Coq au Vin Read online

  It was a good question.

  I put the money back and closed the case, sitting on the lid to get it refastened.

  “Know what I think?” I said. “I think Viv left her room one day, just like always, and something happened to her on the outside. I don’t know—she saw something or somebody who scared the shit out of her or grabbed her or…whatever.

  “Either that, or she came back here to the hotel once and found somebody or something waiting for her, and she was too spooked to even come up and get her stuff.”

  I waited a few seconds, and when he didn’t reply, I asked, “Doesn’t that sound logical to you?”

  This time it was Andre who made a sudden move. All at once he was clearing up the debris from our breakfast and opening the armoire where I kept my things and flinging open the drawers.

  “What are you doing that for?”

  “Get your stuff,” he said. “We’re getting out of here. You’re leaving this hotel.”

  “And going where?”

  “To my place.”

  “Why?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Why?” I asked again. “You think something’s going to happen to me here. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “I don’t know. But I think you should leave. You could save the money, in any case.”

  “You believe somebody was here last night now—is that it?”

  “No—I mean, I don’t know—it’s possible. But aside from all that, I want you to come. I want you to stay with me.”

  I called downstairs and told them I would be checking out and that I’d need to retrieve the envelope I’d stashed in the safe.

  “You know, Andre,” I said when I had finished packing, “I bonded like this—with a strange man—once before. Only once.”

  “What happened?”

  “Not good. Not good. It ended up terrible.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Straight Street

  I sprang from the cab.

  “Holy shit. You live on the rue Christine?!”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Didn’t I mention it?”

  “You most certainly did not, Andre.”

  “You’re tripping because you know Baldwin once lived on this street. Is that it?”

  “No, fool. I’m ‘tripping’ because I love this goddamn street like a schoolboy loves his cherry pie. When you said you got the ham in the market, you meant the market at rue de Buci, didn’t you?”

  He answered, but I wasn’t even listening.

  I was running up the stairs ahead of him.

  “What floor?” I called down to him while he struggled with Viv’s suitcase.

  “Top.”

  Holy shit!

  The tea shop across the street, with the madeleines to die for. The blind man in the fountain pen shop. The fifty-seat cinema at the end of the block. There was a time when I’d have become a common prostitute to live on this block, sold my grandmother, given away my soul. I had been walking on the street perpendicular to this one, rue de Seine, one summer afternoon—I was nineteen years old—and I’d turned down this street and opened my arms to it. I couldn’t even have told you why; there were far more beautiful places to live right in this neighborhood. But I had returned to this street again and again, walked it at all times of the day and night, observing the life that went on, pretending I lived in the apartment over the lingerie store. I used to see this street in my dreams after I’d returned to school that fall.

  And now Andre was turning the key in the lock and letting me into—holy shit! A skylight. The apartment was tiny, but so beautiful. Was this really happening? I was flying around that room, touching everything—the lamp, the kitchen sink, the stereo.

  I turned to face Andre, who was regarding me as if I were insane. I suddenly began to laugh helplessly. No wonder he thought I was nuts. I was acting like—like a schoolgirl version of Andre, when he had some Negro arcana in his teeth.

  By the time my fit of laughter was over, his expression had changed. I knew that face: desire. Wrong word. Desire was the least of it. His face read, as clearly as the headline in the morning paper, You are going to be fucked. No preliminaries. No talk. For better or worse. Fucked.

  I didn’t contradict it, I didn’t examine it. I was too busy tearing out of my dress.

  I ran—ran—to my valise and tried to claw it open, looking for a condom. But he overpowered me, pinned me where I stood. I stopped struggling, fearing he would snap my windpipe with the strong hand at my neck. Fearing, period. I was afraid of him, but even more afraid of the brute strength of my own desire, which had me grunting like a half-wit as we fell to the rug with him tearing at my underpants.

  He was on me. Everywhere. Prying me open. Sucking. Thrusting inside me like a wild boar. Crying out. With my nail, I had accidentally opened a small gash over his left eyebrow. We were either going to come together or kill each other.

  There was unbearable grief in his throat when he finished. I dug my fingers into his hair, pulled his head up off my breast momentarily and looked into his eyes. His face was pasty and wet and he was sobbing. I covered his mouth with mine and we rolled over and lamely began to fuck again.

  Through his tears he spoke for the first time since we had entered the room. What he said was, “Belong to me.”

  “I do,” I said, not missing a beat.

  He made coffee with his back to me. Nothing on except his shorts. That wonderful barely there butt of his seemed to wink at me like a pornographic sign. A warming breath blew across my desire, heating me up again. Inside my head, I went to the next time I would lie gasping under him, barely able to lift myself to him; the next time I’d lick at the sweat in the hollow of his neck in syncopation with the stroking of his finger inside me. Greedy Nan, greedy girl. I pushed the image aside, busied myself with unpacking.

  He got the windows open, then poured coffee and brought mine over to me in a small yellow cup.

  “Nan?”

  I looked up at him.

  “I have never done anything like that before,” he said. “Not even close.”

  “Neither have I,” I said, “and I’m a slut. By some standards, I mean.”

  The next forty-eight hours went by in a blur. I know I phoned Mom to tell her I’d—ahem—changed residences and to give her a no-progress progress report. I know Andre and I had two or three quick meals in the café across the street from the apartment. I know we made a couple of scouting excursions to low-down hotels and hostels to inquire about Vivian, and in desperation we did place an ad in the Trib. But mostly those two days, those hours, went by in a haze of the headiest, funkiest, sexiest sex I had ever taken part in.

  The caveman-type coupling gradually faded into long looks and longer kisses and driving each other wild with touches and tongues, and doing it in the bathtub, and feeding each other cheese with our fingers, and generally going through each other like two kids with a box of cookies.

  It was damn hard to keep my mind on Aunt Viv and her troubles. But on the third day the fog began to lift and I was able to focus a little better.

  Andre and I went back to the hotel on Cardinal Lemoine that afternoon, just on the chance that Vivian had come back to pay her bill and collect her things. No such luck on that score. But the madame, to whom we presented a staggering bouquet of flowers, was good enough to conduct another phone search for us: this time to determine whether Vivian was in jail under any of her various names.

  Andre and I were still unable to keep our hands off each other, but we had at least come back to earth sufficiently to be hungry for a homemade meal. On the way back to the apartment we stopped to acquire groceries and wine in the open-air market. I put the chicken in the small oven and set about peeling some potatoes. While I worked, he supplied a beautiful serenade—a medley of standards that sounded utterly fresh and even downright foreign on the violin.

  After dinner the concert resumed. I was eating his “Don’t Worry ’Bout Me” with a spoon, when he stopped mid-note, th
e queerest look on his face.

  “What?” I said, pulling myself out of the reverie.

  “I just got the greatest idea.”

  Wasn’t it wonderful, my beloved had an idea.

  “What idea?”

  “You know ‘Sentimental Mood,’ don’t you?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Okay. And—let’s see—what else? Do you know ‘Blue Room’?”

  “Of course.”

  “Go get your sax.”

  Duets!

  Why the hell not? Talk about your peas in a pod. Two jazz-drunk African-American neo-francophiles.

  I’d never given much thought to jazz violinists before I met Andre. Now I kicked myself for not making an effort to see artists like Regina Carter or Maxine Roach and the all-female group she was involved in back in New York: the Uptown String Quartet.

  I was now of the opinion that violinists made the perfect musical colleagues. Stuff Smith had collaborated most successfully with Dizzy, and with Nat Cole and Ella. Who else? Joe Venuti, of course. Then there was the old gentleman they called “Fiddler”—Claude Williams, who, if he only had four arms, could accompany himself on the guitar. And, almost too obvious to mention: the Grappelli-Reinhardt combination.

  The world thought I was just little old me from Queens. Ha! Little did they know, I was Django’s illegitimate gypsy granddaughter.

  CHAPTER 6

  Lush Life

  It was time for a bold move.

  Time was flying away from me. Before Vivian became nothing more than a memory, I had to do something forceful, something concrete. And I had to do it now.

  That is why I made the decision to dip into the murky end of the pool, going once again to Pigalle.

  As far as we knew, Vivian wasn’t dead or dying. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t still in trouble. The way I saw it, if she was indigent, hungry, unable to go back to the hotel for her money, and surely unable to get any kind of job over here, she might well have turned to something not so legit, if not outright felonious. And so I decided to seek help from the only French criminal I knew—make that knew of.

  The first bold step I took was to tell a whopping big lie to Andre. I said that I’d run into an old classmate in the drugstore. She was living in Paris and she and I were going to get together for a night of drinking, roasting men, and catching up. It was to be girls-only, I told him; next time we got together, I’d ask him to join us.

  See, I knew he would go nuts if I told him what I was really planning to do. So he spent the evening playing with a couple of other musicians way out in Passy, while I joined my mythical girlfriend for dinner.

  The newspaper accounts of the murder of Mary Polk, the American businesswoman, had made Le Domino, the club where she was killed, sound like sin central. But in fact it was sort of like the French version of the dive where my friend Aubrey danced in New York. A lot of drunks. A few ambulatory junkies. Watery booze and skinny whores and a bunch of randy men who ought to know better.

  I chatted up the bartender and tipped outrageously and hung around long enough drinking donkey-piss beer to get my reward: Gigi Lacroix, the ex-pimp who had been questioned and released in the Mary Polk investigation, put in an appearance about one A.M.

  Yeah, he was a bit oily. But I had been prepared for that. I didn’t expect a guy in a beret carrying a marked-up copy of Nausea or humming Jacques Brel’s greatest hits. I predicted a certain sleaze factor and I got it. Gigi was a thin fellow with a thin mustache, a bad haircut, and a line of bullshit as long as a summer day in Stockholm.

  The thing was, with his big Charles Aznavour eyes and Popeye swagger, he was kind of adorable along with it.

  Gigi said he had not run a stable of hookers in more than ten years; “that nonsense” was all in the past. To hear him tell it, he was an old coot now—enjoying his retirement, and for all he knew, “looking up the ass of death.” Guillaume Lacroix claimed he was now just a regular mec who liked his dinner hot and on time, and of course a glass of wine now and then. But…if a nice man was in dire need of female companionship, or if one person with something to sell needed an introduction to another person with the wish to buy? He broke off with that emblematic Gallic shrug. “Entendu?”

  Understand? Sure I did, I said, managing to slide my hand out of his grip and signal the bartender for another round.

  Unlike a lot of his stuffy countrymen, Gigi adored Americans, he assured me. Especially Al Pacino. Did I love the movies as much as he did?

  Oh, absolutely.

  Was I, or this fellow I was traveling with, involved in any way with the film industry?

  Sadly, no, I had to admit, but we were both musicians—did that count for anything?

  “Not really,” said Gigi. “Paris is lousy with musicians—no offense.” In any case, he said, he wasn’t the one to talk music with. His lady friend Martine was the music expert. She’d probably be dropping in around two-thirty.

  I saw no reason to fence with Gigi Lacroix. He was no more a cop lover than I was. I laid out the Aunt Viv story for him. Let’s say it was the edited version of the Viv story. Leaving out any mention of the ten grand I was going to give her, I stressed how worried the family was about her; I was on a mission, out to rescue my adventurous aunt, who drank a little and who’d always had more nerve than brains.

  While Gigi listened he casually downed another in the army of Pernods I was paying for.

  “Hmph,” he uttered at the end of the tale. “I don’t know the lady. She sounds like an exciting woman, though.”

  “Do you think you could help me? Do some asking around?”

  There went another defining gesture: the puffed-out lips accompanied by raised eyebrows and a slant of the head. Maurice Chevalier in polyester. The guy cracked me up.

  I figured we could come to terms.

  “Écoute, Gigi,” I said, “you’re not going to be able to retire to the mountains on what I can pay you, but I think we can work something out. There’s just one thing I’ve got to get straight.”

  “Of course,” he said expansively.

  “Did you have anything to do with Mary Polk’s death?”

  The false bonhomie fell away from his face then and he shook his head once. “The unfortunate victim,” he said, “was another lady I never had the pleasure of meeting. We simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time—both of us.”

  I had a sudden image of that Girl Scout bandanna. It just flew in and out of my thoughts. “Did you get a look at the death scene? Out back I mean, where the police found her?”

  “Me? No, my friend. I’m no ghoul. I have no curiosity about the dead. Especially when the police are involved.”

  I took that in without comment.

  It was a bit like the time I found my dream chair on sale at a furniture outlet store back in New York. The price was unbelievably low. I couldn’t find a thing wrong with it, and I knew that if it turned out to have been put together with spit, I’d never get my money back. I knew, furthermore, the salesman was the last person I should look to for reassurance. Yet I did. I also told him that at the first sign of a hidden defect, I’d come back there and get postal on his ass. I had absolutely no means of backing up that threat. But he took me at my word, and I left the store with his personal unconditional guarantee in hand. One of those rare occasions when racism works for you rather than against you.

  So it was that I threw in with Gigi the aging pomaded pimp—with the promise that if he tried to fuck me over he’d have to call in Al Pacino to get me off his case. I’d make his retirement uncomfortable as hell, even report to the police that he’d told me he knew who killed Mary Polk as well as my aunt.

  Did he take my threats seriously? Not very, I wagered. But I decided to go with him anyway.

  It was while he was comparing Godfather III to the other installments in the saga that Martine walked in. Gigi Lacroix was like a thousand other trifling guys I’d seen in the world: unregenerate larceny in his heart, livin
g off the weaknesses of others, quick-witted, shrewd, and lazy. When all was said and done, a colorful underworld character, no more. His lady friend Martine, on the other hand, scared the bejesus out of me.

  For starters, my girl had a scar—jawbone to neck. No taller or more powerfully built than he, but there was menace in her very walk. She locked glances with Gigi, ignoring me utterly until he introduced us, at which time she swept her burning eyes across my face and torso. I looked down at her stiletto-heeled shoes, which consisted entirely of straps and laces that crawled up her ankles like garter snakes.

  Martine seemed to take up all the space at the bar. She and Gigi went into a wanton lovers’ clutch for a couple of minutes and then he ran down my story for her. She took it in without comment, helping herself to a belt of Gigi’s Pernod.

  It was after 4 A.M. when I got back to the rue Christine apartment. Andre was sleeping peacefully, waking only long enough to ask if I’d had a good time with my fictitious chum—and he wasn’t one of the guys we roasted, was he?

  No way, I said, and pressed his head back onto the pillow. Then I went in to shower the stale tobacco and barroom funk out of my pores.

  When we got up the next morning, I’d have to tell him the truth about the evening and prepare him for Gigi.

  As predicted, he was not amused. I saw the worst of his play-it-safe side as he turned into my father for fifteen minutes. He blasted me for my foolishness in going into that din of iniquity; preached at me for jeopardizing our status as nice colored foreigners; ridiculed my private-eye fantasies, and so on.

  I sat there and took it, goddammit. But, under my patient, reasoned, point-by-point defense, he had to agree in the end that playing it safe was getting us nowhere with the Vivian quest.

  Once we had a late breakfast and hit the streets, he continued to punish me for a couple of hours with all the quickstep melodies he could think of. I was hung over, but I’d be damned if I wouldn’t keep up with him.

  The folks at the outdoor tables loved our ass. They were giving us an overwhelming round of applause. Andre’s violin case was stuffed with francs. We had played duets all over Paris, and this was one of our favorite spots. We made just as much or more here as at Au Père Tranquille or the gargantuan café on rue St. Denis, where the hookers sometimes helped us with our pitch, or playing for hours in the metro.