Dance on a Sinking Ship

by Kilian, Michael;

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  Dance on a Sinking Ship

  Michael Kilian

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  For Cleveland Amory,

  a grand man and a grand friend,

  for more than mere mankind;

  and for Christiana Kochert MacDonald,

  de Paris, une bonne amie,

  avec remerciements pour 1957,

  et pour 1987.

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was that lingering time between day and evening that Parisians called l’heure bleue. Eugene Fodor’s new European guide for 1935, On the Continent, said of its unique effect on the city: “The contours of the buildings seem to soften and to merge into the dusk. You will see a few people standing on the quay and apparently angling, but in reality they are merely gazing into the air and reflecting what sort of aperitif they are going to drink.”

  Such a marvel of serenity, this tranquil Paris of the latest Fodor’s. The guidebook said nothing of the rioting that had broken out like street fires in 1934 and had burst full force upon the heart of Paris in February—and was returning now in the warm autumn. Fodor’s Europe was a place of pleasure, not the stinking political sewer still reeking of the old war as it fermented a new one. Discussing Germany, Fodor’s complained of difficulties with the currency, noting only in passing that the traveler there can “hardly avoid the Jewish question.”

  C. Jamieson Spencer was avoiding the Jewish question—and all such questions. He had reflected on his aperitifs all day and was now consuming one rapidly—un fine à l’eau—at a sidewalk table of the Café aux Deux-Magots.

  The café, as usual at this hour, was crowded, and the Boulevard de St. Germain close in front of it rattled and smelled from heavy traffic. But Spencer was not interested in serenity. He had earlier stopped at Harry’s New York Bar in the Rue Daunou for a quick whiskey and to leave his afternoon’s news story with the proprietor, Harry MacElhone, for the correspondent whose turn it was to run everyone’s copy up to the boat-train at Gare St. Lazare. Normally he would have had another whiskey at Harry’s and perhaps stayed the night. Like many Americans, he preferred Harry’s to all the other bars in Paris. But it was not a place to pick up women—and, for the first time in years, Spencer was in that mood.

  He watched carefully each jeune fille passing along the boulevard as he drank his brandy, this night feeling as melancholy as he usually looked. A man four years from forty, with sandy hair, somber eyes, and a thin mouth with little smile to it, he was taller than most and narrow-limbed. He wore British clothes in an American manner. His gray flannel trousers were cuffed and his brown tweed jacket unbuttoned, a red-and-black striped tie that didn’t quite match hanging loose over a rumpled white shirt. In his lapel was the green-and-yellow ribbon of the Médaille Militaire, which still gained him many courtesies in Paris. It was an honor he had won during his three months of flying with the French in 1917, before he had joined the Americans and Canadians of the 1st Pursuit Group. He had won only two victories in the air for the French, but he had survived those three months and there was also triumph in that. By 1917, three months alive in the air war was six lifetimes.

  French, Americans, Canadians, even the Germans, they were now all brothers. Les frères de la guerre, les mutilés de la guerre, known to one another by the ribbons in their lapels or by missing limbs or other wounds still visible seventeen years after the armistice.

  He signaled the waiter, a weary, hunched man with a huge mustache, ordering a cognac plain this time, with no water. Spencer was a man who drank little for months at a time and then drowning quantities of brandy or whiskey when sudden occasion demanded it. This was such an occasion. Whitney Ransom de Mornay had made it so. Again.

  He rubbed his hands nervously. He no longer smoked. He had stopped during the war. A cigarette thoughtlessly lighted had set fire to the Spad VIII he had flown in more than three dozen patrols. He had nearly died in the flames and had almost been dismissed from the No. 27 Squadron for his carelessness. Four days later, the replacement ship they had given him, an old Nieuport 17 with a wheezing, underpowered Le Rhone engine, had come close to killing him in combat. He had not smoked since, except in China a few times, and that had been opium.

  The brandy neat was better, warmer. He would eat late that night. Perhaps, if he found a woman, with her. Until then, he would drink.

  The woman he really wanted was not some perfumed stranger. He craved the one he no longer had, the one who had a few days before abruptly removed herself from his life, leaving it to collapse behind her, not caring. Whitney Ransom was ten years and a generation and a war younger than he. She was as rich as he was no longer and blithefully happy as he had not been since he was a boy. And none of that mattered now. She was truly and irrevocably gone. She had loved him but had rejected all the grim realities he dealt with in his everyday life, that had come to define his life. In this way, she had confronted him with a terrible choice. Accept her and deny the truth, deny his work, deny himself.

  He could explain his infatuation with Whitney. Every man who ever met her became infatuated with her. She was such a bewitching combination of American youth and French sophistication, cool reserve and madcap recklessness, loving generosity and impish selfishness, serene beauty and wanton passion, innocence and brilliant education, naivete and yet instinct for the essence of things. What he could not explain was why the infatuation had endured for what was now years. It had become an incurable addiction. She had intoxicated him the very first instant, and she still did.

  Truth to him was love for her and a struggle to survive in a Paris, a Europe, and a world threatened by a human race gone vile and crazy. His life was sunsets that meant only that civilization had endured another day and sunrises that proclaimed it had endured another night.

  Life to her was pleasant Paris gardens, no worry, and a husband who indulged her every notion and wish. Her truth was a bemused belief in the innate goodness and civility of every man. So then did she love Spencer, and love her husband—the one with passion, the other with fondness and gratitude, but both equally, in the perfect world she had invented for herself in this most wonderful and satisfying of cities. Life to her was always charming. As Bismarck had once said of the kaiser, she wanted every day to be Sunday—and it was.

  He had chosen rightly in allowing her to leave him, though he was in agony over the price of his choice. He would not remain her pet man, a lapdog permitted by her ever-indulgent husband. He would not abandon his fascination with the violence-filled streets and famine-dead in China and the new monsters rising in Germany.

  He had thought of taking a woman that night—any woman. But no woman would be Whitney.

  Spencer drank, attempting to content himself with the moment, with the fabled l’heure bleu. He’d been Paris correspondent for the Chicago Press-Bulletin since 1932, and in those three years had developed certain fondnesses. Those for the Deux-Magots and un fine during l’heure bleue were near the top of his list—up near Harry’s New York bar.

  At the very top, though, had been always and was still Whitney. Every happy thought always led to her. It did so now.

  She was blonde and youthful in a fresh and free and yet very stylish way—very, very rich and married to a Frenchman even richer. She was from Ne
w York. Her family had a town house on East 75th Street and a large estate in Westchester. Yet she worked—for one of the Paris fashion houses. Whitney was a tall girl, large but well proportioned and blessed with wonderful legs, a dancer’s legs.

  She knew Paris even better than he. Spencer could not imagine a Paris without her. Yet there it was, all around him, Paris without Whitney. An empty chair at his table. At all his tables.

  It was barely seven o’clock, and in the ebbing daylight, none of the women passing in the street looked particularly inviting. He finished the second brandy and ordered a third. He judged himself deserving of some indulgence. His day had been long and unpleasant, spent dodging the bricks of mobs, the clubs of police, and the craven hypocrisies of Premier Pierre Laval and Ministre Edouard Daladier. Spencer had written a long story on the new Paris disturbances, which his paper would likely cut in half and run on the obituary page. The Press-Bulletin was even more reactionary than its chief rival, the Chicago Tribune, and had been editorially fearful of a European-style uprising in the United States ever since Franklin Roosevelt’s inaugural. Stories about rioting mobs in Paris might arouse the local socialists or, worse, the unemployed South Side steelworkers. It wouldn’t matter, of course, that these particular Paris mobs were largely fascist. Or that the swarm of thugs who had tried to break into the Chamber of Deputies that morning had been right-wing Jeunesses Patriotes and Solidarité Française. To the Press-Bulletin, all mobs were socialist, or at least anarchist, which to them was much the same.

  Spencer turned to observe a woman coming up the Boulevard de St. Germain from the direction of Place Mondor. She was blonde and, from a distance, might have been Whitney. Before she drew much nearer, a careening taxi distracted him, startling him when it suddenly swerved toward the curb and lurched to a stop. A flushed, familiar face, that of Bill Laingen of the New York Herald, poked out of a window.

  “Jim!”

  Spencer used “C. Jamieson” only as a byline. It probably accounted for at least twenty dollars of his weekly salary. A former publisher of the Press-Bulletin had had the name C. Jamieson Spencer—his late and bankrupt father.

  Bill and Jean Laingen were also high on Spencer’s list of Paris fondnesses. He pulled back a chair as a gesture of invitation. Laingen shook his head emphatically.

  “There’s big trouble up at the Place de la Concorde,” Laingen said. “Come on!”

  Spencer shook his head. “My paper isn’t interested in any more trouble. I’ve already supplied my quota for the day.”

  “This is très serieuse, Jimmy! They’re sending in Gardes Mobiles with rifles and sabers!”

  Spencer stood, uttering the obligatory curse, and finished his drink with a stylish flourish. When he finally climbed into the taxi and pulled the door closed behind him, the blond woman passed by not three feet distant. She was not Whitney, but she was a splendor. Spencer was coming to dislike anarchists himself.

  “Allons!” Laingen commanded. “Vite, vite!”

  The driver responded with little enthusiasm but fair speed. As they swerved along, Laingen studied his friend unhappily.

  “It’s not like you to get blotto in the middle of a story. Not one like this.”

  “This story needs blotto,” said Spencer. “The end of civilization. I’d meant to spend it with Whitney, but now I can’t.”

  “You two quarreling again?”

  “No row. No raised voices. She just walked out of my life. She divorced me.”

  “But she’s married to someone else.”

  “La même chose. All the same to me.”

  They could hear the terrible shouting up ahead, even above the engine noise. Besides the riots in February, there had been a massive strike in Paris, one that had seen workers lock themselves in stores and shops for weeks, surviving on food brought to them at great hazard by their families. Now there was rioting again.

  “End of civilization or not,” Laingen said. “Here it is.”

  Entering upon the chaotic scene as cautiously as they might descend into hell, they urged the driver as close to the Chamber of Deputies as his nerve would take him. When he absolutely would go no farther and began to scream at them to emphasize that point, they leapt out and into the crowd, Laingen leading.

  People were hurrying frantically toward as well as away from the furor across the Seine. A group of mounted Gardes Mobiles with drawn sabers came cantering by, and the two newspapermen trotted after the horsemen across the Pont de la Concorde. At the edge of the Place on the other side of the bridge, blue-coated infantry had massed themselves into a formidable wall. Laingen and Spencer moved along behind them, halting every so often to glance over troops’ shoulders at the mass of human heads beyond. It seemed extraordinary to Spencer that such a vast openness could be filled so entirely with people all joined in the same dangerous and violent purpose. It was like the war.

  Ahead, a large body of cavalry began moving out into the mob with slashing sabers, but they made surprisingly little progress. Shots were being fired in the distance, and flames of a burning vehicle were visible in the square. The din generated by the crowd increased till it no longer seemed a human sound. The sunlight was vanishing rapidly; nightfall would aggravate the tensions—and the passions.

  “This is a bad spot!” Spencer said, shouting over the melée.

  “Let’s keep moving!”

  They shoved, dodged, and scrambled their way to the Tuileries side of the Place, finding the battlementlike terraces jammed with more people. They were not onlookers but participants awaiting their turn, reminding Spencer of the reserves in the Great War, silently observing the carnage on another sector of the battlefield until it was their time to swarm out of the trenches and fight.

  “I don’t recognize these people!” Spencer said.

  “They’re communists! See those banners! We’ve got fascists and communists taking on the government side by side!”

  Spencer nodded. All mobs were anarchists. In this at least, the Press-Bulletin’s judgment may have been correct.

  There was a woman’s scream, and some angry shrieks and bellows. Reinforcements for the mob were coming up the quay from the Louvre and were being met by firehoses. Stones and bricks began to fly overhead, some landing quite near. A piece of mortar struck Spencer in the cheek, causing him to bleed. Across the square, another crowd was moving toward them from the Champs-Elysées, their tricouleurs and banners identifying the group as right-wing war veterans of the militant Union Nationale des Combattants. Laingen stared transfixed. Spencer’s adrenaline was failing—he was tiring rapidly and wanted another drink. He glanced quickly about, his eyes settling upon the façade of the luxurious Hotel Crillon, its windows crowded with onlookers observing the gathering clash as they might some sporting event or parade.

  “Let’s get up there!” Spencer shouted into Laingen’s ear. “We can see better!”

  They had to struggle through police to reach the lobby, but once there they could move about freely. Laingen headed for the main staircase and Spencer went for the bar. It was so thick with noise, tobacco smoke, and people he found it impossible to gain the bartender’s attention, so, at an opportune moment, he stole a distracted customer’s drink—from the looks and smell of it, a double brandy.

  “Victoire,” he muttered, then hurried up the main stairs himself.

  Laingen had gone out onto the third-floor balcony that ran across the front of the Crillon. Many others were braving the riot from there, a fair number holding drinks as well, lending the scene the aspect of a cocktail party, a cocktail party out of Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death.”

  It was dark now but as hot as midday. Spencer wiped his brow with his handkerchief, pressing forward toward Laingen. There was swarming movement in every quarter of the square. The din was now so great that it could scarcely be perceived as sound, the sensation more of pain than hearing. Many gunflashes could be seen but not heard. Other fires were burning and more were being ignited. Smoke drifted thickl
y from the Ministry of Marine down the street.

  The throngs in the Tuileries now swept forth as if on signal, dropping from the terraces and surging out the gates, lunging into the Place and pushing wheeling, rearing cavalrymen before them. Some sudden gunflashes drew a necklace of light along a section of the square, but Spencer could not see where the bullets struck.

  He recognized other correspondents on the balcony. Dick O’Brien of the Irish Times, Ronald Batchelor of Reuters, Jim Jackson of Time magazine, Jim Coates of the Chicago Tribune, Bill Shirer of the Paris Herald, Melvin Whiteleather of the Associated Press. Janet Flanner of the New Yorker was also there, wearing an odd hat and a raincoat despite the warmth. Spencer nodded to Coates. O’Brien was scribbling furiously in a notebook and hadn’t seen him. Standing just behind Whiteleather was a woman in a long, blue, backless evening dress. She was so exquisite she might have been the dancer Mistin-guette, and Spencer had to blink and look again to make certain she was not. He emboldened himself with another sip of his cognac, then moved to stand next to her, very close. She was so utterly captivated by the violent tableau below that she noticed him not at all. Her perfect blue eyes were wide and staring, her thin lips held slightly parted. Though she stood absolutely motionless, she was breathing rapidly. If he were to put his hand against the bare skin of her back he knew he would feel a violent thudding of her heart.

  He moved closer still, so near that he could put his arm completely around her waist if he dared. Despite the awful racket around them, he had an impulse to whisper in her ear. The heat and the mingled odors of smoke, gunpowder, and massed humanity had failed to sully the scent of her perfume. Even her hair, brushed to a golden sheen, smelled sweet. He leaned nearer, impudently and recklessly near, and studied the play of flickering light on the curve of her cheek and on the blue sapphire held by the merest glimpse of ear. He wished to kiss her neck, to inhale the fragrance of her skin.