The Tiger Claw

by Shauna Singh Baldwin

  He led her to a bench in a corner.

  “What news of Prosper?” she whispered. “Archambault? Monsieur Hoogstraten and Professor Balachowsky?”

  Eyes looking directly into hers—camouflaged eyes. “It is very sad.”

  “Sad?”

  “They were careless.”

  “Careless?”

  “Oh yes, careless.”

  “And you are careful?”

  In response, a look like that of a hurt puppy. Gilbert flicked back his hair. “Mais oui. Did I not escort you safely to Paris when you first arrived?”

  Émile’s remark that many agents were sure they were followed from the landing field flashed to mind.

  “Yes, you did. But where were you while the roundup was taking place?” She kept her tone merely curious.

  “I was waiting for you. In the garden shed behind the greenhouse. You were late.”

  She ignored his accusing tone. “How is it you remain free?”

  “I’m lucky! I’ve always been lucky. My profession was aerobatic shows before all this sneaking and secrecy, you know. You are very lucky too, it seems.”

  Was she being warned? Gilbert’s tone was innocent enough.

  “Yes, it was fortunate I was late,” she said.

  Silence stretched a beat too long.

  “I will take the messages you wanted sent with me tonight.”

  “I have them,” said Gilbert. “You are happy to leave all this danger, non?”

  Happy to leave with her Armand at Drancy, or exiled in some worse place? Happy to leave without even a chance to see him, or to find out if her message reached him? But before Gilbert she must not be Noor. Anne-Marie wouldn’t feel so empty an ache in her belly.

  Remember how many women have had no news of husbands and fiancés for months, even years now—not only me.

  She blew her nose. “My valise is at the Hôtel du Dauphin.” A trace of emotion still clouded her voice.

  Suddenly, Gilbert was all business.

  “There is a reading room in the hotel. Behind the lobby, beside the courtyard. Continue walking. Meet me there at 20:00 hours.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Le Mans, France

  Saturday, July 3, 1943

  IN THE BOOK-LINED READING ROOM at the Hôtel du Dauphin, Gilbert’s brown head bowed over ivory pieces dotting a chessboard. Shadows drifted across his face.

  Where could she sit and observe his game? On a sofa between a faded man reading a French translation of the third volume of War and Pe ace and a well-preserved lady moving her lips silently, deep in the private debates of a novel.

  At the far end of the room, the pendulum of a mahogany grandfather clock swung like an elephant’s trunk, chimed a study in eight repeated notes and returned to loud ticking.

  Gilbert reached across the board, moved a walnut piece. A painted white knight jumped a few squares and captured it. He leaned across again, moved a walnut rook. The white knight captured it, and the rook vanished into Gilbert’s fist for a moment then reappeared on the sidelines with its mates.

  Noor drew closer to the board.

  Chess and mysticism—just beyond human mental ability, but not so far that she ever lost hope of mastery.

  Everything was conspiring to remind her of Armand on her last night in France, the very night she was to leave for England. Armand waiting for her at Café Zola in the fifth arrondissement. “I have the men, did you bring the board?” Armand following and re-creating the champion Alekhine’s tournaments, discussing alternate moves and defences against the Dragon opening. Why hadn’t they discussed the possibility of the situation each was faced with today? But life couldn’t be reduced to sixty-four squares and thirty-two pieces. How could they possibly have foreseen Drancy?

  The painted white knight had advanced within a few moves of the walnut queen.

  “It isn’t a game when you play against yourself,” Noor sniffed into her handkerchief.

  “But when you play against yourself, you always win, mademoiselle. You can relax the rules, even invent rules.”

  Noor took a seat opposite, put away her handkerchief, rubbed her hands, blew on them, rubbed them together again.

  Sick or well, I can play this game.

  He placed the pieces in rank and file, white before himself, walnut before Noor. A notebook appeared from his vest pocket to write down each move. A white pawn slid forward. Noor replied with an Indian opening, moving the walnut horse immediately into the fray. Gilbert arrayed a good classical defence.

  The grandfather clock ticked, chimed, ticked on. The faded man marked his place in War and Peace and tiptoed off. Noor looked up from a move to notice the lady had vanished as well.

  Gilbert was playing to win with the strategy of capturing the most pieces, carefully noting every move as he went. Noor searched for the best move in light of changing circumstances, playing fluently, with analysis and intuition, using supporting pieces behind one little brown pawn advancing, advancing to an end square, to transform itself to a queen.

  The end-game was soon in sight—win, lose or draw.

  Calculating moves, Noor’s transformed pawn would soon check Gilbert’s king. And voilà! checkmate as well.

  Abruptly, Gilbert stood up. “I’m hungry. We’ll finish the game after dinner.”

  And I predict we never will.

  The hotel dinner menu repeated Soupe aux légumes. Good thing she had saved the cheese sandwich. Gilbert went to have a word with the maître d’hôtel.

  Noor examined the moves he had recorded. What was Bc6x? The notation was not correct, but she’d seen it before somewhere.

  Alekhine vs. Rethy, Munich.

  A poorly translated German news report of that championship game had confused readers of the Herald Tribune by recording moves resulting in capture with x at the end.

  Bc6x.

  German style. This Frenchman records his moves German style? He must play chess with Germans. Regularly.

  Was this evidence? No. But circumstantially, yes. Still, there could be other explanations. France was occupied; French chess clubs couldn’t refuse German members. Perhaps the Germans had introduced their notation rules for chess clubs?

  “Do you belong to a chess club?” she asked when Gilbert returned with the maître d’hôtel.

  “No, but I play as often as I can with friends.” He put his notebook back in his pocket.

  German friends?

  But she didn’t ask that. If Gilbert had no compunction about betraying old comrades, what was there to stop him from making a quick ten thousand francs by luring her down to the nearest checkpoint or to Gestapo headquarters in Le Mans? If she could not reach Armand on this assignment, Noor wanted only to return to Mother, Dadijaan, Kabir and Zaib in England.

  The maître d’hôtel looked down his nose. “This way, monsieur, this way, madame.”

  “Mademoiselle,” said Noor. And added sweetly, “And my uncle.”

  Oh, the pleasure in seeing a look of discomfiture dart across Gilbert’s face. And the pleasure of ignoring it as she followed the maître d’hôtel.

  But instead of leading her to the hotel dining room, the maître d’ moved across the reading room and pushed down on a lever beside the grandfather clock. An adjacent bookcase creaked, then swung open into a stone passageway. With a wink and a finger to his lips, he led them through a short dark passage. A door slid back and she was in a second dining room, this one furnished in belle époque style, in colours of mauve, Pernod green and mustard, dim mirrors reflecting urns filled with fresh flowers.

  The Lysander pilot had been right: Gilbert certainly must know every black market restaurant in the Loire.

  By the time they were seated at a candlelit table, Gilbert had recovered his bonhomie. In an instructive undertone he pointed out the local wine bottler, négociant for many wine growers in this area, and the wineführer with whom he was dining. And another private niche where a sawmill owner clinked glasses with a German buyer.

 
; The colours of flags can be less important than the colour of money.

  Could the other guests detect Noor’s desire to be miles away, out of danger from Gilbert? If they thought him a German sympathizer, they might think Noor was an informer at best, a prostitute at worst. But his presence was, she must admit, better than dining alone.

  Think of Mother—she would have summoned the requisite flair. But then, Mother hadn’t grown up with Uncle’s rhetoric about loose women, a term that definitely included unmarried women who waited for men who were not their relatives in hotels and then dined with them in secret dining rooms.

  Not respectable. Armand would laugh at the word. Musicians—indeed all artists, he said—had to unlearn being respectable.

  The plat du jour offered oysters, a paté Mother would have called meat loaf, a delicious partridge en casserole, a dish of potatoes boiled with peas, four kinds of cheese and a Grand Marnier crème brûlée.

  Noor dined, comfortable with silence.

  But silence was unendurable for Gilbert. “This room—in fact, the entire hotel—it reminds me so much of Château d’Iffendic. I grew up there, you know …”

  Stranger and stranger.

  “The decor, it was like this?”

  “Oui, oui, just like this. The walls were a soft blue, not green, and the chandeliers were pewter with toile shades.”

  “And where is the Château d’Iffendic?”

  “Very close by.”

  Odile’s voice trickled through Noor’s mind: “He’s not well educated—his father is a postal clerk and his mother a housekeeper.”

  “You grew up there?”

  “Yes. We had a cordon bleu chef who always said ‘timing is critical’ for cuisine. I should send him here—he could teach the chef a little haute cuisine.”

  “You live there?”

  “Oh, our château was requisitioned by the Boche, like so many other châteaux.”

  He didn’t seem at all upset by the requisitioning. He hadn’t exactly said he or his family owned a château, but his silk-smooth voice certainly implied it. He hadn’t mentioned his parents or their occupations, but why should he provide her with such details? His hands on the tablecloth before her—too large and wide to pass for bourgeois hands. Was this tale evidence of betrayal or bad faith? No more than Mother’s stories. Mother always dismissed questions of genealogy or made up some new tale of her lineage. Europeans and Indians, she said, gave their bloodlines far too much importance; one should be judged by deeds. The château could be a detail in Gilbert’s cover story, as Bordeaux was for Anne-Marie Régnier.

  She had not quite convinced herself when Gilbert snapped his fingers. “L’addition, s’il vous plaît. And my niece and I would like a room for tonight.”

  “Yes, monsieur.”

  Noor travelled from surprise to anger in two seconds.

  Dissemble, act, pretend.

  She shook her ponytails. “Oh, non, Oncle Gilbert!” Assuming a little girl voice, “You must get to Chartres before curfew—I promised Tata you’d return home this evening. We shouldn’t make her worry.”

  The maître d’s “Yes, mademoiselle” remained between them like the Cheshire cat’s grin as he vanished. Gilbert’s glowering look said he had not spent the tremendous favour of his presence with her for an hour playing chess and bought her a very complete meal to be denied the next few moves.

  Noor widened her eyes to juvenile innocence.

  Gilbert’s look of insult gave way to a knowing smirk. “Merde! I’ve heard of women like you, but I’ve never met one. No desire, no passion—you have lived in England a few years. That is why you are célibataire. You have only a pen pal at the War Office, but no husband.”

  Heat rose to Noor’s cheeks and an unsought longing stabbed her heart.

  Yes, I have desire and desires, and no, that is not why I have no husband.

  Fidelity might be out of vogue in Gilbert’s milieu, but it wasn’t too difficult for Noor; Gilbert was no Armand. The thought of being subjected to his touch …

  Other guests were rising to leave before curfew. Gilbert began to draw in his notebook—a map.

  “Take the bicycle in the shed behind the hotel—ici.” He drew compass points and marked the direction of the landing field from the hotel with arrows. “The landing is at 02:00 hours. Take the turnoff here.” He marked an X. “It’s marked with a netted pole. Meet me here—it’s a woodcutter’s cottage. He was a skilled mechanic at Le Bourget, but he didn’t want to repair Boche aeroplanes, et alors …”

  Noor took the map, oriented herself, made a mental picture and returned it.

  “I must meet two other agents at midnight,” Gilbert said curtly. “I had hoped to spend the time more pleasantly, but …”

  “We could finish our chess game,” Noor suggested. She went into a coughing fit but let her eyes blaze at him over the handkerchief masking her face.

  Gilbert flicked his forelock, obviously annoyed. He accompanied her from the dining room, through the passage and lobby, then departed, without a backward glance, into the warm night.

  Noor borrowed scissors, needle and thread from the bellman and, seated on a chaise longue in the ladies’ lounge, cut up the brown flowered dress she’d bought at Grignon. She wrote to Émile, a single line informing him that she had noted Gilbert used German chess notation and had no affiliation with a chess club.

  Written down, it was such a small thing. Too small to mention?

  She nibbled the end of her pencil.

  It wasn’t small if she thought of Professor Balachowsky describing Max’s torture, and the fear that had invaded Renée’s home, causing an entire family to flee, or Monsieur Hoogstraten’s anguished face during the shootings at Grignon. Her heart and pocket were burdened with the code names of nineteen men and women arrested by the Gestapo as terrorists for protesting the Occupation, nineteen names on the leaf of foolscap she was carrying to London.

  No detail was too small if it would save a single resistant from the Gestapo.

  Write without expressing an opinion. Let Émile form his own conclusions.

  Should she tell Émile about Gilbert’s Château d’Iffendic story? But Gilbert hadn’t claimed to own a château. Whether someone was high-born or low should make no difference, since everyone was a fragment of Allah. Suppose Gilbert was the son of a postal clerk and a housekeeper, as Odile said; he might be a parvenu and a war arriviste trying to polish his past, but it didn’t prove he was a traitor.

  He had invited her to bed. Also irrelevant. When she was about sixteen, she remembered arguing it was men’s lust that should be controlled and men kept in seclusion, not women. Uncle Tajuddin had been so terribly hurt, so very insulted by the idea!

  She wound fabric around the pistol and her note and painstakingly sewed the entire package tight. If she was wrong about Gilbert, the pistol might kill an innocent man, but instinct said she was right, so the pistol might save the lives of other agents. Émile wouldn’t act on it unless there was another arrest. Small comfort in that, so long as that arrest was not her own or Émile’s.

  Her head—feeling immense as a barrage balloon. Her eyes—red and half closed in the mirror. She locked the door to the ladies’ lounge, took her headscarf from her handbag and used the Isfahan carpet for namaaz. Insh’allah, the landing would go smoothly, with no arrests tonight.

  She put on her green jacket, took her coat over her arm. She would leave long before curfew, arrive well in time.

  The bellman exchanged her valise for the package for Émile, bobbing his kepi at her parting tip. When he was back behind his desk, Noor slipped out, circled behind the hotel to the shed Gilbert marked as her starting point.

  The bicycle was a racehorse caught in the traces of a bullock cart—a ten-speed fit for the Tour de France fitted with a pedal generator that powered a headlamp, a luggage carrier with a rope to fasten her valise, and a wicker basket for her handbag. She fastened finger-curl pins to hold her slacks away from the chain, and had a
little trouble getting her leg over the crossbar. She took the back streets again, to avoid the checkpoint. Soon the cone of light from her headlamp began bumping over cobblestones in the Gallo-Roman ruins of the old city and descended to the riverbank of the Sarthe.

  The swish, creak and bump of tires began to reverse the route she and her fellow agent Edmond had taken only two and a half weeks earlier.

  Noor cycled past darkening fields, manure smells. The moon had subsided to a pale crescent since the silver night of her arrival. She gauged the roadside by the glint of porcelain bulbs atop telephone poles.

  By 02:00 hours a pilot would be unable to see trees in the dark. London must be concerned in the wake of so many arrests, to risk a landing on any night with less than a full moon.

  Slow down.

  If she wasn’t careful, she’d land in a ditch instead of taking to the skies.

  There was the forest—where was the netted pole? A partridge poacher’s netted pole at the mouth of a game trail. She dismounted and wheeled the bicycle about a hundred metres till she found it.

  Along the game trail, trees creaked and popped in the cool night breeze. Small animals scurried through grass. The path snaked through heavy undergrowth interrupted by felled logs and stalwart trees. Fine hair on Noor’s arms stiffened; her skin felt moist and cold.

  There was the stream she had to follow, a small backwater with spinning eddies, disturbed as her thoughts. What if? What if? What if an angry, rejected Gilbert went to the Gestapo?

  Beyond the banks of the stream, all shapes faded to black.

  Stop those thoughts.

  But they returned, incessant as raindrops.

  Watch those thoughts pass, let them go.

  Meditation techniques were useless; every shadow hid a German shouting, “Halt!”

  The stream riffled over its gravel bed, poured short curtains over cobbles. Piles of rocks altered its flow and direction.

  Tamas, Abbajaan called it, chaos of the mind. She was lightheaded with it.

  Noor stifled a cough and wiped her nose.

  She came to a wood-slat bridge. Pul-Sirat—“baal se bareek, talwar se tez”—slender as a hair, sharp as a sword-edge. She would fall on one side or the other, into the ravine below; not from the balance between her good and bad deeds, but because she felt so unwell.