Murder At the Flea Club

by Matthew Head

  “Odd? How?”

  “There! I knew it! Why did I have to go and say that? You sound all scared and suspicious. Just forget I said anything. After all—” and she stopped helplessly, or as if helplessly, which is not the same thing at all.

  I didn’t accept this invitation to say something, but stood waiting, and finally she said, “I shouldn’t have said that. Probably you wouldn’t have noticed anything at all. Everyone’s so crazy nowadays anyway. It’s just that Marie Louise has been under a—considerable emotional strain lately, and she isn’t always quite—oh, dear! Now you’ll be looking for it! And probably there won’t be anything at all. There usually isn’t. Let’s forget it, shall we?”

  “Anything you say.”

  She smiled, and took my arm. We began walking again. Some women take your arm, and that’s that. Mrs. Bellen made it something special. No suggestive pressure, nothing obvious, but somehow saying, “This is my hand, on your arm. How very pleasant,” without saying or doing anything you could place. She didn’t mention Marie Louise again, didn’t say anything, in fact, until we had reached the elevator. As I opened the door for her she said, “I’ve forgotten your name. Your first name, I mean.”

  “Hooper. People call me Hoop, of course.”

  “I’m Audrey, Hoop.”

  She was in the elevator now, and I closed the door, a wrought-iron thing of spirals and little flowers, so that I looked at her through a kind of black art-nouveau garden. Very effective. She said, with a dulcet but ambiguous suggestion of promise, “Good-bye, Hoop,” and as the elevator started up, she raised one hand and wiggled the fingers at me. It was the first thing she had done which was a little too coy for her apparent age, but as the elevator disappeared I smelled the perfume, just a whiff floating down, just a couple of dollars’ worth, and I admitted to myself that she had left me wanting to see her again.

  Just to see what would happen.

  “Plenty,” I thought, “if you were fool enough to let it.”

  So much for Audrey.

  Big liar.

  In connection with something I will next get around to explaining, I stopped at the desk and asked the pomaded young man if he was expecting a Dr. Mary Finney and a Miss Emily Collins, from the Belgian Congo. He had been perfectly polite until then, but now his manner changed quickly to one of genuine respect. With Mrs. Bellen I was just another American, not as well dressed as the rest of the clientele. In connection with Dr. Finney and Miss Collins, I was suddenly connected with the Sûreté. Yes indeed, there were reservations for the two ladies. They were expected that afternoon.

  I left my card, although I was expecting to meet their plane in a few hours. The letter from Africa had caught me just in time.

  CHAPTER TWO

  MARY FINNEY’S LETTER was direct and at least partially to the point:

  DEAR HOOPY:

  Summarising that leprosy research in a paper for Paris, London, Edinburgh. Paris first. How about meeting Sabena flight 482 on the 10th? Emmy along too. She has turned into a nuisance, won’t let me wear my sun helmet this trip, says I have to have a hat. Well, I have. God help us all.

  Love,

  M. F., M.D.

  Emmy had added her own postscript, in a hand as neat and wispy as Emmy herself: Hoopy dear, so eager to see you again. How long has it been? Too long. Time is having its way with me; my weight is down to 94, alas, but Mary is as fine as ever. We love you, Hoopy, and are going to bother you terribly to show us Paris between Mary’s engagements. These are terrible, there are so many of them. It makes me feel very important, but not Mary. Love, E. Collins. Oh—we will be at a hotel called the Prince du Royaume, and we are guests of the Sûreté, which impresses me. I am told it is very grand.

  I was a little impressed myself, to find myself moving in both of the two circles which frequented the Prince du Royaume—official guests and rich Americans.

  So I went out to meet Mary Finney’s plane. Even from a distance, behind the barrier where I had to wait while the passengers disembarked, there was no mistaking my pair of beauties. Mary Finney and Emily Collins could never have been much of a size, even as young girls, and time had exaggerated the difference. Where Dr. Finney had expanded Emmy Collins had contracted until now, even concealed within a winter coat, she looked like a bundle of dried twigs tied up with a string.

  Dr. Finney is not a fat woman, but without question she is outsize. That morning she was not at home in her clothes. They were completely undistinguished, managing to suggest the truth, which was that they had been picked up in some Congo department store at the last minute by a woman who over a long period of time had been wearing slight variations on her routine working garb without regard for fashion, or for anything but comfort and practicality. Her hat sat on her head with the uncertain and temporary look of a hat placed on a statue. In the shoe department neither Dr. Finney nor Miss Collins had made any concession at all: both of them wore sturdy brogue-like affairs which were going to be perfect protection against thorns, scorpions, poisonous serpents, and other natural enemies encountered in Paris in February.

  As they approached I saw that Emily had brightened her costume with an unconvincing white cloth gardenia on one lapel. Mary Finney was similarly embellished by a plump gold watch on a chain pinned over one hillock. Even from a considerable distance I could see that the good doctor’s handsome freckles were unmuted by cosmetics of any kind, but Emily’s grainy little face was dabbed with white talcum, generously applied as it might have been to a baby, to freshen and soothe rather than to beautify. None of these little artifices had done much to increase the pair’s resemblance to Garbo and Grable or other classical types, but by the time they had crossed the intervening space I knew that, just as I had expected, here were the two most fascinating women in France.

  Dr. Finney’s expression was enigmatic or even severe, and I knew that she was concealing some inner agitation. Half a pace behind her, Emmy gave the impression of keeping her hand in that of an older, wiser protector’s, walking in her usual relationship of four steps to each of Dr. Finney’s three, but always managing to come out even at the proper interval, like one of those difficult passages in Chopin where the right and left hands are called on to do this same kind of thing. From time to time Dr. Finney would crane her neck to scan the clot of people in which I stood, but as they gained the enclosure they were intercepted by a trio of Frenchmen in morning coats and striped trousers. Dr. Finney regarded them with the friendly trust she might have placed in a trio of procurers, and her expression did not change a great deal even when she was presented with a scroll tied in tricoloured ribbon, to a peppering of flash-bulbs. Something went wrong and one of the photographers asked for a repeat. Dr. Finney handed back the scroll and she and the leading Frenchman each took an end of it, looking a little too much as if they were contesting it, I thought, while the bulbs flashed again. For a moment just after that, Dr. Finney’s eyes met mine directly. I smiled, and could almost have started forward towards her. She gave me a look of happy recognition and then dropped the idea, just as I had, and the five of them, Dr. Finney and Miss Collins and the three Frenchmen, went on down the long corridor and left it free for the ordinary passengers to file in.

  “All that damn foolishness at the airport,” Dr. Finney called it an hour later, when I was sitting with her and Emily in the living-room of their suite at the Prince du Royaume. “I thought it would sure look bad to those Frenchmen if the first thing I did in Paris was accost a young man. Gosh,” she said, leaning back in her chair and looking around the room, up at the crystal chandelier and all around at the walls with their pale, elegant panelling. “Is this usual in Paris? Makes me feel like a hick.”

  “Oh, dear, closed Tuesdays,” murmured Emily, seated near-by at an effeminate little escritoire with a notebook and a Guide Michelin and pencil. “I’ve got us down for the Louvre Tuesday and it says here closed Tuesdays.” She had a couple of pages ruled off into blocks, and now she began to erase what she had
written in one of them.

  “Thursday,” murmured Dr. Finney, pulling it out of the air.

  “We can’t do it Thursday. We’ve got the Ministry of National Health, you know, Mr. What’s-his-name.”

  “All day?”

  “Goodness no, just the morning. Then lunch with the Belgian Ambassador. Then in the afternoon the reception at the Institute for Tropical Medicine. It’s quite a day. Dinner with the Minister of Colonies. No, Mary, Thursday’s impossible.”

  “When’s that policeman’s ball?” Dr. Finney asked.

  “Wednesday,” said Emily, checking it against her diagram. She saw my face and said, “Not really a policeman’s ball, Hoopy. It’s a dinner. And not really policemen, but detectives. The Sûreté. Mary’s going to make this talk—this address.”

  Dr. Finney hitched uncomfortably in her chair and made grumbling noises from which the general sense emerged that she had been called up here by what she termed in a friendly enough way the goddamn Ministry of Colonies, to talk about tropical medicine and summarise her conclusions regarding the control of dysentery and leprosy in the back country and everybody else had jumped on her and taken advantage of what she called her innocence and good nature, and even the cops had sewed her up and got her to accept an invitation to dinner and then told her it was a dinner for her and that she was expected to give them an address, just because she had incidentally in the course of her activities solved a couple of murders on her own strictly amateur and personal basis and they had turned out to be fairly well known in the case books. But she would be, she muttered, goddamned if she knew what to say in the address. Everybody knew about those old cases of hers, they were old stuff.

  “Solve a murder for them,” suggested Emily. “A new one.” Dr. Finney emitted a sound expressive of contempt and rejection best described as a snort, but Emily went on, “There must be a lot of unsolved murders in a city as big as Paris. You could just pick one out and read up on it, and solve it. There might even be one that’s giving them a lot of trouble right now. Don’t you see?”

  There was no logical response to be made to this proposition, since it was offered in good faith, so I dropped back a few sentences and said to Emily, “I hope you have my name down in a couple of those squares.”

  “As a matter of fact, I have,” said Emily. “I had you down for the Louvre, since you know pictures and all. Do you know architecture too?”

  “Somewhat.”

  “Then we’ll take the Ecclesiastical Architecture tour on Tuesday instead,” she decided. “I thought we could take a little walk and see the major monuments in chronological sequence.” I heard myself breathing heavily, but she went on undisturbed, checking against another list, “According to the guide-books the oldest remains are still incorporated in St. Julien-le-Pauvre. Romanesque. I thought we could start there and then go on to Notre Dame and work up through St. Séverin, and then maybe St. Eustache because of the Renaissance modifications and then into the Renaissance itself, St. Sulpice, for instance—”

  “How far do you want to go with this?” I asked. “I can take off all day Tuesday. I’m my own boss.”

  “So can we, all day. It’s our day off. We’re having dinner Monday night with the Portuguese Legation, Angola and Cabinda you see, and something afterwards, and I guess they think by then we’ll need to rest up. So we could do Middle Ages and Renaissance in the morning, and in the afternoon we could see any of several eighteenth-century churches and then I thought maybe Notre Dame de Raincy, the concrete one, for the twentieth century—maybe.”

  “You don’t need a guide,” I said, at almost the same instant that Dr. Finney said, “Emmy’ll kill you. She’s been trying to get me to climb the Eiffel Tower. When it has elevators.”

  “Rather famous elevators, as a matter of fact,” Emmy said. “Installed the year I was born. But to get the real feeling, I think you should climb. Do you know,” she recited, “that the Eiffel Tower is so light that its supports exert less pressure on the earth, per square inch, than Mary’s exerting at this moment? Less downward pressure per square inch than the average man sitting in a chair, the book says. And Mary’s bigger than the average man.”

  “Maybe I am, but you could have made it less wounding by choosing Hoop as your reference. It’s obvious that you’d never hold the thing to its moorings in the gentlest breeze.”

  Emily responded promptly, “The oscillation at the summit is only six inches in the highest winds, and the height varies eight inches according to temperature.”

  I remembered that I had something special to offer even a guide-book exhauster like Emily. “I have an archaeologist friend who’s doing some excavations of earlier stuff than St. Julien-le-Pauvre. Not even in the guide-books yet. In the basement of a night-club. It’s the membership kind of thing, and I belong—The Flea Club.”

  “Improbable sounding spot for ecclesiastical remains,” Dr. Finney commented, and Emmy said, “I’ve never been in a night-club, not even in the morning. We’ll have to start there, right after breakfast.”

  I told them a little bit about The Flea Club, we made an appointment for eight o’clock the next morning, and I hurried home to put on my dinner jacket and then hurried back to the Prince du Royaume to pick up Marie Louise Bellen. It was getting to be quite a shuttle.

  CHAPTER THREE

  WHATEVER ITS NAME suggests, The Flea Club was no scrimey little dive. It was a semi-public night-club with a private section for members. I first went there one night with an American named Freddy Fayerweather, who collected modern painting and had come to be an acquaintance of mine through my gallery, where he would now and then buy a picture. The Flea Club was a spectator’s paradise, and when Freddy said he would put me up for membership I said for him to go ahead and do it.

  After the murder, there was a lot of wild yellow journalistic fabrication about The Flea Club and the goings-on there, but actually the place was fairly mild. Plenty of the members were wacky but plenty of the people who frequent any place that operates well into the night, either publicly or privately, are wacky. I enjoyed The Flea Club and even felt an affection for many of its regulars. And I liked to hear Nicole sing.

  That’s all I could answer when people asked me how it happened that somebody as un-Flea Club as I seemed to be spent so much time there.

  The Flea Club hadn’t been its real name originally. Originally it was called the Club Ste. Geneviève de Fli, since it was on the site of a church—a chapel, rather—by that name, which was thought of as a legendary structure until my archaeologist friend, Professor Johnson, got around to digging and discovered foundations indicating that it really had been there. The chapel was built between 800 and 850, and during the next 1100 years various things happened to it. It was small and easy to lose in a growing city. The level of Paris grew around it until the chapel floor was filled in to meet it. Finally what remained above ground, the upper half, was chopped off and something else was built on the spot. Building followed building, until at some time or other the space was dug out again where the interior of the chapel had been, and the stumps of the original columns, still in place, were incorporated with later masonry, in what had now become the cellar of the buildings that succeeded one another above it. By the time Professor Johnson appeared, there was a mid-nineteenth-century building of no particular distinction standing there, and the part of the cellar with the remains of the chapel incorporated in it had become the members’ room of The Flea Club. It does seem a complicated and round-about way to build a boîte de nuit.

  The cellar held a small bar, a piano, no stage, a few square feet of dance floor—I never saw anybody dance there, but it was a useful area—and enough room left over to crowd in tables and chairs for maybe as many as forty people at a time, if they were careful not to take deep breaths simultaneously, which would have crushed the more fragile members to death. To one side there was also a small, comfortable room containing a bed, a table, a lamp, a radio, and a bookshelf. This room was occasionall
y occupied overnight by a member in a pinch. The night before the murder, such a pinch developed.

  The members’ cellar could be entered through a door at half level from the back street, which was quiet and private, with the blank wall of the butt-end of another building taking up the entire area across from it. You could also enter or leave this cellar by a stairway and locked door, to which only members held keys, into the semi-public part of the club, on the ground floor, which was operated for income. Up here the bar was bigger and the décor was fancier—or, more accurately, there was an effort at décor, whereas the cellar was just whitewashed walls. You entered this semi-public part from the boulevard. Anyone could spend money there, with an introduction from a member, but you could bring only one guest at a time into the members’ cellar. The upstairs bar was larger and the tables were a little roomier. It was a drink-and-listen place. The drinks were satisfactory, and Nicole was worth listening to.

  Nicole’s real name was Marguerite Bontemps, a solid honest name good enough for anybody, but she used Nicole—nothing else, just Nicole—to sing under. I’ve never liked these one-name professional names. I liked Nicole herself, though, in spite of several other things. For instance, in spite of the way she fixed herself up to look like a second-rate Dietrich when she could have been a first-rate Marguerite Bontemps. She had a wide-hipped, full-breasted peasant figure and one of those round straightforward faces that can be so engaging without being either beautiful or distinguished. The songs she did best, the ones she was beginning to be known for, were songs of the little people on the streets, in the best French music-hall tradition—the shop girl whose world is transformed by love, the old ‘My Man’ theme, and all the others, the kind of thing that can be nauseously cloying or really touching, depending on the singer.