Murder in Montparnasse

by Howard Engel

  “Shall we have something more to drink, you chaps?” Biz asked. “This vin de Cahors makes a strong case.” Another bottle was ordered and poured.

  Burdock continued to talk about writers, his wife joining in with sly comments about the women they were living with. While Stella Burdock was talking, her eyes followed Wad’s every movement as he sat next to Julia, drinking in her latest flatteries. As soon as she caught me watching too, she caught my sleeve and said:

  “Hash must have a terrible time with Waddington. Wad and his harem. I don’t see why she allows it, do you?”

  “I’m afraid I’m rather new on the scene.”

  “He’s been like this ever since she lost his manuscripts.”

  “Who? Hash? God, how terrible!”

  “He walked around with a hangdog expression for months afterwards.”

  “That’s my own nightmare, losing everything like that. It’s terrible!”

  “What’s terrible?” It was Wad, back with more wine and now looking ruddy in his cheeks.

  “Your manuscripts, Waddington,” Mrs. Burdock said. “I just told your friend, Mr. Ward.”

  Wad’s smile became a frown. I felt I should say something.

  “What a horrible thing, Wad.”

  He shook his head. “It makes no sense to talk about it. Have some more wine?” He filled Mrs. Burdock’s glass steadily.

  “You’re damned cold-blooded about it,” I said.

  “Over and done with, dead and buried. There are a lot of expressions like that. I think I know them all. Hold out your glass, Michaeleen.”

  I watched the wine fill my stained glass. As Stella Burdock lifted hers, it was shaking, so that her bangles made a noise that caught Lady Biz’s attention. She turned her head to discover its origin. This was a head for Jo Davidson or Brancusi. Modigliani should have been spared to paint Biz Leighton.

  From across the table, Hash was getting an earful from Julia Lowry, while her sister, Victoria, looked on. Julia had moved to Wad’s chair, while Wad foraged for a box of matches.

  “I think it’s wonderful the way you cope with Wad and the baby. I really do. I mean, is there anything you can’t do? Are you really Peter Pan?”

  “Oh, Julia. You exaggerate! My Tatie and I manage just fine.”

  “And how you manage in that squalid little flat is a miracle, nothing short of a miracle!” Hash was looking trapped. Julia had no intention of being brief. “But, of course, you are his wife. You get to read everything he writes first. Before everybody. What a marvellous opportunity! I mean, just imagine being the first person to have read Shakespeare or Milton or Walt Whitman!”

  “I don’t think there was a Mrs. Walt Whitman.”

  “Well, you know what I mean, Hash. I’m just so envious. I mean, you are right there next to him when he is writing his poems and stories. You watch the characters come out of the chaos, like Michelangelo chipping away the marble that isn’t David. I can’t put it better than that. And we all know how far he’s going to go. People are talking about him. And, Hash, you and the baby will be there. You’ll be able to look back at the years you spent in your Paris garret.”

  “You make it sound like Puccini, Julia. At least my cough has gone away.”

  “You know what I mean, Hash. This is just the beginning.” Julia’s eyes were shining.

  “In the meantime, he still has to carry our trash down all those stairs. His shoes need half-soling and he spends far too much on cigarettes.” Hash’s attempt to bring Julia down to earth did not begin to stop her. I reached for my wine and emptied the glass. Burdock cocked an ear at what Julia was saying and began pulling at the hair on his knuckles in an orderly fashion, one finger after the other. We finished the rest of the bottle while Wad, who had now returned and was dealing with an impatient Monsieur Lavigne, was being praised all around the table. In the midst of this, Arlette and her ardent friends bade us good night, and we watched as they prepared to go off into the rain again. Arlette had hardly said a word to me, but I wondered how much she had taken in. She gave me the feeling that little escaped her half-closed eyes.

  When the door closed behind them, Julia returned to her theme. She linked Wad’s name with all my literary gods. She invoked Joyce, Eliot, Lawrence, Wells, Bennett, Anderson and Conrad. Wad tried to get her to stop, but it was a transparent feint.

  “In the States,” he said, “only writers with three names get ahead. I’ll have to sign my stuff Jason Miller Waddington or nobody will take me seriously. Look at all the three-name people: Henry Seidel Canby, James Branch Cabell, John Peale Bishop and —”

  “Be serious, Wad!” Julia said. “We’re talking about your future!”

  “I can’t think of a better way to spoil it than by talking about it, Julie. Sorry, but it’s like walking under ladders. You can do it in perfect safety until a hod of bricks lands on your head. I’d just as soon we talked about Mike’s tennis game. Or Hal’s. What kills writing is talk!”

  The Burdocks were the next to make a move to leave. I was again reminded about tea the following afternoon and given the address. We groped for our damp outer clothing and went out into the night. The rain had become a fine drizzle, with enough mist to put an aura around the arc lamps up and down Montparnasse. Wad and Biz shook hands formally, while Hal Leopold stood watching. Then the Waddingtons went off in the direction of Port-Royal, a direction I had walked several times during the last few weeks, accompanying the Waddingtons first up to the square with the statue of Marshal Ney under the chestnut trees, and then around the front of the Closerie des Lilas and into the narrow street with apartment buildings on one side and the backs of the stores on Montparnasse on the other.

  Cyril Burdock hailed a taxi for the Lowry sisters. He had taken it upon himself to see that all of the women in the group were either chauffeured or escorted out of the Quarter. One couldn’t be too careful, he said, with Jack de Paris on the prowl. Julia’s eyes still bore the afterglow of her evening at the feet of her favourite genius as she waved at us from the taxi. The Burdocks, Hal and Lady Biz walked along Montparnasse with me. As we walked, the Burdocks in the vanguard, Hal Leopold told me that he had a new book coming out next month with Boni and Liveright. He told me in a shy, almost matter-of-fact manner, such as one might use for giving street directions. I tried to sound impressed, but it was far too late in the evening to correct the balance. Wad had won the evening hands down. Perhaps that is why Hal seemed to stew in Wad’s company. I began to wonder why he sought it out, if that was the case.

  On the corner of Raspail, where I left them, Lady Biz took my hand and asked me to call her “Biz” without the title. She held on to my fingers perhaps a moment longer than necessary, or so it seemed to me. I wished Biz and the others a safe return to their homes and turned down boulevard Raspail, hoping that I would not frighten any unaccompanied young women as I made my way down the rue Vavin in the direction of St-Sulpice and the rue Bonaparte.

  CHAPTER 3

  Andrée Chastel was found huddled in the gutter in the rue des Ciseaux, just off St-Germain, at four in the morning by two welders returning late from a wedding in Sceaux. They had missed the last train and had walked back into the city. Quite appropriately, Mlle. Chastel had been stabbed with a pair of scissors. At first, they told the police, they thought she was a heap of old clothes, then, on closer inspection, agreed she was a clocharde who had lost her tenure of the nearby Métro gratings. The blood making steady progress along the gutter had pooled next to a roll of burlap by the sewer opening. This sobered them from the wedding wine and their long walk. The flics were on the scene with portable arc lights within twenty minutes.

  Le Matin was on the street too early to carry an account of the killing, but the afternoon and evening papers made up for it. As the sixth murder of an unaccompanied young woman in ten weeks, it was something for the popular papers to jump at. Andrée Chastel had been selling flowers up on Montparnasse when last seen. She was known as a drunk and sometime model. The
papers stated quite firmly that none of the women murdered in the area frequented by artists and foreigners was a known prostitute. She had no enemies. She had last posed for Moïse Kisling seven months previously and was the subject of a sketch by Modigliani, according to a police statement released by the commissioner of police, Léon Zamaron. I was amused by these irrelevant artistic notes from the policeman. They fed my habit of sentimentalizing the French. What did her work with Modigliani or Kisling have to do with her sudden, violent and untimely death?

  Paris Soir had taken to calling the killer of these women “Jack” after the English murderer of prostitutes. The paper recited the history of “Jack’s” career to date. Here, I read about Brigitte Lefèvre, an art student and the mistress of a Polish sculptor. She’d come to Paris from Nancy when her father deserted the family. Solange Chatelaine was a painter herself as well as a frequent model for several of the painters of the Quarter. She left a young child, who is now having his fate settled in the law courts on the Île de la Cité. The paper gave the names of the three others; they were much the same, models and part-time models, some of them familiar figures in Montparnasse. The factor that linked them was their physical beauty, which the papers — all of them — emphasized again and again. These women for the most part were nobodies. The best known of them had never had a show of her paintings. Outside the Quarter, they were unknown. Singly, their deaths wouldn’t have earned space in their hometown papers, but once they were linked to one another and to the unknown killer who stalked the streets of Montparnasse, a monument to death was created, a spectacular interest was uncovered that eclipsed the state of the unsteady franc, the League of Nations, German recovery, reparations — everything was swept aside by the headline: “JACK STRIKES AGAIN!”

  The only place in town that was not talking about the sudden death in the rue des Ciseaux was the office of the Transatlantic Review on the Île St-Louis. The editor, Cyril Burdock, was singularly uninterested in the daily news. His guests consequently avoided the issues of the day, unless they involved royalty or literary reputations. Stella, his wife, poured tea from a large Sèvres tea service which she said she had rescued from a flea market. The office reminded me of the comfortable and untidy offices of the university newspaper: a mixture of sitting room and work room, with stacks of copy paper and unopened post everywhere. Besides the Burdocks and me, the group consisted of a few unpublished writers, whose names I failed to catch, and Robert McAlmon, an American who edited another literary magazine and who had a glowing literary reputation built upon a very few published works.

  “What sort of things have you been doing?” he asked me.

  “Not very much, really. These are a few stories I wrote in Toronto.” I added my manilla envelope to the stack on the nearest desk. McAlmon snapped it up and was about to open it when Burdock took it from him and placed it on his own desk. McAlmon grinned, shaking his head at Burdock’s turned back.

  “Toronto is said to have the worst Sunday on the face of the earth,” he said. “Is that true?”

  “It doesn’t go far enough. The city is still ringing from the outcry that nearly prevented streetcars running on the Sabbath.”

  “I say, Ward,” said Cyril Burdock, “have you ever edited a magazine?” I told him about my university experience, which was insufficiently interesting or professional enough for him to pursue that line of questioning. He subtly failed to respond to me; instead he told an anecdote about Waddington, who was doing some editorial work for him.

  “I suppose you came to Paris after reading The Waste Land?”

  I didn’t quite like McAlmon’s superior air. If he disliked young writers, why did he hang about editorial offices? I forget what I told him.

  “Do you like any of the French muck? Fargue, Larbaud and that gang?”

  “Ask me when I’ve read them. I’m still getting the kinks out of my French, living in the present tense.”

  More tea was poured. McAlmon turned from quizzing me to making comments about Jason Waddington. He was in a sour mood.

  “I’ve tired of Wad’s stiff upper lip. I like a writer who tells me a story, not one who demonstrates that he’s hurting too much to speak out.”

  “Oh, I say! That’s rather strong, isn’t it?” said Burdock. “I thought you were rather keen on him?”

  “I’m no longer impressed by his half-stifled whimpers. He is simply lint from the pocket of Sherwood Anderson.” Stella laughed at that and then scolded McAlmon.

  “Well, old man, history will blame him on you,” Burdock said. “You encouraged him. You got him going.”

  “Don’t remind me. I’ve already joined Sisyphus on the hill.”

  Stella explained that McAlmon had published Wad’s first collection of poems and stories. I recalled the bitterness in Wad’s voice when he’d mentioned it at the restaurant the night before.

  “What’s he working on now? Anyone know?” asked one of the young men, who appeared to be with McAlmon.

  “I’m afraid I don’t have his confidence as of yore,” Burdock confessed.

  “I hear that he’s trying to make a book out of what went on in Spain this summer,” Stella said. “And I have the reputation of being an oracle where Jason Waddington is concerned.”

  “Ah, Pamplona!” said McAlmon. “I showed him Pamplona the year before last and picked up his expenses.”

  “Don’t be petty, McAlmon. Wad’s not tried a novel yet.”

  “It’ll be a roman à clef floated on vin ordinaire if he finishes it.”

  “I’d write that down, Bob. You might put it in a review.”

  It was plain to see that the Waddington I had met on the quays was a far more complex figure than I’d taken him for. The jealousy, or whatever it was, in the room was palpable. I sat there for another twenty minutes, listening to McAlmon and the Burdocks talk about other writers of the Quarter and drinking tea.

  It was dark when I put my teacup down and made my way across the dim courtyard and through the huge double doors to the Quai d’Anjou. I walked around the island for a few minutes, catching glimpses of the far shores through the cross streets from time to time and hearing some Mozart being played in the church, not far from an old building with gilded fishheaded drainpipes grinning down at me.

  I found a restaurant on the island and ate a good meal. Seafood was the specialty and was treated seriously by the family who ran the place. Steaming platters were served all around me on marble-topped tables. I was a little bothered by the fact that almost all of the customers were speaking English. As I ate my hake, I could appreciate how it might feel to be French and hear a foreign tongue making its insidious way into the very heart of the city.

  That night, talk of Jack de Paris was all you could hear at the Dôme, where I sat looking out into the boulevard from the terrasse. While it was mostly over the heads of the tourists, all of the regulars (and I was now numbering myself with them) were talking about the last hours of Andrée Chastel.

  “She was standing over there under the streetlights last night. I tell you, damn it, she was almost pretty. I could see what Zadkine was always talking about. Good bones.” It was Pascin talking to two of his models. “I was thinking of painting her. That’s the truth. She had the mark of something on her. I didn’t know what it was.”

  “Are we going to eat now?” asked the older of the girls. “You’ve told us about that bitch six times and she’s just as dead now as when you began. So what’s the use?”

  A beautiful redhead walked by with her hand on the arm of a Japanese wearing a stiff collar and tie. She looked American. Pascin sang out:

  “Foujita!”

  The Japanese turned his head, stopped and smiled at the painter. After a whispered word to the lady, they joined the artist and his models, which necessitated the shifting of two tables and several chairs. The models examined the redhead intently, assessing the possible threat.

  “Jules, my dear friend,” Foujita said in heavily accented French. “I hope you w
ill see your lovely companions home tonight!”

  “If we don’t go to eat soon,” said the model who had spoken before, “I’ll take my chances with Jack. Come on, Jules! You said we were going an hour ago.” Pascin moved the brim of his derby hat so that it covered one eye. By this time, the newcomers were seated and had begun to light their cigarettes. Later, Wad told me that Foujita was a painter as well. Known as the Japanese Rubens by the critics, he specialized in rendering nudes with lustrous pink flesh.

  I’d just decided to finish my drink and go home for an early night when I saw Biz getting out of a taxi and holding up her hand to shelter her eyes from the harsh overhead lights. She saw me sitting behind the painters and models and made her way through the packed terrasse towards me.

  “Hello there! I’m absolutely dying of thirst! Would you buy a drink for a chap before she drops?”

  “Certainly. What would you like?”

  “What are you drinking?”

  “I was just going to have another beer,” I lied. “How does that sound?”

  “Bang on. It sounds like the doctor’s own medicine. You’re Mike Ford, or is it Ward? I’m not very good at names. You’ll have to indulge me as a war casualty. I had my memory broken in three places.”

  “Was it painful?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  The waiter came and took our orders and in a short time returned with two lagers in tall glasses. “Here’s mud,” she said as she smiled at me over her drink. The beer was cold and felt good all the way down. Biz had nearly finished her glass before I had well begun a second sip. “I say, this is good,” she said.

  “Have you lived in the Quarter long?” I asked.

  “Don’t let’s ask questions, darling Mike, let’s just get swizzled. What do you say? I’m all talked out. I just left a man in the crillon bar who thinks he’s my fiancé. Another wants to take me to Scotland. Scotland! From the age of seven I wanted nothing more than to leave Scotland. But this fellow from the Crillon, he couldn’t know about that. Give a chap a cigarette, will you? I haven’t actually owned a paid-for packet of my own for three days. I’m terrible when I’m like this. Nobody should have anything to do with me.”