CHAPTER 15

Wham Bebop Boom Bam

“I don’t get it,” I muttered, looking around. “Where is everybody?”

Jacques waved at us. He was the assistant manager at Bricktop’s.

“Ca va?” he asked.

“Oui, I’m fine, Jacques. How come the place is so empty tonight?”

“It’s Tuesday,” he explained.

“Yeah, so what?”

“Everyone goes to Parker’s on Tuesday. Even Monsieur Melon. Tuesday is new talent night over there. Monsieur Melon never misses new talent night at Parker’s. He finds the best young musicians there and asks them to perform here. Just like you and Andre.”

“You need help, Nan. You’ve lost your mind, do you know that?”

Andre was speaking through a mouthful of the chestnut crepe that he had grabbed on the run from Bricktop’s to the métro.

Parker’s was back in the 5th, not ten minutes away from our place on the rue Christine.

“I can’t explain it yet,” I kept telling Andre. Not all of it. Because a couple of pieces were still missing. And without those pieces, the rest was—well, inexplicable. The important thing was to get to Parker’s right away, to act now, before something irreversible happened.

When we strode through the double doors of the impeccably smoky, low-lit club, I may have looked sure of myself. I wasn’t. In truth, I didn’t know what was going to happen—or even if. Maybe Andre was right and I was loco, tripping again. But what if the evil if’s stirring around up there in my brain were all true? I had to do something. This was my last chance.

A girl singer in Carmen McRae capri pants and button-down white shirt was just finishing the last chorus of “The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.”

The emcee announced intermission and a curtain of conversational babble descended, almost covering the taped music (Wayne Shorter, live, 1964) they had begun to pipe in. The voguing, profiling, and table-hopping started then. Folks moving around, floating through the place like minnows. Black-clad Euros, white Yanks with black ladies, black Yanks with blondies, and a healthy measure of prosperous Japanese in drop-dead designer clothes. Not a bad-looking crowd.

With the flummoxed Andre trailing behind me, still regarding me as if he thought I needed electroshock therapy, I made my way across the packed room to the brass-railed bar. I began to scan the crowd. If there had been any doubt before, now I knew Andre was freaked out, off his game, because I spotted the celebrated American jazz musician at a table near the stage before he did.

“What are you looking at, Nan?”

“Not ‘at.’ ‘For.’”

“Okay. What are you looking for?”

“I’m not sure. Let’s get a drink.”

We ordered and I continued to look around.

“Comfortable now?” Andre was patronizing me, attempting to push me down on a barstool, a controlling hand in the small of my back.

I didn’t bother to answer. I just nodded, craning my neck to take in every corner of the room.

“Boy oh boy, I hope Satchmo answers my letter,” Andre said, testing me to see whether I was paying any attention to him.

I laughed and took his hand and kissed it quickly, then returned it to him.

“Who’s this on the tape now,” I asked, “doing ‘High Fly’?”

“Jaki Byard. Like you don’t know.”

Andre downed a good half of his wine along with a fistful of cashews. “I never liked that guy, you know?” he said in a confessional tone, nodding discreetly toward the famous musician. “I always felt bad about it, not liking him, I mean. But I just don’t. He’s a smug little prick.”

“Right,” I said. “I’ll tell you later what David Murray said about him.”

Well, this was good. Andre was getting distracted from what he considered my mental breakdown. He was also getting a little drunk. Understandable, since he hadn’t eaten in days. I was fighting a hunger headache of my own. He polished off the nuts and then dug in on the basket of pretzels.

“There’s that couple,” Andre said, pointing to an elderly man and woman not far from us. “You know, they always give us a hundred francs at Bricktop’s.”

“Yes, they’re nice people,” I agreed, not looking.

“I wonder if I should try to interview them sometime. They’re not black, but they are Americans who’ve been over here for something like forty years. Maybe they could fill in a few blanks for me. Maybe they knew some people I can’t quite nail in that chapter on the fifties.”

“Good idea,” I said, still searching the room. I signaled the bartender for refills.

“I guess Jacques didn’t lie about all the Bricktop people being here. Those actors who always come in late are here, too,” Andre noted. One of the women in the troupe was waving at us—well, at Andre. I knew what that was about. In your dreams, bitch.

“I bet I know what all this is about, Nan,” he said a few minutes later. He was grinning like a Cheshire.

“What?” I said.

“This is some kind of complicated trick you’re pulling. A surprise. For me. Somebody is about to walk in here—somebody who’s so famous and so great that it’s going to knock me off this chair. And you knew all along they were coming. The scene with Jacques was just part of the plan. You knew everybody’d be over here tonight because whoever’s coming is going to be here tonight. I’m the only one out of the loop. Isn’t that it? Some eminence is just about to walk in, and I’m going to be totally knocked out. Right?”

I looked at him. Be careful what you wish for, is what I was thinking. “Sweetie,” I said, “I wish that was true.”

“Then what the fuck is it, Nan? You expecting somebody from your wild past?”

“Just be patient a little longer,” I begged. “Hang in there. I almost have it figured out, Andre. Have some more wine.”

“No problem if you’re looking for Morris,” he said. “There he is—over there.”

Yes. On the far side of the room Melon was holding court, as usual, the center of attention in his fraying London-tailored jacket. He and four other people were hunched around a little pin dot of a table and the old man was serving up some obviously tasty star-filled gossip. And, like always, the drinks were flowing nonstop. Lots of raucous laughter. Looked like a good time was being had by all.

Andre knocked off the guessing game for a while and began to weave this elaborate plan for making us and a number of his street music buddies famous. Something about an album featuring a miscellany of street performers playing all kinds of music. What was it he wanted to call it—Street Smart, Street of Dreams—something. Not a bad idea, I guess, unless somebody had already thought of it. I nodded my “that’s nice, dear” approval.

“See, this wouldn’t be so bad if I really was a legal resident.”

“What wouldn’t be so bad?” I asked.

“Your insanity. They’ve got socialized medicine here, you know. We could have a shotgun wedding and I could check you directly into the clinic. Ah, Jesus, Nan, I’ve had it. You tell me what’s going on, and tell me right now.”

“Okay,” I said, “I’m going to try to. But keep looking around while I’m talking.”

“Look around for what, girl?”

At that very moment, my eye had fallen on a female server. Not a young person like all the others. And not wearing the ubiquitous white apron. She was walking briskly across the length of the club, tray in hand.

“The waitress—” I said slowly. I broke off there.

“What waitress?”

I grabbed his head and turned it toward the woman.

“Forget her,” he said. “Why don’t you ask the bartender if you want a drink?”

“No! The waitress, Andre! That woman with the tray!”

I meant the one with the automatic weapon resting next to the highball glasses. Vivian still had nice taste. She had chosen something in understated gray—very sleek, very expensive looking, and definitely not a toy.

“That’s Vivian! She’s going to kill him!”

I leapt off the barstool and began to rush toward Morris Melon’s table. “Stop her, Andre!” I screamed as I ran. “It’s Vivian! Stop her!”

Viv let the glass-laden tray fall to the floor with a crash. The important item on the tray, the gun, she was now holding with both hands as she strode like the Jolly Green Giant, closer and closer to Melon.

He and his party were so high, and so wrapped up in their own fun, they had paid no attention to the shattering glass. But now, with screams breaking out all over the place as one by one the patrons spotted Viv and realized what was happening, Melon was turning in the chair, bringing his chest full into Vivian’s line of fire. He might as well have been wearing a bull’s-eye on his breast.

Still a few feet away from him, I already had my arm extended so as to grab the back of his collar and pull him to the floor.

Andre was closing in on Viv using the same M.O. I heard him call her name crazily. I know she must have heard him. But she never broke stride.

The old man had bounded out of his chair before I could reach him. The others in his party were diving for cover—uselessly. Those little tin café tables wouldn’t have provided decent cover for a tadpole.

The first shot rang out then, roaring past the clumsily moving Melon and exploding a glass-fronted cabinet.

Melon tried a serpentine footballer’s move. Pitiful. Loping like an old dog. Pitiful—it was almost funny.

More screams. We were in it now.

But then, switching tactics, Melon suddenly turned back to face Vivian. He raised his arms, begging, as if a heartfelt plea was going to stop her next bullet.

Everyone seemed to freeze then, waiting for what would come next.

“Listen to me, Vivian!” Melon cried out. “I had to do it. Jerry showed up at my place. Told me he was broke, desperate. He had to have money, he said—eighty thousand dollars. I almost spat in his face. When you and Jerry took off with that hundred and fifty thousand dollars, I wanted to kill you—all of you. And now, twenty some years later, I’m supposed to bail him out of whatever trouble he’s in? I laughed at him. Where was I going to get it anyway? I’d have to sell Bricktop’s to raise that kind of money. But he didn’t care. You know what he was like—you of all people. He said if I didn’t come up with the cash, he’d start making calls—and not just to the police—he said that he’d tell—everything. I’m too old to lose everything again, Vivian. I had to kill him.”

Vivian broke into hideous laughter. “So you had to. So what? What do I care about that? I’m glad you killed the son of a bitch. But you know this ain’t about Jerry Brainard, Morris. You are not going to hell thinking that.”

He swallowed with great effort and his eyes went neon.

“No,” she stated simply. “Not for Jerry. This is for the country nigger. Isn’t that what you always called him?”

Whang! went the next shot, into the amp up on stage. That caused a sort of Vietnam-movie boom that seemed to shake the club to its foundation. The people rolling around on the floor were now trying to cover their ears as well as their asses.

Melon limped on. Looking for shelter. Hollering.

Before she got off the third shot, Andre was on her. They twisted and lurched together, both of them keening and cussing as they struggled for the gun.

As I took the first step toward them, the gun began to splutter madly. I ducked, then began to crawl toward them through the bedlam.

Another burst of bullets. And then I heard Andre’s roar of shocked pain.

I stood up just in time to see him go down, blood on his shirtfront.

I tried to rush Vivian, but it was no good. With a clear field now, she was aiming at Morris Melon’s back, and she sent out a long, clean volley straight into him. He crumpled at the mouth of the small kitchen.

What the hell did I think I was doing? I went for her, screeching, my hands out like cat’s claws.

“Get back!” she commanded, the gun now on me. “It’s over, Nan. Get back!” She was shaking so hard I almost took the gamble of reaching for the weapon.

Over. How right she was.

I heard myself repeat the words I had uttered to her in the Volkswagen: “I hate you, Vivian.”

Through a flood of tears she tried to say something.

I heard Andre moan deeply then, and fell on my knees beside him. When I looked up again, Vivian was disappearing through the front doors.

While the crowd scattered like frightened cockroaches, I covered Andre with my body, begging no one in particular to get help, and to let him live.

A minute or two later I heard a muffled explosion outside the walls of the café. A single burst of gunfire.

Yeah. I knew that was coming, too.

How else could something like this end?