China Miéville - The Last Days of New Paris

“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.”

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.