Really the Blues

by Joseph Koenig

  De Villiers moistened his throat from his glass and restated his case from page one. Weiler was afraid that he would go on all night when Maier excused himself to make way for the carpenters.

  “The trumpet player committed a rape?” Maier said. “Why wasn’t I informed?”

  “Heads will roll first at the Sûreté for not letting us know,” Weiler said.

  “You spoke to him after the suicide. What is there to tell the old man?”

  “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. His daughter was also a blind fool who couldn’t see two moves ahead. He wants racial justice of the kind we have at home? A pity that he can’t have it. Under the Rassenschande statutes, the girl’s crime was no less than her black lover’s.”

  “You didn’t bring in her boyfriend for screwing a white girl. What did you get from him?”

  “I got nothing.”

  “Not less?” Maier said. “Arrest him again. De Villiers can be a valuable asset. If we are able to offer a kindness, then we should. It’s a Negro head that he wants. Who will miss it?”

  Overnight the run of lousy days ended, the sun in full possession of a hard blue sky, and dry breezes out of the south. A gorgeous day that forced Eddie’s cold into remission for an early dose of spring fever. The recommended treatment was a leisurely walk to work.

  With no warning, the wind shifted to the north. Clouds screened the sun, and the temperature dropped. Hatless, Eddie coughed and sneezed. His trumpet case weighed a ton. Dragging his feet still several blocks from Place Pigalle, he heard his name and saw Roquentin waving to him where he usually got off the bus across the street. They stepped into the gutter at the same time and shook hands on the center stripe, where they would have died together if Eddie hadn’t given Roquentin a quick shove out of the path of a Wehrmacht truck.

  “A close call,” Eddie said, watching the truck roar down the avenue without slowing.

  “It isn’t the only one,” Roquentin said. “I almost missed you. You can’t come to the club. The SS is looking for you.”

  “Who do they say I raped?”

  “We didn’t get that far. I hate to be the messenger of bad news, but better that you learn it from me. The SS don’t just bring bad news. They inflict it.”

  “They’re still there?”

  “They don’t intend to leave without you,” Roquentin said. “You’ve got to hide.”

  Eddie laughed, stopped to shake his head, laughed some more.

  “I can use a good joke,” Roquentin said.

  “It’s not very funny.”

  “An unfunny one will do. Never mind—if you want to keep it to yourself.”

  “I came to Paris, you might say, so that I wouldn’t have to hide. Now I’m told to go into hiding here. There’s nowhere in this world, it seems, where I can show my face. Is it so ugly?”

  “It’s the world that’s ugly,” Roquentin said. “But this is no time for easy philosophizing. We need to get you off the street. Who would take you in?”

  “Carla.”

  “You still have the key to her apartment? That might not be too bad.”

  “I mean where she is now,” Eddie said.

  “No one else?”

  “I’d be asking them to risk their neck to save mine. Considering what mine is worth, it’s a hard sell.”

  “I was afraid you’d say that,” Roquentin said. “I have a place.”

  “What did I do to deserve it?”

  “You think too highly of yourself. The business is lost. I’m already being squeezed out. Keeping you out of the hands of the SS is the one way I have of hitting back at them. You’re doing me the favor.”

  “Let me think about it.”

  “Your opinion doesn’t count. They say you were complicit in Carla’s suicide. I won’t contribute to yours.”

  “Where do you plan to put me?”

  Roquentin stepped on Eddie’s toes, shielding him from the sidewalk. Out of the corner of an eye Eddie saw a couple of flics walk by, holding down their kepis against the wind.

  “At the club,” Roquentin said

  “There’s a funny joke.”

  “We’ll play it on the SS. They won’t look for you there.”

  “They’re looking for me there now.”

  “Yes, and you would appreciate how efficient they are. After they haven’t found you, you can move in upstairs. I use the attic as a liquor closet. You’ll make up a pallet on the floor. There’s all the booze you can drink.”

  “Man doesn’t live by booze alone.”

  “Come downstairs when the customers go home and help yourself to what is in the kitchen.”

  “Just for a little while,” Eddie said. “Until something better comes along.”

  Roquentin took away his trumpet and gave him an umbrella. “When in our entire lives did something better come along?”

  It was too wet to sit in a park. Too public. It had always bothered Eddie that he wasn’t more famous. He’d never really been accepted here. The French didn’t take fully to artists who weren’t native sons. Ask Django, born close by in Belgium and never allowed to forget that he was a Gypsy. Even to serious fans of the music, Eddie Piron was at most the American trumpeter at La Caverne Negre. It would have been best if no one had ever heard him play, or heard of him, seen a face that nothing could be done about other than to hide it in the dark.

  He rode a bus to the Avenue des Italiens near the Paris Opera. At the huge Cinema Berlitz Palais, a hook-nosed ogre looking down from the marquee turned him away. The doors were thrown open for good Frenchmen who had come to learn about the Jews living among them. Le Juif et La France, an exhibit assembled by the Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question, had displaced the movies for the time being.

  He ducked inside a neighborhood cinema without looking to see what was playing, sat through four showings of Remorques, with Jean Gabin and Michèle Morgan, before the lights came on and the ushers kicked him out. He had plenty of time left to kill. La Caverne didn’t come alive until the rest of Paris shut down for the night. Thank God the rains had stopped. Soon, he suspected, he would thank God for even smaller miracles, if he had anything to thank Him for at all.

  At a cab driver’s café, he lingered for hours over coffee with his nose buried in a book. The manual for the Paris hack exam was a riveting masterpiece of French literature which he was unable to put down. They were sweeping around him, stacking the chairs on the tables, when he finally trailed the last cabbie to the street.

  La Caverne was empty now. Roquentin tossed the drunks onto the sidewalk no later than 5:00. The buses had stopped running. Eddie had a long walk back to Place Pigalle. Though the rain had let up, he kept his umbrella open in front of his face. Not the craziest person on the avenues at an hour when everyone had a load on.

  In Montmartre, all the night people knew him. Whores and dips were his biggest fans, along with the bums who loved a soft touch. Tonight he crashed through their outstretched hands. Someone running after him shouting his name caught up and blocked him against a wall.

  “You’re a genius,” he said, “greater than Armstrong. Where were you tonight? We missed you—”

  Disheartening to meet his number one admirer and discover a musical ignoramus. Jabbing the point of the umbrella at the stranger’s belt buckle, he made his escape.

  La Caverne was dark, the savage on the neon sign rigid and colorless without his electric charge. Eddie tapped the umbrella handle against the window, and again on the door. He wouldn’t blame Roquentin for changing his mind about helping. Not too much. Hobnail soles scuffed the sidewalk over the German lyrics to “Lili Marlene” in drunken, three-part harmony. Soldiers arm in arm staggered into him, bouncing him against the window. Waiting to be cut to shreds, he felt a hand displace the shudder on his spine. It crept to his shoulder, his neck, grabbed him by the collar, and pulled him inside the door.

  “What kept you?” Eddie said. “I knocked, and knocked—”

  “I was in the c
rapper. What’s your excuse? It’s almost six.” Roquentin bolted the door, took Eddie away from the windows.

  “Weskers was good?” Eddie said.

  “What?”

  “I asked how Weskers’s playing was.”

  “This is what you worry about?”

  In the darkness, Eddie nodded. The music always came first.

  “Do you need the toilet?”

  “No,” Eddie said.

  “You’re sure? Once you go upstairs, I don’t advise coming down till there’s natural light. What about something to eat or drink?”

  “I want to see my new digs.”

  “Shut your eyes. That’s what you’ll see.”

  Roquentin caught his wrist. Eddie knew every corner of the club but lost his bearings immediately. He stumbled over a stair and was led up a narrow flight that groaned under the weight of two men. A door opened on rusted hinges. Behind it the air was redolent, of dust and soured wine, with a soupçon of dead mouse. Roquentin let him go. Another step, and he was left stranded on an island of spongy footing.

  “I dragged a mattress up here for you,” Roquentin said. “It isn’t the most comfortable, but you could do worse.”

  “Could I?”

  He didn’t mean it the way it sounded. He didn’t mean anything. It was one of those remarks he routinely made that crashed like a lead dirigible. Roquentin was sticking his neck out for him and deserved an apology, but Eddie saved it for another time. If his situation became tense, the insults would come quicker and sharper with even less thought behind them. It was always like that with him. He thought it might explain why he’d never married.

  “You know I like to stay over at the club when we close very late,” Roquentin said. “I won’t do that while you’re here. You’re on your own.”

  “You don’t want to be around if the SS comes back and finds me,” Eddie said. “I understand.”

  “I don’t want to draw them to you with a light.”

  Eddie’s cheek stung. Roquentin was pinching it hard. “Au revoir” was followed by footsteps and the hinges squeaking. Eddie dropped down on the mattress, pulled in his ankles, and sat Buddha-like in absolute darkness, the emperor of all he surveyed.

  The door opened downstairs. He shouted “Wait,” as the dead bolt snapped into place. He’d forgotten to ask for his trumpet. The hell with food, and drink, and going to the toilet, as long as he could have his horn. To sit in the dark silently fingering the valves, making music in his head. Otherwise he was on Death Row.

  The world had turned against him. It had done the same thing before, and he’d bobbed and weaved, feinted the world into believing it had seen the last of him. A dozen years, and now a meaner world had set its hooks for him. Good luck to the world, because Eddie Piron wouldn’t let down his guard again.

  He was prepared to lose himself completely this time, to alter his appearance, become fluent in another language, to change his opinions, even drain his memory, if that’s what it took for him to survive. There would be no Simone to link this new Eddie Piron to the old one. All that he’d keep from his present life was jazz, because without it he’d truly cease to exist. Having seen what his future would be, he needed to settle on a place to live it. One of the outer planets, perhaps. He was trying to be realistic.

  He slept. He realized it as a knife edge of light sliced across his face, opening his eyes, and he watched it broaden on the floor. A filthy window shielded from the street by a shutter was its point of entry. He gave the crank a single turn, then dialed it back. The future had begun. Sunlight, and fresh air, and the sound of the city had no part in it.

  He laid his head down again. Entering a dream, he heard sounds downstairs. Baffled by the long flight, and the attic door, they came softly, faded, and gradually died. Then he heard them again. He wasn’t alone. He knew it as well as Robinson Crusoe did after spotting a naked footprint in the sand.

  He leaned his upper body over the edge of the mattress, clung to it like a life raft as he pressed his ear against the bare floor. Listening hard, he imagined that he heard eggs sizzling in a pan. Certainly they were what he smelled. An omelette frying in sweet butter. Barefoot, on his toes, he crept down the stairs and through the empty nightclub to the kitchen. “Boo,” he said.

  Roquentin, standing at the oven with an apron over his pants, whirled around with a fierce look. “Get back upstairs.”

  “What harm—?”

  “Now.”

  He retreated to the attic. Sure, he needed to be cautious—he and Roquentin did—but there were moments when they could relax a little.

  But when he was settled again on his raft, he heard voices, Roquentin’s provincial twang surrendering to guttural consonants and strangled vowels, sentences that went on forever before finding a verb. He held to the mattress eavesdropping on a conversation conducted through an interpreter. A short silence, and then there were footsteps on the stairs, and a knock, and though it had to be Roquentin (the SS knocked heads, not doors), he couldn’t pry himself loose till Roquentin came in with a tray under a linen napkin, not much different than room service at the Ritz.

  “How did you sleep?”

  “Like a baby,” he said. “I cried all night.”

  A belly laugh from Roquentin wasn’t what he expected. Roquentin’s life was in show business, and he’d never heard that ancient gag? France needed new comedians to replace the clowns in gray uniforms, who weren’t funny at all.

  Roquentin placed the tray on the floor beside the mattress. Eddie gobbled a croissant, but eating like an animal embarrassed him. He tugged at Roquentin’s cuff, didn’t touch another morsel till they were sitting shoulder to shoulder.

  “Who were you talking to?” Eddie asked him.

  “They won’t be back any time soon,” Roquentin said. “Have you figured out where you’d like to go from here?”

  “Yes, I’m going to live on the planet Jupiter.”

  Roquentin nodded gravely. “It’s a long journey. You’ll need money. I owe you a week’s salary, and can lend you some more.”

  “Knowing you’ll never see it again? That isn’t a loan.”

  “You’ll send what you can from the moon. How will you get out of France?”

  “Switzerland is still neutral. What other way is there?”

  “The Pyrenees. They say Franco isn’t turning back refugees. You might consider Spain.”

  “I’ll consider everything,” Eddie said.

  “I have to go downstairs,” Roquentin said. “Sorry to leave you alone. But if someone else comes by to ask where you are—”

  Eddie ate half of what was on the tray, saved the rest. There was no telling when Roquentin would be back. He emptied the coffee pot. Fifteen minutes later he refilled it. The coffee didn’t allow for more sleep. Or maybe he’d slept enough. It was a unique experience for a jazzman, but he didn’t recommend it. Better to be up all night making music till he was too tired to draw another breath.

  The light climbed the walls and mounted a jumble of broken furniture in a corner. On the chair on top was a yellow Editions de la Pleiade paperback of Voltaire’s Candide. He read a page and tossed the volume across the attic. What wouldn’t he do to have a policier? For Simenon, or Sherlock Holmes, or any of the great crime solvers whose powers of deduction might even discover a way out of his predicament? He gave Voltaire a second chance, forcing it down like castor oil. The Paris taxi manual was more engrossing. With a better plot.

  He didn’t put it down until the light faded. He was hungry again. Thirsty and cold, although sometimes, when he felt the walls close in, he was hot. Bored crazy. Crazy to have a woman. Without one he dwelled on old girlfriends, a pornographic bedroom rotogravure, puzzled why sex should be foremost in his thoughts. A question with an obvious answer: When wasn’t it? Wasn’t the instinct for sex the last to go? Preservation of the species, and all that? He wasn’t concerned about preserving an entire species, but only the smallest part, the single unit called Eddie Piron.
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br />   He closed his eyes again. Music woke him. A band—not any band, but his Angels—taking the “Livery Stable Blues” at breakneck tempo, a stampede. Eddie hated the number, cornball musical antics from the earliest Original Dixieland Jass Band recording sessions replete with barnyard sounds. Years ago, he’d stricken it from the Angels’ playlist. Fans who tossed money at the stage demanding to hear it were out of luck. Weskers had announced that it was his favorite number, led a failed rebellion to bring it back as an encore specialty. Tonight Weskers was all over the melody, losing it during a choppy improvisation, and unable to find it again, leading the clarinet and piano to a dead end and abandoning them there. Eddie restrained himself from sneaking downstairs to hide behind the back curtain and play the notes while Weskers silently fingered his instrument up front. Forced to listen helplessly while Weskers butchered the music was real torture. The SS could take lessons from Gert Weskers.

  “It’s a good thing for you that I’m leaving,” he said to Roquentin in the kitchen after the late show when the crowd and the staff had cleared out. “If I stayed, I’d hit you up for a huge raise. You’d pay, or listen to Weskers every night.”

  “Don’t knock him. Gert’s my revenge on the SS. They think they’re getting a going concern, but he’s chasing away customers.”

  Neither man laughed. What Roquentin had said was funny in a way, Eddie thought. Looking at it another way, that’s the last thing it was.

  “I’m going home to sleep in my own bed,” Roquentin said. “I have an early appointment with the lawyer. You’re on your own till noon. Do I have your word you’ll keep out of trouble?”

  “What trouble?”

  Another gag line that fell flat. Why wasn’t anyone laughing?

  Eddie stood by the window out of sight of the street watching Roquentin walk to the end of the block. Then he turned on the lights, giving himself a minute to find his trumpet. He began in the office, in the file cabinet and closet, and the cardboard box under Roquentin’s desk filled with umbrellas and sweaters, and at least two pairs of shoes that was the lost and found, moved to the kitchen and then the club, convinced that Holmes had nothing on him as he homed in on the stage and slid out the trumpet case from a tangle of light cable behind the drum kit. He hefted it to feel the weight of the horn inside, and then dashed to the attic, where he remembered the lights, and ran back to shut them off.