Death of a Century

by Daniel Robinson

  Joe would choose his place. The hunted becoming the hunter.

  As he neared the large boulevards of the city’s Left Bank, he encountered more people on the sidewalk. With the din of the growing crowd and the noise of busses and trucks and automobiles, people had to raise their voices to be heard. Joe heard only a distant surge of sound, muffled and loud and far away from him.

  When he looked over his shoulder to turn a corner or cross a street, he saw the Turk. The big man was playing with him like a boy plays with a beetle in an ant hill. Except Joe was playing his own game as well. He kept half-expecting Dapper to turn up at the round of a corner, but if the little man were with the Turk he did not show himself. That was not a good thought. He decided that he should make some play before he was herded toward some killing pen.

  He stopped after rounding a corner and waited for the Turk. He had been racing around inside the frying pan ever since finding Gresham dead on the sofa. He would just go ahead and jump into the fire and see who got burned.

  The Turk rounded the corner, a long and steady stride. His smile dissolved as he came close to Joe, his step slowing. Dressed entirely in black, he could have been the reaper met at the journey’s end. Except Joe knew that this reaper preferred to send people on the last journey, not await their arrival. His heavy brows curled. Joe smiled at having done something the Turk had not expected.

  The Turk’s eyes looked over Joe’s head at a pair of uniformed gendarme, close enough to see any action yet far enough to not hear any words.

  When the Turk was a dozen feet from him, Joe pulled the short-barreled Smith & Wesson from his pocket and held it to his side. He kept its barrel pointing down so that passersby would not see it against the fold of his overcoat. The Turk, however, did take notice of it and stopped and was pushed from behind by a man carrying a bag filled with long loafs of bread who cursed at the Turk then walked on muttering obscenities about a bread strike in the city.

  Joe stepped toward the Turk. He too looked up at the man who stood a good three inches taller than him and outweighed him by twenty hard pounds. But unlike the man with bread loaves in his hand, Joe had a revolver.

  The Turk’s black eyes stared down at Joe. Joe could not see anything close to fear in them, maybe a recognition or a slight concern over the revolver he held to his side, but not an ounce of fear.

  The Turk asked, “Alors?” and his breath smelled of garlic.

  Joe searched his mind and said in his broken French, “Je voudrais parler avec Marcel.”

  “Pourquoi?” the Turk asked.

  “I have something he wants,” Joe said. “A manuscript. Manuscrit.”

  The Turk nodded.

  “You know where my hotel is?” Joe asked.

  “L’Hotel Le Couer? Oui.” The Turk smiled. “I know it,” he added in heavy English, the words dropping fulsome from his mouth.

  Joe had guessed as much. “At the end of the street is a café called the Gentilhomme. I will be there tonight at the bar. If Marcel wishes to speak with me, he can find me there.”

  The Turk nodded again, his face tightly set, as though tapped into place by a stone mason. “Neuf heures. Gentilhomme.”

  He turned and walked away.

  The Turk was a soldier, a killing machine. Functional but also thinking. He had followed his orders, but he possessed enough imagination to act on his own. Once the game had turned, the Turk had chosen discretion. Joe would need to remember the man was not an automaton.

  Joe watched the big man’s back recede into the crowd on the street.

  Once he could no longer see the Turk, Joe turned and walked on, crossing and re-crossing streets, entering businesses to buy nothing, sitting on park benches, taking the Metro from Saint-Michel to the Gare Du Nord and back by different lines and waiting outside the exits. He recognized the purpose behind his melodrama, he recognized it from the war.

  The isolation of the trenches had forced an unconscious defense upon him. Like others who had lived inside the connecting entrenchments that ran below the ground surface from Switzerland to the North Sea, Joe had formed a nervous obsession with who was watching him, which unseen enemy was readying sniper shots at him. He spent that day’s afternoon convincing himself that he was not being followed, so much so that he did almost nothing else.

  He did stop at a newspaper stand for another copy of the morning’s Herald Tribune and a tourist’s map of Paris. He took them into a café where he sat near the front window and ordered coffee, eggs, and croissant while he read the newspaper. The single-column article on the American woman who had killed herself did not mention any relationship with Paul Dillard, but it did mention her address. He called over the aproned waiter and pointed to the address in the newspaper. “Où est, l’adresse?” he asked.

  The man arched an eyebrow, but told Joe how to find the place. Then he bent close to Joe and said that he could sell Joe an illegal entry into the catacombs below Paris where the bones of millions of dead Parisians were piled. He said in a half-whisper, “C’est ici l’Empire de la Mort,” and laughed.

  “Merci,” Joe said, “but no.” He placed a couple of French coins on the saucer and left the restaurant. He had witnessed the empire of death at its most epic and did not care to see it at its most bizarre.

  Joe found the address on rue Monge. Large chestnut trees, their branches empty in the winter, lined both sides of the street. He stopped across the street from the woman’s house, an age-stained brick building. From inside the apartment building behind him he could hear a pianist practicing. While a few errant snowflakes drifted past, he stood with the pianist running the scales and he studied the front of the woman’s building. He crossed the street and walked past it once, turned around at the corner and walked past the residence again. There were no lights shining, no windows open, no drapes even parted, no sign of anyone home, no sounds from inside indicating the police or a neighbor. Joe saw that the heavy carriage doors to the left of the front door were unlatched and left slightly open. Without looking around and as though he belonged there, he walked through the doors and into the courtyard, to the open stairwell at the back of the house and kicked open the rear door. The old wood of the frame held surprisingly hard, but gave way with a splash of wood shards on Joe’s third kick. He walked up the back stairs to the kitchen, which was clean other than a few dishes on the counter. Nothing to say a person had died there. He walked to the front room, stopped in the doorway, and looked into where the American woman had been found.

  “L’Empire de la Mort,” Joe said aloud. In the pale and empty front room, his words echoed.

  He looked around, walking between the small but high-ceilinged rooms, not knowing what exactly he was looking for. Not even knowing why he had come to the woman’s home, other than coincidences are not supposed to happen. Other than the empty front room, the other rooms were in disorder with drawers emptied and cupboard doors open.

  With no fire in the coal stove, the apartment was cold. The only light came in streamers through the windows. The old wood floors groaned and sighed underfoot. The smell of death lingered in the closed apartment. He walked through the rooms with a feeling of imposition, not just that he was walking through the home of someone he did not know and not just that that person had died, but he simply was not supposed to be there. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time had begun the descending spiral he had found himself caught in. There he was, suspected of murdering people in America and on board the Berengaria and then to be found sightseeing in a dead woman’s apartment. It would be hard to explain it away if he were caught.

  He did not at first think about what he saw, the searched rooms, not ransacked, but clearly searched. The newspapers had said nothing about this, nothing to indicate foul play. Someone besides himself had come to the house in search of something, probably the same manuscript he had come for. If they had not found it, he felt he would not and he took his leave by the back stairs.

  Joe saw the gendarme as soon as he ste
pped from the carriage doors. A neighbor, aroused by the sound or the sight of someone entering the courtyard through those large double doors, had probably called the police. The gendarme called to him as he stepped onto the paved road fronting the residence. Joe turned at once, and ran without even a thought. Like a rabbit bolting for cover, he ran for the nearest Metro station, jumped the gate, and took the stairs three at a time to the platform. Then he kept running, dodging frightened people waiting for their ride home, across the platform, and out the exit. He turned in time to see the gendarme just enter the Metro station across the street. He walked on and around the corner and hid himself inside the movement of people along le boulevard Saint-Michel. He did not look back and heard nobody shouting for him. He walked with the crowd, tight like them inside their coats, and turned off Saint Michel and down rue Monsieur-le-Prince, stopping at the Polidor, a crémerie, where he found a table and ordered coffee, which came in a large white bowl of a cup. He watched others eat, men and some women dressed for jobs of labor or of service. They ate plates of simple food piled high like the cafés he remembered in the American West that fed a man full and well. It was a place for the working class and for students to spend time without spending a great deal of money.

  He sat and drank his coffee and ordered a second along with a crêpe of butter, eggs, and cheese. With the tourist map laid out on the table, he found Saint-Séverin was not far from where he sat drinking his coffee.

  The manuscript Gresham had been working on was awfully important to someone, important enough to have caused the deaths of at least four people. That evening, when he would meet Rene Marcel, he would most likely meet the person who was interested in the manuscript, the person who had continued the carnage from years past. Before then, he wanted to meet Dillard’s sister. The Marcel he was to meet seemed to think that Dillard had once owned a copy, otherwise Dillard and his American lover would not be dead. Maybe the sister knew. Maybe he could keep one person from being murdered. He finished his meal and his second bowl of coffee, pulled his collar up tight against the developing Paris cold and left the restaurant.

  Joe found and walked down rue de Prêtress-Saint-Séverin, a short, cobblestone street off Saint-Michel, staying close to the buildings and the shadows of the buildings as he walked. Tucked away from the street stood a small cathedral, its name engraved on a plaque near its front doors read Eglise de Saint Séverin, the name of the church the automobile mechanic had said Marie Dillard lived near. He fished the address from his pocket, looked from the piece of paper to the numbers on the brick buildings and found the home on the corner of rue Saint-Séverin and across from the church. Gargoyles reigned with imperious presence along the roofline of the old Gothic church, their hollow eyes watching out across and over the building where Marie Dillard lived. They also watched Joe as he looked across the street. Joe was becoming used to being under someone’s stare.

  He found a bench outside the entrance to the cathedral’s ambulatory and sat facing the street, looking, he hoped, like any other man in need of the church’s respite. He checked his pocket watch, four hours until he would meet Marcel. He blew into his cupped hands as he watched each person walk by, waiting for the one who would place a key in the lock of the house across from him.

  He looked at the sky, which through the day had become low and heavy with dark clouds, a heaven lacking in color. He wondered whether he remembered how to pray but did not. He sat in the ambulatory on the concrete bench and watched parishioners enter the cathedral, heads already bowed like after-age supplicants, footsteps echoing, and voices empty or lowered in speech. He turned and saw a filigree of light through the stained glass and another stained glass with light that was thick. He imagined people walking across the stone floors, trails worn from centuries of passage, people sitting in their pews, breathing in air heavy in dust and incense as they knelt to the prayers of the penitent. The people hunched on their knees, hands clasped and heads lowered, words muffled, dark forms in the candlelit church. The flames fluttering in reflection in the windows and along the old and stained walls whenever a door was opened and fluttering again when closed. People praying in whispers and some talking in low voices and pigeons flapping outside and people walking across the flagstones to the stone stairs and people on the sidewalk across from Joe as he sat and hoped that she would soon arrive.

  He did not know what Dillard’s sister looked like nor how he would approach her once he found her. For all he knew she was involved with the killing of Gresham, maybe even her own brother. What could possess someone to murder her own brother was alien to him, but as a newspaperman he had seen a woman who had killed her own children and a man who had killed his father. He had seen an epidemic insanity during the war, an Armageddon. He could not explain the actions of the world’s lost citizens. He would not even try.

  He was lost as well. He was one of what the automobile repairman had called hopeless, without hope, a lost generation. Perdu. That loss had come in the war. It went beyond a loss of hope and it had manifested in Joe’s spirit like a plague. The things he had lost in the war, the hope and several layers of innocence and truth and the absolute belief in abstract words and his church, friends, family, the treasure house of his past, had all been replaced by darker monuments. New engravings had been etched upon his soul and memory as though with acid. Joe could not see beyond them, not in daylight nor at night in drunkenness nor in a church’s ambulatory under an abandoned sky.

  He saw her first from a distance walking on his side of the street, dressed in black. She was tall and quite thin, which, for a reason Joe could not have said, surprised him. Her walk was unsteady and her head was down and shoulders slumped. She walked with her hands in her pockets and her head barely lifted. She wore a cloche hat, but he could see her dark hair cut short.

  As she passed within a dozen feet of him, looking toward him with unfocused eyes, she looked like someone who was no longer touched by the sun.

  “Marie Dillard?” Joe asked as he slid alongside of her on the sidewalk, placing his hand on her arm. She was as tall as he, and her skin was dark, the almond of a Mediterranean.

  She looked at him, startled. Her eyes widened. Her mouth began to open as though to form words.

  “Please, don’t say anything,” Joe said. “I must speak with you. I am an American. . . . My name is Joe Henry. I need to talk with you about Wynton Gresham and your brother.”

  Her breath drew in quickly from surprise and her eyes widened when she looked at him. She looked around at the street and spit in a low voice and with explicit immediacy, “Assassin,” truncating the word as though it were used as a cudgel. Her voice formed almost in a cold whisper that cut quick and raw through Joe.

  She pulled her arm from his grasp and swung her other hand up to slap him across the cheek. Joe saw her hand swing in its arc and could have blocked it but did not.

  “Assassin,” she said louder, more confidently, her head raised as though to announce his condemnation to the world.

  People on the street began to slow. Some stopped while others edged around the two of them on the narrow sidewalk. A couple of men who had stopped, leaned against the side of the church, cigarettes held loosely to their sides, deciding whether they wanted to be spectators or participants in that street’s drama.

  “No,” Joe said. “Please listen to me.”

  She reached into her purse and began to pull something from it. The presence of a crowd surrounding them, however, stopped her, and she drew out her hand empty, pointing her finger at him.

  “Assassin,” she said once more before breaking away from him and walking quickly across the street to enter the brick townhouse. Before entering the house, she turned and said, “Vous êtes un meurtrier. Vous avez tué mon frère.”

  He took one step in following her although she had already closed her door to him.

  A heavy hand landed on his shoulder, and he turned to look into the eyes of a man wearing the clothes of a worker. Unlike the student
s he had seen elsewhere in Paris, and like those in America as well, his worn clothes had been earned. He had dirt on his cheeks and his skin was dark from the sun, and Joe thought that he could feel the rope scars and callouses and half-heeled blisters of a workingman’s hands.

  “Qu’est-ce que vous voulez,” the man said, his voice raised and his accent something other than any French Joe had ever heard, to the point where Joe struggled at understanding.

  “What is it you vant?” The man spat in an accent almost German, Alsatian maybe. His blue eyes alive and hard in the directness of their stare.

  Joe looked at the people who had slowed to watch. Their stares of wonder momentarily impaled him.

  “Wait,” Joe said. He placed his hands up, palms out, as to show his innocence.

  “La police!” the man yelled, and another man standing nearby took up the call.

  Joe took a step, but the first man reached out to take his shoulder, and Joe swung around and in the close space brought his elbow into the man’s nose. Like hitting the hard end of an opened oak door, the man’s nose split and he staggered. Joe punched him once more, unnecessarily for the man had been knocked out. The other man, momentarily struck by the change of fortunes, took one step toward Joe but Joe jabbed him in the throat. The man staggered, lost of breath and lost of voice and probably panicking that he might also be lost of life. Joe pushed the man from him. The two men lay sprawled as broken mannequins on the cobblestones of the street.

  Joe left, walking quickly but not running and not looking anyone in the eye and within minutes he had found his anonymity within the ever-present crowds of the Left Bank. He continued on and away from her house and away from his hotel and back toward the river. The cold cut through his coat even more than before and he tightened his body against a chill. He walked, head down, following the shadow of his footsteps.

  Joe walked along the quai of the Seine, the sidewalk beginning to ice and his breath pluming. He traded his coat and a ten dollar bill—a month’s wages for the average Parisian—to a bookseller for the man’s old overcoat. He hoped to change his appearance and hoped also not to pick up lice along with the trade. Sitting huddled under blankets, old men on the docked barges fished for barbel as dirty smoke rose from oven pipes on top of the boats. He glanced at the sky and then toward where the sun would be and saw a distant orange glow that might have been the sun setting behind a horizon of buildings, gray against the darkening world. Cold light smeared out behind the borders of the buildings. Empty tree limbs twisted in a slight December wind along the river that carried a beginning of snow. He walked alone with a river of brackish waters, a cold wind, and a diminished and veiled sunset.