It was safer if Paul knew nothing—even if he was a member of the Maquis.*
John had met many French agents. Part of Operation Carperbagger meant placing the right person in the right place at the right time. The best operative had no name and no family. Most went missing. Fates remained a mystery. Some agents carried cyanide capsules. If capture seemed imminent, death would take only a few moments.
Captured agents were tortured, then shot or decapitated. Known relatives could face a similar fate, regardless of age. John considered these things as he stared at the toy box and family of dolls set up for a tea party on the floor.
Paul’s cousin’s clothes were too big for John, but Paul said the sleeves and trousers could be hemmed. The clothes were also a little damp, so Paul hung them in the kitchen above the stove.
As John put more wood on the fire, Paul went outside and returned with a metal bathtub. A pair of heavy arms swung out from the fireplace, with hooks for Paul to hang pots of water. When the water was hot, Paul lifted the pots with a rag, and poured them into the tub.
As John undressed, they were both surprised at the state of his foot. After the bath, Paul gave John some rope to bite on while he cleaned the wound.
As Paul delicately wrapped the swollen joint, John asked what time his cousin and family would be home. When the bandage was snug, Paul gave John a stick to lean on and led him outside.
The cool air felt good and the sky was full of stars.
Beyond the farmhouse was a line of low huts where the chickens slept. John wondered what Paul wanted to show him. It was painful to walk and he was worried about being seen.
When they reached a cluster of young fruit trees, Paul stopped. John was about to say something when he looked down and saw four mounds of earth, all faintly indented with handprints. Each was marked with a different-sized cross.
Paul leaned down and touched the smallest one.
“Jacqui was only three,” he said. “But it made no difference.”
Until further notice, John was to spend daylight hours in the cellar. Paul would bring him upstairs at night after curfew, to eat by the fire and talk or play cards.
The cellar smelled like wet magazines. John composed letters to Harriet in his mind. He relived their trip to Coney Island, the gust of wind that blew off his hat, the fishing boats at Montauk, the feeling of her hand inside his.
Paul supplied John with painkillers that made him tired and dreamy. The sound of water through the drainpipe filled him with awe. Heavy showers of rain like music.
They spent most nights beside the fire in silence. Paul often fell asleep because he was farming his cousin’s land in addition to his own.
John grew a beard, as Paul said a mustache would have made him look too English. He also found John a good pair of shoes that fit well.
The days passed, and John’s health deteriorated. Paul took care of his foot as best he could, but it was changing color. Paul studied it by the fire one night and said he’d try to find a doctor. John had grown dependent on the painkillers. Paul showed him where they were, in case something happened to him.
The next morning John heard the latch and thought it was the doctor. A voice called his name, then a single match was struck to light a candle. A face appeared in the entrance to the cellar, and a hand motioned for John to come upstairs. When John hesitated, an old man climbed down the steps with the candle balanced in one hand. He approached John cautiously, then handed him a revolver.
“You can trust me,” he said.
They sat in the kitchen and drank coffee. The wallpaper was yellow and worn out around the light switch. The old man fed John some pâté and a crust of bread that he brought wrapped in a tea towel. He was the town mayor, and said that Paul was trying to find a doctor—but it was hard to trust anyone.
“Your foot might be the end of us all,” he laughed.
Then he loaded the stove stick by stick. When the wood basket was empty, the old man began picking up the toys that littered the floor. John got up to help.
“He’ll be angry at first,” the mayor said. “But it’s for his own good.”
Some of the dolls were sticky. Smiles had been drawn on with crayon.
When Paul didn’t return that night, John packed a few things and left quietly through the back door.
Days had turned into weeks.
It was dark and the streets of the village were empty. This made the main patrol easier to evade.
Some houses had been burned, and there was black around the window frames like smudges of mascara.
When a dog started barking, John looked down a side street and saw a small group of soldiers marching toward him. They would want to check his papers—especially as it was past curfew.
If he ran, they would notice and give chase.
He stood still for a moment, then spotted a light on in a shop up ahead. He walked briskly toward it and entered without hesitating. A bell sounded. It was a barbershop. A solemn-faced man appeared from the back and stood with a towel. He ushered John into a chair and began brushing his face with foam from a large bowl. The patrol passed to the aroma of lavender and vetiver.
After splashing on some aftershave, the barber went downstairs and reappeared with a heavy coat. In the pockets were bread rolls, dried meat, money, a compass, and a small comb.
John left the village at exactly ten o’clock (if the local church was to be believed), and set the wristwatch Harriet had given him for his birthday. Soon he was crawling through hedgerows and skirting the edges of fields.
He darted across roads as quickly as he could, but on one occasion found himself caught in the lamps of a motorcycle and sidecar. It had stopped some distance away with its engine off, at the front of a convoy of troop carriers.
John pretended to be drunk, but nothing happened. Either the soldiers hadn’t seen him or they were amused. John fumbled to undo his belt, then urinated in the road.
It was long past curfew. They could take him in or just gun him down, depending on how busy they were. When he finished, John buttoned up his pants and staggered beyond the arc of the motorcycle’s headlamps and into the safety of a field. He lay down some distance away and watched the convoy for a few moments, then he swallowed two painkillers and set off again quickly.
His plan was to go north, where he hoped to find passage on a boat to England or make contact with the Maquis.
He walked until the first glow of dawn. His clothes were wet from dew. While searching for somewhere to shelter, he heard two bombers hedgehopping at low altitude and wondered if they were from Harrington, and whether he knew the crew. The Carpetbaggers flew only when there was enough moon to navigate by rivers and lakes.
News would have reached Harriet and his parents some time ago. He imagined them at the kitchen table trying to get used to the idea. A hush over the restaurant that would last decades. Sadness in the kitchen, and in the cake pans, and on the plates with the eggs and hash browns.
When John came upon a derelict cottage, he went in because the sun was beginning to rise. The floor was covered with cans and broken glass. Stale, dank air was heavy with the stench of urine. There was an enormous hole in the roof where a shell had entered, and continued through the floor into the cellar. A steady dripping and the echo of drops told John the cellar was flooded. He took off his coat and lit a candle. At first it was difficult to see, but he held the candle as low as he could into the hole. The cellar was also a garage, and against the far wall was the outline of a car. There were also wooden beams, splintered furniture, broken crockery, and what appeared to be the white glow of a human body. John backed away and looked for a place to lie down.
He woke twelve hours later at dusk and lay still, trying to make sense of what was happening. In the silence, he could hear his own heart thudding along—as if counting down the time he had left to live.
/> Before continuing on his journey, John decided to brave the cellar. He first checked for any sign of life outside, then removed his shoes, socks, and bandages. After rolling up his trousers, he dropped a few large pieces of furniture through the hole, wincing at the clatter. Then he climbed down slowly. The icy water numbed the pain in his foot. His plan was to open the hood of the car and get some tubing that would be useful for breathing underwater.
The hood of the car creaked so loudly that John felt certain anyone outside would have heard. For a few moments he listened, but could hear only his breath and the faint whistle of morning wind through the ruins.
The engine and chassis had already begun to rust. John melted wax onto the fender as a base for his candle and located the hose he wanted. It came out easily, and he climbed back up using the stack of furniture, making sure not to disturb the remains of the previous tenant.
After packing up, John wound his watch and went outside. It was almost completely dark. He crept around the house looking for food, and located a small patch of carrots growing near a heavy-leafed vegetable that had mostly been eaten by slugs.
After taking more painkillers, he continued north, skirting villages and scrambling for cover at the faintest murmur of an engine. There was a great deal of action in the air, and John lay on his back sometime around midnight to watch a brilliant firefight.
His plan was proving to be a success, and he considered that he might try to reach an even more northerly position on the coast.
When dawn came, it was dry and warm. With no buildings in sight, John squeezed his body into a hedge, and spread his limbs around the branches and roots, the same way he had hidden himself that first night. He urinated by turning his body to the side (defecating only on the move—so the smell wouldn’t draw attention from anyone passing).
Despite eating half of the food he was carrying, John fell asleep very hungry, then woke about ten hours later in the early evening with no appetite at all. He also felt dizzy, and his foot was so bad that he was half tempted to put a bullet in it himself.
When it was dark enough to travel again, John pulled himself out of the hedge for a third night of walking. For the first hour, he had to vomit several times. Then his stomach seemed to dry out and settle.
The landscape changed. Fields churned by fighting and low fences of barbed wire. John wondered if, by some miracle, he had reached the Belgian border. Then it started raining, and he felt very sick. When dawn came he lay under a tree and passed out.
Nine hours later, when faced with a fourth night of walking, John considered that he wasn’t going to make it.
If he gave himself up, he would be tortured and killed; if he pushed on, he would certainly collapse. He also convinced himself that he’d been walking in circles, and that Paul’s farm was only a few hundred yards away. With the help of four painkillers he kept going. There were rain showers all night, and by dawn John was soaked through and barely able to take a step. His forehead burned with fever and his vision was blurred.
Sometime in the early hours of the morning, he looked around and realized he was surrounded by human remains. He fumbled for his pistol and cocked the hammer. Muddied uniforms of German infantry torn to shreds. They had been attacked from the air with machine guns.
Then John saw a cat. He tried to follow it in the hope it would lead him to a farmhouse, but it turned out to be a helmet filled with mud. He fell on his knees and stared at the helmet, realizing that it was not mud after all.
An hour or so later, John opened his eyes to the growl of a tank. There were no trees or hedgerows in which to take cover, so he rolled into a deep tank track. His intention was to blend in with the other corpses in the field.
As he shifted his limbs in the mud, John realized there was a body beneath his, and when it moved, John flipped over and rammed his pistol into a steadily opening mouth. Two eyes, white with panic, stared at him. John gripped the trigger and waited for the tank to get closer. The noise would mask the shot.
DANNY
LOS ANGELES,
2009
I.
DANNY HUMMED BACH partitas on the freeway and thought of the pianist Glenn Gould in a heavy coat. He knew very little about his father, and often thought of him too.
Some days the sky was so clear, it was like staring into darkness.
Danny moved to Los Angeles from Scotland in his late twenties, determined to be a success, determined to direct pictures his way, and to make life easy for his mother in her old age.
He was born in Manchester, England, and often imagined the moment of his delivery. Screaming for sure, hard fluorescent light, his mother’s shaking hands and glistening forehead, white towels on the floor, nurses in starched uniforms with steel watches pinned to their aprons. In her arms, nothing could hurt him.
When Danny was only a week old, his father taped a note to the television to say he would never come back.
Danny’s mother went from job to job. She was always late for work because it was hard to find people she could trust with her son. Her parents lived in London. Her father wanted to move back to Nigeria, but her mother was happier in Britain. They invited her to come and live with them, but Danny’s mother couldn’t imagine being in her old bedroom with a baby.
When Danny was about twelve years old, his mother fell in love and they left Manchester for Scotland.
The marriage ended after two years with more relief than resentment. His mother battled her disappointment in private, and enrolled in night school to study sociology and nursing. Danny used to walk home from school, then let himself in and watch television until his mother got back and started dinner.
She had a few friends, but liked most of all to be at home with her son.
The apartment complex where they lived overlooked a supermarket. There was also a canal guarded by a tall fence. Holes had been opened in the wire, and the fence resembled a spider’s web teased apart by children with twigs. On the grassy descent to the murky water, there were car tires, a mattress, oil cans, and a ripped armchair that lay upside down. Pupils from a local comprehensive often bought lunches at the supermarket, then ate them noisily on a grass verge above metal lines of carts.
Litter blew against the fence and formed piles. In summer, the upside-down armchair, the car tires, mattress, and other discarded items disappeared under tall, lush weeds.
After Danny moved across town into a flat of his own, he visited his mother several evenings a week—and always on Sunday, with a small box of Milk Tray chocolates to eat during Songs of Praise. She knew each chocolate by its shape. Danny liked the hard caramels because they lasted.
He stayed until she went to bed, then called a mini-cab and waited inside until it came. The apartments were not as safe as they once had been. Gangs of teenage boys shouted things and followed at a distance.
When Danny mentioned that he was thinking of moving to Los Angeles, his mother could tell it was what he wanted.
She came to Glasgow International Airport, and watched him inch along the security line. He knew he would never come back to live in Scotland and felt the pull of another home that could never truly be his.
Danny’s employment in Los Angeles was prearranged to satisfy immigration requirements. He had already worked in television for years. Starting immediately after college, he made coffee and ran errands. There were others his age, but Danny was the only intern who put chocolates on the saucers, and left notes for the actors to say how well they had done. After a few years on set, he instinctively knew where the couch should be for the murder sequence, and how the detective should enter the pub, and for how long he should stand at the bar before having a heart attack, and whether glasses should break or not in his fall, and who should scream (and how).
By twenty-five he was doing well, but for Danny it was not enough. Instead of joining the others at the pub after a hard day
of shooting, he went back to his small flat and read Shakespeare, Beckett, Artaud, and Ibsen—studied Cassavetes, Antonioni, Ozu, and Bergman.
After directing a few short pieces for BBC 2, Danny started writing his own scripts. There were so many techniques that interested him. Ideas flickered like small fires.
The first four years in Los Angeles were not easy. Americans work day and night. His first film took a long time to make but everyone was satisfied. His second was quiet but allowed him to pay his debts. His third picture, a historical drama about the Résistance called Ste. Anne’s Night, was nominated for an Academy Award in the category of Best Director, but Danny felt the film didn’t work, and needed to make a fourth to find out why.
About that time he bought his mother a modern apartment in the Quayside section of Glasgow. He flew back to Scotland for a week and they shopped for furniture. She kept saying, “You don’t have to, Danny, you really shouldn’t.”
It took her six months to settle in. She would sometimes walk around the apartment at night and touch things. Danny called twice a week, and they talked for about an hour.
During preproduction on his fourth film, Danny moved from the Silver Lake section of Los Angeles to the Hollywood Hills. He traded his El Camino for a white Mercedes with tan leather, and hired someone to shout at him regularly in the gym. On the backseat of his car was a Scottish wool blanket for his three beagles. His mother had sent it with a six-month supply of tea bags, and some HP sauce.
Ten years passed.
His mother retired. The beagles were slower and howled less. There were gray hairs on their noses. Danny enjoyed listening to music in the car and being at home with his dogs. He liked sometimes to swim, then eat his breakfast outside with The New York Times. Bougainvillea and jasmine grew around the pool, and there were many birds.
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