by Sherry Jones
“With my compliments,” she told the delighted Nazis as she handed them their bottles. They hoisted them in a toast of thanks and guzzled down the contents, Adam’s apples rising and falling like hammers. While they were occupied, she glanced at Jacques, who gave a quick nod. She reached into her bag for the loose cigarette and lifted it to her lips.
“Allumez-moi, Capitaine?”
Jacques pulled a silver cigarette case with a built-in lighter from inside his jacket and handed it to her. She lit the cigarette and closed the case, then called to a passing waiter, slipping the case into her purse as she hurried away to pursue him.
“Madame!” Jacques called, and in a moment he was tapping on her shoulder. “I would happily give you my case, but it was a gift from a special friend.”
“Oh, excuse me,” and, reaching into her bag, handed him the duplicate case containing the microfilm. “I hope your friend is not too special. I have long been wanting to meet the famous capitaine Jacques Abtey.”
“Then we must arrange such a meeting,” he said, slipping the case into his pocket and giving her a lecherous smile. “As soon as possible.”
Josephine felt a pang: she wanted to pull him close right then and there, to feel the beat of his heart and to say goodbye—for he would leave with Pétain for Marseille tomorrow. Josephine would have left the city, too, by now, but she had to finish her mission. After three days’ training with the Maquis, she had emerged with a camera, the cigarette case, and Jacques’s instructions to make the film and bring it to him here tonight.
Paulette had already gone to Le Beau Chêne, not knowing what had become of Josephine during those three days. Josephine had joined the girl there this morning, the poor thing weeping in relief, she’d thought Josephine dead. Josephine had laughed and said she wasn’t that easy to kill. But now, under the bloodless stare of the Nazi officer blocking her way to her office, she wondered if she’d pushed her luck just a bit too far. His cold blue eyes and scarred nose had haunted her for years. This was the man from Berlin who had fondled his gun while she’d danced, and sent her running out the stage door.
“Excuse me, Officer.” She kept her eyes downcast. “A customer has fallen ill, and I must attend to her.”
“Frau Baker,” he said. “Don’t you remember me?”
She shook her head. “I’m sorry, I am needed elsewhere.”
“From Berlin?” he pressed, stepping to the side to prevent her passing. “The Stage Theater des Westens?”
“I was in Berlin a long time ago,” she said. “Please excuse me.” How did her voice sound so strong when she felt like she might collapse?
“But surely you remember Max Reinhardt, the Juden. Your good friend, wasn’t he?”
“If you want information about him, you’ve come to the wrong place,” she said. “We haven’t been in contact in years.”
“When someone does not look at me, I wonder what that person is hiding.”
Josephine forced her gaze upward, to the man’s face and saw, again, the mix of lust and hatred his eyes had held as he’d stroked the gun in his lap. The urge to run shot through her, but she knew better than to try.
“What can I do for you, monsieur?” She refused to use the German honorific “Herr.” If they wanted to live in Paris, then let the fuckers learn French.
“That captain has been lighting cigarettes for women all night,” he said. “Why didn’t he light yours?”
“His hands looked pretty busy to me,” she said.
He narrowed his eyes. “Give me your bag.” He reached out a hand to take it but she jerked away from him, stepping back.
“What for, monsieur? I have done nothing wrong.” The officer lunged and grabbed the strap, yanking it so hard that he broke it. Josephine’s blood thrummed in her ears as he opened the clasp and pulled out the cigarette case.
“I see that you have a cigarette lighter of your own,” he said. “And it matches the captain’s case exactly.”
“It is a common item.” She folded her arms. “Unlike the bag that you have just broken. It’s a Givenchy.”
She held her breath as he opened the case, praying that she had not made a mistake and handed the wrong one to Jacques. If he found the microfilm, he would arrest her.
“It is empty,” he snarled.
“Of course, monsieur.” Her pulse slowed its wild ricochet. “I carry the case as a courtesy for customers who need a light. Everyone knows that I do not smoke.”
“Then why did you ask the captain for a light?”
She took the broken bag, and the silver case, from his hands. “To lure him from his woman. Surely you saw how she clung to him? I took his cigarettes so that he would come after me. And as you saw, my plan worked.”
The German’s head snapped around as he looked for the captain—but the table where Jacques and the other Maquisards had sat with their drunken German “friends” was now empty.
“Where is he?” he said. “I want to inspect his cigarette case.”
“Do you want to smoke? Let me get some cigarettes for you. I will return in a moment.” She went to the bar, grabbed her wrap, and slipped out the kitchen door, for the second time in her life running away—this time, wondering if she would ever be able to stop.
Before the sun had risen the next morning, Paulette awakened her: The capitaine had come. Josephine ran down the stairs and into his arms.
“You are dressed,” he said between kisses.
“For a quick getaway, Foxy. I didn’t like the way the Germans were looking at me—or at you—last night.”
“I am on my way to Marseille now. And you must leave, as well.” She should not bother to pack her things, he said, but should go right away. If she were stopped she should say she had a performance in Sarlat, the village near her castle.
“Sarlat? Do they now have a theater?”
“Your concert will be in the cathedral.” Posing as her agent, Jacques had arranged a benefit to help Paris reimburse the Germans for the cost of the invasion—a Nazi demand intended to further humiliate the city. “I could not believe how excited the priest became when I suggested you perform there. One might have thought the gates of heaven had opened.”
As indeed they had: under normal circumstances, Josephine would never perform in such a tiny town as Sarlat. At any rate, she was ready to go, and so was Paulette. Most of Josephine’s wardrobe and valuable furniture had already gone to Les Milandes, and Paulette had a Swiss passport and a train ticket to Zurich, where she would deposit Josephine’s jewels in the Suisse Bank.
“She will wear my bracelets and necklaces under her clothes. With the passport, they will not search her. Then she will return.”
“She ought to remain in Switzerland,” Jacques said. “It is a neutral country, and she will be safe there.”
Josephine had tried to convince her of this, but Paulette would not hear of it. “Paris is my heart, and without a heart, one cannot live,” she’d said. She wanted to work against the Nazis; that was evident from the shine in her eyes when Josephine had confided her underground adventures.
“It is an enormous risk,” Jacques said. “If she is apprehended . . .”
“She would rather cut out her tongue than inform on me.” But Josephine had a plan to deflect the Nazis’ attention: before leaving the castle, she would call the police and report that her maid had absconded with her jewels. Since the Germans had hired Paulette to spy on Josephine—and she had been cooperative, feeding them trivial (and false) information—they would expect the girl at their headquarters. By the time they realized she was not going to appear, she would have crossed the border as Marise Delaunay.
“She will keep the name when she returns—as a Maquisard. I will teach her to shoot.” Josephine was a natural marksman, it turned out. After three days of firing at rats in the sewers, she could shoot out a candle at twenty yards.
“But she must not come back here—and neither, Josephine, should you. Göring received orders for your arrest
a week ago. He has delayed detaining you to give the Parisians some time to adjust to the new regime.”
“They will never.”
“I am afraid you are wrong about that.” He sighed. “But Göring has now sent his soldiers to raid your club. La Besnerais says they have shut it down, and will come to Le Beau Chêne for you soon. You must leave for Les Milandes right away.”
“Taking my Paris house wasn’t enough, huh? What grounds do they have to arrest me?”
“Conspiracy to commit murder.” The previous night, five German soldiers had been found dead in a dingy apartment near the Place Pigalle, in their underwear, their throats slit. “Their uniforms were gone, but the Nazis are keeping that quiet. They say the men were in a homosexual party, with some Frenchmen.” He curled his lip. “We decadent Parisians are such bad influences on the pure Aryan race.”
“But what does that have to do with me?”
“They were seen in your club last night.”
“In my club? But what would I know about it?” Chez Joséphine had crawled with Nazis. “Which Germans are we talking about? Who were they with?”
He grinned. “To their great misfortune, they were with me.”
PAULETTE LEFT FOR the Le Vésinet train station immediately with Josephine’s driver François. While they were gone, Josephine fired her staff, telling them she was closing Le Beau Chêne and giving them their pay and bonuses in cash, and went to the stable to collect M. and Mme. Laremie, Jewish refugees from Belgium whom she had met through her work with the Red Cross and hidden in a horse trailer.
When Francois returned, they all piled into the car with her dogs, a box of food, and the champagne bottles of gasoline, and headed east to join the long stream of refugees headed for Pétain’s “Free Zone” in the south. The line of people and automobiles stretched to the far horizon, thousands upon thousands on the road to Bordeaux, fleeing hell. The slow crawl made her want to scream—what if Göring’s men had discovered that she was gone, and were now pursuing her? On the open highway, she’d outrun them—Jean had taught her to race at the Montlhéry track and she’d gotten pretty good—but stuck in this molasses she wouldn’t have a chance.
“I can’t stand it,” she said when the car had stopped for the ten thousandth time. She threw open her door and jumped out to walk, joining the motley parade of cars and trucks and vans and wagons, taxicabs and horses and motorcycles and bicycles, a girl on a unicycle, an entire family on roller skates, a man walking a Great Dane with a small child clinging to its fur, a hearse with its back open and people crowded inside and sitting on top, everyone weary and dazed, so many in the city without any means of transportation except their legs or, in some cases, wheelchairs.
Josephine would have liked to carry them all, but she had a carload, including her two dogs whom she ought to bring outside with her. The buzz of an airplane drew her attention upward. A Heinkel aircraft sped toward them, careening from the sky as if to crash into their midst. Screams filled the air as it swooped over their heads, strafing the ground with gunfire, sending up puffs of dust and clods of dirt and exploding the hearse in a burst of flame. The blast toppled over the girl on the unicycle, and Josephine started to run toward her, toward the burning car, wanting to help, but a hand grabbed her wrist and Mme. Laremie pulled her back. “Get in the car, don’t let the Germans see you.” She followed the woman and crawled, shaking, into the front seat, where she lay down and sobbed, her cries mingling with the wails and moans of injured children and grieving mothers, wringing tears from her body, her mind stained with visions of death like blood that would never come out, until, numb, she slept.
And was awakened by a loud banging noise that, when she opened her eyes, became that of a German fist on her window.
“Madame, we have arrived at the border with Free France,” François said. “The Germans want to see our identification papers, I think, but I cannot understand.”
The poor boy looked scared to death, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. “Bon courage, François. God will protect us.” As she rolled down the window, she forced herself to smile.
“Bonjour, monsieur.”
“Your documents,” the soldier said in German. He wore the uniform of a common Wehrmacht infantryman: gray jacket and pants, green collar and shoulder straps. Josephine handed him her identification card, gritting her teeth. If he asked to see her passport, she’d be in trouble. Jean had it; he’d kept it for her during their trip to Argentina, and when she’d told him she’d decided not to leave show business, after all, he’d left off in a huff, taking her passport with him. You are incapable of being a wife to any man. That had stung, but when he’d been injured on the Maginot Line, he’d begged her to come back to him. Keeping her passport was a way to pay her back, she supposed, for turning him down.
As the soldier took her card, he peered into the back seat, where M. Laremie was reading a newspaper, his white eyebrows furrowed over the page, and Madame knitted a sweater in such a frenzy that one hardly noticed the trembling of her gnarled hands—or so Josephine hoped.
“I want to see the old couple’s papers, too,” he said. “I want to see everyone’s.” Josephine glanced at the couple, who, continuing with their reading and knitting, either didn’t understand German or were very good actors. The boy stared at Josephine’s ID for what felt like hours. She could almost read his thoughts: Why is this name familiar? Is it on my list of those to detain? He mouthed her name and looked into her eyes. Josephine held her gaze steady as she gripped the armrest on her door.
“You are the famous singer?” He looked like he’d just found a treasure chest. “Josephine Baker. I have always wanted to see you perform.”
“ ‘J’ai deux amours,’ ” she trilled, giving him a coy look. He called out, his voice excited, and three other soldiers came over, all boys, one holding out a pen and a notepad and begging for her autograph. She signed the back of another’s hand, and to the first soldier gave a page of her sheet music with her signature scrawled across the front. Autograph in hand, he asked her to sing for them, and she opened the door and stood, and sang “J’ai Deux Amours” and “Mon Coeur Est Un Oiseau Des Iles,” adding verses, singing them twice, watching the traffic stream past, unchecked. She might have distracted them all day but for the call crackling over the radio, and their realization that they were neglecting their duties. The soldiers applauded and kissed her hand, waving the car along, forgetting about M. and Mme. Laremie in the back seat, who embraced each other and did not release their clutch until, when the car had crossed over the line of demarcation into the free zone, they joined Josephine in a champagne toast to freedom.
They all knew, though, that the absence of jackboots and checkpoints was only temporary, free zone or not. Adolf Hitler’s aims could not have been clearer: he planned to conquer the world, and a line drawn in the sand by a government that had so readily capitulated would not hold him at bay for long.
CHAPTER 25
They arrived at the castle midafternoon, after more than ten harrowing hours in the car. As the Laremies marveled over the budding trees, the brilliant green landscape, the blooming flowers, the bright ribbon of the Dordogne below, and the birds swooping down to fish, Josephine and François threw open all the windows, letting air and warmth into the chilly stone rooms. Josephine hummed as she removed the covers from the furniture, as she fluffed pillows and swept floors and wrote out a list of items for François to buy in the Sarlat market, and as she remembered the kisses Jacques had given to her before leaving that morning. Would she ever see him again? She hadn’t dared to ask.
How could anyone think of love while the world burned? On the other hand, how could anyone not?
She cooked steak and frites for her little group while they fiddled with the tabletop short-wave radio Jean had set up in the kitchen. At last they found a BBC broadcast from England, now practically the last free country in Europe. Josephine sliced potatoes while François and the Laremies clustered around the
radio to hear news of the world at war: A German air raid had sunk a ship carrying nearly nine thousand refugees from France to England. Russian troops had marched into Latvia and Estonia. Pétain’s government had moved headquarters not to Marseille but to Bordeaux. (Jacques was so nearby!) Several members of the French cabinet had resigned in protest over the government’s capitulation, including General Charles de Gaulle, the undersecretary of war. They’d gone to London to set up an alternative French government. Had Jacques gone with them?
“It’s about time somebody spoke up about that shameful armistice,” Josephine said. “General de Gaulle and his followers are heroes, if you ask me.”
“Shhh! Ecoutez,” M. Laremie said, turning up the volume. And then, over a faint crackle, came the voice of de Gaulle, measured, confident, strong, telling the people of France not to surrender as their government had done.
“But has the last word been said? Must we abandon all hope? Is our defeat final and irremediable? To those questions I answer—no! Speaking in full knowledge of the facts, I ask you to believe me when I say that the cause of France is not lost.”
Josephine put down her chopping knife and, wiping her hands on a dish towel, moved closer to the wooden table where the others sat. Like them, she leaned toward the box, pulled as if by a magnetic force to this speech that, she knew deep in her bones, she was destined to hear. De Gaulle spoke to all of France, but especially to her. She heard him predict that Great Britain and the United States would come to France’s aid, their industrial strength helping to defeat the forces of tyranny.
“They will come,” she said. “The United States will help us, I know.”
M. Laremie pressed a finger to his lips and moved his head closer to the speaker.
General de Gaulle called for all French soldiers on British soil “now or in the future” to contact him. He was calling her, and Jacques, to join him—and the rest of the Maquisards, all, to save France.