Pantheon

by Sam Bourne

  Then on an inside page of the Register of July the twenty-fifth, he saw it: a photograph showing the window of a railway train, the frame filled with the faces of six children, one a baby on the lap of her mother. The caption read ‘Refugees Find New Haven in Land Holding Promise of Peace’ — but the woman was not Florence.

  His eye combed the story, searching for names. There was a Spokes, a Handfield-Jones and a Phelps-Brown, but no Zennor and no Walsingham. Still, this at least was written confirmation that he had not gone on a wild goose chase, that he had been right to cross the ocean and come to Yale. The Oxford children were here. Then he spotted another, smaller photo lower down. Was that Harry, a blurred little face in the corner? He desperately wanted it to be, but now that he looked closer, he doubted it.

  Of course there were two dozen mothers and five times as many children; it meant nothing that his wife and child had not been mentioned in the article. And yet he had never met any man with a camera who had been able to resist taking photographs of Florence. Half of the press stories about the People’s Olympiad seemed to be accompanied by a shot of the beautiful British swimmer Florence Walsingham. As a result, he had all but assumed that if the New Haven papers had made any mention at all of the Oxford arrivals, his wife would feature prominently.

  But there could be other stories. He advanced to the editions for the subsequent days, eventually finding this: ‘Dress of British Refugees Here Sets Them Apart From US Youth’. There was another picture, of older girls, and a story about the long outer coats and long ‘short pants’ of the younger boys — but no photograph and no mention of Harry. There were references to the sandals and school blazers, with insignia ‘emblazoned on the pockets’, and much excitement over the ‘natural color straw hats to protect them from the rays of the sun’, especially the hat worn by one little girl on top of her pigtails. Back numbers of the Yale Daily News served up similar offerings, but of Florence and Harry there was not a trace.

  He could see immediately why the Assistant Dean had wanted to meet here. A good twenty-minute walk from the university district, all the way down Chapel Street as if descending to some lower realm, this place was on the literal other side of the tracks — across the railway bridge and in the poor part of town. James was no longer among students in varsity football jerseys and professors in seersucker suits, but Italian immigrants, dark young men with slicked-back hair standing on street corners, their mothers swaddled in black, escaping the late summer heat in the house by sitting out on the stoop. If it was a secret meeting the Assistant Dean was after, this was just the place: surely no one would recognize him here, in New Haven’s Little Italy.

  There was no missing Frank Pepe’s: a sign covered an entire wall of the building announcing it as a Pizzeria Napoletana, a phrase that meant next to nothing to James. Had he heard one of the Italians in Spain mentioning pizza? He might have done, but he still had little idea what it was.

  Once inside he saw something that looked as if it belonged in a locomotive: on the far wall, surrounded by white tiles as wide as bricks, was a gaping hole filled by a roaring fire. Several chefs were standing before it, like the crew of a steam engine, apparently stoking the flames. Once he had watched, mesmerized, for a while, he realized they were in fact clutching long paddles which they used to deposit and retrieve discs of dough larger than gramophone records in what was a giant oven.

  He was not sure of the etiquette of such a place. Would the Assistant Dean have made a reservation? It was no good if he had: he had never caught the man’s name. James decided to take up a position under the green awning just outside, and wait.

  He hoped that if he looked out of place now it would be as a Yale man in the wrong part of town rather than as an Englishman abroad. At the J Press store on York Street he had invested in a jacket like those he had seen worn by college men his age, as well as a couple of shirts. The article in the local paper had made him realize that clothes that might strike an Englishman as perfectly ordinary could look strange and exotic to an American. And he did not want to stand out.

  He wondered yet again why the Assistant Dean, an official whom he had never met, had offered to help him. How did he even know what help James needed? Was the rough manhandling and forced ejection from the building all a show and, if so, for whose benefit? What help was the man able to give him and why did it have to be secret?

  James had no good answers to any of these questions and over the last six hours he had damped down his expectations, suspecting the Assistant Dean would probably not even turn up. But now, at twenty-five past seven, he glimpsed the outline of the man who had earlier whispered so urgently and promisingly into his ear, and he could not help but feel excited. Did this man know where Florence and Harry were and was he about to pass on that information?

  On the pavement by the open door, the Assistant Dean gave him no more than a nod of greeting, beckoning him to follow him inside. He asked the waitress for a booth and was taken straight away to an arrangement of dark green benches with high wooden backs, with a tall post marking one booth from the other. Clearly familiar with this layout, the Assistant Dean instantly removed his jacket and hung it on the coat hook at the top of the post. There were two wide rings visible under the arms of his white shirt, sweat patches which, James concluded, suggested nerves rather than merely the sticky heat of a summer night in Connecticut.

  ‘George Lund,’ the man said, offering a brief, cramped handshake across the table. ‘Best if we look like we know each other.’ He gave James a wide and painfully artificial smile. If it was intended to convey long friendship with and affection for James, it would have instantly failed: the man simply looked strange.

  ‘Well, it’s good of you to see me,’ James began. ‘My situation is-’

  ‘We should order. There’s no one on that table over my left shoulder is there? No one who can hear what you’re saying or see us talking?’

  James frowned. ‘Just a family; the adults have their backs to us and the children aren’t interested.’

  At Lund’s insistence, they ordered right away, James opting for what was called a pizza margherita, which his host said was the best introduction to the dish for a novice. Lund made a point of doing the ordering. ‘Best if no one hears your accent,’ he explained once the waitress had gone.

  Quietly, James attempted to restart the conversation and keep it light, calm the chap down a bit. ‘So how long have you been at Yale?’

  ‘Ten years. Straight out of college and into the faculty. The medical school.’

  ‘So you’re a doctor.’

  ‘Qualified but not practising. Preston recruited me straight after my final exams, to help him run the department.’

  ‘Preston?’

  Lund looked puzzled. He was about to say something when the food arrived. Two plates the size of wagon wheels, steam rising from vast patches of melted cheese and deep gory smears of red that revealed themselves to be cooked tomatoes. James thought back to The Racket in Oxford, where this very evening there might be a few couples hiding behind the blackout curtains, sharing a small plate of tinned baked beans on a single slice of toast. What a contrast. Everything about this country screamed plenty; a single one of these pizzas would probably account for a month’s rations.

  ‘Preston McAndrew,’ Lund continued when they were alone again. ‘The man you came to see today.’

  ‘Oh, the Dean.’

  ‘Yes, though he wasn’t Dean then. Only head of the Medical School.’

  ‘And he’s your boss.’

  Lund nodded, his eyes darting to a far corner of the room. ‘Listen, I should have said this before. You won’t tell anyone about this meeting, right?’

  ‘Not if you don’t want me to.’

  ‘I mean it. This entire conversation, even the fact that I’m here, is confidential. Are we agreed?’

  ‘We’re agreed.’ James noticed that Lund was methodically cutting up his pizza into even-sized slices but had not yet eaten any of them.
James was not sure if he was allowed to begin eating or should wait. Was this an American custom?

  ‘I’ve taken a risk doing this,’ Lund said, still not eating.

  ‘What kind of risk?’

  ‘Never mind that. Now, why did you come into the Dean’s office today?’

  ‘I thought you knew. Isn’t that why you said you could help-’

  Lund glared. ‘Don’t repeat that here.’

  ‘But I thought you heard what was going on outside your door. With me and the secretary. I thought you knew.’

  ‘I heard the secretaries discussing your earlier visit, when Miss Kelly had you thrown out. I wasn’t there, but they were talking about it. And then I heard you when you came back.’

  ‘So you decided to throw me out?’ James bit into the pizza, scalding his tongue on the hot cheese. It burned, but it was also delicious, like a thinner, tastier version of Welsh rarebit.

  ‘I did that for your own sake,’ Lund said, picking up the first of his carefully segmented slices of pizza with his hands and letting it hover before his mouth.

  ‘My sake? There had to be an easier way to do that than chucking me onto the street like a bag of rubbish.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that. But I didn’t want to arouse any suspicion. Now to my question: what are you looking for in Yale?’

  ‘I’m looking for my wife and son. They’re here in the Oxford evacuation party. Here in Yale, I mean.’

  ‘Do you have proof of that?’

  ‘Proof?’

  ‘Any evidence that makes you sure they’re here.’

  James leaned his back against the hard wooden panel, attempting to assess the man opposite him. Did he need to be careful? Was the promise of help some kind of trap? Who was this man? He decided to limit how much he revealed. ‘I saw the ship’s manifest to Canada, with their names on it. And a colleague in Oxford assures me they are part of the evacuation group.’

  ‘Canada? Are you sure they made the journey to New Haven? Could they have stayed there?’

  James was seized by a sudden squeeze of panic. He had never considered that possibility. He had taken Bernard Grey’s word at face value, even though, he now thought, he had known that the Greys and the rest of their Oxford co- conspirators were capable of lying to him and had done so several times. If Virginia Grey had felt no compunction in pretending to be shocked by Florence’s disappearance that morning, why would her husband hesitate before serving up some cock-and-bull story? To think he had been in Canada and had done nothing to look for her there. He was suddenly furious with himself. The anger that rose in him spilled out towards this man. ‘Are you telling me that my wife is not in Yale after all? Because if that is the case, I would like to know right away so I can make arrangements to leave.’

  ‘Please,’ the Assistant Dean said in an urgent whisper, his eyes imploring. ‘You must speak quietly. No, that is not what I am saying. I just need to know what you know.’

  ‘And I need to know what you know,’ said James, pushing aside his plate. ‘It’s a simple enough question. Florence and Harry Zennor, possibly travelling under the name of Walsingham: are they here or aren’t they?’

  Lund sighed and again looked left and right. His forehead was gleaming with sweat. ‘I believe they came here to Yale, yes. I am not exactly sure where they are now.’

  James exhaled and sought to steady himself. ‘Thank you,’ he said with genuine relief. ‘It would be terrible if I were barking up the wrong tree entirely.’ He paused. ‘Now, I presume the paperwork for the Oxford group is kept in your office. I don’t understand why we can’t simply look up my wife’s file and find out where she’s staying.’

  ‘It’s not as simple as that.’

  ‘I understand. The foster families want their privacy respected and there’s the confidentiality-’

  ‘No,’ Lund snapped, catching James by surprise. ‘You don’t understand at all. This is much bigger than the lives of just a few families.’

  ‘Of course, I see that. There’s a hundred and twenty-five children, so that must involve, what, perhaps as many as fifty families, with an average of two children-’

  George Lund seized James’s wrist. ‘You have no idea what you’ve walked into here, do you?’ The man’s hand was clammy. ‘You’ve stumbled into something much bigger than you realize. Bigger and more dangerous.’

  He broke his grip, almost tossing James’s hand back at him. His whole face was covered with sweat now and beginning to look pale, as if suffering from a fever. Lund rose to his feet, swaying unsteadily. Then he dashed in the direction of the lavatories, leaving James alone at the table, fielding the embarrassed stares of several diners, including the mother from the family table ahead, who had turned around to assess the commotion for herself.

  What on earth had got into the man? James had simply asked for Florence and Harry’s whereabouts. He had mentioned the ship’s manifest and Canada. And that was it. Yet this man seemed as alarmed as if James had been threatening him. Or did he believe that simply meeting James exposed him to some grave danger? If it did, why had he been the one to suggest it?

  James cut another slice of the pizza. Cooling now, it had lost its initial appeal, the cheese beginning to congeal. James thought it highly unlikely that such a dish could catch on back home: Brits would always prefer the reliability of meat and potatoes.

  Still no sign of Lund. Had the man upped and fled for home? He seemed perfectly capable of such histrionics. On the other hand, he had left his briefcase on the bench where he had been sitting. James could see from the clasp that it was not locked.

  His eyes flicked across the room, from left to right. In one rapid movement, he leaned across and pulled Lund’s bag to his side, shuffling up so that he could wedge the case between himself and the wall. Determined to look natural, he did not open it straightaway. He cut up and ate another slice of pizza instead, before taking a sip of the glass of iced water that he had never asked for but which had been placed in front of him all the same. Then, with his left hand, he found the clasp on the case, a button-release that needed only to be slid downward. The tag of leather that bridged the two halves of the case sprung free, so that now he could easily slip his hand inside. He could feel a hardback book, then another. He glanced down to see what looked like medical textbooks.

  He looked up, briefly making eye contact with the boy of the family nearby, then let his hand carry on probing. Now he felt what he guessed was a large manila envelope. His fingers inched toward the top, where he could tell the envelope was unsealed. He pushed inside, his fingers finding the unmistakable texture of photographs. There seemed to be dozens of them, forming a thick wad. Peeling a few away from the set, he brought them close to the opening of the briefcase so that he might glance down for a quick look. It took him a while to absorb what he had seen. Once he had, the images both shocked him — and explained everything.

  Chapter Nineteen

  A moment or two later, a flushed George Lund returned. ‘I can’t go through with this, I’m sorry,’ he said and, before James had a chance to reply, he reached down for the briefcase — now returned to its place — turned and quickly walked towards the exit.

  James got to his feet: ‘Stop!’

  Lund did not turn around.

  ‘Don’t just storm out like that. Stop, will you!’ James called, much louder this time.

  The mother at the next table was staring again. Digging into his pocket, James slapped down a couple of dollar bills and dashed out. He stumbled, knocking a glass over on his way to the door; he heard it smash to the ground. Once on the street, he looked left and right among the small knots of teenagers and geriatrics hanging around together in the warm evening, but he’d lost him.

  It wasn’t the first time James had encountered one of Lund’s type, he thought as he headed back towards town. There were plenty like him in Oxford and, on two occasions, they had made their feelings known to James. Years later, he had told Florence about it and she had said i
t was his fault for being so damned handsome.

  Even so, the photographs were pretty shocking. Shots of naked young men from the front, back and side on. At first glance each man looked as if he were standing before a medical examination board — facing the panel, then offering a profile, then showing them his back. James had wondered if that was how these pictures had been taken, by an official army photographer, or maybe by a hidden camera smuggled into the examination room.

  But then he had spotted the strange spikes. At regular intervals along their spines, the men had sharp metal pins emerging from their backs. They were especially visible in the profile photograph, the spines silhouetted against the plain white background.

  James liked to think he was a man of the world. In Spain a couple of the other volunteers had pornographic magazines which James had seen, featuring knickerless girls bent over chairs and tables, often prising apart their own buttocks in order to expose themselves more fully. He knew from his academic research that sexual desire was a complicated business and that some people were aroused by the unlikeliest of things — fetishes for women’s hair or feet, for example. But he had never contemplated anything like this, that a man could want to look at images of other men whose bodies had been elaborately pierced.

  As James knocked back his second Scotch at the bar of the Owl Shop, he contemplated his rotten luck. He had hoped that Lund would prove to be his lucky break, the man who would prove that every now and again you could rely on the kindness of strangers. Instead he had run into a homosexual and pervert, who had somehow deluded himself into thinking this visiting Englishman would be interested in a quick, queer embrace.

  No wonder Lund had wanted to meet far out of town, where no one would discover his shameful secret. James should have been suspicious from the off, starting with Lund’s suggestion that they meet in the evening and at a restaurant. And all that flustered placing of his moist hand on James’s wrist: the man was clearly nervous, uncertain of how James would respond to him. What was it he had said? You have no idea what you’ve walked into here, do you?