Rage in Paris Read online

  “After the war, Cole says III made a mint sneaking banned metals and commodities into Germany by bribing the right people. He pumped a lot of spondulicks into the Nazi party, which boosted Hitler’s rise to power. A grateful Adolf extended a personal invitation to Mama von Robinson von Robinson, Robinson III, and his daughter, Daphne, to visit him in Berlin late in the twenties. Robinson III bragged to Cole that Hitler bowed and scraped to them and gushed that they were perfect Aryan types, whiter than white. Any more questions about why Cole detests him, Urby?”

  “It’s hard to believe that he’s so mad about the Boches. He told me they’d killed his wife and her parents in a torpedo attack on the Lusitania in 1915.”

  Jean smiled wickedly. “Hold on, lad. All will be revealed.”

  I sipped some more of the good Domfront calvados.

  “When Robinson II heard that his wife, Robinson III, and his granddaughter were hobnobbing with Hitler and the Nazis, he blew a gasket,” Jean continued. “He called them on the carpet and swore again that he’d give her the old heave-ho and leave them penniless if they ever set foot in Germany again or even whispered ‘Hitler.’And Robinson II forced him to stop forthwith all business ventures with Germany when Adolf”—she put a two-finger mustache under her nose—‘came to power.’”

  “Robinson II sounds like a good man.”

  “He’s a great one compared to his son,” Jean said. “Robinson III and Ma Robinson are so scared of the old geezer that they’ve clammed up about Adolf and haven’t put a toe into Germany since he blew them off. Here’s to Robinson II, says I.” Jean lifted her glass in a toast and knocked back some more calvados. Fabrice had been hovering close to us, polishing glasses and checking bottles. I would have sworn that he was listening in on our conversation, except that he had told me that he didn’t speak or understand any English, aside from words used for ordering drinks.

  Jean said she was going to telephone a friend of hers. I studied Fabrice. He looked toward the wall where the telephone was hanging before she asked, in French, if she could use the telephone. Things were not what they seemed with Fabrice, I realized.

  When Jean returned to the bar, she told me that she had called a fellow with a car who worked in the Chicago Tribune’s Paris Bureau. I protested that I could have walked her home, after she told me that her apartment was on the rue Jacob, which was in easy walking distance. She waved me off, saying that she was too “tipsy” to stagger as far as that.

  Jean smiled at Fabrice and touched her empty snifter. She held her thumb and forefinger a quarter of an inch apart. It was two in the morning, well past closing time. But Fabrice was a friend, and he knew that I would return the favor someday.

  “Encore un,” Fabrice said with a wink aimed at me. He poured Jean double the calvados she had asked for.

  “One for the road,” she promised, smiling at him. Jean knocked it back in one smooth motion, smacked her lips loudly, and rose, unsteadily, to her feet. She looked in the mirror, straightened her bandage, and handed Fabrice a handful of franc notes. Jean looked into my eyes with a somber gaze and said, “If I were you, Urby, I would check back with your friend about Barnet Robinson III. From what Cole Porter told me, and Cole does not lie, no ‘great friend’ would vouch for him.”

  We heard a horn honking repeatedly.

  “That’s Freddy,” Jean said. She held out her arm for me to steady her on her way through the swinging door and out to the curb. Freddy was waiting for us in a banged-up red Renault, the engine running. He motioned to Jean to hurry up.

  “One last tidbit,” Jean said. “The old brain has saved the best for last. I’ve heard a rumor that Daphne’s not Robinson III’s daughter, but his half-sister. His mother had a late dalliance before the war with no less than Kaiser Bill the Second, got pregnant at thirty-nine, and Kaiser Bill, Barnet III, and his mother arranged for Ma Robinson to have an extended visit in Germany to ‘catch up with her relatives,’ so that she could give birth there without Robinson II being any the wiser.”

  “Come on, Jean, that’s just craziness. I mean, the Kaiser is as ugly as sin. He looks like a constipated junkyard dog. There’s no way that Daphne can be his daughter.”

  She scoffed, tossing her head back and laughing out loud. “You’re really a naïf deep down, Urby. Let me finish the story; it gets crazier. Robinson III’s mom delivers Daphne in a posh secret birth clinic in Bavaria, handpicked by the Kaiser. As soon as the baby is born, the Kaiser packs Ma Robinson, baby Daphne, and a few nannies onto the SS Kaiser Bill II before the Kaiserin twigged what was going on. They steam off to New York and break the world record time for an Atlantic crossing. Meanwhile, the Kaiser and Ma Robinson have given III’s teenaged wife, the only child of her doting parents, a million bucks of hush money to pretend that she’s lying in in a private, German-owned and staffed New York clinic on the Upper East Side, awaiting the birth of our Daphne.”

  “You’re making this up,” I said.

  “Nope. Gospel truth, Urby. Barnet II is off on business, and he doesn’t give a damn about III anymore ’cause the kid’s gone against his advice and, in his junior year at Princeton, married a social climbing tootsie he deflowered on their first date. So, II cold-shoulders them from then on.” Jean was chuckling so hard that she couldn’t finish her story.

  “Jean, your friend’s real nervous.”

  Freddy was drumming his fingers on the steering wheel, either worried about the riots and dying to get to a safe spot or bored with waiting and wanting to join in the action.

  “Let me finish, Urby. After the SS Kaiser Bill II docks in New York, baby Daphne is spirited into the clinic and—hey presto!—out she pops from between the million-dollar thighs of Robinson III’s baby wife, and nobody is the wiser. The Germans staffing the clinic are sworn to secrecy. Neat story, non? The Boches really know how to pull off stuff like that. It all means that III ain’t her daddy; he’s her half-brother. Her grandmother is her mother, and Robinson II isn’t kin to her at all. Anyway, Robinson’s child bride and her parents don’t get to enjoy their filthy lucre from the Kaiser and Ma Robinson. Ma beguiles the morons into leaving Daphne with her to take a luxury liner to England to celebrate hitting their jack-pot—in wartime, no less. On Ma’s advice, they take the Lusitania in May 1915, and the Boches’s U-Boat torpedoes her off the coast of Ireland, on the direct orders of Kaiser Bill. They perish, along with over a thousand passengers. Guess who turns out to be the sole heir of child bride and her parents? Robinson III, that’s who. He gives all the dough to Mama, and she splits it with the Kaiser. Got to love the Boches, non?”

  Just then we heard an ear-popping explosion and machine gun fire. We both looked toward the National Assembly and saw flames arching up into the sky. There was more scattered small arms fire and ratatats from machine guns and the distant hubbub of voices and wailing sirens. Freddy honked and gunned the engine.

  “You better go now, Jean; otherwise, Freddy’s cutting out.”

  Jean smiled and kissed me on the cheek, her eyes gleaming. “Goddamn it! Urby, I love France! We could wake up in the morning with the same old crooks in power, with a king, an emperor, a dictator, or a new French Fourth Republic. Anything can happen in this place! Beats Indiana, hands down. In fact, it beats New York, London, Berlin, you name it.”

  I poured Jean into Freddy’s car, and she waved at me. I saw her talking to him. He kept shaking his head no, but he finally started racing down the Boulevard Raspail, toward the National Assembly. Jean flipped the bird at me, making faces through the rear windshield until she was out of sight. She lived in the opposite direction. She was heading toward her story.

  CHAPTER 4

  Paris, Wednesday, February 7, 1934

  What Jean had told me confirmed my first impression that Robinson was as phony as a three dollar bill. My dislike for him was the clincher. But the man had serious money for sure.

  Was Jean’s story that Daphne was really Robinson’s sister true? And, if it was, did it make any di
fference? The contract was to track her down and return her to Robinson III, and I needed the money. As for Buster Thigpen, he was now part of a band of uniformed Fascist, monarchist nuts trying to tear down the French Third Republic under the leadership of a loony French Count who, Jean Fletcher had convinced me, was my father. Did that make any difference to me? The answer was no. So far.

  In the middle of it all, the most violent combat that I had seen or heard since the war was still raging within earshot, and I might wake up in the morning to a whole new France.

  My mind was overloaded and I was drunk. There was only one person in the world who could help me make sense of things at times like these, and he lived on the rue Caulaincourt in Montmartre. It was half past two in the morning, and Stanley Bontemps would be making his rounds of the jazz clubs in Montmartre and the bars and a whorehouse or two in Pigalle. He would head to Mama Jane’s Eatery off the Place Pigalle at exactly 6:00 a.m. for a real down-South breakfast with all the trimmings.

  I decided to walk to Mama Jane’s real slowly. I needed to let my brain cool down before I could talk sensibly to Stanley. Sporadic police vans were still heading toward the National Assembly and the Place de la Concorde. I wondered how many “forces of order” were left in reserve. I could still see the light from flames in the distance and hear amplified cheers and shouts coming through megaphones. The Eiffel Tower loomed like a giant black skeleton in the darkness.

  The stores and cafés and banks were shuttered. The back streets were deserted as I headed toward the Seine, knowing that I had to save some strength for the climb up to Montmartre to meet up with Stanley at Mama Jane’s.

  When I walked into Mama Jane’s, I was back in the Deep South, with the smell of fried chicken, collard greens, pigs’ feet, corn bread. This morning the place was packed with jazz musicians hung over from their night and hungry for some Deep South chow to help them face another day.

  I was sitting in a booth by myself gnawing on some barbecued chicken wings when the noise stopped and people started whispering, giving reports of Stanley’s movements.

  The door flew open and there stood Stanley, of medium height, thin as a rail, brown-skinned, and swaying on his feet. He was resplendent in a big white Borsalino hat and an all-white suit with a black shirt and tie under his white woolen overcoat. His black and white two-toned shoes glinted in the dim light, and a beautiful copper-colored woman carried Stanley’s saxophone case. Stanley saw me and came over, arms wide open for a French-style hug. The copper beauty looked at the men staring at her with their tongues hanging out, shivered, and vanished. Mama Jane came to our table, carrying plates piled high with bacon, scrambled eggs, sausages, biscuits, pancakes, corn bread, and hominy grits. She placed them in front of Stanley and beamed. He lifted his shaggy eyebrows, took off his jacket, and rolled up his sleeves.

  Stanley wolfed down the piles of food, covering them in gluey cascades of dark Karo syrup and molasses. Mama Jane stacked more plates in front of him and watched approvingly as Stanley splashed syrup over the eats and scoffed them down.

  Mama Jane shook her head, grinning from ear to ear. “That ain’t no man,” she said. “That be a wolf!”

  “I’m sure gone to wolf down these eats,” he said, adding more syrup to the mix.

  When Stanley had finished, I counted up the stacks of empty plates and paid his bill for once, feeling rich with my golden dollars in my pocket. The other musicians in Mama Jane’s took out their instruments and tried to get an impromptu “jam session” going, and Stanley was ready to rip. But I made a sign by raising my eyebrows and, understanding it, he staggered to his feet.

  “Sorry I gots to be leaving you good folk, but me and mon petit Urby here got to talk, so, au revoir ’til later.”

  Stanley had a penthouse on the fourth floor of a luxury apartment built in the Haussmann style of Napoleon III’s time. It was sometimes hard to remember that Stanley came from St. Vincent’s Colored Waifs’ Home and was the son of slaves. But then Louis “Strawberry” Armstrong, over six years younger than me, had been a colored waif, too, and he was even higher up in the world than Stanley was.

  Stanley went to his bar, took out a bottle of rye whiskey, some Bohemian crystal glasses, and a bucket of ice cubes. He set them down on a curved, clear-glass pane on top of what looked like a pair of big, ruby-red crystal lips. We eased ourselves down into white leather couches shaped like saxophones and drank that rye until Stanley had the whole story of what had happened from the time he saw me meet up with Robinson III at the bar at Chez Red Tops.

  It was eight o’clock in the morning, and Stanley had swallowed enough food to feed a platoon and smoked enough hemp to float any normal human into the sky to keep the stars company. But as we worked our way through the rye whiskey, Stanley seemed to sober up. He had a telephone call, muttered some words in French, smiled, and then poured himself some more rye. He had puzzled over every detail of what I had told him and finally said, “Mon petit, show me the money this white man give you.”

  I took the five strange-looking gold-tinged twenty dollar bills out of my pocket and handed them to him. He stood up, walked to a floor lamp, and screwed a jeweler’s loupe into his eye to examine the dough.

  “UMMMUMMMPH, sure be the prettiest cash I ever did see, Urby. And it ain’t be no fake.”

  “Robinson says it’s good as gold. Seems like the government will give you genuine gold, if you hand one of those dollars over to them.”

  Stanley looked at me and then unscrewed the loupe to contemplate the ceiling mural of himself and Louis Armstrong in diaphanous togas, basking in the sunny radiance of heaven, playing jazz to God. Then he started laughing his big wheezing laugh with a lot of cricket sounds in it.

  “Onliest one little problem wit’ dis here dough. That Robinson be playin’ you for a fool!” he said, angrily. “Louis Armstrong told me America gone off of the gold standing last year. It ain’t even legal for y’all to have even one of these here gold certificates now, and you got five of them. Old J. Edgar Hoover catch you and he get his G-men to throw yo’ ass under the jail, especially he find out you colored.”

  Stanley seemed as angry about Robinson III and his funny money as I was.

  “I’m going to go straighten the man out—right now!” I said, enraged. As usual, Stanley cooled down first, using his brain to check out future moves, like a chess player.

  “Let’s ease up, and think this through, Urby. Old Robinson need you doin’ somethin’ for him real fast without gettin’ his hands dirty. I mean fetchin’ his daughter from Buster who be crazy as a coot and dangerous. Robinson don’t want you never to say nothin’ about it to nobody afterward. And you won’t if J. Edgar Hoover got you buried in some Deep South jail ’cause of that gold money.” Stanley gargled down more rye, and then his eyes glittered. I knew that he now had a plan.

  “Still and all, you play your cards right, you can make a lot more money out of this than that man even thinkin’ about payin’ you, even with straight dough. Urby, you got to act like everything be copacetic, and don’t let on you wise to him.” He peeled five green-back twenty dollar bills from a wad in his pocket and told me to take the money and let him put the “gold backs” in his safe until he got advice on what to do with them from a friend in Germany. I would pay him back later after we settled affairs with Robinson III.

  “So, I do the job he’s hired me to do? Find Buster T. and his woman Daphne Robinson and then we demand a bonus to punish the man for cheating me? Is that what you’re talking about, Stanley? Bonus money?” I liked the idea of squeezing more dough out of a cheater.

  Stanley grinned slyly. “I be talkin’ ’bout we hold onto his daughter ’til he pay you righteous money.”

  That really knocked me back on my heels. “You’re talking kidnapping? Holding her for ransom? I don’t . . . ”

  He waved his reefer at me impatiently. “I be talkin’ ’bout you gettin’ yo’ just deserves for solvin’ a hard case with a lots a angles. We not talkin�
�� kidnappin’ here; we talkin’ adduction,” he said, almost angrily.

  I thought about what he meant, and then it all fell into place. “So how do we pull off this fake ‘abduction’?”

  Stanley started laughing again, as if I was saying the word incorrectly. “We goin’ to flush Buster out and get him away from that girl and that Count. Get Buster to bring the girl with him. You know Buster. One thing he gone want to do is show off to the girl what a big shot he be. We gone make them come to us.”

  I had begun to see where Stanley was going. “You going to ask him to music with you at Chez Red Tops?”

  “No, mon petit. I’m goin’ to put on a show at La Belle Princesse and ask Buster to be my drummer. You know that Count be runnin’ a politics party. That phone call I just got was from a friend of mine in the government tellin’ me the Count and his peoples got busted up by the cops real bad last night, so they ain’t takin’ over no France no time soon. You find out where the Count’s politics party be at, and you go and deliver the message that Stanley want Buster to be his drummer at La Belle Princesse on Saturday night. Charity concert, with no 10 percent rule, for thems got killed or hurt in the riot, be they workers or dukes. We rehearses on Friday, and it’s there we grabs the gal and hands her over to her daddy against straight dough.”

  I looked at him skeptically.

  “Urby, I know this goin’ to work,” Stanley insisted. “We gone let Redtop and Baby Langston in on the plan since Baby be workin’ at La Belle. If needs be, we gone get him to help us grab Buster and his Daphne while we squeeze the money out of her old man with lagniappe for his cheatin’ you the first time. Then we turns his gal over to him.” He paused and said, indignant again, as if I had accused him of a crime, “You can’t call that no kidnappin’ for no ransom money.”