The House of Dreams (7 page)

“Does everyone have to do this?”

“There are many people pretending to be artists, desperate for our help. We can't assist everyone. I mean, our remit changed somewhat. Originally we were helping only artists and intellectuals. That is still our priority, but my colleague Monsieur Hermant suggested we should give aid to a few of the most deserving ordinary relief cases as well.” I liked that about Mary Jayne. I found out later it was she who was helping the so-called ordinary refugees by bankrolling what they called the Gold List, but she never bragged about it, not once. She was a wealthy young woman who had been swanning around Europe in her own plane, so when France fell to the Nazis, Mary Jayne could have left Paris and run on home to the States, just carried on living her charmed life. But she made her way to Marseille and stayed around to help.

“So, which am I?” I asked her, handing over the sketch. In a couple of minutes, I had produced something good enough to fool the girl, anyway.

“An artist, clearly.” She flashed those big old blue eyes at me. “Very flattering, Mr. Lambert,” she said, glancing from the sketch I handed her to the black-and-white clipping from the exhibition catalog. “May I keep this?”

“Of course,” I said, inclining my head. “I really would appreciate your help, Miss…”

“Gold. My name is Gold.” Of course it was. Everything about this girl was clearly a cut above. I wouldn't have been at all surprised if she had a hallmark stamped on her somewhere. I shook her hand. “I will discuss your case with my colleagues. Perhaps you would be kind enough to come back on Monday morning?”

“As I said, I have enough money to pay for my passage to America, I just need your assistance with visas.…”

“Yes, I've noted it all down. There is one other thing,” she said.

My heart fell to my boots. “Yes?”

“We only help people who are known and trusted by us or our clients. We have to be on the alert for Nazi and Vichy agents, you do understand? Do you have anyone who can vouch for you in Marseille?”

Oh God, so close, so close. I thought frantically. “Vice-Consul Bingham,” I lied.

She looked up in surprise. “You're a friend of Harry's?”

“More of an acquaintance.” I leaned toward her and fixed her with my gaze. “I can't say too much. It really is imperative I leave France immediately,” I said. “I've been an outspoken critic of Nazism for many years.” I pointed at the political cartoon.

“I do understand, Mr. Lambert,” she said, lacing her fingers together. She leaned toward me. “But you must understand, too. Every person who walks through this door is scared for his, or her, life. We have to choose who we help very, very carefully.”

*   *   *

I saw Miss Gold again late Sunday night, in a bar in the Vieux-Port. I was surprised to see her in a joint like that, but she looked as happy as a debutante at the Ritz. A slim, dark guy with round glasses escorted her onto the dance floor. Her face was all lit up with love like Christmas as they danced, but he looked hard, I can tell you, lean and mean, not the kind of fellow you'd expect a rich girl like her to go for. But then, people can be funny like that sometimes. The bar was noisy with voices and laughter, and the band had to fight to be heard. Miss Gold and her man were dancing in the middle of the old parquet dance floor, dark figures moving around them. The dim red light lit up her blond waves, blushed her cheeks like a fallen angel's. When I think of Mary Jayne, that's how I remember her, with a smile on her lips as they turned slowly on the spot, lost in one another.

 

EIGHT

M
ARSEILLE

1940

V
ARIAN

Varian Fry struck his gold Dunhill lighter. The flame licked the soupy night air east of the Vieux-Port, illuminated his horn-rimmed glasses beneath the brim of his dark homburg. The signet ring on his finger glinted. The last warm evenings of a Saint Martin's summer had lingered, but now the mistral swept down from the Vaucluse mountains, a chill whisper in the ear of the gilded Virgin of sinners and sailors atop Notre-Dame de la Garde on its way down to the city and the sea. The wind rustled through palm and plane trees, bringing the metallic tang of the week's catch from the sluiced-off market stalls on the Quai des Belges. That night they were undertaking the third attempt to help a number of the refugees in greatest danger escape to Gibraltar by boat, and it was the biggest risk they had taken yet.
After two failures, this has to work. It will work,
he told himself again, his stomach knotting with fear at the thought of discovery by Vichy troops or the Gestapo.

“Thanks.” Beamish leaned in to the flame, lighting his cigarette. His calm impressed Varian. You would not want to play poker with Beamish. The way he leisurely flicked his cigarette with long, dismissive fingers reminded Varian more of the studied nonchalance of a boy at a dance than of a man arranging one of the most daring escapes of the war. Varian wondered if he was scared, too.

“Are you sure you weren't followed?” Beamish said.

“Of course. I may not be as sharp—”

“Je me débrouille.”
I look after myself. A grin illuminated his face. That smile was why Varian had nicknamed Albert Hermant—aka Hermant the varmint, as Miriam and Mary Jayne called him—Beamish.
A demon of ingenuity with Puck's smile,
that was how Varian described his best friend and right-hand man in Marseille. Who would guess that Beamish had been born in Berlin and arrived in Marseille via the Sorbonne, the London School of Economics, and a doctorate at the University of Trieste? He had fought for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, but when Spain fell to Franco's fascist forces, Beamish ended up in France, a refugee himself. Now, he was putting his intellect and battle-hardened street smarts to good use helping the ARC. Bound by a common intelligence and drive to save as many refugees as they could, Varian and Beamish had become fast friends.

“I'm not a fool, though. No one was tailing me.” But it would have been easy enough. Varian had strolled beneath the blue-painted streetlights of La Canebière with the natural assurance of a Harvard man. His long-legged, confident stride, even his height, marked him out among the teeming crowds of refugees clogging the dark arteries of the city. His anxiety was hidden deep. He wore his learning like armor, a sword and a shield, his nationality like a cloak—
I am untouchable
.
I am the child of a great and neutral country. I am an American.

Now, as he sheltered with Beamish in the shadows on the pier, he had a small valise at his side. Somewhere in the darkness, a ship's foghorn sounded. Until this evening, it had always amused him that the cannons of Fort Saint-Jean pointed inward, as if to keep the inhabitants at bay. Now, he felt the harbor had him at gunpoint, and the dark bulk of the Île d'If made him think of the Count of Monte Cristo, of capture. His gut instinct told him something was wrong. Varian slipped his hand inside his coat and winced.

“You need a holiday,” Beamish said. “At least you look like a tourist on vacation.”

“Good, that's the idea.” Varian checked his Patek Philippe. “The train leaves for Tarascon at midnight.”

“Make sure you're on it. The flics can't hear you were anywhere near here tonight.” As he spoke, Beamish's gaze followed a group of figures lurching along the dock. “Don't worry, it's nothing.”

The door of a shed on the quay near the lighthouse eased open a crack, and Charlie poked his head out. “Hey, boss, we're all set,” he called quietly. His warm southern drawl was reassuring, but his fingers worked nervously, as if he were playing his trumpet.

Varian looked around, then strode over and slipped inside, his eyes adjusting to the darkness. He made out the shadowy figures of the refugees, the pale, exhausted faces of British prisoners of war on the run, Spanish and Italian Republicans, writers, artists, and among them the towering figure of Georg Bernhard, his white hair like a cloud on a mountaintop. He stepped forward and shook his hand. “Good luck, Bernhard.”

“Thank you, Fry.”

“I'll leave you in Charlie and Beamish's capable hands. The boat will be here in an hour. You'll be in Gibraltar before you know it.” The man's intelligent, haunted face touched him. For once, the editor of the anti-Nazi newspaper
Pariser Tageblatt
had lost his natural assurance.
Number three on Hitler's Most Wanted list,
Varian thought.
I'd be worried, too.
Two other ARC clients—the German politicians Rudolf Breitscheid and Rudolf Hilferding—were numbers one and two. As leading members of the Social Democratic Party, they were in grave danger.
They think they are untouchable, sitting leisurely in the same café
every day when they should be in hiding,
Varian thought. He had given up trying to warn them to be more careful. These great men believed the so-called unoccupied zone was safe, but Varian knew better.
No one is safe. “That couple ah sons ah bitches ah just asking for trouble,” that's what Charlie said the other day about the pair of them. But it's up to us to get them out, too,
Varian thought.

The hot bovine bulk of the dark figures in their winter coats, the muffled sound of shallow breathing in the claustrophobic shack, unnerved him. “I'll see you soon, in New York,” he said, and stepped out onto the dock, closing the door.

“Sometimes,” Beamish said quietly, “I think you say that as much to give yourself confidence as them.”

*   *   *

Striding on through the Vieux-Port, Varian imagined the cellars and subterranean smugglers' tunnels beneath the steps of his polished brogues. He sensed the hidden layers of the ancient city, the Phoenician foundations and Roman walls buried below. He glimpsed the gilded Madonna on top of Notre-Dame de la Garde.
Once this city worshipped Astarte, Venus,
he thought, gazing up at the night sky, trying to locate the planet as he walked on. He loved the age of the place, the sense of history. He had taken a boat out before the weather turned cold to try to look for the cave of Mary Magdalene in the cliffs near the city.
“I have found him whom my soul loves,” that's what she said.

Varian glanced up at a cry from an alleyway, the heavy thud of a man's body hitting the pavement. He heard footsteps racing away, splashing through dark puddles oily with gasoline. Lines of washing festooned the alleyway, like dark flags in the moonlight. Varian paused, wary of getting involved. It seemed to him that half the people in Marseille were gangsters and the other half wanted to be. The man was already on all fours, shaking his head as he struggled to his feet, silhouetted against the green light seeping from a bar.

Varian slipped the hip flask from the pocket of his overcoat and knocked back a slug of cognac. For a moment he longed to be back home, in New York, with his wife, Eileen, just reading a book by the fire or in the comfort of his own bed.
My old poo-dog,
he thought. His face softened with sadness at the thought of the letter she had posted to him in Marseille the day before he'd left America. She hadn't the nerve to talk to him face-to-face. Eileen had asked him to bring back a war orphan with him, a child they could adopt and raise as their own.
What does that say about us that she couldn't talk to me, and I've been unable to reply? She'll think I've just ignored her.
Varian walked on and took another hit of cognac.
She doesn't understand, can't possibly understand what I am going through here, how it's changing me.
He was so caught up in work, he hadn't even noticed he had missed the day planned for his return flight to New York. He thought of Eileen's latest letter, coolly asking if he was ever planning to come home.
I can't leave,
he thought.
Not yet. They need me. They all need me.
He raised his hip flask and hesitated.
Or do I need them?

Varian felt as if he had lived a lifetime in Marseille already, but it was only a couple of months since he'd arrived at the Gare Saint-Charles with $3,000 strapped to his calf and a list of two hundred of the greatest creative minds in Europe to rescue. The newly established Emergency Rescue Committee in New York had needed someone on the ground in France to help the refugees to safety. When no one else stepped forward, Varian volunteered. He was an able multilingual journalist and editor, but he had no experience of relief work. Alfred Barr, an old Harvard classmate and now director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, had helped compile the list of the most important refugees in danger. Varian's was matched almost name for name by the Nazis' blacklist of targets, a deadly mirror image.
How many have we ticked off so far?
he thought, totting them up as he walked.
Not enough. Not nearly enough.
He had thought it would take a couple of weeks to spirit his clients out of Marseille, but his work was only just beginning. With no official help from the U.S. consulate, Varian had soon realized the only way out of France for his clients was through illegal and secret routes.

The endless stream of hopeful, desperate faces filled his mind, the refugees queuing outside his cramped hotel room at the Splendide and now at the ARC.
I feel like a doctor during an earthquake half the time.
The threat of Article 19, which directed the French to “surrender on demand” anyone sought by the Nazis, hung over Marseille like the sword of Damocles. Fry thought of some of the petty crooks and gangsters they had no choice but to work with to keep the ARC afloat.
Dealing with people like that, it's only a matter of time till someone betrays us.
It felt to Fry like the very air of the city was alive, crackling with fear and suspicion.
Thank God for my team,
he thought, secure in his trust for them, at least, and that the outwardly respectable relief center's activities giving subsistence allowances and advice about visas to refugees was hiding their more clandestine work, spiriting people out of the country.