Rage in Paris Read online

  Note to the Reader

  The novel includes a number of terms relating to African-American ethnicity which were in wide use in the period (1895-1936) in which the novel is set, but may be unfamiliar to today’s reader. For example, the term “African-American” had not yet been conceived. “Colored” was considered a polite form of address for referring to African-Americans and did not bear the derogatory connotations associated with it by some today.

  Similarly, a number of terms for ethnicity used in the context of the novel’s time period may be unfamiliar to the present day reader. These include:

  “mulatto”(for a person of half-African and half[white] European ancestry);

  “quadroon”(for a person of one-fourth African and three quarters[white]European ancestry); and

  “octoroon” (for a person of one-eighth African and seven-eighths [white]European ancestry).

  To Liz

  “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

  - George Santayana, The Life of Reason: Reason in Common Sense

  PART I

  CHAPTER 1

  Paris, Tuesday, February 6, 1934

  I was drinking a snifter of calvados at the bar at Chez Red Tops in Montmartre near Place Pigalle in the early evening, listening to Stanley Bontemps drip honey from his soprano saxophone. Time seemed to stop when Stanley played. But I knew that was an illusion. Like thinking that spring was around the corner just because, this afternoon, a little sunlight brightened up the gray skies of a cold, early February day in Paris.

  The owner of the nightclub, a red-headed lesbian mulatto named Redtop, was biting her lavender fingernails as she listened to Stanley.

  She had served me my drink herself. Her regular bartender had called in sick, frightened off by the growing street violence as left- and right-wing agitators squared off in the streets of Paris, fighting for political control of France.

  Redtop took a glass of water to an enormous, black-skinned youngster sitting alone at a corner table in the half-empty club, scribbling furiously in a notebook. He was an admirer of Stanley’s named Darius Swilley. Everyone called him Baby Langston. The story was that Baby got the nickname after the famous colored poet, Langston Hughes, heard him recite one of his poems at La Belle Princesse, the Montmartre nightclub owned by Baby’s uncle. Hughes proclaimed that Baby was a poetic genius and the next Walt Whitman, whoever that was.

  Stanley’s sweet sounds were a counterpoint to the raging schemes swirling through my brain about how to make some fast cash to keep my private investigation agency, Détective Privé Domino, in business by bribing some people in the Prefecture of Police to renew my temporary working papers. Any day now, I was expecting a deportation notice from the police to leave France as “an indigent person without French nationality”(or any visible means of support) and with “bad frequentations.” That would mean going back to America, and I wanted to avoid that at all costs.

  The police kept me under “discreet surveillance” because I used to be a big-time clarinetist in a New Orleans Creole jazz band and the owner of a nightclub in Montmartre, Urby’s Masked Ball. They figured that I was using my private eye agency as a cover while I made money by playing jazz illegally on the side, but they were wrong. I had run my club for ten years with the woman I loved, Hannah Korngold. When she finally got fed up with my ways and left me to go back to America two years ago, my music left me too.

  Being a private eye in Paris these days was a dirtier job than being a French politician. Still, it was just as well that I’d found another line of work when my music shriveled up. “Hot black jazz in Montmartre,” which had been all the rage in Paris since the end of the Great War, had started dying out soon after Hannah had headed back to New York.

  The French musicians’ union, jealous of the stranglehold that colored American musicians had on jazz in Paris, finally succeeded in pressuring the Prefect of Police into enforcing an old law limiting to 10 percent the number of non-French musicians employed in a jazz band or orchestra.

  Whenever club owners stuck to the law, their businesses went belly-up. The Parisian public wanted to see colored American jazz musicians, not French ones, playing music Made in the USA by “les noirs américains.” Stanley was one of the few of us the police never hassled. The club owners made so much money off him that they paid the Prefecture a huge bribe to leave him be.

  I used the meager savings left from selling my nightclub to set up a private investigation agency and get the necessary work permits. But the savings and the permits have run out, and my business has kept shrinking as increasing numbers of Americans—white and colored—have dragged their tails back to the States, with this Depression snapping at their heels.

  I didn’t take notice of the man who sat down next to me at the bar at Chez Red Tops until he tapped me on the shoulder.

  “Ah you Uhby Brown?” he asked. “Private investigations?”

  “Maybe,” I answered, sipping my calvados.

  The man looked around as if he was afraid someone was tailing him. He was a big, ruddy-faced fellow with pale blue eyes, about my age. He sounded like a Boston Yankee, saying “ah” for “are,” and the way he said my name. He was dressed like spring was arriving early this year. The man was sporting a straw boater with an orange-and-black hat band. His white-striped seersucker suit was rumpled, as were his white shirt and orange-and-black tie. His brown-and-white two-toned shoes were polished to a high sheen. As a concession to reality, he carried a raccoon coat draped over one arm, to protect himself against the cold and the biting winds that whipped up from the Seine.

  “I have a proposition for you, Mr. Brown. Some quiet place we can go to speak?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Let’s go to my office; it’s right around the corner, a few minutes on foot.”

  I donned my Homburg hat and my double-breasted gray Harris tweed overcoat and waved at Stanley as we left Chez Red Tops. Bent over his horn but watching everything, he raised his eyebrows in a question, and I shook my head no. Redtop and Baby Langston eyed our every move as we left.

  My office was in the rue Houdon, a rundown street off Place Pigalle. To get there from Chez Red Tops at night, even on a Tuesday, you had to make your way past wildly careering taxis and buses, horse-drawn carts and wagons, crowds of beggars pushing their war wounds in your face; past street musicians, mainly accordion players, with crowds around them singing from the sheet music that the musicians sell them for a few sous; past swarms of prostitutes selling themselves to the slumming American tourists. In some places, you had to scan the ground to sidestep the trash and smelly filth littering the sidewalks and streets.

  The rich Americans, who could still afford to make the Grand Tour with a Paris stopover, tended to be bossy and tried to call the tune, even with a proud people like the French. Worst of all, many of them were doing their utmost to make the French bring Jim Crow to Paris just like back home in the States. If you were dark or yellow-skinned and sat in a café next to a table of them, they gave you their chilly stares.

  A number of the colored folks who had settled in Paris after the war were war veterans, like me. Some of the musicians had come to France to play in army bands led by James Reese Europe and ended up as part of the all-black Harlem Hellfighters, the American troops most decorated by the French for their bravery against the Germans and their allies.

  This war-tested breed of Harlem-in-Paris coloreds, the sons and grandsons of slaves, weren’t about to let US rednecks turn Montmartre into Mississippi on the Seine without a fight.

  The dangerous Corsican pimps at Place Pigalle buzzed around the whores and the rich Americans. My neighborhood felt safe to me; I knew those pimps and whores on a first-name basis.

  The big Yankee lumber
ed along behind me, looking like a giant bear in his raccoon coat. He huffed and puffed his way up a flight of stairs and into my office. Once inside, he took off his straw hat and his overcoat and wiped his brow with a big white handkerchief that he pulled from the sleeve of his jacket. Then he took off his jacket, exposing orange and black suspenders over his white shirt.

  The walk from Chez Red Tops looked like it had given him the fright of his life. I slid one of my beaten-up office chairs in front of the desk, and he flopped down into it, gasping for breath, his eyes closed. I took off my Homburg and overcoat but kept my jacket on. The radiator was keeping the office just warm enough for us to keep our overcoats off, but I wondered when they would shut down the heating. The bill was long overdue, and it looked like the cold weather was going to hang around for a while.

  When the Yankee opened his eyes, he looked around as if in a daze. I took an unlabeled bottle of farmhouse calvados and two shot glasses out of my desk and waved them in front of his glassy peepers. He nodded and I poured; he knocked it back and then sputtered most of the moonshine onto my fine Moroccan rug. He kept coughing and choking, his face turning even redder. Slowly, he regained his composure and put his empty glass back on my desk warily, as if it contained nitroglycerin.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I’ll pay to get the rug cleaned. That’s some drink you’ve got. What the hell is it?”

  “Calvados. This kind’s brewed up by farmers in Normandy. From apples mainly.” I held up the bottle. “But you won’t find it in any café or liquor store.”

  He looked around my shabby office as if it was what he was expecting. Then he fixed his pale eyes on the bottle of calvados. I poured him another glass, and he handled it more gingerly this time. A sip came with a crooked smile.

  “Really swell neighborhood you live in, Mr. Brown,” Robinson lied.

  “Yeah,” I said, deadpan. “It’s nice . . . and real safe. That’s what I like about it.”

  He stared at me for a while, studying my face, and then started wheezing with tears flooding from his eyes. He banged on the desk so hard that I thought its flimsy top would collapse. I realized that the man was laughing.

  “Very good, Mr. Brown,” he wheezed. “Safe.” His laughing stopped as suddenly as it had begun. “How safe ah you, Mr. Brown?”

  He riffled through the pages of a small notebook he pulled from his pocket and then handed it to me. I read the words, written in a spidery scrawl:

  “You can trust Barnet Robinson, Urby.

  I vouch for him. Help him if you can, pal.

  Sean James O’Toole.”

  The note was dated October 16, 1933, just four months ago. It was from Tex O’Toole, my buddy from the Lafayette Flying Corps.

  “I suppose you’re Mr. Barnet Robinson,” I said, handing back the notebook.

  He nodded. “Bahnet Robinson III, in fact.”

  “How come you know Tex? He’s from another part of the country. You’re from Boston or thereabouts, aren’t you?”

  “He’s a good friend of a Princeton classmate. When I told him I had a problem to deal with in Paris, he put me in touch with Mr. O’Toole. O’Toole said to look for you in the jazz spots around Pigalle because, if you were still alive, you were the best man to handle my problem.”

  That made me smile. Tex was the best person to handle any problem anywhere.

  He went on. “To answer your other question, yes, I’m originally from Cambridge, near Boston, but I went to Princeton and settled nearby when I graduated. In a place called Hopewell, New Jersey. You know it?”

  “No. I never went to New Jersey when I lived in New York,” I said. Then I asked casually, “How’s Tex O’Toole doing?”

  What I really wanted to know was why Tex had not come to deal with Robinson III’s problem himself.

  “Badly, I’m afraid. He suffered a stroke a while back. They saved him, but he’s going to need a long convalescence.”

  I couldn’t imagine that giant of a man lying in a hospital bed with doctors and nurses fussing over him. Barnet Robinson III had a big problem indeed if Tex was asking me to help him. I hadn’t seen hide or hair of him since the end of the war. I also knew how hard it was for Tex to ask for help.

  “Sorry to hear it. What size problem have you got, Mr. Robinson? I don’t know if I can help you.” I gave him the once-over again. My gut was yelling at me to walk away, despite Tex’s note and my need for cash. “I can give you the names of some private eyes who’d be more useful to you . . . in the circles you travel in.”

  “No, I need the services of a private eye,” he said slowly, searching for words, “of your . . . persuasion.”

  I puzzled out his meaning for a while and then blurted out, “You mean you need a colored private eye?”

  “Yes.”

  That really surprised me. I couldn’t imagine what kind of problem Barnet Robinson could have that involved colored people.

  As if reading my mind, he said, “It’s not what you think. I don’t want you to shadow some dusky Delilah.” He smiled sheepishly at his awkward words.

  “Look, Mr. Robinson. Tex has vouched for you, and I’ll help you if I can. But you have to level with me before we go any further. White and colored Americans together usually spells trouble, and the same crap’s starting up here. I don’t need any more problems right now.”

  He studied me intently, mulling over my words.

  “By the way,” I continued, “the reason I never went to New Jersey is that people in Harlem say that the Jim Crow South starts when you cross the Hudson River.”

  “You’re right, Mr. Brown. It’s a bad state of affairs for you people in America. But I’m only taking yours and O’Toole’s word for your race because you say so. You look as white as the driven snow to me,” he said with a smarmy smile. He probably thought that I would be flattered, but I was enraged. But for Tex, I would have socked him in the face and kicked his smug, bigoted ass out of my office, however much I needed his money.

  He must have sensed my rage. He drew back, looked up at the ceiling, closed his eyes, and said, “All right, Mr. Brown. I’ll level with you. I’m looking for my dawtah, Daphne. She’s going to be twenty-one in July.” He bowed his head to stare at the rug. “She’s got mixed up with . . . a negro musician. She sent one cable saying they were planning to live the good life in Paris. Then she sent another that was an SOS. She asked me to hole up at the Ritz until she could escape from the man. I got your name from O’Toole and cabled her that I was on my way and that I was engaging you to track her down.

  “If the word gets out,” he continued, “her life will be ruined. She’ll be kicked out of Smith College, miss getting her diploma. I’m on the Board of Trustees, too.”

  “I guess her mother must be mighty upset, too,” I put in, not feeling any sympathy for them at all.

  “My wife died on the Lusitania with her parents when it was torpedoed by the Germans in 1915. Daphne wasn’t two yet.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  He waved off my try at genuine sympathy.

  We eyed each other for a while, and I poured us more calvados. Now I felt sorry for him, but I took the musician’s side. I had been there myself—on the run with a white woman. Without hearing Robinson’s story, I could guess what had happened because it was a cliché:

  A sheltered, rich white girl goes out on a date in Manhattan with a rich male with a background just like hers. He’s told her that he knows the scene in Harlem, the hotspots where they do the Charleston and the Black Bottom like it’s supposed to be done. Hotspots where real black folks go, not white-only preserves like the Cotton Club. She sits in a dark speakeasy, overwhelmed by the music, the musky smell of the wild dancers, the black laughter. It’s like nothing she’s experienced before. When her escort orders her another glass of rye and Canada Dry, she starts really looking at the virile musicians, noticing how handsome and alive the drummer is. Then she thinks about the clean, safe banker in her future as a high society woman with
a perfect family and the right friends. The drummer is looking right at her, flashing his pearly whites. She blushes, hides her face behind her black velvet gloves, smooths back an errant lock of her hair. He is playing for her. She feels her heart beating in time with his drums.

  Robinson and I finished the bottle without saying another word. I kept thinking about Sean James O’Toole, from Galveston, Texas, who took on those flyboys in the Lafayette Flying Corps on my behalf, knocking their teeth down their throats if they even looked at me sideways. Tex knew that I was the second best pilot, and he wanted me backing him up when he flew the point.

  When the Air Service of the US Army refused to let me fly for Woodrow Wilson’s air force in the war, Tex threatened to quit. Then they upped the ante and swore they’d ruin him.

  I rejoined the French Foreign Legion and saw out the war killing Germans in the mud in the slaughters in northern France. The last time Tex and I met up was on Bastille Day in 1919, before the allies’ victory parade down the Champs-Elysées. The US Army had banned its colored soldiers from marching in the parade. But, as a French Foreign Legionnaire, I was going to march in it. I ended up missing out, though, because a few minutes before it began, a drunken redneck doughboy walked up to Tex and me and a rifleman from Senegal and called the African a dirty ape and ordered him to get his black butt out of there. I head-butted the fellow, mashing his nose into a bloody pulp. Tex held off a platoon of enraged doughboys single-handedly while the African and I ran for our lives down side streets.

  It came back on me, though. The US Army made an international incident out of the affair. The French Army kicked me out of the legion without a good conduct certificate, so I lost my chance at French nationality. They were going to deport me until my French boss from the Lafayette Flying Corps, Captain Lacroix, moved heaven and earth and they let me stay in France. Tex led a successful campaign to square me with the Americans.

  Now, Tex wanted me to help Barnet Robinson III because Tex was too sick to handle the business himself. The more I remembered how he’d stuck by me, the more I knew that there was no way for me to refuse Tex’s request.