Also by Robert Olen Butler
The Alleys of Eden
Sun Dogs
Countrymen of Bones
On Distant Ground
Wabash
The Deuce
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
They Whisper
Tabloid Dreams
The Deep Green Sea
Mr. Spaceman
Fair Warning
Had a Good Time
From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction
(Janet Burroway, Editor)
Severance
Intercourse
Hell
Weegee Stories
A Small Hotel
Perfume River
The Christopher Marlowe Cobb Series
The Hot Country
The Star of Istanbul
The Empire of Night
PARIS in the DARK
A CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE COBB THRILLER
ROBERT OLEN BUTLER
Copyright © 2018 by Robert Olen Butler
Cover design based on the original design by Royce M. Becker
Cover artwork © Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo
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A portion of this book originally appeared in Narrative magazine.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
This book was set in 11.5 pt Janson MT
by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH.
First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: September 2018
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data available for this title.
ISBN 978-0-8021-2837-9
eISBN: 978-0-8021-4646-5
The Mysterious Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
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18 19 20 21 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Kelly.
It just gets better and better.
Table of Contents
Cover
Also by Robert Olen Butler
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Back Cover
1
In the dark above Paris, in the deep autumn of 1915, there were always the Nieuports flying their patterns, like sentries walking a perimeter. The new, svelte Model 11—called Bébé by its pilots—operated above the high-flying Zeppelins, poised to drop on them in a column of searchlight if the Zepps got by the guns at the French forts to the east.
On a November night I sat beneath the Nieuports at a table outside the Café de la Rotonde. The weather had been unpredictable. It snowed last week but tonight it was almost mild. It might as well have been April and that hammering of engine pistons up above might as was well have been French worker bees going after chestnut blossoms.
My drink was a Bijou—the greenery taste of the chartreuse fitting right in with the bees in the night—and I was surrounded by people I couldn’t actually see, just vague shapes and spots of cigarette flame. But I knew who they were, the assorted male denizens of the Left Bank. Artists and professors; students furloughed for six days from hell; students furloughed for good by a stump of an arm or an empty pants leg; the old, the infirm, the foreigners.
The conversations—at turns hopeful, fearful, or miffed—had been low, as if the Zepps would hear us, and I’d sat away from them, near the street. I had my own brooding and ranting to do, which I kept to myself.
But now a voice rang clearly in the dark.
“Monsieur. You will like one Bijou more?”
I looked up at the shadow hovering above me. He’d spoken in English but wallowing the words in his mouth as the French do. He was old enough to have grandsons in the trenches.
“Thank you,” I said. “That is just what I need.”
I’d replied in French. My French was pretty good. My actress mother, who took on my education in all subjects, knew French well from playing Racine and Corneille in her two long, triumphant tours of the Continent in the mid-nineties. And from a beau or two of hers along the way.
Before the waiter moved off, I said, “Henri, isn’t it?”
“Yes that is me,” he said. “Have I forgotten you, to my shame?” He was speaking French to me now.
“Ah no,” I said. “I heard someone address you.”
“Thank you,” he said.
I said, “I always like to know the name of the man who will help me become more or less drunk.”
Henri laughed a faintly suppressed laugh.
“I’m Kit Cobb,” I said.
“Monsieur Cobb. You are American, yes?”
“Yes I am.”
“You are here.” He paused. I grew up in the theater. I knew how to hear subtext. Here meaning Paris. Meaning Paris deep into the Great War. His silence said: Though your countrymen are not. Then he finished formally, courteously. “I am grateful to you.”
“Plenty of us will be here,” I said, addressing the thing he’d left unsaid. “To fight. The day is coming.”
He lowered his voice. “There are too many professors.”
I shot him a smile, though I doubted he could see it. He knew his clientele here amidst the universities of Paris on the Left Bank. And he knew our American president.
“I share your distaste,” I said. Then, so he knew I knew what he was really saying, I added, “For Professor Wilson.”
He chuckled, and I could even make out his shrug. “But still your countrymen will come?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“I pray it will be in time.”
“So do I.”
“And you, sir? What do you do in Paris?”
Ah, how to answer that.
I was a reporter. A war correspondent. But hobbled, thanks to Henri’s government. And part-time, thanks to mine. I was also a spy.
But I said something that surprised Henri, and surp
rised me too: Je suis poilu. I did not know how to explain other than to lift my arm and tap myself on the heart. I hoped he could see the gesture. I am a poilu.
The public—everyone in France—called the French infantryman le poilu. The hairy man. As a reporter of wars, I’d known a great many hairy men under various flags in my life.
He did see the gesture. Or he already understood. “We must all be poilus,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. Emphatically. Bien oui. “Your boys will hold on. I am sure of this.”
“Vive la France,” Henri said, almost in a whisper.
I said it too, and as I did, I realized that he’d whispered so his voice would not crack from emotion.
He was gone.
Three or four searchlights flared up now and scraped around against the ceiling of clouds, and then abruptly, quietly vanished again.
I knew the sound of Zepps and there was none of that. Only the buzz of the Nieuports.
I drained what was left of my present Bijou and it burned its way up into my nose and all through my head.
There’d be no Zeppelins tonight. The German command had lately shifted their attention to the more vulnerable London. I knew something about all that, had even exerted a bit of influence on those operations during a challenging week at the end of August, when I’d no longer been Kit Cobb at all but a man who existed only in phony documents and a scrim of lies, sneaking around Germany for my country’s secret service.
I’d done well enough that I’d been able to insist on a couple of months’ break from being a spy so I could be who I really was.
As if that were actually possible in this wretched war.
My own quiet café rant, as a war correspondent, had to do with one of the nasty advances of this so-called Great War. Strictly codified censorship of the news. A parallel war against a free press. We could not get into the battle-line trenches where the bodies of the husbands and sons and fathers of Europe were being savaged, countless tens of thousands of them, just forty miles from where I sat. We could not even follow the battlefield advances and retreats until the events were reviewed and adulterated by the generals and the politicians. All in the name of public morale.
At least I’d gotten clearance from the French War Office of Muckety-Muck Press-Suppression to write what might become a decent story. Might even get me close to the action. A feature on the American volunteers driving ambulances to and from the Western Front. The French approved, I figured, because it might give Woody Wilson a kick in the butt, a big story in the U.S. papers about all these American college boys and farm boys and mailmen and store clerks finding the guts that the American president can’t find, to come to France and stand up to Kaiser Willie.
Henri returned with my third Bijou, my intended last, for I would be working tomorrow.
He set it in front of me and said, “Perhaps soon the British will be of more help.”
I thought I heard his subtext: Since America won’t likely be. But as clearheaded as Henri could be about us, he was buying the propaganda about the Brits. He immediately said, “Perhaps from the meeting something good will come.”
Adjoining the war ministry’s office for the suppression of news was the office for manipulating the news. These mugs were doing a lapel-grabbing sales job about a meeting in Paris in a week and a half. General Joseph Joffre and General Archibald Murray, the chiefs of their respective general staffs, were coming to a local hotel. Old Archie, as he was called, was the third such chief since the beginning of the war and the Brits still hadn’t gotten their act together. Short on artillery shells. Short on men. Doing little enough in the war to worry the hell out of the French.
But Henri was hopeful. The power of the press, even if it was in the back pocket of a government.
“Let’s hope,” I said to him.
I figured Henri had his unspoken doubts, however, as he had no further hopeful word to add beyond, “Enjoy your drink, Monsieur Cobb.”
He slipped away.
I looked into the dim expanse of the Boulevard du Montparnasse.
I sipped my Bijou.
Five streets converge around La Rotonde and two of them were over my left shoulder. I did not have to turn to recognize the sound that was swelling along one of them. I heard it in this quarter of the city often. The iron-rimmed wheels of a fiacre and the iron-shod hooves of its horse, hurrying this way with a fare, the sound of metal on cobble drumming up another sound beneath it, from deeply beneath, a cavernous sound found in no other city in the world. This whole area sat upon the Catacombs, the ancient limestone quarries that now held the skeletons of six million dead, the cemeteries of Paris disgorged more than a century ago.
The carriage rushed past. Dim as a ghost, I thought. Or: As if chased by the ghosts it was summoning up. I itched to type my byline and plow into a story on the Corona Portable Number 3 that waited for me on my desk in the small hotel up the Rue de Seine.
Soon there would be some Americans to talk to. At least that. From the American Ambulance Hospital of Paris, in the city’s adjacent commune of Neuilly-sur-Seine. A hospital full of volunteers. I turned my thoughts to them. Nurses in white caps. Guys in khakis. Americans.
And from off to the west the air cracked. The sound brass-knuckled us and faded away.
A bomb. Awful big or very near.
All around me the shadows of men had risen up and were retreating into the bar. They had the Zepps in mind. I jumped up too but stepped out onto the pavement of Boulevard Montparnasse. The fiacre had stopped cold and the horse was rearing and whinnying.
It wasn’t Zepps. I’d have heard their engines. And the crack and fade were distinctive. Dynamite. This was a hand-delivered explosive. I looked west. Five hundred yards along the boulevard I could make out a billow of smoke glowing piss-yellow in the dark.
I made off in that direction at a swift jog.
My footfalls rang loud. Nothing was moving around me in the dark. Or ahead in the glow. I pressed on, and ahead I recognized another convergence of streets, the Place des Rennes, before the quarter’s big railroad station, the Gare Montparnasse.
As I neared, there were sounds. Battlefield sounds just after an engagement. The silence of ceased weapon fire filled with the afterclap of moaning, of gasping babble. Nearer still I heard the approaching fire-engine hooters and police whistles, and I saw figures dashing across the boulevard from the station.
I entered the Place des Rennes.
There were lights now. Gas lamps from the broad, two-storied front facade of the train station; tungsten beams of gendarme flashlights; incidental fires in the wreckage.
Someone had bombed the ground-floor café in the Terminus Montparnasse Hôtel, reduced it to the twisted ironwork of the sidewalk canopy, the shredded and smoldering canvas of the awning, the fragmented clutter of what had been tables and chairs.
I stepped onto a trolley island halfway across the place.
A long-hooded Renault ambulance brisked by in front of me and turned sharply right, stopping in front of the hotel.
The police were wading into the bomb site now, abruptly bending forward, crouching low. To bodies I could not see.
I took a step off the island and onto the cobbles. My foot nudged something and I stopped again. I looked down.
A man’s naked arm, severed at the elbow, its hand with palm turned upward, its fingers splayed in the direction of the café, as if it were the master of ceremonies to this production of the Grand Guignol. Mesdames et messieurs, je vous présente la Grande Guerre. The goddamn Great War.
I lifted my eyes once more to the Café Terminus.
Not one detail I was witnessing—not a bistro table in the middle of Boulevard Montparnasse, not the severed arm at my feet—would ever make it past the news censor’s knife.
As for me, I’d seen enough for tonight.
I turned.
I walked away.
And I realized I’d left something undone.
I walked quickly on.
At La Rotonde, some of my previous drinking companions had reemerged, mostly the wounded and the furloughed. A couple of the soldiers who were still whole were on the sidewalk looking in the direction from which I came. All the rest had resumed their seats.
I turned in and entered the café. The civilians—the professors and the elderly and the routinely infirm—were holding on, but they were inside now, at the marble-topped tables.
I stopped and looked to do what I needed to do.
Henri was turning away from the bar. He saw me and crossed to me.
I pulled money from my pocket.
He nodded to me gravely.
“I hope you didn’t think I was running from my bill,” I said in French.
“Of course not,” he said. “Did you see?”
“A bomb at the Terminus Hôtel.”
Henri cursed. Low. “The Barbarians,” he said. Meaning the Germans. “They are among us.”
2
The next morning I was in a horse-drawn fiacre, its iron wheel-rims ringing on the cobblestones, its four-seat cabin smelling of chilled mildew, its leather seats brittle from age, a vehicle of the sort resuscitated into Paris use to replace the motorized taxis, most of which—along with every last motorbus—were now off plying the roads to the front for the French army.
We crossed the Seine at Pont Royal and skirted the Tuileries. The figures moving among the garden’s chestnut trees were mostly men on crutches and women in black. I wondered if they went there with the intention to meet, these two constituencies of a grim wartime social club, to find consolation in each other. Beyond the gardens we headed west on the Champs Élysées at a surprising trot for a bay horse starting to dip in the back and go bony in the withers. The old boy was another resuscitation project, a good French horse relinquishing retirement, pitching in. Soon he carried us out of Paris at the Porte Maillot and into Neuilly.
All this way, I noted the passing scene only idly, the journalist in me collecting details to describe the city for my readers in Chicago. My mind was out ahead of my resolute old horse, devising questions for the superintendent of the American Hospital, the American nurses in the ward, the French soldiers in the beds, and, of course, the boys who might get me near the action, the American ambulance drivers, though my initial time with them wouldn’t be till tomorrow, at day’s end, at the New York Bar on the Right Bank.
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