The Last Days of New Paris

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.”