Murder in Montparnasse Read online

  Waddington and his wife Priscilla helped me find it. “Hash,” as Wad called her, was sometimes called “Cilla.” I usually called her Hash and she didn’t seem to mind. They both started calling me “Michaeleen” and “Wardo.” They had nicknames for everybody. Hash was a few years older than Wad, a grand pianist and an endlessly tolerant helpmeet for Wad, who never knew when he was coming home for dinner and never thought of sending word ahead when he was bringing a friend. That was how I met her, with her red hair hanging undressed about her shoulders and surprise written all over her smiling, broad face, and nothing in the larder or cooling on the windowsill. I got the feeling that anything her “Tatie” did was fine with her. You could see by the way she looked at him.

  The baby, whom they addressed as “Snick-a-Fritz-Piddler,” “the Pid,” or “Snick” for short, was a stocky, bright, blond imp of twenty-three months, who could stand up and take a Firpo-like pose with both his dukes up and spoiling for action, calling “‘Fraid o’ nothin’” at the sound of the bell. I often took him walking in the Luxembourg Gardens to watch French children with their hoops and sailboats near the octagonal pool while Hash went for a French lesson and Wad was working. Snick and I got along well.

  Wad worked on a back table at the Closerie des Lilas, a café at the edge of Montparnasse, a little fancier than the cafés that had been pointed out to me. As he told me this, Wad also made it clear that when he was working, he didn’t want to be interrupted. He took his work seriously and made sure that I understood that the Closerie des Lilas was forbidden to me while he was busy. After a good deal of questioning, I discovered that his writing was not journalism but stories. He wasn’t able to sustain the fiction that he was a boxer beyond that first meeting. Although he didn’t tell me where I could buy any of his stories, he did say that two of his books had been printed by Paris publishers.

  While I was excited by his publishing success, I was a little disappointed to discover that Wad was just another hopeful writer like myself. I wished he had held on to his stories about being a prizefighter. I quite liked to think of him working out with the pugs at Leida’s. He talked about the best-known local fighters all the time, fibbing about keeping well out of the reach of Mascart’s murderous left or Ledoux’s upper-cut. He enjoyed talking about bullfighting, too, but never said he’d actually fought in the bullring. There was some talk about running with the bulls in the Basque country of Spain, but that failed to catch all of my attention. When I changed the subject from sports to his writing, I got the furrowed brow again and monosyllables. He was free with advice about the journalism I was doing, but he kept mum about his own work and got mad if I pestered him about it.

  He was a fair tennis hand, but one of his legs was dependably weaker than the other and his bad eye proved to be no lie: I could do what I wanted on his left side when I was in control of my game. We were evenly enough matched so that whichever of us won, we both got a good game. In the beginning, I saw Wad for dinner at Notre-Dame-des-Champs a few times, as well as our regular meetings for tennis. Gradually, I saw him for tennis and a beer afterwards if I didn’t have to run across the river to do some work.

  During those weeks, I made myself comfortable under the roof tiles on rue Bonaparte and did a lot of walking in the Quarter. The little writing I did was on the backs of postcards with sepia views of the Arc de Triomphe and the Tour Eiffel. I took a certain pleasure in writing:

  56, rue Bonaparte Paris,

  VIe

  FRANCE

  Having an address that wasn’t a hotel gave me a stake in all that was happening around me. In the course of my job, I went through all the French newspapers. I studied the police reports and read the back files on the latest Paris sensation: “Jack de Paris.” On my own time, I heard a concert given by Paderewski in the Salle Pleyel, visited the public and private galleries and haunted several bookstores. In order to appear less of a tourist and to erase the earnest Canadian features that looked out from my passport, I bought a béret basque and began wearing a grey scarf. I was still too much the over-clean, washed and pressed, serious young man with a look of innocence stamped on his face. I tried brushing my hair in a new way, but the errant brown forelock always found its way back over my eyes. The scarf removed the sharp Adam’s apple from the picture, but only time would grow my hair long enough to reduce the impact of those jug-ears. I watched the way Frenchmen dressed and tried to model myself after them.

  Meanwhile, I pursued another course of discovery as I sought out the narrow, twisting, older streets of the Quarter. Exploration did not wait upon a return to my room to change out of my office suit: I explored all the time, especially while returning to the Quarter and while looking for new places to eat. This was how I discovered the delightful Place Furstemberg, the Cour de Rohan and the perfect tourelle on the rue Hautefeuille. These were private discoveries that helped make me feel at home in the city. The streets of the Quarter were friendlier than the great boulevards that Baron Haussmann had pushed through the remains of mediaeval Paris.

  Living alone in a strange city requires a certain discipline in order to survive. For instance, there’s the question of dining alone. The selection of the right restaurant is important. A mistake can be tragic, like the time I went by myself to one of the famous after-hours restaurants near Les Halles for a bowl of soup. It was bright, gay and noisy. It came well recommended in my guidebook. I sat there thinking of home. Bright, noisy places that are recommended in guidebooks are to be avoided by those who return to a room under the roof by themselves.

  On my way back to the rue Bonaparte one night after one of these disastrous experiments, deep in thought, I saw a young woman in a bright cloak making her way along the narrow street ahead of me. For awhile, I followed her retreating shadow and the echo of her heels on the cobblestones. The sound acted as a sullen metronome to my thoughts. Suddenly, she turned and, seeing me, gathered up her skirts and fled down the street towards the light of the carrefour. I stopped where I was, trying to imagine the fears my own footsteps had awakened in her. Did she take me for Jack, the murderer? Was that how Jack found his victims: searching out the stragglers from life’s march, stabbing the women who had strayed from the main group? I took that thought to bed with me.

  One early October night, while having a late supper at the Nègre de Toulouse on Montparnasse, I saw a party of well-dressed British and American revellers come in rather noisily out of the rain. The owner took their umbrellas from them and directed them to the only large table that was still unoccupied. They were speaking English in an aggressively loud manner that made me wonder why such people come abroad at all. I was chewing on these ungenerous thoughts when into the restaurant came Waddington and his wife, laughing and wet. Wad had covered both of them in a large military-looking cape. He shook it off and was welcomed into the chic gathering with shouts and cries. I put my head down and continued eating my bouillabaisse and reading my newspaper.

  It was Hash who saw me. Then Wad jumped up and asked me to join them for coffee when I finished, if I cared to. For Wad, it sounded elaborately polite, and I felt I should decline. It was plain that they were well ahead of me in their evening. But as soon as I began to back away from the invitation, which, as I say, had been no more than good form, Wad seized me by the arm and pulled me over to his table. My protests were disregarded, and soon my bouillabaisse had been moved to the large table, where I found myself drowning in a sea of new faces.

  “Mike Ward, better known as Michaeleen McWardo, these are my friends,” Wad called over the wine glasses. “Friends, this is Michaeleen McWardo from Canada.” The woman next to me frowned at the scant formality and quickly introduced herself and her husband as Stella and Cyril Burdock. Wad had seated himself again and showed no further interest in helping me find my way with a tableful of strangers. In fact, he seemed a little put out, but whether it was because I hadn’t fought off his invitation more successfully or whether it was the sallow fellow in the spectacles he kept gl
aring at, I couldn’t tell.

  Cyril Burdock had washed-out blue eyes and a walrus moustache. He was a portly English gentleman who seemed to assume that he was the father of this feast. I learned later that he was a former collaborator of Joseph Conrad’s, and that he edited a small literary magazine that Wad sometimes worked for without pay. Stella, his wife, looked like an aging ballerina, with a round face and dark hair pulled back from her high forehead. She plied me with questions about my origins. She wanted to know whether I was in any way related to the Canadian Wards that she knew. I was always being asked that and I gave her my usual answer.

  “Yes, but I’m a distant relation. I’ve never seen their Vancouver house and have spent little time in the family castle overlooking a Toronto ravine.”

  “I met the Vancouver Wards in Fontainebleau last year,” she said. I said nothing to encourage further conversation in this direction. Wad was looking at me as though I’d been lying about my prowess in the ring. He gave me a touch of that slow, Midwestern grin of his.

  To Wad’s left sat Hal Leopold, who was the sometime object of Waddington’s scowl. He was a pale, heavy-set man wearing spectacles that failed to hide a broken nose. I learned later from Wad that he had been middleweight boxing champion of Princeton and was rather proud of the fact. Wad also told me that Hal came from one of the richest Jewish families in New York. Leopold didn’t seem to notice Wad’s scowl; his interest was focused on the woman seated to my left.

  Next to Leopold sat two sisters, Julia and Victoria Lowry, from somewhere in the American South. I learned that Julia was working for the Paris edition of Vogue magazine. Her beautiful yellow coat was draped over the back of her chair. Across from her sat the woman that Hal Leopold couldn’t keep his eyes away from. She was every bit as chic as Julia Lowry, but it appeared that she did it more with her eye than her pocketbook. She was wearing a man’s felt hat and a jersey top over a tweed skirt. The effect was more than the sum of its parts. Whenever I saw Lady Biz Leighton, she seemed to embody the times we were living in. She seemed to do it naturally, without any fuss. Even when I got to know her better, I couldn’t imagine her worrying about her clothes. In fact, I often saw her leave clothes discarded in a heap on the floor of her studio and sail out without a glance at the looking glass. “Biz” was short for Elizabeth. She was British and had been married to a man whose family filled a page in Burke’s Peerage. Hardly anybody called Biz “Lady Biz.” She didn’t seem to mind. Wad told me later that she’d had a hell of a time during the war. I knew a few people who claimed to have had a good war, but I didn’t believe them. Biz looked as if she’d been hurt, and, like all of the men in her life, I wanted to protect her from further injury.

  The other woman at the table was Arlette La Motte, a stunning, assured French woman in a fashionable frock. She looked sleepy and not at all interested in the two noisy Americans who appeared to be her escorts. Occasionally, she looked at one or the other of them and stared, as though to say, “Where did I offend the gods enough to deserve you?” She exchanged a smile from time to time with Burdock, who pretended not to notice, though his wife did, letting go an arpeggio of annoyance by suddenly moving her bangled right arm. Arlette was wearing heavy make-up on her mouth and cheeks, after the French fashion. Lady Biz wore no make-up at all; her face was like a cameo cut in rose jasper. I kept looking back at her.

  “I’ve seen you playing tennis with Waddington,” Leopold told me across his plate of roast duck. “Has he got you boxing yet?”

  “We discuss it from time to time,” I said. “When he’s beating me on the courts, boxing doesn’t seem such a bad idea.”

  “You learned boxing, of course, in Vancouver?” Burdock asked and stated at the same time.

  “The Wards have been a bastion of support for the fine arts in Vancouver,” added Mrs. Burdock to the rest of the company. I said again that I lived in Toronto.

  “Leopold will appreciate this,” said Burdock, leaning languidly across the table in my direction. “I don’t suppose you know it, but the first great English boxer whose name has come down to us was a fellow named Mendoza.” Burdock wiped his stained moustache on his napkin and caught his breath. “Spanish Jew, you know, from the East End of London, if I remember aright.”

  “Really?” said Leopold with a fixed smile. Wad shot me a conspiratorial glance. Other conversations died at once. “Is this the same Mendoza who fought Lord Byron?” Leopold asked.

  “Why, that’s right,” Burdock said. “No gloves in those days, you know!” He was looking up the table at Waddington.

  “Indeed,” observed Leopold, his smile still hunting for a hidden meaning.

  “Bare hands!”

  “Why are you telling me this, Mr. Burdock? I know that Daniel Mendoza is the supposed father of scientific boxing. What more needs to be said?”

  “Well, I … I just …” Burdock caught up his napkin again and coughed into it. When he came up for air, Leopold was still looking at him, not letting the awkward moment pass. Wad was shaking his head at Leopold, at the way he insisted on calling Burdock out.

  “I don’t suppose you were in Mendoza’s league at Princeton, Hal?” Wad said with just a touch of a sneer.

  “I don’t recall boasting that I was, Wad. Why don’t you tell us whom you’ve knocked down lately.”

  Waddington dodged the question by calling the restaurant owner over to the table. “Monsieur Lavigne,” he said, “would you bring us another litre of the vin de Cahors, please?” When the wine came, Wad did the honours, getting up from his place and walking around the table.

  Julia Lowry turned in her chair prettily and held out her glass. It was a thin, rather bird-like arm that went well with her boyish Dutch bob.

  “I was talking to somebody about you today,” she said, suggesting that she had volumes to say.

  Wad grinned at her as he filled her glass. He looked interested.

  “Oh?”

  “Somebody who could do you a lot of good.”

  “Tell me all about it,” he said, pulling up a chair near her. Arlette caught the amused smile on the face of Lady Biz.

  “I would, but I don’t want to raise the already high opinion you have of yourself. Some other time,” she said, “when there aren’t so many people around.”

  Checked, Wad looked petulant for a moment and then put his big arm around her shoulder. “I’m sure you would make a wonderful agent, Julie.”

  We all laughed at that, including Hash, who had been watching how Julia was flirting with her husband. Julia’s sister, Victoria, was watching what was going on over the rim of her glass. She was prettier than Julia, but quieter, less assured, always thinking and watching. Biz was sitting straight in her chair, with her neck slightly arched, finishing her wine, smiling at some private recollection. When Burdock, returning from the WC, leaned past her to tell me something, he nearly brushed her cheek with his own. I felt myself getting warm. I decided I didn’t like him.

  “I haven’t seen Mr. Joyce tonight,” Burdock said when he had regained his chair. “He sometimes comes in here when he’s dining modestly. I’d frankly like to miss him,” he said, putting his chubby hand, judging by her expression, on Victoria’s knee. “He’s been on a borrowing streak again. One can’t deny him a few francs without being branded a Philistine or Boeotian.” He talked in short, breathy bursts, giving the impression that he had just run up a flight of stairs. “People seem to think I’m his guardian. I am only to the extent that I don’t send every tourist around to see him and collect his autograph.”

  “They want to show off about meeting the great pornographer when they get back to Oak Park,” Wad said with a sneer.

  “I say, Mr. Ward,” Burdock said brightly, “Waddington tells me that you’ve written a few things. Would you mind awfully if I asked to see some of them? I’m on the watch for glimpses of the new, you know. Trying to find a few people who aren’t trying to sound like Trollope or Thackeray, don’t you know? I dare say that if you’r
e a friend of Waddington’s, and you’ve come to Paris from Vancouver to write, you must be doing the right sort of thing.”

  “It’s Toronto, really.”

  “You might care to drop around to our rooms on the Île St-Louis. Do you know where that is? Paris must be very confusing after the Canadian West.”

  “I’d like to drop in very much.”

  “Splendid! Say around tea time tomorrow, unless tonight degenerates into one of those evenings that go on and on.”

  “You’re getting old, Cyril!” challenged Arlette from across the table. There was a proprietary note in her husky voice.

  “Not a bit of it. One likes to keep one’s head clear when talking to writers about their work. It’s only polite.”

  “I don’t think I’d care to be a fly on the wall when you geniuses put your heads together,” Lady Biz said, mostly to Stella Burdock.

  “Afraid we may talk about you, Biz?” Hal Leopold asked with a lazy smile.

  “Of course not. I’m sure you wouldn’t talk about me. That’s the trouble. You’d be so busy shredding literary reputations that a mere woman wouldn’t have a chance.”

  “They won’t be talking about me, either,” Leopold said. “The New York papers made confetti of my book. My ears are still ringing.”

  “Biz,” Wad said, “we boast about being in print but forget to mention that the Paris publishers don’t export and that the print run amounted to three hundred copies.”

  “You’ve got post-publication depression symptoms. A mild case. Wait until you have a book come out in the States. Then you can get a serious case and take to your bed.” Hal was delighted when the whole table responded to his joke. Wad smiled too, but there was no illumination behind it. When the table moved to talk of other things, Wad was still looking at Hal, as though the latter were standing on his prayer rug. Later, Wad told me that Hal’s book, Gadget, had been not so much chopped up by the press as ignored. He made it seem important to set the matter straight.