Vango

  A shot was fired into the air. This was the signal for some of the men to jump off the train.

  Which was how Vango found himself running along a bridge above the Thames, on rail tracks leading to Cannon Street station. At first, his pursuers had gone under the arch, where they hadn’t spotted anything. But another train had tooted loudly on sighting the boy on the tracks. The men had retraced their steps and resumed their hunt.

  Vango wanted to reach Cannon Street station itself, which would be full of commuters even at that time in the morning. He could melt into the crowd.

  He was gaining ground. He might just escape them.

  Snow had given way to rain again.

  Vango came to an abrupt halt. He had just seen shadows moving in front of him. They were coming at him from both sides.

  He recognized the Frenchmen and two other nasty pieces of work who must have got out at the next station.

  Vango was caught in a vise.

  The lamentations of the Scriptures rang out inside his head:

  Thou renewest thy witnesses against me,

  and increase thine indignation upon me;

  changes and war are against me.

  The men were closing in on him. They were all around him.

  The different factions were even talking to each other.

  “We’re not going to hurt you,” the French were saying.

  Trains were passing through, indifferent to the drama. Faces could be seen lit up in the windows.

  My brethren have dealt deceitfully as a brook,

  and as the stream of brooks they pass away. . . .

  Vango leaned against a parapet, allowing himself to be slowly trapped.

  He removed his aching hand from his pocket and placed it gingerly in his other hand.

  He was very focused.

  “Don’t move,” the Frenchman kept repeating.

  The enemy was only two paces away.

  And then, with both hands gripped together, Vango raised them toward the sky, arched his back, and jumped. He flew over the parapet and dived into the river.

  Friedrichshafen, Lake Constance, the same evening

  Captain Lehmann entered the map room of the Graf Zeppelin. Eckener was working in there, peering through his pince-nez.

  The airship was in its hangar.

  “Your good friend Paolo Marini has just arrived.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Someone named Paolo Marini. He claims to be your best friend.”

  Eckener folded up his pince-nez. He hesitated for a moment before exclaiming, “Paolo! That old Boy Scout! Tell him I’ll be with him in a jiffy!”

  “He hasn’t got a ticket, Commander. He’s busy explaining himself to the SS officer.”

  “What about me?” asked Eckener, losing his temper as he stood up behind the table. “Have I got a ticket? Paolo is no different from me, he’s my friend, my brother, Paolo Murini . . .”

  “Marini. He said Marini.”

  “Marini, yes, that’s what I said. My old friend from the Scouts. Is it snowing, Captain?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  Captain Lehmann headed off. He was getting used to all these friends the commander suddenly seemed to have, none of whom he ever disowned.

  Eckener returned to his desk and cast his eye over the map.

  He had no idea who this Paolo could be.

  All he knew was that for some time, friends he had never met before had started coming to him from all sorts of countries. He was a refuge, a land of welcome for those the Nazis were hunting down. They were former soldiers, artists, and, increasingly these days, Jews. The laws against them were multiplying all the time. They were banned from practicing many professions. They couldn’t be lawyers or civil servants. And for two months now, marriage or any kind of relationship between Jews and non-Jews had been forbidden.

  Eckener was trying to use his influence. He was doing all he could.

  The bulky and untouchable figure of Hugo Eckener meant that in his shadow he could still provide shelter for many of those who needed it.

  Eckener walked through the zeppelin.

  Night had fallen. In two hours, they would take off.

  This would perhaps be the Graf’s last moment of glory.

  It was going to make a short voyage to New York before returning to spend the depths of winter on the shores of Lake Constance. The following spring, the world would only have eyes for the Hindenburg, the biggest zeppelin ever built. That monster was already champing at the bit in the hangar right next to them. Two hundred and fifty meters long, twenty-five cabins, fifty passengers. This was Hugo Eckener’s greatest victory.

  But as he exited the Graf and turned back to glance at its elegant shape, the commander felt a twinge in his heart. He sighed.

  A few flakes of snow had been forecast. He hoped the forecast would be right. One day, a long time ago, from one of these windows, just there, he had taught Vango how to watch the snow falling.

  If Captain Lehmann had any doubts about the link between Hugo Eckener and Paolo Marini, these were immediately dispelled as he watched the two men being reunited.

  Their exclamations and tears were genuine. They stayed there, hugging each other, for a long time.

  Standing at the hangar door, Eckener had been thrilled to recognize his great friend.

  “How are you doing, ah . . . Paolo? What have you been up to, old friend?”

  “I’ve come to fly for a while in your arms, Commander, old pal!”

  A little group had formed around them, including several soldiers, a few German travelers, and the SS officer in charge of checking the passengers.

  “You’re insane. They’ll require umpteen authorizations,” Eckener whispered into his friend’s ear. “Go away, Zefiro.”

  Zefiro — for it was indeed him — stepped away and made all those around him witnesses.

  “Do you know what my friend Hugo Eckener has just said to me?”

  Eckener froze.

  “He told me I was insane! Do you hear? He says I won’t be allowed to embark.”

  The officer in uniform smirked.

  Zefiro put his hand on the commander’s shoulder in response to his look of alarm.

  “I’m joking. . . . It’s my fault. I’m not good at keeping you up to date with my news, and I don’t suppose you read the newspapers.” He signaled to the officer. “Show him the letter.”

  Eckener took the letter, which he proceeded to read.

  It was written in German and Italian. It came from the president of the Council of Ministers of Rome. It entrusted Signor Paolo Marini, holder of the Fusillini Military Cross and Commander of the Minestrone, with a special mission in the name of the friendship between the Reich and the great power of fascist Italy, by way of a voyage on board the Graf Zeppelin, symbol of the power of national socialism. The letter also contained expressions such as “the glorious alliance of our two countries,” “hope never-ending,” and the “undying purity of our children,” which would have been laughable were it not for the fact that they were a faithful copy of the rhetoric of the day.

  The letter had been signed in a convoluted ink scrawl, where “Bibi” was the only decipherable word. But the block capitals just above spelled out the name Benito Mussolini.

  Eckener folded the letter.

  He shook Zefiro’s hand.

  “In that case you are most welcome, Paolo Marini. And as it so happens, we’ve got a free cabin for you. We’re leaving in an hour.”

  They headed off together toward the commander’s study. Marini could be heard marveling at how handsome the balloon was.

  When Eckener closed the door behind them and they were alone at last, Zefiro asked the commander to forgive him. He put down his small suitcase and punched him in the face.

  Eckener reeled slightly before punching the monk in the stomach. Zefiro bent over but soon retaliated. They started fighting like kids on a playground.

  Eckener was the first down on the floor, spluttering
and writhing. Zefiro watched him, foaming at the mouth and out of breath.

  “What have I done to you?” gasped Eckener.

  “You know full well.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You revealed the location of the monastery to the police.”

  “I revealed it to Esquirol and Joseph so that you’d be able to identify Viktor.”

  “Viktor escaped last night.”

  Eckener was shell-shocked.

  “I have to leave Europe,” said Zefiro. “That monastery is my whole life. I can’t put it in danger.”

  “I don’t feel at home anywhere either, Padre. I no longer recognize my own country.”

  Zefiro crouched down to help his friend up again.

  “I’m doing what I can,” Eckener went on. “If you ask me, Germany is already at war with herself. Yesterday morning, the police went to strike out the name of our friend Werner Mann from the war memorial in his village, near Munich. The name of Mann, do you understand? Hitler gave the order three days ago. No Jewish names on the war memorials of 1918.”

  Werner Mann, the hero who had died in battle, and who had signed the pact for Project Violette with Zefiro and his friends, had just been erased from history.

  The two friends helped each other dust off their clothes.

  Zefiro wiped a bit of blood from Eckener’s lip with his handkerchief.

  “I won’t be a burden to you for long, Hugo. I’ll spend the winter in New York. It’s impossible to return to the monastery for the time being. But I’ve got a few projects to be getting on with.”

  “We need to leave as quickly as possible,” Eckener remarked. “Your fake letter is pretty farcical. I don’t know how the SS were taken in by it. It probably won’t last.”

  Zefiro finally cracked a smile.

  “But I put a lot of effort into it. As you saw in line seven, I had myself decorated with the medal of my favorite ham!”

  They burst out laughing and held on to each other’s hands again.

  “What about Vango?” inquired Eckener after a pause.

  Zefiro remained silent.

  “Has something happened to him?” Eckener insisted.

  “I’m worried I’ve got him tangled up in a nasty business,” admitted Zefiro, trying to restore his hat to its original shape as he explained to Eckener what had happened. “At precisely the moment when I was supposed to meet Vango, I discovered that I was being followed. It was in a train station in Paris. I spotted the photographer in the crowd, one of Viktor’s men. He was hiding a gun behind the curtain of his camera.”

  “You left?”

  “Too late. I saw Vango coming toward me. I had to act as if I didn’t recognize him.”

  “Nobody could have known he was with you.”

  “Yes, they could. Vango wanted to talk to me. He came right up to me. He was happy to see me.”

  “They won’t find him,” declared Eckener.

  “I saw the flash from the camera. They’ve got a photograph.”

  Half an hour later, the zeppelin had taken off. The SS officer called the Italian embassy to inform them that the famous Paolo Marini had left his overcoat behind in the air terminal at Friedrichshafen.

  As far as the embassy was concerned, that particular name didn’t appear to be famous at all. Nobody recognized it. But when the officer read out the list of Marini’s decorations, he could hear people roaring with laughter on the other end of the line. Among those medals were all the necessary ingredients for a substantial Italian dinner, from the salami appetizers to the panna cotta for dessert.

  Moscow, a month later, December 1935

  The little boy was rolling around in the snow. He looked about seven.

  “Kostia! Kostia!”

  The woman who had called out to him was sitting on a bench on the other side of the path. She had a girl on her lap who looked the elder of the two children.

  “Do you think they’re going to come, Tioten’ka?”

  “Don’t worry. They always come,” the woman replied.

  She was such a gentle tioten’ka. The little girl was already very fond of the mysterious woman who had appeared in their apartment only five or six weeks ago.

  Where had she come from? A man had brought her to them one October day. She had a funny accent when she spoke Russian. The girl’s parents had been told that she would live with them from now on and that they should call her Tioten’ka, which means little aunt, so as not to arouse any suspicion from the neighbors.

  Her parents had offered her their double bed, but Tioten’ka had turned it down, making herself comfortable in a little storeroom off the entrance hall, where their big brother used to sleep when he was still with them.

  The whole family had given up on treating her as a guest of honor. She insisted on undertaking more than her share of the household tasks. It was hard to stop her. As well as her tiny bedroom, Tioten’ka had inherited two winter coats from the big brother. It was emotional for the family to see them hanging from the hook on the back of the door, like in the old days.

  Kostia headed back toward the bench, soaking wet.

  “I’m cold,” he said.

  “Me too,” piped up his sister, Zoya.

  Their nurse opened her coat and tucked them both inside it.

  “Will you bake us the white cake again this evening?” requested Kostia, already dreaming of a crystallized violet on top of the whipped cream.

  Tioten’ka was such a magical cook, she was straight out of a fairy tale.

  On her excursions to Sokolniki Park, twice a week, Mademoiselle wore both the coats, which were too big for her. Those layers of fur kept her warm in the freezing wind. One was turned inside out, with the furry side against her skin, while the one with the fur on the outside became white with frost. She would stroll around the park with Konstantin and Zoya.

  Mademoiselle knew that every step she took outside was being watched. She always wondered which of the passersby were her shadows.

  When they had abducted her from Salina, she had been worried they would send her to a gulag in the Arctic Circle, but instead she found herself in the heart of Moscow. She was in captivity in the middle of a family in a tiny apartment, between the coal bucket and the icons hanging on the walls.

  “Here they are!” chirped Zoya, emerging from her furry nest.

  She ran toward a little girl who had just let go of her nanny’s hand.

  The children and the nannies kissed each other and huddled up on the bench.

  This scene had been played out twice a week for the past month. It was a Wednesday and Sunday friendship between two little girls and two women, under the friendly gaze of Kostia.

  The little girl was named Svetlana, but her nickname was Setanka.

  Her nanny never mentioned Setanka’s family. She preferred to talk about times gone by, when she belonged to the great houses of Saint Petersburg, before the Revolution. She had served princesses and people in the theatrical world. Once, she had almost gone to Paris!

  Mademoiselle barely said a word. She listened. Sometimes there were tears in her eyes. She enjoyed these stories from the past.

  Zoya and Setanka, for their part, talked in hushed whispers. One spoke about her brother, who had gone away, and the other about a boy she called the Bird, someone she had never set eyes on.

  “What are they telling each other, those two?” Setanka’s nanny would sometimes whisper with a sidelong glance.

  But the girls didn’t hear. Each was listening fervently to the other’s tale. In the course of those Wednesdays and Sundays, almost without their noticing it, their secrets were changing hands. Setanka was falling a little bit in love with Zoya’s big brother, as was Zoya with Setanka’s Bird.

  When it was turning dark, they went their separate ways at the park gates. There was always a black car waiting there for Setanka and her nanny. The others went down into the subway at Sokolniki Station. They loved the subway. The first line had opened the previous spring.
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  “Look at me, Tioten’ka. Look!”

  Kostia was running through the station as if through a gray marble palace.

  That evening, when they got back to their apartment, which smelled of melted candle wax and incense, the children’s mother seemed very emotional.

  “There’s a letter from your brother,” she announced in a flat voice. “He sends you lots of love.”

  “Can I read it?” asked Zoya.

  “It’s supper time now!”

  She wouldn’t let her children read it later on either.

  This was the first letter. It had come via the neighbors so that the political police wouldn’t seize it. The family was under house arrest.

  Oddly, the letter had a stamp from Great Britain.

  In the middle of the night, when the father returned from his working day, Mademoiselle, who had already gone to bed in her little room, heard the mother rushing to the front door.

  “There’s a letter from our son, my darling. A letter from Andrei.”

  A silence followed, as if she was about to burst into tears.

  “Our Andrei isn’t doing well. . . .”

  Mademoiselle looked up at the three small violins hanging from the wall above her bed.

  Paris, the same night

  It happened in a café at the foot of Montmartre, a little before dawn. The customers had been drinking heavily. The Cat was the only person ordering a fruit cordial.

  Next to her, Boris Petrovitch Antonov took off his wire glasses. He wiped his hand over his waxen face and rubbed his small yellow eyes. His other hand was placed affectionately on top of the Cat’s. He didn’t want to let go.

  It had all started two hours earlier.

  The Cat had been waiting in the gutter above the Russian cabaret on the Rue de Liège. The bright lights on the sign for SHERAZADE had just been switched off. It was four o’clock in the morning, but the man she was waiting for hadn’t come out yet.

  The Cat was following Boris Petrovitch Antonov, in the hope that he would lead her to either Andrei or Vango.

  Thanks to a surprise visit, she had lost all trace of Andrei for several weeks now. The Cat’s parents had dropped by to spend a few hours with her, and this had interfered with trailing Andrei.