She closed the sleeve around her wrist, fastened the button, and pulled up the elastic. “So. I repeat myself. It is cold.”
—
FOR WEEKS, RUMORS had told of the coming Americans, and now Roosevelt’s army was said to be closing in on Paris. Rachel Vedette had learned to discount rumors unless they foretold a deepening misery, yet the frenzy of Drancy guards, including many newly arrived Germans, suggested this one might be true. New barriers of barbed wire were strung on the perimeter of the compound and at the railhead, and gun mounts were hastily constructed at the gates. The senior-most officers, with their lightning-bolt black collar badges, disappeared, but further rumors had it that they were being replaced by hardened leaders of the Death’s Head Unit, come to incinerate the camp rather than see it taken.
In fact, only half-panicked Unterführers were in evidence now, ranting at ever more harried inmates, who were mustered repeatedly, counted off, made to stand for hours, and then dismissed. No explanation was given for these unprecedented exercises, and most prisoners assumed that mere harassment was the motive, although Rachel realized that note-taking guards, moving through the ranks, were recording housing-block numbers. The mass assemblies in the vast courtyard were made more difficult when bonfires were lit at both ends, fouling the air with smoke, but at least the purpose of the conflagrations was clear. Through darkness and daylight, camp functionaries emptied hundreds of file drawers into sacks and hauled the documents to the fires—meticulously kept records, presumably, of the many thousands who had been processed for transport to the East.
And then—an ominous signal—a train with a larger-than-usual number of freight cars and stock wagons had appeared at the railhead. The glad rumor of a coming liberation was trumped now by the recognition that yet another selection was imminent. But even that suggested the end was near, and French prisoners assured one another in whispers that this time Ukrainians and Poles would be the ones taken.
Rachel Vedette and her father were among the decided minority of those first arrested who, all these many months later, still remained in Drancy. And why should she not have allowed herself, as the horror showed real signs of climax, to believe that their luck would hold? Their survival, of course, had not been a matter of luck. Rachel’s dependable access to the pharmacy at the main infirmary had protected the supply of insulin, which, together with steadily purloined honey, apples, and oranges, allowed them to navigate the highs and lows of her father’s blood-sugar levels. Weakness, blurred vision, confusion, the drift toward coma, occasional convulsions—the old man had mostly managed to hold the worst effects of the disease at bay, and, most crucially, to keep from drawing untoward attention to himself.
The professor’s informal havruta group had long before stopped gathering: when one member or another had disappeared, those remaining feared that their discreet Shabbat fellowship was itself the reason. Eventually, everyone who ever joined the group vanished. Saul Vedette alone remained. As Drancy became less a true internment camp than, for more and more of the prisoners, a mere transit point, internees wrapped themselves anew in a cocoon of indifference toward everything that was not food or sleep or distance from the Gabardines and jackboots. In contrast to the early days, that indifference extended to how the once-noted professor was regarded. No one cared who Saul Vedette had been. He was left to pore over his Hebrew texts alone. His daughter, in this void, took to pretending that she had recovered her long-lost interest in Torah study, and joined him in it. To her surprise, if not his, they found a new kind of intimacy, side by side, in keeping their eyes cast down upon the same page. But, in fact, cast down was how they kept their eyes when they were apart, too. They had embraced the survivor’s superstition that if they did not see they would not be seen.
As the hazy light of dawn was brightening the stairwell windows one morning in that time of heightened rumors, she was, as usual, coming down from the infirmary at the end of her cleaning shift—which included, as it did once or twice a week, the numb assignation with Dr. Rivière—when she first sensed that something was wrong below. The infirmary was on the back side of the mammoth building, facing away from the U-shaped courtyard around which life in the camp revolved. Through the night, she had heard no noises from that enclosure, but now the crowd murmurs, coughing motors, and occasional shouts that defined daytime activity sounded from the large quadrangle. Commotion so early was unprecedented. She picked up her pace as she descended the last of the stairs that brought her to the third floor. The landing was vacant, but the door into the cavernous bunk room was ajar. A clamp closed on her chest.
The double- and triple-tiered bunks were still arranged more or less in their orderly aisles, but there were no sleepers. The beds were empty. Here and there, tattered nightshirts and undergarments pooled on the floor, suggesting how hastily the roughly eighty inmates, mainly old women and a few old men, had been made to dress. They were gone.
Pale sunlight filtered in through the many large windows, and fleets of dust motes swirled in the shafts of haze. Rachel heard an air of urgency in the distant courtyard sounds, but she focused on the scene before her. Mattresses and blankets were strewn about, and the boxes and trunks that held the prisoners’ meager belongings were opened, with contents spilled. She might have shrieked “Papa!” and run through the maze to the farthest corner, but a ruthless discipline steadied her. She crossed the dormitory, apparently calm. The niche she shared with her father was defined by their two-tiered bunk and two square meters of surrounding space, hedged in by the suitcase, a chair, and two footlockers, a cagelike area that had come to seem a sanctuary. Now it was a heap. Bedding had spilled from the bunks, and the lower mattress was upended—her father’s. The suitcase and lockers were askew and open. Clothing was piled on the floor, torn pages scattered across it. Rachel knelt and found the leather valise in which she kept her father’s insulin kit. It was, amazingly, intact; its straps were still buckled. When she lifted a shirt, she found under it her father’s spectacles, crushed.
The dozens of pages scattered about bore the sharply angled block script of Hebrew. The pages had been ripped from her father’s Torah, but also from Torat Ha-Adam, the Nachmanides volume. Both had been utterly destroyed. Intact on the floor, unmolested, she found Historia Calamitatum, the only book not in the divine language from which the entire cosmos was created.
Holding the Historia and the valise, she began to leave the room, but her composure failed and she broke into a run, tore down the two remaining flights of stairs and out into the U-shaped courtyard. What she saw stopped her. The nearest part of the quadrangle was vacant, but at its far end a throng of inmates was clustered inside the recently erected funnel of barbed wire. The limit of the courtyard was defined by the platform at the terminal point of the railway track. Rachel ran toward the crowd of prisoners, but as she approached, she saw smaller knots of soldiers, and stopped. To one side, they wore the brown uniforms of the Gendarmerie, and to the other, the gray-green of German infantry, soldiers who carried rifles. Closer to the inmates stood other Germans, whose status as officers was indicated by braided shoulder boards and holstered pistols instead of rifles. Intent upon the crowd at the railhead, none of these uniformed figures seemed to notice her. She moved slowly forward. In the process of observing and assessing, the necessary calm came over her.
The penned prisoners numbered in the hundreds. Those closest to her wore the rough shawls, wooden shoes, and babushkas of Ukrainians and Poles, a sight that gave her hope. She kept moving forward, more quickly. The Slavs were mute, and Rachel saw now that they were being channeled through the wire and along the row of freight cars. In line ahead of them, alas, were prisoners dressed in the tattered remnants of more familiar clothing—French. Rachel drew closer. Those inmates were at the train already; numbers of them had been herded into boxcars, the sliding doors of which were slamming shut.
Soldiers covered the nearer cars of the train, rifles ready, while their comrades, farther down the queue,
were forcing more inmates into the rail wagons. Meanwhile, dozens of other prisoners had drifted into the courtyard from dormitories that had not been targeted. This was a bold move, even if now they timidly kept their distance, observing from the safe side of the barbed wire, an ad hoc formation all along the track; they were not spectators, but witnesses. They clung to one another, yet also gestured and waved toward those who were being taken. Rachel drew closer still. The guards seemed to require of these watching prisoners only that they keep their distance back from the barbed wire. Their exemption suggested with what rigid methods the selection was being carried out. Certain groups, like the Slavs, had been chosen, along with particular dormitory blocks, including her own—all singled out, perhaps, at random. Other groups had not been chosen. That was all. The distinction was as absolute as the order it implied.
The chosen people, she thought bitterly.
Her attention turned to an officer standing beside the rail platform, only a few feet from the line of selected prisoners. His highly polished knee-boots and riding breeches set him apart from other Germans, marking him, perhaps, as one of the newly arrived hard men of whom the rumors had spoken. For sure, the band beneath the splayed eagle on his hat flaunted a skull—the Death’s Head. A skull adorned the right patch at his collar. Next to him was a young girl, as still as a statue. She was barefoot; her dress was torn. The officer was holding his drawn pistol to her head, and the message to the internees was clear: at the first commotion, much less resistance, the girl would be shot.
Rachel, moving outside the wire, eyed the French prisoners as they shuffled along. She recognized an old woman. Rachel quickened her pace. She recognized another, and another—and then she recognized the whole clutch of bent people she knew from her dormitory. She searched for her father’s stooped figure, but before she found him, one of the women pointed at her, and screeched, “Putain! Putain!” Whore! Whore!
It was Madame Picard, shriveled with age. Her bed had been opposite the Vedettes’ corner. Rachel had long ignored her reproving eye. The woman’s voice pierced the air, sucking all attention to itself. Heads turned. Madame’s voice shot up in pitch, painfully shrill: “She is one of us! She is one of us! Take her, too!”
Rachel drew back, but the hag’s gnarled finger followed her. Into rage at the whore’s escape from this final tribulation, Madame Picard poured all of her desperation, dread, and revenge. She screamed again, “Take her! She is one of our group! Putain!”
The officer with the skull on his hatband came toward Rachel, hauling the young girl with him.
Madame Picard cried now, “The whore is his daughter!” and she pointed to the bent man just ahead of her—Saul Vedette. “His daughter!”
Saul was moving slowly forward, ignoring everything around him, staring at the ground as he tottered along.
The SS officer, inside the barbed wire, had come between Madame Picard and Rachel. A rifle-bearing soldier, outside the wire with Rachel, closed on her. The SS officer brandished his pistol at her. “Is that true?” he demanded, in clipped French.
“She is his daughter!” Madame Picard screamed again.
Rachel stared at her father, who was resolutely ignoring her. She’d have given anything for him to turn, for the chance to meet his eyes.
“Is that true!” the officer demanded once more. “You are his daughter?”
Here it was: the perverse fulfillment of her refrain, Who am I now? Against the current of everything she felt and had ever done, and with absolutely no knowledge of what she was saying or why, Rachel Vedette answered, “No.”
At that, the officer released the girl, wheeled, aimed his pistol at Madame Picard, and fired. She fell. Saul Vedette, having refused to look at his daughter, knelt to the old woman, as if to help her.
The barefoot girl collapsed in front of the officer. He ignored that. Instead, he turned back to Rachel. When he saw the horror on her face—admission enough—he whipped around toward the prisoners again, raised his gun, and fired. Battlesight zero: the old man’s skull. Saul Vedette fell over, dead.
Now, when the German turned back to the lying whore, a smile had crossed his face. It said, I will let you live with what you just did.
Instead of shooting Rachel, he shot the girl at his feet, and went back to his place at the railhead.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Patricia Murphy’s, near the corner of Madison and East Sixtieth Street, was to high-end restaurants what “Danny Boy” was to the hit parade. With Irish table linen, Waterford chandeliers and glassware, Wedgwood china, candles on every table, every table with its bud vase, and murals showing scenes from the Gap of Dunloe and the Ring of Kerry, the place always had a line at the door—a line to the head of which every arriving Catholic priest was always ushered. “This way, Father,” the tuxedoed maître d’ would say, gesturing the waiting diners to step aside—which they did willingly. But tonight was different, for Patricia Murphy’s was entirely given over to the men in Roman collars—the Cardinal’s Thanksgiving Eve gala dinner for the priests of New York.
More than two hundred clergymen had shown, and by the time Father Michael Kavanagh arrived, the jovial air was well fueled. Black suits, a few cassocks, white neck-tabs, red faces, flashing cuff links, and hearty laughter. Gaudeamus igitur: let us rejoice, indeed. The men were standing in knots among the tables, glasses in hand. The large U-shaped room, occupying the joined first floors of what had been two buildings, bracketed a glassed-in courtyard onto which, in good weather, expansive French doors opened. The courtyard now was an off-season sunroom, with spotlighted shrubs and potted plants hardy enough to survive without heat. Waitresses in puffy-sleeved peasant dresses were placing baskets of the famous popovers on each table. Kavanagh, in his black suit, rabat, and collar, eased into the crowd, making for the bar. He would not have come, but Bishop Donovan, whose secretary blamed the Bishop’s impossible schedule on an upcoming trip to Rome, had refused to see him. This was Kavanagh’s one shot. Kavanagh’s fellow priests registered his arrival with nods, but they also recognized a man in need of a drink and made way, leaving the hearty hello for when he would return, fully armed.
At the bar, Kavanagh found himself next to Joe Gallen. “Hello, Suede,” he said with a friendly grin.
Gallen arched an eyebrow, the necessary, if minimal, show of displeasure at the moniker. “Hi, Mike,” he answered. “Where’ve you been? Haven’t seen you all week.”
“Busy days, Joe. Busy days.”
Gallen turned to the priest beside him and said, “Mike is lost in Simone Weil. Imagine that.”
Kavanagh said, “It’s ‘Vey,’ Joe.”
“What?”
“Not ‘Wile.’ ‘Vey.’ Her name.” Kavanagh turned to the bartender. “Jack Daniel’s, please. On ice. Short glass. Thanks.”
The other priest extended his hand to Kavanagh. “Seamus Riordan. I’m at Saint Paul the Apostle, on the West Side.”
“A hint of the harp, Seamus?” Kavanagh said warmly, as they shook.
“Righto. Tipperary.”
The priest looked to be about thirty.
Gallen continued, “Mike thinks Simone Vey was an anti-Semite because she was offended by the Old Testament God.”
“The God who killed children, according to Joe,” Kavanagh said. He raised his glass to clink with the others. “Which puts me in mind of the hospital, my rounds today. Just finished.” Kavanagh hesitated. This was not the scene for an earnest report, but what the hell. He would give expression for once to what mattered. He continued: “I was with a family whose week-old infant is in an incubator. I was standing with the father, looking through the window of the preemie nursery. There were maybe half a dozen incubators, all these infants in trouble, struggling to live. And the dad says to me, ‘Pray for our little Eileen, Father. Bring God down to save her, would you?’ And I thought, What kind of God is that? Was God waiting for me to pray for the rescue of Eileen? Was I to ask the Lord to save Eileen, and not the others? And then what? Th
e others die? Because they have no priest saying the hocus-pocus? What do you think, fellows? Old Testament God? Or Catholic God? What do you think?”
Gallen and Riordan exchanged a look. Gallen said, “Hocus-pocus, Father?”
“Hoc est enim Corpus Meum, Joe. It’s where the magic formula comes from. You didn’t know that? It’s what the people expect from us. Magic.” Kavanagh sipped his drink, surprised at himself. Despite his trenchant words, there was nothing sarcastic in his manner. John Malloy had referred horribly to the words of consecration—Quinn’s desecration—but Kavanagh pushed that aside, to focus on the memory of the hospital. “I did as the poor man asked, of course. I got out the oils, put on the gown and mask, went into the isolation unit, and anointed the little girl. I said the sacramental prayers for Eileen, and not for the others. But that’s when it really hit me. God made all those babies, right? God loves them. When we administer the Extreme Unction, are we asking Him to come down and choose one, while ignoring the others? What do you think?”
Riordan said, “Father, I think you need your drink.”
Kavanagh continued, “Afterward, I held the child’s weeping father in my arms, and I went in and blessed her mother. I didn’t tell them what I was thinking. This was two hours ago. So I am telling you.”
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