Paris in the Dark

by Robert Olen Butler

  Though dead,

  He yet speaketh.

  I opened the book and it yielded a place readily, a quarter of the way in. Readily because the page was marked by a photolithograph of a mustachioed man, printed on heavy tobacco-card paper. I removed the card but before I turned my attention to it, my eyes fell to the middle of the page.

  A passage there had been marked by a thin pencil line in the margin. “We have said to the toilers that science had penetrated the mystery of nature—that Jove’s head once more has sprung a Minerva—dynamite!”

  Now I looked at the man on the card.

  He startled me.

  I thought for a very brief moment that it was a picture of Cyrus. It was a young face. And though the man had a wide-winged pointed mustache and Cyrus was clean-shaven, these eyes instantly evoked him, in shape and demeanor. They were prominent, engaged, but narrow set. The shape of this face spoke of Cyrus too, the quick narrowing of the jaw from ear to chin. The bloodlines were unmistakable. I did not need to read the name beneath the image to know who it was. Albert Parsons. And beneath his name, three words: Sentenced to Death. These cards were sold as souvenirs at the hanging.

  I put it in my pocket.

  I closed the drawer.

  And I made my way to the officers’ ward.

  I moved along the hallway, pausing at each room. In one a nurse had her back to me. The uniform alone stopped me, but the shape within it was wrong and instantly I moved on. I paused at the next doorway, and just as I was turning my head to look inside, I saw a movement up ahead.

  Louise emerging from a room two doors up.

  She saw me and squared to me, her face opening. She came to me, swiftly, as if she were going to throw herself into my arms and I took a step toward her, hoping for that indeed.

  But she slowed abruptly, her face not changing in its joy but nodding a little as we wordlessly shared the reason she hesitated, to keep our private acts unsuspected, and then she was near me and nearer still, less than an arm’s length, but we both knew we should not embrace here.

  It was late afternoon and the lilacs had utterly vanished from her. She smelled of carbolic and of lime liniment, which did not fully mask the smells of wrecked bodies beneath.

  I realized these smells were also a reason she held back.

  Because I realized that, I said to her, very low, “You are very beautiful right now. Doing what you do.”

  At this, her hand came to me and I took it and we held tight and she said, “I was so very worried for you.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m glad it was this.”

  I squeezed her hand gently.

  “If it had to be something,” she said. “I’m glad that it didn’t catch you up in it.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “Can you come to me tonight?” she said.

  “Where?”

  “I live away from the hospital,” she said, and she gave me her address, not far from the hospital, toward the river along the Rue Perronet. “I’ll be finished here and presentable to you by nine.”

  “I’ll be there,” I said.

  “Poor Cyrus,” she said.

  “I’m trying to find him.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’ve thought for some time there is something going on in him. He should not be alone with whatever it is.”

  “I agree.”

  “Be a friend to him,” she said.

  For my country, to do my job, I have played roles with a number of people, deceived them, lied to them. This present lie was easy to conceive and absolutely necessary to live by, but it stuck in my throat and I had to will it into words. “I will,” I said, and the egregiousness of it was because I told it to Louise. Because I lied about something she wanted of me, prompted by the gentle, nurturing nature in her.

  But lie I did. And once it was done, I now had to repeat it to make sure it remained a lie, did not become true, even for her sake, because of how this all had to end. So I said, “I will be his friend.”

  “If there’s anything I can do to help,” she said.

  “We’ll talk tonight,” I said.

  We let go of our hands. And I ached to take her in my arms now and kiss her, and I knew for certain she felt the same way.

  But we did not kiss.

  Having let go of our hands, at the very same moment we nodded to each other.

  And I turned and walked away.

  21

  I found Lacey with his Ford, along with a few other ambulances and their fiddling or lolling drivers, at the maintenance shed near the porte cochere of the hospital’s cobbled frontage. His front axle was up on jacks and he was on one knee working at the driver-side wheel bearings with a wrench. He heard my footsteps on the cobble and glanced up as I drew near. He reared back, stood up. Not from deference to me personally. I’d read him sufficiently at the New York Bar to know that much. He knew where I was supposed to be and was surprised I wasn’t there. Was he inferring trouble concerning his roommate?

  “John,” I said, and I offered my hand.

  He looked away, took up a rag draped over the wheel and wiped the grease from his right hand. He then shook mine.

  “They teach you this at Harvard?” I said, nodding at his wheel.

  “I’ve always been handy,” he said. And then, “Aren’t you supposed to be at the front?”

  “Yes,” I said. I let that stand for a brief moment. I found myself instinctively approaching Lacey as if he had a story I needed to finesse from him. How an anarchist crypto-bomber and a Boston Brahmin figured out a way to get along was an interesting enough question that my reporter’s guile had kicked in. I’d give him at least an initial chance to guide the conversation according to his relationship with Cyrus.

  “Is there anything wrong?” Lacey said.

  Once I was standing before him, shaking his hand and making small talk, the only thing wrong one could infer about this would concern my driver, not me. So yes. Lacey had a reason to infer trouble around his roommate.

  “I’m afraid so,” I said. “Cyrus and his ambulance took off sometime late last night or early this morning.”

  I watched Lacey closely.

  He went absolutely dead still for one beat. Two. Then it sunk in. Or he let it sink in. Or he decided no reaction at all was unseemly, that he was revealing too much, such as he despised this guy he lived with. In theory, he would despise him. He compressed his brow and eyes and swung his face away. “Good Lord,” he said.

  I let him have the gesture in peace for a few moments and then asked, “Does this surprise you?” I twisted the end of the question to suggest I doubted it.

  He turned his face full upon me again. The deadness was gone. But so was the compression. He seemed to be assessing me. I said, “I think I saw concern in you as you rose a few moments ago. Before I said a thing.”

  He rolled his shoulders a bit. “I forget you’re trained in this, trying to read people. For your work, I presume.”

  “I don’t mean to sound critical. And I don’t presume to read you. I’m not doing my work now. This isn’t for the newspaper. I genuinely like Cyrus. He seems to care about how the world runs, that it should be fair to all, and I can respect that.”

  I expected Lacey to do a Beacon Hill tut tut at this, but he did not. He looked at me steadily for a moment, as if reassessing me. Then he said, “Took off?”

  “Yes. Your man Pichon says it happens sometimes. The stress.”

  “He’s not my man.”

  “The superintendent.”

  “I have no doubt it does.”

  “Did you see the signs in Cyrus?”

  “I don’t read people.”

  This clearly wasn’t the way to work this guy. So I said, “Look, I’m sorry I got us off on the wrong foot. It’s just that I spent some extended time with Cyrus and I liked him. His honesty, for one thing. He’s pretty open about his politics. Even with me, a prying newspaper man. I want to help him. I liked him. His …”
r />   For the second time in the past half hour I had trouble saying the lie I knew I had to say, though for an opposite reason. I got it out: “His humanity I’d call it. That had to be a big part of why you’re all here. He had it strongly. Now he’s vanished and I have no doubt it’s for that. He just couldn’t be around the suffering from this war.”

  I paused. Whatever I didn’t like about John Barrington Lacey, he was indeed here in Paris, driving an ambulance.

  But my revised approach didn’t seem like it was doing much good. Lacey was listening to me but he’d gone blank again.

  I said, “I just want to help the guy if I can. He’s out there somewhere alone and maybe breaking down. From the time you’ve spent with him, can you remember anything that could lead us to where he might go?”

  Lacey didn’t answer for a long moment, never altering his face, his gaze. He could have been trying to remember something that could help. He could have been cursing at me from a high and superior perch.

  Then he lingered on my own transitional word from a minute ago. “Look,” he said. From a high and superior perch. “I got thrown in randomly with this hayseed autodidact Cyrus Parsons from Illinois, and I have made the best of it. I heard the same talk you did. But I don’t know a thing about him. I doubt you do either. If he’s chosen to go somewhere away from all of us, then I’d suggest we all just let him be.”

  The silence that followed was a that’s-all-I-have-to-say silence and I gave him some of his own blankness. I would let him break this off.

  He did so with a flourish of Ford Baroque. “My vehicle has a loose front wheel. I have examined the spindle in the front axle and found it to be tight, so I have, as well, carefully examined the spindle cones, along with the balls and races in the wheel. And now I am adjusting the wheel bearings. All of which will allow me to safely transport the wounded of this war. Would you mind if I return to my work?”

  I did not allow my sigh to vocalize itself. I said, “You are indeed one handy Harvard man.”

  “I am indeed,” he said.

  “If you didn’t snore you’d be perfect,” I said.

  22

  For personal reasons I didn’t want to see anyone else on this day but Louise, but at this point she was also the next best hope for an immediate lead. A quarter past eight, I stepped out of my hotel, but before I sought a fiacre, I walked down to the Boulevard Saint-Germain and passed under the blue night-light of a post office and into the lobby and into an oaken cabine téléphonique. I called Trask at his hotel. He answered.

  “Are they helping?” I asked.

  He said, “The gendarmes will keep an eye out for the ambulance. I think I caught Fortier after a bottle of red. He grew sentimental over our American volunteers and their touching love for la belle France.”

  “A reminder of why I better work fast.”

  “My very next words to you.”

  “How urgently will he tell you if they find the ambulance?”

  “Urgently. I portrayed our man as a potential suicide.”

  “Even in the night?”

  “It’s possible. I would send my driver for you at once.”

  I had to make a tough, quick decision.

  I said, “I am about to see the Supervising Nurse. She is the best and perhaps the last chance from the hospital for a line on Cyrus. I’m meeting her at her rooms.”

  I let that sit in him a moment.

  “Do you understand?” I said.

  “You know your work,” he said. “Is there a telephone?”

  “Not with her. Perhaps in the building. I doubt it.”

  There was a moment of silence.

  Usually this was a very odd thing, with a telephone. An unsettling invention, really. A person is with you, very much so, inside your ear, inside your head. And then he seems to utterly vanish. Like a kind of death.

  But in this instance, Trask and I continued to communicate somehow. He did not have to ask. I said, “105 Rue Perronet. Second floor rear.”

  “Call me when you are elsewhere,” he said. “Whenever that might be.”

  “I will,” I said, and we rang off.

  To his credit, his tone had been flat in his last remark. Not a wisp of a leer. You know your work, he was saying. Having to draw Louise into this conversation like that was necessary for my task. But I felt bad. In a complicated way. Shooting an enemy to death was quite a lot simpler.

  I arrived before Louise’s maison in a dark stretch of the street. The concierge was asleep on a wooden chair in his loge, and I went up the staircase to the second floor and knocked at her apartment.

  Almost at once the door swung open and Louise was before me in a kimono negligee, brightly beflowered. Her feet were bare. She smelled of lilacs once more. She took my hand, drew me in, and closed the door.

  I took her into my arms.

  We kissed.

  And then she took up my hand once more and we continued to say nothing as she led me to her bedroom. She closed the door behind us and extinguished the electric light immediately, while we were still clothed. She did not need to view my body on this night. I was no longer a matter of therapy. I was glad for that.

  As soon as the room was dark, I heard the rustle and tumble of crepe de chine.

  And I was glad for the dark, as well, so that I could wrap my Mauser inside my shed clothes, unseen.

  For a long while thereafter, in the bed, we touched and touched, and still not a single word was uttered.

  Then we folded ourselves together, the darkness around us mitigated only very slightly by the seep of starlight at the edges of the shutter louvers. I could see the shape of her as she pressed against me, but when she lifted her face for a coda of a kiss, I could not see her eyes.

  Then we lay still, as if to sleep, though neither of us did.

  I began to think of what I needed from her, of what I needed to withhold from her. How to balance these things. How to do this while we still lay naked together.

  But it was Louise herself, after a sudden sigh and a rippling adjustment of her body against mine, who brought up Cyrus. “Are you any closer to finding him?”

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “Will you be able to apply your skills?”

  I angled my face toward her, stalled very briefly by my mind hearing reference to the killing set of skills presently animating me. But of course she meant the skills of the only Kit Cobb she knew. She sensed my hesitation and she giggled us back to what we had just done together. “Skills as a reporter,” she said.

  I said, “Your lilac water has gone to your head, Supervising Nurse Pickering.”

  She slapped me lightly on the cheek.

  I grabbed the hand and kissed it.

  She turned her palm against mine and we interlaced our fingers and we held on for a time, even after our outburst of playfulness had dissipated.

  I was surprised to find that I felt content.

  Then once more it was she who drew us back to business. “I’ve been thinking what you might ask me to understand Cyrus’s story. To help you find him.”

  “And?”

  “He didn’t confide in me particularly. The things I know of him he readily showed. He was angry. And he was passionate for the wounded. But very angry. On their behalf.”

  “He made that clear to me.”

  “But we all are, those of us so close to the personal consequences of this war. I’m angry too.”

  Louise was smart. The world was alert to anarchy. If Cyrus’s anger came across to her as focused wholly on the suffering of the battlefield, he must have carefully modulated the expression of his fuller beliefs with people like her. Some of the things he said to me, the scraps of anarchist screed, seemed simply to slip out, but I was beginning to realize that nothing he told me was inadvertent. Maybe this was the answer to Trask’s puzzlement over why Cyrus took me to the front before vanishing. He’d planned his disappearance from the start. He took me to engage the press in its coverage of the carnage. And to use
his empty Ford truck on his return to restock his dynamite for the long siege to come.

  Louise said, “But that much doesn’t help.”

  “It does,” I said. “It helps me to know how he spoke to you.”

  “I had that answer ready for you, from my thinking what you might ask. But it came out wrong just now. Not wrong. Imbalanced. The anger was in him. But he cared intensely for the wounded. Almost tenderly at times.”

  I knew what was probably hidden from her. Cyrus’s hierarchy of care. “Was he evenhanded in his tenderness?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “From what he said to me, it was evident that he despised the officer class.”

  “Really?”

  “Passionately.”

  She did not speak for a moment.

  I suddenly recognized what had just been a pulse of jealousy in me, that she should be drawn admiringly in these ways to another man. Which was a clue that Kit Cobb the spy might read in the Kit Cobb lying in this bed to understand his growing feelings for Supervising Nurse Pickering.

  She said, “I was at the receiving door once and he was helping transfer a wounded officer. An elegant man, a major, who spoke excellent English. As Cyrus handed off the litter, the officer looked up at him and said, ‘You are our brother.’ And Cyrus said, ‘Brother to your gypsies and ragpickers.’ I think at the time I was struck only by his care for the poor. But it was a harsh thing to say to the major.”

  I thought to go on, to explain away, once and for all, whatever warm feelings she had for Cyrus Parsons. But I let the other me take over now: “Who was he close to?”

  “At the hospital? Which is all I know about. I thought about that question too. Only John Lacey.”

  “Who he lives with.”

  “Yes.”

  “I talked with him. No help.”

  Louise humphed.

  I said, “Do you know if Cyrus might have had lodgings separate from the hospital? I understand some do. You do.”