“What do we do, then?” Varian said. “We can’t put the whole thing on hold while we wait for the snow to melt. We need a boat, for God’s sake. We need the Sinaïa, and a whole fleet of others.”
“What do you hear from Deschamps?”
“Nothing. The Sinaïa left for Martinique perhaps ten days ago. It’ll be weeks before it returns. Anyway, we’re too closely watched just now. Everyone’s been on double alert since that fiasco with Laval at Vichy. We’ve got to wait until the authorities turn their eyes away.”
“Maybe Vinciléoni can help us,” Hirschman said.
“Yes. We’ve got to make that happen. But how?”
“I don’t know. Maybe we’re not offering enough money.”
“Well, let’s offer more. I’ve got to get Zilberman off this continent.”
At that moment the quiet of the office splintered into a percussive din, a wall-shaking racket of pounding on the outer door. Varian went to the door of his own office and glanced out; Lena had just admitted a pair of Sûreté Nationale officers, their expressions grim, their guns gleaming in leather holsters. He didn’t recognize either of the men, one of whom was short and dark, the other wide and porcine. That was the man who spoke first, his hand on his gun.
“Where’s Hirschman?” he said. “Albert Hirschman?”
Varian only just saved himself from glancing back over his shoulder to where Hirschman sat, out of the officers’ view, in the chair beside the desk.
“I’d like to know the same,” Varian said. “We haven’t seen him in weeks. He left his job here some time ago. I heard he’d gone down to Cannes.”
“You’re lying, Monsieur Fry,” the shorter policeman said. “We had a tip he was back from the border and hanging around this office.”
“I’ve told you what I know,” Varian said. “We haven’t seen him since the beginning of the month.”
The shorter policeman turned to Lena, stepping so close to her that his gut pushed against the buckle of her grass-green belt. She took a half-step back, and he advanced. “What about you—Mademoiselle Fischman, is it?” he said. “Have you seen your colleague Hirschman?”
Lena didn’t flinch. Never taking her eyes off the short policeman, she pulled the pencil from behind her ear and used it to punctuate her words in the air. “If I see that man again, I put out his eye, pik, pik, pik! Just like that. He is unfaithful, an unfaithful dog.” Her eyes began to glitter with real tears, and Varian caught his breath. “How he lied to me, monsieur!” Lena went on. “The things he told to me! The things he promised to me!” She fumbled for a handkerchief, and when she couldn’t find one, the policeman offered his own. She pressed it to her eyes for a long moment, then straightened again, having disarrayed her maquillage convincingly. “If you find him, monsieur, tell him Lena Fischman never speaks to him again, never, never!” She blew her nose elaborately into the handkerchief, then returned it to its owner. “Mais jamais!” she said again.
“Well,” said the porcine policeman, his color having deepened to fuchsia. “Well. We’re terribly sorry to have disturbed you, Mademoiselle Fischman, Monsieur Fry. We have reason to believe that this Hirschman may be involved in a variety of illegal activities. We suspect he may be involved with the Gaullists.”
“I am sure he breaks all the laws he can!” Lena said. “Filthy, filthy man!”
“If you’re to hear of his whereabouts, contact us at once,” the officer said, and offered his card to Varian.
“Of course,” Varian said.
The officers bowed stiffly, then took their leave, clomping down the stairs and slamming the outer door behind them. A few moments passed before Varian or Lena or Hirschman made a sound; then they roared with laughter.
“Brava, Lena, brava!” Hirschman said. “Encore, s’il vous plaıˆt!”
“I hope you are not offended, Albert!”
“Offended! Au contraire. Honored. You were splendid. You’ve just saved me from being dragged off to the clink.” He put a hand to his chest and bowed in gratitude. But then he turned to Varian, his expression growing serious. “What must I do now?” he said. “What do you think they know?”
Varian shook his head. “I think we have to assume the worst. It’s clear they’ve got someone watching you. I don’t doubt you’re in danger.”
Hirschman sank into one of the office chairs. “I’m sure you’re right.”
“I felt a hell of a lot easier when you were down at Perpignan.”
Hirschman put his hands together. “Do you know, Varian,” he said slowly, “I have my papers, or at least as many as I’d need to get to Lisbon.”
Lena looked from Varian to Hirschman. “What nonsense is this?”
Varian sighed, a feeling of unbearable heaviness pushing into his limbs. He had suspected, even before the Maréchal’s visit, that this day would come soon; he had braced himself for it. “I know you’re right, Albert,” he said. “I wish it weren’t true.”
“What is true?” Lena half-shouted.
“I’ve got to go,” Hirschman said. “I’ve got to leave France. Already I’ve compromised the operation.”
“But Albert! You cannot go! O mój Boże! Comment tu exagères!”
“It’s folly to stay any longer. I’ve got to leave today.”
“Today!” Lena said, and this time real tears came to her eyes; she sat down helplessly in her office chair. “Today! But Albert! You cannot mean it.”
“I do,” Hirschman said. “I have all my traveling papers with me this moment. I ought not even return to the hotel for my things. The police may be there now. Perhaps you’ll send my trunk along once I’ve reached Lisbon.”
“No party? Not even a proper farewell?”
“This is our party,” Hirschman said. He got to his feet, went to his desk, and withdrew the little cut-glass bottle of whiskey he always kept in the filing drawer. He poured an inch of whiskey for Varian and another for Lena; then he toasted them both with the bottle. Varian drank, trying to comprehend that this was happening, that Hirschman intended to leave today. What would happen when he, Varian, next needed counsel or calming or an infusion of courage? Could Danny Bénédite, quiet and correct, fill Hirschman’s role? Or the anxious and multilingual Jean Gemähling? To the extent that he’d been able to imagine leaving Marseille and the Centre Américain himself, to the extent that he’d been willing to envision what might happen if he were thrown out, his place here had always been filled, in his mind, by Hirschman. But he’d also known this day would come, that Hirschman would be forced to leave France. Even now he wanted to argue it off, wanted to make a case against it; he knew that if he did, if he protested cleverly enough, he might win. But what came to his mind was Vernet, the open latrines, the sound of pickaxes striking the frozen ground, the bone-thin prisoners in their filthy civilian clothes. Hirschman could be dragged there any day. He had done most of the office lawbreaking; he was the connection to the black market, to the illegal conversion of currency, to the forging of documents, the procuring of false passports. It was a miracle he hadn’t been thrown in jail already.
“I wish you didn’t have to do it, Albert,” he said.
“I wish the same.”
Hirschman rose from his chair to refill Varian’s glass, and Lena’s; then he drained the last centimeter of whiskey himself. “I’ll be seeing you, as they say in the movies. Perhaps we’ll rendezvous in New York.”
“Oh, Albert!” Lena said, stricken.
“Oh, Albert, nothing,” Hirschman said, and kissed her on both cheeks. He donned his overcoat, put his hat on his head, and took his briefcase in hand. Varian got to his feet, and for a moment they stood face-to-face in silence.
“Drop us a line from Lisbon,” he managed to say. “And Albert—don’t get arrested at the border, all right? And don’t try to cross the Pyrenees in a snowstorm.”
Hirschman slapped Varian on the shoulder. “Have some faith!” he said. “I’ll be fine. And so will you, my good friend. You’ve learned a thing or two since we first met.”
From anyone else this might have sounded like condescension; Hirschman managed to make it sound like a profession of confidence. To the extent that it was true—to the degree that Varian had gone from absolute fraudulence in his job to passable competence—it was, in large part, thanks to Hirschman himself. Now Varian watched Hirschman raise a hand to his forehead and move toward the door. A moment later he’d gone through it, and then his footsteps echoed down the stairs. Finally they heard the outer door open and close, and in one swift and terrible stroke Hirschman was gone.
22
Bar Splendide
Six o’clock that evening found him in the lobby of the Hôtel Beauvau, a hall of mirrors that extended space infinitely in every direction. The mirror behind the reception desk mirrored the entrance doors, the mirrored walls mirrored each other, the gilded and mirrored ceiling mirrored the reflective black marble of the floors, all of it transmitting the impression that one’s own self was the ultimate embellishment and deserved to be repeated to infinity. When he checked in, he gleaned from the desk clerk that Grant, who had arrived the previous day, had employed the ruse that he was Mr. Fry’s personal physician, that Mr. Fry was gravely ill, and that he, Dr. Grant, must have private access to Mr. Fry’s person at all times, hence the necessity that the men be given rooms that communicated not only with the hall but with each other. The unsuspicious clerk handed Varian a key attached to a small brass medallion emblazoned with a B for Beauvau, and instructed him to take the lift to the troisième étage, where he would find a room that he hoped would suit the patient’s needs.
Here was what Varian would remember later: how, when he opened the door to the room, the scent of freshly laundered bath towels and lavender soap rolled into the hall; how, inside the room, a smooth white bed lay like a frosted cake before a window that gave onto the Vieux Port; how an open door revealed a black-and-white skylit bathroom, shared with the adjoining room, its door also standing open; and how, in that bathroom’s enormous slipper-shaped bathtub, the ostensible Dr. Grant reclined in a nebula of bubbles, his dark hair swept back in ridges, one honey-colored hand trailing over the edge of the tub, sending a slow parade of drops down the tip of the middle finger to fall in a damp circlet on the bath rug below. He might have been a lotus eater; he might have been a drowsy child, the newly fatherless Elliott Grant, immersed in his grandparents’ bathtub in Philadelphia.
“The doctor is in,” Grant said.
Varian undressed without haste. He was unwilling, for the moment, to speak a word about Hirschman or about anything else that troubled him. He wanted only to inhabit this moment with Grant, this instant before, when the memory-to-be was yet to begin, a cup filled to the limit, no drop of experience spilled. He unbuttoned his shirt, shed his pants, unbraced his socks, and stepped onto the bath rug, feeling beneath his toes the circlet of bathwater Grant had let fall onto the cotton loops. Eileen accused him of being a puritan at moments like these—he, Varian, whose habits she knew! She believed he hesitated only because he experienced paralyzing guilt at the prospect of pleasure. But that was far from the truth. He was the basest sybarite he knew. The anticipatory pause only heightened and prolonged his delight. Because, necessarily, the actual experience of tasting, of touching, of entering, was laced with grief. Once it began, it was on its way to being over. Even now, as he let himself step through the foam and into the enclosing heat of the water, even as Grant’s limbs shifted and parted to make room for him, as he immersed himself first to the waist, then to the chest, and finally, with the back of his neck against the cool porcelain roll of the tub, to the hollow of his throat, what he couldn’t help but think about was the fact that now that Tobias had been found, now that he was secreted away at the Villa Air Bel to await his papers and a means to an exit, now that Grant had cabled Katznelson informing him in code that the boy was safe and under his own protection, it would only be a matter of time before Grant would consider his business concluded. And what would happen then? What could come next? Would any of his declarations hold, once the matter had been settled?
“What are you thinking?” Grant asked, his eyes narrowed. He found Varian through the water, and Varian shifted against him.
“Not thinking,” Varian said, closing his eyes. “Not thinking at all.”
“Look at me,” Grant demanded. “Open your eyes.”
Varian looked, though it was a kind of torture. Soap-laced steam had condensed in droplets on Grant’s skin, rendering it iridescent. Reflective spherules hovered on the points of his wet lashes. It was happening; there was no stopping it from going forward. They were occupying these rooms, they were living together, even if only for now, just here, in the protected space of the Beauvau.
* * *
_____
Some two hours later—after he’d recovered enough to tell Grant about Hirschman; after they’d had a long talk about what he’d do without him, how he might carry on all his illegal projects without landing in jail himself; after they’d dressed and gone downstairs and were crossing the lobby to the bar for drinks—the desk clerk waved Varian over, his look and gesture urgent. This was the same clerk who had helped him earlier. The boy had an interesting and memorable blemish, if it could be called that, a small twinned mole like a tiny black figure eight on his cheekbone. Grain de beauté was the poetic French phrase.
“Monsieur Fry, Dr. Grant,” the boy said, giving a slight bow. “A message for the patient.” He handed Varian a slim cream-colored envelope. Inside was a single sheet, unsigned, typed with a single line: Meet Bar Splendide 9 p.m. sharp.
Grant squinted at the note. “Who would know to write you here?”
“Lena. Hirschman. Anyone at the office.”
Grant turned the note over in his hands. Varian took it from him, scrutinizing the typed letters, which had been hammered so fiercely into the paper that their opposites stood in tangible relief on the reverse. It hadn’t been composed on the office typewriter, that was clear; he would have recognized the tilted s, the dropped g. Who would write to him with such vehemence, summon him that way without giving a name? The police, having sussed out his lie about Hirschman? Hugh Fullerton? And then another thought occurred to him.
“My God,” he said.
“What?”
But he couldn’t give voice to what had come into his head: The note was from Eileen. Eileen herself had come to Marseille. It was December 23; could she have come with the excuse of wanting to be there at Christmas? Could she have crossed an ocean in wartime with only that cover? Had the New York office asked her to take matters into her own hands, to remove him from France? Or had Eileen, having read between the lines of his letters all this time, volunteered to come? If she had actually come to France, if she was here, if she had crossed the submarine-patrolled Atlantic in the middle of a war, there could only be one reason.
“I’ve got to go,” Varian said.
“On your own?”
“I’m sorry, Skiff. It’s necessary. We’ll talk about it later.”
His expression grew grave. “You don’t think it’s about Tobias?”
“I don’t know. It’s possible, though the Gestapo would likely take a less subtle approach.”
“Don’t you want me to come with you? If there’s any danger—”
“No, I’d better go on my own. Wait for me at La Fémina?”
Grant inspected the view from the window: toy boats bobbing in the night-dark port. “I don’t suppose I have a choice,” he said. And they left each other the way they always did in public: with a handshake that allowed them at least a moment of parting contact.
* * *
_________
His thoughts, as he walked the edge of the Vieux Port from the Hôtel Beauvau
to the Canebière, were a perfect dark confusion. Eileen: She wouldn’t have sent a note, would she? Wouldn’t she have just come to his hotel? No, a note was more her style: meet on her own terms, at the time and place of her choosing. 9 p.m. sharp. He could hear her voice in that demand. But would he rather encounter her, or a Nazi intelligence man? Would he rather be dragged into a subterranean interrogation chamber or into the hotel suite of a woman who loved him, and whom, if he were honest with himself, he loved?
He found the Splendide just as he’d left it: carpeted in green, stuffed to its rafters with travelers whose fine clothes had seen better days, its desk attended by the same stiff-necked, mustachioed clerk he’d bribed at such high cost months before. The bar lay through those brass-handled doors, just there; it was nearly nine o’clock already. Should he smoke a cigarette first? No. Nonsense. He would just go in. If it was the police, or the Gestapo, they couldn’t be avoided; and if it was Eileen, he would tell her the truth.
* * *
________
He did not at first recognize the person who hailed him from the bar as he entered: a square-jawed, highly pomaded fellow in field khakis, as if this were sub-Saharan Africa instead of Marseille. The man waved again; without a doubt, he was beckoning to Varian. Seated on the stool beside him was a woman of around sixty, a narrow, school-principalish woman in a high-collared pink silk shirt, who smiled at Varian in what might have been a patronizing way if there hadn’t been an edge of apprehension in her eyes, a hint of animal fear.
The Flight Portfolio Page 36
