The Best of Subterranean

  “You Americans came, but there was still no food. Then the American deserters moved in and took over the black market and it was bigger than ever. American soldiers were selling to them—that’s how Louis got that wire recorder, from the American military. And Glenn Miller, he was friends with this Colonel Baessell, who was one of the worst. He would fly over from England with morphine he stole from the Army, hidden in cartons of cigarettes.”

  I knew the name Baessell, of course. He was the other passenger on the flight on which Miller allegedly disappeared. “Are you saying Miller was involved with smuggling morphine?”

  “No. But everyone knew what this Baessell was doing, and Glenn probably knew too. He liked the things that Baessell could put his hands on. Booze and women. Glenn’s appetites were enormous, and he was a very mean drunk. You know why? He was being eaten, from the inside out. Inside he was a great musician, but outside, his body could not play that well. He would have given everything he had if he could have been Jack Teagarden. You can’t live like that, wishing you were somebody else.”

  My father loved Jack Teagarden, and used to lecture us on his awesome technique and control of the trombone. “So what happened on the night of the recording?”

  “A man came in looking for Baessell, a boy, really, very young and nervous. He went right up to him at his table and pulled out a pistol and shot him, bang, in the face. Glenn came off the stage and knocked the gun out of his hand with his trombone, and they began to fight. People were running away now because of the gunshot. They knew the police would come and many of them should not have been there, deserters, black market traders like Louis. Still, someone could have stopped the fight. But there was no love here for Americans. They had not suffered the way we had.”

  I thought of the images I’d seen of the carnage at Omaha Beach and started to say something, but she cut me off.

  “A few weeks of combat is not the same as years of hardship,” she said. “And many of these men were like Glenn and Baessell, they had never seen combat. They came and took what they wanted—women, mostly, by force sometimes—and thought we should be grateful.”

  “What happened to Miller?”

  “Like I say, he was a very mean drunk, and he was very drunk. Most fights I have seen have not lasted long, but this one—Glenn was crazy with anger and would not stop, and the boy, in the end, he was beating Glenn’s head against the floor. I tried to stop it, finally, and then the Military Police came and took Glenn away. I was sure they would arrest us, but it seems they knew who the boy was who shot Baessell, and he left with them, and they said if we ever talked about it bad things would happen to us.”

  “Are you saying the US military was involved with Baessell’s death?”

  “Do I think it is possible that the US Army wanted to stop Baessell from stealing their morphine and didn’t want the publicity of a trial? What do you think?”

  “Have you ever told anyone else?”

  “One time I told an American, after the war, and he was very angry with me and said I was lying. Then a few years ago a woman from England found me. She was doing a book about Miller, but then she went away and I never heard from her again or ever saw the book.”

  “Do you remember her name?”

  “Sorry. I know these things are very important to all of you, but I don’t care. They say life is short, but my life has been very long, and I am tired.”

  “You never thought of going to the newspapers when you saw the false reports of Miller’s death?”

  “Why? When your government decides to tell a lie, that is serious business. Like now, your President lies and nothing happens to him, but this man Wilson talks about the lies and the government sets his wife up to be killed.”

  I tried to find a polite way to ask if she could have been mistaken. “So you knew Miller well? He was a regular customer?”

  “When I speak of his appetites, I do it from personal experience. He was not a bad person. He was not a wonderful trombone player, but he had a true gift as an arranger. He had a sense of humor. He was loyal to his friends, and he was brave enough to take on that boy with the gun. I don’t understand your country. Your heroes cannot have appetites? You want to impeach Clinton for having sex, but you let Bush steal your election and carve up the country for his rich friends. All these soldiers who fought Hitler must be these brave idealists fighting the Good War. Well, the soldiers I saw, half of them had wine in their canteens and they wanted to know why they should be dying for stupid French people. But you never hear that now, just like you don’t hear that Glenn Miller died drunk in a whorehouse. Your father, he was in the war?”

  “The last part of it. He was very young.”

  “So many were at the end. Just children.”

  “He was with the group that found Dachau.”

  “Ah, yes, the camps. The Americans did many bad things at the camps.”

  “The Americans did?”

  “Tortured and killed the guards. Shot German prisoners of war for revenge. Because they could not live with what they saw, and they were only human. Human like Glenn Miller.” She looked at her watch. “I think you should go now.”

  And that was the end. Two minutes later I found myself on the street, dizzy from information overload, oblivious of the rain, clutching my recorder in one hand and my folded umbrella in the other. I sat on the steps of her building and rewound the tape for a few seconds to make sure I had her story. It was there, loud and clear.

  “Holy Christ,” I said.

  I put the recorder back in my pocket and opened my umbrella and started walking. It was getting dark. At the end of the block I found myself on Rue Lamark, and followed it downhill past the stark white domes and towers of Sacré Coeur, then took the long flight of stairs down to Place Saint-Pierre.

  It was the find of a lifetime, and now I had to decide what to do with it. My first instinct was to take it slow, send out a few emails to let key collectors know what I had, let word of mouth start the feeding frenzy that would doubtless ensue.

  She’d stirred up a lot of different emotions, but most of what I felt was triumph. I’d waited a long time for this, and I was not going to screw it up.

  * * *

  My flight wasn’t until Wednesday morning. I spent Tuesday at the Rodin Museum and the Gustave Moreau exhibit at the Musée de la Vie Romantique, then I picked up a few presents at the big Printemps department store, including a necklace with Russian-looking icons of the Virgin for Ann. I felt different, puffed up. No one was looking at me, but it was because they didn’t know the secret I was carrying.

  Afterwards, as evening fell, I walked around the Pigalle district. This was where Glenn Miller came to drink and let out his inner demons. It had changed, of course, since 1944. The Moulin Rouge now offered Vegas-style dinner-and-a-show, feathered-headdress nudity to busloads of tourists, and the shops were cluttered with sex toys and gag gifts—but there were still prostitutes and live sex shows and lonely men with their collars turned up against the night.

  I dropped by the hotel around 7 PM to call and check on my father, and the night clerk stopped me in the lobby. “A man was here looking for you this afternoon, monsieur. He left this message.”

  It was a handwritten note, in English. “Urgent that I speak with you today. Please call me as soon as you get this, no matter how late.” There was a local phone number and a name, David Smith.

  I punched the number into my phone, nervousness edging toward fear. I had to remind myself that my passport was in order, my credit was solid, I’d done nothing wrong.

  A woman’s voice answered, and when I identified myself she switched to English with a colorless American accent. “Mr. Smith has been waiting for your call. Can you hold, please?”

  When Smith came on, he too sounded like an American newscaster. “Mr. Delacorte. Thanks for calling back. If you can spare me half an hour tonight, I have some information I think will interest you.”

  “Are you trying to sell me someth
ing?”

  “Quite the contrary. Do you know what a Missing AirCrew Report is? For example, if a military plane disappeared during World War II on a flight from a rural English airfield to Paris, there would have to be an MACR filed. Now do I have your attention, Mr. Delacorte?”

  “Yes. Yes, I understand.”

  “I can be at your hotel in twenty minutes. Is that okay?”

  “Yes, I guess so…”

  “Great. See you then.”

  I dropped my packages in my room and washed up. Yes, I wanted to see a Missing AirCrew Report on Glenn Miller, but how would a stranger know that?

  I was waiting in the lobby when he arrived, exactly twenty minutes from when I’d hung up the phone. He looked to be in his late thirties. He was wearing an expensively tailored gray suit, but his haircut and bearing both suggested the military. He had a quiet authority that went beyond self-confidence to intimidation.

  He shook my hand firmly and said, “Is there someplace we can talk?”

  “My room is a little small,” I said. Ridiculous as it seemed, I didn’t want to be alone with him.

  He nodded toward a red vinyl-covered bench at the far end of the lobby. “Here is all right, I suppose. This won’t take long.”

  We sat and he opened the manila envelope he was carrying and took out a single faxed page on plain copy paper. “You may read this here. I can’t let you copy it or take any notes. When you’re done I’ll take it with me.”

  The form was crude, from a mimeographed original. At the top it said “R E S T R I C T E D” and beneath that “MACR No. 10770.” The heading was “WAR DEPARTMENT/HEADQUARTERS ARMY AIR FORCES/WASHINGTON.” I skimmed the report, which listed the command, squadron, departure, and destination points. The date was 15 Dec 44. Paragraph 10 listed the persons aboard the aircraft as John Morgan, the pilot, and passengers Lt. Col. Normal R. Baessell and Major Alton G. Miller.

  The most interesting part was paragraph 5, “AIRCRAFT WAS LOST, OR IS BELIEVED TO HAVE BEEN LOST, AS A RESULT OF.” There was an “x” next to “Other Circumstances as follows,” and then the words: “Accidentally destroyed when aircraft strayed into Channel Bomb Jettison Area.”

  I read the whole thing again. “Are you serious?”

  “The Norseman aircraft in which Major Miller was a passenger accidentally overflew an area in the English channel that was used for the disposal of bombs after aborted missions. Several observers on one of the bombers positively identified the Norseman.”

  “This is the Fred Shaw story that was in the tabloids in the 80s. There are a dozen holes in it. No one else ever came forward, there was no Mayday call, no wreckage—”

  “And no MACR. Not available to the general public, anyway. It would have been a morale disaster if the truth had come out while our men were still in combat.”

  “I think this is a fake. For one thing, Baessell’s middle initial was not ‘R.’ ”

  “No offense, Mr. Delacorte, but I think you’re being a bit paranoid. The Army typist hit an ‘R’ instead of an ‘F.’ It’s a simple typo.”

  “If this is the truth, why not admit it now?”

  “If it were up to me, I would. But the military is a bit skittish about taking responsibility for past cover-ups at the moment.”

  Because of the current cover-ups, I thought. I didn’t say it aloud because I was afraid of him.

  “The important thing,” he said, with what should have passed for a sympathetic smile, “is that anything else you may have heard is simply not true. There are rumors, for example, that he was murdered, or any number of other far-fetched scenarios. It was an accident, plain and simple. A piece of really lousy luck.”

  “You accuse me of being paranoid, but what am I supposed to think, with you showing up like this? Who are you? Who do you work for? How did you know I was investigating Miller’s death? Who told you about me?”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Delacorte. I’ve told you all I can.” He gently took the MACR from my hands and put it back in the envelope. “I will tell you that I have a legal background, and that both Major Miller and Colonel Baessell have living relatives. If you knowingly circulate libelous stories about either of them, you could find yourself—and your pertinent possessions—tied up in some very nasty litigation.”

  Smith, or whatever his name was, stood up. “I hope this was helpful to you,” he said. “Enjoy the rest of your stay.”

  * * *

  I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. I sat in my room in the half darkness and replayed everything that had happened since I’d come to Paris. Had I been followed? What about the men in the raincoats at the Marché Vernaison? No one connected with the wire recorder—not Philippe, Vlad, Madame B, nor Madame Rochelle—knew where I was staying. Was somebody reading my email?

  And what was I to believe about Miller? Madame Rochelle had seemed completely convincing, but she had a political agenda and the only evidence to support her was a handwritten label on a spool of recording wire, currently in my safe deposit box in North Carolina. If the recording had been made by anyone other than Miller, or at some earlier time, her story was no more than that. As for “David Smith,” assuming he was military, he also had a motive to lie. American officers involved in the drug trade, and the Army implicated in a black market coup d’état, was far worse than his friendly fire scenario.

  But it was the betrayal that came back to me again and again. Somebody that I’d been with in the last four days was deceiving me.

  I had to do something. I called my airline and took a financial beating to change my flight to a Friday departure—from London.

  * * *

  I arrived at Waterloo Station just after noon on the train from Paris, and used a pay phone to call the number Sandy gave me. I got an elderly woman at a florist’s shop who’d never heard of Sandy or anyone answering her description. “Sorry, love,” she said. “You’ll find someone else, I’m sure.”

  I wasn’t surprised as much as curious to see how far the deception went. I took the tube two stops north to Charing Cross Road and wheeled my suitcase down the crowded sidewalks of Oxford Street and into Marks and Spencer. I found the cosmetics counter and was about to ask a sales clerk for Sandy when I saw her.

  She caught my glance and something like panic flashed across her face. I went up to her, saw the name “Margaret” on her nametag, and said, “Which is it, Sandy or Margaret?”

  “Keep your voice down, please. Please. It’s Margaret.”

  “What are you so afraid of?”

  “Please, could you pretend to be buying something? Everyone here knows me. I don’t want them asking questions.”

  I picked up a lipstick, took the cap off, drew a blood red line on a scrap of paper. “What kind of questions?”

  She looked down and whispered, “I’ve got a fella. They all know him. If word gets back to him that some glamorous older bloke was coming round to see me, I’ll be in it for sure.”

  I thought the “glamorous” was a nice touch. “We have to talk.”

  “Not here. I’ve got lunch in a quarter hour. I’ll meet you just inside the main doors of the HMV across the street.”

  “You’re not going to stand me up, are you?”

  “I’ll be there. Fifteen minutes, I promise. Just go now, okay?”

  I lurked inside the main doors of the giant record store, checking my watch when I wasn’t looking out at Oxford Street. I knew she could easily slip into the crowds and disappear if she had a mind to, and it was with vast relief that I finally saw her hurrying up the sidewalk.

  I stepped out to meet her and she said, “Let’s walk. I don’t want anyone to see us here.”

  We headed west toward Tottenham Court Road. “So your boyfriend is the violent type, is he?”

  She walked on in silence for a long time and then said, “Yes.”

  “Is he the one that gave you the scar?”

  “No, that part was true.”

  “Were you ever working on a book about Glenn Miller? Int
erviewing people for it?”

  She gave me a sidelong glance as if evaluating my sanity. “No.”

  That left the tough one. “Did you talk to anyone about me? In Paris, or here? I mean anybody, a girlfriend, a stranger, a cop?”

  “No. It’s my secret.” She stopped and looked at me defiantly. “Everything I told you is true except my name and the phone number you made me give you.”

  “You didn’t tell me about your ‘fella.’ ”

  “You didn’t ask. You just assumed.” She started walking again. “I needed what you gave me. Maybe it’ll eventually give me the guts to change my life. But if I tell anyone, it won’t be mine anymore. I don’t want to share it.”

  The sound of her heels against the concrete was like the ticking of an enormous clock. “It’s really arbitrary, isn’t it?” I suddenly said. “Who we choose to believe? It’s subject to coercion, or habit, or wishful thinking.”

  “You’re saying you don’t believe me? Not that I blame you.”

  “No. I’m saying I do. Believe you.”

  “I’m really sorry,” she said. “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.”

  After a minute I said, “I lied to you, too. When I said I didn’t cheat? I did cheat. I had an affair, toward the end of my marriage. I hated the deception, even though I couldn’t resist the sex part, for a while anyway. But I broke it off and swore I wouldn’t do it again, and I would either make my marriage work or get out. I ended up getting out.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I mean, in the circumstances, I’d be pretty much of a hypocrite to complain, wouldn’t I?” She reached out and ruffled my hair. “Is that why you came all this way? To confess?”