by Paul Griner
She was unconvinced. “And why did you lie to me at the track?”
“Lie to you? About what?”
“The sound stages. Max didn’t know what I was talking about.”
He started to say something, stopped. “No. You’re right, he didn’t. It was . . .” He felt himself blushing. “I can’t tell you.”
“You can’t tell me?” She stopped, and his footsteps echoed back to him until he stopped too. Dry leaves blew past her as if she’d created her own wind. “I know that your real name is German, that you spent time in jail for treason, things you say that you’ve told no one else.”
“I haven’t.”
“And there’s something else you can’t tell me? You’re married? You’re ill? You’re not American at all?”
“God, no.”
“Then what? What could be so bad?”
How could he explain years of wariness? Some of it would make sense to her, but not all of it, not without revealing everything, and he wasn’t ready for that. “Nothing. It’s not important.”
“It is to me.”
“Why?”
“Why? You have to ask? The first man I’ve been close to in more than a decade and you have to ask?”
She started walking again, rapidly, and he stumbled over a loose cobble trying to keep up with her. “Wait,” he said, “wait,” and he pulled her around to face him.
She was breathing fast, her nostrils dilating.
“Wait.”
He dropped his head, ostensibly to catch his breath. No one was nearby, but he couldn’t bring himself to say what he wanted. It was impossible. He was going to lie. He’d already doubted her and he could feel the lie unspooling on his tongue, candy cooling in water. He’d grown so smooth at it over the years, but he couldn’t say it out loud. He whispered. “I’ve been asked to keep an eye on Max, that’s all.”
“By whom?”
“Someone higher up in the ministry.”
“They don’t trust him?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
She pulled back to look at him. “And you’re willing to do that to a friend?”
“No, don’t you see, that’s just it! I don’t want to.”
“So you’re trying to stay away from him?”
“Yes.” He smiled. He felt horrible lying to her, but he was glad she understood. He tried to take her hand but she pulled back.
“Why don’t you just tell him that he’s not trusted?”
“What?”
“Afraid you’ll lose your position?”
“No. I . . . No.” Now that he’d told the lie, it was too late to come out from under it. Why hadn’t he told her? If he did now, it would seem another lie, told to wipe out the previous one.
“What, then? He’s a friend. Haven’t you learned anything from all you’ve been through? Haven’t you learned that if you don’t trust your friends, you’ll have nothing?”
“Yes, of course. But if I tell him, he might do something foolish.”
“Ah, I see. You’re protecting him.”
It sounded as if she were talking about a disease. “Don’t say that, Kate.”
“I won’t. But do me one favor? If someone ever comes to you about me, don’t protect me. Ever.”
He sighed. He was losing her. And he understood perfectly why. He saw no other choice.
“I have other jobs.”
“Other jobs? What does that mean?”
He shrugged. “Things I do. I can’t really say.”
She laughed. “Please.” She started to walk off.
“No, Kate, I do.”
“Yes. Of course. And what are they?”
“I . . . find out things.”
“Things?” But she’d stopped again. She was listening. “Like about Max? How important.”
“I hear things, like about the parachutes, and pass them on.”
“To Max?”
“No. God, no. Far above him. Max hasn’t the faintest idea. That’s why I don’t spend time with him. Why I can’t.”
“And why are you telling me this? So I won’t be angry with you?”
“Yes, no. Yes.” He stopped and took a breath. What was he trying to say? “I want you to know everything.”
“Everything?”
Now he laughed. “Well, as much of everything as I can tell.”
“And how much is that?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and he didn’t. “I’ve already said too much.”
“Then don’t.”
“Kate.” He put his hand out to still her anger.
“No. I don’t mean it that way. I mean don’t. You needn’t prove anything to me. I believe you.”
“You do?”
She stepped closer and touched his face. “Yes. I knew you were lying before. I believe you’re not, now.”
He felt his shoulders go slack. “Oh, Kate. There’s so much. I have a radio.”
She touched his lips. “Shh. Wait until you’re sure what you should tell me.”
It was extraordinary. The more she quieted him, the more he wanted to tell her. But she was right, he could wait until he was certain that he should. Bertram would be appalled. The thought made his lungs expand like a bellows. He breathed in the crisp air, the odd, autumnal scent of decaying leaves, Kate’s perfume, then she took his hand as if she’d never dropped it and they walked on.
July 17
BEFORE THE WAR Claus had often detoured by Selfridges to take in its famous Christmas displays, but now the ground-floor windows were bricked up and the store gloomy despite its inventive light wells; on each floor only every third lamp was lit, and the alluring brightness of the perfume counters, still clustered near the entryway, was dimmed by lack of stock.
During a break from filming Spirit of ’76, he’d spent two hours in Macy’s with Dorothy Gish as she sampled dozens of perfumes, refreshing her nose every so often with a handful of coffee beans, but she could have made her way through Selfridges’ entire supply in minutes. Set amid displays of colored stones and commemorative plaques, the few bottles for sale looked rather forlorn; the old standby Lily of the Valley and a handful of others, Houbigant Wisteria, Du Barry Comtessa, Richard Hudnut Violet Sec, and Evening in Paris with its cobalt blue oval bottle, of which Myra was especially fond, though it had been years since he’d smelled its woodsy scent on her. Last was a diamond-shaped Acqua di Parma that he would have thought illegal.
The saleswoman, a tall, matronly blonde, seemed to have read his mind. She stepped forward and said, “It’s one of our last bottles from before the war. Interested?”
“No, but thank you” None of the perfumes was Kate’s, a German scent made by Hoffman. A half dozen bottles stood ranked in her armoire, shipped back to England before the war with her furniture.
“That book,” he said, tapping the glass above a Moroccan-leatherbound copy of Trollope’s The Warden. He could begin her new collection. “How much is that?”
He took the stairs to the fourth floor, where the store restaurant had been moved after the Palm Court burned in the Blitz. Surprised to find himself out of breath, he stood with his hands on his hips looking up at the ceiling and its tracery of water damage. Beneath the light well, the tables in the center of the restaurant glowed as if on stage, and Claus instinctively asked for one away from them. “And from the windows too,” he added. The maitre d’, his lapels shiny with wear, nodded almost imperceptibly and steered him to a round one between the two sources of light.
He had an hour and a half until his meeting with the punctilious Bertram, and ten minutes before Max’s arrival. Claus liked Selfridges because it had the benefit of a large officer class from which he often picked up information, though Max had been the one who’d chosen it for their lunch, saying he preferred its good service and poor but plentiful food to the real eggs and undiluted milk they would find in a smaller, local establishment. It was also one of the few places that the bombing h
ad actually improved; the restaurant now had one of the best views in London—almost to the Thames—and an outing there always seemed a bit of a celebration: genuine crystal, heavy silver flatware. “Powdered eggs are a small price to pay in return,” Max had said.
But Claus suspected Max insisted on meeting here because of his wife, and because of Selfridges’ connection to his personal film history. To honor Alina and the dishonorable dismembering of Poland by the Soviet Union and Germany, Max made it his business to speak to the manager monthly to ask Selfridges to take down their Soviet flag from among those flying on the roof, one for each of Britain’s current allies.
“But you know they won’t,” Claus had once said. “Our stalwart Eastern friends.”
“Yes. But they know I’ll be there, every week. They’ll get tired before I do, and when it does come down, I’ll be there to say, ‘I told you so.’”
And of course each visit recalled the high point of his prewar film career, his work on Love on Wheels, an early romantic talkie about a department-store manager and a concert pianist, much of which had been filmed here. Claus understood Max’s attraction to earlier successes. He harbored an obscure fondness for the inside secrets of Griffith’s working style, which fortunately Max loved to hear about: that before cameras were sophisticated enough to have closing irises Griffith had developed fade-outs by slowly raising the lid of a cigar box in front of a camera, and that he’d made other shots look soft-focus by shooting through gauze, details Claus liked telling him because in doing so he could re-inhabit small parts of his past. If he’d been right to withhold other things from Max, from nearly everyone, and not just because Bertram wouldn’t allow it, he was right not to do so with Kate. Still, he’d woken in the night to sheets damp with sweat, wondering if he’d said too much to her. Better not to dwell on it, he decided, obsessively spinning his fork. He’d already taken the plunge.
When the waiter arrived, Claus ordered for both of them—an uninspiring lunch of stewed prunes and pea soup, since they didn’t have much else left—and made two requests of the waiter: that he hold off serving until Max arrived and that he, Claus, not his companion, receive the bill, then he smoothed the Times flat on the tablecloth, skipping past the first-page birth and death announcements to the war news on page three. He hoped he’d find enough to keep his mind off the upcoming meeting, as he couldn’t pretend not to be nervous. Max always chose such luncheons for momentous decisions.
A French Vichy official had been gunned down in Paris—by French terrorists, the Nazis said; a brave Dane disguised as a dockworker had blown up three ships refitting in Copenhagen harbor; rich Hungarian Jews had taken a special train from Budapest to Lisbon while leaving behind one family member as hostage. The German papers were saying that the flying bombs were only a beginning, to be followed by other, more destructive weapons, and that every means of self-defense was justified and sanctified by God. What our side says, he thought. He turned to an article about a bomber shot down over occupied France that had crash-landed in a Normandy cornfield behind German lines. Captured, the bomber’s crew members were taken to a local chateau and served brandy, champagne, and black bread and butter by a German noncom. To top it off, he made them a pot of real coffee.
As the advancing English army began lobbing mortars into the chateau, the captives and the chateau’s sixty Germans were sent outside to a slit trench, where the Germans, passing back and forth in their duties, kept saying, “Excuse, please, British soldiers.” Eventually the Germans pushed the mortar groups back, and the English, let inside again, were happy to discover the commandant affixing a white flag to the chateau wall. He sent out a local Frenchman to find a British patrol and then asked the captives to intervene for him and his men. “The guerre is nicht bon,” he said. They surrendered, and all sixty were flown back to England in a bomber piloted by the crew of six.
It was the kind of story that Max would not only like but see something in; Claus tore it out, thinking that if Max still held reservations about his most recent version of The Bells of Liberation, giving this to him right away might incline him to be more kindly. Making up for not having supper with him and Alina would be trickier.
A loud, friendly American colonel one table over was talking about Saint-Lô and American chances. “I’m telling you!” He pounded the table hard enough to make forks jump. “We’ll break through any day now.”
A lieutenant colonel put his hand on the colonel’s arm to quiet him, and, with only minutes left until Max arrived, Claus flipped through his copy of the script to make notes on his chosen sound effects. Beethoven in the last two scenes, the background noises inside the food store, the silence inside the tailor’s. They were meant as counterpoints, though the dress store’s silence was also in direct contrast to the film’s loud beginning. The movement pleased him, noise to silence giving way at last to music; it underscored his heroine’s journey nicely.
Max emerged from an elevator. Claus was always surprised he took them. Half had been put out of commission by bombing, and, afraid of power outages, Claus never rode one himself, but then Max could be a bit showy about displaying nerve. The result, Claus suspected, of having been rejected for the army because of bad eyes.
“About this,” Max said, and took the script from his briefcase before Claus had a chance to hand over his news clipping or even say hello. He seemed angry. “Let’s get to it, shall we?” He flipped to a place marked with a small Polish flag while the waiter arrived with their soups. “This bit about the time bomb. Did what happened in Naples suggest that?”
Claus wanted to apologize for the dinner slight but sensed it wasn’t the time. Nor for handing over the news clipping. He shrugged. Everyone knew about Naples, it was front-page news. The Germans had pulled out overnight, seeming to spare the city, but had planted time bombs in many public buildings, none of which had been found before exploding. The massive one in the central post office had killed hundreds.
“Really what made me think of it was your suggestion that the stores be across from each other. If the food store had a time bomb, the explosion wouldn’t destroy a building across the street. And if the explosion is filmed from a low angle, like the scene where she’s shown choosing the dress, the flying debris will be more dramatic.”
“And the repeated camera angles would metaphorically tie the scenes together.”
“Hadn’t thought of that.”
“Yes, you had. You just wanted me to feel good about it,” Max said.
Claus bowed his head.
“Mock obeisance,” Max said. “You’re laying it on thick.” He put his glasses on and flipped farther back. “That’s quite strong, actually, but other parts still concern me.” A good sign. Max was often theatrical but he had no poker face; if he hadn’t liked the script he’d have complimented it right away as a prelude to rejection. Claus had known it was good, had hoped it was; Max’s mock-stern exterior banished his doubts. He felt a surge of elation, which he promptly tamped down. Until Max said yes, it wasn’t a go.
“The third act,” Max said. “Furious at the bombing, the townspeople destroy anything German in response, then go after the ‘horizontal collaborators,’ one of whom is the dress-shop owner?”
“Yes.”
“Here, where Marie—I like the new name—finds the storeowner being dragged away as she comes out of the dressing room and then witnesses her hair being cut off, her body being doused in Mercurochrome, I like that. But after, when she shelters the woman crying on the curb with an umbrella, how about having the townspeople rally around her then, bring her some food from the wreckage?”
“No. That’s not believable. They’re not going to forgive her so quickly. Better if they simply go about their business.”
“Okay,” Max said. “And of course, some of them will still be venal, grabbing food supplies from the rubble as they clear it. But the horizontal collaborator,” he said. “Who is she? We need to know more about her for that image to have any resonance.�
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“That’s easy enough to write. I’ve already thought of several scenes. A German officer comes into her shop with a chocolate bar that he puts down while sorting through fabric. He orders a dress to be ready in two days; they’re about to pull out and he wants something to bring back to his wife. That’s the dress we see in the window at the end. She’d made it, but the German had already gone, and now she needs to sell it in order to survive. He hadn’t paid for it, after all.”
“And the chocolate bar? How does that play out?”
“Neighbors see him go in with it, then one finds the chocolate on her counter after the German leaves. They interpret it as something else. And all of those scenes could be interspersed with the ones of Marie making her way back to the village.”
“I like the parallel action.”
“Other early scenes might be of the townspeople begging her for clothes, which she has access to because of her closeness to the Germans, while a later one would show her trembling as she watches the townspeople shouting and marching by after the Germans have gone.”
“All right,” Max said. He shut the script. “But why do you call for silence as she’s choosing the dress?”
“To play off the noise at the very beginning, and the noises all the way through—the bombs dropping, the train, the boat—her world is made up of noise.”
Max looked unconvinced. In the window a fleet of bombers appeared. Claus watched them cross the pane, then played his trump.
“Surely you understand the dramatic possibilities of silence. Think of the beginning of Love on Wheels. There’s almost five minutes of silence there, as the store manager tries to impress the pianist while both look for seats on the crowded bus. That can’t all have been a hangover from the silent films.”
“Of course it wasn’t. It was crucial. Love is often silent at first. It’s gesture, a glance, the touching of hair or a hand. We wanted to show that.”
Claus sat back. He’d been certain that line would work; Max was a sucker for talking about the film, but it also led directly into what he wanted to say.