The Lisbon Crossing (24 page)

“Is that it?” she said.

I nodded. “It’s got four wheels and it goes.”

“As long as it goes as far as Paris,” she said, turning back to Abrielle.
“Ramasse tes affaires et attends-nous.”

The girl quickly ran off across the field, crust in hand, toward the oak. I watched her gather up her blankets, fold them neatly, and carefully place them into a small black suitcase that was lying nearby, then I turned back to Eva.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Help me up,” she said, and I gave her a hand. She was a bit stiff, but she could walk on her own. I followed her into the field of grass.

“We’re taking Abrielle home.”

“We don’t have a lot of time to—”

“She lives in Paris.”

I nodded and we took a few steps in silence while I figured out what to say about that.

“Look, I feel sorry for the kid, too, but—”

“The authorities will be looking for a couple. Having a child along will make us less suspicious.”

“Maybe so, but…” I hadn’t expected this, and I didn’t like it, though I couldn’t really put my finger on why. “What are we going to do with her once we get to Paris? Assuming we get there, that is.”

“She has an uncle in Montmartre. We’ll drop her off and spend the night there.”

“How do we know this uncle can be trusted?”

She shrugged. “I suppose we can’t be certain. But there’s a curfew in effect, and we can’t very well check into a hotel. Anyway, he’ll be grateful that we’ve rescued his niece, and we’ll only need a few hours.”

“It’s dangerous,” I said, searching for some valid reason to leave the child out of the equation. “Dangerous for her.”

Eva gave me a sideways glance. “Is that the best you can do, Jack? That it would be much better for Abrielle if we abandon her here, to fend for herself?”

I shrugged. “Gimme a couple of minutes and maybe I can come up with something better.”

A
brielle had never ridden in a car before, and the look of sheer delight on her face as she sat in the jump seat, covered in blankets, pâté sandwich in hand, wind blowing in her hair, was enough to put a smile on anybody’s face. Even mine.

“Enjoying the ride back there?” I called to her.

“C’est magnifique!”
she cried out, grinning from ear to ear. I looked over at Eva, saw that she was smiling, too.

“How are you feeling?”

“Like I’ve been shot,” she groaned.

“We had a lucky escape.”

“Not just lucky.” She put on an impish smile. “You must be a pretty good stuntman.”

“The best.” I grinned.

Eva laughed, pushed the hair off her cheek, and settled back into the seat. Closing her eyes, she sighed deeply and offered her face up to the midday sun.

I stuck to the secondary roads, making Paris a long ten hours away, at best. If all went well, we’d roll in before the eleven o’clock
curfew, stay the night with Abrielle’s uncle, and be at the duke’s town house on Boulevard Suchet not much after six, when the streets reopened. Madame Moulichon was supposed to catch the evening train back to Lisbon, which gave us roughly twelve hours to do whatever it was we were going to do.

H
ow’s the kid doing back there?” I said to Eva when she woke up, a couple of hours later.

She leaned over and planted a kiss on my cheek. “Now don’t go spoiling your tough-guy image,” she said.

“Yeah, yeah. It’s getting kind of chilly, that’s all.”

Eva laughed, then twisted around to rearrange Abrielle’s blankets.

“She’s had a tough time of it, huh?” I said.

“Yes, she has.”

“So? You gonna tell me or not?”

“If you’re interested.”

“I’m interested.”

“Well…” Eva began, stealing a glance at the sleeping child. “She left Paris with her mother, about a month ago—the day before the Germans arrived. Abrielle wasn’t clear about where they were going, and I’m not sure that her mother knew, either. They were just escaping, along with the rest of Paris. There was a crush of people on the train, she said, taking up every available space in the carriage. She and her mother sat on the floor, in the aisle, unable to move, even to go to the bathroom. It was hot and humid, people moaning and babies crying, but after a few hours, Abrielle was finally able to fall asleep. When she awoke, the train had stopped and her mother had disappeared. Just vanished. Nobody could say where she’d gone, so, terrified that she’d been left behind, Abrielle panicked and jumped off the train just as it was leaving the station.”

“With her mother on it.”

“I would think so.” Eva paused for a moment. “At any rate, she
wasn’t in the station, which turned out to be Bordeaux. Abrielle waited there for three days, until she was told that she’d have to leave. She wandered the streets for another couple of days, until the trucks carrying German soldiers started to appear. She just started walking then, and she’s been walking every day since, with no idea where she’s going.”

I caught a movement in the rearview mirror and saw that Abrielle was waking up. Eva noticed, too, and turned around to give her a smile. There was something touching about the way the girl looked to Eva. Her face lifted and filled with hope—probably the first she’d felt in a long time. But there was something else in it, too, something much more than hope. Faith, I guess you’d call it. Faith and trust.

Ahead of us lay Paris, but for now we all sat back and took in the clean, fresh air and watched the western sky melt into a watercolor of purple and gold. It was a beautiful sight. You could almost believe that all was right in the world.

All was certainly not right
in Paris. The “City of Light” was in mourning.

We left the car at the Porte d’Orléans and caught the last Metro, heading toward Clignancourt. On the surface, everything seemed normal. People sat on hard benches with open books and newspapers, or stood, swaying silently back and forth with the rhythm of the carriage, and they wore the same deadpan faces that you’d find on any subway system in the world. But it wasn’t normal. It was far from that.

There wasn’t a German in sight, but their presence was everywhere. In the slumping shoulders of the man who stared blankly at the cap he held in his lap; in the empty eyes of an old woman who fiddled nervously with a lace handkerchief gripped tightly in both hands; it was even in the students, who stood in groups of three and four, but had nothing to say to each other. It was in the deafening silence, and in the fallen faces of every Parisian we came across. It was the sound and the look of defeat. They couldn’t believe what had happened to them.

Even the weather was gloomy. People wore coats in mid-July, and
carried umbrellas. The mist that hung in the air seemed to cling to everything—buildings, sidewalks, it even attached itself to the people. Everything was obscured by the depressing fog that had descended on Paris.

We got off the train at Boulevard de Rochechouart and climbed the hill toward Sacré Coeur. Abrielle was unclear about the exact location of her uncle’s apartment, but knew that the famous dome was visible from his front door. That didn’t narrow our search too well, though, because the dome could be seen from pretty much every doorway in Montmartre. All we could do was hope that she’d find her way once we got to the top.

We wound our way through a maze of deserted lanes, our steps intruding on the languorous silence of a city in hiding. The only signs of life were the occasional twitching of a curtain and the packs of dogs that roamed the alleys—once-loved pets abandoned to the streets as their owners fled the approaching Wehrmacht.

I could see that the climb was taking its toll on Eva. She looked tired and I worried that she might start bleeding again, but she pressed on silently to the top. We avoided the church’s main square, circling around the back instead, where we were less likely to be seen. I glanced at my watch, but it was too dark to see. I knew it was well past eleven o’clock, though.

“Do you remember anything?” I said. Abrielle pursed her lips and thought hard.

“A blue door.”

“A blue door?”

“Yes.”

“Anything else?”

“A pink restaurant.”

I gave Eva a look, which she avoided.

“Which way do you think we should go, Abrielle?” she asked gently. “Don’t think about it too much, use your first instinct.”

“Mmm…” The girl cast her eyes around and chose a direction. “That way.”

I was considering other options—all of which were pretty unappealing—when, a couple of blocks later, we came upon La Maison Rose, a little corner bistro that was unmistakably pink. I think even Abrielle was surprised. A minute later, we were standing in front of a blue door with a view of Sacré Coeur. It was an odd location for a residence, stuck in an odorous alley between Rue Saint-Vincent and Rue Cortot, but Abrielle had led us straight there, so I knocked—softly at first, then harder when there was no response. We waited, but still there was nothing.

“Are you sure he lives here?” I asked, thinking it looked more like the back of a restaurant and perhaps Abrielle had confused it with her uncle’s workplace.

“Yes, it’s right,” she assured me.

I knocked again, loudly this time, and after a couple of minutes, I could hear whispers coming from inside. I hit the door again, banging it hard with the bottom of my fist.

“Qui est là?”
A man’s muted voice called out from behind the door. Abrielle stepped forward.

“C’est moi, oncle…C’est Abrielle…”

The door opened a crack, revealing only pitch-black inside.

“Abrielle…?”

“Oui, c’est moi, Oncle Christien…”

The door swung back, revealing a tall, slender figure in his early twenties. Younger than I’d expected. His pale skin and delicate, almost fragile frame, contrasted with strong, angular features and a shock of thick, wavy black hair that was brushed straight back off his forehead. He took a tentative step across the threshold, then stopped to look around.

“Ici, oncle,”
Abrielle said softly.
“Je suis ici.”

He turned toward the sound of her voice and she stepped forward, taking his hand in hers. Falling to his knees, he scooped his niece into his arms, and they clung to each other for several moments. When they finally separated, I could see that there were tears in both sets of eyes. Christien shook his head, laughed out loud, and planted
a kiss on each of Abrielle’s cheeks. Then he looked up and whispered,
“C’est qui, avec toi?”

He was looking in our direction, but his gaze was distant and unfocused, as if he was looking straight through us. It wasn’t until then that I realized that Abrielle’s uncle Christien was stone-cold blind.

H
is accommodation turned out to be a couple of stark rooms in the back of a small jazz club, a place called L’École, where he’d been playing piano until the Germans closed them down, along with every other venue in France. The Nazis described jazz as “degenerate Negro-Jewish music,” which seemed to me to bestow undue credit on Irving Berlin, but I guess they thought it gave their denunciation a bit more punch. Anyway, the Reich’s culture police didn’t waste time putting lights out on the Jazz Age in Paris.

We’d interrupted something. Christien quickly herded us into his small kitchen, hoping we wouldn’t notice the cloud of Gauloise-flavored smoke that was wafting in from the front room.

“You are American,” he said to me before I’d made a sound.

“How’d you know that?”

“You walk like an American.”

“Do Americans have a particular way of walking?”

He shrugged and produced a plate of boiled eggs, some soft cheese, and the better part of a baguette from inside a cupboard. Placing it all on the wooden table, along with a bottle of red wine, he motioned for us to sit.

“You must eat,” he said.

Abrielle was the only one to take him up on it. She devoured everything in sight as Christien told us how he’d only recently learned of his niece’s ordeal, through a desperate letter from his sister that had taken nearly a month to reach him. Apparently, she never got off the train in Bordeaux. She’d left Abrielle asleep as she pushed through the crowd to buy some bread and fruit from a vendor on the
platform. When she got back to their place, her daughter had vanished and the train had left the station. She’d begged them to go back, but no one would listen. Unable to get off until the Spanish border, she had taken three days to make her way back to Bordeaux. She arrived just about the time Abrielle was leaving, and she’d been searching ever since, fearing the worst.

Abrielle started to come apart at this point. The poor girl, drained and exhausted, finally felt safe enough to cry. Eva pulled her into an embrace and gently stroked her forehead, whispering softly in her ear that they would write a letter to her mother first thing in the morning, and that Abrielle could draw a picture of herself on the letter, smiling happily, because that would make her mother feel happy, too. Abrielle nodded, wiped away her tears, and tried to smile.

“She needs to sleep,” Eva said.

Christien suggested that she and the child use his bed, and seeing the strain on Eva’s face, I seconded the idea. I asked Christien if he had any bandages and he provided a first-aid kit with enough gauze and tape that I was able to put a decent dressing on Eva’s wound. Abrielle was asleep before I left the room, and Eva wasn’t far behind. When I got back to the kitchen, Christien was waiting for me.

“Come,” he said. “Meet my friends.”

C
laude played bass, Raymond was on drums, and the quiet one, Gérard, played tenor sax. Each offered a little smile and nodded as Christien went around the table, introducing them by name and instrument, as if they’d just finished playing a set and were taking a bow. A fifth chair was pulled up for me, and by the time I sat down, Claude had filled a glass with Armagnac and pushed it across the table.

“The whiskey, she is finished,” he apologized with a shrug. “So, now it is begins, the hard time of war.” Claude was like a big, friendly teddy bear, with tight black curls at the top of an oversize head, and
big, chocolate-brown eyes. I hadn’t seen him standing yet, but I would’ve put him at about six-foot-three.

“Here’s to better times, then,” I said, raising my glass.
“Vive la France.”

A rousing chorus of
“VIVE LA FRANCE!”
came back at me, and drinks were tossed back. As Claude went around the table with refills, I glanced around the darkened room. It was a smallish club—seating for about forty, with standing room for maybe another thirty. The tables were arranged around a low stage with a set of drums on one side and a shiny black baby grand on the other. In the back of the room, near the entrance, there was a small bar. The dark blue walls were hung with black-and-white photos of jazz players, including a signed one of Louis Armstrong blowing his horn so hard that it looked like his eyes were about to explode out of his head.

Claude finished pouring and raised his glass at me. “And now we drink to America,” he grinned. The table echoed the toast, though with decidedly less gusto this time around. Then it was tobacco time. Everyone reached for their pack and we lit up in unison.

“America, she will come now into the war,” Raymond said through rising smoke. “Yes?”

I leaned into the table and paused before answering. It would’ve been easy to be flip with it—something about John Wayne and the cavalry would’ve been my first instinct—but Raymond wasn’t posing an offhand question. These were men who found themselves alone at the bottom of a deep, dark hole, with no way to climb out, and they wanted to know if anyone was going to throw them a rope. They deserved an honest answer.

“No,” I said. “America’s not going to come to the rescue. At least, not anytime soon. I’d be lying if I said otherwise.”

That prompted a sharp exchange between Claude and Raymond, which seemed to boil down to an “I told you so,” “Well, fuck you,” sort of dialogue. I changed the subject.

“So you guys are jazzmen, huh?”

“We have used to be,” Raymond said. “But the Nazis, they don’t
dig it so much.” The guys had been around enough musicians—mostly black Americans who’d made Paris a haven for jazz since the last Great War—that morsels of swing-speak sometimes appeared in their otherwise basic English. “They like only the music for marching,” the drummer added. “Pum, pum, pum.”

It turned out that the four were partners in L’École, which had been open for about a year. They’d pooled their resources to buy the place, hoping they could make enough money to escape their day jobs, and it had just started to draw a crowd when the Germans showed up.

The conversation inevitably turned to New York and my days running the Kit Kat Klub. The guys listened intently as I told stories about legends like Gene Krupa, Lester Young, and Art Tatum, who’d used the Kat as a late-night drinking hole. I got the full seal of approval when they heard that, in ’32, I’d given Billie Holiday her first gig outside of Harlem when I hired her to sing at the club. She was no more than seventeen at the time, but she had a lot to sing about, even at that tender age.

Christien had been sitting back up to this point, hands folded together on his lap, listening, and—in some sense—watching me. In spite of his silence, or maybe because of it, it was clear that he was the group’s leader. When he was ready to speak to me alone, he didn’t have to say a word. The boys somehow got the message, and disappeared into the back of the club.

Leaning across the table, Christien located his Gauloise and extracted a smoke from the pack. I struck a match and lit him up, keeping the flame alive while I readied one for myself.

“You know,” he said, drawing on the cigarette. “On each night for a month, we have sat here together at this table—Raymond, Claude, Gérard, and myself—talking until early in the morning. And each time we face the same question: What will we do?” He paused to take a long drag on the cigarette.

“What will we do?”

“I wish I had an answer for you,” I said.

“Perhaps you do.”

I shifted in my seat. “I don’t know who you think I am, Christien, or what I’m doing here, but—”

“I know that you are not a tourist.” He let the silence hang for a moment, allowing it to make his point.

“Talking, of course, will not defeat the enemy,” he said when he continued. “If we wish to live, we must fight.”

“If staying alive is what you’re after, then maybe you’d be better off not fighting.”

“No, you are wrong about this. You see, if we fight, certainly they will kill some of us. Perhaps many. But in the moment that we accept this evil, then we will surely die, all of us. We may go on breathing, but we will feel empty and defeated, and this will be because our spirits have been extinguished. And when our spirits have died, we will cease to exist. We will become a part of them. It starts to happen already, with the police, the government. How long will it take for them to kill us all? So you see, we have not much time. In order to live, we must start quickly to die. This is perhaps one of God’s playful ironies.”

Christien must’ve been able to sense the expression I had on my face, which was probably somewhere between amused and annoyed, because he broke out laughing.

“You’re right,” he said. “This is just more talk. What I wanted to say is that we offer ourselves in whatever task you have come to Paris to undertake. We are ready to do anything, if it will begin us in our resistance.”

I
was roused at 5
A.M.
by the gentle sound of a piano. Christien wasn’t playing a melody so much as a series of melodic phrases, expressions of a color or mood that seemed to speak to each other, then melt together into a single statement. I sat up from the floor,
where I’d finally found a couple of hours of sleep, propped myself against the wall, and listened as he swept up and down the keyboard. I hadn’t heard anything like it before.