by Howard Engel
“I didn’t know anything about it, but Dark Laughter was such a self-parody, I don’t see what more Wad could do to it. It wasn’t a good book.”
“Yes,” said Alice, “but to do that to a friend! Someone who has helped you so much, Waddington. You are naughty even to think of such a thing.” Hélène had arrived with a tray of drinks and offered them first to Hash. “It’s an infusion of thyme in a cordial that I made in Belley this summer. Oh, how I long to have the run of a real kitchen down there! As it is, I have to do everything in a hotel room.” She said this in a lower voice to Hash and me, leaving her stinging comment to Wad still floating about in the golden glow of the pictures. It looked to be a trick of illumination, but even under the artificial electric bulbs, the paintings seemed to send out their own light.
“In writing as in everything else, Gertrude, you know you have to kill your father. I’ve been trying to break away from influences for years now. First it was Ring Lardner, then it was Anderson. He’s been wonderful to me, but, damn it all, I have to start walking on my own soon or I’ll never learn.” This conversation was interrupted by the arrival of more guests, painters, I was told unnecessarily: their wide-brimmed hats and overcoats worn as capes over their shoulders did not suggest stockbrokers. Some of them brought their wives or “companions,” as they were described. They were often beautiful women whose faces, if not more, were already familiar to art connoisseurs. They appeared to be cowed by the present company and began looking at the pictures as soon as they had been presented.
I failed to catch all of their names, but the ailing Juan Gris put in an appearance, as did Marie Laurencin, who, bravest of her sex, went up to both of our hostesses and embraced them warmly. The sculptor Jacques Lipchitz was soon telling jokes about Picasso, who, he said, had grown so grand nowadays.
Soon the first batch of newcomers was augmented by a second wave. Maurice Denis was among them. He quickly scanned the walls for something he had painted, as though that would make him more comfortable.
The sound of talk and laughter filled the room. Alice and Gertrude were no longer enthroned: their high-backed Renaissance chairs now looked more than empty, as their former occupants circulated among the company. One picked up scraps of conversations, no more:
“. . . He said to Radiguet and me, let’s go to Marseilles . . .”
“. . . Roche knows everybody; that’s his trouble . . .”
“. . . Auric and Honegger and, of course, Darius were there . . .”
“. . . Man Ray didn’t retouch the picture. He swears that’s the way she is . . .”
“Are you enjoying yourself, Mr. Ward?” It was Gertrude Stein, and the question was meant for me.
“Of course,” I said, “but the painters do get in the way of the paintings.”
“You must see them by daylight. Why don’t you come and we can drink in the pictures and have a real talk.”
“I would be greatly honoured,” I said.
She moved her magnificent head closer. “You can talk the language of convention very well, and you do it very often, but can you talk, really talk, Mr. Ward? That’s what I want to find out. Because, once you learn to talk, and learn to hear yourself talking, you will soon be ready to write.”
“Waddington has been talking too much, it would seem.”
“Oh, come now, Mr. Ward. We all have our egos. They crave a dance in the sun. Let yours romp in the sun too. And bring me something you have written. Pussy has taken quite a shine to you, and I want to see what is under the shine.”
“How do I say I’m deeply flattered in an acceptable way?”
“You’ve made a beginning. Now go talk to Marie Laurencin. She was Apollinaire’s mistress, you know. Go, learn something.”
While Marie Laurencin was very charming, she really had very little to say to a young Canadian who neither painted nor collected. She passed me on to Jules Pascin, a painter I had often seen at the Dôme and the Select. His eyes were heavy-lidded and his face was tragic in a public way, as though his troubles were the subject of a play and he were the chief actor. For awhile, he was telling me about how he painted a portrait from the inside out. We looked at the Picassos together. He agreed with everybody else that Picasso had become rather grand these last few years. “You cut off your friends — it’s like cutting your roots,” he said. “He has broken with all his old friends: Derain, Braque, Gromaire, Utrillo, Miró, Soutine, Léger. He owes them all drinks, so he avoids them.”
Later, I was standing near Hash, who asked if I was enjoying myself. I told her that it was all nearly overwhelming. I hadn’t expected Gertrude Stein to be so friendly. I described to her my imagined version: the probing questions, the icy look that penetrated the emptiness within me, the failed examination, the summary dismissal.
“Oh, she’s not a bit like that,” Hash said, taking a clean handkerchief out of her bag and catching a sneeze just in time. “I’ll grant you, she can turn on the crystalline gaze if she wants to. She doesn’t suffer fools. But she couldn’t help liking you, Mike. You’re so nice. Damn it! I’m getting a cold.”
“Are you well enough to stay, or would you like to go home?”
“I’m fine, Mike. You’re so good to look after me. I’m thinking of the other day, too. I don’t know how . . .”
“Let’s not even talk about it. I’m glad things have worked out.”
“Whenever I fall out of a window, some nice man saves me. Did I tell you I fell out of a window when I was little? I was rescued from the bushes by the gardener. My Tatie came along to rescue me later from being an old-maid piano teacher. Then, when Tatie was away in Switzerland and I caught that terrible influenza, Anson Tyler was at my bedside every day until I was well again. I never would have been able to get up out of bed to join Tatie in Lausanne if it hadn’t been for Anson. And now you, dear Michael. You’re my guardian angel.”
“Archangel, actually. But don’t let it get around.”
“You’re very sweet.”
“You’re pretty swell yourself, Hash. It’s good to see you smiling again.”
I next talked to a dapper little man who ran a bookstore and art gallery and was married to Helena Rubenstein, the cosmetician. He told me that he was also getting into publishing some things in a small way on the side. I liked the way he examined what was happening in the room over my shoulder.
Marie Laurencin returned to me. I was surprised by that. She was carrying two glasses of wine. She moved beautifully. I had seen the group portrait she had painted with Apollinaire and Picasso. At first, I’d taken the large head of the poet for that of Miss Stein. Apart from what my hostess had told me about her, I knew little else. I tried to recall what I could of Apollinaire’s tragic death just at the Armistice. Up close, there were lines around her eyes, but the electric light was not altogether unkind to her. She had a way of holding her head first on one side and then on the other. I confessed my near-ignorance of most things and she laughed over her glass at me. She began telling me about Apollinaire.
“That was a long time ago, you know. When you were a little boy cutting up worms with your jack-knife. Even to me, it is like a story in a storybook I read a long time ago. Some think I was his mistress when he died. I let them think that sometimes, when I’m in the mood, when I feel like it. The others I tell that I threw the great bear out of the studio in 1912, before the war. I couldn’t have him tupping every ewe in sight, the old ram, now, could I? I was twenty-five, remember. I threw him out; I gave him his congé, his dishonourable discharge from my studio. He may have been a great poet, but I was just a kid. What did I know? Twenty-five!”
As I was leaving the gathering with Marie, who had by this time asked me to call her “Coco,” we passed a compact, quiet figure in a dark suit. Coco nodded at him and received a deep and formal acknowledgement. “You find policemen everywhere these days,” she whispered to me after we had moved closer to the front door.
I put her into a taxi on the rue Guynemer. The partin
g left me with the impression that I had just kissed the hand of a gallant and beautiful woman. I walked home along the edges of the Luxembourg Gardens. Before going to sleep, I put together a few of the blue notebooks which I thought I might show Gertrude Stein when we met again.
CHAPTER 21
Bright and early on Monday morning, I was waited on by a police officer, who asked me to accompany him to the préfecture. When I asked if the request was of such urgency that I could not call my office, he shrugged. I took that to mean there was no great urgency, so I called Bryson at the agency and made an excuse. Perhaps I should have told my lie out of the hearing of the sergeant, but I didn’t think of that. I had not yet had breakfast and was a little hung over from Saturday night. I wondered whether the officer would be submitting a report along with my arrested body: “tells lies at the slightest opportunity.”
A motor-car was waiting for us with a driver already in place. We were whisked down the me Bonaparte to the river, along the quay, where I got a glimpse of the Institute, and then across Pont Neuf to the Quai des Orfèvres. We went into the Palais de Justice through a guarded portal marked “36” over the impressive entrance. With the sergeant at my side, I was conducted — yes, conducted is the right word — through high, narrow passages built within the walls of the old building. Occasionally, through a high window, I caught a glimpse of green roofing, or once, I thought, of the steeple of Sainte-Chapelle. We climbed a narrow staircase that opened up, though a closet, into a wide, carpeted corridor. Here I was asked to take a seat. Across from me, a thin young man was in close conversation with his well-nourished avocat.
“Mr. Ward?” It was a compact but well-built man of about fifty who addressed me. I stood and followed him into an office. Immediately, my eyes went to the walls. He had as many modern paintings hanging as did Gertrude Stein. I couldn’t believe it. I recognized Utrillo, Modigliani, Kisling and Soutine. When I looked back at the man now standing behind his desk, he was obviously enjoying my surprise. With a gesture, he told me to take a chair. This I did, and pulled it close to the clutter of papers, surmounted by a black hat.
“Mr. Ward, my name is Léon Zamaron, I am a commissioner of police. In recent years — I’ve been here since Picasso was in his ‘blue period,’ 1906 — I have had a rather fancy title, but what it boils down to is the fact that my colleagues have put me in charge of foreigners. They throw up their hands and say, Léon, you deal with them: you understand them, or pretend to.” I smiled to show that his act to disarm me was at least putting me more at ease than I otherwise would be in the office of the Sûreté.
“How may I assist you?” I said. This would save him from explaining to me how he was the benefactor of all these painters on the other side of the river. I wonder how many of the pictures on his walls were bribes. Apollinaire was arrested when the Mona Lisa was taken from the Louvre before the war, but Picasso was only questioned, although he had had some dealings with primitive sculptures taken from the Louvre’s collections. Had the amiable man across from me, with the hair coming down over his forehead and the neat moustache, been bought off with the pictures I saw behind him? I was taking no chances. The police were a breed apart. They often pretended to be a part of society, but, in fact, they were not. They owed a loyalty only to themselves and were more closely linked to the criminal classes than they were to respectable people. Was not the great detective Vidocq a reformed thief?
Zamaron was examining me even as I was sitting in judgment of him. “You were acquainted with the woman Laure Duclos?”
“I knew her. Yes. I suspect you know that already.”
“Yes, we do. We also know that you have an interesting theory about the reason for her death.”
“Theory rather puts a gilt frame on what may be a half-baked notion.”
“You don’t see her death as one of the series of murders that has been ascribed to the so-called Jack de Paris?”
“M. Zamaron, with all due respect, will you please come to the point? You keep telling me what is known. Could you get down to what you want to talk to me about?”
“Saturday evening, you were in less of a hurry. You had time to enjoy the pictures.”
“Saturday evening? Oh, at Miss Stein’s. How do you know I was there? Am I being watched? If I am, I shall consult my embassy as soon as I leave here.”
“Please, Mr. Ward, please!” He got up and came around his desk to sit on the edge. “My dear fellow, I saw you myself. I was there as well, looking at the pictures. Miss Stein and I are old friends.” That took me aback. Then I remembered the quiet man in the dark suit and Coco Laurencin’s comment about policemen. I felt my back unstiffening. My collar was growing uncomfortable.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I have spoken too hastily, sir.” I was still very stiff and formal, and probably right to remain so. Zamaron stayed perched on the edge of his desk.
“I know you enjoy looking at pictures, Mr. Ward. I know that you knew Mlle. Duclos. I know exactly how well you knew her. I know you had argued. I know that you are a foreigner, working under the usual arrangements for your news agency. Everything is all in order and I am not questioning any of that this morning. Do you understand?” I nodded and he went on. “I, too, believe that Mlle. Duclos was killed for private reasons and not by our random killer. How do I know this? I have a feeling in my bones. A presentiment; what can I call it? I don’t know the life expectancy of a presentiment in a Canadian court, Mr. Ward, but I can assure you that such a will o’ the wisp would not live as long as a canary under a bell jar with the air removed in the courtrooms next door. Of this I am sure.” He got up and walked back and forth in front of his private gallery.
“In order to discover the murderer of Mlle. Duclos, whom, incidentally, I knew somewhat better than you did, it is necessary to build a pyramid of proof.”
“You have talked to Jason Waddington? You have his testimony.”
“Oh, yes. He made a statement. We know all about his intrigue with her. That may be beside the point. We also know that he talked with her on the evening she died.”
“Did he tell you that, or did that information come from an informant?”
Zamaron laughed and then blew his nose as he walked over to the window, where he examined the view I couldn’t see from where I was sitting.
“The information of his — shall I call it, dalliance with the deceased? — came to us anonymously. He, himself, told us of his meeting with the woman on the night in question.”
“And I can confirm that,” I said. It struck me as typical of Wad that he should have been less than truthful to me about what he had told the police. “I saw them talking at the Dôme from across the boulevard. She left Waddington sitting at the table alone when she got up to leave.”
“Mr. Ward, were you, by any chance, our anonymous caller? Did you telephone about Mr. Waddington’s affair with the Duclos woman?”
“Mr. Waddington is my friend. But he has recently acquired a group of enemies, who might have informed on him.”
“This becomes more interesting. Were these people also acquainted with the deceased?”
“Yes, they were. And some of them may have had a reason to kill her.”
“I think I have a pretty good idea who they might be. I don’t think I will ask for names.”
“You’re the first policeman I’ve met who didn’t want names.”
“I’m not your average policeman, Mr. Ward. I tell myself that every day and my wife reminds me, for a different reason, every night.”
“There is a corner of this case that you may not have thought of: Laure smoked opium. That may, perhaps certainly, have put her in contact with another group of people, the drug procurers. They may have had motives of their own.”
“Thank you for that information, Mr. Ward.”
“Did you know that she was blackmailing a number of people in the Quarter?”
“Yes, we knew this all along. Mlle. Duclos once tried to see if a commissioner of police was susc
eptible. He was not.”
“Monsieur le Commissaire, you are being very frank with someone you have just met.”
“My dear Ward — if I may? — it’s the well-kept secret that gets a fellow into trouble. If you have a secret, share it with the world. It’s the only defence. Try to see it as a master chess opening, such as our beloved Philidor would have employed.” He put his hands in his pockets and returned to his side of the desk.
“By the way, Mr. Ward, I haven’t thanked you for returning Mlle. Duclos’s handbag to the commissariat across from St-Sulpice. I should not make assumptions, but I believe you came across the purse in an innocent way?”
“I was following Waddington who was following Laure. I lost both of them, but I found the purse near where the body was discovered. I saw no other sign of her. Was she found in a doorway? Was she hidden in some way?”
“Exactly that. Why were you so interested in Mr. Waddington’s movements, if I may ask?”
“I had just had a drink with Laure. She wasn’t interested in prolonging our conversation after a certain point. She was obviously expecting to meet someone. I was curious to see who that might be, so I moved across the street to watch from the Rotonde.”
“Good!” he said, getting up and returning to the window, where the light washed over his face. He showed few lines for a man in his profession. I was surprised.
“Now, Mr. Ward,” he said, turning back to me, “I must officially warn you that these things that you have been looking into are police matters. I formally ask you to leave off this private investigation of yours and to report anything germane to the matter to this office at once.”
I had always been aware that there was a mail fist under the fine grey glove: I was surprised to see that he had an iron gauntlet to put on over the glove. Yet there was something about the way he said officially and formally that left me wondering whether he was not telling me to keep up my good work and to count on him as a friend. I may have misread him, and I’m sure he would deny that he had implied any such thing, but I walked out of his office confused. Did I have an ally in Commissioner Léon Zamaron or not? It was a curious question, and I argued it back and forth in my head as I walked down the broad, curved staircase that led into the formal rotunda of the Palais de Justice. I came out into the Cour du Mai to see a group of tourists standing by the high, gold-tipped, wrought-iron fence consulting their Baedekers.
