A Star for Mrs. Blake (19 page)

Hammond demanded, “Where?”

“D’ya need a road map?” Katie snapped.

“I mean who—where is he—?”

“Behind that curtain there’s another room,” Katie said, pointing. “A man comes out and he don’t have no teeth—I swear I shoulda knocked the daylights outta him.”

“Sounds like someone already has,” Wilhelmina remarked.

The blackboard special turned out to be—not surprisingly—mullet, three slices of fleshy fish that tasted like the mud in which they were spawned, set on a pond of yellow mustard sauce. The rice came in an upside-down cake. There were a few shreds of carrot, but you had to admit the plate was generously sprinkled with parsley. As they were finishing their custards, a strong smell of cigar smoke and the unmistakable
scrape-boom
of a snare drum were heard coming from the back.

“I’ll bet it’s a strip joint!” Bobbie exclaimed. “I’ve never been in one. Should we go see?”

“Not on yer life,” Katie said, folding her arms.

“I want to!” Cora volunteered, thinking of the fishermen’s shacks where ladies weren’t allowed. She’d always been curious about those shadowy places men go that would give you the willies just to step inside, like the smoking parlors near the Bangor railroad station and the cheap palm gardens behind locked doors on Harlow Street. But with Bobbie along, she felt brave and was the first one out of her seat.

“That’s my girl,” Bobbie said, joining her.

Cora made a point of including Katie. “Come on, you know where it is.”

Katie begrudgingly got up.

“Where are you all going?” Minnie asked.

“The library,” Wilhelmina replied confidentially. “That’s what my husband always says.
Don’t wait up, dear. I’m going to the library
.”

“Hold it one darn second!” Hammond called.

But they were already following Katie along the dank hall to an ominous black curtain, where they paused, giggling and poking each other, until Cora boldly pulled it back and was startled to be faced with the proprietor.

Bowing, Jacques said, “Please, come in! Don’t be shy.”

The ladies of Party A followed him into a small dark room with a tiny stage. Three or four scruffy male customers sat at tables, smoking and eyeing them lasciviously.

Minnie repeated, “What kind of a place
is
this?”

The lights went out. In total darkness, several things happened at once. A two-man orchestra rapped out an introduction. Hot white spotlights hit the stage and a woman with severely cut short black hair and big red lips appeared, covering herself with fans.

“Mothers of America!” she announced. “The French say,
How do you do?
”

She flung the fans away. She was not young and not wearing anything but underwear. Regular, bad white underwear, as if Jacques had asked the cook to do him a favor.

On the other side of the curtain, back in the restaurant, Hammond had taken the opportunity to move around the table in order to sit next to Lily.

“We should rescue our lost little sheep,” she said, to fill an uncomfortable silence.

He stared into her face and she returned a questioning look. Alone in the deserted dining room at Jacques, at a table still covered with dessert things and a forgotten plate of half-eaten mullet, he kissed her. Lily stood up so quickly the chair fell over.

She made big surprised eyes and gasped. “What was
that
?”

They heard applause and boos from the other side, and the women’s voices growing louder as they returned down the hall.

“Oh, no!” cried Lily. “They’re coming!”

They were both taken by a fit of giggles like kids about to be caught. Lily righted the chair and smoothed her uniform.

“Quick! Look like you’re doing something!”

Hammond was laughing so hard his eyes teared up.

“What should I be doing?” he snorted helplessly, and searched in desperation for his wallet or a pen but discovered only that his pockets were full of shoelaces.

The following morning, the American journalist Griffin Reed was at his usual table in the barroom of the Ambassador Hotel, reading
Le Figaro
. Three archways gave way from the lobby to a local saloon that was a refuge from the tourists. The stained-glass ceiling let in colored light whose delicate hues cast a tone of respectability over the dark-suited men conducting business over croissants and cigars. The waiter brought Reed’s usual café espresso along with a Cognac. They exchanged indifferent greetings, like workers clocking in for the day. The hotel’s location on Boulevard Haussmann, near the office of American Express, had made it a convenient expat hangout where “the most brilliant authors who are writing in English today,” as the press put it, could collect their rejection slips from the New York publishers and then stop by for a restorative drink.

Reed figured that’s what had befallen Clancy Hayes, who had come through the arches looking ill. Hayes, employed as a foreign correspondent for AP, had moved to Paris from Illinois to write a novel. He was a shave-a-day fellow who always wore a suit and bow tie, the privileged son of a banking family, of the type Reed had no patience for, who was always telling you what it was “worth.” “
It’s worth reading
,” Hayes would say significantly, as if everything in life had a price and you should be grateful for his personal appraisal. He was also already halfway drunk.

Now he huddled over a banged-up manuscript wrapped in creased brown paper with an expression on his face as if his own book had jumped up and bitten him between the legs—which, Reed knew from having once tried to write a novel himself, was very possible.

“What’s the word from New York?” Reed asked with an illicit shiver of glee.

“Lousy,” Hayes mumbled.

Reed raised his espresso and a sympathetic eyebrow, but Hayes ignored him, heading quickly to the men’s room. Reed didn’t mind; he was aware that his most benevolent intentions could be misunderstood. Buttoned up in a tweed vest, jacket, and scarf, with his plastered hair, mustache, and round glasses, he gave the impression of a bourgeois bore.

It was galling that a hack like Clancy Hayes got work while Reed, who knew himself to be a real in-the-blood newsman, was pretty much out of the game. He’d been employed for several years on the proofreaders’ bench at the Paris
Tribune
, fixing other people’s copy in the basement alongside thunderous linotype machines. But when the American troops withdrew, English-language newspapers got into trouble, and the
Tribune
folded. Reed did book reviews and the odd travel piece for throwaways. It wasn’t only because of changing times. The days of breaking news were over for Griffin Reed and the reason was his face, or, rather, the partial mask he wore to cover the unspeakable wounds to his face he had sustained in the trenches.

His new face was not displeasing, and certainly nobody in the barroom would trouble Reed because of it. The regulars knew him as the journalist who’d been tragically wounded while covering the American Expeditionary Forces. There were quite a few “tin noses” around after the war, the result of advanced machine guns that could fire up to six hundred rounds per minute, and of monster artillery capable of sustaining an extended battery of shells stuffed with bullets that exploded with deadly shrapnel. The upper-left quadrant of Reed’s face, bone shattered by a rapid-fire machine gun, had been replaced by a partial covering made of a new lightweight amalgam of metals, thin as a calling card.

The mask replaced his nose, left cheek, and temple, and was cleverly secured by a pair of eyeglasses that hooked over his ears. It had been expertly painted to match his skin by an American sculptress, Florence Dean Powell, who had molded the device from photographs of Reed before the injury. Working in her Paris studio with an innovative plastic surgeon from Britain named Dr. James Blackmore, she had
fixed Reed’s prosthesis with a perpetually friendly look, as if surprised to discover the world was such a pleasant place. This was helped by the round glasses and jaunty mustache. With straight dark hair neatly parted and a scarf to cover the scars at his neck, Reed seemed from a distance to be another expat attempting to be Parisian, although he could never hide his California roots. Otherwise able-bodied, with broad shoulders and sturdy hands, he seemed from the neck down to be his old self: a Stanford University graduate from rancher stock whose people raised cattle in the Central Valley; a young man on the rise who’d never had to worry about his looks, or much else.

After Stanford, he took odd jobs picking fruit and working construction until he was hired to sell classifieds for the
Sacramento Bee
, and found he got along with the cynical, hard-drinking reporters a lot better than with the stiffs running the advertising department. His first byline, which he cut out and mailed to his mother, was a paragraph about a crash involving an ambulance and a police car, both racing to the same fire. He’d scooped it by following the sirens on his bicycle. Reed liked running with the cops—cruising the night, first on the murder scene. He discovered that people—especially heartbroken women—liked to tell him their stories. He was patient and heard things through. His square-built, all-American dimpled chin and inquisitive blue eyes helped. Corruption, psychotic killers, mudslides, bad crops, the boxing circuit, rodeos, kidnappings, county fairs, mummified remains in a bathtub, the house of a hundred cats—juicy small-town stories took him from Sacramento to local papers in Wyoming, Texas, Florida, New York, and finally Virginia, where his sensational exposé of an officer who had shot his wife sixteen times and buried her under their noses at Naval Station Norfolk was picked up by the wires, and he landed a job with the Associated Press.

He had been twenty-nine years old and impatient to get to the big time. It was spring of 1917, and the United States had just declared war on imperial Germany. Reed pressed for an overseas assignment, but was told he had to wait in line. In July the following year, he got his dream job, traveling with the first wave of troops to Belgium. He was there when the Americans joined the Allies at the third battle
at Ypres, during the wettest autumn on record. Fighter planes were grounded. Without air support, the artillery couldn’t hit the enemy’s guns. Troops inching forward were trapped in sludge that turned to quicksand—open targets on both sides. The Germans launched a poison gas attack that caused asphyxiation and blindness, but its real purpose, because chlorine gas is heavier than air, was to force the Allied soldiers to climb out of the trenches into a bombardment of machine gun fire. Crawling over the top and gagging for oxygen, Reed was cut down with the rest.

As a journalist he’d always scored the inside line, that telling piece of color, because subjects had no reason not to trust such an earnest, easygoing fellow. Who would trust their story to him now, to this strange, unreadable countenance? Take the Gold Star Mothers pilgrimages, which came through the Ambassador Hotel on a regular basis. Over the past weeks he’d watched them arrive by the boatload from small-town America, cheerful and ignorant, seduced by first-class treatment by the U.S. government and lavish attention from the press, to accept, along with the badges and bouquets, the burden of the nation’s violence and guilt. Reed spent many promising summer mornings deep in the shadows of the barroom, fascinated by the spirit of the female sex, her capacity for resilience. He knew that they, like him, had suffered greatly in the war, but he could not bridge the gap between his painful experience and those of the factory workers, mid-western housewives, farming women, and club ladies swarming Paris in giddy groups. The journalist in him knew there was more to the story.

The first time Reed saw Cora Blake was through the archway from his solitary table. He realized he was looking at something he had never seen before. She had just come out the brass doors of the elevator and was standing between the palm trees on either side, looking like she had woken up on Mars. He knew she was one of them even though she was thankfully not wearing one of those inane banners. She did have on somebody else’s dress, it seemed, cheap burgundy silk that hung loose on her frame, and a hat like a metallic flying saucer, fortuitously tilted to show the fine curve of her cheek. A woman with
those kinds of looks deserved better tailoring, he thought. She seemed lost and eager at the same time. He liked her very much.

Clancy Hayes, now established in a banquette, along with a second glass of Pernod, had been joined in his misery of rejection by an American photographer named Jim Denver—who on principle refused to comb his hair and favored pretentious Gypsy vests—peering ratlike at him out of small black-framed glasses. Denver’s artwork showed up regularly in the
bouquinistes’
stalls along the Seine, but you had to ask for it, and then you would be handed a smudged box of postcards showing inventive things that could be done with two naked women, a parrot, and a chair. Denver was a useful guide to reefer dens but also a shameless gossip. He dealt in gossip, and in shame, and therefore made a good living in Paris.

Hayes and Denver had spotted Cora Blake, alone, at dead center of a huge Oriental carpet, an intricate motif of gold flowers and obscure shapes like an opium dream. She was turning in a circle, banging a scuffed black leather handbag against her calf, as if looking for someone she had yet to meet.