Really the Blues

by Joseph Koenig

  “What else?”

  “I told him to stop wasting his time on chemistry. As advanced as he was at the keyboard, that’s what an oaf he was in the laboratory.”

  “Go on.”

  “He was a Jew, you know, and the situation in the Netherlands was deteriorating. He had no future there, or on the Continent. I had counseled other young men, promising chemists, to get out. None did. Goudsmit, however, was eager to resettle. I advised him to try the States. He’d learn more about the music in six months than he would in a lifetime in Europe. As his family had to remain in Holland, he didn’t want to go that far.”

  “Where did he land?”

  “I don’t know. He quit school. We lost touch.”

  “He was an ingrate?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “He didn’t come to make his good-byes, and to thank you for all you did for him?”

  “He . . . yes, he might have.”

  “Without mentioning where he was going?”

  “France?” Smits said. “That’s right, he said France.”

  “According to the registrar, Anton Goudsmit left the University of Utrecht in April of last year, days before the invasion of the low countries. It seems peculiar a Jew would flee the Netherlands for France, escape from the fire to go only as far as the frying pan.”

  “How could he know the French wouldn’t fight? He was fortunate to make it out of Holland.”

  “Not so fortunate, seeing how he ended up,” Maier said. “France isn’t the safest place for a Jew on the run.”

  “No place is,” Smits said.

  “There’s Palestine.”

  “Palestine is closed to the Jews. A few thousand at most are allowed by the British to enter each year.”

  “It wouldn’t be difficult if he had the right papers.”

  Smits shrugged. “What do I know about that?”

  “You reds have forgers to aid the flight of the brilliant protégé of an important comrade.”

  “We are firmly opposed to the Zionist enterprise,” Smits said. “The Jews will not solve their problem as neocolonialist lackeys of British imperialism, or in bourgeois nationalism, but in the international brotherhood of the toiling cl—”

  “Spare me,” Maier said. “I’m to believe you wouldn’t have bent the party line for him?”

  “I wrote the party line. Other countries would gladly have taken him in.”

  “Which countries are these?”

  “We lost touch. I can’t say.”

  “Which brings us back to Palestine,” Maier said. “He wasn’t happy there? The weather didn’t agree with him? The food? The quality of the music? What went wrong?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why did he leave the Jewish paradise to end his life among French anti-Semites?”

  “I can’t tell you that he reached Palestine, let alone what it was like.”

  “You didn’t know he was back on the Continent doing party work? He was your protégé in every sense.”

  Smits scrambled to his feet. As Maier pulled him back, his eyes overflowed with tears. Credit Piorkowski, thought Maier, that the professor couldn’t endure being manhandled, despite his confident front.

  Smits grabbed the tablecloth and snapped it with both hands. Maier pushed away as food went everywhere and wine and coffee splashed him. Smits took the cigarettes from his pocket, flung down the pack, and mashed it under his heel.

  Maier called to the lieutenant standing by with his men. “Put Professor Smits out of his misery.”

  “I’m not authorized to execute—”

  “Give me your weapon.” Maier lifted the flap on the officer’s holster, removed a Luger Black Widow revolver, and pointed it at Smits, who stood motionless as moisture seeped across the front of his pants.

  “Do I have your word as a gentleman that Anton really is dead?” Smits blubbered.

  “He is, whatever you want to think I am.”

  “All right, then,” Smits said. “He parachuted into France.”

  “Just like that? The wind gathered him up in Palestine, and blew him over France?”

  “The British flew him. The SOE, Special Operations Executive, charged with clandestine activities in occupied Europe.”

  “Flew him from where?”

  “The eastern coast of England. I don’t know exactly where the airfield was.”

  Maier cocked his head.

  “I don’t.”

  “How did he get there from Palestine?”

  “He was recruited by the British to take on a special mission.”

  “Jazz musicians are recommended for those?”

  “Chemists are,” Smits said. “Even an oaf can mix explosives into a bomb. Anton was valued in that he had lived in Paris after escaping from Holland, and before escaping again to Palestine. He agreed to return, and was airlifted along with several young Palestinians.”

  “We’ve picked up other Jews the British inserted into France—why didn’t we learn sooner about Goudsmit?”

  “I don’t know everything,” Smits said.

  Maier shot him in the foot.

  Smits collapsed onto his side, howling. The lieutenant stepped forward to retrieve his gun, but Maier brushed him off. Smits unlaced his shoe, gingerly rolled back the tongue. Maier batted his hands away. “Answer, or I’ll put a bullet in the other one.”

  “I can’t, I am in immense pain.”

  Maier drew back the hammer. Smits said, “Anton knew the British are bumblers with no regard for Jewish lives, and probably he would be captured and summarily killed like the others. He had friends in Paris, loyal comrades, and the names of a few who infiltrated after he left and were waiting for someone like him. They needed him.”

  “For what?”

  Smits clutched his foot and moaned, one eye on Maier, who was unmoved by the performance.

  “I don’t know why. Really, I don’t. The British have plans for rousing the French from their torpor. Fools’ plans, as all British plans are. We . . . the fighting communist underground hit the occupation where it hurts.”

  “Where is that?”

  “It varies. Targets are not decided by the central committee in Holland, or in France, or Moscow.”

  “Who does?”

  “Agents on the ground know best, and do whatever is in their power to accomplish.”

  Smits pulled off his shoe. His sock was wringing wet with blood. He peeled it away, and Maier saw a ragged hole where the ankle met the heel. If the professor were a horse, he’d be put out of his misery without delay.

  “One more point of information, and I will be out of your hair.”

  Smits winced as he investigated the wound.

  “Without Goudsmit could the group continue their activities?”

  “How can I tell you what is happening there when I’m here?”

  “What if you were there, professor?”

  “I wish I were.”

  “Certainly every heroic communist does. Would you continue your activities as your group fell apart around you?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “To the last man?”

  “We are never down to the last. We recruit more.”

  “Frenchmen?” Maier smiled. It was something he found counterproductive during questioning, and most other occasions, but he couldn’t help it.

  “More men,” Smits said.

  “Communists?”

  “Not all. Some never find out they are working for us.”

  “Useful idiots, you mean.”

  “Useful,” Smits said. “What about my foot?”

  “You will receive proper treatment shortly.”

  His escort gathered around Maier, and he marched back to the administrative wing for a word with the commandant.

  “Did you get what you wanted from the prisoner?” Piorkowski asked.

  “He was useful.”

  “Will you need him for further interviews?”

  “For nothing.”

/>   “I see. We will review his situation appropriately in due course.”

  “As he has already eaten his last meal,” Maier said, “I see no justification for delay.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Eddie slept badly, wasn’t entirely awake, and ran out without his hat. He was too far from the house to go back for it when the skies convulsed, and freezing rain collected in his hair and ran down his collar, sending him chasing after the first bus that went by. The squall, passing quickly, laid down a glaze to which the city surrendered abjectly, as had become its habit, and he arrived at Place Pigalle fifty minutes late. The woman waiting there was half-frozen.

  “Monsieur Piron,” she said, “I was beginning to think I’d missed you.”

  Blue lips and a cherry red nose didn’t detract from her dark prettiness. He was all but certain he didn’t know her. If he did, then he wasn’t awake yet. Hers wasn’t a face a sensible man would forget in any arrangement of colors. His guess was that she was one of the women who lay in wait for him more typically after the late show to be taken back to his place, or in the case of the unattractive ones to hint strenuously and to no avail that that was where they wanted to go.

  “I’m Mrs. Goudsmit,” she said.

  It undercut why he thought she was here. Maybe not. Her teeth never stopped chattering while he decided how to handle her.

  “You played with my husband.”

  One thing he could do was to turn her over to the Germans and get them off his back. But he wouldn’t do that to his worst enemy. Not even to a dog. Well, maybe to his enemy.

  “Did I?” Dumb was good. Dumb was how to continue living with himself. Hadn’t he established that with Carla? “I don’t recall—”

  “Briefly.” She fell in alongside as he stepped onto the curb. “He was a piano player. A Dutchman. He was arrested for being in Paris without papers. The SS took him to your club, and you jammed together. Then they took him away.”

  “I remember now.”

  The woman nodded in the empty way of eyewitnesses to tragedy overwhelmed by sadness and unable to describe what they felt.

  “He was a fine player,” Eddie said, “influenced mainly by Earl Hines, I’d say, and some of Teddy Wilson.”

  “He idolized them,” she said. “He could sound like either one and combined their styles.”

  “I thought I knew all the best players in Paris. It surprised me that I wasn’t acquainted with him. I had a ball.”

  “You’re kind,” she said. “He held you in the highest regard. That is why he had his arrangements sent to you after his arrest. Of all the musicians working in the city, he believed you would make the best use of them.”

  Eddie thought for a while before he remembered the envelope with the book of music inside that had arrived mysteriously at the club. How did he tell this young widow burdened with sentimental attachment that her late husband’s writing had no practical value for him? He didn’t use charts, favoring head arrangements that afforded his musicians leeway to improvise.

  “They’re brilliant,” he said.

  “I’d like them back. Anton didn’t leave me much, and I’ve found someone with an interest in purchasing them.”

  “Another jazzman?” He didn’t know anyone who performed the music as Goudsmit notated it. “I’ll have to hunt for it.”

  “You don’t know where it is?”

  “My apartment is a mess.”

  “I really must have it right away.”

  “Give me your phone number.”

  “It can’t wait,” she said adamantly. “I’ll help you look after the show.”

  Which brought him back to what he had speculated about her originally. “Where did your husband learn to play?”

  “I . . . I don’t know. He was self-taught.”

  “He must have had excellent teachers at some time.”

  “He picked up everything from records,” she said. “He wasn’t taking lessons when we were together.”

  A faint accent that he had puzzled over seemed to be German. Again he revised his opinion. He had thought she must be involved in whatever about her late husband intrigued Major Weiler. It was as plausible that she was an agent of Weiler’s on a mission to entrap him, and that he could be rid of her almost at no cost to his conscience.

  “How did his music book come to me?”

  “After he was taken away, I went to the police station and was told that a book belonging to him had been found in the cell. He had mentioned that he wanted you to have it if anything ever happened to him. I asked that it be sent to you after the inspectors released it.”

  Roquentin’s head poked out of La Caverne, searching up and down the street. “Where the hell were you?” he said. “I told Weskers he was fronting the band tonight.” He looked at the woman and rolled his eyes at Eddie. “Never mind, you’re here now. No harm done.”

  Eddie took the bandstand while she found a table out of reach of the footlights. Almost immediately the houselights dimmed, and he signaled the downbeat for “Memories of You.”

  Inserting a straight mute in the bell of his horn, he blew one chorus with a romantic, nasal tone before taking the verse in a rough growl made bluesier by the cold he felt coming on. He played to the woman, who was not moved by the music, undecided what to make of her. Had she come for the book as she said, for the Germans as he feared, or for him? Carla would forgive him for backing the longshot. Hadn’t she forgiven him everything aside from the one thing that was unforgiveable till the day she died?

  The woman nursed a kir that Roquentin topped off throughout the first show without opening a tab. Eddie led off the second set with “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out,” draining the tragic lyric of pity. The SS stormed in during the refrain, Weiler trailing a mob to the front, displacing ringside customers who scurried to the sides of the room. Eddie made way for a mournful duet by Philippe on the piano backed up by drums before the clarinet brought relief. The woman also had scurried. He checked the other tables, the line for the ladies’ room, and at the bar, but she was gone without her late husband’s precious book. Without him. The Germans weren’t enjoying the show. They banged their glasses on the tables, drowning out the music as they called the titles of songs he had no intention of playing.

  Icy rain stalled over the city in the hours after the buses stopped running. He returned to the apartment soaked to the skin. A pot of water was whistling on the stove when he stopped sneezing long enough to fill a teacup and to hunt for Goudsmit’s book. He looked first in the bureau and bookcase, the likely places where it was unlikely to be, and then tore the place apart, not so desperate to find it as glad to have something to do at four in the morning when the prospect of sleep was vague. After half an hour he was convinced he’d been mistaken when he said that he still had it. He stopped searching, and immediately noticed a pile of old newspapers beside the door, and picking through them discovered the tattered accordion envelope, its torn seams and edges repaired with tape and fastened with brown string.

  He untied the knot and slipped out the unbound book of charts, big-band swing song arrangements that were all wrong for him. Goudsmit was a competent arranger and knowledgeable musician who must have known that there was no place for swing in the repertoire of one of the last stalwarts of old-fashioned New Orleans jazz. Crabbed notes in the margins were scribbled in a language he didn’t recognize and took to be Dutch. He quit trying to decipher them, shoved the book inside the envelope again, and kicked it all the way under the bed. If the woman came for it, it was hers, no questions asked. Something was going on that was beyond his understanding. The safe, wise, only thing to do was to keep his distance.

  He walked in again reeking of camphor and eucalyptus oil from the cold remedy he’d picked up at an herbalist in the Latin Quarter. Roquentin held his nose, and said, “Have you gone to war against the customers? You’ll drive them all away.”

  “I can’t play if I can’t breathe,” Eddie said.

  “W
ash it off. I’ll put up a pot of chicken soup.”

  “For my cold? It’s an old wives’ tale.”

  “For your breakfast.”

  Eddie stepped into the toilet to scrub the balm off his chest. When he came out smelling nearly as bad, Roquentin was in an apron standing over the stove in a chicken-and-celery-flavored cloud. “How do you know Janssen’s girl?”

  “I don’t,” Eddie said.

  “The woman you brought into the club yesterday, wasn’t she Borge Janssen’s girlfriend?”

  “You’re confused. She’s Goudsmit’s widow.”

  “What Goudsmit? Who’s Goudsmit?”

  “The piano player the SS hauled in one night. You remember, he played a set, and they smashed his fingers and took him away. She was his wife.”

  “Watch your step,” Roquentin said. “Her hobby is driving jazz musicians to their grave.”

  “I’ll take my ch—okay, I will,” Eddie said. “Why do you say she was Janssen’s girl?”

  “I ran into them together in the Marais not once but twice, shortly before he died. With those dark good looks of hers, she isn’t a woman I’d forget. Evidently, you did.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She dropped by not long ago and sat alone crying into a hankie. I remembered her with Janssen, and thought she must have warm feelings for the place. Didn’t you notice her?”

  “It’s hard to see the customers’ faces with the lights in my eyes.”

  “Then you didn’t see those warm feelings. They were for you. What gave you the idea she was the piano player’s widow?”

  “She told me she was.”

  “No law says she can’t be both,” Roquentin said, “Janssen’s girl, and Goudsmit’s widow, and with her cap already set for you. It could get messy.”

  “What did you really know about Janssen before you hired him?”

  “You hired him, I paid him,” Roquentin said. “He could play. I didn’t demand a résumé.”

  “That’s it?”

  “What do I know about you?” Roquentin said. “What’s behind this belated interest in our late drummer?”