For the next week, I didn’t hear anything back on the police visit, nor did I expect to. Or from Liz or the Bauers about how I had made my way into their apartment.
Still, I did my best to steer clear of them. I’d done what I could about what I’d found. The rest … law enforcement and the government would have to take it from here. If they even heard about it. My day job was expanding. A Marymount colleague had a friend who needed some help in his appliance store down on Houston Street. And I found I actually liked the work. Assistant manager in the repairs department. It was becoming increasingly clear I was never going to get a job teaching anytime soon.
And something else happened that same week that changed my life.
I met someone.
Without even meaning to. Isn’t that the way it happens? I was heading back from the shop to the elevated trains on Third on my way back to Brooklyn. I was thinking maybe I’d take in a film tonight. On my own. Suspicion with Cary Grant was at the RKO on Grand Avenue. The weather was particularly chilly for November, and all of New York was bundled in winter coats.
I was walking, glancing at the headlines of the afternoon Herald Tribune.
Suddenly a gust of wind rose up, and in front of me, crossing Houston, a young woman cried out as papers she was carrying in sort of a bundle flew into the air. Six or seven of them, perhaps, scattering onto the street.
“Here, let me help,” I said, springing into action. I kneeled and, one by one, picked them up off the sidewalk. One literally right from under someone’s heel as they passed by. They were a little soiled now, whatever they were: typed, in some kind of order. But they all seemed salvageable.
“Oh, that one too!” The woman pointed to another blown like a leaf into the busy traffic on Houston.
I sprinted after it.
“Careful!” she called after me, hugging herself with worry. “You’ll be—”
I darted into the street, raised my hand to stop an oncoming truck, which put on the brakes and gave a honk at me. Quickly, I picked up the sheet. A car had run over it and turned it into a dirty mess.
“Here,” I said, hopping back onto the sidewalk, presenting them back to her. “I hope they’re okay.”
She was around thirty, and pretty, in a dark cloth coat, her curly brown hair tucked under a flat wool cap. Her eyes were olive, but bright, and sparkling, mostly with gratitude. “You could have injured yourself,” she said. “Thank you so much.” She placed all the pages back in a folder. I detected an accent. Dutch. French. In any case, not from around here.
“A little soiled.” I shrugged. “But a little grime from the streets will only give them character,” I said. “Whatever they are.”
“My dissertation,” she said. French it was, it seemed. “How do you say it, I think … my thesis…?” I now saw the papers were all written in French. “I am having it translated.”
“Your thesis? What’s it on?” I asked.
“What it is on…?” She seemed surprised at my question. Cars honked as they went by. “Why, Jung. And it’s my only copy. If it was gone…” She showed me a folder with many more pages in it and shook her head, as if to say, a real mess. “You see, I had the address I was going here.…” She adjusted her bundle and showed me a piece of paper clipped to the first page. 144 East 2nd St. “A tutor. He is helping me to get into a graduate program here. And…” She flung her hand in the air. “Then suddenly, le vent! Disaster!”
“Le grand vent,” I said. “Though Jung might say you were sabotaging your own efforts to gain admission,” I said, “by carrying your work that way.” I grinned sheepishly.
“Jung, maybe…” She laughed. “More likely Freud. Anyway, you have saved me from such a fate. These streets, they are all new to me.”
“You’re French?”
“Oui. From Honfleur. A small town in Normandy. Do you know?”
“I was in Rouen once. At the cathedral.”
“Yes, the Monets are in your museum here. I saw them. Yes, that is nearby. Anyway,” she glanced at her watch and her eyes went wide with alarm, “I must go. To my appointment. The time. I was late to start.…”
“Of course. It’s only around the corner anyway.” I pointed out the route for her. “This is Lafayette, and the next street over is Bowery. Then you make a right on Second Street.”
“This person is very important, I am told, so I must hurry. But maybe some other time…” She hesitated. “We…”
“We could meet,” I said, delighted, picking up on what I was hoping she was trying to say. Who wouldn’t be, gazing into those vibrant green eyes.
“Well, I suppose, yes. We could. I owe you a proper thanks for being so brave.”
“How long is your appointment?” I asked, suddenly having an idea.
“My appointment?” She hesitated. “Why, an hour. If I can even make it.” She smiled guiltily with another glance at her watch. “I’m so late.”
“Then go. But how about I wait for you afterward?”
“Wait…?”
“Why not? Look, I don’t mean to be too forward. But I’ve just finished work and I’ve got nothing planned. Say in that coffee shop over there.…” I pointed to one across the street where I’d had lunch a few times. “We could have a coffee.”
“Well, we could have a coffee, yes. Why not?” she agreed. “You have been the savior of my day. I’d be happy to have a café with you. In an hour…?”
“Great. I’ll be waiting then. Don’t you reconsider now. Dr. Jung would be angry.”
“No, I won’t.” She laughed. Then she glanced at her watch and her eyes went wide again. “But for now I must go! Goodbye.”
“Yes, go,” I said. “I’ll be there. In an hour.” She waved and rushed off into the crowd. “Hey, what’s your name?” I called after her.
She turned. “Pardon?”
“Your name!”
She had one hand grasping her bundle and the other holding on to her hat as the wind picked up. An image of her that I would always picture in my mind.
“Noelle.”
For the next hour I sat in the coffee shop, not wanting to miss her in case she came back early. It had been years since someone smiled at me that way, and it felt truly uplifting. Years. Since that altercation at the bar—no, going back to since Ben had died the year before—it seemed only tragedy had followed me. I thought of Liz. I’ve moved on, Charlie. She’d left no doubt of how she wanted to make our separation final. So, why not? I thought. Why not open myself to someone. I’d paid my penance. I was trying to do the right things in my life. I deserved a little happiness too.
Meanwhile I cautioned myself not to get ahead of myself. A cup of coffee was a long way from a real date.
First, let’s see if she even comes back, I told myself.
The hour passed. I glanced to the front door maybe a hundred times, and each time it flooded my heart with expectation. But still, no sign of her. I checked my watch over and over. At an hour and fifteen minutes, a little doubt began to set in. Maybe she’d reconsidered. Perhaps I’d been too forward. Meeting someone on the street that way, so happenstance, though I might have a feeling about it, the possibilities, who knew if she felt the same? Or if she was married? I never even looked for a ring. Or had a guy? I began to feel sure she wouldn’t show, thinking, how did I even deserve such good fortune? A girl as pretty as her. Still, fate had intervened in that moment.
After an hour and twenty minutes, I looked at my watch one last time in discouragement and decided maybe I should just go home. She wasn’t coming. I could still catch that show at the Orpheum.
Then the café door opened, and to my delight, in walked Noelle, still clutching her manuscript like a baby in her arms. My heart soared. She looked around awkwardly, those large emerald eyes searching the tables.
I stood up.
She smiled as she came upon me. “I am so sorry.” She hurried over, putting her bundle down. “He would not stop and I did not know how to leave. He kept asking if I would like coffee. I’m glad you’re still here.”
“I’m glad you came,” I said. “Here…” I helped her off with her coat. She had a pretty beige sweater underneath and a colorful scarf tied around her neck. A petite, appealing figure. “Please, sit down. I admit, I was starting to have my doubts.”
“Well, I couldn’t just let your mind go off in the wrong direction with all those thoughts of Jung and Freud, could I?” she said. She took a seat. “So, I am Noelle,” she announced formally, and put out her hand. “I think we said that.”
“And I’m Charlie,” I said, shaking it.
“Charlie, Charles…” She had a warm smile like Ingrid Bergman and I was immediately swept under it. “Very nice to meet you, Charlie.”
Over coffee she said how she was new to this country. She’d been here for just five months. A refugee, from France, through Lisbon. She lived in a women’s boardinghouse on Thirtieth Street. “I was very lucky to get a visa to be here,” she said. “The circumstances of my trip were not straightforward.”
I didn’t ask her to explain.
She said she’d been in graduate school in Paris before the war. In psychology.
She asked about me and I told her I was separated, and that I had a daughter. “She’s six. A real young lady,” I said, beaming. That I had been a university instructor myself, in European history, but the job came to an end. I declined to go into just how. The market for such positions was very tight now, I said. The economy had still not fully come back. “But I still read papers for my old department head at Columbia.”
“You read papers?”
“Exams. Dissertations,” I said in my best French accent. “Like yours.”
“You mean they are in French?” she said, wide-eyed, then broke into a smile. It was clear she was teasing me.
“No.” I smiled back. “Though sometimes they might sound that way. And mostly they manage to stay out of the street.”
She laughed.
“It is very hard to start over here in school,” she said, exhaling. “My records, they do not exist anymore. Due to the war. Do you think America will come in?”
“Into the war? Yes,” I said. “I do. In the end, it will be hard to stay out.”
“Good. I hope so,” she said, pinching her cheeks. “I have no love for the Bosch.”
The mention of the war seemed to make her downcast. “But let’s not talk about such topics. Please, tell me about your life here in New York. That would interest me very much.”
The next time I saw her, only a few days later, for dinner, she told me how she was alone here in the United States. That her parents were in a Nazi prison back in France. “Political prisoners,” she explained. “My father was the mayor of our town. He was very important there, how you say, a dignitary, but he would not welcome them.” That was over a year ago. She knew nothing of their fates. “There is no one who can tell me anything,” she said. “It is very hard.”
A brother, in the French army, had died in the German blitzkrieg, defending the Maginot Line.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Are you Jewish?”
“Jewish? No.” She shook her head. “Though sometimes I feel like one.”
“Why?”
“Because the Bosch,” she shrugged, “they’ve taken everything from me.”
Her eyes averted downward and I reached across the table and touched her hand. “I’m Jewish,” I said. “And I lost a brother too. In the Spanish Civil War.” I told her about Ben, and how I felt a bit responsible.
“Your brother fought in Spain?” she asked, surprised.
“For the Republicans, of course. He was really a fellow of principle. A doctor. I think you would have liked him.”
“There are heroes all over your family,” Noelle said brightly, I think referring to my dash into the street to rescue her papers. “To your brother, then.” She raised her glass.
“And to your parents,” I added. All I had was my cup of coffee. But it was enough. “I hope you find out they’re okay.”
“Thank you very much, Charles. I do too. Do you mind if I call you Charles?”
“No, Charles is fine. That’s what my mother calls me.”
“I see you don’t drink?” she asked with an air of curiosity. “We French, we wouldn’t know how to eat supper without a glass or two of wine.”
“I used to. Not so much now,” I said, hedging a full explanation. A topic for another time. “Maybe one day I’ll have a toast with you.”
“I will look forward to it.” She smiled.
“As will I.”
I hadn’t felt so at ease with another person since my early years with Liz. I’d almost forgotten what it was like to feel the basic joy of human connection. Of someone interested in me. Who treated me with kindness and warmth and not judgment for what I had done. I said, “Maybe I can speak to someone at the college and see if they can help you continue with your studies.”
“Is that possible? If you could, I would be in your debt forever,” Noelle said, her eyes bright and alive.
Brickman still had some clout at Fordham. “I’ll give it a try.”
“I am very glad to have met you, Charles Mossman,” she announced, and nodded.
“And I, you, Noelle.”
“So now, please tell me about your daughter.”
I had a photo of us in my wallet and I brought it out. “She’s great. She draws like a champ and loves to do puzzles.” How grown-up she had become. How she lived in a brownstone in Yorkville with my wife. My soon-to-be ex-wife. “In fact…”
It was clear from what she had told me that she had no love for Germans. They had imprisoned her parents and killed her only brother. I felt sure I could trust her with what was going on.
“In fact … I have a little situation,” I decided to share with her. “There’s this couple that lives next to door to them. They’re Swiss, or at least that’s what they claim to be.…”
“What do you mean they claim to be Swiss?”
“It wouldn’t surprise me,” I decided to spill the beans, “if they were straight from Berlin.”
“Berlin?”
“That’s right.” I laid out the story of the Bauers.
I didn’t see any reason to hold it back. I’d done all I could on the matter. It was out of my hands now. And it would be nice to hear someone else’s view on it, a European, even from strictly a moral perspective of what to do.
So I went through it. All of it.
“It’s hard to say.” Noelle listened to my story intently. “Swiss, German, even French, the borders are all not very far apart there.”
“All right, I admit that. But then why would they need a transmitter,” I asked, playing my trump card, “if they’re indeed Swiss?”
“A transmitter?” Noelle said, shocked. “You didn’t tell me that. You mean, to signal someone.”
“Why else, I figure.” I told her about what I’d found in the closet, deciding for now to leave out the details of exactly how I had come upon it, which didn’t sound so dashing in America or France. “Apparently, they’re not illegal, still … It’s not even a crime to be a Nazi sympathizer here in America. We’re not at war. I mean, look at Charles Lindbergh. To you French he’s a hero, but you know he visited the German High Command in 1938 and even received a medal from them. But for most people, getting back to the Bauers, the telephone seems to work just fine unless you have matters you want to keep secret.”
“What matters?” She leaned forward as if I was telling her a great spy story.
“Well, I don’t know for sure.” But I told her about watching them go into the Nazi meeting at the German beer hall, though I painted it as more coincidental, that I had simply come upon them on the street and saw them go in. “It doesn’t sound like people who share the same view of Germans that you do, does it? Masquerading as the kindest, sweetest couple in the world. My daughter can’t get enough of them. And it would hurt her terribly if they were proven to be something else. My wife tells me to just stay out of it. She’s got her head in the sand. But I’m certain … I’m certain I’m right about exactly what they are. It all adds up, doesn’t it?”
“It does. Yes. The way you tell it. In France this would not be allowed to go on without a discussion.”
“I even went to the police.”
“Le milicia. You did?”
“Turns out, there’s a hundred cases just like this they’re already following up on. They even showed me the file. Most of them are cranks, of course.”
“Je ne sais pas, cranks, Charles?” she asked, shrugging.
“Sorry. Meddlesome grandmother-types who hear noises next door. Or crazy people. They just don’t lead anywhere. I don’t know what to do now. I’m not crazy, am I?”
She shook her head. “No, I don’t think you are crazy, Charles. The Abwehr have their tentacles in many countries. I assure you. I have seen it firsthand.”
“My brother was killed in such a way. By one of his own staff, who was actually an enemy saboteur. Anyway, I can’t just go around making accusations not backed up by fact. I’m afraid I’ve got some things in my past.”
Noelle looked at me sympathetically. “We all have a past, Charles. In war, we all do.”
“These things are big, Noelle. I’m actually afraid to tell you.”
“But you can tell me,” she said, touching my hand.
“You’re sure? You won’t think less of me?”
“You have my word.”
So I did. I told her about what happened in the bar two years ago and my time in prison. Which was also why I no longer was teaching at the university, I had to admit. Or married. Or drank alcohol, I finally said.
“Oh, I see.”
I waited. I half expected her to get up and excuse herself and leave.
But she didn’t leave. She stayed. In fact, she reached out and took my hand in hers. Softly. And I felt real tenderness in it. How long it had been since someone actually touched me that way.
“I know this must be very painful for you, Charles.”
“There isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t see that kid. When I’m not haunted by his face, and wish there was a way I could make it up to him.”
I wrapped my thumb around her fingers.
“But there’s not. He’s dead. I tried contacting his parents several times, but they’re not interested. All I can do is live my life the right way now. And this is part of it. Doing what’s necessary. Though I have to be careful. I can’t make any untrue accusations. It will finish me. With Liz. And Emma.”
“Look, you offered to help me, Charles.” She took in a breath. “Maybe I can help you as well.”
“Help? How?”
“I may know someone too. Someone in this line of work you are looking for. In fact, he works for your own State Department.”
“The State Department?” My eyes widened with surprise.
“Yes. In Washington, D.C. He is a friend of mine.”
“How do you know this person?” I asked. Someone who had only been in the country six months, having this kind of contact?
Noelle’s eyes shifted downward. “The circumstances of how I got here were not straightforward either,” she said. “We all have things in our past. Getting to this country required some assistance. He helped me with my visa to remain here. He has many contacts. I am sure he would know precisely what to do with what you know. If you can trust telling him?”
“Let me think about it,” I said. A high-ranking contact at the State Department. I had better be one hundred percent right in whatever I accused the Bauers of.
“I promise, Charles, he is discreet as well as resourceful. You will see.”
I was dying to know what she was keeping to herself—what lay behind the veil of this beautiful woman. We all have things in our past. But she had fled from a country at war. A refugee. Things happen in war. And it wasn’t my business.
“I promise he will know what the right thing is to do. Will you talk with him?”
I looked at her. Her wide eyes locked on me. Emerald and liquid. Her innocent face said all it had to about earnestness and trust. The truth was, with my past, I didn’t have anyone else to go to.
“Why not?” I nodded. I’d wanted what I knew to reach the right people, and this beautiful, mysterious girl, in this country for only months, how fitting she would be the one to get me there. “How did I get so lucky as to bump into you?” I said, and smiled. “I guess we have kind of a pact then.” I put out my hand to shake.
“Yes, a pact.” Her smile was broad and beaming. I think she felt joy, real joy, that I would even trust her. “We can help each other, Mr. Charles Mossman.”
“To each other.” I lifted my water glass. We shook hands.