Collected Stories

by Lewis Shiner

  He kept knocking, and eventually I heard a faint “je viens, je viens” on the far side of the door. It opened on a chain, and the voice said, “Oh. Vlad,” in vague disappointment.

  She reopened the door without the chain, and while the door was closed I reached into my jacket pocket and turned on the minicassette recorder.

  She wore a pink chenille bathrobe, which she held closed with one hand, and bunny slippers. Her face was striking—deeply lined, and yet with such clear skin that she didn’t seem old enough to have been around for World War II. Her hair was white, with odd strands of gray and black, and came halfway down her back in a loose braid.

  We followed her into the kitchen. “My good friend François has been begging me to introduce him to you. François, this is Madame Rochelle.”

  She took my hand and looked intently into my eyes. “So, you are a good friend of Vlad’s? For this I am supposed to welcome you?”

  I went with my instincts. “I just met Vlad a few minutes ago. I want to ask you about the wire recorder that he found in your house.”

  She pressed my hand and nodded. “Okay, Vlad, I will talk to François alone now.”

  Vlad hesitated, as if he didn’t quite believe what he’d heard. Then he shrugged and took a business card from his jacket. “In case you are ever rich,” he said. He squeezed the back of my neck in an oddly intimate gesture and let himself out.

  “Come in,” Madame Rochelle said. “If you insist on something to drink I expect I could find you some tea.” Her French, like Madame B’s, was musical, but in her case legato and husky. For my part, my own French was still ragged, but practice was bringing it back.

  “I’m all right,” I said.

  She led me into the living room, which smelled damp and got a little second-hand light from the bedroom and a bit of filtered daylight through heavy orange drapes. She sat at one end of a faux Victorian couch with worn floral upholstery and I sat at the other.

  “Talk,” she said.

  “I am here because Vlad found an old recorder in your house and took it to the flea market at Saint-Ouen, and eventually it ended up with me. There was a spool of wire with the machine that had a date of December 18, 1944. Do you have any idea what I’m talking about?”

  “No, but I’m fascinated.” She clearly wasn’t. She lit up a cigarette and looked past me out the window.

  “I think the recording contains the sound of someone being beaten to death. I think that person was Glenn Miller, the American musician.”

  “Not a very good musician, and he didn’t die in my house. The military flew him back to the US, to Ohio, I think, and he died in a hospital there. This anyway is what a doctor friend told me.”

  The blood roared in my ears and I thought I might pass out.

  “I forgot that my friend Louis had that machine going,” she went on. “He wanted to record the great Glenn Miller playing with the band from the bar down the street. Everyone was much too drunk, especially Miller, and they sounded like a piano falling downstairs.”

  “Madame Rochelle, may I tape this conversation?”

  “Why?”

  “It is my only proof of what is on that recording wire. It makes it valuable.”

  “You are going to sell the recording wire?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “All right. You may tape.”

  I switched off the recorder surreptitiously as I took it out of my pocket, then set it on the coffee table and made a show of turning it on again. Madame Rochelle shot me a skeptical glance that told me I wasn’t fooling her, but I felt better having it out in the open.

  “How did the fight start?” I asked quickly. “Who was it that hit him?”

  “That, my dear, is a much longer story. How much do you know about the black market here during the war?”

  “Nothing, really.”

  “Okay. From the beginning, then.” She took a deep drag on her cigarette and settled herself on the couch. “When the Germans came in 1940, they set our clocks ahead an hour, so we would be on the same time as Berlin. It brought darkness to our mornings and reminded us every day that we were defeated. That hour was the first thing they stole from us, but it was not the last.

  “At first it did not seem so bad. We were already starving from the long siege, and when the first German tanks rolled into the city, the soldiers were tossing chocolate and cigarettes to us. Yes, like the way you Americans want to think of yourselves. We thought then the Germans would be bring order, but they only brought papier timbré—you know, bureaucracy—and long lines. They helped the black market with their own stupidity. They hired local men to provides all their supplies, so of course the local men stole everything they could. That was right where your flea market stands now, at the Port of Saint-Ouen.”

  “That’s amazing.”

  “What you call coincidence? That is just fingers.”

  I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right. “Excuse me?”

  She wiggled her fingers at me. “You see this finger and this finger and you think they are different things, but there is one hand that moves them both. You understand? Anyway. You know the word se débrouiller? It means to get by, to make do. From this we had le systéme D, the way of getting by. Everyone did it. These days, you can’t find anybody who was not in the Resistance, but then it was different. We did what we had to do. We stole, we dealt with le milieu, the criminals, we traded our heirlooms, we got drunk or high whenever we could so we didn’t notice how hungry we were. Or we were one of the collabos horizontales, a whore, like me. We were most of us whores then.

  “You Americans came, but there was still no food. Then the American deserters moved in and took over the black market and it was bigger than ever. American soldiers were selling to them—that’s how Louis got that wire recorder, from the American military. And Glenn Miller, he was friends with this Colonel Baessell, who was one of the worst. He would fly over from England with morphine he stole from the Army, hidden in cartons of cigarettes.”

  I knew the name Baessell, of course. He was the other passenger on the flight on which Miller allegedly disappeared. “Are you saying Miller was involved with smuggling morphine?”

  “No. But everyone knew what this Baessell was doing, and Glenn probably knew too. He liked the things that Baessell could put his hands on. Booze and women. Glenn’s appetites were enormous, and he was a very mean drunk. You know why? He was being eaten, from the inside out. Inside he was a great musician, but outside, his body could not play that well. He would have given everything he had if he could have been Jack Teagarden. You can’t live like that, wishing you were somebody else.”

  My father loved Jack Teagarden, and used to lecture us on his awesome technique and control of the trombone. “So what happened on the night of the recording?”

  “A man came in looking for Baessell, a boy, really, very young and nervous. He went right up to him at his table and pulled out a pistol and shot him, bang, in the face. Glenn came off the stage and knocked the gun out of his hand with his trombone, and they began to fight. People were running away now because of the gunshot. They knew the police would come and many of them should not have been there, deserters, black market traders like Louis. Still, someone could have stopped the fight. But there was no love here for Americans. They had not suffered the way we had.”

  I thought of the images I’d seen of the carnage at Omaha Beach and started to say something, but she cut me off.

  “A few weeks of combat is not the same as years of hardship,” she said. “And many of these men were like Glenn and Baessell, they had never seen combat. They came and took what they wanted—women, mostly, by force sometimes—and thought we should be grateful.”

  “What happened to Miller?”

  “Like I say, he was a very mean drunk, and he was very drunk. Most fights I have seen have not lasted long, but this one—Glenn was crazy with anger and would not stop, and the boy, in the end, he was beating Glenn’s head against the floor. I tr
ied to stop it, finally, and then the Military Police came and took Glenn away. I was sure they would arrest us, but it seems they knew who the boy was who shot Baessell, and he left with them, and they said if we ever talked about it bad things would happen to us.”

  “Are you saying the US military was involved with Baessell’s death?”

  “Do I think it is possible that the US Army wanted to stop Baessell from stealing their morphine and didn’t want the publicity of a trial? What do you think?”

  “Have you ever told anyone else?”

  “One time I told an American, after the war, and he was very angry with me and said I was lying. Then a few years ago a woman from England found me. She was doing a book about Miller, but then she went away and I never heard from her again or ever saw the book.”

  “Do you remember her name?”

  “Sorry. I know these things are very important to all of you, but I don’t care. They say life is short, but my life has been very long, and I am tired.”

  “You never thought of going to the newspapers when you saw the false reports of Miller’s death?”

  “Why? When your government decides to tell a lie, that is serious business. Like now, your President lies and nothing happens to him, but this man Wilson talks about the lies and the government sets his wife up to be killed.”

  I tried to find a polite way to ask if she could have been mistaken. “So you knew Miller well? He was a regular customer?”

  “When I speak of his appetites, I do it from personal experience. He was not a bad person. He was not a wonderful trombone player, but he had a true gift as an arranger. He had a sense of humor. He was loyal to his friends, and he was brave enough to take on that boy with the gun. I don’t understand your country. Your heroes cannot have appetites? You want to impeach Clinton for having sex, but you let Bush steal your election and carve up the country for his rich friends. All these soldiers who fought Hitler must be these brave idealists fighting the Good War. Well, the soldiers I saw, half of them had wine in their canteens and they wanted to know why they should be dying for stupid French people. But you never hear that now, just like you don’t hear that Glenn Miller died drunk in a whorehouse. Your father, he was in the war?”

  “The last part of it. He was very young.”

  “So many were at the end. Just children.”

  “He was with the group that found Dachau.”

  “Ah, yes, the camps. The Americans did many bad things at the camps.”

  “The Americans did?”

  “Tortured and killed the guards. Shot German prisoners of war for revenge. Because they could not live with what they saw, and they were only human. Human like Glenn Miller.” She looked at her watch. “I think you should go now.”

  And that was the end. Two minutes later I found myself on the street, dizzy from information overload, oblivious of the rain, clutching my recorder in one hand and my folded umbrella in the other. I sat on the steps of her building and rewound the tape for a few seconds to make sure I had her story. It was there, loud and clear.

  “Holy Christ,” I said.

  I put the recorder back in my pocket and opened my umbrella and started walking. It was getting dark. At the end of the block I found myself on Rue Lamark, and followed it downhill past the stark white domes and towers of Sacré Coeur, then took the long flight of stairs down to Place Saint-Pierre.

  It was the find of a lifetime, and now I had to decide what to do with it. My first instinct was to take it slow, send out a few emails to let key collectors know what I had, let word of mouth start the feeding frenzy that would doubtless ensue.

  She’d stirred up a lot of different emotions, but most of what I felt was triumph. I’d waited a long time for this, and I was not going to screw it up.

  My flight wasn’t until Wednesday morning. I spent Tuesday at the Rodin Museum and the Gustave Moreau exhibit at the Musée de la Vie Romantique, then I picked up a few presents at the big Printemps department store, including a necklace with Russian-looking icons of the Virgin for Ann. I felt different, puffed up. No one was looking at me, but it was because they didn’t know the secret I was carrying.

  Afterwards, as evening fell, I walked around the Pigalle district. This was where Glenn Miller came to drink and let out his inner demons. It had changed, of course, since 1944. The Moulin Rouge now offered Vegas-style dinner-and-a-show, feathered-headdress nudity to busloads of tourists, and the shops were cluttered with sex toys and gag gifts—but there were still prostitutes and live sex shows and lonely men with their collars turned up against the night.

  I dropped by the hotel around 7 PM to call and check on my father, and the night clerk stopped me in the lobby. “A man was here looking for you this afternoon, monsieur. He left this message.”

  It was a handwritten note, in English. “Urgent that I speak with you today. Please call me as soon as you get this, no matter how late.” There was a local phone number and a name, David Smith.

  I punched the number into my phone, nervousness edging toward fear. I had to remind myself that my passport was in order, my credit was solid, I’d done nothing wrong.

  A woman’s voice answered, and when I identified myself she switched to English with a colorless American accent. “Mr. Smith has been waiting for your call. Can you hold, please?”

  When Smith came on, he too sounded like an American newscaster. “Mr. Delacorte. Thanks for calling back. If you can spare me half an hour tonight, I have some information I think will interest you.”

  “Are you trying to sell me something?”

  “Quite the contrary. Do you know what a Missing AirCrew Report is? For example, if a military plane disappeared during World War II on a flight from a rural English airfield to Paris, there would have to be an MACR filed. Now do I have your attention, Mr. Delacorte?”

  “Yes. Yes, I understand.”

  “I can be at your hotel in twenty minutes. Is that okay?”

  “Yes, I guess so...”

  “Great. See you then.”

  I dropped my packages in my room and washed up. Yes, I wanted to see a Missing AirCrew Report on Glenn Miller, but how would a stranger know that?

  I was waiting in the lobby when he arrived, exactly twenty minutes from when I’d hung up the phone. He looked to be in his late thirties. He was wearing an expensively tailored gray suit, but his haircut and bearing both suggested the military. He had a quiet authority that went beyond self-confidence to intimidation.

  He shook my hand firmly and said, “Is there someplace we can talk?”

  “My room is a little small,” I said. Ridiculous as it seemed, I didn’t want to be alone with him.

  He nodded toward a red vinyl-covered bench at the far end of the lobby. “Here is all right, I suppose. This won’t take long.”

  We sat and he opened the manila envelope he was carrying and took out a single faxed page on plain copy paper. “You may read this here. I can’t let you copy it or take any notes. When you’re done I’ll take it with me.”

  The form was crude, from a mimeographed original. At the top it said “R E S T R I C T E D” and beneath that “MACR No. 10770.” The heading was “WAR DEPARTMENT/HEADQUARTERS ARMY AIR FORCES/WASHINGTON.” I skimmed the report, which listed the command, squadron, departure, and destination points. The date was 15 Dec 44. Paragraph 10 listed the persons aboard the aircraft as John Morgan, the pilot, and passengers Lt. Col. Normal R. Baessell and Major Alton G. Miller.

  The most interesting part was paragraph 5, “AIRCRAFT WAS LOST, OR IS BELIEVED TO HAVE BEEN LOST, AS A RESULT OF.” There was an “x” next to “Other Circumstances as follows,” and then the words: “Accidentally destroyed when aircraft strayed into Channel Bomb Jettison Area.”

  I read the whole thing again. “Are you serious?”

  “The Norseman aircraft in which Major Miller was a passenger accidentally overflew an area in the English channel that was used for the disposal of bombs after aborted missions. Several observers on one
of the bombers positively identified the Norseman.”

  “This is the Fred Shaw story that was in the tabloids in the 80s. There are a dozen holes in it. No one else ever came forward, there was no Mayday call, no wreckage—”

  “And no MACR. Not available to the general public, anyway. It would have been a morale disaster if the truth had come out while our men were still in combat.”

  “I think this is a fake. For one thing, Baessell’s middle initial was not ‘R.’”

  “No offense, Mr. Delacorte, but I think you’re being a bit paranoid. The Army typist hit an ‘R’ instead of an ‘F’. It’s a simple typo.”

  “If this is the truth, why not admit it now?”

  “If it were up to me, I would. But the military is a bit skittish about taking responsibility for past cover-ups at the moment.”

  Because of the current cover-ups, I thought. I didn’t say it aloud because I was afraid of him.

  “The important thing,” he said, with what should have passed for a sympathetic smile, “is that anything else you may have heard is simply not true. There are rumors, for example, that he was murdered, or any number of other far-fetched scenarios. It was an accident, plain and simple. A piece of really lousy luck.”

  “You accuse me of being paranoid, but what am I supposed to think, with you showing up like this? Who are you? Who do you work for? How did you know I was investigating Miller’s death? Who told you about me?”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Delacorte. I’ve told you all I can.” He gently took the MACR from my hands and put it back in the envelope. “I will tell you that I have a legal background, and that both Major Miller and Colonel Baessell have living relatives. If you knowingly circulate libelous stories about either of them, you could find yourself—and your pertinent possessions—tied up in some very nasty litigation.”

  Smith, or whatever his name was, stood up. “I hope this was helpful to you,” he said. “Enjoy the rest of your stay.”