The Flight Portfolio

by Julie Orringer

  “Skiff, about that,” Varian began, but he couldn’t go on. His mind kept returning to Zilberman, to the way he’d said what he’d said, to his expression as he sat handcuffed in that metal chair at the Evêché, a line of blood running from his temple into his collar. Zilberman hadn’t spoken like a vindictive man; he hadn’t spoken like someone whose intent was to injure or destroy. He had spoken like a person telling the truth. And if he was telling the truth, then Grant—it couldn’t be avoided—had lied. He had lied horribly, at the expense of a life.

  “Well,” Grant said. “Perhaps I’ll see you sometime in New York.”

  It struck him then that this was all really happening, what he’d sworn would never happen again: they were saying goodbye, letting each other go. If Grant walked through the door of that restaurant, if he took a train to Lisbon tomorrow morning, nothing would ever be resolved between them; the terrible question in his mind would never be answered, or would be answered only in favor of Grant as liar. But how could that be, how was it possible, when the last nine months had seemed the only truth-telling of Varian’s life? How could he wake up tomorrow knowing that Elliott Grant, that particular collection of cells, of inanimate elements made animate by some force that claimed kinship with Varian, would walk to the station, mount the steps of a westbound train, and be carried down the long coastal railway toward Cerbère, over the border into Spain, then down into Portugal, and then, in an airborne metal vessel, across the Atlantic?

  Coward, a voice said in his head. You’re a goddamn coward.

  But was it cowardice to call out a lie, to insist on truth?

  Grant reached across the table, and, for an unbearable moment, clasped Varian’s hand. Varian sat still as ice, wanting only to keep Grant from moving, to keep feeling the warmth of his blood through his skin. He tried to meet Grant’s eye, but Grant averted his gaze. And Varian thought: Guilty. At the moment of parting, you can’t even look at me. He extracted his hand from Grant’s, got up, threw bills on the table, and left the bar without a backward glance.

  37

  Under the Knife

  As he walked toward the Evêché, trying to push Grant from his mind, what kept rising to the surface was his memory of the afternoon when he’d met with Chester Greenough on the day of his expulsion from Harvard. His solemn passage through the echoing Gothic arches that gave onto the quad, his transit along those leaf-shadowed brick paths, a rub of John Harvard’s shoe for luck, the ascent through a high-windowed building that smelled of linseed oil and pencil shavings. Then, in Dean Greenough’s office, dense crimson draperies and noise-effacing Persian rugs, scent of fresh-brewed coffee, and Greenough himself like a magistrate behind his fortress of a desk, looking down the bridge of his heirloom nose, waiting to pass judgment upon Varian. And Varian had been in the wrong, no doubt about it. But what had rankled him then, as now, was the sheer imbalance of power: his own will against the whole of Harvard’s; his own power against that collective power.

  How much did the will of a single person count for? How much force could it exert against a university, a government? He had set his own will, in collusion with his intelligence, against Vichy and the Gestapo from the moment he’d arrived in Marseille; he had fought with what he considered to be some success. But how long could he hold out against the power manifested in the Evêché, tricolor flags bristling from its gates, armed sentries in its guard-boxes, the stone archway like an open mouth at its center? He passed through the massive carved door, gave his name at the desk, and was conducted by a uniformed functionary to a large and unfamiliar waiting room. He was the only person in it; the room was silent except for the tick of an enormous mantelpiece clock. Between the windows, mounted upon an oval of green velvet, hung a magnificent military knife with a filigreed blade, almost a short sword, the kind of weapon used to kill a dueling partner at close range.

  He sat beneath the knife and waited. In his mind there was no safe quarter: in one corner stood Zilberman, who, in an interrogation room somewhere in the roots of this building, had delivered his revelation; in another corner was the precious Flight Portfolio, still held captive within these walls; in the third was de Rodellec du Porzic, the man who might seal his doom; and in the fourth was Grant, doing what at that very moment? Packing his beloved and familiar things, the books he’d been reading, the shirts and pants Varian had stripped from his body again and again those last nine months? Writing to Gregor? Writing to him, to Varian, a letter in which he’d own the lie he’d told and pave a path for Varian to forgive him? Was he forgivable? That morning he had seemed entirely unrepentant. In the face of their impending separation he had managed to laugh. And Varian had laughed with him, ignoring for a moment all the declarations he’d made to Grant, all of Grant’s avowals, all of Grant’s subtle and unconscious-seeming acting, his own terrible vulnerability, and the unspeakable thing he himself had done to Eileen, whose only crime had been to marry a person imperfectly capable of loving her. The thought of it made him want to take the ornamental knife from its velvet oval and disembowel himself that very minute, there on the gold-scrolled rug of du Porzic’s waiting room.

  And then at last the uniformed functionary returned, commanded Varian to his feet, and led him through the great carved door. Behind the desk sat Maurice Anne Marie de Rodellec du Porzic himself, Chief of Police, Grand Overseer of the Region of the Bouches du Rhône, resplendent in his decorated uniform, his steel-colored hair pomaded to a high sleek gloss. He wore an antiquated-looking mustache, crisp at the tips, and a pair of small round gold-framed glasses; he had the look of someone who had been stout and then lost a great deal of weight. The skin hung soft at his chin, dull as a deflated balloon, and his eyes had a hungry cast. He dismissed the functionary with a nod.

  For what seemed an eternity he looked at Varian in silence, studying him, memorizing him, seeming to confirm a description someone else had delivered to him in minute detail. Varian willed himself to meet du Porzic’s eye, willed himself not to powderize under that abrasive gaze. At last du Porzic opened a manila dossier on his desk and began to page through it, turning over leaf after leaf of what must have been documentation of Varian’s activities in France. There was the familiar letterhead of the Centre Américain de Secours, and the ERC; there were the embossed seals of the embassy and the American consulate. More than once, he recognized the signature of Hugh Fullerton, who must have been all too glad to cooperate with the Evêché regarding Varian’s fate. When he had turned over the last document, du Porzic removed his gold-rimmed spectacles and spoke.

  “What can be said for a man like you, Monsieur Fry, a man whose own consulate desires to wash its hands of him? Hugh Fullerton disliked you from the start. He insisted to my predecessor, and he insists to me, that you have done nothing but make trouble for his organization here in Marseille.”

  “I’ve only asked the consulate to do its job.”

  “Not according to Monsieur Fullerton. He says you asked the consulate to cover your illegal acts.”

  “All I’ve done, Captain, is to provide relief to refugees. Just the same as the Unitarian organization, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the Masons, and many others I could name.”

  “So you say.”

  “Because it’s the truth.”

  “Then tell me, please, why is it is that both your government and your sponsoring organization have called you home repeatedly, resorting at times to threats?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “It’s all here in your dossier. Your committee ordered you to return home in October, but you ignored them. In January, when they attempted to replace you, you refused to surrender your post. And here we have a facsimile of a cable from the Emergency Rescue Committee, New York Office, dated yesterday afternoon. FRY: YOUR RETURN REQUESTED IMMEDIATELY. FURTHER DELAYS ERC SHALL CEASE TO PROTECT OR SPONSOR YOU. KINGDON.”

  “You’re
ahead of me there. I haven’t received that cable myself.”

  “Perhaps you should consult your office staff. The consulate has just written to me to the same effect. The recent arrest of your secretary, Monsieur Bénédite, places your organization, and you yourself, under deepest suspicion. As far as we’re concerned, you are just as guilty as he is.”

  “You’ve got no proof of that. And your chief witness, Kourillo, is a known liar. He’ll say anything, as long as there’s a payoff. It’ll come out in court, I assure you.”

  Du Porzic sat back in his chair, folding his spectacles. “Proof!” he said. “Do you know what happens, Monsieur Fry, when a justice system demands absolute proof?”

  “Innocent men aren’t thrown in jail?”

  “Guilty men go free. Hundreds of them. In wartime we cannot err in that direction. That was the old France, the Republic, where packs of criminals roamed the streets, thanks to our fear of a single wrongful conviction.” He got up from the desk and went to the window. “When I was a boy, my father told me that my first job as a grown man would be to protect my family, then to protect France. He believed, as I do now, that the laws were weak. They were the laws of a people who valued the good of the individual at the expense of the whole. But now all of Europe prepares to embrace a swifter path to justice. The word conviction—it is nearly the same in English as it is in French, is it not?—signifies belief. Based upon the evidence in this dossier, I have formed the belief that you’ve flouted the laws of France. That is the only conviction I require to carry out justice as I see fit.”

  “And how do you propose to do that, Captain?”

  “Unless you leave France within the week, I will have you arrested and interned.”

  “On what grounds? For what crime?”

  Du Porzic shook his head. “Your mind, Monsieur Fry, is still mired in the laws of your own country. It’s a pity you can’t see things as I do! Our way is elegant and absolute. Soon it will be the only way.” He sat down at his desk again and polished his spectacles contemplatively.

  “Captain du Porzic,” Varian said. “Please understand. I can’t just pick up and leave this instant. My organization serves the basic needs of hundreds of clients. Before I vacate my position, the New York office has to find a suitable replacement. And once the new man arrives, he’ll have to be trained.”

  Du Porzic folded his hands across his chest. “Let me ask you, Monsieur Fry. Do you fully understand, have I made clear to you, that each day you stay in France, the Gestapo increases its pressure upon us? If they come for you, we can offer you no protection whatever.”

  “Yes, you’ve made that perfectly clear.”

  “Why do you persist, then? Why do you care so very much about the fate of your organization, and so little about your own welfare, when the people you’re assisting—Jews, anti-Nazis, degenerate Negroid artists like Wifredo Lam, sexual inverts like Konstantinov—are the basest forms of humankind? Look at you. You’re a thinking man, a Christian man, educated at the best American institutions. Why are you imperiling yourself for the sake of that filth? How do you justify it?”

  “Is this official business, Captain?”

  “I’m asking merely from personal curiosity. Tell me why.”

  “Those people are my people,” Varian said. “If I don’t help them, no one will.”

  * * *

  ________

  The original of Kingdon’s cable waited for him back at the office. Once he’d read it, once he’d assured himself that it was genuine, he went to Danny and drew him aside. Du Porzic meant to arrest him; in the end, he’d refused to give Varian more than a week.

  “It’s my fault,” Danny said. “If I hadn’t gotten myself arrested, you wouldn’t be in this position.”

  “That’s nonsense. It was Kourillo who got you arrested. And Vichy’s wanted me out for months. It’s just become more urgent now.”

  “We must find a way for you to stay.”

  “Maybe we will. But in the meantime we’ve got to keep quiet. I’ll cable Kingdon tomorrow morning and tell him to find someone to replace me. I don’t care who it is, because as soon as I’m out, you’ll be running the operation, Danny. You and Jean. You’ll work as a team, at least until your papers come through and you and Theo leave for the States. Then Jean will carry on alone.”

  “Of course, Varian. Of course we will. We’ll keep the Fittko route running. And as soon as the sea route opens again, we’ll fill it with our people.”

  “And Zilberman. You’ve got to keep looking for him. The consulate won’t do it. If he’s alive somewhere, if there’s a chance we can help him, we have to do it ourselves.”

  Danny took off his small silver-framed glasses and held them in his hands. “Varian,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “Zilberman is dead. There can be no question. He carried poison. He wouldn’t have let himself be tortured.”

  “How do you know that? How can you know?”

  “He told me. It was at the party for the Bretons, when we were all in the garden after dinner. He told me he’d gotten it from a doctor in Arles. He said he’d written his wife and daughter about it, in case he was arrested. That letter you found in the cellar under his studio—I thought you might have read it.”

  “No,” Varian said. “No. It wasn’t addressed to me.”

  “It’s over,” Danny said. “It was likely over before he reached Paris.”

  He had known it all along; had known that when Zilberman stepped up onto that deportation train he was as good as dead. Amid the other sources of despair—perhaps to counteract them—he had suppressed the knowledge. But he couldn’t suppress it any longer. He asked Danny to leave him alone, told him to close the door behind him. Then he put his head down on his desk, on the blotter scrawled with half-formed emigration plans and encrypted names and financial calculations, and cried until the ink ran a pale salt-blue.

  * * *

  ________

  Some time later—the light had begun to shift toward evening, casting violet shadows into the corners of the room—he heard the outer door open and close, then a familiar voice. Danny and Theo raised their own voices in greeting; a woman’s sure footsteps crossed the floor. His office door opened and in walked Mary Jayne in a blue silk afternoon dress the color of forget-me-nots, a gold leather pocketbook in one hand, embroidered platform sandals on her feet. She approached the desk and seated herself in the interview chair, crossing her legs at the ankle. Her position radiated her usual strength, her shoulders turned at an angle of basic defiance; but when she raised her eyes he could see they were inflamed and damp, twin comet tails of kohl dragged underneath.

  “Looks like we’ve both had a bad day,” Varian said. It came out harder than he meant it to, but Mary Jayne refused to avert her gaze. “I haven’t known for weeks where to find you. I appreciate your sending Navarre. He did his best for us. But you might have shown your face around here.”

  “I want to be with those who care to see me,” she said.

  “Can you blame me, Mary Jayne? After you refused to dissociate yourself from that spider, that liar and thief?”

  “You can’t hold me responsible for Killer’s actions,” she said, evenly.

  “Can’t I?” Varian said. “You kept him around, knowing what kind of person he was, what kind of company he kept. I don’t care to comment on the nature of your relationship with him—that’s your business. But once you learned who he was, you should have cut him loose. You had a responsibility to. You should have had some idea, some inkling, that your decisions might reach beyond your own affairs.”

  “Raymond’s in a concentration camp,” Mary Jayne said. “He’s a prisoner of war. He knew he was in trouble. He tried to get over the border, and they caught him. Now he’s at Miranda de Ebro, where they’ve got him chained like a dog. He had to bribe
them to let him write to me.”

  “So he says.”

  “For God’s sake, Varian! Navarre’s seen him. I spoke to him half an hour ago.”

  “What do you expect me to do about it? He sold us out, more than once. He stole from you repeatedly. He stole the diamond bracelet your father gave your mother thirty years ago. Doesn’t that mean anything? He deserves nothing from you, Mary Jayne. We’re finished with him, and you should be, too.”

  She pressed her lips together for a long moment. “Don’t presume to tell me what I should and shouldn’t do. You don’t know him at all. There’s more to him than what’s on the surface. And he’s so young, scarcely twenty-three.”

  “Gussie’s nineteen. Somehow he seems to be able to tell right from wrong.”

  Mary Jayne went to the window and sat on the sill, her shoulders curling. When she spoke again, her voice was a low rasp; he had to strain to hear her. “Why should you be the only one who gets to be happy?” she said. “You and Grant, always filching moments alone, taking off for some little town on weekends, putting your heads together over some novel or other, reminiscing about college, walking in the goddamn garden in the goddamn moonlight like a pair of goddamn—”

  “Stop it, Mary Jayne,” he said. “Stop it. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I know,” she said. “I know it when I see it. You can’t begrudge me my own miserable little bit, even if it can’t be that.”

  “Grant’s going home,” Varian said. “He leaves for Lisbon in the morning.”

  She looked up at him, frowning. “What’s happened?”

  “The short story is that he’s been called back for a disciplinary meeting at Columbia. But we quarreled, is what happened. He lied to me, and I found out about it. And it was a costly lie. It cost Zilberman his life.”