Wherever There Is Light (29 page)

“You want to take little ole me home?”

“Little ole you.”

“Take me home and then?”

“Let's get a cab.”

“Don't you wanna and-then me?”

Her expression was loopy, but underneath it she seemed to smolder. Not with lust, though. With anger.

It was a five-minute ride to the hotel. They took the elevator, a wire cage, to the eighth floor. Julian dug through her satchel for the key. A lamp was on in the sitting room. Kendall put her arms around Julian's neck, pressing against him.

“Remember how you used to fuck me?” She grabbed his lapels and tugged him into the dark bedroom. She let go and fell back on the bed.

Julian slipped off her espadrilles.

She kicked a foot at him. “Forget the shoes. Fuck me.”

The windows were open, and the room was chilly. There was a cotton blanket folded at the end of the bed, and Julian drew it up over Kendall.

“Boy,” she cracked, switching to her southern drawl, “when I tell y'all the blueberries is ripe, you best bring me the durn bucket.”

Julian sat on the bed. “Go to sleep now.”

“You don't want to fuck me?”

“Not tonight.”

“Why not? Why not tonight?”

“Get some rest.”

“Fuck you.”

She flopped over on her stomach. He looked down at her under the blanket with her hands laced together under her chin as if she were praying, and waited until he could hear the even breathing of sleep.

“What happened to you?” he murmured, then quietly walked out of the suite.

I
f, as
les existentialists
claimed, existence was meaningless, then it made sense to begin each day with dessert, a plan that Julian put into action by devouring a
pain au chocolat
at one of the busy cafés in the square outside the Sorbonne. Kendall's hotel was just across the Boulevard Saint-Michel, and Julian was tempted to check on her. Her behavior had disturbed him, but he doubted that crowding her would work out well for either of them.

He finished reading
L'Humanité
, the Communist daily, then glanced at his map and the address typed on an index card, and went up the Boul'Mich with the sun already warm and the light filtering through the treetops. At Rue Soufflot, he could see the portico of columns of the Panthéon as he climbed the slope of Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, past a newspaper kiosk that resembled a small, dark-green church with its cupola, and the students going to class, and turned into the beguiling heart of the Latin Quarter. The smell of fresh-baked bread from the
boulangeries
hung over the narrow cobblestone streets, and it was quieter here and there was the soothing hiss of the espresso machines in the cafés for background music. The old houses of limestone or stucco were three or four stories high, some of them with sunny courtyards and gates glorious enough for a palace and elegantly carved wooden doors painted electric blue or bottle green or the reddish orange of persimmons. He found the bistro he was looking for on Rue Blainville. Dust coated the zinc bar and mosaic floor—so much dust that the light slanting through the windows and across the dark-haired
patronne
sitting behind the cash register at the end of the bar seemed grayish brown.

“Madame Isabella Lefevre?” Julian said.

“
Oui
.” Her face, with its high cheekbones and full lips, had been pretty once, but it was cobwebbed with wrinkles now, and her eyes were dark and vacant—the eyes of someone who had forgotten how to hope.

“
Je suis
Julian Rose.”

“
L'américain?
”

Julian gave her a friendly smile. “How could you tell?”

“Because I've been waiting for you, and you speak French like you're reading from a Berlitz phrase book.” She gestured behind the bar. There were no liquor bottles on the shelves, and the beer taps needed polishing. “You are here to perform miracles with your
boîte de nuit
? To make the people return?”

“You will perform the miracle. Hire the plumbers, electricians, carpenters, and painters. Restock the bar, get a bartender and cook. Whatever it costs, I'll pay for it. You have a cellar with enough space for a bandstand and dance floor?”

“I do. And this
boîte
of yours—it has a name?”

Julian had come up with one at breakfast, and he was proud of it. “Club Dans le Vent.”

A one-armed man with a black beret and raggedy white beard, seated at a table on the other side of the bistro, said, “Monsieur Rose, you cannot be in fashion unless Madame takes down her picture. Go see her picture.”

“And you are?”

“
Marcel le Magnifique
.”

Julian walked over. Marcel the Magnificent was ripe enough with body odor to make his nostrils flare. “It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

With his one hand, Marcel thumbed tobacco out of a pouch into a cigarette paper and rolled up a smoke. “A privilege. It is a privilege to make my acquaintance.”

“How so?”

“Because you have never seen a one-armed man roll a cigarette.”

Julian laughed and took a lighter out of his pocket and flicked it. Marcel lit up. “You want a job?”

“What else can a one-armed man do besides roll cigarettes?”

“Stand outside a nightclub and open the door.”

Marcel smoked and thought this over. “I would need new clothes.”

Julian placed twelve thousand francs on the table.

“All for me?” Marcel asked.

“All for you. Now where's that picture?”

Isabella, getting off the stool, said, “Come.”

The bistro doglegged to the right. On the cracked plaster wall next to the door of the water closet was a large photograph framed in plain wood. Isabella was kneeling in the center of the photo, stripped to her chemise and surrounded by jeering men, women, and children, while a man with muscular forearms cut off her hair with scissors. Isabella's pruned skull made her look as sad and vulnerable as a corpse.

Isabella said, “You have heard of
les tondeurs
and
les tondues
?”

“I have.” The shearers and the shorn were a sideshow of the
épuration sauvage
—the savage cleansing of anyone collaborating with the Nazis. It began after the Germans were chased out of France in the summer of 1944. Thousands were executed, some guilty, others for fun. The women accused of taking Nazis for lovers—for
la collaboration horizontale
—were shamed with public haircuts.

Marcel came to stand beside Isabella. “It's time to take it down.”

“
Je m'en fous!
” Isabella snapped—
I don't give a fuck!

“Please,” Marcel said.

Lovingly, Isabella touched the shirtsleeve pinned to Marcel's shoulder. “I will not let those pieces of shit shame me.” She spun around and said to Julian, “You do not want to do business with a collaborator?”

He suspected that her story wasn't a simple one. But out of pride, she wasn't going to tell it to him.

Isabella asked, “You are a Jew,
non
?”

“I am.”

“You will have to trust me.”

“Then I'll trust you,” Julian said.

F
or three weeks, Julian didn't hear from Kendall. He reminded himself that he had no claim on her time—that part of their life was over. Nor had she promised him anything except a visit to La Palette. Yet that didn't prevent him from worrying about her or being annoyed that she hadn't called, especially after the evening he was scouring Saint-Germain hoping to spot her and bumped into Otis and his musician friends, all of them nicely pickled, stumbling out of Le Montana, and he asked Otis if he'd seen Kendall.

“No one has,” Otis said. “The girl's a regular Houdini: now you see her, now you don't.”

By then, Julian had become one of the nighttime ramblers who haunted the Left Bank. Electricity was rationed, so the great monuments weren't lit. Still, he could see sparks of moonlight on the Seine, and the towers and spires of Notre-Dame etched in black against the stars, and the comforting flicker of candles in the apartment houses on one side of Rue Guynemer with the locked gates of the Luxembourg Gardens on the other, and down a deserted stretch of the Boulevard Montparnasse, the light in the windows of Le Sélect, an all-night café and a haven for
les vagabonds nocturnes
. If it were windy or raining, Julian stopped for a whiskey, discovering that while some of the night wanderers were French, many of them were Americans drinking away their memories of Saint-Lô, Hürtgen Forest, and the Ardennes, all those killing grounds where, in a less illusory world, the grass would be red and the sky white with ghosts.

Julian wandered, hoping to shut down his thoughts so he could return to his room and sleep. Sometimes it worked; sometimes it had the opposite effect. If Julian saw lovers arm in arm, it made him feel so alone that he weighed the pros and cons of returning to the States for hours, and on the night he spotted a couple kissing beside Rodin's statue of Balzac, he double-timed it over to the Trianon and, against his better judgment, gave a note to the concierge asking Kendall to call him. Yet Julian knew that he couldn't go home—not yet. And as bad as these nights of loneliness were, he preferred them to the nights when he would remember the war and Willy doing his Olympian act.

Five days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Wild Bill had posted Julian to Switzerland. With the help of his banker in Lucerne, Julian transferred money to partisans in Norway, Holland, Poland, and France. Eventually, the Gestapo choked off the funds by arresting the bankers on the other end of the transactions. By this point, FDR had ordered the creation of the Office of Strategic Services, and Donovan transferred Julian to the special-operations branch of the OSS and sent him to England for training: weapons, explosives, radios, maps, and parachuting out of creaky Whitley bombers at the Ringway air station. Julian jumped into Brittany and later Normandy to aid the Résistance, arranging airdrops of munitions, sabotaging rail lines and bridges, gathering intel on German troop movements, and snatching prisoners. There had been enough close calls to scare Julian, but nothing he hadn't felt dealing with Siano Abruzzi's boys in Newark. By December 1944, shortly before Christmas, Julian was in Reims, distracting himself with the local champagne and a mademoiselle eager to express her gratitude to the United States, when he was ordered to report to the Eighty-Fourth Infantry Division in the Belgian town of Marche. With all the casualties, Julian figured the Army was short of translators and he'd be interrogating prisoners. But instead a lieutenant colonel had ordered him to patrol the snowy woods outside Marche, and it was there that Julian learned with one squeeze of a trigger you can take two lives: the person you are firing at and your own.

On the nights that this memory throbbed behind his eyes like a migraine, Julian could barely sleep. By dawn he was watching the sun turn the river to emerald glass, and then he bathed and changed into fresh clothes and walked up past Rue Blainville to the Place de la Contrescarpe. The
clochards
who had slept under the trees in the square with newspapers for blankets were just waking up looking for a drink. Julian gave them a handful of francs before breakfasting on the terrace of La Contrescarpe, reading the papers as the laborers knocked back
un petit rouge
and smoked a final cigarette before hurrying off, and the university students lingered over their coffee and brioche, and girls in smocked dresses and boys in knickers tramped by on their way to school.

Club Dans le Vent, as Julian now thought of Isabella's bistro, was around the corner, and Julian went there to check on the renovations. Isabella had the workmen well in hand, shouting at them with such an inventive string of expletives that Julian marveled at her ability to modify the noun
asshole
. All Julian had to do was make a weekly phone call to his Swiss banker, who transferred funds to the Guaranty Trust in Paris, and give the money to Isabella. He also found a one-bedroom apartment with raised paneled wainscoting and parquet floors and a fireplace in the
salon
. It was near the club, on Place de l'Estrapade, an island of serenity with its trees and benches and bubbling fountain. Marcel the Magnificent owned the building, which had been in his family for generations. The roof had holes in it; the limestone exterior required cleaning and repointing; and every apartment needed painting. Most of the tenants were broke, but Marcel didn't have the heart to throw them out. Julian financed the renovations, and because his back ached from the contortions involved in using the squat toilet in his hotel—which he could swear had been invented by the Marquis de Sade—he paid a fortune for an American toilet on the black market. Marcel oversaw these workmen. His language wasn't as inventive as Isabella's, though there was less work to do to make Julian's apartment habitable.

On the morning before Julian moved in, his phone rang, and he was still groggy when he said hello, and Kendall replied, “How are you?”

“Thinking you'd never call.” He admonished himself for the sharpness of his tone and sat up, reminding himself that Kendall owed him nothing.

“I meant to call sooner. I got stuck in Marseille.”

Careful not to sound overly inquisitive, he asked, “What were you doing?”

“A photo shoot of Piaf and her discovery, a singer and actor, Yves Montand.”

Three weeks, he thought. “Must have been a lot of pictures.”

She paused. Then, “Yes, it was. Do you still want to meet me at La Palette?”

“I do.”

“Forty-three Rue de Seine. Around five?”

“
À bientôt
.”