Really the Blues

by Joseph Koenig

“Who do you suppose he was?”

  “Other than from desperate Jews and communists, where would the motivation come?” Maier said. “In Czechoslovakia we encountered opposition from large segments of the civilian population. We are breaking it with harsh reprisals until no one has the stomach to take action against us or to shield our enemies. The same will happen here, but faster. These are the French, after all.”

  “Even a man blowing himself up in an attempt to get at us sets the wrong example,” Weiler said. “Let’s hope it was a one-man operation.”

  “One man, but in several parts,” Maier said.

  Weiler laughed, but Maier didn’t laugh back. It had struck the captain as a humorous remark, but for Maier it was an observation. The humor in the situation eluded Maier as completely as it eluded the man plucked out of the tree and bush.

  A firefighter came off the lane with a cloth sack that he placed at Maier’s feet, backing away as Maier tugged at the drawstring. A flock of pigeons flew by, and Weiler decided that it was imperative to track their flight across the sky, to see the birds safely to their roost in the eaves of the museum, looking back too soon as Maier still fiddled with the drawstring. The bag opened at last, and Maier peered inside and thrust his hand to the bottom, drew it out clutching an object caked in wet mud—a single brown shoe, the scuffed leather cracked over the instep.

  “We have to keep searching,” Maier said.

  “Yes, we must have the head,” Weiler said. “When we do, we may learn—”

  “That its owner is dead?” Maier said. “I was thinking of the mate for this shoe.”

  Maier’s smile was pleasant and good-natured, not ghoulish in light of the circumstances. Feeling an urge to say something about misjudging him, Weiler held back when he noticed a speck of pulp on the colonel’s sleeve, and the smile remained as Maier spotted it, too, and flicked it away.

  “Additional protection must be ordered,” Maier said. “It is disturbing that an attacker came as close as he did without being stopped.”

  “I, myself, am shocked at his boldness. By the grace of God tragedy was averted.”

  “Without access to bombs the boldest bomber is harmless. When explosives are at hand even a docile Frenchman may turn his anger on us if he finds himself at odds with diktat, or after arguing with his wife, or when a German occupies his seat on the Metro. Where I would begin is in keeping explosives out of the hands of our opponents.”

  “I will institute a tighter watch at construction sites where dynamite is in use. An advisory will be posted to arsenals and military bases. This will be the last we hear of bombers.”

  “Unless they already have replaced what was lost here and on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré,” Maier said.

  “What . . . ?” Weiler was looking away again. “Some flesh, I believe, is stuck to your chin.”

  It was blazing hot inside the apartment when Eddie returned. Even with coal in short supply, the landlord sent too much steam heat upstairs. When Eddie complained, elderly Monsieur Drapeau explained that his boiler burned hot or not at all. He advised keeping a window open until the coal ran out, when Eddie could complain about the chill. Eddie never left without opening all the windows so the apartment would be less hellish when he came back.

  Tonight it was close to unbearable. Eddie berated himself for not having seen to the windows despite feeling that he had done that, double-checking the last thing before he went out. Apparently he was mistaken. Now he opened them along with the louvers. The early sun would be in his eyes, which meant getting up at an hour when he should still be sound asleep. What choice was there? He couldn’t go to bed in a sauna.

  He unlaced his shoes and kicked them off beside one of the music texts he was studying to become a better sight reader. Because space was tight, Eddie’s bookcase was the area under the bed. He hadn’t opened the book since his day off, yet there it was in the middle of the floor. Had an earthquake rocked the place while he was at the club, sloshing his stuff? Burglary seemed a better explanation. But what would a burglar want here? Aside from the trumpet that never left his side, what of any value did he own?

  An inventory of his possessions with special attention to his pile of records was over in seconds. Nothing seemed to be missing. The apartment was an unlikely target for a burglar who understood that the first rule of burgling was to burgle a place where there was something to steal. The Germans might have been back for a second look. But Germans weren’t shy, didn’t do their dirty work without observers. The snickerer and his friend, or their Gestapo colleagues, would have wanted him to be here, probably after softening him up with a beating, softening him up again when they didn’t find anything.

  Questions remained: The identity of the burglar. What he wanted. Why he thought Eddie Piron would have it. It was too much to think about, not enough to keep him awake. But when he slipped between the sheets, he couldn’t get comfortable. He got up again and tore apart the bedding, replaced it with linen untouched by strangers.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “So I quit following him and went back to her place,” Mavis said.

  “The girlfriend’s?”

  “Cor-rect. She wasn’t receiving. The doorman said nobody was allowed up there she didn’t tell him in advance she is expecting. I stood at the curb deciding what to try next, when I saw him again, the doorman, holding the door open, and then she stepped out. You know what you are looking for, you can see where she has got a tiny bump, and I don’t think it’s from too much strudel. I came over, all smiles, and said didn’t I know her from such-and-such a place. She highhatted me, but started paying attention when I told her the gentleman who had gotten her in the condition she was in, he was, you know, tossing it to me on the side.”

  “Lower your voice,” Simone said. “We’re in church.”

  “That so?” she said. “I thought Notre Dame was a football team in Indiana.”

  “Very funny.”

  She looked up at the choir and the great rose windows, and into the vaults of the Romanesque arches high overhead. “Where do you suppose that hunchback keeps himself when he isn’t ringing bells?”

  “You’re a regular Gracie Allen,” he said. “How did she take it?”

  “With a harumph. And a snort, in case I didn’t get the harumph. Cracks were beginning to show in that stone kisser.”

  “Or else you’re seein’ things.”

  “It could also be that.” Mavis led him into a side chapel. “It’s peaceful here, makes me feel, I don’t know, holy. A cathedral was not one of the tourist attractions I wanted to visit in Paris, but coming here is worth every penny.”

  “They don’t charge to let you in a church,” Simone said. “You know that.”

  “Yeah, sport, I do.”

  She surprised him by dropping to her knees before a crèche and genuflecting. She got up straightening her hem and said, “I spent four of the longest years of my life at St. Elizabeth’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania. It isn’t a reformatory, don’t get the wrong idea. Where was I?”

  “About Piron’s skirt.”

  “I asked if he put her up in her swell digs, and should I count on moving in next door. She looked like she was going to drop her foal on the sidewalk. As it was nothing I cared to see, I scrammed.”

  “You’re sayin’ she was lookin’ for a cop.”

  “It may have crossed her mind,” Mavis said. “Since I was in the neighborhood, I went around asking about her.”

  “You don’t speak the language.”

  “Point one in my favor. In that part of town only the peasants speak French. English is the language of the upper crust. English and German. I told people I was new and needed a little help in tracking down an old school friend.”

  “Learn anything?”

  “All I had to do was describe what she looked like, and everybody wanted to be my friend. She was educated in Switzerland at one of these finishing schools where the better class of kings and queens send their brats.”

 
; “Why would a gal with money, looks, and connections, not to mention a family that is probably on the same wavelength as these Nazis, why would she be sharin’ a bed with a nigger?”

  “Nobody has a good opinion of her boyfriend. They all mentioned he plays jazz on Place Pigalle. No one said he’s colored. I can’t tell you she knows it’s a black baby she’s carrying around in her belly.”

  “Bet she don’t,” Simone said. “It’s time we catch Piron, and I don’t mean by his toe.”

  “I don’t get you.”

  “When you were a kid, you never sang that song about catchin’ a nigger by the toe?”

  “What of it?”

  “You had it wrong,” Simone said. “The louder he hollers, the tighter I’m gonna squeeze. I ain’t ever gonna let him go.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  The man with the greasy chin had an urgent matter to report. Officer Bastien Landry of the Sûreté looked up wearily from the newspaper he’d been studying since the start of his shift. Under the new realities, the police were the puppets of their German masters. Landry was bored constantly, vaguely ashamed.

  “As a patriotic Frenchman, I wish to disclose the whereabouts of a foreign Jew,” the man said.

  Landry turned the page, uninterested. “Where can the Jew be found?”

  “In my home,” said the man, who was elderly and identified himself as Albert Champenois.

  “You know the penalties for harboring him.”

  “It is not a he, but a woman who persuaded me to take her under my roof. It didn’t occur to me that she was a Jew, let alone a foreign one, until—”

  Landry heard it often, if not exactly word for word. An announcement in Paris-Soir from a fascist militia promised a handsome bounty for every non-resident Jew denounced to the authorities.

  “Until I realized that was what she must be,” Champenois said. “Listen closely to her, and it becomes apparent that French is not her native tongue. She keeps to a peculiar schedule, never going out in daytime or remaining indoors through the night. She has neither friends nor visitors. No one phones her, and she does not make calls. The bulletins warning of who we must guard against to preserve our security were written with her in mind.”

  “You could be right about everything,” Landry said, “and still wrong.”

  “I could. Also the sun may rise in the west tomorrow morning. In these times, a woman rents a furnished room and moves in on the same day bringing nothing, not even a change of clothes, locks herself inside like she is hiding from . . . everybody, and I should ignore what is obvious?”

  Landry had no opinion about foreign Jews, French Jews, Jews of any kind, but the parade of informants wouldn’t end soon. He rolled a form and several carbons in his typewriter and began recording Champenois’s story, disgusted now on top of everything else. “What’s her name?”

  Reports of fugitive Jews progressed routinely up the chain of command in the station in the eighth arrondissement without action being taken. Landry had adapted to the present situation in the preferred manner shared by nearly everyone. Let the Nazis hunt all the foreigners they cared to, but without their help. It was a German game, and for the Jews.

  Corporal Bernard Parneix saw opportunity in his comrades’ laxness. Examining every report, he took personal action on the low-hanging fruit. Close to midnight, accompanied by an Officer Drumont, he knocked at a tumbledown fieldstone home behind a sturdy doghouse in a grassless yard at the address for Albert Champenois. “Where is she?” Parneix asked the old man in robe and slippers barring the way inside.

  “She is Dracula’s daughter, who doesn’t stir until dark,” Champenois said. “When I returned from the police it was still light, and she was gone, however. I suspect she won’t be back at any time tonight, any time at all.”

  “You gave some clue that you were going to denounce her?”

  “Don’t insult my intelligence. People like her, they have a sixth sense to warn them when trouble is on the way. Those who don’t—”

  “Yes?”

  Champenois shook his head, dragging a finger across his throat.

  “There is no sixth sense,” Parneix said. “You probably chatter in your sleep.”

  “Good night, officers,” Champenois said. “I am sorry you made a trip for nothing.”

  Parneix had his foot in the door. “Tell us what she looks like.”

  “With pleasure. She is young, slender, pretty, and rather dark, as I mentioned at the station. Not characteristically Semitic, but that is what she is. I won’t forget her. Find a thousand like her, and I will pick her out of the mob.”

  “It won’t be necessary. More!”

  “Her way of speaking—”

  “We know. How was she dressed?”

  “She came with the clothes on her back, a simple skirt and chemise, and made no additions to her wardrobe. She said that her things were in storage, and would arrive any day.”

  “You believed her?”

  “Up to a point.”

  “Which point is that?”

  “When I came to understand there was nothing in it for me.”

  “How long did you have her here?”

  “I can tell you to the day when she turned up,” Champenois said. “It sticks in my memory, because it was the morning after the explosion on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, when the apartment house was brought down. I remember that the utility company sent a worker to check my gas line. I had to bribe him to turn the gas back on after he said I needed a new pipe. It cost a pretty penny that I hadn’t budgeted.”

  “Show us her room.”

  Champenois took them through a stale kitchen to a small, drab living room and a smaller, darker room behind it. He lit a lamp, which put minuscule light on rough walls, a cot wrapped in a thin blanket, a bowl, a pitcher, and two hand towels on a bruised stand. Empty hangers clattered together when Parneix opened the closet. A mouse ran out, causing Drumont to take a quick step back and Champenois to laugh softly into his hand. The air smelled of cat urine.

  “As I said, she brought nothing.”

  Parneix got down on his knees and looked at the dust under the cot. In a corner the mouse was squeaking. Pressing his hand against the pillow as he raised himself, he nudged it aside, uncovering a handbill advertising a jazz show on Place Pigalle the previous month. He folded it carefully and placed it in his pocket, then took it out for a second reading. Crumpling it into a ball, he tossed it in the direction of the mouse.

  The girl—Anne Cartier was the name she had given to Champenois, though it was believed to be fake—was not the easy pickings he had anticipated. Indeed, he had made the trip for nothing. These things happened, but he would inform the Germans of what he’d learned. If they got lucky, or if hers ran out, it might yet be possible to derive benefit from his tour of M. Champenois’s basement.

  Since the night of “Shine,” Eddie had started every show on trumpet, trading off with Weskers when his lip tired. Tonight his form held deep into the late set. In a short time he’d reclaim the spotlight on a permanent basis. Weskers could take over on drums, if a teacher could be enlisted to give him lessons. Otherwise he had to go. There was no room for a second trumpet, a second-rate drummer, or a second archangel with Eddie et Ses Anges.

  La Caverne was overrun with SS, as it often was for the late show, drunken officers shouting requests for favorite tunes. Some were songs Eddie had never heard of, a few with German titles. Many were swing numbers, which he had no desire to play. The swing virus had crossed the Atlantic, passing over France and infecting Germany, where he hoped it would prove fatal, not just to the music.

  He led off with “I’m Coming Virginia,” a virtuoso piece by Bix Beiderbecke, his favorite white trumpeter, and built a medley with “Clarinet Marmalade,” which Bix had made his own. The long solo improvised originally for reeds put a strain on his lip; but, caught up in its sinuous beauty, he blew his heart out. By the last chorus he was out of gas. The audience didn’t notice. Unless the appla
use that went on for minutes was charity.

  A woman alone at one of the small tables didn’t clap. She was pretty but somewhat withdrawn, one of those women he would see nursing a drink by herself at two and three A.M. before rushing out. The Germans hadn’t spotted her, or they would be demanding that she join them. Her eyes never left Eddie, who noted a paradox. The SS, real fans of the music, rarely watched him except when they were calling for the next song, yet this woman listening with evident displeasure never looked away. He tried telling himself that he’d swept her off her feet and she was too embarrassed to show it. A better explanation was that it was past midnight and he was the one who didn’t want to spend the night alone.

  Syrupy ballads made women crazy to have him. Next on the playlist was “Dr. Jazz,” an uptempo number. Without cueing the band, he switched to “Body and Soul,” leaving the angels in the dust till his lip gave out in the second verse.

  Making way for Weskers, Eddie took his place at the drums. He rapped the high hat till the sticks felt right in his hands, and then nodded to the piano player, who tickled the opening of “Alligator Crawl.” Weskers stuffed the rubber tip of a toilet plunger into the bell of his horn and blew sixteen muted bars. Eddie provided a steady backbeat, taking a restrained solo before the coda.

  Wrapped up in the music, he forgot the girl. When he saw her again, she was dabbing her cheek with a hankie. He could forget about making her fall in love. The trick was in preventing her from becoming hysterical.

  She wasn’t there the next time he looked. He checked the other tables, but she hadn’t fallen in love with the SS either. It wasn’t the first time a pretty girl had made eye contact, vanishing before he had a chance to make his move. Not every admirer was elusive. He searched for a replacement, but no promising candidates stood out from the crowd. It bothered him that he’d been wrong about her. Lately, he misread every woman. None more so than Carla.

  Ten hours later, he was back at La Caverne to hear Roquentin sing his praises. Tourists wouldn’t know if he’d stunk up the joint. The SS appreciated good jazz, but who gave a damn about what they thought? Only Roquentin was knowledgeable about fine playing, as well as a human being whose opinion Eddie valued. He grumbled when Eddie said “Good afternoon,” and let him prepare breakfast for himself.