What he found, when Robinet unlocked the door, was not the pale and cowering boy he expected, but a broad-shouldered, powerful-looking young man, dark-lashed, furious-eyed, blinking in a struggle to focus his vision. The young man squinted first at Varian and then at Robinet, his face not so much hopeless or expressionless as functionally blind; in his hand was a pair of crushed glasses, their bridge bent, one arm askew, lenses shattered. His hands and feet were shackled, and beneath the skin of his face were the purple-blue nebulae of fresh bruises. The room in which he sat was not a jail cell but an interrogation chamber. He sat on a metal chair, and before him was a desk and another chair, empty.
“My God,” Varian said in German. “What have they done to you?” He glanced at Robinet, who looked down at his polished shoes in shame; it was his men who had done this.
Varian scrutinized the prisoner again. He was unmistakably the son of Gregor Katznelson; he had the same hawklike intensity about his features, the same blocky shoulders, the identical sweep of brow and curve of jaw. And then he saw what he had not seen before: the young man was dressed as if for a party, in an evening suit a size too small, a French-cuffed shirt, and a bedraggled black silk tie that had lost its bow, if it had ever had one. He raised his bruise-rimmed eyes to Varian, as if in a hopeless attempt to decipher what the new cloud of shadows near the entrance might represent.
Varian turned to Robinet. “I don’t suppose you’d give us a few moments alone, would you?”
“What would you say to him that you can’t say in my presence?”
“It’s not me, Inspector, it’s him. I doubt he’ll say a word in your presence.”
“Can’t you explain to him that I have his welfare in mind?”
“Look what they did to him. You think he’ll believe that?”
Robinet ran a hand along his diagonal sash and frowned. “How long do you want?”
“Ten minutes. That’s all.”
“All right,” Robinet said, visibly uncomfortable, his shoulders shifting beneath the stiff corners of his jacket. “Get to it, then. I’ll wait outside the door.” He stepped out and closed the door behind him, and the young man let out a shuddering sigh and put his head into his hands. Varian sat in the empty metal chair.
“I’m not going to ask your name,” he said. “If the gendarmes haven’t gotten it out of you already, I don’t want you to say it aloud. I know Robinet’s listening. But I don’t believe he speaks German. I think we’ll be all right.”
“I haven’t told anyone my name,” the young man said, in a harsh whisper.
“And you have no papers, I gather.”
“Burned them.” He touched his bruised face and winced.
“Smart. So they have no idea who you are.”
“No. If they did, I’d be on a train to Germany by now.”
“All right. So let’s start at the beginning. To establish your identity, I’m going to ask your father’s profession and place of residence. And you’ll have to trust me, because I’m the only one who can get you out of this place.”
The young man raised his eyes to Varian, scrutinized him through the haze of his myopia. Varian waited, holding his gaze, wanting only to communicate his openness. But the man shook his head. “Your German is too good,” he said. “I don’t trust you for a moment. You can’t be an American.”
Varian smiled. “Thanks. But I am an American. Varian the American, some people call me around here. And you must believe me: if you’re the man I think you are, I know your father. I’ve spent some time at your house at La Pomme. I can tell you the colors of the rugs in the solarium, and the pattern of the china.”
“Tell me,” the young man said, and raised his chin in challenge.
“Deep blue rugs. And phoenixes on the china.”
“And what kind of trees in front of the house? The little orchard?”
“Persimmon.”
His eyebrows drew together. “Maybe you’re a spy.”
“Maybe you’d better start talking before Robinet comes in here and pulls me out. We’re wasting our time. Now, just so I can be certain, tell me your father’s profession and place of employment.”
The young man’s shoulders dropped in surrender. “My father is a professor of European history at Columbia University, in the city of New York. You know who he is. You know who I am.”
“Yes. And does the name Zilberman mean anything to you?”
A spectacular rose-colored aurora spread from the young man’s neck to his face to his hairline. “You know about Sara,” he said.
“Yes. I believe you were coming to see her father at my party.”
Robinet opened the door and leaned in. “Nearly done?”
“Just a moment more,” Varian said.
“Sixty seconds,” Robinet said, and closed the door.
“This is a trap,” Tobias Katznelson said, and shook his head. “I’m an idiot. You’re one of them, aren’t you?”
“I can see why you’d think so. But I assure you I’m not.”
He put his elbows on his knees, gave a tidal sigh, and scrutinized his crushed spectacles. “What am I going to do without my glasses?”
“I don’t know,” Varian said. “I’m sorry for what they did to you. It’s awful. I mean to help you.”
“You can’t. They’re going to send me to a camp, then deport me. I know. I’ve always known what would happen if I was caught. But foolishly I thought I might get to you. To Zilberman. To see if—” He shook his head. “What an idiot I was.”
“Maybe I can help you still.”
“How?”
“First of all, I’m going to pretend I don’t care much about your fate, one way or the other. The police know my clients are valuable to the Nazis. We can’t let them think you’re worth anything to me or to anyone else.”
Tobias nodded.
“The camp they’ll send you to, Vernet, is a terrible place. I won’t lie. But there’s a chance we can get you out.”
“How can that be?”
“I’ve got a friend at the American Consulate who can help. Robinet knows him. He’ll keep us apprised of what’s happened to you. And then there’s Mr. Grant, the one who’s been looking for you.”
“Mr. Grant? Who is Mr. Grant?”
“A colleague of your father’s, from Columbia. He’s been looking for you for months now, and he’d do anything to help you. Believe me, there are ways. I’ve gotten clients out before. You’ll be there a couple of weeks at most.”
“I’ll be deported by then. Or dead.”
“A couple of weeks at Vernet will be dreadful, but likely not fatal.”
The young man rubbed his eyes again. “I wish I could see your face,” he said. “I don’t know if I can trust you.”
“You’ll have to,” Varian said. “You have no choice.”
Robinet opened the door and stepped inside, drawing himself up to his full height. “That’s enough, Fry,” he said. “Now, my colleagues will be wanting to know this boy’s name and his business. What am I to tell them?”
“Tell them I have no idea,” Varian said. “Tell them I’ve never seen him before in my life.”
* * *
________
By the time he got home to Air Bel, dawn had broken over the valley and the last wave of gaiety had long ago crashed and receded within the villa. The shipwreck scene he’d expected was nowhere in evidence; Madame Nouguet had apparently tidied away the drunk and senseless surrealists along with the dinner plates, the used glasses, the contents of the ashtrays, the paper balloons, the praying mantises and their glass enclosures. He would have had to wonder if a party had taken place at all, had he not come across Breton lying prone on the library sofa, his velvet jacket cast aside, his head on Jacqueline’s lap. Jacqueline, still in her hibiscus-colored gown with the gold lobster pin at the shoul
der, also slept, her cheek resting on her arm. Varian crept past them and ascended to his own room, where Grant lay sleeping on the narrow bed. Varian closed and locked the door, wedged a chair beneath the knob, and lay down beside Grant, too tired to undress or even to undo his collar and cuffs. An oyster-blue light poured through the naked window. Grant’s back rose and fell beneath the twill of his shirt; he had draped his jacket over the desk chair. How many mornings had Varian watched him sleep, the night washing over them still? Maybe this was the way he liked best to look at Grant; the waking version was, at times, a light too bright to regard unblinkingly. He knew the previous night’s effusions had to be treated with suspicion, or at least with caution. They’d been drunk, they’d been high on the drug that was an evening in the company of the surrealists. But here was an undeniable fact: Grant asleep in Varian’s bed. Maybe not only because he was desperate to know what had happened to Tobias; maybe because he wanted to send a message, the neat opposite of the one he’d sent twelve years ago in Maine. That night, after the moonlit sail across the bay with Eileen, after the tromp around the tiny island, its verges slick with seaweed, its inland populated by moss and pines (the seeds of which, she told him, must have come to that place in the bodies of birds), after their identification of a smooth slab of granite, after their struggle with her outer- and underthings, after a brief damp conjunction on that wave-lapped rock, after the long cold sail back home, after the farewell kiss and the promise of another sail, after Varian’s guilty ascent up the back stairs of that white house on the water, there was no Grant in the other twin bed in the room they’d shared; no sign of his belongings, no trace of his luggage, no note or other indication of where he might have gone.
But here was Grant now, a message that consisted of his physical being. A chance for Varian to repair what he’d broken when he’d climbed into that boat. An invitation to walk forward into a trackless shadowland, a place whose existence might be defined by their occupying it. Varian didn’t dare make a move or a sound; he scarcely dared breathe. Half-dreaming, he willed a square of sun to avoid Grant’s face. The sun obeyed. Grant slept, and Varian kept watch. And when Grant woke—after how long?—Varian bent to the spiral of his ear and told him that Tobias Katznelson lived, that he was there in Marseille, and that he might still be rescued, his rare and irreplaceable gifts kept out of the Nazis’ hands.
17
Noailles
The next afternoon found Grant sitting over a telegram blank in Varian’s office, behind closed doors, worrying his pencil eraser against the near-transparent blue paper and wondering aloud what he was supposed to write to Gregor Katznelson. Any message he sent via transatlantic wire might be intercepted by the censors. Any word associated with Tobias’s name might compromise him further. There was little to reassure Katznelson, in any case: his son was in Marseille, yes, but in police custody; soon he’d be shipped to a concentration camp.
“T. lives,” Varian said. “Write that. Say he’s looking well. Say he’s in brave spirits.”
Grant crossed his arms. “You’re saying I should lie.”
“He was in brave spirits. He was bearing it like a soldier. Tell him that.”
Grant bent again over his telegram blank, his pencil moving haltingly across the page. Finally he got up and went to stand beside Varian at the window. Below, a pair of workers tied flags to the lampposts: miniature tricolors emblazoned with Maréchal Pétain’s special insignia, a two-bladed axe studded with gold stars. Another crew swept the gutters with wide pushbrooms. In two days’ time, Pétain would pay a visit to the city. Everything had to be made perfect, all the dirt tidied away.
“You don’t think I should try to see him?” Grant said. “Couldn’t Bingham help us arrange it? I could bring a packet of food and whatever else he might need. Or we could send something with Gussie.”
“No,” Varian said. “We can’t do anything to call attention to him.”
“If only I could send Gregor something he’d written, just a few words.”
“There’ll be time for that, if we can get him out of wherever they send him. For now you’d better go down to the telegraph office before the place closes. Any word is better than no word.”
Grant packed up his papers and buttoned his immaculate coat, gray wool with a scatter of pearl-white fibers. His skin that afternoon had an almost silvery cast; his eyes, glazed with hangover, seemed unusually vulnerable. Between him and Varian hung an invisible fog, all the things they’d said the night before. They hadn’t talked about any of it; maybe they never would. Tobias had been found. Grant had a mission now, Varian reminded himself: a mission that had to take precedence over everything else. He reminded himself of this forcefully, inarguably, as he watched Grant gather his things, pass through the office, and vanish into the world behind the stenciled door.
* * *
________
Harry Bingham called for Varian at the CAS at half past eight, wearing an official-looking overcoat and an aggressively tailored suit, no trace of the previous night’s revels upon him. They were to meet the Chagalls at their hotel for dinner; Bingham thought they might extinguish the last of the Chagalls’ hesitation if they proceeded delicately. Together they walked down the Canebière in the direction of the hotel, distracting themselves from Vichy’s decorations by playing a new game, a contest of one-downmanship involving their former student residences in Cambridge.
“Forty-eight Holden Street,” Bingham said. “Family of rats behind our kitchen cupboards. Not a small family, either.”
“Twenty Prescott,” Varian countered. “Biting flies in the bathroom drains.”
“Sixteen Trowbridge. Roof collapsed into my bed one morning.”
“Really, Harry?”
“I still have the scar.” He pointed to a white half-moon at his hairline.
“Well, how about Thirty-seven Kirkland?”
“How about it?”
“Bloodstains on the bedroom ceiling.”
“Come on, now, Varian.”
“My friend Mr. Grant can confirm it,” Varian said, laughing. Then he experienced a moment of abject terror: Would Bingham wonder aloud how had Grant come to study Varian’s bedroom ceiling? What could Varian possibly say in reply?
But if the thought occurred to Bingham, he didn’t voice it. “Shame we didn’t know each other back then,” he said. “I could have shown you some even worse places.”
“Well, I’d have to say I’m glad you didn’t know me,” Varian said. “I was rather insufferable at the time. And an incorrigible troublemaker.”
“Oh, yes,” Bingham said, and grinned. “You did have a reputation. Weren’t you expelled, for a time?”
“Yes, and all I did was plant a ‘For Sale’ sign on Greenough’s lawn.”
“Well, that wasn’t all you did, according to the Crimson. Apparently you had quite a history. Weren’t you in trouble with the law for driving like a maniac?”
“Ah, yes. You’ve got too good a memory, Harry.”
“Anyway, I think I would have liked you then. I’m more than a little fond of you now, after that party—what genius to get them all together!”
“The surrealists, you mean? It was Mary Jayne’s idea, not mine. I was opposed. I thought it would draw too much attention.”
“But you can’t be sorry about it now. It lured your young German, didn’t it?”
“Lured him close enough to get himself arrested and sent to Vernet.” Bingham knew the story already; Varian had telephoned him that morning to give him the details. He agreed that Varian had taken the right course, that they must at all costs help Tobias preserve anonymity. But Vernet would be a difficult nut to crack. It was true that Mary Jayne had once seduced the commandant, or at least that she’d won his favor; it was true that her clients of interest had gotten out. But it was also true that they’d been caught trying to leave France, that
they were back in Vernet now, and that the commandant was unlikely to be tricked again.
Now they had arrived at the Hôtel Moderne, where Chagall and his wife were staying for the week. The hotel was on the rue Breteuil, a few blocks south of the port, and the place looked like it had fought hard for each of its two stars. The lobby was little more than a corridor, the trompe-l’oeil marble desk fooling no one. From the restaurant came the clink of crockery and a sulfuric whiff of burnt greens. At the end of the lobby corridor was an elevator with a folding gate; it descended, gears groaning, until a dull thud rocked the hallway floor. Then the folding gate opened to reveal Marc and Bella Chagall, the painter in his loose-cut jacket, Bella in a boiled wool coat with a high collar.
Chagall came forward to kiss Varian on both cheeks. “What a magnificent party!” he said. “Charming place, Air Bel. Charming guests. I should like to come again soon to visit Zilberman.”
“Come anytime,” Varian said. “I know it heartened him to see you.”
Bingham glanced toward the hotel’s restaurant. “Is this where we’ll dine?”
“Oh, no,” said Bella. “There’s a proper establishment across the street.” She ushered them through the narrow reception area and out onto the rue Breteuil, where another crew of broom-pushers was busy redistributing the gutter trash. The light was failing fast, the lamplighters doing their work. Across the street, inside the proper establishment with its yellow-and-white-striped awning, the aroma was not of killed greens but of fried potatoes and tomatoes. They ordered dinner and chatted over aperitifs, Varian feeling cheered by the rush of alcohol in his veins. But dinner, when it arrived, was so scarce as to look like its own leftovers. A strand of what looked like poulet had collapsed over a few pale carrots and potatoes. When Varian nudged it with his fork, he found that it was not poulet but panais. Parsnip.
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