VII

PARIS CORONER SAYS U.S. GIRL KILLED SELF

PARIS, Nov. 30—Following Thursday’s inquest over the body of pretty Rose Shannessey of Minneapolis, Coroner Vallot gave the following verdict: “Suicide during temporary insanity brought on by a quarrel with her lover.”

—The Oklahoman, 1 December, 1922

JOE WOKE EARLY, ONLY A FEW HOURS AFTER HAVING FALLEN ASLEEP. He opened his window to sit on the sill, naked in the morning mist. A silvern haze floated above the city. Listening, he heard sounds that he thought typical and right for a Paris morning. A train’s whistle low and slow in the distance, an automobile horn and another and the sound of two men arguing, pigeons, the steady pace of people on their way to work, conspiratorial voices passing unseen beneath his window, the raking sound of a broom pushing garbage into the gutter. A church bell rang the hour of the Angelus. The city’s morning concert taking place.

He leaned into the winter morning and watched dark smoke from coal stoves drift in the gray sky, visible in blackened waves above the morning roofline. A light mist like a horse’s mane fell wild and ragged around the ancient buildings across from him. Up the street, away from the Gentilhomme, he could see an open street market taking shape. Vendors with fruits and vegetables and flowers, some with meats and others with old clothing, still others with live birds inside of wooden cages. Arranging their carts along the cobblestoned lane, they worked like monks—silent and hunched and serious in their morning duty. A waiter in white shirt and black apron sluiced down the sidewalk in front of a café. Joe could smell freshly ground coffee and just-baked pains chocolate. Not just a city’s morning concert but a symphony for the senses, and he closed his eyes to breathe deeply and let the city infuse him.

Joe had always been an early riser, following Teddy Roosevelt’s instilled declarations of the strenuous life, but in France in 1918 he had, like many in the trenches, become almost an insomniac. In the four years since, he had not regained the comfort that allows sleep, so he rose early even though he was far from rested.

Naked and cold in the frigid and misted air of a Paris dawn, he felt close to how he had felt in his youth. He felt alive. The somber and soiled city he had walked through the previous night had vanished with the sunrise, replaced with one filled with expectations. He stood and looked out through the window of his room across the rooftops of Paris, all gray and white-stained from pigeon droppings, peaked roofs with the ancient spires of many cathedrals in the near and far distances.

He was ravenous. Joe dressed and emerged, intent on holding something of that new morning with him. He enjoyed a breakfast of coffee and rolls in the hotel’s salon and read the Herald Tribune as he ate, the crisp crust of a croissant sprinkling the front of his shirt. The headlines trumpeted Clemenceau’s trip to America, which he ignored. He scanned the other articles. A long article on Parisians rioting because of the possible murders of two Frenchmen in America covered much of the front page. Joe read that article with concern. It said less than he, himself, already knew.

Both names were mentioned in the article, but he only had two passports—his and Gresham’s—so his choice of names if he were asked was limited. The police would be on the lookout for Joe Henry, that name would be highlighted on their reports and posted in their stations. Gresham’s might not be, for there would be no reason to be looking for a dead man. That made the choice of who he was to be rather easy. He would be Wynton Gresham for at least a while longer.

One story buried at the bottom of the second page stopped him. A woman in Haute-Loire, an American, had hanged herself at the foot of her bed, using for her noose a fourragère won by a man in the war. The article hinted that she may have been ill for some time. Joe thought of how long the shadows of the past are cast.

He had come to Paris because of Gresham’s ticket, a free trip anywhere. He had also come to Paris because of Gresham, in part at least for why Gresham had been killed. He came also because of the manuscript. He had to read it. Even if the sheriff in Greenwich found a copy of Gresham’s manuscript, he might not read it; even if he took the time to read it, he probably wouldn’t understand the significance. Not without some guidance at least. It would molder in some desk drawer or filing cabinet. Joe knew quite well that he and Dillard might be the only two people alive who could, and would want to, bring light to the meanings of Gresham’s work. With that, he thought that he might also be able to provide a sense of closure for Gresham as well as to offer himself something settled that might put his own life back in drive. A talk with Paul Dillard might unshroud the mystery of Gresham’s death and might clear his own name from the indictment of the Greenwich police. Following that, he thought he might deal with even more distant pasts in southern Colorado. Everything in its time, he thought, remembering poorly the words of a priest he had once listened to.

Joe returned to his room for Dillard’s note delivered the previous day but could not find it. He looked on the table and on the floor beneath the bed. He also could not remember the exact address but did recall the street sounding like “flowers.”

“Rue de Fleurus,” the old woman at the desk said.

“Yes, oui,” Joe said.

“It is not far,” she said and turned to point a palsied finger toward the wall behind her. “That way. You can walk down boulevard Saint-Michel or take the Metro to Jardin du Luxembourg, and rue de Fleurus runs through the garden. Where you want . . . a home? Yes, where you want is probably across the garden, on the west side. You walk across the garden, it is still lovely this time of year, even with the wet and cold, and you will find it. If not, anyone can tell you where.”

He left the hotel and walked to the Metro station at Saint-Michel. The fluid elaborateness and elongated loops of its art nouveau entrance blinked in the morning’s still light. He descended into the catacombs of the Metro, the resolute push of others steadying him along. He hurried for and boarded the underground train, holding tight to a railing, standing the two stops to the Luxembourg Gardens. The other people on the Metro ignored him, old women on their way to the markets, young businessmen with hair black and slicked back and wearing blue suits pressed tight, students looking fashionably sullen in woolen fisherman’s sweaters.

Weak sunshine greeted him as he walked back up to street level. The Luxembourg Garden, still wet from dew, was cast in the shades of winter, and with a light haze upon it, the park became a mystical place. A park on which poems are made. He passed through the garden where, even in the coolness of the winter morning, clutches of heavily bundled old men played boules on the lawn while others sat in pairs playing backgammon or talking. The gravel pathway crunched under his feet, and he felt his pace quickening, from anticipation as well as invigoration.

Before the end of the garden path and the beginning of the paved street, he passed within sight of a number of statues and memorials to men from the past century but did not stop to admire them. Three blocks ahead of him on the street, Joe could see a knot of people and fire trucks blocking the road, bells clanging amid the din of noise.

As he neared the clutches of bystanders and firemen amidst fire equipment, he began to distinguish uniformed gendarme waving traffic down other streets so that the firemen could do their jobs. Joe could see no flames, but some of the men ran around like ants, scurrying between trucks and the smoking rubble of the stone townhouse. He worked his way around the crowd and walked another block until he found an open business where he might ask about Paul Dillard’s home.

The business, an automobile garage, had its wide front barn-like doors open to the street. Inside a heavy man dressed in a heavy shirt and overalls worked on a small two-seater automobile. A round mass of a woman with gray hair shorter than Joe’s sat in the driver’s seat writing in a notebook while the mechanic mumbled to himself and busied himself under the hood. Another woman, thin and dark and vulture-like, stood to the side, silently looking into the engine compartment while the mechanic worked.

The only one of the three of them to look up at Joe when he entered the garage was the thin, dark woman. Her eyes were hard as black stones and cold as the eyes of a crow. Joe avoided her stare and walked closer to the mechanic who was talking, maybe to one of the women or both or neither, while he worked.

“—comme lui,” the mechanic was saying in French. “Comme mon fils et les autres. Tous perdu. Une generation perdue.” He sighed, shaking his head. “Tous perdue,” he said again.

He bent back under the hood. The thin woman stared mutely at Joe. The large woman looked at the mechanic, then the meaty flesh of her enormous arms jiggled as she quickly wrote something in her notebook.

“Pardon,” Joe said.

The mechanic and the large woman in the driver’s seat joined the thin woman in looking silently at Joe.

“Oui?” asked the mechanic. His eyes were crossed but his face kind. He placed a wrench on the table beside him and wiped his hands on a rag taken from his breast pocket.

Joe struggled with his French, forming with the help of the others in the garage his question, “Ou est Paul Dillard?”

“Dillard?” asked the mechanic, struggling over the l’s and the hard d.

“Oui. Paul Dillard,” Joe said again.

The mechanic exhaled long and loudly through his teeth. He tossed his hands in the air then let them drop to his sides.“Duh-yar. Duh-yar. Iz Paul Duh-yar. J’y ai vécu,” the mechanic said, picking up and pointing his wrench in the direction from where Joe had just walked. “There. La. There.”

Joe turned and followed the man’s point but saw only the wood frame of a wall with tools and tires and automobile parts lining and piled against it.

“Where the fire was,” said the mechanic. “He lived there, his family’s home for many years.”

“Where the fire was?” Joe asked.

“Yes, yes. The fire. A terrible thing. Ce matin. . . I hear sirens this morning and follow them to his home. He was under une coverture—blanket. Alive, mais, but not good.” The mechanic shook his head. “Pauvre, unlucky, he was, and very sad, très triste. Je ne savais même pas qu’il était venu à la maison. Did not know he was back. . . . So unlucky.” The man paused as though collecting his breath, then added, “Juste hier son amant s’est suicidé, in her apartment, kill herself. So sad. Quelle histoire. Tres triste.”

Joe stood fixed in the slanted light of the open garage door not quite certain what his next step would be. The light in his room last night. Someone had been there and read Dillard’s note. He felt the responsibility for yet another killing. He had not committed it, but it had come from his presence. Had he not become Gresham, the Englishman Huntington might not have been murdered on the ship and Paul Dillard might not have been burned alive. Like a pebble having been tossed into a pond, his deception had rippled out in unexpected ways and affected people he had never met. He closed his eyes and pushed hard against his eyelids with the tips of his fingers. The air he breathed was distant and distinct and was not an air that smelled of oil and rubber but one that smelled of cordite and death.

“Are you all right?” asked the big woman from her perch in the automobile. She spoke English like an American and in a deep and full-throated voice.

“Yes—” Joe began.

“Is there anything that we can do to help?”

“No,” Joe said. “I was meeting him this morning.” He remembered the newspaper article that he had read that morning about a woman who had committed suicide in Paris. “His lover died yesterday, you said?”

“Oui,” the mechanic said. “Suicide.” He made a gesture as though to hang himself. Joe wondered if somehow he was responsible for this too.

“You were close with Mr. Dillard?” the big woman asked.

Joe did not know how to respond, so he nodded his head and let the charade blossom. The eternal autumn in which he had lived since the war would continue.

“Moi aussi. I knew him . . . but not well,” said the big woman. “Before the war, he shopped for books where I shop for books. I like books so I liked him because he liked books.”

Joe heard the past tense and looked at her and then at the mechanic. “Mort?” he said.

The mechanic shrugged and answered in French so quickly that Joe didn’t understand. The big woman translated. “We don’t know if he is dead, but it was not good.”

“Was anyone else in the house?”

“No-no,” said the woman, still translating for the mechanic. “Just Dillard. Marie, his sister, oh she is so sweet and now also so sad. Marie, she lives near Saint Séverin, near Saint Michel in the Quarter. She is still so young. Now she is so sad as well.”

After the mechanic wrote the address for Dillard’s sister on a piece of oily paper, Joe left the garage and turned to retrace his steps back toward Dillard’s house where people were still gathered to watch the firemen complete their duties. He walked into the mingling crowd. Whatever warmth he had felt that morning upon rising had cooled. Across the street from Dillard’s house, he stopped and leaned against a lamppost to watch the last actions of the firemen.

Smoke from the rubble interspersed with the winter mist to form a dark gray haze, a winter’s grisaille above the dirty city. The stone house had been scarred by the fire, scorches blackened the stone above each of the building’s windows and the front door, the steps were a wash of water and mud and soot and water hoses. Charred wooden beams showed like orphans inside the empty windows. The exterior of the house was dead, but from inside Joe could hear some firemen still at work. He listened to the rasping sounds they made with picks and shovels.

He heard the abrasive sounds of men at work. The smell of steam and fire, the feel of lingering heat, the sight of a house reduced, the taste of another death. He was so absorbed in thought that he did not immediately see the Turk walking toward him. A sudden shift of wind jarred his senses as it brought a whirl of smoke to lay sodden on the street. Through that smoke he saw the Turk approaching.

Instinctively, Joe turned and walked, pushing through the crowd and down the first street he found, preferring the visibility of an open avenue to the confining crowd in front of Dillard’s house. With the Turk following close behind, he again felt like the prey in a lethal game of cat and mouse, but Joe also knew what he was doing. He wanted the confrontation with the Turk to come at a place of his choosing, a street corner not too crowded.

He walked quick-step past businesses with their owners outside sweeping the sidewalk or watching the commotion at the end of the street, a saucer and cup in one hand and cigarette in the other as they leaned against the front of their establishments.

Joe looked over his shoulder. The Turk kept pace with him. Inside the pocket of his overcoat, he kept his hand tight around the small revolver.

Toward the river. He knew that. As though a young boy lost in a wilderness, he knew to walk toward a river. The wilderness he felt lost in was not one of pinions and arroyos, but he was lost and the river would provide an index mark from which he could cipher his way. He walked briskly, confident that the Turk would keep pace.

Joe would choose his place. The hunted becoming the hunter.

As he neared the large boulevards of the city’s Left Bank, he encountered more people on the sidewalk. With the din of the growing crowd and the noise of busses and trucks and automobiles, people had to raise their voices to be heard. Joe heard only a distant surge of sound, muffled and loud and far away from him.

When he looked over his shoulder to turn a corner or cross a street, he saw the Turk. The big man was playing with him like a boy plays with a beetle in an ant hill. Except Joe was playing his own game as well. He kept half-expecting Dapper to turn up at the round of a corner, but if the little man were with the Turk he did not show himself. That was not a good thought. He decided that he should make some play before he was herded toward some killing pen.

He stopped after rounding a corner and waited for the Turk. He had been racing around inside the frying pan ever since finding Gresham dead on the sofa. He would just go ahead and jump into the fire and see who got burned.

The Turk rounded the corner, a long and steady stride. His smile dissolved as he came close to Joe, his step slowing. Dressed entirely in black, he could have been the reaper met at the journey’s end. Except Joe knew that this reaper preferred to send people on the last journey, not await their arrival. His heavy brows curled. Joe smiled at having done something the Turk had not expected.

The Turk’s eyes looked over Joe’s head at a pair of uniformed gendarme, close enough to see any action yet far enough to not hear any words.

When the Turk was a dozen feet from him, Joe pulled the short-barreled Smith & Wesson from his pocket and held it to his side. He kept its barrel pointing down so that passersby would not see it against the fold of his overcoat. The Turk, however, did take notice of it and stopped and was pushed from behind by a man carrying a bag filled with long loafs of bread who cursed at the Turk then walked on muttering obscenities about a bread strike in the city.

Joe stepped toward the Turk. He too looked up at the man who stood a good three inches taller than him and outweighed him by twenty hard pounds. But unlike the man with bread loaves in his hand, Joe had a revolver.

The Turk’s black eyes stared down at Joe. Joe could not see anything close to fear in them, maybe a recognition or a slight concern over the revolver he held to his side, but not an ounce of fear.

The Turk asked, “Alors?” and his breath smelled of garlic.

Joe searched his mind and said in his broken French, “Je voudrais parler avec Marcel.”

“Pourquoi?” the Turk asked.

“I have something he wants,” Joe said. “A manuscript. Manuscrit.”

The Turk nodded.

“You know where my hotel is?” Joe asked.

“L’Hotel Le Couer? Oui.” The Turk smiled. “I know it,” he added in heavy English, the words dropping fulsome from his mouth.

Joe had guessed as much. “At the end of the street is a café called the Gentilhomme. I will be there tonight at the bar. If Marcel wishes to speak with me, he can find me there.”

The Turk nodded again, his face tightly set, as though tapped into place by a stone mason. “Neuf heures. Gentilhomme.”

He turned and walked away.

The Turk was a soldier, a killing machine. Functional but also thinking. He had followed his orders, but he possessed enough imagination to act on his own. Once the game had turned, the Turk had chosen discretion. Joe would need to remember the man was not an automaton.

Joe watched the big man’s back recede into the crowd on the street.

Once he could no longer see the Turk, Joe turned and walked on, crossing and re-crossing streets, entering businesses to buy nothing, sitting on park benches, taking the Metro from Saint-Michel to the Gare Du Nord and back by different lines and waiting outside the exits. He recognized the purpose behind his melodrama, he recognized it from the war.

The isolation of the trenches had forced an unconscious defense upon him. Like others who had lived inside the connecting entrenchments that ran below the ground surface from Switzerland to the North Sea, Joe had formed a nervous obsession with who was watching him, which unseen enemy was readying sniper shots at him. He spent that day’s afternoon convincing himself that he was not being followed, so much so that he did almost nothing else.

He did stop at a newspaper stand for another copy of the morning’s Herald Tribune and a tourist’s map of Paris. He took them into a café where he sat near the front window and ordered coffee, eggs, and croissant while he read the newspaper. The single-column article on the American woman who had killed herself did not mention any relationship with Paul Dillard, but it did mention her address. He called over the aproned waiter and pointed to the address in the newspaper. “Où est, l’adresse?” he asked.

The man arched an eyebrow, but told Joe how to find the place. Then he bent close to Joe and said that he could sell Joe an illegal entry into the catacombs below Paris where the bones of millions of dead Parisians were piled. He said in a half-whisper, “C’est ici l’Empire de la Mort,” and laughed.

“Merci,” Joe said, “but no.” He placed a couple of French coins on the saucer and left the restaurant. He had witnessed the empire of death at its most epic and did not care to see it at its most bizarre.

Joe found the address on rue Monge. Large chestnut trees, their branches empty in the winter, lined both sides of the street. He stopped across the street from the woman’s house, an age-stained brick building. From inside the apartment building behind him he could hear a pianist practicing. While a few errant snowflakes drifted past, he stood with the pianist running the scales and he studied the front of the woman’s building. He crossed the street and walked past it once, turned around at the corner and walked past the residence again. There were no lights shining, no windows open, no drapes even parted, no sign of anyone home, no sounds from inside indicating the police or a neighbor. Joe saw that the heavy carriage doors to the left of the front door were unlatched and left slightly open. Without looking around and as though he belonged there, he walked through the doors and into the courtyard, to the open stairwell at the back of the house and kicked open the rear door. The old wood of the frame held surprisingly hard, but gave way with a splash of wood shards on Joe’s third kick. He walked up the back stairs to the kitchen, which was clean other than a few dishes on the counter. Nothing to say a person had died there. He walked to the front room, stopped in the doorway, and looked into where the American woman had been found.

“L’Empire de la Mort,” Joe said aloud. In the pale and empty front room, his words echoed.

He looked around, walking between the small but high-ceilinged rooms, not knowing what exactly he was looking for. Not even knowing why he had come to the woman’s home, other than coincidences are not supposed to happen. Other than the empty front room, the other rooms were in disorder with drawers emptied and cupboard doors open.

With no fire in the coal stove, the apartment was cold. The only light came in streamers through the windows. The old wood floors groaned and sighed underfoot. The smell of death lingered in the closed apartment. He walked through the rooms with a feeling of imposition, not just that he was walking through the home of someone he did not know and not just that that person had died, but he simply was not supposed to be there. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time had begun the descending spiral he had found himself caught in. There he was, suspected of murdering people in America and on board the Berengaria and then to be found sightseeing in a dead woman’s apartment. It would be hard to explain it away if he were caught.

He did not at first think about what he saw, the searched rooms, not ransacked, but clearly searched. The newspapers had said nothing about this, nothing to indicate foul play. Someone besides himself had come to the house in search of something, probably the same manuscript he had come for. If they had not found it, he felt he would not and he took his leave by the back stairs.

Joe saw the gendarme as soon as he stepped from the carriage doors. A neighbor, aroused by the sound or the sight of someone entering the courtyard through those large double doors, had probably called the police. The gendarme called to him as he stepped onto the paved road fronting the residence. Joe turned at once, and ran without even a thought. Like a rabbit bolting for cover, he ran for the nearest Metro station, jumped the gate, and took the stairs three at a time to the platform. Then he kept running, dodging frightened people waiting for their ride home, across the platform, and out the exit. He turned in time to see the gendarme just enter the Metro station across the street. He walked on and around the corner and hid himself inside the movement of people along le boulevard Saint-Michel. He did not look back and heard nobody shouting for him. He walked with the crowd, tight like them inside their coats, and turned off Saint Michel and down rue Monsieur-le-Prince, stopping at the Polidor, a crémerie, where he found a table and ordered coffee, which came in a large white bowl of a cup. He watched others eat, men and some women dressed for jobs of labor or of service. They ate plates of simple food piled high like the cafés he remembered in the American West that fed a man full and well. It was a place for the working class and for students to spend time without spending a great deal of money.

He sat and drank his coffee and ordered a second along with a crêpe of butter, eggs, and cheese. With the tourist map laid out on the table, he found Saint-Séverin was not far from where he sat drinking his coffee.

The manuscript Gresham had been working on was awfully important to someone, important enough to have caused the deaths of at least four people. That evening, when he would meet Rene Marcel, he would most likely meet the person who was interested in the manuscript, the person who had continued the carnage from years past. Before then, he wanted to meet Dillard’s sister. The Marcel he was to meet seemed to think that Dillard had once owned a copy, otherwise Dillard and his American lover would not be dead. Maybe the sister knew. Maybe he could keep one person from being murdered. He finished his meal and his second bowl of coffee, pulled his collar up tight against the developing Paris cold and left the restaurant.

Joe found and walked down rue de Prêtress-Saint-Séverin, a short, cobblestone street off Saint-Michel, staying close to the buildings and the shadows of the buildings as he walked. Tucked away from the street stood a small cathedral, its name engraved on a plaque near its front doors read Eglise de Saint Séverin, the name of the church the automobile mechanic had said Marie Dillard lived near. He fished the address from his pocket, looked from the piece of paper to the numbers on the brick buildings and found the home on the corner of rue Saint-Séverin and across from the church. Gargoyles reigned with imperious presence along the roofline of the old Gothic church, their hollow eyes watching out across and over the building where Marie Dillard lived. They also watched Joe as he looked across the street. Joe was becoming used to being under someone’s stare.

He found a bench outside the entrance to the cathedral’s ambulatory and sat facing the street, looking, he hoped, like any other man in need of the church’s respite. He checked his pocket watch, four hours until he would meet Marcel. He blew into his cupped hands as he watched each person walk by, waiting for the one who would place a key in the lock of the house across from him.

He looked at the sky, which through the day had become low and heavy with dark clouds, a heaven lacking in color. He wondered whether he remembered how to pray but did not. He sat in the ambulatory on the concrete bench and watched parishioners enter the cathedral, heads already bowed like after-age supplicants, footsteps echoing, and voices empty or lowered in speech. He turned and saw a filigree of light through the stained glass and another stained glass with light that was thick. He imagined people walking across the stone floors, trails worn from centuries of passage, people sitting in their pews, breathing in air heavy in dust and incense as they knelt to the prayers of the penitent. The people hunched on their knees, hands clasped and heads lowered, words muffled, dark forms in the candlelit church. The flames fluttering in reflection in the windows and along the old and stained walls whenever a door was opened and fluttering again when closed. People praying in whispers and some talking in low voices and pigeons flapping outside and people walking across the flagstones to the stone stairs and people on the sidewalk across from Joe as he sat and hoped that she would soon arrive.

He did not know what Dillard’s sister looked like nor how he would approach her once he found her. For all he knew she was involved with the killing of Gresham, maybe even her own brother. What could possess someone to murder her own brother was alien to him, but as a newspaperman he had seen a woman who had killed her own children and a man who had killed his father. He had seen an epidemic insanity during the war, an Armageddon. He could not explain the actions of the world’s lost citizens. He would not even try.

He was lost as well. He was one of what the automobile repairman had called hopeless, without hope, a lost generation. Perdu. That loss had come in the war. It went beyond a loss of hope and it had manifested in Joe’s spirit like a plague. The things he had lost in the war, the hope and several layers of innocence and truth and the absolute belief in abstract words and his church, friends, family, the treasure house of his past, had all been replaced by darker monuments. New engravings had been etched upon his soul and memory as though with acid. Joe could not see beyond them, not in daylight nor at night in drunkenness nor in a church’s ambulatory under an abandoned sky.

He saw her first from a distance walking on his side of the street, dressed in black. She was tall and quite thin, which, for a reason Joe could not have said, surprised him. Her walk was unsteady and her head was down and shoulders slumped. She walked with her hands in her pockets and her head barely lifted. She wore a cloche hat, but he could see her dark hair cut short.

As she passed within a dozen feet of him, looking toward him with unfocused eyes, she looked like someone who was no longer touched by the sun.

“Marie Dillard?” Joe asked as he slid alongside of her on the sidewalk, placing his hand on her arm. She was as tall as he, and her skin was dark, the almond of a Mediterranean.

She looked at him, startled. Her eyes widened. Her mouth began to open as though to form words.

“Please, don’t say anything,” Joe said. “I must speak with you. I am an American. . . . My name is Joe Henry. I need to talk with you about Wynton Gresham and your brother.”

Her breath drew in quickly from surprise and her eyes widened when she looked at him. She looked around at the street and spit in a low voice and with explicit immediacy, “Assassin,” truncating the word as though it were used as a cudgel. Her voice formed almost in a cold whisper that cut quick and raw through Joe.

She pulled her arm from his grasp and swung her other hand up to slap him across the cheek. Joe saw her hand swing in its arc and could have blocked it but did not.

“Assassin,” she said louder, more confidently, her head raised as though to announce his condemnation to the world.

People on the street began to slow. Some stopped while others edged around the two of them on the narrow sidewalk. A couple of men who had stopped, leaned against the side of the church, cigarettes held loosely to their sides, deciding whether they wanted to be spectators or participants in that street’s drama.

“No,” Joe said. “Please listen to me.”

She reached into her purse and began to pull something from it. The presence of a crowd surrounding them, however, stopped her, and she drew out her hand empty, pointing her finger at him.

“Assassin,” she said once more before breaking away from him and walking quickly across the street to enter the brick townhouse. Before entering the house, she turned and said, “Vous êtes un meurtrier. Vous avez tué mon frère.”

He took one step in following her although she had already closed her door to him.

A heavy hand landed on his shoulder, and he turned to look into the eyes of a man wearing the clothes of a worker. Unlike the students he had seen elsewhere in Paris, and like those in America as well, his worn clothes had been earned. He had dirt on his cheeks and his skin was dark from the sun, and Joe thought that he could feel the rope scars and callouses and half-heeled blisters of a workingman’s hands.

“Qu’est-ce que vous voulez,” the man said, his voice raised and his accent something other than any French Joe had ever heard, to the point where Joe struggled at understanding.

“What is it you vant?” The man spat in an accent almost German, Alsatian maybe. His blue eyes alive and hard in the directness of their stare.

Joe looked at the people who had slowed to watch. Their stares of wonder momentarily impaled him.

“Wait,” Joe said. He placed his hands up, palms out, as to show his innocence.

“La police!” the man yelled, and another man standing nearby took up the call.

Joe took a step, but the first man reached out to take his shoulder, and Joe swung around and in the close space brought his elbow into the man’s nose. Like hitting the hard end of an opened oak door, the man’s nose split and he staggered. Joe punched him once more, unnecessarily for the man had been knocked out. The other man, momentarily struck by the change of fortunes, took one step toward Joe but Joe jabbed him in the throat. The man staggered, lost of breath and lost of voice and probably panicking that he might also be lost of life. Joe pushed the man from him. The two men lay sprawled as broken mannequins on the cobblestones of the street.

Joe left, walking quickly but not running and not looking anyone in the eye and within minutes he had found his anonymity within the ever-present crowds of the Left Bank. He continued on and away from her house and away from his hotel and back toward the river. The cold cut through his coat even more than before and he tightened his body against a chill. He walked, head down, following the shadow of his footsteps.

Joe walked along the quai of the Seine, the sidewalk beginning to ice and his breath pluming. He traded his coat and a ten dollar bill—a month’s wages for the average Parisian—to a bookseller for the man’s old overcoat. He hoped to change his appearance and hoped also not to pick up lice along with the trade. Sitting huddled under blankets, old men on the docked barges fished for barbel as dirty smoke rose from oven pipes on top of the boats. He glanced at the sky and then toward where the sun would be and saw a distant orange glow that might have been the sun setting behind a horizon of buildings, gray against the darkening world. Cold light smeared out behind the borders of the buildings. Empty tree limbs twisted in a slight December wind along the river that carried a beginning of snow. He walked alone with a river of brackish waters, a cold wind, and a diminished and veiled sunset.

He checked his watch and found that he had over four hours before Marcel and his men would arrive at the Gentilhomme.

Even though he planned on arriving early to watch them enter, see where they stood, who they were, how they presented themselves, he still had hours to kill, so he decided to use the time profitably. A visit to the American Library would provide him with something he felt sorely in lack of—knowledge.

He crossed the Seine at Port Royal Bridge and crossed through the Tuileries, the grass wet and the hundreds of chestnut trees empty of leaves. A huddle of men, all dressed heavily against the weather, played pétanque in one corner, but Joe didn’t slow to watch. He avoided the large boulevards and took to the narrow side streets and stayed in shadows in case he encountered any police.

The library was on rue de l’Elysée in a palatial building once owned by the Papal Nuncio. Above the large double doors was painted in a Roman script, ATRUM POST BELLUM, EX LIBRIS LUX: AFTER THE DARKNESS OF WAR, THE LIGHT OF BOOKS. They were words that Joe had first read in the spring of 1919 when on leave in Paris he stumbled up the stairs to the library in search of a place that did not serve beer or coffee or women. The large and open reading rooms and thousands of American volumes proved a daily escape from his nights.

The scent of old tomes wafted in the building’s air and dust motes bounced in the window-light as Joe stepped through the doors and scraped his boots on a rough rug just inside the entryway. He had come to read about the battle and the American Library was the only English-language library that he knew. He asked a young man who sat behind a small reading table with a VOLUNTEER sign facing out.

The young man, not too young to have been in the war, was writing. In front of him was a tablet for writing and he had filled better than half the page, and he was writing furiously and without consideration, as though his mind was moving faster than his brain. Joe had heard of it, automatic writing, and knew that some people were using it as a treatment method for shell shock. Joe had visited a small asylum for the wounded sons of rich men where young doctors were experimenting with it, older doctors disdained it and favored the decades old Rest Cure of Weir Mitchell and wondered why their patients blew their brains out at the first chance. This new method, automatic writing, came from Freud through the Frenchman Andre Breton, and Joe thought that it might work in helping the young vets deal with their trench demons. Maybe not for him, but for others.

The young man suddenly stopped writing, and with a nervous jerk he looked up at Joe and saw that he was being watched. That inchoate sense developed in the trench; those who lived in the trenches of France had grown accustomed to being under watch, under the view of scoped eyes, watched by new officers looking for an improperly buttoned jacket or haggard sergeants looking for a volunteer or a Heine bastard across the distance looking to place a bullet in your brain. You never got used to it. Even when your own eyes closed in sleep, you felt the scrutiny. It was a feeling embedded.

The young man capped his pen, black and heavy, maybe Mont Blanc, and looked up as Joe stepped closer. The young man’s eyes were old and sad, a contrast to their clear color, and his left eye twitched a couple of times.

He swallowed and asked, “May I help you?” His fingers, set to either side of the tablet continued to worry against his thumbs as though they needed to catch up with their lost writing.

“London Times History of the War,” Joe asked and the man’s twitch triggered.

Joe had seen it before—other veterans of the war who carried the war with them. Gresham had once told the difference between fact and truth and provided an example. “This is a fact,” Gresham had said. “This is incontrovertible. The war ended on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in the year of our Lord 1918.” Following a moment filled with a drink from his glass of scotch, he added, “This is the truth. The war will never end. You and me and hundreds of thousands of others who fought in that slaughter will carry it with us every single day of our lives.”

Joe had seen men who slept underneath their beds or who would not stay in room unless a door was left propped open. He had seen men who walked always hunched to keep their heads from appearing above a trenches lip. He knew one man in Greenwich who refused any job that made him work during the daylight hours and would only work between sunset and sunrise and once the matin sun rose he was safely barred within his shuttered house. Shellshock, some doctor had called it, and Joe felt that he was lucky that he carried only a slight neurosis with him from the war.

The young man, who if one were to see him sitting at a café with his arms crossed and his eyes closed in contemplation of a lovely day one would think nothing of him, blinked several times and his body shuddered and stiffened to control. He swallowed with a jerk and pointed Joe down a row of shelves filled with books and told Joe which shelf to see.

The young man had obviously looked through those books himself, maybe searching for a reason if not hoping for a cure.

Joe pulled the sixth volume from the Times history along with other histories. Those by Vast and Hayes, whom he had remembered from Gresham’s house, as well one by Alexander Powell and another by Yves Neuville. The story from the first three was much the same—a brave assault and stunning victory. The sort of patriotic jingoism that Joe come to despise.

However, Powell’s narrative of the battle was more visceral and Neuville’s history contained the questions that Joe had come to hear.

The battle had begun with an extended artillery barrage, over seventy hours of almost constant shelling of the German lines which only increased in ferocity on the morning of 25 September 1915. The French soldiers were told by their officers that nothing could survive such a bombardment and that the worst that they would encounter would be the German wounded who had survived. One major, who was on a general’s staff and therefor would not take part in the advance—much to his regret, he had said—had announced that more French soldiers would suffer from sprained ankles crossing through the shelled-out no-man’s land than would be shot by Germans.

The Germans, it was supposed, would not have constructed trenches of depth and strength to withstand the barrage. However, the Germans had constructed rooms and tunnels well below the depth of destruction rained down upon them, so that the bombing would have sounded like a strong thunderstorm. They emerged just before sunrise that Friday morning in time to reestablish their positions and knew the trails the French soldiers would follow and where best to place their old Maxim guns and newer MGs. The killing field they produced became filled with the bodies of twenty thousand Frenchmen. Some killed so many men that German soldiers cried as they hoped the French would discontinue the assault, their machine guns overheated and barrels warped, and still the French came.

Neuville theorized that the Germans had known when and where and how the assault would proceed. “A traitorous coward,” he theorized, “had undoubtedly sold the honor of France, and one can only hope that that man will have to live a long life with the memory of his perfidy and the blood of his countrymen forever on his hands and forever staining his damned soul.”

Joe read them. Unlike Neuville, he hoped the traitor’s life would end soon. As he left, he turned to the young man, right hand shaking, and said, “It will get better, brother.”

He hated lying, but he felt some need to offer hope.

At the Gentilhomme, most of the tables were surrounded by people eating early dinners of soup and eggs and sausages. Joe saw the broad back of Quire at the bar, the back of a serious worker or the hunch of a serious drinker. Joe took the stool next to him and rubbed the cold from his hands.

He patted Quire on the shoulder as he sat and asked, “How you doing?’ He wanted the words to sound jolly.

Quire turned to him. His left eye held the livid mark of a hard knuckle, a play of green and yellow and plum-purple. Quire squinted through the other eye until he recognized Joe. “Hello, Joe,” he said and raised his pint. “Want one?”

“What happened?”

The bartender leaned over the bar and stared at Joe. He ordered a pint, Alsatian, and the bartender brought it. Joe fished in his pants pocket for a coin.

Quire took a Franc coin from the pile in front of him and slapped it down. “On me,” he said. “Hell, it’s only a Franc. That’s what? About twelve cents in real money. You can get the next round.”

Quire offered his glass for a toast, “To the Lost,” and Joe met it. Holding the pint at eye level and looking through it toward the mirror, Quire said, “Down to the sea in ships. Down to life in schooners.”

They both drank, with Joe glancing toward the front doors each time they opened and checking the mirror with regularity.

“Tell me,” Joe said. “What happened?”

Quire scratched the back of his neck. “One of those damn things that makes no sense. We both been inside those deals.”

“Yes.” Joe drank, waiting for Quire to explain further.

He watched the mirror as a woman hipped her way across the room and nudged against him to stand at the bar. She had fresh skin and high cheekbones. Her hair was black and cut tight against her face, the favored style from Colleen Moore although even more severe than the film star’s cut. The French, Joe thought, did everything a bit more severe. Her eyes, ringed heavily with kohl, were obscured, and she had a small mouth with lips as red as drawn blood.

“Pardon,” she said. She waved to the bartender and smiled at Joe, a smile with promises of adventure.

The bartender came and she ordered a Corpse Reviver, which the bartender mixed and served with no reaction beyond a deep breath. She pretended to search for money in pockets that did not exist on her short dress, then drew her mouth into a pout toward Joe and Quire. Quire took another Franc from his pile and handed it to the bartender.

“Merci,” she said.

“Pleasure’s mine,” he said.

“My name is Elle,” she said in accented English, extending her hand across Joe to shake with Quire. “It means ‘She.’”

“He’s Joe. I’m Quire.”

“Quire? What does Quire mean?”

“I’m American. In America, names don’t mean anything.”

She smiled and nodded. “But your eye,” she said, her mouth curved down. “That means something.”

He shrugged, “The streets can be mean.”

“Monsieur, you must be careful.” She smiled again but only at Quire. Joe felt as though he had become an audience. “I return now to my friends. Are you here often?”

“Yes,” Quire answered, nodding.

“I will see you sometime.” Not a question, but a very confident statement. She knew her power. “After Christmas,” she said, holding Quire’s gaze long enough to pass some message Joe was not privy to.

Quire nodded and smiled. “After Christmas.”

She left and the scent of her perfume drifted in a wake behind her. Joe watched her move through the room to her table, her walk a work of art. The room seemed to follow her.

Joe said, “Hell, man, was I even here?”

“Not that I could see . . . nor her apparently.”

Joe drank from his beer. “That did a lot for my ego.”

“She wasn’t thinking no ego, bud.” He winked and drank.

“I noticed. Believe me, I noticed even if you two thought I was one of the invisible.” Joe turned and looked at the woman and her cloche-hatted friends together at their table. His thoughts grew darker and sadder as he thought of how he sometimes envied people like them, smart set people who seemed to have nothing to think about and nothing to destroy their dreams at night.

She didn’t need to buy her own drinks, she didn’t need to pay for the things of life.

“Nice,” Quire said, turning to look.

“Damn nice,” Joe agreed.

“Pretty smart all right. She’s got It.”

They finished their beers and ordered another as well as a plate of fresh baguette and butter. They talked for a while about women they had known. Joe kept his tone light, not letting a sadness invade just then for he knew the price of morose moments. So he welcomed the next beer gratefully and drank fully.

“You going to tell me?” he asked Quire.

“Tell you what?”

Joe pointed a finger at Quire’s face.

Quire touched the swollen area around his eye. “I’m not exactly certain what happened,” he said. “I’m walking home and some guys punch me, and one tells me to forget about helping somebody named Gresham. It doesn’t mean a shit-load of sense to me. I don’t even know anybody named Gresham.”

“Son of a bitch,” Joe said.

“What?”

“You do know someone named Gresham, in a way.”

“What do you mean, Mr. Ford?”

Joe did not even consider how much to withhold from Quire. It was too late to protect him now. Quire deserved to hear everything. That was what Joe told him. He left few details out, concluding as Quire finished his beer and began another, “Someone must have seen us last night, thought there was some connection and decided to convince you to get lost. I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t know.” He shrugged and drank. “If you don’t mind, though, I’ll be taking the guy’s advice. I’m not too keen on dying any earlier than necessary.”

Joe nodded. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “It’s my fight.” He drank and waited for the tight silence that followed to end.

When they talked again, they talked about the war. It was a subject that each knew well and neither could easily discard. They talked about the smells of sage and pine that they remembered from their youths but neither had known in many years, and then about the French. Joe told Quire about working on a newspaper. Quire told Joe what the woman at the bar had meant when she said that she would see him after Christmas, “The week following Christmas is St. Catherine’s Day. All the beauties wear disguises and go around kissing men they’d like to bounce. It’s a helluva’ time, no commitments, just a good night’s roll.” They toasted that. “You just have to be certain you don’t end up in bed with a fire ship.”

Joe laughed, “How will they ever get us back on the farm once we’ve seen the sights of Paris?”

“Ah, yes,” Quire agreed, glancing again toward the woman with kohl-rimmed eyes. They toasted and laughed and talked some more.

The room then darkened; the night began to turn over.

He first noticed the Turk’s presence in the shadows by the rear exit as he had turned for one more glimpse of the beautiful woman and her friends. The Turk walked from the shadows near the rear door and into the canted light of the café. Shadows followed him. His darkness moved with him like a deadly slipstream.

The Turk formed a rear guard, protecting against Joe’s escape through the café’s rear as well as securing a possible exit for whoever came later through the front. Looming above the seated patrons at tables, he looked even larger than Joe remembered. Below the furrow of his heavy and dark eyebrows, his eyes glared. He smiled at Joe like the eternal footman smiling. With a roll of his shoulders he set himself, a massive standing at the ready.

The café’s front doors opened. In walked Dapper. He wore a black overcoat that was buttoned to the collar and extended below the knees. He wore no hat and had dark hair thinning and wet from the wet snow falling outside. He walked slowly into the room, sliding around tables and searching faces until he saw Joe at the bar. When he saw Quire seated next to Joe, he stalled for a second.

“That’s him,” Quire said and Joe followed Quire’s gaze to Dapper. Quire began to rise from his seat. “I’m going to kick that bastard into the last century. Let him know that his big mouth wrote a scrip his little ass can’t cash.”

Joe placed a hand on Quire’s shoulder to steady the block of a man. “Hold on,” he said. “You’re involving yourself in what you just said you don’t want a part of.”

“Things change when could-be become what-is.”

“In that case, you’ll get your chance, but wait a minute and see how things play out.”

Hesitating for a moment, Quire’s gauged Joe’s words, but the man’s eyes carried full fire in them. He nodded and sat back down. His low growl, like that of a dog just before its let loose, told Joe that Quire was not willing to wait long. “See, what’d I tell you? A magnet for trouble. Don’t even have to go looking for it.”

As Dapper ringed around tables filled with drinkers, Joe asked, “You Marcel?”

Dapper looked at him then at the Turk, who nodded, before turning to study Joe’s face.

“Non, Monsieur,” he said with a careful voice. He breathed and repeated, “Non.” His voice, like his eyes, was dark and callous. He faced Joe, unblinking.

“Where is he?”

“Marcel sent me.” The man’s eyes darted between Joe and Quire. “You can do business with me.”

“I do business with Marcel.”

Dapper gave a French shrug that could have meant okay or fuck you or I don’t care.

“I have the manuscript but not here,” Joe said in English. He paused to watch the man’s reaction. There was very little other than a slight curl of the upper lip, like a mongrel before it bites. “If Marcel wants it, he comes to me.”

After a moment of silence between them, the man’s eyebrows raised. Joe could see some cogs and gears working overtime as Dapper chewed on that puzzle he had just been tossed.

“I came here with the expectation that we would do business. How you Americans say, ‘Talk straight.’ I give you something, you give me something.” He paused and smiled. “I scratch yours and you scratch mine, huh? I don’t like playing games.”

“I don’t like people killing my friends, but that hasn’t stopped you,” Joe said, leaning back against the bar. He drank from his beer. He could feel his anger rising, especially following Dapper’s attempt to bait him.

“Business,” Dapper said, as though people’s lives were no more than commodities to be traded.

Sitting on the bar stool, Joe looked into the man’s eyes. Just for effect he stood and looked at the man, who was then shorter than him. The Turk stepped closer. Joe saw them as though in a parallax. Both kept one hand inside a coat pocket and both watched him closely.

“Here’s business,” Joe said. “I have what you want, what do you have for trade?”

Dapper did not look at but nodded toward Quire. “A friend of yours?”

Joe recognized the question as misdirection intended by Dapper to allow himself time to regain his leverage.

Joe looked at Quire. “No,” he said. “Just another American to drink with and talk with.”

“He and I have met.” And he offered Joe a false smile. “If I am really the murderer you say I am, killing your friends, then he is lucky. Wouldn’t you agree, Monsieur? If he were your friend and he became a bother as others may have, then I would have to kill him as well.”

Quire answered with a steady quickness, “Listen. I’ve been sailing near the wind for quite a while now and I wouldn’t be frightened by some piss-ant like you.” He added, “Whatever my friend’s in, I’m in.”

Dapper did not look at Quire, not while Quire spoke nor when he spoke of Quire. “Your friend has a big mouth, as you Americans say.”

“And my butt’s big enough to back it up,” Quire added as he pushed himself from his stool. He stood eye-to-eye with Dapper, but Dapper could have fit inside Quire’s girth with room for a quarter-barrel of stout alongside.

Joe placed a hand on Quire’s shoulder. Quire sat back down with his back against the bar. Every muscle in the man’s body had tightened. The muscles along his neck and jaw stood out like heavy cords. He looked at Joe, his face hard and a deep maroon red as though just fired in a forge.

Continuing to ignore Quire, Dapper spoke to Joe, “And you, Monsieur Henry?” He waved his fingers. “Everyone in Paris knows your name. If I have killed all of those other men, why will I not kill you as well?”

“Because I have the manuscript, and until your boss gets it, I’m safe.”

“You are not safe. Not even now. All Marcel need do is provide the word.”

Joe shrugged, not a French shrug but as good as he could offer. He leaned forward. “Tell this to Marcel. I got to his men outside of Greenwich, and I killed them and took the manuscript from their automobile. I had plenty of time to read it while on the cruise over. You and the Turk over there really should take some lessons in how to toss a room. It was in plain sight, and you missed it. Amateurs. Now Marcel has to play my game. Otherwise, it finds its way to a desk at the Prefecture de Police. Some of them may take an interest in its contents and then an interest in the traitor who sent so many of their comrades to their deaths.”

Dapper blinked slowly, the studied movement of a boundless conceit. “Marcel is not concerned with the contents of Gresham’s manuscript, at least what he had written before his demise. So sad.”

He smiled at Joe. The smile’s lack of warmth spread to the man’s eyes.

Dapper took a cigarette from its silver case and lit it with a match, waving the match out and watching the smoke that he breathed out dissipate before he continued, “Marcel is not concerned with it. There is nothing in it that causes him concern.”

“Obviously,” Quire said and rested back into his seat to continue drinking.

Dapper shrugged again and said, almost as an aside, “However, he would prefer to restrain its release.”

“Why?”

“That is not my concern; that is not your concern.”

“Sounds to me,” Quire offered, “like you think a lot of people either are or should be ‘unconcerned,’ yet somehow people are still killing other people.”

Dapper looked from Joe to Quire and back. “You provide me with the manuscript and Marcel pays you handsomely for your efforts.”

“And then I die in my sleep.”

Dapper shrugged. Head, shoulders, hands, they all shrugged, even his eyebrows shrugged. “C’est la vie. Accidents happen, Monsieur. You would be wise to remember that and to help insure that one does not happen to you.” He inhaled a breath of his cigarette and let out a cloud of smoke to rise within the din of the café. He looked around and then looked back at Joe. “One thousand United States dollars, Monsieur. That would allow you to live in Paris for at least a year.”

“You have it?”

“I do.”

Joe nodded. “That’s tempting . . . if I thought I would live out the year.”

Dapper waved his cigarette-laden hand, a trail of smoke with it. “Swiss Francs, then, at the equivalent amount. They are easier to spend and transfer quite easily if your safety concerns cause you to leave France.” He added, as though an afterthought, “Maybe, if the police take an interest in your presence. Maybe someone contacts them about you and you feel the need to leave Paris very quickly—Swiss francs would be helpful.”

Joe remembered Gresham lying dead on his sofa with a bullet hole in him and said, “His reach is awfully long.”

Dapper smiled. “True, but think of how certain that reach will be if he is not satisfied.”

“Point taken,” Joe said. “When I figure out exactly what I want for it, I’ll be in touch. But next time I talk directly with the man. I want to see what a coward looks like.”

Dapper looked at his cigarette and then back at Joe, his dead eyes impaled and devoid of light. “Tomorrow. No later. That is what Marcel told me to instruct you. Following that, you die and he accepts what may come.”

He turned and left. The Turk followed and grazed Joe as he walked past. Joe could feel the hardness of a pistol inside the Turk’s coat. A reminder. After Marcel’s two assistants had left the café, Joe turned to face the bar and found a fresh beer in front of him.

“Thought you might need some assistance in the thought process,” Quire said.

“Thanks. A thousand dollars is a good bit of money, but I’m not certain I’d live to spend it all. Anyway, my mind was made up long ago. And,” he smiled,” I don’t have what Marcel thinks I have in the first place.”

Quire looked at him, mouth slightly open, then laughed full and deep. “Damn, brother. You do know how to run a bluff. I like that.” He nodded and added, “I think I’ll stick around a while to see how it plays out.”

Joe smiled. “For someone out of it, you seem to have landed yourself in the middle.”

Quire nodded. “It’ll give me something to do with my nights besides drink.”

“Think about it. In case you weren’t listening, people have been dying around me with alarming regularity.”

“In case you didn’t realize it, cowboy, I’ve seen enough of death not to be scared off by its prospect. Anyways, with my lungs progressively turning to pudding, I’m not long for this damn world anyways.” He drank. “And on top of that, I just do not like that little bastard one bit, the conceited little shit. I’d like to kill him, and I’d like to kill his boss with him.”

“You sure?” Joe asked.

Quire held his pint for Joe to meet and said, “Let’s wet this bargain. Here’s to the blue moons in our lives.”

Joe held his pint above the bar. “What the hell’s that mean?”

“Beats the hell out of me, but it sounds pretty nice.”

They drank.

“This could get tight,” Joe said, his tone deeper and more serious.

“It almost just did.”

“And you’re still with me?” Joe asked

“Within an ace of,” Quire said with a wink.

“You have a gun?”

“On me, you mean?”

“No, but can you get one?”

“I do have one, and I do have it on me. Just like you.”

“I don’t like it, but I need it. I haven’t carried a gun since the war.”

“Yeah,” Quire said, nodding. “I haven’t stopped carrying one since the war.”

They drank in silence. Through the fog-rimmed windows at the front of the café, Joe could see people walking past bundled against the December night. Once again the night was cold and damp. Despite the large revolving fans in a line on the café’s ceiling, however, the room was stifling, hot and humid, as the crunch of people continued to grow. The jazz band began to play in a back corner, a quartet of black men charging the lonely night with music. People began dancing like an apocalypse had or was about to happen, like the world had already ended or was soon to end.

Quire said something, but the restaurant chatter and the jazz and the numbing drinks made it difficult for Joe to hear.

“What?” Joe asked.

“To the Lost.”