The Keeper of the Walls (62 page)

Nicky tried to itemize, in his head, all the things he had brought with him to Nice. Mechanically, he laid out his identification card, his French passport, and some extra photographs on the counter, but his heart was pounding erratically. “I don't think my mother gave it to me,” he said. “In fact . . . the only time I've ever needed it was to obtain this passport, in Paris. We thought it would be sufficient.”

The young woman's mouth became a thin line. “We can't proceed without the birth certificate,” she said brusquely. “Anyone can forge another person's identification card, and even his passport. We need the authorization of both the French and the German governments in order to issue someone a visa.”

All at once, as the bottom seemed to be falling out of the floor where he was standing, Nicky had a dizzying sensation of why Consul Asch was able to walk around fearlessly. The Americans were protected by an inviolable wall that separated them from the rest of the world. He understood then how it was that Wolf Steiner's ship of immigrants had been casually turned away. Perhaps they, too, had left their birth certificates behind. A quick anger sweeping through him, he left the building, his feet making quick, clattering sounds on the outer steps.

What to do? Because of the censored nature of communication between the two zones, he would not be able to ask his mother to send the document. Time was of the essence if he wanted to file his papers rapidly. He'd simply have to tempt fate and return to Paris—without the benefit of an
ausweis.
He'd come all this way for nothing!

There was no other choice. Quickly, without warning anyone at the pension, he packed a few things into a small bag, and went to the train station. He was able to purchase a ticket for Châteauroux, near the border to the Occupied Zone, and took his seat in a stuffy third-class compartment. Across from him, a rotund, middle-aged man sat picking his teeth. “Morning,” he told Nicky cheerfully. “My name's Bagnard—Jean-Marie to the ladies.”

Politely, Nicky nodded. They were the only ones in the compartment, and he felt vaguely ill at ease under the scrutiny of this coarse man, whom under normal circumstances he might never have encountered. Bagnard persisted. “What're you doing here, all alone? Where're you going?”

Briefly, Nicky looked up. “To Châteauroux,” he replied.

“Me, I'm on my way to Paris. I've been gone long enough.”

Nicky realized that he was being trapped into conversation. The man continued, winking: “I've been gone from my business too long. Boches or no Boches, a working man has his job to do and his earnings to collect.”

Inwardly sighing, Nicky closed his book and laid it on his lap. “You're not interested,” Bagnard inquired, “to find out what kind of work I'm in? But then, you're such a refined sort, you might just thumb your nose at me.”

“I hope I'll never do that to any man,” Nicky countered, blushing.

The man relaxed, lit a cigarette, and, sitting back on the hard wooden seat, shifted his weight and declared: “Well, then, that's a good sign! I take care of girls.”

Nicky blinked. “I'm sorry. I didn't catch that.”

“Perhaps you're too young and too clean to understand me. I work a stable of girls in Clichy. Or at least, I used to. Got caught by the war in my mother's house, on the coast. Only now, I'm getting hungry for the old life, for the hard sound of the coins against my hip pocket.”

Nicky felt at a loss for words. Not unkindly, Bagnard asked: “Ever done it with a girl? Listen, if you're in the mood, I'll give you my card. And if ever you're in Paris, come to see me. I'll let you have a turn on the house.”

All at once, Nicky burst into laughter. The tension that had been crippling his stomach since his visit to the United States Consulate gave way, and he found himself helplessly gasping for air. He'd left Paris with hardly a farewell to Trotti, the girl he'd cared for the most in his life, because too many essentials of survival had crowded his brain; he hadn't allowed himself to think of her too much in the three weeks since he'd arrived in Nice, in order not to be distracted from his course of action by heart-tugging reminders of their romance. And now, in the midst of a clandestine voyage home, he was being offered a prostitute by a fellow traveler to whom he'd lied about his destination. The irony of his last month was hitting him fully.

“Hey!” Bagnard was protesting. “My girls ain't nothing to make jokes about!”

For a reason he would never comprehend, Nicky turned to the small man and said, very gently: “I'm not laughing at you, Monsieur Bagnard. I'm laughing because I'm afraid, and can't hold it in any longer.”

The pimp stubbed his cigarette out and stared at the young man, a long and hard stare that took in his fine features, his dark eyes, his excellent posture. “Yes,” he murmured. “Of course you'd be scared. You're going to Paris, too, aren't you?”

Nicky nodded. “I don't have an
ausweis.
”

“I'm not going to ask you why you're going. But me too—I don't have one, either. So I'll tell you what: just before Châteauroux, when the train slows down, we're going to jump out and find our own way across the border. Then we'll just take the first train out of the station. The hitch will be to get around the frontier guards.”

Somehow, it seemed less formidable a plan because there were two of them now, and because the middle-aged pimp was savvy in the ways of the underworld. Nicky was glad that he hadn't shown his dismay, and that he'd blurted out his frightened confession. Bagnard was getting out a pack of cards, and saying: “Know how to play poker? It helps to pass the time away.”

A
s the train
wound slowly northward, the third-class compartment began to fill, and Bagnard and Nicky, concentrating on endless poker games, tried to keep themselves apart from the noise and conversations that sprouted up around them. Nicky found that his companion possessed a smart street sense that he himself, from lack of experience, had never developed; and, though his profession was still a mind-stopper to the sixteen-year-old boy, Nicky had to admit that he liked Bagnard. The older man, without an excess of verbiage, had somehow conveyed his own self-confidence to Nicky.

The train took three days before reaching the Department of Indre, of which the capital was Châteauroux, set inside a vast, well-tended forest. During stops for sandwiches and coffee, at various stations along the way, all of which looked the same to the young man, Bagnard extracted his family background from him. Nicky, reticent at first, had wanted to change the subject. But the little pimp had pressed. “Brasilov?
Brasilov?
That name's familiar. It sure doesn't sound French, though!”

Nicky had been forced to tell him it was a Russian name, and then the surmises had started all over again. White Russian, or Red? Nicky had plunged in, explaining that he was going to New York to join his father, but that his mother and sister were in Paris. He felt a huge wave of relief when the stationmaster had announced the need to climb back on board. “You sure don't like to talk about your people,” Bagnard had grumbled. “And mighty fine people they seem, from the little you've told me.”

Then, steepling his long, slender fingers, Nicky had replied: “You're a nice man, Jean-Marie. I don't know what your girls think of you, but I like you. So you see, clichés can be wrong. If not all men of your profession are thieves and abusers, then maybe you can understand that having a title of nobility doesn't always make a man noble.”

“You're speaking of your father?”

All at once deeply ashamed to have betrayed his parent, Nicky shrugged impatiently. “Let's just not discuss our family,” he told the other.

After that, they played silently, and over their
ersatz
coffee, spoke of Pétain, Laval, and the sights and sounds of Paris. Bagnard adored Jeanne Dalbret, and his eyes protruded when Nicky mentioned knowing her. To make up for his earlier aloofness, the young man meticulously described her house, its decoration, and the sinuous, exotic Dragi. He did not tell Bagnard of his family's connection to the
comédienne.

In the afternoon of the third day, the train passed into a thick, emerald-green forest, and Bagnard, drawing out his packet of Gauloises, held a cigarette out to his companion. “Well, Nicky boy,” he said, with his streetwise bravado: “Let's take a breather in the corridor for a few smokes.”

Too late, Nicolas realized that it was time to jump, and that his small bag was still on the ledge above his seat in the compartment. Bagnard was still offering him a cigarette. “One last drag?”

“I don't smoke, thanks.”

Bagnard shrugged. Nicky felt incredibly young, naïve, and unworldly, but he had never learned to dissimulate in order to give himself a veneer of sophistication.

“Now,” Bagnard was saying, tersely. “We're getting ready to pull into Châteauroux, and the train's going to slow down.”

Without a word, Nicky followed him. Bagnard opened the door connecting two cars, and they stood in the whipping wind, watching the wheels below them turning with deafening noise. It seemed to Nicky as if the train was slowing down, but imperceptibly, so that he thought he was imagining it. But the small pimp looked at him, nodded, and suddenly hurled himself, curling into a small ball, to the side of the embankment. Nicky stood staring down at the turning wheels, paralyzed.

Then, out of the nightmare, he heard the laughing voice of a woman. People were approaching in the corridor, perhaps seeking the dining car, and the imminence of their coming upon him now finally galvanized him into action. Drenched with perspiration, he jumped, remembering in the last instant to curl up like Bagnard so that he would hit the ground with his side. But the blow of the ground hitting up at him was blinding, and as he felt himself rolling down the small hill, his right shoulder and hip shot bolts of sheer agony through every layer of muscle and nerve.

At long last he stopped rolling, and sat up, dazed. Gingerly, he touched his right side, wincing. He was at the foot of some shrubbery, in what appeared to be the forest of Châteauroux. He was, mercifully, still alive. But where was Bagnard?

Nicky rose, unsteadily. He could walk, so nothing was broken. Or was it? Perhaps his damned shoulder. Rubbing its tenderness, he began to retrace his steps to where it seemed logical that the small pimp had jumped. But there was no sign of him. Discouraged, Nicky entered the forest, thinking to find a way to the border by himself . . .
some
way.

Half an hour later, he had to admit that he was hopelessly lost. Exhausted, he sat down on the cold, winter ground. Above him, white branches laden with snow moved in the wind, dispersing some of the white powder on his head. Suddenly, he heard a voice.

“You all right?” a stranger was asking.

Nicky looked up, and saw a tramp. He blinked, amazed. But truly, the variety of man staring back at him could best have been found lying on a bench along the banks of the Seine, or on the cobbled sidewalk under its ancient bridges, an empty bottle of wine dangling from his hand. He could hardly have ventured to guess at the tramp's age. Dressed like a scarecrow in dark pants and a tattered dark overcoat, his unshaved face and brilliant dark eyes reminded Nicky of a disheveled, modern-day Christ. “My God,” he said softly. “Where am I? And—who are you?”

“Arnaud. Arnaud de la Tour du Bellay. But that's a little beside the point, isn't it now? Etiquette is for better days. You're the pimp's friend?”

Still in shock, his shoulder hurting badly, Nicky nodded, scrambling to his feet. “I didn't think I'd ever find him again,” he said. “I jumped too late.”

“Well, we're going to cross together: you, me, the pimp, and Richard. Richard's an escaped soldier from the Vichy army. And Bagnard says you want to get to the other side as badly as we do.”

“How did you find him?” Nicky asked.

The tramp shrugged. “It was easy. We saw him trying to get across the border, over there, a quarter of a mile west of here, and we went to warn him about the soldier stationed under the tall birch tree. We've been waiting for the changing of the guard to slip ourselves between the wiring. We'll have a better chance at night.”

And so it was that when nighttime fell, Nicolas Brasilov crossed the border between the Free and the Occupied Zones with a pimp, a tramp from the Paris sewers, and a defecting soldier from the Vichy army. It turned out that Arnaud and Richard had been turned away by a border guard somewhere else in the area, and had decided that this particular stretch of land was the least well guarded, particularly during the change of shifts among the guards.

The next morning, the four boarded a train to Paris, and played four-handed poker for the rest of the journey. By nighttime, they'd reached the Gare de Lyons, and Nicky parted from his newfound friends with genuine warmth. Bagnard pressed a card on him, reminding him that if he wanted, there'd always be a girl on the house for him.

He took the métro, grateful for its logical, familiar route, letting his head rest on the back of his seat. His mother thought that he was safe in Nice, and would not be expecting him, particularly in this shape, his shoulder swollen and his hip bruised. A slight rustling noise near him roused him, and, before he could properly react, he saw, as the train eased to a stop, a thin man in a nondescript raincoat hurrying through the car and then out the door and onto the platform. The man was holding a worn black wallet. Then a surge of people boarding eclipsed him from Nicky's sight, and the next moment, the train began to move again.

His heart thundering, Nicky felt for the bulge in his trouser pocket, and realized that his fears were well founded. The thin man had, effortlessly, lifted his wallet while he'd been dozing. Nicky sat down again. After all that had happened, he almost didn't care anymore. New York loomed like a mirage in the far distance, unattainable and dim. Now all he wanted was to lie down in a real bed, and to eat something warm and thick.