Heartsong

by James Welch

  The whole incident had taken only a few seconds, but Charging Elk had seen the several movements clearly as though time had stood still. He sat for a moment, now exhausted from his labors, still not believing what had just happened even as his mind relived it over and over again.

  Then he panicked. He had to get out of there. For an instant he wanted to be sick, but he had no time. He squirmed from beneath the head and saw that his thighs were covered with the pink bubbles and the dark blood. He almost tripped over the still-kneeling body in the cramped space as he edged his way to the washstand, where he poured water into the basin. He soaked a towel in the water, then began to scrub the blood from his thighs and groin. He looked around the room, trying to spot each piece of his clothing so that he could dress quickly. And he saw on the nightstand behind him something that made him stop scrubbing, made him stop breathing for an instant.

  A pair of gold-rimmed spectacles, neatly folded, gleamed in the dim light which leaked from beneath the red-beaded lampshade.

  Fortunately the large parlor was nearly deserted. Two men and one of the girls were huddled around a table against the far wall. Olivier and the bartender were conversing over the opened cash register, their backs to the room, and the surly doorman was not in sight. The door was a good fifteen to twenty meters away, and his mind flashed back to his escape through the great room of the sickhouse with its soft chairs and sofas four years ago, but this time Charging Elk walked deliberately on the balls of his feet to keep his heels from striking the tile floor, the length of the room. He sang a song he had not sung for some time under his breath and he knew that he had become invisible. He walked quietly and confidently, and when he reached the door he held the the little bell ringer so that it remained silent when the door swung open.

  Once outside he hurried along the now empty, dark street, not caring that his heels echoed over the cobblestones. He tried not to think but to make his escape as quickly as he could. And when he turned the corner in the direction of the Old Port, he allowed himself a long, almost gasping sigh, and he realized that he had been holding his breath since—he didn’t know when. He had just stopped breathing some time ago.

  He opened his pocket watch and glanced down at the white face: four-thirty. He and Marie had gone upstairs a little after eleven o’clock. What had happened to the time? Five and a half hours had passed since then. He felt his legs grow weak, and he stopped and leaned against a hitching post. In spite of the cool early-morning air, he felt icy needles of sweat trickle down his rib cage.

  Marie. What had happened to Marie? What would happen to Marie? Charging Elk groaned with dismay. He should have moved the siyoko’s body. Why hadn’t he thought of that? Surely there would have been another room empty. Charging Elk felt his legs give way as he envisioned Marie opening the door and seeing the dead siyoko kneeling over her bed, the black stains glistening on the sheet, on the floor, the keen smell of blood in the close room. He didn’t even feel the hard cobblestones when his knees struck them.

  He had to go back. But he fell onto his side and lay there, too weak to even focus his eyes on the shadows. What had happened to him? Why was he here? Where was his animal helper? Wakan Tanka? Why had he been left in this foreign town? Why him?

  Charging Elk closed his eyes and felt almost a comfort in his despair. The cobblestones were solid and cool beneath him and he didn’t want to move, perhaps ever again. He knew that he would die soon, that what had happened in Marie’s room would start a chain of events that would lead to his end. Wicked men were always punished. Wakan Tanka saw to that. And Charging Elk welcomed it.

  But now his head was swimming with images past and present. He saw Marie raise her glass of wine, he saw the gold-rimmed spectacles in the lamplight, and he saw his dream as though he were dreaming it again. He saw his people lying at the foot of the cliff and he heard the roaring wind and the voice that entered his ears: You are my only don. Now there will be no one left, he thought, and the idea did not frighten him. He would rather be dead with his people than alone in the world.

  His lips were moving as he lay on the cobblestones and he realized that he was praying—in Lakota—to Wakan Tanka. He was laying down his life, and he begged the Great Spirit to now let him join his people in the real world. Perhaps it was the sound of his own language—he had neither prayed nor spoken in Lakota for some time—that gave him comfort. After these four years of not being able to really communicate, he felt almost intimate with the sound of his voice and the prayer it offered up. He felt renewed even as he waited to die.

  But he had been hearing something far off without knowing it. Now his head was coming back and he heard a man shout and another one answer. He couldn’t hear the words but the voices echoed through the narrow streets and he couldn’t tell how near or far they were. He opened his eyes and waited.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Martin St-Cyr felt a pang in his stomach that almost took his breath away. He cursed himself for ordering oysters this time of year. Although it was only May it was sweltering in Marseille and the oysters could go bad early. It only took one. And leave it to him to find the one without the pearl.

  He took a sip of the digestif and read the article once again. It was only three column inches, but it was the most amazing thing. How could it happen again? At first when he read the article he thought it was a prime case of déjà vu. It happened to him all the time. Just last night, he had been with a woman who told him her secret desire was to help the North Africans find our savior, Jesus Christ. The daughter of English missionaries, she had grown up in the Sudan and now wanted to go to Algeria to work in a French mission or perhaps a hospital. Because he hadn’t really thought of his former fiancée in well over three years, it took a second or two for the young woman’s story to trigger the memory of Odile. But in those few seconds, his senses were overwhelmed with an unnamed familiarity.

  Now it was happening again. Even before he saw the name, Charging Elk, he had the feeling that he had read this article before, perhaps even had something to do with it.

  But this time Charging Elk had killed a man. This time he was in jail for a reason, not just because the Marseille authorities didn’t know what to do with him. This time there was probably not much that could be done for him.

  Still, St-Cyr was curious. And he felt slightly beholden to the Indian. His two stories on the injustice of Charging Elk’s incarceration had landed him a job on La Gazette duMidi, first as a reporter, then as a columnist. It was a good fit. The Gazette was known for its socialist leaning, and St-Cyr could fight the good fight without the dangers he had experienced in Grenoble. After his tenure with the conservative Le Petit Marseillais, the Gazette was a breath of freedom for him. His two columns a week usually involved the exploitation of the workingman, the dockworkers, the draymen, the harassment of immigrants (although he didn’t particularly like them), of the small tradespeople who were taxed beyond reason by the all-devouring state. He loved his job and he had become something of a celebrity, even a hero to the proletariat and the petite bourgeoisie. Of course, he never sent any of his columns to his father, who, at the age of eighty, still mourned his betrayal by the silk workers in Lyon.

  St-Cyr sat up straight in his chair and grimaced as another pang swept through his body. But they were coming less frequently now and he was in the process of concluding that it was only his dyspepsia, painful as it was, which seemed to go hand in hand with his outraged, muckraking sensibility. When the burning subsided, he picked up the telephone and hit the cradle a couple of times. Then he sat back.

  “Hello! Get me the desk sergeant at the Préfecture, if you would.”

  St-Cyr listened to the grainy static on the telephone and wondered at this new invention, less at its novelty than at its efficacy. More often than not, especially during the day when it was most needed, the static made it almost impossible to communicate. But this time, he got lucky.

  “Hello! Sergeant Vautrin here.” The voice was clear and t
inny, as though it spoke from the opposite end of a metal tube.

  “Hello, sergeant. This is Martin St-Cyr of La Gazette du Midi. I understand you are holding a Peau-Rouge by the name of Charging Elk. Is it true?”

  “Yes.” Nothing more.

  “It says here in my newspaper that he killed a man in Rue Sainte.”

  St-Cyr scribbled “Vautrin” in his notebook while he waited for the sergeant to confirm his statement. He was used to this waiting game from his two years as a police reporter. But then he had walked the beat of the precincts and gotten to know the desk sergeants. Now, on the telephone, he felt anonymous, even though he was fairly certain that the sergeant had heard of him, perhaps had read his columns. He took a sip of digestif and wished Borely were still on the job. They would be talking like the friendly adversaries they once were. Now Borely was the head of a special unit that scoured the waterfront for contraband. It was difficult to think of Borely as a real policeman, perhaps even in some danger from the gangs who worked the docks, but there it was.

  “It says that the deceased was a prominent businessman.”

  The sergeant must have decided that he could answer this innocuous question. “That is true.”

  “And what was a prominent businessman doing in Rue Sainte at four-thirty in the morning?” But St-Cyr knew. There were four or five whorehouses down there, including the one he used to go to until Fortune gave him a dose of the clap. He had taken sulfur powders for two weeks to relieve the terrible burning. The disease and treatment had also cured him of the need to seek out the whores, at least those in Rue Sainte. On the other hand, he missed his dark, pillowy Fortune.

  Again the silence. It was as though the man hadn’t learned yet that one could actually have a conversation on the telephone. “Is he being held in the Préfecture?—Charging Elk, I mean. Surely you can tell me that much.”

  This time the voice answered quickly. “You might want to try the American Consulate, Monsieur St-Cyr. Their man was here all morning.”

  St-Cyr hung up the receiver and looked at the face he had just drawn. It was crude but it had some features that he remembered—the prominent cheekbones, the narrow eyes, the even narrower mouth, and the long black hair that hung past the shoulders from a part in the middle of the head. What he couldn’t depict was the aura of death, the ashy smell that filled the small cell in the bowels of the Préfecture. Even now he shuddered to think of it.

  But Charging Elk had survived; moreover, he had apparently lived in Marseille for the past four years. How was this possible? Why hadn’t he gone home to America? Or back to the Wild West show, which had been somewhere on the continent when he was released that winter? Somehow there had been a dire mistake by somebody. He was still here in Marseille. And now he had killed a “prominent businessman” who frequented the whores in Rue Sainte. St-Cyr almost licked his chops as he picked up the receiver again.

  The several restaurants on Cours Estienne-d’Orves were filled with the usual variety of people—shopgirls, butchers, officer workers, financiers from the Bourse, military and navy people, deckhands and dockworkers, mothers with children, husbands with mistresses, old ladies with tiny dogs, boulevardiers—and Franklin Bell. If he wasn’t at some three-hour luncheon or another, he usually preferred the quiet of his own apartment and the simple salads or fish prepared by his housekeeper.

  But today he sat in the shade of an umbrella at an outdoor table of Chez Louis, surrounded by happy, intense, loud eaters, sipping a mineral water and waiting for the notorious Martin St-Cyr. Even in such a gay atmosphere he felt a little soiled and obvious.

  He glanced up at the sky and thought he would miss this Mediterranean climate. Even the heat wave of the past two weeks and the stench emanating from the Old Port had done nothing to diminish his almost sexual enjoyment of the city. But today was a perfect May day—warm but not hot, at least not yet, a hazy blue sky, and people enjoying a break from whatever labors guided them through the week.

  He looked out to the open space of the cours and watched two young women in long slender dresses and straw hats with black velvet ribbons trailing over the back brim walking arm in arm, laughing as though they hadn’t a care in the world. Normally he would have appraised them as possible partners, but today he just envied them their youth and innocence. They were completely at home in their world, unlike him, the perpetual outsider.

  Just then he saw a slender man in his late twenties, dressed in a white suit, a starched blue shirt with a red cravat, and a straw boater with a candy-striped band around the crown, step around the girls and make his way through the tables of Chez Louis. Although he had never met St-Cyr, he recognized the delicate face, with its pencil mustache and neatly trimmed goatee, from the illustrated portrait at the head of his column in La Gazette du Midi Bell stood up, astonished at how much younger the dandy St-Cyr looked in real life.

  “Monsieur St-Cyr? Franklin Bell.”

  “Enchanté, Monsieur Bell. So good of you to agree to meet with me. And on such a lovely day.”

  Bell wasn’t surprised that the hand was soft, but the way it was offered, arched with the palm down, like a lady’s, took him aback. For an instant, he wondered if he should kiss it. Instead, he withdrew his own hand and indicated a chair opposite his. “Please sit,” he said.

  When the drinks came—another mineral water for Bell, a glass of Chardonnay for St-Cyr—the young columnist raised his glass and said, “To your health, Mr. Bell.”

  “You speak English then.”

  “Only a very little. I studied it at university but I’m afraid I have little use of it here in Marseille.” He laughed. “My father said that I had better learn it, as the Americans were getting ready to take over the world.”

  Bell noticed that St-Cyr spoke with a decided British clip, which didn’t surprise him. Many Brits taught English in the universities of France. Must be a blow to the national pride to have to learn English, Bell thought of saying but didn’t. He didn’t feel very chauvinistic today. He had been up since five-thirty dealing with the latest mess involving Charging Elk, and his nerves were very close to the skin. In fact, he was downright scared that he was about to lose his job. There was no doubt now in anybody’s mind at the consulate that Charging Elk had been his responsibility four years ago and he had muffed it badly. It had been so easy then to lose the big Indian, to let him disappear into Marseille, to forget about him. But Bell had never really forgotten him, had thought about him almost daily, if only briefly. But what really fascinated Bell in a perverse way was the dreams he had had of Charging Elk. Whether because of a guilty conscience or fear of discovery of his blunder, he had dreamed several times that Charging Elk showed up at his door in the early morning, covered with blood, unable to speak, a tomahawk clutched in a dangling hand, dripping blood on the Persian carpet in the hallway. Each time Bell would slam the door shut and scream as the blood seeped slowly beneath the door into the room. Then he would awaken and find himself sitting upright, pajamas soaked with sweat on the coldest night, not knowing if he had actually screamed but listening for a commotion outside his door.

  Always the next day Bell would sit at his desk, ignoring the paperwork, and analyze the dream, looking for a reason for the night-time visitations. But he knew the answer deep down: He had failed the Indian. He had neither gotten him home safely nor reunited him with the Wild West show. He had simply willed the Indian out of his life, and with the help of the Soulas family, it had happened. For four years now. But he knew that Charging Elk would come back to haunt him someday, in some way that bore resemblance to the dream. The dream was too strong and persistent.

  So why was he taking lunch with the celebrated columnist of La Gazette du Midi on such a momentous day? Bell didn’t even like what the man wrote about the institutions of commerce, of government. That socialist garbage only went so far. What would these supposed downtrodden citizens do without their leaders, the men who ran the country, the men who supplied the goods and services, the men w
ho greased the wheels of industry, who gave them their jobs? It was absurd to blame them for every little injustice that occurred in the normal business of business. So what was he doing here with this foppish antithesis of everything he stood for?

  He was having his last absurdly normal meal before he had to go back to the consulate and face the controlled (he hoped) rage of Atkinson, who would probably blame him for harming years of delicate negotiations between the two countries with this one act of immense stupidity and incompetence. Unfortunately, Bell would only be able to agree with the old man. The French were notoriously difficult to deal with. They seemed to look for incidents like this one to turn a cold shoulder in other matters. If he was fortunate he would have time to write a letter of resignation after lunch. It would be a token gesture, a small way of saving face. He knew he would never work for the foreign service again. And to think that he had thought he was just a few steps away from replacing Atkinson as consul general. Of course, he had thought that for four years now.

  “I see that you are smiling, Mr. Bell. Perhaps you will share your amusement.”

  Bell was almost amused, in a dark way, to think that he had been smiling through the horror of it all. “Actually, nothing is amusing, Monsieur St-Cyr. I have spent all morning at the Préfecture, trying to appease your people—notably Chef de Police Vaugirard—to no avail. I have had nothing to say in defense of our Indian friend. I have been browbeaten, horsewhipped, keelhauled, and I have been able to say nothing. I’m afraid his ship is sunk.” And mine too, he almost added.