The Book of Lost Names Page 10

  “Oh, I think we’ll just be needing a room for the night, thank you very much.” Rémy sounded as if he was trying hard not to laugh.

  Madame Grémillon sighed. “Very well, have it your way. I’m only trying to help. You can take Odette’s room, 3G. She ran off with a German last week, the tarty little fool.”

  “Thanks, madame. I owe you.”

  The woman rolled her eyes, and after one last appraising look at Eva, she strode out of the kitchen, leaving Rémy smirking at Eva in the darkness.

  * * *

  When Eva awoke the next morning in an unfamiliar bed that smelled of stale calvados, it took her a few seconds to remember where she was. But then the events of the night before came tumbling back in, and she sat up quickly, taking in the room around her. Last night, it had been too dark to see anything, but now, in the light of day, she could see feathered negligees draped everywhere, a lacy brassiere hanging from the corner of the bedpost.

  Rémy was already smiling at her from the dilapidated bedside chair where he’d slept. “Good morning, Sleeping Beauty.”

  “I see Madame Grémillon hasn’t tidied up since the room’s previous occupant ran off.” A champagne coupe with a tattoo of red lipstick at the rim sat on the bedside table, a half-eaten piece of moldy bread beside it.

  “Madame Grémillon is a lot of things,” Rémy replied cheerfully, “but admittedly, a good housekeeper is not one of them.”

  “I suppose she’s an old friend of yours, then. And she feels perfectly fine about catering to Germans, does she?”

  Rémy shrugged. “I think of her rather like a modern-day Robin Hood. She charges the Germans twice the French rate, and gives the difference to the cause.”

  “The cause?”

  “People like us, Eva. Brothels are a good place to hear secrets, too. More than one German has blurted out something he shouldn’t when he’s at his most vulnerable.”

  “So you’re telling me the women here are French spies, then? Patriotically lying on their backs for God and country?”

  Rémy burst out laughing. “Perhaps so. There are plenty of people resisting in their own ways. Be careful not to underestimate anyone. Now, shall we have breakfast?”

  “Oh, this charming establishment serves meals, as well, does it?”

  “You don’t think the women here work on empty stomachs, do you? Come, let’s eat.”

  As Eva pulled herself hastily together, splashing some water on her face and applying lipstick from the worn nub she had in her purse, Rémy flipped through the papers she’d brought to secure her father’s release. When she turned from the washbasin in the corner, he was no longer grinning like a madman. In fact, he looked troubled.

  “What is it?” she asked. “Is there something wrong with the papers?”

  “No, Eva, they’re perfect.”

  “Then what’s the matter?”

  He didn’t answer right away. “I just want you to be prepared for the fact that your father might not be there.”

  Eva’s throat was suddenly dry. She looked away. “Well, of course he is. Where else would he be?”

  “Deported already. Or…” Rémy trailed off.

  Eva raised both hands, palms outstretched to push the words away. “That’s ridiculous. We’ll find him today and take him back to Aurignon with us.”

  Rémy nodded. “I’ll be with you either way.”

  He held out his hand and she took it after carefully folding the papers for her father’s release back into her handbag.

  Downstairs, two dozen women in silk robes were lounging around a large table in the room the Germans had been filtering in and out of the night before.

  “Morning, ladies,” Rémy said casually as he led Eva in, tugging her behind him though she was trying her hardest to stall.

  Some of the women looked up and regarded him with boredom; others didn’t even pause in their conversations. Madame Grémillon hobbled in from the kitchen carrying a large serving platter and nodded in their direction. In the bright light of morning, and without a heavy coat of makeup, she looked even older. “You’re just in time,” she said to Eva. “My girls might screw like rabbits, dear, but they eat like horses. Get yourselves some food before it’s gone.”

  Eva wanted to hold back on principle, but the tray floating by her contained fresh bread, glossy oranges, sausages, and large wedges of cheese. She stared, slack-jawed. “How…?” she began.

  “The Germans like to keep the girls happy,” Madame Grémillon cackled, answering the question that had been on the tip of Eva’s tongue. “Happy stomachs mean happy—”

  “Oh, I’m not sure we have time for one of your anatomy lessons today, thank you,” Rémy interrupted. “Sorry, Madame Grémillon, but we can’t stay. We’ll just grab something for the road.”

  The old woman grunted. “You always think you’re too good to dine with us.”

  “Not at all, Madame Grémillon. I just have places to be.” He grabbed a few hunks of bread, a wedge of cheese, and a thick sausage. “Thanks for the hospitality.”

  Madame Grémillon glared at him for a few seconds before turning to Eva. “How a pretty young woman like you could fall for a man with these manners is beyond me.”

  Eva felt her cheeks go warm. “But I’m not… he’s not…”

  Rémy grabbed her hand and planted a big kiss on her cheek. “What she means to say is that it’s too late. She has already married me.”

  A few of the girls at the table looked up.

  “No, I—” Eva protested.

  “Come on, my darling. There’s a train to catch. See you next time, ladies!” And with one hand full of food clutched to his chest and the other holding tight to Eva, Rémy dragged her from the room and out the back door of the brothel without a look back.

  “I bet you think you’re funny,” Eva said between huge, ravenous bites of bread a few minutes later as they hurried toward the avenue Jean Jaurès in the nineteenth, where Rémy had arranged for them to meet a man he knew who had a car and would drive them to Drancy.

  “Most people find themselves charmed by me eventually. Now come, are you trying to leave a trail behind us on the streets of Paris? Are we Hansel and Gretel?”

  Eva looked behind her and realized that Rémy was right; as she had stuffed bread into her mouth, starving, she had left crumbs all the way down the boulevard Haussmann. She smiled slightly. “I suppose my table manners leave something to be desired. It’s just that I’m so hungry.”

  Rémy handed her a big piece of cheese, firm and waxy, as he dropped back to keep pace with her. “Well, there’s no table here, and I’m not judging you.”

  She wanted to tell him that she wasn’t judging him, either, but of course she was. She had been since the moment they’d met. And perhaps that wasn’t very fair.

  * * *

  It took more than an hour to travel the thirteen kilometers to Drancy, a bleak suburb on the northeastern edge of the city. The war-torn roads were littered with French policemen leaning on their police cars and smoking cigarettes, and young German soldiers laughing as they passed by in trucks. Their driver, a man Rémy introduced as Thibault Brun, had merely grunted a greeting at them when they got into his old truck. Eva and Rémy had awkwardly wedged into the passenger seat with their hips pressed together, and Brun didn’t say a word the whole ride. But he seemed to know nearly every official they passed, waving at some, nodding at others. “Here we are,” he muttered, pulling alongside a curb in a nondescript residential block. “I’ll wait, but be back in an hour. Give me half the money now.”

  Wordlessly, Rémy handed the driver a wad of cash and unceremoniously shoved Eva out of the vehicle, landing beside her. Brun counted his money as they hurried away, the truck belching gazogene fumes that smelled like rotten eggs.

  “You have some interesting friends,” Eva muttered as they made their way down the shadowy street, which was strangely silent in the middle of the day.

  “Brun isn’t a friend. He’s a contact.�
� Rémy didn’t elaborate.

  “Where did you get the money?”

  “Does it matter?”

  Eva hesitated. “No. And thank you.”

  Rémy nodded and put a hand under her elbow. “You might want to hold your breath.”

  “What are you—?” Eva didn’t complete her sentence before it hit her like a punch in the face. The unmistakable scent of human waste was suddenly all around them, drifting in on an underbelly of brackish body odor and mud. She gagged and heaved, stumbling, but Rémy caught her before she went down.

  “You all right?” Without waiting for an answer, he added under his breath, “Keep walking. Reacting looks suspicious.”

  “My God,” Eva managed to say, her eyes watering as they reached the end of the block and turned the corner. “What is that?”

  “Drancy, I’m afraid.”

  Eva looked up and nearly stopped again as the huge internment camp came into view. Flies buzzed around the outskirts, zipping in and out of tangled barbed wire. The buildings themselves were modern blocks, three long, clean-lined rectangles in the shape of a U. Six stories tall, they looked as if they’d been designed to provide housing for a few hundred families, but instead, the enormous courtyard in the middle was teeming with thousands of people, crammed in like cattle on a train, some of them crying, others screaming, still more with faces etched in wide-eyed defeat. There were soiled children, screaming babies, haggard elderly women, sobbing old men. Guard towers loomed over the crowd, and French policemen patrolled the perimeter, their expressions blank.

  “This can’t be right,” Eva murmured as they approached the main gate.

  “Of course it’s not.”

  “I mean, this can’t be where they’re keeping prisoners. It’s—it’s not even fit for animals.” Eva was having trouble breathing, but it was no longer the smell that was bothering her. It was the sense of becoming suddenly unmoored from anything that felt familiar. Certainly the arrests of the previous week had been heinous, but they’d been carried out with some small level of decorum. But this, this penning of humans awash in their own waste, was barbaric. Eva retched again, imagining Tatuś among the throngs. “Rémy, we have to get my father out now.”

  Rémy merely nodded. “Get your papers,” he said under his breath. “And act calm, not outraged. Our lives may depend on it.”

  Eva couldn’t imagine how she could pretend to the French police that all of this was fine. But then again, how were the guards here pretending it to themselves? There were dozens of officers walking around, more moving in the towers overhead, and none of them looked repulsed or even bothered by the atrocity. Could they all be that evil? Or had they discovered a switch within themselves that allowed them to turn off their civility? Did they go home to their wives at night and simply flip the switches back on, become human once more?

  Rémy exchanged words with the officer at the gate, who shuffled through their papers and ushered them inside, pointing toward an office. As they walked, several of the prisoners, penned inside another layer of barbed wire, called out to them.

  Please, you must call my son Pierre in Nice! Pierre Denis, on the rue Cluvier!

  Please, will you find my husband, Marc? Marc Wiśniewski? We were separated in the Vel d’Hiv!

  My baby is dead! Is my baby dead? My baby is dead!

  Eva could feel tears welling in her eyes, but Rémy squeezed her hand so hard she could feel her bones crunching together, and she was reminded of his words. Calm, she told herself, drawing a shaky breath.

  A French officer, dark-haired, stout, and in his forties, stepped from the office, hand extended, his eyes cool, his smile thin as he ushered them inside without a word. “So?” he asked, once he closed the door behind them, muffling the plaintive wails outside. The air in the room was still, hot, musty. In the dead of summer, the windows should have been open to catch a breeze, but of course opening the windows would invite in the voices of those being tortured just outside. “What brings you to our delightful establishment?”

  That he could make a joke about the conditions made Eva even more furious, but there was Rémy’s death grip around her fingers again, crushing her into submission. She forced a detached smile as Rémy spoke.

  “I’m Rémy Charpentier, and this is my wife, Marie, who also serves as my secretary. I’m afraid there’s been a mistake and one of our best workers has been imprisoned here. We’ve come to get him out.” His tone was easy, jovial, light, and Eva marveled at his casual confidence.

  “A mistake, you say?” The officer shook his head. “I doubt it.”

  “Of course we understand the mix-up,” Rémy continued smoothly, as if the man hadn’t spoken. “Our worker is, indeed, a Jew. But he’s Argentine, you see.”

  Something in the officer’s face changed. “Go on.”

  “Certainly you’re aware of the diplomatic agreement between Germany and Argentina. The Argentine consul was quite distressed to learn that one of his citizens had been rounded up. And since he’d hate to have to raise the issue with his German counterpart…”

  Rémy held up the forged letter bearing the Argentine seal, and the officer ripped it away from him, muttering angrily to himself as he scanned it. “Well, I’m not the one who made the mistake,” he barked, looking up at them. “Leo Traube? Doesn’t sound very Argentine to me.”

  “Who can tell these days?” Rémy shrugged dramatically. “Probably a Polack whose parents got on a ship a generation ago. Still, the Argentines aren’t happy…”

  “Let me see what I can do.” The man left, slamming the door behind him and leaving Rémy and Eva alone in the stifling heat.

  “Do you really think that—?” Eva began, but Rémy cut her off with a single raised hand.

  “Shhh. The walls have ears.”

  Eva closed her mouth and turned to look out the window at the teeming crowd of people, miserable and sweating in the beating July sun. Was her father among them, being treated like livestock? She didn’t realize that tears were running down her cheeks until Rémy hissed at her, “Pull yourself together. You’re just the secretary.” But when she looked up at him, there was no annoyance in his eyes, only pity. He quickly wiped away her tears with his thumb.

  The officer returned then, carrying a leather-bound book, his expression unreadable as he slammed the door behind him. He didn’t make eye contact as he flipped through the pages, finally stopping midway through and placing his finger on the page. “Leo Traube,” he said, finally looking up.

  “Yes, that’s right,” Eva said too eagerly, and Rémy gave her a gentle nudge in the ribs.

  “Well, I’m afraid that the mix-up is not my problem any longer,” the man said, turning the book around on his desk so it faced Eva and Rémy. He jabbed a meaty finger at line thirty-five, where the name Leo Traube was neatly scrawled, alongside his age, fifty-two, and the address on the rue Elzévir where Eva had lived all her life. “He’s been relocated.”

  “Relocated?” Eva said.

  The man’s eyes were empty as he nodded and moved his finger. Eva leaned in. Clearly written beside the date of her father’s arrest—16 July 1942—was another notation: Convoi 7, 19 Juil.

  Eva looked up, dazed, and found the officer looking right at her. “That’s two days ago. July nineteenth. What does it mean?”

  “That he was on convoy number seven departing from Drancy,” the officer said, his voice flat. Rémy had inched closer, the back of his hand brushing against Eva’s, but her whole body was cold, too cold to be comforted by anything.

  “And what is the convoy’s destination?” Eva whispered.

  “Auschwitz.”

  Eva just stared at him, the world spinning around her. She could hear Rémy saying something beside her, his tone calm, but the buzzing in her ears drowned out his words. “Auschwitz?” she asked in a whisper. She had heard of it, had heard rumors that Germans were sending Jews there and working them to death, but she hadn’t believed it. Now, in an instant, she did.

&nbs
p; The officer glanced at her. “It’s a work camp west of Kraków. If your employee’s parents emigrated from Poland, he should feel right at home there, yes?” The man finally smiled.

  “Thank you for your time,” Rémy said, already pulling Eva toward the door. Her feet felt as if they were made of lead. “Come,” Rémy said to Eva in a low voice as the officer moved to open the door for them. “Not here.” And then his arm was around Eva, and he was dragging her toward the exit, through the horrific cacophony of distress and decay and death that was all around them, past the agony and hopelessness of the people still trapped behind barbed wire.

  It wasn’t until they were safely back in Brun’s truck, bumping down shredded roads toward Paris, that Eva finally began to cry, softly at first, escalating to a wail that sounded inhuman, even to her own ears.

  “Shut her up, would you?” Brun asked.

  “No,” Rémy said, pulling her against him, offering his shoulder as comfort. “No, I won’t.”

  When she could finally speak again, past the grief that had closed her throat, she whispered, “What will we do? How will we get him out of Auschwitz?”

  Rémy’s lips brushed her forehead. “I’m afraid it’s impossible.”

  Eva closed her eyes. “So now what?”

  “Now,” Rémy murmured, “we pray.”

  As they made their way back toward Paris, horror set in, and along with it, determination. It might have been too late to save her father, but she had just seen up close what was happening to thousands of other Jews. If there was something she could do to help, she didn’t have a choice.

  Chapter Twelve

  “What will happen to him?”

  They were the first words Eva had spoken in more than two hours, the first she could muster, and she knew she had to say them aloud, though she didn’t want to hear the answer. They were on a train headed south out of Paris, and Eva had been so drunk on her own misery that she’d barely noticed when a German soldier spent a tense minute examining her false identity card and travel permit as they boarded.