Paris in the Dark

by Robert Olen Butler

  So I played my upended expectation back at him. I said, “See, that surprises me,” and I paused.

  “What does?”

  “Your humanizing him over his snoring, even if it’s with a punch line. Especially when it’s about a guy like John Barrington Lacey. You’ve made your feelings about authorities clear to me, from banks to politicians to military officers, even if they’re wounded. I ask this not for the story. Just between us. Isn’t a guy like Lacey a big problem for you?”

  I was looking at Cyrus when I said this. He was looking at the road in front of him. He immediately shrugged. Just a little. Without playing to an audience. A goddamn sincere little shrug like he was giving a guy who was the very embodiment of one of Anarchism’s enemies a free pass.

  Cyrus glanced my way.

  And he said, “He’s all right,” the words another mitigating shrug.

  Why did all this piss me off?

  Because I wanted Cyrus pure. If he was the bomber, I wanted what needed to be done to be easy. I was trying to put these little markers of humanity together with a guy who can bomb bistros and Metro stations, and I was having some trouble with that. Which made me understand what I was really wanting. For Cyrus Parsons to be the bomber, so Paris—and I—could have done with it.

  I said, “Does our man from Harvard have depths?”

  Cyrus looked over at me. Sized me up for a moment. Said, “Nah. I just stick cotton wool in my ears.”

  I let that stand.

  I realized I should be happy if my own countryman turned out not to be the anarchist bomber of Paris.

  We fell silent as the convoy squeezed right and we whisked past a farmer convoy of two horse carts, full of shipping tubs of milk.

  Closer in to Paris, some of the farmers went all the way to Les Halles in their carts. Loaded up with food, a secretly munitioned farmer would get his own affectionate pat from the checkpoint guards.

  Selective humanity does not prove innocence.

  I had to go about this differently.

  I pressed. “Aren’t you letting him off the hook?”

  Nothing from Cyrus for a moment. And then he said, “Do you care?”

  I squared around to watch him now as we talked. “More than you realize,” I said.

  Cyrus glanced my way, noted my move, turned his face forward, rolled his shoulders as if he’d just settled into a pose he intended on keeping.

  I said, “Not about him. About the folks beyond the wall.”

  “He’s insignificant,” Cyrus said. Sharply.

  I thought: That’s more like the man I suspect.

  I said, “You’ve been honest with me from the jump. I appreciate that. I know a lot about where you stand. Let me be honest with you. You’ve got a sympathetic ear sitting next to you.”

  I paused for a moment to let that sink in. He was neither embracing or disputing the assertion.

  I said, “That shrug again. I think we were both being a little too glibly cynical. I don’t know anything about your dad’s newspaper work. I’ll take your word about the pigs and chickens. And it’s true I get fed up with my own paper’s boneheads whose two cents’ worth every morning is to cluck and turn the page. But putting the word out has always changed minds. From Moses to Jean-Paul Marat to Thomas Paine.” I hesitated very briefly as I almost added Cyrus’s Uncle Albert Parsons and made this all above board. But I’d just played dumb about his father. So I left it with Paine and added, “Hell. There were three revolutions that got a big boost from newspapers, a satchel full of pamphlets, and a stone slab.”

  This drew a glance from Cyrus. He was listening.

  I said, “Those boys are in some whole other league. But I know how to get the attention of more than a few readers.”

  At best I expected another glance from him. But I got words, instant ones. “Like you said, I’ve been honest with you from the jump.”

  Thatta boy. I knew my way forward with him. I said, “So you and I agree this is a war about big business, big capital, big governments trying to grab all the wealth and power and then letting their competitive greed wreak even greater suffering on all the regular Joes of the world. The folks on the other side of the wall.”

  I paused again. To let him absorb this.

  To let me absorb it.

  I’d started playing a role inside a role. The reporter I can become—the reporter I am—was himself playing a role, one that I’d played with many a Chicago politician or policeman or gangster. You become the other guy. He hears a pal talking who understands him. So he can talk freely in return. What makes that succeed is playing your role right. Which means for as long as you stay in character, you actually see things the way you’re saying them. The other guy hears it. He trusts you. So while I was feeding Cyrus what I knew he believed—what any full-fledged anarchist would also believe—for as long as I sat there saying it, giving it my best words, I believed it too. And maybe at least some of it I believed for real. Which was starting to muddy all this up again.

  “So,” I said. “What do you think I should tell my readers about this war? What do you think we all should do about it?”

  Cyrus looked at me. He said nothing for a time. For a long time. For too long a time to be driving an ambulance in a convoy while looking hard into my eyes. Then he turned back to the highway before us, and he said, “You used the word yourself. Carnage. Rub their faces in the carnage. It’s the only language people understand if they need to put their minds right. All carnage is equal, so just make the carnage real, make the carnage talk directly to them and they’ll change whatever needs to be changed.”

  The place where I sat was cold. The open sides of our driving compartment were sucking the late autumn chill into our space at thirty miles an hour. But a singular dead cold suddenly surged up inside me that made the rest seem balmy. There were still questions about Cyrus Parsons. Questions that needed answers. But I was convinced now—in the visceral way reporters and spies needed to trust—that this was a dangerous man sitting beside me.

  He turned his face to me briefly once more and said, “Can you do that?”

  At first I thought he was talking to me. Are you a good enough writer to do that?

  But then he said, “Can you do that with words?”

  And I understood he meant it as a rhetorical question. A question for which he already knew the answer. No. No you can’t. Words aren’t enough to make the carnage real.

  I decided to play dumb. I said, “I’ll do the best I can.”

  He shrugged once more. To make up for my limitations, he was going to do the best he could, as well.

  18

  Something between us had shifted.

  I didn’t quite know what that meant for the trip ahead. I doubted that he did either.

  If I was right about him, my real work would begin when we returned to Paris.

  But for now it was clear enough to both of us that we had little more to say to each other.

  Route Nationale 2 forked east toward Soissons, and we turned north and west to skirt the dense Forêt de Compiègne, the birch and beech hunting ground of French monarchs. Before the end of the afternoon we expected to be in Compiègne, where tomorrow we would be given our sector assignment.

  We crossed the Oise and on its opposite bank joined the road that led east to Compiègne from Le Havre. But we’d barely made the turn along the river before a gray-and-blue Renault staff car overtook us, its Klaxon blaring, and it vanished from our sight up ahead. Soon the convoy slowed and then each of us in turn, by the example of the driver just before us, pulled off the road. We shut down our engines.

  Our Fords sat end to end along the highway and we got out and a single word was passed along to us. “Troops.”

  We could already hear music, faintly cacophonous, and the low, massive thump of marching men. Cyrus and I sat down, side by side, on our Ford’s running board. He bounced his pack of Gauloises at me. I waved it off and pulled out one of my Fatimas.

  We lit up.
>
  And soon they drew near. The tramping became the rock-grinding crunch of hobnail boots. The music at the head of them clarified into bugles and drums maintaining a familiar military marching cadence but laid over with the exotic nasal wanderings of hautboys.

  These were not the men we expected. They were black men. Tall, powerful, beautifully precise, inspection-ready in their dark mustard uniforms. Chests with medals. The silver wreaths of the Médaille Militaire and the bronze, flare-footed crosses of the Croix de Guerre. These were veteran, tough, volunteer fighters from the French colonies. The Tirailleurs Sénégalais. Come from Senegal and French West Africa.

  They marched past endlessly now, a yellow flag with crescent and star carried before most of the companies—the Senegalese were all Mohammedans—and a band played before each regiment. The company captains always seemed to be the largest of the men, towering well above any of us who sat with our ambulances watching.

  And in their uniforms and bearing, these captains were sublimely strict in their adherence to regulations. Except in one detail. Always they wore their flat-topped kepis subtly askew, angled slightly toward one ear or the other, or pushed back a little from the brow, or tipped a bit forward.

  The effect of all these distinctive, professional fighters flowing past was to mask with awe the silence between Cyrus and me. We smoked. We took an occasional pull on our water canteens. As the parade went on and on I daresay Cyrus had the same thought I did about the arrogance of the French commander who ran us off the road for his colonials just to assert his authority over us, when he could easily have let us make our faster way ahead of him and his troops. But we did not voice that between us.

  Only once did Cyrus speak. Somewhere in the second hour, after we’d eaten hardtack and cheese from the provisions locker, Cyrus lit a cigarette and lifted his chin at the passing Africans. “This is not their war. They were once free men, freer than any of us have ever been. But the things the Allies rightly despise about the Germans in this war, they are guilty of themselves. France and the Brits and the Belgians—all of them—they marched into Africa and subjugated these black men and their tribes. No one had the right to do that.”

  A couple of hours before I’d stopped feeling the need to actively play my role of Cyrus’s philosophical sympathizer. But I myself had seen enough of the world for this fragment of anarchist screed to make sense to me.

  And somehow, ironically enough, his comment finally allowed me to put Cyrus’s small touches of humanity together with his suspected capacity to plant bombs in bistros. Words weren’t enough. Bombs and civilian blood were necessary to save the oppressed and compliant peoples of the world. Nothing else had ever worked. So make the carnage real.

  Then at last they were gone. A division’s worth.

  Their hobnails still rang in our ears.

  The late-autumn early dusk was upon us.

  We cranked our engines and reassembled our convoy for the final dozen miles to Compiègne. It was quite dark now and our electric headlights lit only the red cross on the back of Jones’s ambulance up ahead. We set off at a marching pace, as the division was still ahead of us. But that didn’t last. We began to accelerate, and as we did, I looked at the passing dark. The Tirailleurs Sénégalai had left the road and somewhere out there they were bivouacking.

  Half an hour later, on the edge of Compiègne, we turned off the highway and into a graveled field on the bank of the Oise. Other ambulances were already there. We parked in an orderly row and pulled our kits from our Fords and crossed the field, heading toward an adjacent barracks, our raggedly arrayed group and gravel-shuffling feet put to shame by the lingering image in our heads of the marching men from Africa.

  I was the only initiate in the group, and I gathered quickly that we would drop our kits and reconvene in double time to head down the highway to a tavern at the nearby inn. I followed Cyrus up the barracks stairs to the second-floor common room, dim with gas lamps turned low and full of metal bunks. I picked an empty bed and laid my kit in its center. Though we’d spoken little, Cyrus stepped to the next bunk and claimed it, setting his bag on the floor at its head, on the far side.

  He turned and looked at me.

  We held each other’s eyes for a beat. Then he nodded, and he said, low, “Sleep long tonight. Tomorrow I’ll get you to the front line.”

  At the tavern he drifted away from me. The air was thick with French cigarette smoke, smelling as if the timbers of the room were invisibly on fire. I sat with other drivers—two French and one Canadian—and played the part of an American newspaperman doing a story about volunteer ambulance drivers in France. If Cyrus got me to the front in the morning, the first thing I had to know was when he rotated back to Paris. That would become my return date too.

  The wine was St. Pinard, the poilus’ wine in the trenches, rationed half a liter per day. It was made for courage not taste, a poor red with a hint of gasoline in the nose. My heart wasn’t in the ambulance story, for which I had enough information anyway. But the Frenchmen were charming and each had been involved in early battles, one at the Marne, one at the Aisne, and they had good war stories, the latter’s directly relating to the battlefield where I was headed. So I prepared myself for the trenches for about an hour and then excused myself from my drinking companions.

  I squeezed my way around the room, once, looking for Cyrus, but I did not find him. He was right. I should get some rest. If I was going to spend a night awake, it should be tomorrow, as close to the first trench as he could get me.

  I went out into the night and walked the half mile back to the barracks.

  At the doorway a sound made me pause and turn to face northeast.

  Distant thunder. At the night’s invisible horizon.

  But of course it wasn’t thunder. It was the sound of the German 150s saying good night to the boys in the trenches.

  I went up the stairs.

  The gas lights were turned even lower. Men were snoring down the way.

  I approached my bunk.

  Just beyond was Cyrus, sitting on the side of his bed, his back to me.

  I stopped.

  He was absolutely still.

  I hesitated. But then I stepped past my bunk and stood before him. He looked up.

  In the dim light, his face darkened even more by my shadow over him, I could not make out his expression. I said, “What’s on your mind?”

  He did not answer.

  The silence went on long enough that I thought to simply move away.

  Just before the thought turned to action, Cyrus said, “My uncle was also a newsman. They hanged him for it.”

  Was he ready to talk anarchism?

  I said, “So somebody thought words mattered.”

  As quietly as if talking to himself, Cyrus said, “I never even knew him.”

  I waited for more.

  But instead, he swung his feet up and lay back on his bed.

  The theater has helped me. As a reporter. As a spy. But sometimes it makes me stupid. Standing there over Cyrus Parsons it felt to me as if the curtain had simply gone down on the act and intermission had begun.

  But when I woke at the first swelling of predawn light, Cyrus was gone.

  19

  It took a little while to figure out how gone he was.

  His bag was still there, though eventually it would yield only a few pieces of clothing.

  The bed was unmade. But he had seemed deeply weary when he’d lain back. It would not have been surprising to find that he’d fallen asleep at once and had arisen only a few minutes before I was now arising.

  Eventually I was standing in the center of the parking field and recognizing the empty space where his Ford had been parked. And realizing that it was the only one missing from the cluster of our convoy’s ambulances.

  Still my mind was slow.

  I thought perhaps now was when Cyrus was meeting with a local farmer, a collaborator, who was supplying him with dynamite. And perhaps indeed he was—or ha
d been some hours ago, in the middle of the night—but for the moment I could not bring myself to fully let go of the possibility that he would return. Perhaps Christopher Cobb the newsman was trying to play dumb, trying to think he still had the upper hand in me, still could get himself to the front lines and do his story.

  I went to the French lieutenant who was the commanding officer of the assignment station. He agreed to take over the search, saying, in English, “The men they are very full with stress. I know from some different time one man who just runs away for the stress. They only volunteer, you know.”

  He made a sympathetic shrug.

  His shrug clarified things for me.

  How inadequate it was.

  I knew without a doubt that Cyrus was not returning. Cyrus was abandoning his cover identity. Cyrus was returning to Paris to fully devote himself to the carnage.

  I asked the lieutenant to arrange passage for me back to Paris as soon as possible.

  Compiègne was a railhead, and by mid-morning I was in a sideways wooden chair at the end of a car in an ambulance train. Heading for La Chapelle. An officer car. With a nurse in constant attendance and single bunks along its length instead of three-high stretcher racks. I was conscious, of course, of the irony, chasing Cyrus while surrounded by the privilege of the ruling class. Amongst his “fucking officers.” They suffered, however, with the same muted moanings and muttered thank-yous in the same matrix of stoic silence as did the working class.

  And I was very conscious of how complicated this work had become. The Mexican revolutionaries and the German secret agents and the Turk pashas were simple. Germans in love were another matter. And there was nothing more complicated for me than the enemy likely being one of our own. An American. With the vestiges of an American conscience.

  All of which was on my mind when I telephoned Trask at the embassy from the French commander’s office at La Chapelle. I’d alerted him by telegraph from Compiègne, saying only that I was returning at once from the front and urgently needed to see him at my hotel and that I’d call him from the terminus as soon as I got in.