The Paris Seamstress

by Natasha Lester

  It was Ella Fitzgerald’s “The Nearness of You” and it came to Estella’s fingers more slowly and deliberately than she’d ever played it before, somehow fitting for a Paris night where sadness rather than light pooled beneath the covered streetlamps. As she sang the words—about the delight of simply being near someone you loved—she heard the door open, felt someone sit beside her on the piano stool and pick out the accompaniment to the song.

  Alex’s hands moved expertly over the keys beside hers and she could sense him next to her, back tall and straight, arms relaxed, sleeves rolled up, a natural pianist and then, quietly, too quietly for such a voice, he sang too. His voice, perfectly suited to the song, cast around her like an enchantment.

  When they reached the end, neither moved; both stared at the piano, their hands resting atop the keys, hearing the gentle echo of their voices ring steadily through the room.

  “You play well together.” Lena’s voice broke into the room like a cymbal accidentally struck mid-lullaby.

  Estella jumped and she saw Alex’s hands tense on the piano.

  “I’m going out,” Estella said, standing and moving away from the piano stool, crossing under the chandelier which spot-lit her gold dress like a single window in the city with its blackout curtain ripped off.

  “Where are you going in that?” Alex asked.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Estella retorted.

  “That came out entirely wrong.” He held up his hand. “It’s just that going out at night in Paris isn’t as safe as it used to be.”

  “I want to see Huette. I can buy her a meal. I’m going to take her to Montmartre, to a jazz club we used to go to, so she can feel better about everything. She can stop thinking about lining up for food. And I can stop thinking about how much I want to see my mother. About the fact that, the minute I see her, everything changes. I’d like, for a few more hours, to have nothing change.” The last sentence came out before she could stop it. She closed her mouth before she said any more.

  “Lena and I will come too,” Alex said.

  “I don’t need babysitters.” She was speaking abruptly, she knew, in an attempt to relocate her defenses.

  “I know that. But perhaps I’ve never been to a jazz club in Montmartre.”

  “I doubt that.”

  Alex smiled wryly. “Okay, I can’t get away with that but I’m not offering myself as your babysitter either.”

  “All right.” Estella acquiesced, and then the words tumbled out. “When can I see Maman?”

  “Tomorrow I hope.”

  “If I’d had a choice, I would have put off the moment everything changed too.” With that, Lena turned around and walked out.

  Estella looked uncertainly at Alex. “Does that mean she’s coming?”

  “Give me a minute to get changed. Then I’ll check.”

  He waited, seemingly expectantly, until Estella asked, “Are you going to get changed?”

  “I thought you’d prefer me to wait till you’d gone but if you insist on staying. You’re in my room,” he said.

  “Oh!” Estella hurried out, face bright red with embarrassment.

  He appeared downstairs five minutes later, looking more handsome than a man had a right to be, especially when they’d been traveling rough for so long. Estella hadn’t bothered to do more than put on her dress, rub powder over her nose, touch color onto her lips, and flick mascara over her lashes and now she felt she should have made more of an effort. But Lena would be the one on his arm; she’d simply be following along behind.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  “Where’s Lena?”

  “She’s going to catch up on sleep.”

  “You can stay here with her.”

  “I know I can.”

  He didn’t go back up the stairs.

  “You’re still coming with me?” she asked.

  “Unless I’m cramping your style?” he replied impatiently. “Are we going to stand here and discuss this all night?”

  Estella walked out into the courtyard, mint and jasmine potent on the air, the gentle warmth of a Paris summer night sliding like silk over her skin.

  “Where exactly are we going?” he asked as he caught up to her. “Bricktop’s? It’ll be full of Germans.”

  “Of course you’ve been there. Definitely not Bricktop’s. Somewhere decidedly cheaper.” She smiled, remembering all the nights she and Huette used to spend out dancing and laughing, more sure than ever that Huette needed this chance to revive her spirits so she could resume the struggle again in the morning. “But a lot more fun.”

  Chapter Twenty

  On the way to Huette’s, Estella asked Alex just one question. “Was your work successful this afternoon?”

  “Very,” he said. His words, and the slight loosening of the worry lines on his forehead, made her understand that his agent was safe.

  “I’m glad.”

  At Huette’s, Estella introduced Alex as her lawyer-boss who didn’t speak French and handed over the bag of necessities that Huette seemed to regard as better than treasure.

  “Cigarettes!” Huette crowed, hugging the tobacco to her. She pawed through the food and soap and chocolate and Estella watched her with tears in her eyes.

  “Do you have anything left for the journey back to Lisbon?” Alex asked Estella in English.

  “I kept the escape box. You said that was all I needed.”

  He sighed but thankfully didn’t object.

  “I brought you a dress too,” Estella said to Huette, switching back to French. “I thought you mightn’t have been able to buy fabric to make yourself anything new for a while. I’ve worn it before but it’s only a couple of months old.” She passed Huette the white dress she’d worn to her meeting with Elizabeth Hawes.

  Huette beamed. “It’s beautiful. Thank you.”

  “Then put it on, I’ll buy you dinner and you can smoke as many of our cigarettes as you like.”

  Huette’s smile grew larger. “Dinner and cigarettes and a dance with your very handsome boss sounds perfect.”

  Alex gave a splutter, which turned into a cough and Estella couldn’t resist adding, “Oh, you don’t want to do that. He gets rashes all over his face when women come too close. I think he’s allergic to them.”

  As Huette dashed off to get changed, Alex said, “Next time, I’m going to make you something much less powerful than my translator.”

  Estella couldn’t help grinning in reply.

  Then they all walked to the club in Montmartre, Estella with her arm linked through Huette’s, reminding herself to speak English with Alex, to not do anything to break his cover given that he’d forgone a night with Lena to help her make Huette smile. Before long, the convivial mood dissolved, the night marred by the sight of so many women lining the streets, calling out to Alex, selling themselves, easier to get than butter.

  “Their husbands are prisoners of war,” Huette said. “They have no money—remember we aren’t allowed to have checkbooks like you probably can now in America—and they can’t work during the day because they have to stand in queues to buy food for their children. This is what they do for money.”

  Estella looked at Alex, stricken.

  At that moment, the doors to a nearby club opened, revealing a room full of German soldiers dancing with beautifully attired and not-at-all-skinny women.

  “Collaborators,” Huette said bitterly, nodding at the women.

  And Alex’s words—which would you be, Estella, if you’d stayed?—thundered in her ears as she saw starkly before her the choice that les Parisiennes were making every day—to starve slowly like Huette, or to smile at a German and put food on the table.

  In the uproar of music that rolled out of the club and made it impossible for anyone to hear what they were saying, Alex whispered to Estella. “One of my informants works in one of Paris’s two hundred brothels from nine in the morning until well after midnight. She turns nearly two hundred tricks in that time, every day—seven
minutes per man. But she won’t stop because the Germans tell her things when they lie in bed with her and she passes them on to my network and she thinks that the price she pays is worth it. That’s why I had to rescue my man today; he looks out for her, collects information from her, feeds it to me and I take it to London and that’s how we fight the war.” He stopped speaking as the doors closed and the music quieted.

  Estella shook her head and grasped blindly for Huette’s arm, pretending that Alex hadn’t said anything, that she was still as eager to take Huette out for the night as she had been earlier. God she was selfish! Why hadn’t she said yes to Alex the minute he’d asked her to come to Paris to help him? Because she knew he could have told her that story the night he’d tried to convince her to come and she would have had no choice but to agree. But he’d withheld it, pressuring her, yes, but not blackmailing her with stories of horror, still giving her the option to stay safely in Manhattan if she’d wanted to.

  It struck her then with absolute clarity that even though she knew so little about what he did, even though she’d hated him for it at first because it had killed Monsieur Aumont, Alex had to keep doing it. Every airman he saved was an airman who could drop bombs on the German army, every spy he helped out of a safe house in Paris was one more person who could pass on information to help rid Europe of the Nazis, every secret he couldn’t tell her was one more secret safe from falling into the hands of those who already had too much power and were wielding it like a machete.

  “I will never question anything you ask me to do again,” was all she said, but she knew he understood because he said, “Thank you.”

  They reached the club at last and were swallowed up by the sound of the saxophone the minute they walked in the door.

  “How have I never been here?” Alex asked, in English, holding the door open for Huette, gazing around at the jazz band, the dancing, the bar that still seemed to have wine at least.

  “You were too busy slumming it at Bricktop’s with all the beautiful people,” Estella said.

  “I made a mistake,” he said to her. “All the beautiful people are right here.”

  Estella blushed brighter than a field of poppies.

  It was his fault. He definitely shouldn’t have said anything about her being beautiful. She’d darted away like an escapee in sight of the Spanish border. At first she stayed by the bar with Huette, chatting to the barman who seemed to know her. Then the musicians stepped down from the stage, kissed Estella’s cheeks, dragged her over to a table and sat her down. They teasingly tried to slip an arm around her shoulders but she batted them away good-naturedly and each man sat back in his chair, crestfallen.

  Then she passed out more tobacco, one of the men produced a bottle of black market whiskey and soon she was the center of their devoted attention, regaling them with stories of life in Manhattan, each one grander and more ridiculous than the last, taking everyone out of the misery that was Paris for a while. But Alex could see what it cost her, could see her eyes darting around, fearful of whether the Wehrmacht might enter the club, could see her solicitude for Huette and the way she made sure her friend ate a hearty meal, could see her talk doggedly on even though she must be exhausted by their long voyage to France because she understood that Huette and the musicians and everyone else wanted to listen to New York fairy tales and not think about Occupied Paris for as long as she would entertain them.

  Alex didn’t listen to Estella’s words; instead he watched the men, smitten, each of them spellbound, aware of what he’d noticed the first time she’d walked into the Théâtre du Palais-Royal: her quality.

  She was rarer than blue diamonds, so beautiful it hurt, and bolder than any man he’d ever worked with. More than that, she radiated joy. He could hear her laughing from where he stood, back leaning against the bar, unable to take his eyes off her.

  Eventually he was drawn over to sit at the edge of the group, glad for once to not be thinking about his own work, glad to forget that he had an official reason to be in Paris which was tied to all the cruelties and predilections of men at war, happy to enjoy the calm before the inevitable storm. He pretended not to understand the flow of conversation around him, even though he knew more street French than a Marseilles dockworker and could understand all too well the ribald innuendoes the musicians flung across the table at one another.

  After a time, he caught Estella’s eye. The smile she gave him took his breath away. The saxophonist at his side saw it too and elbowed him, saying, “She don’t give out smiles like that to just anyone.”

  How Alex ached for that to be true.

  Estella knew she was probably a little bit tipsy but she didn’t care. To see Huette laughing, to speak French was bittersweet and the whiskey also helped to dull the thought of how nearby her mother was—but still out of reach. Did Maman still have the gold blouse that matched the dress Estella wore?

  “Play with us, Estella,” Luc, the pianist said, the sound of her name bringing her back into the room.

  “No,” Estella protested. “Nobody wants to hear me.”

  “Estella, Estella,” Huette began to chant. The rest of the band picked up the chant and, within moments, the entire table was chanting her name.

  She saw, with both amusement and astonishment, that Alex had joined the chant too. He grinned at her across the table and she couldn’t help laughing.

  “D’accord,” she said, holding up her hands, deciding it was better to give in than to suffer the embarrassment of them chanting her name. She pointed at Alex. “If I’m doing this, then you are too.”

  “Is that a challenge?” he asked.

  “It damn well is,” she said and the band members cheered.

  “Your wish is my command,” he said and mock-bowed.

  “If only that was true,” Estella said, shaking her head and smiling as he followed her and the band members up onto the stage and sat beside her at the piano. For laughs, she picked out the first notes to Josephine Baker’s “Don’t Touch My Tomatoes.”

  Philippe, the singer, whistled. “She’s corrupting us.”

  Estella raised an eyebrow. “The first place I ever heard this song was right here from you.”

  Alex followed her lead with the accompaniment and she realized he knew the song too; being undercover probably meant he spent a lot of time in bars like this. Then she began to sing along with Philippe and Alex joined in, ad-libbing every now and again with variants he’d heard, he whispered, in Marseilles, in Toulouse, in some town near the Pyrenees. One of them made her laugh so hard she could no longer play and so he picked up both the melody and the accompaniment and embellished with a few riffs that the saxophone copied and which made Estella realize he was as good at piano playing as he was at everything else.

  “You know,” she whispered in the lull between words, “if your current occupation gets too much, you could always become a jazz piano player.”

  “Sometimes I think that might just be the ideal life,” he whispered back.

  At the end he began to play “The Nearness of You” again and Philippe let Alex take the floor because Alex’s interpretation was so moving, each note a key struck on Estella’s heart. He looked at her with a quizzical expression when she didn’t join in.

  “I can’t,” she said. “It’s perfect just the way it is.”

  When he reached the chorus he whispered, “Please?”

  In that moment of vulnerability, she caught a glimpse of the young man who lay behind what he’d become, the young man who’d wanted so much to save his mother that he became a kind of highwayman or pirate, the young man given no choice but to accept the largesse of the British government in return for his life, a bargain struck and most likely repented but one he was too parceled in now to ever extract himself from.

  She nodded but didn’t play. She let him keep the song moving through the room the way it had been, slow, tender, as touchingly beautiful as her vision of the boy-Alex collecting gun money for his father with one hand and
stroking his mother’s cheek with the other. But she sang with him, softly, letting his voice carry the melody, harmonizing with it in places, making her part in it be the synthesis between the sad and the lovely, the bridge that could take one from sorrow to jouissance.

  By the end, her eyes were so full of tears that she could hear them in her voice, making it low and husky. As he played the final note, she turned her head away, not wanting him to see her so undefended, but he reached out his hand and gently wiped away the drop falling down her cheek. Then he took her hand in his, raised it to his lips and kissed it.

  It was the most insubstantial of gestures, featherweight, but its force was staggering, sending a searing ache right through her center, an ache that made her want to lean in closer to him. An ache that made her want to feel what it would be like if his lips touched hers the same way they had brushed against the back of her hand.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Immediately after that, Estella fled, pausing only long enough to say to Alex, “I’m going back to the house. For once in your life, please don’t follow me.” She didn’t wait for him to reply, just pushed her way through the cheering club patrons, flinging a hasty good-bye to Huette as she passed. She didn’t slow her pace until she was several blocks from the club.

  Why was she imagining kissing a man who was dating a woman who could well be her sister? It was madness, stupidity, the temptations of a Paris night in a jazz club, seduced by the saxophones, working feverishly on her already unsettled mind.

  She’d go to her mother’s. She didn’t care what Alex had said about waiting. She’d collect her things from the Rue de Sévigné and be gone before he returned. It would be impossible to even look at him now without betraying everything she’d felt in the moment when he kissed her hand.

  She walked on slowly, couldn’t make her legs pick up pace, could only replay the way Alex’s face had looked as he’d sung, could hardly believe how much it had affected her. Could feel the sensation of his lips blazing on the back of her hand.