The Flight Portfolio Read online

  As Varian walked home with Kirstein that night, Kirstein asked what he thought of promoting Grant from editorial assistant to cultural critic. His tastes were refreshingly irreverent, Kirstein said, his knowledge broad and deep. He was a good writer too: that week he’d read an essay aloud in the American literature class he shared with Kirstein, in which he’d been witty and penetrating on the subject of Hawthorne’s influence on Melville. And he might be even better suited to writing about music—he had an impressive collection of classical recordings, modern stuff like Schoenberg and Stravinsky, accumulated by his father on his travels through Europe. Did Varian know that Grant’s father had been an internationally renowned botanist who’d died in the Amazon on a sample-gathering expedition?

  Varian walked in silence, swinging a slender hawthorn twig he’d picked up outside Grant’s place. Cambridge was rife with fences good for running a stick along; now he made a harsh music against a stretch of white pickets. The fact was, he already knew a good deal more about Grant than Kirstein did. The records, wherever they’d come from, certainly hadn’t come from Grant’s father, who wasn’t a botanist either.

  Varian said, “I think you’ve taken a shine to our friend Grant.”

  Kirstein laughed, almost exultantly. “Jealous?”

  “How is he on Whitman? Penetrating?”

  “Oh, now, Varian.”

  “It’s your call. If you want him, sign him up.”

  “You’re co-editor. You’ve got a say.”

  Varian had paused a long time before assenting. And later, in the privacy of his room, he’d been subject to a great many complicated thoughts about Grant. Among his feelings was a blunt envy that came from Grant’s having achieved, without apparent effort, the sheen of intelligent artistic cosmopolitanism Varian had struggled to affect since boarding school. Varian’s father, a stockbroker, was not unsuccessful at his work, but had never managed to vault his family out of the middle class; their home in suburban New Jersey was a politely unexceptional version of all the others on their street. The things that had set Varian apart in boyhood—the fact, for example, that his mother was so often sick (no one said crazy, of course), and that his aunt lived with them to take care of her—were unexotic, even shameful. If he was different from his classmates, it was only because they seemed slow in comparison to himself. He wasn’t interested in baseball or bikes or boxing, and they weren’t interested in chess or books. At Hotchkiss he’d resisted the brutal rituals of inclusion: the paddlings of younger boys by older ones, the night wakings, the trials by burning or stuffing or starving. His protest had felt heroic at the time, but he knew it hadn’t set him apart in a way that might be read as anything but petulant or sissified. And so, in his early days at Harvard, he’d struggled to create a persona that would win him the admiration of other boys. He thought in detail about his clothes and hair and shoes, hoping to project an inarguable urbanity; at a low-lit café on Mount Auburn Street he held forth nightly about the books he read and the lectures he attended, turning the stocked cabinets of his mind inside out for inspection. He collected like-minded young men and threw parties for them and their friends. But it was all a pasteboard construction, and he knew—and it chagrined him—that the effort was visible.

  Grant, on the other hand, wore his difference like a bespoke suit. Every detail of his being—the foreign cigarettes he smoked, the leather satchel like an artifact of war, the European phonograph records, the ignominious closet-sized dormitory room with its genuine-looking antique Persian rug, even the vaguely anomalous color of his skin—seemed to suggest, entirely without exertion on Grant’s part, that the owner of such things possessed a certain alchemical magic capable of transforming the old and the ordinary into the wondrous and unique. Step into my circle, he seemed to say, and you too will be transformed. It was a quality Varian had observed in certain boys at Hotchkiss whose popularity transcended the usual snobbery about pedigree and class. One boy by the name of Prasad was the son of wealthy Bengali Brahmins, but obviously considered himself the peer, or indeed the superior, of the school’s old New Yorkers and Boston Brahmins. He had a perfect English accent, an agile analytical mind, and the ability to recite poetry in six languages. Varian had spent his last term at boarding school nursing an attraction to Prasad so fierce he feared it would declare itself in some mortifying public way. He’d felt a jolt of the same attraction the first time he’d met Grant, and the feeling had only intensified. But whereas Prasad had seemed merely intelligent and unusual, Grant seemed dangerously unpredictable, as if beneath his outward costume was a creature of another shape, limbs ghosting beneath the surface like the folded wings of a chrysalid. Impossible to tell if this cloaked being was benign or malign or something between, or what its motives might be. And the more he’d learned about Grant—about his parentage, his past, the bending of truth that had landed him at Harvard—the less he felt he knew.

  To have him appear again now, here in Marseille, as if reconstituted from the fog itself, seemed to Varian as appropriate as it was astonishing. Marseille, more than any place he’d ever been, was the province of unexpected convergences, of hidden things brought to light, of things that bore one name in public and another in private. Of anyone he’d gone to school with, Grant was the last he would have expected to encounter here; you could even say he was the one Varian would have least wanted to see. At the same time he was the one whose presence seemed most natural. Varian felt for the business card in his pocket and drew it out, pausing beneath a streetlamp. Les Cyprès, La Pomme, written in Grant’s near-illegible script. Again he felt the pull of those letters, the suggestion of the hand that held the pen. He carried the card home in his damp palm, and didn’t realize until he’d reached his room that he’d forgotten to ask at the desk for a message from Eileen.

  3

  The Splendide

  By the time he left his bed the next morning, squinting against the cataract of sun coming through the window, he’d convinced himself that he would write Grant to cancel their meeting. Wednesday morning was twenty-four hours away; in that time, anything might happen to impede his going out to La Pomme. He dressed, careful not to exercise unusual care in his sartorial choices; there was no reason to think he’d see Grant today, and even if he did, what could it possibly matter if his tie illuminated a certain green fleck in his eye, or if his tweed lent him an air of authority? He ordered breakfast: the standard dry toast with watery marmalade, the burnt-chicory brew that passed for coffee. As he waited for it to be delivered, he sat at the desk, took out an airmail blank, and uncapped his pen. But instead of writing to Eileen, he found himself staring at the silver nautilus cufflink where it lay in a square of light on the desktop. He took it into his hand now, the small hard weight of it, and turned it over in his fingers. He knew nothing about the nautilus except that it was a mollusk, and that it moved forward into new chambers as it aged, walling off the past behind it. Where had he gleaned that fact? Some long-ago biology class at Hotchkiss? There was some special math behind the progressive size of those chambers, a biological mystery mirrored elsewhere in nature. To know that this silver shell had rested against Grant’s sleeve—to be holding that object in his hand—seemed mystery enough.

  The usual unsmiling boy in his too-large jacket delivered Varian’s tray. Not even a generous tip could change the boy’s expression; his polite bow and his curt bonjour were impenetrable. Alone again in the temporary silence of his room, Varian drank his chicory coffee and ate his dry toast, forcing his mind toward the urgent work of the day. Their supply of francs was running out; they had to find a way to exchange a lot of dollars without tipping off the Préfecture de Police. And it had to happen soon: more refugees showed up daily, hungry and ill clad and unhoused. Then there was his costly new project: five high-risk clients’ exit over the border into Spain, to take place in a few weeks if the U.S. visas came through. The clients—Heinrich and Nelly Mann, brother and sister-in-law
of Thomas; Golo Mann, Thomas’s son; and the writer Franz Werfel and his thrice-married wife, Alma—had been living for weeks in a state of barely contained panic at the prospect of deportation by the Gestapo, Golo hiding out at the U.S. vice consul’s villa, the elder Manns and the Werfels in an ancient hotel in an out-of-the-way quartier. Werfel’s mood, in particular, had been growing darker by the day. That weekend he’d joked, looking out the window of their fifth-story hotel room, that if the Gestapo showed up, he could always defenestrate. Varian didn’t take any of it lightly. A rash of suicides had moved through the refugee population in late June, and there were new reports of self-inflicted deaths—some false, some true—nearly every day. The thought of it now was enough to push Grant from his mind, and then Lena was knocking at the door.

  “O mój Boże, Monsieur Fry,” she said, edging past him into the room. “This heat!”

  His secretary lived at the Hôtel des Postes, not ten minutes’ walk down the Canebière, but she always arrived looking as if she’d just crossed a desert in the harmattan, a plume of cigarette smoke chasing her down the hall, her turquoise earrings asway, her hair in need of emergency rearranging at the dressing table. She was Polish, passportless, Jewish, multilingual; she spoke all her languages with wild abandon, and often in combination. She’d entered France on foot some months before and drifted down toward Marseille during the pagaille. She’d meant to become Varian’s client, but when she’d seen what a disaster he was making of things—and having grasped that her own case was unlikely to reach the standards of the Emergency Rescue Committee—she’d volunteered as secretary.

  It hadn’t taken her long to set things right. There was now a filing system for the clients’ paperwork, a set of interview forms, a precious address book kept hidden beneath a loose corner of carpet in case of a police raid, a pinboard for refugees’ messages. She’d insisted that Varian engage a professional bookkeeper, so he had recruited a man named Oppenheimer, a former political economist who now made his living by hiding illegal expenses inside legal ones. Lena herself knew nothing of the illegal side of their practice—nothing of the fake Czech passports Varian had been handing out; nothing of Leon Ball, the former American cowboy who’d been conducting Varian’s paperless refugees over the border into Spain; nothing of the back-channel negotiations about escape boats, all of which had thus far ended in failure. The less anyone else knew, he figured, the safer they all were.

  After Lena had rearranged her hair and made her apologies, she sat down at the dressing table and uncovered the ancient Contin they’d bought from an antiques dealer on the rue Paradis. The typewriter stuck at every third stroke and stank of rancid oil; the type it produced skewed upward, and left more than a little to the reader’s conjecture. But it was a typewriter. More than any other object they possessed, it seemed to lend their operation a note of legitimacy.

  “And so,” Lena said, as she slipped a sheet of onionskin between the rollers, “how are the Chagalls?”

  “Both well. Not leaving France anytime soon.”

  “Nicht wahr!”

  “I’d rather not discuss it at the moment. Let’s start with something else.”

  She raised her chin at him, her turquoise earrings glinting. “Shall we not send a letter to the consulate?”

  “Not yet,” Varian said.

  She arched an eyebrow ceilingward, then opened a client folder. The tilt of her chin communicated that she would return to the subject of the Chagalls before long. She wanted to save them in particular, wanted to have a hand in it; she considered nothing to be impossible. To any form of demurral, to any note of alarm, she had one response: Il ne faut pas exagérer. Now she extracted the first set of client interview notes and began to transcribe Varian’s hasty scratch into type, while he stood over her shoulder and corrected her.

  Albert Hirschman materialized ten minutes later, carrying a small metal thermos and a bag of the North African pastries to which he’d become addicted. Varian couldn’t tolerate anything sweet in the morning, but it pleased him to watch Albert—perfectly blond, perfectly slim, always dressed as though he meant to conduct a lunchtime romance—tear open the bag and lay out three gold eggs of sugared dough on a square of waxed paper. For Lena there was always a sesame-covered chebakia. It was impossible to predict how long the Moroccan bakery could keep producing its pastries, wartime shortages being what they were, but Varian suspected that Hirschman would find ways to get what couldn’t be had. A Berliner, a Social Democrat, and, at twenty-five, a doctor of economic philosophy, he’d been running from the German authorities for the past eight years, had been trailed by Nazi soldiers across the Austrian border, starved in a Paris garret while pursuing his studies at the Sorbonne, fought for the Republicans in the Guerra Civil and been wounded twice; but here he was, undaunted, immaculate, always plotting his next move. Even his approach to romance was strategic: the most recent of his many conquests, a platinum-haired secretary at the Préfecture de Police, had access to the commissaire’s files and had already delivered a few gems.

  “And what do you have for me today?” Varian asked, as Hirschman finished the last of his golden eggs.

  “Something better than pastry,” Hirschman said. But there was no time to elaborate; at that moment the first of the potential clients came through the door. As usual they’d been arriving at the Splendide since dawn. They queued along the outside wall of the hotel until eight o’clock, when the manager finally consented to admit them. Of the three thousand American dollars Varian had brought with him to France, a hundred—no small sum—had gone to this manager in exchange for his not calling the police every day as soon as the line formed. Once they were admitted, the refugees climbed the stairs and lined up outside Varian’s door, all the way to the window that overlooked the back alley. Last week there had been ten refugees a day; this week, more than fifty. They waited all day, until midnight if they had to.

  The first person through the door that morning was a young woman in a white batiste dress, her skin scrubbed to a high polish, her hair arranged in a corona of honey-colored braids. Her dress looked freshly pressed, her shoes clean and new-looking enough to suggest that they weren’t her only pair. She carried a neat and unfrivolous bag, big enough to hold a sheaf of papers. With a schoolgirl’s easy lope, she crossed the room and seated herself in the spindly chair before Varian’s desk. Even before she spoke, Varian knew she must be an American.

  “Miriam Davenport,” she said, in a Boston accent that rounded her r’s into ah’s. “Smith College, class of ’36. Recently of the Sorbonne.”

  “And how can I help you, Miss Davenport of the Sorbonne? We’re generally not in the business of providing aid to Bostonians.”

  She gave a trumpetlike laugh. “Actually, I haven’t been a Bostonian for some time. But I suppose you can’t take the city out of the girl.”

  “I won’t hold it against you,” Varian said, and smiled.

  “I’m not here on my own behalf,” Miss Davenport said, lowering her voice and leaning across the desk. “Walter Mehring sent me, or rather I volunteered to come in his stead, since he’s terrified to leave his hotel room. I met him at Toulouse when I came down in June. His case is rather urgent.”

  “The Walter Mehring, German poet?”

  “Yes, that one.”

  “If that’s true—if you’ve really got Walter Mehring stashed away at some hotel nearby—then you’ve already made my day.”

  “I’ve got a few others, too. Konrad Heiden, Hitler’s unofficial biographer. And Hertha Pauli, actress and writer—she’s tight with Mehring, if you get my meaning.”

  Varian turned to Hirschman. “Albert, meet Miss Davenport. Miss Davenport, Mr. Hirschman. He’ll take down all the necessary information, and we’ll get started on the paperwork at once.” And to Miriam: “You’re wise to speak quietly about Mehring. He’s got to be among the Nazis’ top ten. He’s near the top of
my own list, to be sure.”

  “You have a list?”

  “Oh, yes. But not a long one. Our funds are quite limited.”

  Her eyes widened. “You’ll be able to help him, won’t you?”

  “We’ll try.”

  “And Heiden?”

  “He’s on the list, too.”

  “Oh, thank goodness,” she said. “They’ll be glad to hear it. There’s been little in the way of hope these last few weeks.”

  “Well, we can’t offer much of it, but at least we can get the process underway. I’ll see my friend at the consulate about their visas. Sometimes it takes a while. In the meantime, do you think they’d consider moving to the Splendide? I’d rather have them closer by.”

  “Good luck,” Miriam said. “Mehring will barely look out from beneath his bed.”

  “Tell him he’ll be safer here. Tell him to come today, if he can. Sit down with Mr. Hirschman for a minute and let him get all the details. But don’t let him ask you to dinner. He’s a terrible roué.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Miss Davenport said; she flashed an engagement ring set with tiny diamonds and rubies.

  “All’s well, then,” Varian said. “We’ll do what we can for your friends.”

  She settled in to talk to Hirschman, and Varian opened the door to the next supplicant: a lean, haggard-looking man in beret and turtleneck, his handlebar mustache drooping, a battered sketchbook under his arm. His name was unfamiliar to Varian, his German nearly incomprehensible. He fell into the spindly chair as if he’d reached it from the farthest corner of the world. For a long moment he closed his eyes, and Varian was afraid he’d fallen asleep.

  “And where are you from, Mr. Rubasky?”