The Flight Portfolio

by Julie Orringer

  “State your business,” he said, and coughed emphatically into his fist.

  “We’re here to see Commandant Ormond,” Mary Jayne said, handing him the card. “Please tell him Miss Gold and her associates have come to call.”

  The guard squinted at the card. “What business do you have here?”

  Mary Jayne squared her shoulders. “We have an appointment at noon. We’ll discuss our business with the commandant.”

  Her voice had brought a sub-guard out of the guardhouse, a short-legged person in thick spectacles who goggled at her, mouth open, until his superior shouted him to attention.

  “Officer Poulenc!” the blocky guard said. “Look sharp. Take these visitors to headquarters.”

  The short-legged fellow gave a sharp salute to his superior, a half-bow to Mary Jayne, and a nod apiece to Grant and Varian. Then he conducted the travelers forward over a dirt path of jagged clods, through a gate embellished with the camp’s name in a festive-looking typography, as if this were a summer resort. He marched them through rows of gray-walled barracks, past open latrines filled with excrement, past guard posts decorated with broken glass, past rows of men digging at the frozen clods with pickaxes in a parade ground—men dressed not in prisoners’ garb but in their own torn and dirty clothes, men who looked at them with sharp inquisitive eyes, with activated attention, as if the prisoners could sense at once the aura of the United States that surrounded these visitors. There was no sign of Tobias anywhere, nor of the four whom Mary Jayne had liberated before.

  The commandant’s headquarters lay at the opposite end of the camp, near the west-facing entrance. In an anteroom sat four gray functionaries, each at his own steel desk, and a receptionist, also gray, businesslike, with a look of grim forbearance that may have come from being the only woman in the place. She thanked their guard escort and looked them over slowly, reserving special scrutiny for Mary Jayne and her herringbone suit, her pleated white shirt, her suede handbag with its gold trefoil clasp. Mary Jayne consulted her watch and insisted that they be announced to Commandant Ormond at once.

  Moments later, Ormond himself stepped from a shadowy hallway beyond the anteroom and dismissed the gray functionary with a look. He appraised Mary Jayne as she stood in the light from the office windows; her hand flew to her collar as if he’d parted the stiff white pleats with his gaze.

  “Come in,” he said, almost in a whisper. His command seemed to refer only to Mary Jayne, not to Varian and Grant, but Mary Jayne pretended not to notice; she put a hand on Varian’s arm as if she expected to be escorted down the hall, and he complied. The commandant frowned. Varian could only hope that Mary Jayne knew her game.

  Ormond motioned the three of them toward the chairs in front of his desk, which, like everything else in that building, were gray, sharp-edged, functional, and ugly. But Ormond’s office betrayed its inhabitant’s fantasy of himself as a man of letters: the shelf behind his desk sagged under the weight of biographies and autobiographies of fascist despots, and alongside them were books about the struggles of France: Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir, Hugo’s Les misérables, Zola’s Germinal. Above the bookshelf hung a pair of crossed sabers hazed with dust, and on the desk itself stood a bronze inkstand, its inkpots empty, presided over by a tiny Napoleon on a rearing charger.

  “Mademoiselle et messieurs,” the commandant said in French, leaning over the desk to shake hands with Grant and Varian, raising a single eyebrow at Mary Jayne. “You’ve arrived on an unfortunate day. I’ve just received a reprimand for the slanderous reports on this camp made by Arthur Koestler, that odious Hungarian writer set free by the Ministry of the Interior last spring.” Ormond touched a document on his desk, a letter on thick white stock surmounted by the Nazi spider. “You may be familiar with Koestler’s screeds, which have found their way into print in a series of disreputable journals.”

  “Yes, I’ve read them with interest,” Varian said.

  Ormond raised an eyebrow at him, then turned back to the Nazi letter. “My superiors believe I was remiss in failing to bring about the writer’s end during his captivity. They plan to judge for themselves the nature of my leadership here.”

  “But you’re not a killer, Jean-Pierre,” Mary Jayne said, in an intimate tone—though on their brief walk through the camp they’d seen plenty of evidence to the contrary. “It’s unreasonable, deplorable, for anyone to demand that you become one.”

  Ormond regarded her from behind the steel slab of his desk, over its islands of papers and dossiers. “The Nazis, Miss Gold, are our masters now,” he said, with some bitterness. “In fact there’s no limit to what they can demand, deplorable or not.”

  Grant saw his aperture. “A Frenchman is no one’s servant,” he said. “Stendhal.”

  Ormond glanced back over his shoulder at the bookcase, as if the book itself had spoken. Then he narrowed his eyes at Grant, at Varian. “I run my camp to serve the greater good of France,” he said. “And at the moment, whether we wish it to be true or not, our interests are knit up with Germany’s. Our desires, our needs, are subject to theirs.”

  “Jean-Pierre,” Mary Jayne said in the same penetrating, connective tone, “I’d like a word with you in private.”

  “I’m afraid I haven’t time, Miss Gold, much as I would relish it. An inspector and his assistants will arrive in an hour to be given a personal tour of my operation.”

  Mary Jayne raised an eyebrow. “A brief interview will serve.”

  “I’m sure it would,” Ormond said, with a look that made Mary Jayne curl her shoulders toward each other and clasp her bag against her chest. He rose and removed his military hat from its stand. “I’m afraid I must attend to certain matters before our guests arrive.” He fixed his eyes on Mary Jayne and said, “If you and your friends will kindly wait by the front door of this building, a guard will arrive to escort you to the gate. I’d advise you to make your exit with some speed.”

  “Monsieur Commandant,” Mary Jayne said. “Will you not at least—”

  “Thank you for your visit, Miss Gold, Messieurs Fry and Grant.”

  He meant for them to stand. They stood. Grant threw a panicked look toward Varian, but there was nothing Varian could do. They could go back to the hotel in Pamiers, they could wait another day or two in the hope that the inspectors would depart and that Ormond might honor his promise to Mary Jayne then. Mary Jayne looked dazed, as though she’d discovered that the rifle she’d been holding in battle was a toy. She took Varian’s arm, and he led her through the narrow door of the commandant’s office.

  “I wish you a pleasant return to Marseille,” the commandant said, and put his heels together; the bow he gave them might have belonged to a ballroom and not a concentration camp. He smoothed his glossy dark hair once more, a gesture of closure. And then he shut the door behind them and left them in the corridor.

  “Now what?” Grant said. “We can’t just leave.”

  “We can’t be here when the Gestapo arrives,” Varian said, under his breath.

  A set of gears seemed to have engaged in Mary Jayne’s mind. She looked at the closed door as if she were still looking at Ormond. “I believe we should do as he said.”

  “What?”

  “We should wait by the front door of this building.”

  “And let ourselves be escorted out?” Grant said. “Give up?”

  “Yes.” The color had returned to her features, and she gave her head a shake to arrange her hair. Then she started down the corridor, her shoes making their brisk report on the tile, past the gray functionaries at their steel furniture, past the stern secretary with her critical gaze. The three of them made their way back out into the December wind. A fleet of desiccated leaves blew from some unseen source toward the rolls of barbed wire at the margin of the camp; following the scrolls of leaves were scores of men, prisoners marching, guards leading and following them,
rifles aloft. They were all headed, Varian guessed, to the parade ground they’d passed on the way in; the urgency of the guards’ commands suggested something significant at stake. The official visitors, Varian thought: the men were to assemble to greet them. Only one person marched in the opposite direction, toward the commandant’s headquarters: a tall guard in a high-collared jacket, his hat pulled low over his ears against the cold, a pair of reflective glasses shielding his eyes against the sun. In his arms was a bayoneted assault rifle, which, when he reached the headquarters, he used as a pointer to wave Varian and Grant and Mary Jayne away from the side of the building. Without a word, he directed them into a single-file line and began to hustle them toward the edge of the camp, past the last few groups of marching prisoners—not toward the exit they’d used before, but one on the opposite side. The camp seemed to have cleared toward its eastern edge; they met no prisoner, no other guard. As they approached the gateway, Varian saw that the guard post was empty, the door of the guardhouse standing open. He wondered for a moment at that lapse of security just before an official inspection. Their guard turned and stopped them with the rifle, holding it at chest level like a bar; he jerked it in the direction of the guardhouse, and they understood that he wanted them to enter. The building wasn’t much larger than a phone booth. Did he intend to shoot them once they’d crowded inside? Grant entered first, and Varian stepped back against him. Mary Jayne wedged herself against Varian, her breath warm and quick on Varian’s cheek. The guard paused for a moment before the open door.

  “Sie haben es wahrscheinlich schon bemerkt,” he said, in an undertone. You must have guessed by now. And then he took off his glasses and regarded them with his dark, myopic eyes.

  It was Tobias Katznelson. The travelers stood in silence.

  “Ich habe den Befehl erhalten, Sie nach Marseille zurück zu bringen,” he said, and winked.

  “You’re to escort us all the way to Marseille?” Varian said.

  Grant gave a single, gratified ha. “You, Tobias? You’re our guard?”

  “Das bin ich. Aber genug der Worte. Wir müssen aufbrechen.”

  There was no chance to discuss what had happened, no chance to congratulate Mary Jayne on the magic she had worked. She tilted her head at Varian and smiled.

  Then Tobias Katznelson himself ushered them out of the guard booth and pushed them through the gates of the camp, and they began the long walk back to town by the back roads, a guard and his charges, the relationship between them instantly legible thanks to Katznelson’s uniform, his boots, his inarguable gun, its bayonet a bright exclamation point in the winter light.

  * * *

  ________

  Varian would never forget the strangeness of that journey: traveling in a rail compartment with his lover and Mary Jayne, the door of the compartment guarded by the person they were supposed to have rescued—not a cowering boy, but the clever young man he’d met at the Préfecture, one who had risen to the occasion, who had winked in the face of danger, who had embraced the role of concentration camp guard and was playing it now to the full, despite—or perhaps because of—what he’d recently suffered. And who could begrudge him a little pleasure in it, after his time at Vernet? His cheekbones had a hollowed-out look, and his eyes, when he glanced into the compartment at his charges, betrayed his exhaustion. It was lucky, Varian thought, that he hadn’t been at the camp longer; without a doubt they would have starved him to the point where his uniform would have been implausible, an empty sack on a wire rack. As it was, he filled it convincingly enough. Through the translucent door of their compartment they watched him polishing the blade of his weapon with a handkerchief. He hadn’t been allowed any ammunition, of course; Ormond had never meant for him to have a live gun. But it was a weapon, no question. It was what made his costume convincing. No one had stopped them along the road, no one had checked their progress into the railway station, nor onto the train. They hadn’t even had to buy tickets. When the conductor arrived, Tobias had merely waved him along without a word. Varian had no idea what the boy would do if he were required to speak; Tobias’s French sounded as German as his German.

  The three travelers passed a silver flask between them for courage: half a pint of gin, which Grant had cadged from the hotel bartender. Their conversation, conducted in whispers, concerned what they were to do with their charge once they reached Marseille. He could not be housed at the Medieval Pile; in fact, the Pile must be vacated altogether, lest anyone come looking for Tobias. Nor could he be lodged on his own at a hotel, where any interested party might apprehend him. The only place to house him, as far as Varian could determine, was Air Bel, though his presence might put others at risk. He would have to become one of the invisibles, like Zilberman: nameless and paperless, ready to disappear underground at a moment’s notice, willing to pass long hours in a dank cellar if necessary, prepared to wait months for his visas, without any certainty of escape. And how would Tobias take to it, this young man who had fled Berlin and made his way down to the coast of France, where he’d been planning a run over the Pyrenees?

  “There’s nowhere to put him at Air Bel,” Mary Jayne said. “Where is he supposed to sleep? On a library chair?”

  “He’ll take my room,” Varian said.

  “And you’ll live where?”

  Varian thought for a moment, silent. He knew he couldn’t suffer another Sinaïa episode, couldn’t allow himself to be imprisoned along with his clients if the police came to raid Air Bel. What he needed was to be in town, closer to the office. But he also wanted to be close to Grant, wherever Grant would go once he vacated the Pile.

  “Haven’t thought about it yet,” he said, finally.

  “You think on it,” Mary Jayne said. “I’m going to take a walk, if our guard will let me.” She slid open the compartment door and disappeared down the corridor, and Grant and Varian were alone for the first time since that morning, facing each other in the compartment. Grant’s eyes grew serious and he leaned forward in his seat, arms on his knees.

  “Listen, Tommie,” he said. “About your plan. What are you thinking, exactly? We’ve both got to move out? Me from the Pile and you from the villa?”

  “Yes,” Varian said. “But I don’t know where we can go.” We, he’d said, as if by necessity they had to go together. “Look. What if we both took rooms in town, at one of the hotels on the Vieux Port? Get out from beneath everyone’s scrutiny? I need to think about things.”

  “What things?”

  “My life back in New York. Eileen.”

  “And you’ll have more freedom to do that when we’re living on the same hotel corridor?”

  “I hear there’s a fine bar at the Hôtel Beauvau. Nice view of the port. Maybe we can drink our way to clarity.”

  “You wish we were back at Gore.”

  “No,” Varian said. “I certainly do not wish that.” He looked through the window at the endless marshland passing by outside, its heavy-headed grasses bending toward their reflections in flat silver water. The train seemed almost to be hovering over the liquid surface, moving with a strange lightness at a near-impossible speed. “Soon you’ll be returning to the States, now that you’ve got your man,” he said.

  They both glanced toward the shape of Tobias Katznelson as he stood outside the compartment door, a green-black shadow through the frosted glass. “We’ve got him, but he’s far from safe,” Grant said. “As you said yourself, it might be months yet before there’s an aperture.”

  “Months,” Varian said, and shook his head. “It’s already been months. What will Eileen say if I tell her I’m staying longer still? That there’s no end in sight?”

  “Haven’t you told her that already?”

  He had, but always with the understanding that he would have preferred to be on his way home to her. How long would she continue to believe it, if in fact she believed it now?

 
“I’ll have to wire Gregor as soon as we’re back in town,” Grant said, musing.

  “Yes, you’ll have to do that.”

  “How I wish I could see his face when he gets the cable.”

  Varian thought again of Grant sliding his feet into Katznelson’s slippers, of Grant wearing Katznelson’s robe and sleeping in his curtained bed. Would Grant really leave those luxuries of intimacy, on Varian’s suggestion that to stay at the Pile was dangerous? It was true that Tobias Katznelson was a fugitive, and that the strictest precautions must be taken. But also true that Varian wanted Grant out of Katznelson’s house. He wanted him close day and night, as at Pamiers, as at Arles. In his own hand now was the slim volume of Le faune de marbre, nostalgic Faulkner in French. Lives were at stake, but he knew what he wanted; he had been denied it for more than a decade. He slid his leg alongside Grant’s, and Grant pressed his knee through the layers of their clothing.

  “After we get back,” Varian said, “we’ll get Tobias settled. We’ll make sure he feels safe at Air Bel. You’ll get things squared away at the villa. Then, when the time is right, we’ll pack our things and meet at the Beauvau.”

  Grant’s eyes rested on his own. They seemed to ask if Varian knew what he was doing. Varian knew only that the knot between them had tightened; the Latin word that came to mind was implicatus. The feeling was hardly volitional.

  “All right,” Grant said. “We’ll decamp to the Beauvau.”

  “Even if just for a while.”

  As Mary Jayne slipped into the compartment again, the train began to slow for the station stop at Montpellier. She sat down amid a fresh cloud of jasmine and sandalwood, the chief notes of her fragrance; her makeup looked newly applied. Tobias Katznelson glanced in at his supposed charges, his polished bayonet gleaming. The boy seemed taut as a harp string, his back effortfully straight. On the station platform, gendarmes checked passengers’ papers. Four Gestapo officers stood beneath the station overhang; the most highly decorated among them, a man with a footballer’s build and a blocky jaw, checked his pocketwatch, looked toward the train, and said something to the shorter officer beside him. That man consulted a small notebook and nodded.