I wanted to complete the night in Louise’s arms. More than ever. But I was in deep now. I had the same hesitation in going to her as a spy that she had in coming to me smelling of gangrene and blood and body fluids. On this night there was nothing to wash me clean.
La Chapelle was a crucial operation and would soldier on without pause. And though I strongly suspected the event would be kept from the newspapers, one of the Neuilly boys would soon be there. If any of the La Chapelle staff saw the ambulance come in or even saw it sitting there before the blast, there would be a tale to tell. It was hard to say how it would get pieced together. But at least the basic facts were going to find their way to Supervising Nurse Pickering. Soon. And I’d already given her the crucial piece to the puzzle. She would figure this was where I’d run to in the night. She knew it was about Cyrus.
The news must come from me first.
“Back to Rue Perronet,” I said.
“Yes sir,” he said.
“One more instruction from me,” I said.
“Yes sir?”
“Call me Kit. Never sir. I’m not a fucking officer.”
He barked a sharp laugh.
“Got it,” he said.
And I got it. I heard myself. Fucking officer indeed. That was from inside Cyrus’s head.
I tried to stay there. Tried to sense him beyond the passing wall. It occurred to me I should go out into The Zone first thing in the morning. Try to find him. I had a picture of his uncle who might look enough like him for somebody to recognize him. But the place was vast. If he was out there in a settled way, as a vocal sympathizer, the gypsies and ragpickers and the rest of the oppressed were not going to give him up. On the other hand, I couldn’t see him establishing a secure bomb-making space for himself among the huts and hovels and gypsy caravans. The hardscrabble life for his neighbors would draw thieves or informants to him.
But I circled back again to my earlier thought: I have nothing else to go on.
There was also nothing to do about it tonight.
And I had a tricky task immediately ahead of me. How to tell Louise. How much to tell her. It was getting increasingly difficult to talk with her.
Ten minutes later, we stopped before her building.
Sam said, “Is there a message for Mr. Trask?”
“Tell him now we know why the Germans stole the ambulance.”
Sam exhaled a chuckle. His briefing had covered our lie, as well. Then I sensed something shift in him. He said, “Should I let him know you figured out the bomb? That we rushed as fast as we could?”
I shrugged and said, “Sure. Let him know. Not that it did any good.”
“Sorry,” he said.
I heard a little catch in his voice. He looked out the front window, into the night. I realized what the shift had been and how my last, offhand comment sounded.
“Sam,” I said. “You did everything you could.”
“It’s been in my head ever since,” he said. “If I’d just gone faster.”
“If we go faster we hit that ragpicker’s cart at Clignancourt and we never get there at all. It worked out the way it had to.”
He brought his face back to me.
I said, “Stop thinking about it. Instruction number three.”
He nodded.
I said, “If you can’t, then get out of the service. The job is going to eat you alive.”
He rolled his shoulders. “I can.”
“Good.”
“Thank you,” he said. “Kit.”
“Tell him I want to follow a hunch first thing in the morning. You and I will go into The Zone.”
“Got it.”
“I’ll see you at this curb at seven-thirty,” I said.
“Seven-thirty.”
I opened the door and stepped out of the Pierce-Arrow. I shut the door. It thunked solidly. A beautiful car. The car of the wealthy class. It would only be a provocation and a target on the other side of the wall, and a liability for anything else I might get up to thereafter.
I leaned back into the driver’s compartment. “One other thing, Sam. Does the embassy have another vehicle? Made in France? A little less obtrusive? Maybe even modest?”
“They do.”
“Make it ours.”
He nodded and drove off.
The concierge was gone.
Of course. It was nearly 2 a.m. Still. It stopped me. I turned. I stepped back outside. Sam was gone. I strode out to the sidewalk, looked up and down the street. It was impossible for Cyrus to have followed me. But I worried for Louise being drawn in to all this. He might know more about where she lived than she realized. He could have followed her here any evening.
I shook myself by the lapels: He doesn’t care about her. He doesn’t know my connection to her.
Still. I found myself worrying.
I went up the stairs.
For the last flight and across the landing and with my approach to her apartment, I trod lightly.
Part of me still wanted to turn, to go, to make my way back to my hotel. But not the strongest part.
I laid an ear against her door.
And through the door I heard her voice. “Are you listening there?”
“Yes,” I said. “I thought I’d crept here quietly.”
“Not quietly enough.”
“It’s me.”
“I’ve already figured that out. I’m awake.”
“I’ve already figured that out.”
Then I heard a stirring inside and the knob bolt being turned. The door opened.
Her hair was down, her kimono gaped almost entirely open. She grabbed my hand and drew me quickly in and the door was closed and the bolt thrown and we embraced.
After we kissed and kissed again, and I felt a faint trembling in her, felt it, then felt it subside, I said to her, “Were you afraid?”
“Yes.”
“How did you know to be?”
She drew back.
Her great, dark eyes riveted me in the room-glow of electric light.
I said, “Why were you fearful?”
“A banging on the door? Ripped from sleep? The American embassy sends a man in the middle of the night? I couldn’t help it.”
She was smart. She was probably picking up on even more that she wouldn’t know how to put into words. I wished again that I hadn’t come back to her on this night. And I was relieved that I had.
“Can we talk in bed?” I said.
“Such a fine idea,” she said.
She repeated those words a few minutes later, the next words either of us spoke. Such a fine idea that we were in each other’s arms, beneath the covers, naked even just to speak and to sleep, with the lights on but only because we wanted to see each other’s eyes as we talked.
And having reprised her approval, she let more than a moment pass, let that sentiment thoroughly sink in, before adding, “What’s happening, my darling? I must know the truth.”
I’d come here to deliver a straight, factual news story that she needed to know. But I snagged on darling. The word, the fact of it, made things harder. I found—somewhat to my surprise—that I didn’t want to jeopardize that.
She was waiting.
I said, “There’s been an explosion at La Chapelle.”
She let go of me, sat up.
“What? When was this?”
“An hour ago.”
“How did you hear?”
“I was there.”
“Is that why they came and got you?”
“No.”
“I don’t understand. You go off and come back and this is the message? But it’s not why they came in the night to get you? You said that was about Cyrus’s ambulance.”
She was smart, this woman whose darling I was. She was instinctively asking the tough, sensible questions. I saw two choices. Tell her that for reasons I could not reveal, I could say nothing more about what happened tonight or about anything that I would be doing for the days ahead. Tell her only that, but re
alize this choice number one immediately ran more deeply. I could never tell her about who I really am or about anything I have done and will do as that man. Which meant we would soon be done for.
Or. My second choice. Tell her more or less everything. To sensibly consider this choice I factored out the effect of her sitting before me in the lamplight we’d left on for the conversation, which meant I was seeing, in an ongoing way, far more of my naked darling than her eyes. And I factored in the circumstantial impossibility that Supervising Volunteer Nurse Louise Pickering from Gloucester, Massachusetts, was a covert secret service operative for a foreign power.
I didn’t have to decide at once. As if from a city editor’s mandate to a cub reporter covering a train crash, I’d just give the facts.
I spared none of those. Including the pavilion for enlisted men engulfed in flames. The few bodies drawn out, smoldering and dead. Through this part she drew up, she stiffened. But with toughness and self-possession, in her persona as head nurse in a hospital serving the Great War.
I arrived at the ambulance. I painted the reportorial picture. That it sat at the center of things, consumed in the fire. As I spoke of this, her professional reserve turned to restrained agitation in her shoulders, in her hands, which drew up the sheet to cover her chest. And in her eyes, in her focus, I saw the unanswered questions forming in her head. Questions that would force me to make a tough decision.
When I finished the narrative, she let go of my eyes. She lay back on the bed.
I lay down next to her, my head propped on my angled arm, watching her.
Then she turned on her side to face me.
She said, “Is he dead?”
It was impossible to tell her he was not and then find any plausible lies for her follow-up questions. Are you certain? How can you be? So was it the ambulance itself that exploded? How could it do that? If I knew he was not dead, it meant there was a much bigger situation here. I could shut this all down, letting her know that I understood the bigger situation but could not, would not tell her.
But I realized there was one more possible lie.
The only lie I could get away with was my own complete ignorance. I don’t know if he’s dead. I have no idea why the ambulance exploded. I’m just a newspaper writer trying to find a missing acquaintance. This was a simplified choice number one. When I first imagined this path, I instinctively wanted at least to be honest about the reason I was withholding things. This simple way forward didn’t occur to me till now. I knew why. Because this woman deserved more, deserved better. And I didn’t want to lose her. This simplified choice had an inevitable ending. I’d do my secret work in Paris and perhaps be with her a few more times and when the mission was over, my lies and I would walk out her door and never return. She’d marry some Massachusetts physician and she’d go to her grave with, at best, a few weeks of memories from a fleeting darling in Paris. And I would go to my grave with Louise Pickering a line item in a ledger full of regrets.
And I thought: Maybe, in spite of some useful skills, I am profoundly wrong for this fucking job.
I am just a writer.
Maybe a romantic lead.
I thought, Does James Polk Trask have a longtime darling? How about a wife even? Do any of his boys have a wife? Is it possible for the wives never to know what their husbands do? How do husbands and wives live a life like that?
Louise waited for an answer.
Though rendered here fully as thoughts and questions and conclusions, all of this actually thrashed through me more as feelings than thoughts, emotional logic as spontaneous and rapid as the flames of La Chapelle.
I sat up.
She sat up and faced me.
I said to Louise, “No. He’s not dead. But before you ask anything more I need to tell you that I have two jobs. I work for a newspaper, as you know. I also work for our country. I’m sure, my darling, you have no one to reveal that fact to and no interest to reveal it. It’s very important that you don’t. But if we are to be darlings, you and I, and indeed if I am to keep you safe in the days or weeks ahead, you need to know this about me.”
I paused in my tale to give her a chance to answer her own first few follow-up questions in light of what I’d just told her. I felt her mind working.
But what came next was the lifting of her hand.
She touched my cheek.
The scar. She spread her hand over it, covered it, pressed her palm gently against it, keeping her eyes fixed wide and unblinkingly on mine.
I wondered if she too had snagged on darling. Wondered if she’d even heard the rest of what I said.
As if I’d asked that very thing, she said, as soft as the press of her hand, “Nothing we ever say or do, you and I, is anyone else’s business.”
I reached up and put my hand over hers, kept it there a moment, carried her hand to my lips and kissed its palm.
I let it go.
She lowered her hand to her lap.
And she asked, “Did he deliberately do this?”
“Yes.”
She took a sharp, deep breath. She let it out. Composed herself.
“Are you sure?” she said.
“Yes.”
“And he just walked away.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“So he can do it again. And again.”
She shuddered across her shoulders and through her chest. The visible tremble there, in the center of her nakedness, spoke to me of her vulnerability, told me I was doing the right thing. I was about to fail Cyrus in his expectations of me as a newsman, and when I did, he might try to make the carnage strike close to me. Louise needed to know everything, even if only for her own good. To be on guard.
She said, “I meant why did he set off a bomb?”
“You only know part of what he believes. What he’s passionate about. Those things have led him to anarchism.”
And I told her about Cyrus. About his full beliefs. That he was determined to vividly demonstrate the carnage of war to the people of Paris. I told her about the bomb at the Montparnasse café. And I told her about the bomb at the Pont Neuf Metro station, the one that woke me the morning after our first night together.
“I remember,” she said. “You said it was just a sound. Did you realize?”
“I suspected.”
“We were close enough to hear.”
“Yes.”
“So he’ll do it again,” she said.
“If I don’t find him and stop him.”
“Is the hospital in danger?”
I gave that a moment of serious thought. I would talk to Trask about a guard for the place. My fear for Louise was more personal. I would have to stay away from her, I realized. Until this was over. Cyrus would have no reason to go after her except on account of me. For the moment he still thought I was useful. So I was truthful in saying, “No. I think the hospital is safe. He’s already sent a message to us at La Chapelle. From this point on, it’s the French he’s trying to provoke. As with the first two bombs.”
“You have to find him.”
“I know.”
“Do you have a way?”
“Not yet.”
“It’s about where he might go.”
“Yes. A place where he’s already established. He did not make those bombs at the hospital.”
She paused, shook her head slowly from side to side. “I can’t think,” she said.
“One thing,” I said. “Does Cyrus speak any French?”
“At least some. He seemed to be picking it up. The few times I was at the New York Bar it was always with the drivers. I once heard him say something in French to the waitress.”
The La Chapelle informant only spoke a few words on the telephone. Likely he spoke to an American. No dialogue. Cyrus could very well have managed that.
As I took a moment to think this through, Louise turned her face, lowered it a bit. The mind there that I was coming to respect was also working at something.
The
n she came back to me. “You said you talked to John Lacey.”
“Yes.”
“And he was of no help.”
“None.”
“It’s hard to think that John wouldn’t have some clue about Cyrus.”
I said, “Men can be like that. They can easily live in a room together for months and never open up to each other.”
“I have no doubt,” she said. “But I’m pretty sure these two go back further than Paris. First of all, they came to the hospital together.”
“Together?”
“At the same time.”
“Is that unusual?” I asked.
“Not necessarily. But there’s more. At the bar. They always sat near each other at our table, the two of them.”
“That can be men too,” I said, though a moment flashed through me from the road to Compiègne: Cyrus’s initial resistance to fully attack Lacey. He’s all right. The mitigating shrug. That can be men too. Sure it can. These two don’t agree on politics, but while drinking in a bar and talking about their flivvers and their tough job, they can be all right with each other. So I’d jumped to that interpretation.
Jumped.
Nevertheless, I stuck with my opening line. I said, “Men make superficial connections at bars that can look like friendship.” This rang hollow now. So I spoke the reason I was still half a step behind the truth I saw up in front of me: “From what I could see of the two of them, and from talking to Lacey, they didn’t appear to be close at all.”
“But I picked up on something,” Louise said. She lifted her forefinger, touched the air between us. “Give me a few moments. Let me recover the details.” Then she curled her knuckle against her lips.
And while she did, I recovered a detail of my own. Cyrus calling Lacey Jack. I’d heard a sarcastic dig at a Brahmin. But that’s what I was listening for. Jack could have been the fellow fighter for the oppressed, a refugee convert from the ruling class. Maybe a bankroll for bombs and a place apart in the city.
I’d failed to learn my lesson with Staub.
“Okay,” Louise said. “Here’s how it went. It was that waitress at the New York Bar. I was sitting just to John’s right. Cyrus was on his other side. A conversation was going on across the table that I’d been following. But the waitress came up with our drinks. I looked at her as she arrived. Out of the corner of my eye I saw them both turn her way. She served us and went off and the conversation on the other side of the table resumed. But I heard Cyrus say to John, ‘Chicago.’ He said it low, just for John, but I heard him. And John said, ‘Southside Delicatessen.’ And Cyrus said, ‘The waitress. What was her name? Spitting image.’”
Paris in the Dark Page 17