* * *

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 Tatu? 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 Wi?niewski? 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.