34
Departures
The next day Grant was well enough to get out of bed and sit by the window, and Varian set him up in a deep wingback chair with a quilt over his knees, a tray of baguette and tea at his side, a stack of books from the village library at arm’s reach, the bottle of aspirin close at hand. He voiced no doubt to Grant, he allowed his face to reveal nothing. What was most important, he told himself, was Grant’s recovery. Grant took his hand and assured him that he’d be all right, and Varian dressed and left for town.
But all along the tram ride, all along the walk to the office, past the farmers’ stands at the center of town, past Chave Prison, with its rotten exhalation of dank latrine and spoiled cabbage, all the way to the office on the boulevard Garibaldi, he carried his doubt about Tobias Katznelson like a dreaded diagnosis, a disease whose symptoms were invisible but whose poison penetrated his organs and tumbled through his blood. At the office he buried himself in his work: He wrote an insistent letter to Maurice Anne Marie de Rodellec du Porzic, Chief of Police, demanding the release of the Flight Portfolio; he inquired into sailings for the Chagalls, wrote letters to prominent New Yorkers on behalf of Jacques Lipchitz and his wife, petitioned for an exit visa for Max Ernst. In the afternoon he telephoned Bingham to see if there was any news, and Bingham said he had sent emergency cables to every consular officer who might possibly be of help; so far he’d heard nothing. Varian thanked him and got off the phone before he could tell Bingham what Zilberman had said about Tobias. No one at the office, no one from Air Bel, knew what Varian had learned. If he could keep it that way, if he could prevent the terrible doubt from becoming a real thing in the world, perhaps he could pinch it into nonexistence.
That day passed. So did the next. Still he said nothing to Grant, whose first days out of bed had exhausted him, and who fell asleep for the night before the stars came out. In the long dark hours Varian spent at his side, he forced his thoughts toward his work; in the morning he ran from Grant, ran to work, to the office, staying until after he knew Grant would be asleep. A week went by that way, then another. There was much to consume his attention: Jacques Lipchitz, having received his visas, now had to be persuaded by letter to attempt his escape. Max Ernst’s papers were all in order now, and his departure had to be arranged. The Flight Portfolio remained a prisoner of the state, despite urgent pleas from Eleanor Roosevelt and André Gide; Varian visited the Evêché daily, sat in waiting rooms for hours, banged on the unyielding door of Captain Villand’s office, sent more letters to de Rodellec du Porzic, petitioned Vichy, and even once, in a tiny Romanesque chapel in the rue d’Aubagne, furtively prayed to God. Of Zilberman himself there was still no word at all.
Some afternoons Varian left the office to walk along the Vieux Port, pausing at the dock from which he and Grant had set off on their circumscribed sail. The Monotype National was nowhere in evidence; it must have been put into storage. The dock itself was abandoned. No one was ever there to bother Varian, no one there to interrupt the pattern of his meditation. He would take off his shoes and socks and sit barefoot at the edge of the splintered boards, remembering the feeling from childhood, from afternoons on the Cape with his parents: the lap of wavelets against the pier, the chill of the water radiating from below, the wavering light all around him. With his eyes nearly closed, the sun breaking into brilliant circles on his lashes, he found he could open in his mind a small protected space, a place where he was safe to entertain any doubt. And the one that always came first was this: When Grant had reappeared all those months ago, when he’d materialized from the ether like a Hollywood ghost, hadn’t Varian mistrusted him at once? Hadn’t he felt a familiar flash of discomfort, a familiar suspicion that Grant wasn’t what he seemed to be? Your friend comports himself like a man who is keeping a secret, Youssef A. had said at La Fémina. And Varian had laughed it off. But hadn’t it occurred to him that Grant’s motives might not be pure, that he might be looking to settle an old score? Hadn’t he, in some recess of his mind, always wondered how deeply he could trust Grant, who had, after all, spent all those years pretending to be what he was not—prevaricating, masquerading, passing?
But what did that mean, his passing? What had he been passing for? For what he was? He hadn’t written the laws that considered anyone with a drop of Negro blood a Negro; those laws were vestiges of slavetime, of fear. He had perpetrated a deception, it was true, but had he actually hurt anyone in the process? He had never denied the existence of a Negro family he knew and loved; he’d done only what anyone, black or white, should have had a right to do: gone to college where he wanted to, gone to graduate school where he wanted to, secured the best job he could. He’d never lied to Varian about any of it; he’d always told him the truth. As far as Varian knew, Grant had never lied to him about anything.
Here was what he knew, or thought he knew: For eight months, from their first moment at the Dorade until that morning, Grant had behaved like a man in love. He had risked, he had feared, he had retied a liaison that had nearly been the end of him twelve years before; he had made promises, confessions; he had written to Katznelson (or at least he said he had; Varian had never actually seen the letter, had he?). Everything he had seemed to feel, all he’d shown Varian of himself—could it have been faked? All of it? Was anyone in the world so subtle an actor?
But then, into that protected space, the one in which he’d almost convinced himself of Grant’s innocence, would come a vision of Zilberman at the Evêché, his left eye blackened, that dirty-looking wound at his temple running with blood. He would hear the genuine chagrin and mystification in Zilberman’s voice as he spoke, would see the clear and steady look in Zilberman’s good eye as he told Varian what he knew. He, Varian, who thought himself so subtle: Was he, in fact, a fool, a rube? Was Grant laughing at him silently, had he been laughing at him now for months, having desired and won some form of retribution? Or even just a victory for his lover, to whom he’d return as soon as he could?
No matter how he argued to himself, no matter how he pleaded with himself, that was the conviction he brought home every day: that he had been deceived, that Zilberman had merely revealed the truth that day at the Evêché. Home at Air Bel, in the bedroom he shared with Grant, or in the library, or in the kitchen over tea, Grant seemed to watch him with growing unease. Was it only a reflection of Varian’s own suspicion, or was it evidence of his guilt? When he asked Varian what was wrong—and he did ask, sometimes directly, sometimes with his hands and mouth on Varian’s body, sometimes with silence, the simple communication of patience—Varian told him, always, that he was thinking about Zilberman and the Flight Portfolio, thinking of how he’d failed to save them both. He had unearthed Zilberman’s package for his wife and daughter, he told Grant: not paintings, as he’d imagined, not drawings, but money, banknotes, nearly a hundred thousand francs’ worth. And a letter, a substantial one, tied up as if for luck in a piece of red string. It was stamped and addressed, but Varian couldn’t bring himself to mail it, couldn’t bring himself to deliver to Frau and Fräulein Zilberman that last missive, the note that must have begun along the lines of If you’re reading this letter, you must assume me to be dead. That, he told Grant, was what was on his mind; that was what was stealing his sleep. It was convincing enough as an excuse, enough so that Grant, finely attuned though he was to Varian’s inner music, eventually stopped asking. The days ticked forward, and Grant continued to recover from his pericarditis, and Varian lay awake at night, blinking into the uninterrupted darkness.
* * *
________
He had managed at last to arrange a sailing for the Chagalls, one that would take them all the way from Lisbon to New York. They were to depart by train on the tenth of May; they wanted no send-off, no farewell party, nothing to attract the authorities’ attention. Though Bingham had offered the use of the Cadillac, they wanted to walk to the station; the last look at a city, Chagall said,
was the most important one. So the morning of May tenth found Varian at the Hôtel Moderne at half past six, preparing to carry his clients’ bags some fifteen blocks to the Gare St. Charles. He paid the Chagalls’ hotel bill with Centre Américain funds, then paced the narrow faux-marbled hallway like a prisoner. As at the Bretons’ and Serges’ departure, he knew he should have been proud, but he felt like an idiot, like a mole rat who had recently discovered himself to be naked and blind. Chagall himself did nothing to dispel the impression. When he appeared from between the elevator doors, a long tube of drawings over his shoulder and a paint-flecked suitcase in his hand, the look he gave Varian was one of aggrieved reproof. Bella, following him out of the elevator, stood pale and upright in her black lace dress, her eyes dark and anxious, ringed underneath with dusk-colored shadows.
“Are we ready?” Varian asked, relieving Bella of her hatbox.
“I couldn’t sleep all night,” Bella said. “I’m utterly exhausted.”
“We’ll sleep more soundly, I suppose, when we reach New York,” Chagall said. He relinquished his suitcase to Varian and stepped out through the front doors, into the apricot-colored light slanting from the east.
They turned toward the Canebière, toward the familiar cafés and hotels and steamship offices, all of it offering itself to the painter and his wife for one last crystallizing look. But Chagall’s eye, following the early-morning pedestrians in their springtime clothes, didn’t seem to savor, nor to rest; it moved always, as though in search of something lost. And Bella walked beside him in silence, a tiny photograph of her daughter held to her chest; Ida and her husband had not yet received their visas, and might never be able to follow their parents.
If only he could have told the Chagalls how he had paid already for his error, how he was paying still. His life, which a few weeks earlier had seemed to hover in a region of inarticulable joy, had descended now into a deadwater swamp impenetrable to light, even in midday. As they climbed the long stairs to the station, what he felt most was a terrible and penetrating loneliness. He could think only of climbing the same stairs on the day of Zilberman’s deportation, entering through these glass doors, pushing his way toward that platform, the place he’d seen Zilberman last.
At the Chagalls’ departure platform he set down the suitcases, panting. Chagall looked up with a half-bemused expression at the twenty-foot-high tricolor banner strung from the ceiling of the station. VIVE LE MARECHAL, it read, in two-foot-high capital letters: an admonition, a command.
“I must apologize again, Monsieur Fry, for being such a stubborn client,” Chagall said, his tone still constrained. “I thank you for your persistence.”
“I was honored, Marc,” Varian said, his eyes lowered.
Bella, standing at her husband’s side with her glossy black hatbox in hand, fixed Varian in her gaze. “You look rather done in yourself, Monsieur Fry, if I may say so. I believe you could use a rest.”
“Monsieur Fry cannot rest yet,” Chagall said, pointedly. “He will rest only when all his charges are free.”
“Perhaps you’ll come see us once you’re back in New York,” Bella said. “You’ll return home sometime, won’t you?”
“Sometime,” Varian said. He had believed, for a time, that his home was wherever Grant was. Now he had the sensation, standing there on the platform, of having become insubstantial, transparent, weightless, as if he might float out through the open mouth of the station and be blown away into the Mediterranean sky.
“I’m sorry about your drawings, Marc,” Varian said. “Sorry you had to give them up to that idiot Villand. I hate to think of them in his hands.”
Chagall exchanged a glance with his wife; Bella covered her mouth with her hand. Into her dark eyes came a surprising light: Was it humor? “It’s a shame you didn’t see them,” Chagall said. “They were, in a way, inspired by Air Bel. By the party for Monsieur Allen, in fact. The fame of which has traveled far.”
“Is that so? How, exactly?”
“Well,” Chagall said. “We were our own subjects, Bella and I. We dressed, if that’s the word, just as your friends did on that occasion. I seated myself upon one sheet of drawing paper, and Madame Chagall made a tracing. Then she seated herself on the other, and I did the same.”
“You’re saying you gave him—”
“Two lovely drawings,” Chagall said. “Autoportraits, you might call them. The other drawings, the ones I intended for Zilberman’s portfolio, are here with me now.” He patted the steel tube at his side. “As soon as I reach New York, my gallery will offer them for sale. Your organization shall have the proceeds.”
He couldn’t help himself; he laughed aloud. “That’s brilliant, Marc.”
“Yes, I thought so myself.”
“I made a mistake,” Varian said. “A terrible mistake. About Zilberman.”
Chagall took Varian’s hands in his own, waited until Varian met his gaze. The look of condemnation was gone; all he saw now were those deep-set, deeply lined eyes, the ones that had struck him, on their first meeting, as being capable of seeing more than mortals’ eyes could see. “The true mistake would have been not to come at all. To stay in New York with the rest of the New Yorkers. Not to have tried.”
He wanted to believe those words, wanted to feel heartened by them. But he could only think, as he shook Chagall’s hand one last time and bent to kiss Bella’s, that if he could have turned back time he would have done it; he would have chosen never to have come to Marseille, never to have known that Grant still lived, never to have gotten out from behind his desk at the Foreign Policy Association and taken human lives into his hands. He had cut a thread of fate, he had done it for Grant’s sake. He’d done it bloodlessly, secondhand, but he was just as guilty as if he’d closed the shears himself; as guilty as he’d been when, twelve years earlier, driving the yellow Packard, he’d closed his eyes for a fleeting moment and let his speed carry him over the dividing line.
* * *
________
He dragged himself back to the office, inserted himself behind his desk, picked up a stack of mail. He had just opened the third in a series of visa-application rejections when Danny appeared at the door of his office, a telephone message in hand. The message was from Bingham, who had summoned Varian to the consulate.
“Did he say why?” he asked Danny.
“Only that you’d better come immediately.” He drew his eyebrows together, frowning at the penciled note. “He sounded—unlike himself, I’d say. Downhearted.”
“What about our rendezvous with Kourillo?” He and Danny were to meet their money-changer in half an hour; Kourillo had promised a good rate for Konstantinov’s box of gold coins. Since February the box had been secreted away at the villa, buried beneath a paving stone beside the goldfish pond. But after the last raid, after the ransacking of Zilberman’s studio and the confiscation of the Flight Portfolio, Danny believed it was no longer safe to keep anything of value at Air Bel. Killer, with his eyes on everything, might well have known about the box of coins, though they’d buried it at two in the morning; if he’d been in Mary Jayne’s room, if he’d been looking out the window at that moment, he might have seen them and known what they were about. They were scheduled to meet Kourillo at his hotel at noon, and Kourillo was to give them eighty thousand in cash for the doubloons.
“We’re old friends by now, Kourillo and I,” Danny said. “I don’t need a double. Go down and see what Harry wants.”
“Are you sure, Danny? It’s a lot of loot to carry around on your own.”
“I’m sure. Go.”
* * *
________
He arrived at the consular offices to find a longer-than-usual line out front, a crush of refugee supplicants in the foyer and the waiting room, looking exhausted already though the sun hadn’t yet reached its apex. In recent weeks, boats had been leaving
Marseille at an unprecedented rate. He had put seventy-eight of his own clients, including Breitscheid’s wife, on the Winnipeg a few days earlier, and seven on the Mont Viso, and fifty-three more on the Wyoming. Had he not been so consumed with his private misery, had he not been so distracted by his grief, those departures would have seemed unbelievable victories. He suspected his total now to be nearing a thousand. Jacques Lipchitz had departed for Lisbon earlier that week, Varian having won his trust; and Max Ernst and Peggy Guggenheim were, that very day, to board the Yankee Clipper for New York. Perhaps Bingham had summoned him to congratulate him. Perhaps the note of disheartenment was unrelated. But the familiar lanky guard, the one who spoke unusually agile French, avoided Varian’s gaze as he entered. And Bingham’s secretary, that red-haired Michigan girl who could sing like Deanna Durbin and who always had a smile for him, gave him a look of misery now, her eyes pink and raw.
“What’s the matter?” Varian said, resting a hand on her desk.
“Go in,” she said. “You’ll see.”
The door to Harry’s office stood open, and he crossed the waiting room to enter. What met his eyes was at first incomprehensible: books strewn across the floor, the filing cabinet gutted, the desk a disaster of papers, a fleet of cardboard boxes on the carpet. He thought there must have been a raid. Bingham stood behind the massive walnut desk, his sleeves rolled to his elbows, loading his things into a wooden crate.
The Flight Portfolio Page 53