Murder in Montparnasse

by Howard Engel

  “Break your gun, kid. Don’t shoot till we get across the fence.”

  “There’s nothing down here but freight sheds and a roundhouse.”

  “I know. It’s only half a roundhouse. But there’s a hobo jungle down here I’ve been trying to remember. I tried making it up. That works most of the time, but I haven’t got it right. It doesn’t smell right, so I want to take a squint at it. Do you mind?”

  “Lead on. Into the jaws of death.”

  “Speaking of those particular jaws, Mike, Gertrude Stein wants to talk to you. She’s read your stuff and, as they say in the British Army, ‘You’re for it.’”

  “Why do you talk about her like that? I thought you were like brothers?”

  “Yeah, we are, kiddo, but she’s beginning to get my goat. The way she summons and dismisses you. You don’t meet and talk with Gertrude, you have a bloody audience. And Alice has been sniping at me again. Thinks I want to break up their happy home. Gertrude — I’ll say this much for her — is always up front and straight with me, but her friend! That Alice is wise in the ways of low cunning.”

  We had left the apartment buildings behind us. The cement wall that marked the line of the right-of-way was on our right as we went down.

  “What about that beer we were going to have? I’m getting —”

  “Shut up!”

  “What?”

  “There’s somebody out there.” I looked at Wad, and then in the direction he was looking. We had reached a break in the wall where a set of tracks led off to a line of warehouses, teamways and loading bays. Wad was watching something through the gap. I couldn’t see anything but tracks and signal levers. A brick signal tower stood out against the sky, dark and abandoned. The structure that had replaced it was higher and closer to the station. To the north, the tracks converged and entered the open rear of the station. Most of the quays continued south towards us, covered from the weather by slanted roofs that reached about a hundred yards beyond the end of the station. The quays went on not much further. The quay that led to the old signal tower lay at the far side of the tracks. It didn’t look as though it got much use.

  “He’s in that old tower now, Mike. I saw him go up the steps.”

  “You think it’s Jack?”

  Half a dozen policemen came out of the station and walked along one of the middle quays. They kept coming until they reached the end, where they stopped. They turned and looked around and lit cigarettes, which they cupped in their hands as they faced one another. Nobody climbed down to the ballast.

  “They think the tower’s been searched already, I’ll bet,” I said.

  “Sure. It’s the first place they’d look. That’s why it’s safe now,” Wad said.

  “Should we go over to tell the policemen?”

  “That’ll be his cue to make tracks. Then they’ll never get him. And there isn’t time to go back the long way and report him at the front of the station.” After three or four minutes, the policemen went back inside the station.

  “I haven’t seen anything moving in the tower,” I said.

  “That makes it more likely that it’s Jack. A signalman would have waved or shown himself.”

  “Why did the police disappear?”

  “Because they know the yard back of the station was searched earlier. Let’s get back so the wall covers us.”

  “Wad, you don’t mean to try to take him, do you?”

  “Sure. We’ll surprise him if he heads this way through this gap. Just keep your head down and don’t let him get his hand on those scissors of his.”

  “It’s probably just a clochard.”

  “That’s what the odds say. But what if it is Jack, Mike?”

  “Wad, you’re as crazy as he is!”

  “You want me to take him alone, Mike? Just stand clear.”

  “Oh, go to hell. I’m with you, damn it. But we’re both crazy.”

  Wad took a look around the gap. When he pulled his head back, he shook it. “He’s going to stay in there for a while. It’s a mistake. He should run for it.”

  “Hell, Wad, it’s his head.”

  “He knows they’re doing a sector-by-sector search. He knows that they’ll get to the tower again before long. If he heads out the back, he’ll think he can be seen. But he’d be wrong; the tower would mask him from the station as long as he kept it between them.” Wad peeked around the corner again. “He’s coming,” he said.

  We were both standing on the north side of the break in the wall. Wad’s back was close to the white cement. I took a similar position and tried to remember when I’d done anything so hare-brained before. At the same time, it was exhilarating. I checked my breathing and found that Wad was trying to control his as well. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. I wanted to feel mine, too, but I didn’t want to move.

  It wasn’t long before we heard him, his shoes scuffing over the rails. He was making a wheezing noise, as though he was talking to himself aloud in a whisper. Suddenly the noise stopped. We could see nothing, of course, and the sound had been our sole guide. Then the whispy, whispering breathing started again. Perhaps he had turned around to see if he had been seen. From his point of view, it didn’t matter now. He had only a short block to walk or run before he could lose himself on boulevard de Vaugirard. He was almost out of the box.

  Then he came through the gap and Wad was on him. I went for his feet, got him off balance. He fell to the ground before we heard him cry out. The man was kicking up rough, but I soon was sitting on his legs. I slid my belt free of the loops in my trousers and fastened his legs together at the calf. Where his corduroy trousers had been hitched up during the struggle, his skin looked mouldy. I still hadn’t seen his face, which was hidden by Waddington’s shoulders. From what I could see, Wad was busy keeping the man’s arms pinned on the ground on either side of his head. At one moment, the man freed one of his arms and immediately made a move, which Wad was obliged to discourage with a move of his own. It was a punch; I couldn’t see where it landed, but I heard the scream. From then on, he behaved. As Wad shifted off the body, I could see that the man’s hand was caught in his trousers, as though he had been reaching to protect his groin. Wad put his knee down on his arm at the elbow. He did it firmly, but not with violence. The whole assault had lasted perhaps a minute. All three of us were breathing heavily.

  Jack’s face, if indeed it was Jack, was long, red and heavily lined. He wore a skimpy moustache that lacked enough bristle to do a credible job of it. His brown hair looked matted, greasy and long. With some caution, Wad pulled the man’s hand out of his trousers. There was blood on his fingers. Shifting his knees, he pinioned the arms and extracted a long-bladed pair of scissors from the man’s groin. There was blood on the scissors as well. We hadn’t heard the sound of running up the railway tracks, but suddenly there were other faces looking down at us. The first faces were followed by others. Soon the place was full of caps and capes and uniforms with brass buttons. Wad looked over at me, grinning like a damned fool.

  CHAPTER 25

  The worst fighting I saw was with the Arditi on the X Asiago Plateau behind Mount Pasubio.”

  “They were fine troops, the Arditi,” said Commissioner Léon Zamaron, nodding. “How did an American with the Red Cross happen to be fighting with them?”

  We were sitting around a mahogany table across from the bar in the main room of the Closerie des Lilas. Wad and I had our backs against the banquettes, while the policeman sat with his back to the rows of bottles that lined the bar. It was about an hour after the police had taken charge of our prisoner. The commissioner, who’d made an appearance at the office of the railway police at the Gare Montparnasse, had expedited matters so that we were now able to take some light refreshment after our adventure. It was easy to see that the policeman was fascinated by Waddington’s stories. He mentioned all of his favourite themes: the hobo jungles, boxing on Chicago’s North Side, as well as his exposure to fire during the war.

  “That�
�s a long story, M. Zamaron, and I don’t think I can tell it yet without getting some very fine Italians into trouble for cutting through a lot of red tape.”

  “I see,” Zamaron said, not looking as though he either believed or disbelieved what Wad was saying. Perhaps a policeman learns to listen without judging these things. “Our dossier says only that you carried chocolate to the trenches. But, then, the war records are in a great tangle, are they not? There is so much that has been omitted.”

  “You have a file on me?” Wad asked.

  “Of course. You were an accredited journalist in 1922. You were one of the people in the files on my desk. I get all the foreigners, as I have recently explained to M. Ward.” He smiled in my direction with such simplicity that I postponed asking him about the dossier on me.

  The room was high-ceilinged with shiny yellow paint coming down to the top of the banquettes, except when intercepted by mirrors. Brass rails, which followed the banquettes, were used as a temporary repository for our coats. The Closerie was actually warm inside, unlike the places further along the boulevard. We were drinking the best cognac the Lilas could provide. It looked a little curious in our dirty hands. Wad’s jacket was dirty on one side and my trousers were split at the knee. Apart from that, and the bruises that would not announce themselves for another twenty-four hours, we had survived the ambush without casualties. Even Jack was found to have been hurt only superficially: the blades did minor damage to his own upper thigh.

  Waddington had been right to a degree about Jack. He was a man who rarely had had his picture in the paper, but he wasn’t a complete unknown. He had been the coach of a six-day bicycle-racer of the third rank until the man was killed in the Alps during an ill-advised attempt to break out of velodrome confinement. Since then, Jack had been working as an assistant to a tailor who made football uniforms. He was from Lille originally and had been living on the fringes of the sporting world since his cyclist’s death. Christian Caron was hard-up, thirty-five, unmarried and living with a former champion weight-lifter. He made no statement upon being arrested and charged except to insist that the papers get his name spelled correctly.

  “The Arditi were the finest and toughest shock troops on any side of the wire,” Zamaron said with conviction. I was slowly getting angry at both of them for so casually not discussing the chief event of the day.

  “Were you in the army, Monsieur le Commissaire?” Wad asked.

  “Ah, no. I was considered to be irreplaceable here. I appealed the decision, but to no avail. Instead of finding a marshal’s baton in my knapsack, I found saboteurs at the Rotonde.”

  “We were told that Caron had been up to his old tricks across from the Gare Montparnasse at the Café de Versailles,” I said, hoping to shunt the conversation back to a track that held more interest for me.

  “When M. Caron attempted to accost Mme. Camille Maure, he found more than a match for him and his pair of scissors. Camille was a dancer up in Montmartre as well as a model in the studio across from the gare. She told me that she has even scrubbed floors to help make ends meet. Naturally, a dancer of this description is a better physical antagonist than our sewing-machine operator bargained for. According to a witness who came on the scene and saw the struggle, he was almost convinced that it was Caron who was being attacked. But, messieurs, let that in no way abridge the value of your contribution when you ambushed this murderer behind the station. I am not directly connected with this investigation any longer, but I should be surprised if you didn’t both receive citations from the highest civil authorities for taking this criminal.”

  “Let’s drink to that!” Waddington said.

  Later, when I’d had a chance to clean up, medicate my few scratches and change my clothes, I walked across the park to 27, rue de Fleurus and knocked.

  “Oh, it’s you,” said Hélène, the cook. “We were expecting M. Picasso.”

  “Perhaps I’ll come another time,” I suggested. “Please give your mistresses my compliments.” I turned and was about to leave when I heard Gertrude’s booming voice.

  “Mr. Ward? Is that you?” She followed her inquiry into the hall, and before I could get away, she had me by the arm and was pulling me into the apartment.

  “I understand that you are expecting company. I’ll come back another time.”

  “Pablo never comes when he says he’s coming, Mr. Ward. He has a Surrealist’s sense of time. So do come in. I’ve been hoping that we could have a chat about your work.” I was soon in the large studio room being regarded by the surrounding paintings. Pushed into a chair, I found myself in a moment literally sitting at the feet of Gertrude Stein.

  “Hélène is bringing you a cup of tea. She brews excellent tea. Alice has taken Basket out. She is anxious not to see Pablo.”

  “May I ask why?”

  “Oh, she fancies that he is unfair to Matisse. Matisse is devoted to Pablo, so Pablo should be devoted to Matisse. It’s probably fair, but not fair in the way of the world. Pablo is a genius and his genius is made the goat for a deal of incivility.”

  “Not having met either of them —”

  “Pablo wants to live forever. There never was such a man for squeezing the juice out of every moment. That is why he will not come today.”

  She was wearing a huge corduroy skirt which came within inches of her ample ankles. Her feet, encased in sandals, looked red and troublesome; her hair was newly trimmed and her face was intimidating. She seemed like an animated version of the life-sized sculpture that Jo Davidson had made of her.

  “Now, to business,” she said, placing my manuscript on her lap. “I think that you are not reading enough of the right people, Mr. Ward. I hear echoes in your prose, echoes that run back to stuffy English drawing rooms and American universities. Is that what Canadians aspire to sound like?” She had taken a cigarette without appearing to watch what she was doing, and lighted it from a box of kitchen matches. I needed a cigarette myself, but I was too wrapped up in what was being said to me to attempt to smoke. Gertrude blew a large smoke ring across the gap between us and watched it drift towards the ceiling. As we talked, her ample bosom collected her ashes.

  “Writing is always a matter of voice and sound, Mr. Ward. Yours is yet unformed. I detect familiar accents here and there. You have humour, which is good, and good because rare. You are beginning to see things in the new way. Like our friend Waddington, you often make your sentences experience the thing you are talking about rather than let them simply describe what is going on from a distance. Your narrator is close to the story, but you must not leave him a cipher. Make him opinionated, smother him in the action. Dump ashes before his feet.” At this moment, Hélène brought in a tray with tea and bread and butter. Gertrude didn’t look up. She went on telling me how my work had failed to impress her. I could hardly keep my cup still in its saucer as she told me that I must abandon what I had already written.

  “You must start again, Mr. Ward,” she said, sipping from her cup, “only this time you must concentrate.”

  Half an hour later, I was back in the street with my manuscript, full of tea and bread and butter, trying to remember every suggestion she had made. I took the manuscript back to my room and opened it. I sat there for some time staring at it without reading a word. I was not a born writer, she had implied; I showed no special talent. I was not working in the spirit of the modern writers that she cared about. The only word of hope was to try again. I still don’t know what she meant by “concentrate.” Had she imagined that I had written my stories in a haze or a dope-inspired dream?

  I was now thoroughly out of spirits. Not only had I been condemned as a mediocre writer, but I hadn’t even met Picasso. For a day that had started well, it was now sagging in the most unattractive places. In an attempt to defy the foul fiend of depression, I decided to bury my troubles in an excellent dinner.

  I went to Dagono’s for a steak. Near the slaughterhouse, it boasted that it served the best broiled meat in town. I’ve always enjoy
ed this place, from the picture on the menu of semi-nude female chefs holding up platters of sturgeon and grills of suckling pigs, all mounted on the back of a prize and garlanded steer, to the reality of the truffled foie gras and a variety of fine wines. Because of its location next door to the Cochon d’Or in La Villette, I never expected to run into people I knew there. On this occasion, I was surprised. I was sipping the last of my coffee when Wilson and Georgia O’Donnell came into the restaurant in a company of what looked like well-to-do Americans with the odd monocled Englishman thrown in to make the scene cosmopolitan. They didn’t see me at first, but as I was settling my bill, Wilson clapped me on the shoulder and asked me to join them for a drink. I tried to beg off, but he insisted.

  “Mike! How nice to see you!” Georgia said, leaning across the table to take my hand. She was looking dreadful. With dark lines under her eyes, she seemed haunted, unhealthy. Her smile was warm and her grip was cold without being clammy. I sat across from her in the chair provided from the empty end of the table. I was introduced around the table and quickly forgot most of the names.

  “Georgia’s been under the weather, Mike. Thought I was going to lose her for a few days.”

  “Nonsense, Goofo, it was just the grippe. You thought I had peritonitis again. That’s because you don’t know anything at all, at all, at all, as the French so charmingly say. French women say that, not the men. The French have two languages: one for the women, one for the men. I don’t know either. Mike, do you think that Valentino is cute? Seriously, though? Is he the ideal of masculine beauty, Mike?”

  “Georgia, what are you talking such rubbish for? Mike would like to hear our good news, I’ll bet. We are at last getting out of town. I can’t work worth a damn here, so we’re moving down to Juan-les-Pins for the winter. There are too many people here,” he said, with a glance at the row of animated faces at the other end of the table, “for me to get back in the groove. I can’t write with an ice pack on my head, can I, precious?”