The Girl in the Blue Beret Read online

  “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.

  21.

  IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, WITH STREETLIGHTS AND NOISE streaming through the cracks of the shutters, Marshall tossed with his whirling thoughts. Words and images reverberated—Bourgogne, Lebeau, épicerie, rutabaga.

  Bright lights spilled through the cracks of the dilapidated shutters. He needed curtains. He remembered putting up curtain rods for Loretta, screwing metal pieces to the window facings and hooking together the metal tabs of an infernal system of brackets and flat, corrugated rods. He didn’t want to do that again. He could call Mary for advice. But he didn’t want to think about curtains. Or Loretta.

  Next morning, he decided to go to the Gare du Nord and try to visualize it in the gray tones of 1944. The station was newer, busier now—no German officers in their olive-drab greatcoats, ballooned trousers, and menacing jackboots. He did not know what track he had arrived on, but as he roamed across the wide expanse of the station, heading toward the trains, he remembered more clearly his first sight of Annette when he arrived from Chauny. She was studying a timetable. On the train he had seen a workman wearing a blue beret, and he was concerned that there might be more than one female in a blue beret and he would follow the wrong one. But she was clearly the girl in the blue beret. Her white socks were slouchy, her shoe soles worn thin, her hair tousled. She wore a wool coat, buttoned up tight, and carried a book satchel. She glanced in his direction but did not acknowledge him or the other airman—Delancey, the navigator from Nebraska. At the end of the platform, she turned and crossed the large atrium of the station, then skipped down some stairs. Marshall and Delancey followed as she led them up and down other stairways and out into the street, then finally down into the bowels of the Métro.

  She had zigzagged like a rabbit, Marshall thought now as he tried to re-create that journey.

  After stopping for a pack of mints at a kiosk on the main level, he made his way back into the Métro. At a main juncture for train #4, a jazz ensemble with horns, a saxophone, and drums was playing a song he thought he recognized. But there was no reason he should know a popular song, unless it was some unlistenable noise he had been forced to hear from his children. Thinking about his children’s alien, alienating music saddened him. He stood listening to the musicians, young people from a music school identified on their placard. His habit had always been to walk unresponsively past sidewalk acts and beggars. Now he wavered. He made a resolution. If he listened for more than a minute, then he owed them something. He scattered his change onto the square of dark velvet in front of the musicians. A twenty-franc piece jumped the edge, and he stooped to retrieve it. The trumpet started then, blasting Marshall’s ears. He recognized the song now—“Night and Day,” from the forties. Then, as the trumpet soared, it occurred to him that when he arrived here at the Gare du Nord—scared, wearing a Frenchman’s ill-fitting work outfit—his first sight of Annette had formed his chief impression of her, the one that stayed with him. It was her confidence, the way she strode across the crowded station, gliding past German soldiers. It was her carriage, the way she sported her beret as if it were high fashion, not a mundane piece of a school uniform. It was her liveliness, her self-assurance. And yet she was so young. He had immediately felt that he should protect her, not vice versa.

  From the Gare du Nord, he took the Métro, changing at Châtelet for the #1 train. He wasn’t certain, but he thought the stop he wanted was the Palais Royal-Louvre. After emerging at the large square, he made his way to the colonnaded shops along the rue de Rivoli.

  There had been a photomaton among those shops. One day Annette had guided him there. It was a cubbyhole on a balcony within a department store. He remembered Annette speaking to the woman there. He had practiced his mug shot, in his French dress clothes, and learned “regardez-moi.” The woman placed him against a white wall and aimed the camera at him. “Regardez-moi,” she said. Then, nervously, she packaged his photos in a cellophane sleeve and added a receipt, handwritten elaborately, with several notations. Marshall was eager to leave, but Annette was in no rush. Self-possessed, she exchanged a burble of French jabber with the clerk. Marshall admired Annette’s nonchalance. Finally, with a cheery “Merci, au revoir,” she left the shop ahead of him. He was to walk along the Colonnade, then cross the street and find the bench where she would be waiting in the Tuileries.

  Outside, he remembered now, the sun was shining so brightly that the sandy surface of the winter garden, with its bare shrubs and twisted tree limbs, hurt his eyes. He had worn a suit of M. Vallon’s for the occasion. Even though it was tight, he had felt comfortable in the suit jacket, knowing the Germans would not expect an American to wear a French suit coat and tie. He had combed his hair at the photomaton. His photo was rakish, he decided later.

  As he approached the bench, she stood and made her way, sans souci, toward the Métro.

  At the flat later that day, Annette and her mother worked with the photos, creating a fake ID card for Marshall. Their equipment was kept in a carpetbag, which they were prepared to toss out the rear window in an emergency. The bag contained numerous stamps and specially printed forms to produce work-identity cards. They changed Marshall’s age so that he would be too old for the obligatory work service—the labor camps in Germany.

  “It’s hard to think of so many new names,” Annette said with a sigh, as she pored over the tele
phone directory. “How about François Baudouin? No, there is a François Baudouin. There’s no Julien Baudouin, though.”

  “It will be good for a stonemason,” said her mother. “You are a stonemason!”

  “HOW DID IT GO at the photomaton?” asked M. Vallon when he returned that day.

  “It went well,” Annette said quickly before Marshall could speak. “The photo is handsome. He is a true Frenchman!”

  M. Vallon was a fastidious man, well dressed, calm. Marshall had noticed how he brushed his suit every morning before leaving for work, and he carried an umbrella on rain-threatening days.

  M. Vallon said, “I was on the rue de Rivoli this morning, before you were there. It was just before noon. There was an unusual quietness, but then in the distance I could hear the German soldiers begin their march. Their marching and their music drifted all the way down the Champs-Elysées.” M. Vallon marched across the room, imitating the Nazi goose steps. “If only they knew how ridiculous they appear to others, they would retreat in humiliation.”

  Mme Vallon said gently, “But my dear, if they see you making fun, they will not be amused.”

  “One must make fun nevertheless,” said Annette. “Play the innocent! Confuse them with a perfect stream of beautiful French words. ‘Monsieur, you are in France. In France, one speaks French!’ ”

  Annette’s mother worked on Marshall’s work-permit card after dinner. Marshall practiced writing his new name, Julien Baudouin, on a sheet of paper before signing the card. He was Julien Baudouin, a stonemason, a tailleur de pierre, born in 1917 in Blois, residing in Montreuil.

  That night they heard a commotion in the streets again—a heavy, distant sound, then a siren.

  Mme Vallon, regal in her robe, stood with her family in the center of the living room floor. Marshall watched from his doorway. “We have to do something more,” she said. “They only strengthen our resolve.”