There was no answer, though, and when she knocked again a little harder the door swung open to reveal only the neatly made bed where Mireille’s sewing things lay in a small pile, hastily discarded.
Claire glanced around. Mireille’s outdoor coat, which usually hung on the back of the door, was missing. She must have gone straight out again to meet whoever it was she usually met and to do whatever it was she usually did. Even on Christmas Eve. So it was clearly far more important to her than spending time with her friends. Claire sighed and hesitated, then placed the brown paper package on Mireille’s pillow and turned to go, carefully pulling the door closed behind her.
Her two other flatmates arrived then, laughing and gossiping. When they caught sight of Claire they stopped. ‘Why so despondent? Has Mireille deserted you? Don’t tell us you’re all alone for le Réveillon?’ They glanced at one another and nodded. ‘Come on, Claire, we can’t leave you here. Join us! We’re going out to find some fun. Put your dancing shoes on and come along! You’ll never meet anyone, sitting mouldering up here in the attic.’
And so it was that Claire, after just a moment’s hesitation, pulled the tin out from beneath her mattress again, prised open the lid, drew out some of her carefully saved wages and found herself being swept along the pavement of the Rue de Rivoli in a tide of merrymakers, who scarcely noticed the red, white and black flags that stirred against the starlit sky in the bitter wind that blustered and eddied down the broad boulevard.
Mireille hurried through the narrow streets of the Marais and paused in front of a shop window, as she’d been trained to do, making sure no one was following her. The white sign attached to the door stood out starkly against the lowered blackout blinds: Under New Management, it declared, By Order Of The Administration. These notices were appearing more and more frequently in shop doors and windows, especially in this quartier of the city. They were businesses which had formerly been owned by Jewish shopkeepers. But now their owners had gone – whole families turned out from their homes and sent to deportation camps elsewhere in the city’s suburbs before being transported onwards to God-only-knew-where. The businesses had been appropriated by the authorities and ‘reallocated’, usually to collaborators or to those who had earned the approval of the administration by denouncing their neighbours, or betraying their former employers who used to be the owners of shops like this one.
Ducking her head to lean into the northerly wind, Mireille turned down a small side street and tapped on the door of the safe house. Three quick, quiet taps. Then a pause and two more. The door opened a few inches and she slipped inside.
Monsieur and Madame Arnaud – she had no idea whether that was their real name – had been some of the original members of the network that she’d been put in touch with by the dyer, and this wasn’t the first time she’d been sent to their house to drop off or pick up a ‘friend’ who needed a safe place for a night or two, or to be accompanied across the city and delivered safely into the hands of the next passeur in the network. She was aware that there were other groups operating in the city, helping those in need to pass beneath the noses of the occupying army and be spirited away to safety. Once, in a last-minute change of plans, she’d been asked to accompany a young man to catch a train from the Gare Saint-Lazare, so she knew some people must be getting out via Brittany. But more often her rendezvous point would be at Issy or Billancourt, or out towards Versailles, and the distinctive twang of a south-west accent on the lips of the next link in the chain would reassure her that her latest ‘friend’ was being passed into good hands in order to make the long and arduous journey to freedom across the Pyrenees. She often wondered whether their route would take them anywhere near her home.
Tonight, especially, she felt a pang of longing for her family, picturing them in the mill house on the river beneath this same star-frosted sky. Her mother would be in the kitchen, preparing a special Christmas Eve supper from whatever supplies she had managed to gather together. Perhaps her sister, Eliane, would be sitting there