Really the Blues

by Joseph Koenig

  Champenois dropped the leash. The dog jammed its muzzle into Eddie’s crotch, and the big jaws opened. Fido sniffed, shook himself, then skulked away. Eddie was taken to a room as bright and airy as a punishment cell, where he made a pretense of disappointment losing out to anger at not finding anything.

  “She didn’t leave—?”

  “Not a button, Monsieur,” Champenois said. “The room was as empty when she vanished as the day I let her have it.”

  “That isn’t what she claims.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “She was captured less than three hours ago. She swears that you provided assistance in secreting some items on your property.”

  “That’s absurd,” Champenois said. “Why would I?”

  “She is young and beautiful,” Eddie said. The residue of vanity sparkled in the old man’s smile. “Also desperate and lonely. I would venture that she was not the only one who was. I’m going to tear the place apart until I find it.”

  “It?” the old man said. “What is it?”

  “You know very well.”

  “Come back in the morning when there is bright light and you are sober. It will become clear there is nothing here.”

  “Get dressed,” Eddie said. “Leave some food for the dog.”

  “Go ahead, have your way. See if I give a damn.”

  “Give me your shovel.”

  “I haven’t got one.”

  “In your shed.”

  Champenois fell back against the bed. Eddie considered that in his thirties he had found his real talent, and it was not as a musician, but as a character actor in the role of the hard-bitten flic. Leaving the old man with Fido curled up at his feet, he went outside.

  A tin shed stood tall over a sea of junk in the tiny back yard. Here the street light didn’t reach, and the moon stayed away. From a collection of garden implements sufficient to cultivate a small farm, Eddie selected a shovel with a broad blade. Fido came, and Eddie choked up on the handle. Champenois trailed them to the rear of the house, where he pointed out Anne’s window. Eddie sent him inside to turn on the light and open the shutter.

  Eddie wedged the shovel into the earth, pressed his foot against it, and pried out a pebbly load. The ground was moist, cemented with frost. The digging wasn’t easy as he scraped out a space about a meter square, and then deepened it. Champenois went back to the house for a cardigan to throw over the robe, and cigarettes that he chain-smoked leaning against the wall. He was sleepy-eyed, eager for bed, a feeling that was contagious until the shovel bit against something hard, and he bent over the hole.

  “It’s a box.” Champenois crossed himself. “So help me, I don’t know what it’s doing there.”

  He made a grab for the shovel. Eddie held it out of his reach, then flung it away. Fido ran after it, and brought it back while Eddie carved the soil with his fingers, carefully lifted the box, and set it down in loose earth.

  As he raised the lid, Champenois leaned over his shoulder and struck a match. Eddie shoved him back, and the dog lunged. “Fido, no,” the old man said without conviction. The box was filled with crumpled newspaper. Probing with his fingertips, Eddie traced the outline of a tubular object, then raised one end of a stick of dynamite. Chamepenois came near again, and Eddie closed the lid.

  “What did you find?”

  “As if you don’t know,” Eddie said.

  “But I don’t. I don’t know anything. It is all a mystery. I curse the day I let the Jewess under my roof.”

  “Let’s go,” Eddie said. “My car is in front.”

  “Please, I don’t want trouble,” Champenois said. “It isn’t my fault that it finds me.”

  “I should say it has. I advise putting on pants. You may not return home in this lifetime.”

  “You are being unjust.”

  Eddie shrugged. “I will wait for you in the car.”

  The old man’s face was shiny with tears as he went inside again. Eddie hurried across the street. “Hey,” he whispered, “where are you?”

  The wind whistling through the trees answered. Had a real policeman happened by, or had the neighbors reported a prowler, unduly attractive, lurking on the block? “Shush,” he heard, and Anne was suddenly at his side.

  “You have it?” she said.

  He showed her the box.

  “What about Champenois?”

  “He is dressing for the executioner. I feel bad playing tricks on a frail old man.”

  “He’s a compulsive lecher. I couldn’t undress for bed without his eye at the keyhole. His dog is worse.”

  “Yes,” Eddie said, “his dog.”

  She handled the dynamite without tenderness, unbuttoned her blouse, and slid the sticks against her body. Eddie said, “Are you determined to die horribly?”

  “If you have means of transporting them without keeping them close enough to blow us up, let me know. Put down the box, and let’s . . .” She froze as another bicycle came down the street. “Let’s get going . . . Something in the air—” A spasm racked her body, snapping her head back, and then she sneezed. “I’m allergic to.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  A light shining through the papered windows gave La Caverne the soft glow of a Japanese lantern. Listening at the door, Eddie was nearly certain no one was inside. In case he was mistaken, he sent Anne around the corner before using the key Roquentin had given him to let himself in.

  The light came from an unshaded lamp on a blocky object cloaked in a painter’s dropcloth. A radio crackled with static, all that was left on air after the broadcasters went silent for the night. A half-eaten sandwich in a circle of empty beer bottles fed a swarm of flies. Eddie stuck his head out and whistled for Anne, who came back steadying the precious cargo against her breast. “It looks like everyone was taken away without warning.” She shut off the radio. “As if there was a roundup.”

  “More likely the painters went home early after their bosses left,” Eddie said. “In a few hours they will be back. The old place looks almost new again.”

  She sniffed the pleasant linseed-oil scent of fresh paint. Eddie raised a corner of the drop cloth and drummed his fingers on the glossy surface of a new eight-burner stove. A tangle of electric wires sprouted through empty wall sockets, but not much else remained to be finished.

  “They’re working fast,” he said. “We don’t have a lot of time.”

  “What we have to do doesn’t take much time,” Anne said. “If you are willing to come onstage with the dynamite and a match to light it, and to toss the sticks into the laps of the enemy, it shouldn’t take any at all.”

  “I’ll keep it in the back of my mind.”

  “A delayed-action bomb will give us the chance to be away from the building when it goes off.”

  “That’s more what I was thinking of.”

  “But not as uncomplicated. Two sticks of dynamite, strategically placed, could bring down the entire building, killing everyone.”

  Eddie said, “Isn’t that what we want?”

  “Everyone means everyone. Not only Germans, but waiters, the band, your friends. Anyone who stops by for a drink at the wrong time. Can you accept that on your conscience?”

  “I’ll consult my conscience later. What do you say?”

  “You know.”

  “Kill every German?”

  “Every damn one. Along with every collaborator.”

  “The rest—they’re on their own?”

  “Every one is your good friend,” she said. “Is that it?”

  “A few aren’t.”

  “None are mine.”

  Eddie held his hand against the bulge in her blouse.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Trying to prevent you from going off. How good are you at building bombs?”

  She slipped the dynamite sticks out of her blouse and lay them on the dropcloth. “My instructors in England were the most skilled saboteurs to have escaped from eastern Europe. Bring me an alarm clock, ba
tteries, and copper wire, and I can topple the Eiffel Tower. Demolishing the club, it’s child’s play.”

  “I don’t know any children who play like that.”

  “That’s you.”

  “This isn’t easy,” Eddie said.

  Anne didn’t answer.

  “For you?”

  “Not as hard,” she said. “Leave it at that.” And when he still hesitated, wanting more: “I’ll do what I can so you sleep well.”

  “How will you build your bomb?”

  “Let me worry. The difficulty will be yours, in keeping alive those who don’t deserve to die. I’m open to anything that kills the rest.”

  “I hadn’t considered it till now.”

  “Consider this. You will be on stage. For many the last words they hear will be yours. What will you say to separate the others from them?”

  “When I am playing God?”

  “You don’t strike me as much like God. You’re more like Abraham, who begged God to spare Sodom if he could find fifty decent men there. When he couldn’t, he dropped the number to forty-five, and then forty, and then to thirty, and to twenty, and to ten. Abraham failed to find even that many, and Sodom was destroyed. You will fail, too.”

  “How do I invite some people to continue their lives, and others to be blown to bits? This business of playing God, it stinks.”

  “Even for Him.”

  “There is a woman wishing to speak to you,” said Weiler’s adjutant, Pfluge, “about a matter of utmost urgency.”

  Weiler looked up from the menu of a seafood restaurant in Montparnasse recently transferred to German hands. He almost didn’t recognize Pfluge, whose nose had been altered by the explosion several weeks before, though it was hard to decide where exactly it was changed. “Every Parisian has a half dozen at least,” he said. “Why are you bothering me?”

  “She isn’t Parisian. Not even French, but American.”

  “The question remains. Why?”

  “She’s the woman raped by the trumpet player from Place Pigalle, and wants you to know she is en route to the Sûreté to file a formal complaint.”

  Weiler went to the window. As he opened it, a breeze sailed the menu to the floor.

  “You won’t see her? I’ll send her away.”

  “As he is the star at the opening of our club on Friday while we seek his arrest, it’s understandable that there is some confusion. I will straighten her out.”

  Reaching under his desk for the menu, he watched python-skin peep-toe pumps come near. The heels were run down. He suspected that the soles were patched with newspaper. After hearing from the woman about Piron, he hadn’t looked into her story, satisfied simply to have it. Now he worried that too much might be made of it and would ruin the big night at La Caverne Negre.

  “Good afternoon, Madame,” he said in English when they were face to face. “What can I do for you?”

  “Know what you can do?” Mavis stood with one hip cocked, and her hand pressed against it. The other dangled a beaded purse. “Ah, forget it. It’s been . . . how long’s it been, and I haven’t heard a damn thing about Piron. Getting warm yet?”

  “He’s gone to ground. We are searching everywhere and will have him soon.”

  “Don’t give yourself eyestrain. He’s blowing his horn at his club on Friday. You Jerries own this town. What’s the rub?”

  “It isn’t that uncomplicated,” Weiler said. “Have patience.”

  “I’m fresh out. I’ve had it to here with Paris. I want to go home, but the gent who brought me left me high and dry. I told Piron I’d forget what he did to me for the right price—”

  Weiler watched her grope for other words. If she could be bribed to forget something that probably never happened, then why should he concern himself with it?

  “Not that I could forget. I’m scarred for life,” she said. “Till you find him, I’m stuck in France without a pot to pee in. What I’m saying—”

  “It is hard to support yourself as a tourist.”

  “What I’m thinking is I’m hoisting the white flag and surrendering to you.”

  “You overlook that we are not at war with each other. I may be able to arrange a work permit. What can you do?”

  “Singing and hoofing,” Mavis said. “A little acting. You need a Yank to play the heavy in one of your pictures, I’m your gal.”

  How utterly American she was in the forthright way of all Americans, unlike the native coquettes incapable of speaking frankly to a German. Colonel Maier would regard her as a primitive. He, himself, was not unsympathetic to a woman trapped overseas without means, and believed he could help. A Frenchman might find her captivating, as well as compliant in her sorry state.

  “Paris is not lacking in entertainers,” he said. “Nothing else?”

  “That’s about it.”

  “A beautiful woman? Not one thing more? Think.”

  Mavis said, “Am I reading you right?”

  “Till Piron rights the wrong he did to you, you will have to do something to put food in your mouth. I may have just the opportunity you require.”

  “There’s no reason to get fresh,” Mavis said.

  In his old hiding place above La Caverne, Eddie laughed out loud as he turned the pages of a policier while Anne stared glumly at the walls.

  “Don’t be selfish, I can also use a laugh,” she said.

  “This Chandler is extremely humorous. His plot is complex. In places I can’t follow it. But the language . . . you would have to understand English.”

  “We’re speaking English now.”

  “American English, to get the joke.”

  “Since he is that brilliant, he might want to help with our plot,” she said. “I am still stuck. A bomb that brings down the building will kill everyone inside. A ticking bomb delivered to the SS will call notice to itself, killing us. It’s an either-or situation in which both alternatives are no good.”

  “Can you fashion a device I can smuggle in my trumpet case?”

  “And blow up the band? Ask me again after I have heard you play.”

  Roquentin came in with food, but they didn’t stop to see what was on the tray. Roquentin took the book from Eddie’s hand, and Eddie said, “This is an excellent story, full of beatings and murder to take our mind off our troubles. I don’t suppose you brought another.”

  “Be grateful for what you have. A Wehrmacht officer left it.”

  “Where did he get an American crime novel?”

  “He had emigrated to the States as a child. When the master race took over Europe, he didn’t want to be left out of the fun and returned to Munich. All he missed in America besides detective novels was the—”

  “Don’t tell me,” Eddie said. “The jazz.”

  “The cheesecake at a restaurant on Times Square.”

  “I wouldn’t mind some now.”

  “I apologize that there is none on today’s menu,” Roquentin said. “Will you settle for a slice of birthday cake?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s going to be a surprise birthday celebration during the intermission Friday night. You are expected to play ‘Happy Birthday To You.’ Will you?”

  “It’s so easy, I could teach you.”

  “I would rather that you played. The birthday boy is Colonel Maier, the investigator from Berlin. Any wrong notes will be yours.”

  “You’d like me also to dress like a clown and pull coins from the ears of his friends?” Eddie said.

  “Play the song when we wheel out the cake. That will be enough.”

  “What kind of cake?”

  Roquentin shrugged. “I’m thinking of telling the patisserie to use sawdust for flour.”

  “With arsenic for the frosting?”

  “Never mind,” Roquentin said. “You’ll play? I understand it’s demeaning yourself.”

  “You’ll need a big cake for everyone to get a piece,” Eddie said. “At least half a meter on all sides, I should think.”


  “Why this interest in cake?”

  “You brought it up,” Eddie said.

  Anne tried to get in a word, but Eddie put his hand on hers and said over her, “Can you order one of that size?”

  “Your first idea was better,” Roquentin said. “I should poison it.”

  “Our big one will be harder for them to digest.”

  When they were alone again, staring down the food that neither had appetite for, Anne said, “It’s an insane idea.”

  “You knew right away what I was getting at?”

  “My mind isn’t as quick as yours. It took half a second—”

  “Not more insane than entertaining the SS, or Germans overrunning Paris, or this war.”

  “We can’t hide a bomb inside a cake,” Anne said. “Cakes aren’t meant to tick.”

  “Put the clock in a container, and they won’t hear it. Or as a decoration on top as the symbol of, uh, passing time.” He didn’t wait to hear what she thought. “We’ll play so loud that the ticking is drowned out.”

  “Placing the bomb inside the cake and serving it up to the SS isn’t a bad idea as far as it goes. However, detonating pastry isn’t something my SOE training prepared me for.”

  “I can always light the fuse.”

  “It won’t be cute, like getting a pie in the face in a silent movie,” Anne said. “I’m going to forget about cakes and go back to what we had before.”

  “We had nothing before,” Eddie said.

  He wasn’t like her, couldn’t sit still racking his brain over a puzzle with no good solution. He read till she pointed to her watch. “Time for bed,” she said.

  He beat dust out of the mattress and let her have it along with time to invite him to share it. Waiting, he fell asleep on the floor. He was on chapter seven of Farewell, My Lovely, reading it for the third time, when Roquentin said, “Good Friday morning.”

  “I’d lost track,” Eddie said.

  “The cake is here.”

  “Let’s see it.”

  “The electricians haven’t finished,” Roquentin said. “One of them may walk in at any time. Is it worth your neck to look at a cake?”