The Tiger Claw Read online

  A gentle reminder of the four weeks Noor went without pay when she first joined the SOE. Went without pay for four whole weeks because she couldn’t bear to mention to Miss Atkins that His Majesty’s War Department had mistakenly failed to pay her salary.

  “I appreciate that, marm.”

  “Continue to use the code name we chose during training: Madeleine. In France, be most careful to avoid anyone who could recognize you from before the war or call you Nora.”

  None of Noor’s friends in Paris would call her Nora. Miss Atkins had forgotten Noor Khan, though the name was on Noor’s records; Noor had played Nora Baker quite well.

  “Letters to your family can be sent in care of the War Office at Whitehall. Urgent personal messages are to use our prearranged code; these will be read over the BBC for you to receive. For instance, Prosper’s team will be alerted to expect your arrival with the phrase Jasmin is playing her flute, and you will use the phrase Jasmin has played her flute to tip us off that you have arrived safely. You will identify yourself to Phono with the phrase The sky is blue. The correct response is: But the bread will rise.”

  “Très drôle,” said Noor.

  Gimlet eyes bored into Noor’s. “Yes, very funny. Only, Nora, this is no game. All of France is occupied by the Germans now. SOE agents and the Resistance are risking their lives every day. It’s quite possible you will be there when the invasion comes, if not on this assignment then on another. If captured, you know the rules: Deny all knowledge of other members of the network and the SOE. Hold out twenty-four hours before divulging any information so your contacts will know something is wrong and have time to destroy incriminating evidence and save themselves.” Miss Atkins barely paused; she must have given the same instructions to other agents many times.

  Could Noor resist for twenty-four hours? Of course she could. And they’d never catch her to begin with. And it was torture to be safe in England. And now to have this rare chance to be nearer to Armand, somehow get a message to him …

  Out loud Noor asked, “Do members of the Resistance completely support the return of General de Gaulle, as the BBC says?”

  “Pish, de Gaulle! Vichy court-martialled him in absentia for desertion, yet the BBC calls him General. He’s not an elected head of state, after all.”

  To be court-martialled by Vichy sounded like an accolade. That Miss Atkins, weather vane of official opinion, was so disparaging could mean that General Charles de Gaulle wasn’t as compliant as Mr. Churchill would like foreign leaders to be. His voice on the BBC, though—so inspiring. De Gaulle ran his own resistance networks too, the Free French.

  “Miss Atkins, why have some French refugees joined the SOE and some the Free French?”

  “Contacts, mostly. It’s not always a matter of choice. If you ask me, de Gaulle’s Free French are a ragtag lot, given far too much importance.”

  “Ragtag because they’ve lost everything,” said Noor. “But they do inspire me, and each other. I mean people like Jean Moulin and others who refused to collaborate with the Germans.”

  “Oh, be very careful to use Moulin’s nom de guerre—Max—in France. He’s larger than life to the French resistants, perhaps larger than de Gaulle or his General Delestraint—but we don’t mention that. He could become France’s next president, if Mr. Churchill and Mr. Roosevelt so decide.”

  Miss Atkins pushed her chair back. Noor rose too.

  “If you have a choice, the SOE is far more attractive. General de Gaulle doesn’t have state coffers at his disposal to fund his little projects in France, you know. Anyway, your allegiance is to England and the SOE, my dear. But we do co-operate with the Free French. When we have to.”

  “Yes, marm.”

  The waiter held the door. Miss Atkins strode purposefully through. Noor followed close behind. On Clarges Street, Miss Atkins snapped a black umbrella open against a slow drizzle growing to shower. Noor did the same. Miss Atkins’s umbrella bobbed away down the street. Soon she and Noor were far apart.

  CHAPTER 6

  Pforzheim, Germany

  December 1943

  MISS ATKINS NAMED US ALL. Yolande was “Mariette” and I was Madeleine. But the nom de guerre I wanted was Madelon.

  Madelon from an evening in 1934, when I was twenty. Uncle Tajuddin’s lecture to the Sufi disciples closed with the Universal Worship ceremony, and I slipped away with Armand to the Val d’Or café. When we were sure no one who knew me was near, we walked uphill, summoned by an old man’s plaintive song, “Quand Madelon vient nous servir à boire.” A poilu from the Great War sang of the girl Madelon who inspired warriors like him.

  The poilu stood on his wooden leg at the foot of Mont Valérien, the cemetery where American soldiers lie. His accordion pleated and unpleated, breathing that melody into the summer evening. And before him on the ground he displayed his medals beside his cupped beret.

  Armand tossed a few sous in the beret and his arm encircled my waist. In our special place, we lay down on his coat and the tall chestnuts swayed above. We talked till we found ourselves still speaking but without words. When I close my eyes in this dark hole, I do not feel my chains but feel his lips again, lips on mine, feel his hair between my fingers, dark hair scented with grass. The accordion music vibrates in me, a song from that war that was to end all war, from the poilu’s days at Verdun.

  We married, though no synagogue or mosque sanctified our nuptials. We married, though no one witnessed it but the stars over Paris. And for all that has happened as “the moving finger writes and having writ moves on,” I would not lure that finger back to cancel that one line.

  Of course we should have waited, of course he should have pulled away sooner. Suffragettes have secrets I should have known, but I’d never listened to them, never asked, never read a single pamphlet. Uncle’s fears and restrictions had taught me to think of my body as a thing beneath my clothes, an evil thing to be tamed but never claimed. Armand explored it for me, with me. He played, read and described it to me as if reading a sacred scroll.

  I never planned those long years of clandestine romance, and certainly not a secret marriage. I was travelling in two directions at once, and every magical hour with Armand became one hour stolen from my approved destiny as someone else’s wife. Every hour I spent with him became tinged with the melancholy of probable farewells, yet every hour we were together we became more essential to each other.

  But from the vortex of contradictions that led to this resumption of the wooden-legged man’s war, from the eddying and rushing, from the headlong mix of suitable and unsuitable thoughts, there must have been a self-organizing moment in which thoughts cohered and glided to form a knot of flesh. Your body came into being in that instant, a particle of me became animate, waiting for you. Unensouled, and as yet without anger, defiance, sadness or fear. All that remained was for Allah to send you, light your life within me.

  The girl I was then stood poised on the fulcrum of change. I follow that naive, idealistic girl as if watching another time, someone else’s life. When she comes into view, I write, hoping one word will form the next, hoping a moving pen can translate thought, memory, love, grief.

  I sit enchained, prisoner of the present, looking back farther and farther, letting collage develop to story. Events are connected like prayer beads on a string—Subhan-allah … Subhan-allah … Subhan-allah.

  CHAPTER 7

  Tangmere, England

  Tuesday, June 15, 1943

  NIGHT AIR PARTED before the nose of the Lysander, slipped around its wings. The shudder of the Mercury engine surrounded Noor, sitting in the converted air gunner’s cockpit behind the pilot, facing the tail. Infinitesimal accelerations multiplied as the high-wing monoplane’s propeller wrung and ripped at the moon-bleached night. The plane’s wings rested on air flows as gravity strained to anchor the small plane to Surrey earth.

  The drumbeat of the ground faded. A thump, and her stomach plunged. Excitement mixed with vertigo. The clearest thought since a moto
r car sped her away from Portman Square, London’s buildings hulking past like old women shrouded in chadors of mythic black, since bumping down unmetalled roads to the cottage by the airfield: she was flying.

  “Righto?” the pilot’s voice blared through the intercom. Noor nodded, not trusting her own voice in the shuddering din. The passenger whose knee kept bumping hers, bull-necked, taciturn “Edmond,” whose destination she didn’t know, shouted a response for both.

  The pilot had given Noor an appraising glance across the dining table. She knew the source of that glance; her features had tested his ability to classify. Not-English. French? Italian? Greek? Once more her face had blended into context, becoming elemental, its differences from others around it becoming so minuscule as to make it unremarkable. Surrounded by other Indians, she looked and sounded Indian; by French agents, she looked and sounded French—a chameleon quality highly desirable for anyone in SOE’s French Section.

  She shifted her knees beneath the unaccustomed length of her reversible black and forest-green skirt; correct for current Paris fashion, old-fashioned by English standards.

  Her own civilian clothes weren’t too fashionable. Shown by the butler to a bedroom of the flat at Orchard Court, she had discarded them in the adjoining black-tiled bathroom. The French-made stays were stylish by contrast with her English ones, but the French tailor-tabbed blouse and skirt were drab and coarse in texture, to match Anne-Marie Régnier’s circumstances.

  In the bathroom Noor slipped into the white blouse provided, retained her wristwatch and gold stud earrings, and debated removing the gold chain and pendant she always wore.

  The thin chain that was always tangling was a gift from Kabir, celebrating his first earnings. French-made; she could wear the chain.

  The pendant—a tiger claw enframed in gold—was a gift from Dadijaan. Its gold frame had sheathed the claw’s deadly hostility for nearly two centuries, turning it to ornament, and the strength of her grandmother and an unbroken line of noblewomen had seeped in, tinting it yellow. The claw was a bodily weapon, an amulet worn “for luck and courage.” No German could ever comprehend the intrinsic value or meaning of the heirloom. Hand-fashioned by artisans in India, not England, to anyone unfamiliar with its origin it would appear a translucent seashell of little value. In dire emergency she could pawn the heirloom. It was so much a part of her, she even slept with its curve nesting between her breasts. If she concealed it beneath her blouse, she wouldn’t have to regret leaving it.

  She put on the jacket and reversible skirt.

  Dark rushed past the dome above Noor’s head. The drone of the engine was hypnotizing. She shifted gaze for a moment to the vibrating floor. Her low-heeled T-strap shoes were propped on a metal canister destined for the Resistance. She was at this moment probably perched on a load of live ammunition.

  Noor gripped the seat, steadying herself.

  Peculiar, being catapulted into the air then suspended in mid-air between departure and arrival—a little like the non-place and non-time of meditation. The wall at her back felt membrane-thin; anything could hit or penetrate this fragile, roaring space, not only German fighters.

  The plane was a boat, just a little boat in the sky.

  Feet resting on the canister.

  She’d buckled those shoes in the bathroom, each shoe in turn on the onyx bidet. When Noor returned to the bedroom, there sat Miss Vera Atkins, primly, on the hope chest at the foot of the bed. She supplied the props that corroborated Noor’s cover story: a postcard addressed to Anne-Marie Régnier of Bordeaux from a sick “Aunt Lucille” in Paris, beseeching her to visit; Anne-Marie’s ration book, with a few coupons missing; Anne-Marie’s identity card, issued in Bordeaux; a textile card; Anne-Marie’s certificate of Aryan descent; a booklet of métro tickets; a signed and stamped pale green ausweiss that authorized her travel to Paris. Miss Atkins had neatly typed a one-page cover story, and Noor memorized the details quickly—names of Anne-Marie’s “parents,” an address in Bordeaux. Anne-Marie’s lycée was a Catholic convent for girls like the one Noor had attended in Suresnes. Additional details were up to Noor. Miss Atkins pointed out that the travel pass was stamped “no expiration” with a signature, “Kieffer,” beneath.

  For emergency use there was a family photo featuring an old lady who might, by an India-rubber stretch of imagination, bear a familial resemblance to Noor. Miss Atkins showed Noor the Made in Germany mark on a miniature pair of Zeiss binoculars. A small parcel wrapped in brown paper and string was for Aunt Lucille if she were stopped at a German checkpoint. The parcel was really destined for Prosper. Lastly, Miss Atkins gave Noor the address of her safe house in Paris.

  Noor touched the brass buttons on her new forest-green jacket. Miss Atkins had flipped one of the button covers to reveal a tiny compass within. And as a finishing touch Miss Atkins provided the large black leather handbag now resting on Noor’s lap, showing her the twenty-six thousand francs sporting the face of Maréchal Pétain and mentioning, with a conspiratorial smile, that Pétain’s images multiplied not from officially engraved plates in France but all the way from the basement workshop of an SOE counterfeiter in Toronto.

  Miss Atkins also showed her the small slit in the satin lining of her jacket sleeve, a pocket just large enough for a tiny capsule. She secured the cyanide “L-pill” and sewed the slit closed. “Let’s hope you shan’t have to use it,” she said, biting off the thread. “Or this.” The cold snout of a French-made Mikros pocket pistol met Noor’s hand. Noor drew back the slide to verify that the magazine was loaded. The thumb lever exposed a white dot; the pistol was on “safe.”

  Wound, don’t kill.

  Her instructors, former British heads of police and intelligence in India, were fond of pointing out that a wounded man absorbed the enemy’s resources, a dead one did not.

  The parcel, pistol and banknotes now lay swaddled in Noor’s headscarf in the false compartment of her handbag. In the upper compartment lay a change of underwear bundled about her toothbrush and paste, a folded beret and gloves.

  Waiting for the ground crew’s ready signal in the drawing room of the little cottage at Tangmere, Edmond cranked up the phonograph and played “Just as Long as the World Goes Round.”

  “You have family in France?” Edmond was obviously speculating on her reasons for volunteering for a mission.

  “Yes,” she said, not allowing herself to say “my fiancé and his mother.”

  Sam Browne’s baritone began to untwine Noor’s tight-wound nerves.

  “And you?” she ventured.

  “A grandfather, uncles, aunts, cousins.”

  Miss Atkins went through Noor’s pockets again, searching for telltale British cigarettes or a forgotten London bus ticket. Tucked low between her breasts, Noor’s tiger claw went unnoticed. Then, as the sound of the Lysander’s engines drowned out the gramophone, Miss Atkins turned to Noor and presented her with the parting gift Colonel Buckmaster gave all his women agents: a gold compact case.

  “Made in France,” said Miss Atkins reassuringly.

  Noor thanked her, slipping it into the pocket of the oilskin coat folded over her arm. She had a tortoiseshell compact of her own, but it was kind of the Colonel.

  Tucked in the sealed roar of the Lysander, Noor’s palms tingled; she had been gripping the edge of her wooden seat. Ahead lay the Paris she, Mother, Dadijaan, Kabir and Zaib left three years and one week ago to fend for itself. England, with its sloping slate-roofed houses, its larks and hedges, that soot-grimed and war-besieged island, had fallen away and she was flying across its moat to plunge, like Alice down the rabbit hole, into the hexagon, back to the dark, silenced City of Light. Noor Khan alias Nora Baker was left behind. The code name imposed by Miss Atkins now compelled its alternate reality first on her life, then on the fictitious Anne-Marie Régnier’s: Madeleine.

  CHAPTER 8

  Pforzheim, Germany

  December 1943

  THESE MANACLES WEIGH HEAVY on my wrists, but before t
he guard takes the pen Vogel allows by day and turns off the dim bulb by which I write, hear this: no postman delivered the letter I received three weeks before, nor had it stopped for the wide black nibs of eagle-eyed Englishwomen reading mail in their cabinet noir on the fourth floor of John Lewis department store. Like the two I’d received before—precious talismans I carried everywhere—it was addressed to Miss Noor Khan c/o the Sufi Music Centre, London, England, and had made its way across a France overrun with Germans in the hands of a Red Cross volunteer. The vellum note with it said, “Mademoiselle, a young gentleman in France asked that I deliver this by hand.”

  Inside, Armand’s flourishes filled one side of a postcard. Though black-lined by German censors, they were music to my eyes—such joy, such relief—your father was alive! But “Camp d’internement de Drancy” and “Bureau de la Censure” were spelled in the circle of the rubber stamp defacing the card. It meant everything I’d feared these three years, meant the worst—Armand was arrested. And Madame Lydia as well, since I deciphered the word “mère” on the card. The camp was somewhere close to Paris, I was sure, for the words “Département” and “Seine” were barely legible on the second circular stamp above the address.

  I would find it.

  The first moment I saw your father practising in one of Mademoiselle Nadia Boulanger’s piano rooms is engraved in my memory, from the dress I wore—Zaib sewed it for me from a pattern sent by our aunt in Boston—to the scratch of netted ponytail against the nape of my neck. Armand’s lithe fingers drew Bach’s Third Goldberg Variation from the grand, and our souls seemed to meet in the music. That day he played the way Indian musicians play—oblivious of audience.

  He said he’d seen me once before, on the grounds of the 1931 Exposition Coloniale, that he’d followed me that day through the model Angkor Wat temple and the faux date and palm trees celebrating the contribution of colonies to their colonizers. He’d hoped to learn my name, but I was with my friend Josianne and somehow he lost me in the crowd.