“She stuck to her story and demanded the nurse. Her pain was returning, and she needed her pills.”
“I wasn’t aware.”
“I was,” Maier said. “It was unpleasant to see her suffer so. I asked once more about these loud arguments, and she admitted that possibly—there is that word again—she was mistaken, and not all were between Janssen and Mademoiselle Cartier, but involved outsiders siding against one or the other or both of them.”
“Who are they?”
“Would I know?” Maier said. “I just stepped off a plane.”
Weiler’s stomach growled. They had wasted time tormenting a dying woman when they could have been enjoying lunch, and at a better place than a hospital cafeteria. “Do we have a single piece of conclusive information about the girl?”
Maier shook his head. “Inconclusively, I would say that Mademoiselle Cartier is alive, and in hiding, and ready to resume the activities interrupted on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore.”
“It’s thin,” Weiler said.
“Do you care to bet against it?”
Minutes before the start of the first set, six SS came into La Caverne with a new trumpeter for the Angels. Gert Weskers had acquired a following in Paris as a competent, if unspectacular, jazzman in the years before the war, and as an occasional collaborationist ever since. No one had an enthusiastic opinion of him aside from the Germans, and theirs had little to do with his playing. Eddie didn’t want him sullying the bandstand, but there was no politic way to keep him off, and Roquentin didn’t object to the Nazis who had come to celebrate their protégé with magnums of his most expensive Champagne.
Weskers didn’t embarrass himself, and the set closed to modest applause. More German officers showed up during the intermission, so many that Roquentin had to dispatch a waiter to other clubs for fresh stocks of bubbly.
In the second set, Weskers’s chops let him down midway through a run of high F’s during the coda for “Swing That Music.” The SS didn’t mind, calling for more Champagne and endless encores till Eddie thought his arms would fall off pummeling the high hat. It was close to five when Weskers announced that he couldn’t blow another note, and the SS left. Busboys were stacking chairs on the tables when a sweaty man in a linen suit and white vest, and with a straw boater under his arm climbed onto the bandstand, grabbed Eddie’s hand, and began pumping it.
“Want to compliment you on the swell combo you put together,” he said. He was raspy-voiced, his English assuming a familiarity that Eddie denied to his musicians. “I’m sorry I didn’t get to hear you on the trumpet, but you’re an okay drummer, damn right you are, and that new fellow wasn’t too shabby. What’s his name?”
“Gert Weskers,” Eddie said.
“Gonna file it away in the memory bank, and make a note to catch him next time he plays with you. I’m Thad Simone, your newest biggest fan.” He laughed. “Guess there ain’t that many left in Paris that don’t speak Kraut, and what do they know about music?”
There weren’t, but Eddie kept it to himself rather than second an idea that could get him in hot water if it reached the wrong ears. A half smile was all he had for Simone, who could consider himself lucky to get it.
“Me and the missus just hopped off the Normandie. I know, I know, most Americans are headed back the other way. There’s talk it’s only a matter of time before Roosevelt takes a flyer on this European war, but I’m not convinced. I mean I don’t see why. We got no gripe with Hitler I can put my finger on. It was up to me, we’d knock these Europeans’ heads together, and settle the thing here and now. But that’s just one fellow’s opinion.”
There weren’t so many customers for his music left in Paris that Eddie wanted to antagonize a single one. But he didn’t care for Simone, or to be around him. He said, “I’m bushed. I’ve got to be back on the bandstand in fifteen hours, which translates into, before I know it. So if you’ll excuse me—”
“Sure, sure, know the feelin’ myself,” said Simone, pressing close. “Now I’ve discovered this Caverne Nigger, I’m gonna be a regular. I like the atmosphere, and I like the crowd. I like the music. My only complaint is I don’t get to hear you toot your horn. Did you give it up for good?”
“I injured my lip,” Eddie said. “It’s getting better.”
“Glad to hear that, I’m making it a point to be here when you pick it up again.” Simone started away, got a step or two before he stopped and stared at Eddie. “We met someplace before,” he said.
Eddie shrugged. Simone continued to stare.
“Ain’t no doubt. I’ve got a great memory for faces, ask the missus. Seen yours up close. It just don’t register where. Any ideas?”
“I’ve gigged, must be a million different places,” Eddie said. “You say you love jazz. It could have been any of them.”
“Yeah, I guess—Well, I don’t want to keep you up past your bedtime.” Simone stayed put. “Say, ever play the Dog Pound by Decatur Street in New Orleans?”
“That’s a Negro club,” Eddie said.
Simone grinned at him. “What was I thinkin’? What would you be doin’ there?”
“You tell me.”
“Say, don’t take it wrong. The Dog Pound is integrated now—or what was I doing there? There’s plenty of shines—Creoles passing for white in New Orleans that are as lightskinned, hell, lighter’n me and you. Listenin’ to your outfit I naturally was reminded of New Orleans. And then I remembered the Pound. You boys play the good old good ones I ain’t heard since I was last there.”
“It must be that,” Eddie said.
“My mistake, no offense intended. Say, been back recently? I’m from Galveston myself, only a few hours away from New Orleans across the state—”
“It’s late. I’m going home.”
“Sure, sure,” Simone said. “A musician got to keep current with his shut-eye. Next time, you’ll let me buy you a drink, that a deal?”
Eddie slipped his sticks in his back pocket and walked out. Simone was watching him go when he noticed Roquentin carrying a crate of empty bottles to the curb. “Let me help, mon ami,” he said.
“Much obliged,” Roquentin said as Simone got his hands under the load.
“Say, that house band of yours really knows its stuff, makes the hottest jazz in Paris. I was talkin’ to Eddie, and I asked him did he ever play a particular joint in New Orleans, but I didn’t get a thoughtful answer. His eyes were already at half-staff. Did he, huh, I’m talkin’ about the Dog Pound.”
Roquentin backed onto the sidewalk. Looking over his shoulder, he made his way toward the curb.
“I asked—”
“Did Eddie play a New Orleans club called the Dog Pound? He’s from New Orleans. He didn’t leave home till he was twenty. Unless he didn’t pick up a horn before he left, he must have played somewhere. Any good reason why he wouldn’t play there?”
“I don’t know,” Simone said. “I’ll ask him again.”
“You can. But it won’t get you anywhere.”
“Why do you suppose that is?”
Roquentin put down the case. “Thank you, sir. Good night.”
“I asked why it won’t get me nowhere.”
“Eddie doesn’t talk about much besides his music. Not even to me, and I’m his friend.”
“’Scuse me for repeatin’ myself, but why do you suppose that is?”
Roquentin was starting back to the club when he stopped and turned around. Bending his wrist, he rested his chin on the back of his hand in the pose of Rodin’s Thinker. “I would say it’s nobody’s damn business.”
Simone had an answer, but Roquentin cut him off. “You would say, why do I suppose that is?”
“I probably would.”
“What business is it of anyone’s what he did before he came here?”
“Not mine,” Simone said. “However, you might have the idea I’m on a busman’s holiday.”
“I am not familiar with this expression.”
“Must be b
ecause the buses don’t get you where you want to go here. It means I’m a cop, a detective with the Galveston, Texas, police, whose business it is to look into things that might not be what they appear to be, and get to the bottom of ’em. I’m here on an extended vacation, but that don’t mean I leave my instincts at the pier. Couldn’t if I wanted to. I thought I might’ve heard Eddie back home, but he stepped out so fast I didn’t even get a chance to ask if he made any phonograph records. Me and Mrs. Simone, we enjoy fox-trotting around the living room when we’re stuck indoors on a rainy day. He acted like I was prying into some dark secret he had.”
“If he does, they don’t concern us. Eddie’s a brilliant musician, that’s all we need to know about him.”
Simone nodded. “I wouldn’t want him thinkin’ nothin’ else.”
CHAPTER FOUR
When Eddie stepped out of the cab at the apartment house on Boulevard Victor Massé, the door was wide open for him, the doorman saluting with his free hand. “Good evening, Monsieur Piron, it’s good to see you again.”
Eddie’s fingers were at his lip before he jammed them in his pocket. It had been only a couple of days since he’d been here. What the doorman meant was that he was looking like himself again. Soon he would be able to play the trumpet and really would be the old Eddie.
Carla was always herself, in a mild fever even before he was out of his clothes. It wasn’t as if he kept her love-starved, but tonight she couldn’t have enough of him. When he lay back on drenched sheets, she snatched her cigarettes away from him and said, “I’m not done with you.”
“I should hope not.”
“I mean now,” she said, and forced him on top again.
During a truce in their skirmish under the covers, he said, “What’s gotten into you? Are you trying to kill us?”
“You don’t know?” The hint of a laugh came with nothing in her face that wasn’t serious. “You got into me.” Not an especially clever joke, and still without a smile. “I should never trust you.”
“You can always count on me,” he said.
“Count on you. Never trust you. They amount to the same thing,” she said.
“Stop being mysterious. I don’t know what you’re getting at.”
She put her hand behind his neck and pushed his face close to hers. Taking it as his cue, he was burrowing between her legs again when she said, “I’m pregnant,” and he dropped off her like a sack of potatoes.
“What? Not in the mood?” she said. “I know what you’re thinking. The baby is yours. I’ve been completely faithful.”
Something had been going on with her. He’d suspected she was seeing someone behind his back but hadn’t mentioned it because he hadn’t been entirely monogamous himself and didn’t have the moral high ground. Her assertion of loyalty, normally a protestation of love, was a troubling fact today. He would do the right thing by her, though, because . . . because doing the right thing was the right thing to do.
“You find it funny?” she said.
Baby, the word sounding over and over in his head. He couldn’t have been taken aback more if Carla had unleashed a stream of obscenity at him instead. He didn’t know if he wished she had.
“Yes. No—of course not,” he said. “What do you intend to do?”
“About the baby? I’ll have it. Isn’t that what mothers do?”
“What mothers do. Not every pregnant woman.”
“Beasts,” she said. “Don’t you want to be its father?”
“Not knowing you were pregnant, I hadn’t given the subject any thought.”
“It’s a strange thing,” she said.
“What is?”
“That men don’t.”
“I didn’t expect—”
“You never heard of the birds and the bees? Playing the innocent doesn’t become you. Consider my surprise when the doctor told me.”
“I’m feeling a little of it myself,” he said.
“A little? The baby is as much yours as mine. Everything I feel is yours in equal measure, except the pain.”
“The pain of childbirth?”
“Leave that to me,” she said. “You’ll marry me?”
“Have you told your parents?” he asked, to the point when the situation called for poetry.
“They’re understanding when it comes to their only daughter, which may explain why I push the limits, but they’ll be scandalized. Should I confess that my baby’s father is an impecunious jazz musician on the next boat back to the States, the scandal won’t be small. Papa hates jazz music, though he has never actually listened to it. He is an admirer of Dr. Goebbels, with whom he met last month in Berlin, and—Do you know what Dr. Goebbels has to say about jazz?”
“No, and I don’t care.”
“Now you must,” Carla said. “He says it is Americano nigger kike jungle music. As you are neither a kike or a nigger, or from the jungle, a proposal of marriage will repair some of the damage you’ve caused. There is no getting around that you are American, and that the baby will be one as well as an early bird. But when I am Madame Piron, you—we will avoid all but minor recrimination.”
“When is it best for me to be introduced to them?”
“Is that a real yes?” she said. “You’re not going to make them disapprove of you?”
“I doubt I’ll have to go out of my way. I should start preparing.”
“Not before you agree to a wedding. How will it be if they become fond of you, and there isn’t one? We won’t only be talking of scandal then, but of a disgrace I can never live down.”
“My parents aren’t like that,” he said. “Any girl I bring home, they would love because I did.”
“They are poor,” she said.
“I’d forgotten.”
“The de Villiers are an old, proud family. Before the Revolution they were among the largest landholders in the Île-de-France, giving their sons to the nation as archbishops, cardinals, and chevaliers. They are staunch Catholics, politically conservative, pro-German, anti-Semitic.” She stopped talking. “You’re frowning. Are you going to tell me you are secretly a Jew?”
“I’m not Jewish.”
“It’s one of the first things I noticed about you,” she said, “getting to know you. I just wanted to hear you say it. What’s wrong, then?”
“It’s hard to envision myself as a blueblood.”
“It won’t take much. All you will have to change are your opinions. I don’t care for Germans myself, or Jews. I’m as conservative as my parents, but am going through a stage, as they put it, sowing my wild oats as you’ve evidently sown one of yours in me. At heart, I’m like them, but will be more demanding of our child, though never of you.” She leaned back, and kissed him. “How could I be?”
He had met her six months ago at the bookstalls on the Seine embankment. Thumbing through a biography of Toussaint L’Ouverture, who led Haiti in revolt against Napoleon, he caught a slim but chesty girl eyeing him from the philosophy shelves. He took it for an idle glance but double-checked a moment later, and saw himself getting the once-over. She came by as he was rehearsing pickup lines and demanded to know who he was, remarking immediately about his accent and reacting with disdain for all things American. Fifty minutes later they were in her bed, where he was persuaded that in a hundred years he’d never find another like her.
She insisted on his phone number. Informed that he couldn’t afford a telephone, she made him write the address of the club where he performed. She wasn’t interested in jazz. Negro music was artless; she chided him for his love of it. Her tastes ran to the bittersweet ditties of the music halls, and light opera. The next night, she was at La Caverne to satisfy herself that the story he’d told wasn’t just a story, paying greater attention to the crowd of German officers than to the playing.
Only during his solos did she concentrate on the bandstand. Her contempt for his music irritated him. Later, he understood that it clinched his feelings for her. Carla de Villiers wasn’t a fan, not of
him. Till he’d gotten to know her, he doubted that anyone in Paris would ever view him apart from his music. With Carla there was no mention of jazz, except when she dismissed it as piffle.
She hated speaking about herself. A week ago she’d suddenly confessed that she had been engaged to a captain of infantry in the First Army group who was killed in the German invasion, one of the few French units that remained steadfast.
“He was a brave fool,” she told Eddie. “When everyone ran, he fought for French honor, and his, and what did it get him? What did it get me? Prove to me you are not like him, Eddie. Be a coward, and I will follow you to the gates of hell.”
Without her (and sometimes between assignations even now) he would be back to one-night stands with new fans in his dingy flat. So he promised that he would never do a brave thing, nothing more courageous than to perform a song of his own composition at La Caverne.
Stroking the inside of his thigh with her fingernails, she said, “What are you thinking of?”
“Of us. What else?”
“Of the three of us,” she said, and kissed him again.
The kiss didn’t feel the same. How many kisses would there be if the baby resembled its American side rather than the French? If it carried the genetic legacy not of its mother’s line, or of Eddie’s mother’s—Pirons, Frenchmen from Limousin who came to New Orleans in the early 1700s, making several fortunes in sugar cane and slaves before losing them in Confederate bonds—but of Eddie’s father, tribespeople from modern Dahomey, fierce west African warriors and hunters, the slowest afoot run down by Arab traders and bartered to French sea captains who took them to Louisiana via the middle passage and turned them over at a handy profit to planters like the Pirons at the Tuesday and Saturday slave auctions in New Orleans? This part of his history he’d learned from his father’s uncle, Cephus Sutpen, born on Aurore plantation in May of 1859 or 1860, not long before the war that advanced the Pirons’ ruin, family lore which the old man related on the porch of his estate, a plank shack in the canebrakes. Eddie never tired of hearing how his forebears spent their free Sundays making music with other slaves at Congo Square north of the French Quarter, where his great-grandfather, a redhaired octoroon, had become proficient on banjo and fiddle. He would plead ignorance of all this, accuse Carla if the baby arrived looking like Cephus. If it resembled his blue-eyed mother, the story would have to be told, but not before the child was waiting to become a parent itself.
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