“Well, André,” Varian said. “You’ve outdone yourself.”
“Monsieur Fry, I’m so glad to see that Mr. Grant persuaded you to change your dress. And I rather like his inscription, too. Vaurien! Indeed. Why didn’t I think of that? Oh, Max—” He gestured to Ernst. “Max, do come here, meet Varian Fry, the one I was telling you about.”
And then he was shaking Max Ernst’s narrow, fine-boned hand, trying to tell himself that this was all ordinary, just an evening with the surrealists. Ernst wore his nudity starkly, unabashedly; his nakedness seemed to thumb its nose at the world, to remind everyone that they’d been born unclothed, that any other state was a bourgeois lie. In his presence, Varian found it near impossible to speak. Only through sheer force of will did he manage to tell Ernst what a pleasure it was to make his acquaintance, and to invite him to pay a visit to the office on Monday so Varian might open a file for him.
“Yes, indeed,” Ernst said. “I’m eager to get to New York, God knows. I’ve had enough of this continent. Let me off.”
“I wish you could speak to Gide,” Varian said. “I wish he were half as eager.”
“Yes, Gide would feel invulnerable, wouldn’t he?” Ernst said. “He hasn’t seen what you and I have seen in Germany.”
“You and I?”
“I know you were in Germany, Mr. Fry. I’ve read your reportage in the Times.”
Varian lowered his eyes. “That was some time ago,” he said.
“No need to be modest! I’ve remembered it these five years. It’s an honor to meet you at last.” His gaze ran the length of Varian’s body; Breton pointed out the word painted upon him, and Ernst laughed appreciatively. “An honor to meet you, Monsieur Vaurien.”
Varian raised his glass and drained it, wishing for Ernst’s courage, or Mary Jayne’s nonchalance, or Breton’s unselfconscious delight. He himself had always hidden inside his clothes and been grateful for them; hiding, he understood, was his natural state, or at least the one he’d grown used to.
By the time Madame Nouguet arrived to announce dinner, Jay Allen had lost his shirt entirely, revealing an undershirt worn thin at the chest. Peggy Guggenheim dropped another word into his ear, and he shed the undershirt and draped it over a chair; yet another, and he removed his shoes and pants. Poor Miss Palmer seemed to understand that the league in which she was playing far exceeded her own abilities. She held the folds of her own dress around herself as if she meant to disappear. No one tried to relieve her of it; Breton’s plan extended clemency toward her alone. The other guests began to drift toward the dining room, where, as Varian discovered, the walls had been hung with selections from the Flight Portfolio: Wifredo Lam’s fleeing woman and skeleton child, Brauner’s bleeding fish, Zilberman’s charcoal-trail bombs, a tableau of melting buildings that could only have been Ernst’s, and some others, ten in all, each a reminder of what lay outside the walls of Air Bel. If Jay Allen noticed the drawings, he gave no sign of it; but Miss Palmer, still holding her mud-draggled dress against her sternum, went a shade paler as she drifted from one drawing to the next, her eyes widening, her hands beginning to tremble. Mary Jayne, as if in mercy, directed Miss Palmer’s gaze away from the exhibition and toward her place at the table.
At the center of the linen cloth lay three platters of roasted fowl; the birds must have been poached from some nearby estate. Pale gold, basted with a glistening pink reduction, they seemed as naked as anyone in the room. Above them hung an enormous chandelier of stuffed brassieres, smelling faintly of Chanel No. 5. In place of napkins, each guest had a carefully folded pair of women’s culottes.
Dinner began with a salad of foraged winter greens, courtesy of young Katznelson, followed by puréed turnip soup. Then escargot roasted in olive oil and herbs. Accompanying the poached birds were wild morels and miniature potatoes dug from the garden, everything in tiny quantities, more for show than for nourishment. The main event, in any case, was the conversation. Breton whipped up a froth of praise around Jay Allen, and everyone else injected hot air into the mix. Victor Serge proclaimed the role of journalists second only to that of soldiers on the front lines; Max Ernst declared that a journalist was an artist, plain and simple, and that Allen on Badajoz was the purest proof he knew. Jacqueline lauded Allen’s use of the personal pronoun in his work, insisting that it brought the political situation down to human scale. And Peggy Guggenheim dredged a choice line from the well of memory: There is more blood than you would think in 1,800 bodies.
Meanwhile, Mary Jayne, seated to Allen’s right, kept filling and refilling Allen’s glass with dark red wine, a supply of which kept appearing at her elbow, thanks to a series of signals sent by Breton to Madame Nouguet. And Allen, clothed only in the surrealists’ adoration and in the drape of the tablecloth, drank and drank. When Jacqueline implored him to tell the story of his ascent to his current role at the forefront of his profession, he began to sing an aria of self-praise. As he spoke, Victor Serge silently left the table, was gone for a brief time, then returned fully clothed. No one, certainly not Jay Allen, who was deep into his own autobiography, took note; nor did anyone mark the moment when Zilberman left the room, then returned a few moments later in correct dinner dress. Jacqueline Lamba was next, coming back to the table in a close-wrapped black silk gown; she sat to the far left of Jay Allen, out of his direct line of sight. But it would hardly have mattered if she’d been sitting in front of him, so transported was he by the wine and by his own storytelling, which had ranged by now from his ascent through the ranks at a series of small-time rags to his first assignments for the Tribune in northern Africa. Oh, how he remembered every detail! The ubiquitous grit. The blue-tiled mosques. The camels in the streets. The cries of the muezzin. The difficulty of understanding the local dialects. The ardor of French Colonial women for North American journalists. And he continued to hold forth as Mary Jayne and Peggy Guggenheim silently returned to the table in jewel-toned evening clothes.
At last it was Varian’s turn to disappear and reappear; he and Grant slipped down the hall to the sitting room and dressed swiftly, in silence. Just as they were adjusting their ties, Vlady Serge appeared—also clothed—carrying Jay Allen’s abandoned pinstripes and shirt, and consigned them to the fire.
“Dear me,” Grant said. “It’s going to be a cold ride home for Mr. Allen.”
And then they returned to the dining room, where by now Jay Allen was the only unclothed person present. He himself didn’t become aware of the fact until Madame Nouguet appeared with dessert, a flambé of crepes constructed from black-market flour and eggs and sugar, and set the flaming plate before Mary Jayne so she could serve the guests. A blue tongue of flame lapped Mary Jayne’s sleeve and disappeared, and that was when Allen seemed to understand that she had a sleeve, and that the sleeve was connected to a dress; that the person sitting beside her, Ernst, was also clad; that the person beside him was clad, et cetera. At which point Mr. Allen got to his feet, his face shading first to crimson, then to aubergine, and declared that the whole lot of them could rot in hell. He beat a hasty retreat to the living room, where his clothes could no longer be found; they heard him abusing the room in a frantic search. Then came the sound of Allen storming up the stairs and rummaging in the rooms above. Moments later he reappeared, dressed in a too-short pair of pants and a too-small shirt and jacket.
“Get up, Madge,” he demanded, throwing his counterpart’s cloak into her arms.
Miss Palmer, who had consumed plenty of the red table wine herself, broke into laughter. It was the first time Varian had seen an expression on her face that was anything but anxious or dour. “Just look at you, Jay,” she said, in a tone of rich and surprising vindication. “I think you can find your way home just fine without me.”
Allen glowered at her as he misbuttoned his borrowed coat, and a moment later he stalked out of the room. They heard the outer door slam, followed by the faint jingle of glas
s in the window above it.
“Et voilà,” Breton said, finishing the last of his crepe. “Au revoir, Monsieur Allen. Justice is done.”
25
Breitscheid and Hilferding
“But what I am to do with eighty thousand francs’ worth of gold coins?” the poet Alexey Dmitrich Konstantinov whispered in Russian-accented French, as he sat with Varian at a café on the boulevard Garibaldi. Konstantinov, with his round dark eyes and hunched shoulders, looked like one of those large black-feathered passerines in whom an unusual intelligence has been observed. Varian had secured him a berth on a ship to Martinique—a real passenger ship, one of the few that had resumed regular travel to the French colonies of the Caribbean. Konstantinov’s exit visa was limited to French territories, but Martinique was considered part of France; he would be safer off the continent, Varian knew, and from Fort de France he could petition for entry to the States. Now, before he left the country, the poet wanted to change his gold for dollars.
“Let me put it into the Centre Américain’s bank account here in Marseille,” Varian said. “The New York office can write you a check once you arrive. The exchange rate, I assure you, will be far better than the Vichy value.”
“Hand the money over to you?” Konstantinov said. “Nothing in return until I reach New York? My wife, bless her memory, would call me an idiot!”
“We have no intention of fleecing our clients, Mr. Konstantinov.”
“Eighty thousand francs! I can’t just toss that money away and hope it materializes later! Akh.” He rolled his eyes skyward, as if looking for another solution. Finding none, he sighed and drained his cup of tea. “Well, I’ve already entrusted you with my life, haven’t I? What’s the loss of my little fortune?”
“That’s the spirit.”
“I’m just to give it over to you, then? Bring it over in a flour sack?”
“No, no. I don’t want you walking through the streets with it. I’ll send my colleague Jean Gemähling to your hotel this afternoon.”
“This Gemähling can be trusted?”
“With anything, I assure you.”
“All right, then. Have him come for it.”
* * *
________
Konstantinov’s gold coins, arranged in eight neat rows in a dusty green box bound with string, spent the night in the safe on the boulevard Garibaldi. It was more money by far than Varian had kept at the office overnight; he was anxious to get it to Kourillo, their money-changer, and was taking the box from the safe when the outer office door opened with a shotgunlike report. He stuffed the box back into the safe and locked it up, just as Lena rushed in with a dossier of sensitive documents, one they’d practiced concealing in a wall slot in case of a surprise inspection. With a flick of her hand, the dossier disappeared behind the wainscoting. The door to Varian’s office burst open. But it wasn’t the police who stormed through; it was Jay Allen, florid and breathless.
“What do you mean by this?” he said, slapping a copy of a cable onto Varian’s desk. It was a message Varian had asked Miss Palmer to send, one that instructed the New York office to advance Konstantinov seventeen hundred dollars upon his arrival.
“I mean to help my client,” Varian said. “That’s all.”
“Apparently you didn’t get the gist of the letter I sent a couple of weeks ago,” Allen said. “The one informing you that you weren’t in charge anymore. Your only job now is to teach Madge how to run the place. You’ve got no business messing around with the committee’s finances. Seventeen hundred dollars to this Konstantinov, whoever he is! And Madge tells me you mean to cash in a bushel of doubloons here in France. How much was supposed to line your own pockets, I wonder?”
Varian got up from the desk and began to pace slowly. Lena and Jean, Gussie and Danny and Theo stood silent in the front room, listening.
“First of all,” Varian said, “I don’t know what business you have coming around here to shout at me. Generally you don’t bother to appear at all. In fact—let me see—you’ve not been here once since you came to town. How did you even find the place?”
“I don’t have time for your impertinence, Fry.”
“Lower your voice, Jay, if you wouldn’t mind. As a rule, we don’t conduct business around here at a volume audible in the street. Now, if you’ve got a problem with our finances, it’s usually Franz Oppenheimer you’d want to speak to. But Oppy’s out of the office today, I’m afraid. He’s packing his bags. His ship sails tonight. So this matter will have to wait until we’ve got a new finance man in place. Danny’s working on a replacement now. I’m sure he’d be delighted to talk to you.”
“That’s enough,” Allen said. “You’re not to do anything else around here—not one goddamn thing, understand?—without written permission from me. I can cable New York in a minute and you’ll be out on your hindmost. Trafficking in gold coins! No wonder you’ve got the police up your shorts.”
“One might well ask what’s in your pockets, Jay. Where’s that hundred and fifty-two thousand you withdrew a couple of weeks ago? It’s the Centre Américain’s money. Everyone here deserves to know.”
“Are you accusing me of stealing my own salary?”
“If that’s your salary, I’d like to know what you’ve done to earn it. You’ve spent scarcely three days in Marseille since you hit France.”
“This discussion is over. I hope you’ve understood me clearly. You’re hanging by a thread, Fry.”
“Is that all, then?” Varian said. “I’ve got work to do.”
Allen spat onto the dusty floorboards, then turned and left the office. He slammed the door so forcefully it bounded open again and banged a knob-sized divot in the wall.
“O, mój Boże,” Lena said.
“What a dear man,” Theo Bénédite said, once the outer door had closed. “One wants to give him a medal for his service to the cause of freedom.”
Lena took a screwdriver from her desk drawer, deftly removed their rigged-up wainscoting panel, and lifted the sensitive documents from their slot. “You see,” she said, addressing Miss Palmer. “A perfect hiding place.”
“Well, I’ll be,” said Miss Palmer, and took a note on her pad.
Varian sat back down at his desk and picked up a telegram Lena had handed him that morning. He couldn’t deny feeling a deep-seated satisfaction. The fact was that in the past couple of weeks, his operation had begun to enjoy unprecedented success. It wasn’t just the reopened Caribbean lines, which only worked for those who could get French exit visas; it was Charles Vinciléoni’s route—his network of ship owners and captains, seasoned black marketeers whose politics, if not in perfect alignment with the Centre Américain’s, were at least liberal enough to induce their owners to be bought at the right price. Dozens of decommissioned British officers had safely reached Casablanca and Oran by now, and a few of Varian’s clients had recently followed by the same route. Every day there were fat dossiers of papers to be arranged, cables to be got out to New York and Washington, berths to be secured, money to be exchanged, money to be handed over to Vinciléoni or to his captains, money to be placed into the hands of refugees who would need something, any small amount, to carry them into their new lives. And now, finally, a hint of movement in a big case: Breitscheid and Hilferding, who had been at Arles now for four months, had been informed by the sous-préfet that Vichy had finished with them, and would soon lift their arrest and grant them exit visas. That was the news Lena had brought in her telegram; now she sat before him, pink with satisfaction, as he read and reread the wire.
“It all looks clear,” Varian said. “Sous-préfet assures visas imminent. But that doesn’t explain why Pétain would decide to let them go all of a sudden, when he’s seen fit to keep them here for months.”
Theo Bénédite, listening at the doorway, crossed her arms and frowned in contemplation. “Traps take all
forms, don’t they,” she said. “Breitscheid and Hilferding are confident enough that France will protect them. Let them believe they can emigrate—even give them papers!—and watch what happens when they try to cross a border. Anyone can say the papers are forged, and they can be accused of trying to leave the country illegally. Then they’ll be deported. That must be Vichy’s game.”
“I’m sure you’re right, Theo.”
“Then what’s to be done?” Lena said.
Daniel Bénédite joined Theo in the doorway, holding his small silver-framed glasses in one hand; he liked to gesticulate with them as he spoke, as if dealing bolts of clarity. “If they’re vulnerable at the border, let’s avert it entirely. Perhaps we can get them a place on one of Vinciléoni’s boats.”
“But they think they can get out legally if they wait,” Theo said.
“Well, we’ll have to convince them of the risk,” Varian said. He took up a sheet of typewriter paper and drafted a telegram to be dispatched to Arles. When it was finished, he put on his coat and hat and went to pay a visit to Vinciléoni at the Dorade.
* * *
________
He entered the restaurant through a side door, the one used for deliveries. A dark malodorous passage led to another door, reinforced steel, behind which Vinciléoni waited in a windowless office, his desk covered in shipping forms. Varian had never seen Vinciléoni drink anything stronger than soda water; he sat now with a glass of it in his hand as he marked his forms with a red china pencil. Vinciléoni wore his usual high-necked sweater and professorial tweed jacket, a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles balanced on the bridge of his nose. His silver-shot hair swept backward from a midbrow peak, and his eyes were an eagle’s eyes, perceiving everything.
The Flight Portfolio Page 40
