Really the Blues

by Joseph Koenig

  “What’s that?”

  “We’re not at war with Germany.”

  “Gonna let it get in the way of you becomin’ a hero? Everybody knows the war’s comin’. Congress’ll declare it, the army’ll be in the trenches before you pull your thumb outta your ass.”

  “You’re a spy now?” Perkins said. “It’s a ways from what you were doing last time I heard from you.”

  “Forget what I am. War is right around the corner. Can’t hurt to jump the gun and guarantee a proper outcome.”

  “How’ll the information get to me?” Perkins said. “You can’t drop it in the mail. The Germans inspect everything going to the U.S.”

  “I can send it to Switzerland, Havana, Mexico City, anyplace you want. Bring it myself. It’s up to you.”

  “Nothing is. Not even here in New Orleans. Washington decides on everything.”

  “You’ll tell Mr. Hoover?”

  Perkins’s chuckle went on too long to suit Simone. At twenty-five dollars a minute, it was costing almost fifty cents a second to be mocked.

  “Field agent like myself doesn’t get to meet the Director except for a handshake when I collect my watch for twenty years’ service. He especially doesn’t want to know about a cashiered cop playing Mata Hari. I’ll put word in the pipeline. Someone will notice it and bring it to the attention of someone with connections who knows someone a few doors down from Hoover. That’s how things get done.”

  “Paris ain’t cheap,” Simone said. “I could starve waitin’ to hear back. Makes me wonder what the Brits’ll pay to learn about a Messerschmitt plant in range of their bombers.”

  “I can let you have some earnest money while I try to push this along the pipeline. How’s that sound?”

  “A thousand would sound about right.”

  “What?” Perkins said. “I didn’t hear. Must be the connection.”

  “Wire what you can to the Hotel LaBottiere,” Simone said. “Havin’ any weather?”

  “I thought the call was breaking the bank. You want to talk about the weather?”

  “I intend to get my money’s worth out of every second I’m payin’ for.”

  “It’s sticky hot, and we’re expecting a big blow as we generally do this time of year. That use up the time?”

  “I still got half a minute,” Simone said.

  “What’s left to talk about?”

  “Eddie Piron.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Character I met the other night tootin’ a trumpet on Place Pigalle. Know the name?”

  “There’s no shortage of Pirons in New Orleans,” Perkins said, “a good many of ’em musicians. Most every Piron I’m familiar with is Creole. What’s a colored boy doing in Paris now the Germans are there?”

  “He don’t look particularly colored,” Simone said, “’less you have an eye for it. The Germans, they don’t. They’re too busy lookin’ at noses to be concerned about nappy hair and such. I’m tryin’ to find out what he’s doin’ here. It’s why I ask.”

  “Asking me?”

  “I suspect he’s hidin’ from the law. American law. Louisiana law. He’s got delicate manners, so I would venture it’s not for spittin’ on the public sidewalk. Have his name run through the NOPD files. We still got friends on the force, don’t we?”

  “I wouldn’t call ’em friends of yours. I don’t believe I’ve ever come across anybody who knows you and calls himself that, with the possible exception of myself.”

  “Do it anyway. It’ll give me somethin’ to keep out of trouble when I’m not engagin’ in international intrigue for Uncle Sam.”

  Lukas Schickle, thirty-two, from Cologne, with a master’s degree in the philosophy of the European enlightenment from Humboldt College in Berlin, had been in the French capital for close to three weeks, time enough to start thinking of himself as an old Paris hand. Each day after work, he took a long walk in which he discovered the most interesting bookshops and art galleries, authentic bistros and out-of-the-way restaurants. His fiancée would join him shortly, and the city would be presented to Hilda as an intimate gift.

  Turning the corner onto the Champs Élysées, he was struck by the splendid enormity of the Arc de Triomphe. Not long ago, the victorious Wehrmacht had paraded under the monument in a poignant scene that to his eternal regret he hadn’t been here to see. Hilda would never have tired of his eyewitness account of the historic moment when Germany erased the shame of defeat in the Great War and Paris became an outpost of the Reich.

  As he stepped off the curb on the Rue du Colisée, a black Citroën splashing through a puddle soaked him to the knees. His head whipped around with a furious stare for the idiot behind the wheel. The Citroën was the only car on the block. Prior to the occupation, the streets would have been clogged with traffic, but now, at 8:30, there was only the occasional vehicle, few pedestrians on the sidewalks. “Nique ta mere,” he shouted, and was whisking oily water off his pants when the car skidded to a halt and two men stepped out.

  Shickle started across the street with the pair from the Citroën on his heels. All he’d intended was to express his displeasure with thoughtless Frenchmen in a generic way. They seemed to have taken it entirely wrong, as though he’d seriously suggested fucking their mother. Big Frenchmen, he noticed—quickly glancing back—bull-necked and broad across the chest, nothing like the sniveling frogs he dealt with on the job. An apology probably would defuse the misunderstanding, but the idea rankled him. Besides, these two didn’t look like they would be bought off with less than abject groveling, and that he was not prepared to do. They came up on both sides, grabbing his arms, and muscled him to the car. My God, thought Shickle, I’m being kidnapped for cursing at frogs. Forcing his head down, they threw him onto the rear seat. One got in back with him, and the Citroën careered around the corner, turned again and again until they were bumping along cobbled lanes, the authentic medieval lanes of Paris that he wished he’d never seen.

  His captors said nothing, not even to each other. Using a collegial tone, he asked, “Où allons-nous?” They might have been deaf. There was nothing to do but to sit back and enjoy the ride. His hand was already inside his jacket, fishing for Gauloises and his lighter.

  The butt was scorching his fingers when they rode around the Tuileries and stopped at a columned building that looked like one of the great mausoleums of classical times. A famous edifice with a long and colorful history, but without the Paris guidebook sitting in his hotel room Schickle couldn’t identify it. Anticipating luxuriant carpets inside, he was instead marched along bare floors, his footsteps echoing against empty walls off-white in color, somewhat lighter in rectangular spaces where until recently paintings had hung.

  Schickle breathed a deep sigh. Soon the misunderstanding would be cleared up. He owed his kidnappers an apology for thinking they were French. No longer afraid, he surrendered to outrage. No one had the right to loot precious artworks, and to snatch decent people off the streets. Occupiers had responsibilities, too.

  In a high-ceilinged room lit by torch lamps, lightning flared at the edge of heavy draperies. The men who had forced him into their car now pushed him down on a chair within arm’s length of a desk where a man in a tailored uniform was studying him. Schickle was the quicker study. Foppish officers and party hacks had counted for nothing much in Germany a few years ago. Now they had all the influence and didn’t let you forget it. Schickle knew how to handle him. Senior Nazis had assumed a controlling interest in his firm, and he had done quite nicely, thank you, by being as imperious as they, and more obtuse, never caving in to their appetite for obsequies. This one, too, he would put in his proper place.

  “Schickle, I am Major Weiler.”

  Schickle rose to his full height, leaned across the desk looking down at the major, and extended his hand. Weiler didn’t take it. Bent over, grasping at nothing, he felt absurd. So much for his usual stratagem, but he had others. Mid-level soldiers did not have advanced degrees. He would probe Weiler’
s background and demonstrate the disparity in their education and cultural levels.

  “Sit down,” the major said. “Let us dispense with the preliminaries. We know what you are, and what you have been doing. Tell us what we don’t know, and we—you will be spared the discomforts of the learning process.”

  Not a student of rhetoric, thought Schickle, or else plain stupid; the major didn’t recognize a contradiction when he uttered it. If Weiler knew about him, there would be no reason for interrogation. Schickle searched for words to set Weiler straight, to rid himself of absurdity, and to attach it where it was the best fit.

  “I don’t know why I’ve been brought here. I’ve done nothing wrong.”

  Weiler made a note in a legal pad. “Is that how you view it?”

  Schickle watched him fill the page and start another. Who knew that he was a gold mine of information? He’d merely expressed his puzzlement, and Weiler stupidly had turned the words around.

  “Nothing wrong in conducting several meetings with an American agent?”

  “Me, sir? What would I tell him?”

  “Not a he,” Weiler said, “as you damn well know. As your fiancée will be informed.”

  Schickle felt cold and clammy. At the same time, he was boiling over. Here were clues to what the major was getting at, the various pieces mashed together into something unrecognizable like the cubist works he had seen at the Degenerate Art exhibit in Munich four years ago, familiar colors and forms arranged monstrously.

  “We know about your relationship with her,” Weiler said, “as part of your workings to sell out the Fatherland.”

  “What?”

  “Feigning ignorance is a dead-end street, Schickle. Don’t go down it. I warn you, don’t take the first step.”

  “I’d never . . . I wouldn’t . . . betraying Germany is beyond anything I am capable of doing morally, emotionally, or in practical terms, even if I wanted to. Which I do not.”

  Weiler laughed out loud. Schickle immediately felt jealous. He didn’t think that he’d ever be able to laugh wholeheartedly again. The picture was coming together now as a nightmare scene worthy of Hieronymus Bosch. In a moment of weakness brought on by loneliness for Hilda, he’d told foolish lies to a foreign woman, a tale of such preposterous invention that he’d had a hard time keeping a straight face. Somehow it had reached the ears of military intelligence, who were as gullible as she had been. Paris was infested with spies. He was one visitor who was nothing other than he claimed to be. No, that wasn’t exactly right. Who was what he claimed to be now. Had he known that he was such a convincing fabulist, he wouldn’t have set his sights as low as he had, but tried his hand with the beauties of the Folies.

  “You gave away Messerschmitt’s plans in France. You don’t consider it betrayal?”

  To be suspected of treason was his personal hell. But at last the mystery was cleared up. An admission to his indiscretion with the American was in order. He would add his sincere regret for his unbecoming actions with promises that they would not occur again, and then his ordeal would be over.

  “I did nothing like that, sir,” he said. “I should say, I mean, I mean I told a woman, yes, I confess I did, that I was a project engineer for Messerschmitt, but that was only to encourage her to, to get her to come back to my room. I know nothing about factories, or aircraft. I . . . I’ve never been in a plane in my life.”

  “Naturally, all foreign women are looking for a man professing knowledge of the German aircraft industry.”

  “More than are looking for a man with my real job. Trust me,” Schickle said. “I’m a salesman in ladies foundation garments visiting Paris to oversee the introduction of our new line at the Galeries Lafayette department store chain.”

  “We know,” Weiler said. “They’ve never heard of you at Messerschmitt.”

  Schickle sat back beaming as he had as an elementary school pupil when a teacher awarded him a gold star for right answers.

  “We looked into your story before we had you arrested,” Weiler went on. “Give us the rest.”

  “But that’s all I am, a brassiere and girdle man. Why do you think otherwise?”

  “What we want to know first and foremost is how a corset salesman came into possession of the plans of Messerschmitt Aircraft.”

  Schickle’s hand rushed to his mouth. The picture had been rearranged into an image as lifelike as a portrait by a renaissance master, yet more horrific than anything by Bosch.

  “I am unaware of any of them. I know how it appears, but I don’t. Not one thing. I met a woman. I was feeling rather sorry for myself, bored and without friends in a foreign city, and I did not think, I mean I thought a heroic story about what I do was required to win her admiration. She was quite beautiful. Therefore I . . . I enhanced my background, you might say, and told her I was a big shot at the aircraft company.”

  “Do you expect me to believe that?”

  She did, Schickle wanted to shout in his face. Fell for it completely, in ways he never would tire of although they left him exhausted. Just this morning he had sent a note to Hilda instructing her to delay her departure because he had his hands full here with the underwear.

  “My parents, my friends, my comrades from loyal service in the Kriegsmarine, everyone who knows me, they will tell you I am a patriotic German.”

  “They cannot explain how you know anything other than about girdles. It leaves only one question unanswered.”

  “Yes, sir?” Schickle let out a deep breath. “What is it?”

  “How did you know?”

  Tears came to Schickle’s eyes. It wasn’t a strategy he had employed at his firm. He was a tragic victim of coincidence. Who would believe that a lie coming innocently to mind was a military secret? One more thing he understood about these vain men who had all the power today. When you gave them opportunity to crush you, that’s what they did. He hid his face in his hands and wept. It would give Weiler the wrong idea, but he couldn’t help it. Weiler would crush him to nothingness. Wait and see.

  Three new restaurants were the talk of the Gestapo, a Greek taverna in the Latin Quarter, another that featured fine French rustic cooking, and La Vielle Amie off the Place de la Concorde, which already had earned three coveted stars in the Michelin red guide. Any of them would make an excellent place to meet with Colonel Maier, but Weiler didn’t bring it up. He and the colonel were the occupying powers here, yet Maier spurned the little luxuries that went toward alleviating their heavy responsibilities. Suggest fine food to Maier, and he would denounce it, and you, as decadent. They could confer just as easily in the office. Over the phone.

  “I’ve learned something about the fellows in the band Janssen was playing with when he died.”

  “This is about music?” Maier asked.

  “Indirectly.”

  “Let me tell you directly that I have no interest in music.”

  “You should hear it anyway,” Weiler said. “I mean what I’ve learned. It began when a traveler from Dresden representing himself as someone in the know about Messerschmitt Industries linked up with an American woman in the market for the secrets he seemed to be selling.”

  “How did you get on to them?”

  “The woman had traveled to Paris in the company of another American, a former policeman in the city of New Orleans. The man, Simone, evidently is running her to fish for information.”

  “Information for whom?”

  “For himself, I should say, to be packaged to the highest bidder. He made several calls to the United States from the international telephone exchange where just last week we completed installation of listening devices.”

  “This wasn’t done immediately upon taking over the city?”

  “We did it now, and found out that Simone requested a background check on the leader of the band. His name is Eddie Piron.”

  “You are telling me that Piron and Janssen are linked to the sale of Messerschmitt plans to an American?”

  “Nothing came of that,
” Weiler said. “The man we believed worked for Messerschmitt was a liar.” Weiler paused to allow Maier to berate him for leading him on about nothing, and for being late with the phone bug. Amazingly, the colonel had no comment, not even his maddening questions. “That was by way of preamble. I must say that it is in character for a man like Borge Janssen to be involved with someone like Piron.”

  “What character is that?”

  “We checked on Piron, too, through Interpol headquarters in Vienna. They report that he is sought by the police in the United States, a man who is not what he seems to be. Not even who he seems to be.”

  “You are trying out a narrative for a movie trailer? A melodrama?” Maier said. “Or do you intend to tell me what the allegations against him are?”

  “It is only by way of—”

  “Preamble,” Maier said. “Stop clearing your throat, and get on with it. Why does Simone care about him? Why should I?”

  It was just as well that they hadn’t gotten together at a restaurant where Maier would interrupt his remarks with a barrage of questions. He held the upper hand now. He held the phone.

  “I will begin at the beginning. Piron is from a small town in the province of Mississippi near New Orleans in the American South, born there in the autumn of 1908. . . .”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Sunday was payday for the band. Monday was their day off, and by Tuesday when the players wandered back to the club a good many were broke, hitting up Eddie or Roquentin for a few francs to tide them over. This Sunday, after the last set, when Eddie handed out paychecks, Gert Weskers had a yellow envelope for him.

  “What’s this?” Eddie said.

  “Open it and see.”

  Two pasteboards slipped out as Eddie tore the flap. He caught them as they fluttered to the floor, complimentary tickets to Bonjour Paris, a new revue starring Maurice Chevalier which opened for previews the following night at the Casino de Paris.

  “You are lucky to be holding those,” Weskers said.