Really the Blues

by Joseph Koenig

  Guy kept close by to keep Eddie from fleeing, or trying to make love to his boss.

  Anne walked across the factory floor, waited for Eddie to join her between the bales. “Do one thing for us,” she whispered, “and we will let you go.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Give us the name of a French patriot who reads music better than you do, and also knows mathematics, who has been in the military, and isn’t a coward.”

  “Beethoven couldn’t help you,” he said, “if he had Napoleon and Einstein backing him up.”

  “How do you know?”

  “There’s nothing in those arrangements but music. Music’s all it is.”

  “That simply isn’t so,” she said. “Everything we need is in the envelope. I was told by people who don’t boast, or make mistakes. The fault lies with you.”

  “What am I trying to find?” Eddie said. “Maybe if I knew—”

  “It’s technical information of no concern to you. You wouldn’t understand it.”

  “How do you expect me to find what I don’t know I’m looking for?”

  “You would recognize it as something other than the music. That much would be clear.”

  “If I did find it,” he said, “you’d never let me go.”

  She tried an innocent look, shaking her head, a dismissive laugh, her best smile, but gave up when they left him unpersuaded. He went for his trumpet case, popped open the snaps, and examined his instrument. As he buffed it against his sleeve, Guy made a grab for it. Eddie let him have it rather than risk damaging it in a tug of war.

  “He doesn’t like music?” Eddie said.

  “You are American,” Anne said. “It could be that he thinks you are going to blow it to summon the cavalry to your rescue.”

  “Yeah, and General Custer will finish off the Nazis like he did the Sioux.”

  She went back to the kitchen area, plugged in a radio that gave off bursts of music above harsh static. She tilted it in every direction, and Eddie heard, “This is Radio Londres, the voice of the Free French Forces,” in the plummy tones of a British Broadcasting Corporation news presenter. He squeezed beside her, and she turned up the volume on the frail signal from across the English Channel.

  “Before we begin,” the announcer said, “please listen to some personal messages.”

  Anne lowered the sound to cut down on distortion. “Paul LaGrande, in Provins,” the announcer said, “take the children to school. They aren’t learning anything at home.”

  Eddie started to say something to Anne, who said, “Shush.”

  “Marie Clermont, the dog needs to be taken to the veterinarian immediately. If she does not receive the best treatment, then we cannot be held responsible.”

  Anne put her ear close to the radio. There was an extended eruption of static before the next message came in faintly. Eddie scarcely could make out the warning for Paul Beaudry to hurry to the baker in Clichy before the bread burned.

  Eddie had spent sleepless mornings in bed listening to the coded messages from Radio Londres without making more sense of them than he did now. Anne looked up unhappily as the announcer signed off, and patriotic French music filled the airwaves. Guy dialed Radio-Paris, the Nazi station, and they listened to German swing, an Irving Berlin melody set to lyrics mocking President Franklin D. Rosenfeld, which wasn’t awful, Eddie had to admit, though it was hard to take for more than a couple of minutes.

  “You expected a message from London,” he said. “It was connected to the book?”

  Anne shook her head.

  “You pay close attention for someone who isn’t expecting anything.”

  “I don’t know what I may hear. That’s why I listen.”

  He turned up the volume again on a syrupy intro to Louis Armstrong’s big hit from a few years back, “I Double Dare You.” The trumpeter was no Armstrong, but only one man on either side of the Atlantic was. Eddie hated the slow tempo and stodgy syncopation, the heavy-handed drumming that were hallmarks of National Socialist-approved jazz. He was trying to identify the band when the vocal came in, and he snorted as he recognized Karl Schwedler fronting for Charlie and His Orchestra, the top combo on the Nazi hit parade.

  Anne shook her head at him. “This,” she said, “this is what offends you?”

  He couldn’t deny it. It was all over his face until the negermusik gave way for a news reader detailing the relentless advance of the Wehrmacht on all fronts in his flawless Parisian accent.

  “German propaganda,” Anne said. “Shut it off.”

  Guy had his hand on the plug when Eddie caught it. He tuned back to Radio Londres, which offered the news with a less disastrous slant.

  “If you want to know what is going on in the world, the Nazi station is better,” Anne said. “Their lies are closer to the truth.”

  “You work for the British, and that’s what you think of them?”

  “They are fools,” she said. “They could have prevented this war—could have won it before it began, but were too good to pick a fight with Hitler, too civilized. They are really worse than fools. They are Anglo-Saxons, first cousins to the Germans.”

  “Who are you?” Eddie heard the thrum of the cable as the elevator began to rise.

  “It’s too soon for them to be back,” Anne said, and killed the radio.

  Guy drew a gun. Anne nodded approvingly, but didn’t show one of her own as the car continued its ascent. Eddie refused to be alarmed till Anne clutched at Guy’s arm, and he realized they had only the single weapon. The elevator stopped one floor below. The floorboards creaked as more than one person, heavyweights, explored the spice loft. Eddie made out a single German word, “Rien,” and the car resumed its climb.

  The shaft resonated with voices that were boisterous and unafraid. Guy squeezed between the bales, keeping a clear view of the elevator. Anne positioned herself behind him. He scolded her in their language and she backed away, whispering to Eddie to follow.

  Before he could move, he’d lost her in a maze of silk that gave off the faint tang of mulberries. The elevator arrived at their floor, announcing deadly threats in working-class accents soured by alcohol. Eddie spotted Anne crouched among the bales and moved toward her on his toes, came down flat-footed as a single shot inaugurated a barrage that went on for twenty seconds, so many bullets fired so fast that he lost count, and ended with someone bragging “That finishes the bastard.”

  A sober voice answered, “He isn’t alone. Find the rest. Finish them, too.”

  Eddie went for his trumpet, had second thoughts, and pulled Anne to windows that hadn’t been cleaned in decades except for a streak where the side of a fist had cut through layers of grime. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I seem to have misplaced my rope ladder.”

  He started her moving to the front of the loft. She heard a scraping sound as the window was forced open, and the breeze rushed in.

  “Quick, before they throw themselves out,” one of the invaders shouted.

  Three or four of them stampeded down an aisle on Eddie’s left as he crouched beside Anne, hoping that others weren’t coming head-on. When they’d gone by, he rushed her toward the elevator, where Guy lay in a mess of blood. A militiaman decked out in a wide blue beret, brown shirt, and brown tie under a German flyer’s leather jacket patrolled around the corpse, rewarding himself from a flask. Exchanging it inside his waistband for a gun, he went in search of more action. Eddie came out from the bales and stepped over Guy’s body. Anne circled it. As she entered the elevator, Eddie pulled the handle all the way to the left.

  “They’re in the elevator.” The sober voice in command.

  “Take the stairs.”

  The building shook as the Milice galloped to the street. Eddie stopped at the spice loft, a warren of intense flavors that stung his tongue. He opened a window and looked down as four militiamen burst into an alley and were brought up short by brick walls. They hurried back inside, and he hustled Anne to the stairs. “Faster,” she cried, “t
hey’re coming.” It was her mantra. She didn’t give it up until she was in sunlight on the roof, and then not right away.

  The roof, paved in pebbles, gathered the weather through skylights that had lost glass and were patched with cardboard or not at all. Pigeons fluttered in and out of the empty panes and roosted in the top story. Anne hurried ahead of Eddie, who was fascinated by the birds who’d built nests in abandoned machinery, and was looking the wrong way when she screamed.

  He didn’t see her at first. Then he did, the upper part of her body where she’d broken through a section of the roof surfaced in tar paper and nothing underneath. With one hand she clung to a skylight, treading air. “Hurry,” she shouted at him. “But be careful.”

  He took a quick step, several cautious ones as the tarpaper sagged. Flattened against it, he inched toward her on his belly. Through tears in the paper he saw the fragile lattice holding everything up, the wood discolored and cracked from exposure to the elements. Anne kept still and adjusted her grip on the skylight. Not a strong grip. Eddie saw it slipping.

  The hole widened around her, and she brought her free hand out clutching the envelope. It was the right place, perhaps, but not the best time to mention that she was jeopardizing their lives for garbage. She skidded it toward him, reaching for his hand. His fingers brushed hers, walked across the back of her hand. A deep breath broadened his chest, and he caught her wrist, locked onto it. Letting go of the skylight, she was drawn through the paper to a patch that supported her weight, where she pulled herself up alongside him.

  “Thank God,” she said.

  Eddie said, “Don’t I deserve some credit?”

  “You, too.”

  The roof was edged by a wall a meter high plastered with tar and topped in brown slabs of terra cotta. Across an air shaft stood a building almost identical to theirs, but somewhat shrunken, one story less in height, and not as wide. They knelt beside each other, the sun and soft breeze against their cheeks reassurance that they were alive. Far from the worst place to be, thought Eddie, if not for the damn footsteps on the stairs. Anne looked at him with something important on her mind and said “Merde.”

  “Can you jump it?” Eddie said.

  “What? Can I fly?”

  He shook her hand from his shoulder, from his hip, and from his leg as he stepped up onto the terra cotta and leaped onto the next building before fear anchored him. Coming down with his knees tucked under his chin like Jesse Owens in newsreels from the Berlin Olympics, it occurred to him that this roof, too, might be clad in tarpaper. He landed on pebbles, and something solid underneath, raking his back as he skidded over them. Immediately he was on his feet, waving Anne to come over.

  She put a tentative foot on the terra cotta, and Eddie saw it wobble as she brought up the other. “Don’t look down.”

  She focused on the bottom of the airshaft, flapping her arms to maintain balance, or attempting a takeoff, then rocked back on her heels and flung herself into space. She arrived where he’d landed, but on her feet, the gold medal winner for style. Across the air shaft, the roof door opened. There was no sound of footsteps, the militiamen too knowledgeable about old buildings to dash onto tarpaper quicksand. Eddie had a sense of their heads turning every which way, like owls, as they hung at the door. But it was pure imagery. Crouched below the wall where he couldn’t be seen, he couldn’t see them.

  The door shut, and he sat up with his back against the wall. “What if they figure out where we are and come up the stairs?” Anne asked him.

  “Don’t think about it.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Pray. You can do that.” Because he’d stopped believing in God, that option wasn’t available to him. Soon, he said “I think it’s safe to go down now.”

  “What makes it safe?”

  None of her questions lent themselves to good answers. He wanted to be encouraging, not to brush her off with glibness, but couldn’t think of anything. He picked himself up and led her downstairs, as if that were answer enough.

  “I left my trumpet,” he said. “I’m going back.”

  “You’re out of your mind. Get killed for a musical instrument?”

  He could have said the same thing about her book, but he hadn’t. He didn’t now. “Wait in the alley,” he said. “I won’t be long.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “Why?”

  A question she couldn’t answer. On adrenalin’s dregs they sprinted up the stairs. At the silk loft, Eddie’s strength ran out. He was unable to open the door more than a few centimeters, pushing against something blocking it from the other side. Anne threw her weight on top of his, and a space opened wide enough for them to squeeze in.

  Two fresh bodies lay behind the arc of the door, tangled obscenely where Eddie had just swept them together. The faces were purpled and broken, destroyed in a beating, but from their clothes he recognized the men as his other kidnappers. The hair at the base of one man’s skull was singed by a bullet fired in a downward angle at very close range. He didn’t care to pull them apart to be certain they’d both been killed that way. Anne stared at the floor, not focused on the men, but near them. Her lips moved. He thought it might be the prayer that had eluded her on the roof.

  “Rotten timing,” he said, “coming back when the Milice were here.”

  “Find your trumpet, and let’s get out.”

  They returned to the street without anything to say. Horror spoke eloquently for itself. It was the humdrum stuff, in Eddie’s experience, that generated the most chatter. Okay with him if Anne didn’t want to talk. It meant no more questions without answers.

  The cab was in the alley with the key in the ignition. He had the driver’s door open when Anne said, “We stole it this morning. The Sûreté will have been looking for it all day. We’d better walk.”

  “Where are we going?”

  It was a question designed to have no answer.

  “Yes. Where?”

  “I have a train to catch,” he said. “I was leaving for the station when your friends sidetracked me. So, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be on my way, and you can be on yours.”

  “It’s too late to make your train. Where will you spend the night?”

  “You’re concerned with my well-being now?”

  “Yours and mine. We should spend it together.” She was brought up short by a change in his expression. “Don’t be ridiculous, that isn’t at all what I mean.” She didn’t smile, no room for humor or self-consciousness in her makeup. “It will be safest if we don’t split up yet.”

  “You’ve got it backward. If we separate, and one of us lands in the soup, she—or he—can’t give up the other.”

  “As a couple, we’ll arouse less suspicion than we will alone.”

  “What you’re saying,” he said, “is you’re out of hideouts. Out of comrades as well.”

  “I’m no communist.”

  “It’s a load off my mind. I wouldn’t want to be mixed up with reds.”

  “We can’t stay here all day bickering. Let’s get moving.”

  She had nowhere to go, and no friends left alive, probably no money either. He doubted there was anything she wouldn’t say or do to change his mind about leaving her. He didn’t want her clinging to him. Still, they were on the same side in the war—or would be if she threw her support behind the Eddie Piron faction. Whoever she really was, he couldn’t help feeling sympathy for her. “I can let you have some francs,” he said.

  “It’s you I need.”

  “You know I can’t help with the book.”

  “Just you,” she said. “It’s suicide alone on the streets late at night, or to check into a hotel by myself without luggage, and attract attention I don’t want.” She waited for him concede the logic of what she was saying, but he remained unmoved. “Don’t think it will be different for you.”

  “Who are you?” he said.

  “Everything you need to know about me, you know. More.”

  The
y came out onto the street as a car turned the corner, a glossy limousine that stuck out like a flamingo among the pigeons in the run-down neighborhood. It slowed, and men wearing German gray eyeballed the couple on the sidewalk. Showing her back to them, Anne put her face in the way of Eddie’s and brushed lint that wasn’t there from his shoulders, stopped to straighten his lapels till the car resumed speed.

  He caught her wrist for a look at her watch. “You’re right about the train,” he said. “Do you know any hotels here?”

  “For us, these dumps are death traps. You offered me money to go away. Use it instead for a nice room.”

  Eddie looked at her as he had when she’d first suggested spending the night together. She surprised him with a smile. It was wry, and evaporated quickly.

  “We’re entitled to some luxury after all we’ve been through,” she said.

  “Oh, is that how I should get rid of it?”

  “Your money won’t do you any good tomorrow,” she said, “if tonight is your last on earth.”

  Hunting for a place to stay, Eddie became adept at spotting other couples like themselves, mismatched partners, joyless strangers not talking, uncomfortable with each other, well-dressed women on the arms of shabby young men, and girls alongside much older men who weren’t relatives or lovers, if mutual awkwardness was a good indicator. On almost every block a commercial building had been converted into a cheap hotel or pension. Faces half-hidden behind linen curtains peered out at the street and drew back when he looked too intently at them. “Death trap” probably wasn’t far off the mark. The guests—they reminded him of inmates—knew it better than he.

  At a Metro stop they pushed through the turnstile and hurried down the stairs to the platform. A passenger in their crowded car stole glances at Eddie and squeezed near for a better look. Eddie glared at him. Undeterred, he closed in.

  “Who’s that mec?” Anne whispered.

  “I don’t know him.”

  “Then why is he looking at you like a long-lost brother?”

  “He’s a jazzhound.”