“How’d you know what she did? If it was dark.”
“I suppose…I must have learned about it when I was older, or maybe she told me. At least for the printing, she could turn on a safelight, red or amber.” Which wall had that hung on? Or overhead, with a pull cord? “The crucial thing was to avoid dust, because it makes white spots on the prints.” Noah seemed to recall Père Sonne giving Madame Dupont hell for that. “The whole room stank of fumes.” He sniffed at the sterile air now and tried to conjure them up: sulfurous, vinegary, metallic, ammoniac?
“Like, poisonous?”
“Not if you just caught a whiff, but once I smashed a bottle with my soccer ball and my grandpa roared. Oh, and it had to be kept warm in here all year, warmer than the rest of the apartment,” Noah remembered. “One winter, we burned the chairs.”
“Cool.” Michael wandered off.
Noah thought he could see the flames rise, hear the crackle, but perhaps that was just a family story come to life in his imagination.
Down in the Old Town he paused at a window holding marzipan diamonds in white and pale brown…calissons, that was the word, sudden on his tongue. Beside them, guimauves à la rose. “Rose-flavored marshmallows,” he said aloud.
Michael made a retching sound. “Why would you put roses in them?”
“Flavor. The French are always trying to make life taste stronger.”
“In fifth grade, the teacher made us play this dumb game. If you had enough self-control to hold on to a marshmallow for fifteen minutes, you’d get two.”
Noah was amused. “She was doing a classic psychology experiment on you.” Was that even legal?
“I told her she could stick them up her ass.”
“Michael!”
“Actually I went, ‘No thanks, I don’t like marshmallows,’” the boy said in a saccharine singsong.
“So you got none?”
“I got the satisfaction.”
Noah wondered whether, in the long run, this kind of defiance might come in just as handy as self-control. He pointed into the shop window. “Those marzipan pebbles…” Amazingly realistic in variegated, veined greens and grays. “I think I ate a real rock once. Another kid had told me it was one of those candies.”
“You swallowed it? Sucker!”
“Not quite, but I cracked a tooth.” His tongue moved around his mouth, but of course these were his adult teeth; he couldn’t have had any of these at four.
“That kid, he schooled you.”
“It was a girl.” Noah added, “Coco. Her mother came in twice a week to clean our apartment.”
Michael’s brow contracted. “I did that a couple times, with my mom.”
“Cleaned your apartment?”
“Other people’s.”
Noah couldn’t tell if this was a nostalgic memory of a time when Amber had still been right there, on top of everything…or one of the recollected humiliations of poverty. Had she let him keep the TV on while they were working? Had the cleaning products reeked and stung? “How was it?”
A shrug.
Thinking of Madame Dupont’s daughter, Coco, he checked his phone.
Yes, she’d left him a message, in a voice he didn’t recognize. She’d be delighted to meet him on Sunday after Mass. Noah was surprised; he thought of French Catholics as pretty much nonpracticing these days, though he supposed they couldn’t all be or the churches would be shuttered by now. “We’re actually going to meet her for coffee tomorrow,” he told Michael, “the pebble girl.”
“Bring her a bag of these,” the boy suggested, nodding at the shop window, “and throw in a couple real ones from the beach.”
Noah grinned at that.
His eyes rested on a stream of figures rolling into a doorway: that must be where the Segway tour began. “Would you like to go on one of those?”
“Right now?”
“Why not?”
A hesitation. “Not on my own.”
It was only apprehension that was making the boy ask for Noah to do it with him, but still, it warmed Noah.
The guide looked about seventeen and spoke fast and casually, with such a Provençal accent that he had trouble following him. Of course, Noah probably wouldn’t have understood the technical terms for the parts of the wheeled transporter even in English. He signed the waivers without reading them, then struggled to tighten his helmet’s strap.
Selfie stick slotted through a loop in his jeans like a sword, Michael got the hang of the thing as soon as he stepped onto the little platform and seized the handlebars. “It’s all in the hips,” he told Noah. “Like flossing.”
Noah was thrown by that. “I floss with my fingers.”
“The floss dance, dude.” Michael jumped down and swung his body and his arms different ways, blindingly fast.
On the Segway, Noah tried some pelvic action, like Elvis in slow motion, and found that it did help to steer the device.
But as the little group set off through the cobbled streets, Noah bringing up the rear, it occurred to him: so this is how I’ll break my hip. (The good one, probably, just as a falling slice of bread always landed butter-down.) French hospitals were renowned, but how would Noah manage with Michael if he were trapped in traction? Could he have him shipped back to Rosa like some valuable parcel?
The guide pointed out a tiny shrine, high up on a corner building; one of those relief carvings in which a gigantic Virgin sheltered dozens of tiny people under her cloak. The next alley was redolent of freshly cut leather; wallets and handbags hung on stone walls in a rainbow of shades. Noah thought he remembered this confiserie they were passing, which sold fruits—pears, apricots, whole clementines—steeped in syrup for days on end.
Michael pointed as they rolled past a giant gold thumb outside the Hotel de Ville. Noah supposed it counted as art, but he couldn’t work out the symbolism. A thumbs-up for encouragement? Or a more sinister hint that everyone lived under the thumb of the municipal bureaucracy? He thought of mouches lining up to tattle at the Excelsior. Margot, with an envelope in her handbag that put, if not clear faces, then profiles and shapes to the aliases that masked the Marcels. But if she’d handed over her best photos, he wondered, why hadn’t the Resistance agents all been arrested at once? None of it made sense.
The boy lagged behind, ogling the contents of a window: swords, guns. “Keep up or we’ll lose you,” Noah called over his shoulder.
This time the Boom! from behind took Noah unawares, and he almost toppled off his Segway.
“Just that twelve o’clock thing.”
Breathless, Noah tried for nonchalance. “Right, the cannon.”
Their guide led them past a flower stall. Noah breathed in the overwhelming sweetness and concentrated on not knocking anyone down. The next stall held bizarre fruits; a kind of citrus with crooked, devilish fingers.
Out onto the Promenade, where—once they’d survived crossing the six lanes—it was easier on the broad, smooth pavement. Michael was at the front of the pack, working up alarming speed and—could he be?—videoing himself with his selfie stick held high. But if Noah shouted Slow down, Michael would only pretend not to hear. Besides, Noah hadn’t the heart, because at last, on the sixth day of knowing him, he’d hit on something that thrilled the boy.
They had to turn back at the point where the Prom had been blocked off for something called—rather Franglais, Noah thought—La Nice Carnaval Run 10km. Revelers in outrageous costumes and rainbow clown wigs jogged along to the strains of thumping American pop. Noah would have expected anyone capable of running more than six miles to look lithe and limber, but many of these had the baggy, knock-kneed, or stooped bodies of ordinary mortals.
His phone went off, startling him. He couldn’t stop the Segway or he’d lose his party, and he doubted he’d be able to find his way back to the rental shop on his own. He thought of ignoring the ringtone, but what if it was Coco Lamarche? Or Rosa, from New York, with urgent news about Grace Drew? He fumbled the phone out of his poc
ket. “Hello,” keeping his right forearm pressed on the handlebars and leaning into the phone…which made the Segway speed up. Noah straightened up, came to a sharp halt, and almost fell.
“Monsieur Selvaggio?”
It was Monsieur Benoit from the Resistance museum, Noah worked out after a confused exchange. “Sorry, it’s really noisy here and I’m on a…a rolling thing.” Eyes searching for Michael.
“One of my colleagues has dug up some information that might be of interest to you, but perhaps this is a bad time?”
Noah managed to get a better grip on the handlebars and glide forward. “No, carry on, please.”
“Well, this might not be the same person as in your mother’s photograph, but there is an individual with the initials M.Z.”
Coincidence, Noah told himself.
“A woman,” Monsieur Benoit went on, “Marie Zabel. Though that was almost undoubtedly a nom de guerre.”
“Marie Zabel?” Noah almost shouted into the phone.
“Yes, a very obscure figure. She’s not mentioned in any publications about the Marcel Network, but it’s thought she did some forgery work for them.”
Another of Margot’s targets, then; Noah’s stomach knotted. He hardly dared ask. “Did she…survive the war?”
“Since she seems to have dropped out of view after the summer of 1944, we assume not.”
Noah found he’d come to a halt again. Captured, then; sent to the camps.
“I’m sorry I can’t tell you anything more.”
“No, no, you’ve been more than helpful, Monsieur.” His voice guttural.
“I wish you well with your researches.”
Noah wished he’d never begun his motherfucking researches; wished he’d thrown out Fernande’s last box without looking inside.
“Noah!” A shriek, very young. Michael zoomed up to him. “Where were you, dude?”
“Right here.”
“I couldn’t see you.”
“Sorry.” Still discombobulated. “I had a phone call.”
When they were on the final stretch, approaching the rental shop down a steep cobbled alley, Michael took a corner too fast and fell off his Segway.
Jesus Christ! Noah parked his own machine and hurtled down to the boy. “Are you hurt?”
“I’m good,” Michael insisted, clutching his elbow.
All the guide did was remark that this happened, sometimes; probably the wheel had caught on the curb.
“You’re bleeding, Michael.”
“Not much.” The boy hopped up, proud of himself, and remounted his machine.
“Did you hit your head?”
“You’re as bad as my grandma.”
Noah, fumbling in his satchel for an antibacterial wipe and a Band-Aid, decided to take that as a compliment.
At the rental counter, he was inclined not to put a tip in the guide’s basket because of the fellow’s laxity about safety standards, but Michael kept nudging him with his unbandaged elbow until he did.
The boy munched chicken and fries. Noah toyed with a salade Niçoise. “So the man from the museum identified our M.Z.” Holding her up. “You guessed right: it was an alias of another of the Marcel people—someone who made fake documents for the kids.”
“Shit, your mom was spying on them all?”
“Looks like it,” Noah admitted, leaden.
Michael pulled the picture out of his hand. “This one doesn’t go with the others, though, because they’re outdoors.”
True, it looked like a studio shot, carefully posed. Could Margot have known this M.Z. socially? On what pretext could she have gotten her to pose: had she asked for a memento, but hadn’t been able to persuade M.Z. to risk revealing her face? Was it perhaps through this friend that Margot had come across the Marcels in the first place? And at what point had his mother decided to shop them to the Nazis, and (the question he might never be able to answer) why?
“That’s a weird last name.”
“Zabel? Jewish, probably.” Noah got out his phone and looked it up. “German, meaning board game,” he reported. “Sometimes Jewish, but not necessarily.”
“Marcel Network Marie Zabel,” he tried. No hits.
“Marie Zabel,” Michael chanted, “Marie Zabel, Marie Zabel.”
Noah looked at him crazily.
“What?”
His throat was dry. “It sounds like…Mar-Isabelle.” He sipped his wine. “Isabelle was my grandmother’s name, as well as my mother’s middle name. Margot Isabelle Personnet.”
“Margot, Mar—plus Isabelle,” the boy yelped. “It’s her, dude. Your mom.”
Could it possibly be true: had Margot been Marie Zabel? A helpful forger, rather than a traitor?
“Mar-Isabelle, Marie Zabel, we fucking nailed it!”
“Hang on, now, we can’t be sure.” But Noah’s pulse was scudding along. Yes, it could be, it almost had to be. He should have guessed as soon as Monsieur Benoit had supplied him with the nom de guerre. Daughter of a someone whose nom d’artiste insisted he was personne, no one. Had Margot not been able to resist playing games even in the most serious of times? The photos were clues his mother had left behind, for her future self or for her children. “Zazou with the cane and Odette, Moussa—I think my mother wanted a record of her comrades,” he told the boy, “but she couldn’t show their faces without endangering them, so that’s why she photographed them from behind.”
“And herself too.” Michael flapped the coiled-hair picture. “Bet it was a selfie, she must have took it with a string or something.”
Noah managed not to kill the moment by saying must have taken. “And the cathedral! The picture with the circle and dashes.” Another private joke. “She did the flowers at Sainte Réparate, so that’s where she’d have met the bishop, and he was a Marcel too.” Of course Bishop Rémond would have heard about the great photographer’s daughter and assistant, a parishioner with unusual skills and access to a private darkroom; it must have been Rémond who’d brought her in, Noah saw now. He’d appealed to Margot’s conscience, but her stifled ambition too; even her craving for adventure. That would have been, what, 1942? The summer she’d put Noah on the ship at Marseilles. “That’s why she sent me away.” His voice caught, jerked. “She had to, because her work was so dangerous.” ID cards, passports, visas, baptismal certificates, ration cards. Identity photos for the cards that would spend the rest of the war tucked in the bishop’s books, or buried under one of his trees. Margot had been one thin link in the chain: an archivist of human beings, a filer of children.
“So my great-great-grandma was some heroine,” Michael said sternly, “and you said she was a snitch?”
“I was only guessing. I still am,” Noah warned him.
“Nah, we got her. Marie Zabel!”
Relief, so vivid it made Noah dizzy. But also he was imagining his mother’s constant dread. During all the pedestrian tasks of her days, her heart must have been in her mouth. Each document she worked on like a land mine underfoot.
The buildings of the old port rang a faint bell for Noah: two long flame-peach and pink neoclassical blocks. “Isn’t that rather lovely?” he asked, still shaky from the good news.
Michael wrinkled his nose. “Kind of Baskin-Robbins.”
The white nineteenth-century church was topped with the Virgin, the inevitable gull on her head. On the steps outside, sunburned drunks with bottles in paper bags lay dead to the world in an encampment of sleeping bags and boxes.
In the little harbor at the bottom of the granite steps, Michael ran up to the first of the motor yachts, huge and sleek. They looked more like floating hotels to Noah. “Owned by Russian mobsters, most of them,” he told the boy.
“Cool.”
“Not cool. Probably funded by, ah, exploiting a lot of North African teenagers.” Noah had read something about how the Russians had the French Riviera sex trade sewn up.
“This is a sweet ride, though.” Michael’s hand traced a shining prow in the air. He turne
d his back on the yacht and posed with it, grandiose, holding up his phone on its stick.
As the two of them strolled westerly around the port, the motorboats became reasonably sized, even shabby, with faded canopies. Michael was fascinated by the giant metal rings set into the pavement; he lifted one and let it drop with a clang.
“Don’t smash your foot.” So many ways Noah couldn’t protect this boy; it was like traveling with a bag of bananas he had little chance of delivering unbruised.
A smaller ring, bolted into the wall: the kid put his head right through it and posed for a dying-prisoner-in-dungeon shot.
Noah was up ahead, at a line of tiny sailboats with upright masts and angled cross masts, bright paint flaking, names scrawled on: Ninou, La Galinette, Lou Calanque, M’en Bati. It didn’t look as if any of them were used for fishing anymore, just for nostalgic pleasure boating.
Michael thumped down one of the little boardwalks, then sat down, sneakers dangling over the water.
“That’s private property, and be careful not to fall in.”
“There’s fish down there,” the boy remarked.
“Where do you expect them to live?”
“Smart-ass.” Michael stared into the water. “We had fish.”
Puzzled, Noah asked, “Where?”
“At my grandma’s.”
“For dinner?”
“Pets, dude!”
“Ah, sorry.”
“But they didn’t last long.”
“Often the way, with fish.”
“Mom says when she comes home we’ll get a dog, if the landlord’s cool with that.”
Two years and nine months; thirty-three months from now, so long as Amber managed to pick her way through the contingencies of prison life. If she put a foot wrong at any point, it would be longer than that. Michael would be what, at least fourteen? And what hypothetical home was Amber imagining?
As they walked on past the harbor, every bench seemed to hold someone who looked older and more content than Noah. What a strange city of transients this was: sun worshippers, invalids, mobsters, retirees, cruise-ship tourists, refugees with bleeding feet…
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