Really the Blues

by Joseph Koenig

  “The Germans put me on the hot seat after Carla died, but what they really want to know about is Janssen.”

  “He hated them. That much I can say.”

  “He hated everyone,” Eddie said. “He hated me for hating America more than he hated it himself.”

  “God bless his soul. I hate the Germans, too.”

  “What do they want from you?”

  “Nothing—besides the club.”

  “What?”

  “We’re barely scraping by. I’m not making money, nor am I losing any. I can go on for a while, but they are pressing me to sell at an absurd price, or take on a partner with connections to the SS.”

  “If you go, I go.”

  “What makes you think they’ll let you? You’re the draw. Without you, the business is worth nothing.”

  “What’ll you do?” Eddie said.

  “I’ll know when my back is to the wall.”

  “Mine’s there.”

  “Stall the bastards. Act indecisive. That’s my advice.”

  “It’s not hard.”

  “Don’t tell them you might be able to find out what they want. They’ll demand more. Of course, if you lie unconvincingly, that’s no good either.”

  “What is good?”

  “Before they called us in for talks was good. Before they became your biggest fans was better. Before the invasion, that was paradise. Didn’t you know?”

  Mavis opened the bag from Galeries Lafayette and waved beige stockings under Simone’s nose. “Genuine silk,” she said. “You can hardly find these back home. I’d buy up every pair in France if I had the money.”

  “When we’re sittin’ on a pile, you’ll sink your end into stockings, corner the market like Jim Fisk done with gold.”

  She rubbed them against her cheek, and then she pulled one on. Simone was in the bathroom lathering his face when he heard her say, “Oh, crap,” and tilted the medicine cabinet mirror for a look.

  “What’s the matter now?”

  “They’re no good. I caught a run.”

  “Must be the silkworms ain’t eatin’ their Wheaties.”

  At a knock on the door she tossed them in the trash and went to answer it.

  “What’re you doin’?” Simone said.

  “Somebody’s here.”

  “We don’t know nobody here.”

  She was knocked aside as the door flew open, and two men rushed in. Simone was toweling shaving cream off his cheek as they forced him back against the tub, on him so fast that he was thinking how ridiculous he looked with half his face shaved when he was caught flush on the other half with a punch.

  Since the fight with Piron, he’d carried a sap. It was in his jacket on a hook behind the door. As he put a hand inside the pocket, a blow he didn’t see coming dropped him to all fours. He was flipped over onto his back, and they went to work on him with feet and fists, stomped so hard over his heart that he felt it stop, and pain was all that was left of him. He grabbed at their legs. When he caught a foot, three others came down on him till he let go.

  Few of his fights were fair fights. He’d stack the odds in his favor or else back down, not ashamed to run rather than risk a beating. In a tiny hotel bathroom against a couple of goons, those strategies were no good. He stopped fighting back, covered his head in his arms, rolled into a ball. It made it easy to haul him back onto his feet and for one of them to pin his arms while the other hammered him.

  He hadn’t noticed the goddamn cat that had Mavis’s tongue. She was a noise machine much of the time, a chatterbox, a loud snorer and a moaner in the sack, a shrieker at scary movies, a sobber at tearjerkers, a grunter on the toilet, and the outstanding wailer at a burial they’d happened to walk by at Cimitiere du Montparnasse. Instead of putting up a racket where it might do some good, she’d been struck dumb. It made him want to scream himself, but the goons were pounding his belly and it was a struggle to suck air into his lungs.

  He’d given up on her when she let out a shout, an ear-splitter straight out of the opera house she was always trying to get him to take her to, a pure, perfect note with a gorgeous vibrato, a high C, or maybe a high F over C rising in intensity until one of the goons pointed a finger like the barrel of a gun, and it quieted her just the same as if he’d fired. In the fresh silence he pummeled Simone with renewed vigor, made him pay for Mavis.

  The goons weren’t amateurs. Destroying his body methodically, they dropped him to his knees again and winged punches non-stop, every part of him a target. Then they settled on his kidneys, pounding so hard that if he survived—a big if—he’d be pissing blood for weeks.

  Of the lessons they had come to teach him, there wasn’t one that he didn’t already know: It wasn’t smart to get mixed up with Nazis, or to scam one, or to be in France in wartime. To have gotten out of bed this morning. To have been born. The agony he’d been put through in five minutes outweighed all the good times he’d had in forty years, with sufficient pain left over to balance against any pleasure that might come later.

  He must have lost consciousness then, because the next thing he knew he was staring into the bathtub drain inches from his face as cold water poured down the back of his head. Another punch left him limp at the bottom of the tub. The goons realized he’d absorbed all the punishment he could stand, or else were arm-weary. A final blow, and they were done with him. One of them picked up his hat from the floor. He straightened the crease with the side of his hand, adjusted the bend in the brim, brushed the felt against his sleeve, and then he nodded to his partner and they left without a word, although Mavis said later that they smiled and tipped their hats.

  Simone came to again with water spilling over his forehead, warm water wrung from a washcloth, looking up into Mavis’s frightened eyes as she admonished him, “Don’t die on me, please don’t, I’m begging you—”

  He got a hand on her shoulder and pushed with all the strength he had left. She didn’t notice it. She dragged him onto the wet tiles, sat him with his back against the tub, and washed his wounds.

  “Ow,” he said, “you’re killin’ me.”

  “They didn’t?” She put her face near his. He thought she was looking for a place to kiss him where he wasn’t bruised, but decided that she was double-checking. “You’ll be okay?”

  He didn’t say anything. It frightened her. “Who were they?”

  “I didn’t get their names.”

  “You know what I mean. What did they want?”

  “It ain’t obvious?” He took away the washcloth, flattened it over his jaw, and wrung the blood out of it. Then he touched his nose, which made a clicking sound as it drifted to the side. Just when it had begun to heal, they’d busted it again. He tried his shoulders, his ribs, his back, gritting his teeth. Probably he could find a spot between his toes their fists had missed, maybe not. “We overstayed our welcome.”

  “They couldn’t have said something? They had to do this to you?”

  “It’s how they operate, these Nazis,” he said.

  “What did we ever do to them?”

  “Start packin’,” he said. “Anyplace has got to be better’n this.”

  “That’s what you told me in Chicago. And in Milwaukee, I seem to remember. Not to mention Detroit and Cleveland. St. Lou, those other towns.”

  “You can’t say we don’t get around. You had a nice Paris vacation. We’ll go back where we speak the language and can figure the angles. We’ll make out fine.”

  “Go back with nothing?” She said it coldly, not caring that he suspected she wanted to pick up where the goons had left off, finish the job.

  “With our lives.”

  “Thank you very much,” she said. “You forgot those lies . . . excuse me, the promises, you made to me about cleaning up on the Frenchies? We come all the way to Europe, and what have I got to show for it besides a stamp on my passport, and having to listen to a schnozz you’re never going to breathe through it right again?”

  “Things’ll get bett
er again,” he said. “They always do.”

  She laughed in his face. “What about that Piron character?”

  “What about him?”

  “He was going to be our meal ticket. You were pushing me in bed with him, a colored boy no less, and he got the last laugh.”

  “The nigger’s too stupid to scare.”

  “I don’t get you.”

  “I had the dirt on him. Told him I’d take it to the Germans if he didn’t pay, but you can’t scare anybody stupid as he is.”

  “You didn’t go to the Germans.”

  “Blackmail’s tricky. They’d’ve arrested him.”

  “You don’t think he had that figured out?”

  “I was gonna hit up his girl and her family. Who knew she’d kill herself and let him off the hook? Believe me, he wouldn’t be laughin’ if she didn’t.”

  “Look at you,” she said. “You don’t believe you now.”

  “Mavis—”

  “I believed you enough. It’s time I took matters in my own hands.”

  “What can you do with those?”

  “I can screw as well—” She stopped. It hadn’t come out how she meant, but she didn’t think Simone missed the point.

  His head tilted back, and he slapped the washcloth over his forehead. “It ain’t the answer. We got a boat to catch.”

  “I was trying to say I can screw Piron without screwing him. Screw him but good. He’ll be lucky he doesn’t get lynched.”

  “The absinthe you been drownin’ in here, it poisoned your brains.”

  “Go back without me,” Mavis said. “I’ll catch up.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  A fan at the late show had presented him with a hard-to-find pressing of “Really the Blues,” Tommy Ladnier’s last leader date, recorded months before the unfortunate trumpeter’s death from a heart attack at thirty-nine, and Eddie had stayed up playing the side over and over. On four hours of sleep, he was improvising on Ladnier’s hot licks, transposing the spectacular clarinet duet by Sidney Bechet and Mezz Mezzrow that was beyond the ability of the Angels’ reedman to mimic. Rehearsals were the order of the day. He would drill the band until they made the number, a showstopper, their own.

  Steady knocking that seemed to come through the walls threw him off the beat. When the neighbors wanted to quiet him, they hammered the heat riser, or else Madame Gilbert downstairs took a broomstick to the ceiling. He put down the horn and opened the door to Madame Gilbert’s boy, fourteen-year-old Pierrot, shuffling his feet on the mat.

  “A telephone call for you, Monsieur Eddie,” he said.

  Eddie dug in his pocket for a coin. “Tell maman I’ll be right down.”

  Madame Gilbert was a blowsy redhead in an immaculate apron looking half as old as the mother of a boy as big as Pierrot had a right to look. A war widow, she let her hand linger against Eddie’s as she gave him the phone. She was not lacking in intuition that some mornings, when the boy was at school, she was this close to an invitation upstairs.

  “Hello.”

  “Did you find it yet? This is Anne Goudsmit.”

  She was trouble. Not the lackadaisical sort that was Madame Gilbert. Eddie’s instinct was to hang up and make the trouble go away. But trouble didn’t take no for an answer. “Call tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll have it for you.”

  Madame Gilbert smiled wryly as he pressed his thumb against the cradle. It wasn’t out of the question that she had had a word with Anne Goudsmit, advising her not to invest her affections in a flighty young man. She held a rag under the faucet and washed his germs off her phone, advertising the fastidious homemaker some lucky stiff was going to snatch off the market if he didn’t move fast.

  Clutching his collar, chin against his chest, Eddie left La Caverne in the face of a wet north wind. His shoes were taking on water, the dampness already in his socks, when someone came out of the shadows and marched beside him. He shifted his trumpet case to his left hand and walked faster, then slowed. Fast again as the stranger kept pace. Tired of the game, he put his foot out and stopped short. His companion tripped over it and whirled around.

  “You again,” he said. “Why aren’t I surprised?”

  “I need my book now,” she said. “I’ll help you look.”

  “It’s three in the morning. I’m bone-tired.”

  “Yes, you can use help.”

  Her opinion of him meant nothing, but he didn’t relish bringing her to search for the book in plain sight on his sofa. It wasn’t as though he didn’t have sympathy for her. Who could be that cold-hearted after what had happened to her husband and boyfriend—whatever they really were to her—and with Germans breathing down her neck? But she was poison.

  “You’re up late for nothing. No book is more important than sleep. I’ll have it for you soon. I’m sorry, but—” He yawned, faking it only a little. “You understand.”

  “Perfectly well,” she said, and continued alongside him.

  Before he could point out that obviously she didn’t understand, he saw a gun, not a small one, angled at him. A ridiculous move on her part. How would she get back her precious book if she shot him? He’d never have peace till it was in her hands.

  “That isn’t necessary,” he said.

  “Just the same. . . .”

  On the stairs he heard a sound behind the Gilberts’ door. This wouldn’t be the first time he’d wakened Madame Gilbert coming back from the club with a new friend to spend the night. He knew what she would think, seeing him with a gun at his back. He’d be hard-pressed to argue that he hadn’t bargained for something like it, though not from Mrs. Goudsmit.

  He hit the light as he came inside the apartment. It startled the woman, who froze on the doorstep. Easy to kick the door shut in her face, but he wanted to be done with her once and for all. If she were to change her mind and ask him to hold on to the book a little longer, he’d insist that she take it away.

  He looked at the brown envelope on the sofa till she was looking at it, too, without seeming to recognize what it was. “The book you’re prepared to shoot me for,” he said; “you’ll find it inside.”

  She switched on his reading lamp. “If you don’t mind,” she said, and sat down with the book in her lap, examined the pages and covers, inside and out, flipped through it a second time. Then she looked in the envelope, turned it upside down, and shook it, angry and disappointed as she squeezed her hand inside and poked her fingers in the corners. “This isn’t all,” she said. “You’re holding back some of the pages. Let me have them.”

  “You’ve got everything.”

  “I have nothing. This is worthless.”

  “Hardly,” he said.

  “What do you know?”

  “I took the liberty of reading the scores. I thought there might be something in Goudsmit’s writing I could borrow. These arrangements aren’t right for my band, but they’re not bad. Some other musician will be happy to use them.”

  “Do you think I’d put myself in danger for musical scores?” she said. “Where’s the rest? Don’t lie.”

  “They’re complete arrangements, there are no gaps. See for yourself.”

  “I’m not a musician. I don’t read music.”

  “I can show you.”

  “Let’s say I believe you,” she said. “Can it be a cipher?”

  “A what?”

  “A code. Some elaborate musical code. Can’t it be?” She adjusted the lamp and buried her nose inside the pages, as if what she wanted was perhaps not to be found in the musical notation but contained microscopically in the ink, or the fibers of the paper, or the cloth cover. “The notes,” she said, “the musical staff, they can’t stand for something else?”

  “It’s jazz,” he said. “Just jazz. Who are you?”

  “I’m sure I told you several times. Do you need a formal introduction?”

  He caught her arm before she could heave the book at the wall. “What did you think you’d find?”

  “That’s none of
your business.”

  “The Germans have made it theirs. They’re asking about Goudsmit and Borge Janssen.”

  “You’ll tell them about me?”

  “I told them I’d keep my eyes open,” he said. “They’re open. I didn’t promise more.”

  “There’s something we’re missing.” She opened the book again, making room for him beside her. “Take a second look.”

  “As you said, it isn’t my business.”

  “I spoke rashly. It’s everyone’s.”

  “You sound like Janssen.”

  “I take that as a compliment.”

  “Take it any way you like. Take it and go.”

  A hard rap on the door had her reaching inside her bag. “Lower your voice,” she said. “You woke the neighbors.”

  The knob turned, and the door rattled in the frame. “It isn’t the neighbors,” Eddie said.

  He went across the room on his toes. His eye was at the peephole when the door shook again, and someone who didn’t care if he woke everyone in the building shouted “Open up. Police.”

  She sat tight, showing the gun. He grabbed her other arm and pulled her to the window, and she broke free, gathered up the book, and slipped it back inside the envelope while he boosted her onto the sill. “It’s three stories to the ground,” she said. “Do you expect me to jump?”

  Reaching around her legs, he reeled in a couple of rungs from a rope ladder.

  “You make so many quick exits—?”

  “I would have burned to death in a hotel fire in Chicago if it weren’t for the fire escape. There are no fire escapes in Paris. I don’t take chances. Not with fire.”

  “What is a fire escape?”

  “Some other time,” he said. “You’ll come down in an alley behind the building. Stay there till it’s safe to go out to the street.”

  “What about you?”

  He eased the window shut behind her. The door hadn’t stopped rattling. “Hold on,” he shouted. “You’ll tear it off the hinges.”

  Two men were waiting. Not the pair who had ransacked the apartment after Janssen’s death, but cut from the same drab cloth. One ran past him as he was pulled into the corridor and he was prodded downstairs, listening to his place being torn apart. On the landing, Madame Gilbert reached out to him in a torn bathrobe in a yellow floral pattern over a flannel nightgown. Pierrot was with her in pajamas and slippers. A stranger, a six-footer, stood between them.