The train took its first sudden tug into motion, followed by the slow climb to speed. With a steady pull, the train accelerated and was soon at its cruising speed for the run to Paris. Joe let out an audible breath and sank further into his seat next to the window and watched the increasing evening envelope the Norman countryside, which at first seemed smiling in its presence and then just asleep.
With the train’s hissing steam and broken rhythm, the darkening trees became gaunt and the landscape dark and blurred. Soon he saw mostly his own reflection in the window. He looked through himself at the passing scene that seemed a long time in the past, a return and a dislocation. In the fields, rusting iron objects jutted from the mud, prehistoric weapons of war as though ghosts to haunt the countryside. Like the skeletal remains of long dead animals left to waist in a marginal land, the iron pieces were caught in a moonlit silence, and even though he could not hear, he could see dark skies with large and circling birds descending. And mud. And blood. And then it was dark again and he was thankful.
Wrapped in the heavy buffalo coat, he turned his attention inside. He shared the compartment with two couples. One was a middle-aged and middle-class couple, a man who might work at a bank returning with his wife from a vacation to the coast. They had two wicker baskets, lunch in one and in the other a fawn-colored Chinese Pug unaware of anything other than its own regality. They read French newspapers in the insubstantial light of the compartment. The other couple also in the compartment, a young couple, ate a dinner of rolls and wine and talked in hushed voices. They offered him a piece of their bread and a glass of wine.
“Merci,” Joe said and reached across to take the bread and wine. It was the first that he had eaten since the night before. The nourishment reminded him of how tired he had become.
With his wine drunk and bread eaten and the compartment lights turned down and with the fluid rocking of the train, he eased into a half-sleep and did not fully wake until the train’s brakes first jolted.
As midnight approached, the train arrived in Paris at the Gare Saint-Lazare. After leaving the buffalo coat in a water closet—for it would be too easily identified—Joe hailed a cab and took it across the Seine to the Hotel Le Couer on Place Saint André des Arts the address he had found scribbled on the paper in Gresham’s desk at the newspaper office. The driver had to leave his trunk lid ajar to fit in the steamer trunk, but the streets were less than full and there was no rain. They had no difficulty crossing the city.
As the taxi crossed the Seine, Joe could make out the charcoal outline of the Eiffel Tower against a blue-black midnight sky with the top of the tower kissed by the stars. Below, the Seine ran black with wafers of light bouncing upon its surface. A line of tugs had moored along the cement quay, gray smoke rising from the short chimneys above their living areas and yellow windows candle-lit. A pair of lovers embraced in a kiss against the concrete railing of the Pont Neuf, a streetlamp dripping light from above them. A dusky halo was cast along the quay from the soft glow of restaurant and café windows.
In his newspaper articles, Joe had never been good at writing conclusions. He was good with details, with an objective description of the happenings in other people’s lives, but every article he wrote seemed to be a beginning with no closing, a breath with no expiration. More than once, as they sat across from each other at their joined desk, Gresham had told Joe that he needed to bring his stories to closure, that they all sounded like they should be followed with “and meanwhile, back at the ranch.”
“No closure,” Gresham would have said, leaving his hands spread apart and palms upward as though to mime his words.
Joe wondered if, in that old city of abundant light, whether he could find some culmination, some closure of his own.
The old woman at the hotel desk was startled when Joe asked about his room. She rubbed her hands together as though returning warmth to them, and she kept raising and lowering her glasses to see him while she spoke in halting English, “Monsieur Gresham? We were expecting you. It has been a long time since you were here, but you have changed, no?”
Her gray hair was rolled in a bun on top of her head and she smiled and nodded. She wore a flowered dress that had begun to show its age, thin in the shoulders and some threads showing from the cuff of the sleeve. She was tall and thin and beautiful in her age. She had a slight palsy to her hands and eyes that sparkled significantly in the yellow-lit room.
“Yes,” Joe said. “I probably have.” He signed the hotel registry. “It’s been, after all, how long since I was last here?”
“Ohh, maybe four years.”
“A lot happens in four years,” Joe said. A lot happens in two weeks, he thought.
She handed him a room key and told him that his trunk would be brought up as soon as possible. As he stepped away, she waved him back and told him that the hotel now had heating in all of the rooms, that the plumbing had been fixed since his last visit, that her husband would be at the desk soon and was still lazy, that she preferred him working nights since his snoring kept her from sleeping, and again that a helper would deliver the steamer trunk as soon as possible since both she and her husband could no longer handle such heavy work, as if her husband would even attempt something akin to work.
Joe smiled, assaulted by the mere volume of words that she presented.
As soon as he heard her take a breath, he started for the stairs but stopped when she again called him back. “A message,” she said, excited. “Oh, I almost forgot. A message was delivered for you today.”
She fumbled through a drawer behind the desk. “Let me see. Right here. Yes-yes, here it is.”
Her hand shook as she handed the folded piece of paper to Joe. Gresham’s name was etched in a fine script across the outside. He placed it in his pocket and thanked her, bowing and backing away at the same time.
His was a single room on the third floor, old-fashioned with a high ceiling and a French window facing the street, a large mirror with a crack traversing its lower left corner over a writing table, a large brass bed that sang when Joe sat on it, two high-back wooden chairs, a washstand, and panel openings in the wallpapered wall into both the closet and the bathroom. There was a single square heating vent in the floor and an electric light in the ceiling and lamps on the table and beside the bed.
At $1.50 a day for the room, Joe figured he could afford to stay as long as necessary, to complete what needed completion. He was tired, but not tired enough to sleep, and he sat on the bed to open the note. He looked first at the signature, Dillard. “I have news,” it began. “Everything will change. Come by as soon as possible. The old place—#17 rue De Fleurus.”
“Everything will change,” Joe repeated. “As soon as possible.”
He closed his eyes again and tried to imagine what it could be that Dillard might know, but Joe was not certain what he himself knew, much less what someone else knew.
He considered visiting Dillard that night to put an end to the masquerade. He considered staying in his room, falling asleep on his bed that sang and spending his first night in Paris gathering what thoughts he could. Then he also considered walking into the night and never returning, just losing himself in darkness. He considered walking into the night and finding a café and sitting alone at the bar and drinking a solitary beer. He needed one, maybe a dozen. For that night he would forget about Gresham and the Champagne and Dillard and Gresham’s killer, just drink a cold beer delivered from a legal tap.
He looked again at the note. As soon as possible. He looked at his watch. 1:34 a.m. He looked again at the note held between the trembling fingers of his hands. Christ, he thought, I need a drink. He felt a great need for some palliative to settle his mind and to consider his options, and maybe, just maybe, to forget about his world for a moment.
He decided that he should not wake up Dillard in the middle of the night to tell the man that his friend had been murdered and his friend’s identity had been stolen. That might be better presented in the light of
day. He would visit Dillard first thing in the morning, and he left his room in search of a beer.
Outside the hotel, the sky was dark and the air was moist and filled with the smells of a Paris night, wet cement and old flowers and diesel exhaust. Buildings limited the sky, and clouds hid the stars and moon. Joe pulled up his collar against the damp cold. It would rain soon. It always rained in Paris in December. He could smell the moisture in the air. It would be a shallow rain, enough to wet but not enough to cleanse the city.
He walked toward the Seine along the narrow cobblestone street, uneven from centuries of horse and wagon and then automobile traffic and nearly futile attempts at repair. Once he heard someone behind him and turned to look, but the sidewalk was empty where it was lit from streetlights and too dark between them to see anything. He listened carefully as he walked but heard nothing more that sounded like trailing footsteps. Still, he was happy that he had placed his revolver in a pocket of his overcoat.
At the end of the street, Joe found a café called the Gentilhomme and opened the front door to a roil of warmth and smoke that blew past him as he entered. A haze floated in the café’s indistinct light, and the jazz trill of a single trumpet lit from one of the back corners. He looked and saw a black man, eyes closed and trumpet lifted to the sky like Gabriel. He walked to the bar, as crowded as the tables, and took the first empty seat he found.
“Vide?” he asked the man seated in the next chair.
“Yes,” he said smiling. “It’s empty.” An American.
Joe sat and folded his overcoat across his lap.
“Beer,” he said when the bartender stood across from him, wearing a white shirt both wrinkled and stained and a frown pressed like a pleat across his face. He paid with an American dollar bill, waved off the change and said “compliment” in French. The waiter nodded and arched an eyebrow in gratitude. Joe figured he had made at least one friend in Paris that night. And if not that, he at least guaranteed that he would not want long for another drink.
“Should have ordered a pint,” the man next to him said. Midwestern American.
“Why’s that?”
“They cost about the same and you get twice as much.”
“Point well taken,” Joe said, taking the first cold swallow and letting it ride down slowly. The beer tasted good. It cut through the ship’s death, the train’s diesel, the tight hotel room’s enclosure.
“I’m Joe Henry.”
“Diamond Dick Quire. I prefer Quire.”
They shook hands.
“American.” Joe said.
“As apple pie,” Quire said. “At least I was the last time I checked.”
“When was that?”
“What year is it?”
“Never mind.”
From behind them, like a jive note to bring down walls, the trumpet man hit a note so high that it could call up the dead.
Quire lifted his pint in front of him, the beer glass caught in the café’s weak light. He said in toast, “May the wings of liberty never lose a feather.”
Joe drank with him, both emptying their beers in long swallows. They signaled the bartender for another round of pints and Joe pulled money from his pocket.
“Alsatian,” Quire said to the barman, who nodded and drew two pints from the tap and placed them on the bar in front of the two Americans, the beers so dark they were almost black as stout with a caramel froth floating on top like good espresso.
“Le bonne bière,” Quire said with a smile.
Joe estimated that Diamond Dick Quire, like himself, was in his late-twenties but, unlike Joe, a square-headed block of a man, and probably shorter than Joe by a good two inches with thick shoulders and a large chest. His arms barely fit inside the sleeves of his shirt and when flexed to draw on his pint, the seams nearly burst. He was clean shaven with hair brown and long, almost to his collar in the back. He could have been a miner or a block of granite.
“Where’d you get your nickname?” Joe asked.
“What nickname?”
“Diamond Dick.”
Quire laughed and drank. “That’s no nickname, my friend” he said. “That’s my Christian name. Diamond Dick.” He laughed again. “My mother said that carrying me was one adventure after another, and since then I seem to be a magnet for trouble. I have luck like that.”
Joe nodded. “Don’t feel like the Lone Star Ranger,” he said.
Quire offered a crooked smile. “To trouble,” he said and lifted his pint glass in toast. Joe’s glass clinked it and they drank again.
“You live here?” Joe asked.
“Seems like it,” Quire said.
“I mean Paris. You live in Paris?”
“For now, maybe until I die. And you? You live here also, or are you a reporter looking for a story on the damn expatriate life?”
“Neither. I just got off the boat,” he said with a shrug. “May stay a week or a decade. Don’t know yet.”
“Me neither,” Quire said. He laughed and his laugh descended into a rheumy cough. When he was finished coughing he said, “I came for the gas treatments.”
Joe nodded and drank and asked, “You were in the war?”
“Yes. You?”
“With the 42nd,” Joe said.
“Good group. Never got gassed, though, huh?” Quire asked.
“Not me. Got shot but never gassed.”
“I got gassed in Belleau Wood.” Quire shook his head. “Nasty shit. By the time I knew I was in it, I was fucking swimming in the shit and already almost dead, or as good as dead, or wishing to hell I’d be dead. Damn nasty shit, that gas.”
“To the Lost,” Joe said in toast.
“To the Lost.”
They drank. “What’s this gas treatment you mentioned?”
Quire evaded Joe’s question. “How long were you home after the war?”
Joe rubbed his brow. “I haven’t gone home yet. I found a job the first place I stopped and stayed there until last week.”
Quire leaned forward with his elbows propped on the bar and said, “I went home, Helena, Montana—Hell-on-earth, Montana—but it wasn’t like it was when I left it. Everything was still there and looked the same, train station and mills and Woolworth’s, but it wasn’t the same place. It all looked so goddamn false, like it was hiding something I’d never noticed before. Then people found out I’d been gassed and treated me like I had tuberculosis or something. Old friends would cross to the other side of the road or try not to shake my hand like I was a contagion from a leper colony. I don’t know, maybe they were just embarrassed.”
Joe nodded. “They all wanted heroes, like their grandfathers.”
“There ain’t no such thing as a hero, not in a war like that.”
“Just tragedies,” Joe said.
“Who said that?” Quire asked.
“Me. Just now.”
“Well, shit, you said that right, brother.” Quire leaned forward against the bar again and looked at Joe, eyes half mast, and raised his glass for another toast. A splash of beer fell to the bar and the bartender was quick to wipe it up.
Joe met Quire’s glass with his own, a toast between men who had seen much the same, who had seen things that could not be told to others, that could not be understood by others. The Great War became a brotherhood of decrement for those unlucky enough to have survived it, and Joe and Quire had offered what amounted to the secret cipher.
Quire laughed, “You know one thing, though, that I got from the war? Other than these worthless lungs.” He pounded his chest twice, punishing his lungs for having betrayed him.
“Tell me,” Joe said.
“I actually got to use a brick shithouse. A six-holer, at that.”
“A brick shithouse?”
“And built like a stacked dame.”
“Oh hell,” Joe said and laughed along with Quire, even though his was no match in volume or tenor for the baritone laugh of Quire. Quire’s laugh, however, slid unevenly to a cough that doubled Quire at the
bar, one arm holding onto the bar while the other pressed against his forehead.
They talked for another hour, some about the war, mostly working around the subject until they might know each other better, where they had been and when and how much they hated officers. Some about where they had grown up, Joe in Colorado and Quire in Montana as the sired son of a millionaire goldminer who then went on to prep school in St. Paul and even a year in the hallowed halls of Harvard. Quire talked some about Paris, of which he said, “Paris is a museum and it’s a circus and it’s a whorehouse. Your choice and your poison.”
“Right now I’ll just take my bed,” Joe said, rising to his feet, but the beers he had drunk coupled with the lack of food and sleep put him back on his stool.
“Another one?” Quire laughed. “It’ll help you catch your sea legs.”
“No,” Joe said. “I’ll be heading on. What my legs need is what every other part of me needs—rest. Anyway,” he said. “I have business in the morning. First thing.”
“All right, cowboy. Stop by again tomorrow night and let me know how this city’s treating you.”
“Will do,” Joe said. He struggled through the crowd and the cigarette haze for the door, drunker than he needed to be but not nearly as drunk as he wanted.
The cold air outside the Gentilhomme assaulted him. He leaned against the brick wall to cough out the smoke and catch his bearings. With his overcoat buttoned tight to his neck, he set off for the hotel, his hand finding his revolver. Like a child with his favorite blanket, he wanted the security of something familiar in his fingers. Even with that, he knew how illusory the idea of security had become.
The air he breathed, as exhausted as him, as neutral as the night, had collapsed around him in darkness and winter haze, raw and chilled with steam rising from the wet gutters. A mist lay sodden on the street, and streetlamps provided only a depthless yellow glow. He could not tell which but either he or the city felt old and tired. Maybe both.
Death of a Century Page 13
