Rage in Paris

by Kirby Williams

  Daphne looked at Baby Langston’s body again. Nobody would believe that she could have killed a large black man so brutally. She smiled to herself; her beauty turned all men into fools. No, the killing of this black man bore all the hallmarks of Buster Thigpen’s brutality. And Buster was, judging from what Urby had said to the woman Redtop, on his way to burial in a watery grave. She would make sure that blame for the killing of Baby Langston fell on Buster.

  She suddenly heard the sound of breaking branches and footsteps approaching. Was it the French kidnappers? Coolly, she dipped her hands in the blood gushing from Baby Langston’s head and swabbed it over her dress, face, and hair. Then she tied the ropes back around her arms and wrists and sprawled out on the burlap sack, pretending to be unconscious. There was a knock on the door, and then it was pushed open warily. Daphne heard the sound of two men speaking rapid French. Daphne recognized the voice of Count d’Uribé-Lebrun, and for a moment she was frightened, not knowing how he had found out where she was.

  The Count was growing increasingly worried that Bartholomew Thigpen had not yet returned from the charity concert rehearsal at La Belle Princesse nightclub. Then Pierre had received a phone call from a contact who told him that Corsican friends of his, driving a black Traction Avant, were dropping off two “packages of interest” at the intersection of the Boulevard Malesherbes and the Place Wagram at 10:00 p.m. The packages would be picked up by a métisse woman and a black man driving in a Hispano-Suiza automobile. Pierre tried to find out more, but his contact would only tell him what he safely could.

  Pierre reported the information to the Count right away. He was very interested because Bartholomew had not yet returned from the rehearsal, and the Count was sure he would take his beautiful blonde girlfriend Daphne with him. Bartholomew might be involved with the “packages” in question. The Count’s instincts told him that some plot was being hatched, probably by Bartholomew, to obtain money or something that could be turned into money to feed his drug addiction.

  Perhaps this time he had come up with some “louche” scheme to make himself financially independent. This thought displeased the Count, who wanted to keep Bartholomew on a short leash so that he could be used for the major operation that the Count was plotting against the Socialo-communists: the assassination of the Jew and Socialist leader Léon Blum.

  Egged on by curiosity, the Count decided that this matter of the “packages of interest” was too delicate to be delegated to his hotheaded acolyte Pierre. No, he would accompany Pierre and find out what, if anything, Bartholomew was plotting.

  Pierre and the Count had driven to the rendezvous point indicated by Pierre’s contact in an inconspicuous black Renault. They had arrived early and waited near the statue of the painter Alphonse de Neuville, their engine idling. They had a perfect view of the Corsican youths manhandling two large sacks into the trunk of the Hispano, helped by a large black man. The person driving the Hispano, who appeared, in the low light, to be a woman, got from behind the steering wheel briefly to peer into the sacks. The Corsicans had driven away, and they had followed the Hispano as far as the outskirts of Neuilly. Approaching a traffic light, the Hispano sped through the red light, and the Count and Pierre were forced to stop to avoid colliding with a truck. By the time the light changed and they moved forward, the Hispano had disappeared. Irritated, the Count said, “Mon petit Pierre, you let yourself be outmaneuvered by them.”

  Pierre, abashed, stuttered an apology.

  The Count decided that the “packages” were headed for the Bois de Boulogne. Where they had stopped was a good place for observing if there were any further collaborators in the affair. There was a lone open café nearby, and the Count asked Pierre to buy some sandwiches and wine to sustain them while they waited.

  The Count’s instincts told him that some others would join the woman driving the Hispano and her black helper. Those joining them would be the masterminds, probably Bartholomew and Jean, his closest friend in the Oriflamme. He decided to wait, until dawn if necessary, to see if his hunch proved right.

  Some four hours later, the Hispano-Suiza passed by again. This time, the Count recognized the driver as the famous métisse cabaret owner Redtop. He was surprised to see Urby Brown in the passenger seat. The Count nudged Pierre to follow them. This matter was more interesting than he had anticipated.

  “Make no mistakes this time, mon petit,” he said to Pierre.

  They shadowed the car until the Count was sure that they had been spotted. He ordered Pierre to take a side street, which the Count knew would allow them to drop behind the Hispano and follow it at a distance. They saw the car stop and the woman and Urby get out of it and enter a remote thicket in the Bois de Boulogne. Pierre started to get out of the car to follow them, but the Count stopped him.

  “Let’s wait, mon petit. We will see what happens.” The Count was rewarded when the woman came running back alone, drove the Hispano across the frost-covered grass, and then returned five minutes later with Urby still in the passenger seat. The Hispano sped off toward Paris.

  The Count signaled to Pierre to follow the Hispano’s tire tracks into the wood.

  Pierre was the first to spot a dim light glowing in a thicket. They stopped the car, got out, and crept forward, Pierre carrying his Beretta and the Count his trusted Berthier. About ten yards ahead of them, they saw the outlines of a stable and tracks of footsteps in the frost. The Count asked Pierre to reconnoiter the stable. Soon he came running back, wild-eyed.

  “Mon général,” he said. “The black man who was in the Hispano earlier appears to be dead. He seems to have killed the mistress of Monsieur Bartholomé.”

  The Count and Pierre crept cautiously into the stables and, immediately, the Count saw that the black man was definitely dead. But a quick glance at Mademoiselle Daphné made him suspect a “mise en scène,” that she was feigning an injury. He motioned to Pierre to fill up a bucket of water. He watched the girl as the water filled the bucket. The faint expression of consternation on her face convinced the Count that he was right.

  He signaled for Pierre to douse her with water. She leapt to her feet, soaked and sputtering the water out of her nose and mouth. The Count laughed at her expression of surprise and then anger that her subterfuge had been discovered.

  “You have some explaining to do, young lady,” the Count said to her in his soft New Orleans drawl.

  When she had regained her composure, Daphne stared at the Count, thinking at first that her eyes were playing tricks on her. He looked exactly like Urby Brown, the man who she sensed could help her gain independence from her father and achieve her dream of ravishing Adolf Hitler. She had had a fleeting instinct of the resemblance when she had been introduced to Urby hours before. There must be some connection between them, she thought. She felt her confidence swell at the prospect of using both of them to serve her ends.

  CHAPTER 10

  “Dispose of that cadaver, Pierre. We leave no bodies behind,” the Count ordered, jabbing toward Baby Langston with his cane. Pierre obeyed instantly, hefting the large corpse onto his powerful welterweight’s frame and then manhandling it into the trunk of the Count’s car.

  The Count waved his cane at the stables and made a match-striking gesture to Pierre whose eyes gleamed with pleasure.

  Pierre took a ten-liter jerrican of gasoline out of the trunk and poured its contents over those strategic points, which Pierre, whose greatest pleasures came from arson, knew would accelerate the burning of the stables.

  The Count and the girl watched him dart around, pouring gasoline against the wooden walls of the stables. He then put the empty jerrican on the ground next to the girl and went inside. Pierre returned with a piece of newspaper, which he screwed into a torch. He passed a hand over it like a magician and said, “One match is all that I need.” He lit it and touched it to the wall. There was a sudden whoosh as the stables went up in flames. Pierre smiled as the blaze spread. He heard clapping and turned to see the Count applaudi
ng his prowess.

  “Like magic, Pierre. To Paris now,” the Count said, all the while studying the girl. He planned to question her in detail about Buster’s whereabouts as soon as they reached his headquarters. He also wanted to find out what Urby Brown and the woman, Redtop, were doing at the stables and why they had not taken her with them. As for the corpse they had found with the girl, the Count trusted Pierre’s magic to make it disappear.

  The Count watched Daphne, who was staring at him from the other side of the desk in his office. The Count had had his maid draw a bath for her in the gilded bathtub in his late Countess Hélène’s chambers, which had been unused since her death.

  Daphne was rehearsing, in her mind, answers to his inevitable questions. She had to make an ally of him.

  He sighed after a while, lifted his gaze, and said, “I hope that you have found everything that you need.”

  “Everything was so beautiful that it was like being in paradise. Your wife’s boudoir?”

  “My late wife’s,” the Count answered. “She died of the Spanish influenza, a week after the armistice.” Precisely on November 19, 1918, he remembered, a week and a day after the armistice ending the Great War had been declared. His chief, Philippe Pétain, had been promoted to the rank of Marshal of France that day and the Count to the rank of Brigadier General. The Count was in Paris having his brigadier’s star pinned on when a somber Marshal Pétain informed him that his Countess had died from Spanish influenza a few hours before.

  “I’m so sorry,” the girl was saying to him now. “She must have been a woman of exquisite taste. And she was beautiful. I saw the photograph of the two of you on her dressing table.”

  “Yes, she was all of those things.” He waved his hand dismissively. “But that is the past. What interests me is the present and what has happened to our mutual friend Bartholomew Thigpen.”

  Daphne looked blank.

  “He bears the vulgar nickname Buster,” the Count said, smiling.

  Daphne’s face darkened. “I thought that he cared for me, but he was only after my father’s money. He and a black man called Baby Langston arranged to have some Corsicans kidnap me at a nightclub called La Belle Princesse where the black man works for his uncle who owns the place. We had gone there for Buster to rehearse for a charity concert for the families of the dead and injured in the riots last Tuesday.” Daphne felt real tears running down her cheeks, and the Count handed her a handkerchief with an air of total indifference.

  “Please go on,” he said.

  “The Corsicans pretended to be burglars and slugged Mr. Urby Brown when he tried to stop them from robbing the cash register. They put Buster and me in burlap sacks as if they were planning to kidnap both of us. They blindfolded me and put some ether or something over my face, and the next thing I knew I woke up with my hands bound behind my back.” Daphne broke down, but her tears subsided when she noticed that the Count looked bored rather than sympathetic.

  “Please make an effort to go on, my dear,” he said, drily.

  “When I woke up, the Corsicans were gone, but Mr.Langston and Buster were there. Buster untied my hands and forced me to help him write a ransom note to my father. He wanted one hundred thousand dollars in banknotes and gold for my safe return.” She paused. “One hundred thousand dollars! Then he told Mr.Langston to deliver the note to my father at the Ritz Hotel. Buster tied me up again and put me inside that bag to wait until Mr. Langston returned. He promised to untie me when there were two of them to keep an eye on me. Then he raped me, again and again, with my hands tied behind my back! We’ve made love lots of times; he didn’t have to do that.” Her face had flushed as if she was still outraged by it all.

  The Count made no attempt at sympathy. He pressed on, “Do you think that the owner of La Belle Princesse was complicit in the kidnapping? Or the famous musician Stanley Bontemps? Or Urby Brown? After all, Mr. Brown came here to ask my permission for Bartholomew to take part in the charity concert.”

  Daphne paused as if thinking it over. Then she said, “I’m sure that neither Mr. Brown nor Mr. Bontemps had anything to do with it. I don’t know about Mr. Langston’s uncle. He certainly didn’t try to stop Buster and Mr. Langston the way Mr. Brown did. And Mr. Bontemps seemed shocked by it all.”

  “How did the big black man Langston end up dead?” the Count asked, studying her reaction.

  “When Mr.Langston returned from the Ritz and saw what Buster had done to me, he got angry and said he wanted no part of the kidnapping. While he was untying me, they had a violent quarrel, fought like wild animals, and Buster finally got the upper hand and killed Mr. Langston with a tire iron. Buster got frightened when he realized what he’d done, and he just ran off after begging me not to tell anyone what had happened. To say that Mr. Langston had kidnapped me and that a white man had found us, killed Mr. Langston, untied me, and run away. If I know Buster, he’s lying low until he can collect the ransom from my father, and then he’ll disappear. He always talked about hitting the jackpot someday and going off to Spain or Italy to live like a grandee. I didn’t think he planned to hit the jackpot by kidnapping me and holding me to ransom!”

  “How did the ransom note reach your father? If this black man Langston delivered it, it would have raised eyebrows at the Ritz.”

  “Buster told Mr. Langston to ask a French West-Indian cleaning woman he knew to slip the note under my father’s door.”

  The Count studied Daphne’s reaction to his next question very carefully. “I think that I saw Mr. Urby Brown and a red-haired metisse woman called Redtop leaving the stable in a car before we found you.”

  Without hesitating, Daphne said, “I was groggy, but I remember thanking them for tracking me down so fast. They untied my ropes, and then I told them to go to the police right away and get them onto Buster’s trail fast, before he left the country. Then I must have fainted.”

  Daphne put her head in her hands and wept, all the while keeping an eye on the Count’s reactions.

  Finally, he sighed and said, “I owe you an apology on behalf of Bartholomew, my dear. I know that he has bad sides to him, but he has been most helpful to me, and we have grown quite close. I would never have allowed him to take part in the charity concert if I had known that he was planning to kidnap you.”

  He seemed to Daphne to be truly sorry; his head had slumped forward, as if to hide his emotions from her. In fact, the Count was thinking to himself that he had heard many stories in his long life, and that he had a fine-tuned sense of the difference between a lie and the truth. This time, though, he was uncertain.

  Bartholomew had a violent streak of savagery in him, he knew. He had a penchant for fast women and drugs and gambling, which meant that he needed a constant supply of money. The Count had been happy to supply the money to Bartholomew, up to a point, because of a curious attachment that he felt toward him. He had decided to instill some discipline into Bartholomew and make him work for the money he gave him by forcing him to take a more active part in the attacks of the Oriflamme on the workers and the Socialo-communists.

  The Count felt that Bartholomew had distinguished himself in the attack on the National Assembly last Tuesday, although the enemy had won the battle. In fact, he was so impressed by Bartholomew that the Count now planned to mount a counterattack next week, on Ash Wednesday, by having Bartholomew assassinate the Socialist leader Léon Blum. Bartholomew’s sudden disappearance had jeopardized the Count’s plans.

  The Count kept sizing up the girl as she seemed to wait nervously to hear his next words.

  The Count recalled his surprise when Bartholomew had first turned up with the girl before him who, though American, had breeding. She obviously came from a wealthy background. She was beautiful and of a pure Aryan type. His instincts told him that beyond her seeming fragility, she possessed a steely will. The Count suspected that Bartholomew was a means of sexual initiation for her, but he had also felt from the outset that there was more than sex involved. She was playing Bar
tholomew like a musical instrument, just as he was.

  If, as he sensed, she was behind the kidnapping scheme, he might claim a share of the one hundred thousand dollar ransom. The money would be very useful at this time; many people who would have been generous to his movement were in difficulty due to the Depression and to the catastrophic bursting of the financial bubbles blown by the Jewish swindler, Alexandre Stavisky. For his Oriflamme movement, outside financial support was as essential for toppling the French Third Republic as it had been to Hitler’s Nazis for conquering Germany.

  “Would you like me to contact your father to let him know that you are safe?” the Count asked finally, having decided that her reply would be decisive in determining his course of action.

  “Of course,” she answered, without conviction. “But I know that he’ll book us a passage on the next liner for America, so that I can get back to my studies and graduate with my class at Smith College in June. Unless I have it out with Buster first, I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering if every man who makes love to me is just doing it for my father’s money.”

  Her answer convinced him that she was involved in her own kidnapping and that the idea of the ransom was hers. Bartholomew was not ambitious or imaginative enough to elaborate, by himself, a kidnapping scheme to extract one hundred thousand dollars from a white man of wealth and power.

  “You put me in a very delicate position, my dear,” the Count said, gently. “You are a young woman of breeding, and I feel that it is my duty as a gentleman to report to your father that you are safe and sound. It will then be up to the French police to undertake the necessary—”