The Path Of All That Falls

by Franz Neumann

  — The translating business must make him thirsty, Chase said.

  — At least we know he has a favorite wine, Gaudin said, picking up a bottle and recognizing the label from his occasional visits to the vineyard.

  — Fresh food, Chase said, opening the fridge. It was then that the front door of Regi’s apartment opened. The recording grew muffled and static-ridden as the microphone brushed against Gaudin’s jacket.

  Bombay stood in the doorway with a large bag of groceries in one arm and a long hard-shelled case in the other.

  — Excuse me, mademoiselle, Gaudin said.

  — You shit. Don’t you scare me like that, she said, moving to deposit the groceries in the kitchen.

  — Wrest gave me the key.

  — I know. I’m the one who dropped them off. Who’s he? she asked, pointing at Chase.

  — Chase, Chase said.

  — Glad everyone knows everyone, Bombay said.

  — Wrest had Chase photographing Regi these past few weeks, Gaudin explained.

  — What are you here for, though? Bombay asked. Going to ask me some questions?

  Bombay’s face bore a rigidity matched only by her pose—long cords of muscles showing in the arms she held crossed over her chest. Gaudin remembered thinking that she seemed to have been through this before.

  — How is he today? she asked, when Gaudin couldn’t think what to ask her.

  — Better, Gaudin said. So I hear.

  — Did you see him being pushed? Chase asked. I could swear I saw him being pushed.

  — Chase was taking pictures that evening.

  — Oh. No, I didn’t see anything. I was entertaining the American. Regi was meeting us at the dock, near the bridge. I may have distracted him, but that’s all.

  — How so? Gaudin asked.

  — When I saw him ahead on the bridge, waiting, I kissed the American.

  — Why?

  — You should know, Gaudin. Why ask?

  — Well, just say I’m asking.

  — Jealousy is the quickest aphrodisiac, she said. How’s that?

  — You kissed the American to make Regi jealous? Chase asked.

  — If you like that answer, take it. Bombay walked from them and opened a window. A breeze replaced the hot interior with the sound of traffic.

  — Any other tie-in with Mr. Ferriswheel? Gaudin asked.

  — What do you mean? she said, gesturing for them to take a seat on the sofa. The leather was cool, the cushions pure give.

  — Just asking, Gaudin answered. Wrest wants to know what Regi’s been up to, what’s led to his being pushed.

  Bombay laughed.—Wouldn’t it be nice if we all had jobs as easy as yours.

  Gaudin shrugged at Chase’s questioning glance.—We all make our livings, Gaudin said. I want to finish this job so I can take some time off. I haven’t left Paris for a year. I’ll start killing the tourists if I don’t get out.

  — I hear you, Chase said. It’s the same with me.

  — Maybe he was pushed by tourists, Bombay said.

  — I can go along with that, Gaudin said.

  Below, the street boomed and crackled like firecrackers on Bastille Day, the window filling with gray pigeon wings. Gaudin rose from the couch and walked toward the open window. He jumped aside just as the stone beside the framing fragmented in a cloud of dust. A bullet passed through the open window and exploded the rack of CDs in a rainbow of plastic.

  — Shit! Chase said.

  Gaudin was afraid of bullet ricochets. The leather couch took one where he’d been sitting, sighing out entrails of yellow filling. He spotted Bombay’s long case and reached inside, hoping for a weapon. Instead, his fingers seized upon the cold metal of a flute. How he wished he’d brought his pistol. He cast the instrument aside. The flute bounced once on the couch, then fell onto the floor. But by the time he made it back toward the window for a quick glance outside, the firing had stopped.

  From this point, the tape recording was mostly static, the microphone rubbing against Gaudin’s clothing as he and Chase tramped double-time down the stairwell, Gaudin feeling, for a moment, like a twenty-year-old. It was only now that his muscles felt sore. Even the hot bath had barely helped.

  When they reached the street, they found the owner of the cafe Le Coin, his hands crossed over his chest.

  — Where did he go? Gaudin asked the owner, his eyes searching up and down the street for a flash of soles. He didn’t like being out of the know, with unexpected players entering when he’d believed he knew everyone in Wrest’s cast.—Hurry. Tell me.

  The owner stared at him angrily. Gaudin saw the snub of a pistol peeking from under the man’s stubborn pose.

  —I’ll kill them all, he said. I’ll kill them until they leave me alone. A pigeon flew into the alley. The man immediately raised the pistol, using his other hand to help keep the first steady.

  Gaudin and Chase made eye contact.

  — You’re killing pigeons? Chase asked. The man fired at a pigeon, but missed.

  — No, they’re not ordinary pigeons, the cafe owner said. They taunt me. They say things to me, they are little demons. Another pigeon swooped low over the street and the cafe owner aimed again. In under two seconds, Gaudin and Chase had the man sprawled out on the street, the pistol kicked from his hands, an ancient p38.

  — Don’t hurt him! Bombay said. She was running across the street toward them. Gaudin pinned the man’s arms together, behind his back. Chase called the police on his cell phone. A patron approached the cafe, hesitated, then turned around, foregoing an afternoon coffee.

  — Don’t, Bombay said.—Please. Don’t hurt him.

  Pigeons began to land in the street, warbling under the shaded awnings of the cafe, a couple even landing on the empty chairs. The cafe owner slipped an arm from Gaudin’s grip and made for the castoff pistol, but Gaudin reached for it more quickly and held it to the man’s back to keep him still.

  — There, he said. Want to try that again?

  Bombay crouched beside the cafe owner and placed a hand on his cheek.—Why?

  Gaudin turned the man’s head away so he would not see the birds pecking into the abandoned pastries on the tables.

  In his apartment, separated from the event by only hours, Gaudin shut off the tape. On a notepad, he had scribbled a few notes, although he had yet to conclude anything that could explain the firing. He noted the names on his list and drew a line between one column and another, connecting Bombay with Baptiste, the owner of the cafe. Above the line, he wrote the simple word which he hoped would complicate matters, making the case into a cash cow and eventually ridding himself of Wrest, of Paris in summer, and the malaise that was beginning to creep into his bones. The word was a simple one. Niece.

  The doorbell buzzed. Gaudin rose slowly from his chair as the bell again gave out its mechanical screech. He hit the intercom button to buzz Wrest’s girl back inside the building, then moved more slowly to the credenza, picked up the sweater and smelled it one last time. He opened the door and waited for the girl. The lights in the hallway snapped off and from the darkness walked a woman he’d never seen before.

  “Hello?” she asked.

  “Yes?”

  “You speak English?”

  He nodded.

  “Does Gaudin live on this floor?”

  “I’m Gaudin.”

  “I had the hardest time finding your apartment,” Bianca said.

  Gaudin nodded, though he wasn’t completely certain who she was. “It’s an old building.”

  “You don’t know me.” She paused.

  “No.” Gaudin said.

  “I was given your name by Monsieur Wrest, at the hospital. After the accident. Since the police are so slow, I’ve come to you.” She said monsieur all wrong. She had dark blonde hair and dark eyes which Gaudin waited to take in the light, and which held a tint of green in their blackness.

  “I’m Bianca,” she said. “David was my husband.”

  “O
h,” Gaudin said. It was a sentence he didn’t particularly want to hear. He gestured her inside. “Please.” He saw the sweater in his hand and quickly placed it on a chair.

  She entered and briefly glanced around.

  “I’m sorry to hear of your loss,” Gaudin said.

  She nodded.

  Bianca gave off a strange odor. Gaudin closed the door behind him and checked himself in a mirror. He wondered how much sadness to shape upon his face. The odor in the air kept his nostrils pinched in disgust.

  “Wrest told me you’re going to find out what happened, beyond that Regi was pushed.”

  “We don’t know if he was pushed.”

  “He says he was.”

  “Figuring out the truth can be difficult. We might have to compromise.”

  “I need to know.”

  “Only one thing is for certain,” Gaudin said.

  “What?”

  “Forgive me, but give me your shoes,” he said.

  “My shoes?”

  “Yes.”

  She stared at them dumbly.

  “I think you’ve stepped in a dog’s…business.”

  “Oh.” Bianca balanced on one shoe and lifted the other leg to peer at her sole. She switched legs. “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

  Gaudin took the shoes, feeling the humid heat of her feet evaporating from the leather as he carried the pumps to the window balcony. He scraped the sole on the edge, and left the shoes outside. Then, ignoring the three spaced stains on his floor, he turned to Bianca and wondered how to pick up the conversation. Having started with stepping into crap, it could only improve. He wondered how a woman in her forties, barefoot in his apartment with embarrassment a patchwork stain on her face and neck, could really be called a widow, a word conjuring up living out the rest of a life in the painful margin of little, less, only memories. And why didn’t he feel more guilt?

  He smiled gently. “Have a seat. I have some slippers you may wear,” he said. “And then we’ll have something to drink.”

  Chapter 9

  Baptiste, proprietor of the cafe Le Coin, did not wear his white apron. He did not have a change purse riding his belt as on busy afternoons of sponging up beer sweat, nor did the span of cartilage between his ear and scalp ache faintly from a pen’s presence. He yearned for that ache. Instead, Baptiste lay on a cot in his underwear, dressed as though taking one of his usual naps before the evening shift, when the city sweats out the summer. Only now, the relaxation afforded by those hours at home did not come to soothe him. No relaxing swim of the mind, no paging through the paper or playing Jobim on the stereo to trigger a catalog of good memories.

  The cell was hot and dusty with a square window high up on one wall. The window was sealed by a weave of wavy wire mesh with an eastern feel. If he could reach high enough to peer through the opening, Baptiste almost believed he’d see mosque spires amid a lethargy of flat roofs, instead of Paris beyond. Moonlight tracked across the wall through the mesh window, a polygon of light twice removed from the sun. He counted time by the passage of light over the concrete wall. The span between the faucet and the long crack running from the single coat hook was the hardest. The wall often seemed to stretch itself.

  Over a week had passed since he’d slept on his own bed, days filled with blankness, attorneys and questions he couldn’t answer. The humidity in the air was mostly from his sweat. At times, his heart became a palpitating wreck. His lungs whistled low and ominously at the end of each exhalation. Shame and nakedness made the time move slowly, as though injured.

  From the quiet of the streets, he conjectured that it was now close to midnight. Yet again, Baptiste couldn’t sleep. What he wouldn’t do for a drink now, he thought. The first couple days of incarceration had been worse than this, though. His hands had shaken and he’d been met by the dark specters of late night ruminations he believed he’d put behind him: financial ruin, lost loves, early illness, all things blown out of size in the proportionless expanse of unchecked worry. Those first days, Baptiste drank furiously from the tap. He urinated every half-hour, thinking he could somehow flush out the shakes, quench the thirst, get himself back to how he’d been only a few weeks before, when the only voices he heard emanated from real people, and where the piece of furniture upon which he entered sleep was called a bed, not a cot, the latter name filled with short-life springs, of slung canvas, of temporality and restlessness, the lying place of the sick, the warring, the interned.

  His arrest was born of this: shooting pigeons apparently matched the profile of a murderer. He had worked out three explanations to this nightmare. First, that coincidence had put Gaudin, a private investigator, in his line of fire, somehow tangling him into the crime that had sent Regi, his niece’s friend, toward the Seine. Second, that the pigeons ability to speak was caused by some kink in Baptiste’s own internal wiring, casting a taunting ventriloquism into their beaks. Third, that he had been on the bridge the police kept questioning him about, there with his hand on Regi’s back, a shove forgotten by him because of some amnesia his drunken mind had cloaked over everything. It came to his alibi: a nap, taken in solitude. It made perfect sense not to believe a lunatic who shoots pigeons.

  The pistol he’d used had been from the Occupation, a Walther p38 accidentally left on the counter of the cafe by a German soldier and quietly swept away into concealment by a long since retired waiter, back when Le Coin bore another name, when the cafe still held a back room where more than the sipping of coffee and cognac transpired. Even as owners and names changed, the pistol kept its place hidden behind the bar beside other items forgotten by patrons. These objects seemed appropriate representations of the passing eras: scarves and hats, a Brownie with the film still in it, mink stoles and canes with polished ends and, more recently, Velcro wallets, compact cameras, fanny packs and fake jewelry, everything smaller, lighter, brighter and colored with the sad miracle of plastic. Even after buying Le Coin, Baptiste had kept the shelf behind the bar where the menagerie of lost items could retain their lineup. He’d once had to fire a waiter for hawking some of what lay on the shelf. He’d lost a small bundle of unmailed letters, a doll, other articles that slipped from his memory. During the years of his ownership, Baptiste had cultivated a superstition that the cafe would cease to function without these objects there. Le Coin would fall under some kind of curse for turning out the lost and forgotten.

  Failing to achieve sleep in his cell, Baptiste mentally browsed through the items behind the bar. In his imagination, they slipped and fell from his grasp. He would pick them up and put them back in their place, but they would slip and fall to the floor again, heavier this time, everything increasing in density, everything cold and metallic, slippery with ballistics.

  Since the Occupation, the pistol had gone mostly out of mind. Unfired. It seemed inconceivable that the use of something so close to him, sitting patiently behind the counter for years, wrapped in forgotten fur and silk, could land him in a cell for attempted murder, now on two separate counts: the second weapon the pistol, the first, to the best of his understanding, aiding gravity at a bridge. And then there was the voice. Two days after he’d been arrested, the voice had found him again, incarnated from ether. It told him to get a pad of paper and a pen. It had babbled on in English and Baptiste had willfully tried not to listen, hoping the voice would disappear if he kept the meaning of the words out, the definitions that would solidify the utterances.

  He’d heard the voice for the first time a week before he’d shot at the pigeons.

  — My name is David Ferriswheel, the voice had said. Then again on the metro, later on an open street, even at Le Coin. At first, Baptiste thought it a prank, some American tourist adept at throwing his voice, or perhaps some television show that was filming him candidly, allowing an audience to laugh in cathode-ray light at the gullibility of their own kind, at the core of believability, at goodness now known as naiveté. He constructed these kinds of explanations at length. But the voice followed him into the
night. Baptiste remembered a story in a magazine. The accompanying photo showed a man who had pulled out all his teeth believing one to hold a radio transmitter. His mouth was open and smiling, saliva-thinned blood running down his chin. Baptiste feared the span of time between the onset of madness and how long he could go on plagued by the voice. Baptiste did not like to see people smiling with their mouths open. The sight of teeth almost always made him think of death. The ideas tired him. His eyes slept. His heart rattled.

  He woke in the predawn hours from the sound of his own voice, his tongue thick with Danish, the language of his homeland and dreams. The square of moonlight had drifted from the walls. Sitting up, he saw the pale lunar glow on his thin pillow. He put his head at the other end of the bed and tried to keep words off his tongue and mind, no matter the language.

  With the sun’s rising, Baptiste felt a modicum of innocence again. He pondered his current predicament and hoped what he had to untangle was not some inextricable knot but an easy braid that would separate on its own. If only he could think his way through the first overlaps of coincidence involving Regi, Gaudin, Bombay and himself. Even if ill, why would he try to knock off his neighbor, a man who’d always been a good patron. Baptiste thought rather highly of Regi, especially with all the man’s learning, his fluency and the money he was able to make by translating. He was always the most courteous of patrons. On occasion, they did favors for each other. Regi translated a menu, even foreigners’ requests if he happened to be there. In turn, Baptiste ordered Regi expensive wines that Regi was after, by the case.

  Baptiste believed that young well-to-do men were successful only by a combination of two of three things: hard work, talent, or by cheating. One of these could get a man only so far. Baptiste could hardly see how anything unscrupulous could enter into the profession of translating. At the same time, he couldn’t fathom what anger he could have harbored against Regi, nor where this rage could have stayed hidden, building up armaments and animosity around the corner from his consciousness. Sure, there were times when glimpses of his anger appeared, but he’d never imagined they could be connected to a greater body still hidden from view. These outbursts of his were over incompetence, bad manners and stupidity in others; upset on the side of what was good, not anger from a darker vein.