When finally they stopped, it was at the fishing village with the oil drum-and-driftwood bar in its tin-roofed cantina, the same elderly woman still knitting the same child’s garment in the same chair beside it. She’s slow, Bill thought, dully, or she has many grandchildren. His eyes and head and body ached from driving. He was forty years old and feeling every day of it. He asked the woman was there any fish stew to be had.
Always, she said.
He awoke Julia Smollen, half expecting her to leap out of some skittish nightmare off the back seat of the car. But she just rubbed her eyes with her knuckles and blinked and looked up at him and through the dust-caked rear window, at the gauzy sky.
‘Are we there?’
‘Halfway. Better than, actually. Are you hungry?’
She yawned and sat up and nodded.
After they had eaten and darkness had properly come, she took to the bed he had slept in on his outward journey. Bill returned to the car and sat with the windows open, the oiled weight of his gun heavy and reassuring in his right fist, waiting for the glow of headlamps on the flat horizon or, more likely, the hum of an approaching motor, closer, along the road. He waited calmly. He had never been a coward in the physical sense of the word. He would kill, if he needed to, to protect the woman and the carried child. But nothing came and there came the moment when he knew that nothing would. He looked at the sky, which was starlit and clear. No moon, but enough silver twinkling in the black abyss above him to read by, he thought. He put the infantry issue .45 into the holster he’d strapped under his left arm and reached into his jacket pocket. The letter from Martin was there. He would take it down to the beach and read it. By starlight and phosphorescence glowing from the sea, he would hear the voice of his dead friend talk to him for the last time.
Dear Bill,
If you are reading this, then I feel obliged to begin by saying farewell. We never did take the opportunity to say a proper goodbye to one another. That was a pity and a mistake. Much in recent years has been pitiful and mistaken. But there is neither the time nor the need to dwell on how anything might have been different.
So I will say my goodbye to you now. I sit and write this unable to help myself thinking of how you were in those days when we met. It seems long ago in years, further in memory, with many sadnesses and much loss intervening between then and now. But I remember you as you were then, old friend. You and your lovely wife, Lucy, the dazzling continental Americans; you like Gatsby, golden, or like Dick Diver raking his beach in his jockey cap and his Riviera tan. We were dreamers, weren’t we, Lillian and myself? We were romantic and impossibly naïve.
But it was a more romantic time, wasn’t it? It was how we saw you then. And you never lost the lustre, in the way those fictive characters were fated to do. It’s how I see you now, Bill, just as I saw you then, in your generosity and your hospitality and grace.
I walked away from the war, Bill, which is an act of treason in a soldier. I write this a fugitive, wearing civilian clothes. Men I would until recently have called comrades have been dispatched to capture me. When they try to do so I will kill them in order to secure my escape and win the freedom of the woman who has delivered this note. The fact that you have it in your hand means that I will at least have half succeeded.
My pride and vanity oblige me to tell you, truthfully, that I fought with distinction. But there came a time, eventually, when there seemed no worthwhile point to the fighting. This war is being prosecuted by my country. I still love my country. But I could not find it in me any longer to believe we have a cause.
Julia Smollen is a part of it.
I have not sacrificed honour on the altar of love. I do, with all my heart, love her. But the circumstances in which I first encountered her simply helped prove to me that I had no honour to sacrifice.
Over recent months I have been forced to confront some hard truths. My hope and consolation has been the lovely, noble woman bearing this note. I want to thank you for your gift of friendship, Bill. An only child, I could have wished for no finer or truer brother and felt happy and grateful in my heart to know you. In recent years, you have lived only in my memories. I have cherished them.
I ask you, please, help this woman if you can. I love her. She carries my child.
Martin
Bill took the letter to the edge of the sea where the breeze caused the pages to flutter in his fingers. The sand was heavy and hard at the edge of the water with its weight of brine. Seaweed in glossy clusters bobbed and bowed in the ceaseless back and forth of the waves. Bubbles of foam burst on the sand in those intervals when the sea briefly receded. Some solitary beast of the sea broke the night silence with occasional cries that sounded distant and mournful. A seal, perhaps. Perhaps even a whale, searching for some forgotten latitude or mate butchered by hunters in boats. Bill listened to the sea. Far out, he thought he saw its surface briefly stippled by a shoal of flying fish. Light from the stars smoothed and gilded the water. He breathed a long breath through his nostrils and smelled the metallic perfume of the oil he’d used to clean his gun earlier in the evening, as the weapon creaked, heavy in its leather holster. And he heard the footsteps approach on the sand behind him until they stopped. And he did not turn.
‘Hello, Julia.’
‘How did you know it was me?’
‘The weight of your steps. The length of your stride.’
‘Are you all right?’
He cleared his throat. ‘You should worry about yourself.’
The cry came again, mournful, from the sea.
‘What was that?’
Bill didn’t answer. He still had not turned to face her.
‘He said you were a remarkable man. That was the word he used.’
One of his current clients was the actor Errol Flynn. More accurately, he had been engaged by the studio currently employing Flynn to troubleshoot on Flynn’s behalf until the movie wrapped. It was a war movie.
In the picture, Flynn played some kind of intrepid English jungle fighter, fighting the Japs. Before the real war, Flynn had been very pally with the English actor David Niven. But Flynn was a star who could carry a picture. Niven was more of a support player who skated along on a veneer of English charm. At the outbreak of war, Niven had gone back to England and trained to be part of some kind of elite combat unit. Bill had heard that he’d been involved in heavy infantry fighting before the fall of France. He’d come close to being killed. Now, he was in the thick of it in Italy. Meanwhile, Flynn pulled the pins from fake grenades with his teeth, wearing Max Factor as the lead player in a Hollywood feature. And Bill did what he could to stop the actor indulging his appetite for the young flesh of both sexes.
Bill didn’t personally chaperone Errol Flynn. That task was punctiliously endured by a young, teetotal intern from his office. And the rolling contract he had with the studio was one of the many retainers that had provided him, for nearly twenty years, with an increasingly lucrative career and an enviably comfortable life.
Bill had met Niven at a number of dinners and receptions and dreary rounds of cocktail parties before the war. He had thought the English actor a man who had to work extremely hard to compensate for his lack of skill and impact on the screen. But Niven was a man, it seemed, with remarkable qualities. And Martin Hamer was Bill’s idea of a remarkable man.
‘What do you do, Julia?’ Finally, he turned to face her. ‘Before the war, I mean. What did you do before the war? Did you have a profession?’
‘I was a librarian.’
He nodded. ‘Do you read English as well as you speak it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then we’ll find you something. We’ll take care of you.’
If Julia wondered at that plural, she didn’t question it. ‘Come here,’ she said. He did. ‘Hold me,’ she said. And he held her. They held one another in the night at the edge of the sea.
Two
America never seemed to Julia Smollen like a country at war. It lacked battlef
ields and their desolate aftermath. There were no trains of desperate refugees. There were camps, apparently, out in the desert in New Mexico, where Americans of Japanese extraction were held for the duration. But she never felt the dread vibration of artillery shells or the drone of approaching bomber squadrons.
America fought its war at a remove. In the streets, in the shops and the schoolrooms and cafés, there was no fear abroad; there wasn’t even the need for the rationing of power or food. Mostly absent was the rumour of defeat that spread among a panicked people with the debilitating symptoms of a disease. The Americans were confident of victory. They were going to win this war that never threatened their soil.
But she read the newspapers and she saw the newsreels at the cinema. She saw footage of the landing at Normandy and the marine assault on Okinawa in the bloody campaign in the Pacific. And she came to appreciate the courage of the American soldiers and the resolve of their leadership. America fought its war with a professionalism almost comically absent from what she had witnessed in the tragedy of Poland’s conquest. She thought of her poor, dead brother and the clumsy espionage attempt that had led to his torture and execution. She thought of the Germans who had killed him; the bullish swagger of their victory and the dull, routine cruelty of occupation, They were not swaggering now, the Germans, she thought, reading about an American general called Patton. With his pearl-handled pistols and riding crop, George Patton seemed like some character from the pages of a comic book. But in battles and skirmishes with tanks, he was destroying crack German divisions on the fields and in the forests of northern Europe.
She thought, of course, about the German who had fathered the child she carried. As her belly swelled and the baby grew and kicked with incipient life, she thought tenderly of its father. He had been a soldier hero, decorated by Hitler himself amid much ceremony at the Reich Chancellery. She had seen him kill a man with his hands in the rain at night in a camp in Poland with no more hesitation than a peasant might register before twisting a chicken’s neck or banging the head of a rabbit against a fence post. Martin Hamer had been a brave and ruthless patriot. She could imagine no more purely forged example of the steel in the storm that had spread from Germany and engulfed a continent. But he had been kind and tender and good, also. He had sacrificed his rank and renounced his country and saved her life out of love. And she grieved for him. And she was bitterly sorry that he had not lived to share the joy of their child.
Bill, who had been his friend, did his best, now, to make himself hers. He used his influential contacts to get her American citizenship, the papers stamped and passport supplied within weeks of their flight from Mexico. He got her a comfortable apartment in San Francisco with more amenities than she had ever seen in a home and paid the rent for a year and charged the utilities to an account he set up and put money into, a separate checking account he opened for her at a San Francisco bank.
‘I can’t take this,’ she said, looking at the balance on the account.
‘Just until you get yourself established,’ he said.
‘I can’t take this amount of money from you, Bill.’
‘If only my ex-wife shared your Polish scruples,’ he said, laughing.
‘Bill—’
‘Call it a loan, Julia,’ he said.
She looked around the apartment. The walls were freshly painted and the sunlight slatted through blue blinds and splashed yellow bars on the floor. She could hear the hum in the kitchen of the big American refrigerator. The lambent bars of light on the floor trembled when the blinds moved in the breeze from the ocean. The apartment was near to a flower market and she could smell flowers, freshly cut, through her windows above the street. Azaleas, orchids, lilies, lavender. In a tall pine bookcase she saw tides by Conrad and the Brothers Grimm and Flaubert and Thomas Hardy. They had discussed her love of books, her favourite authors, after their rest stop on the long drive out of Mexico. And there were pictures on the walls. She recognized Dufy’s painted summer boats.
‘You must have loved him.’
‘Oh, you know,’ Bill said. ‘We had some times. We sure had some times. But I’m not doing this for him.’
He was there when her daughter was delivered. Born frail, the baby spent her first week, when not being fed, in an incubator at the side of Julia’s hospital bed. Bill tapped the glass of the incubator and the baby gazed up at him with her open-eyed look of newborn wonder.
‘You okay, kid?’
‘I know. ‘I’m sad,’ Julia said. Her face was in her pillow.
I know you are.’
There was a silence then, for which Julia was grateful. She wanted him there and she didn’t.
Bill waved to the baby through the glass.
‘She’s beautiful. Have you decided on a name?’
‘Natasha,’ Julia said.
‘Natasha isn’t a Polish name.’
‘I don’t feel very Polish.’ And she didn’t. Her parents were dead. Her brother had been killed. Her last three years in the country of her birth had been spent as an inmate of a labour camp a few miles outside Poznan. Her job had been washing laundry, when it hadn’t been servicing camp guards. She was an American now. She had the papers and the passport to prove it. She had given birth to a daughter here.
When Bill became godfather to Natasha a week after the baby left the hospital, it was at a Catholic baptism at an Italian church in the Bay area. His hands shook at the ceremony and his face was pale and there was sweat in a sheen under his sallow skin. The area beneath his eyes seemed almost bruised by shadow and there were cracks of dryness at the corners of his mouth. He had been drinking, she knew, and drinking heavily. He was not precisely drunk. But he did not look as though he had been properly sober for a week. His movements were clumsy with absence of sleep and he seemed smaller, somehow, diminished by guilt and delicacy. She had grown up in a country of hard liquor consumed relentlessly by Poland’s drinking classes. But she had never seen anyone brought so low in spirit by drink as Bill appeared. As soon as they left the cool, marble sanctity of the church, he fumbled on his sunglasses. In the light, his suit looked slept in and she saw that one of his shoes had scuffed, raw leather scabbing the polished toecap.
These details had eluded her when he had picked her up, preoccupied as she was by the baby in her christening shawl, distracted by the sight of the car at the kerb with its chauffeur and ivory satin ribbons stretching back from the figurehead on its hood.
‘You look unhappy, Bill,’ she said, the baby across her lap, dozing, as they were driven back to her apartment.
‘Everyone is entitled to a little unhappiness, Julia,’ he said. His voice was mock grave.
‘Is it written into the constitution?’
‘If it isn’t, it should be. Perhaps I’ll raise the matter with the Supreme Court. Suggest the constitution is amended to guarantee the interests of the morose and the gloomy. Champion the cause of our melancholy minority. We have an inalienable right to our unhappiness.’
She smiled and kissed the baby’s head and ruffled her halo of fluffy blonde hair. He was putting a brave face on things. But he’d been wallowing in booze for days. And it wasn’t over nothing.
‘I’m happy for you, today,’ he said. He looked at Natasha. ‘She has her father’s eyes.’
‘I pray hers never see what his did.’
‘Amen to that,’ Bill said. He sank back into the plush leather seat. A fog had descended around the bay and car headlamps loomed through it pale and amoebic, like creatures from deep under the sea. Julia leant into Bill, her head on the width of his shoulder. She did it for comfort. But the gesture was more about giving than it was about receiving. She had her comfort. Her comfort slept the sleep of the innocent, wrapped in a christening shawl in her lap.
Later that night, after Bill had gone, Julia was awoken by the lunar wail of sirens. She rubbed her eyes and looked at Natasha’s crib. The baby slept. For a moment panic coiled her insides at the thought of her child’s exposure to
an air raid. There were no shelters. There was no drill, no provision. But it couldn’t be bombs, could it? She climbed out of bed and pulled up the blinds and saw searchlights out in the bay, cleaving pale avenues of light through the fog. Boats were out: tugs and police launches, from the small, pugnacious sound of their engines. She heard the cackle of a loudhailer out over the water. Fog and waves distorted the amplified sound into something whispery and inhuman.
‘I hope you get away,’ Julia said. ‘I hope you get away, whatever you’ve done.’
They said that nobody escaped from Alcatraz. She often looked towards the island, to that small patch of confinement and misery squatting in the sea. And she wondered if the inmates were tortured by a view between bars of the lush, proud sweep of San Francisco Bay. The boats bobbing in its harbour; the splendours of Nob Hill; the tramcars twinkling under coach paint and polish as they toiled up its picturesque city ascents. Al Capone had died in there. It was a place peopled by the bad and the mad, the infamous and probably the innocent too; but they were all equally damned, weren’t they?
She looked at the face of Martin Hamer’s watch. It was three-fifteen in the morning, the water cold and deep and unforgiving under the fog in the bay. She had called Bill a cab at midnight, after any number of Martinis from the jug she had mixed that morning and left to chill in the big chrome refrigerator. He’d cheered up a bit after a few drinks, become more loquacious in that clubby, conspiratorial manner he used to keep people at a safe distance. She played jazz records on the stereogram he had bought her in furnishing the apartment. She had played them quietly, so as not to wake the baby in her crib. They even danced a little, which Julia could not remember having done for years. She didn’t know what had wounded him. He was a kind, wounded man. But it was a time when there were a great many wounded people in the world. On the battlefields, in the bombed cities, the world itself wore wounds. On leaving he had hugged her tight and thanked her for the great compliment of asking him to act as godfather to her child. He had pulled a small black box wrapped in silk ribbon from his pocket and presented it to her. After he left, she had taken a bracelet of fine, beaten silver from the box. Natasha wore it now around one deliciously chubby ankle.
A Shadow on the Sun Page 3
