As I turned to my right to meet the boys who were not from Harvard, I paused ever so slightly to observe Louise’s demeanor. I expected her attention to have shifted to J. Barrington. But she was still looking at me. Still not showing a thing.
The reddish-tinted young man had a solid grip and shake, as I expected. “Cyrus Parsons,” he said. “Princeton, Illinois. More or less. A farm out somewhere a little east of there.”
“Got it,” I said. A farmer’s son. Therefore very likely a farmer himself through his boyhood and his young adulthood and most of his early manhood. Getting as far away from the farm as he could now.
The dark-haired young man was reaching across Parsons to shake my hand. “Jefferson Jones,” he said. “From Richmond, Virginia.”
A wiry guy. Pale. A little gaunt. I figured he’d been in France longer than the other two and was showing the rigors of ambulance work.
These three seemed like a good sampling for my story.
I turned once more to the Supervising Nurse in disguise. Her eyes were yet again upon me. This time she doled out a faint smile. “Louise Pickering,” she said. “Gloucester, Massachusetts.”
The boys all looked her way. J. Barrington chuckled, getting her little irony. The other two seemed merely to gawk. To me, even from the other end of the table in a noisy bar, even in spite of the feigned formal content of the words, her voice sounded downright mellifluous.
I said, “Do you haul ’em as well as heal ’em, Miss Pickering?”
She did not withdraw the little smile. “I’m just along for the ride tonight,” she said.
So I took out my notebook and I talked to three young Americans, varied in many ways but not in age, ranging from twenty-one to twenty-five. Lacey and Parsons weren’t even old enough to have voted for Woody Wilson three years before, but each of the three of them was a walking, talking, ambulance-driving rebuke to our gritless president.
I asked them why they were here. Jefferson Jones from Richmond, the oldest, had a postman father who would have been happy for his only child simply to be a postman too, but he’d named his boy after the guy he took to be the greatest rebel in history. Jones’s middle name was even Davis, and he’d always wanted to be a soldier. No matter it turned out that the United States half a century later was still one nation indivisible. His boyhood military dreams were not of Bull Run or Seven Pines or Fredericksburg. They were of Cuba and the Philippines and Panama. He tried to enlist in the Marines when he was eighteen. They turned him down for flat feet. He tried again the next year and his feet were still flat. It was okay, he said. This was a more important war, and the U.S. Marines were nowhere in sight. His flat feet could push a Ford’s clutch and brake and reverse sure enough.
Cyrus Parsons hesitated before answering why. He even glanced across the table at Harvard in a way that made me think Lacey’d been pushing him to answer the same question. I worried that my farm boy was going to be a washout of an interview. I needed at least three talkers for the story.
Finally he said, “I like being out there driving a wounded man. The wounded are everybody’s brother. No matter who they are. That’s very clear. Out there it’s just you and the road and having to make time. Nobody to tell you nothing.”
My worry was unfounded.
I made him pause a moment so I could get those words down exactly.
Part of Jones’s answer was still stuck in my head and I was always looking for ways to stitch my talkers together. So I said to Parsons, “And your farmer father? Did he want you to stay on the farm?”
Parsons hesitated briefly. Then he said, “He comes from a big family. From Texas. But some of them moved to Illinois.”
Cyrus seemed about to say more, but Harvard interrupted. “You need another beer there, Cy?”
Parsons looked at Lacey.
I did too.
He was starting to seem even more like an arrogant, privileged kid. He needed to keep his mouth shut while I was working.
He probably read my eyes. Lacey offered a lame explanation. “I’m about to call the waitress over.”
“I’m okay,” Parsons said.
“Just checking,” Lacey said.
Parsons returned his attention to me and said, “The thing about my father is he used to be somebody else. But he got a few hundred acres to turn himself into a farmer, and ever since, he’s happy clearing stumps and slopping hogs and laying in corn.”
I wrote it down.
“How about you?” I said to Lacey, who had not yet called over the waitress.
“How about me?” he said, lifting his chin slightly, as if he required a formally rephrased question before he would answer a thing I’d already made perfectly clear I wanted from each of them.
I glanced at Louise. I was trying to decide if she was really connected to this guy. She was in the process of turning her own attention from Lacey to me. In the brief moment our eyes met, she flickered her eyebrows at me. Clearly she was not.
Growing up in the theater and cutting my reportorial teeth in Chicago politics, I knew how to keep my disdain for an interviewee well hidden. With a tone of unctuous respect I asked Lacey, “Why did you decide to drive an ambulance in the European War?”
He started elaborately constructing an answer from Harvard Alumni Bulletin boilerplate. When it was finished, it simply amounted to noblesse oblige.
To play against the answers of my two working-class boys, this was actually useful. I was, however, glad for the other thread in the interview so far, though I fully expected similar Brahmin bromides from him. I asked, “And what about your father? Does he approve of your work here?”
Lacey’s hauteur vanished instantly. “His approval is irrelevant,” he said, only a fist-clench short of full ferocity.
He fell silent with that. Parsons looked at him, but without surprise. He’d seen that before, I surmised. Louise’s right hand turned back into a nurse’s hand, moved out toward him, but did not touch.
The thought flashed through me: Maybe it’s just as well I don’t even know who my old man is.
The silence went on for another long moment and then Lacey himself shifted all of us away from whatever just happened. He turned on both spigots in himself at once, the one with his snootiness and the one with his sense of irony. He said, “Which of us do you think is the best driver?”
Parsons and Jones both groaned. Not this again.
“Really,” Lacey said. “The one who handles his flivver the most adroitly. Harvard prevails.”
The others leaped in.
Good stuff for the story and I encouraged it and the three competed for a time over driving honors, picturesquely, quotably, and then together they sang the praises of the hundred or so donated Ford Model T’s converted into ambulances, their nimbleness on the crowded and shell-holed roads, their reliability, their ease of field repair. And the three drivers spoke of the physical grind they faced. Of how they were in duty rotation, a few weeks of peak stress, running between the front and the triage posts, then a few weeks between triage and the train depots or the field hospitals. There were four field sections for this duty. Then they rotated back to a few weeks in Paris, where they carried men between the converted freight station at La Chapelle and the city hospitals, including, of course, their own facility in Neuilly.
Through all this, Louise presided over us silently.
The four-way conversation wound down, and I let it. Enough for tonight. I would see more of the boys soon. I’d ride with them. In Paris, certainly. And, I hoped, to the front lines, though I was still waiting for permission from the Allies’ wartime journalistic bureaucracy.
In the dark, in the street before the bar, the five of us paused. I shook the men’s hands, after which they expected to accompany Louise back to Neuilly on the Metro. But she said to them, “I’ll be along in a few moments, boys,” and they clearly knew to hold their tongues with the tough Supervising Nurse, even though rude remarks flashed into their faces.
Parsons, partic
ularly, looked at me, and then at her, and then back to me. No wink. No leer. But with a kind of worldly shrewdness in his look. He’d progressed well past clearing stumps and slopping hogs, I decided.
They gaggled off along Rue Daunou a little ways, and Louise turned to me.
Her face was lit softly by the spill of light from the bar.
She said, “I hope you didn’t mind my joining you tonight, Mr. Cobb.”
“Kit,” I said. “No I didn’t, Nurse Pickering.”
She hesitated for a moment, fixing on me, but searchingly, shifting her gaze from one of my eyes to the other and back again. Then she decided; or she had decided earlier today—that was actually why she had come—and now she would make it official: “Louise,” she said.
“Louise,” I said, gently.
“I was just interested in what you’d bring out in them.”
“Just that?”
A little too soon to press her. She looked away.
I added, “I hope you learned some things.”
She returned to me. “I did,” she said. “They’re interesting, these boys.”
But her tone was something else. It sounded offhand. Uninterested. Up to this moment she’d always been in absolute control of her tone and demeanor. There was no reason to think that had changed. This was intentional. She was letting me know an interest in the boys was not the reason she was lingering on the sidewalk with me while the boys cooled their heels in the shadows and gossiped about us.
“Very interesting,” I said, overplaying the words just enough, drawing them out just a little, to let her know I understood.
“Dedicated,” she said. Just a bit too somberly.
“Dedicated,” I said.
“I’m sure the story you write will be interesting,” she said.
“I’ll do my best,” I said.
We stopped talking but she kept her eyes on mine.
I said, “We should have a drink together sometime, just you and me. I’d like to hear more of your story as well.”
“Yes,” she said.
“I’m sure it’s interesting,” I said.
“And yours,” she said. “I’d like to hear.”
“I could tell it to you.”
“I’m sure it’s very interesting,” she said.
“You might find it so,” I said.
We were starting to sound like a scene at the Moscow Art Theatre.
But even as this struck me, Louise knew to ring down the curtain.
“Good night, Kit,” she said.
“Good night, Louise.”
She nodded and turned and moved off toward her three American drivers. I watched her for as long as I dared without following her and taking her by the arm and tipping my hat to the dedicated and interesting boys and whisking her away.
I turned my back on them.
And I realized that the air had gone chill. Winter was reconnoitering Paris once again. As I’d talked with Louise, I hadn’t noticed.
I turned the collar up on my suit coat.
I pulled my Waltham from my watch pocket and angled it to the light from Tod Sloan’s bar.
Not quite ten. The boys in the cellar bar would still be there. With maybe even a bomb maker among them.
7
But there was something I had to do first.
I caught a fiacre at the Opéra and paid the driver to wait for me before my hotel.
I went up and paused briefly, shirtless, my razor stropped and laid out on the basin, my shaving brush lathered up and poised in my hand, my face floating in the mirror, dappled in light and shadow from the incandescent bulb above me. I’d done this before, just a few months before, shaved my close-cropped beard to add a touch of credibility to my invented self. That was the first time. This would be the second. Beneath the beard, on my left cheek, was a scar. A long curve of a scar that a German eye would recognize as a sword wound and the eye of the sort of German whose acceptance I needed would further recognize as a Schmiss, the sword wound of a German university duelist, a badge of honor. The Americanized Joseph Hunter got his Schmiss when his American-immigrant father sent him as a young man back to the home country to matriculate at Heidelberg. Christopher Marlowe Cobb got his faux Schmiss last year in Mexico, in a sword fight that was a link in the chain of events that attached him to his country’s secret service. For the men tonight at The Red and the Black and the White, the scar would do far more than a password to open the door to their company.
Still my hand paused.
Faux identification papers were stage props. This thing was part of me. Whenever I carried it openly I was this other guy. He was the scar. The scar was him. I couldn’t step offstage each night and dip my fingers in cocoa butter and wipe him away.
But so it had to be.
I shaved.
I rinsed and dried my face.
I looked at my scar.
A German would assume he knew what this was. A Frenchman would assume it had been a tumble of shrapnel.
So be it.
I returned to my fiacre.
The air was cold now. I buttoned my overcoat.
And then I was walking along the Rue des Petites Écuries. I’d gotten out of the carriage a few short blocks away, not wanting to arrive at the bar with the attention-grabbing clatter of horse hooves and the ring of wheels. There, in the adjacent arrondissement, the street was called Rue Richer, where the Folies Bergère was filling its stage tonight with chanteuses and naked women behind a Zepp-darkened marquee.
But this stretch, as the Rue des Petites Écuries, was intended for commerce at the street level, with residences above. It was utterly silent and dark, inside and out. Had likely been so all evening. It was German, after all. The brasseries and shops—once the places for Wiener Schnitzel and Lederhosen, Pilsner and Taschen books, Leberknödelsuppe and Solingen kitchen knives—were all locked up behind iron shutters, their signs vanished. In the upper-floor residences, the shutters were also shut tight, with only occasional razor-blade cuts of light along the edges.
I had prepared for the unexpected. Inside my coat were my lock-picking tools. From another pocket now I retrieved my flashlight, a new one in the form of a fountain pen, with a brighter Mazda tungsten lamp, and I scanned the street facades till I found number nineteen.
Its entrance was an arched double door that yielded to a turn of the handle. Inside was a cobbled passage to an inner courtyard, but immediately to my right was a descending stone stairway, lit from below by a sconce with an incandescent lamp.
I went down. Tonight I was calm inside about going underground. It was a bar, after all. Its depth was shallow. I stood before a wide, wooden door with a sliding face-panel, presently shut. The handle did not yield. In the plate beneath was a simple ward lock. I pulled back a little.
But before I could lift my hand to knock, the panel opened.
A face appeared there, the lights behind it shadowing its features into invisibility. In German it asked me my name.
I responded in French: “Et le Blanc.”
The head in the sliding panel nodded and then waited.
I understood. After the password was given, the question remained. What was my name. I had not thought this out. Even in character, I had a choice of two. I decided the very complexity of the full answer would give it credence. I said, in my best German, “In the homeland I was Josef Wilhelm Jäger. As a resident now of the United States of America, I am called Joseph Hunter.”
The head hesitated a moment. I was an unusual guest for this place. But the man nodded again and looked down and I heard the warded bolt being thrown. As with the last time I’d played this role, I was conscious of an irony: I felt temporarily thankful for Woody Wilson’s spineless hesitation. A German from America was an instantly plausible sympathizer with the oppressed Germans in Paris. And Joseph Hunter, a reporter for a syndicate of American German-language newspapers, would even be a potentially useful one.
The door opened.
I stepped in.
The place was a little dank and had an underground chill impervious to the temperature aboveground. The drinking area was one low-ceilinged room, patchworked in electric light and cellar shadow, with a zinc bar and rows of bottles. At the far end, hugging the left-hand wall, was a passageway. It ran deep, and it implied other rooms at the back, to the right. Storage no doubt. An office perhaps.
All this I took in at a glance.
I paused for a slow breath.
At this late evening hour Le Rouge et le Noir seemed almost crowded, with maybe three dozen men, a row of them shoulder to shoulder at the bar and clusters of twos and threes at pedestal tables. Some of these denizens had turned their faces to me at the creak of the door. Only momentarily. Apparently it was enough for them that the gatekeeper had let me in.
He appeared at my side now, his face visible. It was middle-aged, fleshy, and blond-stubbled. As I turned to him, he squared around to confront me. He had a purposeful air and, indeed, seemed on the verge of speaking. But his eyes fixed on my Schmiss and his demeanor loosened. He looked me in the eyes and then looked again at the scar.
What he then asked had a casual tone that I’m sure would have been different if it weren’t for what he saw on my face. “So who told you about us?”
“Dieter at the Café de la Paix.”
“Of course,” the man said. “Welcome.”
He moved off.
My gaze followed him to the bar.
There was a spot at the rail, at the end.
I ignored it for now. I would use the search for a place to sit as an excuse to examine what faces I could.
I did a slow scan of the room.
Between those I could see and those who had given me a look when I came in, I’d checked out about half the men. None of them matched Staub’s description. There were plenty left that I hadn’t seen, but I didn’t want to let on I was looking for somebody. I overtly directed my attention to the space at the bar. I headed for it, sidestepping between the burly backs of a couple of boys at adjacent tables. One of them looked up as I squeezed past.
Paris in the Dark Page 5