The Rose Café (22 page)

One of the most entertaining came from Marie not long after le Baron first floated his invitation. We had taken a walk out to the Genoese tower on one of my afternoons off, and we came to the flat rock at the western end of the island and decided to swim out to the little rocky islet called la Brochetta.

We slipped into the water and swam across the channel, fighting a rip all along the way, and then after a rest, swam back. Marie was a strong swimmer and got there first, and she clambered up over the rocks like some elemental, glistening sea creature. We found a flat place and lay back in the sun, drying off.

It was another one of those still, moist days when the sea was calm and green, and the silvery gulls and terns were crisscrossing the island just above the tower and the red-rock heights. Marie picked a sprig of the curry-scented immortelle and began smelling it and running it over her cheeks. I could smell the pungent scent from where I lay—curry mixed with the odor of dried seaweed and saltwater.

She was talking about Paris again and how profoundly boring her tutor was becoming and how the summer was wearing on—all subjects I had heard about before. I was growing drowsy and must have drifted off to her rising and falling monologue. Then in my somnolent state, I became aware that the chatter had stopped and the scent of immortelle had intensified. I felt an insect on my upper lip and brushed it away. Marie was leaning over me, tickling me with the flower.

“And so, as I was saying to you, that night le Baron tried to seduce me on the beach, but I managed to resist,” she said.

“Don't joke,” I said. “Did you know that he has invited us to dinner?”

She threw down the sprig of immortelle dramatically.

“Oh
mon Dieu
, no. Too dangerous. We should not go. He is a very bad man. I have heard this now from my parents.”

Now she had managed to get my interest. I sat up.

“What? What did they say? Is he a drug runner? Something to do with the
Bagheera
?”

“Maybe. They looked him up.”

“Guns,” I said. “He runs guns into Algeria. He supplies the OAS with plastique.”

“'No. Not guns. No bombs,” she said.

“Drugs? Hashish?”

“No. Worse.”

“Tell me,” I said.

“Give a kiss first.”

I kissed her.

“Again,” she said.

“Tell me first.”

“Kiss me. Don't cowboys like to kiss girls?”

“He's a bank robber,” I said. “A swindler. He works with that Dushko. They've transferred stolen, ill-gotten funds to Switzerland.”

She leaned back on her elbows and looked me in the eye.

“Do you know that you are a truly dimwitted cowboy?” she said.

She sat up, grabbed the hair on the back of my head, pushed me down, and kissed me.

“So this Baron, what did they say?” I persisted.

She straightened up again, tousled her hair, and sighed.

“OK. You want to know. I will tell you. My parents, they said he was mixed up in a gang.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. A terrible gang of murderers.”

“Le Baron?”

“Yes. Do you know what they would do during the war? They would go out at night. People were hungry then; there was not enough to eat. So le Baron and his gang, they would go out at night and catch children, cook them up, and eat them. Le Baron invented some savory dishes, which he would sell in the markets. Young boy
aux fines herbes
stewed in wine and eau-de-vie. It was one of his favorites. He used to eat American soldiers too, the fat ones…”

I kissed her.

“Now tell me,” I said.

“I did, it's true. It's what my parents told me.”

“If he ate American soldiers,” I said, “I am going to have to eat you in revenge. I learned from American soldiers how to eat French girls.”

She slapped me and headed for the water.

By this time in the season, the younger crowd there—Chrétien, Karen and her family, Marie, and a shy, mousy French colonial girl who was a refugee from Indochina—had formed a small society of sorts. Periodically, if Chrétien and I could get free, we would all go out to the Ile de la Pietra to swim off the rocks. They all knew about le Baron. Karen and Clotilde had noticed him, of course, since he was a type they had seen often on the Riviera and around the Champs Elysées, and Laurent was very interested in his style of dress, although he had, on several occasions, pronounced it sadly out of fashion. “Too English,” he said.

Among this group, the theories as to le Baron's livelihood and origin ranged widely around the fringes of the various métiers of the European underworld. He was a Russian spy. He was a police undercover agent, gathering information on Pierre Corsini's family of known contrabandists. He made his money selling stolen Jewish-owned art after the war. He smuggled guns and plastique to Oran and Algiers for the FLN. He was involved in illegal shipments of adulterated wine to Cap Corse. He was mixed up in land scandals in Saint-Tropez, where he ran a ring of prostitutes. Or alternatively, from Marie (again), he was a known smuggler of white slaves.

The most entertaining theory (apart from Marie's version) came from an unlikely source—Laurent.

“I have it on good authority,” he said smugly, “that he was a priest.”

Laurent said that le Baron, before he was le Baron, had a big church in Nice with many loyal parishioners. But for years he had dipped into the ample church treasury. On the side he supported a beautiful dusky mistress, an African princess. One night, according to Laurent's sources, he was discovered with her in flagrante by his curate, who blackmailed him. The curate found out later that he was also stealing from the coffers and upped his fee, so le Baron cashed out the entire church savings and fled. He assumed the most unlikely new identity he could think of, a German baron, and decamped with his African princess to Corsica, where he knew no questions would be asked.

A more serious, albeit still outrageous theory came from Chrétien, who had been privy to all my own private investigations and theories.

“It's so obvious,” he said. “So clear you don't even think of it—he's in the OAS. All those anti-Gaullist generals and colonels are in flight now from the French secret police. They're all in hiding in out-of-the-way places. He's one of them. He has big financial interests in northern France and he's financing all the attempts to assassinate de Gaulle.”

“Doesn't fit,” I pointed out. “Everyone agrees he's been out here since the Second World War. He never was in Algeria, nor the military, and he's not that type anyway. Those guys don't wear tailored linen suits. Furthermore, he's supposed to be Belgian. Why would he care?”

“He's not Belgian. He just tells people that.”

I had heard that many of the agents who were associated with the secret police and the anti-OAS agencies were Corsican, some of them from the Corsican underworld that worked out of Marseille and Paris. It made no sense that an OAS operative would hide in the midst of his known enemies. I said as much to Chrétien.

“The fox sets up house in the kennel, don't you see?” he said.

“Who told you all this, anyway?”

“Micheline. She knows all about him. They had an affair last winter. The pillow speaks the truth.”

My more acceptable sources as to the Baron's livelihood were no less helpful in the end. Jean-Pierre corroborated most of what Micheline had told me about le Baron. His family had lost their big château to the Nazis during the war and moved down to Paris. But he added that during the war le Baron had hooked up with a German count who had also been turned out, and had been put under house arrest near Baden-Baden. The count fled and came down to Nice, where he met le Baron. They began a collaboration in which they provided forged papers for people. They might even have been connected with one of the various plots to kill Hitler.

Max claimed le Baron was involved in contraband, something to do with the
Bagheera
. Vincenzo said he was a banker with possible black-market dealings. André and Micheline thought he had underworld connections.

In all these various permutations of his career, no matter how varied, there was a singular French term that came up regularly. Le Baron was
un brasseur d'affaires
, a high-level financier with possible shady connections.

Only Claude, the barber, dismissed all the contraband and criminal connections as mere gossip. He said that le Baron was a man of honor, and he did not, when he said this, intend the local term,
bandit d'honneur
, which is the Corsican phrase for someone who has committed a justifiable crime, such as a vendetta. At least I don't think he did. Claude said le Baron was simply a well-connected banker from a good family who had realized some success and retired to Ile Rousse, and nothing more.

“Out here, if anybody from the continent comes along with a little money through honest labor, anyone who betters himself, they say he is a criminal, part of the Marseille underworld, the milieu. Not true with le Baron. Believe me, he is an upstanding man. He helped out my mother. She was very sick with a bad heart. He flew her to the hospital in Nice and he wouldn't even hear of it when I said I would pay him back.”

He had long before dismissed Fabrizio's tale.

“Fabrizio is just one of those people who was undone by the war, although he never was much of anything to begin with, I should say. He was in the resistance in a way; that is, he knew people, and maquisards would come up to his compound to hide arms around the forest there. The Nazis used to come and beat him up as a matter of course to try to get him to inform. He never talked, but he's never been the same. Did he tell you he killed a lot of Germans?”

“Yes, he implied that he had.”

“Fabrizio doesn't even like to slaughter a chicken. That's why there are so many old useless donkeys around his place. He can't bring himself to shoot them.”

We were discussing all this in our usual spot at the town square.

Out on the boule pitch beyond the café, there was a short outburst of cheers. Someone had made a good throw.

“Fabrizio told me that there was money in his family,” I said.

“But yes, that much is true,” Claude said. “He did come from an old family. He likes to tell people that he is a signori, one of the direct descendants of the old feudal lords of Corsica. He's one of these landed country types who lives like a pauper but has money stashed all over the place. I've never seen this, but they say he has buried silver around the property and under the haymows. Never spends anything, though.”

“They also said he is a mazzero,” I said.

Claude snickered. “Don't believe that. That's back in the old days. There are no mazzeri around here on this coast. Maybe somewhere in the south. But this is the new Corsica up here. Tourists come. Germans, our old adversaries. Swedes. We're going to be part of the new Europe here. And it's a good thing, too. Good for business. I like the Germans. I like the Parisians. I like le Baron. Look at Jean-Pierre and Micheline. They're foreign. We're all one now. We should not be so autonomist.”

The boules players re-formed for a new game. One of them threw the cochonnet for the next round. An old man in black corduroy took the first throw.

“You want to know why all these people say bad things about le Baron?” Claude said. “I will tell you. It is because they have nothing. They do nothing. They play cards. Pitch boules. Work—if they work at all—just enough to get by, no more. And some of them are shady characters themselves. I can tell you. In my position in this community, I hear things. But le Baron. He worked in banks. He came from a good family, generous, benevolent. He has maintained himself with honor.”

The first throw struck the cochonnet and sent it spinning off.

A chorus of exclamation.

Gulls crossed over the plaza, screeching. Children skipped around the little carousel at the west end in front of the bank. Dogs. A drunk man. Women in print dresses in a loose circle, gossiping. Shouts from the market.

Claude said he had to leave, but before he stood up, a flight of sparrows flitted in. He broke off a hunk of bread and tossed it to them, and they scrambled for it, some chasing the others off to defend their crumbs.

He was halfway across the plaza when I saw him stop for a second. Then he turned around and came shuffling back, sat down, and pulled his chair over next to mine so that he was only a few feet away. He leaned toward me.

“You know, there is one thing more I know about le Baron. I think he told me, because—you know—my condition. And maybe because of the troubles with my mother.

“Do you know that Dushko fellow who's out here looking for le Baron? They were in prison together. Some Vichy types, they don't like people like le Baron. They turned him in to the Nazis and he was taken up to Berlin and held in an underground prison cell there, in solitary confinement. They tortured him. He knew nothing. He could not have talked if he wanted to. He was outside the main networks and resistance cells, just a supplier and a forger of documents to those fighting the Nazis. He did not know the leaders they were hunting for, and they knew that, but they tortured him anyway. He and Dushko. Dushko, he maybe had information; he was widely traveled in the underground. But not le Baron. He maintained his honor throughout, I tell you. He doesn't like to talk about that period in his life. He doesn't want to remember that. Somehow the two of them got out, I think due to Dushko's efforts. They paid off guards. Le Baron came out here to nurse his wounds. Dushko disappeared into Eastern Europe.”

He stood and patted my shoulder again.

“Just don't worry. Let it go. Le Baron probably wouldn't want you to know that sort of thing about him.”

I watched him limp off through the plaza.

I had to wonder about this story, just as I had questioned all the others. They were all buzz and chatter, like the meaningless cheeps and whistles of the birds in the maquis. Fact and inventive fictions; contrasts, legends, lies, and gossip; and maybe somewhere in all the stories, a little bit of truth that one could never really determine.