Paris in the Dark

by Robert Olen Butler

  But Cyrus did say one thing to me on the way back from La Chapelle. He saw a rough patch of cobble ahead, seeing it in time to slow drastically but not abruptly, and as he drove over the uneven stones with astonishing little bounce to the men we bore, he said, “They’re enlisted men for us tonight. At least that. No fucking officers.”

  9

  It was dark when our three poilus were gently unloaded and taken inside the hospital. After the last of them had been carried away, Cyrus turned to me and said, “I have to put my Ford to bed. The day is over.”

  “Thanks for letting me ride with you,” I said.

  “Maybe I’ll take you to the front,” he said.

  “I hope so,” I said.

  He went off into the dark.

  I stood for a time in the courtyard. I looked up at the Renaissance facade of the Lycée Pasteur, a scattering of its mullioned windows ablaze with electric light. I thought of Louise somewhere inside there, bathing and treating the wounds of the men I’d dragged hurting from hell. My mind clung to the thought of her. She would be at the New York Bar tonight. I needed to see her at the end of this day.

  But I stank. Stank of the Great War. It was in my clothes, in my pores. And the war for me, the fighting of it tonight in my own way, must be in a cellar bar in the German Quarter of Paris. I’d neglected Franz Staub long enough on this day.

  I turned and walked across the courtyard and out the front gate and I caught a fiacre. I could not carry the smell of what I did today to a German cellar bar. I rolled my shoulders at the thought of my newswriter-cozy hotel. Maybe Trask was right. Spy work needed better accommodations. I was not going to get a proper bath tonight in my hotel room. Hot water was rare above street level in Paris. So I went to one of the establishments along the Seine and bathed till La Chapelle had vanished from my skin, and I returned to my hotel and changed into fresh clothes.

  At Le Rouge et le Noir, a different face appeared in the door’s sliding panel. But it recognized me at once. “Herr Joe,” the face said brightly. He’d drunk my good German beer.

  I went in to nods and greetings and lifted steins. I acknowledged the men as I moved to the bar and looked around openly, a privilege I’d bought last night. Staub was not here. This was several hours earlier than last night and the place presently had half the number of drinkers. Staub could well be in his room. But I feared he’d gone out, feared that Cobb the spy had lost him.

  Hans was opening a bottle of beer on the lower counter down the way. He nodded at me. I nodded in return and put my back to the bar and leaned against it. The passageway to Staub was dim.

  Then Hans spoke from directly behind me. “Hello, Joe,” he said in English.

  I turned to him. “Hello, Hans,” I said shifting us to German.

  He set a stein before me and beside it the bottle he’d opened. It was the nice Bavarian from Kulmbach we’d all drunk together. “I had one left,” he said.

  “Thank you, my friend,” I said.

  “In a stein or in the bottle?”

  I picked up the bottle and toasted it at him.

  While I took a long drink of the beer, I wondered how much trust I’d established with Hans. Or if not actual trust, at least how far I’d raised the threshold of his suspicion.

  When I set the bottle down, he was lingering with me.

  One thing I wanted to know could be gotten at indirectly. “You boys stay late last night?”

  “We close down at midnight,” he said. “We are careful about the police.”

  “That’s smart,” I said. Midnight.

  He grunted assent and put the unused stein on the lower counter. “You are an early riser?” he asked. “Is that the way of a newspaperman?”

  “Yes. The morning is good to do your work.” I said. “The previous day’s notes are easier to read, if you have a hurried hand.”

  Hans laughed a little. “I could not be a newspaperman. My hand is better to open bottles than dip a pen.”

  “You do what you do very well,” I said, and through this little exchange my mind had been making the case: If Hans is party to the bombing, Staub will already have mentioned my appearance at his door. If he is not, my bringing up Staub will not seem suspicious.

  So I said, “I meant to ask. Last night on the way to the toilet I accidentally encountered Mr. Staub. He seemed an interesting man.”

  I watched Hans carefully.

  He shrugged. Convincingly. “He has said very little to me. Only recently arrived. He is a friend of the owner.”

  “I understand,” I said. “A friend of your boss?”

  “The owner. Yes.”

  It was enough for now to be taking an interest in Staub. I’d work on Hans later for information about the owner.

  As for Staub, I would need to follow him. That was best if he could not easily identify me. But I’d already discarded that advantage in last night’s exchange at his door. There was still the cloak of night, which for this day had already fallen upon us. And I could alter my appearance if I needed to follow him in daylight.

  So I played the hand I had. I said, “Perhaps we should ask him to join us for a drink?”

  Hans’s second shrug convinced me he wasn’t a threat. He was put off by Staub’s aloofness.

  I leaned to Hans. “Would you just as soon not have him out here?”

  Hans grunted. He appreciated my picking up on his distaste for the man. But he said, “This is not a choice for me to make. We are a place of business.”

  It would have been easier for him to say the man was out. I hoped he wasn’t simply guessing, as I was, that Staub was in his room.

  “I’ll be back shortly for that,” I said, nodding at the bottle of Kulmbacher.

  I crossed the bar and headed down the hallway, thinking: If he’s not here, I can search his room. For a few minutes, at least. Hans will think it’s the boss’s friend still being standoffish with the boys in the front but okay with the American journalist visiting in the back.

  I was at Staub’s door and leaned into it briefly to listen. Nothing.

  I knocked.

  I listened.

  There was a stirring inside the room.

  He was here.

  The tension I’d been carrying, that he was out preparing his next bomb, abruptly sprung loose in the center of my chest.

  The door opened.

  Staub was not wearing a coat, but the other two pieces of his three-piece blue cloth suit were mostly ready for him to go out. The waistcoat was fully buttoned. His tie was only slightly loosened at the stiff collar. He’d packed a pretty good suit in his refugee duffel bag.

  “Herr Staub,” I said. “I’m Josef Jäger. We met last night.”

  “Yes,” he said, lifting his face ever so slightly, faintly flaring his nostrils. “When you tried my door.”

  I could see what Hans saw in him.

  “I did indeed,” I said. I twisted my head a little bit in the direction of the toilette, keeping my eyes on him. “I’d lost my way.”

  “I have no doubt,” Staub said.

  This did not seem to be going well.

  I said, “I don’t mean to intrude. I just thought to ask you to join me for a drink.”

  He cocked his head in what seemed like full-blown suspicion.

  In the spirit of being in a man’s-man bar, where you tend to think and even say things in an amplified way that you’d know enough not to actually act upon, I thought: Just take out the pistol from the small of your back and shoot this son of a bitch in the center of his chest and get it over with.

  Staub uncocked his head and said, “I thank you for the beer you sent to my room last night. But I am afraid I have an engagement tonight.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Perhaps another time.”

  “Perhaps so.”

  “Good evening,” I said.

  “Good evening,” he said.

  He closed his door.

  I retreated.

  I emerged from the hallway and appro
ached the bar. There was an empty table against the street-side wall, out of the line of sight of most everyone.

  Hans turned away from the couple of Burschen he was talking to and gave me an inquiring glance.

  “Otherwise occupied,” I said.

  With a shrug he returned to his conversation.

  I carried the Kulmbacher to the empty table to nurse the beer and wait, and it wasn’t long before Staub passed through, looking at no one.

  I followed.

  As I hit the steps leading from the cellar, I could hear the upstairs outer door opening and closing.

  I paused to consider the risk of going up at once. If he suspected me, it would be simple for him to pause just outside the doorway to let me tip my hand. But if he didn’t and he walked briskly away, the dark would cloak him, and I didn’t want to lose him.

  I went up.

  He wasn’t waiting.

  I stepped outside.

  It was chilly and clear. There was no visible moon but the stars were bright in the strip of sky above the narrow streets of this quarter. I could see well enough to follow and yet fade into a doorway when necessary.

  Staub was walking west on Rue des Petites Écuries. Briskly, but he was barely thirty yards away. He’d paused, too, before heading off. I crossed the street and followed him from the other side, treading as quietly as I could.

  We passed through an intersection. He kept up the quick pace and I tried to picture Trask’s map, which I’d studied. The cross street was Rue d’Hauteville. The whole German Quarter was tightly circumscribed, with d’Hauteville its central north-south axis. The air smelled of coal fire and kraut.

  In this empty street, in the dark, I was once again keenly aware of the pistol lying heavily against the base of my spine. I transferred it from its hiding place to my overcoat pocket. If he caught me following him and he was who he was, it might be necessary to reveal my identity and intentions and let the reflexes of war take their course.

  For now, though, we crossed the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière and my attention shifted to what I knew was up ahead and I did not try to identify the end-stopping sidestreets we passed. I only began to wonder if our Paris bomber was heading for the chanteuses and naked women of the Folies Bergère a little farther along. I had trouble picturing Franz Staub’s evening engagement being with a Folies girl. Though Lang had known Staub to be a German secret service agent. One of the girls could be a German spy. Or Staub was scouting the place as a target. It would be a prime one.

  He was carrying nothing.

  Certainly not a bomb.

  Too bad, I thought. I could resolve this tonight.

  But thinking of the bomb itself led to a consideration I’d been slow getting to. The bomb in Montparnasse had the sharp crack of sound peculiar to dynamite. Staub wasn’t making his own explosives. The French feared that a sustained attack of civilian terror had begun. They were likely correct. And Staub couldn’t carry that much dynamite hidden in a refugee’s belongings.

  Where was he getting it in Paris? Another path for me follow.

  But for now Staub was slowing as we came to a near convergence of three small streets within a few dozen yards. The focal point was the Folies on the right side of Rue Richer, its neon switched off but a couple of liveried hawkers with flashlights were snagging passersby and directing ticket-holders to the entry doors. The facade was dim but unmistakable, two stories sectioned by faux Corinthian columns, round ones above, which framed panes of tinted glass, and rectangular ones below, which divided a front wall covered in posters, tonight announcing the sensation of Mistinguett’s return to the stage, her blond tomboy face looking us in the eyes and laughing, as a high wind lifted her skirts.

  Staub stopped before the theater, looked up at it. I expected him to cross the street and go in. But he simply gawked. Then he lowered his face and began to look around him. He was clearly unsure of his bearings.

  This was suddenly risky. If you follow a man who doesn’t know where he’s going, you will quickly be found out. I was still on the opposite side of the street, the Folies side. I turned my body away from him, stepped to the nearest poster, ogled Mistinguett.

  Staub was going somewhere unfamiliar to him. Which meant he wasn’t going to the place I was most interested in, where he assembled or picked up his bombs.

  After a moment I chanced moving my face slightly in his direction to catch him out of the corner of my eye. He was coming my way. I focused on the poster. His footsteps sounded near me and then receded along Richer, back the way we’d come.

  I gave him a few yards and I followed.

  But we didn’t go far. He stopped at the nearby cross street, paused again, moved his hands out of sight, and then he shined a thin flashlight beam upward onto the edge of the building just across the intersection. He was looking for the street name.

  The light vanished. Not the one he wanted. He strode on, still heading the way he’d come. The next street did not cross, went only north, to the left.

  He shone his light.

  He switched it off.

  But this time he turned left and walked on. I approached the street, pulling out my own flashlight. I shone it up to the enamel marker one flight up.

  With a little start I recognized the name, switched off my light, and followed Staub. We were heading north on Cité de Trévise. Bernard Lang’s street. I hadn’t recognized it because I’d previously approached from the Metro at the other end.

  Lang expected Staub to come for him. Perhaps this was the night.

  Perhaps.

  Ahead, Staub stopped and shone his flashlight on a house number. He turned off his light. He was a good hundred yards from Lang’s building. There were many buildings between here and there. And yet Staub continued slowly. Checking each building. Stepping back at a couple and looking up to examine the windows.

  I stayed on the opposite side of the street and moved now from dark doorway to dark doorway.

  Staub seemed not to have Lang’s exact address.

  We made our way house by house up the street.

  He drew near number seven. Lang’s building.

  Staub shined his light on the number. Stepped back, studied the place. Just like the others.

  And he moved on.

  Now the street took its jog.

  But Staub did not continue his examination of numbers. He hesitated a moment. Thoughtful. I pressed back into the shadows of the doorway at number eight.

  I waited, trying to decide how long to give him to move on but not let him get too far out of sight, worrying, as well, that he might come back this way.

  I removed my hat and let myself put an eye around the edge of the jamb.

  I saw Staub just as he vanished into the little place at the jog.

  I kept my hat off and stepped from the doorway, edged the twenty feet to the end of the building, looked carefully into the place, expecting him to be across it. The stars were bright enough and a solitary gas lamp was lit, casting its glow just far enough to reveal the nymphs at the fountain and Franz Staub standing before them, looking up at them, his back to me.

  I would never have expected our diaphanous girls to work their charms on our stiff and cold Herr Staub. But they clearly did. And for a long while. Or so it felt. A minute or two certainly.

  Finally he lowered his face, stood for a bit more, and then he moved on through the place and continued north on Cité de Trévise, with me following at a distance as he continued his examination of building numbers and fronts.

  He was looking for Lang.

  But he had only sketchy information.

  At the far end of the street he turned east, headed back into the 10th arrondissement. He stopped at a tobacconist at the corner of Rue d’Hauteville and then went south, ending up at Le Rouge et le Noir.

  He went in.

  I lingered outside, thinking over the probabilities. Whether I left now or left at midnight or left at dawn, I’d still be leaving my surveillance of him on the basis of
the same hunch. No. More than a hunch. A strong intuition backed up by pretty good reasoning. If this was a night for a bomb or for a visit to an accomplice, I couldn’t quite get him waiting till nightfall to go out with vague information about a revenge killing that had to be pretty far down his to-do list and then buying a tin of pipe tobacco and returning to his back-corridor, cellar room.

  At least that’s how I figured it, and I figured I was owed the right to figure it that way. I could leave at dawn to prove my intuition correct or I could leave now. So I headed off to the New York Bar.

  10

  She sat in the same chair at the same table, wearing the same shirtwaist and cardigan, her hair knotted up in the same way. She was alone with a bottle of vin ordinaire. She gave me the supervising-nurse nod, but she added a small, considered smile to it.

  As I approached, the sameness touched me. She had one shirtwaist, one cardigan, one simple way to fix her hair when she left her patients. I was touched too by the smile, offered to me from the place where she’d sat when we first met in this bar, and by her arranging to be alone, though she’d understood I might not be able to come to her. I was particularly touched that all these vulnerable, longing things resided inside the tough-as-a-poilu Supervising Nurse Louise Pickering.

  The table was longer than it was wide and she was at the narrow end. I did not choose the facing chair but the one to her left side, drawing it still nearer to her in the process of sitting down.

  She angled her face to me and let the smile widen ever so slightly, as if she recognized my intention of getting as close to her as possible and she approved.

  A wisp of hair had come loose from her pompadour.

  I wanted to reach to it and smooth it down.

  I kept my hands to myself.

  “You made it,” she said.

  “I did.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “I am too.”

  I nodded to her bottle of table wine. “I can do better than that for you.”

  She looked at the bottle.

  It was still more than half full.

  She returned her eyes to me. “I prefer it,” she said.