nazi ladder, and tonight he’s hosting a dinner. A rather important dinner, from what I understand. Several Germans of considerable rank will be gathered around your table, eating your meat and drinking your wine—”
“Grandmère, that’s unfair. I had nothing to do with that.”
Grandmère’s hand went up. “I’m not accusing you of anything, Daisy. I know your heart. All I need to know is the names of the people at dinner tonight, that’s all. Just their names. You don’t need to do anything at all.”
Daisy gnawed her lip.
Grandmère put her index finger down in the middle of the paper. “I never wanted you to marry Pierre. He’s a weak man, Daisy. Like watered-down wine. But you insisted, God knows why, a man twenty years your senior. You wanted a nice, respectable husband. I suppose I can understand. A girl who grew up without a father naturally wants to fill this void in her life. And now you have your respectable husband, you have your dear children, God bless them. You have your comfortable apartment in the Eighth. And what has it got you, after all? You don’t love him.”
“Enough, Grandmère. You don’t understand, not a bit. You never have. You don’t know what it’s like to grow up without a mother or a father, with all the rumors—don’t think I didn’t hear them—in this crazy place, this hotel, like an animal growing up in a zoo, an animal nobody wants—”
“Don’t say that. I always wanted you. I raised you myself. When your mother died, I wanted to die, too, and you were the only reason I did not simply kill myself with grief, because you needed me, and you were hers. And now I need you, Daisy. I need you to help me.”
“Grandmère—”
“Their names, that’s all. Just the names. Please, Daisy. Help me.”
Daisy closed her eyes and knit her hands together in her lap. She gathered up an image of her children’s faces—round-cheeked Olivier and pale, thoughtful Madeleine—and in the absence of sight, the whiff of pipe tobacco came to her again, mixing up the two ideas, her children and this Monsieur Legrand whose name was almost certainly not Legrand. She opened her eyes again and stood.
“I must get home,” she said. “I’ll think about what you’ve said.”
Daisy found her way back downstairs without difficulty, clutching the book that she was supposed to return to the bookshop the next day. As she crossed the entrance hall, passing over the very spot where the German officer had stopped her, she felt a shiver on the back of her neck. She glanced to the left, where the noises of revelry still floated free from the Little Bar.
She thought she saw a face turn away and melt back into the throng of uniforms. But perhaps she was mistaken. Just nerves, she told herself. Now she was seeing Germans everywhere, even when they weren’t really there.
Chapter Four
Babs
The Hôtel Ritz
Paris, France
April 1964
My nerves bounced and tapped on my skin like flies, but when I looked down to slap them away, I was surprised to see they weren’t really there at all.
“Really, Babs, this is so unlike you.”
I glanced at my sister, Diana, behind the wheel of her roadster, the wind rippling her headscarf. She met my gaze briefly—at least I think she did since her eyes were hidden behind very large white-rimmed sunglasses—then returned her focus to the road, which, considering how she drove, was preferable.
I didn’t want to argue with her, knowing I would lose and then agree that we’d best turn around and head back to Langford Hall. Instead, I remained silent as Diana continued to race toward the local train station, as I clutched the side of my door while surreptitiously checking my watch. I didn’t want to miss my train to London’s Victoria where I would catch the Night Ferry and its train to Gare du Nord in Paris, knowing if I missed it, I wouldn’t find the courage again.