Tycoon (15 page)

“Will the Duchess be as naked as the showgirls?” Jack asked mock ingenuously.

Curt laughed. “Well, then. And dinner afterward.”

“With Betsy, of course.”

The three of them went to the Folies. Jack enjoyed the show. Kimberly had taught him to think of himself as a sophisticated man—she probably would have insisted on the opera if they were to see any show at all—but Jack was not too sophisticated to love the spectacle and to delight in the nudes on the stage of the Folies.

They dined in a Russian restaurant not far from the hotel. It too offered a show, with balalaika music, cossack dancing, and saber dancing. The place was so noisy that Jack found it difficult to talk. He wondered if Curt had chosen this place precisely because it
would
be difficult to talk. When Curt went to the men's room, Betsy took Jack's hand and told him she was happy but missed their assignations of years past.

They walked to the hotel. Paris after midnight. Like New York, it was a city that didn't sleep. For a moment Jack was sorry that he had not brought Kimberly along. But . . .

“Curt . . . is there really going to be a war?” he asked.

“I assure you there is going to be a war. I'm so sure of it that I'm sending Betsy home next month.”

Jack thrust out his arms to gesture at the songs and laughter echoing in the streets. “Not everyone thinks so.”

“I know why you came to Paris,” Curt said somberly. “On the other hand, should we have set up our operation in Helsinki or in Oslo? We've missed
sideshows
, Jack. The big curtain has still to go up.”

“I can't afford to keep a correspondent in Paris and one in Berlin, one in London and one in Rome.
You're
not the problem, Curt. But we've got to find the damned war!”

“The French shook up their government today.
Paris
is the key city. It may be bombed, as Madrid was bombed. That's what I fear most, and that's why Betsy is going home to Boston. Imagine bombs landing on Notre Dame! On the Louvre! Bringing the Eiffel Tower down in a tangled ruin! There's going to be a great story here, Jack!”

“The question is, how long can we afford to wait for it?” Jack said glumly.

“Let's talk tomorrow. I'd like to take you out to the Maginot Line. The world has never seen anything like it. Did you bring a camera?”

Walking back through the marble-floored lobby of the Royal Monceau, Jack noticed three women sitting in chairs in the hallway by the elevators. Even he, an American on his first visit to Paris could guess that they were prostitutes, waiting for a call to one of the rooms. Glancing over them, he decided that one of them, a faintly worn-looking woman no less than thirty-five years old might afford him an example of the legendary pleasures only a professional Parisian whore could offer. The other women were younger and more attractive, but he sensed that he would experience something special only with this conspicuously well used woman.

She said her name was Angélique—said it with a faint ironic smile that admitted it was not her real name and emphatically did not suit her. With sagging tits, smeared nipples, stretch marks on her belly, and a shaved pussy, she was just what he had expected.

And just as he had expected, he learned from her. First, they found that his French and her English were about equally weak. They amused themselves lying in bed, where she gave and he received French lessons.

He would touch her nipple and ask what was the French word for that.

“Le mot propre ou le mot vulgaire, Monsieur?”
she would ask in her throaty Parisian accent—the polite word or the vulgar word, Sir?

And he would laugh and say,
“Oh, le mot vulgaire, Mademoiselle, s'il vous plaît!”

She taught him the Parisian slang for cock, balls, cunt, tits, ass and for fucking, sucking, and what she called
“la manière grecque”
—the Greek style—fucking her in the ass, which she also taught him to enjoy.

She was an earthy Frenchwoman. Back home he would have refused her because she needed a bath. After their first penetration, from the rear, he suggested that they stretch out in the tub together, and she laughed. Then he told her he meant to pay her to stay all night. After that, she was willing to do anything, even take a bath. They agreed on a generous price, and she remained awake all night.

T
HE TELEPHONE WOKE
J
ACK THE NEXT MORNING.

Curt could not control his voice. It cracked as he spoke. He was in tears. “The Germans are attacking in massive force! I will be at your hotel by eight-thirty.”

Angélique detected the urgency of the conversation. “
Les Boches,”
he said to her. She nodded, dressed quickly, and left.

Jack ordered breakfast for two brought to his suite at eight-thirty. His French was good enough to order breakfast but not good enough to understand much from the radio bulletins. Curt described what he had been hearing. The Germans had struck with overwhelming force. It was the blitzkrieg against Poland all over again, only ten times stronger. They were were attacking through Luxembourg and Belgium as they had done in 1914. Besides that, they were invading Holland.

On the streets, Jack and Curt found Paris still lighthearted. The day was fine, and people were going about their business and pleasure the same today as they had been yesterday.

Curt wanted to go to the Gare du Nord to arrange railroad travel to Arras.

“I want to go with you,” Jack said.

Curt shook his head. “Not a good idea. It could be a very dicey trip. The Krauts will start bombing the railroads soon.”

“I want to go,” Jack insisted.

Curt bought tickets for Arras, on a train leaving the next morning.

Jack did not check out of the Royal Monceau, assuring the management that he would return within a week and wanted his suite held for him, with his luggage in it, so he could come back whenever he wanted to.

May 11 was another fine spring day. They reached the railroad station before they saw the first evidence of the major battle that was now raging in Belgium. Dazed Belgian refugees
stumbled off the trains from the north. The station was crowded with grimly phlegmatic soldiers, trudging in ragged columns toward the trains that would carry them to the places the Belgians were fleeing.

Curt had brought with him a middle-aged Frenchman named Jean-Pierre Belleville, a communications engineer who was the other half of Lear Broadcasting's Paris “bureau.” His job would be to patch through telephone communication so Curt Frederick could broadcast live reports to the States. Curt had described Belleville as an expert at improvisation, the aptitude they would most surely need. He was a sad-faced man in an olive-colored double-breasted suit, carrying a case filled with tools.

On the trip north, Jack, Curt, and Jean-Pierre were the only civilians in a car filled with French officers. A colonel and a captain shared their compartment. The officers were oddly confident, certain the Germans were making a major mistake.

At Arras, Jean-Pierre Belleville proved to be the improviser Curt had promised he was—and a consummate scrounger, too. He found them two rooms in a small hotel and a table in a restaurant that was still open.

Shortly after dawn Jack was awakened by the wail of air-raid sirens. He stood at his window and looked for the planes. He saw some: black specks slowly coming toward him. An antiaircraft battery located in a park a few blocks from the hotel opened fire. This was Jack's first experience of war.

When the planes came closer, Jack recognized them as Junkers-87 Stukas—dive-bombers. He had seen pictures of them. He counted six. They flew slowly over the town, apparently oblivious to the black puffs of flak that burst around them. When they went into their dives, the pilots turned on the infamous sirens meant to terrorize civilians below. They disappeared from Jack's sight, behind buildings across the street. He heard the thump of bombs and saw towers of yellowish smoke rising lazily into the bright morning sunlight. Finally he saw the Stukas again, in the distance now, flying away.

He dressed quickly and went downstairs. He spotted Curt in a telephone kiosk, talking earnestly. As Jack approached the kiosk, Curt raised his hand in a gesture to tell him not to speak. Jack stopped and listened. Curt was broadcasting!

The ubiquitous Jean-Pierre had somehow managed to put through a call to Boston, and Curt was on the air describing the raid. He had held the telephone instrument out and had caught the sounds of the antiaircraft fire, the Stuka sirens, and the explosion of bombs.

Jean-Pierre had been scouting for a car and had come up with a twelve-year-old Mercedes-Benz sports touring car, painted white. Though a tangled mass of folded leather behind the passenger seats suggested a top might be raised, the car was open. The front fenders turned with the wheels. The exhaust from each of six cylinders left the engine through a gracefully curved nickel-plated pipe. Not one but two spare tires hung from the rear. The owner-driver was a white-haired Fleming with whom only Jean-Pierre could communicate.

They ate quickly and left before seven o'clock.

As they drove east, the driver explained to Jean-Pierre that he was using secondary roads because all the main routes had been appropriated by the army. Jean-Pierre explained to Jack and Curt. The countryside impressed Jack as neat, in contrast to what he had grown up with in California. Fences were straight and orderly, houses were in good repair, fields and orchards were neatly tended.

An hour and a half east of Arras they crossed the Belgian frontier and began to encounter files of refugees on the road. Sleek Belgian horses pulled farm carts piled high with furnishings. People who had no horses pushed handcarts. The great majority of the refugees were women. Their men were in the army. Only elderly people, pregnant women, and tiny children rode in the carts. The rest walked, stolid and resigned.

Abruptly the Flemish driver shrieked and pointed at the sky. He ran the car off the road and charged through a field of newly sprouted grain, the car bouncing and twisting. He stopped only when they reached a row of poplars a hundred meters from the road. There he threw himself out of the car and tried to crawl under it.

Jack crouched behind the car and wondered if it would stop machine-gun bullets. Thinking maybe the engine block would, he slipped forward and squatted as close as he could get to the car without touching the hot exhaust pipes. He saw two twin-engine airplanes. Before he heard the clatter, he saw the winking yellow lights on machine-gun muzzles.

The two planes swept along the road, strafing the refugees. First he saw horses rear and fall. Then he saw people blasted off their feet as they ran. He saw blood and flesh fly. He heard screams.

The Germans made just one pass and then were gone.

The driver rose, dusted himself off, and spoke to Jean-Pierre. Jean-Pierre spoke to Curt, and Curt translated: “He says we must move on. There is nothing we can do. We can't help those people.”

“We can't leave them lying there!” Jack yelled.

Jean-Pierre translated Jack's protest, then the Fleming's response. “He won't stay here. There are too many for us to help. Anyway, the Boches will be back. From now on, we stay as far as we can from refugees. They attract strafing.”

Jack knew that what the Fleming said was true. He and his companions could not help the dying Belgians. They had nothing with which to help them: no medicine, no skills. Even if they tried to carry some to a village and a doctor, they could not take more than one or two. Anyway, the driver was determined not to take the risk.

They couldn't argue with him. If he left with the car . . .

A
LITTLE FARTHER ALONG THE ROAD, THE
F
LEMING STOPPED
to mount white flags on the Mercedes. There were nickelplated sockets on either side of the hood, and into them he stuck what looked like flagstaffs cut from pool cues, to which were tacked square white rags.

The four men were silent as they drove on. Each one coped with his emotions as best he could. There was nothing to say.

They saw fewer refugees. Those they did see looked stunned as they plodded impassively on. The Fleming scattered them with loud blasts of his horn and sped past. Twice they saw bodies lying beside the road.

“The Germans did the same thing in Poland,” Curt observed, speaking at last. “They strafe the secondary roads to drive the refugees onto the main roads where they'll impede the progress of the armies. It's totally cold-blooded.”

On a stretch of road where there were no refugees in sight, a Stuka flew over. It did not fire on them or drop a bomb—whether because the Flemish driver waved at the pilot, because the car flew white flags, because it was a German-made car, because it was heading east, or because the pilot just didn't want to bother, they could not guess.

Well before noon they reached the Meuse River at Dinant. There they stopped for lunch, and Curt hovered over a radio set, listening to the bulletins. The word was that the French and Belgian armies were moving toward the Meuse and would take a stand on its west bank. German armored columns were advancing steadily through the Ardennes. Important battles would be fought on the Meuse.

The last bulletin Curt heard before they set out again was that German tanks had been seen only forty miles to the east. At the bridge over the Meuse a Belgian officer tried to block them, saying it would be dangerous to go farther and in any case they might get in the way of Allied military operations. Curt asked him if the Belgians meant to move east of the river—knowing very well that they did not. As to the danger, he and Jack were neutrals, Americans, and would not be harmed by the Germans, particularly when they were seen driving a car flying white flags.

This raised a point. Jean-Pierre Belleville and the Flemish driver were not neutrals. They would have to stay in Dinant. The Fleming was not willing to let the two Americans drive his car, so Jack bought it from him, paying him cash—with the understanding that he would sell it back to him when he and Curt returned.