by Phil Keith
Looking far removed from reality and still not steady on his feet, Pereti managed to spit out, “Bullard, I’m going to kill you. You are a dirty scoundrel, a friend to the Germans. You are working for them!”
“Now Justin, you know you are my friend,” Bullard said, his tone continuing to be smooth and warm. “I’m no German sympathizer. Maybe the war talk has got you so scared that you have to kill somebody. Why not kill Hitler?” He inched closer to the drunken gunman.
Should he tell Pereti about his work with the Deuxième Bureau—that he was actually using his club, in part, to spy on the Nazis, not work for them? Would Pereti even understand in his agitated inebriation? What if Pereti blurted this vital information out to someone else, across the street in the club where he and his men hung out? Life tiptoed on a knife edge as Bullard zeroed in on the gun.
Within an arm’s reach of the shaking pistol, he decided to take a chance, hoping his reactions were better than those of the addled Corsican. The skillful ex-boxer made a lightning grab for Pereti’s wrist. He pushed the man’s hand down...but not before Pereti could squeeze the trigger. Bullard was gut punched by a bullet and felt a pain in his midsection that reminded him of a bad cigarette burn.
He managed to twist Pereti’s gun hand behind his back, but the man’s finger remained on the trigger, and he kept firing. As the two men fell to the floor, with Bullard on top, Pereti shot himself in the butt. He continued to struggle and fire until he had emptied the gun’s eight-round magazine. Most of the rounds slammed into the floor.
Bullard yelled to the bartender to toss him a bottle. When he did, Bullard caught it on the fly and brought it down on Pereti’s head. It smashed into dozens of pieces and the gangster went out cold. For a moment, Bullard considered shoving the broken and jagged remnants of the bottle into Pereti’s throat. The bartender and Simone managed to pull their wounded boss away.
Blood was running down Bullard’s right leg and the pain in his stomach intensified. Simone, her face as white as one of the tablecloths, told him he must get to a hospital. She rushed outside and began shouting for a taxi. Bullard staggered past her and turned up the street. His dazed intention was to return to the Café Lizeaux, to tell Pereti’s brothers what had happened, and that they should hurry to L’Escadrille to ascertain what sort of medical attention Pereti needed. After all, they were friends.
Simone and the bartender had other ideas, though, and Bullard was finally thrust into a taxi. Clambering in beside him was Kitty, his companion in espionage and sometime lover. She never seemed to be far away, and somehow she had been alerted. Calmly, she ordered the driver to the nearest hospital—the sooner he arrived, the more he would be paid. With a swift motion Kitty tore off a piece of her blouse and pressed it against Bullard’s belly. The bleeding slowed but did not stop. With her other arm, Kitty pulled him in close against her.
Kitty’s and Bullard’s clothes were covered in blood when they arrived at the hospital. Since it was a quiet Saturday night, the duty surgeon had gone for dinner at a café next door. He was quickly summoned from his soup. In the meantime, the police had been alerted and they were on the way.
As Bullard lay on a gurney being prepped for emergency surgery, two detectives arrived and wanted to know what had happened. The nurses, meanwhile, were trying to shoo the police away. Everyone was yelling as Bullard’s blood spilled on the floor in shocking quantities. Kitty was trying to soothe him.
The circus of interests finally abated when the surgeon arrived and restored a semblance of order. The doctor inspected his rapidly weakening patient. The bullet had bounced around in Bullard’s insides and exited via his right hip. He was a shredded, bleeding mess. Expecting the worst, the surgeon told Bullard he would do what he could but he also cautioned him to prepare himself for the end.
In the meantime, as Bullard had requested, Kitty had slipped away, desperate to find Leplanquais.
For as long as Bullard could remember, going back to his boyhood in Georgia, he had been prepared to die. That he had lived this long, surviving ghastly war wounds, was already a miracle. Perhaps he was out of miracles. What was different now, though, was something more important than his life—his daughters. His desperate thoughts of his little family became his total focus.
As the doctor scrubbed his hands and the gurney began to roll down the hall to the surgery, Leplanquais appeared at his side.
With what felt like his last ounce of strength, Bullard croaked to him, “Remember your promise!”
17
TOO TOUGH TO DIE
Miraculously, the slug that Eugene Bullard took had wandered around inside his abdomen, ripped up some flesh and muscle, but somehow missed all his vital organs. Even so, just from the loss of blood and shock, most men would have died, but Bullard’s strapping constitution coupled with his desire to see his daughters again saved his life. The bullet exited, which also proved a blessing in that the surgeon didn’t have to go poking around inside his patient to find it.
After some exploration and suturing, it was determined that Bullard could be classified as in “serious” condition, which was far better than the initial and somber analysis of impending death. The physician, as a precaution, prescribed rest, limited liquids, baby food only, and a prolonged stay in the hospital.
Within forty-eight hours, Bullard was complaining about a lack of “real food.” He was already getting restless, and he wanted to see Jacqueline and Lolita, who were being cared for—and kept away from the hospital—by the indispensable Kitty. After having done a little sleuthing, it was she who figured out what had caused the confrontation at L’Escadrille in the first place.
Without telling Bullard, she went to visit Pereti in another hospital where he, too, was recovering. Pereti had a mighty sore ass, since one bullet had plowed through both cheeks, but more seriously he had sustained a fractured skull and had lost the sight in one eye from the blow Bullard had inflicted on him with the champagne bottle. He was, however, lucid enough to talk about the incident.
The explanation was certainly not what Kitty expected. Pereti revealed that he was working for yet another Resistance cell. Even though a common thug, Pereti and his mates harbored deep-rooted patriotic feelings for their adopted land and had powerful anti-Nazi sentiments. Pereti, witnessing how deferentially Bullard had treated Oberst Scheer, had become convinced that the obsequious nightclub owner was a collaborator and, in his drunken haze, determined that he needed to eliminate the “black bastard.”
So, there it was, in all its “fog of war” confusion: two teammates mistakenly believed each was on the wrong side. The results of the misunderstanding were nearly fatal for both. When Kitty returned to Bullard, she found Leplanquais at his bedside. She told them both what had happened. It was quite a shock.
Not long after, Pereti’s two brothers showed up to visit. In a room full of flowers, food, bottles of champagne, and cards wishing the impatient patient a speedy recovery, the Corsican mobsters pressed several thousand francs into Bullard’s hand. It was clearly a bribe—they did not want him to press charges with the police. Bullard refused the money, at first.
“Take it as a gift—a peace offering, to cover the cost of your place being closed because of this incident,” the brothers begged.
It was true: L’Escadrille had been forced to shut down for several days while the attack was investigated and its owner incapacitated. Bullard reconsidered, and finally agreed to take the money and drop the charges. The Corsicans departed, smiling, with one last comment: “On les aura,” the brothers promised, meaning in regard to the Germans, “We will get them.”
* * *
“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine,” moans the heartsick, fictional Rick Blaine in Casablanca. Rick is, of course, talking about Ilsa, his former lover, then married to another man and on the run from the Nazis. Ilsa begs the piano player, “Play it, Sa
m.” Then later, the two star-crossed romantics, gazing into each other’s eyes realize, like Rick whispers, “We’ll always have Paris.”
Bullard and Kitty “have Paris,” too, and would wind up leaving his version of a gin joint and fleeing the Nazis. Was there a crossover story between these two that eerily reflects the fate of Rick and Ilsa? We have only speculation. Bullard reveals nothing during his later years about the fate of Kitty—and their relationship, if any beyond the professional. We do know two things, though: Kitty will, as we shall see, become very important to the survival and fate of Bullard’s cherished daughters. There is also one solitary record, post–World War II, awarding one “Cleopatre Terrier, Resistance Fighter extraordinaire, the Legion of Honor.” Was she alive to receive it? Was the award posthumous? Whatever her fate, she seems, like Rick and Captain Renault, to have vanished into the mist at the end of her “movie.”
In the hospital, Bullard made remarkable progress, and after only ten days, and a couple of loud arguments with his doctor, he was given permission to leave. By late July, he was back at work and L’Escadrille was booming once more. He and Kitty were listening in again on their unsuspecting German patrons, smiling, and pretending they didn’t understand anything that was being discussed.
“The Nazis believed their blonde coloring and Nordic ancestry made them superior to anybody else,” Bullard wrote, concerning how unguarded the German officers were in their conversations. “Of course, they figured, no Negro could be bright enough to understand any language except his own, much less figure out the military importance of whatever they said in German. So, as the Nazis talked to each other at my tables and I served them, they were not at all careful about discussing military secrets within my hearing.”
The intelligence and even gossip he and Kitty gleaned was passed on to Leplanquais. Every night was the same—Bullard effected a “dumb” but smiling face and Kitty pretended to flirt. Both had their ears wide open. Remaining impassive became more difficult to do, however, as what they heard became more alarming.
As Bullard and Kitty relayed to Leplanquais, the Germans were spending a lot of time talking about Poland. Was it the next target? It certainly seemed so. The information was dutifully pushed up the chain of command, where it apparently was ignored—or perhaps not believed, and Poland would pay the price.
On September 1, 1939, the German “Blitzkrieg” smashed into the Polish eastern border. The Poles were so poorly prepared that during the first days of the war they actually sent out a unit of one thousand mounted Lancers to charge against German Panzer tanks. The Panzers sliced through these unfortunates as if they were tissue paper. Mounds of blasted horseflesh and mangled human corpses littered a wide swath of Polish countryside. Poland’s entire military capability would be obliterated completely in less than a week.
On September 3, although it was already far too late to save Poland, the mutual defense treaties that France and England had signed with Warsaw went into effect, and the French and the British were at war with Germany. The sons of the survivors of the Great War, and even some who had fought in the trenches, mobilized once again to battle the sons and survivors of their foes across the Rhine.
As Hitler consolidated his gains, the European allies scrambled. The Nazis stood pat, for the most part, and the next six months, from October 1939 to March 1940, was dubbed the “Phony War,” wherein not much happened. Although hope could always spring eternal, it could also offer, at times, a false sense of security.
Eugene Bullard, for one, did not believe it was a phony war, and events surrounding him made him only more convinced that another conflagration was about to commence.
18
THE “PHONY WAR” BECOMES REAL
It had been the pride and joy of a penniless kid from Columbus, Georgia. A car—and not just any car, but a 1934 Delahaye. The green two-door coupe had belonged to one of his pals from the Foreign Legion who had purchased it new, but when he fell on hard times as the stock market in America continued to struggle, he was forced to sell it. Bullard had scooped it up in 1937 for the bargain price of $900. A car in Paris was a true extravagance, and with gas rationing and the snarls of civilian and military traffic, a royal nuisance, but Bullard wanted it anyway. He and his daughters took long drives outside the city on those rare days when he could get away from L’Escadrille. They packed picnics in the boot and sped off, full of boundless happiness despite the tensions to the east.
As 1939 turned to 1940, it was Bullard’s turn to get rid of his cherished vehicle. Rationing was bad enough, but gas was almost impossible to find as war materials were being carefully husbanded by a wary French government. The cost of the garage, which was a half mile from his apartment, was an expense beyond his management as revenues from L’Escadrille plummeted. Besides, where could he and his girls go now? Any drive outside of Paris was dangerous as the roads became clogged with troop movements and millions of refugees streaming into the city and to other, safer, parts of France. A friend offered Bullard $700 to take the car with him to America on the same steamer upon which he had booked passage, and Bullard reluctantly accepted.
There would be more sacrifices. He pulled the girls out of the convent school they had been attending. The tuition was not that great, but every sou counted during those uncertain days; besides, he wanted them close to home. They would stay at the apartment with him, and if anything happened, Kitty or Leplanquais would get them to safety.
Bullard had to stop paying his talent again, too, just as in the early days of Le Grand Duc. Most of the good bandsmen and singers were out of work anyway. At least Gene could feed them and pay for their drinks. As Bricktop had done when she first arrived in Paris, many of the musicians literally sang for their suppers.
The war might be phony, but the preparations and precautions were real. Soon after the declarations of war in September 1939, France began imposing blackouts. The famed City of Light, thirty minutes after sundown, became the City of Darkness. Almost all forms of transportation came to a halt after nightfall, and the Champs-Élysées turned into a pedestrian thoroughfare where denizens and tourists alike stumbled around in the gloom. Theaters shut down, their marquees turned off. Cafés weren’t even allowed to offer flashlights to provide illumination for their customers. Needless to say, the once-hot cabarets and clubs of Montmartre went cold.
By October 1939, the American Embassy in Paris was urging, practically demanding, that all Americans leave France. With increasing frequency, German bombers flew over Paris. One of them, in broad daylight, dropped a bomb on the embassy. Reportedly, it did not explode but crashed through the ceiling and landed at the feet of US Ambassador William C. Bullitt Jr.
Reluctantly, the African American exodus that had sought liberation from racism in the 1920s and ’30s went into reverse. Bookings on the steamship lines from Le Havre and other ports of call skyrocketed. Those without enough money for the fare had to wait for drafts from home, loans from friends, or the outright kindness of strangers.
By this time Bricktop had left1 but Josephine Baker wasn’t going anywhere. She made up her mind to stay; plus, she had renounced her American citizenship and the American Embassy, wearing the snub like a jilted lover, was not of a mind to renew her passport in any case.
Eugene Bullard felt the same about abandoning France, although he was still very much an American citizen. At forty-four, he had been a “Frenchman” far longer than he had been an American. His daughters were French citizens and all that he owned on earth was invested in France. He didn’t have a passport either, but he had never had one: as a stowaway, he had snuck into Europe via Scotland, and had never looked back. The only identification papers he possessed were from his Legionnaire and 170th Infantry days and, of course, his French Air Service pilot’s license.
Another reason he refused to abandon his beloved Paris, as he later wrote in his memoirs, “I was never too crazy about walking away from dange
r.”
As a dreary October slipped into an even gloomier November, the French Army was frantically calling up its reserves and organizing its battalions and regiments into divisions and corps. Most of the troops were being positioned in and along the vaunted Maginot Line, France’s first bulwark against any invading Nazi hordes.
The Maginot Line, named after André Maginot, French Minister of War from 1915-1920, stretched from Switzerland, all along the German border, through Luxembourg, right up to Belgium. It had been constructed during the 1930s and had cost France the staggering sum of three billion francs. The mostly concrete and steel structures hid all types of artillery and were set up to withstand direct aerial bombardment and also to effectively resist attack by tanks. The underground facilities were air-conditioned, and forts along the line had barracks, dining halls, and all the amenities necessary to support the hundreds of thousands of troops who were stationed within its confines.
The bulwark was a modern marvel of engineering and military might, but it ultimately proved worthless. The northern end of the line was not extended to the English Channel, which would have made it complete, because Belgium objected to having the line on its border. This, of course, gave the Germans a way to conduct an end run around the line; so, anticipating that, the French and British military planners factored that in. The bulk of their blocking forces were stationed along the border of Belgium that abutted France.
Even in this, however, there was one fatal flaw: the line was weakest at the Ardennes Forest which covered parts of Belgium and Luxembourg. The terrain was so thickly forested and so riven with steep hills and deep valleys that it was believed to be impassable—except by a modern, mechanized, armed force. This would be exactly where the spear point of Hitler’s offensive would go, and it would be successful.
