The Last Days of New Paris Read online

  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.”

  Don’t discuss anything with those you don’t know. The Gestapo are watching, the Kundt Commission is in town. But there was something in Parsons’s voice.

  —

  The Café Pelikan was crowded. Refugees, intellectuals, a smattering of Marseille scum.

  “What do you know about Surrealism?”

  Jack Parsons scratched his chin. “Art, right? Not much. Is that what she does? I know Colquhoun from kind of another context. Mr. Fry, listen.” He leaned forward. “I shouldn’t be here. I’m en route to Prague.”

  “You can’t get to Prague,” Fry said. “I still don’t know how you even made it here.”

  “I just…made my way. And I have to keep going. I have a job to do. This goddamn war. It’s like you said: in the right context you can make words do all kinds of things.”

  Did I say that? “I’m just a clerk…” Fry said.

  “Come on. I know you run this committee. This Emergency Rescue Committee.” Fry looked quickly around them, but Parsons was unperturbed. “Everyone in the office was talking. I know you have some place in the suburbs, and you look after people, artists, try to get them out—”

  “Keep your voice down.”

  “I’m going to level with you.” Parsons was gabbling. “I want to go to Prague because if I get there, there are some words I think I can make do things they wouldn’t normally do. But now everyone’s saying I can’t get there. So there I am, wondering what to do, and I see you, and I see what you’re carrying. And that is why I came running after you. Because I do not believe in coincidence.”

  Fry smiled. “I have a friend who would agree,” he said. “ ‘Objective chance,’ he’d call it.”

  “Uh huh? See, that person in your magazine is connected to exactly the kind of thing I’m trying to do. Ithell Colquhoun.” He made it sound like a bell ringing. “What’s your connection?”

  “One of my friends knows her,” Fry said. “The one who shares your view on coincidence, in fact. She visited him last year, I believe, in Paris. It was he who made this pamphlet. I believe she’s a painter and a writer. I haven’t even read this yet.”

  “What’s your friend’s name?” said Parsons. “Who made that?”

  With an effort, Fry did not answer. “How do you know Colquhoun’s work?” he said instead.

  “A kind of mentor of mine knew her. Spoke real highly of her, too. That’s why you got me excited. Here’s what I’m wondering. Like I said, there’s something I wanted to do in Prague. Now I’m stuck here. But what if that’s okay? This guy I got a lot of respect for, well, he has a lot of respect for Colquhoun. So if she’s one of these Surrealists, maybe they have the same kind of ideas he does. And I do. So maybe I want to talk to them. To your pals.”

  “My friend who knows her is called André,” said Fry, after a long silence.

  “Mine’s called Aleister.”

  “André Breton.”

  “Aleister Crowley.”

  Chapter Three

  1950

  “Thibaut,” the young scout had said. “They told me where you’d made your way. That you run things here.” The woman was exhausted and bedraggled but uninjured, and smiling to have made it through dangerous neighborhoods to find him.

  He did not see or hear her arrive at the door to the cellar where he was working, until she called him by name, gently enough not to alert his comrades above
. He reached for his gun at the sight of her but she tutted and shook her head with collegial imperiousness. “I’m Main à plume,” she said, and he believed her. That it was by some technique from the canon, some re-uttered poem in a novel context, that she had gained unseen entrance. He put his rifle down.

  She spoke again and did not raise her voice.

  “I came a long way, down rue des Martyrs, from the eighteenth, Montmartre,” she said. “There’s too much shit between here and the eighth. I’m glad I found you.”

  “I don’t run things,” he said.

  “Well. Seems you do. It’s you they wanted me to speak to, anyway.”

  “They?”

  “They knew where you’d be,” she said. “They—we—want you to join us. There’s a plan.”

  She was vague, but almost brittle with excitement. Just beyond the edges of Paris’s Nazi-controlled center, the comrades were amassing.

  Thibaut had fingered the card in his pocket. “Come on,” he said, “why do they want me?”, and watched her shock when he told her at last that he was protecting the ninth.

  Thibaut coils and uncoils the whip he took. He winds it densely around itself to make it a baton. He slaps it against his palm.

  “This shouldn’t work,” he says. “They can’t control manifs. They shouldn’t have even been there. No one should go into a forest.” He looks abruptly down, right at the pajamas he wears, about which Sam has said nothing. He has to gather himself a moment. “ ‘Confusedly,’ ” he says, “ ‘forests mingle with legendary creatures hidden in the thickets.’ ”

  “Desnos,” Sam says. “And that’s not a warning. That’s why I went in.”

  “Was it worth it? To see legendary creatures?” He intends to shame her with the question, with his bitter tone, but she smiles and raises her camera.

  In the remains of the Lycée Buffon, the old classrooms are empty but for dust and the carcasses of birds. Thibaut points his rifle at Sam. She does not cower. She places her bags by her feet, like someone standing on a railway platform.

  “Listen, American,” he says. He tries to make his voice rough. “I’m Paris. Main à plume.” Liar, he thinks. I shouldn’t even be here. “I’ve fought devils, manifs, Nazis, collaborators, and I’ve killed them all.” The Marseille card is in his pocket, that secret counter of rebellion. “Why were they coming after you? I told you. I’ve never seen wolf-tables like that, or manifs obeying Nazis.”

  “No? What about the aeropittura?” she says.

  He blinks. “They hardly count,” he says. Actual fascist manifs, such as those rushing futurist plane-presences, remain very few. “And they don’t obey anyone, fascist or others, they just…lurch about…”

  “Fauves?” she said. “The negligible old star?”

  For a short time, art-shepherds from the Vichy curators of “Jeune France” had tried to direct the garish strutters walked out of Derain’s canvases, the confusing and melancholy point of gray light self-made from lines written by a Vichy enthusiast. The presences, though, were uncontrollable and underwhelming. Thibaut has heard nothing of the crude bright fauvist figures in a long time, but the star is supposed to still haunt the streets some nights, emanating bewilderment.

  “The wolf-tables are Surrealist!” Thibaut shouts. “You can’t compare them to a poem by some stupid American, or fascist scrawls, or Derainist crap…”

  “I’ve seen worse than those tables following orders,” Sam says. “A huge thing ripped right out of art. Don’t kid yourself the Reich can’t manifest things sometimes.”

  Thibaut narrows his eyes. “You’re wrong,” he says.

  She shrugs. “If all my films were developed, I could show you.”

  “How do you know so much about all this?”

  “You’re not a good interrogator. You’re moving on to new questions before I’ve answered the first ones. Why were they after me? Remember?”

  “So why were they?”

  “No, let’s skip forward, in fact. I know about all this because it’s my job. I came in weeks ago. I’m from New York. I’m a photographer, and a curator.”

  “You came through the barricades?” Thibaut says. “From outside?”

  “Come on. There are ways. You know that. Will you point the rifle somewhere else? I’ve done a decent enough job of staying out of sight, I thought. But when I was in the eighth I realized those officers were following me. With their…dogs. I went south through the Grand Palais. They must have followed.”

  Does she understand what she’s saying? Boulevard Haussmann, the avenues des Champs-Élysées and de Friedland, Montaigne and George V: these and the neighboring streets of the sixteenth and seventeenth, around the Arc de Triomphe, are the Nazis’ redoubt.

  There are others throughout the city, of course, like the isolated forces of the tenth he’d seen scattered by the Vélo, cut off from each other, or connected by guarded lines. But the headquarters of the SS is on avenue Hoche; the Hotel Majestique is where the military high command still exercises rump power. Rue Lauriston is the headquarters of the Active Group Hesse, French Gestapo auxiliaries, the Carlingue. Those streets are patrolled by officers and the most reliable of their devil-allies.

  The whole zone is on military and demonic lockdown. The few Parisian civilians within serve its microeconomy. If manifs intrude there they are pushed out or ended with relentless force.

  Very rarely, one resistance group or other might infiltrate, carry out some raid—a theft, the liberation of comrades, a spectacular act of violence. The last time was years ago, and it was Paris itself the rebels had attacked.

  De Gaulle had been predictably aghast by the Arc’s changed configuration. When the dreams of the blast passed, the great structure was sedately on its side. The inside of its stone curve was wet, streaming with self-generated urine. A giant’s pissoir.

  It delighted Thibaut and all the Main à plume. To the Free French it was grotesque. They sent bombers undercover past the torture rooms, barracks, and ministries where trapped functionaries made strange fascist plans. When dawn came the Free French soldiers triggered their ordnance and with a great blurt of smoke and fire exploded the sideways Arc, showering the streets with rubble and piss.

  The stones still lie where they landed, now dry. De Gaulle said he was salvaging Paris’s honor.

  It had been a blind, Thibaut knows, to detract attention from the failure of their earlier assault at Drancy, the camp outside the siege and the old city’s arrondissements. The closed, mysterious horseshoe citylet repelled the Free French, to their shame.

  And now this tourist claims she walked in, walked out, of that controlled zone.

  “I was taking pictures,” she says.

  “Of what?”

  “Everything. The last thing I saw was the Propagandastaffel.” The censors’ building, where fascist authorities oversee what remains of propaganda and art in a city where art hunts. Which is a great deal. She opens a bag and pulls out a canister of tightly coiled film. “To keep a record.”

  She hands him one and nods permission. Thibaut unspools it a little, lets a streetlamp outside the window shine through it. He squints at the tiny images. Occluded streets in negative. Tanks by the pyramid in Parc Monceau, firing in formation at a great sickle-headed fish, a Lam manif swimming violently in the air. A humanish pillar. Thibaut looks closer. It is a woman made up of outsized pebbles, lying down on grass, her legs languorously in the water.

  Sam opens her notebook for him to see her neat English handwriting.

  “A book,” she says. “The Last Days of New Paris.”

  He is quite still. “What?” he manages at last.

  “I’m here to put all this down.” She looks at him quizzically. “You don’t think this can remain, do you? It can’t. It shouldn’t. But it’ll still be a tragedy when it ends. Don’t you think this city deserves marking?”

  Thibaut unrolls a few more pictures, nervous to see the images of places he has never seen, in his own city. That he i
s leaving behind. There is so much of it. It is a world. Can it really be finished?

  He looks closely at what she is showing him—the materials of a eulogy. These are his places.

  “It’s hard to develop them here,” Sam says. “I’m out of chemicals. The rest will wait till I’m out.”

  Negatives of soldiers and devils, machine-gun stations, ranks of vehicles, the Nazi zone. Embryos of a book. A first and last travelogue. “We need this,” she says. “For when it’s all done.”

  He looks at tiny offices with swastikas on their walls, their desks bursting with paper. Close-ups of those papers. How did she get in?

  Here: the Palais Garnier, its stairs dinosaur bones. He squints. Le Chabanais, the walls of the great building dissolved, light glimmering through the resin that has set around suspended women and men and the opulence and billowing cloths and gilded fittings within. A vegetal puppet, stringy, composite floral thing with fleeting human face ooze-growing up boulevard Edgar Quinet. Thibaut frowns at the sight of an arm, the remains of a white statue, a broken human face six or seven feet high, lying with stern expression in a pile of foundations. Plumes of stone-dust.

  Then the sweep of a gray flank. A house-sized curve. Thibaut blinks. “That’s Celebes,” he says.

  Sam takes the film back. “Enough,” she says.

  “It was. You saw Celebes.”

  The most famous manif of Paris, the elephant Celebes. Like a gray-ridged stockpot the size of a warehouse, under a howdah of geometric shapes, bull-horned trunk swaying like a small train.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “It was something. It was fast. I took a picture and ran. It was only a glimpse.”

  “You’re here to take pictures?” he says eventually, as if he’s sneering. As if he hadn’t gazed at them. He looks longingly at the film she holds. “To take pictures for a book?”

  —

  The sun over Paris isn’t an empty-hearted ring, nor black and glowing darkly. It is not the shining rubbing of a great coin, smudged as if the sky was buckled paper. It looks everyday today.