I made the mistake of giving him the payment you had promised while I was still inspecting the contents of the packet. When I looked up he had disappeared.
I found M. Bud in a disreputable boite, which indulges the unfortunate and illegal French passion for absinthe. The green poison had already worked its mischief, and to my mortification he initially confused me with M. Hugues Panassié, the noted jazz critic and moldy fig, enemy of all that is innovative.
I managed to break through his phantasm, and you can imagine my joy when not only did he recognize me, but he importuned me to stay and listen to a new composition.
Of course, I had no choice. M. Barnes, you of all men must understand. And you can but imagine what it was like, sitting in a corner of this filthy dive, surrounded by prostitutes, pochards on the verge of delirium tremens, incautious tourists and predatory loubards, and three mangy cats, listening to a new work of unparalleled genius. M. Bud began with a simple, haunting melody that resolved itself into a minor 7th chord, at once jarring and soothing, and moved into a string of contrapuntally playful arpeggios, beginning with the blues and extending into the territory of fugue ...
But I digress. I was able to convince M. Bud to come home with me, where I gave him a cup of hot tea and put him to bed. I left, locking the door behind me to keep him safe. Then I went to find M. Carraway.
At the Herald-Tribune I was informed that he had already dropped off his column. I tried his hotel. The concierge told me that he had returned to the Herald-Tribune. I understood that the errand was growing urgent, so I stopped for no more than a moment to look in on M. Bud before making a line of bees for the newspaper office.
I found M. Carraway in the composing room, engaged in a heated argument with the compositeur. I approached him with the packet you had entrusted to me.
“M. Carraway,” I said breathlessly, “I bring you a packet of information from M. Barnes himself! He instructed me to inform you that you should read it before writing your column.”
“Thank you,” he replied, “but I have just completed my column.”
“Too late!” interjected M. le compositeur. “The earlier version you submitted has been set in type!”
M. Carraway turned on the man, and there was steel in his voice.
“Listen to me,” he snapped. “You will tear out this column, and replace it with the one I give you now! The earlier version was a mistake, and its publication would dishonor Mr. Barnes. Nothing must go into this newspaper that will do discredit to Jake Barnes. Do you understand me?”
M. Barnes, you should have seen him! His resolve was like a furnace, and the poor man melted before him. Then M. Carraway turned to me, and these were his words:
“Tell Jake thanks,” he said, “but I’m not going to look at the documents, whatever they are. I’ll do this my way.”
I picked up the packet and brought it home with me, where it rests on my bedside table, as M. Bud sits at the upright piano in the corner, putting the finishing touches on his new composition, “Hallucination.”
Sincerely,
Francis Paudras
(ENCRYPTED AND DECODED)
(5/4/53)
FROM: NICHOLAS CARRAWAY
TO: ALLEN DULLES
I COULDN’T USE THE COLUMN YOU SENT ME. I’M SORRY. BUT I JUST DON’T BELIEVE ANYMORE. I’M THROUGH WITH ALL THAT. I’LL ALWAYS CONSIDER YOU A FRIEND. BUT THIS IS A CLOSED BOOK IN MY LIFE. THIS WILL BE MY LAST COMMUNICATION TO YOU THROUGH CHANNELS.
NICK
Atlantic Hotel
Hamburg, Germany
May 4, 1953
Jake, you dear old bear,
You must be proud of your friend this morning. The way he socked it to McCarthy, and “the danger to the American soul, if our government continues its present course of sacrificing our humanity and the core of our democracy at the altar of cold war expediency.” Wow!
I was interested to note, though, that he didn’t use any of the documents I’d liberated courtesy of Clyde Tolson, and delivered to you. Did you decide not to give them to him?
For the first time since my operation, I’ve been experiencing phantom limb syndrome. And I don’t mean a pain or an itch, either. Well, I suppose you could call it a sort of an itch.
I don’t like it much. I wanted to get rid of that thing. I don’t want it suddenly getting all hard and throbbing on me, and it not even there. What makes it bearable is knowing where it is now. And wondering if what I’m feeling at those moments is what you’re feeling. Phantom limb syndrome or sympathetic desire? Either way, I want to put it to rest. And something tells me that in order for that to be buried once and for all, it has to be buried inside me.
By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.
And the sooner the better.
Oh, Jake, we’re going to have such a damn fine time together!
Love,
Christine
From the desk of:
Allen Dulles
By Messenger
5/5/1953
To: George H. W. Bush
I want to know two things. First, this cable from Carraway, what the hell is he talking about? I didn’t send him a column. Who did? Second, who have you been conspiring with? You’ve got a future in this organization, Bush, but you’ve been playing a dangerous game. I’ll tell you something--your father can’t help you. Prescott Bush is never going to be president. But remember this-his son could be, and his son’s sons, if you’re willing to learn where the true power lies, and who to listen to, and how to take orders.
And remember this. If someone can’t help you, it’s time to dump him, even if he is your father.
Come straight to my office on receipt of this. Immediately. And talk to no one. Especially no one named Robert Cohn.
Dulles
14½ MacDougal Street
New York
May 5, 1953
My dearest Nick,
I sat down to write you a letter in which I was going to tell you that whatever you decided, it would be all right with me. I know that you’ve devoted so much of your life to an ideal of America. I know, because I grew up the same way. I didn’t serve in a war, of course, but as a little girl I felt like I was part of it, saving my little cans of bacon fat and balls of tinfoil, and planting my little victory garden. I used to salute every morning when I came out to water my string beans and radishes. But that was Winnetka, in what feels like another lifetime.
New York can change you. It certainly changed me. But I was writing you to tell you that you didn’t have to change for me to love you. I know that first and foremost, you’re an honorable man, and whatever you decided, it would be honest and principled. First thing this morning I went out and picked up the Paris Herald Tribune. When I saw the column you’d written, I just melted. I was actually crying into my espresso at the Café Figaro. (I go there a lot; it’s just down the block from me, and the walls are all covered in French newspapers, so it makes me feel somehow closer to you.)
There’s a spring warmth in the air that’s found its way even into the concrete canyons of New York, but that doesn’t explain the way I felt. I was warm and tingly all over. I had to take several deep breaths before I could even go back to focusing my eyes on what you’d written. You are my hero. If it had been you sitting with me at that moment, instead of just your words on a printed page, I would have jumped right over the table and smothered you with kisses. Oh, Nick, I do want to smother you with kisses. I want to hold you in my arms. You must feel it too. Say you do.
But when will we ever see each other? I loved what you said at the end of your column, about finding what you had come to think of as a realer America than you’d ever known in the musical voice of Bud Powell and the expatriate American voices of musicians like Sidney Bechet and Blossom Dearie. But does this mean ... you’re never coming home? I miss you so much, my darling, it makes me ache.
Love,
Ronnie
Maurice Chevalier
5/5/1953
By messenger
General Salan:
The message in today’s column has been cleverly concealed, but it appears to be embedded in the list of obscure names at the end of the column--Bud Powell, Sidney Bechet, Blossom Dearie. If these are American entertainers, I am a resistance fighter. None of them has ever appeared at the Folies Bergère, I can assure you. And that last name on the list is surely the coded reference, to message 273: We look forward to the spring, when we take our loved ones to see the cherry blossoms open along the Potomac.
Translation: Forget France. Devote all your efforts to suppressing those towel-headed colonials in Algiers. Be as brutal as possible to the bastards.
Vive la Falange,
Maurice Chevalier
5/6/53
FROM: NICHOLAS CARRAWAY
HOTEL DE L’ODEON
PARIS
TO: JAKE BARNES
UNIVERSITY CLINIC
COPENHAGEN
ARRIVE COPENHAGEN TOMORROW STOP BE PACKED AND READY TO ROLL STOP NICK
Jake Barnes
Copenhagen, Denmark
May 6, 1953
Dear Chris,
Nick did me proud. He found that one true sentence, and went on from there.
I did send him the documents. I wasn’t going to. I used them as leverage on that bastard Dulles, and in return, I told him they’d go no farther than me. But I started getting a strange feeling in the old short hairs. There was a tap on my phone, and I’m pretty sure somebody was reading my mail. So I decided to let Nick decide what to do with the documents. And as you can see, he went his own way.
It felt like a valedictory, didn’t it? Disillusionment can set in hard, once it sets in. I don’t know if our boy is ever going back to America. Well, I know what that feels like, don’t I?
Sympathetic desire, eh? It could be. I’ve been getting those same feelings too ... the old pneumatic pump is working the way it oughta. Pending the real test.
Nick is picking me up in the morning, and we’ll be heading south. Get ready for the corrida!
Love and anticipation,
Jake
May 8, 1953
My dear Carraway,
A brilliant article. You succinctly captured the existential failure of the nascent American empire. I hope it will be the first of many. I would like to see you writing a regular column for Libération. Say the word and I will approach the editor.
Camus
United States Information Agency
20 rue Lacepede, Paris 5e, FRANCE
May 10, 1953
Dear Ronnie,
I returned to Paris this afternoon to find your wonderful letter and a parcel from you at the hotel. A letter from you is always occasion for excitement--but a parcel! I tore it open with impatient fingers to find your record (demo, is that what you call it?) inside.
Of course I don’t have a record player, but there’s one at the USIA library, and that is where I have been ever since (note the liberated stationary). I have been tucked away in the audio booth for the last three hours listening to you sing “Lover Come Back” and “April in Paris” over and over again, and I still can’t believe it. My God, Ronnie, where did it come from? You always had a voice, but I swear, hearing you do the show’s theme song, “Snicklepoo and Me and You,” never prepared me for where you’ve gone with it. There are emotions threaded through your delivery that I don’t think I ever felt until I heard you sing these songs. I feel almost criminal now, locking you into that kiddie show for three years when there was this artist waiting to burst out! My God, Ronnie--my God!
Time and distance are measures I can’t quite put into perspective these days. I feel I’ve been gone for years, not months. The distance between us seems more like light years than the few paltry thousand miles that either of us could annihilate in a matter of hours with an airplane ticket. What’s been happening to us, Ronnie? Is there anything left in you of the pigtailed young woman I hired in Chicago? Is there anything left in me of the pompous stuffed shirt who pushed that contract across the desk at you?
I wonder this because I want desperately to see you, Ronnie, and at the same time nothing I’ve ever contemplated has scared me more. I keep telling myself I don’t really know this girl--this woman--and as the song goes, how can you lose what you’ve never owned? But I feel as if I can lose, and lose a lot, and it may be more painful than I’m ready to risk.
There are many reasons for this fear--our ages, of course, and habits, and tastes, and experiences, and a jester’s pouch of other reasons. But I’d be lying to myself and to you if I didn’t admit that there is one issue that scares me more than all the others. It’s a small thing, in a way, and yet it casts a shadow I may not be able to overcome. It seems to have been a problem in my marriage, although one I was never aware of until the end, and since, in which time Marjorie has not stinted in drawing it to my attention. It’s a thing I could never address in a letter, and yet that may be the only way to do it, because I know I’ll never be able to broach it in person.
So here’s what I’m going to do. I’ve just returned to Paris after my drive down from Denmark with Jake. I dropped him off yesterday at a little inn along the Normandy coast--I’m pretty sure he had an assignation lined up, but he was being damned mysterious about it.
In fact, he still hasn’t told me what his business in Copenhagen was, but I have the feeling he was getting hold of something important. There’s a different quality to him, Ronnie, a kind of swagger I’ve never seen in Jake before, and I don’t yet know what to make of it. But that’s for another letter.
What I’m going to do, now, is to tear out a few pages of my journal from the trip, and include them here. I wrote these entries for myself, so they address the subject with a lack of self-consciousness that I could never manage if I were telling the story directly to you.
There are words in it I would never use in front of a young lady, and I am mortified to put them in front of you. But I feel this is something too important to avoid. If this offends you, I understand. I won’t expect to hear from you for a while; and if, after some time, you feel like picking up our correspondence again as if nothing had happened, and keeping the distance and relationship between us as it has been, a sort of confessional exchange between a middle-aged man and his young protégé, I will willingly slip back into that harness.
So--read it, and if necessary, weep. The reassurance Jake offers me here on this matter of my agonizing uncertainty is not the point. He calls it a matter of perspective. His is one thing, Marjorie’s another. The one that will matter is yours.
With love,
Nick
Jake Barnes
Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer
May 11
Dear Nick,
Into each life a little shit must fall. You will not believe what’s gone on since you so blithely dropped me off at the shore a few days ago.
You’ll have guessed that my rendezvous was with a lady. There are ramifications and implications and complications and sidebars that I may tell you about someday, but not now. When you’re older. Suffice it to say I was looking forward with uncommon anticipation to getting laid, and so was the lady.
She never arrived. I waited at the Auberge Aubier until close to sunset, and then I liberated a bottle of whiskey from the bar and walked down to Omaha Beach. I had not been there in almost ten years. It was a warm evening and it was very fine outside and there were smells of cooking from the houses and the whiskey burned and it tasted good even if the lady wasn’t there.
But the beach was not empty. It was alive with soldiers who jumped off landing craft with their rifles held over their heads and struggled through the surf and up onto sand that was churning with bombs and mortar shells. I could smell the explosives and hear their thunder and feel the impact of the shocks of the explosions and hear the shouts of the men and their screams. They were there, and they were real, and I was the ghost among them.
I sat
on a dune and watched the troops storm the beach, and watched the assault, and felt the shells and the bombs exploding around them and all around me, and I drank the whiskey I had brought with me and I thought about the lady who had not arrived, and I wondered what had happened to her and why the bombs and the whiskey were not having any effect on me.
A man was walking toward me across the sand. He wore a hat, and a trench coat that was belted around the middle. He did not look very much different than he had looked thirty years ago, except that he had not worn the hat and the trench coat then. “Hello Robert,” I said. “What brings you here?”
“Hello, Jake.” Robert Cohn sat down on the dune beside me. “I’ve come to take you down.”
“Well, have a drink.”
Cohn took the bottle and drank, and I noticed that the assault had ended and the soldiers were gone and the beach was empty and quiet again.
“Look out there,” he said. “That’s Africa.”
“Where?”
He pointed out to sea.
“No,” I said, “that’s New York. Africa’s down there to the left, past Spain.”
“Well, that’s where you’re going. Africa.”
“I can’t, Robert. I’ve got a date with a lady.” I took the bottle back. “We’ll go shooting in Africa some other time.”
“There’ll be shooting,” he said, “but I’m not going with you. I’m sending you.” He took his right hand out of the pocket of the trench coat and there was a gun in it. It was a MAS 50, a French Army pistol. “It’s all arranged, Jake. I’m delivering you to a guy who recruits for the French Foreign Legion. You’ll be in Algiers in a couple of days. Sorry. You’re getting to be too big a problem.”
The barrel of the gun made a short arc toward my head and everything went black.
I woke up in the dark and I found that my hands were tied behind my back and my ankles were bound too, and I was in a small confined space. I heard voices.
“Well look who’s here.” It was Cohn. “Who’s your lady friend, Davey?”
Nick and Jake Page 12
