The Dress Thief (32 page)

*

Verrian let himself into Calford Press. Three tries at getting his key into the lock because he was rocking on his feet with blood loss. On the
first floor he used a second key to open Lord Calford’s private office. He filled a long glass from a soda siphon, his throat parched from Bonnet’s cognac.

Turning on the reading lamp, he collapsed into a leather chair and thought,
I hate that bastard because he’s right. If Alix is heartbroken, I’m hardly the man to mend her
. He took the same photograph he always kept in his wallet and said to
the girl in the Basque beret, ‘I failed you too, Maria-Pilar. My poor wife. I let you go into danger and couldn’t pull you out of it.’

*

He woke with a start to the sound of a telephone ringing. Once he’d worked out where he was, he followed the noise down to the reception desk, squinting at his watch as he went. It was six in the morning. What day was it … Monday? No, Tuesday. ‘Hello?
News Monitor
?’

A babble of Spanish made his heart leap and he said, unthinking, ‘Maria-Pilar?’

‘
Maria no soy. Escucheme—
’ A woman, speaking so fast he couldn’t make out a word.

‘Señora, whoa, please. Your name, slowly.’ She gave it and he repeated, ‘García …’ Señora García y Rojas was his friend Miguel’s wife. ‘Where are you calling from? Where is Miguel?’

‘No Miguel!’ she shouted. She was in France, she
said. In Marseille on the coast, penniless, alone but for her little son who cried from hunger. No one to turn to except Verrian. He must help her, if he had a heart, and if he did not she would throw herself and her son into the docks to drown.

*

Arriving at Le Bourget aerodrome in the sharp light of early morning, Verrian found his friend Ron Phipps drinking coffee and stuffing down a croque-monsieur
in the pilots’ mess. It was Phipps who’d rescued him at Albacete after his escape from the Madrid police. Phipps made a precarious living flying between London and the Spanish war zone, picking up rolls of film from journalists who had no way of developing their pictures themselves.

‘You want me to take you to Marseille?’ Phipps scratched his head once Verrian had explained his dilemma. ‘
Can
be done, but I won’t be taking off for several hours and I prefer to get over the bumps –’ his name for the Pyrenean mountains – ‘at night, while the buggers with anti-aircraft guns are asleep. Don’t want to run into any Luftwaffe either. We always take a line over Pamplona. We know the landmarks, d’you see?’

By ‘we’, Verrian presumed Phipps meant himself and his beloved six-seater Avro Anson,
currently waiting to be refuelled for the six-hundred-miles to Madrid. But, promised another refuel, his good nature firmly leaned on, Phipps finally agreed to land Verrian at Marseille and fly on over Andorra. They talked of Spanish adventures for a while, but with a long day and night in prospect, they stretched out on the mess chairs and slept.

*

They touched down at Marseille-Marignane at
sunset that same day, Tuesday, 4th May. Verrian gave Phipps most of the French
francs in his wallet on the understanding his friend would come back in two days to pick up four passengers.

‘Four?’

‘A woman, a boy, the woman’s husband – God willing – and myself. You can tip me out in Paris, then take the others to Croydon and put them in a cab to London.’ Where Jack could emerge from his ivory
tower and sort them out with visas. Now all he had to do was find a Spanish refugee and child in the chaos of the Marseille docks.

It took him six hours. From her doorway in a malodorous tenement, Celestia García y Rojas stared at Verrian before bursting into tears. Her cotton frock was a rag, a fitting companion to the draggled cardigan over her shoulders. Legs and feet were bare, her hair tied
in a lank ponytail. At first he thought he’d got the wrong woman. Was this really the sophisticate he’d met two or three times in Madrid back in the days when couples still entertained? He asked tentatively, ‘Where’s Miguel?’

‘Not here.’ She used her cardigan sleeve to stifle her sobs until a child’s wail of misery behind her claimed her attention.

Verrian followed her into a filthy room furnished
with a mattress and two crates. No food, so he went out again foraging and found a café willing to fill a box with brioche and bread and lend a jug of coffee. They ate in silence at first, then Celestia began to talk. She told him that after his punishment shooting, Miguel had been taken to a prison on the outskirts of Madrid. The authorities had allowed no contact. Then, a
couple of weeks later
he’d been as abruptly released. All three of them had been given safe-conduct passes into France and some money so they could take a South America-bound ship here at Marseille. Crossing into France was easier than getting through a war zone to one of Spain’s Atlantic ports, they’d been advised.

Thus far, Verrian thought, Jack had delivered.

Though Miguel was feverish from his wounds, he’d begun
the journey in good spirits. Then, fifty miles from the border, he refused to go further, saying he would not leave Spain as a coward. He would go to his mother’s native Basque country and fight there for the People’s Army – fight for an independent Pais Vasco. Celestia and the child should go to Marseille, he said, and use their tickets. He would join them later.

‘I knew we’d never see him again
if we went to South America,’ Celestia explained in her quick Castilian Spanish. So, agreeing to stay together, they’d found an abandoned truck which Celestia drove north on bomb-pitted roads, knowing every corner might conceal an ambush, every cloud a fighter plane. Miguel had lain in the back, dosed with aspirin, sweating and moaning. At the border with the Basque country, the truck’s engine
blew up. ‘We begged lifts in farmers’ trucks and in a few days arrived at the place where Miguel was born.’

Guernica.

By this time Miguel’s fever was raging and he was admitted into the town’s hospital. Celestia spent her last pesetas on a cheap hotel room. The next afternoon, the Condor Legion came.

They finished their breakfast. Celestia, who’d watched Verrian struggle with his injured hand,
helped him take off the stiff bandage. The little boy, Pepe, watched silently, flinching neither at the sight of the bloody dressing nor the jagged fissure beneath.

‘You’re injured in the same place as Miguel,’ Celestia told Verrian. ‘They shot off two fingers of his left hand. The hand that held the censor’s stamp. They said he approved journalists’ lies.’

‘I was there, Señora.’

She flung
a strand of hair off her face, then fetched a road-stained bag and extracted a handkerchief, which she tore into strips for fresh bandage. ‘This is a sign, I think. You, same place, same hand.’

‘Except I’m right-handed.’

She brushed this aside and moved on, to another thought – ‘The girls downstairs gave me food and this.’ She tugged at the limp cardigan. ‘Strange, I need to come to a slum to
find kindness. When I ran to the hospital in Guernica to search for Miguel, the planes were low overhead. I had left Pepe alone in the hotel. One plane swooped so low over my head I could see the …’ She waved a hand, trying to summon the words.

‘The rivets? The panels?’

‘Guns, spitting white fire into the street. Everyone was dying – old ladies, a nun, even the dogs. They were shooting everything.
Infierno
.’ Hell. ‘The noise …’ She clapped her hands to her ears, either to show him or because she was reliving it. ‘I
couldn’t go forward, I couldn’t get back to Pepe. Everything was smoke and fire, people dying on the ground … in cellars, in the shelters. And the hospital. I howled for my husband because I knew he was dead. I turned my back to it and went to find my child.’

She sobbed for
several long minutes. Verrian stared at his hand, knowing how it felt to close your eyes and re-experience a cinematic show of your worst nightmares. He couldn’t enter hers, but his was a khaki-green vehicle engulfed in a ball of heat no human could penetrate. And from its heart, screaming.

He asked how she’d reached Marseille, a journey of more than three hundred miles. She’d got a lift to Pamplona
with a truck-load of freedom fighters, she said. Then somebody flagged down a French lorry heading for Marseille. She’d been determined to get on that boat for Venezuela. Only, presenting herself at the docks, she’d learned that the boat had sailed.

‘I prayed to Our Lady – please help. I met a woman downstairs who works in a big house some mornings. She goes at dawn to do the laundry and she
let me in when her mistress was still in bed. I was allowed one telephone call. I prayed as I dialled that you would still be in Paris, that you would come.’

He nodded. ‘Señora, do you have Miguel’s papers? His travel permits, his passport?’

Her eyes flashed as she understood. ‘You love Spain that much, Señor?’

‘I don’t think I do. Not now. But I loved …’ He cleared his throat. ‘There’s a song
we used to sing, “Lady of Spain”. I loved a lady of Spain.’

‘What was her name?’

‘Mrs Haviland, briefly.’

*

On the evening of 6
^th
May, he settled Celestia and Pepe in the Avro Anson’s cabin. Pepe wore a new corduroy suit and jersey. Verrian had bought Celestia a coat, hat, gloves and decent shoes. It wasn’t charity; it was polishing them up because he felt a refugee must be able to look a new
country squarely in the eye. She’d refused to go to London. ‘I speak English so badly, and England is heathen, no?’ She would stay in Paris. Paris had Catholic churches. Paris felt closer to Spain.

Ron Phipps, sheepskin jacket hanging loose, grinned under his flying helmet and said in a side whisper, ‘Nice-looking lass. Sad story?’

‘Awful. Phipps, stay with them at Le Bourget until they’re safely
in a taxi.’ He handed his friend a letter. It was for Laurentin, the hotel owner who’d seen Verrian through his fever, and it contained the last high-denomination note from Verrian’s wallet. The money would cover a couple of weeks’ stay for Celestia and Pepe. The letter asked Laurentin to apply to ‘Mme Theakston at the
News Monitor
’ for further funds to cover their accommodation until he returned.
If he returned. Verrian handed over a second letter. ‘Give this to Beryl Theakston
in person,’ he told Phipps. ‘She must take this one to Maison Javier, the fashion house. It’s for Alix Gower – tall, dark-haired, slim. Got it?’

Phipps squinted at the letters, then at Verrian. ‘You’re coming back to Paris with me, aren’t you?’

‘No.’

Then Phipps really looked at him, taking note of the trench
coat Verrian had slung on top of his suitcase. Then at Verrian’s growth of beard. ‘What’s occurring, old chap?’

‘I’m going back.’

‘To Paris? Absolutely.’

‘Into Spain.’

‘Hang on.’ Phipps glanced up at the Avro’s cabin, where a small face peered out. ‘You got chucked out, remember? Re-entry strictly denied. Blotted the old copybook.’

‘I’m not going back as a journalist. I’m joining the International
Brigades. I’m going to fight.’

Phipps’s good-natured face sagged. ‘Listen, the French won’t let you across. They’re sending all deluded do-gooders back at the border, won’t have their country used as a military recruiting office. Bloody hell, Verrian, get on board.’

‘I won’t get stopped.’ Verrian took a passport from his pocket, flipping it open at the bearer’s photograph. The face was part-obscured
by the official stamp of Pais Vasco, Basque region, and showed a man maybe five years older than Verrian. Sculpted cheeks and a beard gave the air of a scholar.

Phipps groaned in comprehension. ‘You’re going to fight as Miguel Rojas Ibarra? Why?’

‘Seems only fair.’ Sensing Phipps needed more, he added, ‘Someone I cared for in Spain burned. Nothing to be done, but I must pay the debt because
until I do I’m not free to offer myself to anyone else.’

‘I hope you have something worth surviving for.’

Verrian answered, ‘If I do, she’s in Paris.’

Jean-Yves gazed out at the countryside. They’d travelled almost an hour through beech forest speared by sunlight. It was hypnotic. The Panhard-Levassor’s suspension coasted over potholes and swallowed hairpin corners with ease. They’d just crossed the river that would accompany them all the way
to Kirchwiller.

He was going home. To prepare for Christine’s wedding, to ensure his castle was ready for a duc and duchesse. And to talk with his land manager about selling off a parcel of the land that had once been his family’s hunting estate.

Most difficult of all, he was going home to face a dying woman. His steward had written warning him that his mother’s former housekeeper might not
make it through the week. Jean-Yves knew that if he didn’t ask Célie Haupmann a certain question on this visit, it would be too late.

The road grew steeper and soon they were carving through orchards, sunshine flickering on slipper-satin bark. In a week
or so, these trees would be blizzards of crimson, the slopes crammed with workers and baskets. Fragrant cherries would dominate the markets all
June and July, the spare sent off to produce the regional speciality, Kirsch liquor. The air would taste bittersweet for the whole season.