Really the Blues

by Joseph Koenig

  “This isn’t New Orleans,” Eddie said. “Get out of my way, or I’ll—”

  “You could try. Might land a lucky punch. One thing you will definitely accomplish is loosenin’ my tongue.”

  Eddie put the records down without thinking about what he was going to do. There was time for that later, when he would be forced to consider the consequences.

  “I know who your people are, what they are,” Simone said, “’xactly what happened in the Quarter that has police all over the world duty-bound to send you back. Lucky for you I ain’t a chatterbox that’s gonna devalue your precious secrets by givin’ ’em away. But it’s a heavy responsibility keepin’ ’em, for which I expect to be recompensed. What’s it worth to you, havin’ me seal my lips so folks here don’t know the man you are?”

  Eddie drew back his fists.

  “Lay a hand on me, I’ll go straight to your gal. From what I observed, she is not a prime candidate to be growin’ a baby inside her that has a fine chance of comin’ out black as the ace of spades. You’re fitter’n me. I ain’t much of a fighter, but it’ll be the costliest punch you throw in your entire life.”

  Eddie lowered his fists as several customers stepped between them on their way to the cheap records in back.

  Simone lowered his voice. “This don’t have to be the melodrama you’re makin’ it into. I’m gonna protect your secrets like a goose settin’ on the golden egg that won’t let harm come to it, so set your heart at ease. How much you fancy this valuable protection I’m providin’ is worth? Your peace of mind.”

  Eddie didn’t answer, let him go on.

  “Woman like her has got more bucks’n she knows what to do with. She ain’t givin’ you none don’t excuse the fact you ain’t gettin’ it. Ask her for it. Fine-lookin’ fellow like yourself don’t come cheap. Not askin’ don’t speak well for the product, encourages her to think she is gettin’ second-rate goods.”

  Eddie shook his head. It was all he had to say.

  “Don’t be bashful,” Simone said. “Once you get the hang of it, you won’t ever want to quit. Not even if I am struck by lightnin’, and off your back.”

  Eddie couldn’t remain quiet hoping Simone would go away. He was being blackmailed, but he refused to allow the blackmailer to set the rules. He said, “She doesn’t have her own money. It comes from family.”

  “You’ll ask her. She’ll ask them. She loves you, don’t she? Why’s she carryin’ your baby if she don’t.”

  “It’s a great scheme you figured out,” Eddie said. “But it won’t work.”

  “Get yourself a positive attitude,” Simone said. “We ain’t arrived at step one, and you tellin’ me it is doomed to failure. Put some of that charm I seen on display at your club into it. You’ll get results.”

  Eddie shoved him away. Simone bounced back with clenched fists. For a man who wasn’t a fighter, he wasn’t a stranger behind them, circling cautiously to his left, his head bobbing constantly, an elusive target.

  Eddie saw a punch coming and reached to block it. Simone answered with a jab. Eddie turned his head to protect his lip, and the punch glanced the side of his head. He hit back at Simone with an uppercut landing under his jaw. When Simone didn’t go down, Eddie wrapped him up in a bear hug.

  The shelves tottered, releasing an avalanche of records that shattered against shoulders, and backs, and were ground to shards under the feet of the battling men. Eddie wanted to break off to stop the destruction, but Simone was winging kidney shots non-stop in the clinch. Eddie went punch for punch fueled by anger he didn’t know possessed him. A roundhouse right caught Simone high on the bridge of his nose. A spurt of blood from both nostrils made a fine target to enlarge the damage.

  Simone fell back against shelves standing almost to the ceiling. They groaned, Eddie heard wood crack and splinter, and thousands of records rained down. The man with the broom stood by, looking miserable. There was a loser in every fight. Already he’d lost this one.

  It was hard to throw a solid punch struggling for footing in the debris, and so Eddie and Simone grappled. Simone wasn’t a bad dirty fighter, murderous in the clinches where knees and elbows came into play, and he could stomp on Eddie’s feet. Eddie was fearful of head butts to his lips and teeth. He didn’t want the brawl prolonged, or to let it end without landing one more hard blow.

  In Simone he saw tormentors he’d held back from striking out at in places where that was impossible for him to do. A looping punch that caught Simone flush on his broken nose raised a howl, and he threw himself on Eddie, smothering his punches as they waltzed like exhausted lovers waiting to be torn apart.

  The man with the broom declined in favor of the manager, a silver-haired woman who placed a hand on each man’s chest and spread her arms.

  Simone blew blood bubbles out his nose and said to Eddie, “You’ll pay for this.”

  The woman, a Madame Combelle, said, “Someone will. You imbeciles have destroyed my stock. I have no way of replacing it, not a single record.”

  Pain lurking in Eddie’s cheek and around his left eye while he’d pumped adrenalin cried out now. What hurt worse was the devastation he’d caused. He’d liked to fantasize that one day every record in the Librairie du Jazz would be his. Now he would be charged for them without taking any home.

  “I’m sorry, Madame.”

  “A lot of good it does,” she said.

  Her hankie was in her hand, and she was about to give it to Eddie when she looked again at Simone and awarded it to him. He balled it under his nose and took it away sopped with blood. “I’ve just started with you,” he said to Eddie. “The price—for everything—is goin’ up.”

  “What is your name?” Madame Combelle said to him. “He I know. He will pay his share. Who are you?”

  “Anything I owe, he’ll take care of,” Simone said. “He’s good at makin’ messes. Makin’ ’em his whole life. He can learn to clean ’em up.”

  Kicking through the wreckage, he started for the door. Only the man with the broom didn’t get out of the way.

  Roquentin said, “Not again! What happened this time?”

  Eddie said, “It’s nothing. My lip is okay. I can play.”

  “Your face will scare the customers.”

  “I’ll wear a hat and pull it low, the old derby I sometimes use for a mute. You’ll keep the lights down, and I’ll stay out of them. It won’t be a big deal.”

  “Only for you. You’ll have to go back on drums. Gert will play trumpet.”

  “Only for a night or two. I’m a quick healer,” Eddie said.

  “Is that what you call it? What’s wrong with you, Eddie? Why can’t you stay out of trouble?”

  It’s my luck, it wasn’t good even before I was born. It wasn’t. It’s so bad that I can’t even use it as an excuse.

  A short, erect man in a gray business suit and with a weathered briefcase bouncing against his thigh came into the club as the early show wound down. Eddie pulled the derby lower over his face. The man ignored the music, drank mineral water, looked uncomfortable, bored, and somewhat haughty. During the intermission he trailed Eddie to the office, snapped open the briefcase, handed him a business card, and introduced himself as the attorney for the record store. The owners wanted money for the damage Eddie had caused. They’d located the other party to the fight, who insisted that he had none, and would fight the action. He claimed to be blameless, had been minding his own business when he was attacked without provocation by Eddie, and might bring a civil suit against the Librairie du Jazz. The owners were sorry, but were left with no choice but to come after Eddie to pay for the broken records. It was a tragedy all around.

  Eddie reacted with anger, most of it for Simone, but in proportion to the amount of destruction for which he believed he was being overbilled. Simone was right about one thing, he should go to Carla. It was distasteful, but they had to talk about many things. The money might never even come up.

  The pain in Carla’s face was as great as
his own, revealed in sighs and one long groan.

  “Oh no, why do you keep doing this, do you hate yourself and are trying to get killed? You look horrible.”

  “Not as bad as I feel.”

  “You are suffering?”

  “Not how you think.”

  “What happened?”

  “I was at the Librairie du Jazz. A fellow made insulting remarks. Next thing you know is what you see.”

  “He objected to your playing?”

  “To my family.”

  “He knows them?”

  “Not really.”

  “He was spoiling for a fight,” she said, “and you were there. Was he the winner?”

  “I’m being sued by the store for damages caused by both of us. I suppose that makes me the loser.”

  “You can’t get blood from a stone, as they say.”

  “I’ve already bled. Blood is easy.”

  “How much money are they asking for?”

  “I don’t have the number. More than I’ve got.”

  “I can help,” she said.

  “Why should you? You didn’t break anything, or have the pleasure of hitting him. I got into this trouble without you. I’ll get out the same way.”

  “How?”

  Eddie shrugged.

  “I will give you the money. You never come to me for a single franc, no matter how hard up you are, and knowing I can give you whatever you need.”

  It was what he was afraid of. He’d rehearsed a loud demand that she foot the entire bill, assuming that like Simone she would tell him to clean up after himself. Having opened a corrosive breach, he would let the affair disintegrate until she gave up her claims on him. Instead he’d allowed his pride—such as it was—to interfere, coming off as a lost lamb, and she the mother ewe with infinite resources of love.

  “You don’t have it,” he said.

  “I will ask my parents.”

  “You’ll tell them what it’s for?”

  “When I am about to introduce you as the man I’m going to marry, the father of their grandchild? I’ll say I need it for myself.”

  Simone was right. There was no trick to getting money out of her. He would have her picking up after him for the rest of his life. Who could ask for more? While wanting less.

  “You look so unhappy,” she said. “What could that bastard have told you that required you to take a poke at him?”

  “He called me a nigger.”

  “He might as well have said Eskimo. Why let it bother you?”

  “If I were one, would I have your approval to knock his block off?”

  “The subject is distasteful,” she said. “Please change it.”

  “Would I?”

  “He could say any damn thing about me, since I have no regard for anyone’s opinion but yours. It’s because you are a man that you take offense. Boys are brought up to fight over the slightest threat to their honor.”

  “It has little to do with masculinity.”

  “Well, then what? A stranger makes a ridiculous remark, and you let it get under your skin. I didn’t know it’s so thin.”

  “It’s not,” he said. “It’s black.”

  She looked at him gravely. “I don’t see black skin, except around the eyes, where it’s black and blue. You were hit in the head and don’t realize it.” She attempted to embrace him, caught him by the wrist, pushed up his sleeve, and thrust her bare arm alongside his. “I am darker than you. If I’m not a nigger, how can you be one?”

  “It isn’t in the color,” he said. “But in the blood.”

  She threw down his arm. “My brain must be scrambled like yours, for allowing this absurd conversation to go on.”

  “What if one of us were black,” he said, “for argument’s sake?”

  “If it were me,” she said, “I would kill myself. As I’m not, I won’t.”

  “And if I were?”

  Her bemusement gave way to frustration and dismay, and then something that seemed to him to be alarm. “What are you telling me?”

  “Do I have to spell it out?” he said.

  “Yes, and write a book about it, too, because I cannot understand how it can be possible. Even then I won’t.”

  “Under the laws of Louisiana, where I’m from, I’m a black man.”

  “How, when you don’t look it in the least?”

  “An ancestor before my great-grandfather’s time was from Africa. Legally, that makes me black. It’s called the one-drop theory. For all practical purposes I am black.”

  “This is France,” she said defiantly.

  Her generosity rubbed him the wrong way. Making his secret into nothing, she would relieve him of the peculiarities that were at the heart of who he was.

  “Under the Germans,” he said, “it’s more like Louisiana each day.”

  “Who made this law?” she said. “Why do you let them decide who you are? I will decide.”

  “All right, what do you say?”

  “You are a white man. End of story.”

  Out of kindness she offered absolution from being the awful thing that the law in Louisiana said he was. Who would make a better mother for his child?

  Maybe if he was a nigger he’d feel different. He was something else, though, a New Orleans Creole of color, a pure mongrel who looked down his nose at black and white. Possessed of the most exquisite French culture, he disparaged Carla’s haute Parisians from the vantage point of superior refinement. Take away the racial laws and he would vanish, mongrelization dead-ending in assimilation. How did you explain snobbery born of suffering to an aristocrat?

  “You don’t agree?” she said. “You don’t want to.”

  “What I am’s not something to be ashamed of. Where it’s lacking is in the quality of the enemies it makes where I come from.”

  “It doesn’t bother me,” she said. “You are lighter than I. As long as the child looks like either of us, it will be beautiful.”

  “If it comes out black?” he said.

  “The chance is small.”

  “You’ve been impregnated before by a black man?”

  “I just know.”

  “Give me a better answer,” Eddie said. “After, we’ll fix the odds.”

  “It can’t come out looking like a Negro,” she said. “I still don’t believe you really are. You don’t look like one. It can’t be.”

  “I had a brother who was nothing like me. There’s a chance the child will be as dark as Tom, or darker. In New Orleans I know people who look white and have black parents, and Negroes from light-skinned families.”

  “You’ve concocted these scenarios to torture me.”

  “Better a sadist,” he said, “than the father of your black baby?”

  “You put your vanity above everything. I, on the other hand, worry for the child.”

  “Love it, and it won’t require as much worrying.”

  “Are you forgetting the Germans will consider it less than human? And what they’ve promised for those they deem subservient to the master race? I, for one, don’t doubt their sincerity.”

  “My trust is in the French,” Eddie said, “in their open-mindedness. Liberté. Égalité. Fraternité.”

  He listened to her laughter, reluctant to call it that. He’d never heard a sadder sound. When he told her it was time to stop, she added tears to the sorry show.

  He couldn’t have said it better himself.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The interrogator considered himself among the luckiest of men alive. As proof, he was alive, when Major Weiler could have had him put aboard one of the transports removing Jews from the city to pay for his mistake. Unluckiest were the Jews. Although he’d never been told—nor had he asked—where they ended up, he knew that none returned. Better to devote himself to serving up more of them to the appetite of that terrifying place than to speculate about what it would be like there for himself.

  Fearful of another blunder that would bring down Weiler’s wrath, he took pains duri
ng interviews with the remainder of the Belle­ville roundup. Their stories were all the same. Polish Jews driven from their homeland by the Wehrmacht, or by the Soviet invasion toward the end of 1939, they had fled to the country with the largest standing army in Europe, where Hitler would never reach them. Not welcomed with open arms, neither were they turned away. Those who could thread a needle, or buy for nineteen francs what they could sell for twenty, or, if they were young and attractive and willing to sell themselves, didn’t starve. Their threat to the Reich, the interrogator determined, was contained in their genes. Soon they would be disarmed.

  Fresh loads dumped regularly at his door built a backlog. All of expatriated Polish and Dutch Jewry might have been waiting to be processed through his office, but he refused to sacrifice thoroughness for dispatch. Major Weiler lurked in the background, and no one received a third chance from him.

  After a week he was done with the mob from Belleville, and they were loaded into a truck that would take them to the transit camp in the old housing project of La Cité de la Muette, the City of Silence, at Drancy in the northeast suburbs. A new batch, doomed in advance, took their place. Rather than ask the tiresome questions, he preferred to shoot every one and be done with it. That would make him redundant, however, and he would be returned to Germany, to the back office of a casualty insurance company in Chemnitz where in eight years he had risen to assistant chief of the actuarial department. His situation in Paris was too precious to squander on shortcuts. If he lived to be one hundred, he’d never have a job as pleasant as the one he had here.

  Around 1:00 A.M., following a three-hour wait in the back of the open truck, the Belleville Jews were driven from the city under the care of three gendarmes. There was no heater in the cab, and the driver and the officer riding alongside him were frozen almost as stiff as their cargo. A neon glow in a haze of woodsmoke beckoned from the side of the road. The men in front looked at each other at the same time. The truck pulled into the gravel lot of the Auberge Cochon Agile, and they went inside, leaving the other gendarme, a nineteen-year-old rookie, in charge of the Jews with the promise of a cup of hot chocolate when they returned.