Really the Blues

by Joseph Koenig

  The next days were carbon copies of the last. Every so often he removed the trumpet from the case to fondle it, toying with the valves, putting the mouthpiece to his lips, and snugging it against his embouchure and holding it there like a baby with a pacifier. It killed him—he feared it really would—that he couldn’t blow a note, and he played two full sets along with Weskers and the Angels without making a sound.

  Time was a burden, the long hours with nothing to do so meaningless that he believed he’d lost his mind. But after losing it, it returned to torment him with knowledge gained in places he never wanted to visit. If he lost it again as the empty days repeated themselves, that was okay. Living like this, he had no use for it.

  Wakened early by furniture skating against a bare floor, he shouted, “Hey, let a fellow sl—”

  It was too much noise from a nightclub owner with an aversion to physical labor. He bit his tongue, hoping no one had heard him above the racket. His mind was in excellent working order, back from wherever it had been keeping itself, spinning off grim scenarios when he’d rather not think at all.

  The sun made its appearance on the floor, and climbed the walls. Eddie knew it was noon when light topped the broken tables and chairs. The furniture stopped moving. The racket became the sounds of hammering and drilling, and of wood being sawed. Abruptly, the activity ceased. He was in blackness again when someone came in downstairs.

  “Eddie? Eddie, are you still here?”

  “Where else?”

  The attic door opened. Roquentin struck a match and waved it under Eddie’s nose as though to satisfy himself that he was at the right address. Then he laughed. When a bad situation became worse, it was hard to keep a straight face. That’s how life was. Eddie’s life now.

  “You can’t stay longer,” Roquentin said. “My lawyer informed me that I have until the end of the week to vacate. I came by early to let you know, but the SS were already here with their carpenters and electricians. They are making La Caverne like . . . from the look of things, it will be as joyful as a hospital ward.”

  “You’ll be able to buy it back for sous on the franc,” Eddie said.

  “I’d sooner burn it to the ground. Come—” Roquentin took him to the kitchen. “You need to eat, and to have good food to take on your journey.”

  Roquentin lit a candle, held it in the bread box, and the ice box, and then whipped together sandwiches using his finest cheeses. Eddie gobbled two. Roquentin made two more, and wrapped them in wax paper.

  “You’re too good to me,” Eddie said.

  “I almost forgot.” Roquentin slipped a roll of bills from his pocket, and dropped it into Eddie’s. “Promise me one thing. That you get out of France in one piece. I won’t tolerate finding out you’re dead.”

  “You have my word.”

  Roquentin grabbed him by the shoulders and kissed his cheeks. Eddie squirmed. If he lived in France for a hundred years, he would never get used to being kissed by a man. Kisses wet with tears were hardest to endure.

  “I advise you to remain until midnight,” Roquentin said. “I’ll be leaving Paris soon myself, returning home to Toulouse in the south. If you change your mind about Spain, maybe I’ll see you on the road. Who knows?”

  The sandwiches went in the garbage with Roquentin’s advice. Eddie didn’t have the stomach for it. Being out in the middle of the night in a city under military occupation would call attention to himself. Besides, he needed all the sleep he could get before starting out for God knows where. He cranked open the shutter, pulled the mattress to where the first light of dawn would find it.

  He was on the street five minutes after his eyes opened. A contractor’s truck was at the curb, and he watched workmen in paint-spattered clothes collect their gear and carry it inside La Caverne. If he’d slept thirty seconds longer, he’d have had to spend another day in the attic waiting for them to knock off, or else shinny down the drainpipe.

  At that hour of the morning Place Pigalle was terra incognita. His friends, the night people, were not to be seen again before dark. The sidewalks belonged to men and a few women marching glumly to their jobs. A paradox: In the harsh light of day, the City of Light showed its dark other side. The people, depressed and sullen, moved as though a hidden hand was pulling their strings. Some German officers swung by in a Wehrmacht staff car, the strings not well hidden. This wasn’t the same city that had captured his heart with its vibrancy and openness. It was all a big hospital ward. A psychiatric ward.

  At a bistro three steps below street level, unshaven laborers at a marble counter turned their head toward the stranger with the trumpet case. Eddie stared back until something in the newspaper demanded their immediate attention, and then he dropped a coin in a pay phone.

  “Madame Gilbert, it’s Eddie Piron,” he said. “Did Pierrot leave for school yet? No, I’m fine. May I have a word with him?”

  The woman was gone so long that he used up all his change waiting for her to return to the phone.

  “Allo, Monsieur Eddie.”

  “Pierrot, has anyone been in my place since I’ve been gone?”

  “Why would they, if you are not there?”

  “That’s an excellent question. Forget it. Answer mine.”

  “It is possible,” the boy said. “I’m at school all day. Someone could have entered then.”

  “Is anyone there now?”

  “Inside?”

  “Inside or nearby. Keeping an eye out.”

  “I will find out.”

  “Be smart about it, and quick,” Eddie said. “Don’t be seen yourself.”

  At the other end, the receiver rattled around on its cord until the boy came back. “There’s no one in the hall. I didn’t hear anyone inside your apartment.”

  “One favor more,” Eddie said, “and then you are off to class. Go to the window. Are any strange cars stopped on the block?”

  “Police cars? Cars with license plates from the occupation administration?”

  “Especially those.”

  The venetian blinds clattered, and Pierrot said, “I don’t see any like that.”

  “Now be a good boy and get to school. If anyone asks if you’ve heard from me, tell them you haven’t.”

  “You want me to lie? The priests say it’s a sin.”

  “Till the occupation ends, the sins will be on me,” Eddie said. “After, we’ll see.”

  He walked back to his neighborhood against the glum tides. Did he stand out because he didn’t appear miserable? In his heart there was sadness, but he didn’t think it showed. How ironic that he was leaving the city he’d called home for years, and his was practically the only face that didn’t appear suicidal. One thing he wouldn’t miss was the occupation. He covered his mouth as it opened in a yawn. If he were fully awake, he would make smarter observations.

  The apartment reeked. With the windows shut, it was a repository for stale air, sulfurous fumes from the basement boiler, and kitchen odors from the neighbors which turned fetid when they could not escape. Eddie opened all the windows before ducking into the shower. In the medicine-cabinet mirror he considered a disguise, a moustache and various beards. Maybe he would part his hair on the other side, or sweep it straight back, or color it. Preliminary experiments with razor and comb ended with him looking like someone trying desperately to appear other than who he was. Like the furtive refugees who were easy to pick out on the streets. He shaved, and combed his hair as he always had. Getting out of France in one piece, as Roquentin put it, would be accomplished with his wits rather than whiskers.

  He didn’t pack a suitcase, not wanting to be burdened with luggage, but his horn went everywhere with him. Over several layers of underwear went the suit which he had worn off the boat at La Havre. The mirror showed a dandy at the height of fashion of a dozen years ago. He exchanged the suit for something newer, not flashy.

  As he transferred Roquentin’s wad of bills from one pair of pants to another, he was aware of its thickness. To count it woul
d seem he was measuring his friend’s kindness. Still, he needed to know how much money he had. The amount was equal to close to two months’ salary. A fortune. If he ever saw Roquentin again, he’d grit his teeth and return the kiss. He’d always liked the club owner. Today he loved him. In spite of his lousy advice.

  The morning rush was over. He’d sit tight until the streets were busy again. He felt safest alone in a crowd. But every sound and footstep, each knock on a neighbor’s door had him conjuring the police closing in. Even the fresh breeze that blew out the rankness portended disaster.

  Unable to sit still, he set out immediately for the Gare de l’Est and the early train into the Alps, the time better spent reconnoitering at the Swiss border for a clandestine crossing.

  At the top of the stairs, he turned back for something to read on the long ride. His policiers weren’t on the shelves, but scattered with his music books on the floor. So the flics had already been here. They came so often that he should have left them the key.

  On the third floor landing he was ambushed by Madame Gilbert, who took him in her arms and smothered him in kisses. Had she torn off his clothes, it wouldn’t have been more unsettling. Pierrot hadn’t told her that he was going away for good, because he hadn’t told the boy. A troubling start for his secret journey.

  A taxi stopped across the street went into motion as he came out of the building. It darted ahead, then lagged behind, drew even as he waited at the corner for a red light to change. The men who scrambled out were not prime physical specimens, but of the furtive breed trying to blend in where they always would be strangers. The gun shoved into his ribs felt more natural than Madame Gilbert’s passionate embrace. Prodded toward the cab, he didn’t resist. When wouldn’t he rather ride than walk?

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Another day in the attic, a few hours longer upstairs, and they might have missed him. If it had snowed or rained, as it did almost constantly this unforgiving winter, if the railway workers had called another strike, or avalanches had buried the track, he would have put off his departure and avoided them. His life was the residue of what-should-have-beens, coincidences as improbable as running into Simone halfway around the world, missed opportunities, bad ju-ju. The unholy star he’d been born under shined brightest in New Orleans but cast its light everywhere he went. On his birthdays, his great-aunt Bertha used to take him to St. Louis Cemetery Number One to light candles and burn incense, and to chalk three X’es on the oven of Marie Laveau, invoking the voodoo priestess’s intercession with the demons in her luckless nephew’s behalf. Behind Bertha’s back he’d roll his eyes, angering Marie Laveau unnecessarily and hardening her heart against Bertha’s pleas.

  The taxi took him through working-class neighborhoods into the slums. It was more bad ju-ju that he hadn’t fallen into the hands of kidnappers like those in his policiers, who transported their victims in Packard limousines to penthouse hideaways where they were kept alive on pâté and Champagne. His captors hadn’t said who they were, but their sullen grubbiness seemed to give them away as flics. Otherwise he hoped Germans had him, foreign Nazis preferable to being snatched by the Milice. These three were miscast as militiamen, subdued when they should have been boastful. Anxious, and grim. He took cold comfort in their lack of swagger. He disdained amateurism, apprehensive about falling into the hands of first-timers, whether kidnappers or surgeons.

  They circled a block twice before regaining their bearings. A series of sharp turns took them away from the Seine embankment on industrial avenues, a shadowy part of the City of Light. It had been a long time since a military patrol went by. The filthy streets were under the occupation of pigeons and rats.

  The cab pulled up behind a factory building a shade darker than the pearl-gray cobblestones. He was dragged from the back seat, and his trumpet was taken away. Chicago gangsters concealed tommy guns in violin cases. Didn’t all Americans know their tricks? In every sense he’d been disarmed.

  A freight elevator took him up past smells of dried fish, coffee, and exotic spices that he associated with Cajun cooking. At the fourth floor, the car stopped short half a meter below the landing. One of his kidnappers grunted. The first sound he’d heard from them, it wasn’t a French grunt.

  Chairs and a table were dashed together in a corner of a loft used to store bales of silk. Bare mattresses were arranged in a haphazard bivouac on the floor. Eddie hadn’t been taken by the police, unless kidnapping for ransom was what they did on their day off. Nor were his abductors Germans, who hadn’t come to France to rough it. Nor the Milice, who would have taken him to their headquarters, where he could be tortured in middle-class comfort.

  A familiar smell overpowered the odors from the lower floors. He wasn’t going to be fed pâté. He identified the smell as cassoulet, a stew of meat and beans, coming from a coal stove presided over by a woman stirring a pot with a wood spoon. Anne Goudsmit turned around with a half-smile that wasn’t for him, addressing the men in a language he didn’t recognize. The way they answered, first with head-shaking, then nodding, he guessed that she wanted to know if he’d been trouble, and if everything had gone okay.

  “Where have you been keeping yourself?” she asked him. “We went several times to your house. We didn’t want to bring you here like this, but you gave us no choice.”

  “You had plenty of choices,” Eddie said. “I’m not the only one in Paris who reads music.”

  She laughed a little. “So far, you haven’t proved you can read it at all.”

  “Then you’ve got the wrong man.”

  “As we already have started with you, you will have to do. We can’t pull people off the streets one after the other till we find one who understands the notes better than you do.”

  “What’s stopping you?” he said.

  The table was set for five. At one chair, instead of a plate and utensils, Eddie saw a brown accordion envelope tied up in string.

  “If you won’t try harder to help, that is your decision. The decision about you remains ours. You’ve already disappeared. You won’t be missed.”

  He untied the string and slid the book out. Anyone watching him flip through the pages would know he was going through the motions.

  Anne stepped away from the stove for a word with the men, giving him his first long look at them. Grubby didn’t begin to describe them. They were dressed shabbily and didn’t appear robust, or even clean. Their hideout was a dump. The cassoulet came from dented cans that he saw in a paper bag on the floor. If they believed they were the army that was going to turn back the Germans, they were delusional. Eddie understood why Janssen had been in a lousy mood all of the time. The drummer had foreseen his own doom.

  He didn’t know who they really were; maybe one of the obscure left-wing factions shouting loudest for war against Hitler until it came straight their way. He sympathized with them, but never took on a cause grander than saving his own skin. Their battles weren’t his. His had been fought in Louisiana and points north, and he’d been defeated on every front. People willing to die for something larger than themselves perplexed him. Unless jazz was their cause, music the filter through which all things became explainable. Because he considered himself an artist, he had an aversion to ideologues. In the long run they were his sharpest critics. All political factions were, all bourgeois. All squares.

  There was nothing in the damn book but damn tunes. The woman knew it, but was afraid to confess it to the others, and to him. To herself.

  “You’ve stopped looking,” she said.

  “It isn’t here.”

  “In Russia,” she said, “they call your type useless eaters and let them starve.” She took away the book, poured half of what was on her plate on another, and put it in front of him. “We will feed you just the same.”

  Their nerves were raw, but he wasn’t afraid of them. They were out to kill Nazis, not jazzmen, though Janssen, who knew them best, probably had believed the same thing. He could argue that they were providing him wi
th a new hideout while he waited for the next train to Switzerland, but would be arguing with himself.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  A few bites, and they were almost done eating. Anne said, “How does it matter? I don’t think anything matters to you.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Same answer,” she said. “It’s enough to know that we are enemies of the Germans and won’t be stopped.”

  “From doing what?”

  She licked both sides of the spoon. As she carried her plate to the sink, Eddie saw her glance toward the envelope. Her faction were monks deprived of the language of their bible, who adhered to arcane ritual while hoping to regain its meaning. Eddie Piron had been appointed their exegist, the prophet to lead them out of the wilderness. Without him they had nothing besides ceremony. They were nothing.

  Blind hope was their god, and Goudsmit had been Christ, his plan for them their gospel. Eddie, the idol worshiper who bowed down only before the golden Selmer trumpet, looked at each one of them. The men looked back innocently, but not Anne, who knew that he recognized their helplessness, and that if she acknowledged it she would lose the others for the cause. He felt sorry for her but couldn’t help. He had a train to catch.

  The men rinsed their dishes, and then two of them went out. The one who remained to stop Eddie from escaping—Guy, Anne called him—went to a window, walked away, came back thirty seconds later to see if the skyline had improved.

  The view was as squalid as what Eddie saw from his old place on the south side of Chicago within smelling distance of the stockyards. A prettier picture was Anne, who shone in mean surroundings. He had no good idea of what motivated her to take on an impossible struggle. She wasn’t a Frenchwoman and could have avoided an active part in a war she’d chosen to fight. No wonder she despised him.