Rage in Paris Page 3

  For the next two years, I was just another legionnaire killing machine, no more, no less. My unit was cosmopolitan with some of the worst scum from every corner of the earth. But it didn’t matter who you were in the Legion, just how well you could kill. The other members of my outfit wanted to fight by my side because I was a sharpshooter, and they believed, mistakenly, that I didn’t fear death. But I was dissembling again; I feared death as much as any of them, and my two years mired in the mud and blood of battle were a nightmare.

  When Captain Lacroix asked me if I wanted to kill the “Boches”—the derogatory French name for Germans—by shooting at them from a flying machine, I said, “Pourquoi Pas?” I would climb out of the muck and mire and into a clean cockpit and uniform.

  I and the other chosen legionnaires were sent to a French airbase in Algeria for training. It didn’t take them long to discover that I was good in the air and, me being an American, they assigned me to the Lafayette Flying Corps, American volunteers flying for France.

  When a bunch of bigots in the outfit assaulted some North African Spahi light cavalry in a café and I stood up for the Arabs, they figured that I had to be colored not to side with them, and I told them my story.

  After that they really attacked me. But Tex O’Toole, the best flyer and the toughest man in the Corps, knocked their heads together and put a stop to the race-baiting.

  CHAPTER 3

  When I came out of the metro station at Saint-Germain-des-Près, it was dark and cold and all hell had broken loose. People were sprinting past me on Boulevard Saint-Germain brandishing torches and carrying flashlights. They were heading toward the National Assembly building to defend it. I spotted workers wearing cloth caps and ragged overcoats, carrying bicycle chains, slingshots, hammers, and clubs. Well-dressed young men and women, probably students, marched shoulder-to-shoulder with them. Here were the heirs of the workers and intellectuals who, since the great French Revolution of 1789, had sparked three others—in 1830, 1848, and the Paris Commune of 1871.

  Three days ago, the new Premier, Edouard Daladier, had dismissed the Paris Prefect of Police, Jean Chiappe, darling of the Fascists and monarchists, accusing him of slowing down the police investigation of a big-time swindler named Alexandre Stavisky who had “theoretically” committed suicide less than a month before by firing two bullets into his brain. Stavisky had pulled off some of the biggest swindles in a French history riddled with great ones. But the Fascists and monarchists were particularly incensed because Stavisky was a Jew.

  They gave notice that nothing would satisfy them, short of dissolving the “corrupt and Jew-infested National Assembly” and replacing its members with right-thinking pro-Fascists. They had called upon their sympathizers to join them in an attempt to seize the building by force and chase out all of the deputies.

  From the volume of the noise in the distance, I figured that they were attacking the French National Assembly building right now because, for once, both the workers and the mounted police were headed in the same direction: toward the building to keep it from being captured by the Fascists and monarchists.

  Being caught up in the middle of the screaming, surging crowd was like being tossed around by a hurricane battering New Orleans. There was no way to turn back, and I was buoyed past the Deux Magots café, its windows aglow like a Christmas tree in hell. My feet barely touched the road.

  I could keep my Homburg on only by lashing it to my head with its leather straps. The smell of rank sweat, French tobacco, and smoke from burning trash was stifling. Thousands of voices chanted the workers’ anthem, “l’lnternationale.” Picks clanked on cobblestones as rioters prised and mounded them up to hurl at their opponents.

  Coming toward us were thousands roaring out, “La Marseillaise,” which meant the right-wing groups were closing in to cut off the throngs rushing to beat back the attack on the National Assembly building. I felt like a lone swimmer between two giant battleships about to collide in a fogbound sea. I tried to figure out how to avoid being crushed in the collision.

  Just then, I felt a tugging at my coat sleeve, and an imposing, square-jawed American woman of about my age named Jean Fletcher grabbed my arm to keep from stumbling and being crushed by the stampede. I had met Jean at Chez Red Tops a week ago. She was a reporter for a New York magazine. Her job was to provide information on anything happening in Paris of interest to American readers of her fortnightly “Paris Diary.” In the course of a boozy evening, we became pals. I agreed to give her the lowdown on the jazz scene and life in the underbelly of Paris for her diary in exchange for useful tidbits. She kept telling me my face was familiar.

  Jean was really struggling to stay on her feet, but her added weight helped to keep my feet on the road.

  “We’ve got to get the hell out of here, Urby,” she said. “If we get pushed as far as the National Assembly, we’ll probably end up in the Seine.” Jean was a really funny woman, but she wasn’t joking now.

  “Uh-oh,” she whispered. I followed her eyes. Some workers were dragging, with long chains harnessed to their bodies, a giant metal cauldron on a tumbrel with a blazing fire underneath it. It was piled high with rivets glowing yellow-white like giant fireflies. Jean pointed to workers wearing chain metal-covered gloves and carrying metal-mesh slingshots.

  “What the hell’s going on?” I asked. At that moment, the crowd parted, and up ahead we could see a solid line of mounted mobile guards riot police and mounted gendarmes, some with their sabers drawn. We could hear the clanking of metal hammering against metal and the frenzied whinnying of horses.

  Through a break in the wall of mobile guards, I saw a band of men in red, white, and black storm-trooper uniforms, the colors of the swastika flag of Hitler’s bunch in Germany. I craned my neck to see a man holding a giant torch and could make out a red lightning bolt running through a white cross on the front of his red and black uniform jacket.

  “Who are those boys?” I asked Jean.

  “They’re a monarchist, Fascist bunch of nuts called the ‘Oriflamme du Roi,’ ‘the King’s Battle Standard.’”

  Jean said they were some of the nastiest of the French Nazi sympathizers, led by a Count named René d’Uribé-Lebrun. She stopped and looked at me and then fell silent, as if remembering something. Then she went on, “Rumor has it that Swindler Stavisky helped to bankroll his outfit.”

  Something else was bothering Jean. She was so engrossed in whatever it was that she tumbled to the ground. Fortunately, I had bent over to pull her to her feet because white-hot rivets, flung from the metal-mesh slingshots of workers right behind us, went whizzing over where my head would have been.

  The glowing rivets flew over the mobile guards and gendarmes like tracer bullets and landed among the storm troopers of the Oriflamme, who surged forward trying to outflank the guards and get to grips with the workers. The guards charged into them, flailing at them with the flat of their saber blades and slashing at them with pikes and nightsticks.

  Some of the mounted gendarmes had charged ahead too fast and were encircled by scores of Oriflamme, who swung at them with bicycle chains and brass knuckles. A mobile guard went down, blood spewing from a brass-knuckled punch to the mouth. Blood was flowing on the streets of Paris again, and it looked likely that a lot more would be spilled before the night was over.

  I pulled Jean to her feet. “Lady, if we’re going to get out of here, now’s the time.”

  I had spotted some space off to the left where we could escape down the rue Saint Guillaume. I figured if we could get there, we could make our way to the Boulevard Raspail, head for Montparnasse, and hotfoot it away from the battle. That was figuring without Jean, who was a reporter through and through.

  “Let’s keep going a while, Urby. This is grand material.”

  “Material? Look, Jean, those Oriflamme people want to bust some skulls, ours included. Let’s cut out now.” Suddenly I saw something that bowled me over. We were close enough to the storm troopers to see that one o
f them was none other than Buster Thigpen. I wondered what the hell Buster T. was doing, dressed up like Adolf Hitler.

  At that moment, a ringing clanged in the din of noise: it sounded like one of those handbells that rich folks use to summon servants to the dining table. A hush fell over the crowd. A man wearing a white uniform with an ivory walking stick in his left hand and what looked like a silver handbell in his right clanged the bell until his troopers released the mounted gendarmes they had surrounded and had at their mercy.

  The man in white advanced to about ten yards away from us, braving the suddenly quiet throng of workers and students. He was tall, handsome, and light-brown haired, almost blonde. He wore a gold-colored patch over his right eye, and he sported a silver and gold cape. He bowed to the relieved-looking gendarmes, to the crowds of workers, and then he executed a sharp about-face and marched back to his men. The fallen mobile guard was stretchered off by his comrades.

  The man in white snapped another about-face and stood facing the crowd, holding his ivory walking stick like a fencing foil. Buster Thigpen was standing right next to him, looking at him like he was Jesus Christ come down to earth again. I was racking my brain, trying to figure out how I could get close enough to Buster T. to subdue him before he could draw his straight-edge razor to cut me. Jean nudged me.

  “That fellow in the all-white duds is Count d’Uribé-Lebrun, the man I told you about, the leader of the Oriflamme du Roi. Now I know what was bothering me. Did you get a good look at his kisser, Urby?”

  “No, but you see that fellow standing next to him, the one on his cane side? That’s a drummer named Buster Thigpen. A man is paying me big money to reel him in. He’s run off with the man’s daughter. The man is wealthy . . . and American.”

  “What’s the man’s name? Promise I won’t tell a soul.”

  “Barnet Robinson III,” I replied, gambling that I could trust her. Jean filed the name away in her brain. From our first meeting, I had been struck by her amazing memory, and I guessed that she would tell me more down the road.

  “Urby, look at the Count, really look at him, not at your Buster Thigpen. He’s got to be the long lost French father you told me about at Chez Red Tops the first time we met.”

  I did what I was told and got the shock of my life. I looked in the mirror every morning when I shaved, and the face that I’d see reflected in twenty years was the Count’s—like my identical twin but one who’d just aged twice as fast as I had.

  “Jesus Christ!” I cried out, then immediately apologized to Jean for swearing. She laughed.

  “I’ve heard a lot worse. But you worry me, Urby. You’re a great guy, but you’ve got ice floes clogging up your veins. Doesn’t what I told you mean anything to you? The Count’s your old man! That’s what I call a BIG surprise. But your only reaction is to say ‘Jesus Christ’ and then apologize to me for taking the Lord’s name in vain?”

  I felt a burning inside me knowing that there, thirty or so feet away, stood the man who made my mother, a person I never knew, commit suicide from despair.

  The Oriflamme was falling back toward the National Assembly. The mounted gendarmes, as if still under the spell of the Count, followed them slowly, making no effort to charge again. The workers had snapped out of their bewitched state, though, and had started to chant l’Internationale again. They rained flaming rivets down on the retreating Oriflamme.

  Suddenly, the line of gendarmes opened and scores of Oriflamme reserves came charging through, running directly at us and the workers, swinging their bicycle chains, clubs, and brandishing their brass knuckle-covered fists. Buster was leading a pack of them,jabbing away with, of all things, a spear. From it waved the banner of the Oriflamme. Buster was about twenty yards away and closing, and I started sprinting toward him, my leather-covered sap in my hand. I figured that my best move was to knock Buster unconscious, drag him off, hogtie him, and bring my contract with Barnet Robinson to a quick conclusion.

  Jean screamed and I turned to look at her. Blood was streaming down her forehead, and she had fallen against a car, trying to staunch the flow with her silk scarf. I ran back to her, looked toward the rue Saint-Guillaume and saw some space between the workers and the Oriflamme, now wrapped together in hand-to-hand combat.

  “Jean, we’ve got to get you out of here and see to your wound. Can you make it?”

  Jean held my hand and nodded yes.

  “Let’s go then!”

  I ran interference for Jean, dragging her behind me, my sap thudding on Oriflamme and workers alike. Finally, we passed the La Petite Chaise restaurant and kept on going until we reached the corner of Boulevard Raspail and the rue de Sèvres. We ducked into the Hôtel Lutetia, opposite the Bon Marché Department Store.

  Fabrice was on duty at the swanky Hôtel Lutetia bar. He was a comrade from my Foreign Legion days. The American bar hounds swore that he made the best American cocktails in Paris, although he had told me that his English was limited to recognizing the names of cocktails and booze.

  Without waiting for us to order, Fabrice brought us a bottle of calvados and some table napkins and swabbed away at the cut on Jean’s forehead. The wound wasn’t as bad as it looked, and soon Fabrice had fashioned a stylish bandage that he tied around Jean’s head. She looked like a pirate modeling for Chanel.

  Fabrice put away the cheap calvados he had used on Jean’s cut and filled two brandy snifters with fine Domfront calvados, which is distilled from apples and pears. He knew that I preferred it to the more widely known Pays d’Auge applejack.

  We told him how Jean had been wounded in the battle raging in the streets a few blocks away. From his reactions, it was clear that Fabrice’s sympathies lay with the Count and his outfit, not with their left-wing opponents.

  The calvados soon revived Jean’s spirits, and she made faces at herself in the mirror behind the bar.

  “That bandage suits you,” I laughed. “Makes you look like a pirate.”

  Jean suddenly turned serious. “A gold-colored eye patch would look better.”

  “Like the one the Count was wearing?”

  “Yes, like the one your dad was wearing. But you don’t care about all that. You’re Urby the Iceman, right?”

  For the first time in my life, I felt the presence of my mother deep down inside me. She was real, at last. My feelings toward the Count could flare into hatred and murder down the road, and I would again become the killing machine that the Foreign Legion had forged. But I did not want to go there. Not yet. Buster was in my crosshairs now.

  “Right. I don’t feel anything one way or the other. That’s just the way I am. An Iceman.”

  Jean looked at me, a hint of tears in her eyes. “It’s the war that’s changed you, right? That’s killed something inside you?”

  It was time to dissemble again.

  “It’s just me, Jean. The way I play the cards that life deals me. The war was one card. Now the Count is another.”

  Jean looked at me steadily as if she were seeing something in me for the first time. Then she chuckled and punched my arm. “We’ve got some talking to do, when we get through this. You’ve got to run me through that story about you being a foundling again so I can do some checking.”

  “Checking” meant, I reckoned, rummaging through the circus-stunt memory I discovered that she had when I first met her last week.

  “What I want to know is what Buster Thigpen is doing with the Count’s people,” I said, trying to change the subject.

  “Maybe he’s passing himself off as someone else, like pretending to be you.” One look at my face made her realize she had gone way too far. “Sorry,” she said, looking contrite. But she returned to the attack, as I knew she would.

  “Another thing, Urby. I ran the stuff I know about the Count through my head, and I know he was in New Orleans back in the nineties, when you were born. He’s your old man, for sure.” Jean laughed before going on. “And think about it. ‘Urby’ is a weird first name in English. Sounds more
like a take on ‘Uribé’ to me.”

  I felt my anger toward the man who made my mother suicide herself rise a few more notches. Jean was staring at me; she had recalled something else.

  “I remember where I heard about your client Barnet Robinson III. You know Cole Porter?”

  “Yeah. I’ve played his music. We’ve swapped French Foreign Legion tall tales at Chez Red Tops.”

  “Well, old King Cole is a Hoosier, like me, so he can’t put up with a lot of guff. We got plastered at Le Grand Duc one night listening to some great jazz band, and we got to naming Americans we wouldn’t like to run into in Paris. Robinson III was in Cole’s top three. Cole said he had met him when he was planning to invest some money in commodities. They palled around for a while in New York right after the war, but Cole got sick of him pretty quick. He told me that Barnet was a Princeton man through and through, even wore orange and black scarves. For a Yalie like Cole, that’s like waving a red flag at a bull.” Jean shook her head, chuckling as if she could not believe her own story. “Robinson’s so crazy about Princeton that he built a mansion a few miles away, near Hopewell, New Jersey. He and Charles Lindbergh have neighboring estates. In fact, they’re big pals.” She made a face and continued. “I don’t like Lindy at all. He’s a rotten egg. But it’s lousy that somebody kidnapped and murdered baby Lindbergh even though Lindy coughed up the ransom. With Robinson III’s help, I’ve heard.”

  I hadn’t followed the story of the kidnapping very closely, so I simply said, “Mr. Robinson was wearing orange and black suspenders when I met him.”

  Jean laughed and clapped her hands. “That phony crap really gets Cole’s goat.”

  The booze was beginning to take hold of me, and I knew that I had to get some sleep soon, so I prodded Jean along. “I still don’t see why he hates Barnet Robinson. I took the job because a great friend of mine vouched for him.”

  “Well, Cole says he’s a liar, a traitor, and a swindler. That for Barnet III the sun rises and sets on the Teutonic Empire. His mother’s some kind of German princess with two ‘vons’ in her maiden name. She and Robinson III were raring to sign on with old Kaiser Bill during the war, until his old man, Barnet Robinson II, threatened to divorce her and disinherit him. I’ll tell you all about that later, as soon as the brain grinds into gear.” Jean tapped her forehead, took a big swig of calvados, and went on.