XI

In short, the Champagne offensive was a trial of strength which was in some ways comparable with the victories of Austerlitz and Jena, although it did not achieve so victorious a result.

—The [London] Times History of the War, vol. 6

THE METRO ALTERNATED IN A SYNCOPATED RHYTHM, LIKE A NECKLACE made of sparks held together by a strand of darkness. Joe felt as if his blinking eyes were operating backward, the dark tunnels closing his sight for longer periods than they seemed opened.

Inside the darkness between stations, Joe remembered one of his first nights in a trench when German 240-millimeter mortars had shelled a section not fifty yards from where he tried to sleep. He listened to the whine as the shells descended and felt the reverberations of the ground with the exploding shells, but the dog legs in the trench had kept the shrapnel from reaching him. He had covered himself through the attack’s duration and prayed words he had thought were lost from his memory. The ground heaved and rolled, bounced with a fury of sudden thunder. In ten minutes, a silence filled the trench followed by the low moans and calls for help from wounded men. Then the calls that an attack had been mounted. Joe had run with others through the mud and viscera to where the shelling had been. He slipped, fell to one knee in the slime and bloody spume. Next to Joe, scatter-lit by a half-moon that had begun to give way to false dawn and shrouded in fog like a gravecloth, lay a man’s body without any head or right arm, his blood dark and abundant where it flowed from the truncations. The smell of shit and burned skin and entrails gagged Joe. He vomited violently, as did others. Then someone yelled that the Huns had come through the wire. He stood, his Springfield rifle dripping from the excrements of war. The pinholed glow of flashlights bounced tight together as the Germans huddled in close compact to make their way through an opening in the barbed-wire entanglement. A man near Joe took a gas lantern, lit it and threw it flaming toward the Germans. It broke and burst into flame on one man, his body a sudden torch. Each man in the trench began firing their five-round magazines and Joe fired with them, stopping only to reload until he, like others, ran out of ammunition. One man cradled a heavy Lewis machine gun and fired indiscriminately until the weapon jammed and seized up. He dropped it into the muck at his feet and pulled a Colt from his belt and continued to fire. They exhausted their ammunition in minutes, rifles and revolvers and pistols alike. They threw hand grenades or wielded their Springfields by the barrels as clubs like ancient warriors. Still the Germans spilled over, crossing the edge of the blown-out trench and joining the Americans in their muck. One man lost his hand when he picked up a German stick grenade that exploded in his grasp before he could throw it back at the Germans. The man sat down in the mud and cried, holding the stump at his wrist. Joe reached down and took a trench club from the waist belt of a dead man and ran for the closest German. He swung the wooden shaft with a round of scrap lead tied onto the end by a barbed-wire binding, and he split the German’s cheek, dislodging the jaw and opening a wound that exposed the entirety of the man’s mouth. The German stopped short and dropped his weapon, his eyes wide with fright and surprise as he tried in vain to return his face to how it should have been. Joe swung again and killed the man with a blow to his temple. The fighting went on with clubs and knives and hands and teeth for another hour until the Germans retreated with the full sunrise. The morning became lost in the echoed sounds of struggle and death. The surrounding death became academic and men became numbers. Finally, the sounds of battle slackened and were replaced by the sounds of men who did not know they were as yet dead. None of the Americans standing said anything or looked another man in the eyes. They had each found the darkest and most primal foundation of their souls. None would face another man in quite the same way again.

Eventually the bodies were gathered and carted to the rear, born on other men’s backs. Later, after a rain had washed the stench and remains of battle back into the mud of the trench, an American colonel came forward to congratulate Joe’s unit for a job well done, for their courage and bravery in the face of the enemy, for upholding the honor and the name of their battalion. The colonel did not venture to where the fighting had taken place and instead talked to them as they rested in a wide spot of the second trench.

“Damn, man. You all right?” asked Quire as the Metro pulled into the turbid light of another station.

Joe felt a feverish sweat rise on his brow and back. He shivered against it. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “I just need some air.”

“This is our station then.”

“You sure?”

“No, but it’s the station we’ll be getting off at.”

“Why?”

“We should make sure of where we’re going before we end up in Versailles.”

The platform was empty of people as they stepped from the train with a few other people from other cars. The other exiting people left quickly, looking furtively and fearfully at the two Americans they had watched enter the train’s last car, leaving Joe and Quire alone in the sepulchral underground of Paris. The train echoed as it receded into the tunnel. They looked into that dark union as the train disappeared, dust swirling within its void.

They walked to a map and found their place, Etienne, neither close nor in line with Marie’s house in the Latin Quarter or with Marcel’s house in Montmartre. They debated what they would do next and decided that Joe would go to Marie’s friend’s house while Quire would find Ballard at Zelli’s. A coughing fit sent Quire to a nearby pillar, bent over like a beggar retching. While he was there the next train pulled into the station.

From the train stepped an acne-scarred man whose close-set eyes focused narrowly on Joe. He held a pistol in his hand and lifted it, pointing it toward Joe and sighting down the length of the barrel. He said in broken and heavily accented English, “Where is your friend?”

“Behind you, sport,” answered Quire.

The man turned quickly. Quire fired twice into the man’s body. He stumbled backward like a drunk before crumpling to the ground. Blood stained the cement platform of the station.

Quire spit bloody sputum to the side then looked down at the dead man. He said, “Help me move him to the bench.”

Joe took hold of the man’s ankles while Quire lifted the head. They placed him face down on the bench, wrapping the man’s coat around him to help soak up some of the spilling blood. They wiped their hands on the tail of the man’s coat.

“I’m taking a taxi to Zelli’s. Ballard’ll want to know that things are coming to a head.” Quire coughed. “You?” He turned and looked at the platform as though he were searching for someplace to spit.

“A crossing train,” said Joe.

“You think that’s a good idea?” Quire asked, eyebrow cocked.

“Maybe not, but I should make sure she’s okay before I go any further with this.”

Quire shrugged. “You want me to follow you after I find Ballard?”

“If you can, yes. We’ll set the rest of the night’s plan from there,” Joe said.

Quire said, “Tell me where Marcel lives. I’ll send Ballard on ahead.”

“Near the Barbe depot.” Joe showed Quire the piece of paper with Marcel’s address written on it.

“Not far from me, huh? A neighbor? I had noticed a rather fetid stench in the last couple of months.”

“That was your gas cure, the cow shit under your flat.”

“Besides that. A certain damn compound of villainous smells.”

Joe looked doubtfully at Quire, who smiled back at Joe like the little boy who knows what nobody else knows. Here was a man, Joe thought, who mixes killing and profanity and Shakespeare with ease.

“Take the valise,” Joe said, handing it to Quire.

“Why?” Quire asked.

Joe told him and Quire nodded. “Besides,” he said, “I don’t know what I’ll find at her place. I may need both hands free.”

Another train was slowing to its stop. Joe nodded at Quire, and Quire left through the dark hallway of an exit. Joe walked to the edge of the platform, leaving the dead man to rest on his own, alone as any dead man must inevitably be. He walked past a couple of gendarmes as they exited a train, his head down within the collar of his coat. He reached to pull down his fedora, but he had lost it someplace and sometime during the short fight. The police were too busy talking to notice the overcoated man trying his best to hide his face.

As the train pulled from the station, the policemen saw the smear on the platform, a blood-red mark like a pock on the gray of the concrete. One stepped toward the man on the bench and the other turned quickly to look Joe in the eye as the train began its release from the station. He pointed and said something to his partner as the partner touched the dead man, who rolled onto the platform like the unraveling end of a mortal coil. The train was gone inside the darkness of the tunnel. Joe saw nothing more.

He rode in the echoing silence of the Metro through the next few stops. Parisians, bundled heavily against the night’s increasing cold and carrying bags of groceries and presents, pushed into the car at each opening. At the Gare du Nord, most of the travelers left the train with a mechanical proficiency. Those who exited were quickly replaced by as many more, all looking the same and carrying the same bags.

Joe watched the people come and go and thought of how easily any single person is replaced. Without a name or even a face, a person becomes the same as the person who stood in that spot ten minutes earlier, and the other person could be dead or a shadow of another. He remembered new recruits coming into the trenches, who after a single day of mud and fear looked like the casualty men they had replaced. The officers never knew, calling men by names that had been dead for weeks. One morning a man was a best friend and the next barely a memory.

When the train stopped at the Saint Michel station, Joe exited into the noise of the platform. He did not look at anyone else and took the steps up and out into the cold wind and commencing rain.

The sky had lowered and a little wind had risen to carry a new rain still so slight to barely cause moisture. The wind caught Joe’s overcoat and flapped it open, so he re-buttoned the front and pulled up the collar. Within a block of leaving the station, the rain filled into a full rain. Large drops slapped into puddles already formed in the seams, cracks, and dips of the cobblestoned street.

He passed prostitutes who stood behind glass doors or windows, offering a view of their wares. He skirted around men with old wooden handcarts laden with fish or vegetables or carts closed tight against the rain to protect a supply of books. He crossed the opening of an alley from which he heard the sounds of a man and a woman engaged.

He walked on in the darkness, his shadow nonexistent until he reached the halo of lambent light underneath lampposts. Then he passed into and through and away from his cast image, then on, then toward and through again as if chasing a lost thought.

At the friend’s house, he was told that Marie had left that afternoon for her own house. She had wanted some papers and had wanted a change of clothes and thought that she would be okay at home during the day and would return by nightfall. “She has not,” the friend said.

Joe left, walking quickly, his head down in that constructed silence of the city’s night until he stood across from Marie Dillard’s home.

He stood and watched the light and dark of different windows, trying to read what lay inside that house, but he could see its soul no more than a disciple could see the soul of Judas. He could see nothing but the light and dark of windows and crossed the street to knock on the door, glad that the bells of Saint-Séverin were not tolling.

She answered the door. Her eyes went wide. She leaned forward and whispered, “Leave. Please.” Her hand pressed flat against his chest, pushing, her eyes pleading.

“No.” A voice called from behind her. The door opened farther. “Please,” a man said. “Come inside. Join us.” His smile was as cold as his words. “It is, I think, time that we meet, formally.”

She stood to the side. Joe stepped in. The front room was dark, lit only by a candle in its glass, the flame waving from the breeze of the opened door. He stopped and turned to her.

She did not look at him as Marcel closed the door, fingering the dead bolt. “Go inside,” he repeated, his words sounding like gravel. “Please. Entre “

Joe stepped inside the parlor and looked around the room. The fire in the fireplace had banked, orange glows soft within the diminishing embers of its last heat. The marble mantel held photographs of children, men and women with children, and soldiers strong and proud in their French uniforms. A rug boundaried the wood floor. Electric wall sconces and floor lamps lit the room, which was empty except for a sofa and chair countering the fireplace like entrance pillars. A fat man stood behind the sofa with a small pistol at his hip aimed at Joe.

“But first,” he added, his hand outstretched as Joe stepped past him.

Joe looked at him.

“Your weapon,” Marcel said. “I’m certain that you did not come without one. You are not that stupid of an American.”

Joe began to reach into his pocket and the fat man coughed to let Joe remember his presence. Joe handed over his Webley and Marcel underhanded it to the fat man.

The fat man with the pistol had a fat, sallow, unshaven face. He had a small mouth and a recessed chin. His small mouth tightened into a taut smile.

Joe turned to face Marcel, the last of the five men who had been with Gresham at the Champagne. The man who had sold out his friends to the Germans and helped seal the deaths of 20,000 men in one haze-filled morning. Joe’s hatred of the man was intense and immediate and complete, fueled from many sources—the death of his friend, the recent deaths of others he had only met or even did not know, the distant deaths of thousands, the deaths of honor and courage and belief.

Joe wanted to put a bullet into one of the man’s eyes. He liked the idea enough to hold that thought until further notice, some pleasure to retain for later in the rainy night when he had retrieved his gun.

Marcel stood no taller than Joe but was thinner. His skin was a pallor, the color of over-cooked pasta; his eyes were gray and lifeless and the underlids were red; his hair was thin and cut short. He looked as though his life had been bled from him, as though his own cowardice had begun the process of rot from the inside, like a maple tree rots from its heart out until the shell is left withered.

“Frederick Gadwa,” Joe said.

Marcel, Frederick Gadwa, bowed his head slightly. “You guessed,” he said in perfect British English.

“It took some time, but eventually it all fell in place.”

“What do you mean?” Marie asked.

“He’s not Marcel,” Joe said. He looked from Gadwa to Marie and back.

Gadwa nodded and gestured with his hands, saying, “Go ahead. I’d like to hear what you know as well.”

“They were all members of an advance reconnaissance unit—Gresham, your brother, Gadwa, the Marcel brothers, and Thomas Wilde. In 1914 as the war was beginning and before the English had much practice in trench warfare, Gresham and Gadwa and Wilde had been assigned to join a French unit, to learn from them. They were to gather information and scout routes and wire holes before an attack. The day of an attack, they were to precede the troops and record the action. This photograph had everything I needed.”

He began to reach inside his coat for the photograph.

The fat man levelled his pistol, and Gadwa cautioned, “Be careful, my friend.”

Joe bristled at the moniker but let it slide. He opened the overcoat to show the inside of its flap and slowly pulled the rolled photograph from inside the pocket. He handed it to Gadwa, who unrolled it and looked, then handed it to Marie.

“I have always hated that photograph,” Gadwa said.

“For good reason,” Joe said. “Like Ephialtes viewing a photograph of Leonidas.”

Gadwa reacted as though bee-stung, but recovered and spat, “Don’t be dramatic.” He waved. “Go on with your little story. I find it entertaining.”

“In the photo, I knew who Gresham was from the beginning. From their uniforms, I could tell the French from the English, and I knew who had died and who had lived. Huntington, the man you had killed on the ship, told me how you had prospered following the war. Since I had not met you, I assumed that you were Marcel, but the woman at a bookstore showed me differently. “Once she pointed you out, it all came clear. How long had you been selling information to the Germans?”

“Since before the war,” he answered. “I had been a military liaison in Berlin for a few years and began then. That, actually, was how I ended up where I was. Through others, I was transferred to the Champagne following the first battle there because everyone knew a second would eventually come. Joffre was so predictable.”

He looked to Joe almost expectantly, his fingers worrying against his thumbs. The man had probably not ever been able to tell his story to anyone, had held only his own council. Joe understood that being able to hear it and to tell it must have felt somehow liberating for the traitor.

“Every night that you went out, you sold something to the Germans—where holes were in the concertina wire, when troop movements were scheduled and advances planned, where the approach roads were. You volunteered to go out alone. Everyone thought you courageous for taking their spots in the rotation. Your superiors probably talked about medals. After that morning, though, with the slaughter that took place, you must have known that you needed to disappear. You were in advance when the day began, out front with Rene Marcel. After the battle, or during it more likely, you kill Marcel and change uniforms, wound yourself enough to be removed from the front. You slide into hiding.”

“Very good,” Gadwa said.

“I wonder, though,” Joe said.

“Yes?”

“How did you pull it off since then?”

“It was so much easier than you might think, so much easier than I imagined that it would be. I thought that I would have to disappear into Germany and begin again. That would not have been so bad, for I had accumulated millions in Swiss francs over the many years that I worked for the Germans.

“But once I became Marcel and spent my time convalescing as him, I had the opportunity to go through his business papers and realized that I had a fortune waiting to be picked, like low-hanging fruit. Especially with Wilde dead in the battle, and, I thought, everyone else. Imagine my surprise when I found out that Dillard had lived. . . and then Gresham. By then, though, I had already taken over that business and built it into what it now is.”

“And nobody questioned it?”

“Why would they. The facts supported the story, even if the facts were wrong. That is what truth is—whatever you can support with facts. People wanted to believe, so they did. And once I became Rene Marcel, one of the richest men in France, I could tell my story as I wanted it to be. Politicians and businessmen kissed my toes because I had what they wanted—money and power.”

“And why rock that boat?”

“Pardon?”

“The politics of pragmatism. Goddamn you.”

“Yes,” Gadwa said. “He probably already has,” then added, “I suppose we will both see if Nietzsche is right or not. But, please, sit.” He waved toward chair.

For emphasis, the fat man pointed the barrel of his pistol toward the chair.

Joe sat, his hands in his coat pockets. He watched Marie, her eyes steady and black, but not looking at him even though she stood facing him, backlit by a floor lamp. Gadwa walked up behind her then stepped to the side to stand to her right and turned to say something to the fat man.

For a moment, Joe felt as though he was looking at Vermeer’s “Soldier and Young Girl Smiling.” Marie, beautiful as he now knew her, faced him with her hands drawn together in front of her and her fingertips dusting lightly together as though she was holding a small cup, the expression on her face more lost than warm. Gadwa, standing tall and with his back to Joe as in Vermeer’s painting, was shown in the orange glow of a lamp. Except the young girl was not smiling and the nearly faceless soldier was a coward.

Gadwa turned to look at Joe, his small, red-rimmed and gray eyes searching and steady. He crossed his arms, but he did not smile as he looked at Joe. His mouth slowly tightened into the small, thin line of his lips. “You are a fool,” he said.

Joe had to agree, and it wasn’t the first time that notion had crossed Joe’s mind. He just hoped it wasn’t the last time as well. When Joe did not answer, Gadwa walked to a side table to pour himself a brandy. Before drinking, however, he held the bottle up and read the label. Then he took a mouthful, moving it around in his mouth to test it on his palate. A mantel clock chimed the hour.

Gadwa nodded and turned to Joe. “For you?” he asked.

“Whiskey.”

Gadwa nodded, “Of course.” He tined ice into a small glass then splashed in whiskey. He handed Joe the whiskey and Marie a brandy and raised his glass, “A votre sante.”

Joe paused. “To the Lost,” he said, then he drained his glass. He held the glass to the light and examined it, amber liquid clinging to the sides.

“Why did you come here?” Gadwa asked, licking his lips, thin and pale.

“Seemed like the thing to do at the time,” Joe said. “I’d be happy to leave if I’m interrupting anything.”

Gadwa laughed. “The famous American sense of humor. . . . I hate it.”

“It’s gotten us through some tough times,” Joe said.

“Yes, I suppose it has. You don’t always realize when you’re beaten.”

“Maybe that’s why we never are.” He looked at Marie standing with her back to the fireplace, her glass full and placed on the marble mantel. She avoided his eyes with studious labor.

He looked at the fat man with the small pistol. “Boss not let you imbibe?” he asked.

The man smiled his sallow smile but did not answer.

Joe shrugged. “You have a large number of people working for you.”

Gadwa shrugged. “I do,” he said. “And in many places across Europe.”

“It must cost a bit of money to pay such an army.”

“It does, but, then, the peace has been very good for me.”

“You did all right from the war.”

Gadwa took three long, slow strides to stand in front of Joe. He backhanded Joe in the mouth, a feline blow that bloodied the corner of his mouth but one that nearly sent him to the floor. His first reaction was to strike back, but there was the large man with the sallow face smiling at him and that little pistol readied. He looked at Marie. In her eyes he saw fear. Her eyes told him to do nothing, to say nothing.

Gadwa looked at Marie. “We have to leave.”

“You bastard,” she said. “Why have you done all this?”

Gadwa cupped her chin in his hand. “You are so beautiful,” he said. “So naïve and so stupid.”

He squeezed, she jerked away, he slapped her.

Joe lunged for Gadwa, but the fat man was there. He clubbed Joe with the pistol and sent Joe back to the floor.

Gadwa smiled at Joe. “The cowboy to save his damsel in distress. How noble. But, thank you for coming here tonight, Monsieur. It helped immensely.”

He took Marie by the arm, “We will leave now.” She tried fighting loose but Gadwa held tight.

Gadwa said to Joe, “My man here will stay with you. Please listen carefully to what he tells you.”

“And Mademoiselle Dillard?”

“She will come with me.” Gadwa looked from Joe to Marie, a thin smile on his lips. He took Marie by the arm and led her out, stopping to whisper in the large man’s ears.

“Mort?” Joe asked after Gadwa and Marie had left the room.

“No,” the man answered, shaking his head. He waited as a door closed in the back of the house. Silence interrupted the room. All Joe could hear was the popping of the coals in the fireplace. The large man stepped around the sofa and to the mantel where he took Marie’s glass of brandy. He drank a little, swirled it in his mouth as Gadwa had and tasted it, shrugged at Joe, and drank the rest in a single gulp.

He looked toward the back of the house before pouring himself another glass of brandy. He kept the pistol on Joe and placed the glass on an end table, using one hand to pour. His eyes darted between the flow of brandy waving in red circles in the glass and Joe sitting. The man leaned against the mantel, a look of sullen content as he sipped from the glass and licked his lips as he finished.

He placed the glass on the end table. Again he lifted the stopper from the bottle and began to pour the brandy.

“What then?” Joe asked.

“I will let you go,” the man said.

“What?”

The man shrugged, indicating that it was not his decision. “I am to tell you that Gadwa is leaving France tonight. He will be at his house in Montmartre for a couple of hours. If you bring the manuscript, he will let the woman go. If you do not bring the manuscript, he will take her.” He laughed. “I suppose that means that he will kill her, eventually he will kill her.”

His eyes returned to the pouring brandy. Joe leapt at him, taking hold of the gun hand in his own and circling his arm around the man’s side with his other, lifting the man onto his shoulder and driving the large man back against the brick of the wall.

The fat man dropped his gun but did not fall. Instead, he hit Joe in the back using his joined fists as a club, battering them together on Joe’s neck. His grip loosened. The fat man pulled Joe away and head butted him. Then his legs went rubber, and he fell like a sack of cement. The fight had not gone well. He was getting his ass kicked.

The fat man stood over him, huffing. The pistol was back in his hand and pointed again at Joe.

“Arrêtez.” The word came from the back door where Quire stood, his own pistol leveled straight arm at the fat man.

The fat man looked from Quire to Joe and back at Quire.

“Don’t,” Quire said, then in French: “Je vais vous tuer.” He added in English, “Sure as shit, Mr. Arbuckle, I will kill your ass.”

The fat man sighed and dropped his pistol. He shrugged his shoulders.

“Bon,” said Quire. “Sit against the wall. There. Legs straight out in front of you.” He quickly pointed with his pistol.

The man did as he was told. His large legs stuck out from his large body.

“The Webley,” Joe said.

The man shrugged and slid the Webley across the floor.

“Impeccable timing,” Joe said to Quire. He wiped blood from a cut on his forehead.

“Like I told you. I have luck with trouble.” He added, “And I said that I’d meet you here. After I got to Ballard, I came straight here.”

“Many thanks, brother,” Joe said.

Quire nodded. “You going to kill him?” he asked.

“It’s a thought.”

“Mort?” the large man asked. His hand moved slowly toward the fireplace tools racked near him.

Joe lifted the pistol from the floor and aimed, cocking it and sighting down his arm and the short barrel into the man’s large chest. Shoot for the middle, he had been told by his sergeant, and you won’t miss. His finger tensed.

“Wait,” Quire said, stepping forward and bending on one knee next to the large man. He held a small pillow in one hand and a Webley pistol in the other. He bent close and asked a question in French. When the man did not answer, he asked again, louder.

He did not answer and Quire placed the pillow against the man’s foot and sank the Webley into the down of the pillow and shot. Feathers and blood and bone meal exploded from the man’s foot. The man cried out. He went to grab his foot, but Quire took the man’s head by the hair and drew it back so that the man looked Quire in the face, sweat and tears running down his cheeks.

Quire repeated his question. He still did not answer. Quire let go of the man, who slid into a fetal position with his hands holding tight to his bloody and now useless foot. Quire stepped to the sofa and chose another pillow. Down from the first pillow was stuck to his hand by the man’s blood. Quire knelt again and pulled the man to a sitting position and placed the pillow to his crotch and sank the Webley into the pillow.

“Non,” he cried, pitiful and bestial. “Please,” he said in English, the single syllable broken.

Quire asked again, “How many men are with Marcel?”

The large man, sweat rolling from his forehead, his shirt beginning to darken. He swallowed and said, “Deux, trois.”

Quire said, “Merci,” then patted his shoulder. He hit the man in the face so hard that his head bounced from the bricks and he slumped to the floor.

“If you want to kill him, we can, but I don’t think there’s a need.” Quire stood and wiped his hands free of down on the back of the sofa.

“Shall we tie him up?” Joe asked.

Quire shook his head. “If he leaves, it won’t be to follow us or even to warn Marcel. He has failed. I imagine Marcel is getting tired of the sloppy work of his people and will probably kill him. No, he’ll be visiting a doctor to fix up that foot of his. Us, though, we should be going.” He stood and winked at Joe as he walked past to the front of the house.

They walked out into the increasing cold of the night, down toward Saint-Germain to find a cab, and while they walked, quickly but not so quickly as to draw attention, Joe told Quire the story and that the man’s name was Gadwa and not Marcel.

“Damn,” Quire said.

They found a taxi and Joe gave him a ten spot to hurry across the city.

The driver, a bellicose man with a short, stubby cigar attached to his lower lip, nodded when Joe told him the address. He then offered to sell Joe and Quire cigars from a box he kept on the seat next to him. “They are not Algerian,” he said in French.

“Just what you need, a bad five-cent cigar,” Quire said. He reached a hand over the back of the driver’s seat, exchanging a couple of franc for a cigar and pulled the cigar under his nose, inhaling the aroma. “Might even be Caribbean.”

Joe sighed and looked through the front windshield. “What I need,” he said, “is not going to be found in something that looks like a dried dog turd.”

Quire smiled. In a moment, his smile dissolved. He looked at Joe. For the first time in the couple of days that Joe had known Quire, Joe detected an introspection in the man’s voice. “Yes,” Quire said. “What you’d like, what we’d all like again, is to be right. In this world, brother, that is the most difficult thing to be.”

Joe did not answer. Quire sat back in the shadows of the seat, looking out his side window and thinking his own lost thoughts.

The street’s tarred pavement ahead bounced in shimmering lines in the headlights of the passing automobiles. The buildings on either side of the rue Saint-Martin disappeared into the gray, acidic smoke and the haze of the blue-black sky. As they crossed the Seine, Joe looked down along the lighted quai alongside the river, black and empty except for a series of tugs and barges tied to the pilings along the concrete pier. Fog pooled in wraithlike vapors alongside the banks of the river which ran slow and opaque and controlled within the city’s charter. He looked back at the river as they passed over the bridge. The river curled and flowed black through the city, sparkling with bounced reflective light but welling heavy and dark as it approached and underran the bridge’s supports. The river disappeared behind them. Joe turned to look again at the city cast in shades of gray under the black sky. The night fog shone in the streetlights of the city. Like the night and the river, the fog floated as though it might lay dark and mazy on the city.

A few minutes after passing over the river, Joe directed the cabbie to let them off at the end of the street down from Marcel’s house. They stood fifty yards from the house, often the width of the no-man’s land between the trenches during the last war.

“That it?” Quire asked.

“It is.”

Joe could feel Quire’s tension rise, like someone turning on the heat from pilot to full.

“Ballard should be nearby.” Quire’s tone was as hard as pounded steel.

“That would be good.”

“I told him to wait for us here.”

“He have the valise?” Joe asked.

“He does,” Quire said.

Joe nodded. “I hope he hasn’t begun without us.”

“I hope he hasn’t finished without us.” Quire laughed a little, the temper in his tone loosening.

“I suppose we should wait a moment and see if we see him.”

Quire looked around him and smiled. “You know,” he said, placing the unlit cigar in the corner of his mouth and chewing. “The first hotel I stayed in was around here somewhere. A real ritzy place that I had decided to put up in for a while. I figured that I was dying fast enough, so there was no reason to save my money. It had a damn drinking fountain in the bathroom, it was so damn ritzy. The goddamn thing must have been made for midgets, though, ’cause it was down near the floor and I had to get on my hands and knees to get a drink from it.” He looked blank faced at Joe, then winked.

Joe looked at Quire open-mouthed. It was as though Quire had no notion of the errand they were on, like they were drunken comrades intent only on the easy promises due young men on a Paris evening.

“What?” Quire asked, looking at Joe, his hands open-palmed and away from his body.

“This is too much,” Joe said.

“What is?”

“Your talking, your joking. You’re acting like we’re hiking Mont Blanc. Man, don’t you understand what this night holds? We are killing people.”

Quire lowered his eyes for a moment and removed the cigar from between his lips. When he again looked at Joe, his eyes were glassed and hard. He stepped forward to stand close to Joe and spoke, his voice deep and collusive, “Would you rather I talk about how many men I have killed in my past or who I have seen die and how and how long it took? Should I tell you how sickened and frightened I am at how much I am looking forward to this killing I know will take place? Would it be better to tell you that my hands are shaking and my legs feel weak as gimcrack? That my stomach is turning? Would that be better?”

“No,” Joe breathed. “I suppose not.” He knew then something that he had long wished, that the world was not as empty as he had supposed, that it was not a world constructed of no known or moral paradigm. Good men lived, even though their goodness was covered in veneers of past evils, not necessarily all of their own making.

They stood shadowless in the dark night across from the building, stark and obscure and cast within numberless shadows. They waited and stood and waited across from the house and watched and listened. Their eyes adjusted, the form of a house became a house, its frontal visage taking shape and appearance.

“Dark as a wolf’s mouth,” Ballard said from a shadow nearby.

“Ballard,” Quire said. “Glad you’re here.”

“Man, I was there before the curtain raised on this drama, and, Quire-boy, I’ll be damned if I miss the last act.” His dark eyes were calm and appraising as he spoke. The eyes of a man who had seen too much, and, since those interrupting sights, had slept too little.

Joe swallowed what little moisture he had. A coldness cut raw to his bones as he anticipated the violence cast within the oncoming moments. He studied the exterior of Gadwa’s building, his stomach tightening cold and hard as a shot of lead. People were about to die.

Tall behind a waist-high iron fence, four bare elm trees sentried the building’s front. The front stoop and brick exterior rose three stories from the level of the street. Two curtained windows were to either side of the ground-floor entrance like blindered eyes. The two floors above each had four windows spaced evenly across the front and which were outlined in light sandstone. Gadwa’s was a house of the rich, not quite a centuries-old aristocrat’s palaise but maybe once a wealthy merchant’s home. Set off from surrounding houses, ostentatiously removed from the fronting sidewalk as though to say that the owners cared not for the added taxes on wasted space, probably with a back entrance and a delivery entrance all its own. Ironworked bars laced the windows of the top two floors, and the front doors were a dark wood with square Judas holes in each.

“This man’s afraid of something,” Joe said.

“Evidently,” Ballard agreed. “I been around back. The place is surrounded by a wall—eight foot. It’s like its own Medieval fortress, fully enclosed. There’s a delivery door back there but it’s set pretty tight.”

“Rich people, especially rich French people, don’t trust poor people, especially poor foreign people,” Quire said.

“But like I said,” Joe said, “he isn’t French.”

“No. He isn’t, but he tries to be.”

Joe leaned against the brick of the building behind him. He took a deep breath and looked around at the street and the quilted sky above and the light rain still falling and the front of Marcel’s home. He looked for something he could not find.

He said, “What would make a man sell out the lives of so many of his countrymen? His friends? I get the money part, but I still don’t understand.”

Ballard answered, “What would make a man produce defective ammunition for you and me to use in that war? Like you said—money. Just money.”

“Men do things for only two reasons, love or money. Money is all this man loves,” Quire added.

“How can it be worth it?”

“You’re asking the wrong guy, brother,” Quire said. “All of my money came from my old man, and that son of a bitch didn’t care where his came from.”

“Shit.” It could have been any one of three voices that said it.

There was a long silence during which Joe again looked around. A hidden moon, no lampposts, no people walking, no automobiles, no lights in nearby house windows. Only a dark and leprous night, cold and wet and tactile.

Ballard broke the silence, “We should do something, and we should begin doing it.”

“All right,” Joe said. “What do you think?”

“Ballard goes around back and finds his way in or stops whoever tries leaving.”

“And us?”

“We have two choices.”

“They are?”

“Either you follow me or I follow you.”

“Goddamn but you’re a strategist.”

“I do my best.”

“Shit,” said Ballard. “Let’s do it.”

Quire rolled his shoulders like a boxer between early rounds and took the first step into the street. As they crossed to Gadwa’s house, he said, “Remember. Start tight, stay tight.”

“Shut up with that shit,” Ballard said. He picked up the valise and carried it with him.

Each step toward Gadwa’s house opened another cleft in Joe’s reservoir of remembered deaths and losses. Even with the night air a palpable cold, he could feel a ball of sweat run his spine.

Ballard separated from them and made his way into the shadows that lined the houses and around to the back. Of the two windows on the building’s lower floor, one had light behind the heavy curtains and the other darkness. They went first to the dark. The window was double-hung, and the bottom of the windowsill was even with Joe’s chin. He pushed up on the lower half but no movement. The window was latched shut.

“Give me your knee,” Joe said.

Quire bended to one knee and braced his other leg behind him, his shoulder against the building. Joe stood on Quire’s elevated knee and held the window’s frame to look in at the lock, a simple brass rotating latch fastened where the double-hung windows overlapped.

Joe dropped to the ground and bent next to Quire.

“We’ll have to break the glass,” he said.

“First,” Quire said, placing a levelling hand on Joe’s shoulder. “Let’s have a look inside that lit window and see what we may be up against.”

Joe smiled. “Since when did you stop to think before jumping into action?”

“It doesn’t happen very often, so you should take heed of it when it does.”

Joe nodded.

They crossed the front walk. Once again Quire boosted Joe up so that he could peer through a finger opening in the drapes.

Gadwa and Dapper stood in front of a fire in the brick fireplace. Dapper was buttoning the front of his overcoat while Gadwa held a glass of brandy. He held the glass as if he were offering it for view, the way a man does when he wants to remind others of their relative position to him.

The floor was hardwood and shined in reflection of the fire. Gadwa and Dapper, however, stood on an Oriental rug, rust-colored and worn only slightly from use.

Marie sat cross-legged on a sofa and her hands in her lap. She looked at the fire. Joe saw only her portrait in profile but could see that she had recently been crying. The skin around her eyes was maroon. A smudge of black mascara remained on her cheek. Joe watched her chest move with unsettled breaths. The Turk hovered near her.

The sofa Marie sat on was antique and elaborate in its design and construction, something from some Louis who had spent the lives of his countrymen on his own comfort. The mantel held small statues ready for observation. Sepia portraits and small paintings, neither modern nor Impressionist but much older, ringed the walls. It looked like the type of room some people might call home, but Joe saw sterility and falsity and pretense.

In the fireplace behind Gadwa and Dapper, a full fire popped and hissed. Joe smelled the sweet smell of burning wood, a smell that would usually remind him of his boyhood home.

Gadwa looked like a man entertaining guests in a pre-yule time fete—brandy and a warming fire and conversation.

Joe saw all that in a short time, just long enough to have peeked through the narrow opening in the curtains and scan the room. Then he dropped beside Quire and whispered, “Just the four.” He held up four fingers. “Marie, Gadwa, Dapper, and the Turk. That guy at Marie’s was right.”

“Dapper the dandy who gave me my shiner?”

Joe smiled and Quire smiled back. His blue eyes shined significantly in the darkness, and he started for the front door.

Joe placed a hand to Quire’s shoulder then a finger over his own mouth. He held out his hand, palm downward, to signal that Quire slow down and wait for a moment. He whispered to Quire, “Listen to that little voice that wants you to think before acting.”

The time had come. Joe knew that he could not hold it back any longer, but he needed Quire’s assistance first. “Help me through the window,” he said.

“Let’s make it quick.”

They re-crossed to the darkened window. Joe took off his overcoat and wrapped the Webley inside. He tapped his hand to gauge the strength of this softened mallet, unwrapped and rewrapped with less insulation around the butt of the pistol, and winked at Quire. “Ready?”

“Just don’t swing for the fence, Babe.”

“A tap should do it.”

Quire bended his knee again and Joe stood. His first swing bounced from the glass with little more than a dull thud. The second swing hit more fully and more forcefully, streaking a crack from the bottom center of the glass where Joe had hit it to the top right corner. Another, softer blow sent the glass into a spider web of cracks.

Joe dropped his gun and overcoat to the ground and began poking at the broken glass until he had loosened a few pieces enough to push them into the room. They hit the wood floor with more sound than Joe was prepared for. He fixed himself to jump and run had the noise been heard from the other room. Nothing. He pulled another couple of pieces loose and dropped them in the bushes until he could reach through with his hand and unlatch the window. He felt a shard cut a single line along his forearm.

Jumping back down to the ground, he said, “I’ll go through the window. When you hear things going down, you come in. Break it down if you have to.”

“A little gunplay, Wyatt.”

“Just don’t shoot one of the good guys.”

Quire pushed open the window then cupped his hands for Joe to use as a prop. “You watch your back,” Quire said.

“You do the same,” said Joe.

“Ain’t no thing for me. I’ll be in there soon.”

Joe stepped onto the brace of hands and pulled himself up and over the sill. He stood for a moment looking into the dark precinct of the room until his eyes adjusted and he could make out the outline of furniture, electric floor lamps, the outlines on the walls where pictures hung, and the cord of light at the bottom of the door to his left.

One last look out the window at Quire padding to the front room window to watch as things began. Joe listened to the sounds of muffled voices, but could hear little more than his heart beating in his ears. From a long ways off, he heard the thrum of thunder sounding like artillery rounds. Standing in that dark room with a sliver of yellow light at the bottom of a door he was set to open, he drew a deep breath and felt the muscles of his body pulled as tight as a bow string.