Murder in Montparnasse Read online

  First published in the

  United States in 1999 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

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  Copyright © 1992 by Howard Engel

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  CIP information for this title is available from the Library of Congress

  Originally published in Canada by Penguin Books Canada Limited

  ISBN: 0-87951-701-8

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  This book is dedicated

  to the memory of

  Morley Callaghan

  and John Glassco,

  as well as to the

  generations of expatriates

  who found heaven if not fame

  in Montparnasse

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  When I undertook the task of editing my grandfather’s papers, as requested by him in his will, I had no idea that I would encounter so many of them. He left it up to me to decide what to do with them. From my mother I know that during his lifetime he was in a quandary: sometimes he threatened to burn the boxes and then tucked them away again among the hundreds of boxes he kept in the basement of his Toronto home. When it was necessary to move him to a nursing home, he marked, in my presence, the boxes that he wanted me to salvage from the coming weeding out of his possessions.

  What I have done with this manuscript, which is but a portion of the memoirs and fictional writings he left behind, is to let my grandfather have his say. Aside from modernizing his spelling and punctuation, I have let the work speak for itself. In his attempt to turn what was simple reportage into a roman à clef he altered the names of some of the characters while giving the real names of others—a maddening device, I might add. In this, too, I left the text as it stood, but here give the reader a key to the better-known names. Jason Waddington is plainly modeled on Ernest Hemingway, whose name appears unchanged in several places in the manuscript (and which I have changed for the sake of consistency); his wife, Priscilla, known as “Hash,” is Hadley Richardson, Hemingway’s first wife; Julia Lowry is modeled on Pauline Pfieffer, Hemingway’s second wife, “Snick” is John Hemingway, then known as “Bumby;” Wilson and Georgia O’Donnell are F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda. Some of the remaining characters are remembered today not only their real names, but also the names that Hemingway gave them in his novel The Sun Also Rises—Fiesta in Britain. For instance Hal Leopold in the following pages is based upon the real-life character Harold Loeb. In Hemingway’s novel, he appears as Rohert Cohn Similarly, Lady Biz Leighton is based on Lady Duff Twysden and appears in the Hemingway novel as Lady Brett Ashley. George Gordon is Pat Guthrie and also Mike Campbell in Hemingway’s fiction. Donald Gracie Hughes is Donald Ogden Stewart or Bill Smith, who both supplied parts of Hemingway’s Bill Gorton. There are other characters, such as Ford Madox Ford and his wife masquerading here as “The Burdocks,” but I will leave them for you to sort out. About some of the other characters, I could discover nothing or very little. Freddy, the bartender at the Dingo, is based on Jimmy Charters, who left his own memoir of the time. Leon Zamaron, by the way, was a real French policeman, who collected pictures and who appears in no other fiction as far as I can tell.

  It would appear that this work was written close to the time of the events described, the autumn of 1925. In editing the manuscript I have decided not to alter certain expressions and sentiments that are no longer acceptable. They tend to show some of the rough edges of the period. I ask the reader’s indulgence and pardon in advance.

  —William Duff Gaspard

  PARIS

  Autumn

  1925

  “… Paris in the early twenties was my university. Here, in the streets of Montparnasse, I met my peers. What I learned about the craft of writing, I learned here. I will not say I learned it from them, although I learned much from the smoke in the air we breathed together and the talk that rose from the terrasses along the boulevard. To outsiders we seemed to be time-wasters and drunks. Some of us were. But even for those who had no purpose in exploring the tables of the Café du Dôme or the Select beyond the possibility of finding a free drink, it was a golden time, a time of high excitement and joy in the chill early morning, a time we will always remember…”

  Jason Waddington

  from New Wine

  Parisians shut their doors tightly that autumn. Women carried their keys and arranged to be escorted through the dark streets leading to their homes. Even on the boulevards, especially in the Quarter, people kept to the brightly lit cafés and perhaps laughed more metallically because of Jack, who was out there, somewhere, waiting.

  Jack’s blade had already claimed five victims in the streets, passages and alleys near the studios used by painters around Montparnasse. He usually picked models; once he chose a young painter on her way home from a brasserie. The police were working on the case. The public had been cautioned to remain calm. Nevertheless, the concierge made very sure that it was a tenant for whom she opened the door at night. The police sifted the crowds sitting on the terraces of the Dôme and the other cafés in the early morning, checking papers, especially those of the foreigners who had made Montparnasse their headquarters in France. The gay conversation never flagged, even as passports were examined and returned to their owners, while another round of drinks was ordered and the moment of parting from the crowded tables under the electric lights was postponed. Still, for one and all of the celebrants, celebrating perhaps the fact that they had survived the war, there remained the moment when they would have to begin the long walk back through the cobblestone streets to dark courtyards and unlighted stairs.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Acknowledgments

  CHAPTER 1

  I first ran across him walking along the quays. We were both looking over the books in the stalls along the embankment and both of us reached for the same copy of The Green Hat by Michael Arlen. When he realized that we weren’t going to get anywhere tugging, he shot me that wonderful grin of his, with the right side of his mouth pulled up so high his moustache hung lopsided under his nose.

  “You take it,” he said, suddenly letting go. “Arlen’s not my meat anyway.”

  “I was just going to check the price,” I said, opening the cover. “Sixty francs.”

  “It’s only been out a year, but it’s still too much.”

&
nbsp; “I thought this was where you could pick up bargains.”

  “Oh, you can, but you have to know which stall to deal at. You have to study out the land, get to know your man. This fellow speaks a little English, so you can’t fool him. You’re not English, are you? I can tell you’re not American.”

  “Canadian,” I admitted, “and newly arrived.”

  “Well! I used to live in Toronto. Canada’s a second home for me. Used to box at the Mutual Arena.”

  “So, you’re a fighter who reads Michael Arlen?”

  “Retired professional. I nearly lost the sight in this eye from a middleweight’s thumb. The thumb was heavyweight.” He indicated his left eye with his own thumb. “What’s your name?”

  “Michael Ward, but people call me Mike. I come from Toronto too, as a matter of fact.”

  “Wonderful! This calls for a drink! Have you any objections to a demi-blonde before the sun hits the yard-arm?”

  “None whatever. The morning’s growing hot. What’s your name? I’m guessing that you’re an American. Canadians are generally more stand-offish, as you no doubt discovered in the Queen City.”

  “Je m’appelle Jason Waddington,” he said, giving the names a twist of his deep voice as though he thought of himself in italics or quotation marks. “You may call me Wad, if you like. I get called all kinds of things but never Jason. I will tell you only once.”

  I replaced the Michael Arlen on the pile where I’d found it and tried not to look at the vendor’s face as the two of us moved off to the left, with the east end of Notre Dame looming up over the chestnut trees. I followed him across the cobblestones to a small café that looked out on the river. He ordered the beers and we watched a group of bouquinistes, second-hand booksellers, talking together, no doubt cursing the slack season. When the beer came, Wad looked at the beads of moisture as they formed around both glasses, clouding the amber beer within. There was an intensity about the way he watched things. When he was doing one thing, you couldn’t mistake him for doing another, although he surprised me sometimes. I can remember him carrying on an argument with a friend about bullfighting, I think — he was often talking about bullfighting — and then giving me hell for saying something in a conversation I was having with somebody at my end of the table. That was when I knew him better.

  Anyway, this first meeting went off without a shadow of all that. He told me about a couple of his Toronto fights, and I told him that I had just started work at one of the news service agencies.

  “Oh,” he said, “so you’re a writer?” His forehead furrowed unexpectedly. I felt as though I’d just admitted to having a social disease. A mild case.

  “What I do isn’t writing,” I said. “I translate stories clipped from the French papers.”

  “You’ll have to do more than translate. French news style buries the lead in the last paragraph. You have to rebuild every story from the ground up. You’ll take a while to get onto it.”

  “For a retired professional fighter, you know quite a lot about writing cables.”

  “Hell, I’ve got a family to support! I can’t get a fight over here, except some club dates at the American Club. I’ve been sending stuff to the Toronto Star.”

  “Of course! You’re that J. Miller Waddington! Greg Clark told me to watch out for you. He said you’d gone off to Paris to write the Great American Novel!”

  “How is Greg? We used to go fishing for trout up on the Mad River. He’s a great little bantam rooster. You worked at the Star too, did you?”

  “I put in a few months until I had a run-in with the editor.”

  “Harry Comfort Hindmarsh!” Waddington grabbed my hand and shook it. “I’m glad I ran into you, Mike Ward. How’s Jimmy Frise? He and Clark — Mutt and Jeff. What a pair!” Wad finished his beer and sat back in his chair so that it balanced on its hind legs. In a minute he had pulled over a chair for each of his large feet. He began telling me about growing up on the North Side of Chicago on the wrong side of the tracks and getting into the fight game in Waukegan, a tough town where the local boy doesn’t like to lose. “That’s where my left eye met its Waterloo,” he said. By the time the waiter brought another two glasses, Wad had commandeered a chair for each of his arms.

  “Monsieur,” the waiter said somewhat sharply. “Vous n’êtes pas tout seul ici, monsieur. Il y a des autres.” Wad sat up and the waiter restored the chairs to their original tables. An angry look followed the waiter out of sight.

  “When I was in Turkey, everybody sat that way. The French, I think, are at least 50 percent Presbyterian. They are so worried about good form. Really, they only care about money. Money and British royalty.”

  Jason Waddington was a big man, at least a six-footer, with a ready grin and intense brown eyes. When he smiled, he looked like a boy dressed up in a man’s suit. I thought he was in his twenties, as I was — although I was sure he was a few years older than me, and he was thickening out. Maybe it was the beer and maybe it was muscle, if what he said about being a boxer was true. He didn’t move like a boxer, though. In fact, with his big feet, he was a bit of a stumbler, missing the curb up to the sidewalk, and — as I discovered later — always showing a cut or a bruise on his head from some low doorway. Looking like a lazy panther, he drained his second glass.

  “Well?” he said.

  “Well, what?”

  “You want to put the gloves on?”

  “Of course not. You’re a professional. I’ve never done any real fighting. Not since school. Three fights, lost all of them. How’s your tennis?”

  “I play a little.”

  “Ah!” I said, finishing my own beer, which left a bitter after-taste in my mouth.

  “Ah, what?”

  “Whenever someone says he plays a little, I get ready to lose a few sets. Where do you play in this town?” I was beginning to relax and take my surroundings for granted. It felt good.

  “There’s a gym in the basement of the American Club. There are a couple of good outdoor courts too. If the weather holds, we can have a few weeks of playing outside. I haven’t delivered my quota of newly arrived Canadians this month.”

  “I’ll leave a letter with my bank about where I’m going. I’ve heard about your sort.” He laughed and we got up. I paid for the drinks, while Wad protested that he would get them next time. From the look of his shoes and the worn elbows of his tweed jacket, I had my doubts.

  Together we walked along the quays, keeping the river on our right, letting the big church slide by. There were a few drifts of fallen leaves caught against the embankment. It would be pretty to say that the river caught the blue of the autumn sky and reflected it, but the fact is the river ignored the sky and gave us something brown does to green even in summer. Wad led the way across St-Michel and down a narrow street of shops leading away from the river. There were small antique shops and dusty places selling tassels and flounces for decorators. We looked into the windows of the antique dealers, filled with armoires, sconces, candelabra, corner cupboards and weather vanes. I fancied a fine copper coq, a girouette that had turned green in the wind at the top of some weathered country church or château.

  “I wouldn’t mind taking that back to Toronto with me,” I said. “How old do you think it is? Twelfth century? Thirteenth?”

  “I know the painter who made it,” Wad said. “You can ask him yourself when you meet him.”

  “You seem to know your way around, Wad.”

  “I know the Quarter. I’ve been here since the war.”

  “Except for your time in Toronto,” I added, wanting to believe him.

  “Sure,” he said. “Except for Toronto.” He clipped me on the shoulder playfully. “And listen, kid, I don’t think you should start thinking of collecting stuff to take home with you. You’ll sour your time here that way. Toronto’s a long way from the rue St-André-des-Arts.”

  We continued up the street, with Wad jumping up and trying to hit overhead shop signs, until we wandered into the Marché du Bu
ci. Here Wad bought some small grey shrimp and a dozen “portuguaises,” which turned out to be oysters. When I left him, he had given me his address on the Notre-Dame-des-Champs and an invitation to dinner at eight o’clock that night. I took the Métro back to my hotel, where I looked up the street on my folding map. My brand new Baedeker on the bedside table was already beginning to look like a leftover from my early days in Paris. It felt good. I grinned at the familiar jug-eared face in the mirror. At last I was getting to meet people. At last I was finding my way around and feeling as though I had finally arrived. I hoped, as I began to run the water for a bath, that it wasn’t because I had spent nearly an hour and a half speaking my own language in this foreign place.

  CHAPTER 2

  It took me a few weeks to get used to the fan-shaped patterns of the cobblestones I could see from the third-storey windows of Agence-Européene-Presse on rue Jean Goujon. But the office surroundings (dirty walls, noticeboards and broken-down typewriters) and routine were easier to manage. Everybody was always on the edge of a holiday mood, and, except for the hour or two before deadlines, we always had time for talk and trips downstairs to the brasserie for a drink. The agency was next door to the Anglo-American Press Association, so one was always bumping into friends and colleagues. Without knowing it, I slipped easily into the habit of working hard in short bursts, running with dispatches to catch the boat-train and getting away from the Right Bank as fast as I could without losing my job.

  I usually walked home. I had a choice of seven bridges and the best scenery in the world to walk through. By now I had a room at the top of a building on rue Bonaparte. It had a slanted ceiling facing east, a floor of large terracotta tiles, some of them loose and used for covering valuables, and a few simple sticks of furniture. For use of the splendid bathroom, I had to apply to the concierge, who was understanding and sympathetic as long as bathing did not become excessive. The toilet was hidden behind a wall panel on the landing below, directly off the stairs. From my single window, if I leaned out far enough, I could see both St-Germain-des-Prés and St-Sulpice: three steeples for one hundred and forty francs a week.