Before her now sat the novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, thumbing the pages of a silver-edged journal she’d given him as a gift. If he was going to be stuck in France a bit longer, she said, waiting for his U.S. visa to materialize, he might as well spend his days writing. “Record everything you can,” she said. “They’re going to need to hear all of it in the States.”
Feuchtwanger smoothed his hair with one hand and resettled his wire-framed glasses, new ones, bought with ERC funds; the old ones had been crushed beneath a concentration camp guard’s boot at St. Nicolas. He had regained weight and taken on some color during a stay at Harry Bingham’s villa, where he spent his afternoons with Golo Mann in the vice-consular swimming pool.
“You want me to make a mockery of myself, Miss Gold,” Feuchtwanger said, teasingly. “You want me to record for history my escape from St. Nicolas, dressed in women’s clothing. You want me to write about being whisked away in Mr. Bingham’s red Cadillac and hidden at his house like a secret lover!”
“No one else could do it better,” Mary Jayne said. “And someone has to do it, because it’s too rich a tale not to tell.”
“But we don’t know yet how the tale ends, do we?”
“All the better!” Mary Jayne said. “Write the ending you want. Then we’ll cause it to materialize, like magic. It’s our job.”
Asset, Varian thought, as he edged around crates of abandoned leather goods and into the cubicle that served as his office. Certainly an asset. But then, as he sat down at his desk and looked out at the marbled sky through his sliver of window, he remembered where it was he’d first heard of Mary Jayne and that Percival Vega Gull. Not in the social pages; long before, at a party one evening in Maine, a few months into his engagement to Eileen. Half a mile off the road to Surry, a family called Parrish had a grand vacation house on a bluff overlooking Morgan Bay. The place had been home to late-afternoon entertainments that featured lobsters and champagne, high-stakes cards, live jazz, and, in a marble-tiled bathroom off the central hall, a little mirrored snuffbox of cocaine. The women wore white linen dresses, the men sailing clothes. The wines were French, the cigars Cuban, the literary and geographic references transatlantic, the circle of friends small enough to create a fantasy world in which these pleasures were commonplace. The younger generation of Parrishes, children and grandchildren of the bluebloods of Blue Hill, scandalized the community with their intrigues and foibles, but were essential to its commerce. The year-round residents could live for a twelvemonth on what they earned during a summer in the service of these Betseys and Vivians and Oswalds. Mary Jayne’s name had drifted across the lawn one evening as Varian and Eileen were engaged in a half-drunk game of croquet. The talk, he remembered now—and where in the brain were these details stored, these endless fragments of conversation, shadowy glimpses of women’s bodies, vague scents of ocean and pine and gin?—concerned the monoplane, and how Mary Jayne, who had been the boarding-school classmate of one of the Betseys or Vivians, had flown to Monaco for a weekend to confront the unfaithful husband of another boarding-school friend. Apparently the mission had been a success. Mary Jayne, meeting the man at a casino table, had punched him in the jaw and landed him on the floor, out cold. Eileen and her friends, retelling the story, had whooped in admiration: here was an ardent and impulsive woman whose loyalty consisted of action, who showed no fear in the face of injustice. But now, in Marseille, would those qualities be assets or liabilities to his mission? Impossible to tell.
His father, he felt, would insist that he trust his instincts. If Varian argued that his instincts were hazy, his father would call it evidence of a weak character. Certainly, here on the rue Grignan, he felt a new confidence in the work they were doing; he couldn’t name the force that had created it, and he refused to strike it up to a desire to prove himself to Grant. But in the past few days he’d been up all hours, writing letters to influential persons in Washington, drafting coded missives to New York, begging money from donors in the States, rushing back and forth from the rue Grignan to the Préfecture in search of visa stamps, poring over the finances with Oppy, meeting with the Manns and the Werfels, exerting the gentlest of pressure on Harry Bingham. And certain essential factors were beginning to come together. The Manns’ and Werfels’ U.S. visas had materialized at last. The francs had materialized too, thanks to Hirschman’s plot with Vinciléoni. Even Bill Freier, the cartoonist whose pen had produced Moreau’s perfect forgeries, had at last materialized, drawn to the Centre Américain through a network of rumors. On Varian’s desk at that very moment sat a stack of safe-transit passes, the forms stolen from the Préfecture by Hirschman’s girlfriend; on those crisp white forms, Freier had forged stamps and signatures indistinguishable from the real thing. He’d also inked the missing visas onto the Manns’ and Werfels’ passports.
But the real coup, the one he held closest to his heart, had been the reply from Nick Butler at Columbia. Within two days’ time the consulate had received a cable not from Butler’s office but from Butler himself, assuring Fullerton that Katznelson had Columbia’s full support. Cables followed from the dean of graduate studies and from Katznelson’s department chair. Not twenty-four hours later, Fullerton had responded with a note to Katznelson, assuring him that a visa was forthcoming. Harry Bingham had sent a facsimile of the note to Varian, who’d informed Katznelson that he should prepare to travel with the Manns and Werfels the following Monday. Freier could provide any missing visas; the rest would be up to chance.
The journey was to start with a three-hour train ride to Cerbère, and then, after a track change, a sprint across the border to Portbou. Then onward through Spain, to Barcelona and Madrid, and finally to Lisbon, where Varian could write uncensored letters to the New York office and to Eileen. A letter from Eileen, a real letter, had finally reached him at the Splendide: Dear V, believe me: I understand the urgency of your work. I admire what you’re doing, wildly so. But you mustn’t delay your return. Not only because I miss you—and I do!—but because you underestimate the danger you are in. The war closes in upon you daily. You would say you know the risks better than I do, Europe and its political convulsions being your area of expertise. But your desire to be of help, I believe, may cause you to ignore plain facts. You know that to be true, dear V.
She was right, of course; there were certain facts, inconvenient ones, that he chose to ignore. But here was one that couldn’t be ignored: He had spent the past month weaving webs, drawing lines of connection between himself and his employees and the forces in power, legal and illegal. He had made himself irreplaceable. When he wrote to the New York office, he meant to make an argument to that effect.
He had taken out a notebook and begun to draft a letter to Kingdon when his office door flew open; in came Miriam in a state of panic, pale and trembling, her hand rigid on the doorframe.
“It’s Walter,” she said. “He’s been arrested at the border.”
“You can’t mean Mehring,” Varian said. “Mehring’s at the hotel.”
“Not anymore. He made a break for it early this morning. The police caught up with him at the station café in Perpignan. It was the fake Czech passport that did it. And now he’s being taken to St. Cyprien.” She meant the concentration camp there, where a typhoid epidemic had killed a hundred and eighty that summer.
“You’re kidding me.”
“I wish I were! Or that I’d known he might run. He was too scared to leave his hotel!” Her voice had begun to tremble; he could see in her eyes that she believed this was somehow all her fault.
“There’s nothing you could have done, Miriam.”
“But now what? St. Cyprien! That place is a cesspool.”
“I’ll call Bingham at once. He’ll help us get a lawyer.”
“All right,” Miriam said, her eyes bright and wet. Varian looked at her a long moment, wondering if he dared say what had just come to his mind.
“
Miriam,” he said, finally. “You’re not—you and Mehring—”
The color flew back to her face, and her eyes widened. “Lord no! Mehring’s in love with Hertha Pauli. And anyway—” She gave a fleet smile and flashed her engagement band, with its tiny diamonds and rubies. “I’m faithful to Rolf. But I adore Mehring. And I can’t bear to think of him locked up in that place.”
“All right,” Varian said. “Just wondering. I’ll get on the phone to Bingham right away.”
“Wonder not. I’m a straight shooter.” She mustered another half-smile, then went out to the front room to tell Mary Jayne what had happened. And Varian picked up the phone to call Bingham, succeeding only in reaching a musical-voiced secretary with a Michigan accent, who told him to wait while she went to see what was what.
Varian waited, trying to push from his mind the thought that he meant to lead his own group of escapees to the border via Mehring’s route in a few days’ time. Werfel would never survive in a place like St. Cyprien. And Mann, who was nearly seventy—he could almost see him now, cuffed and bent, being marched by a rifle-toting guard through the camp’s toothed gate. Varian had never considered this a game, had always grasped what the consequences might be if he steered his clients wrong. But now it was real: Walter Mehring himself had gone in a matter of hours from the relative safety of his white-sheeted bed at the Splendide to a pestilent barracks behind a chain-link fence.
Exhaustion came over him then like the crushing dullness after cocaine, and he put his head down against the cool smooth plane of the blotter. He wanted not to be in charge of any of this, wished himself home in his own white sheets in Manhattan, Eileen in the other room with the Times, the drape of her linen skirt just visible through the bedroom door as she read in the chair by the window.
* * *
________
Mehring’s situation, he told Hirschman that night over drinks at the Coquille de Noix, was an important reminder: anything could go wrong at any time, and it was foolish to think otherwise. Everyone’s papers had to be in order; forgeries could only be of the highest caliber. They couldn’t take any risks. And no more fake Czech passports, under any circumstances.
Hirschman sat over his glass of whiskey, stirring it with a narrow paper straw. “Can this lawyer get him out? What does Bingham say?”
Varian shook his head. “Bingham says it’ll depend on factors beyond our control.”
“Why would he try it—Mehring, I mean—after you told him those Czech papers were dangerous? Why couldn’t he sit for a few days? A Polish or Lithuanian passport could have gotten him across.”
“There was no stopping him, once he’d heard those officers in the corridor.”
Hirschman turned his drink on its coaster. “I suppose there’s no telling what they’ll do if they’re scared enough. Bolting with a fake passport is hardly the worst of it.”
Varian knew what he meant: some of them killed themselves. And did Mehring himself possess cyanide capsules? Would he use them at St. Cyprien if circumstances got bad enough? How long would it take him, susceptible to panic as he was, to reach a state of despair? Varian raised his own glass of whiskey and emptied it at speed. It filled him with a burning like self-punishment.
“Bingham’s lawyer will come by the office tomorrow morning. The case seems promising, he says, at least superficially. But I may have to go to St. Cyprien and speak to the commandant. Or perhaps you’ll go in my place, since the Manns and the Werfels…”
“Of course,” Hirschman said. “And, Varian—”
“Yes?”
“Don’t let this interrupt our plans. Let’s hope the Manns and Werfels don’t get word of it. Their papers are in place. You could keep them back another week or two, worrying about their getting arrested and thrown in St. Cyprien, but the situation’s not the same. I’m not saying there’s no risk—there’s always risk—but the longer they wait, the greater the danger.”
“Of course you’re right,” Varian said. He hadn’t even known how seriously he was considering keeping the Manns and Werfels back, but once Hirschman mentioned it, he realized that he’d been writing excuses in his mind already, inventing reasons to delay. His own health. An intimation of bad weather. But Hirschman was right: he had to follow the advice he’d been giving his refugees all along. When all the papers were in place—as soon as they were—it was time to take a chance. And for the Werfels and Manns, and for Katznelson, that time had come. They’d make their attempt on Monday.
9
Westbound Train
He climbed the broad stairs to the Gare St. Charles in the predawn blue, his nerves lit with adrenaline, suitcase in his hand. Above him the station lifted its columns and pediment into a bruise-colored sky, a French Parthenon on a French Acropolis. But this was far from holy ground: the Romans had staged battles here, famous conflicts he’d studied in school and remembered now as though he’d witnessed them. As he reached the top of the stairs and looked down, he could almost see the cohors militaria striking in wedge formation downhillward toward the enemy at the port, a dentition of swords glinting in the Mediterranean light. He wished he had a sword in hand that morning. His tired suitcase, with its scattering of stickers, seemed ersatz, like a stage prop.
Inside the station, his refugees waited beneath a red-and-gold advertisement for Lyons Tea, Qualité de Luxe: a ship with white sails taut with wind, like a promise of escape. The Manns—steel-eyed Heinrich with his close-trimmed goatee; round, pale-blond Nelly, twenty years his junior; and Golo, their nephew, tall, lank, knit-browed—all looked journey-ready, their few things standing neatly beside them, their clothes sharply pressed, their shoes reflective with polish. Golo, who had spent five leisurely weeks at Harry Bingham’s villa, sported a toast-colored tan and held his cigarette with languid ease. But Heinrich thumbed his collar as if the starch made him itch, and Nelly Mann kept pushing stray hairpins back into her coif, her hands trembling visibly. Then there were the Werfels: Franz in a wrinkled suit, his lips an anoxic blue, and Alma in her astrakhan coat and pearl choker, placid as ice. Behind them stood a flotilla of trunks, hatboxes, banded satchels, and leather hardcases, too numerous to count at a glance.
“Golo, Heinrich, Mrs. Mann!” Varian said, shaking their hands. “And Franz, and Mrs. Werfel. Good Lord.” He glanced at the fleet of luggage. “Did I mention the necessity of packing light?”
Alma Mahler-Werfel nodded, unperturbed. “You see, Monsieur Fry, I transport my former husband’s priceless scores, and the only manuscript copy of Bruckner’s Third, and all of Franz’s current work. A certain cultural capital, if you will. I’ve reduced already. Nothing more can be abandoned.”
“Of course,” Varian said, though he could hardly be blamed for wishing they weren’t transporting a museum. He secured a porter, who began to tag the suitcases with tickets. A whistle blew two sharp blasts; in ten minutes they would have to board. Where were Katznelson and Grant? He had told them clearly where they were to meet. What if Katznelson had had a change of heart? What if he’d been arrested in the night?
But then there was Grant himself, striding up the platform with his sleek suitcase in hand, a linen coat draped over his arm, and at his side was Katznelson with his own slim case. Grant’s eyes went directly to Varian’s, and Varian’s mind slid into the memory of riding the rail of that sailboat on the Vieux Port, Grant straining against the ropes, driving the boat into the sharp chop of the sea. But Grant and Katznelson looked perfectly matched, both tall and dark-haired, their chins upraised, their shoulders squared against whatever was to come. Impeccably shaved and dressed and brushed, they gave the impression of heading off into some urgent adventure where their talents and taste would be necessary, their intelligence equal to whatever awaited. Varian introduced them to the assembled group, employing what he hoped was a tone of cool dispassion. Katznelson, it turned out, had known the Manns in Munich, and had met Golo at h
is father’s house. And Werfel knew and praised Katznelson’s work, which caused Grant to blush with obvious pleasure. Katznelson seemed to take note of Grant’s blush; he drew almost imperceptibly closer, his knuckles grazing the leather of Grant’s suitcase.
Last to come was Leon Ball, who’d been conducting Varian’s clients over the border for some weeks now. Dressed in his usual traveling garb—olive-green jersey, black pants, black beret, black military-issue boots—he looked like a soldier, though as far as Varian knew, he’d only ever served in an ambulance corps. Ball was the scion of a cattle-ranching family in Montana, and had left home at nineteen to study international business at the Sorbonne. Now, at thirty, he owned a lard factory outside of Paris and a two-hundred-acre pig farm in Nemours. When the Germans had marched into the city, he’d left his factory in his foreman’s hands and followed the exodus south, animated by a vague idea that he might do something to subvert the occupation. And when he’d reached Marseille, he discovered what it was. Refugees, he learned, were fumbling their escapes, failing to speak intelligible French to the customs officers, getting arrested for saying the wrong things, or getting disastrously lost on the Pyrenean paths. Ball had spent months in those mountains not long after he’d arrived in France, and knew every path that existed. One day he’d shown up at the Splendide, having heard about Varian’s operation from Harry Bingham, and proposed a collaboration.
Varian liked Leon Ball, this caterpillar-browed, square-shouldered young man whose wealth meant nothing to him, who swore like a cowboy but had picked up five Alsatian dialects, who wanted nothing more than to get himself to the border and over it, burdened with clients, as many times as he could manage. Ball had the perfect confidence of a person whose life had found its ideal use. He strode up to Varian now and pumped his hand.
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