77 Rue Paradis (2 page)

CHAPTER 2

They had worked very fast and with professional skill. A slow tension began to build inside Baron as he realized this. Somehow, the dreamlike way the car had appeared, and the way he found himself here on the rear seat, became a truth among a life of hazy lies.

The man in the front seat partially turned his head.

“Monsieur Baron? Frank Baron?”

“Yes.”

“Please, monsieur. Say nothing. No one will speak to you. Voilà. It would be a waste.”

Baron sat stiffly now on the edge of the small rear seat. He saw the man up there tap the driver on the shoulder, point to the left.

They came onto the Rue Vacon and turned right on Paradis, and by the time they passed the building where he had his room—or where Elene had hers—they were doing an easy sixty. On Paradis this was an interesting speed. They lurched on the old tracks, narrowly missed taking a wheel off a horse-driven cart, swung back into the right lane, bumping across the worn bricks.

He had seen none of them before. The driver was young, he wore a cap, and though it was dusk now and rapidly darkening, Baron made out a very red face. The man beside him was in command.

He glanced across at his neighbor in the rear seat. The heavy gun barrel clunked just once, sharply, across his kneecap.

“Look,” he said. “This is foolish. What the hell is this?”

The Opel’s engine was in good shape. He could feel that much. It sounded as if it were winding up, like a spring-wound toy car just before it exhausts itself. Only this engine was not tired.

They turned left again, passed the prefecture, came on along until they struck the broad, tree-lined Prado. Now the driver really opened it up. It was plain they weren’t going to stop for a while.

He stopped himself from looking once more toward the man beside him. The kneecap pained badly. For another moment or two he remained on the edge of the seat. He no longer thought about being hungry. He had forgotten Elene and the five hundred francs. He had absolutely no idea of what it was all about. He sat there, frightened. Then gradually the fright went away. There was nothing to hinge it on. No reason to be afraid.

“You’ve made a mistake,” he said. “I have no money, not a franc. I’m completely broke.”

Nobody spoke.

They knew him. The hell with it. He had been trying to say the hell with it in Marseilles for three months now. He could afford to go on saying it. He got a smile out of that and relaxed in the seat. There was nothing else to say. For three months he had been at a standstill. It didn’t matter what was happening, so long as it was something. His life no longer mattered. It traveled a course, that was all. He had to recover volition and one way was as good as another.

They drove for some time. He quit trying to place where they were going. It was much too dark now, and they traveled too fast. Besides, it was tiresome. Whatever it was they wanted, he would soon find out.

He kept himself somehow in this frame of mind until the car turned abruptly into an alley and stopped. All he knew was that they were somewhere north of St. Charles’ Station. They had wound in and out all over Marseilles.

“Get out.”

The man from the front seat held the door open for him. His friend in the rear prodded him tightly with the gun barrel. He got out and looked at the man from the front seat.

“All right,” the driver said. He had unlocked a door in the brick wall of the alley. They went into darkness.

He began not to like it again. The fright began to work up into him again. He tried to push it away, to retain the feeling he had manufactured in the car. He could not do it. He remembered Elene and suddenly felt that those few moments before she left the room had been moments of peace. Because now his personal tortures were sinking into a background of memory only. He found he did not like this at all.

They went along a damp, musty-smelling stone hallway. Their heels chunked hollowly on big stone flags. The young driver lit a flashlight and Baron had an impression of brick walls, well worn. They turned down a corridor to the right and went through a curlicued wrought-iron gate into the usual garden. As they crossed the garden on more flags under a star-freckled sky, Baron saw that it was not the usual garden. Flowers bloomed in the night and buds swung from an enormous vine, like giant teardrops. There was the heavy, suffocating odor of night-blooming jasmine. A miniature fountain sprayed weakly from a plump, doll-like stone nymph’s head into a circular cement dish in the center of the garden. They went past some twisted trees that looked like weary old ladies flapping lace shawls over their heads. They entered another door by way of another wrought-iron gate and went down another corridor.

The flashlight in the driver’s hand stopped, played on a door and latch. He knocked. He turned, grunted at the man with the hat.

“Again,” the man with the hat said. “Encore.”

The driver knocked again.

“Yes. Enter,” a woman said.

The flashlight went out. But not before Baron saw the driver smile brightly at the man in the hat. The gun poked. The door opened.

Inside it was warmer, but the smell was still present. It was an odor he had often met with in Marseilles; a presence of damp stone and gray, tired centuries.

“Yes, Lili?”

The woman was seated at a table across the room, with her back to them. She rose. She turned and glanced at the man in the hat without looking at anybody else. It was quite a feat, Baron decided. She wore a red artist’s smock and held a long slim paintbrush in one hand. She had been painting designs on pottery and china plates. Some of the plates, showing carefully intricate work, were racked against the wall above the table where she worked. She was quite tall and slim. The smock somehow managed to reveal the slimness and at the same time give promise of a fine young body beneath it. Her legs were straight, her shoes black, high-heeled, dainty. Her hair was raven black, not too long, and there was something sly about her. Right away Baron liked the slyness.

“Yes,” she said. “One moment.”

She disappeared behind an immense Chinese screen with a scene of red and green dragons and a white pagoda by a turquoise lake painted on the black cloth.

A man’s voice reached them, but the words were unintelligible. Baron heard the door open behind him then. He glanced around and the driver and the man with the gun were just leaving.

“Quietly,” the man in the hat said. He had the gun now, holding it in a hand sheathed in a gray cloth glove.

They waited.

The room was very quiet, as though they were deep underground. Baron could smell linseed oil now, and turpentine and paint.

The girl spoke softly from the other room and again the man’s voice reached them.

Baron looked at the man in the hat. He did not like what he saw. Everything fitted too well. The man looked quite human, no different from anyone else. He was a man of medium build in a gray suit, wearing a gray topcoat of thin smooth material and a gray Homburg. His shoes were shiny, but not too shiny. His eyes looked quite honest, unsuspicious. He wore an inconspicuous blue tie and his shirt collar was clean. It was too perfect. There was nothing particular about the face. Two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. But the gloves. Baron was immediately suspicious of any man who wore one glove with the back turned down and carried the other in his bare hand.

Too, there was the gun.

“Come,” the girl said.

She waited by the corner of the screen and looked at the floor as they walked past her. Baron got a whiff of good perfume, very faint, elusive. The jasmine out there in the garden should give up, he thought. It wouldn’t stand a chance.

He kept trying to bolster his courage in this way. He frankly admitted to himself now that he was scared.

“He is here,” the man in the hat said.

A huge bull of a man stood looking at them from behind a desk as big as a barn door. He drummed fingers like miniature baseball bats on the desk top.

“Lili,” he said, “close and lock both doors. Thanks.”

He looked at Baron and sighed.

CHAPTER 3

Baron waited. On top of what was happening, he realized he had a bad toothache. He wondered that he had not felt it before. Recently the filling had come out of a large cavity and now the tooth really ached.

“Arnold,” the big man behind the desk said, “will you sit over there by the door? Thanks.”

Baron decided Arnold was a good name for the man in the gray hat. Damn the tooth! He watched as Arnold found a straight-backed chair, pulled it over beside the door, and sat. He still held the gun. He took his hat off now and laid it carefully on his lap. His hair was something out of an old-fashioned pomade advertisement, parted exactly in the middle.

“Frank Baron,” the big man said.

Baron said nothing. He stood about four paces from the enormous desk and watched the enormous man and cursed his tooth.

“I am Hugo Gorssmann.”

Baron nodded. He began to feel uncomfortable, standing there. This Gorssmann watched him with a pair of very small eyes that were like lively black bugs waiting to pounce on something good.

Gorssmann sighed again. It was a sigh that took place somewhere behind the buttoned, cream-colored vest. Truly, Gorssmann was the largest man Baron had ever seen outside of a circus. He was not fat. It was meat. He wore dark-blue trousers, pleated and without a wrinkle, the cream-colored vest, a French-cuffed blue-and-white striped shirt, a dull maroon tie. The shirt sleeves were partially rolled back over hairless, freckled arms that looked like heavily inflated tire tubes. His mouth was lipless, like a clamp; a straight slash above the jaw, which went down without a neck to the knot in the maroon tie. He was bald, his skull knobby and liver-blotched, with a fringe of disconcerting kinky red hair above each ear. Gorssmann was quite a picture.

“I shall speak to you in English, Monsieur Baron,” Gorssmann said. “You prefer this?” When he spoke it seemed that no part of his face moved. The lips separated somewhat and the words came out. That was all. With each word Gorssmann hissed faintly.

“It doesn’t matter,” Baron said.

“Correct,” Gorssmann said. “It doesn’t matter in the least. You speak French, German, Italian, and halfway decent Spanish. But you cannot write Spanish, can you? And when you write Italian, it is truly a mess.”

Baron blinked at him.

“Was there any trouble, Arnold?” Gorssmann said.

“No trouble.”

“You may put the gun away, Arnold.”

“You think—”

Gorssmann nodded. He raised his eyebrows slightly at Baron, sighed again, and sank into an overlarge chair behind the desk. The chair vanished.

“Sit, of course, Baron. There.” Gorssmann moved one finger toward an armchair beside the desk.

Baron decided to hell with it again. He went over and sat down. He was conscious that he looked quite ratty. His suit, a brown sharkskin, was filthy. There was a three-cornered tear in the left trouser leg. He wore no tie, no coat. He had sold his hat for twenty-five francs in a café weeks ago. He was badly in need of a haircut. The tooth ached worse all the time. He touched the cavity with his tongue, and winced.

The only thing Baron knew so far was that Gorssmann spoke French with a fine Parisian accent.

“I don’t know exactly how to approach the subject,” Gorssmann said. He drummed on the desk with his baseball bats, glanced carefully at his fingertips, looked once again at Baron.

“It’s simple,” Baron said. “You’ve made a mistake. Somewhere you’ve got your wires crossed. It’s obvious to me. I haven’t got a cent.”

“Precisely.” Gorssmann turned his head a scant inch and said to Arnold, “He hasn’t got a cent.”

“Then what do you want?” For the first time a touch of real anger took hold of him.

Gorssmann clucked his tongue, shook his head. He could not turn his head well because of the amount of meat that stood in the way.

“I have a proposition,” Gorssmann said.

“Oh, great. “

“Your attitude is not good, Baron. Not good at all.”

“Have you got a cigarette?”

“That’s better. Believe me, I was sure of you from the start. You aren’t the kind— Here.” Gorssmann leaned like a derrick and handed Baron a mahogany box of English Ovals. There was a lighter in the box beside the cigarettes. Baron put the box back on the desk, lit up, waited some more.

“You did not find the girl, did you, Baron?”

“What girl?” Something bad touched him lightly and went away.

“Elene Cordon. You were looking for her, were you not?”

Baron watched him. This was just fine.

Gorssmann moved his shoulders. Possibly he shrugged someplace, but it was only bare movement by the time it reached the outside. “We have the girl, Baron. You would never have found her.”

“But why?”

“Ah. Now we begin to get someplace. Your attitude changes, Baron.” He turned slightly toward the man in the chair. “Arnold. Did he talk coming here?”

“No.”

“No excitement? Fright? Fear?”

Arnold shook his head, ran a palm carefully across the hair at the back of his head, looked at his palm, sniffed it. “No,” he said. “Nothing.”

“Bold, then.”

“I would say yes,” Arnold said. “Bold, unworried. I would say he did not care.” He paused, then said, “Of course, this could be an act.”

Gorssmann nodded, looked again at Baron.

“You will care, Baron. Seriously.”

“If you’re trying to worry me,” Baron said, “you’re succeeding. Is that what you’re trying to do?”

“A peculiar man,” Gorssmann said. He stared at the top of the desk. He seemed to be debating about something. He frowned and the meat humped into a small mountain on his forehead.

Baron was just a little bit more scared now than before. His life had never, from the first, been channeled in this direction, and he kept realizing the fact more and more as time went by. He would be distinctly more at home in an American back yard, cultivating shrubbery and a fine lawn. For the first time he allowed doubt to enter his mind, or perhaps doubt simply won itself through the wall, and he wondered how he had survived all this time, running up and down the world, chasing someone he didn’t even know. He swallowed and recognized embarrassment. Then the embarrassment changed into something else and he recognized this, too. It was fear. Plain, simple, direct fear.

“What did you bring me here for?” Baron said.

“I’m getting to that. As I say, I don’t know just how to approach it. You’re much the man I expected, of course. But there are certain facets.” He stopped, stared again at the desk.

“What about Elene?”

“The girl. I had forgotten. Neither here nor there.” Gorssmann paused on a long inward breath, scratched his throat meatily. “You’ve come a long way, Baron. Both up and down. How would you like to go up again?”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

Gorssmann leaned to the right, opened the bottom drawer on the desk, withdrew a polished brown leather brief case. He held his breath, found a key in a pocket of his vest, unlocked the brief case, put the key back. He lifted the brief case upside down over the desk and a sheaf of papers tumbled out. “You, Baron,” he said, pointing to the sheaf of papers with his other hand.

Baron said nothing. He remembered the cigarette, took a last drag, dropped it on the floor, and ground it out with his foot. There was a good rug on the floor, deep nap, green. Gorssmann watched distastefully as he did the job on the cigarette.

“Suppose you tell me about yourself, Baron,” Gorssmann said. He clasped his hands across his front, like stacked fence posts, and stared glumly at the papers on the desk.

“I’m not going to tell you anything.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m damn well thoroughly mad and I see no reason to tell you anything. That’s why.”

“I see. Would seeing the girl help?”

Baron stood. He made a move toward the desk. Gorssmann sat back a little and Arnold stood up, holding the hat in both hands. Gorssmann chuckled, lifted the brief case from the desk, and slammed it against his legs. Baron sat down again.

“Haven’t you grown tired of this life?” Gorssmann said. “Aren’t you rather ill from doing the things you have been doing all this while?”

“All what while?”

“Please, Baron. Let us be honest with each other. I mean since the beginning of the end. You are a broken man, Baron. You must know that. Does this please you? The memory of what you were, the knowledge of what you are? Living with a common street girl, allowing her to perhaps even work for—”

He came up fast, took one step, slammed his hand down on the desk in front of Gorssmann. “Just don’t say that,” he said. His voice was tight and he looked into the bug-like black eyes, seeing nothing. “Don’t ever say that.”

“Ah-ha,” Gorssmann said. “Sit down, Baron. You mean there are still ideals?” He turned with a light flick of his head toward Arnold. “Perhaps we have swooped down too soon. Perhaps we should have waited a little longer. Could it be, Arnold, that we have mistaken the proper time to strike?”

Arnold did not answer. Baron looked at the man and watched him sitting there. He was carefully cleaning a steel comb with a matchstick, digging fine particles of pomade and lint and dirt from between the teeth and wiping them on the rung of his chair.

“No,” Gorssmann said. “If we had waited any longer, you might have come to something else. Perhaps even done away with yourself. Because you are hurt, deeply hurt, aren’t you, Baron? Confess.” He leaned toward Baron, hissing quietly. “This horrible business in your country. It has affected you deeply, is not so?”

Baron looked down at him.

“Please, sit. Thanks.”

Baron sat down again. He crossed his legs and looked at Gorssmann, beginning to feel tight all over and giddy in the head. He wanted to swallow, but when he tried, his throat was perfectly dry.

“Yes,” the big man said. “You are deeply affected.” He straightened in the chair, flapped the brief case back up on the desk. “But we know these things.”

“What do you propose to do?”

He watched as Gorssmann shrugged and wondered how he was able to sit here like that, waiting the way he did. The only word for it was ominous. Gorssmann was obviously sadistically inclined, and whatever was going to happen would be revealed slowly. Possibly painfully. He could sense this. He felt that every question was richly baited, like a secret trap.

Baron heard the words stumbling from his lips. They sounded all right. He wished he had more control, but he realized now that he had never prepared himself for any finality. For a long time he had pursued; his every waking hour—and a good share of his dreamtime—had been spent in a melodramatic portrayal of The Chase. He had not counted on anything like this.

“Say what you have to say,” he told Gorssmann. “Get it over with. I want to leave. If you have the girl, let her go. There’s no reason to hold her for anything. Whatever this is, there’s no reason. She doesn’t even know who I am.”

“She does now, Baron.”

“It changes nothing.”

“All right,” Gorssmann said. “We have bantered enough. We have wasted words and energy. I had to do this, though. Now we begin.”

Baron watched him and he did not feel at all well. He felt worse than ever before in his life. It seemed that he was suddenly being allowed certain revelations, a kind of insight, or hindsight, into his living and himself that had been withheld. He did not belong here. He was out of place. It was disconcerting and fear seemed to weep on the walls, tenderly anxious in the shadows. He belonged back home, in the States. At the same time, he knew he had to brave it out, whatever it was. Only don’t be too brave, he thought. Because then it can turn into something else. And you need some of that bravery yet a while. Because remember, he thought, you have to go on until you find him.

And thinking this he stared at Gorssmann. He knew what he had felt all along, but refused to admit. These were the type of people. My God, could it be that Gorssmann was the very man he was after? This was, he had to admit, almost the way he had imagined it would be. Though he had always pictured the final scene with himself in Gorssmann’s place. Suppose….

And it snickered in his brain, like that. The thrill of it went bright white along his shoulders and up the back of his neck.