Lisbon Crossing, The

by Tom Gabbay

  CHAPTER 28

  All was certainly not right in Paris. The “City of Light” was in mourning.

  We left the car at the Porte d’Orléans and caught the last Metro, heading toward Clignancourt. On the surface, everything seemed normal. People sat on hard benches with open books and newspapers, or stood, swaying silently back and forth with the rhythm of the carriage, and they wore the same deadpan faces that you’d find on any subway system in the world. But it wasn’t normal. It was far from that.

  There wasn’t a German in sight, but their presence was everywhere. In the slumping shoulders of the man who stared blankly at the cap he held in his lap; in the empty eyes of an old woman who fiddled nervously with a lace handkerchief gripped tightly in both hands; it was even in the students, who stood in groups of three and four, but had nothing to say to each other. It was in the deafening silence, and in the fallen faces of every Parisian we came across. It was the sound and the look of defeat. They couldn’t believe what had happened to them.

  Even the weather was gloomy. People wore coats in mid-July, and carried umbrellas. The mist that hung in the air seemed to cling to everything—buildings, sidewalks, it even attached itself to the people. Everything was obscured by the depressing fog that had descended on Paris.

  We got off the train at Boulevard de Rochechouart and climbed the hill toward Sacré Coeur. Abrielle was unclear about the exact location of her uncle’s apartment, but knew that the famous dome was visible from his front door. That didn’t narrow our search too well, though, because the dome could be seen from pretty much every doorway in Montmartre. All we could do was hope that she’d find her way once we got to the top.

  We wound our way through a maze of deserted lanes, our steps intruding on the languorous silence of a city in hiding. The only signs of life were the occasional twitching of a curtain and the packs of dogs that roamed the alleys—once-loved pets abandoned to the streets as their owners fled the approaching Wehrmacht.

  I could see that the climb was taking its toll on Eva. She looked tired and I worried that she might start bleeding again, but she pressed on silently to the top. We avoided the church’s main square, circling around the back instead, where we were less likely to be seen. I glanced at my watch, but it was too dark to see. I knew it was well past eleven o’clock, though.

  “Do you remember anything?” I said. Abrielle pursed her lips and thought hard.

  “A blue door.”

  “A blue door?”

  “Yes.”

  “Anything else?”

  “A pink restaurant.”

  I gave Eva a look, which she avoided.

  “Which way do you think we should go, Abrielle?” she asked gently. “Don’t think about it too much, use your first instinct.”

  “Mmm…” The girl cast her eyes around and chose a direction. “That way.”

  I was considering other options—all of which were pretty unappealing—when, a couple of blocks later, we came upon La Maison Rose, a little corner bistro that was unmistakably pink. I think even Abrielle was surprised. A minute later, we were standing in front of a blue door with a view of Sacré Coeur. It was an odd location for a residence, stuck in an odorous alley between Rue Saint-Vincent and Rue Cortot, but Abrielle had led us straight there, so I knocked—softly at first, then harder when there was no response. We waited, but still there was nothing.

  “Are you sure he lives here?” I asked, thinking it looked more like the back of a restaurant and perhaps Abrielle had confused it with her uncle’s workplace.

  “Yes, it’s right,” she assured me.

  I knocked again, loudly this time, and after a couple of minutes, I could hear whispers coming from inside. I hit the door again, banging it hard with the bottom of my fist.

  “Qui est là?” A man’s muted voice called out from behind the door. Abrielle stepped forward.

  “C’est moi, oncle…C’est Abrielle…”

  The door opened a crack, revealing only pitch-black inside.

  “Abrielle…?”

  “Oui, c’est moi, Oncle Christien…”

  The door swung back, revealing a tall, slender figure in his early twenties. Younger than I’d expected. His pale skin and delicate, almost fragile frame, contrasted with strong, angular features and a shock of thick, wavy black hair that was brushed straight back off his forehead. He took a tentative step across the threshold, then stopped to look around.

  “Ici, oncle,” Abrielle said softly. “Je suis ici.”

  He turned toward the sound of her voice and she stepped forward, taking his hand in hers. Falling to his knees, he scooped his niece into his arms, and they clung to each other for several moments. When they finally separated, I could see that there were tears in both sets of eyes. Christien shook his head, laughed out loud, and planted a kiss on each of Abrielle’s cheeks. Then he looked up and whispered, “C’est qui, avec toi?”

  He was looking in our direction, but his gaze was distant and unfocused, as if he was looking straight through us. It wasn’t until then that I realized that Abrielle’s uncle Christien was stone-cold blind.

  His accommodation turned out to be a couple of stark rooms in the back of a small jazz club, a place called L’École, where he’d been playing piano until the Germans closed them down, along with every other venue in France. The Nazis described jazz as “degenerate Negro-Jewish music,” which seemed to me to bestow undue credit on Irving Berlin, but I guess they thought it gave their denunciation a bit more punch. Anyway, the Reich’s culture police didn’t waste time putting lights out on the Jazz Age in Paris.

  We’d interrupted something. Christien quickly herded us into his small kitchen, hoping we wouldn’t notice the cloud of Gauloise-flavored smoke that was wafting in from the front room.

  “You are American,” he said to me before I’d made a sound.

  “How’d you know that?”

  “You walk like an American.”

  “Do Americans have a particular way of walking?”

  He shrugged and produced a plate of boiled eggs, some soft cheese, and the better part of a baguette from inside a cupboard. Placing it all on the wooden table, along with a bottle of red wine, he motioned for us to sit.

  “You must eat,” he said.

  Abrielle was the only one to take him up on it. She devoured everything in sight as Christien told us how he’d only recently learned of his niece’s ordeal, through a desperate letter from his sister that had taken nearly a month to reach him. Apparently, she never got off the train in Bordeaux. She’d left Abrielle asleep as she pushed through the crowd to buy some bread and fruit from a vendor on the platform. When she got back to their place, her daughter had vanished and the train had left the station. She’d begged them to go back, but no one would listen. Unable to get off until the Spanish border, she had taken three days to make her way back to Bordeaux. She arrived just about the time Abrielle was leaving, and she’d been searching ever since, fearing the worst.

  Abrielle started to come apart at this point. The poor girl, drained and exhausted, finally felt safe enough to cry. Eva pulled her into an embrace and gently stroked her forehead, whispering softly in her ear that they would write a letter to her mother first thing in the morning, and that Abrielle could draw a picture of herself on the letter, smiling happily, because that would make her mother feel happy, too. Abrielle nodded, wiped away her tears, and tried to smile.

  “She needs to sleep,” Eva said.

  Christien suggested that she and the child use his bed, and seeing the strain on Eva’s face, I seconded the idea. I asked Christien if he had any bandages and he provided a first-aid kit with enough gauze and tape that I was able to put a decent dressing on Eva’s wound. Abrielle was asleep before I left the room, and Eva wasn’t far behind. When I got back to the kitchen, Christien was waiting for me.

  “Come,” he said. “Meet my friends.”

  Claude played bass, Raymond was on drums, and the quiet one, Gérard, played tenor s
ax. Each offered a little smile and nodded as Christien went around the table, introducing them by name and instrument, as if they’d just finished playing a set and were taking a bow. A fifth chair was pulled up for me, and by the time I sat down, Claude had filled a glass with Armagnac and pushed it across the table.

  “The whiskey, she is finished,” he apologized with a shrug. “So, now it is begins, the hard time of war.” Claude was like a big, friendly teddy bear, with tight black curls at the top of an oversize head, and big, chocolate-brown eyes. I hadn’t seen him standing yet, but I would’ve put him at about six-foot-three.

  “Here’s to better times, then,” I said, raising my glass. “Vive la France.”

  A rousing chorus of “VIVE LA FRANCE!” came back at me, and drinks were tossed back. As Claude went around the table with refills, I glanced around the darkened room. It was a smallish club—seating for about forty, with standing room for maybe another thirty. The tables were arranged around a low stage with a set of drums on one side and a shiny black baby grand on the other. In the back of the room, near the entrance, there was a small bar. The dark blue walls were hung with black-and-white photos of jazz players, including a signed one of Louis Armstrong blowing his horn so hard that it looked like his eyes were about to explode out of his head.

  Claude finished pouring and raised his glass at me. “And now we drink to America,” he grinned. The table echoed the toast, though with decidedly less gusto this time around. Then it was tobacco time. Everyone reached for their pack and we lit up in unison.

  “America, she will come now into the war,” Raymond said through rising smoke. “Yes?”

  I leaned into the table and paused before answering. It would’ve been easy to be flip with it—something about John Wayne and the cavalry would’ve been my first instinct—but Raymond wasn’t posing an offhand question. These were men who found themselves alone at the bottom of a deep, dark hole, with no way to climb out, and they wanted to know if anyone was going to throw them a rope. They deserved an honest answer.

  “No,” I said. “America’s not going to come to the rescue. At least, not anytime soon. I’d be lying if I said otherwise.”

  That prompted a sharp exchange between Claude and Raymond, which seemed to boil down to an “I told you so,” “Well, fuck you,” sort of dialogue. I changed the subject.

  “So you guys are jazzmen, huh?”

  “We have used to be,” Raymond said. “But the Nazis, they don’t dig it so much.” The guys had been around enough musicians—mostly black Americans who’d made Paris a haven for jazz since the last Great War—that morsels of swing-speak sometimes appeared in their otherwise basic English. “They like only the music for marching,” the drummer added. “Pum, pum, pum.”

  It turned out that the four were partners in L’École, which had been open for about a year. They’d pooled their resources to buy the place, hoping they could make enough money to escape their day jobs, and it had just started to draw a crowd when the Germans showed up.

  The conversation inevitably turned to New York and my days running the Kit Kat Klub. The guys listened intently as I told stories about legends like Gene Krupa, Lester Young, and Art Tatum, who’d used the Kat as a late-night drinking hole. I got the full seal of approval when they heard that, in ’32, I’d given Billie Holiday her first gig outside of Harlem when I hired her to sing at the club. She was no more than seventeen at the time, but she had a lot to sing about, even at that tender age.

  Christien had been sitting back up to this point, hands folded together on his lap, listening, and—in some sense—watching me. In spite of his silence, or maybe because of it, it was clear that he was the group’s leader. When he was ready to speak to me alone, he didn’t have to say a word. The boys somehow got the message, and disappeared into the back of the club.

  Leaning across the table, Christien located his Gauloise and extracted a smoke from the pack. I struck a match and lit him up, keeping the flame alive while I readied one for myself.

  “You know,” he said, drawing on the cigarette. “On each night for a month, we have sat here together at this table—Raymond, Claude, Gérard, and myself—talking until early in the morning. And each time we face the same question: What will we do?” He paused to take a long drag on the cigarette.

  “What will we do?”

  “I wish I had an answer for you,” I said.

  “Perhaps you do.”

  I shifted in my seat. “I don’t know who you think I am, Christien, or what I’m doing here, but—”

  “I know that you are not a tourist.” He let the silence hang for a moment, allowing it to make his point.

  “Talking, of course, will not defeat the enemy,” he said when he continued. “If we wish to live, we must fight.”

  “If staying alive is what you’re after, then maybe you’d be better off not fighting.”

  “No, you are wrong about this. You see, if we fight, certainly they will kill some of us. Perhaps many. But in the moment that we accept this evil, then we will surely die, all of us. We may go on breathing, but we will feel empty and defeated, and this will be because our spirits have been extinguished. And when our spirits have died, we will cease to exist. We will become a part of them. It starts to happen already, with the police, the government. How long will it take for them to kill us all? So you see, we have not much time. In order to live, we must start quickly to die. This is perhaps one of God’s playful ironies.”

  Christien must’ve been able to sense the expression I had on my face, which was probably somewhere between amused and annoyed, because he broke out laughing.

  “You’re right,” he said. “This is just more talk. What I wanted to say is that we offer ourselves in whatever task you have come to Paris to undertake. We are ready to do anything, if it will begin us in our resistance.”

  I was roused at 5 A.M. by the gentle sound of a piano. Christien wasn’t playing a melody so much as a series of melodic phrases, expressions of a color or mood that seemed to speak to each other, then melt together into a single statement. I sat up from the floor, where I’d finally found a couple of hours of sleep, propped myself against the wall, and listened as he swept up and down the keyboard. I hadn’t heard anything like it before.

  As if responding to a Siren’s call, one by one, the other three musicians rose from the dead and took up their instruments. Claude first, on bass, then Raymond, softly brushing his snare. Finally, Gérard took up his sax and the sound transformed into a haunting interpretation of “Body and Soul.” I saw that Eva had been lured by the music, too. She stood at the side of the stage, her hands on Abrielle’s shoulders, a look of lost delight on both of their faces as the sound washed over them.

  I’ve gone back to that image many times over the years, and still do, to this day. It was one of those unexpected moments in life—an instant that sneaks up on you and takes hold and won’t let go. There was something magical about the way Eva looked over at me and smiled. It was as if the music had swept away all the dark guilt that she held in her soul, and allowed her a brief moment of genuine happiness, which she chose to share with me.

  CHAPTER 29

  The measured clip-clop, clip-clop of the horse’s unhurried steps was the only intrusion into the quiet elegance of Boulevard Suchet. The new day had brought a dose of bright, clear sunshine, filtering down through leafy elms to fall in pools of warm, dappled light across the stone mansions that lined the avenue.

  Our early-morning journey had initiated me into the allure of Paris. Upon leaving L’École at dawn, Claude and I set out across Montmartre, traveling west through winding lanes that had been walked a half century earlier by the likes of Renoir, Sisley, Degas, and too many others to name. As the morning’s first light burst forth from the east, strafing the spires and cathedrals that rose out of the cityscape below us, the streets started to come alive with Parisians. They ventured out on foot, and on bicycle, carrying the weight of their defeated spirits in wounded sile
nce.

  Claude left me inside the gate of the district cemetery and continued on to the depot, which was around the corner. I wandered through the gravestones, checking names and dates, until he reappeared, sitting atop his fully loaded milk wagon, wearing a royal-blue smock over spotless white overalls. I climbed aboard and slipped into a matching uniform he’d left on the seat for me. It must’ve been his spare because there was enough room in it for two of me. Claude raised his eyebrows, shrugged his big shoulders, and snapped the reins. As the wagon lurched forward, I rolled up my sleeves and moved Eva’s Luger into the pocket of the smock, where I could get at it quickly if it was needed.

  We clattered along the cobblestones for a couple of blocks, then turned left into a broad avenue, heading south toward L’Arc de Triomphe. As we neared the center of Paris, evidence of the occupation became more conspicuous. Newly printed road signs, in German, were placed at each intersection, marking directions to hotels, official buildings, and all the major sights. I noticed a poster, placed at one of the tram stops, that depicted a young French boy eating a piece of bread as he smiled lovingly at the congenial Wehrmacht trooper who held him in his arms. Two girls watched longingly from a distance, eager to join in the mirth. Printed along the bottom of the happy scene was the advice FAITES CONFIANCE AU SOLDAT ALLEMAND!

  Place your trust in the German soldier.

  Number 24 Boulevard Suchet was built in the Neoclassic style of Louis XVI, suitably grand, but a far cry from Buckingham Palace. Four stories high, with a gray slate mansard roof, its only security was a four-foot-high black iron railing. I was glad to see a tradesman’s entrance on the side of the building.

  Christien had suggested the milk-wagon approach. I hadn’t given him any details about what we were up to, just that we needed a way to scout out a wealthy residence without being noticed. It turned out that—like most of Paris—he knew the duke’s mansion, but he still didn’t ask questions.