20.

MARSHALL WALKED AROUND THE CITY AIMLESSLY, HIS HEAD in a muddle. He was in a detective story, yet he wasn’t the detective. He was the reader, or an innocent bystander caught up in an intrigue. He was tempted to chase down Robert Jules Lebeau the épicier himself, but he recognized that Nicolas wanted to help, and Marshall didn’t want to deprive him of that satisfaction.

Nevertheless, a couple of days later, he found himself in the nearby suburb of Saint-Mandé on the épicier’s block, a short street of small shops off the avenue du Général de Gaulle. The fruits and vegetables were in bins outside the shop. It was a simple grocery store. At the small counter inside stood an attractive young woman in an Indian tunic and jeans, her limp hair tied in two loose hanks. He selected a plum and went inside to pay.

“Bonjour, madame,” he said.

“Bonjour, monsieur. C’est tout?”

“Oui.” She was occupied with tying some string on a package, and he waited to ask about Lebeau. He paid for the fruit, then hesitantly asked for water to wash the plum.

“It is clean!”

“Vraiment?”

“Vrai.” She was shooing him from her shop.

“O.K.,” he said, wondering which one of them had been rude. Maybe his French was at fault.

At the door, he turned. “Is your name Lebeau?” he asked.

“Non. He is not here.”

“Monsieur Lebeau owns this market?”

“Non. It is mine.”

“Where is Monsieur Lebeau?”

She shrugged and began furiously punching some numbers on her small calculator, dismissing him.

“I believe I knew him during the war,” he said. “I’d like very much to find him again.”

“I know nothing of him and the war.”

“Do you know a family named Vallon?”

“No.”

Anger erupted in him, and he turned away quickly. “Au revoir, madame,” he said, his back to her. He thought she grunted a perfunctory au revoir.

She seemed young, but Marshall couldn’t judge age anymore. He didn’t feel old himself. Physically, he felt no different from ten or twenty years ago. He frequently searched his face in the mirror for signs of age. He didn’t have wrinkles, just a few vague sags. He touched his face now. His skin was rough and his beard was scratchy. He needed a new razor.

He returned to the Métro, where several streets met and angled off in different directions. Still irritated, he paused near the stairway down to the trains and surveyed the busy intersection, with its bountiful trees and striped crosswalks. Nicolas had suggested that Saint-Mandé was where Marshall had hidden with the Vallons, but Marshall did not recognize this space. One building opposite the Métro was shaped like a crescent, and he thought he would have remembered that, but he didn’t.

AT AMERICAN EXPRESS he collected his mail—a letter from Mary, a newsletter from the airline, some financial statements, letters from his crewmates Tony Campanello and Bobby Redburn, and a letter from an address in White Plains, New York.

He decided to walk over to the Madeleine, a neoclassical church that Nicolas said had been a meeting place for aviators stashed in Paris. It was easy to find, Nicolas explained, and the men simply blended into the crowd on the steps in front. Marshall had not come here when he was hiding in Paris, but now he sat on a step and read his mail. The open sun warmed him, and the crowd disappeared from his consciousness. Mary’s gentle inquiries touched him. She didn’t mention her food poisoning.

Marshall was glad to hear from two of the three crewmates who had finished the war in a POW camp. Bobby Redburn, the ball-turret gunner, wrote from California:

Marshall found Redburn’s letter painful to read. The mission seemed to be there again—the plane descending, crew scrambling, the tumult that followed. He folded the letter and turned to Tony Campanello’s letter. Tony was the navigator.

Marshall continued reading about Tony’s job in Seattle, his house on the beach, his children and grandchildren, the club he belonged to, all of it remote and almost meaningless to Marshall now. He felt like a rare bird. What did he think he was doing? He had always had a tendency to set out on his own, without advice or help. During the years of his career there had always been a family attached, like a flying buttress, a visible support. Now that he was truly on his own, being a loner had a different meaning. He wished his search for Robert and the Vallons could be simpler, that he could just turn a corner and meet Mme Vallon, holding out her arms to welcome him back to Paris.

The last letter was from Gordon Webb, Lawrence Webb’s son. Marshall had written to the pilot’s widow about his visit to the crash site, and she had passed the letter along to her son. Marshall had a fleeting memory of a rambunctious tyke with a grieving mother after the war when he and a couple of the crew went to Baltimore to pay a condolence visit. Now Gordon Webb wrote that he was flying for Pan Am, out of Kennedy, and that he often flew to Paris. He wanted to meet Marshall, to hear firsthand about the incident that took his father’s life. Marshall didn’t like the idea. He replaced the letter in its envelope and surveyed his mail.

It was too warm in the sun. He stood and made his way down the steps past a pair of picnickers and a woman with a baby stroller parked precariously on a step. The plum in his pocket had grown soft, and it was staining his jacket. He examined the plum, fingering the squishy, bruised spot. He crossed the street and dropped it into a waste bin.

Glancing up, he saw an L-1011 head into De Gaulle, its gear down. For the guys in the cockpit, the adrenaline was starting to pump. Get your heading right, sink rate right, speed right. Line her up, compensate for the wind, bring her in dead center, flare, kiss the tarmac, ease in the thrust reversers. God, he had loved it.