“Uh-oh,” Varian said.
Grant and Mary Jayne followed his gaze. The four officers broke into two groups and approached the train. The decorated officer spoke to the gendarmes at the train door in what sounded like German-accented French, though Varian couldn’t make out the words; a moment later, the gendarmes stepped aside. Tobias stood guard, oblivious. There was no time to warn him. Already they could feel the vibration of the officers’ boots on the stairs of the train car. Almost without thinking, Varian slid the compartment door open, grabbed Tobias by the belt, and pulled him backward into the compartment, bayonet and all. Tobias stumbled and sat down hard on the carpeted floor, knocking Varian against the window. Mary Jayne gasped, and a pomegranate-colored drop fell from her earlobe to her lap. Grant reached over and slid the door closed.
Tobias looked from one of his protectors to the other. Then came the sound of German in the corridor, and the stomp and roll of the officers’ footsteps as they passed.
“Keep still,” Varian said. He’d taken a risk. Bought time. But a train was a trap. Windows too small to fit through, and a single long corridor that revealed all. Doors from which any exit would be visible. In the Wild West they might have found a hatch and climbed out onto the roof. He almost laughed at the thought.
“What can you be smiling at?” Mary Jayne whispered.
“Never mind.” He pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to her.
“Damn you, Varian, you might have made me into Van Gogh!”
“Quiet.”
“You can’t hide that boy in a train compartment.”
“Do you have a better idea?”
She didn’t. They waited. Grant searched for a cigarette in his pocket, then held it without lighting it; the cigarette, trembling, snowed ill-packed tobacco onto his knee. From farther down the corridor came the sound of raised voices, the seal-bark of military German. The train swayed with the force of some unseen struggle.
“Was tun sie?” whispered Tobias. What are they doing?
“Quiet,” Varian hissed.
Tobias lowered his head onto his knees. The strip of skin at his nape was a gleaming, blazing thing, a raw unblemished whiteness, the skin of a blind animal dug from the dirt. A pulse thrummed visibly in the purple vein beside his ear.
They waited, unmoving, as the German voices drew closer again, crescendoed, passed down the corridor. From the window Varian saw the decorated officer and his partner step off the train with a man in their custody, a round-shouldered man in an overcoat many sizes too large. He was uncuffed, but the officers had a grip on his arms; between them, the man clutched a black leather bag to his chest as if it contained something precious, as if it contained, in fact, his own life. Then suddenly the man stumbled and dropped the bag, breaking the officers’ grip. In an instant his hand had disappeared into his coat pocket; he pulled out a small glinting handgun and raised it to his temple. A pause. Then a strangely muffled bang, and a red explosion bloomed from his other ear, a violent spray of strawberry pulp. He crumpled sideways against the Gestapo officer next to him, who fell to the ground, shouting in horror. Varian turned away. Mary Jayne put a hand to her mouth and bent forward at the waist. Grant fell back against the seat cushions, the cigarette limp in his hand.
Tobias got to his knees and pushed himself upright, then went to the window.
“What should I do?” he asked Varian, in trembling German. “What should I do?”
“Get back to your post.”
The boy complied. Moments later, the train whistle blew and the train pulled out of the station, away from the disaster on the platform. They were still an hour and a half from Marseille. All that way, as they sat in shocked silence, their false guard guarded them wordlessly and no one questioned his authority, his uniform, or the bayoneted rifle in his hand.
THREE
More Bang
21
Escargot
A ringing silence followed them home to Air Bel and persisted into the days that followed. At the edge of Varian’s consciousness, always present, was the memory of that gun at the man’s temple, the pause, the explosion. It lingered as he installed Tobias Katznelson in the library of Air Bel; it persisted as he went about his business in town, as he inquired into rates at the Beauvau, as he met Grant for a hurried drink on the Canebière before they both traveled back to La Pomme and retired to their separate beds.
Among the residents at Air Bel, Tobias Katznelson was polite, almost contrite, as if embarrassed to have had to be rescued from a concentration camp, and further embarrassed to be taking up room in the library. Grant had insisted on giving him some money from his father, replacing his shattered glasses, and buying him new clothes in town, well-cut practical items that suited his frame; but Tobias was so desperate to provide for his own needs that he had, by the end of his first week at La Pomme, secured a job as Monsieur Thumin’s handyman. He proved himself adept at any endeavor that wanted mechanical skill. In his first days at the villa he fixed the leaking bathroom taps, re-hinged the chimney flue in the sitting room, inserted new glass into a broken greenhouse frame, and repaired the axle of Peterkin’s wooden tricycle. Faced with the meager offerings Madame Nouguet placed on the table, and observing the children’s constant hunger, he began disappearing from the villa for some hours every day and returning with foraged edibles: bright orange mushrooms that tasted of lobster, fistfuls of wild mustard leaves, gamy hares he’d trapped in pits. When Madame Nouguet or anyone else thanked him, he blushed into his collar and said nothing.
One afternoon, a little more than a week after he’d arrived, Varian saw him on his way out of the house and followed him into the garden. Curious to see where he went on his excursions, he trailed Tobias through the bent fence at the bottom of the garden and down into the scrub of lavender and rosemary below. Tobias hadn’t heard him, hadn’t seen him; one hand in his pocket, a cap jammed backward onto his head, he rambled horizontally along the hillside, through the scrub, picking his way over the rocks, headed, as Varian soon realized, toward the Medieval Pile. The place had been his family’s summer home for many years; how many August days had he spent exploring these hills? It was easy to see, watching him, how he had made his way out of Germany and through the countryside, finding things to eat, hiding in this or that abandoned building, eluding the general gaze. There was something shadowlike about him, a silence, a litheness that seemed to make it easy for him to disappear. No wonder he’d been so hard to find. And yet he, too, had his vulnerabilities: Varian had seen him through the greenhouse windows in urgent and desperate-seeming conversation with Zilberman, presumably about Sara, Zilberman’s daughter. He hadn’t dared ask either of them about it; they appeared, in the past few days, to have arrived at an uneasy détente, as though Zilberman had reluctantly accepted Tobias as a suitor for the absent girl’s hand.
Now Tobias crouched in the dirt beside what Varian saw to be a tiny stream, a riverlet or perhaps only a rivulet, flowing between the rocks of the valley. His spine tensed beneath the broadcloth jacket Grant had bought him; he glanced over his shoulder and, seeing Varian, got to his feet.
“Sorry to startle you,” Varian said, in German.
“I don’t mind the company,” Tobias said. A shy smile. “Look.” He squatted again, reached forward into the winter-stunted greenery beside the stream, and turned over a stone. Then he dug for a moment with his curled hand in the wet earth.
“What have you got there?”
“Escargot. I used to find them by this stream when I was little.” He opened his hand to show Varian five round spiral shells, then extracted an empty flour sack from his pocket and dropped them in. “In the winter, they hibernate together. You have to look under rocks by the water. They’re sealed in now with their own glue, but if we put them in the greenhouse they’ll soon come out. You have to feed them for a few days before you cook them, so you know what’s ins
ide. Grass will do, or cornmeal.”
“How do you know all this?”
A shrug, a blush. “It’s in books. Anyone can learn it.”
“You learned how to survive in the wilderness, didn’t you?”
Another shrug. “I thought I might need to. It’s not hard, if you know the plants and things to look for. And how to build a fire. Anyway, I like to be on my own. It helps me think.”
“Ah, yes,” Varian said. “I’m afraid there’s not much privacy to be had at Air Bel. I don’t mean for you to keep sleeping on that library sofa forever, you know. In a few days you’re to take my room.”
Tobias shook his head. “I’m fine where I am.”
“I’m going to move to town for a while, to be closer to the office. I want you to be comfortable at Air Bel. You may be here a while, you know. Getting you a visa isn’t going to be an easy matter.”
Tobias stood and brushed his dark hair from his forehead, looking away, over the stream and down into the valley. “I don’t want to be a burden,” he said.
“No one expects you to earn your keep. Your father left money for your needs. What we don’t want is for you to go running for the border on your own. We’ve got to keep you out of the Gestapo’s hands at all costs.”
Tobias turned, knelt again, extracted another handful of snails from beneath the stone. “I could get to the border, though,” he said. “I could make it across. I don’t care about the cold. And I can take the gun. Mary Jayne’s young man tells me he can get ammunition.”
“Tobias,” Varian said, hearing his own father’s voice. “For God’s sake, you’re not to get anything from Killer, no ammunition, nothing. And you’re not to make a break for the border on your own. You’ve got to swear to me. People get caught. Do you hear me? Caught and killed. It would destroy your parents.”
“How can I promise?” Tobias said. “If anyone comes looking for me—the police, or Vichy, or the Gestapo—” He paused, and Varian knew they were both seeing what had happened at Montpellier. “If anyone comes for me, I have to run. I can’t hide, waiting for them to pry me out. I’m not Zilberman.” He looked down at the hard damp ground, shaking his head. “Not that he’s so very good at hiding, is he? He said the police caught him in broad daylight at a café.”
“You were caught too, remember,” Varian said. “You saw what happened when you tried to come here to La Pomme, the night of the party. They caught you just like anyone else. It was sheer good fortune that the highest officer on duty that night was Robinet, our friend at the Préfecture.”
Tobias lowered his dark eyes. “I thought I might find Sara here. I suppose I became reckless.”
“You can’t afford to be reckless. The stakes are too high. The Nazis know about your work at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut. They want to learn what you know. And they have methods of extracting information, unspeakable ways.”
Tobias sat down now on the verge of the little creek, sifting the shells of snails through his fingers. He raised his eyes. “Do you think I’ll be safe here, if I stay?”
“We can’t know that for sure. But at least you’re out of Vernet, and out of police custody. Out of the public gaze. And soon enough, I promise you, I mean to get you out of France entirely. I mean to send you to your father in New York.”
“I’m grateful for what you’ve done already, you and Mr. Grant and Miss Gold. I do like Air Bel, you know. I like it better than my family’s house. It’s the kind of place I’d like to live someday.”
“You’re here now,” Varian said. “Just be here. That’s all. You need to rest. You’ve been running long enough.”
Tobias’s shoulders curled, and he put a hand to his eyes. “Months,” he said.
“There’s a time to run,” Varian said. “And a time to pause. If there’s one thing I’ve learned here in France, it’s that sometimes it pays to wait.”
Tobias gave a silent nod, though he made no promise. Then he tied the neck of his bag of snails and slung it into his rucksack, and, with Varian at his side, began the climb back up to the house.
* * *
________
That night, after all the others were in bed, Varian went to see Zilberman in the greenhouse. Zilberman stood before a sheet of rough-looking paper nailed to a blue wooden door; the children had found the door in the garden some weeks ago, lying half-submerged in the tall grasses, and Zilberman had removed it to the greenhouse with the help of Vlady Serge. Now it stood against a long workbench, braced at its base with stones, serving as an impromptu easel. The paper tacked to its surface bore a cascade of vertical black marks, like the trails of falling bombs.
“I don’t want to disturb you, Lev,” Varian said from the doorway.
Zilberman swiped an arm across his brow, streaking it with charcoal. “I’ve been working too long already. Sit down.”
Varian sat on a splintering bench. “Are you all right? Or well enough, under the circumstances?”
“As well as can be expected, I suppose. Eager to leave France. Otherwise, fine. And as you can see, the work accumulates.” He cast an arm sideways, toward the piles of drawings stacked on one of the potting tables. “Not just mine. The pieces for our Flight Portfolio. More arrive every day.”
“May I have a look?”
“Of course.”
Varian went to the potting table and removed the first sheet of protective paper. Underneath was a work on coarse brown paper, a pastiche of pencil drawing and collage: From a rent in the paper emerged a fleeing woman, features askew, one blue eye stacked above the other. Her hair stood upright in flames, her clothes streamed behind her in tatters; in her hand, flayed to the phalanges, she held the hand of a child skeleton, no shred of flesh left on its charcoal-black bones.
“Wifredo Lam,” Zilberman said, with a glance over his shoulder. “And his friend Brauner below.”
Varian turned over another leaf. A zeppelin-headed man knelt before the crushed body of a fish; in one hand he held an upraised scimitar. The fish stared skyward with a cool, knowing gaze. From its torn gills streamed hundreds of tiny Hebrew letters, scratched in a crabbed and panicked hand.
Varian found himself reluctant to turn over another leaf. What he’d seen already seemed a distillation of all the strangeness and horror that had washed over the continent, and would keep washing it, an infinity of waves, for the foreseeable future.
“Won’t you tell me what keeps you awake at this hour?” Zilberman said.
How to answer the question? “I’d like to know if you think I’ve placed an unfair—” Varian groped for the German word: Belastung. “An unfair burden on you, bringing Tobias here.”
“What sort of burden?”
“I’m aware that his presence puts the rest of you at risk.”
Zilberman shrugged. “We’re at risk already, aren’t we?”
“I’m particularly concerned, because—” and he paused, running his hand along the edge of Brauner’s drawing. “I have to move to town, for a time. I’ve got to be closer to the office if I’m needed. But Tobias will stay here at Air Bel. He’ll be here without my immediate protection.” What else could he say? Why had he come down here anyway, why had he distracted Zilberman from his nocturnal work? There was no way to allay his guilt, nothing to curb his suspicion that the decision to move to the Hôtel Beauvau was a selfish one, that the inhabitants of the villa would be more vulnerable without him, and that they were all in greater danger now that Tobias was in their midst.
Zilberman looked carefully at Varian through his tortoiseshell glasses, his eyebrows drawn together, then turned back to his paper and ran the charcoal down its length with meditative slowness. “Truly, I don’t envy your position, Mr. Fry,” he said. “You’re like the boy in the German proverb, the one who carries the pails of milk.”
“What proverb?” Varian said.
Zilberman lower
ed his arm. “Oh, it goes something like this: Who’s most important, the farmer who feeds the cow, the cow who makes the milk, or the girl who milks the cow? None of them. The most important is the boy who carries the milk to market. One wrong step, and the work of all the others is lost in an instant.”
Varian smiled ruefully. “That sounds about right.”
“You carry a heavy load. And you’re an ordinary human being, however extraordinary your undertaking here in Marseille. Why should any of us begrudge you a little privacy in town?”
“Privacy is a peacetime luxury.”
“Nonsense. And don’t trouble yourself about Tobias. I’ll look after him. My daughter would never forgive me if I didn’t.” He got down from his stool and selected another charcoal from a wooden box. “Now, my dear Mr. Fry, you’ll understand if I turn you out. The hour’s getting late, and I’d like to get back to work.”
“Of course,” Varian said. “Forgive me.” And he opened the door and walked out into the garden, where the wind had crazed the dry winter stalks into a crackling sea.
* * *
________
He left Air Bel two days later, going to the office that morning not just with his usual briefcase but with his packed suitcase and a small wooden crate of books. In the room that was now Tobias’s, he’d left a few surrealist drawings and a pile of clothes meant for a warmer season; he’d removed all the hidden lists and papers and maps, the new address book, the francs he’d stashed beneath the floorboards. Now his suitcase stood in the corner of the office like a mute promise while he and Hirschman bent over a stack of client files, each with its own insoluble problem. The Spanish border remained closed; without the slightest chance of getting clients across by train, they’d had to depend upon the Fittkos, who, brave as they were, had scaled back operations as the mountains filled with snow. Hirschman had just seen them at Perpignan. Lisa Fittko, he said, had exhausted herself and was suffering from a liver ailment. Leon Ball was still missing. Hirschman believed that he must have been arrested, with no way of contacting the Centre Américain. Bingham had opened an inquiry but had thus far learned nothing.
The Flight Portfolio Page 35
