27
Ausgang
In the weeks that followed, the clients of the Centre Américain poured out of France in waves. The sea route, no longer a fantasy, was a rolling and glittering path toward safety. The Pyrenees route had gotten clients out in ones and twos, but now two or three dozen could leave at a time. All it took were papers, real and false; papers good enough to pass the capricious and imperfect scrutiny of customs.
But not for Breitscheid or Hilferding; their chance would never come again. Four days after the Ipanema sailed, Frau Breitscheid wrote to Varian that the French police had driven her husband and his friend to Vichy and handed them over to the Gestapo. Jay Allen, chasing a newspaper story somewhere near Cannes, sent word by Miss Palmer that he would go to Vichy himself, and pledged to do what Varian had not been able to do. But the next day, Breitscheid and Hilferding were transported over the Demarcation Line under the guard of four Gestapo agents, according to a panicked telegram from Frau Breitscheid. No one knew where they were now.
In Varian’s office Mary Jayne sat on the windowsill, smoking one of her long gold-encircled cigarettes, while Varian slouched in his desk chair and stared at the lines of the telegram until they dissolved into a gray-green blur. When he raised his eyes, the empty chairs before his desk seemed to fill with ghosts. If he looked farther, through the door of his office, he would see another impossibility: Lena, his secretary, his right-hand woman, loading items from her desk into a wooden crate that had once held confitures supérieures. Lena was packing. Leaving. Her moment, too, had arrived. He lifted his eyes and watched it happen. Into the box went her two Polish paperback novels, a bottle of toilet water, a bottle of aspirin, a miniature French dictionary, her address book, the fine old fountain pen that had been her father’s, and the extra blouse she’d always kept in her desk in case of accidents involving ink or wartime coffee. Though he’d overseen her visa applications himself, though he’d pressed the New York office to petition Washington on her behalf, though he’d written Eileen for help finding her an apartment in New York, he’d failed to believe Lena herself would ever consent to go, that he would someday witness her removing herself from his office, from the Centre Américain, from France. But it was true: if all went as planned, she would cross the Pyrenees two days from now.
“Mary Jayne,” he said, finally, desperately. “Won’t you get me nicely drunk?”
“Of course,” she said, extinguishing the cigarette. “It’s one of my specialities.”
“Let’s do it in Lena’s honor,” Varian said. “And spare no expense.”
Mary Jayne widened her eyes in mock outrage. “Spare expense? The idea!”
* * *
________
That night they threw Lena a farewell dinner at the Dorade, with half a dozen surrealists in attendance, and all the trimmings Vinciléoni could provide. He had closed the place to other business so the surrealists wouldn’t be surprised by the police, and had uncovered the piano in the corner so Grant could play. Grant, who hadn’t sat at a full-sized instrument for months, had no interest in dining. Instead he delivered a steady infusion of old jazz numbers and nostalgic Broadway tunes while Vinciléoni’s staff kept the glasses filled. There wasn’t much to eat anywhere in Marseille, but Vinciléoni had managed to produce dozens of mussels steamed in garlic and wine, olives in green-gold oil, and loaves of hard-crusted brown bread. Lena sat happily between Breton and Serge, digging the meat from her shellfish with a tiny fork. She’d chosen a dress of green crepe-de-chine that had never made an appearance at the office; Varian imagined her keeping it carefully packed in paper at the dusty hotel where she’d lived for the past nine months. At her breast she wore a bunch of near-transparent paperwhites, their scent like lilies crossed with scallions. If she felt anxious in the least about her imminent departure, she hid her feelings with masterful control.
Halfway through the second course, Danny Bénédite arrived with a slip of blue paper in his hand: an international cable. At first, no one else took note of him; to the accompaniment of Grant’s playing, the surrealists had begun a game of praise for Lena, one laudable attribute for every letter of the alphabet. Danny slid into an empty seat beside Theo and whispered something into her ear. An astonishing change came over Theo’s pale features: her skin flushed a deep rose, her narrow eyebrows arched, and her mouth bloomed into an expression that might have been mistaken for sexual satisfaction. She turned to Mary Jayne and whispered to her. Mary Jayne’s eyes widened, and she covered her mouth with her hand. Varian beckoned Danny, who came around the table and laid the telegram before him.
FRY: JAY ALLEN ARRESTED AT VICHY FOR REASONS UNSPECIFIED. DETAINED IN PRISON PENDING ARRAIGNMENT. ERC TO PURSUE. PLEASE RESUME FULL CONTROL OF CENTRE AMERICAIN UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. KINGDON.
“Well, well,” Varian said, flattening the telegram with both hands. “How about that?” He scanned the lines again, a vermilion glow rising through his stomach, his chest. “Look here, Danny. He even says please.”
“He would have done better to say ‘I’ve been a damned fool!’ ”
Lena, savoring a choice piece of praise from Breton—I for inarrêtable—gradually became aware that some event had stolen the attention of her fellow diners. “What is it?” she demanded of Varian. “Tell!”
Varian clinked his glass with his fork, and the table fell silent. “I regret to inform you,” he told the guests, “that our friend Mr. Allen has been arrested at Vichy. Reasons unspecified. I’m to resume full control, Kingdon says, until further notice.”
The silence lingered for a long moment; then a dozen voices lifted in a general cheer, and the diners tossed their napkins ceilingward. Grant played a series of ta-da’s, his eyes on Varian’s, gratified.
“All right,” Varian said. “Let’s not break out the champagne. Allen’s under arrest, and the Vichy police aren’t known for their excessive kindness.”
“Champagne!” Mary Jayne said, and gestured to the waiter. “Excellent idea. Three bottles to start with.”
“Do you think they’ll torture him, Varian?” Theo said, with obvious relish.
“Not Mr. Allen,” Lena said. “More likely, he will torture them!”
Miss Palmer, pale and quiet at her end of the table, asked, “What do we do? Are we to let him sit in jail?”
“ERC to pursue,” Danny said, giving her a small, tight smile.
“Let New York sweep up its own mess,” Mary Jayne said. “They can have him.”
A moment later, the champagne arrived and the waiter uncorked it. Glasses were filled all around. As the bubbles rose into Varian’s head, he told himself he’d be damned, actually damned to hell, if he let himself feel satisfaction at the detainment of a fellow American, a fellow journalist, particularly one who had already been roundly humiliated at the hands of the surrealists. But, he reminded himself, it had taken Jay Allen exactly six weeks to get arrested—and possibly to compromise the mission of the ERC in France—whereas he, Varian, had persisted since August, in the face of the near-constant attention of the French police, the near-total enmity of the U.S. Consulate, and the growing suspicion of Vichy. He’d seen Allen for a fool, had known at once that he would make some fatal mistake, and now it had happened, whatever it was.
But it was true, too, that he hadn’t been as careful with Allen as he might have been. In letting the surrealists play their game with him, in taking him to Air Bel and letting him pass an evening in the company assembled there, hadn’t he shown too much of his own hand? How much had Allen gleaned about Zilberman and Tobias? How much did Miss Palmer know, and what might she have told Allen? More than nothing, that was certain; at the very least he knew of their existence. And what might he say to the authorities now? Considering the animus he harbored toward Varian, how much damage would he be willing to do? He could land Varian in jail if he wanted, and Zilberman and Tobias in the camps. The time ha
d come, Varian thought, emptying his glass of champagne, to get his most sensitive protégés out of France.
* * *
________
Air Bel was a changed place in spring. Tiny chartreuse leaves, limp and purple-veined, sprang forth from the grapevines along the western border of the garden, and the lavender put forth an embarrassment of tight-curled buds. A plush of violets grew at the edge of the fountain, and fuchsias unfurled extravagant lanterns beside the walkways. At night a thousand frogs shot their echoing twangs across the pond. The noise kept Varian awake for hours, though sleep might have eluded him anyway. Since his move back to the villa—their move, his and Grant’s—he had felt a painful self-consciousness as he lay in his old bed, in his old room, though no one seemed to take special note of their occupying it together. Tobias had decamped to the slant-roofed attic just above, and Varian and Grant had taken to whispering whenever they knew he was there. Their sex had descended into a hushed register that harked back to Gore Hall days, a change not without its own erotic charge.
Now, accompanied by the frogs’ incessant call, Tobias traced a triangular route on the floor above, walking from one window to another, then slinging himself into his desk chair with an unmistakable creak. Light filtered down through the ceiling cracks; what was he doing up there? Though he spoke little, he always referred to his attic room as die Werkstatt. He guarded it jealously and admitted no one, a precaution that seemed wise enough to Varian. But what did a young genius’s Werkstatt look like? How did a physicist keep his mind agile in captivity?
After another half an hour in bed, listening to the slingshot jonk of the frogs and the creak and grind of Tobias’s drafting stool, Varian went to the washbasin, cleaned himself, donned a robe, and ventured up the winding stair to the attic door. He knocked softly, hoping not to startle Tobias, but a moment later came the sound of breaking glass and a muffled yelp. The door opened just a centimeter, and Tobias’s dark eye appeared.
“Mr. Fry,” he whispered. “Is something wrong?”
“No, nothing,” Varian said. “I couldn’t sleep, and I saw you were up too.”
“Forgive me, I’ve just spilled ether. I’m preserving butterflies, see?” He opened the door and handed Varian a velvet-flocked card with a yellow lepidopteran splayed upon it, then returned to the desk, where he knelt to wipe up a volatile stain spreading across the floor. He was unclad above the waist; below it he wore the dark green pajama pants Grant had procured for him in town. By now he had become lean as a racing dog on the scant rations, his ribcage a scaffold for his moon-pale skin.
“I caught that one yesterday,” he said. “They’re a nostalgic hobby. My mentor was fascinated by the physics of their flight.”
“Where did you get the ether?”
“Killer,” Tobias said, absently. He gathered the blue shards of the bottle into a rag, then lifted the bundle gingerly with two fingers, setting it in the wastepaper basket beside the desk. “I hope I’ve cleaned up most of it,” he said. “Otherwise, we’ll soon sleep like surgical patients, or die.”
“I’d welcome either, at this point.”
Tobias laughed. “I’ve given up trying to sleep at frogtime,” he said. “Try the day.”
“If only,” Varian said. So here it was, finally, the Werkstatt: the top of the desk cluttered with sheets of closely inscribed graph paper and diagrams of wings; more diagrams pinned to the wall below the window. Dog-eared notebooks stacked on the desk, pencils sharpened down to nubs, an ancient slide rule that looked as though it had survived a fire. “You know,” he said, “maybe you oughtn’t leave things lying around like this. What if it had been the police at the door?”
“I think they’d much rather have your escape-route maps than my drawings of butterfly wings.”
“I beg your pardon, Toby,” Varian said. “The Nazis may very much want to know your thoughts on the structures of wings.”
Tobias glanced toward his notes and shrugged. “Well, I suppose there’s no telling what they want. Better to be safe than sorry.” And he went to the desk and began gathering his notes, stowing them in a series of manila folders.
As Varian’s eyes adjusted to the light, he took in the peculiarities of the room: a birdcage, empty, hanging from a rafter; a dressmaker’s wire mannequin draped in a swath of dusty green velvet; a large plaster ceiling ornament, broken, of the kind that might have once encircled a chandelier; a stack of crates marked only with the words Plus Tard, packed, apparently, by a tidy procrastinator. Along the windowsill were an amazing variety of herbs tied into bundles; Tobias must have gathered them from the valley and brought them up here to dry. On a low table he’d spread one of Madame Nouguet’s crisp white sheets, and on it lay a display of pinned butterflies. Beside the table was his mattress, and a couple of padded blankets of the sort used to protect delicate plants from frost; he must have gotten them from Zilberman’s greenhouse. The place had the air and the smell of a boy’s clubhouse, and it filled Varian with false nostalgia for the kind of American boyhood he’d longed for but had never had.
“What would you say, Toby,” he asked now, “if I told you I may have found a way for you to leave France?”
Tobias, holding a pinned butterfly in one hand, sat down on the drafting stool. “How?”
“For some time now we’ve been sending British soldiers to northern Africa by sea. It’s not a long voyage, less than a day. The soldiers carry papers saying they’ve been decommissioned and are headed home. They stay in Oran or Casablanca or Algiers while they wait for passage back to England.”
Tobias looked at Varian aslant. “I’m not a British soldier.”
“Nor were you a guard at Vernet.”
“Oh,” he said. “I see.”
“Here’s what I’ve been thinking,” Varian said. “We can’t have anyone know you’re on one of those ships. Particularly not the gangster who’s been running them. But he’s been getting crew cards for the Brits who travel that route, and we could simply take one of those cards and put it into your hands. You’d dress as a British soldier and travel to Oran, most likely. You’d stay with the decommissioned Brits, but only long enough to secure an American entry visa, which I believe we can get you with Harry Bingham’s help. Then you’d take a liner to the Caribbean, and sail from there to New York. Would you be game, Tobias? There would be a great deal of risk.”
Tobias nodded. “I don’t mind the risk. Whatever happens, it’ll be a story to tell Sara.” He turned pensive for a moment, taking the slide rule into his hand. “How far, anyway, is Boston from New York? Are there frequent trains?”
“Three a day, at least. I used to take that route often. I went to school where Sara’s grandfather is a professor.”
“Yes, Mr. Grant told me that. He said you knew each other then.” He focused his dark eyes on Varian’s, and between them traveled a complicated freight of understanding. But Tobias made no comment on the subject; instead he looked at Varian with a kind of deep curiosity, as if studying him. After a moment he said, “I wonder if you’d tell me, Mr. Fry. There’s something I want. One small thing.”
“Anything, Tobias.”
“I want to know some lovely and secret place in Cambridge. I want a place to bring Sara.” He looked down at his pinned butterfly. “A place where a person might ask for a girl’s hand. Not in the usual way. In a way that will delight her, surprise her.”
“I see,” Varian said, and put a hand to his mouth and thought. “I believe I know the place you want. In Harvard Yard, on the west façade of a building called Sever Hall, there’s a great curved archway above the entrance—a half-circle of rounded brick. If you stand on one side and whisper into the curve, your words will cross the arch to the other side. Tell Sara to put her ear against the brick. Your message will travel.”
Tobias smiled slowly. “That’s just what I want,” he said. “Thank you.” And then he set the
pinned butterfly on the table with the others, straightening the corners of the cardboard so they aligned. “Find me a place on a ship,” he said. “I don’t care about the risk. It’s time I left this continent.”
“You’re a brave young man, Tobias.”
He shook his head. “Born at an unlucky time, that’s all. But you’ve made some luck for me, you and Mr. Grant. Maybe it will hold.”
* * *
________
In late morning, after Varian had slept a few hours, he sat in the greenhouse with Zilberman, unlayering the depths of the Flight Portfolio. By now it contained nearly fifty works, the product of three months’ appeal to the residents and friends of Air Bel. Some of the pieces had been executed on leaves torn from books, some on newspaper or on repurposed Vichy propaganda posters; some had been painted in miniature upon expired travel documents, papers that had failed to win their bearers exit from France. Chagall, Ernst, Lam, Lamba, Dominguez, Masson, Brauner: all had contributed, all had donated, stipulating only that the works be used to raise funds for the Centre Américain. Peggy Guggenheim had made all the arrangements for a show at a private gallery; from there the works would move to the Museum of Modern Art, thanks to Varian’s letters to Alfred Barr. Barr had written a piece about the Flight Portfolio for the Times, and they had printed it on the front page. His account of what it contained had inflamed desire among collectors, and a speculative bidding war had already begun. Barr had sent a clip of the piece to Varian, and Zilberman sat reading it now.
“Art and money, art and money,” he said. “I’ve always resented the link between the two, perhaps because I don’t usually make work that can be sold.” He smiled ruefully. “These collectors won’t know what they have—no one will know the value of this work, the real value of it, for years. But you’ll have the collectors’ money in the committee’s coffers. And you’ll know what to do with it.” He passed the clipping back to Varian, then went to the sink to clean his brushes.
The Flight Portfolio Page 43
