Paul’s face had all the colors of a bad beating—blue, red, purple, wax-yellow. His right eye was swollen, his left eye covered in gauze. We used to call the men who had to be taken into the ambulance on stretchers “lying-down cases,” and Paul had the look of one.
During the riot they heard him speaking German, Paul explained, and took him for a Marxist.
“Why were you speaking German?” I asked.
“It’s embarrassing. I was in a panic. I was telling myself to stay calm.”
“It was good advice at least,” I said. He didn’t smile. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, don’t be. It worked quite well, actually. They came at me with truncheons, and soon I became very calm.”
I helped him light a cigarette. The hospital had discharged him after a day, but only because they didn’t have enough beds to go around after the riot and Bianchi had promised to look in on him at home. He lay propped up in bed in his hotel room, the ashtrays full, clothes and bandages draping the chairs, blood visible on the sheets.
“Are you sure you’re comfortable here?” I asked. “We could get you a room at a better place.”
He shook his head and winced.
“The doctor said I may lose the eye. I’d like to speak to a real doctor before it’s too late. I need to go back to Vienna as soon as I can travel. For now, I’d prefer not to move one centimeter.”
“I may have good news for you then,” I said.
I told him everything Bianchi had said about the new treatment. I told him that he might finally know the truth, that he might finally confront Fairbanks, or Green, or Hagen. Paul listened with what appeared to be indifference. Really, though, it was the face of a badly beaten man who was feeling sorry for me.
“Tom,” he said eventually. “Do you truly think Mrs. Hagen wants to know who he is? Surely you’ve realized that she doesn’t.”
I’m not certain I had realized that.
“Did you hear me?” he asked.
“Perhaps I don’t care what she wants.”
* * *
My agreement with Bianchi was simple enough that we never had to acknowledge it aloud. A lucky thing, as we both would have been too ashamed. In exchange for more aggressive treatment to Fairbanks—call it interrogation, if you want—I offered to help Bianchi and his brother set up a new life in another country.
Truthfully, I never dreamed Bianchi would accept my offer. I never thought he’d believe I could help him. But supply enough desperation, and anything can be believed. It was a lesson I should have learned well enough—after all, I was desperate too.
That evening, I had to plead on the good name and credit of La Voix to use the hotel phone. But the minute I heard the crackle of the line and Marcel’s voice on the other end I knew I shouldn’t have called.
“Tom,” he said, “you’re not hurt?”
He must have asked the question five times. And when I’d said no in enough ways to convince him, he finally said, “Thank god. It’s been eighteen hours. Dictate to me what you have about the Fascists. I’ll write it myself. The wires are down, you know, nobody here has any details. As long as you are all right this was extraordinary luck.”
I wasn’t expecting him to ask for details; I’d forgotten my job completely. And the disappointment in his voice at my vague account was evident, even though he was clearly at pains to hide it. I hung up without asking him about Bianchi.
There was only one other call to make. If it hadn’t been for the pictures beginning to form in my mind—the brother’s dead face under the iodine, the doctor in tears, the consequences of another lie—I wouldn’t have had the courage, if you can call it that.
* * *
He picked up on the third ring, perhaps half-expecting chamber music played from Paris. But it was my voice, and I could hear something in it not unlike vibrato. And I could hear the concern in his voice—but when Father Perrin talked to strangers there was always concern in his voice.
I knew just what to say, and much of it was even true. I told him about Bianchi and his brother, about the Fascists. All I left out was what any of it had to do with me. He did not ask a single question or utter a single pleasantry. But he also did not hesitate.
Did they need money? Did they have papers? I explained that they needed work.
“Do they speak French?”
“The doctor can read it.”
“He’ll have to do more than that. I’ll need to inquire, but I believe I can help him, hide him from patients until he becomes fluent. If he’s intelligent it shouldn’t take long.”
“After all, I managed.”
“Thank you.”
“I can’t imagine you’d call if there was anyone else who could help,” he said, which was certainly true.
Father Perrin died of a stroke during the Second World War. His bones were placed in the ossuary, just as Father Gaillard’s had been a decade before. That afternoon in Bologna was the last time we ever spoke, though I wrote him often in my first years in California. Over time, his replies grew warmer and longer. He may have even forgiven me. Certainly, he kept his word.
Bianchi and his brother left for France not long after I did, and Father Perrin eventually found a place for him with Dr. Fenayrou in Rodez. But for a time he and his brother lived in the Episcopal palace—perhaps even in my old room—where Bianchi studied French. It was hard not to smile at the thought of Bianchi and Father Perrin whiling away evenings in the office, playing cards, arguing politics, spitting out each other’s cherished local wines. Sometimes over the years I even imagined myself—why not admit it?—in their company.
* * *
It had been a long time—it felt like a long time, anyway—since I’d seen Douglas Fairbanks. Somehow, I no longer expected a mortal man. He’d become so many things at once—Drummond Green and Lee Hagen, ally and enemy, a man I pitied and resented. A man who seemed, as he gazed blankly out, blue circles under his eyes, both alive and dead.
And yet, looking at those heavy-lidded eyes, I could imagine that someone must have kissed them once as my mother had kissed mine. But perhaps Fairbanks hadn’t had my good fortune, even then.
He glanced up as we came in, but only the most optimistic reading would suggest he registered much. The single instruction Bianchi had given—especially to Sarah—was not to go to him. The effort was visible on her face.
A week had passed since the riot. Paul’s eye was still swollen and bandaged, but he walked and talked now without obvious pain. Sarah was dressed in a black blouse and skirt. All that was missing was the veil.
Bianchi waited until everyone was seated, dabbing at his forehead with a folded handkerchief. The room smelled of layers of Sarah’s perfume. The flowers had been replaced by neatly stacked Boston newspapers; on the windowsill sat an oval picture frame holding a girl of eleven or twelve.
Bianchi cleared his throat.
“I have decided to pursue a treatment for Mr. Fairbanks that may help us identify him,” he said. We already knew this, so perhaps he only needed to make it real to himself. “The treatment is used by many colleagues. It is very ethical. But it is unethical that you,” he nodded toward the three of us, “should be here. I want to say this to all four of you, in case there are objections.”
Bianchi blotted his forehead, smoothed the creases of his slacks, blotted.
“There is only a small risk that it will do Mr. Fairbanks permanent harm, but it will be uncomfortable for him. Are there objections?”
My objections, if I had any, were to the way Sarah sat, angled toward Fairbanks, to the way her jaw tremored as if in response to his. I objected to the fact that I no longer knew who I was trying to help or why.
“Aren’t you going to tell us what the treatment is?” Sarah asked.
“Yes. If you want, I will inject two ccs of trementina into the patient’s thigh. His body will respond as if he is ill. He’ll develop a fever, maybe for several days. It is possible that in such a condition he will be more receptive to our questions. Negativism has been known to break down under fever.”
“What is trementina?” Sarah asked.
Bianchi shrugged. “The English word, I don’t know.”
“Turpentine,” I said. “The English word is turpentine.”
“Yes, turpentine. Do you object? Does anyone? I include you in the conversation, Mr. Fairbanks.”
I did not object. Sarah did not object. Paul did not object.
Fairbanks did not object when Bianchi stuck him with the needle. He did not object when the abscess bubbled up on his pale leg, or when Bianchi lanced it with the same needle and rolled out a white bandage.
“How do you feel, Mr. Fairbanks?” Bianchi asked. Fairbanks did not answer.
“It will take time—hours, I think,” Bianchi said, addressing the rest of us, “before the fever develops.”
Sarah had said almost nothing since the turpentine, and Paul had said very little the entire afternoon. They both sat in their straight-backed chairs, looking, I have to say, as if they would rather have been almost anywhere else.
“I’d like to begin as soon as possible. Forty degrees may be high enough, I think. It could be in the middle of the night. Perhaps all of you would like to stay here to wait? I’ve cleared a room for you, Mrs. Hagen.”
“Actually, I’d rather not be alone,” Sarah said.
* * *
“The beds are soft,” Sarah said. “But Bianchi must know we won’t sleep.”
Outside the window there was the blue darkness of late summer. The heat of some animal lying in the weeds. The trickle of the fountain in the courtyard. A bright moon, the light crawling toward Sarah’s single bed on its hands and knees. There was nothing to do but wait. I felt surprisingly calm.
* * *
“Could you eat something, Mrs. Hagen?” Paul asked.
“Could you?”
Paul didn’t really look like he could eat. He’d said almost nothing for hours, no one had.
“I intend to try. I managed to go for a walk today and came upon a bakery, baking raisin bread. Amazing, isn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t say amazing, no.”
“The city almost burned down a few nights ago, and they are already back to baking bread, baking Austrian bread. I find that amazing.”
Paul slid the loaf from its paper.
“I haven’t eaten today, actually,” Sarah said. She accepted a piece of bread and I tried some too, which seemed to please Paul.
“When I was a boy,” he said, as we chewed, “if you went walking after mass on Sunday, the whole city smelled like raisin bread.”
“Don’t they bake it on Sundays anymore?” Sarah asked.
“Some do. But the smell is different.”
Silence again. With the window open you could just hear the last cars of the evening grinding along the boulevard. A ticking from Paul’s pocket watch proved that it had survived the beating.
“For us, it was bluefish in mayonnaise,” Sarah said after a long pause, “on Sundays.”
“What’s a bluefish?”
“They have the strength of ten fish, and taste like it. My father used to say that.”
“That’s the typical meal of Bostonians?”
“Just in my family. It was my mother’s favorite food. I suppose part of what I disliked was that she liked it so much. I wonder if I’m still so wicked.”
“I’m afraid that doesn’t pass for wickedness anymore,” Paul said.
* * *
Trolley wheels squealed in the hall. Sometime later the thumps of a shoeless runner. The taps of a nurse in pursuit. A metal tray or bowl falling to the floor. Insistent knocks on doors up and down the hall. The hours passed that way.
There was much I could and should have said to Sarah, but I didn’t imagine I’d have to. I know that was foolish, I knew it then. But I imagined only feverish Fairbanks saying his true name, any name but Lee Hagen. And afterward: the collecting of the Boston newspapers and the frame with her picture from his room. Or why collect the newspapers? He could keep them, whoever he was, if they brought him any comfort.
“I’ll confess something,” Paul said. “I had never heard of Douglas Fairbanks.”
“I wouldn’t call that a damning admission,” I said.
“No, but I was thinking the real Fairbanks might be interested in knowing about all of this. I was considering writing him a letter.”
“Do you realize how many letters that man receives?” Sarah asked.
Paul did not realize.
“I’m not sure how much you’d like his work,” I said.
“I’ve never understood why anyone likes him,” Sarah said.
“You don’t watch his films then either, Mrs. Hagen?” Paul asked.
“No, I’ve seen them all, I think,” she said. “But I go to the American movies, no matter what.”
In fact, she explained, she’d seen Douglas Fairbanks in The Mark of Zorro in Paris, just a few weeks before she came to Bologna. She and Maud had left, disgusted. She began to explain why, but I couldn’t follow. All I could think about was the fact that I’d also seen The Mark of Zorro in Paris at the theater in Place Clichy. So, she’d been in Paris and made no effort to see me. Sarah didn’t seem aware of her admission, and I felt only a little sting.
* * *
“Paul,” Sarah said, “the girl in Silesia you told us about? Now that I know what you’ve truly been obsessed with, I have to tell you I think you’ve chosen wrong. Was she real?”
He laughed. “Real? Yes, but exaggerated. I doubt she’d remember me.”
“It doesn’t seem like Drummond Green does either,” I said.
* * *
A man cried out from down the hall. He seemed to be in a great deal of pain, but it was impossible to know what kind. Somehow, I didn’t think the voice was Fairbanks’s, but it might have been.
* * *
“What will you do?” Paul asked. “What will you do if it’s not him?” It was nearly dawn. We’d turned the lights out sometime before, agreeing we should at least try to sleep. But no one tried. We just sat in the oily darkness. “I know I shouldn’t ask. It seems we have too much time for our own good, don’t we?”
She lay with her face turned to the wall, but she wasn’t even pretending to sleep.
“I don’t mind telling you,” Paul continued. “I intend to leave tomorrow no matter what. For Vienna. Can I say something else? I never should have told you about Drummond Green. I thought it might help. That was a mistake.”
Slowly, she sat up in bed.
“Are you saying there is no Drummond Green?”
“Of course not. He’s in the next room. But I should not have told you.”
“In that case, why would you leave?” Sarah asked.
“Everything is easier with two eyes, you know. I like my chances better in Vienna. And Bologna is not safe now, for you or Tom either.”
This was true. The communists had promised another general strike. Mussolini had promised that the Blackshirts would retaliate by storming the city, ten thousand strong this time. Some of the papers were already calling it civil war.
“You’re being disingenuous,” she said. “Isn’t it a little late for that?”
“All right, Mrs. Hagen,” Paul said. “Let me not be disingenuous. Once, I intended to kill Drummond Green, but I gave that up a long time ago, truly I did. It was easy to give that up, but I thought that if I ever actually found him I’d feel . . .” He didn’t finish. I heard the paper rustling in his hands. A car engine, the first in many hours, turned over somewhere outside the window. “I do not know. Perhaps it is just easier to accept that there is no meaning when one’s face and ribs hurt so much.”
“Perhaps I should try it,” Sarah said.
“I hope you don’t,” he said. “Anyway, that was disingenuous too. I have a better reason to leave. But that, I’d like to keep to myself.”
It was not until years later when Paul’s wife told me the story of their meeting that I finally realized what he’d meant.
“Tell me at least one thing,” he said. “Have you considered it? If it isn’t him. Do you know what you will do?”
“Yes, I know.”
There were footsteps in the corridor. The door opened, and light from the hall caught Sarah’s arm in a slash. A nurse’s solemn face filled the door.
“Mi scusi, occupata,” Sarah said. The words sounded strangely affectionate. There was just enough light to see the nurse frown and squint.
“I know that,” she said in English. “The doctor is waiting for you.”
* * *
It was just past four A.M.—earlier than I’d thought—when Fairbanks’s eyes met mine in the doorway. He lay on his side, breath whistling through his teeth. But the eyes were angry and alert, resulting in a face that looked suddenly intelligent, even clever. It’s tempting to say that it looked like there was a person inside him again, though perhaps it only seemed that way because he was so clearly suffering.
Bianchi, for his part, looked like a sleepy boy on his way to school. He’d tried to smooth his hair, but it stuck up in birdy spikes. Even so, he touched Fairbanks’s brow with impressive tenderness, asking, “Can you sit up?”
Fairbanks’s head lolled back, but then he did sit up, and then he did stand, and point to a chair—my chair, as it happened. He was much taller than I had expected. Bianchi nodded, and pulled another chair in from the hall, and Fairbanks fell into it, pressing his knees together, folding his hands in his lap.
Bianchi wet a pen on his tongue. He sipped coffee. I would have liked some, if only to distract myself from what I now realized would be awful, no matter the result.
“As I have many times before,” Bianchi said, “I would like to ask you questions, Mr. Fairbanks. But, this time, because I know you do not feel well, I will not use hypnosis. Naturally, I hope you will do your best to answer these questions. You understand?”
“Yes,” Fairbanks said. “No harm in that.” The stiff bark was mostly gone from his voice. He refolded his hands.
“I am glad you think so.” Bianchi looked back at us, offering one final opportunity to stop him. “What is your name?” he asked.
“I like Fairbanks,” the man said slowly. “Can you call me that?”
“If you want,” Bianchi said. “Do you recognize anyone here? From before you came to be in this hospital?”
Fairbanks glanced up, then shyly turned his eyes away.
“I don’t know. I may.”
“Who?”
“Well, it was a long time ago.” He didn’t look anyone in the eyes. In fact, he appeared to be speaking to his own naked right foot.
“What was your name then?”
He licked his lips several times, as if he might find the answer there. “I’d like a glass of water,” he said.
“Why don’t I get it?” I said.
“In my office,” Bianchi said. “There’s a pitcher.”
* * *
I filled then almost dropped the glass. Perhaps I was thinking of all of the times I’d stood behind Father Perrin with a pitcher just like this one for the families who had crossed the Meuse to speak with him. Perhaps I was thinking of all the other rivers: the Marne, the Somme, the Isonzo. And that even the afterlife was no escape: the Styx, the Lethe. Charon. Well, I think of these things now, but I doubt I did then.
I drank another glass of water, but my throat was still parched, my head light. My heart was beating fast. It was an odd and yet familiar feeling. I was not entirely certain I would survive the next several minutes.
“I don’t know,” Fairbanks was saying, when I returned to the room and handed him the glass. “Pine trees. Shoveling snow.”
He drank the water greedily. Paul whispered, “Nothing yet.”
Fairbanks already seemed less lucid than he had before. He was sweating, occasionally clawing at the collar of his shirt. His tongue continued to flicker across his lips.
“Would you rather talk about the war?” Bianchi asked, his voice still smooth as the sky.
“I wasn’t really in the war very much,” Fairbanks said.
“What do you recall about the war?”
“Lice.”
It continued like that, Bianchi calmly asking questions, Fairbanks answering in fragments.
Could he tell us if he’d gone to college? What his parents did for a living? Did he have siblings?
He could not tell us.
“Are you married?”
“I had a girl.”
“What was her name?”
“I’m not at all sure,” he said to his foot.
I watched Sarah’s face as he answered that question. I watched her face the entire time. I saw her beginning to doubt—I feel fairly sure of that even at such distance, even through clearer eyes. It wasn’t that he’d said anything that proved he was not Lee Hagen, but something in his manner of speaking, in the faint outlines of lost mannerisms, betrayed him—perhaps the way his tongue just kept flicking and flicking. I saw the desolation on her face, and, yes, I was happy to see it.
Bianchi asked about a trade, skills. Had he been to Paris? Yes, he had. Verdun? He wasn’t sure. Had he been in the mountains of Italy? He wasn’t sure about that either, but he thought, yes, perhaps.
“How are you feeling, Mr. Fairbanks?” Bianchi asked. “Should we test your temperature?”
“If you want,” Fairbanks said. But his voice was growing quieter, his gaze drawing back.
Even so, Bianchi smiled. “If you want, I will ask more questions. Describe what you remember of your home.”
“I’m afraid it burned down.”
“Your house?”
“The entire city. I was afraid it would burn. I checked the newspaper whenever I could.”
“What newspaper was that, Mr. Fairbanks?”
“The newspaper was run by cruel people. I remember playing the word search.”
“The word search?”
“You know the word search.” His voice surged. “You must.”
“You circle words hidden in a grid of letters, don’t you?” I said.
“I knew you’d know it,” Fairbanks said, nodding. “All the words they’d chosen were horrible. Mustard. Flame. Explosion. Lice. Froth. Buried. I began to scream. And my mother put a blanket around me.”
“Your mother?” Bianchi asked. “Where?”
“Not my actual mother.”
Soon after, Fairbanks began to tremble; Bianchi draped a blanket around his shoulders. “I hope you are feeling well enough to go on, Mr. Fairbanks.”
“I don’t. I don’t feel well.”
Bianchi drew in a breath and turned to us, his face apologetic. “You see that I’ve done all I can. Mrs. Hagen, would you like to ask him anything?”
Sarah seemed startled by the question. She must have thought nothing would be required of her. She began to say something, and then shook her head. Likely, it was too late, anyway. Fairbanks had curled the blanket tighter around his stooped shoulders. He shifted on the chair, trying to find a better position in which to shiver, receding into his fever.
“Will he be all right?” Paul asked.
“It looks like this when you poison a man,” Bianchi answered.
It looked awful. His mouth seemed too weak to work. His lips had gone white, which made the teeth appear all the more broken. Sarah would leave him now. Paul had already said as much. Whoever he was, he would wake from this fever completely alone. Even Bianchi would leave. I would leave too, but now that he no longer posed a threat it was impossible not to feel for him. I told him silently—that is, I told myself—that I’d find some way to help him. At the moment, though, I was too tired even to look at him. I did not want to look at him. As Bianchi finished off his notes, as Sarah and Paul looked on, I only heard the grinding sound he made in the back of his throat. I only heard his heavy breath humming almost musically. And I heard him begin to sing.
I still had a ball, I still had a ball.
I went to the city, but I still had a ball, I still had a ball.
The melody—such as it was—came more from his throat than his mouth, and the words whistled through the gaps in his teeth. Still, there was no mistaking them. And yet I did mistake them. That is to say: though I recognized them at once, I did not fully understand what the words might mean, how Fairbanks might know them, what they might say about who he was.
But, whoever he was, he sang to the white foot, to the ceiling and the window. His eyes flickered open and closed. Bianchi was scribbling in his notebook, completely unaware of what was happening in the rubble of the voice.
I still had a ball, I still had a ball. A ball, ball, ball.
A perfect end, a perfect year.
“What is that, Mr. Fairbanks?” Bianchi finally asked, polite but not quite interested. A ball, a ball, I still had a ball. Then Bianchi looked at me and his manner changed. “What is it, Tom? Mrs. Hagen? Tom?”
I simply could not answer. Every word Fairbanks sang felt like a chisel to what remained of the truth, a ball, a ball, a ball.
It was difficult, of course, to look at Sarah in such a moment. But I had to. Thank god, her hands were covering her face, so I couldn’t see the expression, though she had already risen from her chair.
“Tom,” Sarah said. “Do you hear? You have to tell them. You have to tell them.”
“What is it, Tom?” Bianchi asked.
Paul had risen from his chair too, though he didn’t seem to know what he should do. “What is this?” Paul asked. “Can someone explain?”
What a question. Of all the things I had seen in my life, this was the one I could explain least. And yet I could also explain it perfectly. I could explain that I had met Lee Hagen in Aix-les-Bains, that I had heard him sing this song, that he, in fact, had written it, that he was one of the only people in the world who could possibly know it. And so I did. I explained everything as I recalled saying it to Sarah in the restaurant in Verdun with Michaud the waiter and Michaud the duck. Afterward, I watched her kiss Fairbanks’s fingers and help him into bed. And after that I walked out through the ward past the other patients, some awake and shaving their faces in bed, some still turning over mid-dream.