Beginning an undercurrent of thought that I expected to be commonplace on this trip, words started bumping into each other in my head, grabbing partners, reeling along, improvising little tentative segments for the story I would write. In this case, the words were about our initial rush through the streets of Paris.
The coalescing story made me think of the message I’d received from Clyde.
I dipped into my pocket, pulled out the envelope, removed the telegram, and unfolded it.
Clyde wrote: Good luck at front. As for your question I feel old realizing you are too young to recall Albert Parsons. 1884 he created, edited weekly Chicago newspaper, The Alarm. Younger brother Thomas his managing editor. Albert hanged 1887 for part in bombing at Haymarket Square labor riot. Thomas not implicated at Haymarket but paper was suppressed. He took off. Could be downstate. The two brothers were the newspaper voice of the anarchists.
16
I’d been wrong once in this whole affair. About a German cuckold come to France to murder his wife’s lover. I didn’t need Trask to tell me I sure as hell better not be wrong about an American farm boy come to France to drive an ambulance in the war. But the smell of dynamite in public places was as much the smell of anarchy as it was of German terror.
As we blared our way across the place at the Porte de Champerret—prime bomb bait, certainly—I very casually folded the telegram, put it in my inner coat pocket and turned my face to the anarchist’s son at the wheel.
He didn’t look my way. But almost instantly he said, “Am I scaring you?”
I don’t spook. Still. My farm boy surprised me.
His not looking my way didn’t mean anything. I was in his peripheral vision. But you have to be thinking about the far edge of what you see in order to see it, and he was driving fast at the same time. Which meant he was watching me with intent.
Not that I took him for a mind reader.
It was his driving he was talking about.
I didn’t reply.
He let the question sit between us for a few more moments.
Then he said, “We figure we own the streets of Paris when we’re on the job.”
Sure. It was about his driving.
He had no reason to suspect my suspicion.
I said, “A boy who can plow a straight furrow for his Pa can drive a flivver fast.”
Let him hear me thinking about his father.
He barked a little laugh, though he mostly covered it with a simultaneous punch of the hand-horn at something before us.
He said, “What makes you think I ever mastered a straight furrow?”
“Farm boy to bookworm to ambulance driver. Princeton Illinois to Paris France to the front lines of the Great War. I bet you can do anything you put your mind to.”
“Well, I’ll be dogged,” he said. But the words came after just long enough a hesitation—no more than a few ticks but long enough—to belie their intended impression of spontaneity.
I’d been around enough actors to hear them playing.
But I also heard myself. The way my mind was going. I’d mistakenly assembled Staub just like this. Finding little things. Thinking them out, seeing emotional logic in them. Believing they fit together in a pattern I was already expecting to find.
I looked away from Cyrus Parsons.
Just let him drive.
For now.
We were dashing freely along a stretch of great, peak-roofed, brick warehouses grouted with train tracks.
“You’re right,” he said. “I can do anything.”
Anything? Was he baiting me?
I didn’t turn to him.
There was time. We’d be a few hours on the road.
“This is the way to La Chapelle,” I said. Small talk for now.
“That’s our rendezvous point with the rest of the convoy,” he said. “We head out through the city gate there.”
He said this with his eyes forward. I looked forward too.
So we rushed on into the 18th arrondissement and arrived at the La Chapelle railway station and fell in behind a dozen other ambulances waiting for us there, Cyrus and I at the very rear. Then we moved off and out the city gate at La Villette, where the guard didn’t even glance at our offered papers but cleared us by reaching out and patting the red cross on the side of our ambulance.
And through it all, what little Cyrus and I had said to each other were mere isolated exchanges, like the way through the warehouse park or the eventual fate of an oblivious pedestrian. No subtext. No complexity.
This arrangement had sprung up silently between us as surely as if we’d openly negotiated a cease-fire.
So too did the arrangement spontaneously end.
The convoy finally had sloughed off Paris, and all about us was the flat countryside of Route Nationale 2. We entered a long run of the road edged with poplars, and I was watching the dappled flash of tree trunks when Cyrus said, “So what’s your assignment in France exactly?”
I looked at him.
He kept his eyes on the road.
Jefferson Davis Jones’s flivver was a few dozen yards up ahead.
I wasn’t answering instantly. Not as a rhetorical strategy. I was hesitating in order to stop myself from plunging forward at once as if he were guilty and he knew that I knew it. My strategy was still in the works, but at least for now I figured that would not be it.
Still. It was easy for me to catch an edge in the ambiguity of his words, even if I had to remind myself that it might just be me hearing what I expected to hear. Once again.
After a moment he clarified the question. “You interested in American ambulances or the action in the trenches?”
I said, “So you see through me, do you?”
That wasn’t the way to go either, feeding the ambiguity back to him. It would do no good to stir up a suspicion in him.
“Do I?” He looked my way.
But I had to get to the bottom of this guy.
“The politicians,” I said.
He furrowed his brow briefly before bringing his eyes back to the road.
I leaned a little his way. “You said yourself they got us into this war. Well, to keep us in it they don’t trust us boys of the press to get too close to the action. Tending to the wounded is okay to report. The carnage and the despair in the first trench is another matter.”
Cyrus nodded a faint smile. “So the ambulance stuff is just your ruse.”
“Not entirely. I expect to do that story too.”
“Both of them for the folks back home?”
“Primarily.”
“You expect they’ll help push America into the war?”
“My stories?”
“Yes.”
I wasn’t exactly sure what the anarchists would think about that. Would the intervention of still one more government authority be worse than a quicker end to an imperialist war started by other government authorities?
I said, “If you didn’t have a father who was a journalist I’d just shrug my shoulders in reply.”
“Act like the stories were of no consequence?”
“Just between us.”
“If I wasn’t afraid of running up Jeff’s tailpipe, I’d turn around and watch that.”
A quick calculation: I was good at playing roles. I’d play dumb. He himself had brought up his father’s previous profession, after all. So I said, “Didn’t your old man ever make a difference with a news story?”
“You ain’t driving. Watch me shrug.”
I looked at him.
He glanced at me and away. He shrugged.
Not to ask the next question would be more suspicious than asking it. I said, “What was his newspaper?”
“He made a difference for pigs and chickens.”
He said nothing more.
I backed off.
I looked out the window.
We ran clear of the poplars.
Across a field of winter wheat was a tree line.
I thought of Cyrus’s
anarchist father turning himself into a farmer. And how Cyrus might have picked up the man’s abandoned principles with a vengeance.
Then Cyrus asked, “What does your father do?”
For my country, over the past year and a half, I’d faced a dueling saber, various pistols and rifles, and a U-boat torpedo while standing on the deck of the Lusitania.
This felt like that.
I had no idea what my father does. Or did. Other than spawn me. Or even who he was. I could not remember ever being asked that question, the denizens of the backstages where I grew up understanding situations like this implicitly, particularly as part of the mystique of a great actress. I’m not sure I ever asked the question myself more than once. Not aloud. In my head, I still fought it off now and then.
I kept my eyes on the French farmers’ fields.
For too long.
I didn’t want the silence to suggest more to Cyrus than it already had.
I turned to him. Still not answering.
He flipped me a look, just to see what was going on.
The question still hung between us. What did my father do?
“Pigs and chickens,” I replied.
Cyrus raised his eyebrows and said nothing.
Once more I put my eyes on the fields out the window.
But my mind was roiling around. Trying to yield up a strategy. I could fake a vague memory now. One connected to Cyrus. I could give him a Wait a minute. A meditative Parsons, Parsons, Parsons. A suddenly enlightened Wasn’t that the name of a newsman who got himself hanged in Chicago for inciting the anarchists’ Haymarket Riot?
What could that possibly get me? His admission of a connection I already knew. A connection that was a long way from making this American ambulance volunteer an anarchist bomber in Paris.
It could all be coincidence. An anarchist’s act started the war. But why would an American anarchist want to blow up French civilians in a country at war with a German madman wearing a Pickelhaube?
More likely was a German saboteur in Paris. He just wasn’t Franz Staub.
Whisking by were rows and rows of crop, the stubbled green crowns of winter wheat.
The front of my head muttered away: This was enough for now. No more talk. I’ll wait. Let him lead.
Something else, however, deeper inside me, was beginning to assemble itself.
The great flat space of a crop field.
The trees at the edge.
Did the farmer own the abutting trees?
The echo of Cyrus’s talk. Here in the ambulance. Rippling on back to the New York Bar. The disappointing father.
The field vanished now, hacked off in my sight by a stream.
And then another wheat field.
Out in the middle was a single, vast oak tree.
Cyrus spent his boyhood farming beside his father.
The field rushed past but the tree remained in my head. Winter-leafless but full-branched. For a moment it struck me as odd. The farmer surely considered removing it, an impediment to plowing. But then I realized the tree was a place to pause and sit in the shade while doing his work.
All this clutter in my head, from the man driving the ambulance, from the passing landscape where I’d retreated.
And then it began to fall together: the stand of trees, the farmer’s option to cut down that oak, clear it away, clear its stump. Clear the distant trees, too, if need be. And Cyrus coming as a young man to sneer at his once-anarchist father, a cause abandoned, a man become a farmer now. A man, in Cyrus’s own words, happy slopping hogs and laying in corn. And clearing stumps.
My breath caught in my chest.
Farmers cleared and maintained their cropland with dynamite.
Cyrus the farm boy knew his dynamite.
And France needed its food. France needed all its arable land at full efficiency. Fortier and his boys had a tight grip on the dynamite in Paris. But did they harass the farmers over it as they tried to feed the troops?
I drew myself from the landscape. Slowly. As if with an empty head.
I faced forward in my seat.
I was conscious of Cyrus, though I did not look his way. He was driving his ambulance through this French farmland. Part of a convoy now but soon to be a free agent, solo with his ambulance, with duties at battlefield dressing stations and evacuation hospitals and railheads but with time alone on the road and time off as well. In a vehicle that checkpoint guards, without question, patted affectionately on the side and sent on their way. And every farm we passed had a storage shed with dynamite.
17
I had to think through what was next. Opportunity does not prove guilt. Even in coming to actionable conclusions while operating outside the law, as Trask and I and all our secret service cohorts and enemies were readily doing.
The momentum of the caution induced by the Staub mess persisted in me. All this could be more illusion. Or coincidence.
But the coincidence cut both ways. That I should have been sent on a wild-goose chase for the bomber of Paris and end up sitting next to him in an ambulance bound for the front line; or that this innocent man sitting beside me should have all these indicators of terrorist guilt.
But hell. Life is full of coincidence. Especially in war. Every battle I have covered was heaped with dead bodies rendered that way by coincidence. You coincidentally take a step this way instead of that and you’re dead.
For now, though, I tried to convince myself that I didn’t have to jump to any final conclusions on this venture to the battlefront. If the worst was true of Cyrus Parsons, he wasn’t going to throw a bomb at the front line of the Great War. No one would notice. He was playing his other role now. Ambulance driver. As was I. Reporter. I could do all that I needed to do back in Paris by following the man in his off-hours.
So I considered accepting this caution, in full, as a present plan.
But that made me instantly, actively uneasy. To shadow a suspect is often an uncertain art. And ahead of us, for Cyrus and me, there were hours together on the road. For a man with a reporter’s soul, this was a chance to dig. I had this guy sitting next to me who was redolent of dynamite.
But if I dug too much, pushed too hard, how deep would his suspicion run? Surely I would still only be a newsman to him. As long as my seeming foreknowledge, my lines of questioning, were no more than might come to a newsman, then there would be nothing to make him realize I am what I am. I suspected his two selves. He had no reason to suspect mine.
The point was to stop the killing of civilians.
Which meant I had to know if it might become necessary for me to kill him.
And with that thought I stopped thinking.
I listened to the agitated mutter and slap of the Ford engine, its pistons and its belts, felt the rush of the air around us.
I had no choice but to see what I could learn.
I’d go a little easy with the questions at first, but not from excessive caution. From the instincts of a reporter on a loose deadline dealing with a source potentially full of secrets he dare not divulge. Easy as if, for all that he would know, I was simply gathering information for the ambulance story.
The convoy began to slow and shift as far left on the highway as possible, into the oncoming lane. We passed a group of older men, too old for the trenches, wearing the blue tunics and red trousers of the last century. They were Territorials, breaking rocks and filling holes in the highway.
Beyond them we came up to speed again.
I squared around a little to Cyrus and said, “Can I get back to my job now?”
“Sure.” He said it quick. As if he knew of only one job that I might mean. If he had doubts at this point, I’d fed him the perfect cue line to once again play it with ambiguity. Which job is that?
But he didn’t.
Good.
I hesitated a moment. So I could start with easy questions but with my own agenda hidden in them like a roll of dynamite in a canvas bag in a corner of an ambulance.
I
said, “That shrug I gave you earlier. I still have to write for those Americans, the ones who won’t be swayed one way or the other about the war. The ones reading about you over their toast and eggs. Can you tolerate them for a few minutes?”
“We’ve got a long drive ahead of us.”
“They want to know what daily life is like for an American ambulance driver in Paris. Where have the hospital people put you? Where do you sleep?”
“They’ve got a wing for us at Pasteur. Bunked up like patients.”
Not a great setup to commence a shadow.
“How many around you?”
“Just me and Jack Lacey.”
“Not bad.”
“So you’d think.” Meaning, in his tone, that I’d be wrong.
I figured I knew where he was going. The two men had seemed reasonably tolerant of each other at the New York Bar. But if Cyrus was a full-fledged anarchist, a guy like Lacey—from Harvard and, no doubt, from plentiful money made through demon capitalism—would be a constant irritation or worse. Cyrus had referred to him as “Jack.” Not what Lacey insisted on, I bet.
I twisted my head slightly with a hint of a knowing smile. I’d think wrong if I thought he was fine with his roommate.
Cyrus saw it.
He smiled too. And he said, “He snores like a Brahman bull.”
Cyrus surprised me enough to make me laugh out loud, given my assumption about his attitude and his multilevel wordplay from caste to class to Boston money, all caught in the breed of his animal metaphor.
He took my laughter without expression, but with a play in his eyes as if his blank mug was deliberate and he knew its effect and he was enjoying it with me. He did all this with the panache of a vaudeville comic. And I had a moment like the moment on our way to La Chapelle, when he spoke with feeling about the other Paris in The Zone beyond the Thiers Wall. I found myself liking this guy. The previous twinge was about his seriousness. This was about a light touch I hadn’t expected. Objectively I realized the remark wasn’t all that much, middling clever at best, but when somebody surprises you with a side to them you don’t expect, especially a bad guy, it’s easy to overvalue it.
I let that sequence of thought slip through me very quickly. To vent it off. To avoid losing my necessary ruthlessness, if and when it was called for.
Paris in the Dark Page 12
