The Tiger Claw

by Shauna Singh Baldwin

  Émile reeled in the aerial and returned it to the suitcase. “We can continue cutting phones, derailing trains, bombing warehouses and stealing factory job sheets, whether the Allies invade or not. Viennot will get us information from German officers—he’s in touch with the Free French.”

  Noor tossed her code and message books on the transmitter, threw her chemise on top, closed the lid and secured both clasps.

  Émile’s furious whispers continued. “Not a single German occupying France must be allowed to sleep easy in his bed while they billet themselves in French homes, steal our coal, grain and wine and ‘resettle us’ somewhere in the east.”

  Noor put a finger to her lips.

  Émile was not finished. “The tanks and guns may be with them, but we have no recourse but to fight, for our families, for the future.”

  Carefully, he opened the mausoleum door, looked to left and right, and slipped out. Noor pulled the door closed and stood sweating, mentally counting to a thousand.

  Émile is right—the French must shake off their chains. As long as the Occupation continues, resistance must continue.

  For three days after Prosper and Archambault were arrested, Noor remained in Madame Aigrain’s spare room, lying low, following Proust’s self-absorbed characters through their jaded existence.

  Her only respite from Proust was another quick evening foray to Drancy, back to the garage. Had Claude determined if Armand was still in the camp? Had he received her message? Was there any news?

  “Non, mademoiselle, je suis desolé.” But he promised he would tell her immediately he learned anything. “I have my contacts,” he said in a conspiratorial whisper.

  A dispirited Gabrielle served dinner at the Café Vidrequin and, when her German soldiers were gone, showed Noor a postcard on which was printed, Je serai transféré dans un autre camp. N’envoyez plus de colis. Attendez ma nouvelle adresse. “I will be transferred to another camp. Do not send any more parcels. Wait for my new address.” Gabrielle’s little nephew had signed the printed words.

  Gabrielle had presented herself at the camp gates and asked for the children’s laundry. “They said there is no laundry. They said, ‘They have been deported.’”

  She looked straight before her; it was Noor whose eyes brimmed.

  “I can’t say how I felt when I heard that,” said Gabrielle. “I’ll tell you another time.”

  Then she had requested an appointment with Herr Brunner, the new Kommandant; it was refused. No one would tell her which camp the children had been sent to. Her letters were returned by the camp post.

  “The railway workers who come in here say those cars were bound for Metz,” she told Noor. “But after that they don’t have one single idea where the boxcars will be switched. Idiots! Don’t tell me they don’t know, enh! They have friends down the line, they could find out for me, if they wanted.”

  Gabrielle’s anger at the Germans had deflected to people who were trying to help her.

  And Monsieur Durand—poor Monsieur Durand. Madame Gagné said she had told him to leave. Her voice turned self-righteous, tinted with the certainty of a fortune teller gazing into a crystal ball. “If he’d told me where he was going, he’d be behind the camp walls by now.”

  Back to Madame Aigrain’s little room in Auteuil, where she couldn’t think of anything more she could do for Armand but pray. She had to rely on Claude now.

  By the third day, the forced inactivity was making her muscles crawl; her body was accustomed to hours of exercise. So when Monique insisted she attend their wedding, Noor gladly accepted. She needed a ceremony that celebrated love even as she yearned for her own.

  CHAPTER 21

  Paris, France

  Wednesday, June 30, 1943

  “OH, YOU TWO! Look where you’re going!” Renée’s re-soled wooden heels teetered down the street behind Émile and Monique. “No more kissing!”

  War-weary Parisians stopped to smile as Émile’s curly head obscured Monique’s eyes, radiant beneath white netting.

  A photographer’s lens might have lingered on his tenderness, her joyous smile, brown ringlets and floppy hat brim, the white silk gown edged with lace, bare shoulders and forearms, might have focused on the white kid gloves beaded with pearls that encased her small hands, and missed the swirls of Renée’s hair, swept high into a pompadour decorated with flowers and fruits, more colourful than any turban Abbajaan ever wore for performance.

  Noor, walking in their wake, Odile’s chatter in full flow beside her, wore a pink-ribboned flowered muslin, the only formal summer dress she had brought from London. It didn’t match her black handbag and gloves, but that couldn’t be helped. The sun’s heat was welcome upon her shoulders after the past few days in Madame Aigrain’s apartment.

  Lovers with enough confidence in their future to celebrate a wedding in the middle of war lifted everyone’s spirits. German soldiers sweating under their steel helmets waved the laughing little group through a maze of checkpoints with only a cursory glance at their papers.

  Only three years of Occupation and the Germans have become unremarkable, as if they have always been here.

  “Babette!” Renée called.

  Babette was skipping ahead, past a salon de thé, a boulangerie, a flower stall, heading for the wedge-shaped block of buildings rising over the rue Erlanger. She stopped before the rows of boxed red geraniums limiting the crowd on the sidewalk terrace of La Gargote, turned and called, “Maman! Maman! It’s Madame Meignot.”

  “Ne fais pas l’idiote!” Renée sailed forward, artificial fruit tinkling and bobbling. “Madame Meignot wouldn’t leave her loge for a minute.”

  “Maman, vraiment! I see her cane.”

  It was indeed the concierge from the adjoining apartment building, hair bound up in a sky-blue turban, coming towards them.

  “If I were a director, I wouldn’t give her even a bit part in my films,” Odile whispered at Noor’s shoulder. “Anyone can see she’s trying to find someone but pretending she’s not looking.”

  Émile continued deep in banter with a couple at one of the sidewalk tables, everyone raising their glasses in congratulation. Monique’s laughter pollinated everyone else’s.

  Madame Meignot couldn’t be a Nazi sympathizer, given Monique’s comments about her during the air raid, but after General Vidal, Max, Prosper and Archambault … anything unusual was a danger warning. Madame didn’t seem to be looking in her direction, but Noor’s palms were suddenly damp. She moved into the shadows beneath the bistro’s awning.

  Madame Meignot went up to Renée and grasped her by the forearms. Steadying herself, she shouted, “Congratulations!”

  Noor could see that wasn’t all she said.

  Renée turned to Émile and suggested they take a table inside. Her smile looked forced, and terror filled her eyes.

  “A table—here?” Émile’s arched eyebrow warned of expense. “D’accord! It’s our wedding day.”

  Renée steered him through the arched doorway with La Gargote wrought in iron. Monique followed quickly.

  Inside, white-aproned waiters smoothed and straightened, recommended and served their patrons—Germans and French, elbow to elbow. Odile and Noor helped Madame Meignot to a seat at an empty table. She was quite out of breath. Émile, now serious, ordered a pichet of white wine to go around.

  “Several men—at least five—came to your house,” said Madame Meignot to Renée, eyes large as the dinner plates. “I heard the Citroën and then smashing sounds, so I left my loge to investigate. I thought they were zazous. I was going to beat each boy with my broom and tell him his mother would be ashamed of a son who stole. But then one spoke German with a French accent. He called the pale one with little round glasses Monsieur Vogel instead of Herr Vogel, and I thought, ‘Pah! A traitor.’ The pale one gave the orders: ‘Cartaud! Check the dining room’ and ‘Cartaud—the kitchen.’ So I put the broom away, slipped out and came to look for you. I knew you’d be coming from the métro …” She too
k a shaky sip of wine.

  “Were any in black?” asked Émile.

  “Non, no black. All plain suits. Like yours—but no patches.”

  “Tante Monique and I sewed Oncle Émile’s patches,” Babette objected.

  Renée speared Babette into silence with a single glance.

  “And trench coats,” added Madame Meignot.

  Too hot for trench coats. Definitely Gestapo.

  “You can’t go back. There’s a Citroën at the end of the street, patient as a mule.”

  “What shall we do? Where can we go?” Renée’s trembling voice rose.

  Émile hushed her.

  “They’ll have us in a minute, dressed as we are,” said Monique. “I just wish we knew if they have found … what they have found.”

  “They will find nothing,” said Renée.

  Not upstairs. But they will downstairs, in the cellar. We must destroy evidence that could lead the Gestapo to others.

  A coy look came over Madame Meignot’s face. “I don’t want to know what you’ve been up to, but I’ll tell you a way you can enter your home. Just for a few minutes, then out, oui?”

  “How?” asked Émile.

  “There’s a passage. All the way from the courtyard behind this restaurant to Madame Garry’s cellar.”

  Noor remembered the door to the hidden passage, the one Émile had shown her during the air raid.

  “That old passage? Wasn’t it blocked up? I thought it was full of water,” said Émile.

  “Locked up, not blocked. I have keys. But—you will have to be quiet and very quick.”

  “Oh, madame! That is most kind.”

  Madame Meignot’s turban bobbed back as she quaffed her wine. A waiter came, took her glass and offered Émile the bill.

  “Combien?” Émile asked Madame Meignot, as if studying the bill.

  “Four hundred and eighty francs for Jews, nothing for patriots,” said Madame Meignot, as if Jews and patriots were mutually exclusive. “And you both just married. My father died when the Prussians came last time, and I lost my husband fighting the Boche at the Somme—I have no love for Germans.”

  Émile took a deep breath, then nodded. “No time to waste. I’ll go with Madame—you all stay here.”

  “I won’t let you go alone,” said Monique. “Besides, I must change. Renée, too. Perhaps Babette can stay here with Odile and Anne-Marie.”

  “No one can stay here and wait,” said Madame Meignot. “It will look strange. The Gestapo could be watching the café right now.”

  Émile nodded reluctantly. “What shall we do?”

  “Ask to speak to the owner,” said Madame Meignot. “Say you would like a private room.”

  Émile snapped his fingers and, when the waiter came, followed Madame Meignot’s direction. The owner, tapered as a penguin in his black jacket, soon approached through the tables. He wore a questioning look till he spied Madame Meignot. Her turban leaned close to his ear for a second.

  “This way.”

  Noor followed, moving through the other diners in the brasserie with the same braggadocio as when they arrived, Odile chattering again beside her with desperate bravado. Every detail of the day seemed to have sharpened. She quelled an urge to run, and kept pace with the dignified procession following the owner.

  At the back of the restaurant he opened a door to an oval courtyard dotted with empty tables. At the far end of the courtyard a flight of stairs led down to a nondescript door.

  “We will return within half an hour,” Madame Meignot said. “But if anyone asks, you saw us leave.”

  The owner nodded and slid his key into the lock.

  Down a stone spiral this time, with Noor and Odile holding up Monique’s white silk train. Cool air breathed from the earth as they descended into a large, cobwebby cellar filled with crates of wineglasses, barrels, casks, chests, trunks, hat boxes. Madame Meignot took a lantern from a niche, and a molten glow filled the room.

  “The passage goes all the way to the Bois. Sometimes I take Jews through here,” she said.

  At 480 francs each. Four times the jizya, the 120-franc annual tax levied on Jews to pay their “fine.”

  In a corner of the cellar Madame Meignot paused before a gilt-framed painting two metres high, leaning with its face to the wall. She motioned to Émile to pull it back, revealing a low door set in an archway. Noor crowded with the others in the entrance.

  A ghostly apparition glided before Noor in the afterglow of the lantern—Monique’s white silk gown. Her fingertips grazed damp limestone in the chilly passage. Tiny rough stones pitted the path. Soft little fingers—Babette’s—slipped into her hand. Shadows leaped and danced with every movement of the baubles in Renée’s hair. Madame Meignot’s voice echoed back, telling Émile her husband had been an égoutier—a sewer worker.

  “When he was alive, we grew mushrooms down here and so I learned the tunnels. Now I come here during air raids, and the restaurants pay well for my mushrooms. This stretch runs all the way from the métro to the Seine. They build new buildings above, but everyone leaves the tunnels alone.” She pointed to the support pillars leading to a larger tunnel. “That one runs under the rue Molitor. They intended to build a station there, but it was never completed aboveground. My husband maintained its tunnels till he died, but we’re still waiting for the day it will be built.”

  Snap! Noor started like a high-strung foal. Renée had stumbled on a fissure. Every black shadow in the labyrinth held a German about to spring from his Minotaur’s lair.

  “The Boche think they’ve sealed all entrances to the catacombs and the sewer tunnels inside the city,” said Madame Meignot. “North of Paris they even use some of them to make rocket engines for Hitler, safe from English bombs. But they’ll never find all of them.”

  “Let’s hope so,” whispered Monique, tucking her white veil into her hatband.

  Noor was in a fête macabre complete with costumes, Moët et Chandon, and violins, such as debauched aristos held in centuries past. She looked back: only black. No cellar door.

  Try to breathe regularly.

  Past a few blocked side tunnels, Madame Meignot stopped as solemnly as if in church, to light and plant a candle at a brick-walled intersection. They turned to follow gas pipes, air tubes connecting mail drops for the Paris Pneumatique, and telephone wire sagging from the irregular ceiling till everyone but Babette had to crouch while walking.

  Someone who lived centuries ago had carved friezes into the walls here. Ancient inscriptions they couldn’t stop to read passed beneath Noor’s fingertips. Wet gravel crunched underfoot.

  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 th
e 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.