“La Fleur,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“My code name is La Fleur.”
They went to work. Monsieur Legrand showed her the papers he had forged, the identity cards and the laissez-passers for a pair of Allied pilots downed over Belgium last month and now hidden in a safe house on rue de Bretagne. Daisy picked up the card belonging to one of them—new name Jean-Paul Bisset—and examined it closely. “But it’s perfect,” she said in amazement.
“Of course it is.”
She looked up. “How did you do this? How did you find such a talent?”
“My mother’s an artist. She taught me to draw and paint when I was young. And the first thing you do, when you’re learning to draw and paint, you copy the works of great artists.”
“Well, it’s remarkable.” She looked at his chin, which of course contained a small, perfect cleft, and thought, You’re remarkable.
He waved his hand and rose from the chair to take a pair of books from a nearby shelf. Daisy strained to read the titles, but his hands moved too quickly. He opened the front cover and peeled back the paper that lined it. The gold ring caught the light from the lamp at the corner of the table.
“Now look,” he said. “We tuck the papers inside the false lining of these books, here. Lay them flat, one for each cover. You see? Then just a touch of binder’s glue to hold it back down again.”
He took the pot of glue and unscrewed the lid and dipped in a brush. Daisy stared at his wrist as he dotted the edges of the lining paper and smoothed it back down again, on top of the papers, so delicate and flawless you couldn’t see the ridges at all.
“Now you try it,” he said.
“I—I can’t possibly. Not as well as that.”
“Just try. There may come a time when you’re the only one to do it.”
Daisy took a book from the stack, and one of the identity cards. Legrand had already unstuck the lining, so it peeled back easily. Daisy asked how he did it.
“Steam,” he said. “Steam and a very slim knife.”
Daisy laid the papers flat, brushed the glue, pressed the thick lining paper back against the front cover. It wasn’t bad; she had used a little too much glue, but the edges were straight, the lump of the additional paper only remarkable if you knew where to look. If you were expecting it there. Legrand leaned over to inspect her handiwork.
“Very good,” he said. “A natural.”
His hair was luxurious, right next to her face. She smelled the pipe tobacco, and maybe soap. She couldn’t remember the last time she had sat so close to a man who was not her husband. Certainly not alone, in this small room with its tiny window and its cozy lamplight and the stairs in the corner that spiraled up—so he said, when they first entered, with a wave of his hand—to his bedroom, such as it was. The room was lined with shelves, which were stuffed with books, muffling the sounds of the bookseller and Philippe and their customers on the other side of the wall. On the table in the middle rested the tools of his trade—the pens, the ink, the magnifying lens, the tiny chisels and knives and brushes of all shapes. They sat so close, his knee brushed hers.
She sat back a little. “So now what?”
“Now we let the glue dry, of course.”
“How long will that take?”
“Generally I prefer to let them dry overnight—”
“Overnight! I can’t stay overnight!”
“Hush, hush.” He laid a finger over his smiling mouth. “I am deeply sorry to tell you that we don’t have the luxury of time, in this case. So we shall have to make do with half an hour only.”
“Will that be enough?”
“It will have to be.” Legrand laid the books open, underneath the lamp. “There. That should help. Wine?”
“Wine? You have wine in this place?”
“But of course. I am a Frenchman, aren’t I?”
Monsieur Legrand produced a bottle of Burgundy and a pair of glasses from a cabinet in the corner. The wine was superb. This in itself did not surprise Daisy—Monsieur Legrand was the kind of man who drank good wine, even in wartime—but she was surprised to find herself enjoying it. They talked about books, a subject that was safe but also intimate. It turned out that Legrand’s father was a writer. Nothing Daisy would have read, he added quickly.
“Because these books are English, perhaps?” she said, in English.
He replied in French. “Because they are to do with men and spies, and not, I think, the kinds of subjects that would interest you. At least before now, eh?”
“What do you think interests me?”
He sucked on his pipe for a moment or two, examining her. “Not Flaubert, thank God. Perhaps Shakespeare. But in English, or translation?”
“Both.”
“Dumas, of course, when you were younger. Père et fils. Hugo. Your grandmother started you on Balzac, but it left you dissatisfied, for reasons you could not articulate. Then you left your romantic ideas behind and started Proust.”
She laughed. “You know he practically lived at the Ritz, when I was young. A strange man. He hated noise of any kind.”
“Genius is usually strange. But was I right?”
“Not altogether. I quite liked Balzac.”
“Ah,” he said knowingly, as if that explained everything.
“And you? What did you read? Dickens, perhaps?”
“You think to trap me, do you?”
Daisy shrugged and spread out her hands.
Legrand removed his pipe from his mouth and stabbed the air with the end of it. “Dickens does not understand people. They are ideas to him, types, objects to move around his moral chessboard. I much prefer Trollope. But my favorite book of all, I think . . . now that I have had time to reflect . . .” His eyes crinkled.
“Yes?”
“I believe my favorite book of all is this one.”
He touched the mouth of his pipe to the small copy of The Scarlet Pimpernel at the corner of the table.
Half an hour later, when the glue was not fully dry but at least no longer wet, Legrand put away the wineglasses and helped Daisy gather the books into a basket. “Congratulations,” he said. “You’re now employed by the Mouton Noir, delivering books to customers.”
Daisy had drunk only a single glass of wine, but it landed on top of Grandmère’s cognac and gave her a heady feeling. Or maybe it was the danger, the terror and the thrill of having recklessly cast her dice like this, of becoming an entirely new Daisy in the space of a day, of having spent an hour in the company of Monsieur Legrand and his pipe and his warm blue eyes. She found herself raising an eyebrow and asking, “Is that so? And where are my wages?”
His lips parted, but he didn’t speak. He looked at her mouth, and she looked at his eyes looking at her mouth, and her hand slipped around the handle of the basket.
“If you need to give me a message,” he said, “you should come to the bookshop and leave it inside this book.” He held up the copy of The Scarlet Pimpernel. “It will be on the shelf of English books—Philippe can show you—in alphabetical order, and when you have put your message inside, you will replace the book next to the Dickens. I will do the same. If you see the book out of order, it means there’s a message. Understand?”
She nodded.
“And if the Gestapo have come, and I am gone, then you will not see the book at all.” Daisy started to interrupt, but he held up his hand. “You will leave the store immediately and return to the Ritz, where you will order a drink from the bar, rue Cambon side of course, and when you pay for this drink you will give the bartender—”
“You mean Frank? He’s an agent?”
“Not an agent, just a kind of postbox. You will give him a note for the Badger.”
“Who is the Badger?”
“It’s not important. In this note you will simply write that the Swan has been trapped.”
“Who is the Swan?”
Legrand put his hand on the lever that opened the passageway back in
to the bookshop.
“Me,” he said.
In the end, it was much easier than she imagined. Mundane, even. She went to the address on rue de Bretagne, which turned out to be some apartments above a café. Inside, the foyer was modest and shabby, smelling of damp, the stonework chipped. A concierge sat at a desk, an old woman who read from a book by the light of an ancient lamp with a bowl of green frosted glass. She looked wary when Daisy approached. She folded down the corner of the page and slipped the book under the desk.
“Yes, madame? You have business here?”
“I’m here from the bookshop with a few books for Madame Bisset,” said Daisy, quite cool. “Apartment 3.”
The old woman tilted her head to the stairs and said to go on up.
As Legrand had told her, she knocked three times and called through the door that she was here from the bookshop with the books Madame Bisset had ordered. The handle turned and the door opened a crack.
“You are from the bookshop?” said a thin voice. “The Mouton Noir?”
“Yes. I have your books. The first is La dame aux camélias. Do you remember the name of the second?”
The door opened wider to reveal a woman about Daisy’s age, except even thinner, in a brown dress that matched her hair. Her voice was warm with relief. “La chartreuse de Parme, I believe.”
Daisy handed her the books, and the woman expressed her thanks.
“It’s nothing, madame,” said Daisy. “I hope you will enjoy them.”
She turned for the stairs, feeling immeasurably lighter, relieved of much more than the weight of the volumes in the basket. As she began her descent, the woman’s voice drifted down behind her.
“God bless you, madame.”
Daisy returned to her apartment just in time to greet the children, home from school. It was not Justine’s day to help, so Daisy made them their dinner—coarse bread, boiled turnips, a lump of cheese, a bit of meat—and helped them with their homework until it was time for bed. Pierre had not yet arrived. His dinner remained in the oven, keeping warm. She tucked the children into bed and then climbed in next to Madeleine to read a story. Her hands, she saw, were still trembling a little. Her veins still throbbed with her own audacity.
By the time she had finished, Olivier was asleep, but Madeleine remained awake, cuddled into her side. Daisy stroked the dark, straight hair, so unlike her own and that of Grandmère. The warm skin, the child smell of her.
“Maman, your heart is beating,” said Madeleine. “Why does it beat so hard?”
Daisy kissed the top of her head.
“Cherie, don’t you know? It beats for you.”
Chapter Thirteen
Babs
Rue Volney
Paris, France
April 1964
My heartbeat thrummed as Drew and I walked through the streets of downtown Paris, the city’s rhythm absurdly uplifting, the colors, sounds, and people strange yet somehow invigorating. I’d always considered myself a country girl, and always would be, I supposed, but there was something about Paris. Something that altered one’s perspective, at least for a little while.
As we crossed the street before reaching the bookshop, he quickly grabbed my arm. A motorbike sped by, narrowly missing me as I was attempting to cross the street while looking the wrong way. Again. It made no sense that the French couldn’t be as civilized as the British and drive on the proper side of the road.
“Après vous, madame.” Drew had let go of my arm and was holding open the door to the bookshop and looking at me expectantly. Which is the only reason I could guess at the words he’d just butchered.
I smiled my thanks. “You know, Drew, I don’t believe the consonant s is meant to be applied to the end of some French words such as ‘après’ and ‘vous.’”
He paused a moment to consider. “Really? My French teacher never corrected me. Of course, I was also the first person to volunteer to help her clean the chalkboards and move desks when the other guys ran out of the door first chance, so maybe that’s why.” His grin revealed those startlingly white teeth. “I always got As in French.”
“Of course you did,” I said, moving farther into the shop as he shut the door behind us and I was enveloped in that lovely scent of paper and binding glue that pervaded libraries and bookshops and made me a little homesick. As a child when my brothers and Kit had somehow managed to evade me and escape the house on one of their adventures, and Diana was too involved in one of her personal dramas to notice me, my haven had been to curl up in my father’s library with a good book and become lost in a world where I could have adventures of my own.
Despite it being the middle of the day, the shop was mostly deserted. A young couple was pressed against one of the crowded shelves, their faces so close they were apparently more interested in each other’s pores than in the books behind them. I glanced at Drew and he gave such a perfect impersonation of the Gallic shrug that I almost laughed out loud.
Placing a hand on the small of my back, Drew led me to a high counter at the front of the shop in the triangle of windows. A large brass cash register sat regally in the middle of the countertop, surrounded by a chaotic mixture of books teetering precariously like children’s building blocks.
“Bonjour,” Drew said rather loudly, as one does when speaking to foreigners. As if the volume might compensate for the lack of proper pronunciation.
Before I could suggest that the consonant n is also usually silent, a young man popped his head up from behind the counter. “Bonjour,” he said a little warily, as if unsure of which language we were meant to be speaking.
“Do you speak English?” I asked in my best French.
His look of suspicion changed as he regarded me and my yellow spotty dress, his gaze lingering a little longer than necessary on the exposed skin of my chest before returning to my face. He was probably in his late twenties or early thirties, with dark curly hair and scruffy cheeks, wearing the ubiquitous black roll-neck sweater so common among the French youth as to be almost a uniform.
“For you, madam, of course.” His English was good although heavily accented. “How can I help you?” He directed the question to me, ignoring Drew completely.
Drew pulled out the folded piece of paper of notes from his father and checked the name. “We are looking for a Jack Laypin. Does he still work here?”
Both the young man and I looked at Drew in confusion. I gently took the note from Drew and read it myself. “I believe he meant to say Jacques Lapin. We understand that Monsieur Lapin was the bookseller here twenty years ago.”
“Ah, oui,” the young man said. “Sadly, he is no longer with us. He died some time ago. I run the bookstore now.”
“I’m so sorry to hear that,” I said. I looked at Drew, wondering what our next move should be now that our one connection to La Fleur was dead.
“But I am Philippe, his grandson. Is there something I can help with?”
Drew let out a heavy sigh. “Probably not. We were hoping your grandfather could tell us about someone who may have once been a customer during the war.”
Philippe directed a broad smile at me again, as if I were the only one who’d spoken. “I was just a little boy at the time, but I spent every day after school here in the bookshop with my grandpère. He even put a stool in front of the cash register so I could help him when the store got busy. I knew all the regulars. Is there anyone in particular you are looking for?”
I exchanged a hopeful glance with Drew. “Yes. My late husband, Kit Langford. Do you recognize the name?”
He shook his head. “No, madam. I’m sorry, but I do not.”
I hid my disappointment. “I know he purchased at least one book here, but if he wasn’t here regularly, then I don’t expect you to remember him.”
“Which book? My mère tells me I have a perfect memory—that I can remember the titles of books better than the names of the customers who purchased them.” Another shrug. “It’s doubtful, but possible I’d remember.”
I pulled out the book tucked under my arm and placed it on top of a small stack. “It’s The Scarlet Pimpernel.” I opened up the front cover. “It has the name and address of your store stamped inside the front cover.”
His dark eyes widened as he flipped the book over twice and then examined the cover. “How very strange. I remember this exact book very well, mostly because my grandfather would only ever allow one copy in the store, and if anyone tried to purchase it, he would tell the customer that it was flawed in some way and order another for them to purchase. I was also charged with shelving the books alphabetically, but if I ever saw that particular book out of order, I was to leave it alone. I never thought to question him because he was my grandfather.”
“And you don’t remember selling it?” Drew asked.
Philippe looked at him as if surprised to see him there. “No. It was never sold. It just . . . disappeared.”
All the Ways We Said Goodbye Page 18
