Heartsong (14 page)

In spite of the lateness of the hour, Franklin Bell was in relatively high spirits. He had promised Charging Elk that he would return the next day with cigarettes and food. He thought Charging Elk had somehow understood that, but he couldn't be sure. The Indian had simply nodded without really looking at him. In fact, Bell couldn't remember the Indian ever looking at him. They were a strange race of people, he thought, still attempting to live in the past with their feathers and beads. But perhaps that was understandable, seeing that they had no future to speak of. He had read an article in
La Gazette du Midi
just the other day about “the
vanishing savages,' and that just about summed it up. They were a pitiful people in their present state and the sooner they vanished or joined America the better off they would be.

Still, he now wished he had gone to a performance while the Wild West show was in Marseille. He had read
Buffalo Bill, King of the Border Men
when he was a kid, twenty years ago. He had grown up in Philadelphia, and like all kids then, he had wanted to go west to the frontier to fight Indians. And in 1869, there were plenty of Indians to meet in battle.

Bell crossed into Boulevard Peytral and saw his apartment, with the soft glow of light in the French door behind the wrought-iron balcony. He still hadn't gotten used to closing the shutters every night the way the French did; he hated to wake up in the morning in a still-dark apartment.

As he fished his keys out of his pocket, he thought again of Charging Elk, but only in the abstract. He had finally met an Indian, but not in the heat of battle; rather, he had met a poor wretch in a shabby coat that didn't fit him and hospital slippers that were soaked through; he was alone in a country where he could not speak the local language, and worse, he couldn't speak the language of his own country. He would sit in a French jail for at least four days until the Christmas weekend was over, and maybe longer, given the crowded nature of the French courts. So much for the romanticism of youth. This Indian was thoroughly defeated.

Bell suddenly thought of the other Indian—Featherman. He had been brought to Hopital de la Conception as an influenza case even before Charging Elk, but it turned out he had consumption, which had turned virulent. So he was moved to the tuberculosis ward. It hardly mattered. He would be dead soon enough. And it would be up to Bell to notify his relatives. How does one notify the relatives of a savage? He would have to catch up with the Wild West show somehow. It was all too much.

Bell turned the key and the door swung inward. If only Margaret were there, waiting for him in bed. But—maybe next weekend, in Avignon. He made a silent prayer as he climbed the stairs to his spacious apartment filled with Empire furniture and the pervasive odor of a delicious bouillabaisse that his landlady had created. He would sleep as long as he wanted and perhaps he would dream of Margaret and her abundant offerings. It was Christmas, after all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER FOUR

M
artin St-Cyr hated Marseille in the winter and he wondered at
the turn of events that had landed him here. He wondered quite often, at least once a week, but he never came up with a satisfactory explanation. The simple explanation was that he had followed a girl here. After their graduation from university in Grenoble in 1886, she had taken a teaching job in a lycée here. Because she was a brave Christian girl with a missionary spirit, she had chosen a school in Le Panier, an old working-class section of Marseille that now attracted immigrants from the Barbary States and the Levant, who worked the worst jobs in the soap and hemp factories, the abattoirs and tanneries.

St-Cyr had graduated with a degree in economics and had been accepted into law school at the Sorbonne for the next semester. But he hadn't counted on falling in love with Odile despite the fact that his best instincts told him that they were not at all compatible. She was deeply religious and felt compelled to spend
at least this part of her life helping the less fortunate. He was not religious at all, in spite of being raised in a Catholic household. His third year in college, he fell in with a group of socialists, many of whom (like him) were more in love with the idea of the working classes than with the actual people who constituted the oppressed. St-Cyr attended the meetings and rallies, passed out leaflets, and played a small part in attempting to organize the meat workers and the draymen in Grenoble. But when the police entered the Place St-André, where the workers and students had gathered to protest the arrest of three leading organizers, two students, and a meatcutter, St-Cyr had ducked into the Palais de Justice, just off the square. From there, he watched the trunchion-swinging gendarmes charge the overpowered, if not undermanned, protest. Much blood was spilled that hot autumn afternoon, and after that, St-Cyr had eased himself to the fringes, then out, of the movement.

But St-Cyr had never been a socialist, activities aside. He told his friends he was going to law school to further the goals of democratic socialism—the movement could always use good, committed lawyers—but he still believed in many of the bourgeois values—his own father was a capitalist, a silk merchant in Lyon, and had provided his family a very good life.

So what was St-Cyr doing, sitting in a small drab café on a Wednesday morning in Marseille, sipping café au lait and eating a brioche? He couldn't really answer that. Odile had, in fact, become a missionary and was now in Algiers, emptying bedpans in a charity hospital. At the end of one year, she would decide whether to continue her work or come back and marry St-Cyr. But lately he had wondered at the idea of marriage, of committing oneself to another for an eternity on earth. And there was the subject of sex. Although they had their romantic moments—picnics along the Promenade de la Corniche, day trips to the Camargue to see the
flamingoes and the agile black bulls that were the stars of Provençal bullfights, overnight to Avignon to tour the Palais des Papes, evenings at the opera or the theater—sex had refused to rear its head, at least for Odile. No matter how much or how fast St-Cyr talked about the joys of the subject, she had remained inviolate. Saving it for their wedding day. Forcing him to frequent the prostitutes on Rue Sainte. In fact, he had visited his favorite whore just the night before, a heavy dark girl named Fortune, who invariably smelled of cigarettes and cassis.

Odile the good versus Fortune the bad—what a contrast, thought St-Cyr, the one tall and fair and clean-edged, slim as a boy, except for the swell of hip and breast, a virgin; the other dark, built low to the ground, musky in her ample nakedness, a whore.

St-Cyr sighed and drank off the last of the café au lait. He had become concerned lately that perhaps he preferred the prostitutes. One didn't have to spend eternity with them, and they were always waiting in the Rue Sainte for the next visit. St-Cyr pulled out his gold watch, a graduation gift from his father, and popped it open: eight-thirty. Time to make his rounds. He lit another cigarette, stood up, and dropped a few sous on the metal table. He stood for a moment outside, looking out from under the awning at the putty-gray clouds above the buildings. At least the mistral had blown itself out overnight, after three days of whining. St-Cyr did hate Marseille in the winter, maybe in any season. He flipped his cigarette into the gutter, then he walked across the rain-slick street to the Préfecture.

^“
B
onjour
, Sergeant Borely. Lovely to see you, as usual. Lovely day, is it not? And what have you got for me this exquisite day?”

Borely looked down at the young reporter. He was seated on a platform behind a tall counter, and even as short as he was, he was
a head taller than his guests. The arrangement was meant to be intimidating, and it worked, except with this scamp.

“Ah,
bonjour
, St-Cyr. It is a cold, wet morning, as usual. And I have nothing of interest.” Borely looked down at the log book. “Two wife-beatings, a stabbing, the usual vagabonds, and a cut-purse a citizen brought in after beating him up. His face looks like an
aubergine
, but he will live to atone for his sins.”

St-Cyr took down the superficial particulars of each case as the sergeant recited them: both wife-beatings were fueled by alcohol, as was the stabbing. A Levantine tannery worker, drunk on absinthe, had slashed an Algerian sailor in the face, nearly severing the tip of the nose—the only angle there was that the Algerian was also drunk, a rarity among the North Africans, most of whom were Muslims. The cutpurse entry would be good—the citizens of Marseille were always pleased with vigilante justice. St-Cyr was just about to close his little bound notebook. Not a very good haul, but Tuesdays, even Tuesday nights around the seaport, were pretty quiet. “Anything else, sergeant—anything at all?
S'il vous plaît?”

Borely looked down at the young police reporter. There was something about him he didn't like. St-Cyr had been on the beat for almost two years now, and in that time he had done nothing to offend Borely. He was unfailingly polite, filled with the
joie de vivre
, and quite bright, and he always got his facts right—something that had never concerned St-Cyr's predecessor. Yet there was an air of privilege about the reporter that annoyed Borely—even the way he dressed. Today, in the middle of winter, he was wearing a yellow tattersall waistcoat and a scarlet poet's tie, and a ridiculous wide-brimmed hat that would have embarrassed an Italian. True, he was a handsome devil, with his sparse but trim goatee and small white teeth, and his slim, foppish frame. But it was more at the manners, the politeness, that Borely took offense. They bespoke of good
breeding, of—what else?—a life of privilege with that faint tinge of contempt for authority.

Borely himself barely had two sous to rub together, what with a wife and six children, and his consumptive mother who lived with them in a too-small flat behind Cours St-Louis. The plumbing was always broken and the small street was full of garbage from the open-air market. And now the neighbor was threatening to call the police because her cat was missing and she was sure Borely's oldest boy had thrown it out the hallway window. Imagine that. Calling the
gardiens
on their own sergeant. Borely shook his head at the thought.

“Well, thanks for the information, sergeant.” St-Cyr seemed to interpret this gesture as a negative. He had put his notepad in his pocket and was screwing the cap on his fountain pen.

Borely watched him with a sigh that was almost affectionate. He did like the young man, in spite of, or perhaps because of, those attributes that annoyed him. And as a police reporter he made far less than even Borely. But perhaps he needed something to do more than he needed money. “We still have the Peau-Rouge,” he said.

St-Cyr had started to leave, but now he turned back, his face blank with confusion.

“The Peau-Rouge. We arrested him Christmas Eve, or rather, early Christmas morning.” Borely smiled. “Of course! You were off for a few days, weren't you?” While I have been pulling double shifts throughout this season of the nativity, he thought.

“Yes, I went to spend Christmas with my family. In Lyon.” The words were almost abstract, uttered without inflection, as St-Cyr uncapped his pen. “What about this Peau-Rouge? What is he in for?”

“Nothing to get your hopes up about, St-Cyr.
Vagabondage
. And he left hospital without permission.”

Now St-Cyr was thoroughly confused. “But how does a Peau-Rouge . . .”
He stopped himself. The Wild West show. Of course. But how . . . ?

“He was with Buffalo Bill. According to the American vice-consul, and to the records of
Hopital de la Conception
, he contracted the influenza, and he suffered broken ribs in a fall from his horse. He was hospitalized with these afflictions.” Borely stopped himself to watch a young secretary cross the room to the captain's office. She wore a long-sleeved white blouse with ruffled shoulders and a long, slim black skirt that just brushed the tops of her narrow-toed shoes. Her black hair was done up in a bun with Chinese sticks shot through it. But it was the front of the blouse that caught Borely's eye.