From inside a second story hotel window as he passed, he heard a forced and unpleasant laughter. As he walked, he imagined that he could hear in the mist a continuous and slow whispered “You.” He felt as though he was entering another space in time, a dimension in which his life would be blank. Neither the new world nor the old world from before the war were his world, not anymore and maybe never again. His life might no longer even be his own.
He was drunk. He hoped that his thoughts were simply the thoughts of a drunk.
He gathered his coat tighter and walked on, stumbling a little more than on his first trip down the road’s uneven cobblestones. Fifty feet short of the entrance to his hotel, he stopped short when the feeling of being watched once again grabbed him. He had the sudden sensation of being an animal in a zoo, unable to get away from the eyes that followed him. He could see nobody near him nor hear anyone, not even the fabled lovers of Paris who were supposed to be kissing under each lamppost.
A shaft of yellow light blew from the hotel’s entrance as the front door opened and closed within its recess, sending the light out onto the sidewalk and street. Joe looked up. A suspicious light illuminated the curtains of what he thought was his room. His thumb pushed off the pistol’s safety. He walked on.
An old man sat behind the front counter, his head resting on a folded blanket. Quick snores erupted from the man like rattling thunder. Joe stepped past without waking him. He took the first flight of stairs two at a time before slowing as he progressed to the third floor, then waiting to catch his breath at the landing before walking down the hall to his room. No light showed from underneath the door. He tried the door and found it unlocked. He opened it and stepped inside, closing the door behind him and stepping against the wall and leaving the room in darkness. He held his pistol in front of him, pointed toward the darkness at the center of the room.
He could hear nothing except the night sounds of the city from outside his inch-opened window, the drone of diesel-engined cargo boats on the Seine and the muffled clap of horses on cobblestones and animal sounds. No sound from inside the room, however. He stretched his arm out to feel along the wall. The metallic click of the light button snapped and the room was flooded with light. No one was there.
He checked the closet and bathroom. Nobody. His steamer stood at the foot of the bed. Except for the single broken hasp, the trunk was still locked shut.
As quickly as the adrenaline had rushed through his body it depleted, leaving him even more tired than before. Either he had been mistaken about the room or his trunk had been delivered by the hotel worker just minutes before. He was too tired to care. He sat on the bed and rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands, then stripped and washed in the room’s washbasin and lay in bed, naked under the sheet and brown wool blankets. He chased dreams around in his head for a long time before finally drifting into sleep.
VII
PARIS CORONER SAYS U.S. GIRL KILLED SELF
PARIS, Nov. 30—Following Thursday’s inquest over the body of pretty Rose Shannessey of Minneapolis, Coroner Vallot gave the following verdict: “Suicide during temporary insanity brought on by a quarrel with her lover.”
—The Oklahoman, 1 December, 1922
JOE WOKE EARLY, ONLY A FEW HOURS AFTER HAVING FALLEN ASLEEP. He opened his window to sit on the sill, naked in the morning mist. A silvern haze floated above the city. Listening, he heard sounds that he thought typical and right for a Paris morning. A train’s whistle low and slow in the distance, an automobile horn and another and the sound of two men arguing, pigeons, the steady pace of people on their way to work, conspiratorial voices passing unseen beneath his window, the raking sound of a broom pushing garbage into the gutter. A church bell rang the hour of the Angelus. The city’s morning concert taking place.
He leaned into the winter morning and watched dark smoke from coal stoves drift in the gray sky, visible in blackened waves above the morning roofline. A light mist like a horse’s mane fell wild and ragged around the ancient buildings across from him. Up the street, away from the Gentilhomme, he could see an open street market taking shape. Vendors with fruits and vegetables and flowers, some with meats and others with old clothing, still others with live birds inside of wooden cages. Arranging their carts along the cobblestoned lane, they worked like monks—silent and hunched and serious in their morning duty. A waiter in white shirt and black apron sluiced down the sidewalk in front of a café. Joe could smell freshly ground coffee and just-baked pains chocolate. Not just a city’s morning concert but a symphony for the senses, and he closed his eyes to breathe deeply and let the city infuse him.
Joe had always been an early riser, following Teddy Roosevelt’s instilled declarations of the strenuous life, but in France in 1918 he had, like many in the trenches, become almost an insomniac. In the four years since, he had not regained the comfort that allows sleep, so he rose early even though he was far from rested.
Naked and cold in the frigid and misted air of a Paris dawn, he felt close to how he had felt in his youth. He felt alive. The somber and soiled city he had walked through the previous night had vanished with the sunrise, replaced with one filled with expectations. He stood and looked out through the window of his room across the rooftops of Paris, all gray and white-stained from pigeon droppings, peaked roofs with the ancient spires of many cathedrals in the near and far distances.
He was ravenous. Joe dressed and emerged, intent on holding something of that new morning with him. He enjoyed a breakfast of coffee and rolls in the hotel’s salon and read the Herald Tribune as he ate, the crisp crust of a croissant sprinkling the front of his shirt. The headlines trumpeted Clemenceau’s trip to America, which he ignored. He scanned the other articles. A long article on Parisians rioting because of the possible murders of two Frenchmen in America covered much of the front page. Joe read that article with concern. It said less than he, himself, already knew.
Both names were mentioned in the article, but he only had two passports—his and Gresham’s—so his choice of names if he were asked was limited. The police would be on the lookout for Joe Henry, that name would be highlighted on their reports and posted in their stations. Gresham’s might not be, for there would be no reason to be looking for a dead man. That made the choice of who he was to be rather easy. He would be Wynton Gresham for at least a while longer.
One story buried at the bottom of the second page stopped him. A woman in Haute-Loire, an American, had hanged herself at the foot of her bed, using for her noose a fourragère won by a man in the war. The article hinted that she may have been ill for some time. Joe thought of how long the shadows of the past are cast.
He had come to Paris because of Gresham’s ticket, a free trip anywhere. He had also come to Paris because of Gresham, in part at least for why Gresham had been killed. He came also because of the manuscript. He had to read it. Even if the sheriff in Greenwich found a copy of Gresham’s manuscript, he might not read it; even if he took the time to read it, he probably wouldn’t understand the significance. Not without some guidance at least. It would molder in some desk drawer or filing cabinet. Joe knew quite well that he and Dillard might be the only two people alive who could, and would want to, bring light to the meanings of Gresham’s work. With that, he thought that he might also be able to provide a sense of closure for Gresham as well as to offer himself something settled that might put his own life back in drive. A talk with Paul Dillard might unshroud the mystery of Gresham’s death and might clear his own name from the indictment of the Greenwich police. Following that, he thought he might deal with even more distant pasts in southern Colorado. Everything in its time, he thought, remembering poorly the words of a priest he had once listened to.
Joe returned to his room for Dillard’s note delivered the previous day but could not find it. He looked on the table and on the floor beneath the bed. He also could not remember the exact address but did recall the street sounding like “flowers.”
“Rue de Fleurus,”
the old woman at the desk said.
“Yes, oui,” Joe said.
“It is not far,” she said and turned to point a palsied finger toward the wall behind her. “That way. You can walk down boulevard Saint-Michel or take the Metro to Jardin du Luxembourg, and rue de Fleurus runs through the garden. Where you want . . . a home? Yes, where you want is probably across the garden, on the west side. You walk across the garden, it is still lovely this time of year, even with the wet and cold, and you will find it. If not, anyone can tell you where.”
He left the hotel and walked to the Metro station at Saint-Michel. The fluid elaborateness and elongated loops of its art nouveau entrance blinked in the morning’s still light. He descended into the catacombs of the Metro, the resolute push of others steadying him along. He hurried for and boarded the underground train, holding tight to a railing, standing the two stops to the Luxembourg Gardens. The other people on the Metro ignored him, old women on their way to the markets, young businessmen with hair black and slicked back and wearing blue suits pressed tight, students looking fashionably sullen in woolen fisherman’s sweaters.
Weak sunshine greeted him as he walked back up to street level. The Luxembourg Garden, still wet from dew, was cast in the shades of winter, and with a light haze upon it, the park became a mystical place. A park on which poems are made. He passed through the garden where, even in the coolness of the winter morning, clutches of heavily bundled old men played boules on the lawn while others sat in pairs playing backgammon or talking. The gravel pathway crunched under his feet, and he felt his pace quickening, from anticipation as well as invigoration.
Before the end of the garden path and the beginning of the paved street, he passed within sight of a number of statues and memorials to men from the past century but did not stop to admire them. Three blocks ahead of him on the street, Joe could see a knot of people and fire trucks blocking the road, bells clanging amid the din of noise.
As he neared the clutches of bystanders and firemen amidst fire equipment, he began to distinguish uniformed gendarme waving traffic down other streets so that the firemen could do their jobs. Joe could see no flames, but some of the men ran around like ants, scurrying between trucks and the smoking rubble of the stone townhouse. He worked his way around the crowd and walked another block until he found an open business where he might ask about Paul Dillard’s home.
The business, an automobile garage, had its wide front barn-like doors open to the street. Inside a heavy man dressed in a heavy shirt and overalls worked on a small two-seater automobile. A round mass of a woman with gray hair shorter than Joe’s sat in the driver’s seat writing in a notebook while the mechanic mumbled to himself and busied himself under the hood. Another woman, thin and dark and vulture-like, stood to the side, silently looking into the engine compartment while the mechanic worked.
The only one of the three of them to look up at Joe when he entered the garage was the thin, dark woman. Her eyes were hard as black stones and cold as the eyes of a crow. Joe avoided her stare and walked closer to the mechanic who was talking, maybe to one of the women or both or neither, while he worked.
“—comme lui,” the mechanic was saying in French. “Comme mon fils et les autres. Tous perdu. Une generation perdue.” He sighed, shaking his head. “Tous perdue,” he said again.
He bent back under the hood. The thin woman stared mutely at Joe. The large woman looked at the mechanic, then the meaty flesh of her enormous arms jiggled as she quickly wrote something in her notebook.
“Pardon,” Joe said.
The mechanic and the large woman in the driver’s seat joined the thin woman in looking silently at Joe.
“Oui?” asked the mechanic. His eyes were crossed but his face kind. He placed a wrench on the table beside him and wiped his hands on a rag taken from his breast pocket.
Joe struggled with his French, forming with the help of the others in the garage his question, “Ou est Paul Dillard?”
“Dillard?” asked the mechanic, struggling over the l’s and the hard d.
“Oui. Paul Dillard,” Joe said again.
The mechanic exhaled long and loudly through his teeth. He tossed his hands in the air then let them drop to his sides.“Duh-yar. Duh-yar. Iz Paul Duh-yar. J’y ai vécu,” the mechanic said, picking up and pointing his wrench in the direction from where Joe had just walked. “There. La. There.”
Joe turned and followed the man’s point but saw only the wood frame of a wall with tools and tires and automobile parts lining and piled against it.
“Where the fire was,” said the mechanic. “He lived there, his family’s home for many years.”
“Where the fire was?” Joe asked.
“Yes, yes. The fire. A terrible thing. Ce matin. . . I hear sirens this morning and follow them to his home. He was under une coverture—blanket. Alive, mais, but not good.” The mechanic shook his head. “Pauvre, unlucky, he was, and very sad, très triste. Je ne savais même pas qu’il était venu à la maison. Did not know he was back. . . . So unlucky.” The man paused as though collecting his breath, then added, “Juste hier son amant s’est suicidé, in her apartment, kill herself. So sad. Quelle histoire. Tres triste.”
Joe stood fixed in the slanted light of the open garage door not quite certain what his next step would be. The light in his room last night. Someone had been there and read Dillard’s note. He felt the responsibility for yet another killing. He had not committed it, but it had come from his presence. Had he not become Gresham, the Englishman Huntington might not have been murdered on the ship and Paul Dillard might not have been burned alive. Like a pebble having been tossed into a pond, his deception had rippled out in unexpected ways and affected people he had never met. He closed his eyes and pushed hard against his eyelids with the tips of his fingers. The air he breathed was distant and distinct and was not an air that smelled of oil and rubber but one that smelled of cordite and death.
“Are you all right?” asked the big woman from her perch in the automobile. She spoke English like an American and in a deep and full-throated voice.
“Yes—” Joe began.
“Is there anything that we can do to help?”
“No,” Joe said. “I was meeting him this morning.” He remembered the newspaper article that he had read that morning about a woman who had committed suicide in Paris. “His lover died yesterday, you said?”
“Oui,” the mechanic said. “Suicide.” He made a gesture as though to hang himself. Joe wondered if somehow he was responsible for this too.
“You were close with Mr. Dillard?” the big woman asked.
Joe did not know how to respond, so he nodded his head and let the charade blossom. The eternal autumn in which he had lived since the war would continue.
“Moi aussi. I knew him . . . but not well,” said the big woman. “Before the war, he shopped for books where I shop for books. I like books so I liked him because he liked books.”
Joe heard the past tense and looked at her and then at the mechanic. “Mort?” he said.
The mechanic shrugged and answered in French so quickly that Joe didn’t understand. The big woman translated. “We don’t know if he is dead, but it was not good.”
“Was anyone else in the house?”
“No-no,” said the woman, still translating for the mechanic. “Just Dillard. Marie, his sister, oh she is so sweet and now also so sad. Marie, she lives near Saint Séverin, near Saint Michel in the Quarter. She is still so young. Now she is so sad as well.”
After the mechanic wrote the address for Dillard’s sister on a piece of oily paper, Joe left the garage and turned to retrace his steps back toward Dillard’s house where people were still gathered to watch the firemen complete their duties. He walked into the mingling crowd. Whatever warmth he had felt that morning upon rising had cooled. Across the street from Dillard’s house, he stopped and leaned against a lamppost to watch the last actions of the firemen.
Smoke from the rubble interspersed with
the winter mist to form a dark gray haze, a winter’s grisaille above the dirty city. The stone house had been scarred by the fire, scorches blackened the stone above each of the building’s windows and the front door, the steps were a wash of water and mud and soot and water hoses. Charred wooden beams showed like orphans inside the empty windows. The exterior of the house was dead, but from inside Joe could hear some firemen still at work. He listened to the rasping sounds they made with picks and shovels.
He heard the abrasive sounds of men at work. The smell of steam and fire, the feel of lingering heat, the sight of a house reduced, the taste of another death. He was so absorbed in thought that he did not immediately see the Turk walking toward him. A sudden shift of wind jarred his senses as it brought a whirl of smoke to lay sodden on the street. Through that smoke he saw the Turk approaching.
Instinctively, Joe turned and walked, pushing through the crowd and down the first street he found, preferring the visibility of an open avenue to the confining crowd in front of Dillard’s house. With the Turk following close behind, he again felt like the prey in a lethal game of cat and mouse, but Joe also knew what he was doing. He wanted the confrontation with the Turk to come at a place of his choosing, a street corner not too crowded.
He walked quick-step past businesses with their owners outside sweeping the sidewalk or watching the commotion at the end of the street, a saucer and cup in one hand and cigarette in the other as they leaned against the front of their establishments.
Joe looked over his shoulder. The Turk kept pace with him. Inside the pocket of his overcoat, he kept his hand tight around the small revolver.
Toward the river. He knew that. As though a young boy lost in a wilderness, he knew to walk toward a river. The wilderness he felt lost in was not one of pinions and arroyos, but he was lost and the river would provide an index mark from which he could cipher his way. He walked briskly, confident that the Turk would keep pace.
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