The Girl in the Blue Beret

19.



A SMARTLY DRESSED WOMAN SAT AT THE SMALL ROUND TABLE next to his on the sidewalk at a corner brasserie on the rue d’Alésia, where he was waiting for Nicolas. Struggling with the diabolical crossword in Le Monde, he was aware of her sitting with her hands resting lightly on the table, a demitasse before her. She had shoulder-length blond hair. Her skirt was short, riding up her thighs. Her legs were crossed, and she was wearing stiletto heels with dark stockings. She was sitting there, doing nothing. She had been there perhaps twenty minutes. When he glanced her way, she looked away. He knew he was still attractive to women, at his age, even without his flight uniform. He wondered if she was waiting for him to speak to her. He heard her let out a sigh. She was waiting for someone who wasn’t coming, he thought. He was stuck on a seven-letter word for échelonner. The crossword was impossible. Abandoning it, he read news from the States. Mount Saint Helens was still belching, and the hostages languished in Iran. Marshall was still angry with President Carter for failing to rescue them. The woman next to him was attractive, and he thought perhaps she was an actress, studying for her role as a woman of the café scene. Or waiting to be discovered by a film director.

Nicolas appeared, having taken the train in from Chauny, and they did the two-cheek. All smiles, he brought greetings from the family and a gift of damson jam from Gisèle.

Marshall wanted another coffee, but the waiter, who had seen Nicolas arrive, began clearing another table.

“I’m too impatient,” Marshall said to Nicolas. “I’ll never learn your easygoing ways here.”

“You are so fast, Marshall. Quick to the draw!”

Marshall forced a smile. “Gary Cooper, that’s me. But you know, when I went back to the States in ’44, still gung-ho to fight the Nazis, I was sent to Texas to train bomber pilots. It was a letdown.”

The waiter interrupted, and Nicolas chatted with him about an impending football match. Marshall wished he had a gift for small talk. He saw the woman at the next table pay her bill and walk away, not even wobbling on her stilts.

“I made an interesting discovery, Marshall,” Nicolas said after they had ordered coffee. “There was a youth fascist group who wore the blue beret.”

“Are you serious? How could the schoolgirl who helped me escape have been a fascist? It doesn’t make sense.”

“I know.” Nicolas laughed. “Perhaps it is the French beret that is the problem—it is like a symbol, it can mean anything anyone wants it to mean.”

Marshall stared at a pigeon eyeing a chunk of baguette the woman in high heels had dropped on the cobblestones. The pigeon came strutting across a large manhole cover wrought in the pattern of a star.

“Nicolas, I’ve been thinking. I can’t really imagine what it would have been like if America had been occupied and stressed to the limit the way the French were. What would we have done?”

“You would have risen to the occasion, Marshall.”

“I don’t know.” The pigeon seemed to be looking at him. He said, “I can’t imagine my children doing what the young people here did.” He wondered about Loretta, what she would have done. “What about your daughters?”

“I would like to think that they would be strong.” Nicolas smiled. “We speak often of this question.”

A flock of nuns passed by, and the pigeon skittered away.

“Do you recall a Robert Lebeau?” Nicolas asked. “Robert Jules Lebeau?”

“No. I don’t recognize that name.”

“Lebeau may have been the one who was with you in Paris.”

“The guy I knew as Robert? I don’t think I ever knew his last name.”

“I have run across Lebeau’s name in association with the Vallons, and I believe it’s probable that he came to the apartment where you were sheltered. He worked for the Bourgogne line.”

“Do you know where he is now?”

“He owns an épicerie in Saint-Mandé. A small grocery. I have just been there, but he was in Provence, inspecting crops. I don’t know how long he stays, and his daughter at the shop would not say.”

“Why not?”

“I had the sense that she did not want to expose her father to a stranger. In any case, we must wait a few days for him to return.”

When the waiter brought a press-pot of coffee and a pitcher of hot milk, Nicolas offered more pleasantries. He was no doubt popular with his students, Marshall thought, for he had an easy, jocular manner. Marshall regarded the short-cropped dark hair and brown eyes of the slim Frenchman. He was wearing dark pants, a blue shirt, and thin leather shoes. His long, delicate feet matched his graceful hands.

“So who was this Robert Jules Lebeau?” Marshall asked when the waiter was finished. He hadn’t imagined Robert as a shopkeeper. He had thought Robert might be a diplomat. Or a journalist perhaps.

“He was a convoyeur who met aviateurs north of Paris,” Nicolas told him. “I’m guessing that he was the contact for the Vallon family and very possibly the youth you remember coming to them on his bicycle.”

Nicolas gave Marshall a brief history of the various escape networks for downed airmen. After the largest one, the Comète, was infiltrated by the Gestapo and nearly destroyed, the Bourgogne smuggled airmen from Paris to Spain.

“Did you ever hear of Dédée de Jongh?”

“I don’t think so.”

“She was a young Belgian woman très forte, very strong, very courageous. She began the Comète and escorted many aviateurs herself across the Pyrenees. She was just a girl. But never mind. You could not have known her.”

Nicolas sipped his bowl of coffee and winced at its heat. Marshall liked the idea of drinking coffee out of a bowl, but he had poured in too much milk, making the coffee too weak. A loud bus whooshed past, flooding them with fumes. Nicolas waited for the noise to subside, then reported some findings about the chief of the Bourgogne network—Georges Broussine, a well-known journalist.

“One of Papa’s old contacts remembered Broussine, and he knew that Lebeau had been to Chauny to meet flyers, and then Papa recognized the names. So I think it is likely that they are links between Chauny and the family you stayed with in Paris.”

“Your father said he didn’t know any names.”

Nicolas shrugged. “Papa knows more than he allows. Anyway, the Bourgogne chief still lives here, but he does not answer me. He may be out of the country. Perhaps in the meantime we will find Monsieur Lebeau and get our information.”

Bells in the nearby church were ringing the hour. Marshall had walked past that church, at the intersection of Maine and Leclerc, several times on his way to the Métro, but he had paid no attention to it.

He said to Nicolas, “That church has probably been standing there for time out of mind, tolling its bell. I never took time to notice things like that before. Not since I was in hiding during the war.”

Nicolas said, “Marshall, the churches did not ring their bells during the Occupation. You heard no church bells then.”





20.



MARSHALL WALKED AROUND THE CITY AIMLESSLY, HIS HEAD in a muddle. He was in a detective story, yet he wasn’t the detective. He was the reader, or an innocent bystander caught up in an intrigue. He was tempted to chase down Robert Jules Lebeau the épicier himself, but he recognized that Nicolas wanted to help, and Marshall didn’t want to deprive him of that satisfaction.

Nevertheless, a couple of days later, he found himself in the nearby suburb of Saint-Mandé on the épicier’s block, a short street of small shops off the avenue du Général de Gaulle. The fruits and vegetables were in bins outside the shop. It was a simple grocery store. At the small counter inside stood an attractive young woman in an Indian tunic and jeans, her limp hair tied in two loose hanks. He selected a plum and went inside to pay.

“Bonjour, madame,” he said.

“Bonjour, monsieur. C’est tout?”

“Oui.” She was occupied with tying some string on a package, and he waited to ask about Lebeau. He paid for the fruit, then hesitantly asked for water to wash the plum.

“It is clean!”

“Vraiment?”

“Vrai.” She was shooing him from her shop.

“O.K.,” he said, wondering which one of them had been rude. Maybe his French was at fault.

At the door, he turned. “Is your name Lebeau?” he asked.

“Non. He is not here.”

“Monsieur Lebeau owns this market?”

“Non. It is mine.”

“Where is Monsieur Lebeau?”

She shrugged and began furiously punching some numbers on her small calculator, dismissing him.

“I believe I knew him during the war,” he said. “I’d like very much to find him again.”

“I know nothing of him and the war.”

“Do you know a family named Vallon?”

“No.”

Anger erupted in him, and he turned away quickly. “Au revoir, madame,” he said, his back to her. He thought she grunted a perfunctory au revoir.

She seemed young, but Marshall couldn’t judge age anymore. He didn’t feel old himself. Physically, he felt no different from ten or twenty years ago. He frequently searched his face in the mirror for signs of age. He didn’t have wrinkles, just a few vague sags. He touched his face now. His skin was rough and his beard was scratchy. He needed a new razor.

He returned to the Métro, where several streets met and angled off in different directions. Still irritated, he paused near the stairway down to the trains and surveyed the busy intersection, with its bountiful trees and striped crosswalks. Nicolas had suggested that Saint-Mandé was where Marshall had hidden with the Vallons, but Marshall did not recognize this space. One building opposite the Métro was shaped like a crescent, and he thought he would have remembered that, but he didn’t.


AT AMERICAN EXPRESS he collected his mail—a letter from Mary, a newsletter from the airline, some financial statements, letters from his crewmates Tony Campanello and Bobby Redburn, and a letter from an address in White Plains, New York.

He decided to walk over to the Madeleine, a neoclassical church that Nicolas said had been a meeting place for aviators stashed in Paris. It was easy to find, Nicolas explained, and the men simply blended into the crowd on the steps in front. Marshall had not come here when he was hiding in Paris, but now he sat on a step and read his mail. The open sun warmed him, and the crowd disappeared from his consciousness. Mary’s gentle inquiries touched him. She didn’t mention her food poisoning.

Marshall was glad to hear from two of the three crewmates who had finished the war in a POW camp. Bobby Redburn, the ball-turret gunner, wrote from California:

You asked what I remembered about the crash. I remember scrambling up out of that bubble when Webb said bail out, but then Hootie stopped me from bailing out. And that was after Cochran had already flown out the door. Chick was always impulsive—he had a hair-trigger reflex. That’s a great gunner for you. But I grabbed the chute pack and was ready to dive. I guess I’m glad I didn’t. It tore me up what happened to Hootie—and he may have even saved my life.



Marshall found Redburn’s letter painful to read. The mission seemed to be there again—the plane descending, crew scrambling, the tumult that followed. He folded the letter and turned to Tony Campanello’s letter. Tony was the navigator.

I called your house and your boy told me to write you in Paris. He said you’d retired and become French. Couldn’t get enough of it, huh? When I got out of the stalag I never wanted to go to a foreign country again in my life. And I haven’t.



But I’m kind of misty-eyed about what you told me about going to Belgium. You know, I never thought back. I just hated those Krauts so much and wanted to get out of that hellhole camp I was in and get home. I thought I’d finally gotten that behind me. Truly, it made me feel proud to think of those people in Belgium remembering us, so many years later. A very nice family took me to the hospital. They knew the Germans would come and get me, but my leg was busted so bad they couldn’t have hidden me. I think Ford or Hadley might be able to help you out with your questions about the Underground.…



It would be mighty fine to see you again. I’ve done pretty good for myself, working at Boeing. Real good money, Marshall.



Marshall continued reading about Tony’s job in Seattle, his house on the beach, his children and grandchildren, the club he belonged to, all of it remote and almost meaningless to Marshall now. He felt like a rare bird. What did he think he was doing? He had always had a tendency to set out on his own, without advice or help. During the years of his career there had always been a family attached, like a flying buttress, a visible support. Now that he was truly on his own, being a loner had a different meaning. He wished his search for Robert and the Vallons could be simpler, that he could just turn a corner and meet Mme Vallon, holding out her arms to welcome him back to Paris.

The last letter was from Gordon Webb, Lawrence Webb’s son. Marshall had written to the pilot’s widow about his visit to the crash site, and she had passed the letter along to her son. Marshall had a fleeting memory of a rambunctious tyke with a grieving mother after the war when he and a couple of the crew went to Baltimore to pay a condolence visit. Now Gordon Webb wrote that he was flying for Pan Am, out of Kennedy, and that he often flew to Paris. He wanted to meet Marshall, to hear firsthand about the incident that took his father’s life. Marshall didn’t like the idea. He replaced the letter in its envelope and surveyed his mail.

It was too warm in the sun. He stood and made his way down the steps past a pair of picnickers and a woman with a baby stroller parked precariously on a step. The plum in his pocket had grown soft, and it was staining his jacket. He examined the plum, fingering the squishy, bruised spot. He crossed the street and dropped it into a waste bin.

Glancing up, he saw an L-1011 head into De Gaulle, its gear down. For the guys in the cockpit, the adrenaline was starting to pump. Get your heading right, sink rate right, speed right. Line her up, compensate for the wind, bring her in dead center, flare, kiss the tarmac, ease in the thrust reversers. God, he had loved it.