IX

One last salute; the bayonets clash and glisten;

With arms reversed we go without sound:

One more has joined the men who lie and listen

To us, who march upon their burial-ground.

—Herbert Asquith, “The Fallen Subaltern”

JOE WALKED WITH THE WIND TOWARD THE CLOSEST METRO STATION, thinking momentarily of the city of death that lay beneath him in the catacombs, the thousands of bodies reduced to bone. And he thought of the generation of dead that had been ground into the mud of France. And he wondered if the world had learned any lasting lessons from all this death. And he knew that was not so, for humanity would always feel the need to purge its own sins in the blood of another generation. And so he walked on, his breath a disappearing plume in the night. He saw others carrying their valises and suitcases, always more American expatriates looking to leave the wasteland of Prohibition America, refugees from the Volstead Act. He assumed, with his own valise in hand, that he looked like one of those American tourists.

What had at first been a helpful tool, the valise, had become problematic. It had assisted his need for anonymity while in and near the train station, but on the streets of Montparnasse, it drew unwanted attention to him from every Frenchman he passed. It called out that he was an American and to someone paying close attention it might cause alarm, not an American but the American, the one who has killed so many.

He thought of just dropping it in a closed doorway and forgetting it, let someone else have it. But a plan was working somewhere in his mind, deep and beyond his ability to fully articulate. He thought, this valise might come in handy. Not now, but soon.

He stopped in at the first brasserie that he passed, Le Bar Dix, more a cavern than a bar. Young men and women, students they appeared, huddled around tables in the bar’s tiny room and Joe saw no place to sit, but that wasn’t his purpose. Pulling a single twenty from his roll of money, he asked the first waiter that passed if he could leave his valise behind the bar for a time. Once seeing the double sawbuck, the waiter became quite accommodating. It was nearly his month’s wage.

Before handing over the valise and the bill, Joe tore the bill in half, right down between Grover Cleveland’s eyes. “The other half when I come back,” he said.

The waiter nodded. He may not have fully understood the English words, but he understood the meaning.

“It will be safe?” Joe asked, then pointing to the valise he asked, “Sécurité?”

“Oui, Monsieur. Tout à fait.”

Trust was not something Joe was finding easy to offer, but he had little choice. He left the valise with the waiter, telling him through words and hand motions that he would return for it either that night or tomorrow, and walked on toward Marie Dillard’s home.

He buttoned his collar and thought of what he could have done differently over the past days. The dead, however, would still be dead or hovering in near-death regardless of his actions, but that knowledge did not comfort him. Part of him wanted something like revenge, to put a bullet in one of Marcel’s small, black, and red-rimmed eyes. Another part wanted to walk off into the French countryside, escape into a darkness of his own making and his own population. Mostly, he wanted this settled. Closure as Gresham would have said.

He exited the Metro not far from Marie Dillard’s house and walked there.

He watched people walking through the declining light from lampposts and welcomed the anonymity of the city’s nighttime sidewalk, even felt buoyed by the realization that not having much of a plan meant that at least he would not fail in the plan.

As he approached, he saw her leave the house, locking the front door before stepping quickly down the street. She had looked quickly in his direction before departing, but he was in shadows.

He crossed the street and said, “Miss Dillard. Please.”

She turned and looked at him, no recognition. “Oui?” she asked.

It wasn’t Marie. She was about the same size and had the same close haircut beneath the cloche hat, the same hair color, although a bit darker. She wore her cloche hat and long and heavy coat against the cold. Plumes of her breath wavered in the air as she stopped to face him. Her eyes were a combination of sadness and surprise. She was beautiful. Something, finally, fell into place.

The Marie Dillard who had sent him on the fool’s errand to Tours had not been Marie Dillard. Marcel had played that hand well, had known that he would go to Marie Dillard’s house that day and had known that Marie Dillard would be at the hospital with her brother. While he had been watching her house, they had been watching him and playing him. They had strung him along, baited a line and set the hook without him even feeling the tug. As the old waddies used to say back home on the ranch in Terceo as they explained the set of a poker game, “If you don’t see the fish at the table, then you’re the fish.” He had not seen the fish and he had been caught by the bad hand Marcel had dealt.

“J’ai, uhm, parler avec vous,” he said. “Votre frère. About your brother.”

She tightened her eyes and tilted her head slightly. Moisture glistened in her eyes. Her eyes were brown with amber strikes. She did not say anything for a moment. He wondered if his French was that bad.

“Who are you?” she asked, adding, “I speak English.”

“I’m the man the police—”

She cut him off, “You’re the American.”

“Yes, but I had nothing to do with what happened to your brother.”

“I know,” she said. “It was Marcel.”

“You know.” Joe felt an enormous weight lift.

Her eyes welled but did not tear. She spoke in English, her words slow and even. “My brother is. . . . He sleeps most of the time, but he was awake for a short period last night. He told me what happened, that someone sent by Marcel had tried to get his copy of your friend’s manuscript. I read in the papers today that you are suspected. I am sorry, assumed guilty. I should have notified the police of what Paul said, but I have had so little time.”

Joe lifted his chin and sighed a full breath into the night. As he watched it disperse, he felt like yelling, he felt so good. “It’s okay,” he said. “Letting the police know will come in time.”

She said, “Paul . . . fell asleep before he could answer my questions.”

“Walk with me,” he said. “Let me tell you what I know.”

“But I do not understand,” she said, turning to him. “Why would Marcel want to kill Paul? They were once friends, comrades. My brother was a recluse. He did not offer any harm to anyone. Why would someone wish to kill him?”

Joe spoke evenly and slowly as they walked, “They were in the war together at the Champagne, your brother and Marcel and several other men. Marcel was a traitor and my friend, Wynton Gresham, wrote a manuscript exposing him. Your brother apparently agreed with Gresham. Marcel tried to kill him in order to keep his own treason silent.”

He took Paul Dillard’s wire from his pocket, which he had carried with him since the ship, and handed it to her.

Marie wiped her eyes and rubbed the tips of her tear-dampened fingers together. She opened the message and read it in silence then looked back at Joe. The automobile mechanic had described her as sad. And she was. She also had lost something in that war.

They left the boulevard Saint-Germain, mingling with the evening crowd and walking the short rue Bonaparte past a string of antique and decorator shops, until Joe found the open door of a small café. They took a table away the front window. Groups of people sat in small clutches around several of the café’s other tables, drinking and talking, not taking any notice of the two people near the back wall.

He signaled the waiter, standing nearby with idle condescension written in his slouch against the bar, his round tray under one arm. The man sighed audibly and almost yawned before walking over. Joe smiled—not even the famed condescension of the Paris waiter could upset him. They each ordered coffee, double espresso for him and café au lait for her, and they waited in silence the few minutes until the waiter brought the coffee and swiftly left to read his newspaper at the bar. The espresso, with its layer of crème the color of caramel, was hot and strong. Joe felt an immediate jolt with his first sip. That was coffee. He closed his eyes and drank again. Good coffee, strong and black and hot, that reminded him of camp coffee back home.

A pair of gendarmes walked past the window. Joe turned his head away in instinct as much as anything, for they were too far from the window to be seen.

After Marie had stirred sugar into her coffee, she said, “My brother returned to Paris just weeks ago. He said he was ready to return to his life before the war. He had thought through some things, he said, and had come to some conclusions. He was going to marry. . . .” Her voice did not tremble but her eyes were uncertain. Her fingers quaked slightly before she placed them around the bowl of her cup and held the coffee under her mouth, allowing the steam to wrap her face in its gossamer column.

She asked, “You have a copy of the manuscript?” Since her English was much better than his French, they spoke in English, and she spoke English with a soft accent.

Joe drank from his cup and thought about it. “Yes,” he said. “But I wanted to talk with your brother about his notes, what he wanted to talk with Gresham about.”

She nodded. “I do not know.” Dillard’s notes were probably spread out along a hundred yards of rail line, dispersed by the wind and muddied by the rain. He thought of the other contents of the manuscript box, letters and such, that he had given to Dapper while on the train, that now Marie would never be able to retrieve.

He looked at her. She was in her early twenties, but carried herself as though older. Liquid brown eyes with amber shafts, short bobbed black hair, full mouth set in a synthesis of sadness and uncertainty. The sadness of her eyes was highlighted by the deep rings circling each. She had been crying, and not so long before. She was still pretty, though, and Joe found himself thinking of her beauty as he looked at her. A pretty woman who had not allowed her beauty to spoil her.

Joe sighed, “I don’t know all of the whys, the reasons for what has happened.”

“But Paul,” she said to the air between them, her hands in the air as though clutching for answers. “He only wanted to put the war behind him. Why did this Gresham have to write his manuscript?”

The question was not for Joe to answer, and he did not. He also did not say how difficult it was to leave the war behind like it was an empty box, so instead he told her about Gresham, about becoming Gresham and taking the ship to France, about Huntington. He unfolded the recent drama of his life.

She cut him off, “Why did Marcel not kill you on the ship? Was he on it with you?”

Joe shook his head. “I don’t know. Probably only his henchmen were there. He is a coward, and like all cowards what he fears most is his own cowardice. He hides so that others do not see it. Instead of exposing himself, he let his henchmen deal with the problem.”

They slid into a silence with Marie thinking her thoughts and Joe thinking how Marcel was the type of man who could not kill another man but could easily sell another man’s life or order another man’s death. He was a man whose life was not defined by any moral grounding. A man made perfect for the new century.

“What happened there?” she asked, breaking the silence and looking across the table at him with her fluid eyes.

“The Champagne?” He finished his espresso. As the hot coffee warmed him he realized how cold he had been. He ordered a second. The waiter raised an eyebrow but took the order.

“Yes.” She leaned toward Joe. “Paul had changed so much. So much. At first I did not think it was any different with him than with so many others who had lost part of their lives to that war. They were all so finished, so ruined when they came home. But there was something else with Paul, something more had happened to him. He wanted to tell me. Several times he tried to tell me, but whenever he began to he would close into himself, as though he hated whatever it was that he needed to say.”

She spoke softly, her tone soft with lengthened vowels and lightened consonants, and Joe found himself wanting to wrap up and sleep within the halo of her words.

He forced himself to place a little perspective on the meeting, that he was with and talking to a beautiful woman. He was with her, however, because someone had tried to kill her brother and he had interrupted her on the street. He knew that she may have once thought and possibly still thought that he had something to do with that, and she was right although not how she may have thought. He considered that, sitting in that café and sharing a warm drink on a cold evening, she may also have been playing him. He had, after all, been played before. Still, he thought other things as well, even though no fireworks had exploded overhead, no bells had rung in tall towers, no flashes had been sent along wires.

He breathed deep and said, “Something did happen. All those men died, but men died every day in the war, thousands, like a slaughter yard. But at the Champagne,” he paused to think out his words, “someone, one of the group of men that Gresham and your brother belonged to, let the Germans know what was coming off that morning. What and when and where.”

“Someone told? Someone—” she stopped. “Are you saying my brother—” She did not finish.

“No,” Joe said quickly and firmly, maybe even louder than he had wanted, for people at nearby tables turned to look. He breathed and lowered his volume. “Not your brother and not Gresham either. They would still be alive had they been the one. The only one still alive and not in a hospital is Marcel.”

She looked not at him but down at something only she could see, as though she were at grace. She looked back at him with a sudden hardness in her eyes and said, “I do not know him so well, but he has been good to me in recent years. Watching out for me. He gave me a job in one of his businesses—a medical factory, and even loaned me money so that I would not lose my house. I find it difficult to believe that he would do such things.”

The waiter came back and interrupted them with their second coffees. They sat in silence after he left. Steam rose from their coffee cups.

Joe finally broke the silence. “Marcel gave you a job that kept you near him and so that he could keep informed of your brother’s movements.”

His words were heavy with cynicism, and Marie’s eyes went wide then shut tight with recognition as she nodded.

She said, “He, Marcel, came to my house three years ago. He said that he was a friend of Paul’s from the war who wanted to regain their friendship. I told him that my brother was then living and working in a monastery, that he may return to Paris or may not, I did not know. He said that he was then living in Paris, in Montmartre, and would remain in contact with me about Paul. He offered me a position with his company, but I did not need one then. Soon after, maybe a month, a bank said that they were closing my house. . . .”

“Foreclosing?”

“Yes—foreclosing. I called him and asked for the job. If it was still available. And I went to work for him as a secretary and he loaned me money for the bank.”

“Convenient.”

“At the time, I thought that it was—what?—providential.”

“And you never heard again from the bank?”

“No,” she said. “My father had arranged for family business when I was young and then Paul. I did not know.”

“He plans things well. And you didn’t tell your brother about Marcel?”

“No,” she said, still holding her coffee cup in both hands. “Monsieur Marcel asked me not to. He said that he understood the reasons why Paul would want the solitude of a lay brother. He said that reminding Paul of his past might not be beneficial, that I should wait until he, Marcel, could meet with Paul.”

Joe nodded. “I can understand that. Your brother may have had suspicions even then, and Marcel would not have wanted to alert him. As long as your brother stayed away, Marcel probably felt safe. That must have changed with Gresham’s manuscript and your brother’s return to Paris.”

“And you have read this manuscript and know what is in it?”

This time Joe deflected her question. “What’s more important is that Marcel knows what’s in it and wants it.”

“And he killed your friend to get it?”

“Yes.” Joe remembered the house in Greenwich where Gresham lay like a man asleep, the tossed rug runner in the hall, the shaft of light from the front room, the empty sounds of the house, a clock ticking and rain in the gutters. Everything pointed toward a meeting of friends, the Scotch and Gresham reclining on his sofa. Only the bullet holes were wrong. Those and the vacant stare of his eyes. Joe had seen enough of death before then to recognize its gaze even before he saw the darkened stain. The look was not like sleep, not sad or peaceful or anything. It was lost, a nothingness, something even beyond nothing.

Joe said, thinking of the scenario that he had formed earlier on the Berengaria, “I can’t tell you exactly what happened at Gresham’s home. There was no fight, but he was shot. What I know of Marcel’s men, they probably did not feel the night a complete success without taking at least one life.”

A taxi stopped on the road outside their café to pick up a charge before driving on. Both Joe and Marie watched the passing scene on the street. People’s lives going on. They looked again at each other and Marie said, “I still do not understand why, if he had killed Gresham, why he did not kill you as well.”

“Because he first needs the manuscript, every copy of it. When he had my room searched and couldn’t find it, he needed me alive, frightened maybe and a bit beaten, but alive nonetheless. Otherwise the manuscript might be discovered by the wrong people, and he would be in a worse mess. For now he thinks he needs me to find it, so he wants to keep me scared to manipulate me.” He paused. “Eventually, though, he’ll either tire of that game or get too nervous. That could be good or it could be bad. It comes to a head soon.”

“Pardon,” she said. “Comes to a head?”

“An end,” he said. “Everything must end, either in his favor or ours.” He emphasized the “ours” to include her on his side.

“And you do have a copy of the manuscript?”

“Yes,” he said again, though he wasn’t sure this was true, but the fewer people who knew the truth, the better: that one copy may or may not reside with an oafish American couple and that he had only guessed at the location of the original. If Marcel found out that neither Dillard nor he still had copies of the manuscript, Marcel would have little reason to keep them alive. That, also, included Marie. Joe could see the chess game being played by Marcel with Marie as one of the pawns. He did not want to see her sacrificed for something Marcel might believe to be a higher purpose.

“He has killed others as well?” she asked.

“Yes,” Joe said. “On the ship. Maybe others that we don’t even know about. Right now, though, Marcel must feel as though his world is collapsing, so he’s trying to circle himself tighter within the lie. His entire life is a lie,” Joe said, “and he wants to continue that lie.”

“By trying to kill my brother?”

“Yes. Your brother knew what Gresham had written, knew what had taken place in Champagne. That was the reason Gresham planned his trip in the first place, to speak with your brother about the manuscript, his suspicions about what had happened.”

She nodded. “Yes, maybe. When Paul returned, he called me on the telephone and said that he was feeling much stronger and that he had some work that needed to be done. I remember him mentioning a friend who was to come to visit.”

“Somehow Marcel must have found out, maybe he was watching your brother’s house.”

“No,” she said. “I told him.” She paused and in the silence he felt his eyebrows raise. She continued, “I thought he might want to talk with someone from his past, so I told Marcel that Paul was home. He said that he would contact Paul himself once Paul was settled. I also mentioned a friend coming from America. I recall how surprised he was at that.”

“Did Marcel and your brother have any meetings?”

“No. I asked, but Paul would not talk about Marcel. I assumed that Marcel was too immediate a reminder of the war.”

“Unfortunately, you may have been right.”

“But he never tried to kill Paul before, while Paul was in Tours.”

“Marcel probably believed that Paul was the only man still alive other than himself. As long as your brother remained in seclusion and as long as Marcel had you, he felt safe. I assume that he would ask about your brother?”

She nodded. “I thought it was out of concern.”

“And he probably told you to let him take care of any problems at your family’s house, any problems that might arise?”

“Yes,” she said. “He helped with the banks, as I said. Paul had secluded himself in so many ways, and Rene Marcel helped me with many things.”

“When did you tell him about Gresham?”

“Some months ago, I forget exactly when.”

“And you said he seemed surprised?”

She held her coffee cup with both hands. “He became agitated. He said he had to leave. Something to do with his business.”

Joe did not say anything.

She nodded and her breath caught in her throat. She blinked several times before looking again at Joe and asking, “What do we do? The Prefecture de Police?”

“The police?” he said and shook his head. “They think I’m a murderer, and by now Marcel may have informed them that he has seen me in Paris. He’s going to want to tighten the vise, force me to play his game. No, right now I think the police would be more a burden than a help. I don’t think they’d give me much chance to prove my innocence.”

“I could tell them,” she offered.

He looked at her and wanted to believe her. He remained uncertain. Even if she were telling the truth, however, the police would probably not believe her.

“Not yet,” he said. “Not until I can deliver Marcel to them.”

He looked at someone entering the café. When he looked at her again, her eyes had dissolved into introspection.

She excused herself to go to the basement restroom. Joe watched her walk away, a strong and feminine and confident walk. A few minutes later he watched her walk back, her eyes downcast and no hint of a smile. He watched her move around tables.

She looked at Joe and smiled, her teeth white and straight and exposed in a line between the fullness of her lips, red with lipstick. When she sat across from Joe, the slight gather of her perfume spun around him like a soft, lavender wind. Like a spring day in the South of France, he thought.

They talked some more, as little as they could about the war or about deaths and mostly about where Joe had grown up in Colorado and her life in France. She told Joe about the monastery in Tours where her brother had lived since the ending of the war. He did not mention that he had already been there. They ordered a meal of sausages and red wine and then they sat and ate in silence. They sat across the round table the diameter of a mere whiskey keg and spoke with growing comfort. Sometimes they stole a glance at each other during their meal, but there were several minutes at a time in which they did not speak.

“How did he meet Rose Shaunessy?” he asked.

“Rose?” Marie echoed the name of Dillard’s lover who had been murdered in the fake suicide at her house.

“Yes. If he were secluded in a monastery, how did he meet her?”

She smiled. “She was a nurse in Paris after the war. They met in the American hospital as my brother convalesced from his wounds. So romantic. When he told me that he was returning to Paris, he also said that they were to be married in the spring.”

“I am sorry,” he said.

She looked at him with great sadness in her eyes and asked, “Are you certain . . . about all this? About all that is happening?”

Her words were meant for answering but she also wanted answers to questions beyond the words. Joe didn’t know how he could approach those questions. “Yes,” was all he said.

“There are so many lies in this world,” she said. “So many. I don’t know who to believe.”

Joe wanted to tell her to believe him, to believe in him.

Tears formed in her eyes, making her eyes as dark and wet as polished mahogany. He knew sadness. He had been witness to sadness before. But for the first time he felt himself look despair in the eye, and it pierced him.

She wiped her eyes with her napkin. “Paul always wanted to visit America,” she said. “When we were young he talked about the Wild West, cowboys and Indians, six-shooters. He loved that idea, that romance. You are from that Wild West?”

“Cowboys and Indians, six-shooters and buffalo,” he said. “Last time I was home, Jesse James held up the stagecoach I was on.” He looked at her to see her reaction.

“Monsieur,” she said with her lips in a pout. “You tell big tales.”

“Tall tales,” he said. “I’m a writer, a journalist, by trade. I make my living telling tall tales.”

“Like Monsieur Gresham, your friend, a journalist?”

“Like him.”

She leaned across the table. “Tell me about him.”

“Now you’re sounding like a journalist.”

“Curious,” she said.

“So was Mata Hari.”

“I saw her perform once,” she said, offering the words as an intriguing aside, and she looked at him, her turn to gauge his reaction. “During the war. She danced at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. My brother took me with him and some of his friends because he could not leave me alone at home. Our parents were vacationing in Nice and my nurse had left for the night and so Paul took his seventeen-year-old sister to a nightclub. Scandalous had my parents found out, but I loved it. She was very beautiful and I could see, even then as young as I was, why all of the men watched her with such intensity. She captured them. Her eyes and her movements, she captured them. One of Paul’s friends talked with her following the show, but Paul took me home and I never got to meet her.” She paused. “Later, we found out who she was. Too bad, for she was so beautiful.”

“When was that?” Joe asked.

“During the summer, I believe. It was warm.”

“Do you remember the year?”

“Maybe 1915. Yes, 1915 in the summer.”

“Before Champagne,” he mused.

Marie looked very closely at Joe. He watched her eyes and felt them as they traced his face, gentle along the skin of his cheek.

“You were in that war, also,” she said. “You have the look in your eyes.”

“The look?” he asked.

“Yes. Sometimes, not always, but sometimes you have the eyes of an old man. Paul had that look then even though he was still young, like you. A young man still, but he had seen things that he would not talk about. Not even to me.”

Joe felt a bead of sweat trace his spine as he remembered the scarred and bomb-pitted landscapes like postcards from the moon, the drumfire of distant artillery, the smell of sulfur and the Very flares at night, the sing of bullets, the rotting bodies of dogs and horses and men. He had long since ceased to wonder at how easily his memories of the war could be conjured, how fully they developed and came to his mind. He wished them gone but lived every day with their presence, waiting as they did like the sun behind a cloud. Memory had become for him the single most abiding thing he most wished he could discard. He could not, and so he lived within its roil.

“After the war,” she said, “he was like a fallen tree. He was so sad. I do not remember him smiling after the war.”

They returned to silence, and Joe did not need to tell her that the memories of war were things that prohibited smiles.

He looked at her while she kept her eyes lowered, looking toward her coffee but thinking something else. She was beautiful, a beauty that belonged to a poet. Her face, although somewhat obscured by her downcast, was smooth and rain-freshened. Her hair was black as a crow’s wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek. Even with the sadness cast across her face, she was a woman that Joe knew could either inspire a muse or haunt a man for decades.

They finished their meal, and Joe left payment in coins on the table. Before they stood, he asked the question that he needed answered, Marcel’s address.

“Yes,” Marie said. “I know it. I sometimes was asked to deliver papers to his house.”

She took a piece of paper and Joe handed her the fountain pen that Alice Bright had given him so many years ago, a century ago. She wrote and handed paper and pen to Joe.

“Montmartre,” he said.

As they left the café, another man and woman entered, the woman wearing a long scarf that flowed from underneath her upturned collar to sweep in the wind. Joe held the door, but the man with the woman failed to take it, and the door closed tight, catching the woman’s scarf and causing her head to whiplash, trapping her as certain as if she had been cuffed. She made a feeble noise and threw out her arms to arrest her falling balance, her hands fluttering like wounded doves.

Joe quickly pulled open the door to free the woman.

“Oh, my dear,” said the man with her as he held his hand for the door, his hands white and soft, hands of someone whose money was earned off the backs of other men’s labor. He gave Joe a hard stare, one intended to show disapproval of a lower class and said in manicured English, “Look what you have done.”

“I’m not your servant,” Joe said to the man, stepping close and forcing the man backward. He added to the woman, “I am terribly sorry, Madame.”

The woman raised her hand and said, soft and cultured as though her words came from a Hellenic heroine, “Don’t apologize, my friend. It is the machine again.”

Joe nodded with no understanding but apologized once more before he and Marie left the café, joining the people in the streets. The evening remained cold and damp. He could feel the continued cold of winter lurking inside the evening air. They pulled up their collars and buttoned their coats, thrusting their hands deep into the pockets of their overcoats, their shoulders hunched up against the cold. Their eyes watered, their breath clouded in front of their faces, and they walked through those clouds in silence.

They walked into the clearing cold of the evening although the fog had not completely burned off, leaving a dull overcast sky to ceiling the city. As they walked, their arms touched lightly with electricity.

Along the boulevard, Joe watched the crowd, searching for either end of a spectrum, Marcel and his men or the police. From somewhere ahead on the boulevard, Joe could hear the sounds of a protest. He remembered well how the French loved to protest, especially if it was something that concerned America, maybe the death of a couple of Frenchmen along a road in Connecticut. The French, he remembered from the war, were not always good at action but very good at complaint.

He took her arm. “Let’s avoid the ruckus,” he said, nodding in the direction of the protest noise.

She looked and nodded, then turned with Joe down a street that connected Saint-Germain with the quai along the Seine. As they neared the river, Joe could hear its sounds over those of the protest behind them, the mournful horns of the tugs on their slow swim up the Seine. As they came close to the river, he saw gulls flying over the liquid black of the river.

They walked on. Their arms continued to touch, like wires sending sparks, an exhilaration of possibility that Joe had for so long not experienced that he had forgotten could even exist. Since the war, maybe even since the death of his father, he had lived in a series of moments, stepping stone moments that led him deeper into a dark center of nothing. That moment walking with Marie near the Seine and with their arms touching more often than if by accident was different. He had lost a lot, but he also might have found something.

To others who saw the two walking, they may have looked as lovers on a winter stroll. The pair and the city and the time might have composed the fundamental elements of a good thing. The night and the moon shadows and the glints of reflected light in the water, the gray fog holding in the lamplight, water puddles shining like wafers on the wet streets—it was all good. Above them a pallid moon held in the sky. A man and a woman, both young and bright, with arms mixed looking more at each other than at anyone who came near. And Paris, an ocean of life. The cafés, the smell of petrol and perfume and cooking and the river, and while not springtime in Paris it was nearing Christmas-time in Paris. It all could have suggested love, but Joe knew very well that what one saw suggested from the outside was not always revealed when the truth unfolded.

She turned to him as they walked and spoke in a voice sweet and soft and more than a little melancholy, “I am going to visit my brother. It is late, but I have permission. That was where I was going when we . . . met, and that is where I am now going.”

He stopped. She stopped one step further, turned and stepped back to him. The wind was at his back and in her face and blew her short hair back around her cloche hat to show the white skin of her face. He said, his tone deepened and his words spoken slowly so as to be heard over the noise of the river and the street and the people walking past them, “Marcel will be there, you know. If not him, then one of his men. They will be looking for you now as well.”

“Regardless,” she said. “I will visit Paul.”

“Mind if I accompany you?”

She raised an eyebrow. “Do I have a choice?”

“Yes,” he said and smiled. “Your choice. I can walk with you or I can follow you.”

She sighed and smiled. “Then you might as well walk with me.”

She looked at him as they walked, her face drawn and expressive in understanding. They walked on in silence broken only by the sounds of the city at night. A city of light that pulsed its second life once the hint of darkness began.

She said, “He is at the Hotel-Dieu near Notre Dame on the Ile de la Cite. He is a war hero, and he receives the best treatment.”

They crossed the Seine on Pont Neuf, passed the statue of Henry IV on horseback, the over-sized arches, the caricatures of ministers and pick-pockets and tooth pullers. The wind blowing the course of the river rattled winter-dried leaves and dead seedpods, sending them to be captured in the moisture along the railing’s cement base. The cold air leaked through openings in his coat, and Joe pulled it tighter around him. The full breeze carried with it the scent of the river, a keen blend of diesel and coal and fish and old water. Someone moored close by was frying fish on board their flat-topped barge. The wind at their backs, they descended the stairs from the bridge to the walkway along the Ile de la Cite.

Ahead of them loomed the Palace de Justice with its gloomy façade and its gloomy front. A group of policemen were loitering underneath a lamp along the water wall, sharing a loaf of bread and laughing, paying little attention to the people passing. Even so, Joe pulled his collar higher, as much to hide his face as against the coldness of the evening and the tall building. He kept his head down, his eyes on the walk.

“Madame. Monsieur,” someone called from behind them.

Joe turned. A pair of policemen were coming toward them, not walking quickly or even resolutely. They were, however, coming toward them. Joe felt himself caught within a circle of hard places and rocks, police at both ends of the walkway, an overlarge police compound on one side of him and the Seine River on the other. As much as he hated the idea of a winter dip in a cold river, he steeled himself on that possibility.

He looked at Marie. This would be the test. Her eyes did not offer any clue.

The police spoke in French. Joe followed the conversation as best he could, using the inflection of voices as his clue on whether to dive or stand. They pardoned their intrusion and asked what business the two had along that street. There had been difficulties earlier in the day with a protest, and the police feared anarchists would again target the Conciergerie and the Palace de Justice. Marie, looking once at Joe, her eyes clear and her tongue tracing the line of her lips, explained that they were visiting her brother at the hospital. The police nodded, thanked them, and walked on to join the others at the water wall.

“Thank you,” Joe said to Marie after the police had left.

She looked at him, words formed in her eyes but she did not speak them. She swallowed then said, “We should hurry.”

She turned and walked along the gray walkway with Joe stepping quickly to catch up and walk beside her. The gas street lamps were on, and they walked between shadows. The wind continued, bringing waves of cold and wet air onto Joe’s back. They reached the hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu with its stone front standing several stories high, each story having darker stones from the river’s wet wind and the diesel and coal emissions of passing automobiles and barges. The words circling the arc above the front door read LIBERTE EGALITE FRATERNITE.

They entered through the large wood doors and walked the tiled halls and stairways to the third floor, their footsteps echoing along with them. Every person Joe saw he studied, looking to see if that person was also studying him, some member of Marcel’s soldiers waiting for their arrival. A trap, maybe, ready to be sprung. Dillard as the bait, Marie as the lure, Joe as the prey.

They reached Dillard’s room with no trouble, nobody taking any notice of them at all. Two people at a hospital to visit a sick loved one. That was all. Nurses and doctors and patients in wheelchairs and other visiting relatives and friends passing in the wide hallways, walking as close to the opposite walls as possible as though to avoid a contagion. Each person walked with shaded eyes, downcast or unfocused. People both unseen and blind to other people’s worries, for they all had enough of their own. Down the hall beyond Dillard’s room, a woman sat with her head in her hands, crying silently, her head and shoulders bouncing with her sobs. A teenage boy stood next her, his one hand on her shoulder, his other hand wiping the tears in his own eyes.

They entered Dillard’s room, walking into the rectangle of light cast from the hallway into the room, dimly lit from the single bulb of a table lamp. She looked at her brother in his bed and asked Joe to turn on the room’s ceiling light. Dillard lay on his back, one arm outside of the blanket. A bandage covered the arm from fingers to shoulder, open only where an intravenous tube was needled under the skin of his forearm. His head was also bandaged although his face was not. An antiseptic lotion, however, had been spread across his cheeks and nose and forehead like a glossy layer of film on his skin. His eyes were closed. He breathed with difficulty through his mouth, his breath barely passing through the gauntlet of his swollen throat.

Joe recognized Dillard’s labored wheezing, having heard similar from men caught in the mustard gas. Dillard’s lungs and throat had been damaged from heat and smoke, and now each breath became a battle. He had seen men who had lived through a gassing, like Diamond Dick Quire, but he knew also that for most men whose breath became such a difficulty they did not survive. Eventually Dillard’s lungs might fill with fluid or his throat might constrict or some infection might take hold elsewhere on his burned body, and he would not be strong enough to fight it off.

Joe could see the man dying without ever regaining consciousness, without him being able to tell Joe why exactly Marcel had killed Gresham, without telling the history of those treasons. He could see Dillard dying without ever telling the police who had killed him, leaving them to continue their assumption that Joe was responsible, regardless of what Marie might say. He could see Marie’s brother dying without ever again telling her that he loved her. He could see all that because he had seen all that before.

He watched her bend close to the bed and whisper words lightly into Dillard’s ear. He could not make out the words, but as she spoke softly to her brother, a tear ran from her eye and dropped onto the bed sheet. Dillard’s eyelids fluttered, but did not open. When Marie knelt to bended knee beside her brother’s bed, pressed her hands together and began to pray, Joe felt a lump grow in his throat.

He had not prayed since the war. When he had then it was more out of fear than belief. Watching her silently pray, her lips moving and her head bobbing with her words and silent crying, he considered offering his own prayer. For her and for Dillard, for Gresham and Huntington, for himself, for the thousands of men who had died at Champagne, for his mother and father who had died long ago. But he had quit believing. He had quit believing in so many things that he couldn’t bring himself to offer any words. He opened his eyes and watched Marie continue her own prayer, her hands now holding her brother’s hand.

Joe felt that he was a voyeur looking into someone’s very private sanctum. As quietly as he could, he opened the door behind him and slipped from the room. The same people were in the hallway, their eyes still averted as they walked along the hallway. The same woman was sitting, now with her head lain back against the wall, and the same boy remained standing next to her, his hand still on her shoulder. They had been joined by three others, an old man and woman and another woman. Joe met the eyes of the old man. He saw how the old and the young and the women carry the world’s grief.

He stood to the side of Dillard’s door, leaning back against the wall, his feet together and his eyes watching the shadows of passing people on the floor in front of him. It was not long before Marie left the room and joined Joe in the hallway, her eyes wiped clear of tears but left puffy and red. She looked at him. They left without speaking.

Outside the hospital, street lamps were bright and wedges of light came from building windows. The sky above, where he could see it through the boundaries of buildings, was black and hollow, empty and immense.

Joe took Marie by the arm, turning her gently toward him. “I’m sorry for your brother,” he said.

Marie nodded and swallowed hard. “I prayed for him to not suffer. I can see that he will die, and I prayed that he die soon.” He could see tears begin to well and he took his handkerchief and gave it to her. She took it and dabbed softly at her eyes.

Joe pressed his lips to her forehead and laid her head against his shoulder. He could feel her staggered breathing. “Where do we go now?” he asked.

She pushed away from him and looked around as though she did not know where she was. “Home,” she said. “I think I will go home.”

“Marcel was not here,” Joe said. “He’s certain to be waiting at your home.”

“I do not care about Marcel.”

“You should.”

“I do not care about anything.”

Joe felt like saying that he knew that was not true, for he had seen how deeply she cared about her brother.

He said, “You should not go home tonight.”

She looked at him.

“Is there somewhere you can stay, someone you can stay with for at least the night?” He added, “I’ll come see you tomorrow, to make sure everything is all right.”

She considered it for a moment.

Her breath caught in her throat as she spoke, “Yes. I have a friend nearby I can stay with. On rue Dante not far from where I live. She will let me stay.”

He walked with her to her friend’s apartment. They walked in silence with their hands in their pockets, their coats buttoned tight, their collars up against the wind and gathering cold. The short bridge on which they crossed the Seine was cold and wet. Bare trees on the quai stood in stark relief against the night sky. The lamps were alive, but the night was still dark and darker still when they turned off onto the unlit side street that led them to rue Dante.

A woman answered the door following the second knock. Marie talked to her in French. The woman nodded, looked at Joe with suspicion. She said something and Marie agreed.

Turning to Joe, Marie said, “She is wary of you.”

“That’s okay,” Joe said. “I probably don’t look like the most trustworthy Yank,” and told her that he would talk with her the next day. He took her hand, cold and dry but strong, and told her to sleep well. Not too far away, the bells in Saint Sèverin rang on the hour. He heard them count the strikes but tried to not think of them, whether the bells were tolling for him.

As he walked away, he heard the door close and latch shut behind him and felt their eyes watching him through the slightly parted curtains of a window.