Really the Blues

by Joseph Koenig

  Inside the trumpet case, four feet of fuse coiled around spindles in the lid were attached to two sticks of dynamite in the compartment where his horn belonged. He knocked a worm of ash from the cigarette, and touched the lit end to the fuse until it began to sparkle like a nigger chaser. After lighting it, he had fifteen or twenty seconds to get outside before it went off, Anne had said, unless the fuse was slow, or extinguished itself, or burned so fast that not even Jesse Owens was quick enough to outrun it.

  Eddie would have to outwalk it.

  “Stop him!”

  Eddie looked up as Weiler slammed his glass on the table. It disintegrated in his fist, spattering blood on de Villiers. Shrugging out of de Villiers’s grasp, he charged the bandstand.

  There was silence of the kind, Eddie figured, that John Wilkes Booth had commanded on the stage at Ford’s Theater. “Sic semper tyrannis,” Booth had shouted after his awful deed. Though nothing in what he did at La Caverne Negre tonight was motivated by Booth’s bitter impulse, was in fact its precise opposite, Eddie wanted to shout the same words.

  Instead, he shut the lid and ran.

  La Caverne refilled with sound as the silence fell apart of its own weight. “Stop that man, get Piron,” rose above the racket. The bandstand shook as two men leaped onto it. Eddie felt their footsteps before he heard them.

  Maier pounced on the trumpet case as Weiler came after Eddie, who ran with his head down, concentrating on his footing. The way to the door was blocked by men braced for collision, a defensive backfield in Wehrmacht gray. A stout lieutenant lunging drunkenly at his hips was easily sidestepped, and Eddie lowered his shoulder into two corporals, crouched and nimble, and knocked them off their feet. Outstretched hands pulled him off-stride. They clawed buttons from his shirt and skin from his neck while his internal clock struck the final seconds. Punches transmitting equal pain to his fist and German chins gained two hard-fought meters, and then he stiffened his arm and used it like a jouster’s lance to break through the human wall.

  His steps lengthened; the exit remained distant. When at last he reached it, the door refused to open no matter how hard he pushed against it. Powerful hands spinning him around brought him face to face with Major Weiler. A short, straight punch drove him back against the door, and was followed by a looping blow that caught him between the eyes and relieved him momentarily of his intelligence. Weiler grabbed his lapels and jerked. A head butt was turned back by a fist landing over the major’s heart. Weiler grunted but kept his grip. Eddie brought up his knee into Weiler’s crotch. Weiler didn’t seem to notice. Eddie did it again, getting Weiler’s attention along with a spray of curses, and bloody snot, and Weiler’s skull glancing against his cheek.

  Over Weiler’s shoulder, Eddie saw Colonel Maier tear open the trumpet case and reach in. How could it be that seconds ago too few seconds were left, and now there were too many? The puzzle distracted him, and Weiler’s hands wrapped around his throat. Unable to dislodge them, he winged punches non-stop, connected with most. But he was dizzy, and hurting, and they had no snap, and caused little damage.

  “You’re done, Piron.” Weiler spit the words in his face. “By all that’s holy, your luck’s run out.”

  It wasn’t news. He clapped his hands against Weiler’s ears and saw the major’s face contort.

  He threw more weak fists. Heavier hands hit back. Other Germans rushed to aid Weiler. A wall of SS closed around him, crammed the narrow space where he grappled with the major. A sensation that the building had begun to dance couldn’t be blamed on the pummeling he was taking. The wall of storm troopers came apart with a roar ahead of shock waves from the detonating TNT that reached him, blunted by German bodies.

  The explosion blew the door off the hinges. Eddie rode it locked in Weiler’s embrace until the jolt of a hard landing. Weiler skated, cartwheeled to the gutter, stopped by a hydrant at the curb.

  Eddie was of the opinion that Weiler was right, and he must be dead, taking his bearings in the afterlife with a birdseye view of the world he’d left. It was easier to believe than that he’d survived intact. More than he could say for Weiler, who had absorbed the brunt of the explosion.

  His head ached. Pressing it cautiously between his hands, he was grateful that the shape seemed to be the same, only some patches of hair and skin missing from where they belonged. About the inside it was too soon to know. He winced as a bolt of pain passed through it .

  Getting to his feet, he discovered he’d lost his shoes. In his brain there was room for just one thought at a time now, and that was how to replace them. Weiler had retained his, though not both legs. Eddie went first to one by itself on the street, and snatched a well-crafted oxford with a superlative shine. The other he took from Weiler’s corpse. Not a perfect fit, but, then, what ever was?

  A second inventory of himself was in order. The sleeves were missing from his shirt. Everything else seemed to be accounted for, yet something was not. Through smoke and dust he saw a handful of survivors, though he thought of them as something else, his failures perhaps, also taking stock. Their cries and groans were lost in the ringing in his ears. The ringing was all he could hear.

  La Caverne Negre. Had the name ever been more apt? A black cave was what it was now. The roof, the section above the bandstand, had been blown sky-high, and the starless night pressed down, blotting the light from the street. In the mass of debris was his trumpet. He climbed over rubble slick with flesh. Yellow metal reflected in a passing headlight caught his attention, a lamp or light stanchion. In a hand above the pile where the riser had been was brass recast by immense heat, a musical instrument imagined by Salvador Dalí, the hand extending from the sleeve of a ranking SS officer. It was all Eddie cared to see of Colonel Maier. The trumpet was reclaimable as a souvenir, but Eddie had stopped wanting it. Maier could keep it. A fair trade for good German shoes.

  Fire engines arrived ahead of cars from the Sûreté and a Wehrmacht troop carrier. Seeing the pumpers with flashing lights and firefighters rushing to link sections of hose, and not hearing idling engines and shouts, brought déjà vu from when he was a kid gawking at the silent images at the nickelodeon. For the third time he took an accounting of what he’d lost. His sleeves and his shoes. His horn and his hearing. Paris. Maybe his music. Gone for nothing if the French didn’t take up the fight against the Germans. Who gave a damn? He had nothing here. Never did. No, that wasn’t right. It was late for sour grapes.

  A man from a car with German plates tried to get him to sit down. Eddie pushed him away. Anne was supposed to meet him around the corner if everything went okay, and it had. Hadn’t it?

  A truck pulled up, and Roquentin came around the front barking at him and gesturing for him to hurry. All Eddie heard was the ringing in his head. Gentle pressure where his arm was burned was agonizing. He yelled, but didn’t hear that either. Roquentin gave him over to Anne, who pulled him onto the front seat, and they raced away from Place Pigalle on little-used streets.

  “He’s hurt.”

  He could feel her words on his cheek. In daylight maybe he’d be able to read lips. Now he might as well be blind as well as deaf. He held onto the door handle as Roquentin turned suddenly away from a roadblock, unable to let go as intimations of pain broke through the numbness where he hadn’t known he was injured.

  “I think he’s in shock. He doesn’t answer when I ask where his injuries are.”

  “Frankly, I never expected we would see him alive,” Roquentin said.

  “He was very good, very strong. I didn’t know he would be so brave.” She patted Eddie’s hand, squeezed it, brushed her lips against the knuckles, and clapped his open palm to her face. “I’ll make his pain go away, you’ll see. I will fix him as good as new.”

  “You’ll bring him to your country?”

  “He needs false papers to get past the British. A new identity once he is living there. I can help with those—with everything.” She held him tighter. “He will always have me.”


  “He’s a proud man,” Roquentin said. “It won’t be easy, pretending to be other than himself.”

  “He has no place else,” Anne said. “How hard can it be?”

  REALLY THE BLUES

  Pegasus Books LLC

  80 Broad Street, 5th Floor

  New York, NY 10004

  Copyright © 2014 Joseph Koenig

  First Pegasus Books cloth edition August 2014

  Interior design by Maria Fernandez

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  ISBN 978-1-60598-581-7

  ISBN 978-1-60598-606-7 (e-book)

  Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company