Death of a Century Read online

  “I came here with the expectation that we would do business. How you Americans say, ‘Talk straight.’ I give you something, you give me something.” He paused and smiled. “I scratch yours and you scratch mine, huh? I don’t like playing games.”

  “I don’t like people killing my friends, but that hasn’t stopped you,” Joe said, leaning back against the bar. He drank from his beer. He could feel his anger rising, especially following Dapper’s attempt to bait him.

  “Business,” Dapper said, as though people’s lives were no more than commodities to be traded.

  Sitting on the bar stool, Joe looked into the man’s eyes. Just for effect he stood and looked at the man, who was then shorter than him. The Turk stepped closer. Joe saw them as though in a parallax. Both kept one hand inside a coat pocket and both watched him closely.

  “Here’s business,” Joe said. “I have what you want, what do you have for trade?”

  Dapper did not look at but nodded toward Quire. “A friend of yours?”

  Joe recognized the question as misdirection intended by Dapper to allow himself time to regain his leverage.

  Joe looked at Quire. “No,” he said. “Just another American to drink with and talk with.”

  “He and I have met.” And he offered Joe a false smile. “If I am really the murderer you say I am, killing your friends, then he is lucky. Wouldn’t you agree, Monsieur? If he were your friend and he became a bother as others may have, then I would have to kill him as well.”

  Quire answered with a steady quickness, “Listen. I’ve been sailing near the wind for quite a while now and I wouldn’t be frightened by some piss-ant like you.” He added, “Whatever my friend’s in, I’m in.”

  Dapper did not look at Quire, not while Quire spoke nor when he spoke of Quire. “Your friend has a big mouth, as you Americans say.”

  “And my butt’s big enough to back it up,” Quire added as he pushed himself from his stool. He stood eye-to-eye with Dapper, but Dapper could have fit inside Quire’s girth with room for a quarter-barrel of stout alongside.

  Joe placed a hand on Quire’s shoulder. Quire sat back down with his back against the bar. Every muscle in the man’s body had tightened. The muscles along his neck and jaw stood out like heavy cords. He looked at Joe, his face hard and a deep maroon red as though just fired in a forge.

  Continuing to ignore Quire, Dapper spoke to Joe, “And you, Monsieur Henry?” He waved his fingers. “Everyone in Paris knows your name. If I have killed all of those other men, why will I not kill you as well?”

  “Because I have the manuscript, and until your boss gets it, I’m safe.”

  “You are not safe. Not even now. All Marcel need do is provide the word.”

  Joe shrugged, not a French shrug but as good as he could offer. He leaned forward. “Tell this to Marcel. I got to his men outside of Greenwich, and I killed them and took the manuscript from their automobile. I had plenty of time to read it while on the cruise over. You and the Turk over there really should take some lessons in how to toss a room. It was in plain sight, and you missed it. Amateurs. Now Marcel has to play my game. Otherwise, it finds its way to a desk at the Prefecture de Police. Some of them may take an interest in its contents and then an interest in the traitor who sent so many of their comrades to their deaths.”

  Dapper blinked slowly, the studied movement of a boundless conceit. “Marcel is not concerned with the contents of Gresham’s manuscript, at least what he had written before his demise. So sad.”

  He smiled at Joe. The smile’s lack of warmth spread to the man’s eyes.

  Dapper took a cigarette from its silver case and lit it with a match, waving the match out and watching the smoke that he breathed out dissipate before he continued, “Marcel is not concerned with it. There is nothing in it that causes him concern.”

  “Obviously,” Quire said and rested back into his seat to continue drinking.

  Dapper shrugged again and said, almost as an aside, “However, he would prefer to restrain its release.”

  “Why?”

  “That is not my concern; that is not your concern.”

  “Sounds to me,” Quire offered, “like you think a lot of people either are or should be ‘unconcerned,’ yet somehow people are still killing other people.”

  Dapper looked from Joe to Quire and back. “You provide me with the manuscript and Marcel pays you handsomely for your efforts.”

  “And then I die in my sleep.”

  Dapper shrugged. Head, shoulders, hands, they all shrugged, even his eyebrows shrugged. “C’est la vie. Accidents happen, Monsieur. You would be wise to remember that and to help insure that one does not happen to you.” He inhaled a breath of his cigarette and let out a cloud of smoke to rise within the din of the café. He looked around and then looked back at Joe. “One thousand United States dollars, Monsieur. That would allow you to live in Paris for at least a year.”

  “You have it?”

  “I do.”

  Joe nodded. “That’s tempting . . . if I thought I would live out the year.”

  Dapper waved his cigarette-laden hand, a trail of smoke with it. “Swiss Francs, then, at the equivalent amount. They are easier to spend and transfer quite easily if your safety concerns cause you to leave France.” He added, as though an afterthought, “Maybe, if the police take an interest in your presence. Maybe someone contacts them about you and you feel the need to leave Paris very quickly—Swiss francs would be helpful.”

  Joe remembered Gresham lying dead on his sofa with a bullet hole in him and said, “His reach is awfully long.”

  Dapper smiled. “True, but think of how certain that reach will be if he is not satisfied.”

  “Point taken,” Joe said. “When I figure out exactly what I want for it, I’ll be in touch. But next time I talk directly with the man. I want to see what a coward looks like.”

  Dapper looked at his cigarette and then back at Joe, his dead eyes impaled and devoid of light. “Tomorrow. No later. That is what Marcel told me to instruct you. Following that, you die and he accepts what may come.”

  He turned and left. The Turk followed and grazed Joe as he walked past. Joe could feel the hardness of a pistol inside the Turk’s coat. A reminder. After Marcel’s two assistants had left the café, Joe turned to face the bar and found a fresh beer in front of him.

  “Thought you might need some assistance in the thought process,” Quire said.

  “Thanks. A thousand dollars is a good bit of money, but I’m not certain I’d live to spend it all. Anyway, my mind was made up long ago. And,” he smiled,” I don’t have what Marcel thinks I have in the first place.”

  Quire looked at him, mouth slightly open, then laughed full and deep. “Damn, brother. You do know how to run a bluff. I like that.” He nodded and added, “I think I’ll stick around a while to see how it plays out.”

  Joe smiled. “For someone out of it, you seem to have landed yourself in the middle.”

  Quire nodded. “It’ll give me something to do with my nights besides drink.”

  “Think about it. In case you weren’t listening, people have been dying around me with alarming regularity.”

  “In case you didn’t realize it, cowboy, I’ve seen enough of death not to be scared off by its prospect. Anyways, with my lungs progressively turning to pudding, I’m not long for this damn world anyways.” He drank. “And on top of that, I just do not like that little bastard one bit, the conceited little shit. I’d like to kill him, and I’d like to kill his boss with him.”

  “You sure?” Joe asked.

  Quire held his pint for Joe to meet and said, “Let’s wet this bargain. Here’s to the blue moons in our lives.”

  Joe held his pint above the bar. “What the hell’s that mean?”

  “Beats the hell out of me, but it sounds pretty nice.”

  They drank.

  “This could get tight,” Joe said, his tone deeper and more serious.

  “It almost just did.�
��

  “And you’re still with me?” Joe asked

  “Within an ace of,” Quire said with a wink.

  “You have a gun?”

  “On me, you mean?”

  “No, but can you get one?”

  “I do have one, and I do have it on me. Just like you.”

  “I don’t like it, but I need it. I haven’t carried a gun since the war.”

  “Yeah,” Quire said, nodding. “I haven’t stopped carrying one since the war.”

  They drank in silence. Through the fog-rimmed windows at the front of the café, Joe could see people walking past bundled against the December night. Once again the night was cold and damp. Despite the large revolving fans in a line on the café’s ceiling, however, the room was stifling, hot and humid, as the crunch of people continued to grow. The jazz band began to play in a back corner, a quartet of black men charging the lonely night with music. People began dancing like an apocalypse had or was about to happen, like the world had already ended or was soon to end.

  Quire said something, but the restaurant chatter and the jazz and the numbing drinks made it difficult for Joe to hear.

  “What?” Joe asked.

  “To the Lost.”

  VIII

  Here, during two strenuous years, has taken place some of the fiercest fighting of the great war. Here, too, are some of the finest vineyards of the world; for this was in Roman days the Campania which later gave its name to the province of Champagne.

  —Frederick Dean, Muncey’s Magazine, September 1916, “Champagne and the Great War,”

  SOMETIME BETWEEN MIDNIGHT AND MORNING, JOE LEFT THE Gentilhomme with the café’s music still strong and Quire still drinking. He walked up the cobblestone street to his hotel, less steady on his feet than he would have preferred. The city was wrapped in a cold night fog that could have been imported from London, brackish and impenetrable. He felt wary as he walked, watching within the shadows and measuring the gait of Parisians walking near him. In the moonlit night, icy puddles shined and curtained windows veiled the few building lights still lit. In the air he could smell the wisps of late-night or early-morning warming fires.

  Someone stepped from the recess of a hotel entrance as he passed and touched his arm. He recoiled, reaching for the small revolver in his pocket, but the hammer caught as he tugged.

  “Pardon, Monsieur,” a woman said, her voice raspy from cigarettes, drink, and age. “Ont besoin de compagnie ce soir?”

  “What?” Joe said, his mind, startled, did not make the translation. “Quoi?” he added.

  “Are you in need of company?” she said in broken and heavily accented English.

  “Non,” was all Joe said, and he walked away.

  A block farther, he stopped under a streetlight and leaned against the post to catch his breath. Fear had its own rhythm, and he rested for a moment to regain his composure. He thought of Marcel—why the man relied so on intermediaries. From Huntington’s short biography of Marcel, Joe knew the man was something of a recluse, affected like so many others by the war. Joe knew other men, men that he had served with who had retreated in life to some cabin the wilderness of Maine or the Olympic Peninsula of Washington. People had come out of that war changed, irrevocably changed, and their lives were separated like a concrete dam between what once was and what now is. Just like the bodies of water on each side of that dam, they were never the same. So he understood Marcel’s inclination toward hiding from a world that had so irrevocably changed him and his world, but there was something more to Marcel’s deceit. A greater reason to his desire for anonymity—his cowardice.

  If Marcel had wanted Joe dead, then Joe would have been killed on the boat with Huntington or he would have burned in a fire like Dillard. Something in Gresham’s manuscript had Marcel nervous enough to want it, even though Dapper claimed otherwise. For the time being, at least, as long as Marcel believed he had the manuscript, the Frenchman might not act. They had searched his room and not found it, and Joe felt that his bluff in the café had worked, convincing enough that Dapper would report that he still had a copy squirreled away. Joe needed Marcel to believe that it was somewhere safe, somewhere from which Joe could have it delivered to the police if anything happened to him. How long that concern would hold Marcel, Joe could not guess. Eventually the man would act, for even cowards did not remain passive forever. Marcel’s revulsion at his own cowardice would force him into some movement. By that time, Joe needed some sort of plan of his own.

  At the hotel, the old man was again asleep on the front counter but woke with the tinkle of the door’s little bell as Joe entered. He raised his head and snorted loudly, put on his spectacles to see Joe walk toward him.

  “Monsieur Gresham,” the old man said. His hand shook as he waved Joe over. Even when he put his hand on the counter, it continued to shake. His head also shook in a perpetual “No,” but his eyes remained kind.

  “Un gendarme, they visit you this evening,” the old man said, his English quite good, but Joe felt a quick panic at the man’s choice of tense.

  He looked up at the foyer’s ceiling. “They’re here now?”

  The old man laughed, “Oh no no no. I tell them that you are not here and they leave.”

  Joe sighed with relief and rubbed the stubble of his chin. “Did they say what they wanted?”

  The old man waved his hand. “Some suicide, some murder, some fire—je ne sais pas—I do not understand. They say much, I listen little, understand less. A fire, I know, they say a fire.”

  “Thank you. Merci.” Joe said and started for the stairs thinking that it was time for a night’s sleep and then to pack up and leave.

  The old man called him back to the counter and looked toward the front door and leaned against the counter to speak. Joe stepped close and leaned over the counter as well, as though they were caught in a conspiracy together.

  The old man said, “They ask me to call them after you arrive home, but,” he paused and smiled, “they do not say how long after you arrive. I suppose eight this morning is good, no?”

  “Nine—neuf—would be better.”

  The old man shrugged, “Oui. Neuf. Nine it is. They are suspicious if your trunk is gone, so please use valise that I leave in your room. I will store your trunk in our basement for you.”

  Joe took the old man’s hand, thin and bony but still strong in its grasp, and joined with its palsied shake. “You may be taking a risk by helping me.”

  The old man huffed. “De rien,” he said, waving a quavering hand as he spoke. “They do not buy me dinner. I owe them nothing. You must take care and come back to us.”

  Joe thanked him and took from his wallet a five-dollar bill, enough money to have paid for a week’s reservation. In his room, he sat in the chair for a moment and looked at the owner’s valise, a portmanteau that looked like a doctor’s bag, dimpled black leather with leather handles and a brass closure. He would not even need it. He cleaned himself from the washbasin and laid out a new set of Gresham’s clothes. He sat on the bed and closed his eyes and took a long, deep breath in order to clear his mind and concentrate, then studied the photograph of Gresham and his comrades in the trenches.

  He could not see Gresham’s eyes beneath the shadowline of his helmet. His mouth was straight and his jaw fixed, not necessarily confident but certainly resolute. The difference, Joe knew, often came with one’s length of time in the trenches. The other men held similar countenances, although one or two were forced to the point of vague obscurity. Something was there that he had missed, but he was a couple of drinks past too drunk to find it that night.

  He tossed the photograph on the bed beside him and planned the next day: find the sister, find Quire, find a place to stay alive.

  He slid his Smith & Wesson under his pillow and lay down. Had he thought about it, he would have been surprised at how quickly and easily he slid into sleep. With the night cold and calm, he slept soundly for hours until a dream invaded his morning like a strident n
oise.

  In his dream, he saw the face of a man he had killed. Not the first man he had killed in the war, but the first man he had seen close enough to watch as the life drained from his eyes. Short blonde hair, muddy and rough cut. A cowlick waved in the wind from the crest of his head. His eyes were open and at one time blue but had drained to a wan color and unfocused as though caught between distances. A drip of blood had run from his open mouth like spilled ink. His skin ashen. Right at the hollow of his neck, just above the sternum, a hole had blackened and crusted with blood. He was fifteen, maybe, and lived to as old an age as anyone ever could. Joe had spotted the boy peering from the safety of a shell hole not fifty yards from Joe’s trench position, caught, probably, by the daylight following a night’s recon. Joe waited. He marked the distance and checked the round in his Springfield. The boy raised his head once then twice. Joe shot him. “Damn fine shot, Joe,” someone said. Joe had smiled. That night, Joe met his dead man when he left the trench with a scouting party. Many nights since, Joe had again met his dead man.

  Joe met him once more that morning. For some who had been in the war, nights were a terrible time. They filled with the anticipation of a morning’s advance, either theirs or the enemy’s. Nights since filled with the anticipation of nothing. They might drink as Quire did or they might lie alone or with some prostitute. Some dark horror would eventually take them, envelope them like the fog. Joe knew men like that.

  Night was certainly bad for Joe. But for Joe, mornings were when his war returned. In the semiconscious moments just before waking, his wounds would rise and he would be left alone as the sun hovered on the opening of day. With those memories held fast as though etched with the featheredge of a lancet, he realized that he had never before returned to Europe because he had never really left.

  He rolled over and looked at his pocket watch—8:04. He had to hurry, and he had to travel light. He dressed quickly and made certain that he had his short Smith & Wesson in his pocket. He rolled the photographs and notes inside a pocket of his overcoat. He kept his money in a pants’ pocket.