The Paris Apartment, page 26
The carved clock on the mantel ticked loudly into the silence. Just when Sophie didn’t think the woman was going to answer, she spoke. “Aviva. Her name is Aviva.”
Hebrew for springtime. A beautiful name for a beautiful little girl. A little girl who had remained as still as death throughout the invasion of the apartment.
When the immediate threat had faded, the child had resumed her drawing and had not objected when Sophie picked up one of her pencils. Together, they’d passed the hours drawing, Aviva rendering sketches of dogs and Sophie doing her best to portray a mare and foal galloping across a pasture. Aviva hadn’t objected, either, to Sophie’s lack of talent and simply bent her head, wrinkled her fine features, and added color to Sophie’s efforts.
As the hours had dragged on, Aviva had left the pencils and papers where they lay and curled up in a listless ball on the cot, staring at three small paintings of ballerinas that had been hung high on the wall opposite. The airman had whispered stories about his childhood and Sophie and Aviva had listened. Eventually, he’d fallen asleep stretched out on the floor next to the cot, succumbing to the anxiety and exhaustion of his journey. He didn’t wake when the hidden door had finally opened and Sophie and Aviva had emerged into an apartment with curtains pulled tight against the darkness outside.
La Chanteuse had served them a simple but surprisingly decent meal of bread, soup, and hard cheese. She had remained tight-lipped and said almost nothing, other than to explain that the airman would remain hidden in the wardrobe room until she could make further arrangements and that Sophie would not be returning to her hotel room tonight. That no one would be leaving the apartment tonight. Curfew had come and the city had once again gone dark.
Wordlessly, Sophie had helped tidy up the few dishes and had gazed around the apartment, thinking that it, along with the woman who lived in it, was a study in contradictions. The highly visible pro-Nazi literature that lay scattered about the apartment. The concealed room in which a small girl was hidden, presumably Jewish. The food in the cupboards and the stack of unused ration books and coupons. The array of fine classical art that hung on the silk-covered walls of the apartment and the three Impressionist Degas paintings that hung in that hidden room. A woman who had accepted a gift from Göring and used that circumstance to protect an Allied airman.
“Are the dresses in that wardrobe really gifts from Göring?” Sophie asked into the new silence.
“You heard that conversation.” Not really a question, just a dull confirmation.
“When the wardrobe was open, every word. Did he tell you that you looked like an angel?” With La Chanteuse’s rich, honey-colored hair, hazel eyes, and her graceful carriage, Sophie wasn’t surprised.
“Yes. That was the truth.” Her answer was flat. “I wear them to sing in.”
“They’re beautiful.”
“They make my skin crawl. But all the best disguises do, I suppose.”
“You sing often at the hotels.”
“Just at the Ritz. But not as much since…since Aviva, but enough to remain routine. Welcomed. Included in conversations or, even better, dismissed as mere décor during others.”
“I wondered.”
“About?”
“Where La Chanteuse had come from.”
“We can’t stay here much longer.” The statement was abrupt.
“I beg your pardon?”
“The…man who was arrested. He knows about me, about this apartment, and about Aviva. I would like to think that he would never betray us, but I…” Her face crumpled before she seemed to catch herself. With a visible effort she reasserted her outward calm. “I do not know how long he might hold out under their torture,” she whispered. “I might have days or weeks or—” Her voice broke, and she stopped.
“Or maybe the man that they arrested today might only be imprisoned. Or he might already be—” Sophie stopped, unwilling to say it.
“Dead,” the woman finished bleakly.
“Or he might be dead,” Sophie agreed, trying to gentle words that weren’t gentle at all. “You might be safe.”
La Chanteuse looked at her, despair shadowing her features. “Or I might not. We might not.”
“I just—”
“Enough.” The woman cut her off, speculation about the fate of the man on the basilica steps at an abrupt end. “What do you want?”
The harsh, cynical question caught Sophie off guard. “I beg your pardon?”
“You did what you did at that basilica this afternoon for a reason. And for the life of me, I can’t figure out what that reason is. But no one does anything without an agenda. Did you think that what you did would cast me in your debt?”
“What? No.” Sophie turned, scowling.
“I don’t believe you.”
“If we are measuring debt, then whatever assistance I may have provided this afternoon has been subsequently repaid in kind. Had I taken the American back to my hotel, we would likely have been found, arrested, and I’d be having a far different conversation than the one I’m having now. If we’re keeping score, we owe each other nothing, and in the morning, I will leave, and you will never see me again. I don’t even know your name, which will make it easy for me to forget I was ever here.”
La Chanteuse seemed to weigh Sophie’s answer and came up wanting. “Why did you do it, then?”
Sophie didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “Because I could.” It was an honest, if incomplete, answer.
“I don’t know what you’ve been sent here to do but the fact that London sent two agents tells me that it is important or urgent or both. What you did was foolish and reckless and put you and your mission, whatever it is, at an extraordinary risk.”
Sophie couldn’t disagree.
“Do they teach you in spy school what the Gestapo does to your kind? Or mine? They don’t just shoot us anymore. Instead, they like to see what they can get to fall out of our heads first before they kill us. The funnel, the press, extraction of fingernails and toenails, though that is usually done after they’ve driven needles and wooden wedges underneath them to pry them loose. They’ll burn you, electrocute you, file your teeth, and slit the bottoms of your feet. They might not let you sleep for days, keep you in the dark for weeks, all the while beating you regularly—” She broke off, her expression again one of despair.
“I understand,” Sophie answered.
“Then what were you thinking?”
“I was thinking,” Sophie said slowly, “that I know another pilot. I was thinking that it’s been three years since he was shot down and vanished. But that maybe, just maybe, he might escape from wherever he is and that people like you would help him get home. I was thinking that if the man in that room wasn’t an American but an Englishman who loves cars and art and his bacon blackened around the edges, who found himself cornered in front of a French basilica, that someone might do for him what I did.” She paused. “I was thinking that, one day, that man, or men just like him, will be better served by your continued innocence and anonymity.”
La Chanteuse looked away. “I’m sorry about whomever it is you’ve lost but I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Of course you do. You help get Allied airmen out of France,” Sophie said. “You’re part of a smuggling line.”
“That’s quite an assumption.”
“It was at the time. It’s no longer an assumption.”
“Based on more of your conjecture?”
“Based on the fact that the man who was being hunted trusted you implicitly with the life of the American. He knew that you understood what needed to be done. I guessed then that it wasn’t your first time.”
“And now?” The question was biting.
“I don’t need to guess. In that hidden room, there is a trunk that contains books in English and Polish. Men’s clothes and identity papers and money. And train schedules, though they are over a year old and probably quite useless now.”
La Chanteuse paled. With stiff movements, she slid out from under the sleeping girl, careful not to wake her. In a half-dozen steps she had crossed the room, facing Sophie. “You went through the trunk?” she whispered furiously.
“Wouldn’t you in my position?”
“Your position?”
“Hidden behind a wardrobe wall with no weapon other than my knife to defend all of us should the Gestapo officer have been lucky in his search.” She made a face. “The rifle would have been more helpful had it been accompanied by ammunition.”
“I don’t keep ammunition in there.”
“So I discovered. And the rifle needs cleaning.”
“That trunk was locked. For a reason.”
Sophie shrugged. “It was. And then it wasn’t. Something else they teach us at spy school.”
“Merde.” La Chanteuse pressed her fingers to the temples of her forehead. In the background, Edith Piaf continued to sing softly on the gramophone.
“I know you didn’t ask for any of this,” Sophie said.
The woman sighed. “And neither did you.”
“And yet here we are.”
“Here we are,” she agreed. She dropped her hands and looked up at Sophie. “Estelle,” she said after a long pause.
“I beg your pardon?”
“My name. It’s Estelle.”
“Estelle,” Sophie repeated. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For what you’ve done. The men you’ve helped get home. You’re very brave.”
“Save your thanks. I’m not brave.”
“Yes, you are—”
“No, I’m not,” Estelle snapped. The child on the sofa stirred, and she lowered her voice. “I haven’t been part of that network in over a year. Because I’m not brave. I’m terrified. Terrified that Aviva will be discovered. Terrified that, even if she isn’t, she won’t last this war. Terrified that the promise I made to keep her safe will mean nothing because every day I watch her fade a little more.” She leaned back against the wall, gazing at the slumbering child. “I’m afraid to take her outside. I’m afraid to leave her in the apartment without being hidden. There are ears and eyes everywhere these days. Half my neighbours hate me because they see the black cars that have brought me home from time to time and think I’m one of them. The other half, those who have sold their souls to the Vichy cowards and Nazi pigs, are ravenous for the chance to denounce a neighbour. To prove that I am not who I pretend to be. I’m so afraid I’m going to fail her. I’m so afraid I’m going to make a mistake that will cost her her life.” The words had poured out in a torrent, like the breaking of a dam, and Estelle’s jaded defiance that she had worn like armour was replaced with desolate sorrow. “My world has shrunk to this apartment and the space between here and the hotels, but hers has shrunk to that room. And now even that isn’t safe anymore.”
Sophie didn’t know what to say.
“She wants to be a doctor when she grows up,” Estelle said. “Or maybe a ballerina. I told her she could be both.” She made a harsh sound. “Right now, I’m not sure she’ll even have the chance to grow up.”
“You’re doing your best,” Sophie said gently.
“My best,” Estelle sneered. “My best has yet to be enough. My best has failed at every turn.”
“That’s not—”
“Did you know that the paintings in that room used to belong to her family? The ballerinas? I put them in there thinking that they might make her feel less alone. That a part of her family was still with her.” She was twisting a loose thread on the hem of her skirt around the top of her index finger, turning the tip of her finger white.
“What happened to them? Her family?”
“More of my best.” The thread snapped. “Her father died on the front before he could be taken back to a field hospital in my ambulance. What was left of her family was arrested and shipped east in a liquidation I should have seen coming.”
“That you should have seen coming?” Sophie repeated with raised brows. “You have a crystal ball?”
“Don’t patronize me.”
“I’m not patronizing you. Evil is unpredictable, cruel, and without mercy. I did not foresee the bombs or the guns that killed my husband. Nor, I would imagine, did my parents go to bed one night knowing that it was the last time they would do so.”
Estelle traced a pattern with her toe on the rug. “I’m sorry,” she said after a moment.
Sophie said nothing. She was sorry too.
“I shouldn’t have said anything. You have your own heartache and trials, and neither Aviva nor I are your concern.” Estelle blew out a shaky breath.
“Leave France.”
“You think I haven’t considered that?” Estelle hissed. “You think I don’t want to? But just how far do you think I might get with a child who looks nothing like me and has no papers?” She held up her hand. “Let me answer that for you—not far enough to make me think I could pull it off. Though it seems that now I have no choice but to try. For Aviva’s sake.”
“I could get her out of France.” The words were out before Sophie had stopped to consider them. Before she stopped to consider if that was something that she might actually be able to do.
Estelle stared at her. “What?”
“There are…people who smuggle children over the Swiss border. And there are families who provide a home for them after that.”
“How do you know this?”
“I just…do.”
“That is not very reassuring.”
“You’d have to trust me.”
“I don’t know you enough to trust you.”
“No. I don’t suppose you do.”
“Why would you do this?”
Sophie frowned. “What do you mean, why?”
“What do you want from me in exchange?” The jaded defiance was back.
“Jesus. We’re back to this?” Sophie turned away to the wall of landscapes. Her gaze fell on a richly rendered image of a poppy field beneath an azure sky. The crimson flowers were scattered like drops of blood across the swath of earth, beautiful and oddly macabre all at the same time. “Again, I don’t want anything from you in exchange.”
“In this war, everyone wants something. But I’m having difficulty determining what it is you really want.”
Sophie tried to temper the unexpected emotions that were bubbling up uncontrolled and flooding her chest, making it hard to breathe. “I’ll tell you what I wanted this afternoon. For one beautifully horrifying second this afternoon in front of the basilica, I thought that I would simply draw my knife and bury it in the major’s neck. I wanted to kill him. Later, I almost wanted the fucking sergeant to open that wardrobe door so that I’d have an excuse.” She took a shaky breath, her hands closing into fists. “I hate them. The Nazis. So much so that sometimes it makes me afraid that I will not be able to think through it.” She forced her hands to relax and turned away from the bloody poppies to face Estelle.
The woman was merely gazing at her, and if she was at all disturbed by what Sophie had just said, she didn’t show it.
“I sound like a lunatic,” Sophie mumbled. “Perhaps there really is something wrong with me.”
“What?”
“It’s been suggested a number of times that there is something unnatural about me.”
“Is there?”
“You tell me.”
Estelle studied her for a long time. Sophie resisted the urge to squirm.
“If the Nazis have done anything well,” Estelle said, “it’s to make us capable of hate beyond logic.”
“Yes,” Sophie agreed faintly.
“That is not unnatural.” Estelle continued to watch her. “I think I find it reassuring.”
Sophie straightened her sleeve. “Tomorrow morning I will leave this apartment, and you will never see me again if that is your wish. And while I have asked for your help, know that with or without it, I will accomplish what I came here to do.”
The woman who faced her toyed with the small pendant at her throat. “Have you come here as an assassin, Sophie Beaufort?” She used the name Sophie had given the Gestapo. “To kill?”
“No. I’ve come to use them.” She chose her words with care, knowing she couldn’t reveal too much. Not yet. “I’ve come to make their own Nazi arrogance their downfall.”
The questions she had expected were remarkably absent. Estelle merely pursed her lips. A few times she looked as though she might speak before seeming to change her mind. The silence stretched.
Then Estelle’s fingers abruptly fell away from the pendant. She paced to the sofa, crouching to gently sweep the hair from the little girl’s pale face. “Help me get Aviva out of Paris—out of France—and I will become your new partner. I will help you do whatever you need to complete your mission.”
“No.” Sophie shook her head. “I am not leveraging the life of a child. Whether you help me or not has no bearing on this. That’s not at all why I offered to—”
“When Aviva is gone,” Estelle continued as if Sophie hadn’t spoken, “I will take you to the Ritz and help you do whatever it is that you came here to do. But I can only do that if I know that Aviva is already safely away.”
Sophie shook her head again. “I can’t promise that. That she will be safe. I can’t even promise that I can make this happen.”
“But if you could make it happen?”
“Then all I can promise is that she will have a chance. A chance to survive. To live life again.”
Estelle stared at her.
“I understand that that is a very frail promise. That it is probably not enough.”
“It’s enough.”
Chapter
19
Estelle
Paris, France
24 August 1943
In the back of a café with cracked windows that overlooked rue Saint-Vincent, Estelle sipped her cup of whatever horrid, murky chicory mixture they were passing off as coffee and wondered if she’d been an utter fool to believe that the ice princess could promise anything. The café had been Estelle’s choice. She had chosen it because it was always crowded, and the lack of anything that resembled real coffee, advertised loudly and unapologetically by the proprietors, generally kept away anything resembling a German. A good place in which information could be exchanged quickly and casually without notice at a set time.
