The Last Days of New Paris

Chapter Two

1941

A man in a homburg hat emerged into the Place Felix Baret. He still wasn’t accustomed to the quality of the noise: petrol rationing kept more and more cars from the road, and in this modern town he could hear wagon wheels and horses’ hooves.

Port city, hot thug metropolis, exileville, clot of refugees, milked dry and beaten. 1941, and France for the French.

Varian Fry, thirty-four, thin, his mouth set, with his attention and his focus, looked like what he was: a man who knew something. He squinted at the line outside the office. He’d grown used to the terrible hope he saw in those crowds.

The alleys bustled and the bars were full enough. There were yells in many languages. The mountains still watched over everything and the late spring was warm. Streets away, the sea shifted. I should be sitting on the quay, Fry thought. I should be taking off my shoes and rolling up my trousers. Throwing stones into little waves to frustrate the fish. I should kick my shoes into the water.

He saw sellers of visas, information, lies. Marseille flushed.

A popular sign in a boulangerie said Entreprise Française, by a portrait of the lugubrious marshal. Fry took off his spectacles, as if to disallow himself a clear sight at such barbarism.

“Mess your! Mess your!”

A young man in a cheap suit ran across the square. He was mustached on a baby face, and his eyebrows were so arched they might have been plucked, though his hair did not suggest much grooming. “Mess your!” he said.

“Can I help you?” Fry said in English.

The man stopped close to him and looked suddenly sly. He muttered something Fry could not make out. Oto, adoni, something.

“I’m no more French than you,” Fry said. “Is that even French? Kindly cease torturing the poor language.”

His interlocutor blinked. “Excuse me,” he said. “I thought… I made a mistake. You’re American?”

“You saw me in the consulate,” Fry said.

“Right.”

The man was almost bouncing from one foot to the other in his excitement. He glanced up at a sun like illuminated paper. He said, “That feels wrong,” and Fry was startled, because he had been thinking the same thing.

“Mr….?”

“Jack Parsons.”

“To give you the benefit of the doubt for a minute, Mr. Parsons, I’ll assume you’re merely naive.” Was this man a cack-handed spy? A wheeler and dealer, what the British called a spiv? “Accosting someone in the street in Marseille right now…”

“Oh, gee, I’m real sorry.” Parsons looked sincere. He couldn’t have been older than twenty-three. “Here’s the thing.” He spoke quickly. “I was just in there and I saw you waltz straight past the whole damn line. I’m trying to travel, see? But they laughed in my face. Told me to get back to the U.S.”

“How did you even get here?”

Parsons’s eyes wandered to the boulangerie.

“‘French Business?’” he said. “That’s what it says, right? What else would it be?”

“It’s informing you that it’s not a Jewish business,” Fry said. Could Parsons really be so ingenuous? In the shadows in the lee of a nearby wall was a pile of German-language newspapers. “Do you work for Bingham?”

Of all the U.S. diplomats in the city, Bingham was Fry’s only ally. The others strove to keep cordial relations with Vichy. Fry, they knew, would have brought every refugee out of France, every anti-Nazi, every Jew, every trade unionist and radical and writer and thinker forced into hiding. But he had to choose. His Emergency Rescue Committee focused, not without shame, on artists and intellectuals.

As if the baker, the sewage worker, the nursery teacher didn’t deserve help, too, Fry thought, many times.

“I don’t know who Bingham is,” said Parsons. “But listen. So. I’m wondering who’s the swell sauntering right by the rest of us, and then I saw what you were carrying. Those papers…”

From his case Fry showed the tip of a handmade magazine he had brought to read in case of delays, a little stitched booklet. “This?” He pulled it out a little further. On its front was a hand-colored, twisted figure. Names: Ernst, Masson, Lamba, Tanning, others.

“Right! I could not believe it! I have to talk to you.”

“Ah, are you an art aficionado?” Fry said. “Is that it?”

Marseille ate the guileless. The hotels Bompard, Levant, Atlantique were internment camps, extorting funds out of refugees. The Légion des Anciens Combattants terrorized Jews and Reds. The alleys belonged to gangsters. This Jack Parsons, Fry thought, is trouble, whether he means to be or not.

Fry had already had to banish Mary Jayne Gold from the ERC headquarters at Villa Air-Bel, the large dilapidated house just outside the town. He had overcome his skepticism toward a woman he first thought a wealthy tourist play-acting, but even his nurtured respect for her hadn’t been enough to keep him from asking her to leave. Her boyfriend was a liability. Raymond Couraud—his nickname, “Killer,” Mary Jayne insisted unconvincingly, a reference to his ongoing murder of the English language—was a young tough, a rage-filled deserter who hated almost all of Mary Jayne’s friends, who associated with criminals, who had already broken in to the villa in what he later called a “prank,” who had stolen from Gold herself. She was bewilderingly patient.

“Be sympathetic, Varian,” Fry’s friend Serge had said. “You should have known me when I was twenty.”

“Mary Jayne’s nostalgie de la boue is her business,” Fry had said. “But we can’t risk having him around.”

Fry knew he must walk away from Parsons, but the young man muttered something and somehow Fry stayed put under that sky. Parsons looked avidly at the pamphlet Fry held. The right person might cross an ocean to buy art. Might even come to a war.

“Did Peggy tell you about us?” said Fry.

“Who’s Peggy?” said Parsons. “I want to talk to you about her.” He pointed to one name on the booklet’s cover.

Fry followed his finger. “Ithell Colquhoun?”

“Now that is not the kind of name you forget.”

“I don’t know her, in fact,” Fry said. “Or anything about her. And I certainly don’t have any of her work to sell…”

“See, I do know about her,” said Parsons. “And I was not, in a goddamn lifetime, expecting to see her name, any names I recognize, here. Which is why I want to talk to you.”

Don’t discuss anything with those you don’t know. The Gestapo are watching, the Kundt Commission is in town. But there was something in Parsons’s voice.

The Café Pelikan was crowded. Refugees, intellectuals, a smattering of Marseille scum.

“What do you know about Surrealism?”

Jack Parsons scratched his chin. “Art, right? Not much. Is that what she does? I know Colquhoun from kind of another context. Mr. Fry, listen.” He leaned forward. “I shouldn’t be here. I’m en route to Prague.”

“You can’t get to Prague,” Fry said. “I still don’t know how you even made it here.”

“I just… made my way. And I have to keep going. I have a job to do. This goddamn war. It’s like you said: in the right context you can make words do all kinds of things.”

Did I say that? “I’m just a clerk…” Fry said.

“Come on. I know you run this committee. This Emergency Rescue Committee.” Fry looked quickly around them, but Parsons was unperturbed. “Everyone in the office was talking. I know you have some place in the suburbs, and you look after people, artists, try to get them out—”

“Keep your voice down.”

“I’m going to level with you.” Parsons was gabbling. “I want to go to Prague because if I get there, there are some words I think I can make do things they wouldn’t normally do. But now everyone’s saying I can’t get there. So there I am, wondering what to do, and I see you, and I see what you’re carrying. And that is why I came running after you. Because I do not believe in coincidence.”

Fry smiled. “I have a friend who would agree,” he said. “‘Objective chance,’ he’d call it.”

“Uh huh? See, that person in your magazine is connected to exactly the kind of thing I’m trying to do. Ithell Colquhoun.” He made it sound like a bell ringing. “What’s your connection?”

“One of my friends knows her,” Fry said. “The one who shares your view on coincidence, in fact. She visited him last year, I believe, in Paris. It was he who made this pamphlet. I believe she’s a painter and a writer. I haven’t even read this yet.”

“What’s your friend’s name?” said Parsons. “Who made that?”

With an effort, Fry did not answer. “How do you know Colquhoun’s work?” he said instead.

“A kind of mentor of mine knew her. Spoke real highly of her, too. That’s why you got me excited. Here’s what I’m wondering. Like I said, there’s something I wanted to do in Prague. Now I’m stuck here. But what if that’s okay? This guy I got a lot of respect for, well, he has a lot of respect for Colquhoun. So if she’s one of these Surrealists, maybe they have the same kind of ideas he does. And I do. So maybe I want to talk to them. To your pals.”

“My friend who knows her is called André,” said Fry, after a long silence.

“Mine’s called Aleister.”

“André Breton.”

“Aleister Crowley.”