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.
“I’m sorry, Miss Gold, that Miriam has put you to the trouble,” Fry said, “but we don’t need—”
“I am not a dilettante, Mr. Fry,” Nanée interrupted, but softly, regretting now the silk flying scarf she’d added at her throat for luck, white again but somewhat tattered from Dagobert’s love.
“For Pete’s sake, Varian,” Miriam said. “Nanée gave her airplane to the French military long before you even imagined helping—”
Fry silenced her, then walked to the loo, motioning them to follow.
In the tiny bathroom, a fellow stretched out in the bathtub was dictating a letter to a woman perched with her typewriter on the bidet. The two looked up, not at all surprised to have company, and gathered their things and left, closing the door behind them as Fry turned on the tub faucet and the sink tap.
“We must assume we’re bugged,” he said, “and in any event, the walls are paper thin.”
Nanée objected, “But you’re interviewing—”
“We’re extremely careful with our words,” Fry said. “Those we’re trying to rescue—Picasso, Chagall, Matisse—”
“Picasso has placed a sign on the door of his studio on Grands Augustins that reads simply ‘Ici’—Here—with no intention of leaving Paris,” Nanée said, her irritation getting the better of her. “Chagall is so focused on painting that he hasn’t noticed the Germans have taken France. And Matisse insists that if everyone of merit leaves, France will not survive. You’re intent on helping the famous, who often don’t even want to be helped, when—”
Miriam interrupted, “What Nanée is trying to say—”
“Is that she is far too outspoken for a position that requires the utmost discretion,” Fry said.
Dagobert chose that moment to put his paws on the edge of the tub and lick the flowing water. He shook his head, spraying Fry’s pant legs. A look crossed Fry’s face: She can’t even control her dog.
“What I’m trying to say, perhaps inelegantly,” she said more gently, “is that it’s fine to help famous artists and thinkers escape France, but why is one life to be valued over another? Why spend scarce resources finding those who wish to remain hidden when there are refugees so desperate to get out that they line up at your very public door?”
“The Emergency Rescue Committee has sent me here with a list of people for whom we can arrange American visas,” Fry protested. “They must be my priority. And while Vichy may not be Hitler, Hitler—”
Dagobert barked madly, startling Fry.
Miriam laughed her overloud laugh. “Hitler, Hitler,” she whispered to Dagobert, sending him barking madly again.
“Dagobert is no fan of the man with the mustache,” Miriam explained.
Varian, nonplussed, continued, “Our resources aren’t unlimited.”
“Your resources aren’t,” Nanée agreed. Miriam had told her he’d already spent the $3,000 he brought and, despite generous friends like Peggy Guggenheim and the New Yorker’s Janet Flanner, was strapped for cash. “And yet you pay Marseille’s gangsters a percentage of your dollars just to convert them to francs, when the mafia have as much to gain in converting francs to dollars. Me, I have an American passport—”
“As do I,” Fry said.