Annick’s nod was glacial.
“Mademoiselle Jones is forced to leave Paris quite suddenly,” Spatz continued, “having no more desire than you, Madame von Halban, to entertain Germans. It is of the first importance that she reach Marseille as soon as possible. And so I thought of you, my dear Hans.”
Von Halban frowned at him.
“Mademoiselle Jones has a car but no driver. She never learned the art of motoring herself. Nor does she have any petrol; it’s scarce as hens’ teeth. Of course, for one traveling on government business…You, I believe, are headed for le Midi?”
“How did you know that?”
“My cousin tells me that Joliot is breaking down his lab,” Spatz returned evenly. “It makes no sense for any of you to head north or east—”
“And thus you deduced south.”
Spatz smiled. “When you leave this evening, would you take Mademoiselle Jones?”
The request was so shocking it deprived von Halban of breath. He stared at his friend, his mouth working.
“Her company might prove valuable,” Spatz said smoothly. “Her car certainly would. Your official vehicle—I’m right in thinking you drive one?—is certain to attract unwelcome attention. Whereas if you drive south in Mademoiselle Jones’s car…the escort of a famous entertainer…no one will question your motives in the slightest. You’re pleasure-bent, with suitable company, and why else seek Marseille at this time of year?”
Annick made an impatient sound, half disgust, half jeer. “Decidedly, this is too much! I have never been a party to your debauches, mon cher, at those places you frequent in Montmartre—but if you mean to set up your mistress for this disgusting holiday, if you’ve bribed this man to mock me in my own home—”
Von Halban strove toward her—his helpless brown eyes implored her—but Spatz was before him. Spatz, with his effortless grace, reaching into his jacket and withdrawing a wad of banknotes such as von Halban had never seen, offering the money to Annick as though he were a page and she a queen.
“I know that for a family such as yours—young children, a father unavoidably absent on duties too dangerous to be voiced aloud—many difficulties may arise. Who can say when the banks will close altogether? Who can say when the decision to leave Paris might be taken too late? Please, Madame von Halban. Accept this small token of my esteem and respect.” He had the courage to brush her rigid shoulder. “For the sake of your girls.”
Von Halban watched her attempt to calculate the possible sum in the thick wad; watched her revolve the possibilities the money could bring, and the horrors all lack of it made certain. Then, like a snake, her hand darted out and snatched the notes from Spatz’s hand.
“For the sake of the girls,” she said tightly. And turned toward the children’s bedroom.
The three of them stood in silence while the door slammed closed.
Von Halban found that he was perspiring, his heart racing. He had agreed to nothing, he had compromised nothing—and yet, it had happened! He was taking this unknown woman—this harlequin of fleshly desires, this siren on the rock—with him to Marseille that night. He was actually going to drive her car. He was going to collude and bamboozle the Minister of Armaments, Raoul Dautry, and ditch his official van somewhere outside Paris. Nothing had been said and yet everything was decided. He heard himself begin to plot, felt the vertiginous power of rogue action, of working counter to a system that would undoubtedly entrap him, given half the chance.
“The car—it is where?” he heard himself say.
“In the Rue des Trois Frères.” This was the first phrase Memphis Jones had spoken, and her husky voice was intoxicating, a susurration of foreign French full of backroom smoke and half-learned songs.
“Meet me at the Gare du Montparnasse,” he told Spatz, “at midnight. It will be a rare pleasure to escort your friend south.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The Médoc, where Nell had lived for much of the past decade, lay north of the city of Bordeaux, a sandy, windswept spit of land bordered to the west by the forest of Les Landes, and to the east by the bank of the river Gironde. Beyond the great conifers and the massive belt of dunes was the Atlantic; the main road ran straight and narrow through a string of hamlets, most of them impoverished, to the seaport of Le Verdon-sur-Mer. It was a place of quiet beaches and brackish lagoons, of lone birds on lakeshores, of campsites that sprang to life in the summer months and were deserted the remainder of the year. It had a history of contraband smuggling, cross-Channel passages by moonlight, lives eked out through storms and fishing. The most legendary earth in the history of French wine-making lay at the southern end of the Médoc—where the châteaux Margaux, Lafite, Latour, and Mouton-Rothschild laid down their bottles—but Loudenne was firmly in the north, almost falling into the Gironde, and its wines merited only the most basic Médoc appellation. They were known as cru bourgeois—middle-class drinking wines—and the quality of the land they sprang from would never rise any higher.
Nell’s husband Bertrand, who had inherited the château with its charming, rose-colored walls and its forty-eight hectares of vines, loathed Loudenne. It was too scrubby, too remote, too lacking in chic; the neighborhood was abysmal. The fields were pocked with unexploded shells from the last war, when Le Verdon had been used by the Americans for landing troops and pummeled by German guns. The river docks were decayed and sagging. He’d intended to sell the domaine until the day Nell arrived, fresh with the disillusionments of marriage. The place reminded her of the fen country where she’d grown up, with its flooded cow pastures and dispirited gulls. She recognized Bertrand’s hatred, saw immediately that Loudenne was cause for war. She staked out her position—she with her desultory workers and her vines riddled with phylloxera. When Bertrand gave her jewels, she sold them to fund the vineyard. She grafted old French vines onto disease-resistant American rootstock in the shattered greenhouses near the château. She learned how to dust with copper sulfate against the mold that spoiled her grapes. She brought in electricity, restored the tumbledown chai and cuverie—the outbuildings where the wine was made—and installed a proper English bath in her suite of rooms. Bertrand, who loved Paris and gin and the Jazz Age even after the Depression made such things irrelevant, gave his jewels to other women and came home less and less. But Loudenne was kingdom enough for Nell: It bottled loneliness of a grand cru class.
She was yearning for it already as her lumbering truck broached the outskirts of Bordeaux. They had been driving for sixteen hours and had covered a distance of more than four hundred miles, from Paris to Chartres, to Tours and eventually Poitiers, and on down to Angoulême. The truck’s fastest speed was a firm thirty miles per hour. In the dead of night Nell and her driver, Henri, ran afoul of very few refugees—and saw no sign of German troops. There might almost have been no war. Except for Henri’s constant fear: that the truck would run out of fuel. He had hoarded petrol in tin canisters for weeks before this trip, and could not understand Nell’s insistence that they keep to the back roads. Highways were faster, better paved, kinder to thirsty tanks. He had been driving at a pitch of anxiety, his gaze constantly flicking between petrol gauge and the rapidly draining cans, most of the night.
Nell guessed that Joliot-Curie had access to petrol through the Ministry of Armaments. But she’d been reluctant to ask him for it. She was angry at Ricki—he had disturbed her loneliness and for that she could not forgive him. When she’d called to him from the past, that day in the Boul-Mich, she’d done it on a whim: a test of her old power over him. She’d done it because Spatz had asked her to. She’d meant to take Ricki and drop him again just like before—and tell Spatz everything he needed to know. Unlike Ricki and Bertrand, the German had never promised her anything, had never demanded fidelity, had betrayed her as casually as she betrayed him. She understood Spatz: He was as greedy and solitary as herself.
She had never understood Ricki. Her desire to own and dominate him—to possess that searing look in his eyes, the bur
n of his touch—was like a wound she could not stop fingering. He had given her his glass jugs full of water. A second chance at contact, a promise. She would not ask for petrol, too.
“Would Madame la Comtesse wish to stop for coffee?” Jean-Luc was wedged into the space behind the front seats, knees almost up to his chin, with Nell’s maid lolling sleepily on his shoulder. Nell had left her beautiful little car with Spatz and was bringing the elderly chauffeur home. Jean-Luc was too old for the Front, too old to find other work, and she was determined to make sure he was safe. But there was not enough fuel for two vehicles to drive south and no justification for a chauffeur anymore. The Germans would ruthlessly commandeer everything on wheels—even bicycles—once they marched into Paris. Better that Spatz should drive her beloved two-seater.
“I’d kill for a cup of coffee,” she replied, “but I think we ought to press toward home. Don’t you, Henri?”
The old man merely grunted. Words, like fuel, were not to be wasted.
They skirted Bordeaux, wistful under spring sunlight, a haze of salt air off the sea. They drove steadily north, through the gentle gravel hills of Margaux, across the streams of Pauillac and through the rolling plateau of St. Estèphe, Nell’s heart rising as they turned toward the Gironde. It did not matter that last fall’s harvest had been the worst in memory, or that she had no hope of tending her vines, with most of the labor force gone to the Front. She was home.
She had not expected the cars pulled up on the gravel drive, waiting to greet them.
Three cars, to be exact: one a lumbering black Daimler of uncertain vintage; a neat little dark blue sports car; and a Silver Cloud Rolls with uniformed chauffeur.
This last belonged to the leader of the group. She was slim and tall, with a disciplined mouth and gloves on her hands. Fair-haired, clear-eyed, in a short, fitted jacket and jodhpurs—as though she’d intended to go riding that morning, rather than journey north through ill-kept roads with a party of relative strangers. It was all of fifty miles to Mouton-Rothschild, where the woman lived, and she was not in the habit of changing her schedule for anyone. She had refused to change so much as her name for her husband, the Baron Philippe de Rothschild; her title outranked his. She remained the same Vicomtesse Elizabeth de Chambure to her friends after her marriage, as she had been before it.
Nell had exchanged only a few words with her at various aristocratic functions, years ago when Bertrand had taken Loudenne more seriously. Elizabeth de Chambure de Rothschild was not one of their acquaintance. And so Nell was frowning even before the truck had come to a stop, her mind racing, wondering what the Vicomtesse wanted.
Near the group, there were two children of perhaps four and six playing in the gravel around the dried-up fountain, and a girl whose job, it seemed, was to look after them. Behind Vicomtesse Elizabeth stood three men: dark, elegant, fastidious, foreign-looking men, whose eyes followed the truck as Henri navigated the rutted drive. Three men who did not move as Jean-Luc jumped down from the cab and held the door open for his mistress.
Nell did not get out of the truck immediately, although she was keeping the chatelaine of Mouton-Rothschild waiting in the midday sun. Instead, she said to Henri: “Take the truck around to the chai. I want the oak barrels placed in the first-year room, understand? The jugs of water we brought from Paris must go down in the cellar beneath. Far back in the cellar, oui? With insignificant bottles—poor vintages—in front of them that nobody would want. Comprends?”
“Oui,” Henri muttered, and the truck was already in motion as Nell stepped down, rocking away from her with its secrets at a steady if agonizingly slow pace.
“Madame la Vicomtesse.” Nell managed the French words with her usual grace, but her body was aching from the strain of the ride and she badly craved a bath. “My apologies. My housekeeper should never have left you standing outside—”
“The children preferred it,” Elizabeth de Chambure cut in indifferently. “And indeed, we thought you were from home, and were on the point of leaving. May I introduce you to my friends? The Comtesse de Loudenne—Julian de Kuyper, from Holland.”
One of the men—the eldest, Nell guessed—bent low over her hand. “Enchanté.”
“—and his cousins, Moïses and Elie Loewens.”
These two nodded austerely. Neither attempted to approach her.
“Mr. de Kuyper has his family with him. He and the Loewenses arrived by boat two nights ago at the port of Le Verdon, having fled Amsterdam ahead of the German army.”
“Then they were fortunate,” Nell said.
“Julian and Moïses are very old friends of my husband’s.” Without warning, Elizabeth de Chambure switched from French to English. “I had to take them in when they showed up at my door. But I’ve brought them to you, Nell, because I need your help. I won’t disguise it. I’m at my wit’s end.”
“I see.” Nell studied the other woman’s face. “They’re…Jewish?”
The vicomtesse nodded. It was well known that unlike her husband, she was of venerable French pedigree and Christian blood. “Bankers of a very high order. The Baron has had countless dealings with them.”
The Baron. Nell suffered a faint sensation of dizziness—the aftereffects of her abominable night, or perhaps the force of memory: Philippe de Rothschild as she had last seen him, racing a Bugatti to death-point at Le Mans, his fine hands splayed on the wheel, his mouth sardonic. He was a consummate daredevil, a charming and profound intellect, a lover of dogs and women who strode through the domaine he’d created in a chevalier’s flowing cape. He was a second son of the English branch of the great banking family, and Nell had glimpsed him once in the enclosure at Ascot. But she had never known him, never had a foothold in his charmed circle. And while she was indifferent to Elizabeth de Chambure’s existence, she’d have given a great deal for a few hours at Philippe de Rothschild’s side. There was no man alive—had been no man in three hundred years—quite like the Baron.
“Where is he now, your husband?”
“Paris. He offered his help to Reynaud. They won’t let him leave now that the German army…And your husband? The Comte?”
“At the Front,” Nell replied brusquely. “Does the Baron know you’re here? Handing his friends to a relative stranger?”
Elizabeth de Chambure stiffened, drew herself up—as though she might hurl a blistering reply at Nell and drive off immediately in her Rolls—but then she shook her head. “He expects me to keep them at Mouton. And my daughter is there—she’s still so young!—If the Nazis take Paris, they’ll take Mouton. You know they will. They steal everything that is…Jewish…”
“And if you’re harboring fugitives, it will be that much the worse for you,” Nell said slowly. “Whereas nobody will look twice at Loudenne. It’s not the prize that Mouton-Rothschild would be. And it backs directly to the river, if your friends are forced to escape.”
“You understand!” the other woman cried eagerly, and grasped Nell’s hand. “I knew I could make you understand.”
“Did you?” She glanced over at the silent knot of men, certain from their expressions that they comprehended English perfectly, knew they were being sold. “I have a price. For helping you.”
“What is it?”
“A team of workers. Mouton and the other great houses—Latour, your cousins at Lafite, the Maihles at Comtesse de Lalande—all of them snap up the few remaining hands first, and leave none for the rest of us. In this wretched district I can’t find a soul to help. The commune of St-Yzans is deserted.”
“But we’re not even close to harvest time!”
“I have to rack my wines. Fine them. There are countless jobs in the cuverie, and only myself and three others to do them.”
The two women stared at one another, neither willing to give ground. Elizabeth de Chambure’s lips thinned.
“You English,” she said bitterly. “You do nothing without something in return.”
“Neither do bankers.” Nell smiled at the three men,
the children tossing stones in her decaying fountain. “Take it or leave it, Vicomtesse.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
She was wearing a charcoal wool suit Mainbocher had given her after his final show last autumn—wrong for May, but terribly chic and just the thing, Sally thought, for following a hearse.
She was standing on the pavement in front of the Paris Morgue, staring at the long black car with its square back end, its plated glass, its curiously immobile burden of high, domed sarcophagus so like a mammoth cigar—Philip, in fact, laced with whatever chemicals the mortuary had flushed through his system, bloodless at last, his eyes closed. She could imagine him as he had been Monday night—staring, aghast, at the spectacle Death had made of him. Or she could imagine the cigar-box Philip: hands folded prayerfully across his chest, expression blank. Both were equally remote and beside the point. Philip had dropped his body like a soiled pair of trousers and floated away.
At night—the rare nights since Monday that she had slept an hour or two—the whisper of his presence had flitted across her pillowcase, mosquitolike in its persistence.
Sally. Sally. Pay attention, Sally.
“To what?” she would mutter, and wake all at once in another unfamiliar bedroom, a different quality of dark, the recognition of Philip vanishing.
This war that had been only a rumor the night he died had opened like a pit and swallowed him up. A small thing, really—the violent death of one man, when so many millions were torn from their beds, thrown onto the roads of Belgium and France, their children riddled with bullets. But Philip’s brutal death would never lose its power over Sally—never quite fade to gray. There was justice somewhere, and she would have it. Perhaps then he would stop haunting her sleep.
A second car had pulled up to the curb, equally black and imposing, with a liveried driver of benign aspect. This was the car she was expected to enter, with the elderly concierge Mme. Blum, and allow to carry them at a sedate pace all the way to Cherbourg.
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