The Tiger Claw Read online

  Praise for THE TIGER CLAW

  The Giller Prize Finalist

  “The Tiger Claw is a first-rate spy thriller and also first-rate literature. Set in the 1940s in Occupied Paris with haunting similarities to the world today, this is a novel that reminds us that sometimes only fiction can really tell us the truth. …The story of one woman’s courage in the face of racism, betrayal and hypocrisy on one hand and the evils of war on the other. It is also a love story between Muslim and Jew told in a language that resonates with mysticism and romance—yet it is brutally honest in its assessment of motives and ambiguities.”

  —Giller Prize judges

  “Baldwin finds a Muslim woman who has much to teach our own time. …She becomes more ambitious with every book. …Years of careful research on three continents, as well as extensive contact with her subject’s extended family, result in a portrait of Noor Inayat Khan that explains why she did what she did in compelling, convincing ways.”

  —The Globe and Mail

  “A stirring tale of love and betrayal in a foreign land. Like the troubadour, [Baldwin] has the natural gift of pinning you to the window of her imagination until you hang by her each word and every twist and turn of the tale, begging for more.”

  —India Today

  “The Tiger Claw brilliantly reveals the shifting sands of allegiance in times of war and the duplicity required for survival when all who are operating underground are interdependent but no one can be trusted fully.”

  —The Gazette (Montreal)

  “I only had to read the novel’s first line to know what was in store. … A fascinating portrait of a legendary woman and a novel that, in turn, examines love, religion, nationalism and sacrifice.”

  —The Sun Times (Owen Sound)

  “It’s a fiction closer to truth than any authorized account. …Baldwin’s ability to bring her characters to life has never been in question and it reigns supreme now.”

  —Outlook (India)

  For

  David J. Baldwin

  Remember, even though I have done terrible things

  I can still see the whole world in your face.

  —RUMI (KULLUJAT E SHAMS, QUATRAIN 1110)

  Two hands, two feet, two eyes, good,

  as it should be, but no separation

  of the Friend and your loving.

  Any dividing there

  makes other untrue distinctions like “Jew”

  and “Christian” and “Muslim”

  —RUMI (KULLUJAT E SHAMS, QUATRAIN 321)

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The Tiger Claw is inspired by the life and times of Noor Inayat Khan and the non-fiction accounts of many other resistance agents of WW II. Many historical people are mentioned in this book, but no living person is portrayed. A few new characters have been substituted for historical persons and some names have been changed. Most transliterations are from Urdu, some are from Arabic.

  The first non-fiction biography of Noor, Madeleine, was written in 1952 by Jean Overton Fuller. William Stevenson summarized and embellished this account in The Man Called Intrepid. Later non-fiction writers commented on Noor’s story, like Rita Kramer in Flames in the Field. Noor’s brother, Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, offered his tribute to Noor in his book Awakening. Noor is mentioned in footnotes to biographies of Hazrat Inayat Khan and discussed in books by retired agents of the Special Operations Executive (SOE). Recently, her story was presented with more context in Women Who Lived for Danger by Marcus Binney.

  For me, these non-fiction accounts raised more questions about Noor than their facts could answer.

  My depiction of Noor begins from fact but departs quickly into imagination, bending time, creating characters around her, rearranging or inventing some events to explore as if through her eyes, to feel what may have been in her heart.

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  Pforzheim, Germany

  December 1943

  DECEMBER MOVED IN, taking up residence with Noor in her cell, and freezing the radiator.

  Cold coiled in the bowl of her pelvis, turning shiver to quake as she lay beneath her blanket on the cot. Above, snow drifted against glass and bars. Shreds of thoughts, speculations, obsessions … some glue still held her fragments together.

  The flap door clanged down.

  “Herr Vogel …”

  The rest, in rapid German, was senseless.

  Silly hope reared inside; she reined it in.

  The guard placed something on the thick, jutting tray, something invisible in the dingy half-light. Soup, probably. She didn’t care.

  She heard a clunk and a small swish.

  Yes, she did care.

  Noor rolled onto her stomach, chained wrists before her, supported her weight on her elbows and knelt. Then shifted to extend the chain running between her wrists and ankles far enough for her to be seated. The clanking weight of the leg irons pulled her bare feet to the floor.

  She slipped into prison clogs, shuffled across the cement floor.

  A pad of onionskin. A scrawl that filled the whole first page. It said in French, For Princess Noor—write children’s stories only. Signed, Ernst V.

  She had asked Vogel for paper, pen and ink, but never expected to receive them. “Everything in my power,” Vogel had said.

  She tucked the pad under her arm, then tested the pen nib against her thumb. She reached for the glass jar. Dark blue ink. She opened it, inhaled its metallic fragrance.

  She carried the writing materials back to her cot. She lay down, eyes open to the gloom, gritting her teeth to stop their chattering. Mosquito thoughts buzzed.

  Do it. Shouldn’t. Do it. Shouldn’t. Do it.

  Use initials, think the names, use false names, code names.

  She caterpillar-crawled to the edge, turned on her side to block the vision of any guard and examined the leg of the cot. A pipe welded to the metal frame. Hollow pipe with a steel cover.

  If I can hide some of my writing, I will write what I want.

  She pressed a chain-link against the steel cover. Was it welded? Cold-numbed fingers exploring. No, not welded. Screwed on tightly.

  Push, push with the edge of her manacles. Then with a chain-link. She wrapped her chain around the cover like a vise. It didn’t move. She pushed and turned in the dimness for hours, till she was wiping sweat from her eyes. She froze whenever she heard—or thought she heard—a movement at the peephole.

  Deep breath. Attack the hollow leg again.

  Night blackened the cell. Baying and barking outside, beyond the stone walls of the prison. Twice, the rush of a train passing very close. Noor grimaced and grunted on.

  Finally, the steel cover moved a millimetre along its treads. By dawn, it loosened. She lay back, exhausted. Then, with her back to the door, she rolled up half the onionskin, poked it down the pipe-leg and, with an effort, screwed the cover on again.

  Above her, the window brightened.

  The guard was at the door. She unchained Noor’s manacles so she could use the toilet. Did not glance at the bed. Did not shout.

  The flap door dropped for Noor’s morning bowl, sawdust bread. A single bulb lit the cell.

  Begin, “Once upon a time there was a war …?” No. She would write une histoire, not the kind her captor had in mind, but for someone who might read her words in a time to come:

  I am still here.

  I write, not because this story is more important than all others, but because I have so great a need to understand it. What I say is my truth and lies together, amalgam of memory and explication. I write in English, mostly, English being the one language left in the ring. Other languages often express my feelings better—French, Urdu, Hindustani. And perhaps in these languages I could have told and
read you stories better than this, your mother’s story. But all my languages have been tainted by what we’ve said and done to one another in these years of war.

  When the flap door dropped that evening, Noor dragged her chains to it and placed two sheets on the open tray. On one she had written the Sufi tale about the attraction of a moth to a flame, on another the one about the young man who came knocking at his teacher’s door and when his teacher asked, “Who is there?” cried “It is I” and was told, “Come back when you are nobody.”

  She could see the guard glance at the English writing then thrust the sheets in her pocket without examination. The pad of onionskin lay upon the cot behind Noor, but the guard didn’t enter to count its remaining pages.

  So, the next day, Noor wrote another paragraph, and another:

  With that first creation of Allah—the pen that Vogel has allowed me—poised over the ink pot, then over the page, I wonder what to call you. Little spirit never whispered into this world—une fée. In Urdu I would call you ruh. Feminine. Ma petite ruh. We all begin feminine in Al-ghayab, the invisible, before we enter our nameless bodies.

  I imagine you, ma petite, nine years old, looking much like me and as much like Armand, expectant and still trusting. Encourage my telling as any audience encourages a teller of tales, though I may tell what you may not condone, what you may not believe, or what you cannot bear to know. I write so you can see me, so Armand will appear again by the telling.

  CHAPTER 2

  Germany

  July 1945

  AGAINST THE FLUME and smear of a dying sun, the silhouette of a motorcycle rider rose over a ridge of dirt road. The sharp engine roar dropped and levelled. The rider’s gloved hands downshifted to avoid the scorched remnants of a tank blocking his way. The bike bounced over ruts and craters as Kabir swerved the pod of his sidecar around the shell-pocked hull. The Tiger tank was canted over its cannon, its mud-caked treads stilled in a ditch.

  Kabir didn’t stop to examine the tank, or let thoughts of the Germans who must have died inside cross his mind, but goaded his rattling steed past. Showers sprang from spinning rubber as he furrowed a puddle. He shot a glance through spattered goggles at the jerricans bouncing in the sidecar and, gritting his teeth against flying mud and wind, headed into the darkening horizon.

  Out of Strasbourg, Kabir had raced over a makeshift pontoon bridge crossing the Rhine with a moment of wonder. Only a few months earlier, before the Germans surrendered, crossing the Rhine at any point was unthinkable.

  Faster, faster.

  Past the Rhine, the road crumbled in patches, as if the very soil had soured beneath the tar-skin pasted upon it. Kabir’s Triumph sagged into valleys, zoomed past forests of pine. Detour upon detour drove him south to Freiburg im Breisgau, a city he knew only as a target objective last November, now almost conjured out of existence by Allied bombs—his bombs. As he drove through its high canyons of scorched rubble, the sight of a tiny, ragged girl foraging alone with a wooden bucket amid a mass of crushed possessions and twisted steel brought the Al-Fatiha surah to his lips:

  “‘ … master of the Day of Reckoning,

  To you we turn to worship

  and to you we turn in time of need.

  Guide us along the road straight,

  the road of those to whom you are giving …’”

  Now, as he sped past these patches of green and gold, it was difficult to believe he had just seen Alsatian hamlets like Gérardmer flattened to the level of its glacial lake by the retreating German army, seen the abandoned barracks, the gallows and gas chambers of Natzweiler-Struthof camp near Strasbourg, or the stone skeletons and smoky ghosts of Freiburg. The putrid stench of death at Natzweiler, mingled with the bomb-smoke and rain of Freiburg, lingered in his nostrils, saturated his lungs, an all-pervasive odour that the scent of lavender blooming by the roadside could not erase.

  This was his first time on the ground through Germany. In his childhood, his father’s savings were reserved for passages “home” to India, not European excursions. And since 1933, Germany, though literate beyond Indian nationalists’ wildest dreams of progress, had become the sick core of Europe whence refugees flowed into France. Hitlerland was the omnivorous devourer of the hapless, the racially impure, the non-Gentile, the circumcised. But these beautiful forests, hills and fields of Germany seemed unblemished by German actions.

  The motorcycle rattled past a sign—Stuttgart: 120 km—and approached an improvised checkpoint beside a maze of oil drums. A young American military policeman sauntered up, obviously expecting a courier on the motorbike. Noting Kabir’s rank, he snapped to. “Can I help you, sir?”

  Kabir returned his salute and held out his pass and ID booklet. The MP studied the pass and looked uncertain. A lieutenant approached; they exchanged salutes.

  Kabir raised his goggles, unbuckled his helmet, peeled off his gloves, while the lieutenant took the documents and read the pass aloud.

  “‘This is to certify that the bearer, Flight Lieutenant Kabiruddin Khan of the Royal Air Force, is proceeding through Germany to locate his sister who was held in a German camp.’” He paused, glanced up at Kabir.

  Kabir was intent on the road beyond the barrier, fist clenched about his gloves.

  “‘It is requested that British, French, American and Russian military and civilian authorities assist Flight Lieutenant Khan in his task, and make such housing and mess facilities available, as well as radio, press and all other means which can help him locate his sister. A further request is made to permit his sister to cross the border with him on his return to his home in France.’” He again examined the signature and date on the pass for what seemed like an eon. “Which camp are you headed for, sir?”

  “I don’t quite know. All I know is that my sister was deported to Germany.”

  The lieutenant’s opinion of Kabir’s chance of success was expressed with a sigh, but Kabir was long past listening to the opinions of uniformed officials. He knew the odds were slim. Folded in his pocket he carried a list of the known concentration camps between the Alsace region and Berlin. And this list, without any German prisons, was three pages long. Officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross and UNRRA, the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, had reminded him every day for weeks in Paris: one in ten people survived a camp. Searching for one woman among the millions displaced might be futile. But this was not just any woman. This was his sister, Noor.

  Immediately after Germany surrendered, Kabir had obtained permission to return to Paris, where he waited for the transports bringing deportees and prisoners of war home to Paris. For weeks, in deepening amazement and horror, he met trains arriving at the Gare de l’Est each morning with hundreds upon hundreds of hollow-chested, shaven-headed returnees. Every day, at UNRRA headquarters, at welcome centres for returned deportees and at the Hôtel Lutétia, he examined and re-examined the cards and notes tacked to bulletin boards covering every wall, coming to realize with ever-mounting dread that while he was looking for one woman, many were searching for entire families. A lucky break had come a week before when he recognized an UNRRA worker. A former theosophist, she’d studied Sufism first at his father’s feet, then at Uncle Tajuddin’s, in the now-haloed years before the war, learning about the oneness of Allah and all other names for God. Straight away, he wheedled a list of German camps now under Allied control right out of her lacquered fingertips, requisitioned a motorcycle from an RAF base, obtained three weeks’ leave and a high-level pass, and came searching.

  “Try Munich,” said the lieutenant, handing Kabir’s papers back with heavy finality. “There’s a collection centre there, run by UNRRA.”

  “Thank you.” Gloves back on his hands, Kabir adjusted his helmet and goggles and gunned the engine.

  “Good luck, sir.” The young MP waved Kabir through with a salute of triumphant camaraderie.

  A short distance further, four men and two women carrying bundles and suitcases were climbing slowly into
a Red Cross lorry parked along the road, facing Kabir. These anonymous survivors of the terror, weak from their time in the camps, still wearing their sacklike prison attire, were the liberated—“displaced persons,” or DPs—on their way to somewhere they once called or could now call home.

  Kabir slowed, scanning their faces as they passed, searching for one familiar face, one woman’s face. Sympathy blended with revulsion. Noor—petite, gentle Noor—might be in such abject condition at that very moment. As they trudged past, a sob of desperation surfaced in him. He pushed it away. Insh’allah, Noor was alive. He began another du’a to add to all the others he’d uttered during the last few months, calling on Allah’s mercy for her.

  Speeding to high gear again on the rutted road, a dust cloud lifting in his wake, he tried to recapture the bravado that had filled him like poppy-fume when he volunteered for the RAF, returned from flight school in Canada and began to fly bombers. Back then, in England, he was a refugee after the fall of France, and his British Indian citizenship gave him what he wanted most—the chance to fly. The destructive actions he justified multiplied daily as his tenets and personal code of conduct were suspended, superseded by the obligations of war.

  Flying over Germany once in daylight last winter, the spiky pines bristling from snow-covered slopes were like the bayonets of Great War soldiers buried alive in the trenches of Verdun. From twenty thousand feet the world had looked flat but for mountains, giving no indication of the 23.5-degree tilt affecting the experiences of each person below, or the ferocity of emotions that curdled all co-operation and compromise. And nothing below had presented the jigsaw of warring countries, delineated any boundaries or coloured parts of the soil Occupied. The surface flowed instead from grassy field to knoll, ridge, escarpment, cliff, sea.

  But now, what had looked like green explosions erupting in sudden abundance beneath his wings had expanded to three dimensions—dense foliage flashing past his careening motorcycle.