But when Grant came into view, leaning against a dock post in what might have been the same sailing attire he’d worn all those years ago in Maine, there was no black-haired blackguard at his side, no ostensible captain; he was alone, holding a bottle of white Bandol. He raised a hand in greeting.
“Thought you might like to get out on the water,” he said.
Varian laughed. “Wine and a sail, as if all were well in the world.”
“Not much of a sail. Like sailing in a bathtub.”
But just then the sun penetrated a bank of broken cloud in the west, shooting planes of bright nacrescent light across the waves, and Varian had to shield his eyes against the dazzle of it. The city could shock you that way—could, for a moment, pull its blemishes aside like a veil to reveal a blinding vision of beauty. Millions of metallic scales shuddered across the surface of the port. And then the moment passed: the sun reentered its cloudbank and the light was pale flat September light again, and they were stepping down into a narrow boat, Grant collecting the lines as he made his way toward the stern.
Varian had learned to sail at Hotchkiss, on the inevitable chop of Wonoskopomuc Lake, where he and a group of tangle-haired boys had been taught to pilot twenty-two-foot racing vessels. It was a point of pride for him to know what to do in a boat; it had made him popular in Maine. When he and Grant had sailed before, he had always been the one to hold the lines. Now, as if to nullify that small point of superiority on Varian’s part, here was Grant motioning him to the leeward side of the boat—a Monotype National, not so different from the ones Varian had raced at school—then taking a place beside him, raising mainsail and jib, and steering them out into the port, where there was barely room to tack. Grant turned their bow into the wind and let the sails luff for a moment; the wind was high enough to make a chuddering racket in the canvas. When he spoke, Varian had to lean in and ask him to repeat.
“They can’t record a conversation on the water” was what he’d said. “Not like in a hotel room, or a bar.”
Varian doubted it was true; a recording device might be hidden on a boat just as easily as in a hotel room. And sound traveled across the water, scattering unpredictably over the surface. But he hardly cared what had gotten them out there, the two of them alone, without sharp-eyed Katznelson or anyone else at all. Grant trimmed the jib and mainsail and sent the boat on a slow tack toward the south corner of the harbor. It was obvious he knew what he was doing; he sailed with a sleek economy of movement that bespoke total control. Almost without thinking, Varian uncleated the mainsail and gave it a little more wind. Grant raised an eyebrow, but let him do it. The boat tipped up a few degrees, and Varian felt for the first time in many months the chest-expanding thrill of being on the rail of a sailing craft, skimming a dark plane of water. The smell of it was a tonic, that particular tang of salt and wet wood and sailcloth. Speed gave an illusory feeling of escape. Grant eased them into a less-trafficked pocket of the port, almost in the shadow of the steel transporter bridge that spanned the outlet to the sea. The thing looked like a playground toy for a child giant, a mammoth glider suspended on a gargantuan metal scaffold. It had long ago ceased to serve its initial purpose of moving goods from one side of the port to the other, and now acted as a prospect from which the Nazis could monitor all traffic entering or leaving the port. From this distance it looked devoid of life, but Varian knew it contained a constant detail of watchers, tireurs d’élite they were called, rumored to be able to see beneath the water’s surface to a distance of three fathoms, and armed with snipers’ rifles. But it was there in its shadow that Grant stalled the boat, dropped anchor, and began to tell Varian what it was, after all, he and Katznelson were doing in France.
Grant really had come here on sabbatical, meaning to hole up at the Medieval Pile while he finished his book. Back home, a publisher’s deadline loomed. He’d arrived in April. It had seemed foolery to come even then, and various parties had tried at length to talk him out of it. But he’d visited the Medieval Pile before, and loved it; he felt it was the only place he could get the work done, and he wanted access to certain manuscripts that could only be found in French libraries. Then, a month into his stay, Katznelson had cabled from New York in a panic: his only son had disappeared. Tobias, twenty years old, had been living with his mother in Berlin; he’d been studying physics at the university, but had been forced to drop out when Jews were barred from colleges. Since that time, more than a year earlier, he’d been tutoring the children of illustrious Jewish Berliners. He seemed content enough with the work, and willing to continue his own studies privately, until one morning his mother had come in to bring him his coffee and had found his bed and closet empty. He’d left a note saying that he planned to join his father in New York. He regretted that he couldn’t bring his mother along, but her health was delicate and he knew she wouldn’t leave her sisters and her ailing parents. There had been a quarrel with his mother some time earlier: it seemed that even after he’d been forced to leave school, Tobias had been involved in research at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut for Chemistry, under the secret tutelage of Max Planck, the Nobel laureate in physics. Tobias’s mother had begged him to cease his work at the institute, fearing for her son’s life, but the boy had refused. Finally he’d fled Berlin and Germany altogether. They speculated that he was making his way to the family summer house outside Marseille, and from there that he’d try to assemble forged paperwork, raise money for a ticket, and gain passage to the States. His parents feared, of course, that he’d end up in a French concentration camp. Despite the danger to himself, Gregor Katznelson had come to France at once to look for his son. At the time, France was not yet occupied, and Katznelson had thought he would be safe as long as he stayed within its borders. But then the Nazis had marched in, and Katznelson was trapped. For the past three months, he and Grant had been scouring the countryside for any sign of the boy; none had emerged. All the while, friends of Katznelson’s were being sent to concentration camps; others had killed themselves in despair. Grant became afraid not only for the boy’s life, but for Katznelson’s. He convinced him that he must return to the States. But of course Katznelson’s papers were a disaster, his route back to New York barred. And the boy was still lost. All seemed hopeless.
“And then I heard you were in Marseille,” Grant said. One long-fingered hand was wrapped around the halyard; his eyes were turned toward the sky, cloud reflecting cloud. He lowered his gaze to his own hand on the rope. “Varian the American, saving the unsavables. Imagine how I felt, hearing that name passed among refugees in a bar.”
Could he imagine how Grant must have felt? How accurate had he ever been at guessing Grant’s feelings? He kept silent, and let Grant continue.
“So I dropped you that note, not knowing how you’d reply. Or whether you’d reply at all.”
Varian looked out toward the transport bridge, its giant industrial lacework thrown across the movie screen of the sky. Against the flat gray-blue, silhouettes of birds pulled a glittering raft of cloud.
“Did you really think I wouldn’t answer you?” he said.
Grant concerned himself with knotting and unknotting the loose end of the anchor line, and Varian instantly regretted having asked the question. For twelve years, in fact, Grant had kept his silence. And Varian had not called on him, though a few quick inquiries might have revealed his hiding place in Morningside Heights.
“Here’s another question,” Varian said. “Why didn’t you mention Katznelson’s son in the first place? Why didn’t Katznelson ask me himself? You know we’re casting a wide net across the South of France, looking for dozens, hundreds of people. Someone might know where this boy is.”
Grant breathed for a moment into his curled hand, contemplatively, as if deciding whether or not to answer. “Let’s just say,” he began, and fell silent a moment. “Let’s just say this is all a little more complicated than it looks. Toby Katznelson isn�
��t just any science whiz. He’s been at university since age fourteen. By eighteen he was considered an authority on Planck’s quantum theory. A Pencils,” he said, meeting Varian’s eye again; he was referring to a type of single-minded mathematical savant they’d identified during their Harvard career. “The Nazis’ intelligence men are on Toby’s trail. They believe Planck’s theories have military applications. The Ministry of Defense wants Toby’s work for themselves, and they want him back in Germany to develop it. They don’t believe anyone else can do what he can do.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Gregor tells me everything.”
Varian managed a half-smile. “A Pencils,” he said, and for a moment they might have been twenty years old again themselves, sailing the Charles instead of the Port de Marseille. The air had become taut between them, snapped into a sharp transmitter of movement and respiration. “But let me come back to my question,” he said. “Toby’s case is sensitive, I understand. But Katznelson wants his son back in the States. Why wouldn’t he just ask me to look for him?”
Grant cast his sharp gaze again across the surface of the water. “Katznelson is not, let us say, the most trusting person. He didn’t want me to contact you in the first place. He knows the consulate doesn’t support your work. And he knows you’re a novice here, relatively speaking. I’m not sure he believes you can really be of help. And the fewer people who know how sensitive Toby’s situation is, the better. That’s how he put it to me, anyway.”
Varian experienced an inward flare of indignation, though what Grant had said was obviously true; why, in fact, should Katznelson, who had everything to lose, place his trust in Varian?
“But I told him you could do it,” Grant said. “I told him I knew what you were capable of. And once he met you, he gave me leave to talk to you about all this. That’s why I wanted to see you.”
Varian nodded in silence. What you were capable of: how many things that could mean! The wind shouldered into the sail and pushed their stern toward the south wall of the port, and the shadow of the transport bridge darkened the deck, then lifted.
“And now what?” Varian said. “Does he want me to look for Tobias, to get him out?”
“Gregor wants to get out, himself. And that’s what I want, too—to know that he’s safe.” Grant averted his eyes; the tone of his voice made things clear enough to Varian. “And if you can get him out, then he wants you to try to do the same for his son. Though Toby’s case, you understand, is far more sensitive than Gregor’s. The minute they find him—Vichy police, the Nazis, anyone—they’ll throw him into a camp and ship him back to the dark heart of Germany. And if he doesn’t give them what they want, they’ll kill him.”
“I see. And what’s your role in all this, Grant? Are you going to cross the border with Katznelson? Then follow him home to New York?”
“Yes, I’ll go with him. But only as far as Lisbon, only to trace the route. To see how it can be accomplished with Tobias. Then I’ll come back here to Marseille until Toby’s found, or until it’s clear that he can’t be.”
Grant in Marseille alone, for an unspecified time: the news engaged an alarm in Varian, a self-protective impulse. “You’ve got no idea what you’re dealing with, Skiff,” he said. “A thing like this could land you in a camp, or worse.”
“I don’t care. I want to help Gregor find his son. And I need your help, Varian. I can’t do it on my own.”
“My clients are artists and writers, not physicists. They aren’t wanted by the Nazi Ministry of Defense. If I go down this road, I’ll put my own people at risk. I can’t get involved, Grant. It’s not my line. I’ve got a mandate from my committee, and work to do for people whose whereabouts are known. People in imminent danger of arrest. The Manns and the Werfels, Walter Mehring, Konrad Heiden—all of them waiting to shuffle over the border as we speak.”
“Understand what this means to me, Tom,” Grant said. “Katznelson isn’t”—and he paused, turning his gaze toward the sky—“he’s not just a colleague. I can’t stand by and let him lose his son.”
Varian watched Grant closely. At his jaw, twin strands of muscle twitched; now his eyes rested on Varian’s with a slight waver, remnant of the retinitis that had afflicted him in childhood. Not just a colleague; what, then? A person worth the sacrifice of one’s own safety, apparently. A person worth the risk of one’s own life.
“Here’s how it stands,” Grant said. “I’m going to try to find the boy, with or without your help. But on my own I’m really lost, and the kid probably will be too.”
“Oh, Skiff, for God’s sake,” Varian said.
But he was already in. He knew it and Grant knew it too. He raised his eyes to meet Grant’s. And he would always remember the look Grant turned on him then: relief, trepidation, triumph. Neither of them knew what they were doing; neither was experienced as a saver of lives. For as long as they’d known each other, they’d lived inside the written word—often in the observation and recording of untidy human experience, but always, or nearly always, with the comfortable medium of pen and paper standing between them and the blood and mud and grief. But here was the real thing. The stakes were as dire as they could get. There was no choice, not if they were to live with themselves after. No one knew that better than Varian. And indeed, Varian thought, what was there that Grant could have asked that he would have refused?
As if to seal a pact, Grant reached into the hold for the Bandol, opened the bottle, and took a drink; then he handed it to Varian. The wine was sharp as a whetted knife on the tongue. They drank it as the shadow of the bridge marched up the port and entered the sun-blind city.
8
St. Cyprien
Certain people, his father had told him, were assets; others were liabilities. A shrewd businessman quickly learned to tell the difference. His father had delivered this kernel from his oak-paneled study in Ridgewood, the night before Varian left for Harvard. It was Arthur Fry’s habit to impart wisdom on the eve of some great change: Varian’s departure for boarding school, his entry into high school, his graduation. The wisdom could not be dispensed unless Arthur was sipping from a cut-crystal glass of Balvenie with ice. He wasn’t a smoker, had always dismissed the habit as injurious to the constitution and offensive to the senses, but he praised the virtues of the occasional and judiciously chosen drink. For him, Balvenie on the rocks was a religion in miniature, and involved a series of incontrovertible strictures. The Balvenie must be aired for some minutes before it could be poured. It must be taken with large blocks of ice to minimize dilution by melting. It must be imbibed slowly, from an unfaceted vessel small enough to rest securely in the hand, one that, held to the light, would reveal the leonine shadings of the drink. Crystal, not glass, for its clarity. The ritual of Balvenie, performed on the eve of momentous change, always brought forth drops of wisdom from Arthur Fry. Varian was in the habit of dismissing them out of hand. He’d been trained in the Socratic method, and had learned to reject unexamined thought. But the Balvenie Fryisms came back later with doglike persistence, resisting oblivion. They had scarcely let him alone for a moment here in Marseille, where his own lack of wisdom had provided a gaping aperture.
Some people were assets; some were liabilities. Which was which, and could Varian trust himself to know the difference? Take Miriam Davenport, for example, who sat now at her desk in the new office, laughing at top volume, as rich in casual confidence as she was devoid of self-consciousness. Before her sat another young woman who had arrived at the office claiming talent and reputation as a painter in Prague, but without a scrap of work to show for it; her portfolio, she claimed, had been stolen on the train. Miriam had sent her down to the Vieux Port with some oil pastels and a block of drawing paper, and she had just returned with six works whose choices of line and color conveyed unquestionable brilliance to Miriam’s eye. She was now preparing client intake forms for the otherwise pape
rless young woman, whose case Varian would now be forced to argue to the ERC. But it would have been even harder to argue with Miriam, who, three weeks in his employ, had become the regina de facto of the rue Grignan. The daughter of the concierge must have felt sorely displaced, watching her enter and exit the building, trailed by her various subjects. And she was always trailed by someone; like certain honey-scented wildflowers, she attracted bees. He hadn’t known, when he’d hired her, that she would insist on his hiring Gussie Rosenberg, an eighteen-year-old German refugee who’d fled on his own to France and then followed Miriam south; Gussie, now their messenger and errand boy, equipped with his own bicycle, required housing and clothing and feeding, and had last week been arrested for no reason at all, costing Varian thousands of francs in lawyers’ fees. And then there was Mary Jayne, who had already donated five thousand dollars to the ERC but now expected to be employed as an interviewer of refugees. In a cloud of Chanel No. 5 and a series of jewel-colored afternoon dresses—unwitting insults to the refugees in their overwashed and threadbare clothes—she occupied her own desk in the corner, talking and jotting notes and assessing the urgency of various cases.
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