by Lee Child
She came to my stand late that day as I was breaking down the equipment. Business had been good, she said. For me too. My pockets dragged with change, from yellow fifty-centime pieces to two-euro coins. I even had a few bills. As we sometimes did, we dragged my drum case and horn bags around the corner and sat on one of the concrete benches overlooking the Seine.
We often ended the day like that when the weather was good and the cops didn’t chase us away. The setting sun shone pinkly on the cream-colored stone buildings across the river: the Beaux Arts rail-station structure of the Musée d’Orsay; next to it the squat headquarters of the Légion d’honneur. To the left, upriver, were the towers of Notre-Dame; to the right, the glass-paned cavernous roof of the Grand Palais, French flag flying atop.
The river itself was a sight to see. At this time of year, the Seine was fed by runoff from the mountains. A deep and viscous brown, the water was almost level with the cobbled walkway along the banks. The current slurped against the bridge’s pilings and pushed against the prows of the Bateaux-Mouches as they slid up and down the waterway with their cargoes of tourists.
“Look at this,” Tatiana said, lifting her skirt and taking her earnings out of a pocket sewn inside. “There was a guy waving a ten-euro bill around and when he put it in his pocket he left a corner hanging out. He never even saw me.”
I clapped her on the back.
THE MOTHER, THE man — I’d named him Romeo — and the little girl came by on their way to the gardens often in the month that followed. They — at least the child and her mother — probably lived in the Seventh Arrondissement, on the other side of the footbridge, in one of those apartments with ten-foot ceilings. People in those apartments wore cashmere coats and dressed their little girls in clothing from Tartine et Chocolat, the fancy children’s store on the boulevard Saint-Germain.
Romeo must have learned his lesson, because he never again tried to bring the girl to the beret. She let him hold her hand across the bridge, the Mother alongside. Then she always walked up to me alone. I’d play the polka and do my bobbing routine. It got to be a game: She’d smile at me and I’d respond with a couple of little dance steps and a trombone wail. More steps toward me and I’d twirl around. The girl would laugh and put a coin in. I felt like laughing myself, for the first time in years. Unlike my older fans, who seemed almost ashamed to be giving money to a beggar, albeit a musical one, the child looked straight into my face. Her expression, a kind of puckery smile with a flash of her blue eyes, made me imagine that she knew how much those coins meant to me.
On a gray day in April, I was just finishing a set with “La Vie en Rose” when I saw that the child was there, standing a bit in front of the usual bunch of tourists. Next to her was Romeo. No sign of the Mother. His hair was slicked back from his forehead in an expensive cut. My audience was with me; they had clapped to the theme from Can-Can and laughed when I swayed during the refrain of “I Love Paris.” I’d lose them if I played the polka. Instead, I just winked at the child, and she smiled at me. She seemed unperturbed that her mother wasn’t there. One hand held on to the hand of the man, who looked down at her as if he couldn’t believe he’d won her over. Her other hand fiddled with a heart-shaped locket I’d never seen before and that I could tell was gold.
The girl gave me a bill this time, another ten-euro note from Romeo’s wallet, and then they walked up the stairs and into the gardens. As they moved out of view, the man picked her up and whispered something in her ear.
The money flowed in that day. No sooner had one group left after a set than another would form around me, sometimes even before I’d started playing again. By late afternoon, I must have had forty people watching. I treated them to a jazz improv on the trombone, with only the cymbal tracking. I didn’t try that often, but the crowd was with me.
Suddenly, sirens wailed from the gardens. A voice thundered from the public-address system; I couldn’t make out the words. The pah-paw of police cars and fire trucks could be heard in the distance, then on the road above the tunnel. Two uniformed cops raced in from the bridge and rushed up the tunnel stairs, taking them two at a time as the tourists gawked. Just after the cops entered the tunnel, the great grilled gates, the ones that closed the park off from the bridge each evening, began sliding shut.
The tourists scattered in confusion. I could still hear noise from the gardens, but it was a muffled rumble. I was locked outside. This was not convenient: I’d have to drag my stuff along the quay and around the west side of the Tuileries to get to the Metro if I couldn’t cross the park. Where was Tatiana? I had never before seen the gates close early. I began packing up.
There was a rat-a-tat, and one more set of racing footsteps sounded from the bridge. I turned and saw that they weren’t being made by a late cop. The Mother, her face streaked with tears, coat hanging open, lipstick smeared, a cell phone in one hand, ran across the cobblestones in high heels and threw herself against the barred gate.
“My baby! My baby!” It was more a howl than a scream, a noise like no sound I had ever heard. “Let me in!” She hung on the bars as if without them she would melt to the ground.
Two uniformed policemen trotted down the stairs on the other side of the gate and came toward her. I could hear more shouts; someone was ordering that the gates be opened. The cops reached out through the grille and touched her hands. And I could hear some of the words they said to her:
“So terribly sorry.”
“He says he only looked away for a second.”
“We will find the villain who did this, madame.”
MUSIC WAS THE only thing that ever filled me up inside. Even before the memories from my childhood came back and stopped my voice, even before the stairs and the tunnel and the broad river became my only horizons, nothing but music touched the hollow core inside me. That’s why I learned so many instruments. Each one — not just my one-man-band ensemble, but the violin, the piano, the plaintive oboe — gave me a different facet of what others get from normal life. When I played, I felt complete.
But on this day, the day after the child, the day after the Mother stopped being a mother, I was just blowing air and whacking drums. The voice my instruments gave me was an ugly, blaring thing.
I had gone back to the bridge to work. What else was there to do? I played the most melancholy songs of my Edith Piaf repertoire. No polkas. I didn’t even touch the trombone. It seemed unfair that the park was open as usual and that the beret filled up, even though I wasn’t twirling, or bobbing, or smiling. How could those tourists be unaware that my music was crying, not singing? But I couldn’t leave, couldn’t go away from the last place I had seen her.
Around midday, a hard, thin man with steel-gray hair stepped up to where I was playing. He wore an impeccably pressed navy suit with a tiny square of yellow silk handkerchief poking from the jacket pocket. With him were a chubby sergeant in uniform and a thuggish lieutenant in a leather jacket. The small crowd around me dissipated as soon as they approached.
“I am Commander Bassin,” the suited man said. “Are you acquainted with a Tatiana Plevneliev?” He pronounced the name as if his lips had never had to speak such horrible syllables before.
I had assumed the police would question me about the child. But why were they asking about Tatiana?
He got a nod of the head. It was tempting to deny our acquaintance, but the park cops had seen us together too many times.
“How does she make her living?”
I held out my hand, palm upward.
Bassin raised an eyebrow. The sergeant murmured something in his ear.
“They say you don’t speak.”
I shook my head.
“Are you physically incapable of speech or do you choose not to speak?”
I shrugged.
“I have to tell you, Monsieur . . . Baptiste, this is a very serious matter.”
I put my arm to my side, palm out flat.
“Yes, it’s about the child. Did you ever see her with
Madame Plevneliev?”
Enthusiastic shake no. It was true. There was nothing in children’s pockets to pick. Tatiana would have focused only on Romeo.
“When did you last see her?”
When was it? Had she come by yesterday morning? I shrugged and jerked my thumb over my shoulder in a a-while-ago gesture.
“Monsieur Baptiste, you must search your memory. We know she was in the park yesterday. We want to know if she came this way.”
Bassin was standing motionless, looking straight at me as the sergeant took notes. I wondered what you wrote down if the person being interrogated didn’t speak.
Raising both hands, I shook my head again. Yesterday was filled with the child. I had no recollection of anything else. All I could see in my mind’s eye was the white-coated figure in the arms of the man as he carried her into the park.
“Have you ever seen the Gypsy with children?”
Children? My heart turned cold. I could see where he was heading, and it was very bad. No, I hadn’t. I tried to shake my head as definitively as I could.
But I had a question. I clasped one hand in the other, one elbow high, the other low, then made a gesture straight back from my forehead as if slicking back my hair. Bassin looked puzzled for a second, then the sergeant whispered again.
“It’s not something you need to know,” Bassin told me. “But yes, Monsieur de Marigny says he saw her near the child.” That wasn’t quite what I was asking. But it sounded like the police had found Monsieur Romeo de Marigny to be a very helpful witness.
Bassin left without a look behind him, entourage trailing along.
It was another two days before a park cop told me what had happened. The child had been strangled, and her body had been found in one of the service closets dug into the high walls enclosing the Tuileries. Romeo had alerted the park police that she had vanished when his attention was briefly distracted by a Gypsy. The girl’s gold locket was gone. And when the cops searched every Gypsy in the park, which was of course the first thing they did, they found the necklace. In the pocket that Tatiana had sewn on the inside of her skirt. Which Tatiana was wearing.
I DIDN’T VISIT her in prison, even though I was sure she was innocent. Gypsies lied, scammed, cheated, robbed, maybe even roughed people up a bit. I had known dozens during my years by the river. They didn’t kill.
But even had I been able to tear myself off the tracks that marked my life — home, river, home — to make the one-hour trip to her holding center in Fontainebleau, there was nothing I could do. Tatiana had no more chance of escaping this charge than she had of growing new teeth. No antidiscrimination group would speak up for her, no well-meaning citizen would collect signatures on a petition for her, no politician would stand up in the parliament building across the river and rail against the false charges. When Tatiana told her questioners about finding the necklace on one of the park’s pathways, even she probably knew that they wouldn’t believe her.
I could imagine her in her pretrial appearances before the judges, looking nowhere but at the floor, twisting her skirt in her hands. Had they given her clean clothes to wear? Did she try to speak? Did her lawyer even make an effort? The front pages of the crumpled newspapers that the wind blew up on the embankment showed her photo more days than not: climbing into a police van, surrounded by hard-faced policewomen who seemed to be shoving a little too hard.
Until one day the front-page photo was of only her face, and what the article said was that she had died.
A brain aneurysm in the middle of the night. The authorities said she had gotten the best of care. The authorities said the case was now closed. I put the newspaper into the yellow recycling can on the other side of the tunnel and walked back to my stand and played something or other on my trumpet for the rest of the day.
It wasn’t long after that that I saw the Mother — the Woman now, I guess. She was standing on the bridge, looking east toward Notre-Dame. She was alone, and silent, and thin. Spring had come and gone; it was July. The sun glittered on the river; it was one of those rare days when the water looked almost blue. The faint chatter of the tourists wafted down to me from the bridge. She paid no attention.
I picked up the trombone and began the “Bayrische Polka,” looking straight up at her in the distance, ignoring the crowd of camera-pointing Chinese and sounding the notes as loud as I could. At first, it seemed as if the music didn’t reach her. Then she slowly turned her head toward me and stared motionless for a long time. It was not until the last chorus that she lifted her hand and gave me a gentle wave.
Romeo turned up too, a week or so after that. I didn’t see him at first. He was hanging back in the crowd a bit, as if he were trying to stay out of sight. As I played, I could feel, rather than see, him circling around the watching tourists, coming to rest behind a family of what must have been Americans. A smile was forming on his lips. They had two children, an elementary-school-age boy and a smaller girl. She had blond curly hair and looked like she might have been in kindergarten.
That was enough.
Right in the middle of “Les Rues de Paris,” I put down the trumpet and rose from my stool. I walked through the ranks of astonished tourists, parting them with my hands and breaking through to the back of the crowd. I stood in front of him.
He tried to push by me, but I moved sideways and he stopped, the river on his other side.
I opened my mouth. Breathed in. Made a little cough; breathed again.
“M . . . M . . . Monsieur.” My voice rasped. “I . . . I have some information that I think you need to hear about the little g-girl in the white coat.”
If I had had any doubt, his expression dispelled it.
“I don’t know what you mean.” The tourists were staring at us as intently as if I were playing my trombone from the bell end. I said nothing. Stared at him. He shifted on his feet. “The suspect died in prison. The case is closed.”
I lowered my voice.
“Monsieur, I think it would be better if you heard what I have to say. Better that I tell it to you than . . .”
“All right, what do you want?” No smile now. His arms were folded, his head cocked, but his body was rigid with tension.
“Return tonight, at midnight. I will be here.”
HE CAME NOT across the bridge but from the quay, skulking past the long line of moored houseboats, one behind another, the tables and flowerpots on their decks ghostly in the moonlight. I stood with my back to my instruments.
“I’ve seen men like you before,” I said. “I know what you did.”
“Is it money you want?”
“I want to know the truth.”
“Truth? I don’t know what that is. I loved her. Maybe a little too much — is that what you’re asking? I only wanted to touch her for a second. Nothing bad. But if she’d told her mother . . . Anyway, what will it take for you not to squeal?”
He put his hand into the pocket of the loose jacket he was wearing. As he looked down, I made my move, even before I saw that he was pulling out a knife, not money.
And if someday a body surfaces far downriver from where I still ply my trade, or if the police drag the river for some poor drowned child or missing teenager and turn up the corpse of a young man instead, I hope they notice that the victim is not just another casualty of the muddy waters.
I hope they see on the left side of his head, just above his ear, a deep, slanted wound made with a blow of such force that it sliced, rather than cracked, his skull. A blow struck with the force of love, and pain, and decades of pent-up silence.
I hope whoever finds him will know what went into that blow.
And every day now, the tourists who gather around to see me play and bow and bob can witness the other consequence of that force. My polka renditions are a little tinny, a little off-key. The music just doesn’t sound the same now that the bell end of my trombone is bent so badly.
But the notes that come out are still haunting.
HOT SUGAR BLUES
BY STEVE LISKOW
Bish Underwood hasn’t told the girl on the couch a single lie yet, which is a very good sign. Of course, she’s only been here ten minutes.
Bish has just done three encores to top off a two-hour set in Trenton — our thirty-fifth concert in forty-one days — and he’s left them twitching in the aisles. The LP, which came out two days after we left home, has been in Billboard’s top five ever since, the last three weeks at number one. Bish is in full wind-down-at-the-end-of-the-tour mode, and he’s already ordered champagne and bourbon and fruit and ice and God knows what else from room service.
He’s ready to celebrate, and the girl looks like she can probably help him. The whole suite — 928, because it’s his lucky number — is thick with sweat and hormones.
But she insists that business comes first.
No, not like that. Bishop Underwood has six platinum LPs under his belt, so he never has to pay for it. But this chick’s a freelancer with the green light for an interview from Rolling Stone, and that means they talk on the couch before they talk on the pillows.
I want to go to bed with someone too, and plenty of women have slipped by security and are patrolling the halls ready to help me do just that, but I’m Bishop’s manager and he’s never been good at editing his mouth, so I don’t go away until this girl turns off her tape recorder and closes her notebook. What happens after that is her business.
“You were a folksinger first.” She’s done her homework. “Why did you switch to electric? Did Bob Dylan show you that was the way to go?”
“Sorta.” Bish has his feet on the coffee table and is trying to entice her closer, but she’s sitting at the far end of the couch, long legs in tight jeans, ending in scuffed sneakers mere inches from his right hand. Even dressed casual, she can put the groupies outside to shame. A blind man couldn’t miss what she’s got, and Bish is not blind, especially when it comes to women. He’s still wearing the white shirt and leather pants from the show, the debauched-preacher look. And he plays the blues like nobody else can since Michael Bloomfield died in that car last year.