77 Rue Paradis (5 page)

“You know these people. You are friends of theirs. Chevard likes you, we know. They believe in you. You will approach them and explain that you are—on the road back. Yes. You wish to start life anew, build yourself up again. Eventually prove yourself innocent of the foolish charges laid against you by your own country. They will understand. What better than to take you into their confidence? You will take a job of some kind in the plant over by Cassis.”

“It will never work.”

“Ah, but it will. If it wouldn’t, you would not be here, or in France, and your daughter would be in Florida—or possibly even with you someplace in America. Now.” He stood, overwhelming the desk, his huge meaty face smiling in its own fashion. “I will tell you this much: The tremendous capacity of this plane is accomplished by what we know of as a ‘breather.’ It is a simple enough invention, possibly. But there is only the one, you see? Anyone can equal the building of the engine. But the breather, no. It is so secret it even makes me perspire to speak its name. Can you guess what your job will be?”

Baron watched Gorssmann. He could say nothing. He could not trust his voice.

Gorssmann shrugged. “It is just as well. I will talk with you again, and explain. For now, then, here….” He opened a drawer in the desk, took out a bundle of franc notes with a rubber band around them, and handed them to Baron. “Take this and get yourself in order. We will contact you. Do not move from your present address.”

“Suppose I fail?”

“You will not fail.” Gorssmann came around the desk, pressed him to his feet, guided him toward the door. Arnold stood up and looked at them. “You are the only man who can do this job. There is no such thing as failure. Every move is blueprinted, Baron. And, Baron—I can never tell you how important this is. You are the man. You go home now. Rest, become a person again.”

He felt dizzy, sick, his body ached. It all had to be a dream.

“Lili,” Gorssmann called, opening the door. “Show Arnold and Monsieur Baron out. Thanks.”

Arnold preceded him through the door. He turned away from the door, looked again at Gorssmann.

“When will I see my daughter?” he said. He could not keep the anxiousness from his voice. “You’re certain she’s all right?”

Gorssmann grinned. “In time you will see her. She is perfectly safe.” He closed the door in Baron’s face.

Baron turned and Lili rose from the table where she was painting. She laid down her brush and stepped up to them, where they stood beside the Chinese screen. She was a very pretty girl, her black hair gleaming in the subdued lighting of the room. She smiled faintly at Baron, held out her hand.

He took it, felt a warm pressure.

“Welcome, monsieur,” she said.

Arnold grunted impatiently beside him. Suddenly Baron was startled and he stared hard at the girl Lili. Her face was expressionless now. He wondered if he could have been wrong. Then it happened again. Lili, holding his hand, quickly but obviously scratched the center of his palm with her index finger in a universally accepted gesture. Just as quickly, then, she released his hand and turned away.

“Alors,” Arnold said. “Quickly. Come, we go.”

Baron stared at Lili’s back. But already she had settled herself at the table and was again dipping her brush into the paint on a colorfully neat pallet.

CHAPTER 6

He stood on the Cannebière and watched the Opel vanish up the street, the taillight winking redly. It was the exact spot where he had been standing hours ago, when the car stopped before him.

He started on along the street. His body pained him in every muscle as he moved. He was bewildered. He did not know what to do, what was happening to him.

A girl stepped toward him from a doorway. “Monsieur!”

“What?” He turned to her.

“Ah, Américain!” she gushed, came up next to him. Her breath reeked of cognac and her eyes were blackly wicked. “Sailor, eh? Dronk, eh? Zigzag, eh, babee?”

“Go away.”

“Babee, listen. Babee!” She grabbed his arm, slung her plump hip against him. She showed him her teeth and they were not good. “Me plenty good,” she said, her black eyes whirling, glittering like twin pots of sin.

“Please,” he said.

“Too much dronk?”

“No.”

“You sick?”

He tried to pull away from her.

“I no sick, babee. Hot like hell. Babee, you come weez me, eh? Me good for you, babee. Zigzig, plenty good. Zigzig, babee!”

He yanked away from her. “You missed the boat,” he said. He walked on up the street, limping slightly, bewildered.

“Cochon!” she screeched after him. “Peeg, peeg, feelthy peeg! Dronk! Cochon!”

He heard her heels clatter wildly toward him on the pavement. Then they stopped. He glanced back. She was beneath a street light, watching him. Her face was flat white. Lipstick was smeared all over her mouth, down on her chin. She turned, walking slowly in the other direction, reeling slightly. Her purse, hanging from one hand, scraped the sidewalk as she moved away toward the harbor.

He went on, reached the Rue Paradis, and turned to the right.

Gorssmann. Hugo Gorssmann. All in one night. He could not believe it, and thinking of Bette in Gorssmann’s hands made him ill all over again. And Elene, what about Elene? Good Lord, what was he to do?

He had to go to the police.

That was a laugh.

The street was not busy. The city seemed calm. An occasional legionnaire hurried along, apparently sober. They drew hardly enough pay to get drunk. Music slammed from some of the cafés; other cafés were absolutely empty and looked like old-fashioned drugstores back home, with the cold enamel, the zinc bar, and the twisted wire chairs.

He entered one he knew and ordered cognac.

The bartender, Pierre, was very thin, gray-faced, with a long lock of hair hanging down the side of his face. He stared at Baron, frowned.

“You sick?” he said.

“No. The cognac, Pierre.”

“Bon.”

He paid the man, yanked one of the notes from the bundle. It was a five-hundred-franc note. Pierre stared at it, then stared at him.

“What you owe?”

“Sure, take it out.”

Pierre rang it up, gave him back ten francs, and smiled broadly.

He drank the cognac. It was like water. He looked at the glass.

“Pierre. Did you see Elene tonight?”

“Elene? No. She was in early, not late. She came in, bought cigarettes, and went away. That was all.”

He turned and left. He moved on up the street, walking in a kind of vacuum. He turned in at Number 77, went up the long flight of black stairs lighted only by the dim saffron glow from the downstairs hallway. The stairs creaked. The house smelled of old cognac, old wine, old fish, old bread, old years, and old love.

His door was open. He had not locked it. He went in, pulled the tasseled cord on the 1927 lamp with the wild angled shade. It glowed once again with that scarlet light. Elene’s idea. “Better for the eyes, chéri,” she had said.

The bed was unmade. It was sway-backed, a double bed that smelled like an old double bed. He limped across the room and stared at himself in the big, mottled mirror over the dresser. He leaned on the dresser with both hands, looking at himself.

He was a mess and he certainly did look sick. Joseph had spared his face, though. There were no cuts on his face, only large swellings along either jawline and beside each eye by the temples. It changed his appearance considerably. He looked as though he had his cheeks full of cake. His eyes were muddy and harried.

He returned to the bed, slumped down on it. He stared at the threadbare, colorless carpet on the floor. The sagging, faded curtains on the window fluttered in a small wind. Somebody out on the street shouted at somebody else and a girl laughed high on the scale, cutting it off sharply.

He lay down on the bed and stared at the ceiling, at the stretches of peeling paint he and Elene had often counted. Twenty-seven spots, there were. Five spots had appeared since he had lived in the room. You never saw them come; they appeared as if by magic.

He had to go to the police. He knew this. He knew that no matter how long he remained here on the bed, he would eventually get up and go to the police.

He began to perspire, just lying there.

He could not stay on the bed. It had become already a kind of cell, a method of imprisonment, because of his strong sense of being so completely trapped. He was surrounded with a bulwark so strong and so neatly rigged that there was no possibility of a loophole.

He knew Gorssmann and the rest of his clan would allow no loophole. Since they had spent months arranging things, they certainly had overlooked nothing.

He came to his feet from the edge of the bed in a rush. He limped to the dresser, fumbled in a cluttered ash tray for a decent-sized cigarette butt, lit it, and began to pace the room. He paced consciously. He tried to keep on the move, attempting in some way to find enough nerve to take action. Nerve, that was it.

He had never thought of himself as a courageous man. He would stand up to whatever he had to, but, too, he had never clearly expected to find himself in a position such as this. How could he have been such a fool as to spend the past two and a half years and every bit of his money trying to locate somebody he didn’t even know? He must have been mad.

Did he still want to find this man, this person, this existence? He asked himself the question, standing in the center of the room, staring at the small cigarette butt. Yes. The answer was there, all right, waiting.

He had come this far, he would not stop now. He went over and sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the scarlet lamp shade. But how? How was he to find a way? He dropped the cigarette on the floor and ground it out with his foot in a light fury of exasperation.

They were more than clever. And he was more than absurd.

He had to treat it ail logically and very slowly. And he must hang onto whatever presence of mind he possessed.

This thought brought laughter to his lips. But the laughter vanished when he suddenly recalled what Gorssmann had said about Bette. How was it possible than men could weave such a perfect web about another man? It was done, he believed Gorssmann. Bette was in their hands. What should he do? What could he do?

He remembered that afternoon in Atlanta when he had last seen Bette. She had been with her mother at Patricia’s father’s home and Patricia had been out.

He remembered how Bette had looked, there on the big old gallery. The honeysuckle was in bloom, and her eyes were glowing with freshness and happiness at seeing him.

“Don’t you want to see her?” Bette said. “She’ll be back shortly.”

“Not if I can help it, honey.”

“I understand.”

“I’m glad you do. I’m going to Europe. I wish you could come with me. It’s been six months since I’ve seen you.” And he tried to discover how she lived and what boys she was going with, what she did for fun, how Patricia treated her, without asking it outright. And all the time his mind had been clouded with the thoughts of his trailing.

And he had learned little or nothing from her. Just that she was healthy and young and vital, and that she wanted to be with him.

“Aren’t there some arrangements you can make?” she asked. “Can’t you do something?”

“You know what your mother would do.”

“Yes.”

She was sitting in the hammock, lying back against the pillows, swinging idly. He watched from his perch on the gallery railing, where he could see the drive, in case Patricia should return unexpectedly. Bette was truly a beautiful creature, and he felt a father’s pride and it wrenched him some inside, knowing he could not enjoy time with her. Blue-eyed, blonde, fresh, and vitally young. Talking with her made him feel old, stale. He knew that if he could be with her more often this feeling would vanish.

“I read the papers,” she said. “You’re a heller, aren’t you? Frank Baron’s prolonged bat. Where does he get the money? You know what they say, Dad? They say you should have been shot.” She paused. “But it’s dying out, lately. If you only wouldn’t get yourself into the newspapers like you do.”

“Sophistication doesn’t become the young,” he told her.

“Phooey,” she said. “Don’t you worry about me.”

“I mean the way you talk, Bette.”

“I have to be sophisticated,” she said. “You should see the circles we travel in. Mamma is a dear.”

“A dear what?”

“That’s a good question.”

“Do you believe what you read in the papers?”

“Certainly not. I know what you’re doing.”

“What does your mother say?”

“Good riddance.”

He watched her, drinking her in, because he had no idea when he would see her again. She was growing up so suddenly. The last time he’d been with her, she had not talked this way. She had been a little girl then. She was greatly changed and it had seemed to happen overnight. There were so many things he wanted to know about her and he wasn’t finding out anything. He supposed other fathers had been through the same situation.

The one thing he was happy about, that had troubled him more than anything else before seeing her, was that she somehow had not grown away from him. If anything, they were closer than before. She was a wonderful girl, soon to be a woman, and he was proud of her. He was proud of her beauty and of her mind and—well, of her. He wondered how she had managed to miss Patricia’s stamp. He had worried about that, too.

“You know,” she said, “you arrived here a little over an hour ago, and you’ll be leaving soon. I don’t like it.”

He shrugged. He wanted to talk, to get really close to her. But there seemed no way. Right now was as close as they would ever get.

She had gone very serious just then. The expression on her face changed and her eyes had become inquisitive and sober. She stopped rocking back and forth in the hammock and the skirt of her brightly flowered dress was stilled and he could smell the honeysuckle.

“You’re not letting what they did get you, are you, Dad?”

He shook his head.

“Really, why are you traveling all over like you do? Why do the newspapers print what they do?”

Again he shrugged. There was no way of explaining. So long as she knew the stories weren’t so, that was enough. He could not tell her what the truth was. It would be too laborious.

“Are you trying to rectify it?” she asked.

He said nothing.

“You are, aren’t you?”

“What makes you think that?” he said.

“Because that’s what I would do. I’m darned if I’d let them lie the way they do. Mother believes it all, you know. But I don’t. I want you to know that.” She smiled. “It gave me a hard shell.”

He laughed and she laughed and he went on staring and smelling the honeysuckle, wondering in the back of his mind if Patricia would return. Maybe he even wanted to see Patricia. See what she looked like. Know what Bette was up against, because he knew Patricia now.

“It’s almost like that story, ‘The Man without a Country.’ People believe it that way.”

“It’s nobody’s fault,” he said. “These things happen, and let’s forget them. Someday it’ll be all cleared up.”

“I hope so. But I’ve never had a chance to talk with you about it.”