“Won’t you excuse us, Captain?” Bingham said. “I’d like a word with Monsieur Fry before I go.”
“Of course,” the captain said. He stood and bowed to Bingham, expressing his regret that they were not meeting under more congenial circumstances. Then Varian and Mary Jayne and Bingham went out onto the deck, where prisoners lounged against the railing or strolled for what little exercise could be had. Bingham, it was revealed, had brought along a hamper full of provisions. Victor Serge could be seen on the lower deck preparing sandwiches with the aid of a wooden knife.
“I’ll go back to the office and see what can be done,” Bingham said. “We haven’t got many advantages to play. I’ll cable Eleanor Roosevelt. Perhaps she can be prevailed upon to shame Fullerton into helping you.”
“Let’s hope she can. I’m not dressed for prison,” Varian said, indicating his robe. “It’s a terrible waste of time, more than anything. There’s too much to be done at the office. And I’m anxious to learn what’s happened to young Katznelson.”
“I’ll see if I can find out,” Bingham said. “And I’ll send some more provisions tonight.” Bingham shook Varian’s hand and kissed Mary Jayne’s; then he descended to the main deck and walked down the gangway, drawing his coat together against the fog.
Mary Jayne leaned over the railing to look down into the rank bouillabaisse of the port. “Another night in this tub!” she said. “If only Miriam were here. She’d find a way to make us all laugh.” She sighed, folding her hands over the rail.
“You can’t really wish she was stuck here with us.”
“I do! I miss her terribly. Her absence leaves a rather gaping hole.”
“You’ll be busier at the office, at least, if we ever get off this boat. That’ll be some distraction.”
Mary Jayne pushed her hair back and turned her face into the wind. “The fact is, Miriam was my guide there, too. I had no idea what I was doing. You saw, Varian—I made such a mess of things with Feuchtwanger. But I started paying closer attention after that. To Miriam, I mean. To the way she did things. Now I’ll be at sea again.”
“That’s nonsense, Mary Jayne. You’ve always been perfectly at ease. You’ve proceeded intelligently, and with fine results. Feuchtwanger made his own mess.”
She shook her head. “What must you think of me? That rich dilettante with the good-for-nothing boyfriend! Treats all of this like it’s one grand party.”
“That’s not what I think at all. You’ve been there at the Centre every day with the rest of us. You’ve conducted your work admirably. You’ve been more than generous with your own funds. If you’ve made things a little less dull at Air Bel, so much the better. And if I’m not fond of your boyfriend, well”—he hesitated a moment, then threw caution to the wind—“at least he’s not mine.”
A charged moment passed, and then Mary Jayne laughed. “No,” she said. “No. I can see he’s not your type.” And then, without further comment, she caught his arm in her own, and they went down to join Breton and Serge and the others.
* * *
________
At nine that night Deschamps summoned Varian again, this time to the chessboard. Varian hadn’t played in years; the feeling was not unlike trying to debate in a language he’d once spoken fluently but had forgotten. And his aim was a complicated one: not to win, but to be beaten, subtly and in winners’ drag, in order to cultivate the captain’s goodwill. He wanted a patient opening that would allow him to lose slowly, to make a series of calculated mistakes while he advanced his more important point. But Deschamps opened with a Danish gambit meant to end the game in twenty moves, and Varian found himself stalling for time over his glass of cognac, turning it on its leather disc.
“Let me confess something,” he said. “My work here in Marseille hasn’t been going as well as I’ve liked.”
The captain glanced up from the board. “How is that?”
“The legal avenues are closed to my most sensitive clients, the ones most wanted by the Nazis. And our clandestine channels keep shutting down. One of my greatest assets—an American who knew the Pyrenees passes—had his cover blown in the international press. Now he’s gone missing. And the sensitive clients keep stacking up, waiting for a way out.”
“Funny,” the captain said, shaking his head.
“What’s funny about it?”
“When I made your acquaintance twelve years ago, you struck me as a charming and intelligent young man—but alas, if you don’t mind my saying so, rather a self-centered and self-satisfied one. I would never have imagined this line of work for you. I suppose you weren’t the only one guilty of making assumptions.”
Varian smiled. Twelve years earlier he’d been surprised, enough so that he’d been unable to mask it, by Deschamps’s erudition, by the fact that he possessed an extensive library of volumes in French and English and knew most of their contents by heart. Deschamps had declared Varian’s opinion of sea captains to be both retrograde and hopelessly American. He was not a whaler, not a ferryman; in his offshore months he’d pursued the doctoral degree in French literature. He’d shown Varian a copy of his dissertation, handsomely bound in calfskin. Varian could see the spine of that volume from where he sat now. Well, the captain was right to have called him self-centered; at the time, his world had been pitiably small. But self-satisfied? Perhaps he’d appeared that way, though he’d felt the opposite. He’d hated himself on that voyage, considered himself ugly, unlovable, duplicitous.
“Glad to think I appear less self-centered now,” Varian said. “Though actually I’m mustering the courage to ask a personal favor.”
Deschamps plucked a rook from its square, then advanced it three ranks to take Varian’s bishop. “Well, don’t beat around the bush,” he said. “Let’s have it.”
“I want to know if you might be willing to transport some rather precious cargo.”
The captain squinted at him. “You realize that my boat is under surveillance by Vichy.”
“Yes, it’s clear the government believes it has a special relationship with you,” Varian said, wryly. “All the more reason for me to ask. No one will suspect you.”
“On the contrary, I’m under constant suspicion. All captains are. Ships are among the most valuable commodities in this war.”
“Indeed,” Varian said. “But I don’t want your ship. I want to pay you to take passengers. A few special passengers whose lives may mean something to us all.”
“You’re asking me to put my own neck on the line,” Deschamps said. “Is that it?”
Varian moved his knight to D7, a position he knew would allow the captain the aperture he needed. “I see you’re a fair- and free-minded man who’s been deprived of his will,” he said. “Your boat is not your own. I’m offering an opportunity to make it yours again.”
The captain eyed Varian from under his brows. “Offering?” he said. “I wouldn’t say that’s what you are doing.”
“It’s not only soldiers who fight a war,” Varian said.
“No, and not only soldiers who die.”
“We’re talking about the intellectual flower of Europe,” Varian said. “You can have a hand in saving it.”
The captain’s fingers hovered over his queen; she stood in line to take Varian’s knight. Varian knew he had hit the correct vein, that this captain among all captains would be vulnerable to the prospect of rescuing art and literature.
“Just how many passengers are we talking about?” the captain asked. A hint of conspiracy had entered his tone, and Varian knew he was weakening.
“That depends on your capacity,” he said.
The captain glanced over his shoulder; the windows of his cabin stood open to the night, and everything in Marseille listened. He got to his feet and closed the windows, drew the shades, made sure the lock on the door was secured. Then he said, in a lowered v
oice, “I have a private compartment that can be accessed only from my quarters. It’s a feature my father insisted on building into his ships. He was a shipwright, you know. That was how I came into the profession.”
Varian looked up from the board. “A compartment?” he said.
“Two feet by three feet. The ceiling is five and a half feet in height.”
“Show it to me.”
The captain scrutinized Varian for a long moment, as if to determine finally whether the young Turk of all those years ago could really have transformed into a person to be trusted. But then he pushed back his chair, went to the wall, and removed an oil painting of a sloop in a tempest; he took up a corner of the painting’s backing and removed a tiny skeleton key. The wooden panel upon which the painting had hung, Varian saw, had an almost invisible seam. What appeared to be a knothole in the wood was in fact a keyhole, into which the captain fitted the key. The panel, as it turned out, was cleverly hinged. The captain opened it to reveal a shelf-lined closet. It was packed with disappointingly mundane things: canned goods and cigarettes, matches, bars of soap. But then the captain pointed out clusters of ventilation holes in the ceiling, walls, and floor, apertures through which a stowaway might breathe.
“Your father was a man of foresight,” Varian said.
“Smuggling has always been a lucrative branch of our business.”
“I’m afraid I can’t offer you much in the way of money,” Varian said. But then he named a figure certain to please the ghost of the captain’s father.
The captain, an experienced gamesman, kept his expression impassive. But the pinky of his left hand twitched, Varian could not help but notice; and though, once the captain had closed and locked the door of his secret compartment and replaced the key in its painting, he sat down at the chess table again and handily placed Varian’s king in checkmate, Varian knew that he himself had once again won the game.
* * *
________
By ten o’clock the next morning, officials had arrived from the commissariat to interview prisoners in the captain’s quarters. Eleven o’clock saw Varian and the surrealists standing before an elderly detective with a lisp; ten minutes later their papers had been returned to them, their names cleared of suspicion. They could leave the ship, the elderly detective said, as soon as they had gathered their things. As a finale, the detective handed over to Varian a letter from the original commissaire in which he offered his apologies that Varian and his associates had been subjected to such a lengthy inconvenience.
“Apologies!” Mary Jayne said, as they descended the gangway at last and stepped onto dry land. “Apologies! I want champagne sent to the villa. Fine champagne, a magnum of it. And plenty of food. And orchids, lots of them. Really! His apologies.” Raising a hand in farewell, she walked a tight indignant line toward the streetcar. Varian, too, was anxious to get back to Air Bel, but more anxious to see what had become of the office; he suspected it had been ransacked like the house. He walked toward the boulevard Garibaldi with Lena at his side, kicking through the aftermath of a Vichy parade: scraps of tricolor confetti, fallen clouds of bunting, images of the Maréchal printed with brave slogans. Lena had heard that nearly twenty thousand people had been arrested in Marseille that week, stuffed into ships, hotels, and movie palaces that had been converted into makeshift jails.
They found the office door locked, the file cabinets untouched, the typewriter in place, the two office plants tranquil in their pots. The hallway was deserted; no refugee would have dared show his face at an American aid office while Vichy officers roamed the streets.
Lena pulled the cover off the Contin and sat down before it. “Alors,” she said. “Where to begin? Perhaps you shall dictate that letter—the one you prepared to start when the commissaire arrived?” She inserted a new sheet of paper and looked at him.
Varian was starving, exhausted, dirty; all he wanted was a bath in the swan-footed tub and an uninterrupted sleep in his cool clean bed. He wanted to wake to the sound of Grant’s voice downstairs, Grant sitting with the surrealists in the library while Madame Nouguet prepared dinner and Aube Breton ran the halls in her little blue shoes, singing some Alsatian tune. He wanted time to think; he wanted to write to Eileen. But the war hadn’t paused while he’d been detained on the Sinaïa, and would not pause now. The bombs would go on falling, the typhoid-spreading lice would keep biting at Vernet and Gurs and Les Milles, the Führer’s megalomania would widen and deepen, and the desperate refugees would keep washing up against the door of the Centre Américain. So he leaned back in his chair, laced his hands over his midsection, and began the afternoon’s work.
19
Pamiers
Villa Air Bel
La Pomme, Marseille
12 December 1940
Eileen, Eileen.
And so we enter the last weeks of the year. When I embarked on this journey, I couldn’t have imagined we would spend Christmas apart. I saw us by now in a house in Westchester sitting beside our own fire. How little you deserve what you got instead. I hope you’ll receive my Christmas presents soon. The turquoises come from Oman, the spices from farther east. I wish only that I could have delivered them in person.
Much has changed here in Marseille. I find it, to be honest, rather gloomy. You’ve heard by now that Miriam is gone, off to Yugoslavia to wed her ailing fiancé. We feel the lack of her sorely, but our work goes on. Our friends at the border do what they can, making a way for our clients where no way exists. Little by little, client by client, our numbers climb, though the situation on the ground grows ever worse. Not here in Marseille, where, despite desperate shortages of food, music plays in the cafés at night and men and women do all the usual dances. But in the countryside, the French pack their refugees into horrible pestilent camps. Thousands of innocent foreigners and Jews. Last week I delivered a report on conditions in those camps to Vichy; we want them to know we’re watching. They, too, want us to know they’re watching. Someday I will tell you what happened when the Maréchal came to town.
The fact is, though, I still can’t tell you when someday might be. I can’t, in fact, answer any of the questions you posed in your last letter. You and Frank Kingdon and Paul Hagen repeatedly mention this mysterious someone you’ve selected to replace me, never naming him; thus far my replacement has yet to arrive in Marseille. Perhaps the matter is one of recruitment. No person of sound mind would want my job. Or maybe you’ve all begun to understand what folly it would be to replace me now, when my network of contacts is so broad and relies so much on personal trust. What sense can it make to retool the machine? I must be allowed to go on doing what I do. In the meantime I must ask you to instruct the office to keep our funds flowing. As long as our sources of francs and passports hold, we’ll continue saving lives.
So please, Eileen, tell my parents not to worry. And don’t you worry either. Our plans have already succeeded beyond our first goals. This must be seen as cause for celebration, and the work must go on. You’ve known me always as a stubborn man, and now I’m perhaps more myself than I have ever been. If I ask for your patience—which I must, once again—I ask for it humbly, and with nothing to offer in exchange but my gratitude and love.
As ever,
Your V
* * *
________
Oh, he was a liar, pants afire. Oh, how he could hide behind his righteous work. What the unwritten paragraphs would say! How, upon his return from the Sinaïa, he’d come back to Air Bel to find no sign of Grant, and had then run all the way to the Medieval Pile to find it deserted, items of clothing strewn around as if Grant had left in a hurry, or been arrested; how, in a blind panic, he’d taken the train straight back to town, despite his exhaustion, and inquired at the Evêché, then at two hospitals. And now here he was in the library at Air Bel, confronting Theo Bénédite, demanding she tell him what she’d written to Grant.
There was no more urgent desire in his mind than to see Grant, and not a word of this, not a hint, had he intimated to Eileen. He held his lying letter in his hand now as he paced before Theo, demanding that she tell him everything.
“I did just as you asked, no more and no less,” Theo said. She was perched in the library window seat, her back erect, holding a pair of scissors and a sheet of brightly colored paper; on the rug before her, Peterkin played with a set of cutout circus animals. “I sent Mr. Grant a message saying you were aboard the Sinaïa with everyone else. I told him you were all in urgent need of help. He wrote back to say—”
“He wrote back?”
“Yes. He said he’d go see Harry at once and try to get you sprung, that was all.”
“Did you run into him at the office?”
“I haven’t been to the office,” she said. “I didn’t think it safe to go to town. But perhaps he left you a note?”
“Where? I’ve been all over the house.”
“Not here. At his own place. He knows we’re being watched by the police.”
“I’ve just been to his place. There’s no note there, either.”
“Do you think he was detained?”
“I’ve already checked with the police. I want to see his reply to you, Theo. If you still have it.”
“All right, just a moment.” Theo handed him the scissors and the paper, then went into the hall and disappeared up the stairs.
“Pourriez-vous couper mon éléphant?” said Peterkin, and held out his hand.
Varian had never been adept with scissors, but he did his best; Peterkin watched with a critic’s eye. By the time he freed the elephant from its surrounding paper, Theo had returned with the note. Varian took it, read it, scrutinized its lines for any clue. Then he turned it over in his hands. On the back was a railroad timetable, a pencil dot beside a destination.
The Flight Portfolio Page 30
