New York to Paris

    Section C of the Times for August 20th, 1919 contained portents of the days that were to haunt me for the rest of my life. BEASTLY MURDERS IN FRANCE. A headline that tugged at my collar. I read the spread, but my mind was still on a dream I'd had the night before. I saw it still, as I sat slumped at the breakfast table, staring through swollen eyes into the steaming murk of my coffee. The rooftops of London. Two men stood on the edge, their silhouettes maddened by rain, and strangely bulbous. They wore tall, rectangular hats, and I could not see if they faced toward or away from me. The flicker of lightning sought to reveal them, but they remained unlit. What’s more, they grew ever more massive with each strike, until they engulfed the night itself.

   
    My editor at The Monthly Shamus, Tillson was a rhomboid of a man with powerful, hairy arms which he incessantly rubbed with his fingers. Feet twitching on the expanse of his desk, he told me of the feature he wanted on European reconstruction. "Make it sweeping," he said, "epic! I want to see the fetid rot of failed empires painted on my eyelids when I finish reading! You leave tomorrow!"
    "Yes, sir."
    "This is quite an opportunity I've given you!" he shouted and raised his index finger upward as if skewering something. One of his favorite gestures. "If you don't take it, you're a fool. And also fired." A man in a suit popped out of the closet to whisper in his ear. "Hmph. My attorney has informed me that I can't fire you for that. However, I won't like you very much."
    "Yessir."
    "I've arranged passage for--"
    "Paris, sir?"
    "Paris?" He stuck the same finger in his ear and rubbed it vigorously with an irritated frown.
    "It seems only right, Mr. Tillson. It should be quite convenient to get a sense of it all before heading on to Verdun."
    "Well…quite so. I shall leave the details to you, m'boy! Get straight to the source, the blighted farms, the cadaverous trenches -- all of it!" As he spoke, a dream of some delightful banquet to come lingered in his smile. "I'm issuing you a photographer, as well, straight out of storage in our warehouse! A Mr. Allen, if memory serves. Quite the fellow. Well- don't let me keep you." He stood and flapped his arms at me, a cloud of smoke he was attempting to dissipate. "Pack light, only your best prose, y'here!? Like that piece two months ago - brilliant! - instead of the tripe from last week, yes? Bahn Vo-yaaazh, as they say!"



    "Judith, there's something wrong with our son," said Father, peering at me over the top edge of a ledger.
    "Oh, there's nothing wrong with him."
    "Nono, there is. I can see it."
    Father and Mother's apartment looked down on uptown, and looked as if it belonged in a museum. The dining room table was spotless because it was never used. The armoir was dustless but never opened. In polished silver the candles waited, wicks unblackened.
    "The paper is sending me to France tomorrow," I said. "This could be a break for me. We'll be running a feature."
    "That's wonderful, Dear!" said Mother. "Write us from Paris, won't you? No one's ever wrote me from there. Make sure there's a photograph of you with the Eiffel Tower in the background, to the left or in the center. You can have someone else in there, too, if you like; a ladyfriend, perhaps?"
    Father peered over the ledger again, attempting to focus his spectacles with his thumb. "Not sure why they want to feature those blasted Frogs, but I suppose you need whatever help you can get. So…cheers!"


    It was but one night hence that I packed my things and headed to the Harbor, envisioning a scarlet specter somewhere beyond the horizon. I had never been to Europe, or more than a couple states distant from home, and I was excited. That is to say that excitement dwelt in the distance, overshadowed by apprehension of the ensuing sea voyage, and the many things which might go wrong.
    The ship was monstrous, drunken, lolling about in the waves, already belching forth from its single smokestack. I walked up the gangplank and was swallowed, to spend weeks sloshing about in its belly. 
   
    In retrospect, I can admit to you, patient reader, my own delicate constitution is not one to stomach the life of the sea, especially aboard one such as the Falstaff. Never was there a beast more temperamental than this iron excrescence, drawing from me a near constant flow of humors which I had not known I contained, most likely in the pursuit of fulfilling some infernal pact signed beneath the waves. In the unseen rain, we cleared the mouth of the Hudson past the last buoys with an insistent headwind, as I felt my blood retreating from the vicinity of my bowels in protest, most of it holing up in an undisclosed location and leaving me a pallor which I would maintain throughout the voyage.
    Sleep was beyond me that first night, as I hunched in my cabin and listened to the slosh and speckle of the waves breaking on deck. My pen and notebook were my constant companions of the voyage. I scratched away by lamplight, my words turning naturally to the previous week, before the dream, before this new assignment.
    I sat unshaven in my robe on the couch, empty notebook before me. It was true what Tillson later told me. I hadn't written anything worth the paper in months. Something else sat in the back of my mind had clogged the pipes. The radio spoke to itself. It was the steak that did it. She brought it in from the kitchen and set it on the table, half of a cow, all for me and none for her. It was peppered and garnished and tender, tendrils of steam frozen in the air. I picked up the fork, oblivious as the meat itself. "I can't do it," she said. "Not anymore." I chewed but didn't speak. She put her coat on herself and walked out.
    The pounding of Captain Stovepipe's fist on my cabin door was a welcome distraction. He entered unannounced – it was his boat, after all – a facsimile of his namesake in all particulars, straight-backed and emitting constant plumes of tobacco smoke. How he kept it lit in the rain above was beyond me.
    He flitted around the room a bit before acknowledging me at my desk with a look. "Writer, eh?"
    I nodded.
    "What ya doing, then? Writing?"
    "That I am, Captain."
    He paused as if searching my face for lies, and chewed on the stem of his pipe before returning to his inspection of my things. "Nasty weather tonight, sir. Fierce wind on the prow, and rain to boot. But the coal fires burn bright. We'll get where we go, whether 'tis God's want or not." He chuckled at that last bit. I suppose he was trying to reassure me.
    I started when he slammed my cabin door, staring at the pen in my hand, still pressed firmly to the page. Whatever thought had been pouring from me was gone now. I was on a boat to more important days. I opened my suitcase. Atop my shirts was yesterday morning's Times, folded with greater care than the rest of the contents. Buried within, I scanned the same article from the other day, replete with grisly photographs.

    Five dead in the streets of Paris in five days. From midday pistols to knives in the dark, no method is     too wanton for these killers. Where and who will they strike next? The heirs of a butchered banker have     called for blood, but the inspectors are baffled!

The article waxed on about dark alleys, outraged gentry, and incompetent detectives, but what I craved were specifics. Even the photos seemed taken in a confounding haze, suggesting more than they could ever show. I found myself wishing to sketch them in my notebook. While my right hand worked, I peered beyond their resolution, imagined color, a breeze down the cobblestone street, a constable shielding his delicate nose from the stench of blood.
    A violent wave plowed into the hull. I glanced at my sketch, once, then again. Two silhouettes in rectangular hats stood on a rooftop in the dark, staring straight out of the page at me...
Perhaps sleep was what I needed after all.

    As I prowled the decks come morning, it became quite clear that the Falstaff was not in any way a passenger vessel. My room below appeared to be a converted cargo hold, separate from the main hold, stuffed somewhere under the turret and above the coal bunkers, and suspiciously inconspicuous.
    I was distracted from my indignation by the presence of water in every possible direction. Some of it even seemed to be above us, bleeding green into the sky around the edges. We were only one day out after all, and I wondered if I might not see the faint rise of land at the stern if I squinted hard enough in the moments when I wasn't losing my breakfast. But the only interruptions of the whitecaps marching into the distance were the ridges of our own wake cutting across the waters.
    It was there by the railing that I met Evans.
    "You must be Mr. Allen," I said.
    He stood there and plucked at the creases in his shirt, bundled beneath his suspenders. "It's Evans, actually." His hair seemed to sheen with the oils and sweat of fretful sleep.
    "Oh, excuse me. I thought you might be the photographer that Tillson..."
    "Tillson, yes… quite a memory on that one." He put out his hand and vainly attempted to seem friendly around his bleary morning eyes. "I am that photographer, but it's Evans. And you're Jones?"
    "It's James, actually…"

   
    "Yes, the Warehouse, that's right. Not the most comfortable place. You may not have seen it, working in the office as you do."
    The three of us sat around the mass of the table in Captain Stovepipe's cabin, sampling his stash of spirits. For all that the invitation had come from the man himself, the Captain's presence seemed more a means of keeping an eye on us than any desire for conversation. Mistrust emanated from his skin in distinct tentacles, probing the air between our words. When he looked at me, a lifetime of reservations were piled behind his eyes, only visible because they sparkled in the lamplight. "Can't say that I have," I said. "I assumed it was more of a metaphor?"
    Evans sighed. "Sadly, no, it's quite real. We're under a nondisclosure agreement, but let's just say I've had my fill of sawdust."
    I twisted my glass upon the table, and resorted to an examination of the cabin. The walls were littered with a surprising variety of decoration. The visage of a stuffed predator I could not identify. A long snake twisted up in a glass case. The skeleton of a fish that appeared to have wings. "You have quite the collection here, Captain. You must have travelled extensively in amassing it."
    "Aye. I collect all sorts of life. There's nothing quite like mounting a head on your wall." He chewed on his pipestem and admired his decorations while we sat dumb in response. "Gentlemen!" He stood and raised his glass of scotch while filling it again. "A toast to the Denizens of the Deep! May they ever desire to keep us from the abyss,  and their own ravenous jaws."
    I cleared my throat and stood. "Hearhear!" Outside in the dark, the ocean belched and sprayed over the Captain's window, like a sheet of quartz sliding across it.
   


    I was packing my satchel as if there were some place to escape to. "The captain said we're going to fight, as they'd likely kill most of us, anyway."
    Evans sat at the small table against the wall of my cabin, drinking a cup of intensely brewed coffee. He had brought a whole sack of beans in his luggage, and his clothes smelled of it constantly. He lifted one foot and placed it on his knee. "Are there still pirates in the early 1900s?"
    "Well apparently, yes!" I gazed out the porthole at the ship pulling up along side us, flying a black flag, and out of time in other ways; oak, rigging, sails, and all. "In fact, that one appears to be wearing an eye patch."
    "Imagine that! But don't worry, my friend explained it to me. You're statistically much more likely to die in a car crash than on a boat."
    I knocked the cup from his hand and grabbed him by the collar. "Evans: we're under attack! By pirates! This affects our mortality rate!"
    "Does it?!"
    "…I think so, yes…anyway, where are you getting these statistics from?"
    He absently wiped at the coffee stain on his sleeve as a cannonball split the cabin and invited itself in. It spun in the corner, humming. I was ignorant of whether cannonballs generally exploded or not. "Well," he said, "I suppose I didn't check his sources on that one. It made sense at the time."
    We were both just watching it spin. "Let's go see what they're doing upstairs," I said.
    "Alright."

    Upstairs, it was a clear noon day, and Captain Stovepipe was bludgeoning a pirate over the head with the butt of his saber. His grimace was as intact as always, only split to call out to a nearby sailor over the crack of the guns. "Finn! Blast it, I told someone to check on the boiler! Can you people do nothing I ask?" He'd finished bludgeoning the pirate and had switched to kicking him instead.
    "I'll get right on that, sir!" groaned Finn, and keeled over with a cutlass in his back.
    "You, Writer!" the captain was grinding his heel on the pirate's forehead. "You don't look busy. Go check on the boiler! Finn here's under the weather, and I got me hands full!" He did in fact have his hands full, choking another pirate who had happened past.
    "Of course! We can do that. Evans?" I began to march briskly off toward the starboard side of the ship, away from the raging cannons and pillars of fire sprouting from the privateer vessel alongside us.
    "Why yes, sure," he said and followed. "Do you know where the boiler is?"
    "Well no, I was hoping you did. But I assume it's belowdecks, somewhere away from fires and murderers."

    The boiler turned out to be easy to find, as it was screaming. We stood in the doorway and watched it on the verge of shaking itself apart. Evans had acquired a gash on his forehead on our way there, which he held his handkerchief to. "Should we….I dunno? Run? Should we run?"
    "Normally yes," I said, "absolutely." It occurred to me that just behind us was the forward magazine room, housing the bulk of the Falstaff's gunpowder stores. "Except there's nowhere to go."
    He shook his head, eyes distant, perhaps thinking about his broken cup. "I suppose we should fix it, then. Or break it even more." The screaming rose in pitch. "My mechanical knowledge is confined to cameras. You?"
    Shuddering pipes ran in all directions from walls to the large tank in the center, an angry metal octopus decorated with dials, knobs, levers, and meters. "I fixed my stove last month. With directions."
    "Yyyaaaarrrr!!"
    "Excuse me?"
    "Yyaaar -- hahharrharr!" Blocking the exit behind us was a solid and thoroughly unwashed man brandishing a cutlass, a pistol, and a mouth full of black and gold teeth.
    Evans burst out, "My God! They really do say it!"
    "Um. Run!" We both ran into the maze of pipes in opposite directions, pursued by reports, sparks, and piratical slogans.
    "James, are you dead??" Came a call over the racket.
    "I don't think so! You?"
    "Not yet!"
    "Avast! Stand still, damn you!" Searing steam hissed from bullet holes in the pipes, nearly drowning out the screams of the boiler.
    "He said it! He said it!" I could barely make out Evans through the steam, who seemed to be running in circles now.
    "Pull that lever there!"
    "Lever?"
    "Right behind you, Evans!" The bullets had stopped and now the steam was cooking us alive. I began turning the crank next to me like a madman – admittedly with no idea what it did.
    "Brilliant!" exclaimed Evans. He pulled the lever and the screaming began to subside, along with the flow of steam.
    I waved it from my face and peered through the pipes at the doorway. The pirate was nowhere to be seen, and in his place stood our own Captain Stovepipe. "Jumpin' Jehovah! I asked you boys to check on it, not poke holes in it."
    As we ascended to the deck, the other ship was dead in the water and stacked high with flames and smoke. The Captain rested his boot on the port railing and watched it shrinking behind us. "Those must be the most incompetent pirates I've ever encountered." Nevertheless, I wondered aloud at our successful defense, to which the Captain revealed that the hull of the Falstaff was home to a number of hidden guns, behind canvas flaps and just above the stores on each side. It seems to me that it was ultimately these that saved us, in addition to our foe's strangely outdated vessel.

    With so many of the regular crew 'under the weather' as it were, it fell to Evans and I to pick up the slack for the remainder of our journey. A task for which we were by no means fit. It was for weeks after debarking that the stench of coal and sweat filled my nostrils. My journal is rather empty during these days, as I had not the strength to put pen to paper by the evenings.
    I do not believe it occurred to either of us to demand to be treated as paying passengers, though we were. For one, I was quite focused on a swift and safe arrival after nearly being bisected by a cannonball. For another, the Captain had deftly dropped in the story of his name, an event some years past which featured himself clubbing an uppity sailor with a discarded stove pipe in the mess hall. I later confirmed this story with several of the crew.

    Back in my cabin that first night after the attack. "Who are you talking to?" It was Evans, looking haggard as always, and slightly amused at the air around him.
    "Was I talking?"
    "You were."
    "You should really knock. I'd prefer to keep my neuroses private."
    "My apologies," he said, and took a seat on my bed, setting a bottle of gin on the table. "I blame my upbringing, of course. Big family, lack of manners, and all that. Swiped that from the Paymaster's store. I figure we deserve it after today."
    "I'm sure the Captain will understand," I said doubtfully. This was before either of us had heard the Stovepipe Story.
    His foot twitched idly. "So it occurred to me to wonder about your plans once we arrive. What exactly is this piece about?"
    "Reconstruction, is what Tillson told me."
    "Same to me, but beyond his grand gestures, I've not a clue what he wants from me."
    "To be honest, I haven't given it much thought." There was a…Presence within, just waiting to express itself. In what manner, I didn't know yet.
    Evans laughed at that. "Fair enough. Well, I suppose I'll start by pointing my camera at anything that looks sad. I'll bet you can manage to spin that."
    "Oh, I can spin it. Just rub some soot on an urchin's face, and I'll write you a tragedy."
   
---

    Paris, and the streets felt paved with story. The footprints of revolutionaries were etched on the cobblestones. In a square stood the ghost of Sydney Carton, still waiting patiently at the steps of the Guillotine while the crowds called his number. A hollow ring to the pavement, an echo through the catacombs below, where a hundred generations gave their bones up to the dust. Everywhere a flare for the arch, the steeple, the jagged joints of grimy, old buildings heavy with the souls of their occupants. I prowled the byways and thoroughfares, siphoning vitality from the sights, Evans milling in my wake and pointing his camera at things. He wore several bandoliers of flashbulbs that made him clink as he walked.
    Naturally, our first stop, before even washing the coal dust from our clothes, was a wine bar. It was just like I'd imagined it, a long room with a counter and stools, barrels stacked behind it, and a Frenchman who wore his apron with a sovereignly air. "Good day, Mssrs! I will be Jacques for you. You are travellairs, yes? I can see zat hunger for rest in your eyes. Where has zis journey brought you from?"
    My nine years of French were rusty, of course, but passable. Enough to be understood, but frequently with that chuckle and shake of the head reserved for foreigners all over the world. "New York, actually." I set my luggage by the stool and sat.
    "Ahhhh, Americans. Wonderful! With the papers, yes?" He gestured to Evans, who could be mistaken for nothing else while draped in cameras and equipment. "Zay have sent you across ze ocean, nobly to find ze finest vintage, wherever it may take you!"
    "Well, not ex--"
    "And but of course, your search has brought you 'ere, to my 'umble estableeshment." He rubbed a thumb on the bridge of his nose and grinned. "Quite in luck you are, Mssrs, for a journey to my shop is made not in vain, no matter ze distance!"
    "And here I thought it was an 'umble' shop," said Evans in English.
    With a twist of his wrists, Jacques produced two filled snifters before us, darker than red, thicker than ink. "Drink, and doubt me no more, weary travelairs!"
    He was quite right, of course. And it was several glasses into idle conversation that I began to tell Evans about the newspaper article. As the evening took us in, patrons, friends, drunkards filtered in and out, occupying and vacating stools. Evans held to his luggage and equipment, with a keen eye for any who stumbled too close, and snapping the occasional photos of  the most unfortunate among them. My own suitcase lay open on the floor, the notebook tucked beneath my shirts, the aformentioned article on the countertop, to which Jacques himself took an interest, between expounding on the merits of his stock. "Zees one in particular, I remember it from a dream, a dream in which I was zwept eentoo a violent storm, filaments of darkest black piercing my mind, yes? It picked me up and flew me to ze finest vineyard in all Tuscany, grown on ze ashes of a most ancient volcano. I knew only ze grape of zis place would do for such a mixture, so what wondrous fortune zat my cousin owned a stock in zis land!" He glanced at the photograph in my newspaper, of a young man who lay dead in an alley, surrounded by uniforms. "Ahh! You know of zese murders, then? What grisly fortune stalked our streets in zose days?"
    "Stalked? So you think it has left, then. Or they have, rather?"
    Jacques grabbed a new arrival by the cheeks and shook him in greeting. "Beautiful to see you friend, and in health as well! Almost certainly, Mssr. Weeks have passed since this killing, and while they lasted, there was at least one a day. It is my thought that they have vanished, yes?"
    "Excuse me, Jacques," said Evans, "but your accent seems to be disappearing?"
    "I think not, Mssr. Evans, rather the reader is meant to - how you say? - internalize; to but save us the pain of such spellings as 'zees', 'razair', and 'eenternalize'."
    "Well, thank Heaven for that. It was growing rather tiresome, wasn't it?"
    "Yesyes, wonderful," I said. "Jacques, have they printed anything else since this? Announcements? Leads? Flotsam? Jetsam? Anything?"
    "Jet--sam? Hhmm, I think not. The matter lies as open as the thighs of the most wanton demoiselle in all Paris."
    "May I find her zis night, friends!" said an elder man two stools away. He emptied his glass, slapped it on the counter, and strode out the door, straightening his cap with purpose.
    "Do you think he will?" asked Evans.
    Jacques watched him go and shrugged. "He has not far to go, but Pierre would not know Wanton if it bit him on that gigantique nose of his. Still, perhaps She will find him, instead. And perhaps, friends, she will give him a peck on the cheek before robbing him blind." Evans laughed at that. "Importantly - what did we speak? - ze case! papers, yes! My cousin, Mssr., is a gendarme of excellent quality! On the week in question, as he would say, I heard no end of his grumbles on the subject. If you wish, I will be your centerman - no! - middleman in the matter of the Pogrom of Paris." At the last, he placed one hand on his chest, and the other held in the air between us; a grand gesture which made me think of Tillson.
    "Is that what the papers have been calling it?"
    "Not yet, friend, but they most certainly will. It is my own concoction, and has quite the kick to it, don't you think?"

    Locating our hotel amidst the wine fog and orbiting street lamps was no easy task. We rambled and chattered through the neighborhood, the latter kept up mostly by Evans, who seemed as if he had finally learned to ride a bike but didn't know how to get off of it. "My family questions the wisdom of such endeavors, of course. I couldn't exactly tell them when I was coming home. It's not as if I want to go back to the Warehouse, but try getting them to understand that, I dare you! Especially Eldest Marjorie, or Meddling Marge, as I call her. Though not to her disprop- disproportionate face, you understand." He held his hands far apart to demonstrate the size of her face. "Like a witch doctor's mask! Regardless, I hated to disappoint Cynthia like that. And watch, she will have evaporated by the time I return." He sighed. "She was the one not on fire."
    "What's that?"
    "James, imagine everyone are life boats drifting on the ocean, drifting away while you're drowning; but they're on fire, and whenever you look at them you can feel your eyes burning and you couldn't possibly climb inside to save yourself though of course you're always paddling closer, as who wants to drown?"
    "Sounds terrifying."
    "Right? She was the one not on fire."
    "You should have been a poet, Evans."
    "Then what would I do with all these cameras?" They hung on him like stone weights on an eremite. "In any case, she may have sunk by now."
    I had picked up a pipe from somewhere near the wine shop, and had already learned to puff on it in response to any comment, followed by something sage. "Life is an emotional roller coaster, or some such."
    His head drooped. "I find it to be more of an elevator, myself…" He seemed on the verge of collapsing beneath his gear.
    Another puff. "Stamp your foot and tell that bellhop to take you to the penthouse!"
    "Quite, quite! …say, James…?"
    "Your servant."
    "Did you agree to this job because you want to be a detective?" Evans grinned up at the sky.
    "Whatever do you mean?" Puffpuff.
    "It's this Pogrom of Paris business. Jacques's new moniker seemed to strike like a flint in your pupil, I could see it! And now you're smoking a pipe."
    Puff. Did two shadows just stand on a rooftop against the night for a second? "I'll admit, I'm intrigued, but it's not all by any means. We have the seeds of the End of History to record, right? The human dregs of the Great War, or whatever other pompousness will impress Tillson. And who could pass up a free trip across an ocean?" Having lived through that trip, I was inclined to disagree with myself on the last point.
    "Glad to hear I'm not wasting my flashbulbs. Still, Inspector, if you need me to snap any photos of crime scenes, I'll be right there."
    I puffed one more time and put on an air to fit. "Of course, my dear Evans." Down the street, every lit window seemed a portal to a new universe, which would open to a single passphrase, if I could just remember the words. "I'll tell you what. In the morning we get our first Parisian breakfast, you take your photos, and I'll go see this cousin of Jacques's. Just out of curiosity, of course. After that, we've got an article to write."