The Rose Café (21 page)

I got back into town in the late afternoon and stopped at a café at the north end of the plaza, away from the boule pitch and my usual haunt. I ordered a beer and sat stretching my legs, watching the little children wheel round and round on the pointless carousel. Daydreaming there, I heard a familiar French-inflected English greeting behind me. It was le Baron himself, dressed in his linen suit and carrying his leather wallet.

“What are you doing down here?” he asked. “Shouldn't you be cleaning fish?” He was joking, of course, but I explained, even though he probably already knew, that I was taking days off.

“Mind if I join you?” he asked.

I nodded and waved my hand toward the free chair. He ordered a local beer, and we sat talking about the Rose Café and some of the guests and the poor lonely dentist, Eugène, and the outing of Herr Komandante. This eventually brought him around to Marie.

“She's a devilish little scamp, isn't she? Flirting with poor Eugène and all the others. Throwing over Chrétien as she did.”

“He saw it coming,” I said. “I was with him the day Karen and her sister arrived. He was taken from the start.”

“No need to worry about Chrétien, I suppose.”

“No, he can take care of himself.”

“I say, how well do you know Marie?” le Baron asked.

“Pretty well. We talk. She thinks I'm a cowboy. She likes to hear about American life.”

“I think there's more to it than that,” he said.

“Maybe.”

He drank, looked over at the bank.

“
Tu parla italiano
?” he asked, seemingly out of nowhere.

“
Si un po, perché
?” I answered.

“That's what I thought,” he said. “How about Spanish?”

“Yes, I lived there before I came to France.”

“German?”

“No. A little. But why do you ask?”

“We see you shuffling around like a peasant from the maquis—limited French, pretending to be Italian around English speakers. Your friend Maggs was telling me she thinks it's your trick, right? Makes it easier to eavesdrop, doesn't it?”

“Not really, I like languages. I just listen. I don't speak any one language very well, though.”

“Right, I saw you eavesdropping on that Dushko fellow. He knows a lot of languages.”

“I noticed,” I said. “Where's he from anyway?”

“Dushko, ah, Dushko,” he said with sad resignation. “Who knows where Dushko is from. That's probably not even his name.”

“He was looking for you when he first came out here,” I said. “I'm afraid I tipped him off. I hope that was OK.”

“Sure, he would have found me anyway. And it doesn't matter.”

“Who is he?”

He laughed. “Who is Dushko? Now there's a good question. Just don't ask Dushko. He doesn't know who he is. He's a gambling man. A man without a country, blown across borders by the winds of war. He's got any number of personae. Take your pick.”

“Peter thought that. Buffeted around by wars?”

“To say the least,” he said into his beer.

Dushko, he explained, was one of those entrepreneurial types who seemed to be able to get himself out of any scrapes he fell into. Le Baron said he thought Dushko might be a Czech Jew or maybe a Serb, and had managed to survive the war a free man—mostly. He had been in business in Berlin before the war, he said, and was associated with some left-wing group that was opposed to the rising tide of fascism. He had a lot of connections in the international community, and he and a compatriot got the idea of running arms into Spain during the Civil War. He had contacts everywhere by then and wasn't afraid to use them. At first he sold arms to the Republicans, but he got caught and thrown in prison. Then he cut some deal, got himself free, switched camps, and started selling guns to the Falangists. But he still had his old Republican contacts, le Baron said, and may still have been working with them. After the war, he escaped through Perpignan and disappeared into the refugee camps with the other Republican Spaniards. When the Second World War broke out, someone—probably in revenge—turned him over to the Gestapo for some unidentified crime and he ended up in prison again, back in Germany, in Berlin.

“I think he got knocked around a bit while he was there. Somebody didn't like his attitude. Or maybe they thought he had information,” le Baron said. “He was in solitary confinement but, you know—he made contacts—communication by tapping on pipes, that sort of thing.”

Le Baron said that somehow, Dushko bartered his way out and after that ended up in Istanbul. He had no country by this time, no allegiances to anyone, nor any cause, neither fascist nor antifascist, nor communist, nor patriot. He would work for anyone, le Baron said. After the war he ended up in one of those little border towns in Eastern Europe where anyone could sell or buy anything, including passports and new identities. Somewhere along the way he got a press pass and a uniform. Cuban, le Baron thought, or Paraguayan, with a badge, papers, and calling card.

“Uniforms counted for a great deal back then,” le Baron said. “So did papers. He was free to move anywhere.”

“How do you know all this?” I asked. “Is he a friend?”

“He told me.”

Le Baron said that half of what Dushko told anybody was probably a front, but that he didn't make it up entirely. “Part of his story must be true,” he said. “He was always in and out of international trade, for example. But he was a good forger of documents, and he was also dealing in contraband. He managed to get himself down to Monte Carlo at some point with money in his pocket, and he was intelligent enough to win some earnings for a while. He may even have worked out a system to beat the wheel.”

Le Baron was living in Nice at the time and used to see Dushko around. He was either rich or destitute. Never in between.

“Once when I saw him he was living in a tent in a gypsy camp outside Nice. Next time I saw him he was in a tuxedo at the bar at the Negresco.”

I took a chance and asked how it came to pass that he knew such a man as Dushko. Le Baron claimed that he had been working in a bank in Nice and that Dushko had come in to fill out an application for a loan.

“The documentation was suspect. We could see that immediately, but for some reason, I liked him. He was such a good talker, such a great posturing liar, and he had all those stories. He could go on for hours with his tales of intrigue. He could talk or buy his way out of anything, I daresay. Even Nazi prisons. We had lunch one day and he pulled a card trick to see who would pick up the chit. I played, knowing what I was getting into, and he won, as I knew he would, of course. He amused me. Then he began to pester me, and then I dropped him. And now here he is again.”

“He wants money?”

“Dushko does not come looking for you to make social calls,” he said.

He drained his beer and looked around for a waiter.

“I must be going,” he said and left some coins on the table, more than enough to cover my beer as well as his, I noticed.

We shook hands.

“I say, would you like to come out to the villa some evening for dinner?” he asked. “Bring your little friend with you. She might enjoy the garden. I happen to know she is not unfamiliar with country houses.”

The invitation was a little frightening, but I said I would like to come sometime if Jean-Pierre would liberate me from my dreaded scullery.

He laughed again. “Of course he will,” he said. “I'll mention it to him.”

On another one of my free days, after a long nap I took a stroll out to the Ile de la Pietra to the Genoese tower. I hiked northward out over the red battlements of rocks and threaded my way between narrow passages to the isolated north shore of the islet. The ancient Genoese tower loomed above me like a judge, and in time I came to a blue-green, narrow cove. It was dead still and hot that day, and rather than smashing itself apart on the rocks as it often did in this exposed quarter, the smooth water simply rose and fell quietly, as if the sea were breathing. I stripped and dove in and floated there, dreaming of the vast sweep of human history that engulfed this part of the world—the old Torréens who built the menhirs and torri scattered around the island, the Phoenician traders nosing into the coves along the coast, the Greeks in their dark-prowed galleys, Romans in their cataphract triremes, Genoese, English, and French—and all of them warring with one another. Alone there, surrounded by the silent sky and the slow rise and fall of the quiet sea, I could almost hear somewhere in the distance the clash of bronze swords and the shouts of wave on wave of senseless armies hammering at each other—and to what end? “
A quoi bon
?” as Marie's tutor Giancarlo used to say during his vast reviews of human history.

Back on shore I dried off in the sun and carried on with my exploration, intending to circle the islet and return to my cottage on the little causeway. I was forced inland in some sections, and had to clamber up through narrow passages and then work my way back down to the shore. Halfway around, at the western end of the islet, I was once again forced upward, and on my way back down from the heights, I could see down to the flat, smooth-rock shore that ran out to the west. Here I saw a couple lounging, a blond woman stretched out flat and a sandy-haired man on his side, propped on his right elbow and leaning over the woman intimately. They were both nude and had been for a swim. I could see the gleam of water on their skin and their wet hair.

It was a bit of a shock. I recognized André and Maggs.

So as not to intrude I retreated, climbed over the top of the island, passed under the Genoese watchtower, and rested there for a while, my heart pounding.

I knew that adults had affairs; illicit assignations were not uncommon in the New York suburb where I had grown up; and there were constant flirtations and affairs at the Rose Café. But this was somehow different. If it had been Chrétien with Karen, someone my age, I would have been amused. I had seen Maggs taking a coffee or a glass of beer with André and had seen them sometimes leaning close together in intimate conversation and dancing together when the gypsies were at the café. But I was too naive to realize that they were beginning an affair.

Be that as it may, when I saw her the next day, Maggs joined me on the terrace and carried on as if nothing had occurred over the past week that was in any way different from any other seven-day period. She chattered on about Poland and London, and the color of the sea beyond the harbor and that funny little man Pierrot, with his cocked eye and his down-at-heel espadrilles. The difference was in me, I realized, and I began to listen to her war stories in a new way, trying to work out an explanation for her betrayal of Peter. I had a dull, unformed thought that Peter was a bit of a bore, a quiet sort, with an obsession for spearfishing. On the other hand, he had to have something within him. I gathered from what Maggs had said that he was a fairly successful sculptor back in London, and I had heard that he had traveled around India on a motorcycle in his younger years.

I sensed all along that something worse than the average horror of war-torn Warsaw was haunting Maggs. She often mentioned a certain Nazi officer in her stories of her Warsaw youth. She had spoken of him so often I began to wonder if she had perhaps been his girlfriend, and in fact once I ventured to merely hint at asking her in as indirect a manner as I could summon. But with her seemingly instinctive ability to read character and thoughts, she must have seen it coming and dodged the question before I was even able to launch it. She went on to speak of the officer's many qualities: I gather he was older, and, at least in her view (she must have been about seventeen), worldly and civilized, fluent in languages, knew all about ancient Greece, and used to quote long passages from Friedrich Hölderlin to her. He could also play the piano.

“Once I was with him in a little bistro when no one was around,” she said. “He saw a piano. ‘Ah ha,' he said. ‘Please excuse me for one moment.' He went over, sat down, and played a few little Mozart passages. Then he rested a minute, rubbed his hands together, and set into the opening bars of Bach's
Goldberg Variations
. He must have been studying for years …”

She drew a breath and looked out at the harbor.

“But then one day when I was with him on the street, we came suddenly upon a Jewish family …”

She halted, glanced up at me quickly, and then looked back at the ice at the bottom of her glass.

Just then one of the martins flitted past us and landed in its nest, fluttering. The young pitched their heads up and began squawking, open-beaked. She looked over at them.

“You know, sometimes I think that human beings are an aberration of nature, an evolutionary dead end that will end up exterminating itself by its own hand,” she said. “The animals are more ethical than we are, don't you think? They have a code that they live by. They don't just kill indiscriminately. But we, we have no purpose. None that I can tell, anyway.”

She shifted her glass on the table, brushed back her hair from her eyes, and stopped talking.

The silence was ominous.

“Where's Peter today?” I asked.

“Oh you know, out with Jean-Pierre probably. Spearfishing. The usual.” She sipped her beer. “I wish I could do that,” she said. “I'm getting restless out here. I think I need to get back to London and work.”

chapter thirteen

Le Baron

For some reason, the theoretical dinner invitation from le Baron made me nervous. I was half-hoping he'd forget about it. But a few days later, when he came out for a card game, he mentioned it again.

By this time, even though I had been snooping around all summer long, I didn't feel I knew any more about le Baron than when I first saw him making his way across the town square in his white linen suit back in April. Furthermore, all the conflicting stories about him were mounting.