WHATEVER ITS NAME suggests, The Flea Club was no scrimey little dive. It was a semi-public night-club with a private section for members. I first went there one night with an American named Freddy Fayerweather, who collected modern painting and had come to be an acquaintance of mine through my gallery, where he would now and then buy a picture. The Flea Club was a spectator’s paradise, and when Freddy said he would put me up for membership I said for him to go ahead and do it.
After the murder, there was a lot of wild yellow journalistic fabrication about The Flea Club and the goings-on there, but actually the place was fairly mild. Plenty of the members were wacky but plenty of the people who frequent any place that operates well into the night, either publicly or privately, are wacky. I enjoyed The Flea Club and even felt an affection for many of its regulars. And I liked to hear Nicole sing.
That’s all I could answer when people asked me how it happened that somebody as un-Flea Club as I seemed to be spent so much time there.
The Flea Club hadn’t been its real name originally. Originally it was called the Club Ste. Geneviève de Fli, since it was on the site of a church—a chapel, rather—by that name, which was thought of as a legendary structure until my archaeologist friend, Professor Johnson, got around to digging and discovered foundations indicating that it really had been there. The chapel was built between 800 and 850, and during the next 1100 years various things happened to it. It was small and easy to lose in a growing city. The level of Paris grew around it until the chapel floor was filled in to meet it. Finally what remained above ground, the upper half, was chopped off and something else was built on the spot. Building followed building, until at some time or other the space was dug out again where the interior of the chapel had been, and the stumps of the original columns, still in place, were incorporated with later masonry, in what had now become the cellar of the buildings that succeeded one another above it. By the time Professor Johnson appeared, there was a mid-nineteenth-century building of no particular distinction standing there, and the part of the cellar with the remains of the chapel incorporated in it had become the members’ room of The Flea Club. It does seem a complicated and round-about way to build a boîte de nuit.
The cellar held a small bar, a piano, no stage, a few square feet of dance floor—I never saw anybody dance there, but it was a useful area—and enough room left over to crowd in tables and chairs for maybe as many as forty people at a time, if they were careful not to take deep breaths simultaneously, which would have crushed the more fragile members to death. To one side there was also a small, comfortable room containing a bed, a table, a lamp, a radio, and a bookshelf. This room was occasionally occupied overnight by a member in a pinch. The night before the murder, such a pinch developed.
The members’ cellar could be entered through a door at half level from the back street, which was quiet and private, with the blank wall of the butt-end of another building taking up the entire area across from it. You could also enter or leave this cellar by a stairway and locked door, to which only members held keys, into the semi-public part of the club, on the ground floor, which was operated for income. Up here the bar was bigger and the décor was fancier—or, more accurately, there was an effort at décor, whereas the cellar was just whitewashed walls. You entered this semi-public part from the boulevard. Anyone could spend money there, with an introduction from a member, but you could bring only one guest at a time into the members’ cellar. The upstairs bar was larger and the tables were a little roomier. It was a drink-and-listen place. The drinks were satisfactory, and Nicole was worth listening to.
Nicole’s real name was Marguerite Bontemps, a solid honest name good enough for anybody, but she used Nicole—nothing else, just Nicole—to sing under. I’ve never liked these one-name professional names. I liked Nicole herself, though, in spite of several other things. For instance, in spite of the way she fixed herself up to look like a second-rate Dietrich when she could have been a first-rate Marguerite Bontemps. She had a wide-hipped, full-breasted peasant figure and one of those round straightforward faces that can be so engaging without being either beautiful or distinguished. The songs she did best, the ones she was beginning to be known for, were songs of the little people on the streets, in the best French music-hall tradition—the shop girl whose world is transformed by love, the old ‘My Man’ theme, and all the others, the kind of thing that can be nauseously cloying or really touching, depending on the singer.
I always told Nicole that she ought to drop the lamé gowns and the rhinestone bracelets and the blondined hair and the shaved-off and repainted eyebrows and the blue eye shadow and try being Marguerite Bontemps. But she was afraid to change. She was beginning to make a reputation as Nicole and besides, she said, whoever heard of a night-club singer who didn’t look the part? Which I said was exactly the point.
She never said so, but perhaps she didn’t like remembering Marguerite Bontemps. She was born on a farm, a real peasant. At the beginning of the war she had run off and come to Paris, not because of the war, not for fear of the Germans, although the farm was in Alsace, not too far from the border, but because the city offered her two things she had discovered she was going to need within the next several months—anonymity, and a charity ward. She kept body and soul together one way or another, largely by kitchen work and other domestic employment, and later on as a waitress. The baby was born six months after her arrival in Paris. She must have had a terrible struggle but she managed to support herself and care for the baby by various desperate stratagems until nearly the end of the war, when things began to pick up for her personally in spite of the toughness of the general situation, and she was able to place the child in a convent home near Grenoble, where it still was when I knew her.
She began to sing almost by accident. Like so many Alsatians she spoke as much German as French, and during the Occupation she began making her own doggerel translations of popular songs of the Piaf type, singing them literally on street corners. She had always enjoyed singing, imitating Piaf and other popular favourites from gramophone records. Her voice had a harsh quality when she forced the high notes of her small range, and almost a guttural quality on the lower ones, although it was of extraordinary sweetness and warmth in between. Now she suddenly discovered that these natural defects gave a piquancy to her singing that a conventionally better voice would never have had.
She had a bad experience at this time. She said that it never occurred to her that singing for Germans’ tips was any worse than waiting at tables for them, but one afternoon she was pretty badly knocked about by three women who might have done her real harm if the police hadn’t intervened. She never sang in German again, but she had discovered her voice, and she worked from that time on towards a single goal—to be a singer and make a living at it. She was not at first ambitious for a name and she didn’t even consider the possibility that she might make really big money. She set about capitalising on her voice as she might have set about investing a small unexpected inheritance. She had a little something and she intended to make maximum use of it within the limits of safety.
Nicole never at any time had a great stroke of luck. She had no rich sponsor. She sang anywhere, under any conditions, for any money she could get, accumulating a reputation with a tenacity and a single-mindedness almost obsessive. She worked in her profession with exactly the same acceptance of long hours and hard work and exactly the same recognition of the importance of every small profit that she would have expected if she had been opening a shop. She was astute, she was intensely practical, and as a singer she was increasingly sensitive. In her middle thirties, at The Flea Club, she was coming into her own.
She was not only the singer at The Flea Club, she was also its general manager for the members. She kept the books, which nobody ever bothered to look at, did what buying was necessary, handled the cash, and supervised the staff, which was small. Her crutch and her support and her Rock of Gibraltar was an old woman we knew only as Bijou, who was part personal maid and part housekeeper. Nicole’s life seemed as steady, as open, as industrious, and as well regulated as you could ask. It was, if anything, lacking in variety and excitement.
This was the woman that Mary Finney, Emily Collins, Professor Johnson and I were to discover, with her head bashed in, half buried in one of the pits of Professor Johnson’s excavations in the basement of The Flea Club, on the morning of the day which we had expected to consume by Emmy’s chronological tour of ecclesiastical architecture and architectural remains in Paris.