Brainquake (21 page)

“He didn’t tell them,” Paul said quietly.

“We don’t know that. Sometimes they cut out your tongue after they learn what they want to know. It’s a mafia trademark.”

“He told them nothing.”

“But if he did, they’re in France now.”

“He told them nothing.”

“I’m just saying if…that’s all, Paul…if. I’m not saying we should do anything different. It’s no good to run. We’ll find nothing as safe as this barge.”

“He told them nothing.”

“We’ll keep inside. We’ll hang the baby’s washing in this room. We’ll keep the carriage in this room.”

Paul said nothing. Then, after a few moments:

“You’re right. No place safer than this.”

She changed the subject. “Was the attack bad?”

“How did you know?”

“Your face in the taxi…sweating.”

“It was bad.”

“What did you see?”

“Johnson. Ice cubes. Opium pipe.”

“Ice cubes?”

“To pack on his balls.”

“Why?”

“They help.”

“How do you know?”

“I packed them on his balls many times.”

“You did?”

“That and milk.”

“Milk?”

“They helped him stay alive. When the drug made him sick.”

“You never told your boss?”

Paul said nothing.

“Johnson owed you.”

Paul said nothing. She rose and went to him, held him close. His back still to her. She turned him around slowly, and caught a flash of tears glistening in the moonlight. His face remained a cipher.

“I’m sorry, Paul. I’m sorry he’s dead.” Michelle was surprised because she meant it. She led him to the bed. They undressed in silence.

He got in bed, couldn’t sleep, stared at the ceiling. Then he looked at her. She was looking at him. The sleeping baby in the crib gurgled.

“I wish Lafitte hadn’t bought that monkey,” Michelle said.

This time he changed the subject. “What is the Resistance?”

She lay back against the pillow and told him about the French Resistance. The stories Lafitte had told her as a girl, about fighting in the underground against Nazi soldiers when Hitler’s German troops occupied Paris. About Jean Bourgois, about how brave he was. And how one day the Nazis captured him and executed him by firing squad.

“How did he fight them?”

“Blew up bridges and factories making guns and shells and other things to kill people. He and his men ambushed Nazi soldiers in the streets, in the parks, on the riverfront.”

“Jean Bourgois was your grandfather?”

“Yes, Paul.”

“Michelle Bourgois is a beautiful name.”

“It’s my mother’s name. Mine’s Borcellino. My father was with the mafia. He was a bagman too.”

It took a long moment for Paul to absorb it. She went on.

“My father was born in New York. His family was from Sicily. That’s an island off Italy. The mafia was born there. It was called the Black Hand. They shook down shop owners and factory owners in cities and in towns for protection.”

“Protection?”

“Protection against the Black Hand.” She was sure he didn’t understand. She had to make it plainer, so that a child would understand. “If a shop owner paid them money every week, it was protection against the Black Hand blowing up their shops.”

“Like gangsters in the bootleg days.”

“Yes.”

“My father told me about them.”

“You said he was a bookie.”

“My grandfather was a bootlegger. He wouldn’t hurt a saloon if they bought his whiskey and beer.”

“That’s it.”

“He hijacked whiskey and beer from other bootleggers.”

“Like pirates.”

Paul nodded. “There are pirates today who hijack bagmen.”

“Were you ever hijacked?”

“A hijacked bagman is killed.” There was a long silence. “Tell me more about your father.”

“You really want to know more?”

“Yes.”

“He got a job driving for one of the mafia families when he was seventeen. My grandfather repaired shoes down in Little Italy. Ten hours a day, hammering nails into soles, polishing rich men’s boots. He was angry and ashamed because my father was giving the Italians in America a bad name. When my father became a bagman, his father never spoke to him again.

“My father was a lot like you, Paul. He kept to himself, never talked much, knew he was in the wrong business but it was too late to quit. If he quit, he would be killed. He knew what kind of money he was carrying in his bag, and he hated it. In that way, he was not like you. You told me that for ten years you slept nights. He never slept. He would wake up and feel sick about what he carried. But I understand you, Paul. You were doing nothing wrong. You had nothing to do with what that money represented. You were delivering the mail like a mailman. You didn’t ever think where it came from.”

Paul eyes slid shut. She read his silence.

“You were born with three strikes against you, Paul. You had no reason to feel guilty, for doing what you had to.”

“I did once. Feel guilty. I shot a boy who shot at me.”

“You thought he was going to hijack your bag?”

“Yes.”

“Then it was self-defense, Paul. That’s not the kind of guilt I’m talking about.”

Michelle slipped out of bed, slowly paced. Her bare feet on the rug made no sound.

“One day an informer who hated my father gave his name to the police. His bosses found out. He knew they would never believe him that he’d been loyal. He got a forged passport under the name Valour and he flew to Paris, to his old friend, Captain Lafitte.”

The baby woke up crying. Michelle changed its diaper, and went on with the story in a low, soft voice. “Years before, my father had been in Paris on business. That’s when he first met Lafitte. They met at a bar, I guess, went drinking and whoring together. Lafitte told him he was trying to track down an old Resistance fighter. He gave my father the man’s name. He’d heard he was in New York. When my father returned to New York, he made it his business to find the man. He sent Lafitte the address. Lafitte and his friend wrote letters to each other until his friend died.”

The baby fell asleep again with the monkey held very close. Michelle sat on the side of the bed. “My father hid on this barge. Lafitte never asked him why. No visitors ever came on the barge until one day Lafitte introduced my father to Camille Bourgois, his old comrade’s daughter. They fell in love. Lafitte brought a priest to the barge one afternoon, another former Resistance man, and quietly they got married.

“Then my father heard, through the only man he trusted in America, his lawyer, who grew up with him, that on his deathbed the informer had cleared my father’s name. All was forgiven! His bosses wanted him back, wanted him to work for them again. My mother was pregnant. They needed the money. The lawyer advised my father to return without his wife and to never mention her name. If the mafia learned about her…well, you know what they expect from a bagman. No attachments. Anyway, that’s what my father did. He went back to New York and for very good pay became a hit man.”

Michelle stretched out next to Paul. “Every week he sent money back, for me. I wasn’t born yet, but he wanted to take care of me. My mother wrote him every week, through the lawyer. I was coming early. My mother was hysterical. No time to call a doctor. No time to get a midwife.”

Michelle paused.

“Lafitte delivered me.”

She sat up, propped the pillow behind her head.

“My mother died a year later. Cancer of the kidney. She was young, but that’s what happens. I grew up on this barge. When I was five, Lafitte brought me by bus to the school every morning and picked me up every night. Lafitte had no trouble explaining me to the authorities. He told them my father was dead and he didn’t want to put me in an orphanage. He was a Resistance hero, I was the granddaughter of one. The authorities blessed him for giving me a home.

“When I was eighteen, my father stopped sending letters, but the money kept coming. Every week. Less and less, but always something. I couldn’t reach him. Lafitte had a telephone number, but his phone had been disconnected. I was frantic. I phoned his lawyer but the lawyer wasn’t reachable either. Lafitte arranged for my passport. I flew to New York. Found the lawyer in the hospital—he looked terrible, like a corpse, maybe ninety pounds. Said it was pneumonia. Didn’t want to say AIDS. He gave me the address where my father was living, a cheap room in Chinatown, no phone, nothing but a bed. Sick, he was of no use to the mafia anymore. He made a little money stealing, sent me every penny, kept only enough for his room and one meal a day. I found a small furnished apartment, got a job as a cashier. Bought him medicine, food. I had to give him back some of what he had given me all my life.

“That was when I met Frankie Troy. My father met him, didn’t like him. But Frankie had money, more than we had, and he promised he’d get a bigger apartment if I married him. I did. My father lived with us at the Saint Charles, without ever saying a word to Frankie. The same week I got pregnant, my father had the stroke that killed him. Frankie said, ‘About time.’ When my baby was six days old, we left Frankie.”

Happily piloting his tug into the rising red sun, the engine throbbing, Lafitte blew three sharp whistle blasts. Michelle and Paul waved back from the barge deck. He was off to pick up a load of soft drinks. He wondered why the baby favored the monkey above the other toys. He dreaded the day they would leave him.

Paul and Michelle watched the tug become a silhouetted speck against the sun, then sat down to have more coffee. They glanced at the baby in the hammock. The awning shielded him from the sun. He was pulling on the monkey’s tail.

Paul looked through the binoculars, but his mind wasn’t on the faces he saw on the upper deck of the approaching sightseeing boat. The pace of events in Michelle’s story last night crowded his brain. Her bagman father hiding on this same barge…Lafitte delivering her…her mother’s death…her father’s death…Frankie Troy…running away with her baby…Frankie shot by the gun in the carriage…bomb under the baby…Al and Eddie…all had led them here. How? And where was it leading now?

The question brought gigantic pressure. Yet he had no brainquake.

* * *

Throb of engine getting weak. Craft in the Seine becoming ghosts. Banks of the river vanishing. Rays getting cold.

Then Lafitte saw him.

Red sun became the red face of General Petain, hero of Verdun in the Great War of 1915, traitor of World War II in 1940. For decades, the Petain nightmare had ravaged Lafitte’s sleep. He had challenged Petain to explain his treachery, never got a response.

Now Petain was haunting him in the sun.

Lafitte had gotten used to the Petain nightmare like he had gotten used to his own nightmares as a youth fighting the Nazis occupying Paris. Led by Jean Bourgois, he fought Nazis drinking French wine with French collaborators, bombed them and ran. He shot Nazis eating French food at sidewalk tables with French Jew-haters and ran. He shot Nazis fucking French whores and ran. He saw swastika flags flying from the Arc de Triomphe and ambushed Nazi soldiers in side streets. He saw Nazis escorting Hitler down the Champs-Élysées to the Tomb of Napoleon and that night grenaded a truckload of Nazi soldiers.

The recurring Petain nightmare and his own recurring nightmares as a youth were linked. The linkage enraged Lafitte.

Now, he and Petain were alone. Everything was silent as a coffin. Petain’s giant face was saintly in the sun. His eyes of compassion met Lafitte’s eyes of contempt. Then Lafitte’s fallen idol broke decades of bitter silence.

Captain Lafitte, it’s time we had a talk.

General Petain, what is your defense?

Let me remind you, first, that I fought the Kaiser.

You were a Frenchman then. You stopped being a Frenchman when you went over on Hitler’s side.

I was never pro-Hitler.

Why didn’t you fight him?

It was wiser not to.

That’s traitor talk!

I was never a traitor.

Then why did you order us to stop fighting Hitler?

Two million Germans were about to invade Paris.

We were at war, goddam it! In war we fight the invaders. We should have died fighting Hitler. Foch would have died fighting him. Joffre would have died fighting him. Were you afraid to die? Were you too old and wanted to live? Is that why you kissed Hitler’s ass? To live?

It was mass killing season for Hitler.

You should have died fighting him.

Then millions of French corpses would have been swept into Hitler’s ash-heap of history.

You shamed us!

I saved you.

Saved us? You became Premier of France under Hitler, goddam it! You had a big office, a big desk, hundreds of guards to protect you. You lived like a dictator. You lived like Hitler! You posed with Hitler while Frenchmen were put into concentration camps. You posed with Hitler knowing French would fight French as you signed the surrender truce!

Those French casualties would be small. I had to prevent France from becoming a nationwide graveyard.

You collaborated with Hitler!

Wrong. I knew one day he would lose. All dictators in history have lost. I had to save France.

You are saying what you did was heroic?

Yes.

You are saying you saved France?

Yes. I alone saved France.

Then goddam it, General Petain, tell me why you were convicted of treason against France when Hitler lost the war in 1945?

The face of Petain vanished. His tears remained, streaks of yellow along the red face of the sun.

* * *

The baby was still playing with the monkey’s tail. Michelle was reading the
Herald Tribune
. Paul was looking at the faces on the upper deck of another sightseeing boat.

He suddenly shook.

Sitting alone in a rear seat, in a brown jacket, smoking a cigarette, was Eddie.

His hand holding the binoculars shook and he lost Eddie. Forcing the glasses hard against his eyes, he focused to the limit.