Murder in Montparnasse

by Howard Engel

  I ran down the steps into the Métro at the Champs-Élysées, waited endlessly for the second train to come to the Châtelet station, then pushed against the crowd descending into the St-Germain-des-Prés station on my way out. On my way to my room, the concierge handed me some letters and postcards. I arranged with her to have a bath drawn; it was part of the bargain I’d made with her. She told me that she would knock on my door when it was ready. Once inside the room under the slate roof, I locked the door behind me and checked to see whether the bag was where I had left it. It was.

  This time I opened it without the excuse that I was in search of a clue to the owner. There was a certain desperation in my fingers as I spread out the contents on the plain wooden table that served both as a wash-stand and a desk. I found my notebook and opened it to a fresh page. Here I listed:

  1 handkerchief (gold flecks)

  1 cigarette case (silver)

  1 postcard (Françoise)

  1 Parker pen

  1 notebook

  2 aspirins

  1 page of typewriting

  1 box matches

  5,237.85 francs in bills and coins

  1 compact with make-up

  1 identity card from Berlitz School

  1 pair kid gloves

  I examined all of these things again: the postcard from Françoise with the Tilsitt address, the perfumed handkerchief with the gold flecks Laure had wiped from her face after the students had been chased from the Dôme, the expensive fountain pen and cigarette case and her gloves. Without looking further, I wondered how I could have raised a moment’s doubt about the owner of the bag. Of course, it was the implication! In addition to these items that I recognized, a notebook, written in closely-packed French that I couldn’t decipher, was no help to me. But a page, a yellowing page of newsprint paper, the same sort we use at the agency, attracted my attention. On it I read the following, in blurry, typewritten sentences:

  They hanged the three whores in the marketplace

  after lunch. The fat one with the broken shoe

  hobbled up the steps and had to be held…

  The whole passage ran to under a dozen lines. It was centred on the page so that I was sure that this was the entire piece; there was no second page. It didn’t seem to be part of anything, simply an isolated event written in stark, realistic terms as though by an eyewitness. As I refolded the paper, a bent corner fell off onto the table. In this condition, it could not have survived in Laure’s purse for very long. Could this have been the piece of paper she showed Waddington at the Dôme?

  As I stared at the list in my notebook and the short prose piece on the yellow newsprint, I became acutely aware of my position should I be discovered with this purse in my possession. I would have a difficult time in a back room of the commissariat, trying to explain myself and my relationship to the dead woman. No wonder my every nerve and fibre rebelled against identifying Laure with the latest victim of Jack de Paris. As if to confirm my anxiety, I dropped Laure’s notebook to the floor when the concierge knocked upon my door to tell me that the bath had been drawn and the bathroom now awaited me. Quickly, I put the contents of the bag back together and clicked the clasp.

  An hour and a half later, I rang the bell at Laure’s building to attract her concierge. When she came to the door, which she opened no more than she had to, she told me that Laure, “that one,” as she described her, “had not been seen all day.” She launched into a diatribe against young women today and I nodded until I could properly take my leave.

  It cost me just a franc to hire a boy outside St-Sulpice. I gave him the handbag and instructed him to take it into the commissariat du Sixième Arrondissement. I watched him long enough over the sculptured horses in the fountain to see that he went inside. Then I quickly walked into the rue Madame and tried to make as much speed as I could before I came to the rue d’Assas, where a translator I’d met lived. It was a good moment for a call, so I paid him a short visit and enjoyed the drink he poured me more than he could have known. It felt good to be rid of the handbag, but I was now plagued by the thought that somehow it would be traced back to me. The French police were astute when they chose to be. My fingerprints were all over the bag and the papers within it. Could they read fingerprints left on leather or paper? I didn’t know. The only thought that gave me peace was the fact that my fingerprints had never been taken and so were not in the files of the French police. That calmed me considerably, as did the invitation from my translator friend to taste some cherries preserved in alcohol.

  Later, when my host had walked with me to the Dôme, I sat with him watching the pedestrians walking by, holding their coats around them.

  “It was a terrible summer,” my friend said. “Now it’s coming on winter. Maybe I’ll escape to Italy. If it gets worse, I’ll definitely go south.”

  Fine for him, I thought. Some of us have little choice. After he left me, I continued to watch the moving throng outside. Tonight it looked sad. Poor deluded tourists! Didn’t they know they’d come too late to the City of Light? I worked it out; we were all five years too late. All the truly great painters had either died or moved away. Modigliani was dead, and so were Cormon and Bannat. John Singer Sargent never understood Vorticism; now they both were dead. Picasso was seldom seen on Montparnasse. Matisse had moved to the south. Proust and Apollinaire were gone, gathered to their ancestors. I’d even missed the visiting revolutionaries from Russia. Was it Lenin or Trotsky who had plotted on the terrasse at the Rotonde? Perhaps both. Now all these café chairs were occupied by Vlamincks, Soutines and other lesser talents like Pascin, Gris and Denis. Did they think they could take the places of the Montparnasse originals? I was entertaining this thought while watching a fellow I knew as Kisling count out his change twice before leaving most of it beside his two saucers and empty glass. When he got up and left, I saw Cendrars, looking like the mutilé de guerre he was, with his empty sleeve pinned up. A spent force, I thought.

  “Hello, Michaeleen! What are you looking so glum about?” It was Waddington, of course. I didn’t even have to look up.

  “Hello yourself. Sit down.” When I looked up, I caught him glancing at the other tables near mine, perhaps looking for a more agreeable companion. He must have been working on something: his beard was a two- or three- day growth. He was wearing an open shirt over a sweatshirt, all nearly hidden by a double-breasted suit badly in need of a flat iron. I didn’t mind him watching me examine him. I’d seen him examine me often enough.

  “I can see that you have served in the Indian Army, were wounded in the heel of your left foot and are left-handed on your mother’s side. I can see that you have been shearing sheep out of season. But what is that to gentlemen of the world?”

  “Hell, my left heel is about the only place I wasn’t hit. Took a piece of metal out of my knee yesterday morning. Stuff keeps working its way out.” Wad bunched himself down into the wicker chair opposite me.

  “If the metal is zinc, you can open a bar.”

  “A lot of Americans have washed up on zinc beaches, Wardo.”

  “What have you seen of the old gang?”

  “That bunch of worthless characters? I’ve been avoiding them since I started working again. Rewriting and cutting. It’s nearly ready to send to New York,” he said, pretending to give me a left and then a right jab over my saucer and coffee.

  “You call them characters because they’re all in the book, I presume. Maybe one of them will come looking for you with a gun.”

  “I’m not saying that I’ve put anybody you know in the book. But, kid, you should know that nobody ever recognizes himself in a book. Everybody knows that.”

  “Have you seen Laure Duclos in the last few days?” I tried to make the question as casual as I could, but I could see that it put him on edge. A muscle in his cheek twitched, stretching his mouth into a half-smile.

  “Told you, I’ve been working. When I work, Michaeleen, I curtail the social commitments to three meals a day and a
good night’s sleep.”

  “So, you’ve not been seen on the boulevard?”

  “I told you, Mike! Do I have to chew my cabbage twice?”

  “Hey! Don’t get sore! I’m sitting here having a swell time and suddenly Anger shows his ruddy face! Did you join me for a drink or an argument?”

  Waddington grinned and sat back, glancing over his shoulder to see whether the waiter was working his way in our direction.

  “Are you playing tennis these days, Mike?”

  “When I get a chance. Mornings are tough for me. Late afternoons are easier.”

  “Good! I can’t make it in the morning either. Sorry I growled at you, Michaeleen. Laure’s not my favourite character.”

  “No?”

  “Hell, it’s the way she infiltrates the American lines. Like she’s a French spy. Like Mata Hari, whom I met once, but that’s another story —”

  ‘“And besides, the wench is dead.’”

  “What?” Wad was on his feet and looking shocked.

  “Mata Hari was shot eight years ago. It’s hardly news. Were you in France in 1917?”

  Wad made a face and sat down again. “Oh, shove it along, Mike! I thought you meant. … How the hell does anybody talk to you?” He wiped both sides of his moustache with a curved index finger. “How do you know for sure that I didn’t meet the lady?”

  “You’re talking about Mata Hari again, are you?”

  He didn’t bother to nod. “Maybe it was in a shabby room with a high ceiling in the Seventh Arrondissement, some place near the Champs-de-Mars? Maybe it was an afternoon, and the light through the shutters painted stripes on the wall and bed?”

  He was making me lose my grip on the facts such as I knew them. I’d just done a piece on Mata, so I was sound there, but I was short on facts about Jason Waddington.

  “You couldn’t have been much older than eighteen then, Wad. What was your special appeal for the lady?”

  “She found out through the Allied General Staff that I was singularly well-endowed. She was sent to investigate on behalf of the German High Command in the name of the German People.”

  “Highly democratic. And?”

  “Mata Hari did her duty.”

  “You’ve got it bad, Waddington! I’ve worked in paddocks with less of what you’re shovelling.”

  “You wound me, Mike. Cynicism like that led to the fall of Rome. I preserve a tender memory of dear Mata. She paid a high price for our night of bliss.”

  “Uncle! Uncle!” I cried. “You win, I lose! Only stop!” We both laughed, and Wad ordered a beer for himself. I decided to switch to beer as well. The waiter was preoccupied and sweaty; I wondered what was happening in his life. When the drinks came, I tried to get back to our earlier discussion.

  “You said that Laure infiltrated the American lines like your dear friend Mata Hari. I’m interested in her, Wad. I might put her in a sketch I’m thinking of. Unless you’ve done her already?”

  “Hell, no!” he said, taking a cigarette from my case. “Help yourself.” He was showing a shine on his forehead and drank off his beer as soon as it came to the table. “Shouldn’t talk about what you’re working on, Wardo. It’ll spook the work as sure as sunrise. The Quarter’s full of writers who talk about what they’re going to do, or are planning to do, or plotting to do. In the meantime, all they do is build pagodas of saucers on tables like this one. I call people like that scum.”

  “Thanks, I’ll remember that,” I said, adding, “and what about Laure?”

  Wad frowned and pulled at the corner of his moustache. “Laure, Michaeleen, is out for learning. It’s as though she was studying her friends to get her manners perfect or something. She’s fly about what’s in and what’s out of fashion. That’s why she hangs around with Julia Lowry. Because of Paris Vogue. She tips off the French press about American trends. She soaks up information and always manages to turn it to her advantage. She’s learned a lot from the men she’s lived with, especially Wilson O’Donnell.”

  “What?” I couldn’t believe what Wad had just said.

  “O’Donnell’s a born teacher. Information, the buying and selling of, that’s Laure’s stock in trade.”

  “No, I meant about them living together I want to hear.”

  “Hell, I thought you knew. Laure gets around.”

  “No, I didn’t know. I suppose everyone else does?”

  “This is not for one of your cables, old man. It could hurt Wilson professionally and get him in dutch with that crazy wife of his. Georgia is more than a little jealous. She asks where he’s been when he goes out to buy a cigar.”

  “You seem to know a lot about Laure and the O’Donnells.”

  “Met Wilson in the Dingo a few months ago. He passed out in my arms. Wilson’s always passing out. He was born a couple of drinks below par.”

  “And Laure? Was she under orders of the Allied High Command?”

  “Ah, kid. Let’s lay off Laure, huh? She’s somebody to keep a paddle-length away from.”

  I was wondering whether to share my suspicions about Laure’s possible fate with Wad. I was worried about her. Several times a day I had to blink back the image of her handbag lying in the gutter. But her death was still such a far-fetched idea, even to me, that I decided not to speak of it. I would have given a lot to see Wad’s reaction, although I didn’t completely trust him on this subject. I knew he had seen her the night she disappeared. I didn’t want him to know that I had reasons for suspecting she might have been Jack’s latest victim.

  In the back of my mind, I’d decided to try to get a story about Wilson O’Donnell for the agency. It would give me a chance to see him from across a table. I wanted to clear up the mystery of 14, rue de Tilsitt. French café tables are smaller than tables at home, and faces are consequently thrust closer together. In some cases the intimacy is welcome. I don’t know what I expected to find in the face of Wilson O’Donnell.

  When I put my mind back into focus, Wad was talking about his life in Toronto. “On Sundays, Hash and I used to go out to Woodbine to watch the horses work out on the track.”

  “But there are no races on Sundays, Wad. Are you Pulling my leg again?”

  “Hell, kid, in those days we were too poor to bet most of the time. And the horses have to be worked whether they are racing or not. Horses don’t know it’s Sunday.”

  It was late when we got up and headed down the rue Vavin. I left Wad where his long narrow street crossed my slightly longer way back to the rue Bonaparte.

  CHAPTER 11

  They were taking pictures outside Sylvia Beach’s book-shop on the rue de l’Odéon. A young man with blond bangs was pretending to climb down from a second-floor window to the not-very-secure helping hand held up to him. The hand belonged to the bob-headed proprietor herself, who was admonishing the young man to be careful. When enough exposures had been made, the photographer, a woman with a plain round face and a long woollen skirt with a vest, took her camera into the bookstore at number 12. Sylvia Beach and I followed. I apologized for spoiling one of the pictures by blundering into the scene.

  “Don’t be silly, young man,” Miss Beach said, “it may turn out to be the best on the roll.” She introduced herself and her friend, the photographer, Adrienne Monnier, who ran the French bookshop across the street at number 7. I didn’t mention that this was not my first visit to the rue de l’Odéon. I had stopped by for a few minutes during my first week in Paris, to see with my own eyes the place that Morley Callaghan had told me about. Of course, Morley’s information came from Waddington, who was a friend of Callaghan’s in Toronto. I explained to Miss Beach that I was expecting to meet Wilson O’Donnell at the shop for an interview I was doing for the news service.

  “Then you’d better have a chair, you know,” she said. “I once lost half a day waiting for Wilson to keep an appointment. And I’m not the only one he’s kept dangling.”

  “No indeed,” Adrienne Monnier agreed, in inflections strikingly similar to Mi
ss Beach’s.

  “Have you seen his new book?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I read it on the boat on my way over from Canada.”

  “Ah, another Canadian!”

  “You mean there are more of us?”

  “Oh dear, yes,” Miss Beach said. “The most famous poet in the world lives in the Place du Panthéon.” She exchanged a wry look with her friend.

  “But T.S. Eliot is in London and is an American.”

  “But I’m talking about Robert W. Service, who wrote ‘The Shooting of Dangerous Dan McGrew.’”

  “Canada has a great deal to answer for,” I said.

  “Oh, don’t be a snob, Mr. Ward. Bob’s a very good fellow and all the real poets love him dearly.”

  “Especially James Stephens,” added Mlle. Monnier.

  “Dear me, yes! They go about like a pair of vaudeville soft-shoe dancers. They’re great friends. Bob’s been trying to learn how to paint.”

  I took out my watch and looked at it while Miss Beach poured a cup of coffee for me from a well-used pot. O’Donnell was half an hour late. I accepted the coffee and complimented Miss Beach and her friend on their locations; I’d been watching the pedestrian traffic moving up the slight rise in the direction of the Odéon, the Theatre of France. When I brought the conversation around to Waddington, they both smiled at the mention of his name. I asked if there was a copy of Wad’s stories, for all time, in the shop.