The Best of Subterranean

by William Schafer

  “My hotel is just up the street.”

  “And do you have, you know—”

  “Condoms? Yes. I didn’t think I’d be using them, but—”

  “But you never know.”

  Once in my room the mood turned awkward again. There was nothing there but the full-sized bed, two small end tables, and a half-size refrigerator. The TV hung from the ceiling and the closet was small and without doors. I went to shut the window to the airshaft and Sandy said, “It’s freezing in here.”

  “I know,” I said. “Sorry.” I shed my coat and took hers. “Get your shoes off and get into bed. I’ll warm you up.”

  The plastic mattress cover under the sheets made crinkling noises as we got in. I pulled the covers over us and held her for a minute or two, fully clothed, without saying anything. I listened to the rhythm of her breathing, both alien and comforting, and felt the muscles of her back slowly begin to relax. I buried my nose in her neck, inhaling the warmth of her skin, and then I was kissing her neck, her ear, her mouth. We slowly worked our way out of our clothes and pushed them out onto the floor, and then I had a condom on and was kissing her breasts and their small, clenched nipples, and moving down to taste between her legs. It had been so very long.

  “Mmmmm,” she said. “That feels wonderful, but if you’re trying to make me come, I should warn you it’s not going to happen.”

  “No?”

  “Not with a man. Not even with a man present, if that was going to be your next question. I appreciate your thoughtfulness, but you should carry on and enjoy yourself.”

  “What’s in it for you?”

  “Don’t fret, it feels lovely. Oh, don’t let’s talk. Just make love to me, will you?”

  I had been seesawing between desire and irritation all night, but at that point I suspended all judgment and let my body have its way. As I entered her she said, “Yes. Oh, yes.”

  * * *

  Later, I asked her about the scar.

  When she finally answered, it was in a firm, affectless voice. “I was coming home late from the clubs about four years ago and a man in a balaclava—what is it you call them?”

  “Ski mask.”

  “Yes, one of those. He had a broken bottle and he dragged me into a car park. I was so startled at first I didn’t think to scream until it was too late and he had the glass at my throat and was tearing my tights off. He never said a word, and when he was done he twisted the glass into my cheek, like he was disgusted with me.”

  “Christ. I’m so sorry.”

  “I had a mobile, and I called the police even as he was walking away. I was lucky—they caught him, and sent him up, though it was only for two years. That was when I left Manchester. I know the odds of it happening again were no worse there than in London, but I just couldn’t feel safe there any more, you know?”

  I didn’t know what to do or say. We were both still naked and it seemed wrong to hug her, so I took her hand instead.

  “It’s easy to go from there to thinking men are just animals and all, but I didn’t want to be like that. So I had to box it up and put it someplace, like it happened to somebody else. And in a way it did, you know, I mean, I wasn’t part of it. And I know you’re anti-authoritarian and that, but I will always be grateful there were authorities that night.”

  I resented her using her personal horror to score points in our ongoing hit and run political debate. She’d preemptively trumped anything I could say about the authorities having failed to prevent the assault in the first place, or their inability to keep her from living in fear afterwards. I hadn’t been there, after all; I wasn’t the one who suffered.

  “And I don’t blame men in general,” she said. “There are nice things about them. Dancing. Sex, when it’s sweet, like with you. You just can’t trust them, that’s all.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s the sex thing. I mean, men cheat. It’s the way they are.”

  “I don’t,” I said.

  “Well. Perhaps you’re the exception.” She kissed my forehead in what seemed a very condescending way and turned her back to me.

  I was still trying to find the words to answer her when she began to snore softly. I watched her for a while in the faint light from the airshaft and eventually I was able to work my way back to my first impression of her, one more lost and lonely traveler, not that different from me. I curled up against her back and felt her squirm slightly against me as she settled in, and then sleep took me too.

  * * *

  I woke at seven AM to Sandy sorting out her clothes in the half light. “You’re not going?” I asked.

  “I must. I have to pack and catch a train.”

  “Not just yet.” I reached for her hand and showed her what I had in mind.

  “Oh,” she said. “Well…”

  Afterwards, it felt as if we had wound the last eighteen hours back onto a reel and we were suddenly strangers again, with nothing to say to each other. She went to the bathroom, and then immediately began to dress.

  “Can I come to the station with you?” I asked.

  “I don’t want you to even get out of bed.” She bent to kiss my cheek and whispered, “Thank you. This was perfect.”

  “What about your address, or phone number? How can I get hold of you?”

  She started to say something, then thought better of it. She wrote a phone number on a scrap of lined paper from her purse and handed it to me. “Bye now,” she said, and slipped out the door.

  I felt the way I did after a night of heavy drinking—back when I did that—minus the hangover. It was like I’d squandered something.

  I tried to go back to sleep, but couldn’t find a comfortable place for my mind or my body. The rain had returned, cold and steady, but I had warm boots and an umbrella, so I ate the hotel’s continental breakfast and headed out to the Porte de Montreuil market, remembering to tuck a mini-cassette recorder in my pocket just in case.

  The market was located in a faceless gray commercial neighborhood on the eastern edge of the city. It was mostly new clothing on Mondays, but deeper into the stalls there were always a few interesting antiques and collectables among the old tools and chipped plates. Nothing for me, though, not that morning.

  I was nervous about going back to Vernaison. Philippe had meant well, I was sure, but too many times I’d come back to dealers like him and found only awkwardness and excuses. Once I’d turned around, though, I discovered I could hardly wait. I took the wet walk back to the Metro at nearly a run and hurried through two changes of trains.

  When I finally got to Vernaison it was two in the afternoon and Philippe’s booth was open, but deserted. I waited five minutes, pacing the narrow alley, and when I was about to give up, I noticed him coming from the front of the complex, head down, a FedEx package in his hands. My timing, I realized, could not have been better. He saw me, held up the package, and smiled.

  I followed him into his stall. “You will forgive me,” he said, and I waited while he carefully unwrapped the package, took out the record, and admired it. “Still sealed,” he said. “Remarkable.” He rubbed the edge of the album against the leg of his jeans with a practiced touch, parting the shrink wrap, and stopped to inhale the aroma of vinyl, cardboard, and glue before setting the record on the turntable and carefully cleaning it. I tried to picture him cooking a meal with the same deliberate speed, and imagined that he ate out a good deal.

  The vinyl popped and hissed, an announcer made a brief introduction, and Brel began to sing, accompanying himself on guitar. “Et voila,” Philippe said softly, then turned to me and said, in English, “I thank you so much for this gift.”

  “You’re very welcome,” I said.

  He took another index card from his inside jacket pocket and handed it to me. I liked that he’d had it ready before the package came. “This is the man who sold me the recorder,” he said in French. “Along with a lot of other things. He will see you this afternoon if you like.”

 
“Thank you. This is very kind of you. If you don’t mind, can you tell me what sort of other things you got from him?”

  “They are mostly gone. A radio, a Victrola that our friend Madame B bought, some silverware. He had also some dishes and ladies’ clothes that did not interest me. He is in the real estate business, he tells me. He comes across things from time to time in the houses he buys, and lets me know.”

  “He didn’t say where he got the recorder?”

  “I think from some old house. Maybe the owner died.”

  “Did you see the house?”

  “The things were all in boxes, in the trunk of his car. I think maybe he lives in that car.” He looked at me over the top of his glasses. “Seriously.”

  Just then a man in a black raincoat walked by. I didn’t think it was the same man I’d seen at Madame B’s on Saturday, but it made me unaccountably nervous. I thanked Philippe again and shook his hand, and as I left he was putting the needle back to the beginning of the album.

  * * *

  I called the name on the card, Vlad Dmitriev, from the street in front of the Vernaison. My nerves were still bad, and from the way I was looking around, people probably thought I was making a drug deal. I got a bad mobile connection and it took me a while to convince him that I was an antique collector and not trying to trap him into admitting anything. He finally agreed to meet me at the edge of the markets, where the Avenue Michelet met the access road for the loop. I was to look for a cream-colored Mercedes.

  Half an hour later the car pulled into the swarm of traffic at that corner—pedestrians, bicycles, motorcycles, vans—and parted them like a killer whale. Vlad had his window down, yelling and shaking his fist at a gang of kids that had tried to cross in front of him. He was a bit younger than me, with long hair slicked straight back, a short beard, and a black leather jacket over a dress shirt and new blue jeans. He reached across to open the door for me and beckoned me inside.

  “Where you going?” he asked. “I’ll drop you.” His French was slangy and heavily accented, and I could barely understand him. As I settled in, I noticed an open shoebox on the back seat that seemed to be full of American passports, and I had to fight off a moment of panic.

  “I don’t know where I’m going next,” I said. “I was hoping you could tell me.”

  “The stuff from that old house, it’s worth a lot, is it?”

  “Only to a collector,” I said. He didn’t seem threatening, but things were getting a little out of control for my comfort.

  He nodded, pulled into traffic. “It’s okay. I don’t do the detail work. I leave that to guys like you and Philippe. I’m strictly wholesale where junk is concerned.”

  “This place, what was it?”

  “Just an old apartment house in Montmartre. Place was a wreck. Crazy old lady ran the joint, couldn’t keep up with it anymore. I’m going to knock all the walls out, put in some offices.”

  “The old lady, she’s still alive?”

  “She’s alive, but I don’t think she’ll talk to you. She hates the whole world. Living in some crazy past that never really existed. Doesn’t sound like it was so great back then, either.”

  “Have you talked to her much?”

  “Not really. Business, mostly, you know. She says the place used to be a whorehouse during the war, and that she worked there. I think she’s making it up.”

  “You’re talking about the Second World War?” Vlad nodded as if it were obvious. “I really need to meet this woman. I could pay for her time.”

  “She doesn’t give a crap for money. Not like me. You say this is worth a lot?”

  “If you’ve got a card or something, I promise I’ll send you some money if I get rich from it.”

  He thought about it, then said, “No, it’s okay. I’ll take you to see her. Maybe she’ll talk. Who knows?”

  We were headed south and west, toward the center of the city, winding our way uphill into the artsy Montmartre district, the highest point in Paris. Vlad slowed the car and leaned across me to point out a narrow red brick building sandwiched between two others just like it. “See that? That’s one of mine. You’re not looking for something like that, are you?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Just visiting.”

  “Maybe when you sell your whatever-it-is and you’re rich, eh?”

  The steep, narrow streets, the walled-in gardens, the parks and streetlight-lined stairways seemed both welcoming and saturated with history. It was easy to picture myself living there, looking out one of those bay windows as I fixed dinner, Mingus on the stereo. Maybe when Pop finally goes, I told myself.

  We turned down a cobbled alley and pulled into a narrow parking space. The building was plaster and wood, in poor condition, and Vlad led me up three flights of stairs to a peeling green door, one of three on the landing. He knocked, waited, knocked again. After a minute or so I assumed he would give up, but he said, “She’s here, she’s just making sure we’re serious.”

  He kept knocking, and eventually I heard a faint “je viens, je viens” on the far side of the door. It opened on a chain, and the voice said, “Oh. Vlad,” in vague disappointment.

  She reopened the door without the chain, and while the door was closed I reached into my jacket pocket and turned on the minicassette recorder.

  She wore a pink chenille bathrobe, which she held closed with one hand, and bunny slippers. Her face was striking—deeply lined, and yet with such clear skin that she didn’t seem old enough to have been around for World War II. Her hair was white, with odd strands of gray and black, and came halfway down her back in a loose braid.

  We followed her into the kitchen. “My good friend François has been begging me to introduce him to you. François, this is Madame Rochelle.”

  She took my hand and looked intently into my eyes. “So, you are a good friend of Vlad’s? For this I am supposed to welcome you?”

  I went with my instincts. “I just met Vlad a few minutes ago. I want to ask you about the wire recorder that he found in your house.”

  She pressed my hand and nodded. “Okay, Vlad, I will talk to François alone now.”

  Vlad hesitated, as if he didn’t quite believe what he’d heard. Then he shrugged and took a business card from his jacket. “In case you are ever rich,” he said. He squeezed the back of my neck in an oddly intimate gesture and let himself out.

  “Come in,” Madame Rochelle said. “If you insist on something to drink I expect I could find you some tea.” Her French, like Madame B’s, was musical, but in her case legato and husky. For my part, my own French was still ragged, but practice was bringing it back.

  “I’m all right,” I said.

  She led me into the living room, which smelled damp and got a little second-hand light from the bedroom and a bit of filtered daylight through heavy orange drapes. She sat at one end of a faux Victorian couch with worn floral upholstery and I sat at the other.

  “Talk,” she said.

  “I am here because Vlad found an old recorder in your house and took it to the flea market at Saint-Ouen, and eventually it ended up with me. There was a spool of wire with the machine that had a date of December 18, 1944. Do you have any idea what I’m talking about?”

  “No, but I’m fascinated.” She clearly wasn’t. She lit up a cigarette and looked past me out the window.

  “I think the recording contains the sound of someone being beaten to death. I think that person was Glenn Miller, the American musician.”

  “Not a very good musician, and he didn’t die in my house. The military flew him back to the US, to Ohio, I think, and he died in a hospital there. This anyway is what a doctor friend told me.”

  The blood roared in my ears and I thought I might pass out.

  “I forgot that my friend Louis had that machine going,” she went on. “He wanted to record the great Glenn Miller playing with the band from the bar down the street. Everyone was much too drunk, especially Miller, and they sounded like a piano falling downstairs.”


  “Madame Rochelle, may I tape this conversation?”

  “Why?”

  “It is my only proof of what is on that recording wire. It makes it valuable.”

  “You are going to sell the recording wire?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “All right. You may tape.”

  I switched off the recorder surreptitiously as I took it out of my pocket, then set it on the coffee table and made a show of turning it on again. Madame Rochelle shot me a skeptical glance that told me I wasn’t fooling her, but I felt better having it out in the open.

  “How did the fight start?” I asked quickly. “Who was it that hit him?”

  “That, my dear, is a much longer story. How much do you know about the black market here during the war?”

  “Nothing, really.”

  “Okay. From the beginning, then.” She took a deep drag on her cigarette and settled herself on the couch. “When the Germans came in 1940, they set our clocks ahead an hour, so we would be on the same time as Berlin. It brought darkness to our mornings and reminded us every day that we were defeated. That hour was the first thing they stole from us, but it was not the last.

  “At first it did not seem so bad. We were already starving from the long siege, and when the first German tanks rolled into the city, the soldiers were tossing chocolate and cigarettes to us. Yes, like the way you Americans want to think of yourselves. We thought then the Germans would be bringing order, but they only brought papier timbré—you know, bureaucracy—and long lines. They helped the black market with their own stupidity. They hired local men to provides all their supplies, so of course the local men stole everything they could. That was right where your flea market stands now, at the Port of Saint-Ouen.”

  “That’s amazing.”

  “What you call coincidence? That is just fingers.”

  I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right. “Excuse me?”

  She wiggled her fingers at me. “You see this finger and this finger and you think they are different things, but there is one hand that moves them both. You understand? Anyway. You know the word se debrouiller? It means to get by, to make do. From this we had le systéme D, the way of getting by. Everyone did it. These days, you can’t find anybody who was not in the Resistance, but then it was different. We did what we had to do. We stole, we dealt with le milieu, the criminals, we traded our heirlooms, we got drunk or high whenever we could so we didn’t notice how hungry we were. Or we were one of the collabos horizontales, a whore, like me. We were most of us whores then.