He approached the pair and took the man’s hand, realizing as he did that this was the Chicago Tribune journalist Jay Allen, whom he’d met in New York some years ago. Allen had given a lecture at Columbia about his coverage of the Spanish Civil War; specifically his subject was Badajoz, where he’d witnessed a massacre. At the party after the lecture, held at the home of a political science professor and his wife, Varian had approached Allen about writing an article about Badajoz for The Living Age. Or he’d tried to approach him. While the other guests stood and listened in silence, Allen had held forth for nearly two hours about his time in Spain with Hemingway—Papa, as he called him. He and Papa had witnessed this or that horror, had drunk memorable drinks amid shards of glass and wood in what had once been a famous café, had fought bitterly over a local girl whose dialect neither of them could understand, and had nearly been blown to pieces one night when the pension where they were staying came under fire. As he talked, the weary hosts had first run out of food and then liquor, and had finally resorted to opening fine old bottles of wine from their own cellar, bottles that had obviously been intended to be consumed slowly and mindfully on private occasions. When at last Varian had found an aperture for his request, Allen had brushed it off, citing his busy travel schedule; but a few weeks later he’d published a detailed account of his Badajoz experience in The New Republic.
Not Eileen, then, after all; merely this blowhard journalist, likely wanting to interview Varian about the refugee situation in France. A wave of relief rushed through him, chased by an undertow of guilt.
Now Allen clapped him on the back and shook his hand, calling the bartender over to see to the needs of “my good friend Fry, a man of letters, one of our best.” The principalish lady was Margaret Palmer, who hailed from Pittsburgh and had been secretary to the chief curator at the Carnegie Institute. Allen explained that he’d come to France as a representative of the North American Newspaper Alliance. He’d traveled through North Africa by way of Casablanca, where he’d interviewed General Weygand, Pétain’s minister of defense. The interview had been a fine piece of trickery-talk on his own part, he didn’t mind saying now, the kind that gets a villain like Weygand not only to show his hand but to reveal the tattered ace up his sleeve. Of course, this was only stage-setting for the real journalistic prize: an interview with Pétain himself, brokered by Weygand.
“Well, that’s good news,” Varian said. “The word must get out.”
“That’s what I was just telling Madge, here,” Allen said, shaking the frail-looking Miss Palmer by her narrow shoulder. Miss Palmer smiled bravely. “We’re fighting the good fight, bringing the truth home to Main Street. Where they don’t really want to hear it, do they, Madge?”
“No, indeed,” said Miss Palmer.
“I’ll take the train up to Vichy tomorrow,” Allen said. “Start at once. Got to file before Christmas if I can. But I wanted to see you first. Get things squared away here in Marseille with the Centre Américain.”
“Squared away?”
“Transfer of power, and all that.” He tapped a long ash from his cigarette and swigged from his drink. “Set up Madge in the new post. Introduce her to everyone.”
“I’m afraid I’m not reading you,” Varian said. “We’ve got a hundred codes going here in Marseille, Jay. A person can get muddled. We can go elsewhere to talk, if that’s easier.”
“Oh, no need, I like it here fine,” Allen said, drawing from his breast pocket a much-folded envelope, which he flattened against the bar before handing it to Varian. On the face of the envelope was Varian’s name, in Paul Hagen’s handwriting; the embossed return address was that of the Emergency Rescue Committee’s office on Forty-Second Street. Varian opened the envelope and withdrew a single typed sheet.
VARIAN: This is to introduce Mr. Allen, who is to take over directorship of operations at the ERC office in Marseille, effective immediately. You will kindly do us the favor of instructing him in your work in every detail, sparing nothing that could aid the successful transfer of control. After Mr. Allen’s two-week acclimatization period you are to return stateside, where you will debrief the Committee on your activities in France. We appreciate your cooperation with these instructions.
Sincerely, PAUL HAGEN
Varian read and reread the note. He looked from the creased sheet of bond to Jay Allen and Margaret Palmer and then back again, buoyant incredulity rising in his chest. So it had happened at last: he’d been fired, ash-canned, his pink slip delivered by his replacement. His first thought was that Eileen had betrayed him, that this was all her doing. His second was that he would never comply. And his third was that he must move carefully, must never let Jay Allen or Miss Palmer know how he felt.
“So they’ve finally given me the relief I’ve been asking for,” he said, modulating his expression to one of pleasant surprise. “It’s about time. How soon can we get you behind that desk, Jay?”
“Well, I won’t be the one behind the desk,” Allen said, haw-hawing, leaning away from Varian as if to distance himself from the idea of it. “Madge will be manning the director’s seat. You can think of her as an alter-Jay, a Jay-in-fact, while I’m at large. You see, I’m really here to cover the war. That’s the truth, and also my official alibi. Madge will just occupy the chair in my place. She’ll report everything to me, and she’ll carry out all my orders to the letter. She’ll be the organization’s public face. I’ll never even have to meet the office staff. No one can connect the Centre Américain to me, don’t you see? But I’ll be the brain, as it were, behind the face.”
“Let me get this straight,” Varian said. “The Centre Américain is to be run long-distance? You’re to oversee operations, but you’re never to appear in the office?”
“Yes, that’s right,” Allen said. “You’ll show Madge how to run everything, and she’ll fill in all the details for me when I stop back through Marseille.”
“So you’re not planning to live here, actually?”
“Well, now, how could I? Have to go where the stories take me. But that’s where Madge comes in. Our woman on the ground.”
Miss Palmer winked at Varian, as if this were all a kind of inside joke.
“I see,” Varian said. “Well. What a novel idea, Jay.”
“Exactly what Paul said. And what the organization needs. New thinking. Better cover. Better results. More bang for the committee’s buck. More valuable clients. Raise more money back at home.”
“More bang, did you say? For the committee’s buck?”
“Oh, yes. Just ask your friend Harry Oram in New York, the money guy. Someone like Einstein’s worth about a hundred thou in fundraising speeches, give or take a thou. Now Picasso, he’d be worth fifty thousand, if we could get him. Those three you sent over a few months ago—Werfel, Mann, and the one with the unpronounceable name—those guys scarcely brought in ten together, according to Harry. We’ve got to round up a few biggies or see the whole thing go under, he says. You can do it, Jay, he says. Your name means something. You’ve got the clout.”
Varian had to stifle a laugh. He would never be able to reproduce this in sufficient detail for Grant, and might have to wait months to narrate it to Hirschman. So this was what had been going on in New York: this calculation, this rendering of lives in dollars, give or take a thou. They wanted Jay to come up with some biggies, raise some bucks. Nothing could have made it clearer to him that the men and women in charge—Ingrid and Paul and Frank Kingdon and the others—even Eileen, who should have known better—had no bloody idea, no concept at all, of what was really going on in France.
Of course he’d suspected that this moment would come, that Eileen would prevail upon the committee to send someone to replace him. And he really had asked for a replacement, back when he still had a job to go home to in New York. But he’d never imagined that the ERC would come up with Jay Allen. They couldn’t make Varian hand over con
trol to a person like that; they couldn’t make him hand it over to anyone. Mary Jayne had already donated half a million francs, and she planned to put another two hundred thousand into the coffers before January. Peggy Guggenheim was ready to put forth another half-million francs. Bingham himself had donated a hundred thousand, and others, dozens of others, had put forth money of their own. It was hidden here and there, banked in various locations and in various currencies, so it couldn’t all disappear at once, or be appropriated by an idiot like Allen; but it was there, a comfortable seven figures’ worth of francs, and though he couldn’t pretend that he didn’t need New York at all, the fact was that he didn’t have to depend on them.
“…what you really must need,” Allen was saying, somewhere in the background, “is a good strong dose of what’s happening elsewhere. Get stuck in Marseille for months on end, you miss a thing or two. Why, Papa was just telling me the other day—I mean Hemingway, you know—he was just saying, now Jay, you’ve got to see the war with your own two eyes, see it in the flesh, and if you’re not where it’s at, just go off and get to the center of it. That’s why I thought to ask Weygand about Pétain. These old fascists are only too glad to brag about their connections, if you take my meaning, they’d claim they buggered Hitler himself if you got enough drink in them—and of course Weygand fell over himself to say that Pétain would see me if he told him to, and the general called his girl in that moment so he could dictate the letter in front of me. Lo and behold, Vichy’s opened its doors to me, and I’ll be damned if I don’t walk straight in and get the interview. That’s the way I’ve always done it, Mr. Fry. That’s the way you’ve got to do it, and if you can’t, then you might as well just hang up your cock and balls and go home.” He drained his drink and raised his empty glass at the bartender.
“Ahem,” said Miss Palmer. “Perhaps I should be saying goodnight, gentlemen. It’s been a rather long day, and we’re likely to have a longer one tomorrow.”
“Oh, now, Madge,” Allen said. “I expect you’ll learn the whole operation in ten minutes flat.” He turned to Varian. “Madge is great with facts. Mind like a weasel trap. Unlike me. I go for the human angle. I’m a man of the heart. Too much heart, Papa says. It’s a liability in a man of letters. And he’s right, isn’t he, Madge?”
Miss Palmer blushed into her pink silk collar, unable to muster a reply. But Allen hadn’t really been asking a question, and wasn’t looking for an answer; what he wanted was to tuck into his next drink and dilate upon the subject of Vichy and of Maréchal Pétain, and what Hemingway had had to say about it. Miss Palmer was left to take herself off to bed, and Varian watched her go, watched the hunch of her shoulders and the hesitancy of her walk as she made her way between the bar tables. Though she was Varian’s enemy now, he could only pity her.
He listened to Allen for as long as he could stand it, then said a polite goodnight, shook Allen’s hand, and stepped out of the bar and through the glass-awninged entryway of the Splendide, out onto the boulevard Dugommier. As he walked through the familiar scents of Marseille, pipe smoke and cinnamon and garbage rot and sea salt and cumin and crustaceans, each in its usual place between the Splendide and the Vieux Port, his body seemed to have become strangely light, as if he’d been stripped of an overcoat that had grown heavy with rain without his realizing it. All this time, all these months, he’d considered himself the employee of the ERC, its subject, its limb. But now that they’d cut him free, now they’d told him he was no longer needed, he knew they were the ones who’d been the appendage. He, Varian, was the Centre Américain. His New York life had shrunk to a vanishingly small point, his job abandoned, his marriage stretched to a filament. His earlier self had been subsumed by this other person, this man walking along the Canebière toward the quai des Belges, where, in that restaurant whose yellow light spilled onto the pavement like a flood of saffron, another man waited, a man who would understand all of this implicitly, a person to whom, despite all his mysteries, despite all that still lay hidden, Varian need hardly explain anything.
23
Gide
Open revolt: that was the only way to describe the reaction of the office staff. That first morning, Danny Bénédite would not meet Miss Palmer’s eye; he addressed all his comments to Varian and only to Varian. Jean Gemähling pretended not to understand English. Lena, delivering a cup of tea to Varian, spilled it directly into Miss Palmer’s bag. Even Theo, with her impeccable manners, feigned a coughing fit when Miss Palmer tried to ask if she knew of a good seamstress who could repair a slip, as she’d brought only one and had torn it already. At noon Miss Palmer claimed an intestinal indisposition and retreated to the Splendide. That afternoon the staff met in Varian’s office.
“Just how did this happen?” Mary Jayne asked, pacing before the windows, her arms crossed over her chest. “Was this Ingrid Warburg’s doing? Eileen’s? Paul can’t have been this stupid. He can’t have imagined it would work.”
“It would take months to teach Miss Palmer what you do,” Theo said. “If such a thing were even possible. I consider it a rather dangerous waste of everyone’s time.”
Danny got up from his chair and leaned against the desk, squinting at Varian through his small silver-rimmed glasses. “So they accuse us of not getting enough done,” he said. “Not delivering enough bang, when we’ve already saved twice the number of refugees on the original list. And now we are supposed to pause to educate Miss Palmer? If you don’t mind my saying so, Mr. Fry, I haven’t seen evidence yet that she’ll be able to grasp the basic principles of what you do, never mind operate its human angles.”
Jean Gemähling shook his head in anger. “I’ve got a few choice words for Paul Hagen,” he said. “I’ll give him some bang for his buck.”
“I shall write the Forty-Second Street office myself,” Lena said. “I will send them cables and cables. C’est évident, ils ont perdu la tête!”
Danny, who had picked up a newspaper from the desk, tapped it on his knee. “Now’s hardly the moment for a changing of the guard,” he said. “Every journalist in town predicts that Marseille will be occupied by mid-January.”
“Well, the New York office can be hanged, as far as I’m concerned,” Varian said. “I believe, frankly, we’re better off on our own. Without the ERC’s gatekeeping. And their oversight.”
“Absolutely not,” Theo said. “We need New York. It’s folly to think otherwise.”
“Look what they’re trying to do to us!”
“Still, they’re lobbying Washington every day on our clients’ behalf. And they’re our primary source of funding, though just barely.”
“They’re delaying our cases, dozens of them, because they aren’t prestigious enough. Because they won’t bring in enough money. They’re biding their time, waiting to ask Washington for favors until the big names come through. Meanwhile, geniuses are rotting in camps or in their hotel rooms. Or killing themselves.”
“But what if you get arrested?” Danny said. “You can’t rely on Harry Bingham for everything. You need New York’s protection, and their connections.”
“Why would they protect me? It’s clear they want to wash their hands of me.”
“The other option is to throw you to the wolves, and they won’t do it. Apart from the fact that it’s morally unconscionable, it would be terrible press.”
“So what do you suggest we do, Danny? Mary Jayne? Theo? Anyone?”
Jean Gemähling looked up from his brooding. “We’ll do what they do on the football field,” he said.
“And what’s that, my friend?”
“Stall for time,” Jean said. “Let the other team think they’ve got the advantage. Then quietly execute our own offense.”
* * *
________
And that was what they did. Jay Allen, for his part, was too distracted to notice; he’d gone up to Vichy to try to get his interview, an
d had ended up mired in the same administrative weeds that would have tangled anyone, his letter from General Weygand notwithstanding. Miss Palmer came to the office every day and sat with Varian, taking dutiful notes as he tutored her in his procedures and practices; infrequently she relayed to Jay Allen a précis of what she’d learned. Allen transmitted his mandates through her—Fire three staff members before New Year’s!—and Varian roundly ignored them. Meanwhile, the real work went on. Varian begged visas from the consulate, wrote endless letters to Washington, and, when the Spanish border finally opened again, sent small groups of clients down to Cerbère. Theo teased out refugees from their hiding places and convinced them to become clients. Mary Jayne plied her rich friends for money, and kept throwing her own dollars into the Centre’s coffers; she spent her days interviewing clients even when her nights involved bouts of drinking and dancing or loud acrobatics with Killer. Danny and Jean Gemähling took over Hirschman’s illegal operations, his connection with Vinciléoni, his pursuit of false documents and cheap francs. And Lena sent ever-lengthening lists of names to New York.
* * *
________
Sometime after Christmas, he and Grant went up to Cannes to see Gide. If the New York committee wanted big names, Varian thought, let them have this one; surely André Gide could bring in thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, in New York alone.
To get to Gide’s house in Cabris, a hamlet in the mountains above Cannes, they had to take a bus from the train station—a bus powered by a cumbersome charcoal burner screwed to the vehicle’s undercarriage. Gazogène, the fuel was called, though it had nothing to do with gas; it smelled like a campfire, caused mysterious cracklings and poppings in the engine, and only propelled the bus a few kilometers before the system broke down and had to be fixed by the driver and a mechanic who rode along at all times for this purpose. The trip to Gide’s house might have been speedier had he and Grant walked, though Varian conceded that it wasn’t unpleasant; he welcomed the excuse to sit at Grant’s side, and he liked the smell of woodsmoke. It put him in mind of bonfires on Brighton Beach with his grandfather. If he closed his eyes, he could imagine himself in short pants, surrounded by his grandfather’s charges, those boys and girls who’d been given the privilege of temporary removal from their tenements, singing “Oh, My Darling Clementine” at the top of their lungs as shadows fell over the Lower Bay.
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