She was finished with what she had to do. She was finished.
13
I found the wartime concierge, an old man, cowering in his ground-floor loge. He was happy to let me handle the telephone responsibilities for a couple of murders. I called Fortier first.
I returned to Lang’s apartment. Greta was now sitting in her parlor, staring out the courtyard window, her hands folded in her lap. I sat quietly across the room.
Fortier arrived with the gendarmerie. He saw what he wanted to see, and he and I went out. At a bistro on Rue Richer, we sat inside, at a corner table in the rear, each of us with our back to an adjoining wall. All of this at his leading.
We’d been mostly silent on the walk here, and seated finally, I let him set the agenda for our conversation. He remained silent till we had our cafés noirs before us, as concentrated and bitter as Fortier’s mood had been.
He finally said, “She did my work for me.”
I had no reply for this.
After a clench and a release of his jaw, he added. “As did you, for which I ask your pardon.”
“None of this was clear till I could frisk his room.”
“I did not think the Germans capable of such sentimentality.” He said this with surprising mildness, and a small shrug. It sounded almost like a grudging French compliment for this Boche affaire de cœur. Perhaps Fortier’s gentleness, though, was for Fortier, forgiving himself for this possibility never entering his mind, even in his initial suspicion of Lang.
And even this American spy didn’t figure it out till too late.
I was not so forgiving of myself. I’d been seeing the signs. Poor Staub, I thought. Not just all the queerness I’d discussed with Fortier about the man’s initial visit to Lang’s street, but how that visit ended. I watched Staub once more, in the depths of my café noir, stopping before the three gossamer-gowned, stone fountain nymphs in the place in the middle of Lang’s street. He stood there a long while, imagining his Greta somewhere nearby, as wooingly undressed as these three, offering herself to her homewrecking maître d’.
But Fortier was right. I never expected murderously jealous revenge of him, not of the stiff and brilliantined Herr Staub, declining a drink with the boys in the next room. Things I’d missed continued to chatter back into my head. Lang’s special anxiety about Staub coming for him; Lang urging me to kill this guy quick, which meant, of course, that Staub would have no chance to reveal his true motives to me.
I had both men pegged in certain ways, so these tip-offs simply hadn’t registered on me.
“It has not been a total waste,” Fortier said. “Your thought about the dynamite still pertains. That might lead us somewhere. And I’m happy to find out about the meeting place of the traitorous immigrants among us.”
This last declaration thumped into my head.
I looked his way.
He took a sip of his café, watching me over the lifted cup.
“What’s your plan for them?” I asked.
“Close the place down. Round them all up.” He paused a moment and then lifted his cup at me. “Grind them and brew them.”
This thumped again in me. Louder. Like artillery shells walking closer to your position.
Now that Staub had been properly understood, there was no evidence to suggest that Hans and the rest of the Germans in the cellar bar were anything but willing immigrants to France, with some original-home-team sympathies, who got together to drink and grumble. They did it secretly because they’d all found themselves, in Paris, France, guilty of treason by ethnicity.
I had not thought myself capable of such sentimentality. Especially not since I’d begun covertly to hunt and kill for my own country’s felt enemies, who happened, indeed, to be mostly of this same ethnicity. What I myself had seen and done so far in this work was, it seemed to me, thankfully, justifiable.
Maybe Fortier was justified too.
There were a million Germans out there on the front ready to march into Paris and likely do unto the French what they’d already done, savagely, unto the Belgians.
Still. The country I was working for was pretty tolerant of folks grumbling. Immigrants or not. As a matter of principle. Hell. We were all immigrants.
I said, “You think maybe, instead, a couple of your boys should take over that window you were finding for me and keep an eye on the comings and goings? This particular crowd of Huns turned out not to be dirty over Staub. From what I saw firsthand, their wartime objective looked to be simply getting complainingly drunk. So watch for newcomers and shadow them. If the bad boys think Le Rouge et le Noir is safe, they may come.”
Fortier snicked his mouth at this, like he was trying to remove something stuck in his teeth without touching it. But a couple of moments later he nodded. “Perhaps,” he said.
That was as far as I was prepared to go for my erstwhile German drinking buddies. But I was glad to go that far. Fortier was all wrong anyway in the tactics he was professing. Anyone in that cellar who was the real foe wasn’t going to grind very easily. The ones who were grindable would be as misleadingly worthless as Lang.
14
By that evening it had begun to snow.
I stood in the New York Bar, my foot on the bar rail, leaning on the zinc top, nursing a beer till our table at the back opened up and I took my seat on the side, leaving the narrow end open. Not that I’d gotten in touch with her. Given her agenda, I figured she might be done with me. I’d been missing clues lately. I was trying to fix that.
I thought of the crisply made bed.
And that was another thump inside my head on this very odd day.
But I was simply a reporter again. That felt right. And I was glad that was the only way she knew me.
I figured I had to touch base with Trask, but he’d find me soon enough. As far as I was concerned, I’d been unloaned to the French.
Paris did, however, still have its saboteur.
Maybe a bar was a dangerous place. Maybe it was the last place where I’d want Louise to show up. But surely this bar was okay. The Huns would only piss on their own shoes if they went after an American establishment. They wanted to unsettle the French, not rile up the Americans. There were far better targets for that.
So I sipped my beer and I waited.
And on my third beer she was there in the front doorway, in her shirtwaist and cardigan and with her hair in that pompadour knot, which I found myself suddenly liking with sweet intensity, since I now knew what her hair looked like unknotted and falling over her bare shoulders.
And here she was.
She saw me and she brightened—clearly so, all the way from the front to the back of this joint—and she came to me and took her place at the head of the table, the way we’d sat last night.
Last night felt like a long, long time ago. In between: a bomb, twice holding this woman as close as possible, a shadowing, two murders, an abrupt suspension of Cobb the spy.
She leaned a little bit toward me and said, softly, “I’d touch your hand …” Then she hesitated.
Did she not know how to finish the sentence or was it too hard for her to say?
I leaned toward her and said the thing that would be the most difficult for her, the thing that might have made her feel she had to declare it at once: “But it was only for the one night?”
“No.” This came without hesitation but without conviction. At least to my ear. There were still conditions on what we were doing. Which was fine. I was merely helping out Louise Pickering’s future husband, setting her mind right for him. He would need to be very modern about these matters. Maybe she even had the man in mind. Or I’d be a liberated woman’s none-of-your-business secret past.
“Just not in public,” she said.
Okay. Maybe that was the only limitation for now.
I said, “Are the Model T boys coming tonight?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “Cyrus is being rotated forward day after tomorrow.”
“Is this
my chance to get to the front?”
“I took the liberty of speaking to Superintendent Pichot. He’s got all he needs from the ministry. So that’s between you and Cyrus.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Now it’s my turn trying not to touch hands.”
“Be careful,” she said.
“Okay. No touching,” I said.
“I mean at the front.”
“I’m just along for the ride.”
“Both of you.”
“He’s done this before, right?”
“Yes.”
I said no more on that. We looked into each other’s eyes for a long moment.
I could read them. She was tumbling deeper into worry.
Maybe last night and this morning weren’t entirely about her future husband.
“When was the last time you lost an ambulance driver?” I said.
“A couple of months ago.”
I’d thought it would be a reassuringly rhetorical question.
She read my surprise. And the tough girl in her turned mordant. “You’ve heard of German artillery, I presume?”
“I have.”
She rolled her shoulders a little at making her point.
She looked away into the bar and then came back to me with another small smile. She said, “So it took that, did it?”
I didn’t understand.
“My talking to the superintendent for you,” she said.
I was still slow.
She removed the little smile and put on a pout. “To make you want to touch my hand.”
“Be careful of the easy smiling and pouting,” I said. “In public that’s as telling as a touch.”
She rolled her eyes and looked away.
An hour later we opened the outer shutters of my hotel room, and we lay deep in the bedclothes, watching the snow fall. And when we held each other closer still, we remained in the dark, beneath the covers. She no longer needed to look at my unwrecked body, though her last whispered words to me before we fell asleep were, “Be careful.”
15
Louise and I sloshed through the ankle-deep Paris snow the next morning, the sun shining, the air warming, the quasi-smell of melting snow flaring coldly in our noses. Our arms clung tight around each other’s waist and our hips rubbed together as we walked, recalling the night.
I hailed a fiacre on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. I was to come up to the hospital tomorrow morning, ready for the trip to the front.
The cab stopped. Louise and I embraced under the discreetly averted face of the driver and the over-the-shoulder gaze of the horse.
As we held each other, I felt a tremor in her. Of lingering fear, I figured. This was our last embrace for a while. She would work a night shift tonight, and we’d have no chance to kiss good-bye at the hospital tomorrow. So we kissed now. The public be damned. Besides, it was Paris, in the morning sun, in the snow.
When I returned to the hotel, Trask’s Pierce-Arrow was sitting at the curb. His bodyguard driver had already spotted my approach and was waiting at the automobile’s vestibule door. He opened it. I nodded to him as I drew near. He nodded to me as I stepped in.
Trask offered his hand when I sat down beside him.
I shook it.
He could be brusque even when he was pleased with you, so I took this to be an apology for loaning me out to a wild goose chase.
“No worse for the wear,” he said.
“No worse,” I said. “You talked to Fortier?”
“Tell me how you saw it.”
I gave Trask the story.
When I’d finished, he wagged his head. Shrugged. Said, “Hell, look at how this war started. A punk kid anarchist trying to be an assassin who misses his chance in the Archduke’s big parade. So an hour later he’s standing in front of a delicatessen, his pistol still in his pocket, and the duke’s driver takes a wrong turn and stops right in front of him.”
Trask shook his head again and looked out the window.
True enough, what he’d said. Ironic enough. But it felt a little fuzzy to be coming from the mind of James Polk Trask.
I waited.
He looked back to me. He snorted to herald his explanation. “The prime ministers and the presidents and the emperors think it’s all about the big things, always. But in our business, in this day and age, we sometimes have to pay attention to what some little punk might do. And some other punk might be the only guy who knows the plan.”
“A punk like an unemployed maître d’,” I said, seeing his drift, drawing his still-shaky comparison on his behalf, perfectly willing to let Trask and Fortier both off the hook.
“On any given day,” he said.
It was time to move on. I said, “I’ve got a chance to go to the front.”
He nodded with clench-jawed solemnity. “Go work on your cover identity,” he said, like sending a penitent off to do fifty Hail Marys.
Ten minutes later Trask kindly dropped me at the nearest approved Press Bureau telegraph, in the central office of the Postes et Télégraphes on Rue de Grenelle.
The censor sat in his separate office, the tunic of his unranked military uniform sprinkled with cigarette ash on the chest and dandruff on the shoulders. I wrote out the telegraph form at a small desk across from his. This message would clear with no problem. Addressed to Mr. Clyde Fetter, editor in chief, the Chicago Post-Express, Chicago, Illinois, USA.
Going forward tomorrow. Will get back to Paris to do story as soon as I have what I want.
That was all Clyde really needed to know at this point. But I thought of my previous ride with Cyrus, to La Chapelle, and of the follow-up question I’d not gotten a chance to ask. It felt marginal to my story, but I was still curious. So I wrote to Clyde:
You ever know an Illinois newspaperman by the name of Parsons? Turned into a farmer downstate a couple decades ago.
I went back to my room and packed my kit bag and I lay alone in the dark. Before I slept I did my Traskian Hail Marys. Instead of dwelling on my mistakes with Lang and Staub, I determined to wake up restored to my newsman’s frame of mind. I thought: The guy beneath my byline wouldn’t have made those mistakes. You let a source talk freely and you listen closely till he shows you what he really is. You set your preconceptions aside.
But was that so? Us gentlemen of the inkpot are only too happy to figure out our subjects ahead of time—at best, by whatever we already think we know to be true; at worst, by whatever the public would eat up—and then we only hear what fits the thing we intend to write.
Usually without fatal consequences, however.
I didn’t sleep all that well.
But the morning was bright and the snow had melted mostly away and I suddenly felt pretty good. Whatever other newsmen generally were apt to do, I had mostly done journalism my own way, and somewhere in the night I’d convinced myself I was pretty smart, pretty rigorous about trying to write an authentic story.
I rushed through my breakfast and was striding to the front door of the Hôtel de Seine, clad in my war correspondent puttees and carrying my kit, when the concierge saw me and circled from behind the front desk with his hand raised.
I stopped.
“Monsieur Cobb,” he said. “You are returning when?”
“Hard to say,” I said. “A couple of days. A couple of weeks.”
“We have you booked here for two weeks.”
“I’m leaving things in the room.”
“Of course.”
“I’m off to the front. If it looks like I’ll stay longer, my newspaper will wire you more money.”
Something dawned in the old man’s face. He lifted a forefinger to keep me where I was, and he went back to the desk.
He returned with a Postes et Télégraphes envelope. I glanced through its glassine window. A cable from Clyde. A cheery go-get-’em, I assumed.
But I was running late. So I simply stuck the envelope in my pocket, thanked the old man, and strode on.
In Neuilly, I went straight to t
he courtyard.
There were only three ambulances, waiting side by side. The other two drivers were talking together at the far Ford. Jefferson Davis Jones was one; the second was an older man, middle-aged and paunchy, who I did not know.
Cyrus was lounging against his front fender. He looked my way as I crossed to him, and he straightened. He shot me a mock salute.
“Watch out,” I said. “I know what you think of officers.”
He barked a laugh.
I said, “We’re just a couple of boys who like books, you and I.”
“Sure,” he said.
He turned and shut his hood.
“They’ve moved us up an hour,” he said. “Won’t be long.”
I nodded toward the other drivers. “Just the three?”
“This time. From here we’re joining a larger city convoy. We all go to Compiègne together, where we get dispersed to a sector along the Front.”
“Our man Lacey?”
“On a different rotation.”
I circled the Ford and put my bag behind the front passenger seat. Then Cyrus and I stood away from the auto a few feet and smoked together.
He was almost chatty for a time, playing his role of driver. He rattled on about tires and spark plugs and lubrication points. Then he fell silent.
I didn’t initiate further conversation. We had plenty of time before us. A journalist’s luxury. If your source has a chance to feel comfortable being silent with you, he’ll be even more comfortable in talking later on.
We just smoked.
Then the pea-whistle chirped from the direction of the gate. I looked. A guy in a suit.
“Let’s go,” Cyrus said.
I stepped to the crank, caught it from beneath with my left hand, pushed it in, engaged its ratchet with the shaft, waited for Cyrus to advance the spark, and then I gave the crank a sharp lift.
Our Ford started up its phlegmy muttering, and we were ready.
The older driver led us out. Cyrus followed Jones.
We fell into a brisk pace. For now the only thing Cyrus said was in explanation of this: “We’re playing catch-up.”
And then no more words, as we pushed through intersections with our horns rather than our brakes.
Paris in the Dark Page 11
