Death of a Century

by Daniel Robinson

  Soon the sharp outline of Paris rose black against the night. Lines and broken shards of flat-topped roofs and blind windows like patterned quilts.

  The train rolled toward a stop into the huge wooden station. People began to gather their belongings, valises and bags and children and bottles of wine. Joe stood. When the train lurched to its stop, he donned his overcoat to follow the other passengers from the train onto the narrow platform. Another train, pointing outbound, steam rising from around the locomotive, waited across the platform, so people mingled as some prepared to leave while others arrived. Joe kept his head up, watching for Marcel’s men. He crossed the platform and boarded the other train. He sat in the first unoccupied compartment to watch out the window. Dapper exited, but not the Turk. He was probably walking the length of the train to make sure Joe had gotten off.

  A pair of uniformed police stood talking at the end of the platform, not paying much attention to people walking past. Still, that was not good. Joe was a wanted man—the American in Paris wanted for arson and attempted murder, maybe even the murder of Dillard’s lover. All Dapper had to do was lay the line, and the station would be shut tight. That Dapper had not walked over to talk with them, however, was good news, for that meant that Dapper was still concerned about Joe’s having another copy of the manuscript.

  He looked again at the gendarmes guarding his exit and he looked for some way to camouflage himself, blend in with the other passengers walking like insects from here to there.

  A small brown valise was in the overhead rack above him, perhaps someone’s clothes for a short vacation to the Swiss mountains. Joe pulled up the collar to his overcoat and picked up the valise, now an actor’s prop. He left the compartment to walk down the train’s hallway. People were busily and noisily readying for the train’s departure, businessmen and lovers and old couples and families. He heard a dozen languages from English and French to exotic languages of the Orient. He left the train in the guise of a tired tourist returning from the country, from a liaison maybe or maybe a businessman having returned to life in the city.

  He walked in a hunch as though weary-worn. From a distance and with luck, he might appear that way for just long enough to leave Marcel’s men behind him. The police seemed to have little interest in the movements around them, so Joe walked from the platform and into the crowd of Parisians.

  Outside of the train station, standing in the rain and the glow of a streetlamp, he looked around, surprised, if nothing else, that he had once again dodged a bullet.

  He carried the borrowed valise as he walked through the diminishing crowd until there were few people on the street with him, walking toward the Seine only because Paris leans toward the river. He walked in long strides, collar up and shoulders hunched, one hand deep in his pocket and the other with the valise. It provided a good prop. People who saw him carrying the valise, noticed it. In that, he hoped that they would form an assumption.

  The rain turned to snow. Heavy, wet flakes fell around him. He walked down the dark street, bleak and silent but for distant and muffled sounds. Joe could hear the river ahead of them, the churn of a tug pulling barges, taxis slushing past on the street, the creak of a shudder closing.

  Two gendarme rounded a corner ahead of him and stopped under a lamp to light their cigarettes. The two policemen, arms moving and fingers pointing, appeared to debate which way to walk, maybe what café in which to wait out the snow. They walked toward Joe. For lack of choices, he walked toward them, passing them with his face tilted and shoulders hunched as they argued. He was glad that he kept the valise, for it allowed a certain anonymity. The police were not looking for a weary traveler.

  He stepped into the nearest café, a small and rectangular sign in gold and maroon against the building’s brick, weathered both by rain and time. The café, dark and small, was quiet and smelled of potatoes, onions and wine. The door closed behind him with a sigh. Then the sounds of the café eclipsed those of the street, the din of silverware and the hum of conversation. He sat and checked his watch, then ordered fried potatoes when the waiter stepped over.

  While he waited for his meal, he opened the valise. It was filled with papers, some originals and some carbon copies. “Damn,” he muttered and laughed a little at the irony. He had stolen someone else’s manuscript.

  “A glass of wine, Monsieur?” asked the waiter when he brought the potatoes, steaming with onions in the oil.

  “Oui,” Joe said. “Red. And the Herald-Tribune.”

  The waiter nodded, left, and returned with a glass of red, a table wine, not good but not bad. By the end of the second glass, the table wine tasted much better.

  Soon the waiter brought a copy of the newspaper. Someone had already read it and left a coffee stain on the front page. The stain, a hollow circle from the bottom of a coffee cup, was next to an article on the murderer of Wynton Gresham, one Joseph Henry. The article detailed the murders of Gresham and Huntington and Rose Shaunessy. It especially detailed the attempted murder of Paul Dillard. It also mentioned an unnamed accomplice, and that both were then in Paris. He figured Quire was the unnamed accomplice. There were, however, no photos of Joe.

  The time to begin taking action was soon. Force Marcel’s hand. A winter offensive. The worst kind.

  Before he considered the future, however, he tried fitting pieces into his puzzle.

  He thought back to the beginning, the night that was supposed to meet Gresham for a drink and some talk about a manuscript that Gresham had written. He traced a step further into the past, why Gresham had not met him—Gresham had been murdered at his house by the two Frenchmen who had then died on the rain-slick road outside Greenwich, Connecticut. Another step: How they had so easily gained entrance to Gresham’s house? Not as Greeks bearing gifts but as Frenchmen bearing gifts but still someone to be wary of. And like those Greeks of Homer’s tale, the Frenchmen had concealed themselves, even allowed Gresham to drink, before killing him. The gift that they had used for entry was not a giant horse, but a book—Joyce’s Ulysses—which every literary person wanted to read since its publication in February. Joe had read an installment in a well-worn copy of The Little Review a year or so earlier but thought that the author must have been insane. Others, however, looked forward to its publication as a book as though it were a holy writ.

  Paul Dillard had taken no vows and would have been free to wander the city when not engaged in his work at the abbey. He could easily have heard about Ulysses from someone in Tours, a tourist or at a bookstore or from a traveling writer or an American expatriate while sitting in a café enjoying a morning coffee. He might not have been able to buy a copy or even order a copy from a bookstore in Tours, so he would have written and asked Marie to buy one in Paris at the American bookstore, maybe also arranging for her to send one to Gresham in America. Joe remembered the wrapping and name from Gresham’s home. Somehow, Marcel had interrupted that communication and had used the book to get to Gresham. Somehow it connected. If Joe was lucky, someone at the bookstore might remember the sale.

  Joe paid his bill and asked the waiter for directions to Shakespeare and Company, then was back on the street walking toward rue de l’Odeon.

  A perpendicular signboard with an egg-shaped head of Shakespeare marked the entrance to the bookstore tucked between a shoemaker’s shop and that of a maker of nose sprays. Paneled top-to-bottom windows, bright and lit from yellow electric lights inside the store, opened on either side of the front door. On the wooden facades between the windows and the door were written “Lending Library” and the misspelled “Bookhop.”

  A thin, almost bird-like woman wearing a man’s black velvet smoking jacket greeted him as he entered. “May I help you?” she asked, voice both thin and strong at the same time as well as obviously American.

  From behind her, a man yelled out, his voice booming and echoing in the bookstore, “By God, Mademoiselle Shakespeare, you help more people than an Italian whore. Or should we call you Mademoiselle Company?” Th
e man, sitting behind a desk and sprawled like a lazy cat on the edge of his chair, laughed out loud at his own joke. His tawny eyes and hair both jumped in the canted and amber light of the store.

  “Don’t mind him,” the woman said, turning to Joe. “He likes to hear himself talk. Browse if you want. I’ll be in the back if you need any help.” She carried an armload of books with her as she turned toward the store’s rear.

  “Ain’t that a place for to give some help, I reckon,” the man said as she walked past him. Joe saw the man wink at the woman. He wore his shirt collar open, even in the store’s cold, and one side of it fell outside the lapel of his own smoking jacket. Around his neck, in a careless knot of silken motion, curled a purple cravat. A wide-brimmed Spanish flop hat waited on the table for the man to swoop up in a single devil-may-care motion.

  Joe stood like a new arrival in the city, coat buttoned and valise in hand, come to the first place on his list of must-sees. He nodded toward the tawny man and smiled innocently.

  He nodded back and read by the light of a table lamp. He looked up from the cloth-bound book in his hands, then toward the rear of the store, then at Joe again, and finally back to his book without saying anything more. He read half aloud but to nobody other than himself, or so it appeared to Joe, for he could barely make out the man’s muttered words, “Homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship.” He slammed shut the book and said aloud, “That’s too damn good, if you’d ask me. . . . But you ain’t, so’s I’ll return to me book.”

  Joe looked at a display of books on a table, a few had been read but most looked new enough as to be uncut. Lining the walls were shelves heaped heavy with books. Those walls not supporting shelves were painted as bright as spring in greens and blues and yellows. Running along the front of one of those walls were racks of small magazines, American magazines with names like Poetry and Exile and The Little Review. Some he was familiar with, some he was not. Above the magazines and on any open space along the walls hung an abundant population of photographs. Black and white woolen rugs covered the hardwood floor. Antique chairs and tables waited in any space not holding books or magazines or racks or shelving or the desk and chair at which the tawny man sat and mumbled to himself.

  Joe walked to the back of the store where he found the woman kneeling in front of a shelf of books in a small storage room separated from the front room by a doorway. The door was held open by a red paving brick.

  Joe said, “Excuse me, but I am looking for the owner.”

  “I am she,” said the woman. She stopped what she was doing and looked up at Joe. She had piercing eyes, high cheek bones, and a straight, thin mouth, the look of someone intelligent enough to be an intellectual or a professor but smart enough not to be either. “How may I help you?” she asked as she stood. She was taller than he had originally thought, nearly as tall as him, but thin and angular.

  “I’m inquiring about a book that was bought here a month or two ago.”

  “Oh my,” the woman said. She touched a finger to her lips. “We sell a good number of books. I don’t think that I can remember every sale.”

  Joe said, “This was a copy of Ulysses that was purchased for an American named Wynton Gresham.”

  “A copy of Joyce?” boomed the tawny man from the front of the store, and even his voice seemed tawny. “Good goddamn show.”

  The store’s owner waved toward the front like a mother waving off her son.

  “I do remember that sale,” she said, pointing a finger toward Joe. “The customer was very anxious to have the copy and said that he was travelling to America and would deliver it himself. Why do you ask?”

  “It’s complicated,” Joe said. “Was the man who bought it a Frenchman, a dapper fellow about this tall?” He held out his hand to illustrate.

  “Maybe,” she answered, “but he was not French. He spoke French very well, but this man was not French. English I would guess.” She thought for a moment. “Dutch maybe,” she mused.

  Not Dapper, then.

  He placed the valise on the floor. From inside the pocket of his overcoat, Joe pulled the rolled photograph of Gresham and his fellow soldiers in the trench. He flattened it in an empty square on top of a desk cluttered high and full with books, notepads, and other photographs. After pinning the edges of the photograph with the books, he pointed to one of the faces.

  “Is this the man?” he asked, his finger impaling the body of one of the two Marcel brothers.

  “No,” said the woman, taking a pair of reading glasses from her pocket and holding them still folded to her eyes. “That is he,” she said, pointing to another man, one in an English uniform. She put her glasses on and looked down her nose at the photograph once again. “Yes, that one.” She replaced the glasses in a pocket.

  “Are you certain?”

  “Absolutely,” she said. “And see,” she paused to look again at the photograph of five men eating a meal inside the confines of their trench. “And see—English, not French.”

  “I see,” said Joe. And he did. He saw what he had missed the other times he had looked at the photograph. Missing pieces were falling in place.

  “Don’t judge a manuscript by its cover,” he said.

  “Pardon?” the woman asked.

  “Nothing,” Joe said. He paused, then added, “I have a thank you note for him, but lost the address.”

  The woman frowned, skeptical.

  Joe said, “They were in the war together, see, and Wynton had a special message he wanted relayed.”

  “Oh, yes, I understand,” she said, “but he did not give me his address. He picked up the book himself.”

  Joe kept his smile, although it hid gritted teeth. Two steps forward, he thought, one step backward. “Thank you, anyway,” he said.

  As he turned to leave, she said, “But wait.”

  He turned back. Her mouth was in a slight smile and her finger was pointed to the ceiling. “When he came in to order it, he left his card with telephone number and address. I may have placed it in my book. I send out notices about important readings, so I may have kept it.”

  When he nodded and thanked her, she walked past Joe and toward the front of the store. Joe took a moment to look closely at the photograph before returning it rolled to his pocket and followed the woman.

  He whispered, “I know your face now.”

  At a desk near the front, the woman pulled a notebook from the center drawer, a blue notebook like students would use at a university. She pulled open the notebook using a silken sash that marked the end of a list of names.

  “Marcel,” Joe said.

  She held out the notebook with her index finger pointing to the address. Below the name, “Rene Marcel” was written in the column next to the title of the book Marcel had purchased for Gresham. “Ulysses,” she said.

  “But no address,” she added. “I am sorry.”

  “Thar she is,” said the tawny-eyed man from his perch at the desk behind Joe. “A good man, helping out ol’ Joyce. He a friend of yours, this man who buys Joyce?”

  “Of my brother’s from the war,” Joe lied.

  “From the war?” asked the man.

  “Yes,” Joe answered.

  “The theater of war,” the man said stroking the point of his short goatee beard. “I would not have thought that a theater could cause such harm. I could not have thought how death has undone so many.”

  The tawny man turned away and put his head in his hands, elbows on the desk in front of him. He sighed, as if a weight were bearing heavily down on him.

  Joe did not answer. Though he was not certain what the man had said, he knew absolutely what the man had meant.

  He looked again at the notebook, its lack of address. He looked outside through the windows. People walked by with their heads lowered and shoulders hunched. The wind, which had been soft all day, began to strengthen, forcing walkers to bend against it. Inside the bookstore, however, Joe was warm.

  The woman closed her notebo
ok. The tawny man slid back in his seat behind the gate-legged table. He once again began his mumbled reading while Joe thanked the woman, picked up his stolen valise, and walked toward the front door. A gust of wind sent a whistle through the seam between the door’s opposing sides. The tawny man whistled back and returned to his book. Joe stood, looking out the window and wondering what his next move should be.

  He still needed the address, and he knew of only one person who might be able to provide it—Marie Dillard.

  IX

  One last salute; the bayonets clash and glisten;

  With arms reversed we go without sound:

  One more has joined the men who lie and listen

  To us, who march upon their burial-ground.

  —Herbert Asquith, “The Fallen Subaltern”

  JOE WALKED WITH THE WIND TOWARD THE CLOSEST METRO STATION, thinking momentarily of the city of death that lay beneath him in the catacombs, the thousands of bodies reduced to bone. And he thought of the generation of dead that had been ground into the mud of France. And he wondered if the world had learned any lasting lessons from all this death. And he knew that was not so, for humanity would always feel the need to purge its own sins in the blood of another generation. And so he walked on, his breath a disappearing plume in the night. He saw others carrying their valises and suitcases, always more American expatriates looking to leave the wasteland of Prohibition America, refugees from the Volstead Act. He assumed, with his own valise in hand, that he looked like one of those American tourists.

  What had at first been a helpful tool, the valise, had become problematic. It had assisted his need for anonymity while in and near the train station, but on the streets of Montparnasse, it drew unwanted attention to him from every Frenchman he passed. It called out that he was an American and to someone paying close attention it might cause alarm, not an American but the American, the one who has killed so many.