VI

“BERENGARIA PROPELLER DAMAGED BY WRECKAGE

Big Cunard Liner Delayed in Reaching Cherbourg, but All on Board Are Well.

The great former German liner Berengaria, the largest of the Cunard Company’s transatlantic ships, struck part of a submerged wreckage. . . . She was due at Southampton yesterday, but will not reach Cherbourg, her first port of call, until some time today.”

—The New York Times

A SERIES OF KNOCKS ON THE CABIN DOOR STARTLED JOE FROM HIS restless sleep. His own memories had whipped his dreams and his heart raced with the sudden interruption. He sat on the side of his bed, head in hands, his mind still half a decade away. He looked quickly around the room before again remembering where he was and who he was or who he was supposed to be. The sudden, nervous sweat cooled on his brow. His heart slowed, but he did not reach to answer the door. He gathered the notes and photograph that covered the table in front of him and with no time to properly hide them, slid them inside the pages of his copy of Scribner’s magazine. Hidden in plain sight.

Above the chest of drawers, the portal window showed darkness.

Once again, he had fallen asleep with his clothes on. He felt as though he were apprenticing for bumdom and tucked in his shirt and straightened his pants. He held the pistol in his right hand, covering his arm with an overcoat.

Another series of knocks measured his door, sounding more like a fight on the wood than friendly raps.

He called out, “Just a moment,” breathed deeply and opened the door.

Facing him in a semicircle at the door were five ship’s officers, their uniforms pressed to the point of death and as rigid as their postures. At the front of the cluster stood a man of girth carrying a chest full of ribbons above his large stomach. The Captain, Joe decided, looking into the gray eyes of an Englishman who approved of his own of glory, probably earned in the comfort of a state room.

He could see each of the men as they immediately measured him, taking stock of his disheveled state, his day-old beard, his irregular hair, the probable redness of his eyes. He knew that he must have appeared like a stumbled drunk. Whatever they were there for, he was not making a good first impression.

Even with that, however, Joe felt no panic. He had been discovered. He could not run. There was no place to run to on a ship at sea even if he could fight his way out of the room. He loosened his grip on the pistol, allowing his index finger to break from the trigger.

“Yes?” Joe asked, blinking and wiping his mouth with the back of his free hand.

“May we enter?” the Captain asked in response. It was not a question at all, just a polite demand, not even meant to be answered.

Joe stepped aside and waved them in. The Captain nodded and entered, followed by the others. Together, the six of them took up almost the entire floor space of the room.

“Can I help you?” Joe asked, turning his body to hide the movements of his hand as he slid the pistol into a pocket of his overcoat, placing the coat on his bed.

“We are here about August Huntington,” the Captain said.

“Huntington?” Having expected them to arrest him, or at the very least to question him about being Wynton Gresham, he felt a certain release along with his confusion. That they had asked about Huntington might have meant that he had dodged another bullet. Had he been superstitious, he might have begun to taste invulnerability, but he was more experienced, if not smarter, than that.

“Colonel Huntington, yes” the Captain said, his voice a deep baritone. Fitting, Joe thought, for a captain of the ship.

“What about him?”

“He is dead.”

“What?” At that moment, had he been superstitious, he would have wondered whether he was a curse. That pendulum of fortune that he had been swinging on for the past week, swung with swift speed.

“He was murdered in the hallway outside of his cabin,” said one of the other officers, a thin man with a thin voice.

Joe sat on the bed next to his coat, hands on his knees and feet even on the floor in front of him.

He watched the other ship’s officers as they coldly fingered through the things in his cabin. At least they were more careful than the last sets of inquiring eyes. They also had the time and sanction to search more closely and slowly. Joe didn’t know what they were looking for but could guess that it was something to incriminate him. He had read that script before.

The Captain continued, “A passenger found him last night and reported to our steward. He was dead before our medical officer even arrived.”

He nodded to his underlings and they began their search, opening drawers and patting the pockets of hangered suits and fingering inside shoes. The Captain, watching as his men looked for anything of use, picked up Joe’s loaded copy of Scribner’s, and Joe questioned the wisdom of his hiding place.

In plain sight, he silently chided himself.

The captain began leafing through it as he talked. “After we attended to him, we searched his room for any indication of who might have killed him.”

“And that’s why you’re here?” Joe could hear the Captain’s assumptions hum through the room and thought with a flatness that too many people assumed too much about too many things.

The Captain looked at Joe, returned the magazine to the side table, pulled from his pocket Joe’s written request to meet with Huntington. He opened it and held it out for Joe to read. “From you?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Why did you wish to meet with him?”

“We were in a battle during the war. Same time, same place.” He felt himself slide once again into the spiraling necessity of lies.

“You knew him from the war?”

“No” Joe said, shaking his head and keeping his lie simple. “We didn’t know each other. We just happened to discover during dinner the other night that we had fought in the same battle.”

“And which battle was that, may I ask?”

“The Champagne.”

The Captain measured Joe with leveled eyes. “That was a bad day,” he said with solemnity. Joe could see the man practicing his visage in front of a mirror, memorizing the proper look for the proper occasion for the man had to perform throughout the sea-voyage.

“In more ways than one,” Joe said. In more ways than you could ever know, he thought but did not say.

“A black spot on the integrity of the Crown,” said the Captain, puffing his chest with self-righteous patriotism.

Chicken-shitting bastard, flashed through Joe’s mind.

He gritted his teeth. He wanted to say that the integrity of the Crown during that war had been blackened well before the Battle of the Champagne, that it had been blackened by bastard officers carrying chests filled with medals who never saw the mud and rats of a trench, whose exposure to mustard gas was limited to what they read in the pages of the London Times. Those men, old and rich men who sent the young and poor to war, turned Joe’s stomach, like the former president and his Western vice-president whose jingoistic ballyhooing had killed thousands of Joe’s generation. Joe referred to them as “Chicken-hawks,” too cowardly to fight when they were young but more than eager to damn another generation. At other moments, even less-forgiving moments, he called them “Chicken-shitting bastards.”

To the Captain, however, did not say anything.

One of the underlings leaned across between Joe and the Captain, taking the magazine from its table and let it flip open to Joe’s insertions. He held them for the Captain to see and Joe watched as the Captain studied the photograph.

“Are you or Huntington in this photograph?” the Captain asked, looking from the photograph to Joe.

“No,” Joe said, then began to mill his story with counterfeit truths: “I took the photograph. Those are others who were there. I’m going to France to visit some of them.” At least that last part was not a lie. He felt his body and mind clear to regain a sense of solid particularity, the sloughing off of another death in a world in which life had become cheap. He pushed thoughts of Huntington to the background and again concentrated on his own survival.

“And you had the photograph out for . . . ?”

“I thought Huntington might know some of them.” Joe was becoming accustomed to lying. He had become pretty good at it, easily slipping between truths and lies like a serpent in tall grass.

Another officer, pointing to the list of names, leaned close and whispered something in the Captain’s ear. While the man was whispering, the Captain raised his thick eyebrows and turned his eyes toward Joe. Joe had the falling feeling of having suddenly been placed under a microscope, once again pinned beneath the fixed stare of a focused eye.

The Captain looked at Joe but spoke to the officer next to him. “Go and see,” he ordered. “Let me know as soon as you know something. And take Montgomery with you.” He nodded his head toward a lower-grade officer standing near the door but never allowed his eyes to waver from Joe sitting on the bed.

After the two officers left the room, the Captain said to Joe, “Interesting coincidences.”

“What are?” Joe had begun to hate the word in the way a child hates the slap of a strap against an open palm.

The Captain paused before answering. He pulled a chair from the round table and sat with a long and audible sigh, as though relieving himself of a physical burden. With his hands on his knees and facing Joe straight on, he said, “Just that you would meet a man who had been with you during such a disastrous battle, a debacle and treason really, or so the stories say, and then you arrange for a meeting and he is murdered outside his cabin door the same night as your meeting.” He sighed again and sat back, thrumming the fingers of one hand on the table. “Interesting coincidences.”

“You already said that,” Joe said quietly, shaking his head and wishing he had a whiskey.

“Yes, I did,” said the Captain, his eyes not smiling at all. “Wouldn’t you agree, though?”

Joe’s mind flashed on the series of coincidences that had originally interwoven him in the web he felt caught in, a moth having wandered in flight onto the blue leaf of a columbine only to touch to the viscid gossamer of the spider’s web. His life had become fixed within that web of contradictions and lies and false assumptions. He wondered how long before he was mummified in silken threads or killed. He answered flatly, “I’m not such a fancier of coincidences.”

“Neither am I, sir,” answered the Captain.

Joe shrugged. He would have guessed as much, could have said the line for the Captain had he been asked.

The Captain stood, folded his arms across the extent of his barrel chest and pursed his lips. He said, “You do not seem overly concerned about Colonel Huntington’s death.”

“We weren’t friends,” Joe said. “We just met. On the ship. We were little more than acquaintances.” It wasn’t really a lie, but it was also far from the truth. He had liked Huntington, and in the few days that he had known the Brit had come to feel trust for the man. They shared membership in a select group: They had fought and survived the Western Front. He disliked having dismissed Huntington with such an off-handed remark, and he notched another event that would need redemption.

He had once read about the Viking belief in Valhalla, where warriors would meet in the afterlife. He didn’t believe in that, but he thought that there must be a special club in heaven for those who served with honor. He hoped that if he made it past St. Peter at the Pearly Gates, that Huntington would welcome him and forgive his callous remark and the two could sit over a pint or ten and share war stories.

“Yes.” The Captain nodded and paused as though scripted and practiced in front of a mirror. “We will arrive in Cherbourg late this afternoon and proceed to Southampton in the morning. The police may wish to speak with you, so my first mate will accompany you ashore in Southampton when we arrive there.” He paused as for effect and leaned toward Joe. “You will not disembark today. Your trunk is in the hallway. Apologies for the broken hasp, it was not preventable. I have asked for a steward to return later this morning to retrieve the trunk for transport tomorrow.” He waited a moment and added, “Do not attempt to disembark in Cherbourg.”

Joe did not answer. Each person’s world turns on its own axis, and his axis had once again been knocked from its plane. He sat and watched the officers depart in their descending order following in the Captain’s wake. They took nothing with them, leaving the photograph and note on the table and not asking for his passport. Gresham’s passport.

He remembered the note informing the ship’s passengers that Cherbourg would be the initial docking, that the ship would not dock in Plymouth as originally scheduled. Once more he thanked the heavy and rough seas and the broken turbine for that bit of fortune. Joe knew enough to know that there was always a bit of a push once the ship docked for disembarkation. In that rush of movement he hoped for another quiver of fortunate possibility.

After they had all left the room and the room had returned to its silence, Joe retrieved the trunk, stripped, and cleaned himself with the water on the washstand. He felt his jaw tighten as his mind mulled the situation. He felt like a lesser Theseus having muddled his way deep into a maze not of his making, only he lacked his Ariadne with her length of saving thread.

Huntington’s murder further muddled things for Joe. He knew who had killed Gresham—the Frenchmen from the accident—and he knew why. That incomplete knowledge traced a slight frown across his face. The two Frenchmen who had died on the rain-slick road outside of Greenwich were not alone and had been working for someone else, the someone who had since killed Huntington. Joe knew the shape of that man, but not the man himself.

He dried himself and set aside a clean gray wool suit, packed the rest of his clothes in the steamer trunk, locking it as best he could with its one broken hasp. He piled all of his money, the photograph and notes, revolver, and passports, his and Gresham’s, on the bed next to his overcoat. Standing next to the bed, he looked over the things he had arranged. With them, he might make it. If he could get off the ship all right, then he could make it. He could leave everything else behind if he needed to.

He sat for a moment but felt claustrophobic and decided to leave, for fresh air on the deck. He wished he could keep his trunk of clothes once he left the ship, for if he did get to Paris after landing at Cherbourg, the clothes would be nice to have. He patted his pockets. He had the necessities, money and a gun.

When he opened the door of his cabin, he saw an opportunity. Standing like silenced sentinels outside the cabin doors to two other rooms in the wide hallway were steamer trunks. He pulled his own trunk out into the corridor, leaving it outside his cabin and walking across the hall to knock on the first door.

A woman answered, her face hidden behind a heavy layer of makeup that made her age difficult to guess. Somewhere between seventy-five and dead, Joe thought, and probably closer to the latter.

“Well, can I help you?” the woman demanded in a burnished New England accent.

“I’m sorry ma’am. I must have the wrong room. I was looking for the Blaines, Amory and his wife.”

She looked him up and down and curled her upper lip. She did not like what she saw. “You do have the wrong room.”

“I do. I apologize.” He bowed and motioned as though to tip his hat had he been wearing one and apologized again. The woman shut her door without responding. She would not do. He needed someone who might not be as suspicious or as aware. While she had not recognized his faux nom, she was too quick to her skepticism.

The next cabin had two trunks outside its door. He knocked and another woman answered. She looked to be dressed more for an opera than for leaving the ship. She even raised her lorgnette glasses to her face in order to study Joe.

Joe repeated his lie, “I’m sorry, ma’am. I must have the wrong room. I was looking for Amory Blaine and his wife.”

“Sorry,” the woman said. “We are the McKees.”

“Who is it, dear?” her husband asked from inside the room.

“Just someone looking for the Blaines, darling.”

“The who?”

“Blaines—Amory and his wife. You remember them.”

After a pause, the husband answered, “Oh, yes-yes. Good fellow. Drinks a bit much, but still a good chap. Don’t know their cabin number, though.”

The wife turned to Joe. “I’m sorry. We can’t help you, but when you find them, please give them our regards.”

“I will do that, Mrs. McKee,” Joe said, bowing and thinking how people are easily fooled when played to their vanity.

He went back to his room, leaving the door open, and waited. He waited for the count of one hundred after the McKees left their cabin before pulling his steamer trunk across the hallway to exchange with one of theirs. He left his tags attached and pulled their trunk into his room, cutting their tag with his penknife and sitting back to wait for the steward.

Joe lay back on the bed and closed his eyes and felt the movement of the ship. After a knock on the door woke him from his past, Joe drew in a long breath as in silent prayer. He opened the door to find a small, almost fragile old man standing next to a hand dolly. The man wore an ill-fitting uniform, too long in the sleeves and too large in the waist, and a rigid hat tilted back on his head with tufts of graying hair shooting out at angles.

The man looked at a piece of paper in his hand. “Mr. Gresham?” he asked, Cockney accent winking out the words.

“Yes,” Joe answered, standing to the side and motioning for the steward to enter. “Come in. It’s all packed and ready for you. You will take care of it, won’t you?”

Joe knew officers well enough to know that they would never tell a man in the trenches more than was absolutely necessary. That was something Joe was counting on. The ship’s officers would have told the steward to pick up Joe’s trunk and place it in a special hold. They would not have told him why, and the man would be more prone to think the trunk held a rich man’s valuables instead of a supposed murderer’s possessions, especially after Joe tipped the man a sawbuck for his troubles. Which Joe did with minimum flourish.

The steward, startled maybe from the size of the tip, hesitated. For a moment Joe thought he had underestimated the ship’s officers or that in his confidence he had overplayed his hand.

“Thank you, sir. Thank you very much.” The man beamed and his body seemed to inflate.

Joe smiled and felt a loosening in his breathing, a loosening of the noose.

The steward asked, “You spending the Christmas in Paris, sir?”

Joe knew the question was more a mannered response to his tip than anything else, for from his job with the newspaper in Greenwich he had seen the effect that money could have. A few greenbacks could easily open doors as well as open a working intimacy. The rule held true in the middle of the Atlantic as it had in Connecticut.

Joe smiled and answered the steward’s question, “No. I’m going across into Germany.”

The steward nodded and busied himself with a strap to hold the trunk tight to the dolly. After pulling the slack from the strap, he said, “I been there once, to Heine-land. Right after the war, it was. Them Heines weren’t none too nice, neither.”

“So I’ve heard,” Joe said.

The steward never bothered to check the trunk for a nametag, and Joe thought, Why should he? He was doing as he was ordered and that was all, retrieve the trunk and not ask why. That ingrained European caste system had maddened Joe during the war, watching the Brits or French unable to as much as dig a deeper latrine without an officer telling them, but that mindset would prove his ally in his departure from the ship.

The steward groaned and pulled on the dolly’s handle and worked the heavy load into the hallway. Joe followed, glancing at his real trunk in position down the hall. It might actually work, he thought. His clothes, Gresham’s clothes, might make it into Cherbourg, but he still needed to find his own release from the ship’s officers.

The steward lowered the trunk and wiped his brow with a handkerchief. “You don’t needs to ’company me, sir,” he said, leaning against the handle of the dolly. “I’ll see it reaches the Head Steward’s office right quick.”

Joe smiled, “Thank you.” He carried his overcoat, weighted with a pistol in the right hand pocket and stood outside his door.

“He does this on ’cassion,” the steward added. “Has someone’s trunk put in his office so’s he can take it through customs himself. Quick as a flame, that way, especially with as slow as them Frogs can be.”

Joe nodded and stepped into the hallway, closing the door behind him. Then, as though he had suddenly thought of it, he stopped and faced the steward. “Would you be so kind as to return for my friends’ trunks here? The loading dock is fine.” He pointed to the two trunks outside the McKee’s cabin.

The steward looked at the trunks with a heaviness. “I’ll do my best, sir.”

Joe unfolded another sawbuck and handed it to the steward.

“Don’t give it another thought, sir,” he said, bowing and pocketing the bill in one fluid motion. “Quick as an arrow, I’ll be.” He hefted his load and pushed it down the hallway.

Joe watched until the man had turned a corner and was gone, then he opened his cabin door again to make one final check through the room before leaving it to spend the remainder of the voyage on deck. With that tip he had given the porter, he knew that his trunk would be among the first off the ship and waiting for him to claim in customs.

The day opened around him as he walked onto the deck, a gray coolness eddying in the wind, crisp and fresh and filled with promise. The horizon blended into the sea with a smooth alchemy as the day lifted easily from its own shadow. His spirits lifted with it. While he could not tell the future, he felt himself within an even chance of leaving behind something of his past.

Joe avoided his deck chair, with its folded wool blanket, and instead stood near the bow of the ship, mentally hastening its progress. He faced into the ship’s wind with the day rising cool but not cold, overcast but not threatening. The ocean continued to lay dark blue and silent all about and gulls flew in tightening circles around the ship, noisy harbingers of land. France was just beyond Joe’s sight. His stomach tightened at its approach, the approach of a landscape of freedom but also a continent of destruction.

He remembered the similar tightening in his stomach five years earlier when he had sailed into Cherbourg for the glory of war, nervous at the thought of battle but filled with the expectations of youth and honor on the battlefield. Then, eighteen and filled with the romance of youth, dressed in his green wool and carrying a pack on his back and Springfield rifle with twelve clips of .30 caliber bullets in a cloth bandolier over his shoulder, the approach to France had felt like an entrance, an adventure, a coming-into of his life. At the railing of the Berengaria, with all those lies of the past century proved so wrong on the battlefields of France, he could not help but wonder what further lies might await him there.

Leaving France following the end of war, he had stood at the stern of the ship to watch the Cotentin Peninsula and the town of Cherbourg disappear into the line of a gray horizon. The French city, as gray as the cloudy day that shrouded it, had then looked like a tombstone sinking into the sea.

He walked the deck several times, had an Irish whiskey in the Gentleman’s Reading Room, walked the deck again, sat in another patron’s empty deck chair, walked, stood along the rail of the ship at the stern and the bow and on both sides, and walked, all the time feeling as though a clock were running against him. As the day’s shadows shortened to noon and then again lengthened, the ship’s deck became busier. More people, dressed in overcoats and hats and some even in evening wear with long furs or top hats and shining black canes with silver handles, lined the railing to watch the ship’s arrival into Cherbourg.

Joe lost himself in the crowd near the gates to the ship’s secondary boarding bridge. In the tightening compression of the growing and moving crowd, Joe kept his hands in his coat pockets to keep hold of the pistol as well as the money split between the pockets. He patted himself once to make sure the photograph and lists were safe within his inner pocket. He returned his hand to his side pocket in time to feel another hand move inside it. He turned to face a man who quickly ducked his way through the crowd, empty of anything of Joe’s.

“Bastard,” Joe cursed.

Then he smiled. Maybe his running clock had again gained a minute of time or maybe that swift pendulum of fortune had swung back in his favor.

He looked around the crowd, watching the men closer to the gates, several of them already fingering their papers and passports. Seeing his life as something from a Beadle’s Dime Novel, he elbowed toward them until he stood close to one who was near him in size and age and face. As the man returned his passport to the pocket of his fur overcoat, Joe lifted it clean and backed away, letting the crowd fill in like a ship’s wake. He smiled and breathed deep, feeling as though he were born to a life of petty larceny.

The ship docked. Passengers waved to lovers or family waiting on the pier, some threw streamers and confetti, some drank from champagne glasses and tossed the empty bottles into the water. The atmosphere was near that of a carnival.

Standing near the railing and with their backs to the approaching pier stood Dapper and the Turk. Dapper busied himself with the lapels of his coat. The smile flat across the face of the Turk was imminent and menacing. His eyes were hard and colorless in their darkness, and they fixed solidly on Joe. The Turk moved his mouth and Dapper looked up at him then followed his glassed gaze to Joe. He then also smiled, nothing friendly in his smile as well.

Joe moved with the pulse of the crowd, a jerking compression of people moving toward the main gate. The closer he got to the gate, the more difficult it was for him to move his arms. The chatter of people became deafening, the deck silenced in its own cacophony of sound, the crush claustrophobic, the Turk’s hard stare staggering. The humid air filled with the acrid smells of stagnant water and anxious people, body odor and boozed breath. His breathing felt as cramped as his body.

He looked up toward the gate, at the passengers stopped to identify themselves to a ship’s officer holding a clipboard, at those disembarking and walking with a bounce down the bridge, at those waiting on the pier with their arms ready to enfold a lover in an embrace, and then back at the threat carried in the blackness of the Turk’s eyes.

Dapper and the Turk were not following. They stood away from the crowd of disembarking passengers, their hands in their pockets and talking to one another, watching Joe’s movements like birds of prey waiting for their lunch to bolt from his cover.

They were toying with him, letting him attempt an escape and knowing that he, as Wynton Gresham, would not leave at Cherbourg. How they knew that, Joe could not say, but their easy approach revealed their knowledge. Whoever pulled their strings was quite well placed, having the Captain’s ear and being privy to the Captain’s orders.

What they did not know, however, was what Joe held in the fingers of his left hand.

As he neared the gate, Joe studied the passport that he had lifted, memorizing his new name and where this man came from. A Princeton man, Joe liked that, ivy-walled eating clubs and traditions extending back to Jonathan Edwards. The passport photograph showed a man wearing a pair of wire-rimmed glasses, banker’s spectacles, trimmed hair, and a pleasant smile. Other than no glasses and hair let grow, Joe figured his resemblance was close enough to pass a cursory inspection by the customs agent. He knew that with any amount of interested inspection, his thin cover of anonymity would be exposed, but the officers at the gates had little reason to elevate their level of scrutiny. The name of Wynton Gresham was on a special list, and he was no longer Wynton Gresham.

He looked again at his passport. He was, at least for the time being, Harold Braddock of Princeton and every other inch a gentleman.

He turned when he heard a commotion nearby, expecting to find associates of Dapper and the Turk pushing through the crowd in his direction. Instead, he saw the man whom he had just become pushing people away from him and looking around the deck for his papers, yelling about his passport. A few other passengers looked around as well, but most avoided him, probably thinking the man was either drunk or crazy.

Joe smiled, knowing how hard it was to find, and how easy it was to lose, oneself. Since the war, he had met a lot of men in his generation who were lost. He wished it truly were as easy as lifting another man’s name to change one’s fortunes.

At the boundary between the ship’s gate and the bridge, Joe answered the necessary questions about purpose and length of stay, and he complimented the officer on the capitol service once again provided by the Cunard line. Then he smiled at the officer and nodded and tipped his fedora to the Turk, turned and strode comfortably down the bridge to the pier, another American ready for the sights of Paris. He felt alone, and it was a splendid isolation.

Once he reached the pier, Joe turned for one more look. The Turk had pushed himself almost to the gate, pushing aside even the man still searching for his passport, who punched the Turk and ignited a small melee. The Turk outweighed the Princeton man by a good thirty pounds, but the lost Princeton man crouched like a collegiate middleweight and gave the Turk a good turn.

Joe hurried through customs, using the borrowed passport once again. Because the French officers at the customs table seemed more interested in catching a glimpse of the fight aboard the ship, they rushed everyone through with a minimum of delay. They stopped one man who was trying to smuggle tobacco and pushed him into a back room, but Joe and others moved through quickly. He found a porter, handed him a dollar bill and told him to retrieve Gresham’s trunk and place it on the train for Paris. The man obliged with a formal bow. Joe felt not a little drunk by the power of money.

He left the Princeton man’s passport underneath a newspaper on a bench—It was difficult enough to remember who he was between two people without adding a third to the mix—and he boarded his train and paid for a compartment seat and sat so that he could watch the station doors for Dapper and the Turk and waited for the train’s departure. He switched bench seats before anyone else entered the cabin so that he sat facing front and relaxed into the padded comfort to let his body heat warm against the leather seat. He closed his eyes and felt as though he had taken his first full breath in over a week.

The train took its first sudden tug into motion, followed by the slow climb to speed. With a steady pull, the train accelerated and was soon at its cruising speed for the run to Paris. Joe let out an audible breath and sank further into his seat next to the window and watched the increasing evening envelope the Norman countryside, which at first seemed smiling in its presence and then just asleep.

With the train’s hissing steam and broken rhythm, the darkening trees became gaunt and the landscape dark and blurred. Soon he saw mostly his own reflection in the window. He looked through himself at the passing scene that seemed a long time in the past, a return and a dislocation. In the fields, rusting iron objects jutted from the mud, prehistoric weapons of war as though ghosts to haunt the countryside. Like the skeletal remains of long dead animals left to waist in a marginal land, the iron pieces were caught in a moonlit silence, and even though he could not hear, he could see dark skies with large and circling birds descending. And mud. And blood. And then it was dark again and he was thankful.

Wrapped in the heavy buffalo coat, he turned his attention inside. He shared the compartment with two couples. One was a middle-aged and middle-class couple, a man who might work at a bank returning with his wife from a vacation to the coast. They had two wicker baskets, lunch in one and in the other a fawn-colored Chinese Pug unaware of anything other than its own regality. They read French newspapers in the insubstantial light of the compartment. The other couple also in the compartment, a young couple, ate a dinner of rolls and wine and talked in hushed voices. They offered him a piece of their bread and a glass of wine.

“Merci,” Joe said and reached across to take the bread and wine. It was the first that he had eaten since the night before. The nourishment reminded him of how tired he had become.

With his wine drunk and bread eaten and the compartment lights turned down and with the fluid rocking of the train, he eased into a half-sleep and did not fully wake until the train’s brakes first jolted.

As midnight approached, the train arrived in Paris at the Gare Saint-Lazare. After leaving the buffalo coat in a water closet—for it would be too easily identified—Joe hailed a cab and took it across the Seine to the Hotel Le Couer on Place Saint André des Arts the address he had found scribbled on the paper in Gresham’s desk at the newspaper office. The driver had to leave his trunk lid ajar to fit in the steamer trunk, but the streets were less than full and there was no rain. They had no difficulty crossing the city.

As the taxi crossed the Seine, Joe could make out the charcoal outline of the Eiffel Tower against a blue-black midnight sky with the top of the tower kissed by the stars. Below, the Seine ran black with wafers of light bouncing upon its surface. A line of tugs had moored along the cement quay, gray smoke rising from the short chimneys above their living areas and yellow windows candle-lit. A pair of lovers embraced in a kiss against the concrete railing of the Pont Neuf, a streetlamp dripping light from above them. A dusky halo was cast along the quay from the soft glow of restaurant and café windows.

In his newspaper articles, Joe had never been good at writing conclusions. He was good with details, with an objective description of the happenings in other people’s lives, but every article he wrote seemed to be a beginning with no closing, a breath with no expiration. More than once, as they sat across from each other at their joined desk, Gresham had told Joe that he needed to bring his stories to closure, that they all sounded like they should be followed with “and meanwhile, back at the ranch.”

“No closure,” Gresham would have said, leaving his hands spread apart and palms upward as though to mime his words.

Joe wondered if, in that old city of abundant light, whether he could find some culmination, some closure of his own.

The old woman at the hotel desk was startled when Joe asked about his room. She rubbed her hands together as though returning warmth to them, and she kept raising and lowering her glasses to see him while she spoke in halting English, “Monsieur Gresham? We were expecting you. It has been a long time since you were here, but you have changed, no?”

Her gray hair was rolled in a bun on top of her head and she smiled and nodded. She wore a flowered dress that had begun to show its age, thin in the shoulders and some threads showing from the cuff of the sleeve. She was tall and thin and beautiful in her age. She had a slight palsy to her hands and eyes that sparkled significantly in the yellow-lit room.

“Yes,” Joe said. “I probably have.” He signed the hotel registry. “It’s been, after all, how long since I was last here?”

“Ohh, maybe four years.”

“A lot happens in four years,” Joe said. A lot happens in two weeks, he thought.

She handed him a room key and told him that his trunk would be brought up as soon as possible. As he stepped away, she waved him back and told him that the hotel now had heating in all of the rooms, that the plumbing had been fixed since his last visit, that her husband would be at the desk soon and was still lazy, that she preferred him working nights since his snoring kept her from sleeping, and again that a helper would deliver the steamer trunk as soon as possible since both she and her husband could no longer handle such heavy work, as if her husband would even attempt something akin to work.

Joe smiled, assaulted by the mere volume of words that she presented.

As soon as he heard her take a breath, he started for the stairs but stopped when she again called him back. “A message,” she said, excited. “Oh, I almost forgot. A message was delivered for you today.”

She fumbled through a drawer behind the desk. “Let me see. Right here. Yes-yes, here it is.”

Her hand shook as she handed the folded piece of paper to Joe. Gresham’s name was etched in a fine script across the outside. He placed it in his pocket and thanked her, bowing and backing away at the same time.

His was a single room on the third floor, old-fashioned with a high ceiling and a French window facing the street, a large mirror with a crack traversing its lower left corner over a writing table, a large brass bed that sang when Joe sat on it, two high-back wooden chairs, a washstand, and panel openings in the wallpapered wall into both the closet and the bathroom. There was a single square heating vent in the floor and an electric light in the ceiling and lamps on the table and beside the bed.

At $1.50 a day for the room, Joe figured he could afford to stay as long as necessary, to complete what needed completion. He was tired, but not tired enough to sleep, and he sat on the bed to open the note. He looked first at the signature, Dillard. “I have news,” it began. “Everything will change. Come by as soon as possible. The old place—#17 rue De Fleurus.”

“Everything will change,” Joe repeated. “As soon as possible.”

He closed his eyes again and tried to imagine what it could be that Dillard might know, but Joe was not certain what he himself knew, much less what someone else knew.

He considered visiting Dillard that night to put an end to the masquerade. He considered staying in his room, falling asleep on his bed that sang and spending his first night in Paris gathering what thoughts he could. Then he also considered walking into the night and never returning, just losing himself in darkness. He considered walking into the night and finding a café and sitting alone at the bar and drinking a solitary beer. He needed one, maybe a dozen. For that night he would forget about Gresham and the Champagne and Dillard and Gresham’s killer, just drink a cold beer delivered from a legal tap.

He looked again at the note. As soon as possible. He looked at his watch. 1:34 a.m. He looked again at the note held between the trembling fingers of his hands. Christ, he thought, I need a drink. He felt a great need for some palliative to settle his mind and to consider his options, and maybe, just maybe, to forget about his world for a moment.

He decided that he should not wake up Dillard in the middle of the night to tell the man that his friend had been murdered and his friend’s identity had been stolen. That might be better presented in the light of day. He would visit Dillard first thing in the morning, and he left his room in search of a beer.

Outside the hotel, the sky was dark and the air was moist and filled with the smells of a Paris night, wet cement and old flowers and diesel exhaust. Buildings limited the sky, and clouds hid the stars and moon. Joe pulled up his collar against the damp cold. It would rain soon. It always rained in Paris in December. He could smell the moisture in the air. It would be a shallow rain, enough to wet but not enough to cleanse the city.

He walked toward the Seine along the narrow cobblestone street, uneven from centuries of horse and wagon and then automobile traffic and nearly futile attempts at repair. Once he heard someone behind him and turned to look, but the sidewalk was empty where it was lit from streetlights and too dark between them to see anything. He listened carefully as he walked but heard nothing more that sounded like trailing footsteps. Still, he was happy that he had placed his revolver in a pocket of his overcoat.

At the end of the street, Joe found a café called the Gentilhomme and opened the front door to a roil of warmth and smoke that blew past him as he entered. A haze floated in the café’s indistinct light, and the jazz trill of a single trumpet lit from one of the back corners. He looked and saw a black man, eyes closed and trumpet lifted to the sky like Gabriel. He walked to the bar, as crowded as the tables, and took the first empty seat he found.

“Vide?” he asked the man seated in the next chair.

“Yes,” he said smiling. “It’s empty.” An American.

Joe sat and folded his overcoat across his lap.

“Beer,” he said when the bartender stood across from him, wearing a white shirt both wrinkled and stained and a frown pressed like a pleat across his face. He paid with an American dollar bill, waved off the change and said “compliment” in French. The waiter nodded and arched an eyebrow in gratitude. Joe figured he had made at least one friend in Paris that night. And if not that, he at least guaranteed that he would not want long for another drink.

“Should have ordered a pint,” the man next to him said. Midwestern American.

“Why’s that?”

“They cost about the same and you get twice as much.”

“Point well taken,” Joe said, taking the first cold swallow and letting it ride down slowly. The beer tasted good. It cut through the ship’s death, the train’s diesel, the tight hotel room’s enclosure.

“I’m Joe Henry.”

“Diamond Dick Quire. I prefer Quire.”

They shook hands.

“American.” Joe said.

“As apple pie,” Quire said. “At least I was the last time I checked.”

“When was that?”

“What year is it?”

“Never mind.”

From behind them, like a jive note to bring down walls, the trumpet man hit a note so high that it could call up the dead.

Quire lifted his pint in front of him, the beer glass caught in the café’s weak light. He said in toast, “May the wings of liberty never lose a feather.”

Joe drank with him, both emptying their beers in long swallows. They signaled the bartender for another round of pints and Joe pulled money from his pocket.

“Alsatian,” Quire said to the barman, who nodded and drew two pints from the tap and placed them on the bar in front of the two Americans, the beers so dark they were almost black as stout with a caramel froth floating on top like good espresso.

“Le bonne bière,” Quire said with a smile.

Joe estimated that Diamond Dick Quire, like himself, was in his late-twenties but, unlike Joe, a square-headed block of a man, and probably shorter than Joe by a good two inches with thick shoulders and a large chest. His arms barely fit inside the sleeves of his shirt and when flexed to draw on his pint, the seams nearly burst. He was clean shaven with hair brown and long, almost to his collar in the back. He could have been a miner or a block of granite.

“Where’d you get your nickname?” Joe asked.

“What nickname?”

“Diamond Dick.”

Quire laughed and drank. “That’s no nickname, my friend” he said. “That’s my Christian name. Diamond Dick.” He laughed again. “My mother said that carrying me was one adventure after another, and since then I seem to be a magnet for trouble. I have luck like that.”

Joe nodded. “Don’t feel like the Lone Star Ranger,” he said.

Quire offered a crooked smile. “To trouble,” he said and lifted his pint glass in toast. Joe’s glass clinked it and they drank again.

“You live here?” Joe asked.

“Seems like it,” Quire said.

“I mean Paris. You live in Paris?”

“For now, maybe until I die. And you? You live here also, or are you a reporter looking for a story on the damn expatriate life?”

“Neither. I just got off the boat,” he said with a shrug. “May stay a week or a decade. Don’t know yet.”

“Me neither,” Quire said. He laughed and his laugh descended into a rheumy cough. When he was finished coughing he said, “I came for the gas treatments.”

Joe nodded and drank and asked, “You were in the war?”

“Yes. You?”

“With the 42nd,” Joe said.

“Good group. Never got gassed, though, huh?” Quire asked.

“Not me. Got shot but never gassed.”

“I got gassed in Belleau Wood.” Quire shook his head. “Nasty shit. By the time I knew I was in it, I was fucking swimming in the shit and already almost dead, or as good as dead, or wishing to hell I’d be dead. Damn nasty shit, that gas.”

“To the Lost,” Joe said in toast.

“To the Lost.”

They drank. “What’s this gas treatment you mentioned?”

Quire evaded Joe’s question. “How long were you home after the war?”

Joe rubbed his brow. “I haven’t gone home yet. I found a job the first place I stopped and stayed there until last week.”

Quire leaned forward with his elbows propped on the bar and said, “I went home, Helena, Montana—Hell-on-earth, Montana—but it wasn’t like it was when I left it. Everything was still there and looked the same, train station and mills and Woolworth’s, but it wasn’t the same place. It all looked so goddamn false, like it was hiding something I’d never noticed before. Then people found out I’d been gassed and treated me like I had tuberculosis or something. Old friends would cross to the other side of the road or try not to shake my hand like I was a contagion from a leper colony. I don’t know, maybe they were just embarrassed.”

Joe nodded. “They all wanted heroes, like their grandfathers.”

“There ain’t no such thing as a hero, not in a war like that.”

“Just tragedies,” Joe said.

“Who said that?” Quire asked.

“Me. Just now.”

“Well, shit, you said that right, brother.” Quire leaned forward against the bar again and looked at Joe, eyes half mast, and raised his glass for another toast. A splash of beer fell to the bar and the bartender was quick to wipe it up.

Joe met Quire’s glass with his own, a toast between men who had seen much the same, who had seen things that could not be told to others, that could not be understood by others. The Great War became a brotherhood of decrement for those unlucky enough to have survived it, and Joe and Quire had offered what amounted to the secret cipher.

Quire laughed, “You know one thing, though, that I got from the war? Other than these worthless lungs.” He pounded his chest twice, punishing his lungs for having betrayed him.

“Tell me,” Joe said.

“I actually got to use a brick shithouse. A six-holer, at that.”

“A brick shithouse?”

“And built like a stacked dame.”

“Oh hell,” Joe said and laughed along with Quire, even though his was no match in volume or tenor for the baritone laugh of Quire. Quire’s laugh, however, slid unevenly to a cough that doubled Quire at the bar, one arm holding onto the bar while the other pressed against his forehead.

They talked for another hour, some about the war, mostly working around the subject until they might know each other better, where they had been and when and how much they hated officers. Some about where they had grown up, Joe in Colorado and Quire in Montana as the sired son of a millionaire goldminer who then went on to prep school in St. Paul and even a year in the hallowed halls of Harvard. Quire talked some about Paris, of which he said, “Paris is a museum and it’s a circus and it’s a whorehouse. Your choice and your poison.”

“Right now I’ll just take my bed,” Joe said, rising to his feet, but the beers he had drunk coupled with the lack of food and sleep put him back on his stool.

“Another one?” Quire laughed. “It’ll help you catch your sea legs.”

“No,” Joe said. “I’ll be heading on. What my legs need is what every other part of me needs—rest. Anyway,” he said. “I have business in the morning. First thing.”

“All right, cowboy. Stop by again tomorrow night and let me know how this city’s treating you.”

“Will do,” Joe said. He struggled through the crowd and the cigarette haze for the door, drunker than he needed to be but not nearly as drunk as he wanted.

The cold air outside the Gentilhomme assaulted him. He leaned against the brick wall to cough out the smoke and catch his bearings. With his overcoat buttoned tight to his neck, he set off for the hotel, his hand finding his revolver. Like a child with his favorite blanket, he wanted the security of something familiar in his fingers. Even with that, he knew how illusory the idea of security had become.

The air he breathed, as exhausted as him, as neutral as the night, had collapsed around him in darkness and winter haze, raw and chilled with steam rising from the wet gutters. A mist lay sodden on the street, and streetlamps provided only a depthless yellow glow. He could not tell which but either he or the city felt old and tired. Maybe both.

From inside a second story hotel window as he passed, he heard a forced and unpleasant laughter. As he walked, he imagined that he could hear in the mist a continuous and slow whispered “You.” He felt as though he was entering another space in time, a dimension in which his life would be blank. Neither the new world nor the old world from before the war were his world, not anymore and maybe never again. His life might no longer even be his own.

He was drunk. He hoped that his thoughts were simply the thoughts of a drunk.

He gathered his coat tighter and walked on, stumbling a little more than on his first trip down the road’s uneven cobblestones. Fifty feet short of the entrance to his hotel, he stopped short when the feeling of being watched once again grabbed him. He had the sudden sensation of being an animal in a zoo, unable to get away from the eyes that followed him. He could see nobody near him nor hear anyone, not even the fabled lovers of Paris who were supposed to be kissing under each lamppost.

A shaft of yellow light blew from the hotel’s entrance as the front door opened and closed within its recess, sending the light out onto the sidewalk and street. Joe looked up. A suspicious light illuminated the curtains of what he thought was his room. His thumb pushed off the pistol’s safety. He walked on.

An old man sat behind the front counter, his head resting on a folded blanket. Quick snores erupted from the man like rattling thunder. Joe stepped past without waking him. He took the first flight of stairs two at a time before slowing as he progressed to the third floor, then waiting to catch his breath at the landing before walking down the hall to his room. No light showed from underneath the door. He tried the door and found it unlocked. He opened it and stepped inside, closing the door behind him and stepping against the wall and leaving the room in darkness. He held his pistol in front of him, pointed toward the darkness at the center of the room.

He could hear nothing except the night sounds of the city from outside his inch-opened window, the drone of diesel-engined cargo boats on the Seine and the muffled clap of horses on cobblestones and animal sounds. No sound from inside the room, however. He stretched his arm out to feel along the wall. The metallic click of the light button snapped and the room was flooded with light. No one was there.

He checked the closet and bathroom. Nobody. His steamer stood at the foot of the bed. Except for the single broken hasp, the trunk was still locked shut.

As quickly as the adrenaline had rushed through his body it depleted, leaving him even more tired than before. Either he had been mistaken about the room or his trunk had been delivered by the hotel worker just minutes before. He was too tired to care. He sat on the bed and rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands, then stripped and washed in the room’s washbasin and lay in bed, naked under the sheet and brown wool blankets. He chased dreams around in his head for a long time before finally drifting into sleep.