Murder in Montparnasse

by Howard Engel

  “Biz, you’re a snob! I never would have believed it!”

  “Yes, I bloody well am, Wad. It keeps me from being taken in by that carnivorous poseuse. She was actually lecturing me about ‘a woman’s place.’ This at the bar of the Crillon!”

  “Biz, Julia is a friend of mine. She’s Hash’s best friend in Paris. I guess you forgot that.”

  “Another thing, dear Waddington. You must find another, less conspicuous restaurant for your tête-à-têtes. A chap doesn’t quite know where to look. I wouldn’t want to embarrass such a good old friend, Wad. You must see that?”

  “Oh, let’s close the subject, please,” George said. “You promised me you weren’t going to speak of that, my dear.”

  All of us tried to change the subject at once. The resulting outburst, scored for five parts, ended as abruptly as it began. It was George’s voice that in the end prevailed.

  “I think I’m tight enough now to go back to the subject I was about to broach when Don came roaring in across the street.”

  “Didn’t mean to spoil your moment, George,” Don said.

  “What’s the question, George?” Wad asked, with some of the heat he had not been able to expend in Biz’s direction.

  “Well, Wad, we all know you’ve been working on that book of yours. The Spanish book. Working damned hard at it, I hear.”

  “And?”

  “Well, damn it all, we understand that you’ve put us all in it.”

  “Who do you know who’s read it?” Wad’s voice was even and quiet.

  “Now, don’t get your puttees tangled, old man. Hear me out.”

  “You’re talking about a book that nobody has read, George. I was only reminding you. Just for the record.”

  “Well, good, then. We haven’t seen the book, but all of us have a good idea that we are models for some of the characters. You’ve hinted as much, old man. You can’t deny it. You told me yourself that you put a lot of worthless characters in it.”

  “Are you saying that that’s how you think you recognize yourselves?” Wad threw his head back and pretended to laugh, but the effect failed. “Come on, George. You can think faster than that.”

  “You’re not making this easy, old man. A chap gets the feeling when he’s being taken down and studied. We have talked about this among ourselves and agreed that, since you’re such a damned good fellow, that, well. . .”

  “Come to the point, George. I want to hear the end of this.”

  “Well, now we hear Hal, here, has introduced you to his publisher and that they are interested in publishing the book.”

  “You’re a little behind, George. They’ve already published one book of stories and sketches and I have a contract for a second and even a third book.”

  “You know I’m not much of a reader, Wad. The point is it would embarrass all of us to be recognized as characters in a novel. I heard that Burdock chap saying you were working on a roman à clef. Now we all know what that means.”

  “Go on, damn it!”

  “You’re not making this a bit easy, Waddington.”

  “What do you want me to do? Burn the manuscript?”

  “Steady on! We’re not trying to bring pressure to bear.”

  “What do you call this, then? A garden party? I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to change a comma to please you, George, as pleasant as you are. What I write is my business and what I publish I’ll stand behind!”

  “This is something for lawyers to talk about!” Hal put in. “We could get an injunction. They stopped Joyce publishing Ulysses in the Little Review, you’ll remember.”

  “And failing that, old chap, there are other ways of making a fellow see reason. Society is a very giving and forgiving institution, Wad, but one must obey the rules of the game. And when a chap crosses the line, society takes its gloves off.”

  “You call it society; I call it a kangaroo court.”

  “Try to see it our way, old man,” George said.

  “I don’t have to justify what I’ve done to you, George! Christ Almighty, you don’t understand about this. Mike, you tell them.”

  “Mike? Oh, sure thing! Mike wasn’t in Spain. He doesn’t even have a walking-on part in this. He didn’t make a damned fool of himself with Spanish vino.” There wasn’t much I could say after that.

  “Don, say something. You were with us. Wad’s in one of his holier-than-thou moods where he is defending the integrity of the artist over chaps like us. Just look at him! Horatius at the bridge has nothing on him.” George’s face appeared to be on the point of melting from drink.

  “Jay, there’s something in what they say, old son. I’d go through hell for you, kid, but you’re playing with their lives. Hell! With my life! I was forgetting that. I’ll be damned if I can see any good coming out of this for any of us, unless it’s you.”

  “Nobody recognizes himself in fiction, Don. It’s a well-known fact.”

  “It’s other people recognizing me that I’m worried about, old man. I’ll never get through the thing, to be honest.” George looked to the others to see if there were arguments that hadn’t been made yet.

  “Wad, you know we all think of you as our friend?” Biz was trying something new. “It would be caddish of you to make public what was, after all, a private party. Even if you simply report the facts, it would demonstrate that you are no gentleman.”

  “You aren’t giving me much credit, any of you. Do you imagine that I’m the first writer to borrow a few things from the people he knows? Where do you think a writer gets his material? Damn it all, is it news to you that Mark Twain grew up with a kid like Huck Finn and that Daniel Defoe knew of a castaway that he called Robinson Crusoe?”

  “We’re not talking about Robinson Crusoe or about any dead people. We’re talking about us, Jay!” Don looked serious and the others were watching him. Wad had a beleaguered expression. “We are talking about the laws of libel, which has to do with damage to the reputation of a living person. You can’t bring discredit on an enemy and get away with it. How do you imagine you can treat a friend that way?”

  “I’ve been to see a lawyer, Wad. Just for clarification,” said Hal.

  Leopold may have the right end of the stick in this, old man. Perhaps we should all consult counsel.”

  “Damn it, George, are you threatening me?”

  “Take it as you see fit. The best suggestion I can make is that you forget all about this Spanish book.”

  “Or?”

  “Be prepared to take the consequences.”

  “Of all the bloody cheek! I’ll see one and all of you in hell first!”

  “So be it! So be it! And remember, whatever happens, you brought this on yourself!”

  CHAPTER 17

  Freddy, the friendly barman, finally lost patience with us at I don’t remember what hour. He threw us into the rue Delambre after changing his white jacket and putting on a topcoat. I was still trying to get the others to leave Waddington alone. It didn’t do any good. Wad just stood there, propped against a street lamp as though he were a stag at bay. Soon his truculent silence began to pay off: Hal and Don, tired of standing around on the corner, waved that they had had enough and left; George and Biz started shouting at one another, and George stomped off in the direction that Hal and Don had taken. Wad went off into the dawn that was breaking over the rooftops along the boulevard, going in a direction that wouldn’t take him back to his street. Somehow the evening ended with Biz and me in a taxi heading back to the rue Broca and Biz’s studio. We were both rather tight and not responsible. We continued in that fashion up the stairs, after the concierge finally pulled the cordon, swearing loudly. I remember there was some difficulty with the key.

  The studio was larger than it had appeared on the night of the party. The morning light was pouring unwanted into the room, picking out motes of dust like suspended punctuation marks in the slanted shafts. Biz dropped her coat at the foot of the stairs and walked over it towards me. I held her to me as we ki
ssed, and then I followed her up the steps to her balcony bedroom. By the time I had loosened my necktie and removed my jacket, Biz was lying on her untidy bed, fast asleep. I looked down at her to see whether there might not still be a flicker of life, but there wasn’t. I waited a few minutes, hoping that in another moment she might open her eyes, smile up at me and say, “Hello, you.” But she didn’t. I removed her shoes and put them neatly beside her bed, where the floor was paved with discarded clothing and accessories. On my way out, I picked up the discarded trenchcoat and hung it over the chair on the posing rostrum. There was a gentle sound of snoring coming from the loft as I let myself out. I thought about the night we’d taken Wilson O’Donnell home to the rue de Tilsitt and laughed to myself. There were more flights of stairs going down than I remembered.

  I found a working-men’s café, open for early starters, and ordered a shot of applejack to drink with my coffee. The stale roll needed dunking in this chicory-rich mixture before I could eat any. I was gritty around the eyes and felt like stepping into the shower-bath in my parents’ house in Toronto. It was the first time I’d thought of Toronto in some weeks, I thought, and then remembered that it was only a few hours ago I was recalling an evening with Morley at the Mutual Street Arena watching some welterweights. I had to laugh.

  I walked back to the rue Bonaparte. Mme. Janot was already washing down the sidewalk in front of number 56. We scarcely nodded as I hurried by her and through the door.

  The morning papers brought the news of another death. The body of Madeleine Charpier had been found against the railings at the bottom of the entrance to the Edgar-Quinet station, not far from the Montparnasse cemetery. Like the others, she had been stabbed, probably with a pair of scissors. Jules Voisin, for fifteen years a veteran with the Métropolitain company, found the body when he locked the gate after the last passenger had left the last train. He was questioned at the scene of the crime and released. When asked by reporters whether this was another of Jack de Paris’s unchecked series of killings, the prefect refused to comment.

  Quentin Bryson was doing a story about the murder when I came into the office nursing a headache. He gave me the details, including the information that the deceased had been born in a village in the Vaucluse, near Avignon, where her family could be traced through ten generations. She had been working as a model for Poiret, the fashion designer, and, more recently, for a painter named Léger. She had a son, who had won a place at the École Normale. According to Quent’s information, which was usually good, there were no additional clues found at the scene that had not been reported in the papers.

  At lunch he said that his wife had been talking about inviting me to dinner in order to give me a home-cooked meal. No date was suggested, so I filed the invitation with all the others before it. Quent stated at lunch that what I needed in my life was a motor-car and a place in the country. That, he thought, would give me an outlet from the pressure of work, a chance to rekindle the resources depleted during the day, and would present vistas of fields and forest that rest the eyes and hurt not. I told him I thought I needed to find a girl. I suggested that we take a walk along the rue du Faubourg-St-Denis after we finished our luncheon. There we could find a solution to my problems for a few francs and hardly any risk. Quent held his match in the air above the pipe he was about to light and said that there was no use talking to me when I refused to be serious.

  Wad stood me up on the red clay courts off the boulevard Arago. He’d never done that before, and so, after waiting around for another half hour and watching a couple of newcomers slam the ball around, I set out walking in the direction of Notre-Dame-des-Champs. As I walked, I started going over in my head the final box score of the night before. I remembered the prizefight clearly, and even Wad’s quarrel with Hash. After that things began to get tangled. There were too many faces and they were all of them drunk and shouting at one another. If Wad had packed all of them into his damned book, he couldn’t have left much room for plot, I thought. Still, when Wad wandered away from the me Delambre, he and I were still on speaking terms. There was no explanation of his failure to appear on the boulevard Arago to be found in the events of last night. Unless it was a headache.

  The sight of Don Hughes sitting at a table in the Closerie des Lilas pulled me back to the reality of the cold wind blowing across the wide boulevard St-Michel and into my bones.

  “Hello there, Mike!” Don called, having sighted me about the same moment I’d seen him. He waved me to take the yellow wicker chair opposite him. “Did all of that really happen last night or was it a nightmare for general admission, no reserved seating?”

  “You remember it all?” I asked.

  “It needed editing. I cut it short before the voices were raised and the threats began.”

  “Don, you’re the only person in the world I can ask this. What the hell happened down in Spain to cause all of this? I feel like an outsider, the only man in town who doesn’t know what went on. Can you give me a short version, or will I have to wait until that book comes out?”

  “I can’t see a pal writhing in pain. Puts me in mind of Berlin, which is still in —”

  “A ferment. I heard,” I said, beating Don to his joke.

  “The very word for it, Mike.” The waiter hovered near. Service was always good at the Lilas. As soon as drinks arrived, Don began.

  “Wad had arranged to go down to the fiesta in Pamplona. He’s been going every summer since ‘23. Last year he invited me along, and we went up to Burguete first for the fishing. Had a wonderful time. This year we did the same, but it was terrible. Logging had spoiled the river. So, he was in a black mood when we got to Pamplona. Then things got worse. Biz and George had invited themselves to the fiesta while we were still in Paris, when it was almost too late to get tickets. Hal Leopold was going to be there too.”

  “An unwieldy party at mealtimes,” I said.

  “That’s not all. You see, before we left Paris, Biz had run off with Leopold to San Sebastian.”

  “Hal with Biz? I don’t believe it!”

  “Biz confessed to Wad, who tried to warn Hal that Biz was coming to Spain with George. Hal refused to change his plans.”

  “How embarrassing for everybody.”

  “Hal wouldn’t recognize that the nuptial flight was over, that he’d been a momentary whim of the lady. You know how stubborn and long-suffering he can be.”

  “Jesus!” I said.

  “As usual, Mike, you understate the case. Can you imagine us in the same hotel for a week of drinking, dancing and bull fighting? Of course, Waddington tried to be protective of Biz and had a conniption fit whenever Hal came near her. Wad knocked him down one night.”

  “He repeated that scene recently at the Dingo.”

  “Glad I missed it. Wad was either crazy in love with Biz himself or demented with alcohol poisoning.”

  “Well, if he was in love with her, why didn’t he do something about it?”

  “He couldn’t with Hash sitting there, in the role of the adoring wife who’d put her inheritance on the table to support both of them. Besides, it was all too public. No place to hide.”

  “What happened then?”

  “George ran out of money at the end of the fiesta. Everybody went away mad.”

  “Biz didn’t dance on any tables or run away with a picador?”

  “Not while I was around.”

  “That’s not much to fill a book. I guess he could describe a bullfight or two.”

  “Don’t forget that we were all tight for the week and Biz can hold her liquor with the best. Still, I’m not anxious to see all of it between the pages of a book. Wad will change our names, of course, but I’ll know I’m the American lug without the Jewish mother.”

  “I thought they were all down on Hal because he was Jewish.”

  “It didn’t help. But mainly it’s because he didn’t know when to go away. He kept hoping he could find a little of what went on in San Sebastian and fan it up again.”
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  “Well, well, well.”

  “Couldn’t have said it more brilliantly myself.”

  We drank our drinks and talked of other things for a few minutes. I told him that Wad had stood me up on the red clay courts and that I was on my way to see what had happened. Don told me to give the gang his love. “I’m catching the slow afternoon train back to Berlin. I got a wire this morning. They found my last draft of the script cold and they’re in a ferment about it, and I won’t see you again until I get back after Christmas.” I put some money on the table to cover my drink, against Don’s protests, and we shook hands.

  The high whirring of the buzzsaw in the courtyard distracted me from my speculations about what Waddington had done after the débâcle at the Dingo. The concierge recognized me and let me go up to the flat above the carpenter’s yard. Hash opened the door quickly when I knocked.

  “Oh, Mike! I’m glad you’ve come. Have you seen my husband anywhere?” She was carrying young Snick in her arms. He held his mother tighter as I followed Hash’s invitation to come into the front room. Snick was examining me closely.

  “You not Papa. Ward notta Papa.”

  “He didn’t keep our date for tennis,” I said. “That’s why I came here.”

  “You know he didn’t come home last night?” She was wearing an old shirtwaist; her nose was looking pink, as were her large eyes. “I hope you don’t want a drink, Mike. There isn’t a drop in the apartment.”

  “No thanks. Have you any idea where he is?”

  “I’m not allowing myself to think in that direction. He promised to take Snick for a walk in the Luxembourg after meeting you for your match. He didn’t go near the Closerie this morning. They haven’t seen him since yesterday. That’s what they said.”

  I sat down in a worn blue-velvet chair with a nice French shape to it and watched Hash with the boy. She kept looking out the window, and I saw how her short auburn hair moved with her head when she turned. After awhile she closed the window, and the noise from outside was cut in half.

  “Has this ever happened before, Hash?”