Really the Blues

by Joseph Koenig

“A dog?” she said in English. “Make sense.”

  “A fan of the music.”

  “All fans are yours?”

  “I used to wish they were.”

  The man went through his pockets for a handbill, folded it to the clean side, and stepped over other passengers’ feet, pointing a pencil at Eddie. “My God, he wants your autograph,” Anne said, and pulled Eddie out of the car at the next station.

  They crossed the platform to another train and rode across the city to the Champs de Mars stop near the Eiffel Tower. Anne slipped her arm around Eddie’s hips, and they walked the tourist streets feeling as obvious as the doomed couples they’d left behind. Her hand was cold, not soft, and prodded him whenever he dropped the pace. As a caricature of affection it was as believable, he thought, as a revolver pressed into his flesh.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  At the four-star Auberge St. Viateur, the girls working a convention of Bavarian chocolatiers were demure and well-mannered and spoke second-hand German punctuated with barracks curses. The desk clerk smiled familiarly at Anne, and at the trumpet case that was Eddie’s luggage. The rates were as obscene as the prostitutes’ chatter, but Eddie felt secure in a hotel that kept out the riff-raff, catering to a better class of Nazis. He thought up a name for the register, and Anne preceded it with Mme where it was her place to sign. In an elevator smelling of bon-bons and cocoa, a man with plump, hairless cheeks and jeweled swastika cufflinks recited a story that ended in a one-word punch line that sounded to Eddie like “Palesteena.” Other sweet-smelling fat men couldn’t stop laughing. “Palesteena” was an Original Dixieland Jass Band hit built around an oriental riff, but Eddie doubted the Germans knew any of that. Anne looked hard at the comedian. Eddie saw her look at all the laughing chocolate men, sorry that she didn’t have a real revolver to use.

  Their room was immense, cream-colored with gold trim, stuffed with Louis XIV reproductions, a set for a boudoir farce. The bed was in keeping with the outsized scale. The carved, painted headboard forced Eddie into comparisons with the scoreboard behind the sun-bleached outfield at Heinemann Park by the New Orleans railyards, where the Pelicans played ball. Anne gave it a wide berth, circling toward an easy chair beside the window.

  The Philips radio on the mantel was fixed on the German station. News of the Wehrmacht’s latest triumph gave way to a broadcast from Berlin, a fulminating Katzenjammer Nazi. Eddie turned it off. Anne said “Put it back on,” and he tilted it toward the door to keep their voices from being heard in the corridor.

  “Since we have no choice,” she said, “I can’t object to staying here.”

  Eddie said, “I could get used to luxury like this.”

  “You mean if everything was different. If the Germans hadn’t taken over.”

  That wasn’t what he’d meant. He didn’t mean anything he hadn’t said. He didn’t care for Germans any more than she did, hadn’t a taste for luxury even when Carla had tried to make him a slave to it.

  “The world is what it is,” she said. “What anyone hopes for is irrelevant.”

  “Give yourself some credit for trying to make it different.”

  “I’m irrelevant.”

  “Me,” he said, “I’m hungry.”

  She didn’t like his flip attitude, but didn’t object to ordering from room service.

  “The clerk won’t be happy that he can’t rent this room a second time tonight,” Eddie said. “You saw how he looked at us. He expects to pocket a second fee.”

  “These days everyone chisels. I can’t blame him.”

  She’d had little to say since he’d stopped being her captive. With his pocket full of money and hers empty, she’d become his. They sat looking at each other across the white carpeting till there was a knock on the door, and Eddie brought in their food.

  Anne wolfed her meal, yawned, and put her plate on the floor.

  “Time for a nap,” Eddie said, and moved over to make room for her.

  She gave him the same look she’d had for the Germans in the elevator. “I’m comfortable where I am.”

  He didn’t undress. His money was in his pants. The best way to guarantee that it still would be there along with her when he woke was to leave them on.

  She was out cold instantly. Probably, she’d learned to sleep under conditions more troubling than those keeping him awake. If he could be like her. . . . Why consider it? Someone had to put her neck on the line fighting Nazis, and someone had to stay up till dawn in smoky clubs entertaining people who didn’t much give a damn about what was happening in the world. That was how it was.

  He was still awake when her chair creaked. “I can’t sleep,” she said. “I keep thinking about—”

  “Guy? And the others?”

  “How I failed.”

  “At what?”

  “Everything—leave it at that. And don’t ask who I am.”

  “Tell me about Goudsmit,” he said. “And Janssen. Nothing can happen to them where they are now. Who were they?”

  “Go to sleep.”

  He patted the mattress. “Thanks the same,” she said, and rearranged herself on the chair. Eddie’s eyes closed and he felt himself drifting off. “You really don’t know about them?” she said. “Borge didn’t try to make a convert of you?”

  “Huh?” he said groggily. “Janssen? All the time. He despised me for not being political. As for what he wanted to convert me to, I never learned more than that he hated Germans a good deal more than the average Frenchman does.”

  “He talked too much. He had no discipline.”

  “Is that why he died?”

  She yawned again. Eddie expected another brush-off, but then she sat up straight. “Yes,” she said. “But not what you’re thinking.”

  “What should I think?”

  What was the use in asking? Hadn’t she made it clear a thousand times that she wouldn’t speak about herself and her organization? He was stretching out again when she said, “He was going to help me create a resistance against the occupation.”

  His back hurt, but he held as still as he had in his great-uncle’s blind in the long-leaf pines when a white tail came into his sights and the slightest movement would send it bolting.

  “But he got himself killed,” she said. “He was a reckless man who died for nothing—nothing having to do with why he came to France.”

  “Goudsmit was like him?”

  “You insult Anton’s memory. Anton was brilliant without being stupid, traits found in combination in too many smart men. You heard him at the keyboard, how meticulous he was with each note. That’s how his brain met every challenge.”

  “The challenge of being your husband while you lived with Janssen?”

  “He was a free-thinker who looked down his nose at marriage. We were closer than man and wife, although I was not attracted to him physically.”

  “Yes, I see now,” Eddie said. “Very brilliant.”

  “You didn’t know him. His ideas had real value. Janssen was a prototypical red, a vehement proletarian, once you overlooked that his father was a dentist and his mother came from the minor nobility. He styled himself as the Danish Lenin, and weren’t we fortunate to have enlisted him in our plot. His ideology was wet—”

  “I’m unfamiliar with the various leftist factions,” Eddie said.

  “It came from the bottom of a bottle,” she said. “He couldn’t keep his mouth or zipper shut and needed to be iced down when an attractive woman, or the other kind, passed within arm’s reach.”

  “You lived with him?” Eddie said. “Not Goudsmit?”

  “We all sacrifice for the cause.”

  “He didn’t strike me as someone who would kill himself.”

  “He didn’t strike himself as that type either,” she said. “Anton knew him before the war through jazz circles. He didn’t have a good opinion of his politics, or his talent as a musician.”

  “He wasn’t too bad—”

  “Or of yours,” she said. “It isn’t a
s though we could place advertisements for underground fighters who were committed, brave, and sober. We took whoever was willing to carry out a dangerous job. Janssen wasn’t the worst. Not by far.”

  “So you killed him.”

  Her foot hit the floor. Her heel, landing in the plate, shattered it. She collected the broken pieces and wrapped them in a napkin, and then used the napkin to blot a trickle of blood on her foot, all while Eddie wanted to kick himself. He’d gotten her talking, but it wasn’t enough. Attempting to show that he wasn’t a dope, he’d managed only to put her on guard.

  “You were saying. . . .”

  “The credit goes elsewhere,” she said. “I don’t know who she was.”

  “She?”

  “Once, returning from a meeting with Anton, I saw a girl, not the prettiest, leave the apartment. The bed was damp when I got into it, and it reeked of hand-rolled cigarettes and cheap fragrance. The second time I saw her was when she stopped me on the sidewalk to mention that she would pour acid in my face if I didn’t let her have Borge. A real proletarian. A student, he told me, though I’m skeptical. More likely they found each other at the club where he played with you.”

  “It would seem that you should have let her have him.”

  “It would seem she did everyone a favor.” Anne stopped talking to press the napkin against her heel. “That was unfair. Janssen was a sad excuse for an underground fighter, but didn’t deserve what he got. She was jealous over nothing. I wasn’t his lover any more than I was Anton’s. We lived together for appearance’s sake, when nothing could have been more inconvenient. After she threatened me, Janssen had no choice but to tell her to get lost. A day later he was dead at her hands, or her brother’s, or her pimp’s. Another lover’s, for all I know.

  “Consider my situation,” she went on. “A stranger in Paris to build a resistance movement, one of my key operatives is murdered in a stupid lovers’ quarrel. With the Germans breathing down my neck, I’m stuck with a body that will stink if I don’t get rid of it fast, and my organization will decay with it.”

  “Wouldn’t it have been easier to dump it in a field or bury it in the basement, instead of taking it to one of the most picturesque bridges over the Seine and hanging it for everyone to see?”

  “I, myself, though not at all brilliant, am not smart either,” she said. “Anton was already dead. With Janssen gone, too, there was no one I had worked with longer than a few days, or who had my full confidence. I thought if we made a public display of Janssen’s death, the Germans would think our operation had collapsed and lose interest in hunting for us.”

  “They weren’t fooled.”

  She shrugged. “Janssen’s death began a run of bad luck. Explosives he’d stored improperly went off in the basement, nearly killing me, and then . . . never mind. As you see—” She lifted the napkin and dabbed at the cut, which was bleeding again. “It hasn’t changed.”

  “Where do you go from here?”

  “I can’t tell you,” she said.

  “Because you won’t say more about yourself?”

  “Because I don’t know. What’s the hurry?”

  “We can’t stay forever.”

  “Now you mention it.”

  Her smile, when he finally had it unblemished by cynicism, was not French, the ideal instrument of the irony that shaped it, well worth the wait for the second or two that it lasted.

  “I should try to sleep,” she said. “I don’t often have a safe place to catch up.”

  Again he patted the bed. “It’s not damp, and doesn’t smell from cigarettes or perfume. There’s plenty of room.”

  She reached for the envelope. The last thing he saw, shutting his eyes, was the book in her lap as she turned the pages mechanically. They opened again as she bumped against his leg. “Change your mind?”

  “The chair,” she said, “it’s a crippler.”

  His arm crooked around her shoulders and turned her onto her back.

  “No.” She wrapped herself in the extra blanket. He brushed his lips against the base of her neck, and she caught his hand riding along her hip and pinned it against the mattress.

  “It’s understandable that we are anxious tonight,” she said, “not knowing what tomorrow may bring. It would feel so good to make love and relieve those tensions.”

  He snuggled close. “Some of them, yes.”

  “For me it would create others,” she said. “Relieving your tensions is not the purpose of my existence, and I can endure mine without help, thank you very much. I wouldn’t make love for such a slight excuse.”

  “What for, then, only to have babies?”

  “Not only.”

  “What am I missing?”

  “Everything, I should say. It is called making love because that is what it should be. It isn’t called relieving tensions.”

  “Do you find me repulsive like Goudsmit? Maybe stupid like Janssen? Or have you discovered something else to dislike?” Eddie said.

  “I don’t know you. Therefore I can’t love you. There is no good reason to have sex with a casual acquaintance, not for me. Whether or not I may be physically attracted to you, don’t bother to analyze it. It goes nowhere. The time will be put to better use in getting your rest.”

  “Did you deliver that speech off the top of your head, or was it prepared in advance for when you find yourself in bed with a man?”

  “You should feel flattered to know that you are my muse.”

  He wasn’t ready to let her have the last word when it was no. “A modern woman,” he said, “you can’t be serious.”

  “I don’t give the impression of seriousness? Please let me know where I’m vague. I will try to be more clear.”

  In the middle of the night when he woke to massage a cramped leg, her blanket had come undone and she lay on her side with the top of her head just below his chin, so close that he felt each breath. A moan tickled the hairs on his chest, and then she hoisted herself onto her other side, rubbed against him like Josephine Baker doing a somnambulistic turn till her rear was nestled against his hips. Whatever tortures the Germans had in store for him couldn’t be as agonizing. He reached out for her again. Less than awake, her objections might not be strenuous.

  He berated himself for what he was thinking while he thought more about it. Trying for sleep was an ordeal in a bed that reeked of a nubile woman in her full efflorescence, so he took her place in the crippler chair. After twenty minutes, he got up to ease an ache in the small of his back and tripped over something in the dark. Using his toes, he sized up her precious book and kicked it across the floor.

  Soccer wasn’t his game. A better kick would have sent the book out the window. Easy enough to do that yet. Not so easy to face Anne in the morning when she asked where it was.

  He turned on the light. Yanking the book out of the envelope, he sliced through a taped seam, the heavy paper curling back to reveal foreign script in a meticulous hand. He stripped the tape from the opposite crease, folded the paper on the remaining hinge, and spread the envelope open with its stained, filthy side against his lap. The other side was clean, a buff canvas for a schematic drawing, lines, arrows, and mysterious symbols as incomprehensible to Eddie as the notations in the unknown language.

  He managed not to shout. What he understood of Goudsmit’s writing was that it was a death contract for a woman acting alone—for anyone trying to put it into action. What flaw in his character prevented him from dropping the envelope out the window while encouraging Anne to continue probing the book of music for its hidden meaning? It was a conundrum requiring almost as much analysis as her feelings about him.

  “Why is the light on? Come to sleep.”

  She was still on her side, her head propped up on one arm and a hand cupping her ear, a beautiful woman calling him to bed while he put his brain through gyrations about bombs and plots.

  “You woke me,” she said. “What are you doing?”

  Uninterested in the answer, she bunched th
e pillow and buried her face. His knee depressing the mattress and his hand on her back caused her to ready an elbow for him. The lamp on the nightstand came on, and she turned toward him, shading her eyes with her hand. “Why won’t you sleep?”

  “I have it.”

  “You do?” She yawned, and behind her covered mouth asked, “Have what?”

  Eddie opened the envelope over the sheets, and she squinted at the diagram through sandy eyes. “What am I looking at?”

  “Your holy grail.”

  He put her hand on the paper, as though it were braille and she needed help in finding her place. She couldn’t see clearly, still unaccustomed to the light. She rubbed her eyes, blinked them into focus, and sat up suddenly wide awake, her breast spilling out of her blouse a holier grail, the picture more entrancing than the one she examined now from every angle.

  “Where did you—?”

  “The inside of the envelope the book was in,” he said, “that’s what you’re looking at. It’s Goudsmit’s plan?”

  “Didn’t I say he was brilliant? Who else would have thought of hiding it there?”

  Too brilliant. Eddie kept it to himself. “Will you tell me now what it’s for?”

  She shot an unpleasant look as her hand went to her breast. She buttoned her blouse, and then she examined the paper for a full minute before turning it 180 degrees, so that she was viewing it upside down, or else had been before. Then she turned it back the other way.

  She stifled a laugh. Eddie didn’t share her sense of humor, how anything connected to a bomb plot could be funny. The frustrated laugh came with tears that weren’t tears of joy, and she wiped them away, and lowered her head over the drawing the way she’d scrutinized the musical arrangements when she couldn’t figure why Goudsmit’s secrets eluded her. She muttered two or three words in a strange language. Though Eddie didn’t understand them, couldn’t tell where one ended and the next began, there was no mistaking that they were curses.

  “I can’t do it,” she said to him. “Not the slightest part.”

  “Do what?”

  “Blow up this place.”

  “You don’t have explosives? Wires? Batteries?”