The Postmistress of Paris(23)
Still, they met every evening at the Pelikan Bar, where Miriam greeted Dagobert by exclaiming, “Hitler! Hitler!”—the name alone provoking him to bark like mad, which made everyone laugh. They ate dinners out, since the meat and bread rationing didn’t yet apply to restaurants, then moved on to conversations in the local bars about when Germany would occupy all of France. Nights often ended with friends crowding into Nanée’s hotel room to listen to the 1:00 a.m. BBC broadcast while taking turns soaking in Nanée’s tub—a radio, booze, and a bath luxuries Nanée was happy to share.
Now Nanée walked with Dagobert on leash toward the H?tel Splendide, where Miriam was going to introduce her to her boss, Varian Fry. Fry had recently arrived in Marseille, sent by the newly formed American Emergency Rescue Committee—in French, Centre Américain de Secours, or CAS—with a list of some two hundred notable artists and intellectuals: Picasso, Chagall, Lipchitz, and Matisse; writers like Hannah Arendt; Nobel Laureates; and even the journalist who’d bestowed on the German National Socialist Party the nickname Nazi, Bavarian slang for “bumpkin” or “simpleton,” which became so ubiquitous that Hitler’s only recourse was to embrace it. Fry was working behind the political cover of providing perfectly legal aid to refugees and a CAS “affiliation” with the respected American Red Cross to quietly arrange illegal escapes from France for those on his list. Surely this Fry fellow could use Nanée’s help, and her money too.
But Varian Fry was reluctant even to meet Nanée, Miriam had warned; he didn’t think people like Nanée existed.
“Does he imagine me a spy for the Gestapo or Vichy or both?” Nanée responded, and they’d laughed together as they laughed at everything.
Then Miriam replied matter-of-factly, “I’m afraid this is how Varian believes spies work, though—sending beautiful women to infiltrate.”
Nanée wanted to do something to help, the same as any decent person in this newly terrible world surely must. Having failed at getting Peterkin out of France and at finding Danny, she was now intent on learning from someone who knew what they were doing. And the people on Varian Fry’s list included many of the same people Danny had arranged French residency permits for before the war. If she couldn’t help Danny or his family, perhaps she could help those he’d helped himself.
Nanée slipped through a lobby crowded with refugees, pale to a person despite the long Provence summer just ending, and desperate after so many days wearing the same clothes and hiding out in dirty little rooms. She took the stairs up to room 307, a single room filled with volunteers interviewing refugees from the edges of the bed or leaning on radiators or sitting on the floor—a cacophony of conversation carried on over giggles and squeals from a playground the makeshift office overlooked. And there was Miriam, interviewing at a desktop made from a mirror, its former placement visible in unfaded paint on a nearby wall.
They hardly had to move in the cramped room to reach a man in horn-rimmed glasses, rolled shirtsleeves, and a loosened Harvard tie. Decent posture. A lean if not hardy build, thinning hair, a domed forehead, and a broad nose. It was hard to fathom how Miriam found the bookishly earnest thirtysomething Varian Fry attractive, but then most women prefer their heroes to be handsome, and so often we see what we want to see.
Fry, speaking in a clipped Eastern Seaboard monotone, was showing a list of names to a refugee, asking, “Do you know the whereabouts of any of the others on my list?”
Who would have imagined the hardest part of helping famous refugees escape would be finding them? But the peace treaty with Germany required France to “surrender on demand” anyone requested for extradition by the Gestapo, which had in mind to hunt down every voice ever raised against Hitler, including most of the people on Fry’s list. And the Marseille police were a mixed lot; some would look away, but others conducted mass arrests of refugees and hauled them off to internment camps. What any official did on any given day was a measure of the state of his own nerves. Some two hundred thousand refugees stayed in Marseille anyway, the chaos of temporary grape-and olive-harvest workers and organized crime making it possible to disappear here while at the same time searching for an escape. Nobody advertised where they lived, though, not wanting to end up in Camp des Milles or the hellhole of Saint-Cyprien, much less in Gestapo hands.
The refugee speaking with Fry pointed to a name on the list. “He’s living at the Bar Mistral on Point Rouge.” Another—an art critic and specialist in Negro sculpture—had hanged himself at the Spanish border when they wouldn’t let him out of France.
“I don’t want to be like him,” the poor fellow said.
“There are ways to get people out,” Fry assured him.
The man wept at Fry’s offer of money for clothes, having not had a kindness in months.
Varian offered his handkerchief, apologizing that it wasn’t fresher, then saw him off with, “I’ll see you soon in New York.”
An optimist, Nanée thought, but then Varian Fry had not been long in France.
As Miriam introduced her, Fry eyed the Robert Piguet suit Nanée had worn to impress him: a blue darker and less flashy than royal yet not quite the dull everyday of navy, with soft yellow pinstripes, a conservative midcalf skirt, and a short jacket that escaped boredom through its soft yellow lining and a stylish collar stretching to her shoulders. He frowned at Dagobert, who wasn’t at all that kind of poodle, not prissy or clipped or even overbrushed, but she could see Fry adding him to the equation, somehow finding her as frivolous as Dagobert might look if he were pampered and chic.