Century Rain

NINE

It was the middle of the morning by the time Floyd returned Custine to Susan White’s apartment, heavy toolkit in one hand. Custine’s practicality never ceased to amaze him: the man could turn his hand to almost anything, whether it was repairing the Mathis, fixing the plumbing in their apartment or attempting to repair the jury-rigged receiving equipment of a dead spy. Floyd knew a little about fixing boats, but that was about his limit. He had questioned Custine once about where this practicality came from, but the only explanation Custine had offered was that a certain skill with electricity and metal was very useful for an interrogator in the Crime Squad.

That was as much as Floyd wanted to know.

He waited in the car while Custine was let in, then drummed his fingers on the steering wheel for another five minutes until Custine’s form loomed in the fifth-floor window. Custine did not expect to get any results before the middle of the afternoon, but they had arranged to speak by telephone at two regardless.

Floyd pulled away from Blanchard’s street and drove to Montparnasse, negotiating the smaller side streets until he found the house where he had left Greta the night before. In daylight the house seemed a little more cheerful—but only a little. Greta opened the door and escorted him up to the sparsely stocked kitchen that the tenant Sophie had shown him around the night before.

“I called the telephone company,” Floyd said. “It should be working now.”

“So it is,” Greta said, surprised. “Someone rang through on it only an hour ago, but I was so distracted that I didn’t really think about it. How did you persuade the company to reconnect her? She still can’t afford to pay them.”

“I told them to put the charges on my bill.”

“You did?” She cocked her head. “That’s awfully decent of you. You’re not exactly rolling in money either.”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s not as if…” Hisvoice trailed off.

“Not as if it’ll be for ever?” she finished for him. “No. You’re right. It won’t be.”

“I didn’t mean to sound callous.”

“It’s all right.” Now she sounded cross with herself. “I’m taking it out on whoever’s within firing range. You don’t deserve this.”

“Don’t worry about it. You’re doing a pretty swell job from where I’m standing. How is Marguerite today?”

Greta spread honey on to a slice of buttered toast. “About the same as yesterday, according to Sophie. The doctor’s already given her a shot of morphine for the day. I don’t know why they can’t give it to her later, so that she could at least get a good night’s sleep.”

“Maybe they’re worried that she’d get too good a night’s sleep,” Floyd said.

“That wouldn’t be such a bad thing,” Greta said quietly. She was dressed all in white today, her black hair tied back in a white bow. The bow shone luminously, like something in a washing-powder commercial. Greta passed him the toast, then licked her fingers clean with girlish little pops of her lips. “Thanks for staying with me last night, Wendell,” she said. “It was kind.”

“You needed the company.” He bit into the toast, tilting it to avoid spilling honey on his shirt. “About Marguerite. Would it be all right if I said hello to her? I know what you said last night, but I really would like her to know that I care.”

“She may not even remember you.”

“I’m ready for that.”

“Well, all right,” Greta said heavily. “I suppose she’s as sharp now as she’ll ever be. But don’t stay too long, will you? She gets tired very easily.”

“I’ll keep it brief.”

She led him upstairs, Floyd finishing off the toast as he went. The floorboards creaked as he made his way across the landing. Greta eased open the bedroom door, slipped inside and spoke very softly to Marguerite. Floyd heard the old woman answer in French. She spoke nothing else, not even German. She had been born in the Alsace region, Greta had told him once, and had married a German cabinet-maker who had died in the mid-thirties. At home they had spoken only French.

When things became difficult for Greta’s family in Germany—Greta was Jewish on her mother’s side—they had dispatched her to live with Marguerite. She had arrived in Paris in the summer of 1939, when she was nine years old, and had lived in the city for most of the last twenty years. There had been a great deal of anti-German sentiment after the failed invasion of 1940, but Greta had weathered most of it, speaking French with a pronounced Parisian accent that revealed nothing of her true origins. On first meeting her, Floyd had never guessed that she was German. The disclosure of that secret to him had been the first of many intimacies, each of which had brought a small, stabbing thrill of mutual trust.

She called to him from inside the room. “You can come in now, Floyd.”

The door opened wider to reveal Sophie, who was just leaving, carrying a tray with her. He stepped aside to let her pass, then walked into the shuttered quiet of the bedroom. There were subtle squares and oblongs on the walls where paintings, photographs and mirrors had been taken down. The bed had been made neatly around Marguerite, presumably in readiness for the doctor’s visit, and the old lady was now sitting almost upright, supported by three or four plump pillows. She wore a high-collared, long-sleeved floral nightgown that seemed to belong to the nineteenth century. Her white hair had been combed back from her brow and her cheeks dabbed lightly with rouge. Floyd could just about make out Marguerite’s face in the muted light, but what he saw was a thin, cursory sketch of the woman he had known. He thought it would have been easier if there had been no similarity at all, but she was recognisable, and that made it all the more difficult.

“This is Wendell,” Greta said gently. “You remember Wendell, don’t you, Aunt?”

Floyd presented himself, holding his fedora in both hands like an offering.

“Of course I remember him,” Marguerite said. Her eyes were surprisingly bright and clear. “How are you, Floyd? We always called you Floyd rather than Wendell, didn’t we?”

“I’m… doing swell,” he said, shuffling his feet. “How are you feeling?”

“I am all right now.” Her voice was a rasp. He had to concentrate to make out her words. “But the nights are difficult. I never imagined sleeping could take so much energy from me. I’m not sure how much I have left.”

“You’re a strong lady,” he said. “I’m sure you’ve got a lot more energy than you think.”

She placed one of her thin, birdlike hands atop the other and rested them on her stomach. The newspaper was spread across her lap like a shawl, open at the Parisian news pages. “I wish I felt that were true.”

She knows, Floyd thought. She might have been frail and she might not always have quite this good a grip on what was happening around her, but she knew perfectly well that she was ill, and that her illness was never going to let her leave this room.

“What’s it like outside, Floyd?” Marguerite asked. “I listened to the rain all night.”

“It’s clearing up a bit,” he said. “The sun’s coming out and…” His mouth suddenly felt dry. Why had he insisted on this visit? He had nothing to say to Marguerite that she must not already have heard a hundred times before, from similarly well-intentioned visitors. He realised, with a spasm of shame, that he hadn’t come up here to make her feel better, but to make himself feel better instead. He was going to stand before her and never once allude to the fact that she was terminally ill, as if there was an elephant in the room that no one dared acknowledge. “Well,” he said, fumbling for words, “it’s beautiful when the sun comes out. The whole city looks like a painting.”

“The colours must be beautiful. I’ve always loved the spring. It’s nearly as breathtaking as the autumn.”

“I don’t think there’s a time of year when I don’t love this city,” Floyd said. “Except perhaps January.”

“Greta reads the paper to me,” Marguerite said, patting the pages spread before her. “She only wants to read the light news, but I want to know it all—the bad as well as the good. I don’t envy you young people.”

Floyd smiled, trying to remember the last time anyone had called him young. “Things don’t seem too bad to me,” he said.

“You weren’t here in the thirties, were you?”

“No, I wasn’t.”

“Then—with all due respect—you probably have no idea what it was really like.”

Greta glanced at him warningly, but Floyd shrugged good-naturedly. “No. I have no idea.”

“It was good, in many ways,” Marguerite said. “The Depression was over. We all had more money. There was more to eat. Nicer clothes. Music we could dance to. We could afford a car and a holiday in the country once a year. A wireless and a gramophone, even a refrigerator. But there was also a meanness to those times. There was always an undercurrent of hatred bubbling just beneath the surface.” She turned her head towards her niece. “It was hatred that brought Greta to Paris.”

“The Fascists got what they deserved,” Floyd said.

“My husband lived long enough to see those monsters come to power. He saw through their lies and promises, but he also knew that they spoke to something nasty and squalid in the human spirit. Something in all of us. We want to hate those who are not like us. All we need is an excuse, a whisper in the ear.”

“Not all of us,” Floyd said.

“That’s what a lot of good people said in the thirties,” Marguerite replied. “That the message of hatred would only be heeded by the ignorant and those who were already filled with bile. But it wasn’t like that. It took strength of mind not to let yourself be poisoned by those lies, and not everyone had that strength. Even fewer people had the courage to do something about it; to actually stand up to the hatemongers.”

“Was your husband one of those brave people?” Floyd asked.

“No,” she said. “He wasn’t. He was one of the millions who said and did nothing, and that’s how he went to his grave.”

Floyd did not know what to say. He looked at the woman in the bed, feeling the force of history streaming through her like a current.

“All I’m saying,” she continued, “is that the message is seductive. My husband said that unless those hatemongers were annihilated—wiped from the Earth, along with all their poison—they would always come back, like weeds.” She touched the newspaper on the bed. “The weeds are returning, Floyd. We mowed the lawn in nineteen forty, but we didn’t put down the weedkiller. Twenty years later, they’re back.”

“I know there are a lot of people saying bad things,” Floyd said. “But no one really takes them seriously.”

“No one took them seriously in the twenties,” she countered.

“There are laws now,” Floyd said. “Anti-hate laws.”

“Which aren’t enforced.” She tapped the paper with one sharp-nailed finger. “Look at this story: a young man was beaten to death yesterday because he dared to speak up against the hatemongers.”

Floyd’s voice suddenly sounded as weak as Marguerite’s. “A young man?”

“By the railway station. They found his body last night.”

“No!”

Greta slipped her hand around his sleeve. “We should be going now, Floyd.”

He couldn’t say anything.

Marguerite folded the paper and pushed it from the bed. “I didn’t mean to lecture you,” she said, with a kindness that cut him to the core. “I just wanted to say how little I envy you now. There were storm clouds on the horizon twenty years ago, Floyd, and they’re gathering again.” Almost as an afterthought, she said, “Of course, it’s not too late to do something about them, if enough people care. I wonder how many people walked past that poor young man last night, when he was in need of help?”

Greta edged him away from the bed. “Floyd has to go now, Aunt Marguerite.”

She reached out and took his hand. “It was nice of you to come up and see me. You’ll come back, won’t you?”

“Of course,” Floyd said, forcing a smile to disguise his discomfort.

“Bring me some strawberries, won’t you? This room could do with brightening up.”

“I’ll bring you some strawberries,” he promised.

Greta led him downstairs, still holding his arm. “That’s how it is with her,” she said, when they were safely out of earshot. “She’s sharp as a tack about the news, but she doesn’t even know what time of year it is. You’re lucky she remembered who you were. Let’s just hope she doesn’t remember asking for strawberries.”

“I’ll find her something.”

“At this time of year? Don’t worry about it, Floyd. She most likely won’t remember a thing about it the next time you go up there.”

If she sounded cruel, Floyd thought, it was only because she loved Marguerite so much.

They sat down in the kitchen again. A pigeon was cooing on the windowsill. Greta picked up a piece of stale bread and threw it at the glass, scaring the bird away in a bustle of grey feathers.

“It might not be the same young man,” she said, guessing what was on Floyd’s mind. “Maybe you don’t read the papers these days, but people are always getting beaten up.”

“We both know it was the same kid, so why pretend otherwise?”

“We went over this last night. If you’d tried to do anything, they’d have cut you up.”

“The old me might have tried.”

“The old you would have had more sense.”

“You’re just trying to make me feel better about it.” Floyd looked up at the ceiling, picturing the bedroom he had just visited, the ordered placement of its furniture and the stillness of its occupant. “She might not have much of a grip on the time of year, but she knows how things are going.”

“Maybe it’s not as bad as she fears. Old people always think the world’s going to ruin. It’s their job.”

“Maybe they’re right,” Floyd replied.

Greta bent down to pick up the bread she had just thrown at the pigeon. “Perhaps they are. And maybe that’s as good a reason as any to think about leaving Paris.”

“Nice segue.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve given any more thought to what we talked about?”

“I mentioned it to Custine,” Floyd said.

“How did he take it?”

“He took it well. The same way he takes everything.”

“André’s a good man,” Greta said. “I’m sure he’d do a fine job of running the agency.”

“He’d probably have Paris eating out of his hand within the year.”

“So why not give him the chance?”

“I’ve been here twenty years,” Floyd said. “If I leave now, am I saying that the last twenty years of my life were a mistake?”

“Only if you want to think of them that way.”

“I’m not sure there’s any other way.”

“It’s not the same city you arrived in,” Greta said. “Things have changed, and not many of them for the better. It wouldn’t be an admission of defeat. How old are you now, Floyd? Thirty-nine? Forty? It’s not so old. Not if you don’t want it to be.”

“Have you had a chance to look at the papers in that box?”

“Nice segue yourself,” she said, allowing him a tolerant smile. “All right. We’ll talk about it later. Yes, I have looked in the box.”

“Anything you can tell me?”

“Can we talk about it somewhere else?” Greta asked. “This place is getting to me. Sophie’s here for the rest of the morning. I could really use some fresh air.”

Floyd reached for his fedora. “Then let’s go for a stroll.”

Floyd found a place to park the Mathis on rue de Rivoli, near the Louvre. The rain had given up for now, although the clouds on the edge of the city had the inky look of thunder about them. But it was pleasant enough on the Right Bank, with the sun doing its utmost to dry the pavements and provide some late-season business for the ice-cream vendors. It was one of those autumn days that Floyd never took for granted, knowing that there might not be another like it before winter stole slyly in.

“Well,” he said, feeling his mood improve. “What’s it going to be: culture or a stroll in the Tuileries?”

“Culture? You wouldn’t know culture if it bit you on the nose. Anyway, I said I wanted some fresh air. The paintings can wait. They’ve been there long enough.”

“Suits me. More than half an hour in any public institution and I start feeling like one of the exhibits.”

Greta took the biscuit tin with her, tucking it under one arm as they walked. The Tuileries Gardens ran between the museum and place de la Concorde, stretching in an elegant formal ribbon along the Right Bank. They had been part of the city since the time of Catherine de Medici, four hundred years earlier. It always amazed Floyd to think of these geometric green spaces enduring through all the changes that had overtaken Paris in that time. The gardens were one of Floyd’s favourite places in the city, especially on a quiet morning in the middle of the week.

Deckchairs had been positioned around the large octagonal basin at the western end of the gardens. Greta and Floyd found themselves a pair of adjacent chairs and started scattering the scraps of stale bread she had rescued from the kitchen.

“I don’t know what you want me to make of this,” Greta said, tapping the tin. “I mean, if you go looking for something odd or unusual, you’re almost bound to find it.”

“Tell me what you have. I’ll worry about making sense of it.”

“What was the name of the woman again? Susan something? I have her Christian name on the postcard, that’s all.”

“Susan White,” Floyd said. “If that was her real name.”

“You’re really convinced she was up to something?”

“More than I was yesterday. Custine’s still trying to make sense of what she did to the wireless set in her room.”

“Well,” Greta said, “I don’t mind admitting that this is as good a way as any to take my mind off my aunt.”

“Whatever helps.” Floyd tore off a chunk of stale crust and tossed it to a gathering of anxious, squabbling male ducks. “Come on, then, what have you got for me?”

“I can’t help you with the maps and sketches, but I might be able to shed some light on this.” She fished in the tin until she found the letter printed on headed paper.

“That’s the one from the steelworks in Berlin?” Floyd asked.

“Kaspar Metals, yes.”

“So what’s it all about?”

“All I have to go on is this one letter,” Greta said, “so there’s necessarily some guesswork involved. But it looks to me as if Susan White got wind of a contract that Kaspar Metals was handling.”

“Not one she had a role in herself?”

“No. Definitely looks as if there’s a third party involved. Judging from the letter, White must have already dug up some information about this contract, enough that she wouldn’t look like a complete outsider.”

A small, formal party approached the duck pond. There were eight or nine suited men, all wearing trilbies, surrounding an elderly man in a wheelchair who was being pushed along by a sturdy nurse.

“Tell me about the contract,” Floyd said.

“Well, it doesn’t go into any great detail—that must have been covered in an earlier letter—but it looks as if the firm was being asked to cast a big, solid chunk of aluminium. Three big chunks, actually—and the quote talks about additional costs for machining to the desired spherical shape.”

Floyd watched the old man in the wheelchair throw bread into the pond with trembling hands, drawing the ducks away. “There was a diagram in the tin,” he said. “Something round. Must have been part of the same caboodle.”

“You look disappointed,” she remarked.

“Only because I thought we might be on to something, that maybe the plan was for a bomb. But if the casting is solid…” He shrugged.

“There’s some talk about the objects forming part of an artistic installation, but that could be a cover.”

“None of this makes any sense,” Floyd said. “If she was an American spy, why would she have needed a German firm to make those things, no matter what they’re meant for? There must be a hundred American firms that could have done the same work.”

“Look,” Greta said, “just suppose for a minute that she was a spy. What do they do, apart from spying? They also keep tabs on the activities of other spies.”

“Agreed,” Floyd said. “But—”

“What if she was put here to keep her eye on another operation? White finds out something about the Berlin contract. She doesn’t necessarily know all the details, but she knows she has to find out more about it. So she writes to Kaspar Metals, posing as someone connected to the organisation that arranged the initial order.”

“Possible,” Floyd allowed.

Greta tossed some more bread into the duck pond. “Actually, there is another thing I should mention.”

“Go on.”

“The letter also covers costs for transportation and delivery of the finished goods. Now, this is the interesting part: it was broken down into three separate billing items. Somewhere in Berlin, somewhere in Paris and somewhere in Milan.”

“I don’t remember seeing addresses in that letter.”

“You didn’t. The man who wrote the letter must have assumed that both parties already had that information.”

Floyd had been wondering where the Milan connection would come in. “Except we don’t have that information,” he said. “All we have is a couple of lines on a map of Europe.” He remembered the L-shaped figure, with the neatly marked distances between the three cities. “I still don’t know what the markings on that map mean, but they obviously relate to the work being done by that factory in some way.”

“One last thing,” Greta said. “That train ticket. It was for the overnight express to Berlin, and it hasn’t been used.”

“Is there a date on the ticket?”

“Issued on September fifteenth for travel from Gare du Nord on the twenty-first. She’d reserved a sleeping compartment.”

“She died on the twentieth,” Floyd said, recalling the details in his notebook. “Blanchard said that she gave him the tin on the fifteenth or sixteenth—he couldn’t be sure which. She must just have booked the ticket and never used it.”

“I wonder why she didn’t simply get on the first train to Berlin, rather than book passage on one that wasn’t due to leave for four or five days?”

“Maybe she had other business she had to attend to first, or maybe she’d called ahead and made an arrangement to visit the factory on a particular day. Either way, she knew she wasn’t getting on that train for a few days, but she also knew she was in danger and that the tin might fall into the wrong hands.”

“Has it occurred to you, Floyd, that if someone killed her because of what was in that tin, they might do it again?”

The party with the elderly man had retreated from the duck pond, the wheelchair crunching away across the gravelled promenade in the general direction of the Orangerie. Beyond the party, looming above the trees lining the Seine, the slick, wet roof of the Gare d’Orsay on the Left Bank shone in the sunlight. Despite its name, it was many years since the Gare d’Orsay had been a railway station. There had been vague plans to turn it into a museum, but in the end the city authorities had decided that the most effective use of the grand old building would be as a prison for high-profile political detainees. Seeing the prison, something tugged at this memory, some elusive connection waiting to be completed.

He dished out the remainder of the bread to the few ducks that had stayed loyal. “I know there are risks. But I can’t just drop the case because some people might not want me to succeed.”

Greta studied him carefully. “How much does this dogged determination have to do with what Marguerite just told you?”

“Hey,” Floyd said defensively, “this isn’t about anything other than getting a job done for a client. A job that happens to pay pretty well, I might add.”

“So that’s all it boils down to: money?”

“Money and curiosity,” he admitted.

“No amount of money will make up for a broken neck. Take what you have and go to the authorities. Give them all the evidence and let them piece things together.”

“Now you sound like Custine.”

“Maybe he has a point. Think about it, Floyd. Don’t get in too deep. You’re a big man, but you’re not a strong swimmer.”

“I’ll know when I’m in too deep,” he said.

Greta shook her head. “I know you too well. You’ll only realise you’re in too deep when you start drowning. But what’s the point of arguing? I’m hungry. Let’s walk to the Champs-Elysées: there’s a place there that does good pancakes. You can buy me an Esquimo ice cream along the way. Then you can take me back to Montparnasse.”

Floyd surrendered, offering her a hand. They set off in the direction of the avenue, Floyd watching as the wind whipped up in the distance and hoisted someone’s umbrella into the sky.

“How’s the band doing?” Greta asked.

“The band ceased to exist when you left,” Floyd said. “Since then we’ve not exactly been snowed under with offers.”

“I was only ever one part of it.”

“You’re a damned good singer and a damned good guitar player. You left a big hole.”

“You and Custine are both good musicians.”

“Good doesn’t cut it.”

“Well, then you’re better than good.”

“Custine, maybe.”

“It’s not as if you’re the worst bass player in the world, either. You always knew you could make it work if you only wanted it badly enough.”

“I make the moves. I can lay down a pretty steady beat.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing. There are a hundred bands in Nice who could use a bass player like you, Floyd.”

“But I can’t do anything you haven’t seen before. I can’t make it new.”

“Not everyone wants it new.”

“But that’s the point. All we ever do is play the same old swing numbers in the same old way. I’m tired of it. Custine can barely bring himself to take out his saxophone.”

“So do something different.”

“Custine keeps trying. You know how he was always trying to get us to play that fast eight-beat stuff, when all we ever wanted to do was stay in four-four?”

“Maybe Custine was on to something.”

“He heard a guy playing here a few years ago,” Floyd said. “Some heroin fiend from Kansas City. Looked sixty, but he was really about my age. Called himself Yardhound or Yard-dog or something. He kept playing that crazy improvisational stuff, like it was the wave of the future. But no one wanted to know.”

“Except Custine.”

“Custine said it was the music he’d always had in his head.”

“So find a way to help him play it.”

“Too fast for me,” Floyd said. “And anyway, even if it wasn’t, no one else wants to hear it. It’s not stuff you can dance to.”

“You shouldn’t give up that easily,” Greta admonished.

“It’s too late. They don’t even want straight jazz anymore. Half the clubs we played last year are out of business now. Maybe it’s different in the States, but—”

“Some people won’t ever get it,” Greta said. “They don’t want to see black people and white people getting along, let alone playing the same music. Because there’s always a danger that the world might actually become a better place because of it.”

Floyd smiled. “Your point being?”

“Those of us who care shouldn’t give up that easily. Maybe we need to stick our necks out from time to time.”

“I stick my neck out for no one.”

“Not even for the music you love?”

“Maybe there was a time when I used to think jazz could save the world,” Floyd said. “But I’m older and wiser now.”

Walking the gravel path, they passed the party with the elderly man again and something in Floyd’s head clicked like a key in a well-oiled lock. Maybe it was the conversation he’d had with Marguerite, or perhaps the juxtaposition of the man and the political prison across the river, but Floyd suddenly recognised him. The man lolled forward in the wheelchair, his jaw slack, a thin worm of drool curling down his chin. His skin was glued to his skull like a single layer of papier mâché. His hands trembled with some kind of palsy. Beneath his blanket, it was said that the doctors had hacked away more than they had left behind. Whatever trickled through his veins was now more chemical than blood. But he had survived the cancers, just as he had survived that assassination attempt in May 1940, when the advance into the Ardennes had come to an inglorious end. The shape of the face was still recognisable, along with the outdated, priggish little moustache and the vain swoop of thinning hair, white now where once it had been black. It was almost twenty years since his ambitions had crashed and burnt during that disastrous summer. In the carnival of monsters that the century had produced, he was only one amongst many. He’d talked hate back then—but who hadn’t? Hate was how you made things happen in those years. It was the lever that moved things. It didn’t necessarily mean he believed it, or that he would have been any worse for France than any of the men who had come after him. Who could begrudge him a morning in the Tuileries Gardens, after all the time he had served in the Gare d’Orsay? He was just a sad old man now, less a figure of revulsion than one of pity.

Let him feed the ducks.

“Floyd?”

“What?”

“You were miles away.”

“Years away,” he said. “Not quite the same thing.”

She steered him towards an ice-cream stand. Floyd dug into his pocket for a few coins.