The Paris Hours

by Alex George

  “How exciting,” says Thérèse. “But don’t take long. They don’t like it when we talk too much.”

  “They?” Guillaume glances up and down the street. “Is someone watching?”

  Thérèse gives him a sad smile. “Someone is always watching.”

  “I’ll be quick, then,” says Guillaume. “It’s about Emile Brataille.”

  “Never heard of him,” says Thérèse.

  “He’s a client of yours.”

  She shrugs. “They don’t tell me their names.”

  “He’s an art dealer. He has a gallery on Boulevard Raspail. I’m sure he told you about that.”

  “Oh, mon dieu. Yes, I know who you mean.” She exhales a luxuriant plume of white smoke. “His cock is the size of a cacahuète,” she tells him.

  “Is that so.” Guillaume cannot stop a smile spreading from one ear to the other.

  “The silly man won’t leave me alone,” says Thérèse.

  “That’s why I’m here. He says he’s in love with you.”

  “Of course he’s not in love with me,” she scoffs. “He needs a bucket of cold water thrown over him, that’s all.”

  “I saw him last night,” says Guillaume, who is not willing to give up just yet. “He was weeping over you. Real tears. I saw them.”

  Thérèse looks at him, unimpressed. “And?”

  “Well, when I told him I knew you, he begged me to come and talk to you, to see if you might change your mind. And so here I am.”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “Oh, nothing.” Guillaume tries a shrug. “He’s an old friend of mine, that’s all.”

  “An old friend of yours?” Thérèse looks suspicious.

  “The art world in Paris is small, you know,” he hedges.

  “And you’ve come to plead his case?”

  “All I know,” Guillaume says, “is that he’s crazy about you.”

  “Let me explain something to you, chéri. These men come here and pay cash for twenty minutes in a room with me.” She points toward Le Chat Blanc. “When the door closes they don’t get down on one knee and recite poetry, no matter how much they say they adore me. They want one thing, and only one thing, and that is what they get.” She sighs. “Why do you think they come here at all?”

  Guillaume says nothing. He watches as Thérèse lights another cigarette.

  “Because they’re terrible people,” she continues. “Every last one of them. That’s why they have to pay strangers for sex. They’re needy and angry and bitter as hell.” She looks at him. “Now can you understand why I never want to spend more time with any of them?”

  Guillaume can feel hope slipping away. “Please, Thérèse? As a favor to me?”

  “I’m sorry, chéri.” She reaches out and puts a hand on his arm. “You’ll have to tell your friend that I’m flattered and everything, but the answer is still no. I don’t want to see him or his tiny peanut dick again.”

  “Hey, you,” says a voice in his ear.

  Guillaume turns. A huge man has materialized, seemingly out of nowhere, and is standing right next to him. He appears to have been built for the specific purpose of inflicting the maximum amount of pain on other people in the most efficient manner possible. His hands are monstrously huge. His ill-fitting jacket bulges with granite slabs of muscle. He looks capable of tearing Guillaume limb from limb without breaking into a sweat—and would probably do so with a contented smile on his hard, flat face. “She’s not here to talk,” grunts the man. “Either pay up or move on.”

  Thérèse shoots the man a look of disgust. “Relax, would you, Léon? He’s a friend of mine.”

  “I don’t care if he’s the reincarnation of Emperor Napoleon, ma poule. Rules are rules.” The man gives her an ugly leer and turns back to Guillaume. “You’ve had your free look, my friend. Make your decision, or I’ll make it for you.” He takes a step forward, so close that Guillaume can feel the man’s stale breath on his neck.

  “I’ll go,” he mutters.

  “It’s always good to see you, Guillaume,” says Thérèse softly.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve got six hundred francs you could lend me?” he says.

  Guillaume can still hear her laughter as he walks away.

  19

  Paris, 1918: The Treble Clef

  JEAN-PAUL MAILLARD STANDS in front of the small grave, lost in his memories.

  * * *

  Anaïs Maillard had an exquisite voice—the kind of voice, her husband used to say, that could charm the birds down from the trees.

  Jean-Paul loved his wife most when she was singing. It was the ravishing vigor with which she performed that laid siege to his heart. Music coursed through her, a joyous river. It illuminated her from within, filling her with the light of a thousand suns. When there was a tune on her lips, his wife was always the most beautiful person in the room.

  Had they lived in Lyon or Toulouse, Anaïs might have pursued a professional singing career, but in Paris there was no hope of that: the finest singers in the world traveled across the globe to perform on the city’s stages. But she did not complain. Paris was bursting with music, and she joyfully plundered the riches on offer, joining all the choirs and choruses that she could.

  Jean-Paul was sent home from the Western Front in late 1916. Soon after he returned to their apartment on Rue Barbette, Anaïs became pregnant.

  She sang to her unborn baby from morning to night. The apartment was always filled with song. Arias, requiems, masses, lieder—the little life growing inside her heard everything. Anaïs continued to rehearse and perform as her stomach swelled, to Jean-Paul’s quiet consternation—but he knew that his wife could no more stop singing than she could stop breathing. Her waters broke during a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. At the hospital she spent the next three hours belting out “Ode to Joy” while she waited for the baby to arrive. Toward the end, the familiar melody was punctuated by a disquieting variety of shrieks and grunts. When their daughter was finally born, her soft infant cries were beautiful, already in harmony with her mother.

  Elodie’s first months were an anxious procession of fevers and afflictions. She cried frequently and with impressive gusto. She’s inherited your lungs, Jean-Paul told Anaïs as they were once again shaken awake by the window-rattling yells from the crib at the end of their bed. The only thing that could quieten the baby’s screams was her mother’s voice. Within moments of hearing Anaïs sing, Elodie would be cooing along in contented accompaniment. And while Jean-Paul could carry a tune, whenever he tried to sing his daughter back to sleep, her beautiful features contorted into a mask of wordless, red-faced fury.

  A few months after the birth, Anaïs joined the choir at a nearby church, the Église Saint-Gervais. She took Elodie with her to rehearsals. The baby slept peacefully through it all, becalmed by her mother’s song. Anaïs became adept at holding her sheet music in one hand and her sleeping daughter in the other.

  Good Friday of 1918 fell on March 29. It was Anaïs’s twenty-sixth birthday. That morning Jean-Paul gave her a silver brooch in the shape of a treble clef. She kissed him softly and pinned the brooch onto her blouse.

  “Thank you, chéri,” she said.

  “Do you like it?”

  “Look where I’ve pinned it.” She pointed. “Over my heart.”

  “Will you wear it this afternoon?” The choir at the Église Saint-Gervais was to sing at the Good Friday Mass. Anaïs had been looking forward to it for weeks, humming the music to herself as she moved about the apartment.

  “Of course.” She smiled at him. “I’m going to wear it every time I sing.”

  Elodie was lying on their bed, cooing gently. Anaïs picked her up. The baby’s hand reached immediately for the glittering brooch.

  “Ah, someone else likes it, too,” said Jean-Paul.

  “Of course she does. Elodie has excellent taste, don’t you, ma chère?” Anaïs began to hum the refrain from a Palestrina motet, rocking the baby gently in her
arms.

  “I’m sorry I can’t come to the service today,” said Jean-Paul.

  “That’s all right.”

  “You know how much I want to hear you sing, but these deadlines—”

  “I know.”

  “Next time, I promise.”

  “You get to work. We’ll go and enjoy ourselves.” She tickled the baby under her chin. Elodie let out a small gurgle of pleasure.

  Jean-Paul watched his wife and daughter, his heart full.

  After Anaïs and Elodie left for the church, Jean-Paul settled down to work. On his return to Paris, he had resumed his job at the city desk of the newspaper, reporting on stories from across Paris, going wherever his editor sent him. It was tedious work, but it paid the rent. Still, every time he sat down in front of his typewriter he experienced a brief but intense moment of regret. He longed to write a novel, but had been unable to find a tale that he needed to tell. Instead he told other people’s stories, rather than his own.

  Jean-Paul soon lost himself in the details of a report about the thriving black market for truffles that had sprung up in Paris. War or no war, people loved to eat well, and were ready to pay for the privilege. He was wholly focused on the words on the page in front of him when a low, rolling boom thundered through the apartment. He put on his coat and hobbled out onto the street. People were pouring out of their houses and running in all directions. He made his way to Rue Vieille du Temple, his leg throbbing in foreboding. People were streaming northwards, away from the river.

  He called out to a couple who were hurrying past. “What happened? What was that noise?”

  “Some kind of explosion,” panted the man.

  There was a chorus of wailing klaxons in the distance.

  “An explosion?” said Jean-Paul. “Where?”

  The woman pointed behind her. “Somewhere near Rue de Rivoli.”

  Jean-Paul began to limp down the street as fast as he could. The shouts and the sirens got louder as he approached the river. He crossed Rue de Rivoli and turned onto Rue François Miron. How many times had he strolled this way, without a care in the world, on his way to Sunday Mass? The street was barely recognizable now. Eddying typhoons of debris floated in the air. People were emerging from the clouds of dust like ghostly figures materializing out of a dawn mist. They staggered down the street in small groups, leaning up against each other for support. Some were limping, others were bleeding.

  On Place Saint-Gervais, the doors of the church were open. Jean-Paul climbed the steps, but was stopped by a policeman before he could enter.

  “You can’t go in,” said the gendarme. “It’s not safe.”

  “What happened?”

  “A bomb. Direct hit on the north side of the roof.”

  “I need to find my wife and daughter,” said Jean-Paul.

  “It’s too dangerous, monsieur. The place may collapse at any moment.”

  “My daughter is six months old,” said Jean-Paul, as if this might change the policeman’s mind.

  “I’m sure your wife and daughter are quite safe, monsieur,” said the gendarme. “Find them, and take them home.”

  Jean-Paul turned to survey the crowds in front of the church. People stood as still as statues, immobilized by the horror. Men yelled warnings. Mothers screamed for their children. He limped back down the steps and began to weave through the chaos, looking for Anaïs and Elodie.

  They were not there.

  He tried to remain calm, to think. If they had escaped unscathed, there was no reason for them to remain nearby. Anaïs would have taken Elodie back to Rue Barbette. They were probably in the apartment right now. Anaïs would be wondering where he was. He turned and began to retrace his steps. As he hurried home, Jean-Paul did his best to bury his fear. By the time he arrived he had almost convinced himself that he would be greeted with his wife’s tales of a close escape and his daughter’s gurgles of delight.

  The apartment was empty.

  For two hours he did not know whether to feel terrified or hopeful. He wanted to be there when the front door finally opened, when he could hold them tightly in his arms and breathe once more. But the waiting was torture. He couldn’t sit there and do nothing. Finally he scribbled Anaïs a note, promising to return soon, and put his coat back on.

  Back at Place Saint-Gervais, the crowds had disappeared. The doors of the church were open. Men hurried in and out. Jean-Paul climbed the steps and went inside. The floor was hidden beneath an uneven landscape of fallen masonry. He picked his way unsteadily toward the center of the church, the carpet of rubble shifting beneath his feet. Ahead of him he could hear men shouting to each other. As he reached the high-ceilinged nave, he could see dim silhouettes clambering over a mountain of fallen detritus.

  Men, looking for bodies.

  “Anaïs!” he yelled.

  Above him there was a jagged streak of sky: the hole in the roof where the German shell had hit. As he moved forward, a shower of rocks fell on his shoulders. He picked his way toward the altar. There were men everywhere, straining and heaving to shift slabs of fallen stone.

  Where were Anaïs and Elodie?

  Jean-Paul chose his spot. He began to clear away the rubble.

  * * *

  Hours later, he was still in the church, working in the light of kerosene lamps that had been erected so that rescue efforts could continue into the night. His knuckles were scraped bloody and raw. His limbs were screaming in exhaustion.

  There were people buried beneath the fallen stones. Their bodies had been pulverized, their faces bloodied and bruised. Working with another man, Jean-Paul uncovered corpse after corpse. Men, women, young, old; none were spared. A young girl, no more than six or seven years old, was missing her left arm. Without speaking—there were no words—they lifted the bodies out of the rubble and took them down to the front of the church, and delivered them into the care of a priest. Jean-Paul watched the other men carry their own gruesome cargo down the aisle. He looked at every body.

  No Anaïs. No Elodie.

  There was one last large slab of stone on the ground in front of the altar. Jean-Paul and three other men eased it onto its side and heaved it upright. A body lay beneath it. The force of impact of the falling masonry had twisted the victim’s head, the neck gruesomely snapped. There was a black crater smashed into the side of the skull.

  But Jean-Paul saw none of this. All he saw was the silver brooch that was pinned to the bloodied shirt.

  * * *

  Jean-Paul stood knee-deep in rubble while two strangers carried Anaïs’s body down the nave to the waiting priest. He did not turn to watch. His eyes scanned the floor of the church, his gaze darting among the fallen stone.

  He was looking for his daughter.

  Nobody had asked Jean-Paul who he was or what he was doing in the church. Now, when he told the men that there was one more body to recover, he saw the ghosts of skepticism creasing into the corners of their tired eyes. Jean-Paul didn’t care. He waded back into the debris and began to turn over every last stone, no matter how small. He moved with a manic desperation, the hours of back-breaking work forgotten. His ferocious energy dragged the other men into its irresistible vortex. Within minutes they had all wearily joined the search.

  Elodie was not there.

  Jean-Paul moved through the ruined church, speaking with every person he saw, asking the same question, over and over. Nobody had seen an infant.

  It didn’t make any sense. Bodies didn’t simply vanish, not even tiny ones. Some trace of her would have remained. He finally stumbled out of the church. Anaïs was behind him, lying beneath a white sheet on the cold stone floor, but he had no time to mourn her, no time to say good-bye—not while Elodie might still be alive.

  He limped to the nearest hospital. He went from one ward to the next, then one hospital to the next, interrogating nurses and registrars, asking if a baby girl had been admitted.

  The answer was always no.

  As the sun rose over the city’s
rooftops, Jean-Paul traipsed numbly down the deserted streets back to Rue Barbette. Inside the apartment, he picked up the note he had written to Anaïs and tore it into little pieces. His clothes were filthy with sweat and blood and grime, but he was too tired to undress. He lay on the bed and stared into the darkness.

  * * *

  Elodie’s disappearance created a fathomless hole into which everything tumbled. His grief needed a body, a home. Without it, he was left suspended by the thinnest threads of improbable hope—threads that refused to break and set him free. A father’s love was a bullish beast, immune to logic and reason. Without a body, there was the faintest possibility that Elodie was still alive, and while such a possibility existed, Jean-Paul had no choice but to cling to it with everything he had. Perhaps Elodie had been fussing before the service began, and Anaïs had asked a friend in the congregation to hold her while she sang. Perhaps the baby had been in a different part of the church when the roof collapsed, and she had been carried away to safety. Perhaps there would be a knock on his door tomorrow, and he would see his daughter again, delivered safely back to him.

  He lay on the bed, and waited.

  * * *

  There was no knock on the door the next day, or the next. And then he realized: whoever was looking after Elodie would not know who she was or where she lived. Of course there would be no knock. Nobody would bring her to him. He would have to go and find her.

  He returned to the hospitals. He visited every orphanage in the city. He papered the walls of the quartier with handmade posters, begging for information. He stopped people on the street. He stared helplessly into every baby carriage. He persuaded his editor to run a story about Elodie in the newspaper, listing his name and address. For two days he sat in the empty apartment and waited.

  Nobody came.

  * * *

  His sister came to Paris to help with the funeral arrangements. It was she who picked out a coffin for Anaïs, she who chose the flowers, she who purchased the plot at Père Lachaise. The service came and went in a blur. All Jean-Paul could remember was his dismay when he saw the tombstone his sister had ordered.