77 Rue Paradis

by Gil Brewer

  Baron continued to feel more and more ill. Bette was in this man’s hands and he could see a dry evil flame in Gorssmann’s eyes now.

  “I should much like to meet this woman,” Gorssmann said. “You might say I collect such creatures. They interest me.” Gorssmann writhed slightly in the chair, the arms creaking against his weight.

  Baron was close to exploding now. It was all he could do to stand there and know the man Gorssmann was.

  Gorssmann shrugged, rose to his feet. The chair rose with him. He wriggled his hips and the chair clattered to the floor. Gorssmann’s derby bounced to the floor and rolled over by the bed.

  “Would you kindly pick it up for me?” Gorssmann said.

  “No.”

  The big man loomed beside Baron. He stepped over, fished for the hat with his cane. He had no success.

  “I will ask you again. Please. I cannot. Would you hand me my hat?”

  “You will leave then?”

  Gorssmann waited. Baron went over and picked up the hat, flipped it to Gorssmann, waited. Gorssmann passed him a slow tight look, turned, and walked out through the door. Baron waited. The door opened and Gorssmann stepped back inside.

  “Please act immediately. As soon as you can, Baron. I will keep in touch.” He turned and the door closed. Baron heard him speak to Arnold, then the slow descent of the stairs began, and he thought how good it would be to push Gorssmann down those stairs, to see his huge body tumbling end over end with the high song of fear bubbling on his lips.

  He knew what he had to do.

  * * * *

  She stood stiffly in the shadows of the closet and stared at him.

  “Come on out,” he said. “I’m in a hurry, Lili.”’

  She reached for him, her fine body beginning to tremble again, and Baron did not know what to do.

  “Darling,” she said. “Darling.”

  He left her there, hurried across the room to the front window. He heard her padding along after him, her bare feet whispering on the worn carpet.

  If he could follow Gorssmann…. He looked down and the big man and Arnold were standing by the gray Opel, parked behind the Fiat. Gorssmann brandished the cane, pointed across the street. Arnold said something.

  “Please,” Lili said. She held to him, gripping him and pressing her warm soft body against his back. “Please, Frank!” He felt her breath against his neck and her thighs tightened on him, her body moving against him. He wanted her, but he had to try to follow Gorssmann. He did not exactly know what was in the back of his mind.

  “I did not know,” Lili said, holding to him. “Frank, I love you. I love you, chéri! It is magnificent and I never knew. I love you. Come to the bed again, Frank. Please, darling!”

  He pulled her around and held her against him. The smell of her hair was like heady musk in his nostrils and he held her there against him, looking down to the street.

  Gorssmann whipped the cane against Arnold again. Arnold shrugged his shoulders and the two men crossed the street in front of the Opel and entered a café. Baron saw them sit at a table near the door.

  “I am a grown woman and I never knew!” Lili said. She whispered it against his throat, pressing herself against him, whispering again and again that she loved him.

  He held her way from him, keeping one eye on the café, trying to arrest the rise of passion that again confronted him. He wanted to take her over to the bed. He wanted her perhaps even more now than before. She seemed to be trying to let him know that she was completely his, and the sly look in her eyes was there all the time. He wanted to believe her, trust her. Abruptly, then, he tore off his robe, whipped it across her shoulders, held it tightly closed.

  He moved across the room, gathered up his clothes, returned with them to the window, and began to dress.

  “Listen, Lili,” he said. “I don’t want to stop now, either. There’s nothing I can do.”

  “Yes.” She watched him. The robe began to sag open and he kept his eyes on the window. She was the most tantalizing woman he had ever seen.

  He fumbled nervously, dressing, trying to forget that Lili stood there, pleading with her eyes.

  “Is what Gorssmann said about Bette true?” he said.

  She nodded. “He did not go shopping with her. He says those things to tease you. Bette is well. Tonight I will talk with her. She said to tell you she is all right and that she understands.”

  “But do you understand?”

  “Only that I have found love, Frank.”

  He said nothing. He got his tie around his collar, knotted it, realizing he had his collar under the tie, unknotted it. He saw Gorssmann and Arnold come out of the café. Gorssmann carried a paper bag. They looked up and down the street, then moved on across and climbed into the Opel.

  “I’ve got to go,” he told her. For a single moment he held her against him, kissed her warm lips.

  “You are going to follow them? Why?”

  He said nothing. He could not bring himself to tell her about Follet. He still could not trust her.

  “Gorssmann is bad,” she said. “I must tell you this, so you’ll know. Quickly!”

  He glanced down the street. The Opel still hadn’t moved.

  “What, Lili? What?”

  She stepped away from him, turned her back, and went over to the bed. “He does bad things. I know they are bad. He has never touched me, but he makes me dress up all in black. With black pants that you can see through, Frank. Then he makes me do things. Like—stand on my head. Sometimes he pins the skirt of my dress over my head and makes me dance for him on his bed. Always on his bed. He has a huge bed. Once he painted me with black paint all over and— He has a peephole cut into the wall of the— I never know when— It’s truly terrible, Frank. I thought you must know.”

  He stood there staring, and his stomach turned slowly. He wanted to go down there and kill him. He knew now that he had to act, and quickly. Already he had seen the man’s eyes when he spoke of Bette. Bette did have a wonderful body, as lovely as Lili’s, and if…. He left the thought unfinished, rushed through the door and down the stairs.

  As he reached the front door and opened it, he saw the Opel draw away from the curb. He climbed behind the wheel of the Fiat and drove quickly out into traffic. He kept the small sloping rear end of the Opel in view, two cars ahead.

  As he headed out Paradis toward the Cannebière, he remembered with a touch of panic that he hadn’t told Lili that Gorssmann had handled her package of paints. If Lili was honest and the alert Gorssmann happened to see the package when she reached his place with it, there would be trouble. Because Gorssmann would remember.

  CHAPTER 16

  Baron was frightened. He knew he was doing the best he could, but the sense of fright and panic would not leave him. He was dealing with things over his head. He had already realized that his life had not been meant for this. This was the kind of thing you looked at in a movie, or read about in the morning paper over coffee with your first cigarette. Yes, he thought, drying one palm after the other on his trousers, then grasping the sweat-slippery steering wheel of the Fiat, only you are in it. And now you’ve gone and begun to cross the fat one.

  And thinking of Gorssmann, he recalled again what Lili had told him as he left the room. The man was a monster. Imagine, painting a girl with black paint! He had never heard of one just like that before.

  Somehow he had to keep Bette out of his mind. Thinking of her only brought more pain.

  He knew he should insist that he see Bette. Suppose Gorssmann was lying? Suppose Lili was, too? Maybe Bette’s knife-sliced body already lay on the banks of the canal, her blood tinting the waters crimson. Like Elene.

  The Opel drew to the curb before a bakery, just ahead. Baron came to the curb and waited. For the moment, his mind cleared, and he tried to remember what it was Follet had said he should do if he wanted to find him.

  Yes. Café Demoiselle on the Prado, somewhere around the Place Castellane. He would find it. It was a
gamble, but lately everything was a gamble.

  He would try to see Louis Follet and talk him into staging a raid on Gorssmann’s headquarters. That way Bette could be saved, and Gorssmann would be put behind bars, where he belonged, with the rest of his crew. And surely among Gorssmann’s effects there would be some lead to the head man. Baron wanted that as much as Follet. He prayed now that Follet would take the chance. He knew the agent wanted the big boy, not the middle man. Nevertheless, he must go along with it. He had to.

  He saw Gorssmann at the bakery door. He went inside, and Baron waited. Arnold got out of the car and stood on the sidewalk in front of the bakery, looking up and down and carefully brushing his hat.

  Gorssmann returned, striding across the sidewalk with two long loaves of bread beneath his arm. He nodded brusquely to Arnold, and after they were inside, the Opel pulled away into traffic again.

  As he followed, Baron realized he was hungry. Seeing the bread had done it. He passed the bakery and the loaves were racked fresh and flaky and brown in the windows.

  The moment the Opel turned off the main street into the alley, Baron knew for sure it was the spot. He remembered it from the first night, and he also recalled that he’d been past here today. How he missed it he didn’t know. But to make doubly certain, he parked the Fiat and ran across the sidewalk to the corner of the alley. The Opel was nowhere to be seen.

  He stood there.

  For an instant he went sort of blind inside. He was about to move down into the alley when a grape arbor on the right side, shielding the rear of a home, rustled, and Gorssmann stepped out. He looked up the alley.

  Baron ducked back. When next he looked, Gorssmann, Arnold, and the young driver were moving through the door into the corridor that led to the garden.

  Baron turned and made for the Fiat. Exuberance picked him up, and he headed back toward the Prado.

  * * * *

  “Oui,” he told the thin, red-haired woman in charge of the Café Demoiselle. “Room Two.”

  She stepped back from the side of the small bar, took hold of the beer spout, and looked him over. She was very tall and very thin. She wore a gray dress with a white apron, and her eyes were like the blued heads of freshly tempered horseshoe nails. Her long nose hooked out over her upper lip and her chin hooked up. Her mouth was a buttonhole and Baron saw suddenly that the red hair was a wig. It was disconcerting. From beneath the edges of the red hair, just around the woman’s large pendulous ears, fine gray-white hair peeked in fuzzy knots and knobs, like the gray gobs of dust that collect beneath beds.

  “Room Two?”

  «S’il vous plait,» Baron said. He watched as the woman arched her head back and swallowed.

  «Whom do you seek to find, monsieur?»

  «Simply Room Two, please.»

  She frowned question marks at him.

  «This is the Café Demoiselle?»

  “Mais oui, monsieur.”

  “You are—the madam?”

  He could have sworn that she blushed. She nodded.

  “I was told that I should ask you for Room Two.”

  “Who told you that, monsieur?”

  “A man—a friend.”

  “Ah.” She released her grip on the beer spout, moved around behind the bar, pushed the cork tight in a bottle of vin ordinaire. She held the bottle up to the light, toward the street, looked at it, then looked at Baron over her shoulder. He could have sworn now that she was trying to look coquettish. It was his turn to blush. He whirled around, stared out the front door of the café. A man who had been at the back of the café, playing the pinball machine, walked past him.

  The man nodded and waved a cigarette at the woman.

  The woman waved the bottle.

  “Well?” Baron said to the woman.

  “Would you desire a glass of beer, maybe?”

  “No.”

  She shrugged, put the wine bottle down, and stared at it. She scratched her head. The wig moved back and forth with the itching movement of her fingers. When it moved, Baron saw the pink scalp just about the tufts of gray hair. It was somehow grotesque, horrible, frightening.

  “What kind of man was this man who sent you to Room Two?”

  He stared at her. “Maybe I should go,” he said. He knew very well that he could not go. Had Louis Follet been making jokes?

  A young girl with an extremely flagrant behind entered the café. She went to the bar, ordered a double cassis, drank it, did not pay for it, and left. She did not once look at either Baron or the red-haired woman.

  “You are sure you do not desire one beer, maybe?”

  “All right.”

  She smiled, picked up a glass, held it under the spout. She pressed the handle. When the glass was full she held it up to the light, inspecting it. She found something. She wiped her index finger across her apron, dug into the beer for the something, had some success, wiped the finger on her apron and wiped the bar with the apron and set the glass carefully on the bar just beyond the spot she had wiped. She grinned steadily above the glass of beer.

  He paid her. He did not drink the beer. She rang the money up on the cash register. The grin vanished.

  “Come.”

  She motioned to him and walked rapidly ahead of him across the café floor, through some bedraggled violet drapes into a hall smelling strongly of fish and cabbage. She went to the end of the hall, opened a door, and stood aside as Baron entered. He saw the numeral 2 on the door. Inside he turned just in time to have the door close in his face. Not loudly.

  An hour and a half later, Louis Follet entered the room and stood there looking at Baron. He took his hat off, stuck it beneath one arm, prodded his pockets for tobacco, and rolled a cigarette.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting. I had a long distance to come to arrive.”

  “Forget it.”

  Baron had been sitting in one of the two chairs by the small circular table in the center of the room. There was an ash tray in the center of the table. Otherwise the room was empty. Baron was so tired and sick now he did not care what Follet did. He could not even see through the one window in the room. It had been painted a peculiar color sometime along about 1912, maybe.

  He was so worked up, thinking about Bette and how he had sold Chevard out, that he could just barely stand looking at Louis Follet. He hated Follet. He hated everybody he knew. He could think of no one he did not hate vehemently and with glass-smooth, easy-flowing, unadulterated hate.

  “Madame said she did not know whether or not to trust you,” Follet said. He chuckled. It was a dry sound, like sand poured down a cellar door.

  “Good Lord,” Baron said. “Who is that harridan?”

  “We keep her on,” Follet said. He came across the room. He dropped his spent match into the ash tray, rocked on his heels, dropped his broken hat on the table, and sat down opposite Baron. “She was, believe it or not, one of the very most famous spies in the Allied forces during the First World War, and she caused the firing squad and the rope, too, and even suicide for many an unhappy one.” He mused quietly above his cigarette, coughed lightly, like a beetle cleaning its wings, while he picked shreds of tobacco from the cigarette. He shook his head. “You perhaps saw the wig?”

  “How could I help seeing?”

  Follet nodded. He did not smile. “They did that to her, too. She was captured. They burned her hair off, Baron. Then they cut her scalp into small checks, like a chessboard, and plucked the pieces out one by one. Her hair never grew back, of course. She escaped, and came across to our lines with her head bandaged, as a prisoner of war, disguised, you know? When they took the bandages off, there was only the skull—the shiny white bone. They performed surgery—plastic surgery, you know?—and saved her. It had already started to—” He made loopy motions with his finger. “But the hair, it never became again, except some tufts near the ears.” He shook his head. “She was content that she lived, even grateful. She continued with her work. She even managed to return and somehow kill the very of
ficer who cut her scalp. She cut his throat. What was it you were going to say about Madame?”

  Baron said nothing. The picture in his mind was bright and horrible.

  “Not many know of these things that happen during war,” Follet said. “Or during peace, either. The ordinary person has no conception of what is gone through, perhaps.” He smiled behind the thin cigarette smoke. “It is, as they say in America, a tough proposition—rugged.”

  “Were you at the Cassis plant this morning?” Baron said. He did not want to think about what he had thought of the woman.

  “What did you summon me for?”

  “All right.” Baron sighed, rose from the chair, and searched for a fragment of calm. Some calm had to be someplace. He paced the room and told Follet why he’d wanted to see him. “You’ve got to do this,” he insisted. “You’ve got to.”

  Follet ground his cigarette out in the ash tray. He rolled himself another, coughed around it, and lighted it. “It stands to reason, it’s a good chance all round.”

  Follet nodded.

  “I can’t take the chance, with this Gorssmann. Not now,” Baron said. “They’ve got my daughter.” He looked over at Follet. The man sat quietly smoking, staring at the flyspecked wall beyond the table. Baron came quickly across the room, smashed his fist onto the table. The ash tray leaped up, flipped out its ashes, slammed back in place. Follet brushed the ashes off the table into his hand, emptied them back into the ash tray, and looked at Baron.

  “I’m sorry, damn it! Can’t you see how I feel?”

  “I did not disagree with you, monsieur,” Follet said. “I was merely thinking about the prospect and how we should best approach it. All right, we will try.”

  Baron felt relief like a cold shower on a hot day. He settled into the other chair and suddenly felt extremely tired and hungry. He leaned his head on his arms on the table, then peered over his arms at Follet, saying nothing.

  “Tonight, then. You will come?”

  “Try and keep me away.”

  “Good. The sooner, the better. Just after dinner, then. Let me think.” He took out a large round gold watch from his vest pocket, inspected it, put it away. “Two hours, eh? Good. I shall play the fool.”