Death of a Century

by Daniel Robinson

  He thought of just dropping it in a closed doorway and forgetting it, let someone else have it. But a plan was working somewhere in his mind, deep and beyond his ability to fully articulate. He thought, this valise might come in handy. Not now, but soon.

  He stopped in at the first brasserie that he passed, Le Bar Dix, more a cavern than a bar. Young men and women, students they appeared, huddled around tables in the bar’s tiny room and Joe saw no place to sit, but that wasn’t his purpose. Pulling a single twenty from his roll of money, he asked the first waiter that passed if he could leave his valise behind the bar for a time. Once seeing the double sawbuck, the waiter became quite accommodating. It was nearly his month’s wage.

  Before handing over the valise and the bill, Joe tore the bill in half, right down between Grover Cleveland’s eyes. “The other half when I come back,” he said.

  The waiter nodded. He may not have fully understood the English words, but he understood the meaning.

  “It will be safe?” Joe asked, then pointing to the valise he asked, “Sécurité?”

  “Oui, Monsieur. Tout à fait.”

  Trust was not something Joe was finding easy to offer, but he had little choice. He left the valise with the waiter, telling him through words and hand motions that he would return for it either that night or tomorrow, and walked on toward Marie Dillard’s home.

  He buttoned his collar and thought of what he could have done differently over the past days. The dead, however, would still be dead or hovering in near-death regardless of his actions, but that knowledge did not comfort him. Part of him wanted something like revenge, to put a bullet in one of Marcel’s small, black, and red-rimmed eyes. Another part wanted to walk off into the French countryside, escape into a darkness of his own making and his own population. Mostly, he wanted this settled. Closure as Gresham would have said.

  He exited the Metro not far from Marie Dillard’s house and walked there.

  He watched people walking through the declining light from lampposts and welcomed the anonymity of the city’s nighttime sidewalk, even felt buoyed by the realization that not having much of a plan meant that at least he would not fail in the plan.

  As he approached, he saw her leave the house, locking the front door before stepping quickly down the street. She had looked quickly in his direction before departing, but he was in shadows.

  He crossed the street and said, “Miss Dillard. Please.”

  She turned and looked at him, no recognition. “Oui?” she asked.

  It wasn’t Marie. She was about the same size and had the same close haircut beneath the cloche hat, the same hair color, although a bit darker. She wore her cloche hat and long and heavy coat against the cold. Plumes of her breath wavered in the air as she stopped to face him. Her eyes were a combination of sadness and surprise. She was beautiful. Something, finally, fell into place.

  The Marie Dillard who had sent him on the fool’s errand to Tours had not been Marie Dillard. Marcel had played that hand well, had known that he would go to Marie Dillard’s house that day and had known that Marie Dillard would be at the hospital with her brother. While he had been watching her house, they had been watching him and playing him. They had strung him along, baited a line and set the hook without him even feeling the tug. As the old waddies used to say back home on the ranch in Terceo as they explained the set of a poker game, “If you don’t see the fish at the table, then you’re the fish.” He had not seen the fish and he had been caught by the bad hand Marcel had dealt.

  “J’ai, uhm, parler avec vous,” he said. “Votre frère. About your brother.”

  She tightened her eyes and tilted her head slightly. Moisture glistened in her eyes. Her eyes were brown with amber strikes. She did not say anything for a moment. He wondered if his French was that bad.

  “Who are you?” she asked, adding, “I speak English.”

  “I’m the man the police—”

  She cut him off, “You’re the American.”

  “Yes, but I had nothing to do with what happened to your brother.”

  “I know,” she said. “It was Marcel.”

  “You know.” Joe felt an enormous weight lift.

  Her eyes welled but did not tear. She spoke in English, her words slow and even. “My brother is. . . . He sleeps most of the time, but he was awake for a short period last night. He told me what happened, that someone sent by Marcel had tried to get his copy of your friend’s manuscript. I read in the papers today that you are suspected. I am sorry, assumed guilty. I should have notified the police of what Paul said, but I have had so little time.”

  Joe lifted his chin and sighed a full breath into the night. As he watched it disperse, he felt like yelling, he felt so good. “It’s okay,” he said. “Letting the police know will come in time.”

  She said, “Paul . . . fell asleep before he could answer my questions.”

  “Walk with me,” he said. “Let me tell you what I know.”

  “But I do not understand,” she said, turning to him. “Why would Marcel want to kill Paul? They were once friends, comrades. My brother was a recluse. He did not offer any harm to anyone. Why would someone wish to kill him?”

  Joe spoke evenly and slowly as they walked, “They were in the war together at the Champagne, your brother and Marcel and several other men. Marcel was a traitor and my friend, Wynton Gresham, wrote a manuscript exposing him. Your brother apparently agreed with Gresham. Marcel tried to kill him in order to keep his own treason silent.”

  He took Paul Dillard’s wire from his pocket, which he had carried with him since the ship, and handed it to her.

  Marie wiped her eyes and rubbed the tips of her tear-dampened fingers together. She opened the message and read it in silence then looked back at Joe. The automobile mechanic had described her as sad. And she was. She also had lost something in that war.

  They left the boulevard Saint-Germain, mingling with the evening crowd and walking the short rue Bonaparte past a string of antique and decorator shops, until Joe found the open door of a small café. They took a table away the front window. Groups of people sat in small clutches around several of the café’s other tables, drinking and talking, not taking any notice of the two people near the back wall.

  He signaled the waiter, standing nearby with idle condescension written in his slouch against the bar, his round tray under one arm. The man sighed audibly and almost yawned before walking over. Joe smiled—not even the famed condescension of the Paris waiter could upset him. They each ordered coffee, double espresso for him and café au lait for her, and they waited in silence the few minutes until the waiter brought the coffee and swiftly left to read his newspaper at the bar. The espresso, with its layer of crème the color of caramel, was hot and strong. Joe felt an immediate jolt with his first sip. That was coffee. He closed his eyes and drank again. Good coffee, strong and black and hot, that reminded him of camp coffee back home.

  A pair of gendarmes walked past the window. Joe turned his head away in instinct as much as anything, for they were too far from the window to be seen.

  After Marie had stirred sugar into her coffee, she said, “My brother returned to Paris just weeks ago. He said he was ready to return to his life before the war. He had thought through some things, he said, and had come to some conclusions. He was going to marry. . . .” Her voice did not tremble but her eyes were uncertain. Her fingers quaked slightly before she placed them around the bowl of her cup and held the coffee under her mouth, allowing the steam to wrap her face in its gossamer column.

  She asked, “You have a copy of the manuscript?” Since her English was much better than his French, they spoke in English, and she spoke English with a soft accent.

  Joe drank from his cup and thought about it. “Yes,” he said. “But I wanted to talk with your brother about his notes, what he wanted to talk with Gresham about.”

  She nodded. “I do not know.” Dillard’s notes were probably spread out along a hundred yards of rail lin
e, dispersed by the wind and muddied by the rain. He thought of the other contents of the manuscript box, letters and such, that he had given to Dapper while on the train, that now Marie would never be able to retrieve.

  He looked at her. She was in her early twenties, but carried herself as though older. Liquid brown eyes with amber shafts, short bobbed black hair, full mouth set in a synthesis of sadness and uncertainty. The sadness of her eyes was highlighted by the deep rings circling each. She had been crying, and not so long before. She was still pretty, though, and Joe found himself thinking of her beauty as he looked at her. A pretty woman who had not allowed her beauty to spoil her.

  Joe sighed, “I don’t know all of the whys, the reasons for what has happened.”

  “But Paul,” she said to the air between them, her hands in the air as though clutching for answers. “He only wanted to put the war behind him. Why did this Gresham have to write his manuscript?”

  The question was not for Joe to answer, and he did not. He also did not say how difficult it was to leave the war behind like it was an empty box, so instead he told her about Gresham, about becoming Gresham and taking the ship to France, about Huntington. He unfolded the recent drama of his life.

  She cut him off, “Why did Marcel not kill you on the ship? Was he on it with you?”

  Joe shook his head. “I don’t know. Probably only his henchmen were there. He is a coward, and like all cowards what he fears most is his own cowardice. He hides so that others do not see it. Instead of exposing himself, he let his henchmen deal with the problem.”

  They slid into a silence with Marie thinking her thoughts and Joe thinking how Marcel was the type of man who could not kill another man but could easily sell another man’s life or order another man’s death. He was a man whose life was not defined by any moral grounding. A man made perfect for the new century.

  “What happened there?” she asked, breaking the silence and looking across the table at him with her fluid eyes.

  “The Champagne?” He finished his espresso. As the hot coffee warmed him he realized how cold he had been. He ordered a second. The waiter raised an eyebrow but took the order.

  “Yes.” She leaned toward Joe. “Paul had changed so much. So much. At first I did not think it was any different with him than with so many others who had lost part of their lives to that war. They were all so finished, so ruined when they came home. But there was something else with Paul, something more had happened to him. He wanted to tell me. Several times he tried to tell me, but whenever he began to he would close into himself, as though he hated whatever it was that he needed to say.”

  She spoke softly, her tone soft with lengthened vowels and lightened consonants, and Joe found himself wanting to wrap up and sleep within the halo of her words.

  He forced himself to place a little perspective on the meeting, that he was with and talking to a beautiful woman. He was with her, however, because someone had tried to kill her brother and he had interrupted her on the street. He knew that she may have once thought and possibly still thought that he had something to do with that, and she was right although not how she may have thought. He considered that, sitting in that café and sharing a warm drink on a cold evening, she may also have been playing him. He had, after all, been played before. Still, he thought other things as well, even though no fireworks had exploded overhead, no bells had rung in tall towers, no flashes had been sent along wires.

  He breathed deep and said, “Something did happen. All those men died, but men died every day in the war, thousands, like a slaughter yard. But at the Champagne,” he paused to think out his words, “someone, one of the group of men that Gresham and your brother belonged to, let the Germans know what was coming off that morning. What and when and where.”

  “Someone told? Someone—” she stopped. “Are you saying my brother—” She did not finish.

  “No,” Joe said quickly and firmly, maybe even louder than he had wanted, for people at nearby tables turned to look. He breathed and lowered his volume. “Not your brother and not Gresham either. They would still be alive had they been the one. The only one still alive and not in a hospital is Marcel.”

  She looked not at him but down at something only she could see, as though she were at grace. She looked back at him with a sudden hardness in her eyes and said, “I do not know him so well, but he has been good to me in recent years. Watching out for me. He gave me a job in one of his businesses—a medical factory, and even loaned me money so that I would not lose my house. I find it difficult to believe that he would do such things.”

  The waiter came back and interrupted them with their second coffees. They sat in silence after he left. Steam rose from their coffee cups.

  Joe finally broke the silence. “Marcel gave you a job that kept you near him and so that he could keep informed of your brother’s movements.”

  His words were heavy with cynicism, and Marie’s eyes went wide then shut tight with recognition as she nodded.

  She said, “He, Marcel, came to my house three years ago. He said that he was a friend of Paul’s from the war who wanted to regain their friendship. I told him that my brother was then living and working in a monastery, that he may return to Paris or may not, I did not know. He said that he was then living in Paris, in Montmartre, and would remain in contact with me about Paul. He offered me a position with his company, but I did not need one then. Soon after, maybe a month, a bank said that they were closing my house. . . .”

  “Foreclosing?”

  “Yes—foreclosing. I called him and asked for the job. If it was still available. And I went to work for him as a secretary and he loaned me money for the bank.”

  “Convenient.”

  “At the time, I thought that it was—what?—providential.”

  “And you never heard again from the bank?”

  “No,” she said. “My father had arranged for family business when I was young and then Paul. I did not know.”

  “He plans things well. And you didn’t tell your brother about Marcel?”

  “No,” she said, still holding her coffee cup in both hands. “Monsieur Marcel asked me not to. He said that he understood the reasons why Paul would want the solitude of a lay brother. He said that reminding Paul of his past might not be beneficial, that I should wait until he, Marcel, could meet with Paul.”

  Joe nodded. “I can understand that. Your brother may have had suspicions even then, and Marcel would not have wanted to alert him. As long as your brother stayed away, Marcel probably felt safe. That must have changed with Gresham’s manuscript and your brother’s return to Paris.”

  “And you have read this manuscript and know what is in it?”

  This time Joe deflected her question. “What’s more important is that Marcel knows what’s in it and wants it.”

  “And he killed your friend to get it?”

  “Yes.” Joe remembered the house in Greenwich where Gresham lay like a man asleep, the tossed rug runner in the hall, the shaft of light from the front room, the empty sounds of the house, a clock ticking and rain in the gutters. Everything pointed toward a meeting of friends, the Scotch and Gresham reclining on his sofa. Only the bullet holes were wrong. Those and the vacant stare of his eyes. Joe had seen enough of death before then to recognize its gaze even before he saw the darkened stain. The look was not like sleep, not sad or peaceful or anything. It was lost, a nothingness, something even beyond nothing.

  Joe said, thinking of the scenario that he had formed earlier on the Berengaria, “I can’t tell you exactly what happened at Gresham’s home. There was no fight, but he was shot. What I know of Marcel’s men, they probably did not feel the night a complete success without taking at least one life.”

  A taxi stopped on the road outside their café to pick up a charge before driving on. Both Joe and Marie watched the passing scene on the street. People’s lives going on. They looked again at each other and Marie said, “I still do not understand why, if he had killed Gresh
am, why he did not kill you as well.”

  “Because he first needs the manuscript, every copy of it. When he had my room searched and couldn’t find it, he needed me alive, frightened maybe and a bit beaten, but alive nonetheless. Otherwise the manuscript might be discovered by the wrong people, and he would be in a worse mess. For now he thinks he needs me to find it, so he wants to keep me scared to manipulate me.” He paused. “Eventually, though, he’ll either tire of that game or get too nervous. That could be good or it could be bad. It comes to a head soon.”

  “Pardon,” she said. “Comes to a head?”

  “An end,” he said. “Everything must end, either in his favor or ours.” He emphasized the “ours” to include her on his side.

  “And you do have a copy of the manuscript?”

  “Yes,” he said again, though he wasn’t sure this was true, but the fewer people who knew the truth, the better: that one copy may or may not reside with an oafish American couple and that he had only guessed at the location of the original. If Marcel found out that neither Dillard nor he still had copies of the manuscript, Marcel would have little reason to keep them alive. That, also, included Marie. Joe could see the chess game being played by Marcel with Marie as one of the pawns. He did not want to see her sacrificed for something Marcel might believe to be a higher purpose.

  “He has killed others as well?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Joe said. “On the ship. Maybe others that we don’t even know about. Right now, though, Marcel must feel as though his world is collapsing, so he’s trying to circle himself tighter within the lie. His entire life is a lie,” Joe said, “and he wants to continue that lie.”

  “By trying to kill my brother?”