FOUR KINGS: A Novel

by M. D. Elster

  The pavement is uneven and Nurse Kitching has her work cut out for her, muscling the wheelchair to a little patio table beside the fountain. She parks the chair, sliding down the little mechanical lever that clamps a brake on one wheel.

  “I’ll just go fetch your visitor and bring her out,” Nurse Kitching says, and scurries away.

  As I sit there, bored, I hear the sharp flapping sound of a bird’s wings and glance over, only to see a black raven has alighted on the lip of the fountain’s bottommost basin.

  “Well, hello there, handsome birdie,” I say, on automatic impulse. I have always had a chipper reflex for animals in nature, ever since my earliest days in the Blue Forest. The raven snaps to attention at the sound of my voice, and I am momentarily entertained by his precocious, anthropomorphic gaze. But after a few seconds, my sense of entertainment transforms into something else. Could it possibly be… is the raven… looking at me? It cocks its head this way and that. The raven’s shiny black feathers catch the eerie, incandescent light and glisten with that curious opalescent oily sheen. I am mesmerized, but also a little frightened. This bird truly seems to be taking me in. I lean forward, aiming my own stare as it looks at me through one beady eye.

  And then, a shocking thing happens: The raven winks at me.

  I gasp. The wink happens so quickly I cannot even be completely sure it happened at all. But… I could swear it did.

  Winked at by a raven! Oh God, I think, is this another sign I have lost my mind?

  But just as I am pondering this, I hear footsteps. It is maddening: Nurse Kitching has parked my wheelchair so that I am facing with my back to the courtyard’s entrance. I listen to the footsteps coming closer, my sense of dread returning. The noise of high-heels: Those funny clip-clop sounds that equally suggest either a young woman or a horse. Clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop, they come, closer and closer. The high-heels circle to the other side of the patio table, in front of me. Then they stop.

  I look up, and immediately recognize the face.

  Yes: This is indeed Colette. I take in the details. A svelte woman of about twenty-five. She is a composition of appealing smudges on a painter’s palette: red lips, snow-white skin, jet-black hair. Her hair is cut short and waved close to her head in the manner of a Hollywood screen siren. She has almost catlike eyes — wide eyes that are tilted slightly upwards at the outside corners. She is wearing a dark gray, low-cut dress, a belt in matching fabric cinched tightly around her small waist. It’s a dress I recognize from the jazz club; I have seen her sing in this dress before. A diminutive black hat is pinned to her hair, offset at the crown, the delicate mesh of the hat’s veil quivers over her eyes. I have seen her wear that hat before, too… onstage, standing before a great silver microphone, her long black eyelashes batting against the veil, its mesh casting a becoming shadow over her face by virtue of a spotlight above her.

  I am remembering things: My stepfather owns a nightclub in the French Quarter; a club he named after one in Paris, called les Quatre Rois. Jazz and cabaret. Colette is one of his singers. Indeed… Colette is his prized singer. Entranced from the second she floated in the door for her audition, he made her a local star, and promptly fell in love with her. And then, old-fashioned soul that he is, he asked for her hand in marriage.

  “Anaïs,” she says now in a soft purr of a voice. Her gray-green eyes inspect me from behind the veil. “Anaïs, I have been so worried about you. I can’t tell you how happy I was when I got the telephone call that your health had improved.”

  I don’t reply, refusing to allow a single hint of expression to pass over my face.

  “You are…” she hesitates, squinting more closely into my face, searching my eyes. “You are… better now, aren’t you? You can speak?”

  “Yes,” I say. My voice is sullen.

  She smiles — a tight, uncomfortable twist of a smile: A starlet humoring a surly photographer.

  “May I sit?”

  I don’t respond, and she delicately eases herself into the wrought-iron patio chair across from me.

  “Anaïs, I’m glad you’re feeling better, but I want to talk to you about that night.”

  “Which night?” I ask innocently.

  “That night,” she replies, unamused. She narrows her catlike eyes at me.

  “You mean the night my stepfather was shot,” I supply in a flat voice.

  “Yes… I need to know what you remember from that night…” she says, her voice still even and low. “Do you… do you remember anything at all?” She gives me a look, and for the first time, I see something slightly anxious, slightly frazzled in her disposition. “I need to know,” she repeats.

  Is there something she is afraid I might remember, I wonder? Is that why she’s come? I bristle, and fix her in a fiery glare. I let her wait.

  “Look,” she says, composing herself again and readjusting her tactics. Her voice purrs again. “Perhaps you ought to know something.”

  “What is that?”

  “No one knows if Léon — your stepfather — will ever wake up. They are giving me the courtesy of consulting me as your guardian.”

  “But you aren’t my guardian!” I protest. “You weren’t even married yet!”

  Her perfect bow-tie lips move in a sly smile. “I know,” she says, “but nonetheless they are leaving some decisions up to me. Decisions I think we’ll both want taken very seriously…”

  “Such as what?” I challenge her.

  “The doctor has mentioned electroshock therapy,” she says. “But he is requiring I make the decision to authorize it or not.”

  Electroshock therapy. Colette gets to decide. It strikes me as a threat. Suddenly it feels as though the walls of the courtyard are moving closer, crushing in on me. I am going to be ill. I feel powerless; I am still a child, she is a woman — up against her, I cannot win. My head is spinning. My throat closes as though I am being suffocated.

  And then, all at once, a bolt of memories having to do with Colette unfurls, unspooling like ribbon, or else perhaps like a film reel, for they flicker against the lids of my closed eyes like a projector screening a fragmented film. I see: Colette, singing Bei Mir Bist du Schöen on a stage, Colette kissing my stepfather while shooting me a baleful glance over his shoulder from out the corner of her eye, Colette holding my hand and shepherding me into a Voodoo shop in the French Quarter, the shopkeeper’s bell tinkling as we enter… and finally, Colette reading my tarot, dealing me the death card. I see that image, again and again: Colette reading my tarot, Colette dealing me XIII.

  That image — La Mort — takes root in my mind, and I am overcome with a sense of sharp fear. My memory burns with the sharp details of the card, emblazoned with an XIII, a grotesque skeleton swinging his scythe over a field of human body parts and bones. Colette and La Mort… La Mort, meant for me!

  “Anaïs!” Colette shouts now, in the courtyard, but everything is beginning to blur. The scent of her perfume — an antiquated potion of tea roses — fills my nostrils, and triggers the memory of something my mind cannot tolerate.

  “ANAÏS! ANAÏS!”

  After that, all I can remember is several pairs of burly arms wrestling me to the ground, a flash of Nurse Kitching’s white uniform, a syringe, a needle piercing my neck, followed by absolute black.

  CHAPTER 7.

  Once upon a time, there was another chanteuse — another singer — and as the sedatives Nurse Kitching has injected into my body creep through my veins like spidery fingers closing around that all-important muscle, my heart, I can see the other singer… singing in another café… far away, across a deep blue ocean.

  The other singer was my mother.

  We believed we were safe, that Belgium might fall, but that France would hold strong, that Paris would never see the day the Germans might come marching in. We were wrong; there in the City of Light, we were more in the lion’s den than ever, and it turned out the sheer population of the city, its busyness and
glitz and glamour were our only safety, for they provided subterfuge.

  After the Germans marched into Paris, the city changed. At first, the sharp clacking of the storm troopers’ heels struck terror into the hearts of all; the city was as nervous as a hare. We were ordered never to walk the streets without our papers, and flinched any time a soldier gave us a second glance, for it meant an impromptu interrogation was about to commence. But then the commanders came, the high-ranking officers with their love of cigars and schnapps and eager enthusiasm at the prospect of pilfering Paris’s legendary art. They toured the city in open cars, pointing at the architecture, jubilant, triumphant, surveying their new kingdom, quite willing to enjoy the spoils. And in the evenings, it was demanded that all good German soldiers should be entertained and fêted. To everyone’s surprise: The Germans wanted a party.

  And if the Germans wanted a party, then a party they would have. The champagne flowed once again. The nightclubs reopened, but with important differences: The bands were eternally poised to play a polka or Bavarian waltz should someone demand it and the best tables were perpetually reserved for any Rottenführer or Hauptsturmführer who might drop in for a nightcap with a beautiful young Parisienne on his arm. The owners of these clubs bowed and scraped and grinned like nervous dogs showing their teeth, muttering French profanities under their breath while selling their best bottles of Margaux at half the going rate.

  That was when I learned that war, despite all its rationing and other austerities, is often accompanied by a carnival sideshow of excess. My mother had little interest in Paris’s renewed nightlife. Her only desire was to keep me hidden, remain inconspicuous, hold her breath and wait for the war to pass, hopefully leaving us both untouched.

  But one day, a nightclub owner crossed paths with my mother while paying a visit to his mistress in the hotel where my mother worked as a femme de ménage. He came whistling down the corridor, a bounce in his step from his recent tryst, but paused when he heard a noise that was far superior to his own whistling. My mother was bent over, scrubbing the floor of a recently vacated room, singing to herself when the man — a one Monsieur Jean-Pierre Brisbois — passed by the open door. To describe her singing voice: She possessed nothing so flimsy as the hushed register of a whispering angel, or the shrill, overly chipper pipes of a lark. My mother’s voice was low, throaty, melodic.

  Monsieur Brisbois poked his head in the door and was further surprised to discover the face that was paired with this voice, for here was the angelic choirgirl otherwise utterly absent from the more deep and sinuous sound filling his ears. My mother looked up, startled by his entry, her blue eyes bright.

  “Oh, don’t stop on my account!” he said to her, smiling. “You have a very lovely voice — that peculiar Negro fashion that is in vogue in America just now, and very much appreciated by the Germans who frequent my nightclub… though they would hardly admit to liking it if one were to describe it in connection with such national origins, eh?” He chuckled and winked.

  My mother did not reply. She was stricken; it was her deepest fear to be noticed, let alone to be noticed by an individual as indiscreet as Monsieur Brisbois. He was finely dressed, or rather; he was expensively dressed, to put it more accurately. It was clear the war was being good to him, and if the war was being good to him, he could not be trusted.

  “Please,” he said, eyeing my mother’s appealing physique as she scrambled to her knees and stood. “Here is the name of my nightclub.” He handed her a card with the words les Quatre Rois, boîte de nuit discreetly inscribed.

  He noted that she was indeed rather fetching, if a little unpolished and rough around the edges. Blonde tendrils had escaped her pinned-up bun; they lay curling around her porcelain-doll face. Her heart-shaped mouth would be quite glamorous with a little lipstick, he thought.

  “I’d like to give you a trial some night in my club,” Monsieur Brisbois continued, ever the frank businessman. “We’d help you dress the part, put you in one of the evening gowns that the other girls keep backstage, of course. And I’d pay you a flat fee. I’d pay for the night, even if it doesn’t work out.” He smiled widely, clearly pleased with his own generosity.

  My mother aimed a reserved, wary look at the man grinning at her. He was middle-aged, with a curiously smooth, infantile complexion coupled with graying hair.

  “Thank you,” she said in a quiet voice, curtsying and accepting the card with a timid hand.

  When she came home that evening, she promptly tore the card into a thousand tiny pieces and burned them in the brazier.

  But Monsieur Brisbois proved difficult to refuse. He returned to the hotel, specifically looking for my mother, heckling her ceaselessly to come to his nightclub for the trial he’d described.

  “You’d be a hit,” he insisted, “with that voice, and that blonde hair. The Germans would love you. I cannot ignore a good business proposition when I see one.”

  He raised the price he promised to pay her, and then he raised it again. Finally, he resorted to threatening her with mild insinuations.

  “Did I mention I am a native Parisian, born-and-raised, Madame Laurent? A native always knows a non-native when he encounters one: It’s in the little things, the tiny gestures, the lilt of the voice, and so on. I find it so interesting, learning the reasons why people immigrate to Paris.”

  It was a threat, and not a very subtle one. My mother realized she couldn’t risk what he might do if she continued to decline his insistent urging, and so, at last, she said yes.

  She had her misgivings about singing for the Germans. By that time, news had gotten back to us about what had happened to the small population of Jews left in Belgium after Germany invaded. Rumors about the work camps were beginning to swirl.

  Feeling she had little choice, my mother scrubbed her face, put on her nicest dress and made the trip across town to the nightclub at the appointed time. At Monsieur Brisbois’s direction, the backstage attendants immediately re-dressed her — as promised — in a glamorous crimson beaded evening gown. It was finer and far flashier than anything my mother had ever worn in her life. They waved her hair, rouged her cheeks, and slicked blood-red lipstick over her pale lips. My mother said later, she’d hardly recognized herself in the mirror.

  When it came time to perform, she had to be pushed out onstage. She frowned and squinted into the spotlight; the audience chuckled at the distorted face she made. Here now, they were likely thinking, is some poor farmer’s daughter who has gotten lost in the big city. But then, when she finally made her way to the large silver microphone and gave a nod to the bandleader, the jibes struggling to the tips of their tongues were silenced. My mother closed her eyes against that spotlight and sang a ballade in such a low, husky voice it had the effect of hypnotism over all the room. An ovation afterwards led to requests from the audience, and soon my mother had sung much of the night away.

  Monsieur Brisbois insisted she quit her job at the hotel, and come join his staff as a regular performer. The salary he offered was more than six times what my mother earned as a chambermaid.

  Then commenced a period during which she worked at night instead of during the day. I assumed I would see more of her, but staying up so late meant she was often very tired, and sometimes slept a good portion of the daylight hours away. We were like ships passing each other; I saw less of her than ever before. I begged her to take me with her in the evenings — I wanted to see the nightclub, peek out from behind the backstage curtains, hear my mother sing.

  Finally, when I reported to my mother that a man had tried to pick the lock on the door to our apartment one night while I was home alone, she relented. Better the devil you do know, she said with a sad, beaten expression, than the devil you don’t. The next night she brought me with her.

  At first, my mother took pains to hide me backstage, but her efforts were wasted. As it turned out, Monsieur Brisbois was fairly indifferent to my presence. He only took direct notice of me once: He tipp
ed my chin up to the light and gave me an appraising look.

  “She takes after you, I see, Adélaïde,” he said over his shoulder to my mother. She watched him in the dressing room mirror, a look of minor alarm on her face, frowning at the sight of his hand on my chin. “Your coloring and dark blue of eye. Might turn out not half bad-looking one day.”

  But that was all. He released me and — I’m quite certain — thought very little about me after that. A few times he put me to work, mending costumes, or fetching a bottle of special vintage up from the cellar when he had a high-ranking guest to impress. Over time, I got to know the inner workings of the nightclub very well. Backstage became a second home for me. The musicians were kind, jovial men; creative types who felt somewhat out of place in a world so intent on war. I loved watching the glamorous singers get dressed, applying their make-up with expert care. The waitresses sometimes came backstage to take smoking breaks, and allowed me to eavesdrop on their gossiping. There were also a handful of stagehands, one whom — a broad-shouldered man named Max — sometimes let me help pull the ropes that raised the curtains.

  I suppose we made a sort of haphazard family: The stagehands, singers, musicians, bartenders — all of us nervously struggling along together — with Monsieur Brisbois serving as our terribly gauche, rich uncle.

  I was happy there, skulking around backstage at the nightclub, getting lost in my daydreams, regularly dazzled by the colorful lights and costumes and the dusty smells of the dressing rooms. Even with the German soldiers hooting and hollering from the other side of the curtain, presiding over the best tables on the club floor, even with everything they represented, I felt safe again for the first time since we left the Blue Forest. It was the first time I felt safe since we’d buried my father.