20 “i wish i could shimmy like my sister kate”

We moved past all the terrasse tables outside the Closerie des Lilas, full of cackling bohemians and ogling tourists, to a little red booth inside. The café chatter reminded me of my final telephone conversation with Fox last year. He had insinuated that Hausmann had Ray Chevallier in his sights, something about cabaret and “Monsieur Chevallier’s weakness for the dark and exotic.” Fox was too infuriating; I had put it out of my mind. I wish that I had understood his words not as a tease, but as a warning.

The air in the café was stuffy with exhaled breath and the booth was slightly sticky. All I wanted to do was smoke in the low light, but Maisie insisted we order chips and beer. She would have kicked off her shoes too if we hadn’t been in public. She licked the beer foam from her lips.

“Katie King, how can cold beer be so warming?”

“Tell me about Michel, Maisie.”

“This is a story.” Maisie stretched her legs. “At the hospital, Michel went with Ray, blubbering and wailing, his apology composed of excuses. He hated Hausmann too, but he was scared of him and couldn’t take the fear any longer. Over thin coffee in a disgusting café behind the hospital, he told us everything.

“The story starts in the war. In the hell that was Verdun, Ray went a bit mad. ‘Crazy Ray,’ they called him. Recklessly brave and couldn’t stop talking. After one raid he came back with half a dozen POWs and babbled at them all the way back to their lines. He told them all sorts of confidential details including, Ray says, where they kept their stores of munitions. The next day Ray woke up in a puddle, only to find out that one of the prisoners had escaped and the munitions dump had been bombed, killing two hundred men. This man, Michel, was the escaped prisoner.”

“He’s German?”

“He’s from Alsace; French father, German mother. He joined the German Army in 1914 then defected to the French Army in 1917. Anyway, after Michel escaped, he ran straight to his superiors across the German lines and repeated everything that Ray had babbled. The Germans wrote everything down, as Germans are wont to do, including Ray’s name. Signed, stamped, the whole lot.

“I found Ray asleep at the dining table with a little note clutched in his hand. I recognized the name Hausmann and I made Ray tell me everything. The note was delivered by Michel and said that Hausmann had these documents.”

“What did Hausmann want?”

“Money. What else? Loads of money, all the money from Ray’s family estate in Senegal. If Ray didn’t cooperate, Hausmann would use the evidence to say that Ray was a traitor, a double agent for the Germans, that he had murdered his fellow soldiers. All nonsense, of course, but when it comes to one’s war service, well, mud sticks.”

“Especially trench mud. How much have you paid so far?”

“Nothing. Between us, we’ve done a magnificent job of stalling. We said the cocoa estate was on the verge of bankruptcy. Then we said it all belonged to Ray’s elder brother, that we had to consult lawyers, that French lawyers took forever, et cetera et cetera. Our final promise was that we were getting the money, we just needed to offload a particular shipment of cocoa. That was in March.”

“And Michel?”

“Hausmann was blackmailing Michel as well. Michel’s French now, he has a French wife, a French war service record, and a job in a French hospital, but the only place he truly lives is in fear. Michel doesn’t want anyone to know he fought for the Germans, that he even spied for the Germans! When he saw Ray, he assumed Ray would recognize him. He panicked and, over coffee, unraveled. He doesn’t want to be a courier, he just wants to live a quiet life with his seamstress wife, in the country somewhere, with his own little vegetable garden… sweet, I suppose.”

“Were you at the meeting? Weren’t you in hospital?”

“I wasn’t going to stay in that building one moment longer. I went to that café, I almost started bleeding again and was laid up in bed for weeks. I got so bored that Ray bought a radio, so I could lie on the couch and listen to the news.

“Anyway, once Michel had confessed, then we had something to work with. We took him out to a little plot in the country, and after that Michel agreed to steal the evidence for us, to be paid exactly the cost of that little plot. It was expensive but cost us much less than Hausmann would have. Hausmann tried to keep blackmailing us, he even contacted Ray himself as, of course, he couldn’t find his go-between. He turned up at our house and left in a lather when we told him we’d burnt the documents.”

“Had you burnt them?”

“Abso-bloody-lutely. But knowing the German Army, there’ll be copies.”

This didn’t sound at all like the type of blackmail Fox had mentioned.

“So, the blackmail had nothing to do with you? Or Ray’s past in Senegal?”

“No. Why would it?”

I shrugged, hoping the smoke in the café would mask my confusion.

“Hausmann doesn’t like me, of course,” she said. “He called me ‘colored’ and ‘coolie’ before Ray threw him out of our apartment. But he didn’t threaten me.”

She took my packet of cigarettes and pushed the plate of chips toward me.

“Katie King, what do you know?”

I didn’t want to tell her, but between her frown and my hunger, I couldn’t resist. I took three chips, licking the salt from my lips as I contemplated how to say what I barely knew.

“Fox mentioned something last year. He knew that Hausmann was going to target Ray. I thought… well, I thought Fox was just winding me up. Apparently not.”

“You’re working for Fox again?”

“I work for him whether I like it or not. It feels like blackmail, not employment.”

“That’s because it is blackmail.”

I lit up to avoid looking at her. The floor was covered in the burns of a thousand cigarettes.

“Katie, it always was. It’s just that his threats used to be undeniable: do this or we lose the war.”

“It’s not the war now. I don’t want to involve you.”

“Hausmann has been blackmailing us. I’m involved regardless.”

Maisie watched me as I took a big slug of my beer and ordered another, cigarette dangling from my lip, a spot of beer on my bright blue dress. Her look was full of pity and love and I could hardly bear it, I had to turn away. The café’s warmth was rent by the sawtooth wind through the ever-opening door. She was still watching me as I stubbed out my cigarette.

“You can’t hide from me, Katie King.”

I hugged her then, maybe even cried a little, let her laugh at me and shush me and put more chips in my mouth.

“As I eat, read this.” I reached into my bag and handed her the note.

“What is it?”

“My mission.”

She scanned the spidery handwriting.

“Fox is still being cryptic, I see.”

“He can’t help himself.”

“Don’t make excuses for him. Do you carry this everywhere?”

“I have the last few days. Once I work it out, I’ll check with Fox and then get rid of it.”

She read the note a few times, frowning, her lips moving slightly as she went over the different ideas. I ate mechanically. I was thinking of Hausmann and when I saw him last, cursing me in the Citroën factory, after Tom and I had stopped him from stealing a Picasso painting. Hausmann was going to sell the painting to raise money for his Brownshirt cause, but in the end all he took with him was the bullet I had put in his shoulder.

She took a deep breath. “Houseboys,” she said, “that’s Hausmann.”

“Your recent history with him is my final bit of proof. The ‘religion in a brown shirt’ are the Brownshirts from Germany, the Freikorps. The ‘black-clad men who tempt and slay’ are the Italian Fascists, led by a man called Benito Mussolini.”

“And the leader? The princes?”

“English princes. As for the leader… I don’t think anyone knows. Yet.”

“With those people, the rest makes sense. You need to find the princes. Hausmann is still recruiting for his cause, and we know he wants important men or he wouldn’t have contacted Ray with his diplomatic links. But this leader… he’s not only a leader of princes. From these clues, he’s also a leader of ‘people starved and shunned from the shelled fields.’ To me that says ordinary soldiers, ordinary men and women, especially those who have been ‘shunned’ from their fields… Ray talks a lot about the violence in the east, the disintegrating Austro-Hungarian empire, the new nations that France now needs to have individual treaties with, immigration deals and extradition treaties and all sorts.”

“The Ottoman Empire has undergone the same thing. And the German.”

“And what do the Italians call this, what did Ray say—the ‘mutilated victory,’ that’s it. That despite being one of the victors, they have no spoils, and have even lost territory. That would support your idea that this refers to Muscle-man’s Blackshirts.”

“Mussolini. Benito.”

“Right, Benny the Muscle. He’s calling to people who have lost everything—which, strangely, is both princes and paupers.”

“Learning French has made you political.”

“Oh no, Katie, I was always political. I just didn’t used to care so much about the tantrums of powerful men. Now, as a diplomat’s wife, I have to.”

“Well, we always had to sponge their backs and empty their bedpans.”

“Ha! We still do, only they call it taxes.”

“I’ve missed you so much, Maisie.”

“Katie, you have no idea.” She clinked her beer glass with mine. The morning had turned into afternoon, the darkening sky outside calling forth spirits from the bar.

“But here, Katie, this line, ‘make an army whom liberticide and realpolitik make a primed dud to all who wield.’ Fox seems to imply that these ordinary people are a ‘primed dud,’ ready to explode but nothing will happen… or does ‘dud’ mean not failure but some unexpected consequence, like a grenade exploding in your hand? Who is in danger here?”

“I think that’s a warning, where the mission turns away from 1922 and back to the time when it was written. Shelley wrote the original poem, ‘England in 1819,’ four years after the end of the Napoleonic wars. England’s army slaughtered its own people when they conducted a peaceful protest, in a massacre nicknamed Peterloo. England was about to become the most powerful empire of last century. The danger is to ordinary people who get in the way of the powerful as they create an empire.”

“Not the princes you need to save.”

“Not in the original poem. Princes are the ‘dregs of their dull race,’ according to Shelley.”

“Who was a radical lord.”

“And that’s the main link—politically radical aristocrats. All much too clever. However, what I need to do is to find the princes before the Brownshirts or the Blackshirts get them into trouble.”

“I still think there’s more…”

“There’s always more, with Fox.” But right now I didn’t want to delve into how much more Fox meant. “Have you heard anything from Ray about Benny the Muscle? Or the Freikorps? Any gossip at work about a recruitment drive, event, demonstration, a big something or other?”

“Not that I can remember, but I will ask.”

“Be subtle.”

“Fuck subtle. I don’t need that, Katie. Not with Ray and not about Hausmann. Ray’s a patriot, to his marrow, and any political schemer who endangers France’s borders, or people or forests or oceans, he opposes.”

“But didn’t he grow up in Senegal? How can he have such a commitment to a country he only knew as an adult?”

“Why did so many Australians want to die for the British Empire? I don’t know, Katie. He went to boarding school here and only returned to Senegal over the summer holidays… but I think it was the war. Actually, I’m certain it was the war, and his mother’s death just before it, and one of his brothers’ death in Verdun, and his father bleeding the cocoa company dry, its workers destitute, before he died in the arms of his German lover. It’s something to do with all of that.”

She gave a perfectly Gallic shrug, complete with pout, her sleeves slipping up her arms as she lit a cigarette. She knew how she looked too, as she raised her eyebrow, inviting me to appreciate her performance. She checked her watch and jumped up.

“I have a shift starting in half an hour!”

“Catch a cab.”

“I’ll have to! And borrow a uniform.” She shrugged on her coat. “I haven’t run from beer to bedpans since Armistice. But Katie, we haven’t discussed Fox—and Tom, have you seen him?—and all the important things!”

“I’m staying in Paris, Maisie.”

“For good?”

“We have time.”