Really the Blues

by Joseph Koenig

  “Musical instruments are going for next to nothing. These are practically new, you know, hardly broken in. I thought you might come up with a few francs.”

  “Leave them,” Eddie said. “You might change your mind.”

  Janssen shook his head.

  “Well, it’s up to you.”

  “You’re not a Frenchman, Piron. What keeps you here?”

  “There are worse places to be.”

  “That’s hardly a recommendation.”

  “Good enough for me.”

  “Living under the Nazis? What’s good about it?”

  “Nazis don’t have a monopoly on nastiness. You haven’t been around.”

  “What hellhole are you from? You never say.”

  “Take your drums and get out.”

  “Eddie’s American,” Roquentin said.

  Janssen disconnected the pedal from the bass drum, watching the trumpeter. “You’re telling me Roosevelt’s another Hitler?”

  Eddie topped off his cup, added cream.

  “An America Firster, huh?” Janssen said. “That’s your gripe with Roosevelt?”

  “I’ve had my fill of the States, that’s all. I’m not political.”

  “I get it. A Heinie-lover. You talk like one.”

  “Been to America, Janssen?”

  “For my eighth birthday I sailed to New York with my favorite uncle. We took the train to Chicago, and then out west to see the Grand Canyon. America’s the most beautiful country on earth. The people are the friendliest, the common folk are, always with a smile and a friendly word.”

  “Since you like it so much, maybe you should move there.”

  “If I had a U.S. passport, I wouldn’t return next door to Germany.”

  “You’re wrong about the States. You don’t know about a place till you’ve lived there as an adult.”

  “I was wrong about you,” Janssen said. “You’ve got some Nazi in you, yourself.”

  “You were a stupid judge of people when you were eight. You haven’t gotten any smarter.” Eddie picked up the paper, buried his nose in it.

  Janssen leaped from the bandstand, tossed a punch that Eddie caught against the newspaper. Eddie kicked the table over, and as he lunged at the drummer Roquentin saw blood on the trumpeter’s chin. He threw himself between the brawlers and muscled them apart.

  “I’m not saying that crack didn’t call for it,” he said to Janssen, “but you can’t pick fights with my meal ticket. If anything happens to his lip—” He looked to Eddie to back him up, shouted “Oh my God,” ran to the kitchen, and came back with ice wrapped in a cloth napkin that he pressed to the trumpeter’s mouth. “Look at what you did to him.”

  “I should have done more.”

  “You musicians are thick in the head, fragile where it counts. Eddie’s no Nazi. Nazis don’t bleed. He’s just trying to get your goat. It’s something Americans do that you must not have noticed when you were there.” He winced as the trumpeter probed his lip. “How does it feel?”

  Eddie stepped in front of the back bar, inspected his lip in the mirror as the slight swelling of a moment ago blew up. “It’s numb.”

  “You look like you’ve been stung by a bee. By the whole hive.” Roquentin jumped onto the bandstand and stopped Janssen, who was back to taking apart his drums.

  “What are you doing?” Janssen said.

  “Eddie can’t perform like he is. And I can’t give the customers a band with just five men. Philippe will take the spotlight, but I need you to fill out the rhythm. Will you stay on for the next few days? The mess you put me in, it’s your fault.”

  “I’ll be glad to.” Banishing him from the bandstand was his triumph over Eddie. But when he looked for him, the trumpeter was gone, hurrying past the window with the ice pack against his face.

  Eddie went out into the neon dusk surrounded by the waiters and bartenders, prostitutes and thieves of Montmartre on their way to work. Twice he started back to La Caverne to finish what Janssen had started, but decided that what he owed the drummer was a favor. For at least a year his lip had been killing him. His embouchure was bad, the mouthpiece of his horn seated in such a way that it felt like he was touching a hot iron to his lip every time he blew. He needed a trumpet lesson. A beginner’s lesson that would be his first. A smile stretched the swollen lip, and pain traveled around his mouth. He was a professional musician who had never studied music, or his instrument. A pity that he couldn’t decipher Goudsmit’s arrangements. If they were any good, perhaps he could find players to do them justice. It would be something to have his own orchestra like Benny Goodman’s or Duke Ellington’s. Big band music—swing—wasn’t his style, but a chance at the success he craved could persuade him otherwise.

  Paris had changed, not for the better. In his heart remained the city between the wars where everything was possible. But Janssen was right. It would be a crime against the conscience to love the Paris of today. The German Paris. Hitler’s. Definitely not Eddie Piron’s.

  A Citroën 7A rolled by, filled front and rear with men wearing black berets and khaki shirts. French fascists, they did the Germans’ dirty work pro bono, rounding up Jews, communists, other antisocial elements, and anyone with whom they had a grudge. People turned away in disgust, but not all did. What he had in his heart for those Frenchmen and their supporters was more unpleasant than what Janssen would prescribe. How he felt about France or the French, however, was nobody’s business but his own. Other than how he played his music, Eddie Piron was nobody’s business.

  At an apartment house on the Boulevard Victor Massé, the doorman was asking whom he was here to see when suddenly he was ushered in with an embarrassed “Good evening, Monsieur Piron.” Eddie touched his fingers to his lip, which had begun to throb. That the doorman hadn’t recognized him was due only in part to his injury. It was a time of day when he never showed up here. When he should be at La Caverne getting ready to take the stage.

  He rode the lift to the fourth floor and rang a doorbell. The peephole opened, and he felt compelled to say “It’s Eddie,” not certain that it was convincing, because footsteps moved deep inside the apartment. Soon they returned, and the door was inched back by a woman wrapped in a bath towel. Another was twisted into a turban around her head. “What happened to your face?” she said.

  “You don’t like it anymore?” He said it with a smile, the smile unlikeable to judge by the frown it prompted.

  He dropped his hat on a chair and walked into the bathroom. Water was still standing in the tub, and the woman watched him scrub fog from the medicine cabinet mirror and examine his lip. “Aren’t you working tonight?” Carla said.

  “I can’t play with my mouth like it is. Thank God the lip isn’t split, or I’d be out for months.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “A difference of opinion,” he said.

  “About the political situation? The war? What?”

  “About the divine wisdom of the head angel of Eddie et Ses Anges.”

  She snuggled against him and tried to kiss him. Directing her lips to his cheek, he peeled back a corner of the towel.

  “You need to see a doctor,” she said. “Not my breasts.”

  He unwrapped her all the way. “I know what I need.”

  The other towel went over the shower curtain rod, and she stepped back into the tub while he got out of his clothes. When he was undressed he looked at her again and said, “Wait in the bedroom, I won’t be long,” and sat down in her bathwater, soaked in it, then emptied the tub and refilled it with water so hot that he barely could endure it. Lately he was taking two, sometimes as many as four baths a day. If a doctor was what he needed, it should be a psychiatrist, he thought, although it wouldn’t take a Dr. Freud to tell him why he might be starting to lose his grip.

  In bed she was tender and solicitous, suppressing the abandon which he normally provoked with words and specific motions of his body, which she would demand more of until she was driven to wild pa
roxysms that gave him greater enjoyment than anything besides his music. By nature Carla was selfish only in love-making, Eddie encouraging her greed and taking advantage of its excesses. If he wanted tame affection, she would step aside for other girls. Today, mistaking his best medicine, she let down both of them, achieving only a call for a premature halt.

  She said, “How soon do you think it will be before you can play again?”

  “Play well?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “I don’t know that I have ever played well.”

  “I’ve heard that before.”

  “I was thinking I would like to break down my technique and start over. To learn the trumpet from serious musicians.”

  “From the Paris Opera? The symphony? I’ve heard that before as well.”

  “I have the time now.”

  “And if they are not selecting new pupils from the graduates of La Caverne Negre?” she said. “What will you do?”

  “I haven’t gotten that far in my thinking.”

  “Go there.”

  “In that case, I would like to travel in the country.”

  “You’ve been here ten years. Certainly you’ve been around.”

  “I want to see all of France. Before it changes permanently.”

  “You mean because of the Germans?”

  He reached across her for her cigarettes, shook one out of the pack, and was striking a match when the pain registered, and he put it back without lighting up.

  “They’re only men,” she said, “not gods. Despite what they believe about themselves. The mountains and lakes won’t be different because they’re here.”

  “Everything else is,” he said. “Including me.”

  “What prompted this reappraisal?”

  “The SS brought a piano player to sit in with us last night. We jammed for ninety minutes, he was a lot better than Philippe. When they were tired of listening, he was taken away. He’s Dutch. A Jew.”

  “It doesn’t mean they’ll kill him,” she said. “He may be spared, or escape. They might want to hear him play again.”

  “They already killed him,” Eddie said. “I watched it happen.”

  “In the club? In front of everybody? That’s bestial even for them.”

  “They smashed his hands,” Eddie said. “It’s the same thing.”

  “They wouldn’t harm you. They wouldn’t dare.”

  He rubbed his lip.

  “Would they?”

  “It makes me think,” he said.

  “You’re not a Dutchman, or a Jew,” she said. “You’re France’s greatest jazzman.”

  “Second greatest,” he said.

  “Have it your way.” she said. “Isn’t it protection enough?”

  “The greatest, a musician I can’t hold a candle to, is running for his life. If they can do that to him, they can do it to—”

  “To anybody?”

  “To me.”

  At the usual time the next day, Eddie was at his usual place at La Caverne. Roquentin told him, “It’s as I say, you can’t keep away. I should charge rent. Better yet, I should charge you to play.”

  “How was last night’s show?”

  “Magnificent. Fantastic. The best ever. I never knew that Philippe, Janssen, and the others were such virtuosos till I heard them without you hogging the limelight. Stay away as long as you like. Please . . .”

  “Is that so?” Eddie said.

  Roquentin shook his head. “I can’t tell you they actually drove away many customers, because I didn’t have a single reservation after word got out that you can’t perform. A handful of tourists, Spanish priests, walked in off the street. What they know about jazz you can fit on the head of a pin next to the angels they are trying to count there. I thank my own angels for Janssen. He is atrocious, and so he keeps the rest on their toes covering up for him.”

  “They’re my angels,” Eddie said. “Where is he?”

  “He’ll be in by eight to run through the song list and assign solos. Unlike you, he leaves nothing to chance.”

  At 7:30 Eddie went out for a walk and to pick up lip balm at a pharmacien. When he returned an hour later, Roquentin ran out of the office, cursing.

  “Oh, it’s you,” he said to Eddie. “I thought you were Janssen. He told me, he swore I can depend on him. It’s time to go on, and no one’s seen him. You musicians, not one of you is a humanitarian. You’ll drive me to an early grave.”

  Three minutes before nine, the band trooped in, all but Janssen. The club was a quarter full, a better crowd than Roquentin had anticipated. He told Philippe that tonight would be his big break. Again. Philippe said he would happy to play extended solos, to sing, and to crack jokes, even to tap dance if the audience wanted it, but the music would sound tinny with only five players. Roquentin told him to forget about dancing, and asked Eddie to sit in on the drums until Janssen showed up.

  “I’ve never held a drumstick except on Thanksgiving,” Eddie said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “What do I know about playing drums?”

  “You’ve watched drummers play them. Flail your arms, work up a heroic sweat.”

  “I’ll give it a try.”

  “Hit them with the sticks occasionally,” Roquentin said. “It’s a nice touch.”

  The applause when the lights went up was cut short when Eddie kept to the background. The band opened with “Alligator Crawl,” Philippe’s specialty number. If it was the one tune you heard him play, thought Eddie, you’d think he was the second coming of Fats Waller, but it was the only piece where he shone. Eddie punished the snare drum, hoped no one was offended by the spastic beat. What was keeping Janssen? Roquentin was having fits.

  So would Carla if he didn’t get back to her apartment before dawn. When she demanded where he’d been, he’d summon the requisite contrition, keep it to himself that he could have begged off to Roquentin, but agreed to sit in knowing she was waiting up for him. In particular he would keep silent about how much he was beginning to enjoy himself. Roquentin was right. He would pay to play. Even the drums.

  The applause withered, the crowd thinned. After the set ended at 11:00, Roquentin dimmed the lights and came onto the bandstand.

  “Let’s call it a night, boys, okay?” he said. “We’re not doing anybody a favor with the music. You’ll be paid in full.”

  Everyone but Eddie seconded the idea. He suggested they stay for one more set.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Olympic games awarded to London for the summer of 1944 had been cancelled because of the war in Europe. Undeterred, the oarsmen of Le Société Nautique de Paris put their boats into the Seine every day to prepare for the next Olympiad seven years away. On a cold, drizzly morning they worked the stiffness from their back ahead of a misting tailwind; single sculls, two-man boats, fours, and an eight, which, generating the most speed, overtook and passed the lighter craft. It was the coxswain reading the river from the back of the eight who noticed the corpse washed up against a stone pier of the Pont Neuf and barked commands through his megaphone to detour for a look.

  Suicides had become an everyday phenomenon in Paris, so common that the police were called routinely to investigate lost wet wash, bundles of old clothes, and the occasional mannequin discarded in the water. The body under the Pont Neuf wasn’t the first encountered by a crew from Le Société Nautique. None of the rowers grew used to them. Practice was stopped and a single-sculler who hadn’t actually viewed the corpse, the least shaken, was sent to bring the flics.

  A car from the Sûreté stopped shortly alongside the bridge to allow a first look at the scene before officers parked at mid-span. There they hung over the rail, pressing their broad-billed kepis to their heads.

  “A jumper,” said one.

  “Not a flyer, that’s for sure,” said his partner. “He dropped straight down, deadweight, and dashed his brains out, if he had any to begin with, on the stones.”

  The current animated the co
rpse. A wobbling arm seemed to signal to remove it from the river fast, but the flics were in no rush. At any second the body might dislodge from the pier and become the problem of officers downstream. At great length they debated methods of retrieving it without getting themselves wet. The corpse refused to budge. They were running out of time when carp fishermen sailed by in a small motorboat and were enlisted in throwing a rope around the remains and hauling them to shore.

  Short hair and a V-shaped torso had made it apparent that the victim was a man, a fact reiterated when the corpse was raised from the river nude above the waist. Sergeant P. Bourassa turned the pants pockets inside out to find keys, a few coins, and a handkerchief, and then arranged a guard to keep the dead man company during the wait for a wagon from the morgue. Returning to the Pont Neuf, he sighted upstream for the next suicide. If it was on the way, he might save a return trip. There was nothing on the water but cardboard flotsam, and it was with feelings of a job well done that he drove back to the station.

  Attendants at the morgue, meat inspectors reassigned to assist with the heavy workload, shared the on-scene assessment of suicide. They noted little damage to the skull, but no doubt a broken neck would be discovered, or a concussion that rendered the victim unconscious when he hit the water. The dead man appeared to be in his mid to late twenties. A handsome, well-groomed man, he hadn’t been in the river long. Because rigor mortis was present, the coroner, Dr. Laurent, assigned an approximate time of death of twelve hours before the body reached him at 7:45 A.M. A man with blond hair, a thin moustache, light stubble on the chin that could have been the beginnings of a goatee, and blue eyes clouded now, 183 centimeters in height, 71½ kilograms. The attendants undressed him. The pants, made of an inferior wool blend, were not custom-tailored, and might have been part of a medium-priced suit. The label was foreign, the name of the designer, or possibly the store where it was sold, unfamiliar, as was the language in which it was stitched. The same for the plaid boxer shorts.