Rage in Paris

by Kirby Williams

  She wondered if Chancellor Hitler had said something to Rudolph Hess about her. Despite having a cold, calculating mind and having experienced the reality of sexual humiliation with Buster, Daphne still harbored the romantic notion that Chancellor Hitler would see in her the sixteen-year-old maiden he had walked with in the Tiergarten and would, when he was crowned Kaiser of the new German Reich, choose her as Kaiserin.

  The nurse, who with stiff formality introduced herself to Daphne as “Fraülein Elsa Herbst, head of household of the Widowed Prime Minister of Prussia Hermann Goering,” could not take her eyes off Daphne. She stared adoringly at her, her Meissen blue eyes seeming to glow in her porcine face. Daphne thought that she resembled her master.

  As the car drew closer to Berlin, the three Germans became ever more sycophantic. They probably knew, she thought, that, in a matter of days, she would see their Führer.

  Daphne knew that older men were very attracted to her. Buster became her lover when he was more than twice her age, and Urby was almost as old as Buster. Chancellor Hitler would turn forty-five in two months, on April 20th. He would not be able to resist her and, as he grew older, she would grow stronger until she, the mother of their progeny, was firmly in control.

  Hours later, lying in the plush four-poster bed in her suite at the Hotel Adlon, Daphne remembered her last sight of Urby, asleep in their private dining room at La Pérouse Restaurant. After submitting to the degradation that Buster delighted in inflicting on her, making love to Urby had stirred her deeply and reaffirmed her belief in her sexual power over men. She regretted that she had to administer the knockout drops to Urby, as instructed by the Count, but she believed that the plan to convince her father to have Urby track her down in Berlin would succeed. She hoped that they would be lovers again in a short time and that making love to Urby would help her to prepare herself for her greatest ambition: subjugating Chancellor Hitler’s heart.

  Some five hundred miles away, in Paris, Hambone Gaylord had a big problem on his hands. His nephew, Darius “Baby Langston” Swilley, had been missing since the phony abduction of Buster Thigpen and the rich blonde girl from La Belle Princesse.

  Now, Stanley was accusing Hambone and the Alfieris, and even Baby Langston, of being in cahoots to kidnap the girl for real and hold her for ransom.

  What really angered Hambone was that Stanley was right about his plans for making money off the girl, although he had not been able to put them into motion. Once Stanley and Urby had outlined their fake kidnapping scheme and mentioned how rich the girl’s father was, Hambone had figured that having the blonde girl to hand was like “finding a bird’s nest on the ground.” He reckoned that big money could be made if he played good cards.

  So Hambone and the Alfieris had worked out a real old-fashioned kidnapping scheme. The plan was simple, Hambone told himself. Why had it all gone wrong? If his nephew, Baby Langston, had come in on Saturday like he was supposed to, Hambone and the Alfieri brothers would have leaned on him to tell them exactly where Redtop had stashed Buster and the girl, and then they were going to kidnap her themselves. They planned to work a ransom deal of their own on Daphne’s father and then blackmail Stanley to keep his mouth shut by threatening to tell the father that Stanley and Urby were behind the girl’s kidnapping.

  The problem was that his nephew hadn’t turned up for the third morning in a row and, because of that, a new and greater fear was gripping Hambone on this Monday afternoon. Stanley’s threats were scary, but they were nothing compared to his fear of what his baby sister, Magnolia Swilley, would do to him if she found out that her only child, Darius “Baby Langston” Swilley, had disappeared on Hambone’s watch.

  Hambone knew that he was a cold killer. His talent for killing had made him a hero to the French and Americans during the Great War. It enabled him to climb to the top of the ladder in the postwar Harlem-in-Montmartre underworld, backed by the Corsicans. The story was that Magnolia, the most feared gangster in Harlem, New York, had never killed anyone herself. But she was so beautiful and powerful that anyone who crossed her got killed in exchange for her sexual favors. And they got killed real nasty.

  She had let Darius travel to Paris to pursue his poetry career because Hambone had promised to take him under his wing. Hambone could not refuse her because she owned La Belle Princesse lock, stock, and barrel.

  Hambone had had the Alfieris scouring Paris, looking for Baby Langston and using all of their connections to track him down since Saturday afternoon. But so far, they had come up empty-handed. It was very late in the afternoon on Monday now, and there was no further word from them of Baby’s whereabouts.

  La Belle Princesse closed on Mondays, so Hambone was alone with his fear of Magnolia. He felt like getting drunk and forgetting what a mess he was in. He remembered that there were two bottles of Tennessee mountain moonshine, which he still had tucked away in the cellar. He drank the moonshine sparingly, like the rarest French champagne, because he had only smuggled in five bottles of it when he arrived back in France from his last trip to America many years ago at the height of Prohibition. Whenever he drank that White Lightning, it brought back memories of home and his childhood with his sister, Magnolia, before they grew up and went their separate ways.

  Hambone opened the trapdoor down to the cellar and turned on the light. When he reached the bottom of the steps and stood in the cellar, he bumped into the crates of champagne, whiskey, and other items stored there, looking for the hole in the moldy walls where he kept his stash of moonshine. He moved a few cases of champagne aside and then bent down to avoid hitting his head on a low arch. Moving on quickly, he stumbled over something. Hambone felt for his pistol and realized, panicked, that he had left it upstairs behind the bar.

  When the thing he stumbled into didn’t move, he bent down in the dim light and discovered a body lying face down on the earthen floor. It was a big body wearing big shoes, their soles full of holes. An enormous fear slammed into his heart, and he choked, afraid that he was going to have a heart attack then and there. He wanted to run away and pretend that there was no body there, but he turned it over. His nephew lay dead with his head smashed in. There was no blood; the body had bled out someplace else. He felt terrible for Baby for a heartbeat, and then his fear of Magnolia gripped him again.

  Hambone decided instantly to get rid of the body. As long as there was no body, he could make up a story for Magnolia about Darius having left Paris to go traveling. She would be furious that Baby had not left a forwarding address, but as long as she thought that Darius was alive, he, Hambone, had a slim chance of living long enough to find a way to destroy Magnolia with the help of the Alfieri clan.

  He looked around the cellar for something to wrap the body in so that he could tote it upstairs. He would drive his car to the street behind La Belle Princesse, using the same back entrance that the Alfieris had taken to make off with Buster and Daphne the night of Stanley and Urby’s fake kidnap deal.

  Hambone found some old, torn packing materials and some rope and trussed Darius up like an enormous parcel, after searching through his pockets to make sure that there was no identity on him. It was hard work hauling him up the stairs, but Hambone was a big man himself, and Darius felt lighter with the blood drained out of him.

  Night had fallen, and the alley was dark. The street lamp was out of order. Hambone was able to bring his car around to the back and load Baby, together with a pitchfork and a shovel, into his trunk without being seen. He reckoned that the best way to dispose of him was to bury him in some deserted spot in the country where he could put down a marker and say Christian words over the remains.

  He planned to tell Stanley that Baby Langston had contacted him from a hiding place and asked him to let Stanley know that he had helped Buster to escape with the blonde girl because Satan had tempted him by dangling big dough before his eyes. Baby had seen the error of his ways and wanted Stanley to know that Buster had gone off with the girl and was hiding out with her somewhere in P
aris until he collected ransom money for her. Stanley would have his doubts about Hambone’s story, but there was no way he could disprove it, Hambone thought. Unless he found Buster and the girl first and they told him a different story.

  Hambone drove on through the night. He felt sorry for his nephew, but he calmed down at the thought that, if Stanley swallowed his story, he would unwittingly help Hambone to send Magnolia up a blind alley until he and the Alfieris found a way to destroy her.

  CHAPTER 18

  Paris, Tuesday–Wednesday, February 13–14, 1934

  Auguste, the night concierge-receptionist of the Ritz Hotel, sat at the front desk, alone with the splendors of the Ritz’s lobby, which was empty at three in the morning.

  He heard the squeal of tires and the repeated honking of a horn on the Place Vendôme just outside the hotel’s florid doors. He thought to himself that it must be Socialist and Communist troublemakers who were increasingly targeting luxury hotels with acts of vandalism and sabotage. The unions had called for an extension of yesterday’s mainly unsuccessful General Strike, and the hooligans outside had probably decided to start early after building up their courage with cheap red wine and rum.

  Auguste left his front desk to wake up the top-hatted doorman who slumbered on a Louis XV chair in a corner space off the main lobby. The doorman leapt to his feet, stretched himself to his considerable height, and smoothed down his long black jacket and top hat, waiting for orders.

  “I heard noises outside,” Auguste said. “Be careful, though, it may be some of those red vermin.”

  “I will deal with them, boss, fear not,” the doorman said. He came back a few minutes later, dragging a man by holding him under his armpits. The unconscious man was not a good sort, Auguste thought. He wore a felt-covered metal Homburg hat that was pushed down over his head and held on by a chin strap, a species of haberdashery that Auguste had never seen before. From what he could see of the man’s clothes under his rough tweed overcoat, they had no doubt been custom made but not with a fine fabric. They marked him out as being from a middling social milieu: not a worker.

  After Auguste spotted a tag on the man’s lapel reading “Take me to Barnet Robinson right away. I am Urby Brown,” he had the doorman take him into a well-appointed room off the lobby to await further instructions. He decided that it was unwise to buzz Mr. Robinson at this hour; instead, he took the elevator to Mr. Robinson’s suite. Auguste tapped on the door, and Mr. Robinson opened it right away, as if he were expecting someone. Fully dressed, he looked as if he hadn’t slept.

  “Yeah?” he asked.

  Auguste answered, “A man has just been brought in, unconscious, from the Place Vendôme. A note pinned to him states that he is Urby Brown . . . ”

  “Great!” he said excitedly. “Bring him up right away. I’ve been waiting for him all day.”

  A sharp whiff of ammonia cleared my head, and I saw Robinson III and two other men standing over me.

  “Can you understand me? What’s your name?” Robinson asked.

  “Napoleon Bonaparte,” I answered.

  Robinson grinned and said to the two men, “You fellows can go now.” He held out some dollar bills. One of the men snatched them and they left.

  Robinson looked worried. “When you didn’t bring Daphne, I phoned Count d’Uribé-Lebrun. He said things didn’t pan out like he planned.”

  I was really surprised by that, and he must have read it on my face. I said, “I met her at La Pérouse Restaurant, all right.”

  “He paid Thigpen the ransom, right?”

  “That’s what the Count told me he was planning to do. I put the money in a locker at the Gare du Nord, had the key left off with the Count, and met up with Daphne at twelve thirty on Monday afternoon.”

  Robinson looked surprised. “That was yesterday. It’s three thirty Tuesday morning now.”

  It was my turn to be surprised. “Daphne was at the restaurant. We toasted with champagne to celebrate her release, and that’s the last thing I remember,” I said.

  Robinson III looked as if he knew that already, but asked, “How was she?”

  “Fine. Shaken up, but happy to be free of Buster Thigpen.”

  “Thigpen must have arranged to slip you a Mickey Finn . . . ”

  “That’s impossible,” I said without thinking.

  “Why impossible?” he asked, suddenly suspicious.

  “Look, Mr. Robinson, I’ve known Buster for a long time. He just doesn’t have the . . . brains to cook up anything like that.”

  “Maybe the man Baby Langston Daphne mentioned in her note is behind it. The Count doesn’t think so, though.”

  I was confused. I couldn’t imagine how the Count knew about Baby. “Baby Langston doesn’t strike me as the kidnapping type.”

  “Daphne said he was involved though.”

  I thought about it for a while. If Baby Langston was in on the scheme, Stanley was right that Hambone and his Corsicans might be pulling the strings. A Corsican might have posed as a waiter and slipped me the Mickey Finn at La Pérouse. All that I could remember was making love to Daphne. I had to find her because I was beginning to think that I was in love with her.

  “It’s possible,” I finally answered. “His Uncle Rawlston Gaylord runs the La Belle Princesse nightclub in Montmartre and has close ties to the Corsican mafia. They might have gotten wind of Buster’s ransom demand and decided to take the deal over and keep the ransom for themselves.”

  “The Count’s really cut up that Thigpen is still on the run aftah I paid the ransom.”

  The telephone rang like a sudden scream in the night. Robinson picked up the receiver.

  “Yes?” he answered, staring at me. He motioned for me to come closer and listen in with the second earpiece. It was the Count.

  “You gave a colleague of mine a photograph of your daughter after they found her note at the Hôtel Crillon,” the Count said. “I passed a copy of the photograph to a friend at the Quai d’Orsay who had it circulated to various embassies. She has been spotted in Berlin with a man believed to be of a Mediterranean type. The man may be my protégé Bartholomew Thigpen, alas.”

  “Daphne’s crazy about the place,” Robinson said. “But it’s a bad spot for your man right now. Seems that Hitler’s people attack non-Aryan types on the streets.” The Count was lying about Buster; I wanted to know why.

  “My contact knows where she’s staying. I would go to Berlin myself, but I can’t get away because the leftists would use my travel to Germany to brand me as a lackey of Chancellor Hitler. Can you go?”

  I studied Robinson III’s reactions, wondering if what Jean Fletcher had told me about Robinson II’s embargo on his setting foot into Germany was true. He went deathly pale before answering lamely, “Not right now. I have some problems . . . with the present authorities.”

  “May I make a suggestion?” I heard the Count ask, suspecting what his suggestion might be.

  “Shoot,” Robinson said simply.

  “I understand that you have a private investigator named Urby Brown in your employ. Perhaps you could send him to Berlin to track down your daughter and settle affairs with my treacherous colleague once and for all. I have friends who can be of assistance to him. I will personally pay for his fees.”

  Robinson III looked at me imploringly again, and I nodded my approval. He patted me on the back.

  “Mr. Brown is listening, right beside me. He agrees to go. How soon can you arrange everything?”

  “I strongly recommend that he leave for Berlin on Thursday so that he may still benefit from the element of surprise. I’ll prepare the necessary letters of introduction, make funds . . . ”

  “Thank you for offering, Count, but Daphne’s my responsibility. I will take care of all of Mr. Brown’s expenses.”

  “As you wish,” the Count said.

  “Let’s get moving. Let’s meet up for dinner tonight . . . ”

  “I’m sorry, but I must lead a demonstration against the Left. Th
ey’re planning another General Strike. I propose that we meet in your suite for lunch on Thursday. I shall have all of his documents by then. Mr. Brown should be packed and ready to leave immediately thereafter.”

  All of my instincts were screaming at me to back off, but my mind was focused on bringing Daphne back to her father. Afterward, I would deal with whoever was behind it all, whether it was the Count or Hambone and his Corsicans or Baby Langston.

  Two hours later, I was at Mama Jane’s off the Place Pigalle to meet up with Stanley for his 6:00 a.m. breakfast.

  Stanley strode through the door and hurried to his table, carrying his own soprano saxophone case for a change. He looked worried, seeing my drawn face. I must have looked worse than I felt because now that the die was cast, I was looking forward to my trip to Germany—which I intended to make short—and seeing Daphne again.

  Stanley studied me as he devoured his food. He pushed a plate toward me, which I refused.

  “Boy, you lookin’ peaked,” he said. “You lookin’ blue.”

  I shooed away Mama Jane and told Stanley everything that had happened yesterday, starting with the lunch with Daphne at La Pérouse. He got so caught up in the story that he stopped eating to listen to me.

  “I was thinkin’ Hambone, Baby Langston, and them Corsicans behind this for sure, ’cept for Hambone bein’ so scared. I ain’t never seen a man so scared. I sticks my Colt in his mouth last night and says I goin’ to off him he don’t give me answers, and he just cry like he beggin’ me to shoot. Somethin’ wrong with the man; he more scared of somethin’ than dyin’.”

  “I’m going to go to Berlin, Germany, and bring the girl back to her daddy. Then whoever’s behind it can fight over the ransom money. This one’s too deep for us, Stanley. I just want to collect my fees and get on with my life.”

  “Yo’ life be music. You gone ditch this private eye business, get back to where you belongs?”