Death of a Century

by Daniel Robinson

  Joe did not like the idea of removing his overcoat, his money and passports and revolver all inside its pockets, but if he could not trust a monk who could he trust? He removed his shoes and hat and gave them with his coat to the man at the door. One of the monks gave Joe a brown cassock and soft, moccasin-like shoes to wear while in the abbey. The wool of the cassock rubbed and itched on Joe’s neck and wrists. Another reason to not enter the monastic life.

  He passed through a corner of the castle’s bailey and was led through the old hallways of the abbey, past frescoes and an age-grayed statue of St. Martin offering his robe to the peasant. They passed a reliquary that probably held at least one bone from an arm or a leg of the warrior who had become a saint through his sacrifice and devotion, maybe even a patch from the robe.

  They led Joe through a series of dark and damp hallways, the stone walls stained with age and niter. They stopped in front of an oak door, pushed it open, and motioned for Joe to enter.

  “His room. His belongings, those that he left, are stacked on the table.”

  The room, barely ten feet square, was Spartan. A door on one side and a small window near the ceiling opposite. A wooden table and hard chair, also wood, stood against one wall, a bed, little more than a wood frame with sacking on top, in a corner against the other. Plated candles, unlit and inside glass bowls, were on the writing table and the table next to the bed. A single crucifix hung above the head of the bed. Words and dates and names had been carved into the stone walls, but they were all mostly faded even to the touch.

  While one of the brothers watched him, Joe went to the table and sorted through the papers and belongings that Dillard had left. It wasn’t much, barely enough to have fit into a medium-sized valise. The monk stood nearby, watching but not interfering. Joe found envelopes with letters—some from Gresham, others from Marie and Rose Shaunessy, one from Huntington. On hands and knees, he looked underneath the bed. In a small box was the manuscript.

  Joe felt like a kid with buried treasure, even more—something almost religious—as he cradled in his hands the box made of a heavy paperboard which had been taped shut for shipping. The tape had been cut at the seams and on top were Gresham’s return address and an address for Dillard that was not the Abbey’s.

  Joe pointed to the address, a postal box in Tours, and was told that the Abbey received no mail except that sent to either the abbot or the prior.

  Joe sat on the bed with the box on his lap, the lid open to reveal its contents—a couple hundred carboned pages of typed paper. That was all, but that was a lot. He looked down on the paper like the knight-errant gazing upon his grail.

  “I’ll take these to his sister,” Joe said, his mouth suddenly dry. He gathered the box in one hand and everything else in a hemp bag provided by the monk—the letters, a single pen and capped ink well, and a couple of old, leather-bound books by Balzac and Zola.

  The monk nodded.

  Joe was escorted from the abbey by the same three robed monks, one behind and one on either side. They kept their heads in the shadows of their hoods and walked silently through the same halls. From somewhere else in the abbey, Joe could hear the sounds of chanting, maybe a choir practicing.

  At the gate, there was no ceremony when he prepared to leave, no farewells. He thanked them for their help, returned the robe, and they nodded and returned his clothes and closed the heavy doors. He heard the latch click tight. He felt returned to the modern world.

  He took the same taxi back to the train station, passing back through the ancient walled city, feeling even more anxious than he had felt on the drive to the abbey. He placed the bag of things on the seat next to him and folded his coat over that, but he held the box on his lap as though to relinquish any control of it would cause its disappearance. He wanted to be on the train where he could begin to read.

  The train, of course, was late, for trains in France regularly ran late. He had to wait an hour at the train station in Tours and found a wooden bench, worn smooth and dark from the decades of people sitting on it. He sat like a junkie on his way back down, fidgeting and uncomfortable. And before he could make himself too conspicuous, he went into the bar for a drink, the box, now hidden inside the bag under his arm. He drank two Anis del Toro, followed by a beer, and finally felt relaxed enough to sit and wait. He returned to the well-worn bench.

  Looking the length of the wood-planked platform, he searched for anyone who might be watching him, either police or Marcel’s men who had followed him. He saw none, just as he had seen none while in the depot’s small bar. He hoped that maybe he had done something right and at the right time. But he did not have a good feeling. Marie Dillard had as much as invited him to come to Tours, and while he could not see anyone watching him, that did not mean that he was not being watched.

  On the bench next to him was a wrinkled copy of the previous day’s Herald-Tribune. There was nothing of interest other than an article in which the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan said they would never unmask—more of the world’s violent cowards hiding their true selves. When the train arrived, he boarded with the other passengers and found his compartment, which remained empty of other passengers as the train lurched from the station. A pair of small brown bags rested on the floor against the opposite bench. Joe leaned over to read the names on the tags and smiled.

  He did what he needed to do as quickly as possible, opening the cheap locks on one of the bags and dropping the manuscript inside, then placing Dillard’s old books inside the box. With pocket knife, he cut the window covering’s cord and wrapped it tight around the box, double knotting it.

  The train began its heavy tug toward speed and moved through the fogged miasma of its own steam held within the station’s wood canopy. He could see birds rise from trees nearby and some birds remain, huddled on the glazed branches of the empty elm trees.

  “This is good,” he said to himself, as the train pulled from the station. That he could spread out and not be bothered by anyone else was a fortune he had not counted on, at least until the owners of the brown bags returned.

  The compartment door opened. In walked Dapper, followed closely by the Turk. Dapper smiled at Joe, a smile with a thousand tiny teeth. He lit a small cigarette with the flick of a silver lighter and inhaled, put back his head and exhaled a long and full plume of smoke toward the ceiling of the moving train. The smoke rose straight up to curl and dissolve in the windless room. He smiled again, a man with oleaginous charm.

  Joe sat next to the window with the manuscript box on his lap. His revolver was inside one of the coat pockets which was on the bench beside him. He picked up the coat and covered the box with it. Dapper sat in its place, the smell of fresh garlic heavy with the small man.

  “Monsieur, what a pleasure, although not unexpected,” Dapper said in patterned English, his voice as affected as his smile. “You do not mind if we join you, do you?”

  Joe shrugged, opening his hands as if to say “of course.”

  Dapper reached a hand across Joe and patted his chest pocket and reached inside the coat to see if Joe had any weapons, then he patted the overcoat, smiled and took Joe’s Smith & Wesson from its pocket. He weighed the small revolver in the palm of his hand and smiled at Joe. “Merci,” he said and stretched out to place the gun in his own coat pocket.

  Joe nodded, “De rien.”

  Dapper moved to the facing bench, leaning forward to be heard over the thrum of the train. Joe could smell a whiff of cigarette breath as Dapper spoke to him, nodding toward Joe’s lap, “Right now, I would like to see those papers.”

  Dapper looked at Joe. He was no longer smiling. The thinness of his lips were dry and cracked. Joe could see that Dapper was younger than he had first thought, not much older than him, maybe thirty.

  “Do I meet your boss now?” Joe asked.

  Dapper shook his head. “No. You will not have that pleasure.”

  “My pleasure,” Joe said, thinking that his only pleasure would come with Marcel’s
death.

  “We can do this without you dying or with you dying,” Dapper said and shrugged. “The decision is entirely your own. However, I have lost my patience, so I will ask you only one more time before I am forced to exert greater measures.”

  Joe sighed. Dapper was sitting across from him, the Turk standing with folded arms in front of the door. Joe shook his head and handed the bag of papers and letters to Dapper, keeping the boxed manuscript on his lap. He looked outside the window at the landscape becoming cloudy in the evening light. Pastoral farms and farmhouses with red tile roofs, silos, barns passed on the side of another set of railroad tracks occasionally filled with another train headed in the opposite direction. The faces of those train’s occupants passed in blurs, black and white petals on broken boughs, and he looked upon the same countryside that he had seen just hours earlier, although now different.

  “Please,” Dapper said, his mouth tightening into the small and thin line of his lips. “Let’s be gentlemen about this. No childish games.” He tossed the bag onto the seat next to Joe where the letters spilled out like a pile of autumn leaves.

  Joe said nothing.

  “Give it to me.” Dapper spat. His face drew hard.

  Joe shrugged. He lifted the manuscript box, tight within its corded wrap, over to Dapper, who took it with a smile.

  Dapper rested the box on his lap.

  “And now I have the manuscript,” Dapper said, his hands flat on top of the box.

  “A copy of it,” Joe said.

  Dapper uttered, “Ahh,” as he smiled and nodded, not a pleasant smile. “A copy. And you have another copy, I suppose?”

  “I do,” Joe said.

  “Why would you want this one?”

  “Buying power. I thought I might double my money by selling them both to you. Economics, pure and simple. Your boss should understand that.”

  Dapper laughed, a laugh even less pleasant than his smile. “You know what I think,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I think you’re lying. There is no other copy.”

  Joe shrugged. “And I once believed in Santa Claus. We’re both wrong.”

  Dapper stayed quiet for a moment.

  “Look,” Joe said, his back straight and his hands on his knees and facing Dapper. “Either Marcel thinks that I have another copy of the manuscript, maybe even the original, in which case I live, or you think I don’t, in which case I die. But if you kill me and guessed wrong, think of who might end up with it. Think of how angry your boss will be when the other copy lands on the prefecture’s desk. Of course, I could be just running a bluff. The call is yours to make, and you’ll have to make it soon. We’ll be in Paris in a couple of hours. I won’t be leaving this train with you. Place a gun to my side, I don’t care. You won’t have me with you.”

  Before Dapper could respond, there was a knock. The Turk looked at Dapper before moving to the side and opening the compartment door. An old man in a poorly fitting and age-faded blue uniform nodded as he stepped into the doorway and said in a sad, almost apologetic tone, “Pardon, billets s’il vous plait.”

  “Excus-ah me. Pardon-ah.” A large, overdressed woman with as poor a French accent as Joe had ever heard pushed her way past the conductor and the Turk, who looked to Dapper for direction.

  Turning to speak past the conductor and out the door, the woman said, “Yes, here they are, Harold. I told you that you left them here.”

  “Hello, Mrs. McKee,” Joe said, standing and lifting his coat from the seat.

  The Turk tensed but did nothing.

  The large woman turned and for a moment did not seem to recognize Joe. Then she smiled and said, “Why it’s Mr. Gresham from the ship,” and out the door, “It’s Mr. Gresham from the ship, you know that friend of the Blaines, Harold.” Turning back to Joe, “How are you, Mr. Gresham?”

  “Well, thank you,” Joe said.

  “Did you ever find the Blaines before disembarkation? I hope you remembered us to them.”

  Joe smiled. “I did and I did.”

  She smiled, then added, “We had such a time getting off the ship. Fights and missing luggage and some sort of intrigue. Ghastly.”

  “Madam,” said the conductor.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “Is this your compartment?” he spoke in frustrated English, and an English heavily accented, pronouncing each syllable with separate emphasis.

  “Our bags,” she said, pointing to the brown bags on the compartment floor. “My husband left them by mistake. Will you bring them along, boy?”

  The conductor straightened, and his face reddened deep purple. He began to speak, but Joe cut him off. “Allow me,” he said.

  Then, turning to Dapper, he added with a wink, “And then there was one.”

  Looking down at Dapper, he touched his first two fingers to his brow in mock salute and grinned. “If you will excuse me, gentlemen,” he said, “I will vacate this compartment and leave you alone for the trip.”

  Dapper’s face went rigid. The lines on his forehead stood out like cracks in marble, eyes like polished stones. He seemed to snarl, his bared teeth all discolored and sharp. When he spoke, however, his words slid out without any tightness.

  “Oh, Monsieur,” he said, raising a hand as though to hold Joe for a moment longer. “Be sure to read today’s newspaper, any newspaper. There will be something of interest for you.”

  Joe turned and took his ticket from the pocket of his coat, handed it to the conductor. With the two small bags in hand, he stepped past him into the corridor. Joe winked at the Turk—there would be no easy killing that night. The air in the corridor tasted of sweet and fresh. With Mrs. McKee leading, he carried the bags. Even though they asked him to join them in their compartment for the remainder of the trip to Paris, Joe excused himself. He would visit them later, once he had finished with his business, and he had involved enough people who had later died. He wanted no more blood in his wake. He left for the anonymity and security of a crowded coach car.

  In the club car he sat at the first open seat nearly halfway down the right side. With the moment’s adrenaline drained, he deflated like a worn tire, head heavy and body depleted. His fingers moved involuntarily from the adrenaline of having lived longer than he would have guessed, but his insides remained hollow and raw. All he could do was sit, looking out the window and barely noticing what the train passed. He sat facing the direction from which he had walked so that he could see if Dapper or the Turk came for him. Twice he saw the Turk’s face through the window of the connecting door.

  Slowly, his mind began to clear. Whatever was inside that manuscript was too important to Marcel to allow for any possibility of mistake. That was Joe’s only weapon, Marcel thinking he still had a copy. At least, maybe, keeping alive the spark of a question. Without that possibility, he knew that he would soon be dead. He might be anyway. He could not trust that his luck would continue. Stretched too thin, he knew, even a run of good luck will snap from its own accumulated weight.

  He wondered whether Dapper’s cryptic comment about the newspaper would provide that added weight. Whatever it would be, it would not be welcome news. Marcel had been a step ahead of him for a couple of days. It was probably Marcel who had sent the police to his hotel while he was at the Gentilhomme—a message to Joe of how precarious his life had become. Marcel had manipulated Joe into traveling to Tours, using Marie Dillard as a tool. Marcel was calling the shots and turning up the heat. And while Marcel knew his face, Joe did not know Marcel’s. Not knowing the face of his enemy made him feel particularly vulnerable.

  The weather outside had begun to turn as storms over the Loire Valley dropped rain. Houses and fallow fields and wagons on roads glistened. The rain and the evening cast the approach into Paris in a veiled gray light, a canted shadow on the day. His life had been left in shadows for a long while, sometimes the shadow was long and dark and sometimes light as gossamer. But always there was a shadow.

  His trip had been
a construction. He saw how it fit together. Twenty-twenty hindsight. If asked, the monks could easily recognize him as the man who went through Paul Dillard’s room. Couple that with the suspicion that Joe had once tried to kill Dillard, and right side of that formula read “GUILTY.”

  Marcel had wanted Paul Dillard’s room checked for the manuscript, but he could not do it himself or even send his men. He and Marie—she probably believing that Joe had torched her brother’s house with him in it—had manipulated Joe into doing the job for him. If he ever came to trial, now there were dozens more—the monks, the taxi driver, everyone at the station—who could link Joe to Dillard, and through Dillard all the way back to Gresham’s murder. He might have just provided a court with motive, depending on what lie was being produced as to his reasons for killing Gresham. He had played the sap so well.

  “You idiot,” Joe whispered. “Smart as a fucking two-by-four.”

  He sat in silence, his legs apart and feet flat, his coat, lighter than before, across his lap, his hands empty on his coat. The train hummed and scraped. He felt the train’s gentle rocking. Through his feet he felt the staccatoed vibration. He watched the door and watched France pass outside the train and listened to the rain drum on the wooden roof of the train car. At one time, train rides would have put him fast asleep, the deep hum of the engine and iron wheels and the gentle rocking motion of the cars. That ride, however, produced nothing like sleep, despite his exhaustion. He felt once more like he might never sleep well again. It was a feeling he remembered following his return from the war. Everything he had been brought up to believe, the sanctity of life and the importance of honor and the rightness of God and country, had ended up as hollow vessels.

  They passed one small village after another as the final bit of daylight faded into dusk. Clouds, pink and black, rested on the bruised ceiling of the sky. Empty fields stretched far away from the railroad line. When the river showed, Joe could see an evening mist rising before it became too dark to see the river or the fields.

  As evening brought along its beginning darkness, he saw the villages pass as embers in the distance—larger villages reflecting their light from the night clouds as though casting spectral shadows of their own. With the darkness, Joe could imagine the countryside that they passed. The moon and any stars were hidden. When he leaned his head against the cold window to look above him, he saw a low sky heavy with dark clouds. He pulled his pocket watch out to check the time but replaced it without opening it, deciding it did not really matter.