He tried to think how to ask it in a coded or casual way, such that Amber would read between the lines. But no, this was ridiculous; Noah would only botch it. Maybe he could whisper his question, in person, when next he visited.
Not with Michael; Noah would go on his own. This wasn’t like Bond movies or Mission: Impossible; there was no glamour to spying on your own peers. Given Michael’s belief in the no-snitching code, how could Amber ever tell him, bring him to understand the deal (never to be spoken of) that his dad had had to make? A deal that had backfired, too. Her great generosity punished; her child left alone.
Just then the boy came out of the bathroom. “Night.” Getting into bed.
“Night.” Noah put on his pajamas, brushed his teeth, and snapped off the light.
He shouldn’t get ahead of himself and jump to conclusions, as he had about his mother. (All those bad habits built into the human brain because they were useful shortcuts: confirmation, framing, hindsight bias.)
Surely there’d be evidence sitting in some prosecutor’s filing cabinet in Brooklyn. Rosa had her friend in the police. Could she—and would she, if he asked—get Noah proof that Victor had been a CI? He reached for his tablet in the dark and wrote the social worker an email, spelling out his theory. “Surely Victor’s family has a right to know,” he finished, a little self-importantly. Then added, “I’d be very grateful for your help.”
A terrible volley of farts.
Noah thought it was the machine at first. Then, “Michael!”
The kid’s voice was only a little sheepish: “Got to let it out.”
“You could have gone into the bathroom.”
“I was too sleepy to move.”
Noah switched his tablet off and set it on the nightstand. “Did you hear about the man who died of inhaling his own gas?”
“This one of your unfunny jokes?”
“Not a bit. Back in the ’90s, I think it was. He’d eaten a lot of beans and cabbage, he was sleeping in a tiny bedroom, and he inhaled so much of the methane he released in his sleep that he never woke up.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“The paramedics got poisoned too when they came in, but they recovered.”
“Why would you tell me that?” Michael demanded. “Now I can’t get back to sleep from thinking about dying of the fumes.”
“Believe me, I’ll put you out in the corridor if it builds up to dangerous levels. Good night,” Noah added.
“Night.”
VIII
Schooled
Noah woke late to a weirdly warm Sunday, like summer in February.
“I’ve been awake for hours,” Michael told him.
“OK. Give me a minute.”
“You mean like half an hour to get your socks on.”
“You’re learning.”
The boy’s journal was splayed on the floor between their beds, which Noah took as an invitation to look at the latest double spread. The teacher would have a field day with this—possibly the principal and the psychologist too, if the school had one. In a nightmarish comic strip, a stick figure in a fedora and glasses was being attacked by a seagull the size of a pterodactyl. Next, the cartoon Noah was sprawling in a pair of obscenely small swim trunks on a stony beach. Then attacked by a hailstorm of thorny flowers. In the next panel, Noah was trodden—literally “creamed,” as Michael would say—by an elephant; and finally (as far as he could make out from the smeared ink) devoured by a lion in a surprisingly accurate Roman arena. The caption beneath said, with unusual brevity, My “Great” Uncle.
Noah put the notebook back on the carpet.
“I was looking at your mom’s pics,” Michael said. “Is that OK?”
“Sure.” Noah straightened up and rubbed his face.
“This one of the feet going by, I reckon these are the kids she saved.”
“Why’s that?”
“Duh, because of the suitcase,” Michael said.
“What suitcase?”
“There.” Michael put his finger to a black shape in the upper right corner.
Now the boy said it, yes, it could be a valise one of them was carrying. Somehow Noah’s eye had skipped over the shape because nowadays roller bags moved at ground level. “Huh. Well done.” He imagined the weight of the case in the child’s tired hand. “But Michael…” Should Noah be honest? “This photo, now that you’ve pointed out the luggage, it looks to me like lots of children all walking along together.” Burdened by whatever they’d been allowed to take with them. “But the hidden kids—the Marcel people tucked them away all over the countryside, in ones and twos. They wouldn’t have risked drawing attention to them by walking along in a big group in the street.”
“So who would these kids be?”
“Well, maybe…” He hated to say it. “The others.”
Michael frowned in puzzlement.
Noah went to the window and looked down: tourists with backpacks, locals with shopping bags, a girl in a feathered and spangled mask. “The ones who weren’t hidden in time. The Nazis would have marched them from here to the train station, just five minutes up the street.” (Then on to Drancy, then to Auschwitz.) Had Margot stood in the street and watched them go by, these small ones who’d slipped through the Marcels’ hands? Discreetly (through a gap in her coat) positioned her father’s Leica? She’d done what all war photographers managed to do, no matter how they shook or wept, so that each abomination would be recorded, at least: pressed the shutter.
“But what about RJ?” Michael pulled out the photo of the small smiling boy.
Noah studied the soft lines of the boy’s face. “He could certainly be one of the hidden ones, if she was making him an identity card.” A random representative? Perhaps there’d been something about RJ that had particularly moved her, lodging him in her memory. Please let him not have been a lost one, whose picture Margot had saved because she hadn’t been able to save the boy.
Michael went back to his game, and Noah took a shower.
Once he was dressed, he checked his email.
“I suspect you’re right about Victor,” Rosa wrote, “and the same thought had actually occurred to me, but it didn’t seem the time (or my place) to speculate. I’m afraid there’s unlikely to be anything about a deal in police files. Generally no record gets kept, for the CI’s own safety.”
But Victor hadn’t been safe, in fact, had he? It must have been his puppetmasters who’d told him to go to Long Island that night, Noah saw; the encounter made no sense unless it was a sting. He did trust the maroon chip, now; believed that Victor had been three months clean and sober when they—law enforcement and dealers, two jaws of a pincers—had forced him back in. And under such perilous conditions, too: a wire taped under the young man’s shirt, flop sweat pooling. Was that why Victor had agreed to take heavy-duty narcotics with whoever he was meeting in that motel—had that been the only way to convince them he was the real thing?
Surely the autopsy would have mentioned the wire, though. No? Noah fired off a quick follow-up to Rosa about that, apologizing for bothering her again on the weekend. Funny, he didn’t even know if she had a family of her own, but he could imagine how wiped out she’d be after checking in with her twenty-four cases.
In the café around the corner from the pealing bells of the church, Michael polished off a chocolate chip–studded roll. Today his T-shirt said LEVEL UP, and he had the Roman helmet on his lap because Noah had made him take it off.
The door tinkled as another customer came in, but it was a middle-aged man, not the woman Noah was waiting for. He dipped his napkin in his water and handed it to Michael.
“What’s that for?”
“Your mouth.”
Michael swiped at his face, eyes still on his screen.
“You’re making it worse.” Noah took back the napkin and finished the wiping himself, holding Michael by the chin. “Listen, would you please be polite to her when she comes?”
“Does this lady speak Eng
lish?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then she won’t understand even if I say, Sup, bitch?”
Noah fixed him with a look.
“OK, OK, I’ll be nice.”
A woman of Noah’s vintage coming in: he leaped to his feet. Could it be Madame Lamarche? “Colette? Coco?” he asked, faltering. He yanked at Michael’s sleeve to get him to stand.
She had pink lipstick, overplucked eyebrows filled in with pencil, and a shining silver bob. Smiling broadly, she kissed Noah on both cheeks. Some classic perfume. Yes, she told him with a strong Niçois accent, it had always been Coco, but the priest hadn’t been willing to baptize a baby with such a name, so officially she was Colette.
Neither recognized the other’s face, they admitted once their coffees were ordered, but she did think Noah had something of his pépère about the eyebrows. And so did his young relation, she added, nodding at Michael. She liked his helmet.
The boy produced a choirboy smile before going back to his game.
Noah realized that he and this woman had slipped right back into addressing each other as tu, as when they were small.
They’d buried a swallow together, Coco mentioned.
He drew a blank. “Oui, oui,” he said, pretending to remember.
It had flown into the window and broken its neck.
Where was it they’d made the grave, could she remind him?
On the beach, under the stones.
Noah didn’t mention her getting him to chew the pebble. He cast around for some more small talk before he broached what was really on his mind. He remembered her mother warmly, all of Madame Dupont’s kindness to his family. He didn’t believe he’d ever met Coco’s father, had he?
He wouldn’t have, no; Papa was sent away to a German factory during the war.
The Service du Travail Obligatoire, a forced-labor program for Frenchmen and -women: Noah had almost forgotten about that.
When a compensation scheme was set up about fifteen years ago, Coco said, she and her siblings had applied—not for the measly seven thousand euros, which wouldn’t have gone far among the three of them, but for the principle of it. Anyway, they were informed that what their father had gone through didn’t count as slavery, because he’d received some wages.
Noah shook his head in sympathetic outrage. This seemed as good a moment as any to bring up Margot. Back in the 1960s, he mentioned, Madame Dupont had told a journalist a strange story of his grandfather being worried sick when Noah’s mother was absent from the apartment for two nights in August 1944. He had the article here. (Reaching for his tablet.) He didn’t suppose Coco happened to know anything more about that?
“Mais bien sûr.” She waved the tablet away. Then seemed to hesitate. She didn’t want to speak ill of the dead…
Of her mother or mine? Noah wondered privately.
But Madame Dupont had, well, harbored suspicions of the photographer’s daughter. Staying on when Marc went to New York, then sending their child after him—some saw that as daughterly devotion, but Coco’s mother had her own thoughts on the subject.
Noah pushed it: she’d believed his mother had a lover?
Coco pursed her lips. He should forgive her mother for wondering; those were judgmental times. And of course Madame Selvaggio had been more than punished, if by any chance it was true.
“Punie?” Noah repeated. How had Margot been punished?
Coco blinked at him. Hadn’t he been asking about the three days his mother had stayed out, at the end of the war? Well, she’d come back black and blue, with a dislocated knee.
Noah nodded, his hand trembling on the warm rim of his coffee bowl.
Frankly, Madame Dupont had assumed Madame Selvaggio had been beaten for fraternizing with a German. Those last weeks of the war, such rage had been unleashed; the streets were chaos. But Coco’s mother had asked no questions and had managed to find a doctor, who’d done his best to patch up Madame Selvaggio as well as treat poor Monsieur Personnet’s pneumonia.
Noah’s head was spinning. Margot’s bad leg, yes; bad for the rest of her life. But if it hadn’t in fact been a punishment beating…
Coco put her hand lightly over his. Please, he wasn’t to think badly of his mother. Many women did what they had to, for the sake of better rations for their families.
In a husky voice he told her that Margot hadn’t had a lover that he knew of, German or French. She’d been forging documents to help save children from the Holocaust.
Coco sat back, her eyes compassionate.
Noah thought she was moved by that—Margot’s nobility—but then he realized she didn’t believe a word of it. It was true, he insisted, he had a picture. He fumbled for the envelope in his satchel.
Well, she said awkwardly, it was just that so many did claim they’d been in the Resistance, afterward, didn’t they? Lined up for praise and thanks, medals, even money from de Gaulle’s new government. And maybe they even half-believed it. Memory was deceptive, n’est-ce pas?
“Non, mais—” Hang on, there was the photo of the tree, the children’s feet, where was the one of Margot? Noah plucked it out and slapped it down on the tiny table, almost upsetting the sugar bowl. That was his mother, he said, with—look, on the back—MZ for Marie Zabel: Margot Isabelle, Marie Zabel, see?
A nickname? Coco asked gently.
No, no, her nom de guerre. This M.Z. was a known forger for the Marcel Network, according to the archivist at the Musée de la résistance azuréenne.
Coco’s drawn-on eyebrows went up.
Noah felt a childish satisfaction that he was convincing her at last.
But why had Madame Selvaggio not said?
Well, Noah imagined Margot didn’t want to endanger her father. (He didn’t say: And how could she have been sure of the sympathies of anyone else—Madame Dupont included?) The fewer who’d known, the better.
Ah yes. But Noah had grown up hearing the stories?
Not a word, he admitted. Just this week, he’d found some old photos in a box and put two and two together. With the help of his clever great-nephew.
“Huh?” Feeling eyes on him, Michael looked up.
“I’m telling her how I couldn’t have figured it out without you—my mother’s story.”
Michael nodded and went back to his screen.
Many of the best of them had kept quiet about it, Coco was saying. Un sentiment de culpabilité.
A sense of guilt. That they’d survived, Noah asked?
She nodded. And that they hadn’t managed to do more. Save more. Les femmes, women in particular, Coco had the impression that many had plunged back into private life after the war, making babies, wanting to bury the whole horror in silence.
Noah thought of his little sister’s pudgy cheeks.
Coco discreetly checked her watch for the second time, so Noah said he was sure she had things to do. A granddaughter’s birthday party? How nice. If she could help him understand one last thing, though…in 1968, why had her mother not told the journalist about Margot coming home injured?
Oh, she wouldn’t have done that, Coco said, tutting. Maman was loyal to Monsieur Personnet and would never have brought shame on his memory. Whereas Coco didn’t mind answering Noah’s questions, since he was one of the family. Besides, it seemed now that her mother had misjudged his mother; Coco was very sorry about that.
That was all right, Noah assured her, getting to his feet. He’d done plenty of misjudging himself.
Coco was tugging her coat on with difficulty; Noah helped it over her shoulder. Better to forgive them all, at this point, she supposed. “Il vaudrait mieux passer l’éponge.”
He hadn’t heard that idiom in decades, probably not since Margot’s death: best to pass the sponge. (Incongruously, it made him think of the Roman toilets at Cemenelum.) Wipe the slate clean, he supposed you’d say in English; let bygones be bygones.
“I need a rest,” Noah told Michael, turning back in the direction of the hotel.
/> “Already?” The boy’s voice echoed inside the helmet. “All we’ve done today is sit in a café.”
“Afraid so. Especially if we’ll be out late at the Carnival tonight.” Noah stopped just outside the Excelsior, so Michael walked right into him. “Oh Christ.”
“What?”
The black doors, how they swung closed, like teeth. “Of course.”
“What?” Michael demanded.
“I think my mother was arrested.” Noah turned wild eyes on the boy. “Held here for three days.”
“Is that what your Coco lady said?” Michael asked, heading into the lobby.
He shook his head, letting Michael go into the elevator ahead of him. “Her mother, our house cleaner, she didn’t know where Margot had been except that when she got home she was in bad shape, with a smashed knee.”
“You figure the Nazis smashed it?”
Noah covered his mouth.
Her eye as well, though Coco hadn’t mentioned that. He supposed that sort of injury didn’t show. Was it in this hotel that Margot had lost half her vision, which afterward she’d blamed on an infection?
Michael didn’t break the uneasy silence.
I’m really in no state to be in charge of anything, Noah thought. Not a child. Particularly not this child.
Once through their door, he went straight into the bathroom to collect himself. Sitting on the toilet lid, his eyes fell on the shallow bathtub, the unyielding rectangle of ceramic. Margot had had their tub in New York ripped out.
Michael thumped on the door. “What’s going on? You made a terrible noise.”
Had he?
“You having a heart attack in there?”
Noah stood up and opened the door in the boy’s face. The helmet was off, and clutched to Michael’s chest. “No,” he managed to say.
“I thought you were dying on the toilet like fucking Elvis.”
“Sorry to scare you.”
“I wasn’t scared.”
Noah tried for a hint of levity. “Mildly concerned? Or just curious?”
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