Could there possibly be a connection? Brener had a wife back in Paris, Noah discovered from the next paragraph. But could the MZ woman in the photo have been a comrade of his, passing as Madame Zazou in Nice?
Head whirling, Noah pulled out his envelope of small snaps. The MZ picture was clearly taken indoors, but from behind—and maybe without its subject’s knowledge? Whereas this Zazou guy had been standing in the street. Outdoor photography had been verboten, so had Margot crept up behind the man, doing her best to record his face, but managing no more than a side perspective?
Noah was feeling sick. “I have to go talk to someone for a minute, Michael. Don’t get in any trouble.”
In a conference room, a small cluster of people were chatting over some open folders. They had the air of a study group rather than an organizational meeting, and after all the door was open, shifting slightly in the draft. So Noah steeled himself and tapped on it to apologize for disturbing them. He was visiting from America and he had these photographs…
They were very kind, and one of them found Monsieur Benoit in the archive for him.
He wasn’t the old Niçois Noah had been expecting but a middle-aged man wearing a yarmulke over short cornrows; an Ethiopian Jew, Noah guessed from his accent. Monsieur Benoit switched from French to English, in which he was even more fluent. Yes, he confirmed that the dandy picture could very well be Brener, aka Zazou. But the MZ photograph rang no bells for him. “And this I would say with a degree of certainty is Odette and Moussa themselves,” he added, plucking out Noah’s shot of the couple on the bench.
“Sorry, who?”
“Moussa Abadi and Odette Rosenstock, I should say. They founded, they effectively were, the Marcel Network. To hide the children?”
“Sorry, I never heard of any of this till today. My mother…all I know is that she was in Nice during the war.” Noah stared at the back of the bench in the photo. “You can’t even see the people’s faces in this shot.”
“True, but if you look at other images of Odette and Moussa…” Benoit led him back to the room where Michael had spotted the photo of Brener with his cane.
Noah stared dully at Rosenstock and Abadi in close-up, then walking arm in arm down the Prom, as the archivist explained that this extraordinary pair and the little knot of allies they’d enlisted had managed to save many hundreds of Jewish children. Yes, Noah could see the resemblance now; something about how they sat together, as well as their individual outlines. Such an ordinary-looking pair; angels in disguise.
“Perhaps your mother knew them?” Monsieur Benoit suggested.
“Perhaps.” Noah writhed inside. He wished he’d never brought Margot’s strange pictures into this building. Was Monsieur Benoit too polite to wonder aloud why the photographer and her subjects weren’t looking one another in the eye? If she’d been anything to these Marcel people, Margot had been their Judas.
“That one was probably her boyfriend.” Michael, popping up at Noah’s elbow and pointing at Zazou like some glib ghost.
“Don’t be silly.” Underneath his coat, Noah’s armpits were dripping. “I think my young great-nephew’s got the wrong end of the stick.”
Monsieur Benoit shook the boy’s hand and said he was delighted to meet him.
Scowling, Michael pulled away and headed for the door.
Noah knew he’d better follow him.
“Oh, and one more thing, about your photograph of the young child?”
“Yes?” Noah hung back, holding that one out.
Monsieur Benoit read the scrawled leters, RJ. “All I can speculate is that it was taken for an identity document.”
“But…isn’t the format wrong? And he’s smiling.”
“There was no rule against smiling.” Its dimensions were rather unusual for an identity photograph, Monsieur Benoit agreed, but there was no compulsory shape or size, and after all, the same negative could have been printed for different purposes.
Noah’s nose was dripping; he had to go into the bathroom to wipe it with toilet paper.
Behind a stall door, a familiar beeping.
“Michael?” he asked.
A pause. “What?”
“Come out of there.”
The boy emerged. “I was just playing my game and a woman told me off for making noise.”
“It’s OK.” Noah’s head was still whirling. “Let’s go. Wash your hands.”
“I don’t need to.”
“Just wash them.”
But Michael was pushing out through the door already.
Noah thought he’d better use the toilet himself before the long bus ride back to the hotel.
Outside, the February breeze cut sharply and he couldn’t see the boy at all. Panic flared. “Michael!”
He found him around the corner, slashing at a flowerbed with a stick.
“Stop that this instant.”
Michael beheaded another.
“Those are for everyone to enjoy,” Noah told him. “I let you out of my sight for two minutes and you disgrace me—”
Michael’s eyes narrowed. “I disgrace you?”
Noah was already regretting the word. “Well, you’re my relation, and you’re behaving like—”
The kid cut him off with a contemptuous sound in his throat. “Just a few goddamn flowers, dude.” He dropped his flail and fell into line behind Noah, pushing his earbuds in. Music thumped from his hood.
After they’d walked for a few minutes, Noah turned and made a gesture that meant “Take them out.”
“I can hear you fine,” Michael said, too loud.
“That’s not the point.” Noah spoke deliberately softly.
Michael poked his screen to pause the music. “What?”
“I don’t want to have to guess whether you can make me out over your music, so please be civil enough not to wear your earbuds when you’re talking to me.”
“I wasn’t talking to you.”
“Listen, I’m sorry I called you ‘silly.’” Noah heaved a breath. “I was embarrassed. Ashamed, actually.”
“Because she was running around on your dad?”
He shook his head. “It’s me who got hold of the wrong end of the stick. The people in the photos—they were in the Resistance, rescuing kids from the Nazis, and my mom…I don’t think she was their friend at all.”
The pause was awful.
“What was she, then?”
Noah’s voice dropped to a whisper, even though there was nobody else on the street. “My best guess is that she was surveilling them. Recruited, because she could take covert photos and print them.”
Michael frowned. “Recruited, like the army?”
“Recruited by…the enemy.”
They caught the wrong bus—Noah’s fault, his eyes confusing a 5 with a 6—so they had to double back. By the time they got out at Place Masséna, he was dog-tired.
The plaza was vast, paved in a black-and-white checkered pattern with an oddly 3D effect: Michael called it “kind of Minecraft.” There were red neoclassical arcades but the square was dominated by seven immense poles on which sat cross-legged figures (Buddhas?) that lit up with different pastels, fading and changing hue as Noah watched. The stands for watching the Carnival Corso stood empty, a little ominous.
To board the crowded tram he and the boy had to squeeze chest to chest between strangers. Noah couldn’t help thinking of cattle cars; of trains on their way to the camps. Whether Margot had been unfaithful to Marc, or even had a child, didn’t matter a damn compared with this. What had she done, who had she been in the darkest of the années noires?
For their dinner, Noah stopped at a hole-in-the-wall around the corner from the Excelsior, because he couldn’t face a proper meal.
Standing in line, he tried to remember: who was that Egyptian god who weighed hearts?
When he carried the steaming bag into their room, the beds were made, as crisp as ever. Michael stiffened and went to check under his covers. Impeccable sheets.
&
nbsp; They ate chicken skewers and rice, all of it startlingly yellow. Noah eyed the threadbare Pick-Pick Bird on his bedside table. He thought of children watching its motion, rapt, laughing.
The little boy. That photograph didn’t fit with the others; he was smiling right into the lens, with curiosity, with trust. If R.J. wasn’t one of Margot’s targets, then, could he have been her child? Noah’s head hurt. Two and a half years. Spying, and an affair, and the birth of a baby? (Not Brener’s—a German’s, then, maybe a German who’d won her over politically as well as personally?) All in two and a half years, and all in utter secrecy?
On his tablet, he thought to check the phone listings for a Madame Coco Dupont. If the cleaner had by any chance talked to her daughter about Margot’s movements during the war…and if the daughter was still alive, and still in Nice… He found Duponts, no Cocos. But that was Coco’s maiden name, of course, and odds were she’d have married.
A quick email to Vivienne: “How might I go about tracking down a woman born Coco Dupont, in Nice, around 1938 or 1937?” Then—since the little girl could have been a bit older than Noé but certainly hadn’t been any younger or less verbal—he added, “Possibly 1936?”
Rosa sounded busy: her reply from this afternoon said only, “Good, keep me posted.”
Noah googled the Ancient Egyptians. It was Anubis who set your heart on the scales against the Feather of Truth, and if your crimes weighed it down at all, it was thrown to the crocodile-faced demoness Ammit like any other scrap of meat. Only the clean-hearted got to walk forever in the Field of Reeds.
When he thought to check the Correctional Communications app, there was a message from Amber for Michael, headed Hey yourself. Scrupulous, he didn’t open it.
“From your mom,” he told the boy, holding out the tablet.
Michael dropped the plastic fork with a piece of chicken still on it.
From under his eyebrows, Noah watched him as he read the screen; tried to interpret that closed face. The boy’s knuckles went up to his temple briefly; could that have been a tear? “You can answer her,” Noah said.
“’Kay.”
“Go ahead.”
The boy started pecking at the screen.
Lying on his bed to give Michael some privacy, Noah traced a faint watermark on the paint with his eyes. He found the food had settled like lead in his stomach; he struggled up on the bolster and pillow. Had this room had the same ceiling when the Nazis had taken over the hotel and turned it into their own private hell?
Turning toward the wall, leaning on one elbow, Noah looked up the Marcel Network on his phone. Starting in 1942, a Syrian Jewish graduate student in theater, Moussa Abadi (aka Monsieur Marcel), and a doctor, Odette Rosenstock (alias Sylvie Delattre), had cycled around Nice and its hinterland persuading the managers of Catholic schools and convents, as well as Protestant families, to take in Jewish children under assumed names. Children too religious to touch non-kosher food, or foreign refugees who couldn’t pass for French, Abadi and Rosenstock sent off to Spain or Switzerland instead, in the care of passeurs (people smugglers).
He glanced over his shoulder. “You must be done emailing her, are you?”
“Have you got like zero games on this thing?” Michael asked.
“Just two: chess and checkers come built in.” Noah held out his hand for the tablet. He couldn’t stop himself from asking: “How’s Amber?”
A shrug.
To push it or leave it? Noah wished he had more experience at this.
But Michael went on after a minute. “As soon as she gets moved to a facility that has Family Reunion, we’re going to have a trailer visit.”
Surely if there were any immediate prospect of Amber being moved, Rosa would have said. “What’s that?”
“Forty-four hours, dude! Just us two in a trailer. Mom’s promised to make a cake for my last birthday and we’re going to watch TV and sleep all curled up all night, two nights.”
Noah’s eyes pricked with sorrow. Who’d decided on forty-four hours as the limit? “Sounds fantastic.” He waited, in case any more was forthcoming. “Maybe you could update your journal?”
Michael groaned, but got out his ballpoint.
Noah googled on. Bishop Paul Rémond, head of the Catholic church in Nice, had provided a room in his episcopal palace and the services of his staff to help the Marcel Network forge baptismal certificates and ration cards. A Baptist minister, Edmond Evrard, and Pierre Gagnier of the Reformed Church had been in on the conspiracy too. One particular image struck Noah as surreal: Moussa Abadi had sent children off to their places of refuge all over this lovely countryside in horse-drawn carriages, with Jewish Boy Scouts for escorts.
And Margot: when had she started tracking the Marcels? And had she managed to capture these heroes’ likenesses well enough for them to be identified and seized?
Noah asked the question with a fingertip so clumsy that he had to go back and respell it twice.
Rémond’s status as Bishop of Nice seemed to have protected him; likewise the ministers and their families. Abadi had somehow evaded capture too. The Gestapo had hurried up the stairs of Brener’s office one day, brushing right past him—but he had gone into hiding and managed to survive the war. He wasn’t the only one who owed his life to a fluke: Georges Isserlis, a schoolboy messenger for the network, had been scooped up and avoided Drancy only by climbing out the window of the train.
As for Rosenstock, she’d kept out of the Nazis’ reach for a full seven months, but in April 1944 she’d been interrogated in the Excelsior. Noah swallowed hard. He put one palm against the wall and thought of what the word interrogated might cover. He looked at his mother’s photo of Moussa Abadi and Odette Rosenstock again; Monsieur Benoit had identified the couple at a glance because he was familiar with other images of them, but surely on its own this rear view of them on a bench wouldn’t have been enough to expose them?
From the Excelsior, Rosenstock had been moved to the Hotel Hermitage up in Cimiez, Noah read, and then to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and then to Bergen-Belsen, where typhus had put her into a coma. Inexplicably, she’d lived through the war and—as if further proof of her goodness were needed—stayed on at Bergen-Belsen for some time after, to help other former inmates. In 1959 she and Abadi had married at last (he in his fifties, she in her forties), maintaining their silence about the Marcel Network pretty much unbroken for the rest of their lives.
So the network’s agents had all survived? Then Margot couldn’t have had any blood on her hands.
Relief, like sugar in Noah’s mouth.
But he read on, and learned about two young Jewish social workers who’d joined the Marcels in the autumn of 1943: Nicole Weil (alias Nicole Salon) and Huguette Wahl (Odile Varlet). Weil had been denounced by an anonymous informer after just three weeks, he read, Wahl after a matter of days. They’d both been killed at Auschwitz.
Noah squeezed his eyes shut. Of course his mother could have taken other photographs, better ones. Maybe the handful in her envelope were just the rejects, the ones she didn’t bother handing over to her masters at the Excelsior.
Michael tossed the notebook across the gap between their beds, making Noah jump.
“You didn’t spend long on that.”
The boy tapped his cropped head. “Work smarter, not harder.”
At the top of the page was what Noah realized was a diagrammatic representation of the Promenade des Anglais, Famous Street of Death scrawled over it. Jihadi psycho killer, Michael had added, with an arrow to the truck and a dotted line showing its zigzag progress, stick figures littering the pavement behind. At the other end of the street, by a sketched-in car, a figure labeled Airhead Dancer Managed to Strangle Her Self With Her Scarf. Then, a little inland, several crime-scene body outlines: Nazis Shot Teen Resistors HERE. Floating well offshore, on a raft, with sketched cupids overhead, was Sainte Réparate’s young skull separated from her dripping limbs, labeled Medeeval Martyr With Angels to Keep Off the Vultures.
Joan weighed in: Well, at least he’s been paying attention.
“Very vivid,” he commented, handing the journal back, and went to brush his teeth.
Getting into bed, he noticed Michael’s phone tucked under his pillow. “Never leave that there!”
Too stern: the boy’s eyes narrowed.
“I just mean—a man was burned to death in his sleep one time, when his phone burst into flames.”
“Got it.” Michael moved his phone to the bedside table.
“And by the way”—Noah looked away, buttoning up his pajamas—“if you happen to have an accident tonight, just throw a towel over it.”
Raging: “I won’t.”
“It’s only a stress symptom.”
“Just stop.”
“OK.” The room felt oppressive; too small for two. Noah risked a grain of humor. “All I’m saying is, even if you wet the bed every night, it’s not a problem.”
“You wet the fucking bed.”
“I might well. Oldies are known for losing control of their functions.”
“Shit in it too for all I care,” Michael growled.
“Now there I draw the line. It would be too sticky.”
That got a very small laugh.
After midnight, Noah lay listening to a cacophony outside the window that reminded him of some sci-fi movie about the rise of the machines. He got up to finger the curtain aside and see what was going on. Just garbage trucks.
He was tired, doubtful, not one thing or the other, neither here nor there. He’d returned to his homeland, but he wasn’t at home there; on the other hand, where in the world was Noah really at home at this point? The apartment in New York was his place of residence, as bureaucrats would put it, but it still echoed with Joan’s absence almost a decade on. Perhaps Noah should make the break; throw away Mendeleev’s heated pad and chew toy; move out.
As for his mother, she eluded him. Noah was working blind, fumbling in the dark to form a new, clear, awful image of Margot.
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