Paris Twilight

by Russ Rymer

  I thought she would climb the doorman like a tree. She threw herself through and over and around him, her arms outstretched, barking my name in a hoarse quaver and holding out in one shaking hand the engraved invitation with my name on it. “S’il vous plaît, madame, s’il vous plaît, s’il vous plaît”—her dervish whine accompanied by slobberous weeping—and she yelled that the child was about to do something, “quelque chose terrible!”

  A calm warmth edged up close behind me, and Emil’s breath was quiet in my ear. “The Little One?” he asked.

  And I answered, “It seems.”

  XXIII

  THE CAR SLIPPED GENTLY between the cordon poles, and as soon as we were inside, the waters closed behind us and the soldier hooked the chain again. Drôlet angled us into a space that wasn’t any designated space but seemed at least sufficiently out of the way, and Emil stepped out and closed the car door behind him and strode toward a knot of men wearing uniforms and loitering in the lot. They spoke. He walked on somewhere I couldn’t see. He seemed quietly purposeful, a toreador departing for the chute.

  After Céleste’s arrival at his house, Emil had ushered her into the kitchen and soothed her with a snifter of Côte de Something and a shawl around her shoulders until she’d settled her nerves enough to deliver a coherent alarm. Her composure collapsed again as her explanation tumbled out. It tumbled out in confessional form, her confession to a petty trespass leading to a petty theft. She’d let herself into Landers’s apartment, she said, snooping for signs of Corie. Fear brought her in; she’d known full well what my question about Corie had implied. She found her corroboration crumpled in a corner of the study. The note was doubly terrifying for inducing a fifty-year-old déjà vu. As with the last such message she’d found, the farewell in Aranese from Carlos Landers addressed to his lost Alba, this one was indecipherable except for those few words where its language overlapped with Céleste’s: necessity, sacrifice. In a panic she ran for a translator—me—the page clutched in her fist.

  She found my door ajar and no one home. She went in (clearly not for the first time) and noticed immediately two things amiss: something added, and some other items gone. The added part was the party invitation, which I’d left on the table. The missing items scared her so terribly that she’d caught a taxi straightaway to the address engraved on the card.

  As Céleste slurped, and spewed her confession, we ironed out the note with our palms on a kitchen counter and flipped the dial on the tiny kitchen television until we found a relevant news report and then we stood around viewing helicopter footage of a protest gathering near the Bastille and surging down the boulevards a hundred thousand strong. It was heading toward the Élysée Palace and the American embassy, though security forces were positioning to stop it short of that goal. Police and protesters had already suffered injuries, the television claimed, from thrown rocks and the glass of shattered windows. Hospitals were readying for an onslaught. Emil made a phone call, and another, and now here we were, the three of us—Emil, Drôlet, and I—on the margin of the accumulating storm. Absent Céleste, whom we’d left at the house submitting to the forced sedation of a plate of party food, after which she would hurry back to rue Nin on the chance that Corie might reappear there.

  Emil was preternaturally calm on our ride, lodged in a distant place. It was a place I couldn’t read: Was he resentful? He had reason, certainly, being crowbarred out of his party. At the same time, his mood seemed like some familiar home place, a country in itself that Emil could inhabit comfortably at will. He stared out the window at the passing slate of Paris, his every muscle entirely relaxed, and occasionally asked me a question. What exactly had happened with Corie at the apartment the night she disappeared? I told him about the telegram, the death of Corie’s role model. “And this apartment is exactly next to yours, really?” Had she said anything unusual before her departure? The note she’d left, did it sound like her? The note was a hopeful sign, Emil said. Those most intent on suicide often leave nothing, no word at all of their plans. Who else was involved? he asked. No one, I told him, and he absorbed my answer almost osmotically, facing me immobile as though waiting for my voice to diffuse into his skin. Then he turned to stare out the window, placid.

  The emergency had swept away his melancholy. “So much to say,” he’d told me as we danced, but whatever he’d intended to discuss, he wasn’t discussing it now. And he wasn’t the only one with news—oh, no! And what I had to relate would thrill him as greatly as it had me. I’d cheer him up, by God! That, too, would have to wait, though: This wasn’t the time. It wasn’t the point of our mission. Anyway, I didn’t want to squander the wondrous chronicle of my miraculous inheritance by relating it during Corie’s wretched crisis. On the far side of mission, our private dawn awaited.

  “So what’s your choice, ultimately,” he asked, focusing on our business, “among the probabilities?” His question swept me back to our night in Reims, and to my broken promise not to get involved with Corie—did his words contain a reproof? Whatever, they also posed a genuine question. He wanted my diplomatic counsel.

  “Not school,” I answered, and, with reluctance, “and maybe not the war. Love, maybe. Maybe fear.”

  “Of?”

  “Past, future . . .” I said. “I don’t know . . . Emil, I’m sorry.”

  He looked at me directly then. His wan smile held on valiantly.

  I said, “What a mess I’ve caused.”

  His forehead wilted into my shoulder, and he reached to clasp my hand to stop my explaining further. And then he righted back into his reserve and his vigil. We’d neared the scene of the manifestation—you could tell by the angry clots of traffic and the security forces controlling the intersections—and Emil said to Drôlet, “Over there,” and I could see the stockade, in a parking lot, under the icicle glare of generator lights, off in the velvet distance. He said to me, “In a way, you’ve made things easier.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked him after giving him time to amplify. Then, guessing, “Emil, where did you go these past days?”

  He nodded. The question was right. “Not far,” he confessed, and not for diplomacy. As it turns out, he said, “Some things are beyond negotiation.” He’d needed confirmation of something, though he’d been sure of it already, he said. “Something I’ve known for a while.”

  “Confirmation of what,” I said, beginning to go numb.

  When he answered, it was as though he were changing the subject. “Remember your Stamps and Buses? What did you say you call it when something is both behind you and ahead?”

  “Medically?” I said, the numbness cascading. “I said that, as a doctor, I called it remission.”

  “Drôlet,” he commanded, “here we are. Turn through right here.”

  We slipped through the cordon and Drôlet stopped the car, and as soon as it was parked, Emil emerged from his thought and from the car door in a single and unitary glide of outward motion. The door swung shut and he strode off across the lot.

  A few minutes later he was back, tapping on Drôlet’s window. “I’m to be let through,” he told the chauffeur. “Alone,” he said. He might not be returning to this depot after events played out, so we shouldn’t wait. Also, as such things went, it might take till morning to resolve matters, statements to be given and so forth; best we head toward home. And then he began to walk off again, just like that, in his patent leather shoes, pulling the lapels of his dinner jacket up around his ears. I yelled after him, “Emil!,” and jumped from the car to arrest his flight.

  Thankfully, he wheeled around and returned to me and heard my request. “You can’t seriously think that’s a good idea,” he answered, putting a hand on the roof of the idling limousine.

  “I do think! I think it’s necessary,” I told him. I was obstinate about the one thing, Corie, because I was obsessing about the other. Perhaps I thought that if I could contest Emil on something, everything would be contestable. Mostly, I just wanted to go with him. “I�
��m the person she needs to hear from,” I said. “It’s me she’s upset with.”

  “Precisely,” he said. We were standing in the crotch of the open door. “Do you know how instantaneous this would be?” he said. “A flinch could be fatal. It’s no different than a jumper. And if they managed to save her, it might be even worse, believe me.”

  “You’re afraid I’ll set her off,” I said. “I see. But I won’t! Please. I have to help her.”

  “Anyway,” he said, “that’s not the problem.”

  “I know it’s not!” I almost shouted. I could feel the sob rising like a bubble inside me. “I know it’s not the problem! Emil, you said it was one hundred percent. That you’d dodged the bullet. What are you telling me now? Why did you lie?”

  But he wouldn’t be pulled off the topic. “The problem,” he continued, “is that you’ll be arrested before you get ten yards.” He motioned with his head across the parking lot. “The boys over there aren’t happy about this. Not a bit, and they told me about it. They feel this whole episode could have been avoided if their search for this person had succeeded. And it nearly did. Until their investigator got thrown off the trail by a mysterious, charming, foreign-born aristocrat on rue Nin. Nin, I’m trying to remember, isn’t that close to your duplex?”

  I searched his face for recrimination, those limpid eyes, and was surprised to find only amusement. He looked proud. “Anyway,” he said, “it was just last night, and now it appears she may be an accomplice, this woman. May be the same individual who sprang our would-be martyr from protective custody on a past occasion, which is why this woman is now the subject of a warrant.”

  “A warrant,” I said. “Me?” And he laughed despite himself. “That all depends,” he said. “You wouldn’t be Madame Magdalena Landers, by any chance?”

  “Emil, I can—” I began, and he silenced me with his fingers against my lips. Then he closed his eyes as if hit with an ache, and his hand dropped. “I didn’t lie to you,” he said. “I answered your question. You asked if my lymphoma was cured, and it is. The lymphoma. It’s just”—he paused—“that you didn’t ask the doctor’s question, where the lymphoma came from, and I was glad you didn’t, Doctor. You asked if it was over. You asked the lover’s question.”

  And I wanted to ask him a hundred newer things, lover’s questions all, and to tell him we would get through this, that I knew what he was talking about, how cancers sometimes arise from other cancers, and the one they’d fixed was a sign of deeper illness, but I’d help him. We’d turn this around together, whatever it was. But he cut me off.

  “Miss Landers,” he said, “I have to ask if you’ve made the acquaintance of a certain Capitaine Cassell.”

  “Cassell!” I said.

  Emil nodded. “Yes, Cassell. Because here comes the good captain now.”

  I made to turn and he yanked my wrist. “I wouldn’t,” he said, and he drew a breath. “Listen,” he said, and his firmness had a bitter, incontestable finality to it. “I will get your Corie out of this. I promise you. And you must promise me something in return, and promise it solemnly, this time. That you will attend to my sister.” And he impressed upon me, urgently, that I must let nothing stop me in that, must not put helping anyone else ahead of helping Odile, and that I must take care of myself “before the surgery, and afterward,” for as long as she needed me, which meant not getting arrested, obviously, and not getting involved in bizarre capers, and also meant “giving me a very visible embrace and getting back into the car now.”

  His hug was as brief as it was encompassing, and crushingly tight. “Promise,” he breathed, as he held me. The voice was as burdened with needing to know as any I’d ever heard.

  “I do,” I told him. “I promise.” He released me, and as he more or less shoved me through the open door and as I more or less crumpled into it, I heard—or imagined I heard, at least—him whisper, “Don’t forget.” Or was it “I won’t forget you,” as I came to wonder later? The door slammed, and I slid into the shadows in the center of the seat as footsteps approached and a voice I knew said, “Ready, Mr. Sahran?”

  “Never more,” Emil answered. His demeanor had made its immediate return trip to jaunty.

  “And you’re convinced you can help us in this . . .”

  “This unfortunate situation, yes, Monsieur le Capitaine, I’m sure, but—”

  “But you needed to see me alone.”

  “I do. There’s a matter.”

  “About this girl.”

  “I’ve never met the girl,” Emil said. “I’ll do my best to return her, and you can do with her as you like. Maybe that will help ease some . . . embarrassment, if you will, Capitaine. For the department, I mean. If you want to say you called me in, that’s fine.” The two men were almost leaning against the car; all I could see were torsos and elbows, a cigarette in a rising hand. “No, I must request your consideration with someone else,” Emil said. “It’s this Landers person.”

  “Oh, I see,” the captain said.

  “Let me strike a deal with you,” Emil said, and the two began moving across the parking lot, Emil’s hand on the captain’s shoulder, a cigarette arcing redly into a puddle. I peered back as the car moved forward, hoping for a stray glance as we exited the stockade, but there was none. He didn’t look around.

  Our exit was via a different gate than the one through which we’d entered, and when we’d left the depot behind us by only a few dozen meters, Drôlet braked to a halt in the middle of the street and put the car in park. He leaned his arm along the back of the seat and craned his neck around to face me directly. His question was his ancient and only and eternal question, except that this time it was all in his eyes, and, as I’d never known him to ask it so oddly and silently, I was shaken for a moment. Then it came to me that his effrontery was actually an invitation, and that silent was as brash as he could get.

  “Toward home?” he asked finally, echoing his boss’s orders, but his emphasis was front-loaded, and he left conspicuous air between the words, and as soon as I recognized the nature of the offer, I took him up on it, gladly.

  “Yes, Drôlet, thank you,” I said. “‘Toward’ would be perfect.”

  The streets were spookily calm—the police had cordoned off the neighborhood. The only movements were the shifting of drivers in the dark cabs of the paddy wagons lined up in convoy along the far curb. Drôlet let the car drift forward at an idling speed with his window rolled down, gazing up through the windshield as if navigating by the stars. Which he was, in a way, or at least by son et lumière, sound and light, though his only quicksilver constellation was a helicopter whose gyrations brought it whipping suddenly over the housetops for a few loud seconds of grinding glare before it disappeared again. When its searchlight crossed our path, the world was turned a blinding antiseptic blue. Then it clattered off and left us with another sound, a low throbbing murmur like a pulse beneath the pavement, punctuated at intervals by squalls of whistling whose shrillness pierced the dark like the helicopter’s glare, bleaching it the same cold ozone blue. At some point, his inner sextant satisfied him, and Drôlet parked and locked the Mercedes and we walked in the direction of the throb.

  We came upon it full blast, suddenly, as we turned around the angle of a last narrow side street into the rumble of a human avalanche. The street before us was a thoroughfare, judging from its width—it must have had multiple lanes and generous, tree-lined sidewalks, all now buried from battlement to battlement beneath the throng of protesters, their multitude flowing over everything indiscriminately. Stoop, stair, truck, curb, car—all was stood upon, the streetscape elevated two meters up into a rolling topography of human heads. Our tributary conjoined the avenue down a small flight of steps, which allowed us a momentary vista over this vast molten flow that extended to our left back through pools of lamplight and under the inane stop-and-go of intersection signals, block after block, as far as we could see. To our right, several score yards away—Drôlet had placed us deftly�
�the sea met its seawall. We descended down into the mass; it was in that direction that we tried to move.

  It was effectively impossible, the pressing so great that at times I was lifted off my feet and rocked back and forth in the stagnant tide. I was afraid to exhale, afraid I wouldn’t be able to re-inflate my lungs. The tide had nowhere to go. It washed in place for long minutes and the pressure built and then some shift would occur and the whole mass would adjust an increment in one direction or another and the whistles would blow and we would accommodate to the new equilibrium. Whenever there opened any piece of leeway or when we were set down firmly enough for Drôlet to get traction, he would push us mercilessly ahead through the mass, and eventually in this gradual way we came to the foot of a tall crowd-shape enshrouding, as in amber, a delivery truck.

  Drôlet yelled through the roar—I could read the Madame on his moving lips better than I could hear it—and he pointed to a person above us who was reaching down a hand. Drôlet gave me a sufficient moment to decline the informality, then he grabbed my waist and lofted me up to meet it. With some scrambling and yanking (you try spelunking in your best silk sheath), I got myself to the top of the palisade and found a place to perch on the edge of those heights and survey the source of our impoundment.

  The impediment was only some thirty or forty yards ahead, at a point where the number of people didn’t diminish but their mass changed color and character. The road was bisected by a Plexiglas barricade, shields behind which an army of helmeted riot police pushed toward us. Their front ranks wore gas masks; the vanguard of protesters drummed a tattoo on the impassive shields and screamed with an added fury, the two sides facing each other intransigent, warring continents contesting a fault. Like a fault, it would slip once in a while, abruptly one way or the other, and the mass would slide an increment more and the great terrifying whistle would rise into the night.