Really the Blues

by Joseph Koenig

  “Unlike the situation in the Marais,” de Villiers went on, “work at Place Pigalle is ahead of schedule. The club will reopen Friday night, a gala event with the leading lights of the occupation and SS as invited guests. I would be honored to have you at my table.”

  Speer’s hand was on the arm of his driver, who stomped on the brake, throwing the men in back against the front seat. Speer stood up, pointing his camera at a faded mansion. “What is that house?” he asked.

  “The Hotel de Rohan-Guemenee,” de Villiers said. “The writer, Victor Hugo, lived there.”

  “I think we should save this one, gentlemen,” Speer said. “What do you say? The old pile will make an excellent public pissoir, no?”

  Avoiding main thoroughfares, Eddie took Anne away from the Seine through the eastern part of the city. He couldn’t say that he’d been to the eleventh arrondissement half a dozen times. North of Boulevard Voltaire not even that often. Here the buildings did not seem Parisian, the faces not particularly French. Pressed, he would have difficulty saying what a French face should look like, aside from his and those he missed in Montmartre. At Boulevard Menil­montant he and Anne had the same idea at the same time, and they turned together toward the entrance of Cimitiere Pere LaChaise.

  He felt at peace immediately. The peace of the grave. Cemeteries rarely had that effect on him, not those in New Orleans shaded in live oaks tangled in Spanish moss, and haunted by the spirits of the witches and voodoo queens interred in the ovens where they cheated the subsurface rivers washing buried cadavers to the Gulf. There was nothing sinister about the hallowed ground of Pere LaChaise. At the Mur des Federes he stopped to examine the memorial to the insurrectionists from the Paris commune massacred in 1871. Anne walked by without a second look but lingered at the graves of Frederic Chopin, Georges Bizet, and of Sarah Bernhardt, and the caricaturist Daumier. A monument covered in cupid’s bows stamped in lipsticks of various shades marked the grave of Oscar Wilde. Anne leaned so close that Eddie thought she was going to add her kiss, but she pulled back after placing a pebble on top.

  “We should be safe here,” she said. “The police and militias don’t come where there already are corpses. They prefer to make their own. Besides, a cemetery is a place we should get used to.”

  “I’m not ready for it,” Eddie said. “The British wouldn’t have dropped you in France without a plan to get out, and a backup. How can it be that you’re stuck?”

  “They were as unrealistic about evacuating us as they were in what they expected us to accomplish. We Palestinians knew we were entrusting our lives to amateurs with no concern for us as individuals. It didn’t matter. We had to return to Europe to do whatever we could. Among ourselves we discussed how we might escape. If we could reach the Pyrenees, we would be in sight of Spain. From Spain we could walk into Portugal, and from there we could get on a ship. My mistake was in thinking I could roll across the border on a French train.”

  On a leafy path at a monument under a plane tree, Eddie stopped again.

  “Whose grave is this?” Anne said.

  “Judah Benjamin’s.”

  “Should I know the name?”

  “He was a big shot from my city. New Orleans. A U.S. senator.”

  “Why is he buried here?”

  “During the American civil war he quit Washington to be a minister in the rebel government. After the defeat he ran away to England. I wouldn’t have thought I could have sympathy for a man like him, a slaveholder, but I’m starting to understand how he felt stuck here.”

  “He wanted to go home?”

  “He had no home.”

  They sat on a bench beside the grave of Ferdinand de Lesseps, excavator of the Suez Canal. Eddie said, “Something I was going to tell you, but I forget.” Then he snapped his fingers. “Roquentin, my old boss at La Caverne, is going back to Toulouse in the south. He’ll give us a ride.”

  “He has a car with room for two more?”

  “I don’t know how he intends to travel, but we’ll be welcome to come along. Spain was his idea, too.”

  When the gates closed, they were among the last to exit the cemetery, attaching themselves to mourners from the burial of someone who was not among the pantheon, if the small number of vehicles in the cortege was an indication of earthly status. An elderly man for whom French was not a first or second language asked if he could drop them off.

  “If you can bring us close to Montmartre, we will be grateful,” Eddie told him.

  The man led them to an American LaSalle, stealing peeks at Eddie’s trumpet but too diplomatic to ask why he needed it at a cemetery. Several blocks from Place Pigalle, Eddie thanked him, and they got out of the car. Though he’d been away for just a few days, he felt the same as if he’d returned from a long voyage. All that was lacking from an ideal homecoming was a new gig at La Caverne.

  The man-ape swinging his club above the door was darker, devolved into a Neanderthal Sambo with heavy ridges over his eyes, a protuberant jaw, white rubber lips curled in a simpering grin. Slung over one shoulder was a woman, King Kong’s sexpot Ann Darrow as Marianne, the chaste symbol of France. Brown paper was taped over the windows. The door was locked. When Eddie tried it, a voice called out, “Go away, can’t you see we’re closed?”

  “It’s me,” he said. “Eddie.”

  It brought silence. Fingers appeared against the window glass, widening a seam in the paper. Anne said, “You don’t know who’s inside. It could be the—”

  The door opened. Roquentin looked at them as though he was looking at a ghost, and the ghost had brought along an angel. “What are you doing here?”

  “This is how you greet your old meal ticket?” Eddie said.

  “It is when I want him alive.” He pulled them inside. “You promised you were leaving Paris.”

  “I promise a lot of things I can’t do.”

  “And never pass up those you can do to make trouble.” He was looking at Anne. “I know you from someplace,” he said to her, and left it at that. “What brings you back?” he asked Eddie. “Miss me, or the SS?”

  “Getting to where I’m going is more complicated than I thought.”

  “And you respond by finding a beautiful young woman so no one will look twice in your direction, and returning to a business under the ownership of the SS.”

  “We need a ride.”

  “Anyplace in particular?”

  “Wherever you are traveling suits us,” Eddie said, “as long as it is out of the occupied zone.”

  “Ah, I see, you are trying to get me killed with you.”

  “Is that a no? I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t understand anything. I, on the other hand, understand everything but why I go along with you.”

  “Thank you,” Anne said when Eddie didn’t.

  Eddie looked around the club. Changes made to the interior were no less drastic than those to the sign out in front. Newer, larger tables had replaced the old scarred ones, and there were more of them, closer together, covered in linen cloths. Additional banks of lights suspended above the riser seemed adequate to illuminate the Comedie-Française. There were new menus on the new tables inscribed with new prices. Posters promoting appearances by international stars, and shows headlining Eddie et Ses Anges were missing from the walls, which were now a gallery of not-very-good watercolors.

  “I told them they are turning away customers,” Roquentin said. “I don’t know why I opened my mouth. There’s nothing I would enjoy more than for them to lose their investment. I patiently explained that the charm of La Caverne is in its hominess. It isn’t an art gallery, or restaurant, or concert hall, but a jazz club, where half of the patrons are pie-eyed and can’t see as far as the walls. The Germans didn’t want to hear. They believe that where there are conditions of order there is automatic improvement. I give the club a few weeks before it goes under.”

  “You can buy it back.”

  “No, I am gone for good. I will be happier in the un
occupied zone. Maybe I’ll open a bar in Toulouse.”

  “How will you get there?” Eddie said.

  “Did you know that Philippe is also from Toulouse? He has a truck, and I am going to load my things on top. There should be space for two more, if everyone takes shifts riding in back. If not, we can drop the piano at the side of the road.”

  “When do you leave?”

  “After the weekend,” Roquentin said. “The SS are preparing a grand opening and demand that I organize it.”

  “How is it going?”

  “We won’t draw flies. There will only be Germans and their guests. If I could get away with it, I’d poison them all.”

  “It’s a reasonable idea.”

  “Unfortunately, I know as much about poison as they do about presenting good jazz. Leave mass murder to the Germans, and the music to me, then you can’t go wrong. When no customers show up, they may want to murder me, too, but it’s out of my hands.”

  “Is that a hint that you’d like me to play?” Eddie said.

  “Certainly not. You can’t show your face. You would be arrested in a flash.”

  “Because, you know, if you need me to boost the gate, I’ll do it, considering all the risks you’ve taken for me.”

  Anne put her foot over his toes.

  “I didn’t take them for you to end up in the same place as if I hadn’t,” Roquentin said.

  “Announce that I will perform. You’ll fill every seat.”

  “Those are the last things I want to do.”

  Anne said, “You heard. You’re not wanted. Why do you insist?”

  “Inform the SS that I guarantee the successful start of their endeavor in exchange for the charges against me being dropped,” Eddie said to Roquentin. “Ouch,” he said then as Anne stepped on his foot with all her weight.

  “Are you nuts?” said Roquentin. “They will use you and then kill you. You know them.”

  “Do it for me.”

  “No.”

  “Then I will set up shop on the sidewalk with my horn until I’ve drawn a crowd, and bring them in like the Pied Piper of Hamelin. It’s up to you.”

  “When it comes to you,” Roquentin said, “nothing ever is.”

  Anne said, “You’re a fool. I’m leaving without you.”

  “Excuse me,” Eddie said to Roquentin, and manhandled Anne into a corner. “Before you go, I ask one favor.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “You mentioned that some dynamite remains hidden. I would like you to build a bomb for me.”

  “For you?”

  “For me at first. And after for the SS. I’m no good with poison either.”

  She looked at him skeptically. “To what should I attribute this sudden conversion?”

  “So that you will have a better opinion of me,” Eddie said, “the next night we spend together.”

  She shook her head. “One thing has nothing to do with the other.”

  “So I need to find a better reason?” he said. “I’ll leave it to you.”

  Weiler said, “Roquentin says things aren’t going well, there is little excitement about the new club.”

  Without looking up from his paper, Maier said, “Does it surprise you?”

  “This does. He also says that arrangements can be made for Piron to come out of hiding to play for us.”

  As Maier turned the page deliberately, Weiler was unable to conceal a smile. Maier’s responding to every question with another question, the delay in answering, his determination always to be deferred to, and his contempt for every idea other than his own had become old hat. It was intimidating until you got on to it and recognized it as the stagecraft that it was. He watched with amusement as the colonel folded the paper again and placed it precisely on the corner of his desk, squaring the edges before looking at him.

  “Why would a wanted man put himself on public display?”

  “He is at the end of his rope,” Weiler said. “He tried to flee, to go underground without success—maybe even to kill himself only to find out he didn’t have the nerve. If he doesn’t come to an arrangement with us, he is finished. In attempting to curry our favor, he is seeking preferential terms.”

  “This is what you believe?”

  Why couldn’t Maier say he had a different idea, and tell him what it was? Why another damn question? He would give the colonel a dose of his own medicine and see how it went down.

  “What other interpretation is there?”

  “I’m not a soothsayer,” Maier said. “Find out where he is and seize him. Leave it at that.”

  “Won’t it be sweeter to allow him to think he has bargained for his freedom, and then to snatch it away? After using him to make a success of the club, why can’t we hold up de Villiers for a larger share of the project in the Marais?”

  “We can accomplish the same thing also by putting a gun to de Villiers’s head.”

  Weiler scratched his ear. Twice the colonel had answered with declarative statements. Perhaps he had broken him of an obnoxious trait, one of them.

  “Having Piron under lock and key will be sweet enough,” Maier said, “without playing games.”

  “It would be diff—Would it not be different if it was your daughter he drove to kill herself?”

  “Every case has its human aspects,” Maier said. “If I were to act upon sentiment, my work would suffer as a consequence. I put my confidence in reason. However, I am human. As I shut my eyes in bed, my feelings often overwhelm my thoughts.”

  “Yes?” Weiler said. “What do you do?”

  “Go to sleep.”

  “For me it isn’t that easy. Piron is a beast, deserving of the harshest treatment.”

  Maier was staring at him without blinking. Had he actually contradicted the colonel? Why had he never shown his mettle before?

  “I have already instructed Roquentin to inform Piron that we will accede to his request,” he said. “The reopening of the club will be a huge triumph. I have invited everyone who is anyone in the occupation administration. De Villiers will witness the arrest of the man responsible for his daughter’s ruin. If I know anything about human nature, he will reward us generously.”

  “Do you?” Maier asked.

  “Sir?”

  “Should it turn out that you only think you understand human nature, what then?”

  “But I do,” Weiler said. “It’s a gift.”

  Maier still hadn’t blinked. Weiler felt an overpowering urge to shut his own eyes. Even knowing that the colonel’s constant stare was a trick, it was unsettling how he kept on with it for so long.

  “Strange, then,” Maier said, “that you don’t have a clue about mine.”

  “There, that house,” Anne said to Eddie before the barking of a big dog sent them into the shadows.

  In street lamplight strained through the bare crown of an elm, Eddie surveyed a box-like dwelling of native fieldstone, centuries old, with a sloping roof and iron shutters sealing the windows, one of thousands throughout the city, this one set back from the sidewalk by a scabby lot. Two bicycles preceded by the flapping sound made by a soft tire moved from right to left across his field of vision. “The dynamite,” he said, pulling Anne deep into the blackness, “it’s inside?”

  “Do you think I could sleep soundly beside eight kilograms of high-grade explosives?” she said. “The old man, Monsieur Champenois, used to visit a prostitute in Clichy on Monday and Thursday afternoons. When he was gone, I made two trips to bring it from where we stashed it after stealing it, and buried it in the alley under my window.”

  “You wouldn’t sleep next to it, but rested comfortably on top?”

  “Understanding that nothing short of an earthquake would set it off, I slept quite well at times. It was fear of the militias that spoiled my rest.”

  “You didn’t carry it in a crate in your arms with a shovel over your shoulder.”

  “The sticks fit in my bag like fat baguettes. The shovel I borrowed from Monsieur Champenois�
�s shed. We can’t dig in the yard without waking him, and I can’t announce I’m here for the dynamite that I forgot when I ran away. How do you propose getting it out of the ground?”

  “Something will come to me.”

  “What am I to do while you are waiting for inspiration to strike?”

  “Go back to Roquentin’s.”

  “I’ll wait here,” she said. “Should something go wrong, I can be of use in collecting your pieces.”

  “What would I do without you?”

  He went across the street, pounded on the door with no idea what he would say when it was opened. The pounding triggered renewed barking inside, the frenzied scraping of claws against a bare floor, and slippered feet slapping it, followed by “Silence, Fido,” and then, for human ears, “Who are you? What do you want?”

  Good questions.

  “The police.”

  “Un moment,” came from inside the house, and there was more barking before Eddie looked down at the massive black-brown head of a Rottweiler as sturdy as a hippo. Slobber dripped from the snarling jaws as it fought the old man for slack. Fido? Cerberus was a better fit.

  Champenois was seventy-five at least, pinch-faced without his false teeth, not an imposing physical specimen in his struggle to control the dog. Eddie speculated about his whore, her looks, and the strong stomach required in a profession that prohibited rejecting even such a client. A frayed robe hanging from the old man’s shoulders dragged against the floor, and on his head was what looked to be a knit dunce cap. It puzzled Eddie till he realized that he was the dunce, and it was a night hat. “You’re here about the Jewish bitch,” Champenois said.

  “The woman you kept hidden.”

  “I hid no one, and nothing. During the time I let her stay with me, I didn’t know what she was.”

  “I am sure that you didn’t,” Eddie said. “Others may not see it from your perspective. Cooperate with me, or you will be taken to the station to convince them.”

  Eddie felt Fido’s hot breath through his pants. Champenois snapped the leash. Fido didn’t notice.

  “I told my story at the time she disappeared,” the old man said. “You’ll find nothing of hers here. After she left I—All right, come inside. Look to your heart’s content.”