Rage in Paris

by Kirby Williams

  “Yeah. The music’s back. When we were playing ‘Tiger Rag’ and Sidney Bechet came on to buck me, the feeling came back. I haven’t felt like that since Harlem.”

  “All right, mon petit! Time for you to reopen up ‘Urby’s Masked Ball,’ best Creole jazz club in the whole world! Let’s get her goin’, ’cause I wants us to blow together again, like last Saturday night. And you tell Hannah to get back here. You needs her, not that goldilocks messin’ with yo’ brain.”

  “You know anything about Germany?”

  “Used to have some high old times in Berlin eight or nine year back. Them Hitler peoples was already makin’ trouble back then, but, shoot, thems was some of the best days, Berlin.”

  “Sounds like things have changed since Hitler took over.”

  “True, mon petit. But you don’t look no different to them white on white folk he like so much. If you got any problems, I got people there can get you out that place lickety-split. I’m talkin’ army people. My main man be a colonel. Man play piano ’most as good as Jelly Roll Morton hisself. You got somethin’ to write on?”

  I took out a piece of paper and a pencil, and Stanley twisted his head to and fro trying to get to grips with the complexity of his friend’s name.

  “Man got two name. Hold on, first one, Schultz, like that Dutch Schultz run the numbers racket in Harlem, the second Horn, like a horn.”

  “You mean Dieter Schulz-Horn? He was a major last I heard.”

  “He the man,” Stanley said.

  I remembered the name from the war. My Foreign Legion Corps had come up against his troops at Belloy-en-Santerre in 1916. I remembered someone saying to me, “If we get captured, I hope it’s Schulz-Horn does it. He’s old-school. He won’t let the Boches use our white flags as a target marker to machine gun us down.”

  “He Colonel Schulz-Horn now,” Stanley said, reading my thoughts. “You got any trouble with them Hitler folk, you look him up. You needs money?”

  “No, I’ve got all I need.”

  “You protect yourself, you hear? Take that tin Homburg hat I give you. And yo’ Colt.”

  “I’m leaving all that behind. If the Boches catch me with that stuff, I’ll end up in prison, or worse. Can you let Schulz-Horn know that I might look him up?”

  “No ‘might’ about it. You best look him up soon’s you can. If you got to get out of Germany real fast, he be the man to help you.”

  We hugged each other good-bye, and then I left to cop some sleep. I woke up in the afternoon, packed, and phoned Jean Fletcher to meet up at the Coupole. What I hoped was that she’d give me the lowdown on the “new Germany.” She probably had contacts who could help me and Daphne cut out of there double time, if Stanley’s friend Schulz-Horn couldn’t.

  I didn’t like the idea of going into Germany. My memories of the Great War and how they had nearly destroyed the world were still strong. I had killed too many of them to feel comfortable going into their heartland. They were a fanatical bunch, the Boches: their new leader, Adolf Hitler, seemed to be leading them to where the Kaiser left off less than twenty years ago.

  Still, I had to go because Daphne was there, alone or with Baby Langston or the Corsicans, and I was going to bring her to her father, whatever it took. I kept remembering how good it felt to sink deep inside her body, but Daphne had gotten deep inside my mind and my heart, too, and it would be hard to get her out. Whatever happened, I had to be with her again. One more time, I said to myself, and then I can walk away from her and my life as a private eye. The music was back with me and, with Stanley’s help, I would re-open my nightclub, Urby’s Masked Ball, and then beg Hannah Korngold to come back to France.

  Jean Fletcher and I started drinking at the Coupole in the afternoon while she filled me in on Germany. She liked Stanley’s idea of my getting in touch with Colonel Dieter Schulz-Horn. She had met him in Paris at Le Grand Duc nightclub a few years ago with some of his fellow German officers, all of them in mufti. She could not believe that they were Boches, the way they joined in and appreciated the jazz music. Schulz-Horn had even asked if Urby’s Masked Ball was open and was very disappointed to hear that it had just closed down. Jean told me that Schulz-Horn was probably my best bet if I got into a jam, but she knew a young journalist named Skip Oatman who knew the ropes and could use his connections to the American Ambassador to Germany, William Dodd, to help me get out in an emergency.

  I told Jean that I had met up with Robinson III at his suite at the Ritz, and the Count had phoned him there to tell him that Daphne had been seen with Buster in Berlin, but that I had my reasons for believing that Buster wasn’t there. I told her about Baby Langston and the Corsicans. Jean said that if Baby Langston was as big and as black as I had described him, he would have a lot of trouble with the Nazi brown shirts who went around attacking obvious “non-Aryans,” unless they were celebrities who were treated like “temporary Aryans.”

  These celebrities were “protected” she said, because Hitler had too much riding on hosting the summer and winter Olympics in Germany in 1936 and didn’t want to have his bully boys tarnishing Germany’s reputation more than it already was. She assured me that I wouldn’t have any problems because I was an “Aryan physical type.” We both had a good laugh about that.

  Then she became serious. “Tell you the truth,” she said, “I don’t like the setup. My gut feeling is that Robinson III and the Count are using you for something. I get it that Robinson III can’t go to Germany because he’s frightened that his old man will cut him off at the knees. The Count’s got a good excuse for staying in France because the Left is itching for more action after the General Strike turned out to be a damp squib.” She was sobering up fast and continued. “What bothers me the most is that Robinson III and the Count worship the ground that Hitler walks on, so why should they be so fussed that Daphne’s in Germany? If she wants to escape from Baby Langston and/or the Corsicans, all she has to do is use her fluent German on any Boche in hailing distance of a brown shirt, and they’ll lynch them on the spot.” Jean was voicing many of the same qualms that I had, but I had brushed them aside because of my feelings for Daphne.

  “You watch out for that girl, Urby,” she said, all sobered up now. “She reminds me of the Lorelei in Heinrich Heine’s poem: a beautiful blonde babe who sits naked as a jaybird on a boulder above the Rhine, brushing her wavy locks and singing the blues until sailors with their tongues hanging out smash their boats against the rocks and drown.”

  “Let’s go home, Jean,” I said, knowing that another drink would put me over the edge, too. She did something then that she’d never done before. She kissed me full on the lips. I was even more surprised when she burst into tears afterward.

  “Sorry to go all emotional on you, Urby, but you’re walking into a trap. I can feel it in the old bones. Maybe you’ve used up your nine lives.”

  We really got drunk after that and toasted our friendship until we could barely stand upright at the bar. Honoré, the waiter who was on the phone repeating, “Certainement, Monsieur le Comte” over and over again, put down the receiver to escort us to the chauffeured car Jean’s magazine had laid on for her until the end of the taxi strike. She dropped me off at my place but didn’t kiss me again.

  CHAPTER 19

  Paris-Berlin, Thursday, February 15, 1934

  At the lunch with the Count in Robinson’s suite, III showed me a telegram that he had received from Daphne a few hours ago. In it, she pleaded with her father to pay the ransom quickly and said that Buster was planning to ask for double the amount unless he got the money really fast. She begged her father to send the private investigator Urby Brown to Berlin to fetch her back to Paris, once Buster’s terms had been met.

  Robinson gave me a thousand dollars cash and the names of some of his Princeton buddies at the American embassy whom I could contact in an emergency. He suddenly looked panicked and then relieved when I whipped out my US passport, which I still have thanks to Tex O’Toole. I keep it valid for w
hen the French cops check my papers. He handed me a thin leather briefcase, and I opened it to find train tickets, a reservation voucher for the Universal Hotel, and what looked like enough stacks of German dough to open up my own bank in Berlin. I put the briefcase into one of the two suitcases that I had brought with me. Robinson took one look at my battered luggage, went to his closet, and brought out two custom made Louis Vuitton suitcases. He asked me to repack my things into them because he had booked me into a swanky hotel, and I would arouse suspicion arriving with my tatty luggage. I took his blunt hint but asked him to keep my bags until I returned for them.

  The Count also gave me the names of people to contact at the French embassy if I needed help. He said that, in the event that Buster was with Daphne, he would consider it a great favor if I could bring him back, too, and he would reward me handsomely.

  Feigning sincerity, I told him that I would do my best. The Count filled me in on Daphne’s last known whereabouts. Robinson poured some champagne; we drank toasts to the success of our “enterprise”; and then the Count and Robinson III drove me to the Gare du Nord in an Oriflamme-chauffeured car.

  They put me on the afternoon train to Berlin and waved until it pulled out of the station. I had so much on my mind that the countryside passing by outside made little impression on me.

  I kept thinking of my lunch with Daphne at La Pérouse on Monday and the whole stretches of time that I couldn’t account for.

  My brain was teeming with images and sounds like throwing a stone into water, hearing a splash, and seeing the circles lapping away from it. I fell asleep, my head against the cool window. When I awoke we were pulling into the Friedrichstrasse Train Station, and it was past ten in the evening.

  I got my suitcases down from the luggage rack and walked out onto the platform with people rushing all around me shouting and gesticulating in German, a language that I hadn’t heard much since the war. Immediately on leaving my carriage, I was accosted by two men in black leather trench coats demanding to see my passport. They scanned through it, and one of them said in American-accented English, “Are you Ernest Shipman?”

  That really made me angry, but I held my temper in check. The man was holding my passport, so why was he asking me if I was somebody else? “No, my name’s Urby Brown.”

  He kept asking me if I was Ernest Shipman, and I kept answering that I was Urby Brown. Finally, he walked off with my papers and conferred with another fellow wearing a black leather trench coat over his black storm trooper uniform. The man skimmed through a list in his hand, turning the pages like an opera score. The he disappeared into an office.

  Jean had told me to watch out for the men in black. They were the SS black shirts, and they were rivals to the SA—the brown shirts—Hitler’s original mob before he came to power. The black shirts and the brown shirts were at war, tearing at each other like gangs back in the Battlefield in New Orleans. Jean was backing the black shirts to win because they were more ruthless and polished than the brown shirts, who had done the dirtiest jobs for Hitler as he gobbled up power but were now an embarrassment, and a danger, to him.

  After a nod from the black shirt who reappeared from the office, my first black trench coat returned my passport to me, saluted, and said, “Welcome to Germany, Herr Brown.” They turned their attention to another passenger.

  I walked to the taxi rank outside the station and handed the cabbie a card with the address of the Universal Hotel. He snarled and mumbled some words under his breath as he put my suitcases into the trunk of his cab; then he sped away from the train station. So far, Germany was turning out a lot worse than I expected.

  The cabbie kept mumbling to himself angrily, and I could feel that he was enraged about something. I saw rows of headlights all around me and the bright lights of Berlin illuminating the red, white, and black swastika flags that were draped over every available space. I wondered if the cabbie hated the Nazis or their flags; each time he passed more bunting or brown shirts and black shirts walking on the sidewalks, his growling grew louder. I was still wondering about him when the cab stopped at a large, brightly lit hotel, the Universal.

  The driver clammed up suddenly, climbed out of his seat, and grudgingly removed my suitcases from the trunk. The English-speaking hotel porter helped me out with paying the driver because I found the different varieties and numbers of paper money and coins bewildering, and the German script was hard to decipher. The driver looked so unhappy that I slipped a few banknotes to him without knowing their value; he smiled for the first time. He doffed his cloth cap and drove off smiling.

  The hotel porter perked up, too, when he saw the tip that I’d given the cabbie. He whisked my two suitcases up to the front desk. The concierge looked at my American passport picture and then at me over and over again and then had me sign the register. He told me that I could pick up my passport first thing in the morning. I didn’t like being without it for a second, in case I had to make a fast escape with Daphne, but it was the way they did things here and in France.

  On the wall behind the front desk was a large photo of Adolf Hitler surrounded by swastika emblems. The expression on his face was stern. He wasn’t the smiling “Cher Adolphe” posing with the Count in the photograph on his desk.

  The concierge was all smiles and politeness as he scrutinized my passport, checking out my face to make sure that it matched the passport photograph. But there was something about his eagerness to spot a difference, something that could pigeonhole me into a racial or religious category that made me think I was back in the South. There, white people were so obsessed with race that they would check your cuticles to see if you had the mythical half-moon near them that “proved” you had colored blood in you, even if your skin was white and your hair was straight and blonde. It made me wonder what the jovial concierge’s reaction would be if he knew that I was colored or if he saw a name like Korngold on my passport.

  Finally, he smiled deferentially and gave my room key to the porter, who ferried my bags to the elevator and then up to the tenth floor and my room. I gave him some banknotes with the same portraits and numbers on them as the ones I’d given the cab driver, and he nearly snapped in two thanking me.

  The Count and Robinson III had put me up in style. I had a large bedroom with its own bathroom, and everything was blue in the room, including the marble in the bathroom. There were two large armchairs facing each other across a round mahogany table. The huge window overlooked a park. A decanter of water, two glasses, and a siphon seltzer bottle sat on the table.

  I held out some more banknotes and said to the porter, “If you can bring me some alcohol, they’re yours.”

  “Schnapps? Made with ploms. Is good?”

  “Ja,” I said, using one of the two words I knew in German.

  I handed some more money to the night porter when he returned with a fancy one-liter bottle of schnapps with purple plums on the label and a crystal schnapps glass. He opened the bottle and filled my glass, and I gestured for him to sit and have a drink with me. That surprised him, but he went to the door, peered both ways, closed it, and poured a short one for himself. The man was plainly nervous as if it was a first for him to have a drink with one of the guests.

  “Down the hatch,” I said. He looked puzzled. This was obviously not an expression that he’d heard before. I pointed to my open mouth and said, “Hatch, American for ‘mouth.’” He smiled, obviously happy to learn some new slang.

  “Hotch,” he repeated.

  “My name’s Urby Brown. What’s yours?”

  He suddenly became guarded. I looked at him closely for the first time. He was around eighteen and had dark hair and a sallow complexion and dark brown eyes that moved constantly, never coming to rest. He was really nervous, and there was more to it than having a drink with a guest.

  “Gunther Kalman.” He seemed relieved when I didn’t react.

  “Can I call you Gunther?”

  That floored him. I decided not to ask him to call me Urb
y. I needed a favor doing, and he was on edge just having a drink with me. He probably had to leave soon, or the front desk man would start asking him some questions.

  “Yes, certainly, Herr Brown,” he said. “You are American, is it not true?”

  “Guilty,” I said. He looked confused and then smiled nervously.

  “I have cousin in America, in New York.”

  “Where abouts?”

  He was puzzled by the words but continued, “At the end of Manhattan. Where many Europe immigrant live together. German, Italian, Polish.”

  Lower East Side, I thought.

  “You planning to visit your cousin some day?”

  He scanned the room as if somebody might be eavesdropping on our conversation. He made a decision then. He leaned closer and whispered, “I want go to America. I want to leave Germany schnell . . . fast. I am half-Hungarian. Not good place for me here now.” He whispered again, scanning the walls and the furniture, “With Hitler and the brown shirts, is very hard. I am not Aryan type. The brown shirts attack me much; they think I am Gypsy,” he hesitated, “or Jew.”

  Gunther was fleeing his country because of his background. We had a lot in common. He looked at his watch and then abruptly gulped down his schnapps and stood up. Tears rolled down his cheeks. I didn’t bother to ask him what his “other half” was; whatever it was made him a marked man.

  “Sorry for tears, sir, but I forget what is like to be human being,” he said. “Thank you very much. Herr Brown, be careful in the streets. The brown shirts attack foreigners like hyenas.”

  “I want to ask you a favor, Gunther. I might have to leave Berlin very quickly . . . ”

  He looked wary again. “Are you spy for America, maybe?”

  “No. I’m trying to help a friend in trouble. I might have to check out quickly without being seen with my luggage. So, after I pick up my passport tomorrow morning, I’m going to leave my suitcases packed in the closet. If I don’t come back for them, an American friend will ask you for my suitcases on the way into the hotel, settle my bill, and tell the concierge I’ll be back for my luggage later. I’d like you to have my suitcases waiting in back of the hotel for him so that he can pick them up without making the concierge suspicious.