There was a big Snowdrop on the door, whacking his nightstick into the palm of one hand as if looking for someone to practise on.
I said, ‘I’m looking for a Miss Emily Rea.’
He glanced down briefly at me, then looked away with, ‘Officers only. Beat it.’
‘I am one. Pilot Officer. RAF.’
‘An’ I’m Betty Grable’s left tit. Beat it.’ He spat. It hit the driver’s side door of the Humber, and ran down the side. That wasn’t a clever thing to do. Les smiled at him. You may already know that I’m leery of men who smile when something bad has happened.
I tried, ‘It’s all right. I’m on government business. I can identify myself.’
He laid the stick horizontally across my chest.
‘Only one government’s business behind these doors, son, an’ that ain’t yours. Now beat it. New York cops don’t ask no four times.’
I shrugged and walked back to the car, leaning down to speak with Les and the Major.
Les said, ‘I heard him. There’s a cafe across the road, a hundred yards back. See you there.’
He was moving away from the kerb before his lips had stopped moving, pulling a left U-turn in the face of the oncoming traffic.
We sat at a table outside the Café Libération in violation of Les’s rules. I could see that he felt uncomfortable: he was moving about in his seat all the time. Had it been the Café des Allemands until the Germans sloped off?
James said, ‘That wasn’t very helpful of him, was it? Although I suppose all sorts of Allied yeomanry tries to get in there. I’ve heard that they have a free bar. What are we going to do next?’
Les said, ‘Wait here, and shoot the bastard?’
‘That won’t help me.’
‘It isn’t supposed to. It’s supposed to piss him off. With dicks like that representing the occupying powers no wonder the French are still shooting at us.’
A waiter with a narrow, twirled moustache came out to the table. I ordered bread, small pieces of smoked fish, and glasses of wine. The wine here was fifteen cents a glass: I suppose that the owner had bigger overheads.
Les said, ‘Shocking.’ Then, ‘ ’allo, ’allo. Where’s our friend off to?’
The Snowdrop outside the ARC Club had been joined by another: a black man who carried two inverted stripes on his arm. Maybe that’s what had pissed the white one off. They crossed the road, and walked that measured policeman’s walk towards us. They carried their nightsticks, and the holster flaps of their big American pistols were unbuttoned.
Les muttered, ‘Wankers.’ He kept his Sten in his lap, and an innocent expression on his face. They weren’t coming for us. The big white cop had probably already forgotten me, the way you forget a fly you’ve waved off your food, which didn’t mean that there wasn’t a problem.
The problem was that Les hadn’t forgotten him. As he reached our seats, and was about to pace past, Les stuck out his desert boot and brought the man down, neatly hooking his legs away from him. He twisted as he fell and his head ended up on the pavement close to Les’s right boot. Les bent over and stuck the muzzle of his Sten in his victim’s ear. The other cop was the first black cop I’d seen. He was quite good. He instinctively dropped into the fighting crouch, his hand to his holster, before he heard the neat clicking noise – Major England cocking the old Webley .38 he kept on a lanyard. He said, ‘Please don’t do anything precipitate, old chap, and please join us.’
England was good with his feet too. He used one to hook out a fourth chair for the man.
The cop on the ground gulped for air. There was a smear of blood on the paving where his chin had met it. Two Parisians, and a mangy old dog, stepped around him as if a military policeman lying on the path wasn’t an unusual occurrence.
The black cop sighed, as if depressed. When he asked, ‘Would you mind telling me what this is all about, before you kill me?’ he had a melodious, cultured voice. James smiled. It was a smile that veiled something else.
‘It would be helpful if you first placed your truncheon on the ground, and buttoned down the flap on your holster. But please move very slowly.’
The cop moved so slowly, and in jerks, that he was taking the piss. He wasn’t scared.
‘That’s nice,’ James told him. ‘We can all relax now. I’m afraid that when we paid a visit, your man there made the mistake of spitting tobacco all over our car. It disturbed my driver.’
‘Is that serious, sir?’
‘It could be. I don’t always have him fully under control.’
‘That’s the problem with Bassett. He’s the man about to clean off your car with his tongue.’
‘Bassett?’
‘Yes sir. PFC Bassett. Passed out bottom of his class at Fort Benning. Now passed out in the gutter by the looks of it.’
‘He could be one of my relations,’ I told him. ‘I’m a Bassett too.’
He gave me a shrewd look.
‘I hopes not. One is more than enough. So what was your problem, Mr Bassett?’
‘I need to meet with a woman named Rea. She asked me to look her up over here.’
OK. So it wasn’t quite true. It was just the best I could think up at the time.
‘Miss Emily?’
‘Yes. That’s right.’
‘Emily’s up at the Front for a couple of days. How come you didn’t know that?’
‘It wasn’t that kind of appointment. I last saw her in the ARC Club in Bedford. She said to call on her if ever I crash-landed in Paris. It’s become important because she’s also a friend of a friend of mine: someone who just happens to be important to someone important, and who may have run away to join the Red Cross somewhere in Europe. Am I explaining this badly?’
The coloured said, ‘I’ve heard better, but I think I’m following you.’
‘I’ve been sent over to find a Miss Grace Baker, and Emily Rea is a person over here she might turn to.’
The Negro stared off into middle distance, and then asked Major England, ‘Can I make a call? There’s a phone back in there. I could make a few checks.’
‘If you left your gunbelt at this table you could,’ James agreed. The man draped his white belt and holster across the back of his chair. He grinned us a set of teeth even whiter. James asked as an afterthought, ‘What’s your name?’
‘Simmer, that is Simms, McKechnie. My father came from Scotland. Who’s the dame you’re looking for again?’
‘Baker. Grace Baker.’ I told him. ‘She was a delivery pilot. English girl. She’s about twenty-eight. Dark-haired and pretty. I went to Scotland once,’ I added. ‘Glasgow. My family had been evacuated up there.’
‘You see any black folks?’
‘Some merchant seamen. That was all.’
*
The telephone in the bar made that god-awful sound that French telephones still do, and the man with the corkscrew moustaches picked it up, and called out to us.
‘It’s for you,’ I told the Negro.
‘I know that. Je parley. I was waiting for the man with the gun to say I could go fer it.’
‘What gun?’ James grinned.
When McKechnie came back to us he said, ‘We have a Lieutenant Kilduff. People call him Binkie; I don’t know why. He asks if you can come back tomorrow after lunch.’
The Negro coughed, looked uncomfortable, and looked away. James said, ‘What’s he do, this Binkie?’
He looked England in the eyes; I’ll give him that. He replied neutrally, ‘Same sort of thing you do, sir, I’d guess. Only in my army we call it liaison.’ Then he asked James, ‘You would be Major James England, and his driver Private Finnigan, sir?’
‘Yes. How did you know that?’
‘We got a signal that you were out. There were photographs with it: I should have paid more attention to them. Lieutenant Kilduff thinks that it’s very amusing, us sitting here and waiting for you to give us permission to go.’
James positively beamed. I didn’t ever like him in that mood.
‘Have another drink.’
He said that to include everyone. That included Sweeny Todd and his demon moustaches, and even PFC Bassett sitting on the kerb cleaning the car door. I remember that it was several glasses later that McKechnie told us that he was a medical student before he was called up – but the Army had made him a policeman. The Army had no prejudice against black doctors. They had no black doctors either, because they thought that their smashed-up white soldiers might not like that. Wrong again. I noticed that the pads of his hands were as pink as mine. My namesake finished with the car door. The only time he took his eyes off Les was when he waved away a glass I offered him. There was a smear of dirt on one cheek, and he dabbed at the blood on his chin with a grubby khaki handkerchief.