The Girl in the Blue Beret (16 page)

“Do your parents hide many aviators? How do you feed them?” He wasn’t supposed to ask his helpers questions, so the Krauts couldn’t force anything out of him if he got caught.

She shrugged. “We manage.”

“And what do you do?” He knew she went somewhere Friday afternoons after school.

“You are not to know.” She smiled. “The Germans, if they are on the bus, I put my books beside me and occupy as much space as possible. I enjoy making inconvenience for them. Also, it is amusing to drop my books at their feet. In a way they are gentlemen. ‘Oh, mademoiselle, I must assist you!’ and in another way they are ready to make the arrest. But they do not, not the schoolgirls. So they think they are kind and helpful, but we are laughing at them. Every little bit of trouble we can cause, innocently—‘Oh, it is only the schoolgirls’—is a way to express our frustration.”

“Should you be provoking the Germans?” he asked. “It sounds dangerous.”

“I know. But how can one resist?”

Mme Vallon was at the door, with her groceries, mostly rutabagas.

“Your usual catch,” Marshall said, but he could not make the expression understood.

“If this war ever ends, I will never touch another rutabaga!” Mme Vallon said, depositing the bags on the kitchen table.

“Did you find anything else?” Annette asked, poking into the smaller bag.

“I have ten grams of butter—very precious. I have the sugar. We must get along without even ersatz coffee. Tomorrow, they said. No bread, of course. All the farina is going to Germany. Maybe our men working at the factories will get some of it.” Mme Vallon rummaged deeper in the bag. “One cheese ration.”

“Let me imagine,” Annette said. “Tonight, baked rutabaga with cheese. A soupçon of butter.”

“A tiny pinch of sugar with the butter,” her mother said with a smile. “I have some herbs.”

THEY WARNED HIM
to stay away from the dining room window, which gave onto the street, but he could watch from a side angle through the lace curtains. He saw only an occasional vehicle—a Kübelwagen or a Mercedes-Benz flying a small flag with a swastika on it. The building was on a corner, and his bedroom overlooked a small side street. The blackout curtains at night cocooned him. He heard few traffic noises. People were out in the mornings and flocking home late in the day, after dark. He watched them, did exercises to keep his muscles from cramping with inactivity, and studied French. For months as a pilot trainee he had studied mechanical manuals: hydraulic pressures, lift angles. In January he had been keeping house in his barracks, writing lovesick letters to Loretta, trying to squelch suspense over the next mission. During the day he attended lectures and flew trial runs, and ten times in two months he had been out on wild sky rides, lugging bombs. A few times he had visited the villages near the base, and once he had been to London. Now, he was trying to talk French and reading Verlaine. He was almost twenty-four years old. He had stepped into an alternate life, like Alice in Wonderland, down a rabbit hole—but without his Bugs Bunny jacket.

There was hardly anything he could do to help Mme Vallon. He envied Robert, the good-humored young guy who came by bringing fresh meat wrapped in paper. He brought cigarettes. Marshall listened for his bicycle, arriving in the downstairs foyer. Robert was slender but powerfully built, with thick hair and dark eyes. He always seemed to be on urgent business. Marshall imagined him as a daring Resistance agent out gathering intelligence or transporting explosives, while Marshall himself sat out the war behind lace curtains.

Annette teased Marshall for lolling around the house while she worked so hard at school. She teased him for his efforts at French, even while she patiently coached him. And she teased him for the rude outfits he had to wear—the layers of old sweaters, the too-short pants, the rough socks, the cloth slippers with the seams loosened to make room for his huge toes.

At the table the family managed to make their meager dinners last for hours, regaling one another with jokes at the Germans’ expense and family stories that Marshall thought must have been often told.

“The wine makes us convivial,” said Mme Vallon. “We forget the difficulties.”

M. Vallon did not speak of his work at the city hall, but Marshall observed that he came home with extra ration books.

“If they fail to account for the number, who is to know?” Marshall overheard M. Vallon say—but in French, so Marshall wasn’t sure.

Once M. Vallon said to Marshall, “I am an honest man. I have always been an honest man. It is for honor, for patriotism, that we take care of the
aviateurs
.”

“We are not violent,” said Mme Vallon. “But we can do this.”

“The Germans were a people of culture,” M. Vallon said sadly. “I do not permit myself to believe that every German connives in this conquest.”

“We are ancient enemies,” Mme Vallon said.

From time to time, hints of despair broke through the Vallons’ determined tranquility. But they quickly assured themselves that de Gaulle and his Free French troops would liberate Paris soon. Any day the
débarquement
of the Allies would begin. In the evenings the family played card games and conversed. At nine o’clock, Annette’s parents tuned in to the BBC on the wireless for the news of France.
Chut!
Shh!

One night, they were awakened by explosions followed by sirens. In the chilly dark they were all out of bed, peeking from behind the curtains.

“It is not far,” said Mme Vallon. “The smoke is across the park.”

“Whatever happens, I will not consent to leave Paris again,” said her husband. “The exodus in 1940 was shameful. We will not descend to that again.”

18.

M
ARSHALL DINED WITH JIM AND IPHIGÉNIE AT A QUIET
bistro and told them about his visit to Chauny. He tried to avoid discussion about the war that might upset Iphigénie, but today she seemed more relaxed with him and asked questions about the Alberts.

Marshall saw that she adored Jim. He noticed that Jim’s hair was thinning.

“Retirement’s a hell of a thing, Marshall, but you might say I’ve got a new career here in Paris,” Jim said, touching Iphigénie’s cheek affectionately. “It’s like picking up a new route I haven’t flown before. Remember when we added the New Delhi route?”

“Oh, do I.”

The crew of a Connie might be away for as long as two weeks, flying from New York to Madrid or Paris, then resting a couple of days before picking up the next leg to New Delhi. They stayed in New Delhi two or three days before turnaround.

“What a life,” Jim said.

For a while, they rehashed the glory days of air travel, but then Marshall declared that sometimes he had fewer regrets than he had expected.

“Deregulation is going to ruin the airlines,” he said with a momentary flash of anger.

“We got out at a good time,” Jim said. “I try to tell myself there are other things in life. Tell Marshall about our trip, Iffy.”

Iphigénie finished a delicate maneuver with sauce, potato, and a fragment of duck leg before speaking. “My niece is getting married, and we’re going for two weeks in the Dordogne.” She became animated, flicking her ring-studded fingers outward. “It will be a very nice country wedding.”

Jim patted her hands down. “Iffy’s going to see her whole family, and—
oh, la la!
My God, Marshall, you sit with these Frenchies and their feasts all afternoon and you can’t understand why they’re not all blimps. Iffy is loyal to her family, but then she comes back to Paris.” He lowered his voice to a mock-conspiratorial tone. “She’s very French, very chic. She won’t wear pants, none of those jeans that American women wear.”

“Disgusting,” said Iphigénie. “Disrespectful.”

“I’m with you there,” Marshall said. The waiter refilled his wineglass.

Jim went on. “Iffy wears those heels that make her ankles so slim and sexy, you know what I mean. I’ve known her for five years and she always surprises me.”

All the while Jim was speaking, he was looking at Iphigénie, teasing her, judging her reactions (she was pretending not to hear him), congratulating himself for his taste in women and, Marshall thought, insulting Iphigénie in an underhanded way. He tried to remember if he had treated Loretta this way. He thought about Annette and her mother, and after a lull in the conversation he began telling Jim and Iphigénie about hiding in the Vallons’ apartment.

“I keep thinking how brave they were,” he said. “I really didn’t give them credit for the risks they took. It’s only becoming real to me now. Strange, isn’t it?” He swallowed some wine. “I’d love to find them again.”

“They may want to forget the war,” Iphigénie said, her eyes down. “But they were very kind to you.”

“Retirement takes you full circle,” Jim said. “A lot of people want to go back to their young days. Maybe that’s true with the people you’re looking for.”

“Who knows what might have happened to them?” Marshall said. “They could be in Timbuktu. That goes for all of the people who helped me escape. I’d like to find them, to thank them. But I don’t know. Maybe it’s not a good idea.”

“You were fortunate to find the persons in Chauny,” said Iphigénie, touching a napkin gracefully to her lips. “And fortunate they were happy to welcome you again. As for the others …” She waved her hand ambiguously.

Later, as they parted on the street, Jim said, “We’ll be back in a couple of weeks, but here’s where you can reach us if you need to.” He wrote the number on a bit of paper. It was Iphigénie’s parents’ home near Brantôme.

“
Au revoir
, Marshall,” Iphigénie said, pecking his cheeks lightly.

Marshall tucked the paper into his trousers pocket and walked to the Métro, wondering whatever could possess him to call Jim Donegan in the Dordogne.

MARSHALL FOUND HIMSELF
circling Napoléon’s Tomb. The thing was like a sleigh, or a giant baby’s crib with a lid on it. It was highly polished stone, the color of roasted chestnuts. Freestanding in a circle under the Dôme des Invalides, it was downright weird. Inside—a man once, now disintegrated. And he was packed into a set of coffins nesting one inside the other like Russian dolls.

A vague memory had drawn him here. Napoléon’s Tomb was a safe house, he recalled someone saying. He didn’t know what that meant. Did Nappy have room inside his cave to hide a scared airman with his dog tags in his boot? Marshall wondered why so many people got the idea that they were Napoléon in a past life.
Reincarnation—what crap
, Marshall thought. But Napoléon was always good for a laugh.

He had come here once with someone. With Robert on his bicycle?

NICOLAS WAS ON THE TELEPHONE
with news. Marshall had just returned to the hotel from apartment hunting. It was too expensive to remain in the hotel. He was still breathing hard from his walk up five flights of stairs. The elevator was small and busy, and he had grown impatient with the wait.

“I’ve learned a few things,” Nicolas said. “But I don’t yet know what to do with this information. As you know, the people who helped you before you got to Chauny would be very difficult to locate, but we can start with the family you knew in Paris. My father told me something about the network in Paris that picked up the flyers from this region. It was one of several escape lines. It was called the Bourgogne.”

“I don’t remember anyone ever mentioning that name.”

“You recall my father spoke of going to Paris to do the maps for the intelligence service?”

“Oh, oui.”

“He made a connection with a
convoyeur
from the Bourgogne on that trip.”

Nicolas explained that the escape-line organizers had trained with the Free French in England, then sneaked back into France to find people to establish safe houses, to make the false IDs, and to act as guides. The Bourgogne network led the flyers from Paris south to Pau or Perpignan and linked them there with other guides for the rest of the journey. “All that is very familiar territory to you, Marshall.”

“Yes and no. I was mostly kept in the dark. After I returned, I was debriefed in London, but I couldn’t tell them much. And after the war, I just wanted to forget it. It was over.”

“Yes, I understand,” said Nicolas. “But now you want to know. That is normal. I’m trying to contact the man who was principal in the Bourgogne, and I’m waiting for him to answer my call.”

“Well, I appreciate this, Nicolas. I’ll have to give you more than a Bugs Bunny jacket this time.”

Nicolas laughed. “It is my pleasure and my duty, Marshall. It would be an honor to me to help you in this quest.”

“Of course they could all be dead, or citizens of New Caledonia by now.”

“Ah. Life is an adventure, Marshall.”

“So it is.”

“I’m going to check more in the libraries. I may take the train into Paris one day and check some holdings in the National Archives or the
bibliothèque
.”

“I could do that, perhaps?”

“It is no problem to me. Besides, Marshall, you may need better French for research at the very proper and bureaucratic Bibliothèque nationale! I mean no offense.”

“I understand.”

“I’ll be in touch.”

MARSHALL BOARDED A TAXI
with his luggage and a bag of laundry. He had found a suitable place in the Fourteenth Arrondissement, south of the Montparnasse Cemetery. The concierge, who lived on the ground floor, was a laconic country woman from the north. Her husband had returned to their village for the summer to help his aged father with his fruit orchard.

In the lobby of the apartment building two chairs sat in a tiled nook with a potted plant and a wall telephone with buzzers. Marshall had rented a two-room furnished apartment up two flights. He squeezed his belongings into the Tom Thumb elevator and dashed up the stairs to meet it.

The apartment was spacious enough, with a large living area overlooking a small park, a minimalist kitchen, a shower, and a plain bedroom with a narrow but long-enough bed. There was even a bidet.

Exploring the neighborhood, he found a small market on the rue d’Alésia and stocked up on supplies, everything from cornflakes to toilet paper. He toted his bags back, then tried to figure out bedding. He had never bought sheets in his life. Where did one buy them in Paris? The concierge was out. Should he call Jim in the Dordogne?