by M. L. Huie
The theater felt small, claustrophobic even, which Livy assumed added to the sensations depicted onstage. Most of the audience sat close to the stage in orchestra-type seating, but a few sat in a small balcony just above. Martel led Livy to one of four private boxes under the balcony.
Martel handed her a program. “So, you watch the show, and then I can answer any questions you might have tomorrow. I hope you are quite comfortable, Miss Nash. Tonight’s first play is one of our classics. Crime in a Madhouse. A favorite of our audiences. At least those who can make it to the end. So—enjoy the show,” she said, with a slightly arched leer.
While the script didn’t exactly rival the literary heights of Shakespeare, Livy could see why this particular two-act play of unpleasantness might engage an audience, though they seemed nonplussed by the carnage onstage. She watched as a young Frenchwoman named Louise begged to be released from an asylum only to have her eyes gouged out by a crazy old bird called One-Eye. The grand climax featured two other nutters burning One-Eye’s face off on a hot plate and then popping off to take communion.
The gore didn’t faze her. She scanned the audience, wondering which woman might be the one who’d reintroduce her to her old friend Luc. To Livy’s right, a young couple held on to each other during the shocking finale, but once the lights were restored, they began to laugh. A few rows behind them three young men, who appeared to be university students, whispered, pointing to the exit. One even yawned.
Livy’s gaze wandered to Madame Martel, who stood at the bottom of the stairs to the lobby, anxiously watching the audience’s reaction.
The lights dimmed again, although the main drape remained closed. “Mesdames et messieurs, je vous présente Le Grand Diablo!”
The curtains ruffled, and a short, pudgy man in black tails strolled center into the glow of the footlights. Le Grand Diablo—an interesting linguistic combination—struck a bizarre figure. Completely bald with a mustache curled at the ends and one permanently arched eyebrow, Diablo looked to be the post-gore comic relief. No doubt behind the curtain, stagehands shifted the set for the next bloodbath.
Livy glanced down at the cracked face of her wristwatch and saw Madame Martel note the small gesture.
Onstage, Diablo began an uninspired performance of the interlocking rings. He showed the audience three seemingly solid metal circles and proceeded to pass them through one another effortlessly. After a few tepid claps, he went on to catch some coins out of the air, disappear cards, and—rather effectively—pull razor blades on a string from his mouth.
By now, the audience had warmed up a bit to Le Grand Diablo, so when he asked for a volunteer for his next trick, a few hands went up. Diablo immediately chose a U.S. serviceman sitting in the front row.
The young man, a corporal with a bony frame and freckles, swaggered up to the stage with that same sort of bounce Livy had noted on first meeting Tom Vance. Maybe Yanks are born with it, she thought. The corporal stood several inches taller than the magician, which Diablo played for effect, standing alongside the American on tiptoes at one point.
Finally, Diablo brought out a deck of cards and fanned them for the audience. The theater’s intimacy aided him, as even Livy, at the back of the house, could see each card clearly.
“Now, peek a cart. Eee-neee cart,” Diablo said in a parody of an English-speaking Frenchman, which drew laughs from the crowd as well as the lanky corporal. “Plees shew your cart to zee aww-deence.”
The corporal flashed the eight of hearts. Diablo instructed him to place it back in the deck. The American did so, as the magician turned his head. “No peek-eeeng,” he said.
Diablo performed a few fancy shuffles, then let the corporal cut the deck once. Then he fanned the cards and reached inside his cutaway coat. He pulled out what looked to be a .38 revolver.
“Now,” Diablo said, smiling, “Find yawr kart or—bang bang.”
Livy’s mouth went dry and she leaned toward the stage. The American, who had retreated a few steps when Diablo produced the gun, snickered nervously at the audience.
“You ’ave a one-in-feeftee-two shans,” Diablo said, egging the audience on.
The corporal laughed, shrugged, and reached into the deck. Livy held her breath.
“Eees zat yawr kart, monsieur?”
The American looked at the card, chuckled, and shook his head.
“Zen what ees eet?”
Livy knew what the card would be before the corporal turned it to the audience. It was the ace of spades.
Diablo then fanned the deck. Every single card had become an ace of spades.
“Eet ees not your luk-ee day, monsieur,” Diablo said, grinning. He cocked the hammer on the revolver and fired. The sound of the shot reverberated throughout the tiny space, eclipsed only by the scream from the audience.
But when the noise died down and the smoke from the barrel dissipated, the audience saw the American serviceman bent over, his hands over his head. On the other side of the stage, Diablo’s gun had a sign hanging from the barrel that read BANG!
Livy couldn’t get her breath. A fist held her chest tight in its grip. She felt as if she’d gone right back to the prison just before the mortar fell and turned everything to jam.
The audience began to laugh, slowly at first, but as the image of the short, fat French magician with the cartoon gun aimed at the nervous skinny all-American corporal sunk in, the cackling grew louder.
Livy put a hand on her chest, closed her eyes, and gasped for air. Her head reeled from the escalating laughter and the smell of the gunpowder.
Madame Martel appeared beside her box. “Miss Nash, are you unwell?”
Livy stood up, excused herself, and rushed out of the box as the laughter morphed into applause for Diablo. She half stumbled through the lobby of the theater and out the front door. She bent over and tried not to throw up. As her stomach calmed, she leaned back against the stone facade of the entrance and felt her breath slowly coming back.
But the ever-present Madame Martel stood behind her.
“Please, madame,” Livy managed, “give me a minute.”
“I’m afraid the mademoiselle ate something earlier that didn’t agree with her,” a man said.
“And you are?” Martel asked.
“Tom Vance, United Press.”
Chapter Thirteen
Vance calmed Martel enough so she believed her theater’s performance hadn’t left a visiting English reporter violently ill. That gave Livy time to compose herself so she could at least breathe freely without fear of her legs crumbling underneath her.
Still, what she had just witnessed onstage couldn’t have been coincidence. Nathalie, her contact, had worked at the Grand Guignol recently. Seeing that card trick was no more chance than Tom Vance showing up in Paris again.
Still, Livy wondered if her embarrassing exit had blown any chance of meeting the contact. How could she now, surrounded by the Yank and this fawning Frenchy?
With Martel successfully shooed back inside, Vance stepped down where Livy leaned against the building.
“You all right there, Miss Nash?”
“I’ll be fine,” she said, stepping away from him. Livy needed time to think.
“Now, I can see how the dismemberment might have made you queasy, but that magician? Unless, of course, you’re offended by the excessively corny.”
“You’re missing the rest of the show, Mr. Vance.”
“Aren’t you sweet?” he said. “I just wanted to make sure you’re hunky-dory.” He pulled out a pack of Camels and offered her the pack.
“Don’t smoke.”
“Might help calm you down,” he said. Livy shook her head. “Suit yourself.” He lit himself one, drawing the smoke in deeply. “I have no choice in the matter. Sort of the family business.”
Livy’s head had stopped doing cartwheels, so she turned to face the nattily dressed Vance. “Thought you were a journalist.”
“Well, I am. Just like you,” he said, flashin
g that smile. “But the family money’s in tobacco.”
“Fascinating, but I do have an early meeting—” Livy turned to step off the sidewalk and stumbled on the cobblestones, catching herself before falling outright.
Vance lent her a hand, which Livy accepted and then quickly brushed off.
“Look, we keep running into each other. There’s gotta be something to that. Why don’t you let me buy you a little something to calm that weak stomach,” he said. “I think there might be a café around here where the waiters keep their clothes on. Whattya say?”
* * *
Half an hour later Livy sat at a small table in a café a few blocks from the Pigalle. Vance babied her, ordering her a cup of tea and white toast with strawberry jam. He had an espresso and what appeared to be a ham sandwich. He ate with a certain relish that belied his expensive clothes and rich-boy affect.
“So, theater aficionado, are you, Mr. Vance?” Livy said between sips of the rather disappointing Earl Grey. Mrs. Sherbourne would have been appalled.
“I think we’re acquainted well enough for you to call me Tom,” he said, munching a razor-thin sandwich. “But I think we were there for the same reason.”
“You’re writing an article about the Grand Guignol? How patrons view it in light of the real horror of the war, concentration camps, et cetera, et cetera?”
Vance didn’t miss a beat. “Well, of course,” he said, sipping his coffee. “They don’t make it here like they do at the Dorchester.”
“That’s an espresso,” Livy countered. “Be happy it’s not acorns.”
“Oh, I am.”
“So we happen to be in the same city again, working on the very same story. I wonder, where did you spend your war, Mister Vance? The tobacco fields, I suppose?”
Vance bristled slightly. “Oh, you know, I was here and there. You?”
“I sat at home and darned socks for the RAF.”
Vance shook his head. “My guess is you were making life hard for the Germans in the wilds of France.”
Livy drank tea.
“Didn’t get enough of this during the war? Aren’t you sick of it?”
“Oh, are we being honest with each other now?”
Vance shrugged. “You first.”
“We all saw things we’d prefer to forget. Didn’t you, when you were ‘here and there’?”
Putting his espresso back in its small saucer, Vance shot his cuffs and straightened his tie. “Okay. Cards on the table. I was a Jedburgh. With some of your boys.”
Livy had known one or two others in the Firm who’d joined Jedburgh teams. The operation paired American and British agents with a French Resistance fighter. The Jedburgh teams parachuted behind Nazi lines late in the war to prepare for the Allied invasion. Many of them had been shot down, captured, or executed in prison.
“No women allowed on the Jeds,” Livy said.
“Well, it’s no fun taking machine gun fire when you’re dangling at the end of a parachute.”
“I suppose not.”
Truth was, Livy liked this man. Maybe it was that southern American accent, but he seemed so damned genuine. Still, his presence at the Grand Guignol made her question everything. Vance’s meeting with Fleming. The Dorchester. That long kiss while the cab waited. Her feelings for him, if that’s what she had, would have to wait. In this line of work, there were no such things as coincidences, and right now she trusted Tom Vance as far as she could throw the Eiffel Tower.
Livy dug a few coins out of her clutch purse and put them on the table. “I hope it won’t offend your Gone With the Wind sense of chivalry if I pay for myself. I believe I owe you one anyway, and I really do have an early—”
“Livy, we want the exact same thing,” Vance said, dropping the Rhett Butler act.
“Really now, me mum raised me right.”
Vance ignored her parry. “I meant we are on the same side.”
“Oh? What side would that be?”
He leaned toward her. His voice low. Tobacco and the pine scent in his cologne mixed in a very pleasurable way. “Livy, London was about something different. You know that. But now—well, this isn’t a game.”
“I was never any good at sport anyway,” Livy said, standing. “Good night, Mr. Vance. I feel reasonably certain we’ll see each other again.”
* * *
Livy didn’t mention Diablo’s entr’acte or the second appearance of Tom Vance to Allard on the drive back. As far as the older man knew, she had gone to the theater for an evening of blood and guts in an attempt to contact Nathalie Billerant, and the contact hadn’t shown. Still in the process of figuring out what both of the night’s events meant, Livy felt it best to keep the full story to herself.
Allard dropped her off at Madame Riveaux’s boardinghouse a few minutes after eleven with a promise to return the next morning. She had a follow-up interview at the theater with select members of the Grand Guignol staff.
The search for Nathalie had better bear fruit tomorrow, Livy thought. Deep down she feared she’d blown the best chance to make contact, get the list, and arrange a meeting with Valentine.
Exhausted from the evening and from keeping up appearances with both Allard and Vance, Livy looked forward to a long bath and a longer nap in her tiny bed.
As she closed the main entrance behind her, the landlady’s door popped open. Madame Riveaux, wearing the same Oriental dressing gown, stood in her doorway, holding a piece of paper between her thumb and index finger.
“For me?” Livy asked.
The Frenchwoman shook the paper at Livy as if ringing a bell.
Livy took the note with a quick “Merci,” and the landlady disappeared into her room like a turtle retreating into the comfort of its shell. Livy unfolded the paper. There, written in a very precise hand, was the address of Paul Cornet’s café near Rue Saint-Charles where she’d eaten that afternoon.
Just when she’d thought all might be lost, it appeared her afternoon visit with an old friend might actually bear fruit.
Ten minutes later, Livy found herself back at the café. Then the mystery of the note quickly faded. Grant Duncan, the charming Scot from the French Embassy party, sat at a round wooden table being kept company by a bottle of vodka, two glasses, and what appeared to be a small plate of caviar.
She felt like the naive girl in a Peter Lorre picture, the one who ends up kidnapped or murdered.
“It is a small world,” Duncan said. He didn’t sound like Grant Duncan at all. Rather, he sounded like he’d grown up eating borscht and reading Chekhov.
“Didn’t you used to be a Scot?”
“Didn’t you used to be French?”
Ice effectively broken, the tall man stood and offered Livy a seat.
“I have a gift for dialect, as do you,” he said, now sounding more like Stalin’s educated brother. “But I assure you, this is my natural way of speaking. And I assume this charming British accent is also your own?”
“It is.”
“Splendid. Well, now that we have shed our disguises, perhaps you would like a drink. You look like a woman who might appreciate vodka,” he said.
“I used to.”
“Used to? No, no, you must try this.”
The Russian lifted the sleek bottle from the table and poured two shots into glasses in front of him. He pushed one over to Livy.
“Best vodka from Siberia. This is the only place in Paris that has it. It is called Five Lakes. Go ahead. Drink.”
Livy had a sip. It went down like smooth acid.
“Yes? Now, that’s Russian vodka.” The man who wasn’t Duncan seemed very pleased playing host. “Now try the caviar. One taste for each drink.” Livy followed his advice but didn’t tell him both the booze and caviar did her queasy stomach no favors.
“At home we have to get three people to buy one bottle,” he said. “In Paris, I can have as much as I want.”
“So, you are—who, exactly?’ she asked.
“I am Andrei Ivanovich Mi
rov and you are Olivia Nash. The owner here is a friend. He said you wished to speak. But can we not enjoy a simple drink before we talk business? Please. We have no more Hitler, and this beautiful city is free of the vermin. Enjoy.”
Livy pushed the glass away, even though this had to be the smoothest vodka she had ever tasted, and leaned across the table. “Look, Mr. Mirov, I’ve had a long day, so you’ll forgive me if I skip the pleasantries. That night at the embassy in London, one of your boys took something of mine and left me with this little bruise right on my cheek. But I’m willing to let bygones be bygones as long as I recover my property.”
“I apologize for my nephew’s rude behavior. Levchenko is ill-tempered at times. His father was Ukranian,” he offered as explanation.
Livy massaged her temples, trying to clear her head. Fatigue and the drink clouded her mind. She knew this moment demanded all her focus.
Finally, she said, “Yeah, your boy packs a wallop. You teach him how to do that?”
Mirov smiled. “He is a fanatic. Like others back home. But I believe we can work together. We do not have to be brutes.”
“Well, brutes don’t drink this kinda booze,” Livy said. “But I’m trying to cut back on the libations, and you’re still not saying anything I want to hear.”
“We could share the list.”
“Then why did your boy take it from me?”
“I had to make sure it was authentic.”
“And?”
“It is.”
“Brilliant. Then perhaps you’d like to return it.”
Mirov’s bright eyes danced as he downed another shot. “Even in my position, I can’t get a drink like that at home. We sacrifice so much for the state. To create utopia. Hmm. We have a long way to go.”
He leaned toward her, as if to share a very spicy secret. “I have the first half of the list, so perhaps I have the upper hand. Other than that, I know nothing. Except I know that you are here to get the rest, and there is something about you that tells me you have, maybe, an idea how to find it. Now, we could each keep our halves of the list and carve up the agents like we have with everything in Berlin and Vienna. Or we could work together. Our countries were allies in the war, yes? I have no quarrel with the British. I respect your spies. I do. You are professionals. We can work together, because we both know who would like to put us out of business.”
