Really the Blues

by Joseph Koenig

  REALLY

  THE

  BLUES

  JOSEPH KOENIG

  PEGASUS CRIME

  NEW YORK LONDON

  This book is dedicated to the memory of

  Ferdinand Joseph Lamothe

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER ONE

  Call it the law of diminishing returns. The yield from a pre-dawn roundup in the Marais was several Gypsy pickpockets, two real Frenchmen released with full apologies, eight Dutch and Polish Jews. Brought to a police station off the Place des Vosges, they were lodged in the crowded holding pen. One of the Jews, a neurasthenic Amsterdamer with blood clotted under an ear, hung back at the bars to distance himself, if only a little, from the mob. By the weekend the lockup, packed to bursting, would be emptied, the inmates gotten rid of with others like themselves from all over the city.

  Time, passing slowly, nevertheless moved too fast. Friday night an open car, an elegant Mercedes 770K cabriolet, arrived at the station, and officers in leather trenchcoats giving off the scent of mink oil brushed past flics demanding to see papers. Downstairs, they surveyed the prisoners in their cage.

  “These pigs make my eyes water,” said a lieutenant, fanning the air. “How are we supposed to pick the right one out of this stink?”

  His superior, a Wehrmacht major, shouted “Goudsmit!” A man on the other side of the bars barely lifted his eyes before lowering them quickly. “Here he is, right under your nose,” the major said. “The biggest stinker.”

  “We’ll take this man,” the lieutenant said. “We will issue a receipt.”

  “Take any you want,” said the jailer. “Take them all, I wish you would. I don’t know what to do with these I have, let alone the new ones we catch every night.”

  Flics unlocked the pen, and Goudsmit dove back into the mob as they rushed in. They caught him by the wrists, pulled him out with his arms twisted behind his back.

  “Idiots,” the lieutenant said while Goudsmit struggled. “If he can’t use his hands, I’ll see that you will never use yours again. His kidneys—persuade him there.”

  A knee to the small of his back dropped the prisoner on all fours. The police hoisted him under the shoulders and loaded him onto the back seat of the Mercedes. Propped between the major and lieutenant, he stared despondently beyond the headlights.

  “Where are you taking me?” he asked in lightly accented German after they had gone a few blocks.

  There was less curiosity than resignation in his tone. No destination, in the company of these two, was a good place to be. He clasped his hands in his lap conspicuously, a reminder that they were not to be damaged en route.

  “For a night on the town,” the major said. “We are going to have a high time. The entertainment will be supplied by you.”

  Goudsmit kneaded the sore spot in his back. Every bump in the road produced groans. The lieutenant stuffed a Gitane between the prisoner’s lips, kept him lit up till the big car stopped on Place Pigalle.

  The plaza was enclosed on all sides by bistros, nightclubs, boîtes à chanson. Since the occupation reached Paris, the area had lost its luster. Tourism was dead. Few Parisians could afford to take in a show or cared to linger at nightspots that had been their second home. But the red windmill on the roof of the Moulin Rouge still was bathed in floodlights, and the streets were clogged with German cars. A new crowd was not shy about rubbing shoulders with the viceroys of French industry from Berlin. Goudsmit understood why he had been brought here. He spit out the cigarette. If it was entertainment the German bastards wanted, let them play Russian roulette.

  The Mercedes rolled past the Theater of the Grand Guignol toward La Caverne Negre. Over the entrance, a neon savage draped in a leopardskin loincloth, a banjo-eyed, knuckle-dragging manape, wielded a knotted club. His other hand twirled a lion by the tail around his head. The sign wasn’t an accoutrement of the Nazis. It had been there a decade before, when La Caverne was The Jungle Room.

  The major, whose name was Weiler, produced a flask from his trenchcoat and instructed Goudsmit in using brandy to dissolve the blood around his ear. “You still smell,” he said, “but more agreeably. We can’t have you turning important stomachs, can we?”

  Goudsmit accepted a pocket comb and used it to re-craft his pompadour. With every hair accounted for, he offered the comb back to Weiler, who ordered him to toss it out of the car with the brandy-soaked handkerchief.

  The Germans escorted him to the entrance of La Caverne, where he balked. An involuntary twitch, wondered the lieutenant, or was he about to make a break? In the sinister alleys of the red light district there was a fair chance that he might make a successful getaway. Goudsmit planted his feet an instant before the sound of a jazz band reached the street. He seemed to have second thoughts, making an adjustment to his tie before walking inside.

  Twenty tables cloaked in checked tablecloths and lit by candle stubs in Chianti bottles were clustered around a low bandstand. Papier-mâché stalactites tapering from the ceiling evoked a vaguely subterranean atmosphere. But it was the damp chill that made Goudsmit feel he’d been brought underground. Paris had lacked warmth since the Germans arrived. He was shivering even before the occupation army seized much of the stocks of coal and heating oil. His hands began to stiffen as Weiler shoved him to the front.

  A seven-man combo—“Eddie et Ses Anges” was stenciled across a celestial sunset on the bass drum—was mired in a desultory arrangement of “Chasing Shadows.” The musicians were ragged and uninspired, not trying to hide it. The leader, the trumpeter, was the exception, linking the lackadaisical ensembles with inventive solos. Goudsmit frowned at his improvisations. It would be obscene to admit to enjoying himself even for a moment, even to himself.

  An extended guitar riff petered out, and the piano picked up the melody with the ham-handed drummer. Goudsmit was prodded onto the bandstand by Major Weiler, who laid a hand on the piano player’s shoulder, patted it, and jerked him from his stool. The music ground to a halt, the sound like a needle dragged over the grooves of a spinning record.

  Goudsmit took his place at the keyboard. The Bentside spinet had been a beautiful instrument in its day, but that day had come and gone. The ivories were scorched by cigarettes. Spilled drinks had washed away the finish. A wobble in one leg was partially corrected by a cheesebox splint. Fingering the keys, Goudsmit discovered two of them close to dead. The evicted pianist was led away as the crowd hooted. Just another night under the new order at La Caverne Negre.

  The trumpeter announced the next song to Goudsmit, who turned to Weiler shaking his head. “I don’t understand a word he says.”

  “Why not?” Weiler said. “He’s speaking French. You speak French. What is the problem?”

  “His accent. It’s incomprehensible.”

  “Don’t jabber. Play.”

  The guitarist strung together chords that Goudsmit shredded with his right hand and reassembled as the intro to “Manoir De Mes Reves.” He was no Django Reinhardt, but his playing lost its sloppiness behind the new pianist. The drummer, switching from sticks to brushes, demo
nstrated a confident touch. The tenor saxophone assumed the lead, and the trombone and clarinet added embellishments. Goudsmit lingered over the melody, laying down a walking bass line with his left hand. The trumpet player brought his instrument to his lips, depressed the valves soundlessly, and then, squeezing his eyes shut, he began to blow.

  Goudsmit struck a wrong note. No European jazzman played with the trumpeter’s sly brilliance aside from Django, and Django, a Gypsy, was laying low. Goudsmit had been in Paris for close to a year since the Germans chased him out of Holland. But he had never gigged with anyone as accomplished as the front man for Eddie and His Angels.

  The other musicians held back while the trumpeter matched Goudsmit hot lick for hot lick. Every idea that Goudsmit introduced, the horn man explored on fresh ground. His night out with Nazis was turning out be a memorable occasion in ways he hadn’t anticipated. At the close of the number, the trumpeter pronounced the next title, keeping Goudsmit guessing till the first notes of “Avalon” poured from his horn. Goudsmit joined in, driving the melody, taking it into areas he’d never considered until, abruptly, his concentration vanished.

  New customers decked out in black with death’s heads on their uniform lapels had entered La Caverne. SS. None of the German occupiers were to be trifled with. Not for a Dutchman, a jazz musician, a Jew. But these were the deadliest, charged with implementing the Nazis’ racial policies. They marched (yes, Goudsmit thought, that was how they always moved—in lockstep) to the front and took the table closest to the band. Goudsmit hit a dead key, wondered how many more he might be permitted before it was his turn to be yanked off the stool. Steadying himself, he played for all he was worth—played for his life.

  Under the Thousand-Year Reich, jazz was disparaged as the mindless noise of animalistic Negroes. For unknown reasons, the SS were defiant partisans of the forbidden music and went unpunished for deviating from the party line. Goudsmit survived in Paris because the murderers whose job it was to destroy him needed him to hear the music as it was meant to be played, a delicious irony, but tortured logic that eluded him as he concentrated on fitting his fingers on the right keys.

  If this was to be his last night on earth, he would spend it doing what he was born to do. His fears were for nothing, though. He hadn’t been put in the spotlight to be killed. The Germans hated him but loved his jazz, and didn’t it mean that he had them over a barrel? The drummer looked intently into the audience, and Goudsmit glanced back as the SS settled their bill and marched out. Now he could relax, even get to know the trumpeter and find out where he had learned to play. Paris had been a haven for American jazzmen before the war. None were left, but the hornman with the idiosyncratic French seemed to have picked up their style, and become nearly . . . no, every bit as good as the best of them. Possibly—Goudsmit smiled as he pictured it—an interpreter could be found to translate.

  Because he hadn’t rehearsed with the band, every number came apart as a jam session with the piano and trumpet leading the charge. “Someday Sweetheart” closed on a bluesy coda by the sax, and the trumpeter called out “Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams,” his English also colored by a peculiar accent. The trombone was stating the theme when Weiler carried a bottle of Champagne onto the bandstand. Rather than award it to the musicians, he poured a glass for himself and moved among them, listening, then placed it on the piano and slammed the lid down over the keyboard. Goudsmit screamed as his fingers shattered. He was grabbed from behind and lifted from the stool as the original piano player reclaimed his place.

  A police van was double-parked beside the Mercedes at the curb. Goudsmit was dumped in back and driven away. Inside La Caverne Negre, the trumpeter asked his pianist where he had been.

  “Next door, having a drink with our German masters. They said they had brought Goudsmit for a command performance for the SS, and I would have my old job back.”

  “Goudsmit? That’s his name?”

  “Was he very good, Eddie? Someone I could learn from?”

  “Not bad. A shame what they will do with him.”

  “A bigger shame what they would have done to me if he was not disposable. There are things I could have taught him.”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “About staying alive,” the pianist said. “Let’s not think of it.”

  “If you say so. It’s the easiest thing, once you put your mind to it. I do it all the time.”

  “What will we play?”

  “Do you know ‘Didn’t He Ramble’?”

  The piano player shook his head.

  “Fake it—it’s a funeral march from New Orleans,” Eddie said. “Play it like a dirge. Play it for Mr. Goudsmit.

  “Un, deux, trois,” he whispered, and waited for the drummer to beat out the time. Tapping his foot, he blew a mournful phrase, built two somber verses around it before tucking his horn under his arm and singing the chorus in his odd English.

  “Didn’t he ramble . . . he rambled

  “Rambled all around . . . in and out of town

  “Didn’t he ramble . . . didn’t he ramble

  “He rambled till the butcher cut him down.”

  Eddie Piron was back at La Caverne Negre at four the next day for breakfast. Most of his musicians wouldn’t show up until they were due on the bandstand at 9:00. One or two might not be there even then. Eddie liked to get to the club well ahead of time to hang around, talk to Pete Roquentin, the manager, and take advantage of the free meals for employees.

  He sat where the SS had been the night before. The Parisian dailies hung on sticks on the wall, and he took down Paris-Soir and, turning past the war reporting, studied a weather forecast of afternoons in the mid-40s and clear, dry nights fifteen degrees cooler. The news pages in the collaborationist press scarcely merited a look. It almost certainly was true that the Wehrmacht was advancing across Europe without encountering significant opposition. But about more than the weather, he didn’t really care. As long as he had a steady gig, the world could keep going straight to hell. Eddie Piron, at thirty-two, had achieved everything he dared to dream of when he arrived in France nine years ago, aside from a recording contract, a movie-star wife, and bushels of money, and these he was resigned to forgo until the fall of the Thousand-Year Reich.

  “This is a jazz club, not an auberge,” Roquentin said to him. “When I hired you, I didn’t anticipate your moving in.”

  “It’s only because I’m underpaid that I piss away my life in this dump. If you gave me what I’m worth, I could afford to live in keeping with an artist of my genius.”

  “You don’t fool anyone,” Roquentin said. “You’re here all of the time because you have nothing other than to wait to play your songs, play them, and then to wait to play them again. Which reminds me . . .” He went to the office in back, returning with a large accordion envelope which he put down beside Eddie’s eggs and ham.

  “What’s this?”

  “From the piano player the SS brought in last night.”

  “He left it for me?” Eddie said. “Why? We never spoke.”

  “It came from the police,” Roquentin said. “He had been lodged in jail in the Marais. After the Germans took him away, this was found in the cell. He can’t use it where he is now. Someone thought that you might.”

  Eddie untied the cord, shook out pages of sheet music which he laid flat over the newspaper and made a show of examining carefully. It was no one’s business, least of all Roquentin’s, that he barely could read the notes.

  “These are no good,” he said.

  “What are they?”

  “Written parts for an orchestra with full brass and reed sections.”

  “What’s wrong with them?”

  “You won’t pay for more than seven men.”

  “For six. Janssen is quitting.”

  “Well, I can’t use the arrangements in any case.”

  “You wouldn’t use the trumpet part if it was written by Satchmo himself,” Roquentin said. “You won’t play a note tha
t isn’t your own.”

  “So why did you bring them?”

  “I’m only the messenger. Don’t kill me.” He watched Eddie sprinkle confectioner’s sugar over a beignet. “Goudsmit was a huge improvement over Philippe. Too bad we’ll never hear him again.”

  “Maybe the SS will provide another like him,” Eddie said. “They know where the best musicians . . . where they can be dug up.”

  He leafed absentmindedly through the obituaries, the soccer scores, the results of the races at Longchamps. Behind the sports were the want ads. In these hard times, people were parting with prize possessions, even priceless antiques, for a song. He told himself that he would rather have a good song. In English it was almost funny.

  One of his musicians came into the club, accepted a small check from Roquentin, and stepped onto the bandstand. He walloped the bass drum with the pedal and began disassembling the kit.

  “You’re leaving?” Eddie said.

  “That’s right,” said Janssen.

  “You might have mentioned it last night.”

  “Last night I wasn’t sure—before that business with the Jew.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Back to Copenhagen.”

  “Family?”

  “No, I have no one. A girl in the eighth arrondissement, who’s staying.”

  “You’ve got a job lined up?”

  “The jazz scene is dead there. Very dead.”

  “What do you have?”

  “Peace of mind,” Janssen said.

  “How much food does that put on the table?”

  “A better question is why you don’t require it yourself.”

  Eddie read the advertisements.

  “You didn’t answer the question,” Janssen said.

  “You haven’t answered mine.”

  “The Germans are lethal critics of the music. I didn’t come to Paris to be made a nervous wreck.”

  “Once you loved it here,” Eddie said.

  “Once there were no Germans. How much will you give for my kit?”

  “Roquentin says you are irreplaceable, or, I should say, that he won’t replace you. I can’t use drums without a drummer.” Eddie tapped the paper with the back of his hand. “Run an ad.”