A Troubled Peace (11 page)

A
round two
A.M.
, Henry stumbled through the revolving door of the Hotel Scribe. He'd been lost for a good hour. The hotel was near the landmark Opera House, which was straight up the Avenue de l'Opéra from the Louvre. But the neighborhood was dark and confusing. For years the city had been operating in blackout mode against potential Allied or Nazi raids and electricity had yet to be really restored. The end of the war had brought a sudden, strange juxtaposition of lighting. The streets were illuminated by moonlight, candles from inside buildings, and ricochets of white beams from the newly lit floodlights on the Opera House about a half mile up the boulevard.

Once he found his way to the avenue, Henry felt like a moth drawn to a porch light. He'd never, ever, in his entire life seen anything as fancy as the enormous Opera House. The building had to be a couple of acres big. The walls
were covered with statues of dancers, musicians, cupids, and Grecian women, all surrounded with stone wreaths or framed in arches. As he walked along its edge to take a left onto the rue Scribe, he gaped at two huge, winged golden statues perched on the roof's corners that seemed big enough to carry the building off. He nearly ran into a street lamp, he was staring so.

He felt even more the country bumpkin inside the hotel. Although it smelled of tobacco and flat champagne, leftovers of the day's excitement, the lobby was intimidatingly elegant. Painted frescoes covered the walls; columns held up the vaulted ceiling, and from it swung cut-glass chandeliers the size of hay bales. He was almost relieved that no one was behind the wood-paneled desk. He sat down in a soft armchair in the corner, figuring he'd wait for a clerk to show up. He leaned his head up against the chair wing to keep watch. Within ten minutes he was asleep.

 

“Excusez-moi.”

Sunlight and a musical voice woke Henry.

A young woman was talking with a desk clerk.
“Pourrais-je laisser un message pour Monsieur Hemingway?”

The clerk told her there was no Hemingway staying at the hotel.

She frowned.
“Ernest Hemingway? Mais il m'a dit qu'il logeait ici.”

Ernest Hemingway? Staying here? Henry sat up. He knew that name from his crew navigator, Fred Bennett. Fred had made it through two years at Harvard before joining up. He was a literature major and was forever telling Henry about books he should read. A few nights before their plane was hit, Fred had had a few too many beers and ranted on and on about a Hemingway book called
For Whom the Bell Tolls
. Henry remembered the title because it sounded so ominous, almost as if Fred had had a premonition. Poor Fred. Henry flinched at the memory of his body in the nose of the plane. He would have been so excited to meet a real live author.

The desk clerk was trying to shoo off the girl. He clearly thought she was someone Hemingway would not want to be bothered by. She clutched a bundle of papers. She had met Hemingway at a bookstore. He had promised to look at her novel when she was done. Well, she said, she was done. And she wanted to find him. He had promised.

A tall, gaunt man entered the hotel as this was going on. He leaned up against the desk, waiting to collect his key and messages.

“Sortez.”
The clerk waved his hand at the girl in final dismissal. Monsieur Hemingway would not be interested in the likes of her, he said.

“Oh, I think he would be,” the gaunt man broke in. He had a thin, clipped moustache, and when he smiled it
stretched itself and wiggled. His voice was clipped, too, British. In perfect French he told the girl that he knew Hemingway. The writer was lodging at the Ritz. He leaned close to her to say in a stage whisper that it had a better bar. The girl was out the door in a flash.

The clerk thanked the man. The things he had to deal with, he complained—lovesick girls, pushy journalists, rude Americans sleeping in the lobby. He glanced down his nose at Henry. Embarrassed, Henry stood. He hadn't meant to fall asleep. He'd admit he was scroungy-looking, but that was because he'd only been able to take one real bath, at Madame's house, since landing in France. He brushed himself off to approach the desk.

“Je suis une chambre pour louer,”
Henry tried asking for a room.

The clerk sniffed and stared at him scornfully. Henry repeated himself. The clerk smirked.

With a sympathetic smile, the Brit put his hand on Henry's shoulder. “You are not a room for hire. What you wish to say, I assume, is that you have a room and you want your key. That is:
J'ai une chambre ici et je voudrais ma clé.”

Henry turned sunburn red and repeated the Brit's wording.

Only then did the clerk switch to English. “I have no rooms available.”

Henry started to step away, too embarrassed by his mis
takes and the clerk's hostility to argue.

“Tell him your name, lad. It might be under that.”

Henry did so. With irritated drama, the clerk searched through cards. He paused over one and glanced up at Henry and then at the paper again. “Pardon,
monsieur
. You should have said you were with the OSS. We have rooms for them on the third floor.” He reached for a key.

“I'm not OSS,” Henry said.

The clerk shoved the key at Henry and was done with him. He handed the Brit a few messages. “Dining room open?” the man asked. The clerk nodded and the man headed for the wide marble steps leading downstairs. “Better work on that French, my friend, if you're going to be intelligence,” he said as he disappeared.

“But I'm not OSS,” Henry muttered as he closed himself into the birdcage elevator and pushed the number three. After a few moments of waiting, he realized there was no electricity. The clerk sniggered as Henry headed for the staircase.

 

Up on the third floor, Henry stood listening to a dozen typewriters clacking and newsmen shouting questions to one another about de Gaulle; the size of the previous day's crowd; Eisenhower's whereabouts; how the Americans, Brits, and Soviets would divvy up Germany among themselves for occupation; and whether France would be given
a zone as well. Voices came in English and a hodgepodge of languages Henry was unsure of—Italian, Swedish, Spanish maybe. He passed a door with the sign
WIDEWING, USSTAF
and another with
GANGWAY
, 9
TH AIR FORCE PUBLIC RELATIONS
. The doors were open and inside lieutenants were busily typing.

Henry passed more rooms, marked with signs like
PRESS WIRELESS
, until he came to the end of the hall. His room was long, a narrow closet really, but it had a nice single bed with crisp white linen and a washstand with towels. Henry wanted a real bath. He made his way back to the Air Force office to ask where the showers were.

“Down the hall, Mac, around the corner.” A corporal pointed the way. “You're new, right?” He didn't really wait for an answer or introduction. “Better hoof it. The water's heated from seven to ten
A.M.
Most everyone's going to be heading that way soon after getting their stories filed.”

The water was lukewarm, but Henry was very grateful to be clean, his hair blond again instead of a strange color of greasy. Shaved and dry, he figured he'd treat himself to something decent to eat and headed downstairs.

 

In the dining room, most of the men there had their heads on the tables, trying to recover from the night's celebrations. Only the Brit who'd helped Henry seemed wide awake. He'd finished eating and was pouring loose tobacco
into paper to roll his own cigarette. He wore a blue flannel shirt and his leather jacket hung on the back of his chair—unusual workingman clothes in the collection of officer uniforms, tweed jackets, and silk ties around him.

Henry decided to thank him for the help with the desk clerk and his clumsy French. “Thanks for bailing me out, mister. I never seem to get my French quite right. Nearly got killed last year because of it.” He put out his hand, “My name's Henry Forester.”

The man licked the edge of his cigarette paper, rolled it tight, and stuck it into his mouth before taking Henry's hand. “Orwell, George. Have a seat.”

“Oh no, sir, I don't want to interrupt.”

Orwell extended his arms. “What's to interrupt? I'm the only sober man here and that's only barely.”

Henry gratefully sat down and was amazed when the waiter offered him poached eggs and white toast with jam. He looked up at Orwell in surprise before digging into his food with a vengeance.

“Enjoy. Only in the Scribe will you find such fare. The Americans ship it in. Sometimes there is a line of Parisians out back hoping for scraps, like something from the eighteenth century. Been a while since you've eaten?”

Self-consciously wiping his mouth with a big white napkin, Henry nodded.

“No offense, my boy, but you really don't fit the OSS.
You are going to stand out like a sore thumb. There are a number of British and American intelligence officers in this hotel. You're nothing like them. Maybe you're clerical support?” he asked hopefully.

“I'm
not
OSS, sir. I'm not anything at all.”

“What are you doing here then?”

Henry hesitated.

“It's all right,” Orwell said. “We can make it off the record. I'm in need of a good story right now. And I can tell you have one.”

Henry assessed his face. There were dark circles under the man's deep-set eyes. His skin was stretched taut and pale over high cheekbones. He was probably around forty and looked sickly, sad. Something about his melancholy told Henry that he would understand.

So he told him. Told him about being shot down, being saved, and his search for Pierre. The man nodded and listened, pulling long inhalations of his cigarette. He was so attentive, Henry even admitted to his nightmares, and his hopes that Patsy would think he was ready to restart his life when he came home.

He finished by telling Orwell that he had wheedled himself out of arrest. The only part Henry omitted was exactly how he did that. He left out the Nazi nested in with the Americans. Instinctively Henry knew that keeping that information to himself was the only reason he was still in
France. Divulge it and he broke the unspoken pact with Thurman. And somehow, Henry sensed, Thurman would hear of it if he did. He was getting the distinct feeling of being shadowed by the man.

When he was done, he felt emptied.

Orwell coughed, a hacking rattle, and then tipped onto the back two legs of his chair, putting his hands behind his head. “When was the last time you flew over Germany?”

“March last year.”

“Then you haven't seen the absolute devastation dropped out of the sky by your bombers. I've just come back from Nuremberg and Stuttgart, covering Allied movements for the
Observer
. German cities are ruins. Every bridge, every train, every viaduct in the three hundred miles between the Marne and Rhine rivers was blown up. Europe will suffer a long poverty before we can build things back to the standard of living of the Depression, let alone anything better.”

He rocked forward and leaned toward Henry. “If you find this boy, and his mother is dead as you fear, you should take him home to America. He'll end up in an orphanage here. He'll be marginalized, a third-class citizen.”

Take Pierre home? Henry hadn't thought of that before. “Why do you think he'd be…did you say ‘marginalized,' sir?”

“I fear France will not break apart its class structure
any time soon, no matter what its socialist intellectuals and Resistance fighters say. De Gaulle's nationalism feels very old school, very
bourgeois
, the French would call it. I suspect, sadly, that the emphasis will be on getting France back to the way it was—the cabarets, the fashion makers, the superb wine—not making life better for orphans or ordinary people. But I hope I am wrong.”

He thought a moment and added, “Be careful around the Scribe, Henry. The OSS seems interested in you. You must know something or they think you'll lead them to people they want to watch. When the government wants something, it has a way of dogging you. Before you know it, someone may convince you to do something without your even realizing you're doing it.”

Orwell reached around to pull his coat from the back of his chair. As he did, Henry caught a glimpse of a pistol stuffed inside the breast pocket.

“Whoa,” Henry murmured, and pushed back from the table.

For a moment Orwell looked puzzled. “Ah, yes. I carry this for protection. Ever since I wrote about the betrayal of the workers' revolution in Spain by the Communist party and the Soviet secret police, I have been afraid of a Stalin-ordered hit. The Soviets are feeling very bold right now. All sorts of retributions are happening in dark streets. And I'm about to publish something that Stalin is sure to hate.”

He stood up and shook Henry's hand good-bye. “I'm leaving for Austria. Remember what I've told you about the OSS. I know. I did a stint with the BBC in its India section, wanting to help the war effort. But I was sickened by writing propaganda. It's twisting reality, presenting things to promote the government's agenda, manipulating words to indoctrinate—to make us sheep.”

Orwell contemplated Henry for a moment. “Just like farm animals,” he muttered more to himself than to Henry. Henry tried not to squirm under the gaze.

“You strike me as being an idealist, like me,” Orwell continued. “Face it—your time of influence here is over, lad. That's true of all good soldiers. The aftermath of war is a messy, brutal elbowing among political ideologies, as different groups that survived the war battle each other for power. They will smile at one another's faces while plotting coups and spying on each other.”

“Sir? What are you talking about?” Henry asked. “Peace has been declared.”