Sergeant Salinger

by Jerome Charyn

  “Good-bye, kiddies. And don’t get lost. Bring me Hemingway’s scalp.”

  The captain leapt off the jeep and was immediately swallowed up by a little mob of Parisians who kissed him and carried him into a corner bistro, where another mob waited to kiss him. Meanwhile, Sonny and Corporal Benson rode behind a half-track, a “Dirty Gertie,” filled with dogfaces, some of them with delirious little boys and lovely Parisian girls on their laps.

  “Les GIs,” the girls screamed, “les GIs,” as they kicked out their legs like cancan dancers.

  There were still snipers on the rooftops. Sonny watched them climb among the chimney pots with their long rifles. The German commandant had surrendered the city from his sumptuous quarters at the Hôtel Meurice. But a general in claret-striped pants couldn’t control every pillbox and machine-gun nest, every maverick sniper stationed on the roofs. He was powerless. Parisians ran into the Meurice and nearly kicked him to death. And the constant crackle of gunfire mingled with the sound of celebrants. Paris was still under siege. Sonny’s own unit had to dismantle a machine-gun nest dug right into the place d’Italie. Celebrants danced around the hailstorm of bullets that left flying splinters of glass and a shower of little stones off the façades of buildings. And in the midst of that hailstorm, a dozen girls with shaved skulls and bare breasts marched along the boulevard Vincent-Auriol, with a female member of the maquis behind them, carrying a submachine gun. Some of the girls couldn’t have been older than thirteen. They all had swastikas painted in blue on their breasts. They must have belonged to some brothel that serviced the boche. Parisians tossed bags of excrement at them like firebombs.

  The fighting stopped for a moment as these young girls with bald heads passed in front of the little German fort dug into the ground. Sonny was seized with a sadness he couldn’t control. He didn’t want the girls to be harmed, no matter what their sins were, no matter how hard they were mocked and poked by the Parisians.

  The German soldiers surrendered.

  Sonny didn’t want to catch a glimpse of their fate. He had his driver swerve around the half-track and into the heart of Paris.

  2.

  HE DREADED THE RITZ. It reminded Sonny of the Stork, with its cacophony of myths. He imagined Chaplin must have stayed here once upon a time in the Imperial Suite. It had been a playground for celebrities until the Germans arrived and took over half the hotel. The Ritz had its own neutrality. It was a haven for collabos, like Coco Chanel and somber-eyed Arletty, the most beautiful woman in the world. He’d seen her in Le Jour Se Lève a dozen times. His mother had sent him clippings of Arletty and her beau, a young German lieutenant in the Luftwaffe, who had lived with her at the hotel.

  Sonny and Corporal Benson, with their CIC armbands intact, stood under a white awning shaped like a cupola, at the entrance of the Ritz. A soldier wearing the motley uniform of a cavalry recon outfit blocked Sonny’s path with a submachine gun cradled in his arms.

  “No tourists allowed,” the soldier barked.

  Sonny stared him down. “Well, we’re here to see Hem.”

  “What for?”

  “To arrest him,” Sonny said.

  The soldier livened considerably. He put down his submachine gun and removed an enormous walkie-talkie from the pocket of his pants. “Crooner to the commandant, do you read me?”

  The radio crackled and Sonny heard Hem’s scratchy voice. “What’s up, Crooner?”

  “Sir, we have two live ones at the gate. They’ve come to arrest you.”

  There was a slight pause and then another crackle. “Send ’em up.”

  And so Sonny entered the Ritz, a hotel without a lobby or a lounge, to discourage curiosity seekers and uninvited guests without cash in their pockets. Paintings had been plucked from the walls. The mirrors had stark blue veins in them. The hotel’s tiny elevator rattled in its cage. It was piloted up to the third floor by another soldier in a cavalry recon uniform. They went down a corridor to room 31. The chandeliers rocked over their heads and could have come crashing down on Sonny and the corporal with their unpolished vertebrae and creaky stems. Sonny ducked and didn’t have to knock. The door was open. There was a scatter of men inside, woolly men with mustaches. They seemed out of place among the pink lamp shades, the doilies, the gilded mirrors, and antique furniture. One of these Irregulars sat cross-legged near the door, cooking coffee on a camp stove. The others were cleaning their submachine guns with towels from some raided linen closet. They had hand grenades clipped to their belts. With them was Papa Hemingway with an enormous paunch. He could have been Falstaff rather than the rich, muscular writer with a panther’s sleek moves that Sonny had met at the Stork.

  Hem had ballooned out. He couldn’t even hide his belly button under his half-open blouse. Sonny was crippled by that first glance. This bravado wasn’t even close to the Hemingway that Sonny had once adored, that monklike young man in multiple sweatshirts, scratching poetry into little blue booklets in some unheated Paris café. That writer had gone utterly underground, and a self-proclaimed officer emerged, the commandant of the Ritz.

  “Papa,” asked a Resistance fighter among the Irregulars, “on peut fusiller tous les deux?”

  “Not today,” said the commandant. “We don’t have firing squads at the Ritz.”

  “D’accord, mon capitaine.”

  Hem stared at Sonny’s sergeant stripes and his CIC armband. “Who sent you? General Patton or the provost?” Then he stared a second time, squinting with his weak eyes. “Hey, kid, haven’t we met?”

  “At the Stork,” Sonny said.

  All the scratchiness in Hem’s voice was gone. He chortled like Falstaff, another soldier-clown in search of a mission.

  “I remember. It was at that skunk’s table. W-a-l-t-e-r Winchell. You were with Oona O’Neill. What a gorgeous gal!” Hem caressed the stubble on his chin with a blistered hand. “Sonny Salinger. I’ve seen your stories in the Post. Damn good. Read your profile. You prefer to write in foxholes.”

  Sonny felt embarrassed. “I never said that. It’s pure baloney … from The Saturday Evening Post. The bastards changed my titles. They wouldn’t let me keep ‘Death of a Dogface.’”

  Falstaff chuckled again. “Can’t have the word death in a title, not at the Post. Wouldn’t be kosher…. Who’s your accomplice?”

  Corporal Benson introduced himself. “Proud to meet you, Papa.”

  Sonny had noticed a kiosk near the hotel’s front desk. It must have been where German officers parked their pistols and ceremonial swords before going up to their rooms. And here was Hemingway with an entire arsenal. The enormous brass bed with its pink coverlet was piled with hand grenades and revolvers.

  “Papa,” the corporal asked, “did you notice any German officers hiding in the attic?”

  And that’s when Hemingway began to talk in a kind of telegraphese he must have used with his Irregulars. It was one more bit of swagger. “Swept the place clean. Not a Kraut in sight. And not much of a staff. Had to serve ourselves lunch in Le Petit Jardin. Lucky we brought our rations, or we might have starved.”

  The Ritz was half-deserted when Hemingway arrived with his band. The waiters didn’t even have their white shirts. The manager had fled somewhere. And his assistant wasn’t prepared to accommodate new guests. So Papa stormed the palace, and it was now his headquarters, in the same hotel where Marcel Proust had once wandered about, preparing to flirt with the hotel’s young waiters.

  “Papa,” Sonny said, “you’ll have to give up the guns and the grenades.”

  And Falstaff’s face suddenly darkened. He’d come to a war zone as a correspondent from Collier’s, and gathered his own troops in Rambouillet. It was hard to keep a pistol or a submachine gun out of his hands. He dubbed himself a captain of his own scruffy militia, in borrowed uniforms and with borrowed guns, and beat Leclerc and Sonny’s regiment to Paris. And Sonny knew that Falstaff would remain in Paris, exiled at the Ritz. Who would dare dislodge him? The generals couldn’t afford to tan
gle with Papa Hemingway. It was much too risky. They’d rather box him in. And so this liberation had become his tomb. He was locked in a palace on the place Vendôme. And Sonny could sense Papa’s wistfulness.

  “Where do you go next?” Papa asked.

  “To Le Sphinx.”

  It was Paris’ most celebrated brothel. It had its own private clientele. Until last month, you could meet Picasso and members of the German high command at Le Sphinx. The girls were very haughty there, Sonny had been told. They didn’t have to sleep with a man. They could pick and chose their own objects of desire. A dwarf, a busboy, or another girl. That was the hallmark of the Sphinx, and made it so different from any other brothel. Les poules were in command.

  Sonny had aroused Papa’s interest. “And who are you going to arrest, Sergeant Salinger?” Papa asked, squinting at Sonny’s chevrons for a second time. CIC agents weren’t usually supposed to display their rank. But it was part of Sonny’s disguise—Sergeant Salinger.

  “I can’t disclose that,” Sonny said. “It’s privileged information.”

  “Lemme guess. Boldy.”

  The baron de Boeldieu, or Boldy, was a celebrated collaborator. He could be seen with officers of the SS on the avenue Foch, at auction houses, or at the Sphinx, which had become his preferred haunt. He’d rescued several rich Jews, smuggled them out of Paris, and had given up the hiding places of others. He lived his life on some extraordinary whim. He’d betrayed his friends and shielded his enemies. He was incurably unreliable. He could have rushed across the Rhine with the Krauts. Göring would have let him sit out the rest of the war at Carinhall, his extravagant estate outside Berlin, in a forest filled with peacocks. But whimsical as ever, he remained at Le Sphinx.

  “Papa,” Sonny said with a masked smile, “is he a friend of yours?”

  “I had dinner with him once—at the Ritz. Don’t judge him too harshly. He’s saved a lot of souls.”

  “And watched others suffer—if my dossier is correct…. Ah, but I have a favor to ask.” Sonny removed a GI pocket edition of Papa’s short stories from a coveted place in his Eisenhower jacket. “It’s for Sottotenente Lorenzo Tropea.”

  “Do I know him?” Papa asked.

  “Yes, in a way. He’s in an Italian prisoner of war camp at Tiverton. And he’s devoted to your work. He thinks of little else. He knows your early tales by heart. His English is as good as mine—perhaps even better, since it’s precious to him.”

  Papa smiled. “If you say so, Sergeant.” He dedicated the book with a pencil stub, in a slow and deliberate scrawl, and returned it to Sonny. “Now, are you going to arrest me or not?”

  “That would be criminal of us,” Sonny said. “Right, Corporal?”

  The corporal hesitated for a moment. “Right,” he finally said. “Absolutely criminal.”

  The corporal felt a shiver run right through him. He would tell all his buddies back home that he had met Ernest Hemingway at the Ritz.

  “Have you read my stories, son?” Papa asked.

  The corporal panicked. “I …”

  “He isn’t much of a reader,” Sonny said. “But I’ve recited your stories to him—like songs.” And Sonny began to recite from “Soldier’s Home,” about a boy who returns from the First War and can’t seem to adjust to civilian life. The boy’s name was Krebs. But the words didn’t please Papa Hemingway, didn’t please him at all. And Sonny had to stop in the middle of a sentence, as Papa grimaced, looked like a crazy man, rather than an Irregular at the Ritz.

  “What’s wrong?” Sonny asked.

  “Wrote that story in one sitting,” Papa said. “Didn’t have to change a word. It’s a young man’s arrogance.” “No,” Sonny said.

  “It’s a gift,”

  Papa’s lip curled and began to tremble. “If you say so, Sergeant.” He looked like a guy who’d just been lobotomized. But that current of madness disappeared. And he was the commandant again, with his Irregulars. War had become a kind of romance to Papa, a quixotic quest, with bandoliers and invented fables and flags, while it was nothing but pillage to Sonny, the soiling of a landscape, all the unheroic horror and static silences that Hem himself had once written about.

  “Sergeant, the boy who wrote that story had shrapnel in his ass and thighs—I still do. But it was another war, a kinder war in a way, though the killing was just as brutal. I don’t have the stamina to sit in cafés. I saw myself as a priest on a holy mission. That holiness is gone. What am I, Sergeant?”

  Sonny was silent. He couldn’t say the words.

  “No better than a luxurious prisoner of war. Patton and the provost won’t let me fight. So we had our little run. And I’ll enjoy my stay at the Ritz. Now go and catch Boldy if you can.”

  3.

  THEY TOOK THE SIDE STREETS, which had fewer tanks and Dirty Gerties, and not one German outpost. Benson had to drive at a crawl, as men and women danced in front of the jeep. But they arrived at the Latin Quarter, where Hem had lived on the rue Cardinal-Lemoine with his redheaded wife and his little boy, Bumby, without heat and hot water, and refashioned American literature with a few short stories, like “Soldier’s Home.” That Hemingway had been replaced by the commandant of the Ritz, a fusilier rather than the father of a brand-new idiom, a piercing flatland of sentences without a single adjective or adverb. Sonny sought the same simplicity, at least some of it. He also admired the lushness of Scott Fitzgerald. Gatsby was his favorite book. But Fitzgerald was also gone—and forgotten.

  A little gang of clodos had assembled on the sidewalk of Cardinal-Lemoine with their bottles of rotgut whiskey. Some of them wore the discarded uniforms of Nazi officers, with the twin lightning bolts of the SS. Sonny knew that these tramps weren’t collaborators, just unlucky souls. He didn’t want them torn to pieces by members of the resistance. He got out of the jeep and made the clodos strip to their underwear.

  “Vite,” he said, “vite, vite!”

  While the clodos hopped and danced, Sonny took their tailored uniforms, dug them into a trash barrel, and set the uniforms on fire with his Zippo lighter. He watched the cloth, silk and wool, crackle, hypnotized by the flames, caught in their swirl, as if the fire and their fumes had the power to enchant—and to wound. The corporal had to nudge him.

  “Boldy, remember? Le Sphinx. He could be planning a trip to China, Sarge.”

  Sonny shook himself out of his trance. They could still hear the crack of gunfire from some lone-wolf sniper as their jeep stalled for a second on the cobblestones.

  Down the Mouffetard they went, a market street without any markets. The Mouffetard had become a winding road of empty stalls. The Krauts had grabbed every crop within a hundred miles of Paris so that the officers of the high command could have their vegetables and beef at the Crillon and the Lutetia, at Maxim’s and Le Tour d’Argent—Sonny had been to none of these places.

  The vendors stood beside their empty stalls and saluted Sonny and the corporal. Some of them and their wives and children waved miniature American flags. Sonny didn’t feel much like a liberator. He’d come to arrest and interrogate collabos, like the baron de Boeldieu, who’d profited from the war and had committed treason while headquartered at Le Sphinx….

  Finally they reached the boulevard Edgar-Quinet and found a slot in front of the brothel, which looked like a fortress with its barred windows and nondescript façade. There was a medallion of a sphinx dressed like a pharaoh on the front wall. Otherwise, Sonny might have fled right past it. He knocked on the front door. No one answered. Sonny knocked again, louder this time.

  “Open up. We’re on a military mission.”

  The door opened with a terrific screech. A dwarf stood near the entrance with a truculence that Sonny had never encountered. He wore a red uniform with bandoliers and a cartridge belt, and had a Luger under that belt. “Madame Marlun isn’t here,” the dwarf snarled, half in English, half in French. He had a beautiful mouth, despite the venom that he spat.

  “I’m Pierre,” he said. “Le Sph
inx is not open for business, not in such disastrous times. You can see for yourselves, every girl is gone. And Madame is indisposed. I doubt she’ll ever be back.”

  The bar and the sofas in the salon had been covered with drop cloths. There were frescos on the wall of pharaohs wearing black masks. That was the only mark of opulence at Le Sphinx. Sonny had to step on shards of glass strewn everywhere, like a macabre minefield.

  “I’m here to see the baron,” he said.

  The dwarf smiled. “Is he expecting you?”

  “That doesn’t really matter. I have official documents.”

  “But it might matter to him,” the dwarf said. “Come with me—both of you.”

  They followed the dwarf behind a red curtain, went through a curious maze lit with a pink light—Sonny couldn’t have retraced his steps. This truculent dwarf had led him into a labyrinth. They entered a darkened room. The dwarf himself screwed a bulb into a socket, and Sonny found himself in the company of another militia, like Papa’s Irregulars. But these Irregulars were all poules.

  The dwarf had lied to him. Le Sphinx’s girls hadn’t disappeared from the premises. They stood around a golden chair, carrying every sort of armament. One of them kneeled in front of a bazooka that could have knocked Sonny and the corporal through the Sphinx’s front wall.

  The baron de Boeldieu sat on his golden chair with his legs crossed. This wasn’t his office; it was his throne room. He was much younger than Sonny had imagined—in his mid-thirties perhaps. He had a singularly handsome face, with an aquiline nose, high cheeks, and purplish eyes in the dim light of the dwarf’s bulb. He was wearing a silk shirt, a foulard, and a velvet suit, like some maquereau, or master pimp.

  Sonny introduced himself, “Sergeant Salinger, CIC…. Boeldieu, Papa sends his regards.”

  “But that’s not why you’re here,” the baron said in a silken voice; his English didn’t have the slightest hint of a foreign accent. “And who’s this boy?”