He thought it would be a good idea for her to return to the United States. This she was not ready to do but she immediately agreed to leave the villa.  Still, she worried about why Varian had waited until now to ask her.

Killer had previously told her an outrageous story.  He and Mathieu had assassinated a stool pigeon and they had buried the body on the villa’s grounds.  Her sense of reality was astonishingly askew. Not only had she believed Killer’s cock and bull story—she had walked the grounds of the park furtively looking for freshly turned earth—but she convinced herself not to question the morality of  “offing” a stool pigeon [emphasis added] who, supposedly, had set up Mathieu [Killer's boss in the gang], landing him in jail for a month. She believed Mathieu and not Killer had pulled the trigger. Her deepest concern seemed to be that Fry had learned of the story, which was why he was asking her to leave.

But after Mathieu had stolen that fifty thousand francs of CAS’s hard-earned money with his phony scheme of the diplomatic car, Fry had reason enough to be fed up with Mary Jayne’s continued association with her criminal friends.  [Emphasis added.]  Danny’s subsequent arrest at the end of May only confirmed that the committee had to be much more careful in their dealings with the Marseille gangs.

With her dog, Dagobert, Mary Jayne moved into a small hotel just north of the Canèbiere [sic], though she kept her room at the villa.

She was mostly on her own, seeing Killer only now and then and members of the committee only occasionally.

She spent a good deal of time with Victor Serge’s companion Laurette Séjourné.

When she dropped by Air-Bel only her old friend Theo [Bénédite] seemed happy to see her.  Varian pointedly left the house whenever Mary Jayne arrived.

Mary Jayne and Killer had become estranged. He claimed she refused to tell him she loved him, and that she held out on him.  And even though her so-called friends had abandoned her, she was still giving her money to the damned committee.

One day she was in a beauty salon—living in a city strangled by rationing was no reason to neglect one’s coiffure—and Killer showed up.

Mary Jayne immediately noted his aggressive and hostile look.  He publicly accused her of considering him a "no-good punk," and left in a huff, saying: “I can be a real devil. You’ll see.”[1]

She thought he was merely on one of his tirades, but in fact he was setting her up for what he was about to do

That evening there was a knock on her door. It was Marcel Verzeano from CAS.

He had come to tell her that Killer had broken into her room at Air-Bel, terrifying the young Spanish maid Maria. He had turned the room upside down.

Mary Jayne immediately took the tram to La Pomme [the location of the villa].

Her room was a shambles.  The contents of the drawers and armoire had been emptied.  As soon as she picked among the pile of her possessions, she realized that Killer had stolen her jewelry and many precious heirlooms.

She could hardly believe it.  She was traumatized.

She never considered that he could do this to her.

As if to erase the deed, she tidied the room, putting everything back in its place.

Theo arrived back from the office and ran to console her. She threw her arms around the sobbing Mary Jayne and told her she'd better spend the night at the villa where she'd be safe.

But Mary Jayne wasn’t yet done with Killer.  Now she decided she couldn’t leave him to navigate alone in Mathieu’s world.  She would save him yet. Besides, she wanted her jewelry back. To say that, for a woman in her thirties, Mary Jayne was immature and self-involved, would be a gross understatement. She was caught in a personal melodrama, in some kind of neurotic headlock.

Inconceivably, Mathieu showed up at the villa with an atrocious story. He claimed the robbery had been Killer’s idea and offered to get the jewelry back. Of course Mary Jayne didn’t believe a word of this, but Mathieu could lead her to Killer and she needed to see Killer.  Mathieu said he would accompany her by train to Cannes, where he would demand Killer join them. 

Theo was frightened for her when she learned of Mary Jayne’s plan to leave with Mathieu, but Mary Jayne told her not to worry. “I’ll stay at the Carlton," she said.  "They can’t shoot me at the Carlton.”[2]

During the trip to Cannes, Mathieu made protestations of love and offered to shoot Killer.  What he was up to Mary Jayne could scarcely fathom.  Perhaps he wanted the rich girlfriend for himself.

She put him off with hysterical giggles, which wasn’t hard since she was actually feeling quite hysterical.

In Cannes the melodrama worked itself out at the Hôtel Carlton just as one might have predicted.  Mary Jayne insisted on seeing Killer privately. With a great deal of finesse, he wormed his way back into her good graces. He said he must have been crazy. He’d been a fool. Mathieu had probably already fenced the jewelry, but he would get it back. The thing that really seemed to shock him was Mathieu’s offer to kill him.  Killer had always been a loyal lieutenant in Mathieu’s gang.
Mary Jayne finally got to play the starring role in her own gangster film. Or at least that’s how she remembered it.

Later, when she and Killer met up with Mathieu in a local café, she took over.  She told Mathieu: “You can make a deserter from the Foreign Legion disappear, and no questions asked…. But you can’t make me disappear.  Headlines in the New York Times.... So hands off.  And hands off [Raymond], or I’ll go to the police.” As they walked out, Killer kept repeating: “Tu es formidable.”  Looking back with a certain degree of self-irony, she would say: “I was so elated by my big scene that I had no time to be frightened.” [3]

Mary Jayne, thirty-two, and Killer, just twenty, were playing dangerous games while the real tragedies of war swirled around them.

It is difficult to understand her.  She seemed to believe that he was a soul mate and that in saving him, she was saving some orphaned part of herself.  Now that she had protected him from Mathieu, she had no illusions about the longevity of their relationship.
Both knew that Killer was in a precarious position.  It was clear that he had defected from the gang and that Mathieu would not stop looking for him. It was imperative for him to get out of Marseille. With an audaciousness that must have been offensive, Mary Jayne approached Varian Fry.

He [Varian] politely declined to lend the committee’s help. She wasn’t surprised he’d said no, but was rather hurt that he had done so without a moment’s hesitation.

She approached all the other members of the committee and was peremptorily refused.  How could they disclose their invaluable clandestine route to a guy like Killer?

Finally Mary Jayne found an ally in Charles Wolff from CAS. Without Fry’s knowledge, he located a Spanish guide who was willing, for a stiff price, to take Killer across the Pyrenees.

Killer said all he needed to do was reach the British Consulate in Barcelona. He was going to join the British army and become a British officer.

He would explain his French accent by claiming he was a Canadian from Quebec and therefore a citizen of the British Empire.

He wanted Mary Jayne to join him in England.  Surely there was war work she could do.  She demurred.

Killer slipped away with his Spanish guide one morning at dawn. He left Mary Jayne a note: “I love you with all my black heart. Think sweetly of me—Killer.”[4]

In Spain he managed to get to Barcelona and the consulate, where, with no trouble, he was given the certificate he needed stating he was a British subject.

But he was picked up as he was making his way to Gibraltar and, like many British soldiers caught in Spain without transit visas, he was put in the concentration camp Miranda-del-Ebro, British Section.
Soon after, Mary Jayne and even Theo at CAS began receiving demands for money from Killer.  He claimed to have lent the money Mary Jayne had given him to some of the committee’s clients at the internment camp, and was demanding more.  The committee was thrown into a panic.  Such wires were all the confirmation the police needed to prove that CAS had been illegally helping refugees and British officers escape France. Mary Jayne wrote a frantic telegram telling Killer to shut up.

But she sent him more money through the Unitarian Service Committee.

Before long, Killer was transferred to Gibraltar.  On October 1941 he made it to England.

In no time, he received a commission as lieutenant in the British army.  He wrote to Mary Jayne:  “All my dreams are realized….I beg you not to say anything to your English friends, who have been so kind to me, about how awful I was to you in Marseille….If you could only see the new Raymond in all the splendor of his new uniform!”[5]

Eventually Killer became a paratrooper.

He and other members of the elite commandos became the darlings of English upper-class society.  Using Mary Jayne’s friendships and contacts, he was soon referring to weekends at country estates at which “Lord Dickie” [Mountbatten] was the featured guest.

His English had improved dramatically.

Much to Mary Jayne’s surprise, Killer, it turned out, was a snob.

In the end, Mary Jayne was vindicated in her judgment of Raymond Couraud.  He became a hero.  His temperament of bravado and derring-do was brilliantly suited to war.  He was seriously wounded at the infamous Battle of St. Nazaire, where a force of 611 British seaborne commandos launched a raid against the German-controlled shipyards. Even after he recovered he was parachuted many times behind enemy lines.

He claimed to be one of the first British officers to march with his squadron down the Champs-Élysées after Paris was liberated.

He wrote Mary Jayne that, on that very afternoon, he made a pilgrimage alone to her old apartment near the Bois de Boulogne, where he sat in her dining room and once more berated himself for his betrayals. The Boche [sic] who had occupied her apartment had left it in pristine condition and had even added a grand piano. It was ready and waiting for her return.[6]

By the time the war was over, Raymond Couraud had achieved the rank of major in the Second Regiment of the Special Airborne Services and had earned the Military Cross for bravery in battle.  He was twenty-four years old.

By the middle of June, Mary Jayne concluded it was finally time to leave France.  With Killer gone, the villa’s residents had gradually become friendlier.  They never mentioned Raymond Couraud [Killer].

By the end of June, she had secured all the necessary papers and prepared her good-byes.

She was pleased when the committee showed enough confidence in her to give her a final assignment. Carrying condoms inserted inside tubes of toothpaste and face cream, she left with secret messages for British Intelligence in Lisbon.  She encountered no difficulties getting these through.

In her memoir Crossroads Marseilles, when she examined her Marseille experience years later, she expressed regret at having missed the opportunity to know André Breton better.

Breton had made life feel like a voyage of inner discovery.

She regretted, through her own fault, never having been fully accepted by the committee and not having been as useful as she could have been.

But she never regretted “succouring” (as she put it) that “delinquent boy.”[7]

They remained in contact over the years.  Raymond would write of his love for her and tell her about his current love affairs.