The Tiger Claw

by Shauna Singh Baldwin

  “Someone,” said Émile reasonably, “alerted the Gestapo that there was a house on the rue Erlanger that should be searched.”

  “I feel it was Gilbert.”

  “You feel? You have no proof,” said Renée. “I agree someone did, but not a Frenchman.”

  “It was a warm, beautiful day,” said Monique. “It was our wedding, and I’m so glad you were with us, Anne-Marie.” She bent over her smocking. Obliquely, she had delivered the reminder that Noor could not have betrayed them without walking into the Gestapo’s trap herself.

  “You told me Gilbert said to meet him at Grignon at 10:00 hours,” Noor said to Émile. “But had I been on time, I would have been arrested. And Gilbert must have been there, but he was not arrested.”

  “Coincidence,” said Renée.

  “Perhaps,” Noor conceded. “We have not considered: what if Monsieur Viennot informed the Gestapo?”

  “Oh, no,” Renée responded for Émile. “His grandfather and ours were brothers. He’s our cousin.”

  “Even if he were not,” said Émile, “Viennot has been buying information from the Gestapo for a long time. He cannot want Prosper arrested—there are hundreds, maybe thousands of people in that network, all his best customers. And I never described to him the extent of our work at Grignon.”

  “Gilbert gets a big salary from London,” said Monique, “so why should he want Prosper arrested?”

  “He could be well paid by Berlin as well,” Noor pointed out.

  Émile’s lips twisted in wry acknowledgment of this possibility, but Renée and Monique seemed surprised by the idea. Noor sneezed as if she’d sniffed pepper.

  I’ll be here till next Id without convincing them.

  She rose. The garden undulated around her.

  “Believe what you will,” she said. “Pray there will be no more arrests, but we cannot be too careful. I had to warn you. What are your plans?”

  “Émile telephoned Madame Meignot’s loge,” said Renée, “and Madame told him a Gestapo car parks every morning at the end of the street and another takes its place at night. But we cannot stay in Le Mans forever, Babette must return to school in Paris in September.”

  “She could go to school in Le Mans,” said Monique. “And under the circumstances, perhaps it would be wise—”

  Renée looked down her nose at Monique and gave a firm, “Non!”

  “We’ll find another apartment in Paris before September, then,” said Émile. “We have to stay hidden for some weeks. They’ll tire of watching the house. I don’t mean we can return and live there, but …” The sentence trailed away.

  Noor’s glance prompted Monique. “I have two weeks’ leave for our honeymoon. After that I will write to my superiors at the Hôtel de Ville saying my grand-père has died and I must go to Marseilles for his funeral. So if the Gestapo comes to search for me, they would send them to Marseilles. Voilà! That will keep me away from work this month. Next month, August, is a month of vacation. And then the Allies will come. If they don’t …” She stopped. “I must return to the Hôtel de Ville. Especially if we rent an apartment here and another in Paris.”

  So vast a gulf between those who can leave and those who must stay.

  “I will return to France as soon as I can,” said Noor.

  Monique took Noor’s hand. “I can see you now. At the front of the invasion, the Maid, Anne-Marie Jeanne d’Arc!”

  Everyone laughed, even Renée. Babette was called to say goodbye. Renée’s admonitions to the little girl faded as Émile escorted Noor back to the Hôtel du Dauphin.

  A new soldier was stationed at the checkpoint. The heart-thudding humiliation of identification must be endured again. Three streets away, Noor caught up with Émile’s stride.

  “Each year, I think I am now used to Occupation,” he muttered. “Then they search and manhandle us, and it infuriates me again. Monique and I were walking in the gardens yesterday and a soldier came and asked what was I doing there. What am I doing in my own country? Where else should I be? We’re second-class in our own land—they call us chimpanzees.”

  The British used such tactics in India, and Indians were called “brown monkeys” in London. The French had like terms for Algerians, Moroccans and Tunisians—personal indignities trivial compared with arrests and torture, distractions from the colonizers’ plunder.

  “Can you imagine, we French are reduced to living on cauliflower sandwiches,” said Émile. “Renée complains she has no kitchen garden here but insists on cooking, and Monique is kind enough to let her—but one of these days I’m going on a hunger strike! But then I think, what can she do when the Germans give ration tickets for just 1,200 calories a day?”

  Earlier in the century, Algerians under the French had made do on 1,500 calories a day, two-thirds of what Europeans lived on. And Dadijaan said Indians in Calcutta were trying to stay alive under the British Raj on a mere 850. The Germans had learned the colonizer’s tactics well.

  “Since you’re leaving, you could give me your ration tickets?”

  Noor fished in her handbag and came up with the booklet of ration coupons. Keeping three for her dinner that night, she handed the rest to Émile.

  “Merci bien!”

  Émile slowed to let other pedestrians pass, and detoured around a tarpaulin-covered car.

  “Renée—she is carrying too many burdens,” he said in an apologetic tone. “She refuses to understand the times, the France we now live in. She sees only the distance between what she expected and what she has become.”

  Noor was silent. Émile continued, “You know, some of Guy’s clothes were stored at my home, to be used whenever Renée and Guy visited in the summer. She is helping Monique refit them for our boys in the Maquis, the same she called outlaws.”

  Parting with some of Guy’s clothes has to be Monique’s idea, not Renée’s. How uncharitable of me to think so.

  Émile gave an indulgent laugh. “Oh, Renée, Renée! She is a pure patriot, above all. She taught me to shout ‘Vive la France!‘ when I was a boy.”

  But Noor had heard Renée exhibit her patriotism. Genuine and pure, but that didn’t make it any more attractive. France for the French, as defined by Renée. None of them—Armand’s family, Noor’s family—none of them could assimilate into Renée’s ever-shrinking circle. It was possible that Monique and Émile were so accustomed to her anti-Jewish and anti-foreign remarks that they simply didn’t notice them any more; they assumed she was like them at heart, forgiving her for the sake of preserving their family. Perhaps it was Noor who was acutely sensitive to words undergirded by hate, feeling their cruelty as Armand might, responding with greater anger than he could at this moment.

  A little further, Émile said, “Madeleine, do you still have the pistol?”

  Noor hesitated. The incriminating pistol was with her, concealed in her handbag. She could guess why Émile needed it.

  “You have Sten guns and Bren guns, grenades and bombs, buried all over the Loire,” she whispered.

  “A pistol is easier to hide. Tu sais, I believe you about Gilbert. Maybe you do not know, but it is not only Prosper and those in our cell who were arrested. All through northern France, hundreds of men and women have been marched into Gestapo headquarters with one suitcase. Here is a list. I typed it for you to transmit, so no one would recognize my writing if it fell into enemy hands. All code names, of course—but since you’re going to London, take it with you. Agents arrested in the last three days. Eighteen people.” He pressed a leaf of foolscap into her hand. “And only this morning I learned of one other. Wait, give me the paper—I’ll add his name.” He took a pencil stub from his pocket and wrote at the bottom.

  Nineteen! No wonder Émile looked so haggard.

  They had entered the Square Lafayette. Émile guided her towards the Monument aux Mortes.

  “I come here for inspiration. My mother used to bring me here every Sunday. She’d sit on this bench and talk to that stone monument, and I was too smal
l to understand she was really talking to his soul—to me, that stone was my father. She’d tell it all that Renée and I’d been doing, things I’d already confessed to in church and some that I still wonder how she found out. She’d ask his advice as if he were alive, till the very end of her life.”

  Mother and son, both earnestly engaged in what Uncle would call “Hindu idolatry.”

  “Renée said your father died in the tunnels at Vauquois,” said Noor.

  “Blame that too on the Germans. He’s still buried somewhere in that mountain—we never received his body.”

  Under other circumstances, or if Émile had shown reciprocal curiosity, she might have mentioned her similar grief for Abbajaan.

  She took a seat on the bench beside him. A couple of disconsolate pigeons flew away.

  “Renée used a pigeon in poule au pot—I had to hold my nose to eat it! I’m told they taste better with a bottle of Moulis or Margaux. But hélas! even those wines are loaded on trucks and trains bound for Germany. It’s not only the wine—I hear there’s bromide in our coffee … and I’m a newlywed man.”

  He made a comical face. She smiled.

  “Alors, we were discussing Gilbert. I believe you even if my sister will not, that’s all. And if he leads the Germans to us—should I lead them to an arms cache while I go to find a pistol? The solution is—Merde! I don’t have to tell you.”

  That solution was why she hadn’t voiced her suspicions before. That solution was the one she had used at Grignon. It saved her life, but today it felt like no solution. The reminder of her violence, held constantly against her body, was affecting her health. She wanted never to see that pistol again.

  But she didn’t want Émile to kill anyone.

  “Leave a packet for me with the bellman at the hotel.” Émile had sensed her hesitation.

  Noor had the pistol with her, but this gave her more time to decide. She agreed.

  “I’ve been thinking,” said Émile. “Gilbert knew the location of the safe house. Two reasons. First and foremost, I remember when we were at Chez Tutulle, Prosper told Gilbert you would not stay at his apartment but at Madame Garry’s home. Second: I have information that other agents strongly believe they were followed immediately after landing.”

  So the Gestapo could have followed Noor the many hours she had wandered through Paris. Maybe Renée was right: the Gestapo had noted that Noor travelled in the last carriage of the métro, and followed her and discovered the safe house. It wasn’t egocentric to believe she was important enough to be followed; it was her part in the larger game that was important.

  “And if Gilbert knew about Madame Aigrain’s home, the Gestapo would have searched it by now.”

  His words transposed the images of destruction at Renée’s home to old Madame Aigrain’s apartment.

  Noor said, “My father said one can bring about events one fears, just by fearing them.”

  “Maybe. But at present, fear keeps me alert, anger keeps me from despair. I never go into a room with only one way out. They don’t even need to arrest me—I would live in fear even if I wasn’t doing this work. If I lose my job for any reason, Renée, Monique and Babette will have no one to support them. Three years ago I thought all the time about getting away to England. But then I thought, ‘Who will look after them?’ so I couldn’t leave. But now I wake up angry, go to sleep angry. I, who was going to be a great inventor—huh! You know, I have a better design for an automatic washing machine, another for an electric shaver. And what am I thinking of every day? How to destroy a plant or derail a train. It’s no way to live!”

  In an undertone he said, “Don’t tell Renée, but if you are a murderer, so am I. Germans, mainly. French, sometimes. Merde, it’s war! You know how easy it is to destroy? Far easier than to create and invent. I have destroyed trains and sabotaged factories, but …” He stopped and glanced away. “Never have I killed someone I know, someone I trusted. But when I think of poor Madame Hoogstraten, Madame Balachowsky, Odile … what they must be feeling at this moment! I think of Prosper and Archambault suffering, tortured as Max was. And not only them. German reprisals against relatives—women and children! All held collectively responsible! Oui, oui, oui—I would kill Gilbert to save others from that.”

  Noor opened her handbag and put her sunglasses on to veil her eyes from Émile. Had she added to all the wrongs she had hoped to oppose by coming to France? She’d have to wait till Judgement Day to find out. Meanwhile, she would live with her actions, and Émile must live with his own.

  She was about to close her handbag when she remembered the leather pouch and five diamonds. The pouch was concealed with the pistol. Quickly, she explained to Émile and suggested he take the gems—use them to help the families of those who were arrested.

  “Sell or barter them,” she said.

  “Yes, but where? The jeweller in Le Mans is a Nazi sympathizer, and in Paris diamonds are assumed to come from the Resistance. Any offer to sell would be immediately reported to the Gestapo. And if I were caught with them … would I be free a single day? Jamais de la vie! And I could not let Monique or Renée hide them, after what has happened. No, no, it’s far too dangerous.” He plucked anxiously at the stubble of his moustache with thumb and forefinger.

  Émile was right. There was a better way.

  Noor drew the last of her counterfeit money from the handbag and offered it to him, retaining only a few francs for dinner that evening. “I won’t need this now. Bonne chance!”

  Émile’s face relaxed for a moment. With a grateful nod he slipped the bills into his pocket.

  “It is easier to fight when you’re alone, Anne-Marie. I would be a bolder man if Renée, Monique and Babette were in England.”

  “You are very brave,” Noor assured him.

  A sharp laugh. “To be brave, one must learn to ignore reality.”

  “Renée might be safer in England, but I doubt she would be happier.”

  “Better unhappy than dead or at the mercy of the Gestapo,” said Émile. “Tiens, ask Colonel Buckmaster if he can send a Lysander to take them to England? Tell him Marc will be our air movements officer, the same Prosper used last time he landed.”

  Odile had said Prosper chose not to land at a field picked by Gilbert when he arrived two weeks ago.

  “I will go to the Colonel immediately,” said Noor, rising. Her legs felt like water, the touch of her garments chafed her skin. “Now, we’ll need two phrases.” She paused. She couldn’t think of a nonsense phrase in the condition she was in.

  Émile waited expectantly.

  She would rely on Rumi, translate lines familiar to her, unfamiliar to others. “Listen to the BBC, and if you hear The angel’s wings are tied to the donkey’s tail, it will mean London has agreed to send a plane for Renée, Monique and Babette. And when you hear, Open the prison door with keys that spell joy, the Lysander will arrive the next day … But without a radio operator, how will Marc tell London where the plane should land?”

  “He will have to send a courier to a Free French network with a radio operator of its own. There is one cell still operating. Of course, they don’t use that salaud Gilbert.”

  The pigeons fluttered back to the bench.

  “Meanwhile, be strong,” said Noor, as much to herself.

  A woman of about sixty, dressed in black and clutching a bunch of flowers, approached the monument. She looked harmless—but an informer would look harmless.

  The woman laid the flowers gently before the inscription—La Sarthe a ses enfants. Morts pour la France 1914–1918—and stood with her head bowed.

  Émile stood and took Noor’s hand. “I must leave you here. Mes hommages. Thank you for all you have done.” Then he whispered, “I will ask the bellman for a package. Remember about the aeroplane. And tell London: one more arrest or incident and I swear Gilbert will be no more.”

  With that, he turned and walked away, elbow patches swinging, fists punching backwards, punching air.

  Noor lifte
d her heavy head to the breeze percolating through the sunny cobbled streets of Le Mans. Her forehead was burning. A clock tower chimed 16:00 hours.

  Almost time to meet Gilbert.

  The flying buttresses of Le Mans cathedral soared on the hill above Noor. She had knelt to make a zikr there, lit a candle before the Virgin and admired the stained glass in the rose window, but dread still lay leaden in her stomach.

  Across La Place des Jacobins, a bird man struggled from the peak of a dun-coloured obelisk. Noor sat in the shade of a chestnut tree, keeping the monument in sight. So far, no Gestapo in sight, no uniforms, no one hiding behind a newspaper.

  A pregnant woman rested her panier on a bench, an old man pushed an earth-filled wheelbarrow across the square. Laughing children ran about. Pigeons nodded, fluttered and preened.

  Almost 16:30 hours. Would Gilbert come, or would the Gestapo?

  A man with a magazine under one arm approached, a swagger in his step. Around the monument he went, as if studying the workmanship, then took a seat at its base. His hand passed over his brow, flicking back a lock of glossed hair. Gilbert.

  Wait, wait. Watch. Do his eyes dart anywhere?

  Gilbert shook open his magazine and began flipping pages.

  After a few minutes Noor stood up and walked past the monument. In a moment Gilbert was at her elbow.

  “Monsieur, monsieur! Oh, it’s a mademoiselle. You forgot something,” he said.

  “Thank you,” said Noor, taking the magazine from his hand.

  He fell into step with her. “The slacks—very American. And the two ponytails. Mais, très chic! Almost I didn’t recognize you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Have you ever seen such a monument! Can you see Messieurs Wright in Ohio, flying twenty-four miles at thirty-eight miles an hour? How amazed they would be to see me in a modern flying machine! They were like you: only in France were they truly appreciated.”

  “I am appreciated, monsieur.”

  “But not enough, mademoiselle. Englishmen only prize women’s ankles. We French, on the other hand, we appreciate women completely. But you know that … alors!”