Mademoiselle and Monsieur ascended to their rooms and left their things. Minutes later they were out on the street again, walking a narrow channel of daylight between white-shuttered buildings of pink brick and stone. The concierge had drawn a little map for them, and Varian followed it at a pace that made Mary Jayne beg mercy, indicating her glossy shoes. At last they reached the bookshop, a dingy establishment with a great bay window, where, between dust-flocked editions of Rousseau and Descartes, a tortoiseshell cat lay in a pond of sun, licking the webs between its toes.
“Revolting,” said Mary Jayne. But Varian made out Grant’s silhouette between the ceiling-high bookshelves, and could spare attention for nothing else. Grant looked up from his book—he must have sensed a change of light at the window—and raised one long-fingered hand, a wash of relief breaking over his features.
What further inducement did Varian need? He might have stepped through the plate-glass window and felt no pain at all. But the door sufficed. In another moment they were face-to-face again.
“Thank God you’ve come,” Grant said. “I fear I’ve made an awful mess of things already.” And then to Mary Jayne, who stepped gingerly around the towers of books, looking askance at the cat: “To what do we owe the pleasure?”
Mary Jayne collected herself and rearranged her navy-blue jacket. “I’m to be the bait,” she said, simply.
Grant flushed with apparent embarrassment, but Mary Jayne took no notice. “I don’t know about the two of you,” she said, “but I’ve got to have a drink. Is that place across the street anything to speak of?”
“They’ve got alcoholic beverages, if that’s what you mean,” Grant said. “I’m already too familiar with their menu, but I suspect it’s no different anywhere else.”
“Let’s go, then.”
“All right. Let me just buy this.”
Varian looked down at the book in Grant’s hand: a slim new edition of Le faune de marbre, Faulkner’s early poems translated into French. And again he experienced that strange folding of time, a jolt of electric energy as the past rejoined the present: They’d read that book aloud to each other on the banks of the Charles, lying on a plaid wool blanket, passing a silver flask between them. When thunder sounded, they ran indoors and left the book among the red-gold trash of autumn leaves; the storm ruined it, and Varian had never replaced it. Now here it was again, in Grant’s hand. Grant approached the counter, paid the gamine perched on a stool, and accepted the girl’s ministrations: the wrapping of the book in Florentine paper, the embellishment of the package with a thin gold cord. The girl delivered the package into Grant’s hands, and Grant, without a word, put it into Varian’s.
* * *
________
At the bar across the street, they learned how Grant had come to be in Pamiers. Harry Bingham had invited Robinet for drinks; in the course of their conversation, he had gotten the inspector to confirm the current whereabouts of the young man, who was using the pseudonym of Teitelbaum. Bingham had passed along the information to Grant, and Grant, not knowing how long Varian might be imprisoned on the Sinaïa, had found himself unable to wait. He’d visited the camp three times by now. The first time he hadn’t made it past the front gate; the second he’d been made to wait in the camp’s administrative offices until the administrators left for the day; the third time he’d been told he could have an audience with Commandant Ormond, but before he entered the commandant’s office he’d been seized by the fear that, merely by virtue of asking for the boy, he would reveal how important he was, how delicate his case. In the end he’d fled without making his petition.
“I was a fool to try,” he said, looking down into his drink. “I’ve been watching you at this for months now, Varian, and have learned essentially nothing.”
“Tobias’s case isn’t like the others,” Varian said.
“No case is like any other. And yet somehow you manage to know what to do.”
“I’m not sure I have any idea how to proceed now. But we do have Mary Jayne.”
“It’s rather straightforward, as I see it,” Mary Jayne said, leaning back into their velvet-upholstered booth. “Ormond failed to consummate our rendezvous last time. He wouldn’t even see me alone at the hotel. I’ll merely tell him I’ve been tormented ever since. I’ll ask if he’d think me entirely débauchée for proposing another meeting. I’ll claim there’s no other way to quell the fire in my heart. Oh, and then I’ll mention that there’s a small matter I want to discuss—the fate of another prisoner, just a boy, really, who deserves compassion. Then we’ll wait,” she said, rubbing her hands together. “We’ll have to trust his memory of the scent of Chanel No. 5.”
“And then?” Varian said.
“Then we’ll dine together and I’ll lay out my demands.”
Grant shifted uneasily in his chair. “And afterward,” he said. “What if the commandant…behaves inappropriately?”
“Well, isn’t that what we’re hoping?”
“I mean, what if he tries to hurt you in some way?”
“I guess you can leave that up to me.”
“Really, though—”
“Really, though, I’m a grown woman. And the commandant is rather timid in matters of the heart, if last time was any indication.”
Grant drew his shoulders together and leaned forward, elbows on the table. He seemed ready to say something more. Instead he flagged the waiter and asked for a stronger drink. Varian watched him closely. His forehead, usually smooth, was striated with narrow lines; he set his cup on the table and began to bother the cuticle of one thumb with the nail of the other. Certainly there was much about this to make him uncomfortable. Did he worry, among other things, that Mary Jayne’s plan might in fact succeed, and that its success would mean that he, Grant, would have to assume full responsibility for Tobias Katznelson? A fugitive from Vichy, a fugitive from Nazi military intelligence, a physics genius, disciple of Max Planck, whose brain contained dangerous ideas? What did a prodigy eat for breakfast? What did he do for exercise? Would he make trouble? Could he be trusted with secrets? And where, under their current circumstances, could he be housed? There were no easy answers to these questions, a point Varian might have made to Grant if Grant had waited for Varian’s release from the Sinaïa before he’d rushed to Vernet. But he hadn’t, and here they were. And Varian suspected there was no time for delay if they meant to save their young man.
“All right,” Varian said now. “Let’s say we get Tobias out. How do we get him back to Marseille? The trains are policed. We can’t take a car because there’s no petrol. It would take about two weeks to walk.”
“What about the Feuchtwanger method?” Mary Jayne said. “Dress him in my clothes?”
“That would be brilliant if you were several sizes larger, or Tobias several sizes smaller. But even if he were in drag, he’d have to have travel documents.”
“I’ll admit, I hadn’t considered that,” Grant said. He pressed his temples with his fingers.
“Maybe Lena could send something up on the train with Gussie,” Mary Jayne said.
“Possible,” said Varian. “But we’d still need a photo.”
“Photos can be got,” Mary Jayne said. “Get a passport and a faux safe conduct sent, and we’ll work out the rest.”
Grant’s eyes had filled with tears, to Varian’s surprise. “It’s very kind of you both,” he said. “Mary Jayne—you don’t know what this’ll mean to his father. Gregor’s alone in New York, utterly alone. If Tobias can be with him—” He put a hand to his eyes, eliciting in Varian an unconscionable spur of jealousy.
“All right, Mary Jayne,” he said. “Write to Ormond. We’ve got to get this business finished and get back to Marseille.”
* * *
________
The commandant must have been overcome with regret at his failure to meet Mary J
ayne at her hotel on her previous visit. He replied that he would be delighted—beyond delighted, transported—to meet her at the hotel restaurant for dinner that very evening, and would gladly discuss any of his charges with her; he made no mention of the fact that her last four concernees had slipped their guards during their furlough in Marseille and had only been returned to Vernet after their near-escape on the Bouline. Grant and Varian would dine at the same hour, though not at the same table, and would be witnesses to the conversation. In Varian’s hotel room, half an hour before the rendezvous, Varian coached Mary Jayne to intimate nothing of the prisoner’s significance, only that young Teitelbaum was dear to his father and that he must be returned to him, and that he’d been sent to Vernet by mistake, due to an administrative gaffe at the Préfecture. She must make no mention, of course, of the Nazis’ interest in the prisoner. And above all, she must keep the conversation light; she must seem ready to give up her petition at any point, lest the commandant sense that he had something of real value.
“And yet, in return for this valueless boy, I’m to offer myself up?”
“As I understand it, you’re irrepressibly attracted to the commandant.”
“But in—in that event, he’d have to understand there was a quid pro quo.”
“I trust you’ll know how to play it,” Varian said.
“All right,” she said. “And now, unless the commandant plans to stand me up again, I’d better get downstairs to meet him.”
“Go ahead. We’ll be right behind you.”
“For God’s sake, I hope you won’t make that serious face at me all evening!”
“We’ll be invisible,” Varian said. “You won’t even notice us.”
* * *
________
There must have been a thriving black market in Pamiers, or perhaps the local farmers had done a better-than-usual job of concealing cows and game and crops. Whatever the reason, the larders at Au Fond du Platanes produced a spread unlike any Varian had seen for months. The waiter offered hot fresh knots of bread with curls of clandestine butter. A rémoulade of root vegetables followed, then a dense pork stew flavored with thyme. Grant and Varian sat, as promised, just behind the table where Mary Jayne was dining with the commandant. Varian had a half-view of the commandant’s face, obscured in part by Mary Jayne’s head. Ormond was a neat, dark-haired fellow with a boyish dimple and a shy smile; he looked more like a Parisian library attendant than the director of a concentration camp. His uniform had been threatened into a state of crisp perfection, though his pomade must have been imperfect: a heavy lock of hair kept falling forward into his eyes, and he kept smoothing it back with a nervous gesture. The conversation, insofar as Varian could follow it over the noise of the restaurant, mainly concerned the four prisoners whose liberation Mary Jayne had accomplished some months before.
“When I received your note yesterday,” the commandant was saying, “I thought you were here to make another petition for the escapees’ release. I can assure you, dear Miss Gold, that would be futile. I’m still quite angry about what happened last time, you know. I ought to punish you.” He showed the boyish dimple and flirtatiously corrected the errant lock. He’d spoken in a manner that might have been called caressing, though his tone evoked a shiver of distaste in Varian: he thought of the glide of an earthworm against a hand thrust into loose soil.
“If you think I had anything to do with that business about the Bouline, you’re mistaken,” Mary Jayne said. “I’m a woman of my word. One could rather blame your guards for relaxing their vigilance. I heard they made a shameful scene at a brothel the night your escapees were boarding their boat.”
The commandant coughed and looked down into his soup. “Suffice it to say your friends are more carefully guarded now,” he said. “And I will have you know that, in deference to you, I withheld harsh discipline, though it would have been my right to teach them a lesson.”
“Oh—” said Mary Jayne: an inward breath of pleasure, as if he’d opened a jewelbox to reveal some reflective trinket. “In deference to me?”
“Perhaps I was hoping you’d come back for them,” the commandant said in a lower voice, one that Varian had to strain to hear. “I wouldn’t have wanted you to find them mistreated. Perhaps I’ve saved all my discipline for you.”
Mary Jayne answered in a tone that fell beneath the clamor of the restaurant. In response to Grant’s raised eyebrow, Varian gave a minuscule nod.
“…a different request,” she was saying now, brushing a pale gold curl behind her ear. “One of a more personal nature.”
“Your Berlinese friend.”
“Oh, it’s really his father who’s my friend. A former professor of mine, actually. Teitelbaum taught me all I know about eighteenth-century German verse.”
“Is that so? I’m afraid I wasn’t much of a student myself. I was always too much interested in matters outside the curriculum.” The smooth young commandant’s hand fell upon Mary Jayne’s, and she allowed her hand to be enclosed and stroked.
“A good professor engages even the most incorrigible student,” Mary Jayne said.
“I’m sure you’re right, Miss Gold.”
“Anyway, you understand it’s all a…” And then the waiter escorted a torpid troupe of walruslike diners through the space between the two tables, and the connection was cut momentarily. Grant drummed the table with his long fingers. He wanted to light a cigarette, Varian knew, but couldn’t risk becoming distracted.
“…though I know it may be impossible,” they heard Mary Jane saying, as the last of the walruses passed. She looked down in what seemed to be shy supplication.
“Under the right circumstances all things are possible,” the commandant said, then leaned forward, still holding her hand, to make an inaudible addendum. Mary Jayne sat back slightly in her chair and patted her mouth with her napkin. An instantaneous flick of her gaze toward Varian: affirmation, confirmation?
“It looks like our friends are finished,” Varian said, under his breath. The commandant had called for the bill and was settling it, and in another minute he rose with Mary Jayne and steered her by the waist toward the restaurant door. His thumb, Varian saw, had entered the keyhole aperture just above her waistline; that tease built into the dress had found its ideal application. Mary Jayne hadn’t risked meeting Varian’s or Grant’s eye again. Now they could only watch as she glided through the door under the commandant’s guidance and disappeared down the corridor.
Grant sat back in his chair. “What do you think?”
“She appears to know what she’s doing,” Varian said. “She looks to have him entirely under her control, and to have convinced him that the reverse is true.”
With a sigh, Grant sat back in his chair and lit a cigarette. “I don’t want to think about it,” he said. “Let’s talk about something else.”
“All right. Suppose I tell you how I ended up on a prison ship.”
“Yes, suppose you do.”
“As I understand it, we were all suspected of being communists. We might have been a danger to the Maréchal.”
“Yes, but why a ship?”
“Because it had room for all of us, I guess.” Varian reached for one of Grant’s cigarettes and lit it. Caution forbade him from saying what he wanted to say next, but he supposed he had long since heaved caution overboard. “Funny thing, though,” he said. “I’d been on that boat before.”
“Oh?”
“It was the one I sailed on to Europe after you left Maine.”
“I didn’t know you went to Europe that summer.”
“Of course you didn’t. And I don’t know what you did, either.”
Grant crushed his cigarette into the crystal ashtray. “I scarcely remember,” he said. “Tried to kill myself, I suppose.”
“Tried to kill yourself? What do you mean?”
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p; Grant sighed and turned his eyes upward. “I promised myself I’d never tell you.”
“Well, now you’ve got to.”
“I don’t know how it began,” Grant said. “Maybe I just wanted to get out of the house. I was living at home, basically living with my head under a stone. But eventually my mother pestered me out of the house. If I wasn’t going to go to school, she said, then I’d better get a job. I didn’t want a job. I didn’t want anything. But I put on a suit and took a train to New York and went down into a subway station. Just watched the trains go by, one after the other. After a while, I don’t know why, I took it in mind to walk into the tunnel where it got dark and just lie down between the rails. No one saw me do it. I lay down on the gravel between the tracks and waited. I didn’t know what would happen. I suppose I thought I might be crushed or horribly injured, and that whatever happened would be better than the way I’d been feeling. In any case, I lay there and waited. And eventually a train came.”
Varian had forgotten all about his cigarette. The ash had fallen onto the tablecloth in a peppery heap. “And…?”
“There was a terrific roar. And a terrible heat. It went on and on. I thought it would never stop. The worst thing was the smell of it, the smell of burning brakes so close to my nose and mouth.”
“And nothing hurt you, nothing touched you?”
“Not that time.”
“Not that time? You mean to say you did it again?”
“And again and again.”
“Grant.”
“I kept count. I did it eighteen times.”
“For God’s sake!”
“I didn’t want to live. Truly, I wanted to die. I begged God, though I didn’t even believe in him, for some low-hanging bit of metal to put me out of my misery.”
“And you survived unscathed. Eighteen times!”
The Flight Portfolio Page 32
