The Flight Portfolio

by Julie Orringer

  He would play whatever game Villand wanted to play. “Please,” he said. “I know the law. You can’t search a private home without a warrant. You can’t remove a private person’s property without cause. And every prisoner is allowed a visitor.”

  “We had a warrant, you’ll be pleased to know. We’d had a tip about a fugitive at your place of residence. We believed Zilberman might lead us to others of interest. Your Flight Portfolio is a veritable cornucopia of degenerates, some of whom have tried our patience long enough.”

  “What can I do, Captain? What is it you want?”

  Villand got to his feet behind the desk, resting his hands on the swell of his belly. The brass of his uniform glittered in the late-afternoon light falling through the window; he seemed to arrange himself at an angle that showed it off to advantage. “I want what we all want here at the Préfecture,” he said. “I want the best for France. Naturally, an American’s concerns may differ from our own. There should be no mystery, Monsieur Fry, why I must deny your request to have that portfolio back. As to your seeing Lev Zilberman, I must deny that request for the safety, the security, of France.”

  Varian scrutinized the man as he stood in his slant of sunlight, buttons glittering. Was he bribable? Prideful? What mystery lay behind the smooth plane of his forehead?

  “I have something that might be of value to you,” he said, finally.

  “What can it possibly be, Monsieur Fry?”

  “Something of great value to the world. But it can be yours alone.”

  Captain Villand laced his fingers. “Do tell.”

  “Monsieur Chagall had two drawings for Zilberman. He went to deliver them this afternoon. I believe he may be persuadable. He might, in other words, be brought round to the idea of delivering those drawings into your hands instead.”

  The captain sat down again in his chair. “Chagall, deliver two drawings here? I don’t believe you for a moment.”

  “Let me telephone,” Varian said.

  “You are a prevaricator, Monsieur Fry. Please bear in mind that I can arrest you at any time. Monsieur Zilberman was found to be residing at a premises rented in your name. It is quite a serious crime to harbor a fugitive—as I’m sure you know, since you’re so familiar with our laws.”

  “Two drawings by Chagall himself,” Varian said, struggling to keep his voice steady. “Two. Without likeness in the world. Yours alone.”

  Villand sat back in his chair, flicking his unlit cigar with his thumb. “Bribery is also a crime in France. Perhaps in the States you have different laws. Wild West laws.”

  “I can have the drawings here in half an hour,” Varian said.

  Flick. Flick.

  Varian sat silent in his chair, hardly breathing.

  “I suppose those drawings must be admitted as evidence,” Villand said, lifting the brass pineapple toward his cigar; he leaned forward to light it, then released a cloud of tar-scented smoke. “If it’s true, as you say, that Chagall was on the verge of delivering them, we must have them here at once.” And he pushed the telephone across the desk toward Varian.

  * * *

  ________

  An hour later, a jackbooted guard conducted Varian into the bowels of the building, those subterranean catacomb-like hallways with their rounded ceilings, their too-close walls. Varian imagined ranks of skulls behind those walls, the entombed bodies of thousands of men, prisoners of decades past. He would never get used to the sound of jails, the clang of metal on metal, metal on stone, keys against key rings, metal trays on floors, metal toilet pots on floors, boots on floors, fists against bars; and that was to say nothing of the stench of it, the stench of shit and sweat and old broth and vinegar, of cigarettes and sulfur, of the damp stone itself, the body of the earth carved out to make room for other bodies.

  The guard led him not to the cells but to an interview room, not far from the one in which Varian had first met Tobias Katznelson. A bare bulb burned overhead; here again was the same brand of steel desk, an ugly block; the same twin steel chairs, identically hard and cold. In that room he waited alone, rubbing one hand with the other, for what seemed an eternity. Then came Zilberman’s shuffling step in the hall, and the heavier footsteps of the guard. The door opened, and the guard pushed Zilberman into the room. His wrists and ankles were cuffed, his white shirt stained with archipelagos of blood. A raw-edged gash ran from his left temple to his earlobe; dried blood traced a line down the side of his neck and disappeared into his collar. His left eye was blackened. Through the other eye he squinted at Varian as if trying to make him out from far away.

  “Ten minutes,” the guard said, and closed the door. The sole concession to the high price Varian had paid—to the price Chagall had paid, and the rest of the world—was the fact that they were allowed to be alone.

  “Lev,” he said. “We’re going to get you out of this. They arrested Chagall earlier today, but they freed him again within the hour.”

  “I’m not Chagall,” Zilberman said, his voice a harsh, pained whisper.

  Varian met his eyes. “Do you know what Chagall says about you?” he asked. “He says we haven’t seen the smallest fraction of your work, or what it can do. He says you’re superior to him as an artist in every way.”

  “That would mean nothing at the moment, even if it were true.”

  “We’ll get you out. You must be ready to meet the Sinaïa as soon as it docks.”

  “The Sinaïa,” Zilberman said, his tone shading toward bitterness. “The Sinaïa sailed some time ago. Somehow I missed it.”

  “You know the situation. Tobias—”

  He shook his head. “And now they’ve got the Flight Portfolio. I saw it in their hands, saw it thrown into the trunk of the police car. What will they do with it? Fifty-two pieces of original art, the work of the greatest artists alive in Europe—all in Vichy’s hands! Even if I get out, we’ll never get it back. And you, Mr. Fry. You’re known to have harbored me at Air Bel. Your days in France are numbered, to be certain.”

  “We can’t worry about that. We’ve got to focus on the immediate problem.”

  “They’ve been kind enough to tell me what they’re planning for me. Not a camp. Nothing so kind. Deportation by the first eastward train. Think of it: I’m to see Germany again! Mein Vaterland.”

  “No,” Varian said. “You’ve got a U.S. entry visa. I’ll go to Bingham. We’ll put a stop to this at once. You’re not going back to Germany.”

  Zilberman shook his head. “Mr. Fry,” he said, “you must know you have my greatest admiration. What you came here to do was impossible by almost any measure. Your job was to extract people from a sticking morass and shove them through an impenetrable barrier, a series of impenetrable barriers. You took it on with no previous experience. And yet, as we both know, you’ve had great success. I admire your obduracy. It’s a fine quality for a person in your role. But not everyone can be saved.”

  “You can be,” he said, desperately. “You will be. If we could get Tobias Katznelson out of France, we can get you out, too.”

  Zilberman shook his head. “I’ve never understood it,” he said. “The way you talk about that boy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your friend Mr. Grant was obsessed with preserving the boy’s life, and somehow he must have communicated the obsession. Tobias Katznelson! Of course every life matters, but I must ask you, Varian—why him, of all people? Why all that effort on his behalf?”

  There were voices in the hall, and footsteps. How much time did they have left? “You know why,” Varian said, under his breath. “You know what he was doing at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut—what he was capable of.”

  “What do I know?” Zilberman said. “That he was a passable student? That he loved my daughter? How many students, how many lovers, have been killed already?”

  “Not a passab
le student,” Varian said, quieter still. “A rare talent. A genius. You know. You knew him in Berlin. I don’t understand it all, I admit—I know nothing about theoretical physics or how it can be applied to military defense. But the Germans had heard enough about it to want him working for them, or to want him dead.”

  Zilberman sat back in his chair, his long, articulate hands cuffed on his lap. He looked at Varian steadily from beneath his silver brows. “Where did you get this information?” he whispered.

  “Grant told me everything. Everything he knew.”

  Zilberman sat for a long moment, silent. “There was a boy,” he said. “A friend of Tobias’s. A boy of prodigious talent, a disciple of Planck’s. Abel Heligman, his name was. In fact, before my daughter bewitched young Katznelson, she was a favorite of this Heligman. In love with him, I would say.” Zilberman shifted in his steel chair. “Many nights he sat at the piano in our front room and played, nearly as well as Mr. Grant. I knew about Heligman’s work. Planck told me about it himself—he was a friend of mine, an admirer. A collector of art. He was too excited about Heligman to keep silent, as perhaps he should have. Tobias Katznelson was a great friend of Heligman’s. He assisted him in the lab at Kaiser-Wilhem for a time. Then Heligman was arrested. The rumor is that he was tortured. But he wouldn’t give them what they wanted. When it became clear they wouldn’t release him, that they would send him to a camp, he hanged himself in his cell. It was a terrible shock to my daughter, and to Tobias.”

  Varian sat in silence, dry-mouthed. A dull buzzing began to emanate from the walls of the room, a sound that seemed to press in upon him from all sides.

  “Tobias envied Heligman,” Zilberman said, almost gently now. “He knew he didn’t possess what Heligman possessed. Not by a long measure.”

  The walls seemed in danger of falling inward upon Varian. “Is this—are you telling the truth?” he said. “Is this what I must now understand to be true?”

  Zilberman glanced toward the door, beyond which they could hear the guards’ muffled voices. “If Tobias Katznelson had what Heligman had, and was now en route to the States, that would be a triumph indeed! Katznelson was a hardworking student, but he told me—he joked to me—that he would never understand a tenth of what Heligman did. His own father lamented his lack of brilliance.”

  His father. Gregor Katznelson, Grant’s lover.

  “Tobias Katznelson!” Zilberman said, shaking his head. “I always thought of him as the most ordinary of boys. Even his envy of Heligman was common enough. But perhaps he was more intelligent than I gave him credit for, getting himself here from Germany on his own, then weaving this elaborate web.”

  “Do you mean to hurt me, Lev?” Varian said, involuntarily. “You’d certainly have a right. Here you sit in chains, threatened with deportation, while Tobias—”

  “I’m telling you nothing but the truth, Mr. Fry. I ought to have voiced my questions sooner, but I didn’t realize how misled you were. And I wanted you to save Tobias, of course. He’s a good boy, a fine boy. I knew what his escape would mean to his parents, and to my daughter, after what happened to Heligman.”

  “This can’t be right, Lev,” Varian said, his voice scarcely under control now. “I know Katznelson was what he said he was. Nazi military intelligence was looking for him. And Tobias himself said—”

  “What, exactly? How did he frame it to you?”

  Varian put his forehead into his hands. He went back in his mind through his encounters with Tobias, every one: the Evêché, the concentration camp, the weeks at Air Bel. Tobias in his torn clothes, then, later, in a prison guard’s borrowed uniform; Tobias clad in the fine clothes Grant had bought for him in town; Tobias snow-pale and naked at the dinner table with Jay Allen, or clad only in pajama bottoms in his room at the villa. Tobias with a pinned butterfly in his hands. And all that time, he’d said scarcely a word about his work. Varian couldn’t think of a single instance in which he’d misrepresented his situation. Varian himself, often speaking obliquely, had expressed how urgent it was that Tobias be saved. Tobias had merely agreed.

  The guard opened the door to the interview room and announced that the time had expired. When Zilberman sat unmoving, the guard pulled him to his feet by the chain that linked his handcuffs.

  “I left something for my wife and daughter,” Zilberman said. “In the root cellar, in case something like this should happen.”

  “Time is up,” the guard said again. “All conversation is to cease at once.” He gave Zilberman’s cuffs another yank. Zilberman stumbled toward the door and out into the hall, where he turned back toward Varian.

  “I’m grateful for what you’ve done,” he said. “Whatever its limitations.”

  “Face forward,” said the guard. “I don’t want to have to drag you.”

  And then they started off down the echoing length of that catacomb, and in a few moments Lev Zilberman was gone.

  33

  Reckoning

  He would never know how he got to Bingham’s villa that night, how he climbed the dark hills of Marseille to the winding drive, with its twin colonnade of lindens and its ankle-high plantings of verbena. He seemed to be moving through a kind of tunnel, kin to the catacomb from which he’d just emerged. The night pressed in upon him from all sides, pushing him toward the ivory-colored house ahead, toward its blue-painted portal with its weathered brass ring. How he beat his fists on that door, how he pounded the brass ring against the door until flakes of paint snowed onto the doorstep. He kept pounding, shouting Bingham’s name, until Bingham came to the door himself, wearing a smoking jacket and holding a glass of whiskey in his hand.

  “What on earth, Fry? At this hour? How did you get here?”

  “Harry,” he said, and collapsed against the doorframe. “Let me in.”

  “Good God, Varian, what’s happened?”

  “Zilberman’s been arrested. They’re threatening to ship him east. And they’ve taken the Flight Portfolio, all of it.”

  There was no need to elaborate, no need to explain the urgency. Bingham left him in the vestibule and ran up the curving stair, returning moments later fully dressed. He instructed his valet to pull the car out, and, moments later, the gleaming red Cadillac emerged from its stable with its engine roaring. They climbed in, and Bingham pressed the pedal to the floorboards, shooting them down the drive and through the streets of town, where Bingham ran a dozen red lights, threatened pedestrians, barely avoided a long series of postboxes and trash cans and hitching-posts, and finally screeched to a halt in front of the Evêché, where he left the car parked directly in front of a sign that read DEFENSE ABSOLUE DE STATIONNER.

  Despite Bingham’s demands at the front desk, despite his presentation of his diplomatic papers and his promise that the U.S. consul-general himself would intervene unless the commandant granted their request, the officer on duty refused to admit them even to Captain Villand’s anteroom. They sat instead in a general waiting area on narrow wooden chairs apparently designed for discomfort; they sat for hours, hardly speaking, Varian with his head in his hands, acutely aware that Zilberman was somewhere in the building, his cuts untended, his black eye swelling, his thoughts on his wife and daughter. He was still here in France, still alive, still savable, if only they could get to him.

  He called Chagall from the coin telephone in the hall, and Chagall promised to give Captain Villand anything else he might want. He called Peggy Guggenheim, who proposed an extravagant cash bribe. He couldn’t call Mary Jayne, because she had disappeared with Killer. He called Gussie at his hotel, then sent him to the villa to bring Danny; Danny arrived breathless, having run all the way from the tram. Varian brought him to the waiting room and told him nearly the whole story, though he couldn’t repeat what Zilberman had said about Tobias, couldn’t repeat that piece of information, or of false information, if that was what it was. His insides twisted and burned; hot wav
es of pain broke over him, surging upward through his abdomen and chest, bringing drops of sweat to his forehead. He wiped his forehead with his handkerchief until his handkerchief dripped. Sometime in the night, Bingham went home to sleep for a few hours. He would go to the consulate before dawn, he said, would do whatever he could. He would telephone Mrs. Roosevelt. He would telephone the president himself.

  Varian watched him go—Bingham in his light trenchcoat, tall blond ultraman, embodiment of American power, the idealistic and inclusive kind. What power did Varian have without him? What could he do? He could wait, that was all. The Evêché never closed its doors, a police station couldn’t; he would wait in perpetuity if he had to. Danny stayed with him, pacing, cleaning his glasses, making little notes in his pocket notebook, inquiring periodically at the desk. He told Varian that Grant’s condition had stabilized back home, that by the time the doctor had arrived, the aspirin had brought Grant’s fever down again; the doctor had delivered pain medication, and Grant was sleeping now, or had been sleeping when Danny left. He delivered this news for comfort, in a low and reassuring tone. But when Varian’s mind slid to Grant, when he envisioned Grant’s long form stretched beneath the sheets of their shared bed, he experienced a kind of inner recoil, as if at the touch of something hot or sharp. Someone had lied. That was clear. Was it Zilberman, there at the Evêché, or Grant? In his mind he returned to that September afternoon on the Vieux Port, the day Grant had revealed the particulars of Tobias’s case. Amid the flashing of light on the water, amid the thrill of riding the rail of that Monotype National with the sea rushing past beneath them, amid the glow of the white Bandol and the astonishing fact of Grant’s closeness, the heat of his body, the shape of his shoulders beneath his linen shirt, would Varian have been able to discern a lie? Would he have been looking for it? He knew what he’d been looking for: some indication that Grant still felt for him what he, Varian, felt. What he’d felt all along, those twelve years. All else was blurred now in his memory.