The Girl in the Blue Beret

2.



DAZED BY HIS BRIEF VISIT TO THE MUDDY FIELD IN BELGIUM, Marshall spent the last hours before his flight home walking around Paris. It was a mellow spring day.

He had always enjoyed this city. He bid for Paris flights several times each year, and when he became senior enough, he got them. Climb out of JFK in the evening, fly above the invisible Atlantic during the hours of darkness, and arrive in Paris under a bright sun.

He thought tenderly of Loretta, who had always refused to believe he was anything less than heroic. He wished she could have been with him on this trip.

He watched children on skates zooming alongside the Luxembourg Gardens, near the crew hotel. He thought about the boy in Belgium who had helped him, and he thought about the boy’s father—shot for convoying a gunner from the Dirty Lily.

On his layovers, Marshall had rarely gone to museums or tourist attractions, but he enjoyed the bustle and anonymity of a city that still had a feeling of intimacy—unlike New York. Or London. He liked being able to understand conversations he overheard. After the war, he had taken courses in French, and over the years he had become fluent enough to get along. He liked to read novels in French.

By the time he reached the Louvre, he realized that during his walk he hadn’t been seeing Paris as it was now, 1980. He had been resurrecting 1944. Ghostly images overlaid the scene before him. At the Tuileries, his gaze followed the magnificent view through the gardens and on up the Champs-Elysées to the Arc de Triomphe. Over this sight now he superimposed his memories of being there long ago, when there were hardly any vehicles. He saw images from newsreels and photographs: Hitler’s hordes marching in perfect lockstep; later, Churchill and de Gaulle triumphant.

To Marshall’s right, somewhere along the rue de Rivoli, was a Métro stop. He and a brash bombardier named Delancey had stumbled up from the Métro, scared, towering like Lombardy poplars among the crowd of much shorter Frenchmen. If they missed their contact, they would be stranded—lost amidst the Germans, circulating around them in their menacing gray-green uniforms.

She was there. He saw her first, sitting on a bench reading a timetable. There was a quietness to the crowd, as if people were on their best behavior. Marshall had doubted that a mere schoolgirl would be sent as their contact, but there she was, sitting with a book satchel and earnestly consulting a timetable.

The agent’s directions had been precise. Find the girl in the blue beret. She will have a timetable and a leather school bag.

Marshall remembered that moment vividly. She was waiting there, her blue beret standing out like a flower against the barren winter gardens of the Tuileries.

There was still a bench in that area. Not the same bench, he thought, but it was in approximately the same place.

But no, he was wrong. When he saw her on the bench, Delancey hadn’t been with him. He and Delancey had first seen her at the train station. Why did he meet her in the Tuileries? Then he remembered.

As he neared the place de la Concorde, he thought of the Concorde—the SST. He wished it would fly over, a happy coincidence, tying history in a knot. Moments of history entwined here—Marie-Antoinette lost her head; the Egyptian obelisk replaced the guillotine; Napoléon dreamed the triumphant arch. Marshall felt his own history emanate from him, as if he been holding it condensed in a small spot inside himself. Reviewing his past was new for Marshall, something that had started as he approached his sixtieth birthday—and retirement. Tomorrow was his final flight.





FOR YEARS, MARSHALL had dreaded retirement. Mandatory premature retreat, he called it, infuriated at the federal law. He hated being forced out. He was perfectly healthy, and he had stopped smoking ten years ago. Asking a pilot to stop flying was like asking a librarian to burn books. Or a pianist to close the lid forever. Or a farmer to buy a condo in the city. His mind entertained new metaphors every day.

Retirement would be like the enforced passivity he had endured during the war, after the crash landing. Then, he was a caged bird.

The airline didn’t want rickety, half-blind ancients at the controls. Screw the airline, he thought now. Roaming Paris, he composed the thousandth rebuttal he would never send in: Since being let go on account of advanced age and feebleness, I’ve been forced to adopt a new career. Henceforth, I shall guide hikers up Mont Blanc, and on my days off I’ll be going skydiving.

The pilots Marshall hobnobbed with might talk about investments, or summer homes, or time-share condos, but none of them really cared about anything except flying. One former B-24 pilot golfed, and an ex-fighter jock intended to sail his deep-draft sloop around the world someday, but Marshall thought their pastimes were half-hearted substitutes. He was interested in everything to do with aviation, and he was always reading, but he thought hobbies were silly. Collecting swizzle sticks or crafting model airplanes—he couldn’t imagine. Whenever he thought of what to do with his retirement, he drew a blank. Pushing the throttles forward, racing down the runway, feeling the wings gain lift, pulling the yoke back and aiming high into the sky—that’s what his pilot friends really wanted. That’s what he wanted.

Marshall wandered down a street of five-story apartment buildings. This was the lovely, proportionate architecture he remembered.

The people who had helped him in Paris during the war would be retired now, he thought. The French retired young. Robert? Rohbehr. Marshall didn’t recall the young man’s last name, but he would never forget him. Robert and his clandestine missions. He remembered Robert appearing in the small hours of the morning with an urgent message. He remembered Robert letting his rucksack fall to the floor, then reaching in like a magician to produce cigarettes or a few priceless eggs. Once, he pulled out an actual rabbit, skinned and purple. From inside the lining of his coat came thin papers with secret messages. Whatever happened to him after the war?