Rage in Paris Page 5

  I knew that Redtop was going to be let in on the plan because she was Stanley’s closest friend in Paris besides me. He didn’t want any heat to fall on Chez Red Tops in case anything went wrong with his “charity concert” scheme. But I also knew that he didn’t like or trust the owner of La Belle Princesse, Rawlston “Hambone” Gaylord. By choosing his nightclub as the venue for the concert, Stanley could deflect the heat onto Hambone in case everything blew up in our faces.

  I reckoned that he would keep Baby Langston in a limited role because he worked for his Uncle Hambone as the barman and general factotum of La Belle Princesse, and Stanley needed an inside man to help him make whatever arrangements he was cooking up to snatch Daphne and Buster. Knowing Stanley, I figured that he trusted Baby Langston enough to do what he told him to do and shut up because Baby’s head lived in a world far removed from his Uncle Hambone’s. He kept body and soul together by working for his uncle at La Belle Princesse, while he scribbled away in his garret, dreaming of becoming the colored Walt Whitman, as Langston Hughes had proclaimed.

  I didn’t know a thing about poetry, but I reckoned that if a man wrote it, he must have caught the bug from a woman who was important to him, like his mother. But Stanley had told me that Baby’s mother, his Uncle Hambone’s baby sister, Magnolia Swilley, was one of the deadliest gangsters in Harlem, male or female. The story on her was that money, power, and sex were what made Magnolia tick, not poetry.

  CHAPTER 5

  I had read in Léon Blum’s Socialists’ newspaper Le Populaire that the attempted Fascist takeover of the National Assembly had ended in a shambles. After hours of skirmishes lasting until the morning, the riot police had forced the Fascists and monarchists off the Concorde bridge and cleared the Place de la Concorde. That put an end to the coup d’état: the Third Republic was alive and kicking until further notice.

  As I hurried through the debris littering the rue Royale, I passed some men in morning dress staggering into Maxim’s, sporting bloody bandages like they were ribbons on Croix de Guerre medals. I wondered how many men and horses had drowned in the Seine last night. I figured that Count d’Uribé-Lebrun wasn’t among the victims.

  I turned left in front of the Madeleine church onto Faubourg Saint-Honoré and then made a right onto the rue Boissy d’Anglas. I checked the address that Redtop had found for me in the telephone directory and stopped in front of an elegant building. On a gilded nameplate were engraved the words, “Le Comte Import-Export, Premier étage gauche.”

  I had arrived at the headquarters of the Oriflamme du Roi. I pulled on a metal contraption on the door, saw the door click open, and I walked into the dimly lit hallway. Immediately, three burly men wearing the storm trooper uniforms and Oriflamme du Roi armbands seized me and marched me up the staircase at double-quick time.

  They pushed me into a brightly lit room, and two of them pinned my arms behind my back. They looked at me and their jaws dropped. The third man, who seemed to be their leader, recovered fastest, took one look at me, and then frisked me, his hands lingering on my shoulders, arms, and calves, sizing me up.

  He marched me to an oak door, which he hammered on. I heard a handbell ring, and then he ushered me into a large office. The man who was holding my arm and I had seen each other in New Orleans half a lifetime ago, and neither of us had forgotten the time or the place. He was the foreigner who’d been hanging out with the police and the Ku Klux Klan loyalists when they burned the St. Vincent’s Colored Waifs’ Home to the ground on July 5, 1913.

  The Count, looking like my identical twin, except for his age and the gold-colored silk eye patch, sat at an ornate desk on which were planted three gold-colored box files, each one stamped with a crest that I recognized immediately. He was skimming through sheets of paper yellowed with age. He didn’t look up. Oil paintings of his ancestors covered the walls.

  An elaborate gold writing set, the gleaming silver handbell, and two photographs in gold and silver frames were the only other items on the desk. I recognized the handbell, which bore the same crest as the one on the box files: a crowned two-headed black eagle traversed by three arrows, perched on a golden scroll with the words “Jamais ne serai vaincu” written on it. I had its identical twin in a safe in my office.

  I was shaking with anger while the Count’s goon and I stood at attention, waiting for the master to acknowledge us. He kept on reading his papers. Finally, the Count said, “Pierre, seat our guest, please, then leave us. Lock the door after you.”

  I was glad to be able to place the name “Pierre” on the face I’d seen in my dreams and nightmares for more than twenty years. Pierre instantly pulled up a leather armchair. He pushed me down into the chair gently, stood behind me for a second, then clicked his jackboot heels. The next sound that I heard was the turning of the lock. The Count continued working.

  I glanced at the photographs. The first one, in the gold frame, was a color portrait of the Count and a beaming Adolf Hitler standing in front of a huge red flag bearing a black swastika on a round white field. The silver-framed black and white photograph was of the Count in a Brigadier General’s uniform with a somber-looking Marshal Pétain pinning the Croix de Guerre on his chest.

  All of a sudden, the Count looked up. I glanced at the golden eye patch that sheathed his right eye, but it was the cold blue left eye that was drilling into me. He contemplated me in silence for what seemed like minutes and then sighed. Finally, he tendered me a gold cigarette box.

  “Virginia tobacco?” he asked.

  I nodded and took one of the cigarettes. I noticed that the cigarette box bore the same crest as the one on our handbells.

  “Calvados?” he asked out of the blue. That worried me a lot but not as much as his next question. “Domfront calvados, of course?”

  I stared at him for a moment and then he smiled.

  “That is where the Château d’Uribé-Lebrun has sat for six hundred years. In the Domfront region in Normandy, near Bagnolles-de-l’Orne. You know the region?”

  “I know the calvados. It’s my favorite. How did you know?”

  The Count smiled but did not answer my question. He spoke excellent English, with a New Orleans lilt. He smiled again and pointed to a rosewood bar against the wall to my right.

  “Help yourself. You probably know the best one to choose, and bring me the same, if you please,” he said.

  I helped myself to the best one that I could find among the many excellent bottles of Domfront calvados in his collection. I poured us both generous snifters. With a sudden chill, I realized there could be only one explanation for his knowing my tastes in calvados: he must have me under observation. I thought instantly of Fabrice at the Hotel Lutetia because I had been there last night and caught him in a lie about his inability to understand English. But the Count could have found out about me from scores of other people.

  The Count sniffed at his glass, and a smile creased his face. “Tchin! Tchin!” he said, lifting his glass without clinking it against mine. “This is my favorite, too.” Then he inquired, “To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit? Mr . . . .?”

  “Brown. Urby Brown.”

  The Count repeated my name to himself, his expression becoming distant again.

  “A friend of mine, a great musician, has discovered that you have a fine musician of his acquaintance in your employ,” I said, carefully.

  The Count sipped at his calvados, his face giving nothing away. Then he said, “No doubt you are referring to Mr. Bartholomew Lincoln Thigpen Junior?”

  Bartholomew Lincoln Thigpen Junior? I said to myself, chuckling inwardly. I knew that I had some blackmail potential for bringing Buster Thigpen into line if I threatened to tell people his real moniker. I kept my composure and answered, “Yes, he’s a fine musician, and Mr. Stanley Bontemps would be very much obliged to you if Mr. Bartholomew Lincoln Thigpen Junior could be his drummer in a charity concert he’s organizing this coming Saturday night, 10 February, at nine. A number of other great musici
ans living in the American expatriate musical community in Paris will be participating.”

  The Count sipped the calvados and then swiveled in his chair, turning his back to me. Then he suddenly swiveled back to confront me head on, his face reddening. “Charity begins at home, non? So, what charity would Mr. Bontemps want Bartholomew for?”

  “Mr. Bontemps loves France and wants to help those who’ve been harmed in the recent . . . disturbances, regardless of their political affiliation.” It was a mouthful, but I’d been rehearsing those lines for hours. The smile on the Count’s face made me think that my hard work was paying off.

  “You mean, people like my Oriflamme, two of whom were shot dead by French soldiers on the Place de la Concorde? They are going to be helped by this charity concert?” he asked.

  “If not them, their loved ones. That’s the message that Mr. Stanley Bontemps wishes that I convey to you.”

  “My followers get all the money they need from me. We do not need charity from a Jewish-Negro musical conspiracy called jazz to help us.” He said this calmly, but his face was flushed.

  “But other people need that help, and it would be seen as a measure of your generosity if you let Bus . . . Bartholomew, a great jazz drummer, display his talents beside one of the greatest jazzmen in the world, Mr. Stanley Bontemps.”

  “I will agree then, on one condition,” he said. “That you play the clarinet during the charity concert.”

  At my look of complete surprise, he grinned from ear to ear.

  “I was once a resident of New Orleans. I liked much about it at that time in my life: the jazz, the beautiful women, especially the women of color.”

  If he noticed my rage, he concealed it very well.

  “I have been told that you were once called the ‘Mozart of the Creole Clarinet,’” he said, smiling. “A very apt nickname, from what I’ve ascertained.” He smirked and continued. “New Orleans was alluring, but I returned to France to answer the call of my ancestors to serve in her armies.” He pointed to the portraits of men in breastplates and armor and powdered wigs on the walls. Among the serried ranks of military portraits, I noticed a recent oil painting of the Count decked out in a French general’s uniform from the Great War, with rows of medals on his chest.

  He went on, “I have been confirmed in the rightness of my decision to return to France by my great friend Maréchal Pétain. And since my contacts with Il Duce and..—he picked up the photo of himself with Hitler—“my dialogues with mon cher Adolphe, I have seen the errors of my youthful ways. All of the sins that I committed in New Orleans are dead and gone.” His cold blue eye fixed on me before he added, “Or soon will be.”

  We stared at each other for a while, and then I placed my empty glass on the table.

  “Thank you for your cooperation and your hospitality. Mr. Bontemps would be more than grateful if Bartholomew could be present for a brief rehearsal on Friday, say, at six in the evening. It will acquaint him with the program—”

  “I have one further condition,” he interrupted, “and then all is agreed. I wish to be invited to the charity concert on Saturday, with a few of my men to provide protection in case some unsuitable elements choose to create disturbances. Say, five of my men?”

  “I’m sure that Mr. Bontemps will find that arrangement satisfactory,” I answered. It would be all the more satisfactory, I thought, since we planned to abscond with Buster and Daphne at the Friday rehearsal, and there would not be a charity concert on Saturday at all, I reckoned.

  “Please take good care of Bartholomew; he is very dear to me, and his face always brings back pleasant memories of a very good friend from my young days. He is like a son to me, barring the matter of his racial origins, of course.”

  “We will take care of him, I assure you.”

  He looked at me approvingly for the first time.

  “You yourself are of a higher order than Bartholomew, one can see that. You are as white-skinned as myself. People have even detected a resemblance between us.” His widening smile was goading me deeper into rage. I knew that it was time to leave before I committed mayhem on the man, who seemed to know a whole lot about me, to my surprise.

  “You honor me, sir. Thank you, again, for your cooperation—and for the wonderful calvados from your Domfront region.”

  We stood to shake hands. We were the same height, the same build, even identical in skin color if he spent a little more time in the sun. I wondered if he knew that I had the same handbell as his, stashed away in my office safe. Father Gohegan had passed it to me seconds before he burned to death in the fire at St. Vincent’s Colored Waifs’ Home in New Orleans over twenty years ago now. A fire that the Count’s main goon, Pierre, who had ushered me into his office a few minutes ago, had probably started or helped to start.

  “Urby Brown,” he said. “An interesting name. You are, of course, aware that ‘Brown’ translates into French as ‘Lebrun’?”

  “Yes,” I said to my older replica.

  “An interesting coincidence, is it not, if one believes in coincidences? I even used the name Brown sometimes in New Orleans, to make it easier for the natives of that city to understand it.”

  Before I could answer, he picked up the handbell. “Have you ever seen one like this before?”

  “No,” I lied. He looked quizzical and then smiled.

  “Maybe yes, maybe no?” he asked. He rang it twice. “I think yes,” he said with finality.

  Pierre unlocked the door and came rushing into the office. He led me out and through the front door of the building and onto the rue Boissy d’Anglas. He gave me a wolfish smile and said, in English, “See you again soon, Mr. Urby Brown. Very soon.” When he drew his right index finger across his throat to intimidate me, I reached out, grabbed his right hand, and yanked him off balance by pulling him toward me. Then I head-butted him with the crown of my Homburg hat. In fact, it was a metal helmet, covered in felt and shaped to look like a Homburg. It was a birthday present from Stanley. I knew that it was going to hurt Pierre real bad, but it was time to send him a message that he could understand.

  “First blood always goes to the best hunter,” I whispered in his ear as he lay writhing on the sidewalk, his face covered in blood. He was too stunned and in pain to go for his gun.

  Hitting Pierre made me feel that I had finally paid a first installment toward avenging Father Gohegan and the colored waifs. But he was just the organ grinder’s monkey, and I was aware that the Count must have ordered him to destroy my world.

  CHAPTER 6

  As I hurried away from the Count’s headquarters, my run-in with Pierre brought back memories of July 5, 1913:

  Hannah Korngold waits on the sidewalk outside the St. Vincent’s Colored Waifs’ Home in New Orleans. The sun beats down on her mercilessly. The word has just come down: the city is closing the Waifs’ Home due to budget cuts. In other words, the Klan had decided to close the school, although officially the Klan no longer existed.

  Hannah waves to me. Surprised, I walk away from her. She calls out, “Can we talk?”

  I notice two white men standing across the street, leaning on a black Ford, pretending not to look my way.

  Hannah follows me. I don’t break my stride. I keep walking as if I don’t know her. All the while, I watch the two men out of the corner of my eye. One of them I recognize as a plainclothes policeman from the NOPD. Louis “Strawberry” Armstrong has pointed him out to me before. The other man—I now know—is Pierre. He sports a gray Borsalino hat and, despite the heat, wears a gray linen suit with matching spats over his black patent leather shoes.

  The policeman throws his cigarette butt onto the sidewalk and stamps on it, looking disgusted. I duck through some back streets, trying to shake off Hannah and make sure the two men aren’t following me. I step inside a doorway and see the black Ford cruise by at the end of the street. Relieved that I’m alone, I walk on, whistling one of Stanley Bontemps’s riffs. Someone taps me on the shoulder, and I turn around
to see Hannah blushing angrily.

  “I’ll ask once more. Can we talk?”

  I make sure that no one is watching, take off my “Colored Waifs’ Home” shirt. I tuck it under my arm, leaving me in a dingy undershirt.

  “Let’s walk,” I reply. We keep talking during our long ramble.

  We walk through the French Quarter under balconies draped with Confederate bunting, past the throngs, to the Mississippi River. We sit down on the grassy bank to watch the riverboats pass by.

  “Be nice to be sailing far away, ” Hannah says with a sigh.

  “Real far, ” I agree.

  “Far as New York?”

  I don’t answer.

  “You going there?” Hannah repeats.

  “Yes’m.”

  Hannah looks at me, irritated.

  “People say it’s the greatest place for a musician.”

  “Guess they ain’t been to N’awlins, Miss Hannah.”

  “You hate my father for letting you go? Someone burned a cross on our lawn last night.”

  I feel bad about that but say, “That be what the Klan do in N’awlins. They s’posed to be shut down but they still got the votes and the guns. They done nailed the Waifs’ Home shut, too.” I pause and say, “Why should I hate your father? He been good to me. He give me a clarinet for my birthday yesterday, which gone get me out this place. Nobody done gifted me nothin’ before.”

  Hannah looks nervous and then asks, “Do you hate me?”

  Her question really surprises me. “Why? Ma’am, you somethin’ else.”

  “What else?”

  “I’m still workin’ on that, ma’am”, I say, and I see a soft look in her eyes.

  “I got some questions for you,” she says. “Like, why don’t you ever look me straight in the eye when we talk? How come you keep calling me ‘ma’am’ and saying ‘yes’m’ when we talk?”