Death of a Century

by Daniel Robinson

  “Yes. Your brother knew what Gresham had written, knew what had taken place in Champagne. That was the reason Gresham planned his trip in the first place, to speak with your brother about the manuscript, his suspicions about what had happened.”

  She nodded. “Yes, maybe. When Paul returned, he called me on the telephone and said that he was feeling much stronger and that he had some work that needed to be done. I remember him mentioning a friend who was to come to visit.”

  “Somehow Marcel must have found out, maybe he was watching your brother’s house.”

  “No,” she said. “I told him.” She paused and in the silence he felt his eyebrows raise. She continued, “I thought he might want to talk with someone from his past, so I told Marcel that Paul was home. He said that he would contact Paul himself once Paul was settled. I also mentioned a friend coming from America. I recall how surprised he was at that.”

  “Did Marcel and your brother have any meetings?”

  “No. I asked, but Paul would not talk about Marcel. I assumed that Marcel was too immediate a reminder of the war.”

  “Unfortunately, you may have been right.”

  “But he never tried to kill Paul before, while Paul was in Tours.”

  “Marcel probably believed that Paul was the only man still alive other than himself. As long as your brother remained in seclusion and as long as Marcel had you, he felt safe. I assume that he would ask about your brother?”

  She nodded. “I thought it was out of concern.”

  “And he probably told you to let him take care of any problems at your family’s house, any problems that might arise?”

  “Yes,” she said. “He helped with the banks, as I said. Paul had secluded himself in so many ways, and Rene Marcel helped me with many things.”

  “When did you tell him about Gresham?”

  “Some months ago, I forget exactly when.”

  “And you said he seemed surprised?”

  She held her coffee cup with both hands. “He became agitated. He said he had to leave. Something to do with his business.”

  Joe did not say anything.

  She nodded and her breath caught in her throat. She blinked several times before looking again at Joe and asking, “What do we do? The Prefecture de Police?”

  “The police?” he said and shook his head. “They think I’m a murderer, and by now Marcel may have informed them that he has seen me in Paris. He’s going to want to tighten the vise, force me to play his game. No, right now I think the police would be more a burden than a help. I don’t think they’d give me much chance to prove my innocence.”

  “I could tell them,” she offered.

  He looked at her and wanted to believe her. He remained uncertain. Even if she were telling the truth, however, the police would probably not believe her.

  “Not yet,” he said. “Not until I can deliver Marcel to them.”

  He looked at someone entering the café. When he looked at her again, her eyes had dissolved into introspection.

  She excused herself to go to the basement restroom. Joe watched her walk away, a strong and feminine and confident walk. A few minutes later he watched her walk back, her eyes downcast and no hint of a smile. He watched her move around tables.

  She looked at Joe and smiled, her teeth white and straight and exposed in a line between the fullness of her lips, red with lipstick. When she sat across from Joe, the slight gather of her perfume spun around him like a soft, lavender wind. Like a spring day in the South of France, he thought.

  They talked some more, as little as they could about the war or about deaths and mostly about where Joe had grown up in Colorado and her life in France. She told Joe about the monastery in Tours where her brother had lived since the ending of the war. He did not mention that he had already been there. They ordered a meal of sausages and red wine and then they sat and ate in silence. They sat across the round table the diameter of a mere whiskey keg and spoke with growing comfort. Sometimes they stole a glance at each other during their meal, but there were several minutes at a time in which they did not speak.

  “How did he meet Rose Shaunessy?” he asked.

  “Rose?” Marie echoed the name of Dillard’s lover who had been murdered in the fake suicide at her house.

  “Yes. If he were secluded in a monastery, how did he meet her?”

  She smiled. “She was a nurse in Paris after the war. They met in the American hospital as my brother convalesced from his wounds. So romantic. When he told me that he was returning to Paris, he also said that they were to be married in the spring.”

  “I am sorry,” he said.

  She looked at him with great sadness in her eyes and asked, “Are you certain . . . about all this? About all that is happening?”

  Her words were meant for answering but she also wanted answers to questions beyond the words. Joe didn’t know how he could approach those questions. “Yes,” was all he said.

  “There are so many lies in this world,” she said. “So many. I don’t know who to believe.”

  Joe wanted to tell her to believe him, to believe in him.

  Tears formed in her eyes, making her eyes as dark and wet as polished mahogany. He knew sadness. He had been witness to sadness before. But for the first time he felt himself look despair in the eye, and it pierced him.

  She wiped her eyes with her napkin. “Paul always wanted to visit America,” she said. “When we were young he talked about the Wild West, cowboys and Indians, six-shooters. He loved that idea, that romance. You are from that Wild West?”

  “Cowboys and Indians, six-shooters and buffalo,” he said. “Last time I was home, Jesse James held up the stagecoach I was on.” He looked at her to see her reaction.

  “Monsieur,” she said with her lips in a pout. “You tell big tales.”

  “Tall tales,” he said. “I’m a writer, a journalist, by trade. I make my living telling tall tales.”

  “Like Monsieur Gresham, your friend, a journalist?”

  “Like him.”

  She leaned across the table. “Tell me about him.”

  “Now you’re sounding like a journalist.”

  “Curious,” she said.

  “So was Mata Hari.”

  “I saw her perform once,” she said, offering the words as an intriguing aside, and she looked at him, her turn to gauge his reaction. “During the war. She danced at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. My brother took me with him and some of his friends because he could not leave me alone at home. Our parents were vacationing in Nice and my nurse had left for the night and so Paul took his seventeen-year-old sister to a nightclub. Scandalous had my parents found out, but I loved it. She was very beautiful and I could see, even then as young as I was, why all of the men watched her with such intensity. She captured them. Her eyes and her movements, she captured them. One of Paul’s friends talked with her following the show, but Paul took me home and I never got to meet her.” She paused. “Later, we found out who she was. Too bad, for she was so beautiful.”

  “When was that?” Joe asked.

  “During the summer, I believe. It was warm.”

  “Do you remember the year?”

  “Maybe 1915. Yes, 1915 in the summer.”

  “Before Champagne,” he mused.

  Marie looked very closely at Joe. He watched her eyes and felt them as they traced his face, gentle along the skin of his cheek.

  “You were in that war, also,” she said. “You have the look in your eyes.”

  “The look?” he asked.

  “Yes. Sometimes, not always, but sometimes you have the eyes of an old man. Paul had that look then even though he was still young, like you. A young man still, but he had seen things that he would not talk about. Not even to me.”

  Joe felt a bead of sweat trace his spine as he remembered the scarred and bomb-pitted landscapes like postcards from the moon, the drumfire of distant artillery, the smell of sulfur and the Very flares at night, the sing of bullets, the
rotting bodies of dogs and horses and men. He had long since ceased to wonder at how easily his memories of the war could be conjured, how fully they developed and came to his mind. He wished them gone but lived every day with their presence, waiting as they did like the sun behind a cloud. Memory had become for him the single most abiding thing he most wished he could discard. He could not, and so he lived within its roil.

  “After the war,” she said, “he was like a fallen tree. He was so sad. I do not remember him smiling after the war.”

  They returned to silence, and Joe did not need to tell her that the memories of war were things that prohibited smiles.

  He looked at her while she kept her eyes lowered, looking toward her coffee but thinking something else. She was beautiful, a beauty that belonged to a poet. Her face, although somewhat obscured by her downcast, was smooth and rain-freshened. Her hair was black as a crow’s wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek. Even with the sadness cast across her face, she was a woman that Joe knew could either inspire a muse or haunt a man for decades.

  They finished their meal, and Joe left payment in coins on the table. Before they stood, he asked the question that he needed answered, Marcel’s address.

  “Yes,” Marie said. “I know it. I sometimes was asked to deliver papers to his house.”

  She took a piece of paper and Joe handed her the fountain pen that Alice Bright had given him so many years ago, a century ago. She wrote and handed paper and pen to Joe.

  “Montmartre,” he said.

  As they left the café, another man and woman entered, the woman wearing a long scarf that flowed from underneath her upturned collar to sweep in the wind. Joe held the door, but the man with the woman failed to take it, and the door closed tight, catching the woman’s scarf and causing her head to whiplash, trapping her as certain as if she had been cuffed. She made a feeble noise and threw out her arms to arrest her falling balance, her hands fluttering like wounded doves.

  Joe quickly pulled open the door to free the woman.

  “Oh, my dear,” said the man with her as he held his hand for the door, his hands white and soft, hands of someone whose money was earned off the backs of other men’s labor. He gave Joe a hard stare, one intended to show disapproval of a lower class and said in manicured English, “Look what you have done.”

  “I’m not your servant,” Joe said to the man, stepping close and forcing the man backward. He added to the woman, “I am terribly sorry, Madame.”

  The woman raised her hand and said, soft and cultured as though her words came from a Hellenic heroine, “Don’t apologize, my friend. It is the machine again.”

  Joe nodded with no understanding but apologized once more before he and Marie left the café, joining the people in the streets. The evening remained cold and damp. He could feel the continued cold of winter lurking inside the evening air. They pulled up their collars and buttoned their coats, thrusting their hands deep into the pockets of their overcoats, their shoulders hunched up against the cold. Their eyes watered, their breath clouded in front of their faces, and they walked through those clouds in silence.

  They walked into the clearing cold of the evening although the fog had not completely burned off, leaving a dull overcast sky to ceiling the city. As they walked, their arms touched lightly with electricity.

  Along the boulevard, Joe watched the crowd, searching for either end of a spectrum, Marcel and his men or the police. From somewhere ahead on the boulevard, Joe could hear the sounds of a protest. He remembered well how the French loved to protest, especially if it was something that concerned America, maybe the death of a couple of Frenchmen along a road in Connecticut. The French, he remembered from the war, were not always good at action but very good at complaint.

  He took her arm. “Let’s avoid the ruckus,” he said, nodding in the direction of the protest noise.

  She looked and nodded, then turned with Joe down a street that connected Saint-Germain with the quai along the Seine. As they neared the river, Joe could hear its sounds over those of the protest behind them, the mournful horns of the tugs on their slow swim up the Seine. As they came close to the river, he saw gulls flying over the liquid black of the river.

  They walked on. Their arms continued to touch, like wires sending sparks, an exhilaration of possibility that Joe had for so long not experienced that he had forgotten could even exist. Since the war, maybe even since the death of his father, he had lived in a series of moments, stepping stone moments that led him deeper into a dark center of nothing. That moment walking with Marie near the Seine and with their arms touching more often than if by accident was different. He had lost a lot, but he also might have found something.

  To others who saw the two walking, they may have looked as lovers on a winter stroll. The pair and the city and the time might have composed the fundamental elements of a good thing. The night and the moon shadows and the glints of reflected light in the water, the gray fog holding in the lamplight, water puddles shining like wafers on the wet streets—it was all good. Above them a pallid moon held in the sky. A man and a woman, both young and bright, with arms mixed looking more at each other than at anyone who came near. And Paris, an ocean of life. The cafés, the smell of petrol and perfume and cooking and the river, and while not springtime in Paris it was nearing Christmas-time in Paris. It all could have suggested love, but Joe knew very well that what one saw suggested from the outside was not always revealed when the truth unfolded.

  She turned to him as they walked and spoke in a voice sweet and soft and more than a little melancholy, “I am going to visit my brother. It is late, but I have permission. That was where I was going when we . . . met, and that is where I am now going.”

  He stopped. She stopped one step further, turned and stepped back to him. The wind was at his back and in her face and blew her short hair back around her cloche hat to show the white skin of her face. He said, his tone deepened and his words spoken slowly so as to be heard over the noise of the river and the street and the people walking past them, “Marcel will be there, you know. If not him, then one of his men. They will be looking for you now as well.”

  “Regardless,” she said. “I will visit Paul.”

  “Mind if I accompany you?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Do I have a choice?”

  “Yes,” he said and smiled. “Your choice. I can walk with you or I can follow you.”

  She sighed and smiled. “Then you might as well walk with me.”

  She looked at him as they walked, her face drawn and expressive in understanding. They walked on in silence broken only by the sounds of the city at night. A city of light that pulsed its second life once the hint of darkness began.

  She said, “He is at the Hotel-Dieu near Notre Dame on the Ile de la Cite. He is a war hero, and he receives the best treatment.”

  They crossed the Seine on Pont Neuf, passed the statue of Henry IV on horseback, the over-sized arches, the caricatures of ministers and pick-pockets and tooth pullers. The wind blowing the course of the river rattled winter-dried leaves and dead seedpods, sending them to be captured in the moisture along the railing’s cement base. The cold air leaked through openings in his coat, and Joe pulled it tighter around him. The full breeze carried with it the scent of the river, a keen blend of diesel and coal and fish and old water. Someone moored close by was frying fish on board their flat-topped barge. The wind at their backs, they descended the stairs from the bridge to the walkway along the Ile de la Cite.

  Ahead of them loomed the Palace de Justice with its gloomy façade and its gloomy front. A group of policemen were loitering underneath a lamp along the water wall, sharing a loaf of bread and laughing, paying little attention to the people passing. Even so, Joe pulled his collar higher, as much to hide his face as against the coldness of the evening and the tall building. He kept his head down, his eyes on the walk.

  “Madame. Monsieur,” someone called from behind them.

  Joe turned. A
pair of policemen were coming toward them, not walking quickly or even resolutely. They were, however, coming toward them. Joe felt himself caught within a circle of hard places and rocks, police at both ends of the walkway, an overlarge police compound on one side of him and the Seine River on the other. As much as he hated the idea of a winter dip in a cold river, he steeled himself on that possibility.

  He looked at Marie. This would be the test. Her eyes did not offer any clue.

  The police spoke in French. Joe followed the conversation as best he could, using the inflection of voices as his clue on whether to dive or stand. They pardoned their intrusion and asked what business the two had along that street. There had been difficulties earlier in the day with a protest, and the police feared anarchists would again target the Conciergerie and the Palace de Justice. Marie, looking once at Joe, her eyes clear and her tongue tracing the line of her lips, explained that they were visiting her brother at the hospital. The police nodded, thanked them, and walked on to join the others at the water wall.

  “Thank you,” Joe said to Marie after the police had left.

  She looked at him, words formed in her eyes but she did not speak them. She swallowed then said, “We should hurry.”

  She turned and walked along the gray walkway with Joe stepping quickly to catch up and walk beside her. The gas street lamps were on, and they walked between shadows. The wind continued, bringing waves of cold and wet air onto Joe’s back. They reached the hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu with its stone front standing several stories high, each story having darker stones from the river’s wet wind and the diesel and coal emissions of passing automobiles and barges. The words circling the arc above the front door read LIBERTE EGALITE FRATERNITE.

  They entered through the large wood doors and walked the tiled halls and stairways to the third floor, their footsteps echoing along with them. Every person Joe saw he studied, looking to see if that person was also studying him, some member of Marcel’s soldiers waiting for their arrival. A trap, maybe, ready to be sprung. Dillard as the bait, Marie as the lure, Joe as the prey.

  They reached Dillard’s room with no trouble, nobody taking any notice of them at all. Two people at a hospital to visit a sick loved one. That was all. Nurses and doctors and patients in wheelchairs and other visiting relatives and friends passing in the wide hallways, walking as close to the opposite walls as possible as though to avoid a contagion. Each person walked with shaded eyes, downcast or unfocused. People both unseen and blind to other people’s worries, for they all had enough of their own. Down the hall beyond Dillard’s room, a woman sat with her head in her hands, crying silently, her head and shoulders bouncing with her sobs. A teenage boy stood next her, his one hand on her shoulder, his other hand wiping the tears in his own eyes.