Daisy laughed and unwrapped the little boy’s arms from her waist. “I am not so late, am I? Where is your grandfather?”
Philippe shrugged. “Out. I am minding the shop.” He said this proudly, straightening himself to his full hundred and fifty centimeters.
“Very good.” She took her pocketbook from her shoulder and opened it. “Do you know what I have for you?”
“Sweets?”
“Not today, I’m afraid. Something else.”
Daisy put her hand inside the pocketbook and drew out a small stuffed rabbit. Philippe shrieked.
“For me?”
“Yes, for you! What other little boy is named Lapin? You must take very good care of him, do you hear me? There are not so many such rabbits to be found these days.”
Philippe drew the furry toy reverently from her hands and stroked its back with his finger. “He is just like Mademoiselle Madeleine’s rabbit.”
Daisy smiled and knelt down, so her head was on the same plane as Philippe’s dark head, all peaks and angles, eyes like the glossy chocolates they served on tiny, exquisite plates at the Ritz. “Not quite. Hers is spotted, and yours is brown all over. Like you, my little lapin.” She rose and kissed his hair. “Now, tell me what . . .”
Her words trailed away, because there on the other side of the room, where there had been nothing but shelves, Monsieur Legrand now stood in his shirtsleeves, damp with heat, a pen dangling from one hand and a book from the other. Staring at her.
Daisy went again to brush her hair from her forehead, but of course she had already done this, and there was nothing to brush. She tucked a few strands behind her ear instead. “Good morning, monsieur.”
“Good morning.”
“A little hot, isn’t it?”
“Miserable. Especially in that stuffy little hidey-hole of mine.”
“Is there somewhere else you can work, perhaps?”
“You can work in my room!” said Philippe.
Legrand gave the little boy a kind look. “No, no, my good man. We wouldn’t dream of intruding. We’ll just find a way to bear it, that’s all.” He stood back from the entrance to the hidden office. “Madame?”
Legrand was right. It was terribly hot in their workroom, almost intolerable. “I open up the window at night, to let in some air,” he said, “but I’d rather not take the chance during the day.”
“It wouldn’t help, anyway. The air’s no cooler outside.”
Legrand put the pen behind his ear and held out the book. “There are two more on the desk, still drying. Addresses are right here.” He squinted at her. “Is something wrong?”
“Yes. Pierre was in a very good mood this morning.”
“And this is bad news?”
“He wants to take me to dinner tonight. He wants to celebrate, he said.”
“Celebrate what?” Legrand said sharply.
“I don’t know. He wouldn’t say, exactly. I tried to draw it out of him, but he only admitted it was something to do with work, some big project that’s about to come to fruition and—one presumes—further advance his standing among the Germans.”
Legrand swore. “For a man working in the Jewish Affairs office, that can only mean one thing.”
“The rumored roundup?”
“What else could it be?”
Daisy pulled out a chair and sat. “The Levins have disappeared.”
“The family at school?”
“Yes. I asked the headmistress this morning, and she told me the children were no longer enrolled, that’s all. And her expression when she said this, it was like . . . it was like marble.” Daisy looked up at Legrand’s grim face. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything?”
“Nothing. I can only hope the move was of their own planning.” He sat down in the chair next to her and lifted his pipe from the tray where he kept it. From his pocket he took a matchbook and lit a match, which he stuck carefully in the pipe’s bowl until the tobacco inside had caught and the rich perfume seeped into the air. Daisy had watched him perform this ritual at least a hundred times by now. It meant that he was thinking about something, turning over some problem in his head. She tried not to stare at his fingers, or the play of tendons in his forearms, which his rolled sleeves exposed. But it didn’t matter, did it? Each shape of him, each bone, each color and shadow and hair of him was like her own. She could close her eyes, she could stare at the wall, she could bury her head in the thickest pillow and still she would know what he was doing, what he looked like at any particular moment, from any particular angle. Now he settled the pipe in his palm, wrapped his fingers around the bowl, set his mouth at the end.
A hundred times, and more. A hundred hours, possibly two hundred—who counted? Day after day they had met, they had labored without speaking, they had labored while speaking. It was a charity project, she told Pierre. For residents of Paris in these hard times, when paper was rationed and nobody could afford a new volume, the Mouton Noir had a kind of lending library, and Daisy delivered books and brought them back again. Which was true. The soundest lies, as Legrand told her, were the ones built on a foundation of truth. So she could look at Pierre and tell him, without blinking, how she spent her days. Not that Pierre really listened, or even cared. Pierre was too occupied with his own work.
Madame Levin. A handsome woman, a little reserved, dignified and correct in all her manners but sometimes funny, when you least expected humor. Daisy knew her in the way she knew any or all of the other mothers at the École Rousseau. They were more than acquaintances, less than friends. Still, Daisy had always liked Madame Levin. Her children were clever and maybe a little boisterous, but always polite in a genuine, unaffected way. Now they were no longer enrolled at the école. Daisy pressed her fingertips together and inhaled the smell of Legrand’s pipe and tried not to imagine the police—the French police, the shame of it!—pounding on the Levins’ door, dragging away Madame Levin and the two little girls, Marie-Rose and Geneviève, in their pinafore dresses and brown curls. Their pale, innocent skin.
A hand landed gently on her shoulder. “Now, then. Don’t despair,” said Legrand.
“Not despair? There’s nothing we can do. They will be deported to Germany, they’ll be interned in those terrible camps.”
“What do you know of these camps?”
“From my grandmother. How many do you think, in this roundup? Hundreds?”
“Thousands, possibly. Some of our agents are picking up terrible rumors. The Germans have got something up their sleeves, and they’re pushing the French to demonstrate their loyalty by cooperating.”
“Like Pierre.”
“Like Pierre. Like a great many officials in occupied France, many of whom have no love for either the Jews or the British. You cast your lot with the victors, it’s the way humans have survived and thrived through the centuries.”
Daisy drove her fists into the table and rose. “But what can we do? Isn’t there anything we can do? If I could just—just . . . stick a bomb in Pierre’s briefcase . . .”
“That would be brave and stupid and solve exactly nothing, besides killing the father of your children.”