Death of a Century Page 25

  A young gendarme, a flic, looked lazily up at Joe as he entered. A Paris newspaper lay folded on his lap. No recognition in the man’s eyes. Joe knocked the door shut with his heel and flung his coat on the flic, who raised his hands out of surprise. Joe pushed his head back with one forearm and unsnapped and pulled out the man’s pistol. It was a French Ruby pistol from the war, light weight and plenty potent.

  Joe placed its barrel against the man’s forehead and said, “Taisez-vous.”

  Joe pushed him back down into his seat.

  The flic raised his hands and looked with wide eyes first at Joe then at the closed door then back at Joe.

  Joe picked up the newspaper and stepped behind Dillard’s bed, keeping the pistol centered on the flic. Dillard was still comatose, still breathing with shallow, constricted breaths, still hooked up to tubes. Joe opened the newspaper until he found a photograph of himself alongside an article about the American murderer in Paris.

  “Look,” Joe said to the flic, holding the paper up for him to see. He looked but was too afraid to understand.

  “Look,” Joe said, pointing to his face. He looked at Joe.

  Joe held the newspaper next to his face. “Regardez.”

  The man’s eyes finally showed recognition.

  Joe dropped the paper, leveled the pistol, and said in broken French, “Je reviens, when I return, if you’re sleeping, dormez, I will kill you, vous tuer.”

  The flic swallowed at the threat of his own murder. Joe could see that he fully expected to die right then. Joe told him to lie face down on the floor beneath the bed and not get up for two minutes, which he did. Joe left the Ruby on the bed sheets—he thought of keeping it, but didn’t want the flic unarmed should Marcel’s men arrive—and walked quickly across the hall to retrieve his hat and overcoat. Marcel’s man watching the front door would be expecting him to approach the hospital and not leave it, so he felt secure.

  He knew what the flic would do. He would call his superiors and report that Joe Henry had tried entering the room, but he had prevented it. The police would double their guards around Dillard. That was what Joe wanted anyway—more protection for Dillard from Marcel.

  He took another circuitous route back to Quire’s. It had become habit to not go places in straight lines, to look over his shoulder, to listen to footsteps behind him. The weather continued to turn colder; Joe’s mood was turning as well. He was angry; he was ready.

  Quire met him at the door, once again holding a pistol in his hand.

  “You finished with your errand?”

  Joe told him.

  “So now?”

  Joe shrugged. “Now we begin.”

  Quire smiled. Without speaking, he sat and slipped on his work boots, lacing them quickly and tight around his ankles—a man ready for the fields or the mines—before walking to the wardrobe. He pulled a long coat from its hangar. With one arm in its sleeve, he said, “We’re wasting daylight, cowboy. Let’s get this road on the show.”

  “There isn’t much more daylight to waste, but you’re right. Let’s do this.”

  “You packing?” Quire asked.

  “I’m without.”

  “The hell’s wrong with you?”

  “I keep losing them.”

  “We’ll fix that. His soldiers will have something that we can take.”

  “Most likely.”

  “You know where he lives, right?”

  “I do.”

  “All right, then. Enough talking,” Quire said. “Let’s get going. If it’s to be done, better it be done quickly, or some shit like that.”

  “Over the top,” Joe said and stood.

  “Don’t say that. My blood chills just hearing those damn words.” Quire finished putting on his coat and walked to the wardrobe. He opened a drawer and moved things around until he found what he wanted, a YMCA-issue Bible from the war that he placed in the left-hand breast pocket of his shirt.

  “I wouldn’t have taken you for religious,” Joe said, watching Quire pull on his overcoat and tuck his pistol neatly inside the pocket.

  “I’m not,” Quire said. “My first sergeant wore one. I saw him take a hit right there in Genesis and live to tell about it. I figured right then, a little religion can’t hurt.”

  Quire put a box of shells into the other pocket of his overcoat.

  Joe watched him and asked, “You looking to do a lot of shooting?”

  Quire said, “You can never have too many bullets. You might be able to have too much fun and you can certainly have too many women, but you can never have too many bullets.”

  Joe shook his head and muttered, “I feel like the straight man in a vaudeville show.”

  “And so it goes.” Quire put a pint bottle of whiskey in his pocket with the loose shells. “Ready for anything now,” he said.

  He faced Joe, arms down at his sides and feet steady and shoulder-width apart like some sort of cowboy gunfighter.

  Joe arched one eyebrow and asked, “You set, Diamond Dick?”

  “You’re my Huckleberry, Joe.”

  They left the building that smelled like cows and walked out into the evening darkness like a pair of duelists. Joe carried the valise in his left hand, his right hand ready. The street was narrow and dark. They walked with overcoats unbuttoned and flapping in the wind.

  Sometime during the war, like so many men he had known, Joe had quit becoming. He had quit evolving. It was not that he had suddenly felt complete. He had stopped forward movement and lay bobbing in still water. Walking with Quire down the dark and narrow cobblestone street of the Marais District of Paris made him feel existent again. A flame that had burned out was once again lighted.

  The contradiction of actions did not, however, escape him. He had lost a vitality in his life during the slaughters of the Great War and was now reenergizing himself through the prospect of a new battle. In the former he had been a pawn. In this new game he was a player. From object to subject. That had made all the difference.

  As they approached the large Metro station at Gare de l’Est, Joe saw Dapper and the Turk emerge from the block-long building. A third man walked with them, a man whom Joe did not recognize. He pulled Quire by the arm into the closest station door. The station was crowded, the air pungent with the powerful smells of a large number of people heavily clothed. They watched through the condensation on the cold-fogged windows as Marcel’s men approached, their fogged breath partly obscuring their faces as they walked. The three walked a little hunched over against the cold night, watching their feet instead of their way and taking no note of their surroundings nor of the two Americans watching from behind the window.

  Once, just before reaching the window from which Joe and Quire stood watching them, the three men stopped and turned and looked behind them, speaking once to each other before turning again and continuing their walk. In ways that made Joe uncomfortable, Marcel’s men reminded him of himself and Quire. Men with reason and purpose and violence.

  As Dapper and the Turk and the third man passed the front of their window, Joe and Quire stepped back into the shadows of a wall, then stepped close again and leaned over a wood bench to watch.

  “Their confidence makes them lazy,” Quire said.

  “That’s good for us,” Joe answered.

  Quire nudged Joe and winked at him. “Let’s you and me fall in behind them. When we get close to my apartment, the dark street just outside, we’ll take them from behind. Hopefully that little dandy will fight, and I can kill him.”

  “No,” Joe said.

  “No? No what, man?” Quire’s eyes raked Joe, a violence in them that showed how badly Quire wanted this battle to begin. Two nights earlier when they first met at the Gentilhomme, Joe had recognized in Quire a man with whom he could become friends. A good man, which was the highest compliment he had ever heard his father afford another man. Joe also knew that while Quire was a good man, he was also a short fuse that had already been lit. Joe hoped that he could hold off the violen
ce of explosion long enough for the fuse to ignite its charge when he most needed it.

  Joe said, “If they’re here, then that’s fewer we have to worry about at Marcel’s place when we get there.”

  As Dapper and the Turk disappeared from sight into the darkness, Quire turned to Joe and asked with some little derision, “And you don’t think they’ll be at Marcel’s place soon enough? Where do you think they’ll go after they find nobody home at my apartment? They won’t head around the corner to take some loose skirt into a hotel.”

  Joe shrugged his shoulders, “You’re probably right, but if we hurry maybe we can beat them there with enough time to take care of things before they even arrive.”

  “Pipe dreams,” Quire said. He shook his head, took one step away, then turned and faced his partner. “You’ve been letting other people control your actions for so long that you’re afraid to take control. You have to decide whether you’re the man with the hammer or the man being nailed to the cross.”

  Joe gave him a dull, hard look. He shook his head as though he was thinking through a wad of cotton. He knew what Quire meant. He could not deny it. He rubbed his eyes with the palms of his fists.

  “Well, damn,” he said. “You think they’re too far away to catch?”

  “Now you’re talking Mr. DeMille.”

  “Let’s take ’em.”

  They left the station, a cold draft of night air hitting them as the doors opened. They walked as two desperados. They walked with heads up and hands to their sides, watching the dim figures of their opponents in the night fog ahead of them, walking with long strides in order to close quickly on the other three. That was their mistake, for their own confidence had also made them careless.

  Marcel’s men stopped in the night shadows of the street where Quire lived. Quire took Joe’s arm and the two slid next to a building, away from any lights cast from the moon or windows or lampposts. They watched Dapper and the Turk walk on while the third man stepped back into an entry to a building.

  “You see him?” Quire whispered to Joe. “He’s lighting a cigarette,” he added, nodding toward the darkness.

  A short flame illuminated the man’s face. Then the flame fell to the street and was snuffed out underneath a shoe. Then the small, red glow of a burning cigarette dotted the darkness like a fallen star. The glow moved in a slow, reciprocating arc as its owner dragged on his cigarette.

  “The guy’s bored,” Joe said.

  “You think so?”

  “He isn’t concerned or interested, otherwise he wouldn’t be smoking in the first place. He isn’t nervous because he takes too long between each hit. He probably thinks we’re in your apartment and is just trying to pass the time until the other two return to tell him that they have killed us. He’s just a lookout.”

  “Well, shit, Sherlock, I hope you’re right. It’ll make our next move that much easier.”

  “And what is our next move?” He looked at Quire. In the darkness he could not see the look on Quire’s face, could not even see the difference between the man’s good and bruised eye. He could, however, trace the menace carried in Quire’s words.

  “I’ll just walk on up and introduce myself.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What? You want to wait until morning light before you bound over the top. Sometimes, my friend, you’ve just got to scream shit and let loose the dogs of war.”

  “What if—”

  “If-shit. It begins now.” Quire unbuttoned his overcoat and walked from the shadow, not waiting for any response from Joe. It was to begin, and Quire had begun it. Joe watched his friend’s steady gait, his shoulders roll, his fists clench and unclench. He watched Quire take the Colt from his pocket and hold it within the fold of his coat against his hip. A cold wind blew and folded Quire’s coat around his arms to conceal the pistol as he walked.

  Joe studied the street, looking for signs of another person, of possibly Dapper or the Turk returning already. He watched for others who might also be Marcel’s men but saw none. Yellow squares of light tossed from a window spread across the sidewalk in front of Quire, and Quire walked through them. Marcel’s man must also have seen Quire, for he dropped his cigarette, snuffing it dead beneath his shoe. He stepped forward from his shadow.

  A dog barked from somewhere down the street, a cat hissed, a metal can clanged against the cobblestone street behind him. Joe turned to see who was approaching. He saw nobody but heard the sounds of two cats engaged in a hissing battle. He looked again toward Quire and Marcel’s man. They were closer together.

  Quire stopped in front of the man, who had stepped to block Quire, holding his arms out like a cop directing traffic. Quire’s Colt remained within the folds of the coat and against his hip as Quire looked to say something to the man, who abruptly pushed Quire backward and took one step toward the street in the direction Dapper and the Turk had walked.

  Quire swung around and hit the man hard on the crown of his head with the thirty-nine ounces of metal in his right hand. The man went down immediately. From his place in the shadows, Joe heard the swollen sound of skin opening. He ran the distance to where Quire stood over his quarry, breathing hard. Two small pools of blood had begun to form. One from the man’s wound to his head as well as another from his nose, which was the first thing to meet the concrete sidewalk when he fell.

  Quire lifted the man by his armpits and pulled him back into the building’s entry. He pulled the collar up to hide his ruined face. Quire also lit another cigarette and placed it between the man’s lips, letting it dangle as though the man had simply fallen asleep. He opened his flask and emptied an amount of whiskey on the man’s clothes before taking a good brace of it himself and returning the bottle to his coat pocket. He bent over the man, lifting his wallet, keys, Webley pistol, and black jack. He took three steps away with Joe before returning to the man and tying his shoelaces together.

  “Insult to injury,” he said.

  They walked into a square of soft light from a window. “Damn,” Quire said, trying to wipe blood from his shirt. “That son-of-a-bitch bled on me.”

  As they walked toward Quire’s apartment, Quire discarded the fallen man’s keys and wallet, after removing any paper money. He said to Joe, “He can’t drive without keys, and he can’t ride the Metro without money.”

  Joe nodded.

  Quire passed the Webley to him.

  Joe took it and checked the clip and chambered a round.

  As they walked farther from the lights, Quire’s street became darker, like a catacombs. They unconsciously slowed their pace, walking deliberately, like blind men without canes. Joe could not see what might be along either side of the street, who or what might be hiding within the shadowed recesses. Any small sound made him hold more tightly to the revolver, which he held at his side.

  A rush of cold, wet wind blew over him as he passed into a glade of light, followed on its wings by the strident crack of a pistol firing and the sound of wood splintering.

  Standing near that rectangle of light, Joe felt momentarily spotlighted until Quire pulled him into a side alley, pitching the world into a palpable darkness. There were no stars nor moon nor lights from windows nor streetlamps to open the blindness that Joe felt as he lay prone on the alley’s cold and wet surface. He lay facing the direction from which the first bullet had come, his legs spread wide and the Webley held in both hands in front of him and steadied on the valise. He kept his sight down the barrel toward the gray end of the alley.

  Another shot fired from around the side of a building at the end of the alley. Joe answered twice with quick, snapping rounds at where he had seen the small muzzle flare. He heard scampering sounds of a man moving from cover to cover and then the sounds of another man further away running toward them.

  “Let’s go,” Quire said. They were both up and running, running as though hell was on their heels and not looking back over their shoulders to see if anyone were following, letting their ears tell them what was
behind them.

  Joe heard Quire trip then regain his balance and then the sounds of Quire running flat-footed close behind him. Shots followed, ricocheting from the stone surface of the alley and the sides of the buildings. A man yelled, “Arrêtez!” but Joe did not know if it was the police or someone else nor whether the man was yelling at him or the shooter. He did not stop to ask. They ran through the streets back toward Gare de l’Est, weaving around startled people. From behind them, they heard other people running as well as the shouts and whistles of the gendarme. Joe felt the same automatic nature he had slipped into so many days during the war before his wound placed him in a hospital bed until the armistice. It was a mechanical impulse that moved his body, his hands and feet.

  Joe hurdled the entrance gate and took the steps two and three at a time. By the way people recoiled from his advance as he reached the landing, he must have appeared like a shriek in the night. White and drawn faces receded to opposite ends of the platform, leaving Joe and Quire standing alone in the middle.

  Joe’s chest hurt from the running. He bent to rest his fists on his knees, keeping the pistol tight in his grip and the valise on the concrete floor between his feet. He breathed hard and felt the sweat beading on his forehead.

  Quire leaned an arm over Joe’s back and between coughs spoke in convulsions, “A little . . . trigger talk . . . huh, Joe?”

  Quire stepped away from Joe and bent over in a tubercular cough, then spit bloodied sputum into the Metro’s railway. When he turned back to Joe, he was wheezing heavily.

  The sounds of yelling near the station’s entrance stopped both Joe and Quire. They stepped behind a pillar, pistols against their hips, fingers white on the triggers. Those first sounds of men yelling and running were eclipsed by a railcar as it pulled to a stop, rosettes of electricity sparking from the overhead wires.

  The doors of the subway car opened. Joe and Quire stepped from behind the pillar and into the last car, walking quickly to the rear. There they could watch the entrance to the landing through a dirty window as well as use a dividing wooden wall for some protection. Nobody else stepped on to the train, either in that car or the other two that opened doors at that station. The commuters already on the autorail, seeing two sweating and ruffled and heavily breathing men enter their train carrying sidearms at the ready, gathered their belongings and left to stand apparitious on the platform while the doors closed and the train jerked with a pneumatic hiss to motion.