Really the Blues

by Joseph Koenig

  “What did you say your name was?”

  “Piron.”

  “What brings you to Paris, Mr. Piron?”

  “This, that, and the other thing.”

  “Aside from those?”

  “The music.”

  “There isn’t enough back home?” she asked.

  “Too much of the kind I don’t enjoy playing.”

  Simone hadn’t sent her to get his ideas about the jazz scene, but she wouldn’t learn anything about him here. Screwing was more productive than administering the third degree. Where she shined was in getting a man in bed and keeping quiet while he provided answers to questions she’d never think to ask. She said, “It’s late. I’m a little tight. Tired, too. Will you see me back to my place?”

  “Paris is safer than it’s ever been. The militias chase everyone off the streets at night.”

  “Empty streets terrify me,” she said. “So do militias.”

  “I’ll call a cab.”

  She put down her glass, looked at him squarely. “You know,” she said, “I’m not looking for a ride.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  She would tell Simone that Piron was fresh. It might be the music that brought him to Paris, but he also liked talking dirty. No, dirty wasn’t the right word. What did the Frenchies call it? Oh yeah, double entendre. Wising off to white women.

  “If it gets me where I want to go,” she said. “When I take a ride with a stranger, that doesn’t always happen.” She checked to see if he was up to speed. He was nodding, going along with it up to a point, but not smiling. “If you won’t take me home, let me stay with you. It’s your fault I’m in the fix I’m in.”

  “How’s that?” he said.

  “I wouldn’t be stuck here past my bedtime if I hadn’t hung around to hear you play.”

  “What will my girlfriend say?”

  “Not a thing,” she said. “Unless you mention it. I don’t recommend that.”

  “She knows everything I do.”

  “I don’t recommend that either.”

  It was frustrating being unable to get him to open up, the frustration part of a larger feeling of anxiousness that she couldn’t properly explain. Hard to figure why a trumpet player should have secrets that Simone could turn into cash. Yet there was an undeniable mystery about Piron. Even if there would be no payday down the road, she wanted those secrets for herself.

  In the meantime, she had a job to do. “Tell me about her,” she said.

  “My girl? What for?”

  “Maybe I can come up with a good story.”

  “She doesn’t need a story.”

  “For you. About why you invited me to spend the night.”

  “It was past five when he put me in the taxi,” she told Simone at the hotel.

  “This was after you steam-cleaned him? You were with him so long, I was beginning to think you two had eloped.”

  “Where could we run off to with military patrols on all the roads?” she said. “We stayed in the club till I couldn’t keep my eyes open.”

  “What did you get?”

  “Conversation,” she said.

  “You should’ve slept with him.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I should have.”

  Simone gave her a sour look. Usually she would pout when he did that, demand to know what she had done that was so terrible. Tonight she enjoyed his discomfort, knowing the reason for it. She had fallen for Piron in a small way. Simone’s tough luck. If it bothered him, he shouldn’t have sent her to do a job on a colored man.

  “Why didn’t you?” he said. “On account of he’s a nigger?”

  “He wasn’t all that interested. You saw what his girl looks like. What chance did I stand against her?”

  “At three, four in the morning I ain’t met the man that’d roll you out of bed, Mavis.”

  “He never let me get him near a bed.”

  Simone plumped the pillows behind his head, settled back against the headboard. He patted the covers, but Mavis remained in her clothes in the hard chair on the other side of the room.

  “Thanks, but no thanks.” She crossed her legs. “At least till you stop looking at me like that.”

  She watched him go through various facial contortions, ending up where he’d started.

  “He must’ve let something slip about himself.”

  “He’d rather talk about his girl,” she said. “Me and him, we’re brother and sister.”

  Now Simone had the hairy eyeball for her.

  “You don’t want to hear what he told me? Yes or no?”

  “As long as you’re not comin’ to bed, what else’ve I got to do?”

  “Never mind that. His girl’s trying to make an honest man out of him. He hinted that he got her knocked up, although it could just be he wants me to think he did ’cause what will cool off a woman faster than a man who is going to be some baby’s daddy?” She paused while Simone lit a cigar. He tossed the match, and she saw it put a scorch mark in the rug. “I don’t suppose it’s something we can take to the payout window.”

  “It might be, if the woman isn’t someone he picked up in an alley.”

  “Does she look like something you would find in an alley?”

  “No, I will give you that,” Simone said. “Most days neither do you.”

  Mavis pouted. She had been holding back, and it got away from her.

  He continued. “From what I saw, she looked like a real lady. Elegant the way some frogs can be. Which raises the question of what she’s doin’ with a horn player.”

  “This is Paris, you’re forgetting,” Mavis said. “There’s more women chasing after artists and musicians than there’s artists and musicians to go around. It’s a seller’s market.”

  “Not for a nigger, I wouldn’t think.”

  “You can’t tell by looking even up close. I couldn’t see one thing about him that isn’t white.”

  “He either is colored, or he ain’t. There’s no in-between.”

  “She might think there is.”

  “Why? Because you do?” Simone said. “You ain’t carryin’ his kid. Think you’d be so broad-minded if a pickaninny was growin’ inside your belly?”

  Mavis didn’t answer. Simone had won the argument. It was time to drop it, but she knew he wouldn’t. He never did when he had her on the ropes.

  “You tell me you didn’t lay him ’cause he wouldn’t go for it. If he was a German, one of these master race specimens they have got here now, or even a Frenchie, his clothes would’ve been in a pile on the floor before he knew he was out of ’em. It’s the first time I sent you to do a job on a fellow, and not all of ’em exactly like Clark Gable, that you didn’t clinch the deal. If you want to know, I don’t believe you, the excuses you’re makin’.”

  “You have a better idea about what I’ve got in here—” Mavis tapped her finger against her head, “than I do myself.”

  “It’s between you and him,” Simone said.

  “Nothing is.”

  “It wouldn’t hurt if you’d got his girlfriend’s name so we can get her opinion about hatchin’ a nigger baby,” Simone said. “We’ll bring it up with Piron and find out what he’s ready to pay for our advice.”

  “You have it all figured out. What do you even need with me?”

  He patted the bed again. Mavis uncrossed her legs and kicked off her shoes. Then she recrossed them.

  “Say,” she said, “did I tell you that boy can really play?”

  The room shook twice as Eddie was wakened by the sound of an explosion. Lifting his head, he considered whether he’d been dreaming until a faint echo rolling across the city rattled the shutters. He had listened to enough artillery fire during the invasion to sort out the distant rumble of big 150mm German cannons from larger French 155s, which in any case rarely were fired. This was something else, closer, bringing the caustic flavor of cordite. He went to the window and raised the louvers, but the smell was gone. In the street, people were going about
their business. Probably it had been a dream. Or not.

  Sleep was a lost cause, the explosion just a part of what was keeping him awake. The woman from the night before had attached herself to him almost till dawn. Women like her were fringe benefits of the jazz scene. Those he didn’t bring home, he sent away three sheets to the wind. Last night he’d done neither, because he wanted to talk. Normally he laid off his troubles on Carla, who was a repository for them without being crushed by their weight. He couldn’t do that when Carla was their cause, she and the baby, his baby, the black baby that was going to get him killed.

  There was something in the paper about Nazi fanatics proposing to institute the laws of Rassenschande in France. Rassenschande meant racial scandal and brought deadly punishment to violators, who sought to water down Aryan bloodlines by mixing with lower orders. He was a living, breathing example of Rassenschande, Rassenschande in the flesh, defying anyone to suggest that he should never have been born. Until today, when he would make of himself the last in the line of Piron mongrels, the price to be paid for staying out of trouble, and having the life that was off-limits to him back home.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The explosion blew in the windows, showering Weiler in glass. Thrown out of his chair, blinded, unable to breathe or move, he realized that he had been fatally injured. A blast of dry heat convinced him that he was being delivered prematurely to the gates of hell. Satan wasn’t there to welcome him, no one more remarkable than Pfluge, his adjutant, who stood over him anxiously, dripping blood from his eyes, asking, “Are you alive, Major? We have been attacked. Are you alive?”

  Weiler concentrated on Pfluge’s voice, the bloody face blurred by smoke and dust. He wanted to get to his feet but was unable to move, sadly accepting that he had been rendered a paraplegic before Pfluge lifted the desk that had toppled across his hips. As the weight came off, Weiler picked himself up, piece by piece as it were, checking each part to determine if it remained and how well it functioned, until he was arranged nearly upright with one hand on the desk for balance. The other stirred the cloud in front of his eyes. Pfluge came into focus, along with a couple of junior officers who were also there to see about him.

  “Attacked by whom?”

  “We don’t know. You are all right?”

  Weiler filled his lungs, coughed, spit gritty phlegm. “How can I be—?”

  He was starting to sound like Maier with his damn questions. Shepherding the colonel everywhere would do that to you. Plucking glass out of his scalp and the back of his neck, he unplugged a gout of blood that ran down his shoulders. He was fishing for his handkerchief when Pfluge took his own bloodsoaked rag from his face and pressed it to the wound.

  “See to your injuries,” Weiler said, “and those of the others.”

  “You are sure you are well, Major?”

  “Do it.”

  Weiler stumbled through the wreckage of his office to a bank of file cabinets. A bottle of Albert de Montaubert Cognac from the exquisite 1912 vintage, 750 ml, worth half a month’s pay, was stashed in the bottom drawer for a special occasion, and what was more special than that he was alive? He felt inside for it and immediately withdrew the hand, gushing blood from the thumb, the most disturbing of his injuries. Dipping the handkerchief into the puddle in the drawer, he pressed it to the back of his head. Cognac made a fine disinfectant.

  Approaching sirens overwhelmed groans in the corridor. He went to the window, hobbled by pain in his hips. Fire trucks converged on the Tuileries, and men in raincoats and leather helmets linked together lengths of hose and snaked them through the foliage. Grass fires burned alongside the gravel lanes. The firemen squelched every one, but seemed puzzled about where to concentrate the flow of water. The smoke was thickest over a grove of chestnut trees. Weiler couldn’t see through the leaves, but that was where the firemen were busiest.

  Steam rose in threadbare billows and was dispersed with the smoke by a wet breeze. There was little in the way of flames. Weiler went downstairs gingerly as more pompiers arrived. A frenzy of preparation petered out with nothing much for them to do. A knot of spectators tightened around them, buzzing with speculation. As they packed close, a man was left standing alone at their edge. Weiler limped to his side and saluted.

  “Are you all right?” Weiler asked him. “I nearly was killed.”

  “Were you?” Colonel Maier said. “I, myself, escaped unscathed.”

  Weiler was waiting for the colonel to inquire sympathetically into the extent of his injuries. He blinked several times but, with the blood, smoke, and dirt in his eyes, couldn’t pull them into focus. Rubbing them until he cleared them cleared up nothing.

  “How—?”

  “I had left my desk to go to the toilet,” Maier said, “and must have flushed at the instant the blast went off, because I didn’t hear it. I was unaware anything had happened until I returned to my office and found a duststorm swirling inside.”

  Weiler started in the direction of the crowd. Maier held him back.

  “Aside from a large hole in the ground close to the wreckage of a drinking fountain and some benches that have been rendered into excellent firewood, there is nothing to see.”

  “A very deep hole?” Weiler asked. “Did an underground gas line explode, as was the case—as we thought was the case at the apartment house on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore?”

  “Do you smell gas?” Maier said. “Who would be so crazy as to stand over a broken main? The damage was done by an explosive, dynamite I should say, or a less stable compound. Nitroglycerin, or material fabricated with amatol.”

  “That was used in the explosion which brought down the apartment building.”

  “It would be a remarkable coincidence, wouldn’t it, if the same material was responsible for both blasts?”

  “Why set it off in a park?” Weiler said. “Did the bomber have a gripe against the squirrels?”

  “They are not at the top of his list of enemies. The explosion occurred along the broad path bringing walkers to the portico of the former museum. Sherlock Holmes isn’t required to deduce that our enemies intended to deliver a surprise to those working inside—to leave it and quickly disappear, as a stork might deposit a bastard—when the bomb went off ahead of time.”

  “It makes sense,” Weiler said.

  Maier looked at him with a measure of annoyance. If it didn’t make sense, would he have said it?

  “You are welcome to suggest another set of circumstances to better explain what happened.”

  “Who would do such a thing?”

  “What is the population of Paris, Major?”

  “I don’t know. Several mil—Oh,” he said. “I see what you are getting at.”

  “A better question would be who is capable, and who has the wherewithal, courage, and determination.”

  Weiler mopped blood from his neck. He didn’t have the answer.

  “Very few of those several million.” Maier coughed softly into his fist. Weiler thought he was being sarcastic, but then he coughed again and spit into the grass. “Those qualities are not characteristic of the French.”

  An ambulance arrived ahead of several others, and attendants brought out canvas litters and carried them through the crowd. “Let’s have the first look at what they find for the morgue,” Maier said.

  They dogged the attendants to the edge of a depression a couple of meters in depth, where the firefighters played hoses on smoldering ash. The water saturated the earth, formed rivulets that collected in a brown pool at the bottom. Two men skittered down the steep sides and tramped through the water, probing it with their feet. Back and forth they waded, then side to side, bumping shoulders as they passed in the middle. It was a small boy gazing up at the clouds while everyone else focused on the ground who spotted gray pants in the crotch of a plane tree. Brought back to earth, they were found to contain the lower part of a human body. The spectators scanned the treetops for the rest until a fireman also glancing the wrong way discovered
the upper torso under a rose bush. The mob, pushing close, retreated after a quick look. A man vomited, and Weiler saw one or two others in a sudden hurry to get to where they’d been going when they were sidetracked by the blast.

  The body parts were shredded, scorched, burned beyond immediate recognition. Weiler determined with certainty only that he was looking at the remains of a man, at least someone dressed in a man’s clothes, twill trousers and a blue pea coat. A beret snagged on another bush was clean and undamaged and might have been left by a spectator who had fled. The body was missing both arms, a leg, the head.

  “Find it,” Maier said. “The head.”

  “It isn’t in the pit,” a fireman said.

  “Look further,” Maier said. “It can’t have gone far without legs.”

  “Look for it yourself,” the firefighter said. Then he spun around, saw Germans in uniform, and said, “Of course, Monsieur, yes sir, that’s what we will do, sir.”

  The ambulance attendants placed the halves of the torso onto stretchers and carried them to their vehicles. Would they use one vehicle, or two, Weiler wondered. What was the protocol? Maier intercepted them and lifted the sheets from the remains.

  “What do you expect to see?” Weiler asked. “I can barely stand to be around it.”

  Maier ignored him.

  “I’m surprised,” Weiler said, looking away, “that the bomber would attempt to bring down the building in the daytime. The Musee du Jeu de Paume was erected in the previous century when civic structures were as sturdy as the monuments of antiquity, built to last as long. In the daylight hours it’s well guarded. At night it would be more vulnerable.”

  “Daytime is best if your aim is to murder the people working inside.” Maier spit into the ruined corpse. “That is what this son of a bitch was trying to do, to murder us.” He wagged a finger at the medics, who replaced the sheet and took the body away. “The building wasn’t the target. Frenchmen harbor a fondness for the old pile. It detracts from the glory of France to injure it merely to evict German military intelligence.”