Really the Blues

by Joseph Koenig

  The recent suicides often were foreign Jews, refugees running out of money, luck, hope, and the will to live in the City of Light. This man wasn’t one of them. Not a Jew of any kind unless there was an uncircumcised population that hadn’t previously turned up on a slab. The remains were well-nourished, also uncharacteristic of Jewish suicides. Despite wounds to the head, Dr. Laurent concluded that death was unlikely to have resulted from an intentional leap from the Pont Neuf. If he were to choose a Seine bridge from which to end his life, he would reject the Pont Neuf for not being sufficiently high above the river. The coroner, brought out of retirement in his seventies to deal with the rash of violent deaths, speculated that the corpse had gone into the water somewhere else and become lodged against the bridge after traveling with the current.

  As the attendants turned the body over, Dr. Laurent saw a slit under the left shoulder blade made by a narrow instrument, a screwdriver or the blade of a stiletto-like knife. Two more like it were between the uppermost vertebrae, inflicted when the victim was crouched or kneeling. While still a medical student, he had given up using a pen to fill out autopsy reports. Erasing apparent suicide as the cause of death, he penciled in probable homicide.

  A baby dead with six adults in a gas leak at a Boulevard St. Michel tenement was squeezed against the back wall of a refrigerated unit to make room for the blond man placed at her feet. Space at the morgue was at a premium. Days went by before the murder investigation began with an examination of the victim’s clothing. The mysterious label read “Dry Clean Only” when translated by a professor of Swedish from the Sorbonne. The label was photographed, as was the victim from the neck up, and the pictures distributed to the daily papers.

  Roquentin slipped Paris-Soir off the sticks and kept it close at hand. When Eddie came in, he ambushed him, shouting, “I’ve got something to show you. He was murdered.”

  “Janssen?” Eddie said.

  “How did you know without a look? Did you kill him?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “You didn’t get along. Tell me how you knew it was him. I’ll tell you how serious I am.”

  “I read the paper at Carla’s. Is that a good answer?”

  “For me. I wouldn’t mention to detectives that you fought.”

  “I have no intention of mentioning it to anyone ever,” Eddie said.

  “Someone must identify the body.”

  “Why us?”

  “You, you mean. If you don’t, his girlfriend will. When she tells them you were enemies, it will mean the third degree for you, the rubber hose, the rack, the guillotine. Tell the detectives she wasn’t happy about his going back to Denmark. Point the finger of suspicion at her before it is turned on you.”

  “He was stabbed in the neck and his body thrown in the river. Do you think she did that?”

  “What I think is that you know more than you let on. I’m giving sound advice.”

  “You just don’t want to get involved with the police yourself.”

  “You have all the answers, don’t you?”

  “Not even one,” Eddie said.

  “How did you come to hire Janssen?”

  “You were there. You don’t remember? He walked in one morning after we lost Yves and were short a percussionist and said he was our man. I gave him a tryout, you know, and he played the Krupa solo over the Goodman recording of ‘Sing, Sing, Sing,’ not badly. He got the job.”

  “What did you know about him?”

  “He could play like Krupa, if he had to.”

  “That’s all?”

  “I confess to overlooking the target on his back. He wasn’t the only stranger in this city wearing one.”

  “Did you know who his friends were? Where he’d performed before? What he was doing in Paris? Did you ever meet the girlfriend? For all you know, she doesn’t exist.”

  “He could play.”

  “Tell that to the detectives.”

  “If they were interested in the music—but we have nothing to talk about.”

  “You’re afraid of them,” Roquentin said.

  “You’re being ridiculous.”

  “Why are you afraid?”

  “Now you’re making me mad.”

  “Will you force me to kneel before you and stick a knife in my back?”

  “Get off my back,” Eddie said.

  He’d brought his horn. He removed it from the case, tried it against his lip, and ran through the scales. The pain was excruciating. When the band came in, he took his new place at the drums. Janssen’s place. His discomfort under the lights in the murdered man’s seat was excruciating, too. The crowd was the largest in weeks. How much did it have to do with the drummer’s murder? All publicity was good publicity. Murder might be the best. He settled down, reminding himself that the public didn’t know yet that the Pont Neuf corpse was Janssen from Eddie et Ses Anges.

  Roquentin counted the house, grinning at him. By this time tomorrow the murder victim on the front pages would be identified as the drummer at La Caverne Negre. Roquentin would have to find extra tables to handle the mobs.

  While the beans soaked, Eddie sautéed the onions, celery, and garlic and diced the vegetables, plump bell peppers more precious than gold since the occupation. Dumping them in a pot with thyme, cayenne pepper, and pork bones that the butcher had let him have for free with a promise that his dog would love them, he set a low flame and prepared rice, ham, and andouille. He considered himself in most ways to be a normal Frenchman. Yet often he cooked up a mess of red beans and rice like the poorest Creoles in New Orleans, following a recipe handed down over the generations by his mother’s people—the family jewels.

  Behind iron shutters, the tenement flat was still but for the pot simmering on the stove. Eddie touched his lip. The pain hadn’t gone far, a jolt sufficient to discourage him from going back to bed. Not that he could. Someone was pounding on the door.

  “Police! Let us in.”

  “A moment,” Eddie said. “I just got up.”

  Someone snickered. He heard “Now!” in a different voice.

  He dressed, opened the window, and cranked the shutter. The afternoon sun was harsh on his eyes, and he readjusted the angle of the louvers. Enough light remained to pile up between four gray walls in need of paint, the gray ceiling, a bare floor tilted away from the door. The cold-water tenement at 43 Rue des Terres had gone up not long after the Revolution, one of thousands that lent Paris timeless charm and minimal comforts.

  The two men who stormed inside when he drew back the bolt were bigger than Eddie and quicker on their feet, slamming him back against the wall. He had the same rights as any real Frenchman, so he’d crowded them to slow the stampede. Except that he had no rights here. The French never had as many as they boasted, and let a lot of them slip away. Now they had none.

  “Edouard Piron?”

  Eddie shook his head.

  “Don’t lie to us. We know who you are.”

  “Then you know I’m not Edouard.”

  “You deny you’re him?”

  “I’m Eddie. It’s the name on my birth certificate.”

  One of them put his hand out for it.

  “You’ll have to take my word.”

  They weren’t here for his word. Their flashlights played against every surface, and corner. He saw blood on his pillow. It was his own, but he didn’t want to explain how it got there.

  They’d announced that they were police, and because he was expecting the police he’d let them in. Watching them tear apart his place as if they owned it, owned him, he realized his mistake. Flics were obsequious civil servants, their badge an outstretched palm, giving off the sweaty aroma of functionaries suspicious of everyone above their station in life and below it, the politicians who were their bosses, and the public who paid their salary, fearful of the criminals who provided them with work. Many entered the municipal ranks in other departments, gravitating to the Sûreté because that was where opportunities for easy advancement and g
raft were greatest. These two were different, efficient and enthusiastic.

  “Let me see identification,” he said.

  They looked at him as though he had declared for a padded cell in Charenton asylum. One of them—the one who’d snickered in the hall—said, “You know why we’re here.”

  “I have no idea,” he said. Blurted it, giving himself away.

  By now so had they. Their French came with a German inflection, but they weren’t the military. Gotten together as they were in well-tailored mufti and bad haircuts, they had to be Gestapo. In occupied France it was impossible to disguise what you were after opening your mouth and visiting a barber.

  The snickerer said, “How did you know Borge Janssen?”

  They’d come for information, and told him more with one question than he could give them. So Janssen’s first name was Borge.

  “He was my drummer.”

  The other said, “You haven’t answered,” while the snickerer looked through Eddie’s stuff.

  “He walked into the club one night and told me I needed to hire him. He played for me, and I did.”

  “When was this?”

  “Six weeks ago? Two months?”

  “In that time you became friends?”

  “I never saw him away from work.”

  “That isn’t what we asked.”

  “No, we weren’t friends.”

  Socks, underwear, dirty shirts, his clean one and only tie, never worn, were strewn on the floor while they ransacked his chest of drawers. Under a sweater they found treasure, a heavy envelope.

  “They’re musical arrangements I’ve been thinking of using,” he said. “That’s all they are.”

  They flipped through Goudsmit’s book and tossed it onto the pile.

  “But you know his friends?”

  “None.”

  “His girl?”

  Eddie shook his head.

  “The people he worked for?”

  “He worked for me.”

  “But you knew his friends?”

  His answers wouldn’t be different the second time around, the third. The Dane was a capable drummer when the mood struck him. It wasn’t Eddie’s business that he’d been killed.

  “The girlfriend’s name is Anne Cartier.”

  “Means nothing,” Eddie said.

  “She lived on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, in the eighth.”

  Eddie shrugged.

  The snickerer opened the bottom drawer and goosed blue wool bathing trunks. “You haven’t asked why we’re here.”

  “Janssen was killed,” Eddie said. “You want to know who did it.”

  “Very good. You’re American. Where in the United States do you live?”

  “Chicago, Illinois.”

  “I have first cousins in the suburb of Oak Park that I visit every other Christmas,” the snickerer said. “You don’t sound like anyone I’ve heard there.”

  “I was brought up in New Orleans.”

  “Why are you in France?”

  “It’s my home now.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  He understood that responding transparently would cast suspicion on himself. Braced by a cop in the States, it had been safest to craft his answers to sound truthful. Here—now—that was dangerous. He was expected to lie. Didn’t everyone have something to conceal from the occupation?

  “Why would an American prefer to live in occupied France than in his own country?”

  “There’s no law against it,” Eddie said.

  “You are a musician? A jazz musician?”

  “Yes.”

  “. . . who left America for Paris to find work? We find this hard to believe.”

  “The jazz scene isn’t what it used to be there. Swing isn’t for me.” Damn it, they had him telling the truth again. “I like Paris,” he said. “Don’t you? Isn’t that why the Germans grabbed it for themselves?”

  “How long do you intend to stay?” they asked at the same time.

  “Until the music runs out.”

  “When do you anticipate that will be?”

  “Never.”

  They concentrated on his belongings, toed the pile of clothes making tsk, tsk, tsk sounds with their tongue against their teeth. They didn’t approve of his reading, French translations of American detective novels, but there was nothing officially subversive in it. They went through his pantry, ice box, kitchen cabinets, and the milk boxes in the closets where he stored hundreds of phonograph records, and which they shoved back so hard that he would need to take inventory of how many they cracked. The snickerer got down on his hands and knees to look under the bed, said “Ah-hah,” pulling out a hinged case covered in faux alligator hide. When he popped it open, Eddie’s trumpet fell out, and he snagged it by the bell.

  “This is your instrument?”

  “Yes. What else?”

  “Janssen was a member of your band. Were you also a member of his?”

  “He didn’t have a band. He performed exclusively with me.”

  “Did I say anything about music?”

  The other one stopped poking around to listen to Eddie’s answer.

  “I haven’t any idea what you’re getting at.”

  What did he know about the drummer’s life aside from the sorry way it ended? When the next question was slow in coming, he said, “What do you think he was doing when he wasn’t playing for me?”

  “We are not here for your edification. Answer the question yourself.”

  “Eating and sleeping,” Eddie said. “Practicing. Making love to his girlfriend in the afternoon. Musicians are lucky to have time for that.”

  “I wouldn’t want his luck, or hers. Not yours either. If you don’t give us something substantial, we will make things miserable for you.”

  “You’re already doing a good job.”

  They laughed. Eddie wished that he could get his players to come in on the downbeat as crisply as these two.

  “We haven’t begun,” the snickerer said. “Tell us why he is dead.”

  “When he leaped off the bridge, he took his reasons with him.”

  “What do you suppose they were?”

  “No one was as surprised as I. I’d seen no sign that he was depressed.”

  “He killed himself because he was happy?”

  “All suicides appear happy right before the end, don’t they, knowing their troubles are over?”

  Eddie never felt suicidal. Possibly, he thought, he was too unhappy. He would sort out his feelings later, after he was rid of these men.

  After another tour of the apartment, they started toward the door.

  “You had better not be holding too much back,” the snickerer said.

  “You’re holding back something of mine.”

  The snickerer studied his reflection in the trumpet before tossing it on the bed. Eddie caught it on the bounce as they went out and took it to the window. Across the street they made a call from a café. He was still watching when they drove away. Without cleaning up the mess, except to extricate the sweater from the tangle on the floor, he hurried to La Caverne Negre. He was boiling over, and the dim, mid-day quiet of the club was the right atmosphere in which to cool down. It wasn’t called La Caverne for nothing.

  Roquentin was studying the paper but didn’t say anything. Eddie went to the kitchen to tell the cook how he wanted his eggs, and then went to the bandstand and pounded Janssen’s drums.

  “Practicing?” Roquentin said.

  “Getting rid of my frustrations.”

  “With a girl like Carla you’ve got frustrations?”

  “Fewer than without her. But still—”

  Roquentin didn’t laugh. Eddie didn’t smile. Ironic conversation substituted for candid talk about their situation. Parisians had stopped speaking from the heart while they waited for the Germans to leave. Eddie was waiting as fast as he could.

  His eggs came. Roquentin put Paris-Soir beside his plate folded back t
o Page 3, which was headlined with the account of another suicide, the twenty-fourth that the authorities knew of that month.

  “Read it,” Roquentin said.

  “These stories give me indigestion.”

  “I’ll digest it for you.” Roquentin took back the paper. “It says a woman in the eighth put her head in the oven and killed herself out of despair. She was just twenty-two, quite beautiful if witnesses are to be believed. It’s unthinkable that she should decide that life is hopeless at her tender age.”

  “Everyone feels like that to a certain degree these days,” Eddie said.

  “Not everyone turns on the gas in a sealed room. A neighbor came to find out about the smell and switched on the light. The spark triggered an explosion that brought down the building. Two more died, eight were injured, and forty are left homeless because of her thoughtless act.”

  “Tragic,” Eddie said.

  “The reporter says she became despondent after her boyfriend was pulled from the Seine. He likened them to a modern Romeo and Juliet, although the boyfriend wasn’t a suicide as originally thought, but was murdered.”

  Eddie pushed his plate away, went back to the bandstand.

  “Borge Janssen, it says here, was the drummer for Eddie et Ses Anges at La Caverne Negre. The authorities are looking for any scrap of information and demand the cooperation of every citizen.”

  “I’ve already been questioned,” Eddie said. “I came clean, which is to say I gave nothing.”

  “They’ll be back for more, you know,” Roquentin said. “A foreign national killed to look like suicide. It’s not something they’ll give up on until they’re at the bottom of it.”

  “What’s really going on?” Eddie hammered the tom-toms, punished them. “Who gives a damn about a dead jazzman in Paris?”

  “Other than us two?” Roquentin turned up his palms. “Well, I don’t suppose the publicity will kill us.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  The tri-motor Ju 52 broke out of thickening skies above the north approach to the runway. The wheels were down, flaps raised, when a smaller plane escaped low clouds three hundred meters below. The tri-motor was descending at a steep angle when the pilot noticed the other aircraft, a mail plane from the provinces, and pulled up abruptly. After circling the city, the Ju 52 made its second approach over Orly. Cars assembled on both sides of the fogbound strip, headlamps blazing, to light the way.