Charlie's War

by David Fiddimore

  Lee said, ‘Ignore it. Some guy has promised me a Chevy saloon. I plan to get to Greece with it.’ Then she said to us, ‘This is Pablo, and this is Boris,’ and in French to them, ‘This is Charlie, and Ham ’n’ Eggs. I knew Charlie in England: he’s OK. I don’t know the others.’

  ‘They’re OK, too.’ I switched to their lingo. ‘Only they can’t speak French.’

  ‘What about their English?’ Boris asked me back in English, extending his hand for a clasp.

  ‘Clumsy, but adequate,’ I told him back in French.

  Les said, ‘What was all that about?’

  ‘Introductions. They’re cool about you now.’

  ‘What does cool mean?’

  ‘It means you’re OK.’

  ‘Then say OK the next time.’

  ‘OK,’ I said, and he gave me the look.

  ‘When you’ve finished? . . .’ Lee said, and raised her glass.

  I can’t remember Boris; isn’t that odd? Only that he was something to do with the ballet, and seemed an improbably masculine type for it: you must have heard all of the stories. Pablo was a small, rounded man with short-cut greying hair, and the blackest round eyes you ever saw. He was what the working class would have looked like if they had been designed by Arthur Rackham. He looked rotund and muscular, even though he was probably thin under his clothes. Most Parisians were in 1945. Being fat was like wearing the label collaborator around your neck. Lee pronounced his name in a slurred, Frenchy way: it came out almost as Pavlo.

  Pavlo proposed the first toast, which was, ‘Death to the French!’

  I asked him, ‘Aren’t you French?’

  ‘Sometimes. Usually I am Spanish. Sometimes I am Basque. A world citizen.’

  ‘There are a lot of those, these days. Half of Europe is on its feet and moving around.’

  ‘I thought all Englishmen said, Death to the French? I thought that would please you.’

  ‘We haven’t said that since Trafalgar . . . and you don’t have to please me.’

  ‘Good. I can tell you that you are short and ugly then?’

  ‘Yes, you can. You are even shorter and uglier than I am; and, what’s more, you’re old.’

  ‘Ah, but you are English. You still have a lot of catching up to do.’

  The Major enmeshed him and Boris in an argument about art, of all things, and soon they were all waving their arms at each other, and shouting insults. Even Les had an opinion.

  He told them about an exhibition he’d seen by a man named Harold Larwood, at a place named The Oval. Boris didn’t get it, and argued hotly. Pavlo did. He sat back in his chair and with his feet swinging just above the ground, grinned over his glass. His eyes twinkled wickedly. Lee was sitting next to me. She linked her arm through mine, and raised her glass for a clink. The greeny-tinged fluid in it moved lazily, like uncut disinfectant.

  ‘Welcome to Paris, Biffo.’

  ‘That’s what you called me when we met in Bedford,’ I remembered.

  ‘Suits you, doesn’t it?’

  ‘We’re looking for somewhere to stay for a couple of days.’

  ‘When you see the pigs fly over, give me a call: I’d like to get a shot of them. You got contacts?’

  ‘Tweedledee and Tweedledum thought they had. They were wrong.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Two guys giving me a lift. They’re sort of supplies staff. They estimate how much food we need to lift into an area when we liberate it, if everybody isn’t to starve. The older man is James England, he’s the expert.’

  James picked up on his name.

  ‘Say Hello, James,’ I told him. He waved lazily, and raised his glass. Alcohol gave him a great smile. ‘. . . and the other one’s Raffles, his driver. Only his name’s not Raffles, and I wonder if James’s real name is England, as well. I’m keeping funny company.’

  ‘Don’t let it worry you, Biffo. Everyone’s got more than one these days. Lee Miller isn’t all my real name, either.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Lee Penrose, I suppose. Do you like it?’

  ‘Not as much as Miller. Penrose sounds too English for you.’

  Her eyes had a sudden sad cast to them. She looked away and quietly said, ‘Bravo, Charlie.’

  ‘Sorry. I touched a nerve there.’

  ‘Not the one you wanted to, Biffo . . . want to come to a party? We’re drinking at Pavlo’s studio. He’s an artist, in case you hadn’t guessed. You might meet someone there who can put you up for a few days.’

  When I looked up Les was looking at me. He hadn’t missed a word of any of the conversations. He nodded almost imperceptibly. I said, ‘Yes please. That would be lovely.’

  If you ever asked me what an artist’s studio looked like I would tell you that it was several rooms so filled with people and booze and tobacco smoke that you couldn’t see the walls. There was a small kitchen with a chipped square sink. I got stuck with my backside against it, and people looking for water had to wriggle past me all afternoon. One thin girl in a summer frock – her eye make-up made her look like a vampire – stood with her right hand, with its cigarette, on my shoulder, and her legs astride mine as we talked. She used the press of the crowd against me. I lasted a delicious five minutes or so. She studied my eyes all the time. Immediately afterwards she said, ‘I was watching for the moment. I love men’s faces at that moment.’

  I said, ‘You’re another American. You must be an artist.’

  ‘No. Pavlo’s the artist, and so is Paul. I’m not an artist.’

  ‘You’re an artist.’

  ‘No. You need a cock to be an artist. All great artists paint with their cocks.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Some artist.’

  I could have said See, but it wouldn’t have made any difference. Lee must have noticed. She moved in on me, and said, ‘I see you met Mariel. She was a friend to Papa once.’

  ‘You mean your father?’

  ‘No; Hemingway, stupid. He lived here in the Twenties.’

  ‘You knew him, of course?’

  ‘Not in the way you’ve just known Mariel.’

  I looked down for the damp patch, and must have blushed. It wasn’t there. She laughed. I laughed. I heard James’s laugh over the buzz of the crowd somewhere. Part of my mind said, So this is what peace is like. I could live with that. England muscled over with Les not far astern. Les had a girl on his arm: a drunken redhead with a wicked great mouth. James said, ‘Do you want the good news or the bad news?’

  ‘Try good news first,’ I shouted at him.

  ‘I’ve done a deal with the artist. We can sleep in his studio after the party’s finished.’

  ‘. . . and the bad news?’

  ‘It may not finish.’ He shouted that back. I could live with that too. I wished that Les would put the Sten away. Lee Miller hadn’t drifted off. I asked her, ‘Where do you stay when you’re in Paris?’

  ‘Sometimes with a pal. But if I’m working it’s usually the Hotel Scribe. Room 412 is Lee Miller’s room.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘Near the Opera. Near the Place de la Concorde. One Rue Scribe.’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘You’re making fun of an old lady, Charlie Bassett. That isn’t fair.’

  ‘I know. I’ll do whatever you like to make it up.’

  ‘Drive me home.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Drive me home seriously. I’m too crocked to do it by myself. My time fuse tells me I’ll pass out in about thirty minutes.’

  She leaned very close, and blinked her eyes slowly at me several times. It wasn’t a come-on: it was to show me that there was nothing much going on behind them. I believed her.

  A jeep isn’t as easy to drive as it looks. God knows how she managed it. Carrying about six cwt of kit up to room 412 of the Hotel Scribe when you’re a drunk was even harder. Her room was a tip; like the inside of a junk shop. Old clothes everywhere, old food, weapons, a million c
ameras, and a strong smell of developer solutions and booze. She was flying straight again: more or less. We said a bit of this and a bit of that, probably wondering how to get away from one another, when she blurted out, ‘I don’t want to fuck you, Charlie.’ She sounded more like one of my aunts.

  I said, ‘Good. I don’t want to fuck you either.’

  ‘In that case you can stay. You can wrap in a blanket and sleep on the other side of the bed. In the morning you can tell people that you spent the night with the famous Lee Miller.’

  After a couple of glasses of something that came out of a battered jerrycan we turned in. I wrapped myself in a rough horse blanket I found on the floor, and lay alongside her. She turned towards me, and tucked her head over the arm I offered. But that was all. When I awoke during the night, she murmured, ‘I met your Grace in England, didn’t I? What’s the matter with her?’

  I said, ‘I think her stepfather shagged her a lot.’

  ‘Oh, that,’ Lee said. Almost a whisper. She didn’t speak again until the morning.

  You’ll remember that I wondered how Lee ever managed to drive a jeep. The answer was well. The next morning she piloted it like a racing driver, her elbows high and wide and moving like wings, her every movement smooth and coordinated. Back in Pavlo’s studio it looked as if the night had ended in a fight. Everything was broken. I said, ‘Cripes!’ and Lee said, ‘Don’t worry. It looked like this before we started.’

  There was a gendarme in the kitchen, asleep on an overstuffed armchair; a half-filled wineglass by his side and an empty bottle on the floor between his feet. He had probably arrived wearing a cap, but there was no sign of it now. He stirred, and said, ‘ ’allo, ’allo’, to me. He had a lisp, and a very odd accent. He asked me my name, and produced a notebook for it.

  I said, ‘Bassett. Charles Bassett. Royal Air Force.’

  ‘Ah, oui. English?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Rank?’

  ‘Wing Commander,’ Lee said.

  The policeman gave my ragbag of uniform parts a sceptical once-over: Lee added, ‘with the Resistance.’

  ‘Ah.’ He made a great show of scribbling over what he had written, and disappeared the notebook again. Lee asked him, ‘Was there trouble here?’

  The policeman answered in English, very slowly and concisely, for my benefit, because everyone knows that the English can’t communicate with foreigners.

  ‘Someone was shot. With a small automatic weapon.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘A woman.’

  ‘Fatally?’

  The gendarme shrugged.

  ‘For her pride. A clean and honourable buttock wound. She will tell her grandchildren she received it resisting the Boche, not servicing the British.’

  ‘Who did it?’

  This was wholly Lee’s conversation: I wanted nothing to do with it.

  ‘The artist. It appears there were two British soldiers staying here last night. When the artist had retired with his woman, one of the soldiers played a childish trick. He tied a bicycle saddle to his head, and a pair of handlebars behind it. In the half-light, once his head was bent forward, he looked like the Minotaur. Delicacy does not permit me to fully describe the moment – but imagine yourself the artist; your woman is above you when the Minotaur looks over her shoulder. He screamed, grabbed at the gun the soldier wore, and in the struggle a round was fired which pierced the backside of a person in the next room. She demanded a judicial investigation.’

  ‘Where is Picasso?’

  ‘Fled. That has happened before. He is a bull around women, but not around other bulls.’ Bulls was French police slang for policeman. That wasn’t a bad pun, I decided. I asked about the two Englishmen.

  ‘Arrested.’

  ‘Where, Monsieur?’

  ‘At the Police Office. One of them took my cap, and gave me his own.’ He handed it to me. I recognized James England’s battered headwear. Bollocks.

  The Police Office was the size of a small shop. It had three cells. Les was in one, pretending to be asleep. His beret was tipped over his eyes, and the Sten still around his neck: no magazine, though. Major England was in the next cell, cuddled up to the redhead I’d last seen with Les. She was wearing a gendarme’s cap.

  From the corridor outside I asked Les, ‘What’s with the bird? Droit de seigneur?’ It was one phrase from French history that English schoolboys remember.

  ‘She wanted second helpings,’ he told me. Then, ‘You took your time.’

  ‘What do I need to do to get you out?’

  ‘Ask the copper?’

  The policeman looked uncomfortable when I asked him.

  ‘You could promise that they will keep better company in future?’

  ‘I could.’

  ‘That they will refrain from shooting our citizens in the arse.’

  ‘That too.’

  ‘. . . and that the gallant Major returns my hat.’

  ‘Certainly. Would there be any paperwork? Any embarrassing documentation?’

  Only the French understand the word embarrassing better than the English. He shrugged.

  He suggested that I move the Humber discreetly round the corner, and wait there. After about ten minutes the Major and Les appeared, the latter clipping the magazine ostentatiously into the Sten, the former under his own battered cap again. I had moved to the passenger seat to give Les his due. The Major settled into the back with a sigh. He said, ‘Impressed, young Charlie. You know Picasso, and Paul Éluard; you spend the night with Lee Miller; you bribe the police to get us out of poky, and apparently they think that you’re a hero of the Resistance.’

  ‘I deny all that,’ I told him. ‘Where’s the girl?’

  ‘She’s staying,’ he told me. ‘The gendarmes want to photograph her backside. There’s such a wonderful bullet hole that they’ve all gone home to get their own cameras.’

  Les asked, ‘Where to, Guv’nor?’ and it was startling to realize that he had addressed the question to me.

  ‘Can you find the Grand Central American Red Cross Club?’

  Seven

  There was a big Snowdrop on the door, whacking his nightstick into the palm of one hand as if looking for someone to practise on.

  I said, ‘I’m looking for a Miss Emily Rea.’

  He glanced down briefly at me, then looked away with, ‘Officers only. Beat it.’

  ‘I am one. Pilot Officer. RAF.’

  ‘An’ I’m Betty Grable’s left tit. Beat it.’ He spat. It hit the driver’s side door of the Humber, and ran down the side. That wasn’t a clever thing to do. Les smiled at him. You may already know that I’m leery of men who smile when something bad has happened.

  I tried, ‘It’s all right. I’m on government business. I can identify myself.’

  He laid the stick horizontally across my chest.

  ‘Only one government’s business behind these doors, son, an’ that ain’t yours. Now beat it. New York cops don’t ask no four times.’

  I shrugged and walked back to the car, leaning down to speak with Les and the Major.

  Les said, ‘I heard him. There’s a cafe across the road, a hundred yards back. See you there.’

  He was moving away from the kerb before his lips had stopped moving, pulling a left U-turn in the face of the oncoming traffic.

  We sat at a table outside the Café Libération in violation of Les’s rules. I could see that he felt uncomfortable: he was moving about in his seat all the time. Had it been the Café des Allemands until the Germans sloped off?

  James said, ‘That wasn’t very helpful of him, was it? Although I suppose all sorts of Allied yeomanry tries to get in there. I’ve heard that they have a free bar. What are we going to do next?’

  Les said, ‘Wait here, and shoot the bastard?’

  ‘That won’t help me.’

  ‘It isn’t supposed to. It’s supposed to piss him off. With dicks like that representing the occupying powers no wonder the French are still shooting
at us.’

  A waiter with a narrow, twirled moustache came out to the table. I ordered bread, small pieces of smoked fish, and glasses of wine. The wine here was fifteen cents a glass: I suppose that the owner had bigger overheads.

  Les said, ‘Shocking.’ Then, ‘ ’allo, ’allo. Where’s our friend off to?’

  The Snowdrop outside the ARC Club had been joined by another: a black man who carried two inverted stripes on his arm. Maybe that’s what had pissed the white one off. They crossed the road, and walked that measured policeman’s walk towards us. They carried their nightsticks, and the holster flaps of their big American pistols were unbuttoned.

  Les muttered, ‘Wankers.’ He kept his Sten in his lap, and an innocent expression on his face. They weren’t coming for us. The big white cop had probably already forgotten me, the way you forget a fly you’ve waved off your food, which didn’t mean that there wasn’t a problem.

  The problem was that Les hadn’t forgotten him. As he reached our seats, and was about to pace past, Les stuck out his desert boot and brought the man down, neatly hooking his legs away from him. He twisted as he fell and his head ended up on the pavement close to Les’s right boot. Les bent over and stuck the muzzle of his Sten in his victim’s ear. The other cop was the first black cop I’d seen. He was quite good. He instinctively dropped into the fighting crouch, his hand to his holster, before he heard the neat clicking noise – Major England cocking the old Webley .38 he kept on a lanyard. He said, ‘Please don’t do anything precipitate, old chap, and please join us.’

  England was good with his feet too. He used one to hook out a fourth chair for the man.

  The cop on the ground gulped for air. There was a smear of blood on the paving where his chin had met it. Two Parisians, and a mangy old dog, stepped around him as if a military policeman lying on the path wasn’t an unusual occurrence.