Murder in Montparnasse Read online

  CHAPTER 7

  I didn’t see Waddington or any of the rest of that gang of his for a few weeks. Work at the agency had piled up and I began to earn my pay. In the evening, I started eating at Michaud’s in the rue des Saints-Pères, on the chance that one night I might catch a glimpse of James Joyce, who was said to dine there all the time. Three nights’ vigil snuffed that canard.

  I didn’t want to meet Joyce, I just wanted to see him. My admiration for Ulysses and Dubliners was such that I wouldn’t dare present myself as another stammering votary. I imagined that one day we might exchange a knowing glance that would encapsulate all I would have liked to say but, because of his perfect understanding, I need not try to express.

  Waddington’s questions about what I was working on had got me thinking. Handling his book made the thought visible. I had to admit to myself that I was not without literary ambitions, but the stories I had left with Cyril Burdock were older than I liked to say. “What had I written recently?” was the question I had to address. The answer goaded my desire to become more than a journalist. I wanted my name on the cover of a book. To this end, I began to make some notes and even went so far as to buy several small blue notebooks at the Librairie Joseph Gibert on boulevard St-Michel. I sat for an hour at a back table in a nearby brasserie with a succession of cafés-crèmes and tried to think of something to say. It wasn’t easy. I tried to tell myself that the time spent sitting was an important early step to writing fiction, but I only half believed it. When my hour was up, I went for a walk in the Luxembourg Gardens and watched the children sailing their boats in the octagonal pond. Maybe I could write something about them.

  The ivy on the drooping garlands that bordered the Médicis Fountain had started turning brown. The water had been turned off for the season. A group of women were standing around a tripod, being instructed by a small, black-bearded man in a smock in the alchemy of photography. The women stood well back, away from the camera, as though it might explode. I watched the instructor overcome their timidity, and indeed soon he was inviting each of the women to share with him under the black cloth an inverted view of the grande allée leading to the pond.

  Recalled from this distraction by a tugging at the cuff of my trousers, I turned away from the photography lesson to find a white poodle busy at work on my left leg. The moment he stopped tugging at it, he started entwining his forepaws tightly around my calf, mistaking me for one of his own kind.

  “Viens ici! Dépêche-toi!” This was the voice of the dog’s owner, I presumed, as I tried to shake off this unwelcome attention.

  “Get down, dog. You need glasses if you think I’m a bitch! Get away from me!” The dog continued in spite of my turning and shaking.

  “Madame, ce chien manque de politesse,” I said. “C’est pas poli de faire comme ça,” I added, in what I hoped translated into a tone of rebuke in French.

  “Basket! Get down!” she said. “Basket, come here at once!” By now I could see that the owner was a thin, tiny woman with an olive complexion and a forbidding countenance. I pulled the dog off me and picked him up. He was a well-fed mutt and heavy.

  “Madam, your dog,” I said, dropping into English and feeling abashed at my outburst in a language in which I did not believe I would be understood.

  “Basket, you naughty, naughty dog!” she said. She did not look up at me. I was by now feeling doubly ruffled. The dog had abused me and now I was being cut by its owner for my outburst. The woman kept her dark, rather Spanish eyes on her dog, petting and embracing him. After a few moments of this, she stood up again.

  “Monsieur,” she said in French, although she had heard my English, “Je suis vraiment désolée. Viens, Basket, nous sommes déja en retard,” she said with little feeling. I was glad to hear that she valued her time as I tried to deal with the curtness of her apology. By the time I had brushed off my trousers, the dog, who was really a very clean dog, had had a leash attached to his collar and was hurrying away down the grande allée pulling his mistress behind him. I watched them until they began a turn around the pond. Maybe I could write something about them, too, I thought.

  I left the park through the gates leading into the Place Edmond Rostand and found an empty table in a café. I sat down and surveyed the damage to my trousers. It was visible, but required no immediate attention. Thinking about that odd woman with her dog, I ordered a demi. I thought of her foreign-looking face, then laughed to myself at my audacity: here I was, a displaced Canadian sitting in a Paris café, daring to call people foreign.

  I finished the beer and ordered another, passing the time with a discarded copy of Le Matin. When I looked up from time to time, the green-and-cream-coloured streetcars were still skirting the statue in the middle of the square. I settled into an account of a meeting held the previous night to protest the lack of progress being made in the hunt for the killer of six unaccompanied young women in the Montparnasse area, for the most part within the last thirteen weeks. Monsieur le Préfet de police was having a hard time both with the press and with groups of angry citizens demanding immediate action. He announced both that he was exploring every lead, questioning several suspects, and that he had nothing to announce at the moment. He said that he expected an early break in the case. The paper did not report whether any of his fingers were crossed when he said this. The Prefect is a political appointee, required to be more of a politician than a policeman. But Paris is more tightly controlled than a North American city: the concierges report unusual comings and goings; hotel-keepers report all changes in residence; informers ply a profitable trade in the cafés on both sides of the river. The terrasse of La Rotonde was said to be alive with police informers. Nevertheless, it remained the “political” café of the Quarter, where revolutions were being plotted from dawn till well after midnight. That was to be expected.

  Having finished with the news, I turned the paper over to the back page, where I found the usual puzzle: two apparently identical drawings, but with seven subtle differences which I began trying to find. Working through Les sept erreurs had become an important part of my day, a reward I gave myself for reading through the business pages and editorials. I had begun to notice myself setting up small rewards for completing unpleasant tasks. Was it a sign of my uprooted condition? Should I try to seek out my drinking friends again? Would that hold back the insidious creep of middle age over my bones? I didn’t know, nor did I get a chance to think about it further, because, just then, as I’d located the third error, the shape of Hal Leopold came between me and the sun.

  “May I sit down?” he asked, in the act of doing so.

  “Sure. How are you?”

  “I want to get out of this town,” he said.

  “From what I saw of it the other night, you lead a complex life. How’s the Countess?”

  “I haven’t seen her. I hear she’s been sick. She drinks too much. That’s her trouble.”

  “She had a rotten war.”

  “She wears it like a badge.”

  “It killed her husband, isn’t that enough?”

  “It didn’t kill him, Mike, it turned him into a drunk, a dangerous drunk. She had to get out of that.”

  “And why do you want to get away from Paris? Seems like a grand place from what I’ve seen this last month and a half.”

  “You don’t understand the way it can close in on you. Too many people want a permanent place in my life. I just want to be free of that. Ever since my book came out, people are after me. Everybody’s standing with his hand out. Everybody wants me to help start a magazine, or find a new place to stay, or lend enough to buy clothes, or paint, or canvas. It never ends. And it’s not just women. They’re harder to get rid of, that’s all.”

  “Have you seen any of the gang from the Dingo?”

  “Not since I last saw you. Nothing decent ever happens to me in the Dingo. Have you seen Wad?”

  “No, but I’ve been thinking about him, trying to figure him out.”

  “Aw, Mike,
he’s just a bully. Has to be a tough guy. And he’s a braggart, too. He hasn’t done half the things he says he has.”

  “Oh, I’m catching on to that. I’m trying to think why he does it.”

  “He keeps saying I was the middleweight boxing champion of the Princeton boxing team when there isn’t a Princeton boxing team. He’ll say it until it becomes the truth.”

  “What kind of war did he have?”

  “He got blown up in Italy on the Austrian Front. You’ve seen his legs on the courts. He’s not making that up.”

  “Why’d he tell me he was a boxer from Chicago’s North Side? Why’d he put on this story about living in hobo jungles, riding the rods and getting pitched off freight trains? We both come from the same sort of middle-class home. Both our fathers are doctors. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “It took me a while to find out he came from Oak Park. He tries that out on everybody. Wants to wash those tree-lined streets and big houses out of his system. He’s always making changes. Hash is going to be next, if he gets his courage up.”

  “Hash?”

  “Sure. He’s trying to leave her.”

  “But she’s a wonderful woman! And there’s Snick! He couldn’t leave them. And who’d he leave ’em for? The Countess? Julia? I don’t follow your thinking, Hal.”

  “He hasn’t been able to love Hash since she lost his manuscripts. Wad doesn’t know how to forgive people. He just strikes them off his list.”

  “You must be sore at him to say a thing like that. This is something between the two of you.” Leopold stared at me, smiling at my thick-headedness. “Leave Hash, indeed! Hash isn’t people, she’s his wife. She does everything for him. She even puts up with that harem he runs around with. Not many women would tolerate that. He’d never leave her.”

  “Open up your eyes, Mike. It’s the way he is. Those stories meant the world to him. Over two years of solid work! And she lost all of it.”

  “I heard something about that from Stella Burdock a few weeks ago. What actually happened?”

  “Wad was covering a peace conference at Lausanne for the International News Service and the Universal Service, for Hearst.”

  “I thought he was working for the Toronto Star? I know he was a Star correspondent.”

  “I don’t know about that, but I’m sure he was working for the two Hearst agencies. Maybe he was double-crossing his Toronto employers. It wouldn’t be the first time. Maybe he gambled that the Toronto people never saw an American paper? Who knows? Anyway, Hash and Wad were supposed to have gone to Lausanne together, but Hash had a bad cold and was sick in bed when he had to leave. When she recovered, she thought it would be a good idea to take the stories he’d been working on with her. Trouble was, she brought everything. Roughs, carbons, early drafts, notes, everything. It was just a few days before Christmas in 1922. The Gare de Lyon was busy with people leaving on holiday. After she got her things installed in a compartment, she went out for a paper, according to Wad, or to check to see whether the valise with their winter clothes was being loaded into the baggage car, according to Hash. Anyway, when she got back, the suitcase with the manuscripts in it was gone. Before the train had even left the station.”

  “Every writer’s nightmare!” I said, thinking of my own stories.

  “Wad won’t say exactly what was inside the suitcase. It may have been stories and poems. It may have been a big part of a novel. He says he never talks about casualties.”

  “He may not talk about them, but, from what you say, he never forgets about them either. Didn’t Carlyle have to rewrite the first volume of The French Revolution when it got burned by accident?”

  “You got me there. I only know that Wad is actively and at times not very subtly scouting about for Hash’s successor. He may not even know he’s doing it, but he is.”

  “You think it’s Julia Lowry?”

  Hal smiled across at me, then shrugged. “He’s been seen with Lady Biz and Laure Duclos as well. Take your pick.”

  “It won’t be Biz; she doesn’t have any money. Wad may like the lady’s title, but that will disappear in the divorce court. Julia’s a better bet.”

  “Now you’re talking. She’s rich as Croesus. Or at least her uncle is. She could support him until his writing catches on. She’s thick with that crowd down on the Riviera, too. Once he’s in with them he won’t have to double-cross editors anymore. He’ll never have to work again, except at his stories.”

  “And Laure?” I was interested in Hal’s assessment of Laure for my own reasons.

  “Not sure about her. People are afraid of her. Nobody has the nerve to tell her to shove off,” Hal said. “She lived with Tolstoi for a long time, and there were others before and after him. Her father was shot as a French traitor during the war. Did you know that?”

  “I’d heard that he was dead. That’s all,” I lied.

  “Laure’s a major source of the gossip you hear around the Quarter. Some of it is hare-brained. She once said that Waddington was going to run off with Gertrude Stein.”

  “I didn’t even know they knew one another. He’s never mentioned her to me.”

  “Wad likes to keep his friends in separate pens. He doesn’t like them to know one another unless it’s through him. He likes to be in control. Gertrude has been a big help to him in his writing. That’s what Wad used to say. I haven’t heard that lately. It irks him to admit a debt.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, jumping to the defence of my friend.

  “There was a time when Wad had a good word to say for all of the people who’d either helped him or given him some good models: Sherwood Anderson, Ring Lardner and Miss Stein. But not nowadays. He is less than generous, Mike. I’ve heard him go out of his way to slam Lardner and Anderson. He heard about Spain from Miss Stein and McAlmon; now you’d think he thought the place up all by himself.”

  “You have to crawl out from behind your influences.”

  “Is that it? Maybe.”

  “Speaking of Spain, what went on down there this summer? What happened?”

  Hal ran a knuckle around the edge of his mouth before answering. “I’m not the one to tell you about it, Mike. I had a rotten time and ended up … You ask Wad about it. I’m still too mad to talk about it.”

  “Does it have anything to do with Biz?”

  “Goddamn it, it has everything to do with dear Lady Biz. I’ll tell you that for nothing!”

  “And this book of Wad’s?”

  “It’d better be barroom talk, Mike. It damn well better be like the rest of Waddington’s lies. If he’s telling the truth for once, he’s stirring up a hive of wasps.”

  I asked Hal to join me for a drink and then dinner, but he said that he had to meet someone at the Crillon in less than two hours. I was beginning to love it the way the Quarter was a playground for some people; they put on their old clothes here, drank cheap draft beer and made jottings in blue notebooks in cafés. Then they got dressed up and spent a fortune at the bar of the Ritz or Crillon. I thought about that while we each paid our share to redeem the saucers on the table. Hal was quiet. Was he brooding over what had happened in Spain? Or was it Wad and his novel? When we parted, he could spare only a limp handshake and a courteous inclination of his head.

  I watched him walk across the square, in his compact, self-possessed way, thinking that I’d follow him across the river to see what distraction I could find in Place Pigalle. A sudden thought of Laure Duclos held me back. My fingers were almost tingling at the image of her. It was too early to begin searching for her in Montparnasse. Later on, I would have more luck. It was perhaps silly of me, but I needed to talk to her. Anyway, it made more sense than following Hal Leopold across the Seine.

  CHAPTER 8

  That night, I saw Joyce at Michaud’s. He was sitting there with his family, looking like a rather shabby dandy, with a velvet jacket and a brocaded waistcoat. A monocle was attached to a watch fob by a thin black ribbon. He quizzed the waiter
about the menu as though he were a police inspector questioning a suspect at the commissariat opposite St-Sulpice, all the while letting his fingers play arpeggios on his ash-plant walking stick as though it were a knobbly peasant’s flute. His son, Giorgio, sat across from him, dressed like a junior banker. Giorgio’s sister was ignoring the men and deeply engaged in a dispute with Nora, her handsome mother, whose fine, dark hair framed her face. When the waiter had retired to the kitchen with the order, Joyce began drumming on the table with his many-ringed fingers, obviously quite happy with the selections he had made. I felt peculiar taking my eyes off such objects to look at the menu and make my own decisions about dinner.

  When I looked across at the Joyces a few minutes later, there were tall, green bottles on the table, as well as a new face across from the writer. Giorgio had been displaced by a long, stoop-shouldered man with a craggy face and a red beard. Nora Joyce was lecturing him, and, from the look on his face, he couldn’t wait for her to stop; he hadn’t come here to listen to Mrs. James Joyce. In the end, Joyce himself interrupted so that the redheaded Bohemian was able to get his oar in. I call him a Bohemian because he wore no necktie or cravat of any kind and the trousers of his suit didn’t match the double-breasted jacket he was wearing. I wrote him off as a painter. The Quarter was full of them, famous for them in fact, although they didn’t often find their way to Michaud’s. Since the death a couple of years ago of Modigliani, painters had made Chez Rosalie on the rue Campagne-Première a holy shrine. Others hung about the small restaurants near the studios on the Grande-Chaumière, where horsemeat steaks could be bought at reasonable prices. Whoever this painter was, he was speaking English with an American accent. His talk was animated and could be heard across the room.

  “Listen, Jimmy, Mussolini ain’t as noir as he’s been limned. Come on down to Rapallo; see for yourself. I’m livin’ in a cookie jar, Jim, goin’ like sixty and hittin’ on all six cylinders.” He spoke as Huckleberry Finn himself might have spoken. The spirit of Mark Twain was perhaps riding on his shoulder. I leaned closer when my soup plate had been removed.