Quartet for the End of Time (49 page)

It was unbelievable, wrote Emmett in that (what would be his last) letter, that there should be, especially here, where even the war itself was the purest of fictions, a faith in anything being “natural” at all. How could they not also see how everything was, instead, contrived ahead of time—prearranged? Just as (he had once read) in ancient Mesopotamia whole battles had once been orchestrated in order to entertain the rich. They'd appeared to the guests as genuine contests of strength and chance, but in the ring every move was accounted for, and all the players knew from the beginning how it would end: the losing team ceremonially beheaded in front of the admiring crowd. Think of it! Emmett had written. Playing a perfectly choreographed game as if there were another outcome at the end than having your head cleanly removed by the opposing team, but knowing there was not!

You needn't—he continued wryly—stretch your imagination very far.

It was the resignation inherent in this last line that inspired in Alden the slightest tremor of instinctive fear, or knowledge—whatever it was—that Emmett's death had not been so purely accidental as his mother later claimed. He was prepared, however—so confused by the line that separated what one intended and what one did not had he become by that time—to understand this last comment, with which
Emmett concluded his letter, as the most banal and everyday of prophecies. The sort we make, or could make, at any moment: there not being, ultimately, very many outcomes to this life, or too many variations, when you think about it, of when or how it will end.

W
HILE
A
LDEN WAS LOSING
himself in these reflections that evening— just after Emmett's death, while they were all gathered, as usual, at Dick's place, and Dick had said what he said about everything making sense after all—Jack had launched into a discussion of neutrality, and somewhere along the way the conversation had taken a turn. Later, he was told that it had to do, in particular, with the Stavisky affair, which the poet Maurice Bonheur had brought up by way of something Dick had said—before sitting back again, amused as ever, to watch both Dick and Jack (now anything but neutral) circle each other, while he exclaimed out loud, Oh-ho-ho! So—
Américain
! But even had he known this, by the time Alden's attention had been recalled, he had no way of entering into the conversation—or of understanding why Dick especially was suddenly beside himself with fury.

Then Carol came in, still rubbing her neck, and holding on to a plate of American crackers; just as she did so, and before any of them—perhaps even Dick himself—knew it was coming, he had pounced on Jack with such force that, even with how much bigger he was, Jack was immediately knocked toward Paige on the couch, who—with her quick reflexes, which had only been quickened over the course of her close association with Jack—had already sprung effortlessly out of the way.

There they were, then: Dick and Jack scuffling on the floor, Alden to one side, Paige to the other, Maurice Bonheur perched on an ottoman, looking on with delight. And Carol. Still hovering with the crackers at the door and rubbing her neck. The struggle went on for some time without either Dick or Jack doing any damage to the other, or sustaining any, but then finally Dick broke free of the hold Jack had on him and succeeded in making genuine contact—planting a powerful back-fist directly under Jack's right eye. Jack roared. Then came another loud crash. The dinner plate filled with American crackers had hit Dick
squarely in the middle of the back, so that in another moment the crackers, the plate, and Dick himself went flying. Then all came to rest: the crackers and the plate smashing into pieces upon contact with the floor.

Dick stood up, off balance. He touched his hand to his back, and started to say something, but no one paid him any attention. Even Carol shifted her gaze—bored—to where Jack was rolling on the floor, holding his eye.

—

S
ERGE
A
LEXANDRE
S
TAVISKY
,
FOR THOSE WHO NO LONGER RECALL
the affair, had been found dead in Chamonix on the eighth of January, 1934—a gun wound in his side. Among other questions that persisted even many years later, there was the question (memorably touched upon that night by the poet Maurice Bonheur) of whether, as the official reports of the crime would have it, he had inflicted this wound on himself, or if he had died at the hands of the police—who by that time had been after Stavisky (or, as he was better known, “Le Beau Sacha”) for many years. It was more popular to assume (because it was also much more likely) that the police had killed him—but fourteen of twenty-two newspapers that reported the incident went with the official report: the death was ruled a suicide. Even with the forensic evidence, which described a distance the bullet would have had to travel far greater than the length of one man's arm. The only concessions that were made to the discrepancy within official reports were sardonic allusions to what became known as Le Beau Sacha's “long arm.”

For many years before the incident at Chamonix, Serge Stavisky kept busy selling inflated, worthless bonds, which—for some reason, never fully explained—even after the first whiffs of scandal, people continued to buy. Among his most famous exploits was a pawnshop run on the surety of an emerald necklace purported to have belonged to the late Empress of Germany—a necklace which turned out to have been made out of glass. But how Stavisky managed to operate his
business for so long without getting caught, or losing the greater portion of his devoted clientele, is really only a small mystery. He had a keen eye for business and in a short period of time had contacts and partnerships with some of the most influential people in all of France— those who, quite simply, could not afford to be embarrassed. If he was threatened, Stavisky simply bought off the would-be whistle-blower— or someone very close to him—with the threat of exposing their own involvement in a scheme they could only have known from the beginning was not entirely as it appeared. Stavisky's favorite method of settling accounts with the media, for instance (who sought at various times to endanger his integrity), was to buy large advertising blocks in the paper—in order to continue to promote, of course, his own false bonds. The real mystery of the Stavisky affair, then as now, was that it was considered a mystery at all—as if Le Beau Sacha were a sort of bogeyman, an aberration of a system that would otherwise have destroyed him.

This was, quite simply—as Dick had once, disastrously, attempted to argue with Jack and Maurice Bonheur—not the case.

I
N 1927, SEVEN WHOLE
years before Stavisky was finally brought to his grisly end, he was arrested. The trial, however, was “systematically” postponed. His bail was raised nineteen times; people with injurious stories to report no longer knew anything of the affair; a judge who claimed he had “secret documents” (which would, he promised, finally lay the whole thing to rest) was found dead, his head cleanly removed at the throat.

After that, there were no more documents, let alone secrets of any kind. The case was dismissed.

It wasn't, then, until 1934 that Stavisky, after fleeing to Chamonix, picked up a gun at the end of a very long arm and shot himself. There then proceeded a general overhaul of the government ministers, many of whom were far too close for comfort to the nasty little affair. The right wing accused the left of murdering Stavisky in order to protect their own. In an effort to reestablish their integrity, Police Chief Jean Chappe
was dismissed, further inciting the ire of the right, and directly causing the right-wing uprising of February 6, 1934—perhaps the most blatant abuse of police power the country had ever known.

All of this on the price of a glass necklace.

A
FTER THAT, NO ONE
seemed to know the man. Even, or especially, Stavisky's well-positioned friends (the friends he had so conscientiously made precisely because they were so dependable in their continued refusal to embarrass themselves). If presented with a photograph, they could not recognize him. There was no paper trail of anyone having any involvement with him at all. The fake bonds, the advertising contracts, the business luncheons—these were all now otherwise accounted for. So
that
was the great mystery, in the end: the way Le Beau Sacha had been absorbed into his own story. That he disappeared, having taken on—like the Empress's jewels—only the most imaginary value.

As in the de Maupassant story of the same theme: the one about the poor woman, who borrows a beautiful diamond necklace from a wealthy friend, which, over the course of the evening she wears it, is either stolen or lost. She is, of course, forced to replace it, and at such tremendous cost that she and her husband spend the rest of their days indebted to the hockshop broker. Perhaps you remember by now (or, if you do not, will have guessed) that the story ends only after our unfortunate heroine encounters the woman from whom she borrowed the necklace and discovers that (though that woman is now, unwittingly, the proprietor of a genuine diamond necklace) the original had been made out of glass.

We are always, perhaps—as the poet Maurice Bonheur would later reflect to Alden, at the height of the war—as in this story, fooled twice. But not as the story would have it: as though we existed outside the story's frame and were able, therefore, to observe ourselves—our fortunes and misfortunes, whatever they may be—from that fixed distance. No, on the contrary. We exist very much within the story's folds. We are (the poet said) both women at once; on the one hand, believing,
and paying, for what is in fact worth nothing at all, and on the other hand—unknowingly, unwittingly—proprietors of that which is worth inestimably more than we ever could have guessed.

—

T
HEN
—
AS IT ALWAYS HAPPENS
,
WITHOUT ANY SEEMING PROGRESSION
by which they might later have accounted for its passing—four years went by.

I
T WAS THE SUMMER
of 1940; the tenth of June of that year, to be exact. A day in which—watching from the window of Jack and Paige's second-story apartment as the clouds of an impending summer storm darkened the streets—Alden waited. For what, he could never later be sure. Most Americans he knew had left the city some months before. He himself had received an urgent telegram from the Judge at the beginning of January, when things began to look increasingly grim, insisting that he immediately resign his post and return home.

Will make all arrangements
, the telegram had assured him.
Return on first available flight.

Alden had let the telegram sit unanswered on the window ledge of his seventh-floor flat; then—very carefully one morning—he tipped it over the side, watching as it skittered down the gleaming metal roof and was lost.

I
T WAS ANOTHER WEEK
before he sent a terse reply—stating simply that, as he could see no immediate reason for it, he had no intention of returning home.

Sutton had applauded the decision. “You must tell me absolutely everything,” she insisted, every time she wrote.

What he
didn't
tell her was how often, now that the war had actually arrived, he regretted his decision. How often he thought wistfully after the Judge's telegram—churned into mud by then, no doubt, in a neighboring courtyard somewhere.

F
OR WEEKS
, J
ACK HAD
been dead set on joining what was left of the French Army. They were still holding the line, just south of Chartres: Why didn't Alden come along?

Well, for one thing there was the notice from the embassy indicating that, if the Germans took Paris (as there was now every indication they would), both he
and
Jack would be expected to report to the office in Vichy—where U.S. Ambassador William C. Bullitt planned to immediately reconvene.

Then there was Paige's sister, who had been telephoning every day, urging all of them to join her in Châteaudun.

Jack had scoffed at that idea. Sit out the war! he'd said, shaking his head in amusement and disbelief. You wouldn't catch me dead! But he had not yet left to join the army, and Paige had not yet left to join her sister in Châteaudun. As usual, their conflicted impulses and desires held them in check. Even as the sirens screamed and the Stukas fell, and the people rushed, in every imaginable direction, into the street, they only continued to wait. Alden—having nothing to propel him, naturally, in one direction over any other—waited with them, feeling only (as he later recalled it) a sort of dull alarm, akin to boredom.

All day they remained, smoking cigarettes, sipping vermouth (everything else having long ago been emptied), and watching out the window as the street roiled below. It was stinking hot. Paige wore only a light chemise over a pair of slacks she had rolled to the knee and it was possible to see, beneath it, her very large brown nipples.

This is absolute madness, she said, for at least the fifteenth time that hour. If it wasn't for the two of you I would be well out of this.

Carol had already left, back to Ohio, by then. In response, Dick had barricaded himself (though not yet literally) inside.

Oh, it's my fault? roared Jack in reply. It's still a free country, he said—though (he checked his watch with a dramatic flick of his wrist) I wouldn't wait too much longer now—

From there the fight escalated, until Paige wound up poised above Jack, wielding the nearly empty bottle of vermouth. His hands grasped
around her thin wrists, Jack held her off easily, but still, it was Paige who seemed to maintain the upper hand, and in the end it was she who came out victorious. Alden did not recall later how the decision was made. The bottle was replaced on the kitchen table, a few scattered things were packed into bags; they were on their way.

J
ACK HAD HIS
A
RIÈS,
which he was very proud of, and they climbed in and revved the motor and began the slow push out of the city. They never got up any real speed, but they didn't stop, either—if they had, they would have become hopelessly bogged down and never would have got started again.