VIII

Here, during two strenuous years, has taken place some of the fiercest fighting of the great war. Here, too, are some of the finest vineyards of the world; for this was in Roman days the Campania which later gave its name to the province of Champagne.

—Frederick Dean, Muncey’s Magazine, September 1916, “Champagne and the Great War,”

SOMETIME BETWEEN MIDNIGHT AND MORNING, JOE LEFT THE Gentilhomme with the café’s music still strong and Quire still drinking. He walked up the cobblestone street to his hotel, less steady on his feet than he would have preferred. The city was wrapped in a cold night fog that could have been imported from London, brackish and impenetrable. He felt wary as he walked, watching within the shadows and measuring the gait of Parisians walking near him. In the moonlit night, icy puddles shined and curtained windows veiled the few building lights still lit. In the air he could smell the wisps of late-night or early-morning warming fires.

Someone stepped from the recess of a hotel entrance as he passed and touched his arm. He recoiled, reaching for the small revolver in his pocket, but the hammer caught as he tugged.

“Pardon, Monsieur,” a woman said, her voice raspy from cigarettes, drink, and age. “Ont besoin de compagnie ce soir?”

“What?” Joe said, his mind, startled, did not make the translation. “Quoi?” he added.

“Are you in need of company?” she said in broken and heavily accented English.

“Non,” was all Joe said, and he walked away.

A block farther, he stopped under a streetlight and leaned against the post to catch his breath. Fear had its own rhythm, and he rested for a moment to regain his composure. He thought of Marcel—why the man relied so on intermediaries. From Huntington’s short biography of Marcel, Joe knew the man was something of a recluse, affected like so many others by the war. Joe knew other men, men that he had served with who had retreated in life to some cabin the wilderness of Maine or the Olympic Peninsula of Washington. People had come out of that war changed, irrevocably changed, and their lives were separated like a concrete dam between what once was and what now is. Just like the bodies of water on each side of that dam, they were never the same. So he understood Marcel’s inclination toward hiding from a world that had so irrevocably changed him and his world, but there was something more to Marcel’s deceit. A greater reason to his desire for anonymity—his cowardice.

If Marcel had wanted Joe dead, then Joe would have been killed on the boat with Huntington or he would have burned in a fire like Dillard. Something in Gresham’s manuscript had Marcel nervous enough to want it, even though Dapper claimed otherwise. For the time being, at least, as long as Marcel believed he had the manuscript, the Frenchman might not act. They had searched his room and not found it, and Joe felt that his bluff in the café had worked, convincing enough that Dapper would report that he still had a copy squirreled away. Joe needed Marcel to believe that it was somewhere safe, somewhere from which Joe could have it delivered to the police if anything happened to him. How long that concern would hold Marcel, Joe could not guess. Eventually the man would act, for even cowards did not remain passive forever. Marcel’s revulsion at his own cowardice would force him into some movement. By that time, Joe needed some sort of plan of his own.

At the hotel, the old man was again asleep on the front counter but woke with the tinkle of the door’s little bell as Joe entered. He raised his head and snorted loudly, put on his spectacles to see Joe walk toward him.

“Monsieur Gresham,” the old man said. His hand shook as he waved Joe over. Even when he put his hand on the counter, it continued to shake. His head also shook in a perpetual “No,” but his eyes remained kind.

“Un gendarme, they visit you this evening,” the old man said, his English quite good, but Joe felt a quick panic at the man’s choice of tense.

He looked up at the foyer’s ceiling. “They’re here now?”

The old man laughed, “Oh no no no. I tell them that you are not here and they leave.”

Joe sighed with relief and rubbed the stubble of his chin. “Did they say what they wanted?”

The old man waved his hand. “Some suicide, some murder, some fire—je ne sais pas—I do not understand. They say much, I listen little, understand less. A fire, I know, they say a fire.”

“Thank you. Merci.” Joe said and started for the stairs thinking that it was time for a night’s sleep and then to pack up and leave.

The old man called him back to the counter and looked toward the front door and leaned against the counter to speak. Joe stepped close and leaned over the counter as well, as though they were caught in a conspiracy together.

The old man said, “They ask me to call them after you arrive home, but,” he paused and smiled, “they do not say how long after you arrive. I suppose eight this morning is good, no?”

“Nine—neuf—would be better.”

The old man shrugged, “Oui. Neuf. Nine it is. They are suspicious if your trunk is gone, so please use valise that I leave in your room. I will store your trunk in our basement for you.”

Joe took the old man’s hand, thin and bony but still strong in its grasp, and joined with its palsied shake. “You may be taking a risk by helping me.”

The old man huffed. “De rien,” he said, waving a quavering hand as he spoke. “They do not buy me dinner. I owe them nothing. You must take care and come back to us.”

Joe thanked him and took from his wallet a five-dollar bill, enough money to have paid for a week’s reservation. In his room, he sat in the chair for a moment and looked at the owner’s valise, a portmanteau that looked like a doctor’s bag, dimpled black leather with leather handles and a brass closure. He would not even need it. He cleaned himself from the washbasin and laid out a new set of Gresham’s clothes. He sat on the bed and closed his eyes and took a long, deep breath in order to clear his mind and concentrate, then studied the photograph of Gresham and his comrades in the trenches.

He could not see Gresham’s eyes beneath the shadowline of his helmet. His mouth was straight and his jaw fixed, not necessarily confident but certainly resolute. The difference, Joe knew, often came with one’s length of time in the trenches. The other men held similar countenances, although one or two were forced to the point of vague obscurity. Something was there that he had missed, but he was a couple of drinks past too drunk to find it that night.

He tossed the photograph on the bed beside him and planned the next day: find the sister, find Quire, find a place to stay alive.

He slid his Smith & Wesson under his pillow and lay down. Had he thought about it, he would have been surprised at how quickly and easily he slid into sleep. With the night cold and calm, he slept soundly for hours until a dream invaded his morning like a strident noise.

In his dream, he saw the face of a man he had killed. Not the first man he had killed in the war, but the first man he had seen close enough to watch as the life drained from his eyes. Short blonde hair, muddy and rough cut. A cowlick waved in the wind from the crest of his head. His eyes were open and at one time blue but had drained to a wan color and unfocused as though caught between distances. A drip of blood had run from his open mouth like spilled ink. His skin ashen. Right at the hollow of his neck, just above the sternum, a hole had blackened and crusted with blood. He was fifteen, maybe, and lived to as old an age as anyone ever could. Joe had spotted the boy peering from the safety of a shell hole not fifty yards from Joe’s trench position, caught, probably, by the daylight following a night’s recon. Joe waited. He marked the distance and checked the round in his Springfield. The boy raised his head once then twice. Joe shot him. “Damn fine shot, Joe,” someone said. Joe had smiled. That night, Joe met his dead man when he left the trench with a scouting party. Many nights since, Joe had again met his dead man.

Joe met him once more that morning. For some who had been in the war, nights were a terrible time. They filled with the anticipation of a morning’s advance, either theirs or the enemy’s. Nights since filled with the anticipation of nothing. They might drink as Quire did or they might lie alone or with some prostitute. Some dark horror would eventually take them, envelope them like the fog. Joe knew men like that.

Night was certainly bad for Joe. But for Joe, mornings were when his war returned. In the semiconscious moments just before waking, his wounds would rise and he would be left alone as the sun hovered on the opening of day. With those memories held fast as though etched with the featheredge of a lancet, he realized that he had never before returned to Europe because he had never really left.

He rolled over and looked at his pocket watch—8:04. He had to hurry, and he had to travel light. He dressed quickly and made certain that he had his short Smith & Wesson in his pocket. He rolled the photographs and notes inside a pocket of his overcoat. He kept his money in a pants’ pocket.

As he crossed the hotel’s foyer, the old man raised his palsied hand and said with a smile, “Bon chance, Monsieur Gresham.”

“Merci,” answered Joe.

He walked out into a thick and muddy morning fog. Underneath the fog, however, the city hustled as though shaking its inhabitants from head to foot. He walked to the boulevard Saint-Germain and then along the wide street. A cadence of sounds linked sidewalk cafés—unmufflered automobiles, morning-weary prostitutes, gendarmes in their rain slickers, sleeping drunks, and roaming dogs. Joe stopped once to speak to a one-legged prostitute, turning his back on a pair of uniformed police as they walked past.

His first stop would be the house of Marie Dillard on Saint Séverin. One of two things would result from a second visit. Either he would find out that she was as good as he hoped or as bad as he feared.

The night’s fog held into the morning. The city’s gas lamps remained lit, casting a yellow haze across the sidewalks. The weather had changed drastically since the sun of the previous day. Joe smiled. The rain and fog were perfect for a man in exile. People on the street, including the police, kept their heads down against the dampness of the day. It was a weather in which everyone seemed to respect the autonomy and anonymity of others.

He waited again beside the cathedral across from her building, standing under a leafless chestnut tree in the park-like ambulatory. His stomach sounded from morning hunger, but he did not want to find a patisserie and risk the chance of missing her. He knew the French well enough to know that she was not an early riser. She was not of the working class, not from where she lived nor from how she was dressed the previous day. Her day might not begin until noon, but he wanted to meet her whenever it was that she left her home.

He waited over two hours, listening to the church’s bells twice ring in the hour as he marched in place for warmth, before he saw her door open. When she emerged from her building near eleven o’clock, Joe remained in the shadows of the ambulatory to watch her. Marie Dillard looked around but he was well back in the shadows and she moved quickly, as though nervous about something. She dropped her keys back into her purse as she fumbled with them before finally taking them out and placing them in the lock.

He followed her as she crossed Saint Michel. She did not look behind as she walked quickly. Joe kept pace from less than a block behind. The crowds of people flowed around her like water parting around a tug and its barge. She turned along boulevard Saint-Germain, busy with people and automobiles and pigeons.

Marie Dillard entered a café. Joe slid behind a clutch of people standing around a bus stop, newspapers raised to signal to others not to enter their little world. He waited for a moment, hands pocketed and collar up as much for anonymity as against the cold, before crossing the wide boulevard, dodging puddles and automobiles and trolleys and deliverymen in the old horse-drawn wagons bringing fresh produce from the countryside around Paris.

The restaurant had a glassed front and long cream-colored awnings, Café de Flore scripted in green and gold on the awning. The trees in front of the restaurant were empty of leaves and wet from the fog and rain.

Joe entered Brasserie Lipp across from the Flore, walking through the glassed entry with its tables already taken by straw-hatted Americans bent on the French experience they had heard about in their eating clubs of Princeton or Harvard. He chose a table in the restaurant’s front from which he could watch the Flore’s door.

A waiter in black suit, white shirt, and bow tie, white apron from waist to the tops of his polished black shoes, took his order of Alsatian beer sausages. He bought a copy of the Herald Tribune from a paperboy passing through the brasserie and sat back in the wood and leather chair, watching across the street while scanning the newspaper, and he took advantage of the moment to order a meal. A man at a table opposite him in the small restaurant sat with his back to a mirror eating bread and drinking coffee slowly, as though the acts took forethought. The man, young and not quite gaunt, looked hungry and appeared to Joe to be making his simple meal of bread last as long as possible, as though exacting penance in his meager feast.

Joe sat back and drank his beer and ate his sausage, waiting for Marie across the boulevard to finish her meal. He glanced through the newspaper again, reading a short article on the death of Rose Shaunessy, which according to the Paris coroner was a suicide: “Suicide during temporary insanity brought on by a quarrel with her lover.” He folded and dropped the newspaper on the empty chair next to him, thinking about how fiction becomes fact and fact becomes fiction. The man opposite him had wiped his plate clean with bread and sat back with a large coffee and a pad of writing paper and sharpened pencils on the table in front of him. Joe hoped the man’s manuscript, whatever it was, would not cause as many problems to as many people as Gresham’s had.

Joe finished his lunch and the Herald and watched the man, who was dressed as a worker and looked as though he could be a worker but obviously wasn’t, for a working man would not be lounging in a café with pencils and paper as the afternoon hours passed. He drank his beer and another and ordered a third just to keep from being asked to leave, but let it sit.

Finally, Marie left the Flore with a man whom Joe did not recognize nor could see well. He wore his trench coat with the collar pulled up and his fedora low over his eyes, and when he spoke, Marie turned toward him.

Joe watched them as they stood in front of the Flore on the wet sidewalk, sparrows jumping around them in search for breadcrumbs. Not far away in the branches of the leafless trees, other sparrows sat puffed against the cold. Joe left a pile of coins on the table and went to stand in the glassed front with the loud Americans, college boys intent on sampling every bit of the Paris expatriate scene they had read about in the pages of Vanity Fair.

When they separated to leave, the man turned down a side street while Marie Dillard walked back alone along boulevard Saint-Germain. Joe watched the man walk away, hunched into himself and not looking over his shoulders, before turning in Marie’s direction. He let her get ahead before he crossed the street and once more fell in behind.

He needed her to understand what was happening, that he was not a murderer, not the person who had tried to kill her brother. It wasn’t out of sentiment that he needed her understanding, however; it was from necessity. If Paul was still alive, Joe needed to talk with him, and he needed her to take him to her brother, to help him get into Paul’s hospital room. So he would try once more before finding another way.

After a hundred yards, he slipped up next to her on the sidewalk. He gently entwined his arm with her near arm and slowed her to a stop. A few people grumbled at the pair’s sudden and disruptive halt in the sidewalk, but soon the flow of people accommodated their little island.

Before she said anything, Joe said, “I just need to talk with you.”

He looked at her and saw nothing other than shock.

He spoke quickly, not giving her a chance to interrupt, “What happened to your brother—I had nothing to do with that. I did not know your brother. Let me talk with you for a few minutes. Here,” he lifted an arm, “in the open. You choose a place where you are comfortable. I just need to talk with you for a minute.”

She looked at him with her mouth open and her eyes tight and sharp.

“Just give me a few minutes. That’s all,” he said, hopeful. “Please.”

A large truck droned past on the boulevard and in the quiet that followed it, he repeated, “Please.”

She opened her mouth as though to speak. She looked around at the people passing them on the sidewalk and at the fronts of stores and then at the sky. Then she looked at him with hard eyes. “Leave me alone. Leave my brother alone. Haven’t you done enough harm?”

It was a good question, if Joe had time to consider it. He held out his hand. “Wait. Please,” he said.

She looked at him, her body half-turned as she decided whether to wait or to leave. Her face was white, her eyes tight.

Joe sighed and spoke softly, “Your brother has a manuscript—”

She cut him off, turning to face him, “Stop it.” She looked at him quickly, a hard glance. “If it did not burn in his house, then it is in Tours.”

“Tours?”

“At the monastery there. Paul lived there until three-four weeks ago. He left some of his things behind. He was returning for them this week. Then you. . . .”

“It wasn’t me,” he said.

“Shut up,” she hissed. “I don’t care. I don’t care about you and I don’t care about your book.”

“Listen—”

She slapped him across the cheek.

“Leave me alone,” she said, her body shaking. “Go to Tours. Tell them I sent you. I will even have a message delivered to them to expect you. Just never approach me again.” And then to punctuate her words, she added, “Bastard,” and walked away.

He rubbed his cheek and watched her disappear into the sidewalk crowd. An old man caned over to him, a smile on his weathered face. “Femme,” he said, shaking his head as though passing on information he had learned the long and hard way. “Ils ne vous laissent jamais les comprendre. C’est comme essayer de décrire la couleur rouge.” He shrugged and added, “Elle sera de retour. Après elle sent que vous avez assez souffert, elle sera de retour.”

He caned off, his head lowered and shaking.

Joe only understood about half of what the man said, but he agreed. It wasn’t, however, Marie’s gender that he did not understand.

He felt the uncomfortable tethers of being controlled by someone else. Why would she send him to Tours to retrieve the manuscript if she thought he was responsible for the fire? He would go to Tours. He didn’t understand if the rules of the game had changed or if he was in a different game altogether. But he would go to Tours the next morning.

He checked his watch—nearly half past two—and took the Metro across to the Right Bank and to the American Express office at 11 rue Scribe where he booked a train passage for the next day to Tours. When asked, Joe gave his name as Diamond Dick Quire. The young man, an American with slicked back hair and wearing Cortland eyeglasses, was efficient and humorless when Joe said that he’d lost his passport the night before in some “café in the Latin Quarter.” With a frustrated breath, the young man issued the tickets and warned Joe to visit the embassy as soon as possible. Joe thanked him and told him that it was next on his list.

It was a lie, of course, and right then he had more pressing matters, find Quire and then find a place to stay the night. His hotel would be watched by one or both of the groups he needed to avoid. As afternoon slid into evening, he walked. He strolled past the Hotel-Dieu on Île de la Cite, but was suspicious of too many people loitering. He walked on. The small side streets were dark and empty of people. Joe preferred the night that way. Once, looking back over his shoulder, he saw someone looking at him from a doorway. He stepped into a recess and waited, but nobody came along. Most likely he had seen someone stepping out for a cigarette before dinner. The closer he came to the boulevard Saint-Michel, the louder the street became with taxis and crowds of people, a league of languages from several continents accumulating in concert. He crossed the boulevard and walked to rue de Buci, once again to spend an hour in the shadows of a building watching, this time across from the Gentilhomme.

Quire rounded the corner opposite him, walking along the street with his body hunched and hands tight in his overcoat and looking very much like a roughly chiseled chunk of Vermont granite. Joe stayed in the shadows and watched the street behind Quire, looking for anybody who might have followed him. He saw a handful of people milling along, but could not tell if anyone was seriously behind Quire.

He stepped into the light of a lamppost and motioned to Quire, who raised his head, nodded, and crossed the street. A large automobile, dark in color and dark in the street’s half-light, pulled to the curb down the street. Joe watched but nobody left the vehicle and he could not see into the windows.

“Lots of people are looking for me. Possibly for you, too,” Joe said when Quire walked up. “Let’s find someplace else to talk.”

Quire nodded. “Fine by me. There’s always a door to walk into in Paris this time of night.”

“First, let’s find a way to get rid of whoever is in that car back there.”

Quire looked over his shoulder. “You sure they’re interested in us?”

“I’m not certain of a thing anymore. They just pulled over at the wrong time.”

“You sure you don’t want to find out?”

“I’m sure.”

Quire pinched his lips tight together and nodded. “Okay.”

Quire took Joe by the arm and led him toward the large, full boulevard Saint-Germain. “In one door and out another,” he said.

It did not take long to leave behind whoever might have been following them. Crossing streets, recrossing them, changing directions, in and out of restaurants, front doors, back doors, side doors, the Metro, and finally a taxi ride across town to Montmartre and Zelli’s Jazz Club.

“I know a guy there,” Quire said as they crossed the rain-slick roads to the other side of town, “an American Negro in the band. He was at the Champagne with a group of Legionnaires. He can put us up for a night or two.”

Joe agreed. A good drink was always welcome, even when caught in a tight spot, for it helped relax the mind. He felt restless, he had no other plan, so he sat back to enjoy the taxi ride for as long as it took. He watched the old buildings pass in the commencing rain and the people on the sidewalks walking quickly between doorways, some dancing on a sidewalk corner to the sounds of a small street band. There was the occasional emptiness of the city, the dark side streets and the empty trees like knife shadows on the street.

Zelli’s Jazz Club was crowded, smoky, and noisy. The band’s music slapped them as soon as they entered. Quire stopped and breathed in a full lung of air, coughing as he exhaled. He smiled and looked around and waved to someone across the room. People were jammed tight inside the club. Joe and Quire found room at the bar. They ordered beers for dinner and stood back to watch the jam of people dancing in one place and the Negro band at their instruments, sweating and smiling and yelling to the dancers and at each other.

“That’s him,” Quire said, leaning close to Joe’s ear to be heard over the band’s music and the noise of the crowd. “On the drums.”

Joe nodded, watching the black man go on his drums, hard and carefree and stirring the dancers in front of him to a crescendo of movement. He smiled as he played, watching the dancers, and sometimes he would yell out to them, “Thaaat’s riiight. Yeah, thaat’s sooo goood.” And he would laugh and smile again. Joe smiled at the man’s enjoyment of his place, an infectious and unbridled enjoyment.

The music stopped, and Quire said, “Damn fine drummer.”

“I agree,” Joe said. “You said he was at the Champagne with the Legion?”

“I did. There were lots of Americans, black and white, in the Legion before we actually joined the war, you know. Lots of Americans to begin with. He was one of the few who lived through that morning. The Legionnaires suffered badly, you know.”

“Everyone knows,” Joe said.

Quire coughed a laugh. “Shit, they probably even know in Helena.”

The music began again. Joe and Quire slipped into a silence. Joe watched the dancers, especially a beautiful woman with very short hair who was dancing right in front of the drummer. A tall and thin woman, young, gorgeous enough to know how gorgeous she was and that every man in the room was or had or would spend time watching her that night and thinking about what they would like to do with her. He envied the man dancing with her for what they would do later that night. He also wondered if that was how his life would turn out, watching from the sidelines as other people enjoyed the game. If he lived through the next twenty-four hours, he’d give it some serious thought.

The music stopped again. Again Quire leaned over to speak, “You fight with any of the Negro troops?”

“No,” Joe said. “I think most of them were farther north from where I was.”

Quire nodded. “Any problems with talking to a black man?”

Joe looked at Quire. He thought for a moment. “I haven’t known many, but I knew a lot of Mexicans back in Colorado when I was growing up. People treated them like niggers, but my family taught me to treat a man as a man until he proves himself otherwise.”

“That’s good,” Quire said. “Some Americans can’t do that, hell most Americans can’t. Over here, a black man is as good as a white man. Took me a little getting used to, I admit. I was raised a tad different.”

“Now?”

“Now,” he shrugged. “They bleed red just like me.”

They drank their beers and another and another while the band played through its set. They did not talk because it was easier not to with the club’s noise and people breaking between them trying to find a bartender to serve them. The band rested, each member wiping his head with a towel before stepping from the stage to join one group or another in the crowd.

“Quire-boy, man. Hahre you?” the black drummer said as he clapped Quire on the shoulder.

“Great,” Quire said.

“Thaat’s good.”

“This is a friend of mine,” Quire said, reaching out for Joe. “Joe Henry meet Jacques Ballard. Don’t let the first name fool you, he may be from Paris, but as in Texas.”

They shook hands, the first time Joe had shaken the hand of a black man. Joe was impressed by the size and power in the man’s hands. He was not a large man, but his fingers were the size and strength of hickory sticks. He shook Joe’s hand and smiled a bright and white smile that made Joe smile in return.

“Got a favor to ask you,” Quire said.

“Anything, Quire-boy. You just ask.”

Quire gave Ballard an abbreviated explanation. The man listened attentively, asking few questions and nodding, his eyes seldom leaving Quire’s and then only to look at Joe. Joe could see Ballard’s jaw muscles tighten as Quire talked of the Champagne. Ballard’s eyes were seeing images from years earlier, men literally cut to pieces by German 77s, bodies lying across barbed wire and strewn throughout the no-man’s land like stepping stones and sometimes used as such when the retreat began. That battle, long over, had left its mark in the lines on Ballard’s face as certainly as though he had been hot-iron branded. Joe knew the distanced appearance of a man looking within himself, his soul and his own foul memories, at things he was unable to keep himself from seeing. It was a cauterized look that haunted him, because he also had those lost eyes that peered into the depths of an oblivion, and, rising from his past, he thought of a prayer gone wrong, “As it was then, is now, and ever shall be.”

Ballard blinked and ran a hand across the stubble of his short hair. With that action his smile began to return. The sadness in his eyes remained, but only a person intimately related to that sadness could recognize it. “Sure,” he said. “Flop in my place. There’s a sofa and a chair. The bed’s mine. Man, I ain’t so nice that I’m giving up my bed.” He laughed again.

Joe and Quire thanked him.

“I’ll be home in the early hours. We’ll talk when I wake up, not too damn early though. I can’t tell you anything you don’t already know about Champagne, but I want to hear what you have to say. I’d like to know who laid out my camarades like that.”

The other musicians, all Negros, began to warm up their instruments, and Ballard excused himself. He drank a quick shot of Absinthe without the water chaser, shook his head, and yelled, “Thaat’s riight, man. I’m coming.”

He shook hands again with Joe and Quire—sealing a deal—and clapped Quire once more on the shoulder before returning to his drums. Picking up the sticks, he said to the crowd, “Damn, let’s gooo.” The band hit it hard and the floor was again crowded with dancers, crowded so tightly that people basically moved in place.

Joe looked for the beautiful woman and her lucky man but they were not on the floor. He saw them heading for the front door, the woman wearing a green hat and a wrap around her shoulders. The man had on his overcoat and held the door for her. The lucky bastard.

It was an hour past midnight before Joe and Quire, both at least an hour past drunk, left Zelli’s. The cold night air with its pretentions of rain slapped Joe hard, but not hard enough to sober him. They walked erratically down the sidewalk to Ballard’s apartment, which was not far away. There was little more than a bed, a sofa, and a chair in the single room, a drum set, a coal stove for heat, and a table with chairs. “The man lives Spartan,” Joe said after Quire turned on the light, a single bulb hanging bare from the ceiling.

They flipped a coin. Joe won the sofa. He lay down and, surprised at how tired he was, began to drift toward sleep almost as soon as his head hit the sofa’s arm. He dreamed of his father’s ranch in the hills of Colorado where spring rains cleaned the arroyos and brought color to the fields of grasses and flowers. From them, the grasses and flowers, and also the juniper and sage and pine, the full aroma of spring would wake him to ride all day long in a lengthening sunlit day. He had that dream, a good dream. Later that night and through that night, he had bad dreams that did not wake him only because he was so used to bad dreams.

Even with his exhaustion and his depression and his dreams and his drunkenness, Joe did not sleep long. He woke soon after the sun, still drunk, to find Quire standing backlit and naked in front of an open window.

“I thought the full moon set with the rising sun,” Joe said, sitting up on the sofa and stretching his neck, feeling a deep and dark pain in his eye sockets.

Quire turned around. “Damn, man, I couldn’t sleep. Not with thinking about that battle. The war was bad enough on its own, but what happened to Ballard and your friend and others at that battle. It worked on me like a canker.”

Joe nodded in confirmation. He spoke low and plaintively, “That day seems to have worked under a lot of people.” He rubbed his eyes, tight with dried mucus, and his hair, matted. He began to pull on his pants. He had a trip ahead of him which he looked forward to and might find sleep on the train, the lolling movement rocking him like a baby in its buggy. Sleeping like a baby with few concerns was something he had not done in a long time.

Joe added, “And put some clothes on, for Christ’s sake.”

Quire laughed. “Jealous,” he said and walked to a table where there was a water bowl to splash water on his face. “I remember,” he said as he combed water through his hair, “when my mother accidentally broke a thermometer and the mercury in the bulb got to her ring. Nothing she could do to stop it from just eating that ring until nothing was left. That’s what this reminds me of. Someone broke it open and it’s begun to corrode whatever it touches.”

“Doesn’t bode well for you and me, does it?” Joe sat on the edge of the sofa, working some moisture into his mouth while watching a cockroach move in quick spurts, starts and stops, along the baseboard.

“Then why’re you head-long going into this scrape, taking a train today to get yourself even deeper?” Quire asked. He had slipped on some pants but sat with no shirt on and tapped out a thin cigarette from a pack of Gitanes on the table, placed it in his mouth and lit it using a silver lighter. With the first drag he coughed hard and phlegmatic and crushed out the cigarette and said, “Don’t know why I even try.” He coughed again to clear his throat and spat into his handkerchief.

“Damn, man, can’t you boys shut up?” Ballard raised his head from the sheets. There was another form under the sheets as well, but she kept herself hidden, not even unfolding the sheet to expose her face.

Ballard sat up with his back against the wall, the sheet down around his hips. Several scars were apparent on his chest and stomach, knife scars and shrapnel and bullet scars raised like hills and dikes against the dark surface of his skin. His muscles were corded and he was thin. “You say you going somewhere?” he asked Joe.

“Yes,” Joe said. “I’m taking the train to Tours.”

“Why’s that, man?” He took a pack of Gitanes from the table next to him and shook one out. He lit the cigarette and inhaled with his eyes closed then exhaled like a junkie.

“Dillard lived in a monastery there until recently. He might have left some things behind. Maybe a copy of the manuscript.”

“You need someone to go along with you?” Quire asked. He sat hunched over the table, looking like he had just ridden in on a rail.

“No,” Joe answered.

“Good,” Quire said and meant it. For every beer and absinthe that Joe had drunk the night before, Quire had downed two. Joe could see that he was a man of amazing capacities when it came to alcohol, but even Hercules met his match. He sat with his elbows on the table, his hands cupping his head.

“I should be fine. Nobody but you two and Marie Dillard know that I’m going to Tours.”

Quire raised his head, his eyebrows cocked. “You’re sure about her?”

“Not an inch.”

Quire nodded and returned his head to his hands. He raised his head again and winked at Joe, a smile spreading across his face. “I need something,” he said. “Either breakfast or a little of the hair of the dog.”

“I got me a bottle here,” Ballard said. “We should take us a nip to warm our bones. Then there’s a bakery down around the corner, not one of the French bakeries with those little petits fours and flutes of bread, but a bakery where you can get a real breakfast. Bacon and eggs and bread, and beans, even if you don’t want them.”

“I’ll begin with the bottle,” Quire said, and Ballard tossed a pint bottle of amber liquid underhanded to him. Quire uncorked the bottle and took a good drink. “Shit-goddamn,” he said. “That’s good Scotch.”

They shared the bottle. Joe also passed around the photographs and his notes and told them Huntington’s story of Marcel. They speculated, each offering his own scenario. When they had finished their conjecturing, Joe again rolled everything into the inside pocket of his overcoat.

They dressed and left the apartment, the lump under Ballard’s sheets never raising her head to look at them. The day was cold but the sun was warming the street. The bare linden trees along the street glistened and dripped on the sidewalk. They walked a short distance to the bakery, ordered their food, and took large white bowls of coffee with them to sit at a window table.

Quire took out his pack of Gitanes, and Ballard pulled the fixings to roll his own cigarette. Quire placed his cigarette unlit in the corner of his mouth and left it there and like that. After Ballard had finished rolling his and had lit the cigarette and took a deep drag, he sighed. Joe sat and looked out the window at people beginning their days at work.

“You two weren’t there at the Champagne, were you?” Ballard asked and blew out a plume of smoke.

They shook their heads.

Ballard did not wait for Joe to ask about the battle. He began talking like a man telling his single, most abiding secret, low, solemn, in halting starts. “It was lethal,” he said. “We thought we had it, though, from the very beginning. Five days of artillery pounding the Germans. The night before, all damn night long it went on. We were sure that whatever Germans had been over there were dead. We were told that there weren’t more than a skeleton force in their trenches to begin with, and with the artillery, we figured our worst troubles would be avoiding the mud. Right after sunrise they blew the whistles and we went over the top. I was with the Foreign Legion at the time, damn fine group of men. We begin to trot across the clearing, not going too fast and certainly not a damn bit worried, and then the Germans opened up with their Bergmanns and their oh-eights and then from far away their Whizz Bangs. Shit, man.” He shook his head slow and steady before continuing. “It all turned bad. A disaster. How they survived the artillery I don’t know, but they did. I knew right then that they knew we were coming, that they had planned the day on top of whatever had been planned by our generals. The boches called in artillery, which they weren’t supposed to have, and every shell crater and twig of a dead tree and mound of dirt seemed to be sighted in. There wasn’t no place to hide.”

Ballard stopped talking for a moment, taking a long, deep breath and then another long drag on his cigarette. He looked at Joe, and Joe could see the pain of memory in the man’s eyes, yellowish and bloodshot. There was a distance in the man’s eyes that would always be there, a distance between any moment Ballard lived and the time before the war. It was a distance caused by having seen humanity at its worst.

He began again. “Whole sections of our line fell at once, some falling in rows and others on top of one another like cord wood. The machine gun fire was so thick, so constant that the dead, lying there on the field, were hit time and time again, rolling around like target shooting cans. Pieces of their bodies were shot off as they lay dead. Some of the men still charging lost limbs as they ran. I was covered in blood and mud from the shells landing around me. There weren’t more than a dozen of us when we reached the wire. It was that way all along the line, and we had to turn around and run back through the same damn firing. There were two hundred men in that company of legionnaires who led the charge, and at roll call that night we had eight. Eight. Shit.”

Joe was no longer hungry, but he ate for something to do. None of the men looked at each other as each relived his own terrible violence. Joe had not been at the Champagne, but he had witnessed the carnage at a lesser scale, had seen the bodies immolated and heard the sounds of a world lost to destruction.

After several minutes, Joe said, “That was a bad day.”

Ballard said, “There ain’t much else you can say about it, brother. It was as bad as they get. One thing, though,” he said, pointing at Joe. “You find the man responsible for setting up les boches on that morning, and I want in on it. I want to see his eyes when I bleed the life from his body. You promise me that.”

Joe nodded. They spent the remainder of their breakfast in silence. After, Joe thanked Ballard for the place to stay and told Quire he would be in contact as soon as he returned from Tours that evening. Joe left, taking the Metro across the city to the Gare Montparnasse.

Police stood in pairs throughout the station, talking between themselves or watching the women walk past. Joe kept his distance as he weaved through the crowd. He walked past a cart of trunks, mostly Vuittons, to the train, found his compartment. Within minutes, the train jerked to life and began its steady climb to speed.

An older couple shared the compartment with him. They also shared their bread, cheese, and wine with Joe. He spoke with the couple in French, as much as he could, before they sank into a private conversation. He was left to himself. They were interrupted once when the porter arrived asking for tickets. Each gave the porter a ticket and then settled back into their seats. Joe sat next to the window and looked out.

He watched as the train passed through an industrial part of Paris and then finally into the country, farms and open landscape, inviting even in its winter gray. The transition was not gradual. Joe could have stood on the boundary had the train stopped and allowed him to. There was a factory with steam and smoke rising from tall chimney pipes and then a set of railroad tracks and then a field and then farms. Joe had seldom seen things as delineated and wished that other things in the world were also so easily distinguished.

People worked their land or rode on carts loaded with a morning’s cutting. Later, as the train neared the Loire Valley, Joe wondered at how much more abundant was the landscape there than in Paris. It was December and deep within winter in both places, but Paris held a gray cast within its darkened cityscape while the expanding valley along the Loire River showed its fertile heart just under the barren ground. The soil was dark with humus and rain and lay ready for the next spring’s renewal. There was a promise in the land.

The train thrummed along. A recent rain left the landscape glistening and beautiful. Watching France pass outside his window, Joe realized that something had changed in him as well. There was reason for his journey, a quest. He cared about discovering a truth, the reasons for what had happened on a field in France in 1916. Discovering that would lead him to other truths as well. Even though he was not there, it still mattered to him. Nothing had really mattered to him since sometime during the war. Since then he had lived as though anesthetized.

There, with the hum of iron wheel on iron rail, he felt like he might relax for a moment. He was becoming a participant again.

At Tours, he took a cab from the train station to the monastery on the other side of the great walled city, traveling the old roads of cobbled brick and stone that pilgrims hadwalked over for centuries. Even in the middle of the day in the third decade of the twentieth century, the city looked Medieval and old with its small, winding roads, high walls, and stone fortress-like buildings, some still with defensive battlements atop the walls. The walls of the monastery stood two stories high, covered in ivy with mother vines thick as Joe’s thigh. Moss clung in the shadows. Small parts of the wall had crumbled, leaving piles of tailings. The large double doors at the front, thick wood and iron bars like a castle’s portcullis and with gatehouses to each side like those of a barbican, with square Judas holes at eye level, prevented easy entrance. The wood was old and age-weathered but solid and the iron bars guarding the Judas holes had colored a patina almost black over the years. Above the doors, engraved in the stone and almost faded to nothing, was the abbey’s name, Abbey de St. Martin de Tours.

Joe pulled on the leathered handle of a chain. A series of bells rang just inside the door. He could not hear movement from behind the heavy doors but felt that he was being watched. His hair stood on end and he wanted desperately to drop and hug the ground, but stood and waited, looking around and seeing arrow slits through which a person might spy. He looked up at the overhang of the barbican and saw the murder holes above him, and he thought that every century has its own implements of death and the turn from one century to another did not just bring advances in medicine and arts but also advances in the implements of war. And as men at war always had, like dogs they howled.

The square window-door opened, although Joe could not see into the shadows behind. A man spoke softly in French through the barred opening, asking who he was. When Joe answered in English, he heard a shuffling, followed by the voice of another man, this time in English. He asked Joe what he wanted at the Abbey. Like the first man, he remained within the shadows.

“I have come to see Paul Dillard’s room,” Joe said, adding, “His sister wired you about my coming.”

There was no answer, but Joe could hear the muted discussion between two men.

“Mademoiselle Dillard has asked me to retrieve his materials from the abbey.”

“Why does she wish to have them?”

He stepped closer to the opening. “Her brother was badly injured in a fire at his home in Paris. He is in the hospital.” Joe improvised. “She wants him to have his things with him. He has nothing after the fire, and she hopes these things may help him.”

More muttering, one voice raised and then silenced. The small square door was pushed but not entirely closed. Joe could hear the voices of several people in consult, disagreeing but not in heated exchange.

Finally, the small door shut, followed by opening of the large wooden doors. They were pulled back at the center only far enough for Joe to enter, swinging in like irrigation gates and closing immediately behind him as though to allow as minimal an amount of the outside into the sanctuary’s courtyard. He entered but was not allowed to walk into the courtyard as three men in cassocks stood with him, not threateningly but still fencing him against the door.

“We have strict rules about attire in the abbey,” one of the men said. Like the others, he kept himself hidden within the folds of a hooded cassock. “Please remove your overcoat and hat. Are the soles of your shoes hard?”

Joe nodded, “Yes. Leather.”

“Your shoes as well.”

Joe did not like the idea of removing his overcoat, his money and passports and revolver all inside its pockets, but if he could not trust a monk who could he trust? He removed his shoes and hat and gave them with his coat to the man at the door. One of the monks gave Joe a brown cassock and soft, moccasin-like shoes to wear while in the abbey. The wool of the cassock rubbed and itched on Joe’s neck and wrists. Another reason to not enter the monastic life.

He passed through a corner of the castle’s bailey and was led through the old hallways of the abbey, past frescoes and an age-grayed statue of St. Martin offering his robe to the peasant. They passed a reliquary that probably held at least one bone from an arm or a leg of the warrior who had become a saint through his sacrifice and devotion, maybe even a patch from the robe.

They led Joe through a series of dark and damp hallways, the stone walls stained with age and niter. They stopped in front of an oak door, pushed it open, and motioned for Joe to enter.

“His room. His belongings, those that he left, are stacked on the table.”

The room, barely ten feet square, was Spartan. A door on one side and a small window near the ceiling opposite. A wooden table and hard chair, also wood, stood against one wall, a bed, little more than a wood frame with sacking on top, in a corner against the other. Plated candles, unlit and inside glass bowls, were on the writing table and the table next to the bed. A single crucifix hung above the head of the bed. Words and dates and names had been carved into the stone walls, but they were all mostly faded even to the touch.

While one of the brothers watched him, Joe went to the table and sorted through the papers and belongings that Dillard had left. It wasn’t much, barely enough to have fit into a medium-sized valise. The monk stood nearby, watching but not interfering. Joe found envelopes with letters—some from Gresham, others from Marie and Rose Shaunessy, one from Huntington. On hands and knees, he looked underneath the bed. In a small box was the manuscript.

Joe felt like a kid with buried treasure, even more—something almost religious—as he cradled in his hands the box made of a heavy paperboard which had been taped shut for shipping. The tape had been cut at the seams and on top were Gresham’s return address and an address for Dillard that was not the Abbey’s.

Joe pointed to the address, a postal box in Tours, and was told that the Abbey received no mail except that sent to either the abbot or the prior.

Joe sat on the bed with the box on his lap, the lid open to reveal its contents—a couple hundred carboned pages of typed paper. That was all, but that was a lot. He looked down on the paper like the knight-errant gazing upon his grail.

“I’ll take these to his sister,” Joe said, his mouth suddenly dry. He gathered the box in one hand and everything else in a hemp bag provided by the monk—the letters, a single pen and capped ink well, and a couple of old, leather-bound books by Balzac and Zola.

The monk nodded.

Joe was escorted from the abbey by the same three robed monks, one behind and one on either side. They kept their heads in the shadows of their hoods and walked silently through the same halls. From somewhere else in the abbey, Joe could hear the sounds of chanting, maybe a choir practicing.

At the gate, there was no ceremony when he prepared to leave, no farewells. He thanked them for their help, returned the robe, and they nodded and returned his clothes and closed the heavy doors. He heard the latch click tight. He felt returned to the modern world.

He took the same taxi back to the train station, passing back through the ancient walled city, feeling even more anxious than he had felt on the drive to the abbey. He placed the bag of things on the seat next to him and folded his coat over that, but he held the box on his lap as though to relinquish any control of it would cause its disappearance. He wanted to be on the train where he could begin to read.

The train, of course, was late, for trains in France regularly ran late. He had to wait an hour at the train station in Tours and found a wooden bench, worn smooth and dark from the decades of people sitting on it. He sat like a junkie on his way back down, fidgeting and uncomfortable. And before he could make himself too conspicuous, he went into the bar for a drink, the box, now hidden inside the bag under his arm. He drank two Anis del Toro, followed by a beer, and finally felt relaxed enough to sit and wait. He returned to the well-worn bench.

Looking the length of the wood-planked platform, he searched for anyone who might be watching him, either police or Marcel’s men who had followed him. He saw none, just as he had seen none while in the depot’s small bar. He hoped that maybe he had done something right and at the right time. But he did not have a good feeling. Marie Dillard had as much as invited him to come to Tours, and while he could not see anyone watching him, that did not mean that he was not being watched.

On the bench next to him was a wrinkled copy of the previous day’s Herald-Tribune. There was nothing of interest other than an article in which the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan said they would never unmask—more of the world’s violent cowards hiding their true selves. When the train arrived, he boarded with the other passengers and found his compartment, which remained empty of other passengers as the train lurched from the station. A pair of small brown bags rested on the floor against the opposite bench. Joe leaned over to read the names on the tags and smiled.

He did what he needed to do as quickly as possible, opening the cheap locks on one of the bags and dropping the manuscript inside, then placing Dillard’s old books inside the box. With pocket knife, he cut the window covering’s cord and wrapped it tight around the box, double knotting it.

The train began its heavy tug toward speed and moved through the fogged miasma of its own steam held within the station’s wood canopy. He could see birds rise from trees nearby and some birds remain, huddled on the glazed branches of the empty elm trees.

“This is good,” he said to himself, as the train pulled from the station. That he could spread out and not be bothered by anyone else was a fortune he had not counted on, at least until the owners of the brown bags returned.

The compartment door opened. In walked Dapper, followed closely by the Turk. Dapper smiled at Joe, a smile with a thousand tiny teeth. He lit a small cigarette with the flick of a silver lighter and inhaled, put back his head and exhaled a long and full plume of smoke toward the ceiling of the moving train. The smoke rose straight up to curl and dissolve in the windless room. He smiled again, a man with oleaginous charm.

Joe sat next to the window with the manuscript box on his lap. His revolver was inside one of the coat pockets which was on the bench beside him. He picked up the coat and covered the box with it. Dapper sat in its place, the smell of fresh garlic heavy with the small man.

“Monsieur, what a pleasure, although not unexpected,” Dapper said in patterned English, his voice as affected as his smile. “You do not mind if we join you, do you?”

Joe shrugged, opening his hands as if to say “of course.”

Dapper reached a hand across Joe and patted his chest pocket and reached inside the coat to see if Joe had any weapons, then he patted the overcoat, smiled and took Joe’s Smith & Wesson from its pocket. He weighed the small revolver in the palm of his hand and smiled at Joe. “Merci,” he said and stretched out to place the gun in his own coat pocket.

Joe nodded, “De rien.”

Dapper moved to the facing bench, leaning forward to be heard over the thrum of the train. Joe could smell a whiff of cigarette breath as Dapper spoke to him, nodding toward Joe’s lap, “Right now, I would like to see those papers.”

Dapper looked at Joe. He was no longer smiling. The thinness of his lips were dry and cracked. Joe could see that Dapper was younger than he had first thought, not much older than him, maybe thirty.

“Do I meet your boss now?” Joe asked.

Dapper shook his head. “No. You will not have that pleasure.”

“My pleasure,” Joe said, thinking that his only pleasure would come with Marcel’s death.

“We can do this without you dying or with you dying,” Dapper said and shrugged. “The decision is entirely your own. However, I have lost my patience, so I will ask you only one more time before I am forced to exert greater measures.”

Joe sighed. Dapper was sitting across from him, the Turk standing with folded arms in front of the door. Joe shook his head and handed the bag of papers and letters to Dapper, keeping the boxed manuscript on his lap. He looked outside the window at the landscape becoming cloudy in the evening light. Pastoral farms and farmhouses with red tile roofs, silos, barns passed on the side of another set of railroad tracks occasionally filled with another train headed in the opposite direction. The faces of those train’s occupants passed in blurs, black and white petals on broken boughs, and he looked upon the same countryside that he had seen just hours earlier, although now different.

“Please,” Dapper said, his mouth tightening into the small and thin line of his lips. “Let’s be gentlemen about this. No childish games.” He tossed the bag onto the seat next to Joe where the letters spilled out like a pile of autumn leaves.

Joe said nothing.

“Give it to me.” Dapper spat. His face drew hard.

Joe shrugged. He lifted the manuscript box, tight within its corded wrap, over to Dapper, who took it with a smile.

Dapper rested the box on his lap.

“And now I have the manuscript,” Dapper said, his hands flat on top of the box.

“A copy of it,” Joe said.

Dapper uttered, “Ahh,” as he smiled and nodded, not a pleasant smile. “A copy. And you have another copy, I suppose?”

“I do,” Joe said.

“Why would you want this one?”

“Buying power. I thought I might double my money by selling them both to you. Economics, pure and simple. Your boss should understand that.”

Dapper laughed, a laugh even less pleasant than his smile. “You know what I think,” he said.

“What?”

“I think you’re lying. There is no other copy.”

Joe shrugged. “And I once believed in Santa Claus. We’re both wrong.”

Dapper stayed quiet for a moment.

“Look,” Joe said, his back straight and his hands on his knees and facing Dapper. “Either Marcel thinks that I have another copy of the manuscript, maybe even the original, in which case I live, or you think I don’t, in which case I die. But if you kill me and guessed wrong, think of who might end up with it. Think of how angry your boss will be when the other copy lands on the prefecture’s desk. Of course, I could be just running a bluff. The call is yours to make, and you’ll have to make it soon. We’ll be in Paris in a couple of hours. I won’t be leaving this train with you. Place a gun to my side, I don’t care. You won’t have me with you.”

Before Dapper could respond, there was a knock. The Turk looked at Dapper before moving to the side and opening the compartment door. An old man in a poorly fitting and age-faded blue uniform nodded as he stepped into the doorway and said in a sad, almost apologetic tone, “Pardon, billets s’il vous plait.”

“Excus-ah me. Pardon-ah.” A large, overdressed woman with as poor a French accent as Joe had ever heard pushed her way past the conductor and the Turk, who looked to Dapper for direction.

Turning to speak past the conductor and out the door, the woman said, “Yes, here they are, Harold. I told you that you left them here.”

“Hello, Mrs. McKee,” Joe said, standing and lifting his coat from the seat.

The Turk tensed but did nothing.

The large woman turned and for a moment did not seem to recognize Joe. Then she smiled and said, “Why it’s Mr. Gresham from the ship,” and out the door, “It’s Mr. Gresham from the ship, you know that friend of the Blaines, Harold.” Turning back to Joe, “How are you, Mr. Gresham?”

“Well, thank you,” Joe said.

“Did you ever find the Blaines before disembarkation? I hope you remembered us to them.”

Joe smiled. “I did and I did.”

She smiled, then added, “We had such a time getting off the ship. Fights and missing luggage and some sort of intrigue. Ghastly.”

“Madam,” said the conductor.

“Yes?” she said.

“Is this your compartment?” he spoke in frustrated English, and an English heavily accented, pronouncing each syllable with separate emphasis.

“Our bags,” she said, pointing to the brown bags on the compartment floor. “My husband left them by mistake. Will you bring them along, boy?”

The conductor straightened, and his face reddened deep purple. He began to speak, but Joe cut him off. “Allow me,” he said.

Then, turning to Dapper, he added with a wink, “And then there was one.”

Looking down at Dapper, he touched his first two fingers to his brow in mock salute and grinned. “If you will excuse me, gentlemen,” he said, “I will vacate this compartment and leave you alone for the trip.”

Dapper’s face went rigid. The lines on his forehead stood out like cracks in marble, eyes like polished stones. He seemed to snarl, his bared teeth all discolored and sharp. When he spoke, however, his words slid out without any tightness.

“Oh, Monsieur,” he said, raising a hand as though to hold Joe for a moment longer. “Be sure to read today’s newspaper, any newspaper. There will be something of interest for you.”

Joe turned and took his ticket from the pocket of his coat, handed it to the conductor. With the two small bags in hand, he stepped past him into the corridor. Joe winked at the Turk—there would be no easy killing that night. The air in the corridor tasted of sweet and fresh. With Mrs. McKee leading, he carried the bags. Even though they asked him to join them in their compartment for the remainder of the trip to Paris, Joe excused himself. He would visit them later, once he had finished with his business, and he had involved enough people who had later died. He wanted no more blood in his wake. He left for the anonymity and security of a crowded coach car.

In the club car he sat at the first open seat nearly halfway down the right side. With the moment’s adrenaline drained, he deflated like a worn tire, head heavy and body depleted. His fingers moved involuntarily from the adrenaline of having lived longer than he would have guessed, but his insides remained hollow and raw. All he could do was sit, looking out the window and barely noticing what the train passed. He sat facing the direction from which he had walked so that he could see if Dapper or the Turk came for him. Twice he saw the Turk’s face through the window of the connecting door.

Slowly, his mind began to clear. Whatever was inside that manuscript was too important to Marcel to allow for any possibility of mistake. That was Joe’s only weapon, Marcel thinking he still had a copy. At least, maybe, keeping alive the spark of a question. Without that possibility, he knew that he would soon be dead. He might be anyway. He could not trust that his luck would continue. Stretched too thin, he knew, even a run of good luck will snap from its own accumulated weight.

He wondered whether Dapper’s cryptic comment about the newspaper would provide that added weight. Whatever it would be, it would not be welcome news. Marcel had been a step ahead of him for a couple of days. It was probably Marcel who had sent the police to his hotel while he was at the Gentilhomme—a message to Joe of how precarious his life had become. Marcel had manipulated Joe into traveling to Tours, using Marie Dillard as a tool. Marcel was calling the shots and turning up the heat. And while Marcel knew his face, Joe did not know Marcel’s. Not knowing the face of his enemy made him feel particularly vulnerable.

The weather outside had begun to turn as storms over the Loire Valley dropped rain. Houses and fallow fields and wagons on roads glistened. The rain and the evening cast the approach into Paris in a veiled gray light, a canted shadow on the day. His life had been left in shadows for a long while, sometimes the shadow was long and dark and sometimes light as gossamer. But always there was a shadow.

His trip had been a construction. He saw how it fit together. Twenty-twenty hindsight. If asked, the monks could easily recognize him as the man who went through Paul Dillard’s room. Couple that with the suspicion that Joe had once tried to kill Dillard, and right side of that formula read “GUILTY.”

Marcel had wanted Paul Dillard’s room checked for the manuscript, but he could not do it himself or even send his men. He and Marie—she probably believing that Joe had torched her brother’s house with him in it—had manipulated Joe into doing the job for him. If he ever came to trial, now there were dozens more—the monks, the taxi driver, everyone at the station—who could link Joe to Dillard, and through Dillard all the way back to Gresham’s murder. He might have just provided a court with motive, depending on what lie was being produced as to his reasons for killing Gresham. He had played the sap so well.

“You idiot,” Joe whispered. “Smart as a fucking two-by-four.”

He sat in silence, his legs apart and feet flat, his coat, lighter than before, across his lap, his hands empty on his coat. The train hummed and scraped. He felt the train’s gentle rocking. Through his feet he felt the staccatoed vibration. He watched the door and watched France pass outside the train and listened to the rain drum on the wooden roof of the train car. At one time, train rides would have put him fast asleep, the deep hum of the engine and iron wheels and the gentle rocking motion of the cars. That ride, however, produced nothing like sleep, despite his exhaustion. He felt once more like he might never sleep well again. It was a feeling he remembered following his return from the war. Everything he had been brought up to believe, the sanctity of life and the importance of honor and the rightness of God and country, had ended up as hollow vessels.

They passed one small village after another as the final bit of daylight faded into dusk. Clouds, pink and black, rested on the bruised ceiling of the sky. Empty fields stretched far away from the railroad line. When the river showed, Joe could see an evening mist rising before it became too dark to see the river or the fields.

As evening brought along its beginning darkness, he saw the villages pass as embers in the distance—larger villages reflecting their light from the night clouds as though casting spectral shadows of their own. With the darkness, Joe could imagine the countryside that they passed. The moon and any stars were hidden. When he leaned his head against the cold window to look above him, he saw a low sky heavy with dark clouds. He pulled his pocket watch out to check the time but replaced it without opening it, deciding it did not really matter.

Soon the sharp outline of Paris rose black against the night. Lines and broken shards of flat-topped roofs and blind windows like patterned quilts.

The train rolled toward a stop into the huge wooden station. People began to gather their belongings, valises and bags and children and bottles of wine. Joe stood. When the train lurched to its stop, he donned his overcoat to follow the other passengers from the train onto the narrow platform. Another train, pointing outbound, steam rising from around the locomotive, waited across the platform, so people mingled as some prepared to leave while others arrived. Joe kept his head up, watching for Marcel’s men. He crossed the platform and boarded the other train. He sat in the first unoccupied compartment to watch out the window. Dapper exited, but not the Turk. He was probably walking the length of the train to make sure Joe had gotten off.

A pair of uniformed police stood talking at the end of the platform, not paying much attention to people walking past. Still, that was not good. Joe was a wanted man—the American in Paris wanted for arson and attempted murder, maybe even the murder of Dillard’s lover. All Dapper had to do was lay the line, and the station would be shut tight. That Dapper had not walked over to talk with them, however, was good news, for that meant that Dapper was still concerned about Joe’s having another copy of the manuscript.

He looked again at the gendarmes guarding his exit and he looked for some way to camouflage himself, blend in with the other passengers walking like insects from here to there.

A small brown valise was in the overhead rack above him, perhaps someone’s clothes for a short vacation to the Swiss mountains. Joe pulled up the collar to his overcoat and picked up the valise, now an actor’s prop. He left the compartment to walk down the train’s hallway. People were busily and noisily readying for the train’s departure, businessmen and lovers and old couples and families. He heard a dozen languages from English and French to exotic languages of the Orient. He left the train in the guise of a tired tourist returning from the country, from a liaison maybe or maybe a businessman having returned to life in the city.

He walked in a hunch as though weary-worn. From a distance and with luck, he might appear that way for just long enough to leave Marcel’s men behind him. The police seemed to have little interest in the movements around them, so Joe walked from the platform and into the crowd of Parisians.

Outside of the train station, standing in the rain and the glow of a streetlamp, he looked around, surprised, if nothing else, that he had once again dodged a bullet.

He carried the borrowed valise as he walked through the diminishing crowd until there were few people on the street with him, walking toward the Seine only because Paris leans toward the river. He walked in long strides, collar up and shoulders hunched, one hand deep in his pocket and the other with the valise. It provided a good prop. People who saw him carrying the valise, noticed it. In that, he hoped that they would form an assumption.

The rain turned to snow. Heavy, wet flakes fell around him. He walked down the dark street, bleak and silent but for distant and muffled sounds. Joe could hear the river ahead of them, the churn of a tug pulling barges, taxis slushing past on the street, the creak of a shudder closing.

Two gendarme rounded a corner ahead of him and stopped under a lamp to light their cigarettes. The two policemen, arms moving and fingers pointing, appeared to debate which way to walk, maybe what café in which to wait out the snow. They walked toward Joe. For lack of choices, he walked toward them, passing them with his face tilted and shoulders hunched as they argued. He was glad that he kept the valise, for it allowed a certain anonymity. The police were not looking for a weary traveler.

He stepped into the nearest café, a small and rectangular sign in gold and maroon against the building’s brick, weathered both by rain and time. The café, dark and small, was quiet and smelled of potatoes, onions and wine. The door closed behind him with a sigh. Then the sounds of the café eclipsed those of the street, the din of silverware and the hum of conversation. He sat and checked his watch, then ordered fried potatoes when the waiter stepped over.

While he waited for his meal, he opened the valise. It was filled with papers, some originals and some carbon copies. “Damn,” he muttered and laughed a little at the irony. He had stolen someone else’s manuscript.

“A glass of wine, Monsieur?” asked the waiter when he brought the potatoes, steaming with onions in the oil.

“Oui,” Joe said. “Red. And the Herald-Tribune.”

The waiter nodded, left, and returned with a glass of red, a table wine, not good but not bad. By the end of the second glass, the table wine tasted much better.

Soon the waiter brought a copy of the newspaper. Someone had already read it and left a coffee stain on the front page. The stain, a hollow circle from the bottom of a coffee cup, was next to an article on the murderer of Wynton Gresham, one Joseph Henry. The article detailed the murders of Gresham and Huntington and Rose Shaunessy. It especially detailed the attempted murder of Paul Dillard. It also mentioned an unnamed accomplice, and that both were then in Paris. He figured Quire was the unnamed accomplice. There were, however, no photos of Joe.

The time to begin taking action was soon. Force Marcel’s hand. A winter offensive. The worst kind.

Before he considered the future, however, he tried fitting pieces into his puzzle.

He thought back to the beginning, the night that was supposed to meet Gresham for a drink and some talk about a manuscript that Gresham had written. He traced a step further into the past, why Gresham had not met him—Gresham had been murdered at his house by the two Frenchmen who had then died on the rain-slick road outside Greenwich, Connecticut. Another step: How they had so easily gained entrance to Gresham’s house? Not as Greeks bearing gifts but as Frenchmen bearing gifts but still someone to be wary of. And like those Greeks of Homer’s tale, the Frenchmen had concealed themselves, even allowed Gresham to drink, before killing him. The gift that they had used for entry was not a giant horse, but a book—Joyce’s Ulysses—which every literary person wanted to read since its publication in February. Joe had read an installment in a well-worn copy of The Little Review a year or so earlier but thought that the author must have been insane. Others, however, looked forward to its publication as a book as though it were a holy writ.

Paul Dillard had taken no vows and would have been free to wander the city when not engaged in his work at the abbey. He could easily have heard about Ulysses from someone in Tours, a tourist or at a bookstore or from a traveling writer or an American expatriate while sitting in a café enjoying a morning coffee. He might not have been able to buy a copy or even order a copy from a bookstore in Tours, so he would have written and asked Marie to buy one in Paris at the American bookstore, maybe also arranging for her to send one to Gresham in America. Joe remembered the wrapping and name from Gresham’s home. Somehow, Marcel had interrupted that communication and had used the book to get to Gresham. Somehow it connected. If Joe was lucky, someone at the bookstore might remember the sale.

Joe paid his bill and asked the waiter for directions to Shakespeare and Company, then was back on the street walking toward rue de l’Odeon.

A perpendicular signboard with an egg-shaped head of Shakespeare marked the entrance to the bookstore tucked between a shoemaker’s shop and that of a maker of nose sprays. Paneled top-to-bottom windows, bright and lit from yellow electric lights inside the store, opened on either side of the front door. On the wooden facades between the windows and the door were written “Lending Library” and the misspelled “Bookhop.”

A thin, almost bird-like woman wearing a man’s black velvet smoking jacket greeted him as he entered. “May I help you?” she asked, voice both thin and strong at the same time as well as obviously American.

From behind her, a man yelled out, his voice booming and echoing in the bookstore, “By God, Mademoiselle Shakespeare, you help more people than an Italian whore. Or should we call you Mademoiselle Company?” The man, sitting behind a desk and sprawled like a lazy cat on the edge of his chair, laughed out loud at his own joke. His tawny eyes and hair both jumped in the canted and amber light of the store.

“Don’t mind him,” the woman said, turning to Joe. “He likes to hear himself talk. Browse if you want. I’ll be in the back if you need any help.” She carried an armload of books with her as she turned toward the store’s rear.

“Ain’t that a place for to give some help, I reckon,” the man said as she walked past him. Joe saw the man wink at the woman. He wore his shirt collar open, even in the store’s cold, and one side of it fell outside the lapel of his own smoking jacket. Around his neck, in a careless knot of silken motion, curled a purple cravat. A wide-brimmed Spanish flop hat waited on the table for the man to swoop up in a single devil-may-care motion.

Joe stood like a new arrival in the city, coat buttoned and valise in hand, come to the first place on his list of must-sees. He nodded toward the tawny man and smiled innocently.

He nodded back and read by the light of a table lamp. He looked up from the cloth-bound book in his hands, then toward the rear of the store, then at Joe again, and finally back to his book without saying anything more. He read half aloud but to nobody other than himself, or so it appeared to Joe, for he could barely make out the man’s muttered words, “Homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship.” He slammed shut the book and said aloud, “That’s too damn good, if you’d ask me. . . . But you ain’t, so’s I’ll return to me book.”

Joe looked at a display of books on a table, a few had been read but most looked new enough as to be uncut. Lining the walls were shelves heaped heavy with books. Those walls not supporting shelves were painted as bright as spring in greens and blues and yellows. Running along the front of one of those walls were racks of small magazines, American magazines with names like Poetry and Exile and The Little Review. Some he was familiar with, some he was not. Above the magazines and on any open space along the walls hung an abundant population of photographs. Black and white woolen rugs covered the hardwood floor. Antique chairs and tables waited in any space not holding books or magazines or racks or shelving or the desk and chair at which the tawny man sat and mumbled to himself.

Joe walked to the back of the store where he found the woman kneeling in front of a shelf of books in a small storage room separated from the front room by a doorway. The door was held open by a red paving brick.

Joe said, “Excuse me, but I am looking for the owner.”

“I am she,” said the woman. She stopped what she was doing and looked up at Joe. She had piercing eyes, high cheek bones, and a straight, thin mouth, the look of someone intelligent enough to be an intellectual or a professor but smart enough not to be either. “How may I help you?” she asked as she stood. She was taller than he had originally thought, nearly as tall as him, but thin and angular.

“I’m inquiring about a book that was bought here a month or two ago.”

“Oh my,” the woman said. She touched a finger to her lips. “We sell a good number of books. I don’t think that I can remember every sale.”

Joe said, “This was a copy of Ulysses that was purchased for an American named Wynton Gresham.”

“A copy of Joyce?” boomed the tawny man from the front of the store, and even his voice seemed tawny. “Good goddamn show.”

The store’s owner waved toward the front like a mother waving off her son.

“I do remember that sale,” she said, pointing a finger toward Joe. “The customer was very anxious to have the copy and said that he was travelling to America and would deliver it himself. Why do you ask?”

“It’s complicated,” Joe said. “Was the man who bought it a Frenchman, a dapper fellow about this tall?” He held out his hand to illustrate.

“Maybe,” she answered, “but he was not French. He spoke French very well, but this man was not French. English I would guess.” She thought for a moment. “Dutch maybe,” she mused.

Not Dapper, then.

He placed the valise on the floor. From inside the pocket of his overcoat, Joe pulled the rolled photograph of Gresham and his fellow soldiers in the trench. He flattened it in an empty square on top of a desk cluttered high and full with books, notepads, and other photographs. After pinning the edges of the photograph with the books, he pointed to one of the faces.

“Is this the man?” he asked, his finger impaling the body of one of the two Marcel brothers.

“No,” said the woman, taking a pair of reading glasses from her pocket and holding them still folded to her eyes. “That is he,” she said, pointing to another man, one in an English uniform. She put her glasses on and looked down her nose at the photograph once again. “Yes, that one.” She replaced the glasses in a pocket.

“Are you certain?”

“Absolutely,” she said. “And see,” she paused to look again at the photograph of five men eating a meal inside the confines of their trench. “And see—English, not French.”

“I see,” said Joe. And he did. He saw what he had missed the other times he had looked at the photograph. Missing pieces were falling in place.

“Don’t judge a manuscript by its cover,” he said.

“Pardon?” the woman asked.

“Nothing,” Joe said. He paused, then added, “I have a thank you note for him, but lost the address.”

The woman frowned, skeptical.

Joe said, “They were in the war together, see, and Wynton had a special message he wanted relayed.”

“Oh, yes, I understand,” she said, “but he did not give me his address. He picked up the book himself.”

Joe kept his smile, although it hid gritted teeth. Two steps forward, he thought, one step backward. “Thank you, anyway,” he said.

As he turned to leave, she said, “But wait.”

He turned back. Her mouth was in a slight smile and her finger was pointed to the ceiling. “When he came in to order it, he left his card with telephone number and address. I may have placed it in my book. I send out notices about important readings, so I may have kept it.”

When he nodded and thanked her, she walked past Joe and toward the front of the store. Joe took a moment to look closely at the photograph before returning it rolled to his pocket and followed the woman.

He whispered, “I know your face now.”

At a desk near the front, the woman pulled a notebook from the center drawer, a blue notebook like students would use at a university. She pulled open the notebook using a silken sash that marked the end of a list of names.

“Marcel,” Joe said.

She held out the notebook with her index finger pointing to the address. Below the name, “Rene Marcel” was written in the column next to the title of the book Marcel had purchased for Gresham. “Ulysses,” she said.

“But no address,” she added. “I am sorry.”

“Thar she is,” said the tawny-eyed man from his perch at the desk behind Joe. “A good man, helping out ol’ Joyce. He a friend of yours, this man who buys Joyce?”

“Of my brother’s from the war,” Joe lied.

“From the war?” asked the man.

“Yes,” Joe answered.

“The theater of war,” the man said stroking the point of his short goatee beard. “I would not have thought that a theater could cause such harm. I could not have thought how death has undone so many.”

The tawny man turned away and put his head in his hands, elbows on the desk in front of him. He sighed, as if a weight were bearing heavily down on him.

Joe did not answer. Though he was not certain what the man had said, he knew absolutely what the man had meant.

He looked again at the notebook, its lack of address. He looked outside through the windows. People walked by with their heads lowered and shoulders hunched. The wind, which had been soft all day, began to strengthen, forcing walkers to bend against it. Inside the bookstore, however, Joe was warm.

The woman closed her notebook. The tawny man slid back in his seat behind the gate-legged table. He once again began his mumbled reading while Joe thanked the woman, picked up his stolen valise, and walked toward the front door. A gust of wind sent a whistle through the seam between the door’s opposing sides. The tawny man whistled back and returned to his book. Joe stood, looking out the window and wondering what his next move should be.

He still needed the address, and he knew of only one person who might be able to provide it—Marie Dillard.