Death of a Century

by Daniel Robinson

  Through the flaws, condensation, and dust on the windows, Joe watched as two men ran onto the platform, yelling and gesturing at the leaving railcars. Dapper and the Turk. The Turk spit as he yelled.

  “Someone should give a saliva test to that dog,” Quire said and laughed between coughs.

  Joe leaned against the wicker back of a seat and sighed, “Almost too damn close,” he said, his voice gravelly. He wiped his brow, which ached from tension.

  Quire coughed, then hunched into himself as though to stifle his hacking through a physical challenge. “No almost about it,” he coughed. “But, damn, wasn’t it fun?”

  Joe hung his head and had to agree that having at least done something, having at least instigated something had felt good. The results were not so positive, but at least not negative. He felt how bound tight his body had become from the small battle and the race afterward. Every muscle seemed as though it had cinched. The tightest and last to loosen were his jaw and shoulders. He rested a hand against the seatback in front of him to exhale fully. He felt something like an old man whose clock had begun to wind down.

  Quire offered a weary smile and said, “Things are rolling now. Now we all know. No secrets about tonight. Marcel knows we’re coming for him.” He checked his revolver and replaced the spent shells with new ones he pulled from the box in his pocket. He loaded three for his own revolver’s cylinder and put the rest loose in his pants pocket, dropping the empty box to the floor of the railcar.

  “Yes. He knows,” Joe said.

  Quire added, “And he knows we’re coming to kill him.”

  “I don’t know if that’s in his plan. His plan has him killing me. He’s drawing me to his house like a lighted lamp calling a moth.”

  Quire coughed and held his head as though he had a migraine.

  “Think we were foolish?” A glint of amusement passed through Quire’s eyes. “Like I always say—”

  “Yes I know. Cry shit and let loose the dogs of war.”

  Quire winked. “That’s right. We’ll have plenty of time when we’re dead to rethink it all.”

  Joe coughed an unconvincing laugh even to himself. “Sounds like a fool’s plan to me.”

  “That’s all it takes to start a war, and, pardner, that’s what we’re in right now.”

  “It takes a lot of fools to start a war,” Joe said.

  “No. It takes a lot of goddamned fools to start a war.”

  “So what does that make us?”

  “No Solomons, that’s for damn sure.”

  XI

  In short, the Champagne offensive was a trial of strength which was in some ways comparable with the victories of Austerlitz and Jena, although it did not achieve so victorious a result.

  —The [London] Times History of the War, vol. 6

  THE METRO ALTERNATED IN A SYNCOPATED RHYTHM, LIKE A NECKLACE made of sparks held together by a strand of darkness. Joe felt as if his blinking eyes were operating backward, the dark tunnels closing his sight for longer periods than they seemed opened.

  Inside the darkness between stations, Joe remembered one of his first nights in a trench when German 240-millimeter mortars had shelled a section not fifty yards from where he tried to sleep. He listened to the whine as the shells descended and felt the reverberations of the ground with the exploding shells, but the dog legs in the trench had kept the shrapnel from reaching him. He had covered himself through the attack’s duration and prayed words he had thought were lost from his memory. The ground heaved and rolled, bounced with a fury of sudden thunder. In ten minutes, a silence filled the trench followed by the low moans and calls for help from wounded men. Then the calls that an attack had been mounted. Joe had run with others through the mud and viscera to where the shelling had been. He slipped, fell to one knee in the slime and bloody spume. Next to Joe, scatter-lit by a half-moon that had begun to give way to false dawn and shrouded in fog like a gravecloth, lay a man’s body without any head or right arm, his blood dark and abundant where it flowed from the truncations. The smell of shit and burned skin and entrails gagged Joe. He vomited violently, as did others. Then someone yelled that the Huns had come through the wire. He stood, his Springfield rifle dripping from the excrements of war. The pinholed glow of flashlights bounced tight together as the Germans huddled in close compact to make their way through an opening in the barbed-wire entanglement. A man near Joe took a gas lantern, lit it and threw it flaming toward the Germans. It broke and burst into flame on one man, his body a sudden torch. Each man in the trench began firing their five-round magazines and Joe fired with them, stopping only to reload until he, like others, ran out of ammunition. One man cradled a heavy Lewis machine gun and fired indiscriminately until the weapon jammed and seized up. He dropped it into the muck at his feet and pulled a Colt from his belt and continued to fire. They exhausted their ammunition in minutes, rifles and revolvers and pistols alike. They threw hand grenades or wielded their Springfields by the barrels as clubs like ancient warriors. Still the Germans spilled over, crossing the edge of the blown-out trench and joining the Americans in their muck. One man lost his hand when he picked up a German stick grenade that exploded in his grasp before he could throw it back at the Germans. The man sat down in the mud and cried, holding the stump at his wrist. Joe reached down and took a trench club from the waist belt of a dead man and ran for the closest German. He swung the wooden shaft with a round of scrap lead tied onto the end by a barbed-wire binding, and he split the German’s cheek, dislodging the jaw and opening a wound that exposed the entirety of the man’s mouth. The German stopped short and dropped his weapon, his eyes wide with fright and surprise as he tried in vain to return his face to how it should have been. Joe swung again and killed the man with a blow to his temple. The fighting went on with clubs and knives and hands and teeth for another hour until the Germans retreated with the full sunrise. The morning became lost in the echoed sounds of struggle and death. The surrounding death became academic and men became numbers. Finally, the sounds of battle slackened and were replaced by the sounds of men who did not know they were as yet dead. None of the Americans standing said anything or looked another man in the eyes. They had each found the darkest and most primal foundation of their souls. None would face another man in quite the same way again.

  Eventually the bodies were gathered and carted to the rear, born on other men’s backs. Later, after a rain had washed the stench and remains of battle back into the mud of the trench, an American colonel came forward to congratulate Joe’s unit for a job well done, for their courage and bravery in the face of the enemy, for upholding the honor and the name of their battalion. The colonel did not venture to where the fighting had taken place and instead talked to them as they rested in a wide spot of the second trench.

  “Damn, man. You all right?” asked Quire as the Metro pulled into the turbid light of another station.

  Joe felt a feverish sweat rise on his brow and back. He shivered against it. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “I just need some air.”

  “This is our station then.”

  “You sure?”

  “No, but it’s the station we’ll be getting off at.”

  “Why?”

  “We should make sure of where we’re going before we end up in Versailles.”

  The platform was empty of people as they stepped from the train with a few other people from other cars. The other exiting people left quickly, looking furtively and fearfully at the two Americans they had watched enter the train’s last car, leaving Joe and Quire alone in the sepulchral underground of Paris. The train echoed as it receded into the tunnel. They looked into that dark union as the train disappeared, dust swirling within its void.

  They walked to a map and found their place, Etienne, neither close nor in line with Marie’s house in the Latin Quarter or with Marcel’s house in Montmartre. They debated what they would do next and decided that Joe would go to Marie’s friend’s house while Quire would find Ballard at Zelli’s. A cough
ing fit sent Quire to a nearby pillar, bent over like a beggar retching. While he was there the next train pulled into the station.

  From the train stepped an acne-scarred man whose close-set eyes focused narrowly on Joe. He held a pistol in his hand and lifted it, pointing it toward Joe and sighting down the length of the barrel. He said in broken and heavily accented English, “Where is your friend?”

  “Behind you, sport,” answered Quire.

  The man turned quickly. Quire fired twice into the man’s body. He stumbled backward like a drunk before crumpling to the ground. Blood stained the cement platform of the station.

  Quire spit bloody sputum to the side then looked down at the dead man. He said, “Help me move him to the bench.”

  Joe took hold of the man’s ankles while Quire lifted the head. They placed him face down on the bench, wrapping the man’s coat around him to help soak up some of the spilling blood. They wiped their hands on the tail of the man’s coat.

  “I’m taking a taxi to Zelli’s. Ballard’ll want to know that things are coming to a head.” Quire coughed. “You?” He turned and looked at the platform as though he were searching for someplace to spit.

  “A crossing train,” said Joe.

  “You think that’s a good idea?” Quire asked, eyebrow cocked.

  “Maybe not, but I should make sure she’s okay before I go any further with this.”

  Quire shrugged. “You want me to follow you after I find Ballard?”

  “If you can, yes. We’ll set the rest of the night’s plan from there,” Joe said.

  Quire said, “Tell me where Marcel lives. I’ll send Ballard on ahead.”

  “Near the Barbe depot.” Joe showed Quire the piece of paper with Marcel’s address written on it.

  “Not far from me, huh? A neighbor? I had noticed a rather fetid stench in the last couple of months.”

  “That was your gas cure, the cow shit under your flat.”

  “Besides that. A certain damn compound of villainous smells.”

  Joe looked doubtfully at Quire, who smiled back at Joe like the little boy who knows what nobody else knows. Here was a man, Joe thought, who mixes killing and profanity and Shakespeare with ease.

  “Take the valise,” Joe said, handing it to Quire.

  “Why?” Quire asked.

  Joe told him and Quire nodded. “Besides,” he said, “I don’t know what I’ll find at her place. I may need both hands free.”

  Another train was slowing to its stop. Joe nodded at Quire, and Quire left through the dark hallway of an exit. Joe walked to the edge of the platform, leaving the dead man to rest on his own, alone as any dead man must inevitably be. He walked past a couple of gendarmes as they exited a train, his head down within the collar of his coat. He reached to pull down his fedora, but he had lost it someplace and sometime during the short fight. The police were too busy talking to notice the overcoated man trying his best to hide his face.

  As the train pulled from the station, the policemen saw the smear on the platform, a blood-red mark like a pock on the gray of the concrete. One stepped toward the man on the bench and the other turned quickly to look Joe in the eye as the train began its release from the station. He pointed and said something to his partner as the partner touched the dead man, who rolled onto the platform like the unraveling end of a mortal coil. The train was gone inside the darkness of the tunnel. Joe saw nothing more.

  He rode in the echoing silence of the Metro through the next few stops. Parisians, bundled heavily against the night’s increasing cold and carrying bags of groceries and presents, pushed into the car at each opening. At the Gare du Nord, most of the travelers left the train with a mechanical proficiency. Those who exited were quickly replaced by as many more, all looking the same and carrying the same bags.

  Joe watched the people come and go and thought of how easily any single person is replaced. Without a name or even a face, a person becomes the same as the person who stood in that spot ten minutes earlier, and the other person could be dead or a shadow of another. He remembered new recruits coming into the trenches, who after a single day of mud and fear looked like the casualty men they had replaced. The officers never knew, calling men by names that had been dead for weeks. One morning a man was a best friend and the next barely a memory.

  When the train stopped at the Saint Michel station, Joe exited into the noise of the platform. He did not look at anyone else and took the steps up and out into the cold wind and commencing rain.

  The sky had lowered and a little wind had risen to carry a new rain still so slight to barely cause moisture. The wind caught Joe’s overcoat and flapped it open, so he re-buttoned the front and pulled up the collar. Within a block of leaving the station, the rain filled into a full rain. Large drops slapped into puddles already formed in the seams, cracks, and dips of the cobblestoned street.

  He passed prostitutes who stood behind glass doors or windows, offering a view of their wares. He skirted around men with old wooden handcarts laden with fish or vegetables or carts closed tight against the rain to protect a supply of books. He crossed the opening of an alley from which he heard the sounds of a man and a woman engaged.

  He walked on in the darkness, his shadow nonexistent until he reached the halo of lambent light underneath lampposts. Then he passed into and through and away from his cast image, then on, then toward and through again as if chasing a lost thought.

  At the friend’s house, he was told that Marie had left that afternoon for her own house. She had wanted some papers and had wanted a change of clothes and thought that she would be okay at home during the day and would return by nightfall. “She has not,” the friend said.

  Joe left, walking quickly, his head down in that constructed silence of the city’s night until he stood across from Marie Dillard’s home.

  He stood and watched the light and dark of different windows, trying to read what lay inside that house, but he could see its soul no more than a disciple could see the soul of Judas. He could see nothing but the light and dark of windows and crossed the street to knock on the door, glad that the bells of Saint-Séverin were not tolling.

  She answered the door. Her eyes went wide. She leaned forward and whispered, “Leave. Please.” Her hand pressed flat against his chest, pushing, her eyes pleading.

  “No.” A voice called from behind her. The door opened farther. “Please,” a man said. “Come inside. Join us.” His smile was as cold as his words. “It is, I think, time that we meet, formally.”

  She stood to the side. Joe stepped in. The front room was dark, lit only by a candle in its glass, the flame waving from the breeze of the opened door. He stopped and turned to her.

  She did not look at him as Marcel closed the door, fingering the dead bolt. “Go inside,” he repeated, his words sounding like gravel. “Please. Entre “

  Joe stepped inside the parlor and looked around the room. The fire in the fireplace had banked, orange glows soft within the diminishing embers of its last heat. The marble mantel held photographs of children, men and women with children, and soldiers strong and proud in their French uniforms. A rug boundaried the wood floor. Electric wall sconces and floor lamps lit the room, which was empty except for a sofa and chair countering the fireplace like entrance pillars. A fat man stood behind the sofa with a small pistol at his hip aimed at Joe.

  “But first,” he added, his hand outstretched as Joe stepped past him.

  Joe looked at him.

  “Your weapon,” Marcel said. “I’m certain that you did not come without one. You are not that stupid of an American.”

  Joe began to reach into his pocket and the fat man coughed to let Joe remember his presence. Joe handed over his Webley and Marcel underhanded it to the fat man.

  The fat man with the pistol had a fat, sallow, unshaven face. He had a small mouth and a recessed chin. His small mouth tightened into a taut smile.

  Joe turned to face Marcel, the last of the five men who had been with Gresham at th
e Champagne. The man who had sold out his friends to the Germans and helped seal the deaths of 20,000 men in one haze-filled morning. Joe’s hatred of the man was intense and immediate and complete, fueled from many sources—the death of his friend, the recent deaths of others he had only met or even did not know, the distant deaths of thousands, the deaths of honor and courage and belief.

  Joe wanted to put a bullet into one of the man’s eyes. He liked the idea enough to hold that thought until further notice, some pleasure to retain for later in the rainy night when he had retrieved his gun.

  Marcel stood no taller than Joe but was thinner. His skin was a pallor, the color of over-cooked pasta; his eyes were gray and lifeless and the underlids were red; his hair was thin and cut short. He looked as though his life had been bled from him, as though his own cowardice had begun the process of rot from the inside, like a maple tree rots from its heart out until the shell is left withered.

  “Frederick Gadwa,” Joe said.

  Marcel, Frederick Gadwa, bowed his head slightly. “You guessed,” he said in perfect British English.

  “It took some time, but eventually it all fell in place.”

  “What do you mean?” Marie asked.

  “He’s not Marcel,” Joe said. He looked from Gadwa to Marie and back.

  Gadwa nodded and gestured with his hands, saying, “Go ahead. I’d like to hear what you know as well.”

  “They were all members of an advance reconnaissance unit—Gresham, your brother, Gadwa, the Marcel brothers, and Thomas Wilde. In 1914 as the war was beginning and before the English had much practice in trench warfare, Gresham and Gadwa and Wilde had been assigned to join a French unit, to learn from them. They were to gather information and scout routes and wire holes before an attack. The day of an attack, they were to precede the troops and record the action. This photograph had everything I needed.”