[Dorothy Parker 05] - A Moveable Feast of Murder Page 14

  “As for the Duchess, she is considered an ‘enemy of the state.’ They want her because they believe she has raised sympathy and financial support to take back her country. They will take her back to stand trial or hide her away where her voice will not be heard.”

  “Meanwhile, a series of events has changed everything. Where my original mission was merely to deliver the Duchess to a safe house with the assistance of French agent Claude Dubois, I was instructed at the last minute to also receive information Latham wanted delivered to a contact in Paris. Then, when Latham failed to show, I was wired to await further instructions, and in the interim continue with the original mission of coordinating the protection of the Duchess Sofia. After we discovered the body in the trunk, I later made a thorough search of the bags—their linings and seams—looking for hidden and recessed compartments, hoping to find whatever it was that Latham had hoped to give me, thinking it might have been sitting in his luggage all along. It wasn’t.”

  “Why is the Duchess travelling under her real name? Why not a false one?” I asked.

  “The Duchess Sofia Louise was booked on five different steamships, and several trains to Canada and the West Coast. It’s hard to disguise a person of her countenance and social standing. She was brought onto this ship a full day before we sailed, as cargo, and had not left her room until the day after we sailed and I had done a check of all the passengers on board. But I must have missed uncovering a communist agent on board, after all.

  “Now, I must insist that you not tell anyone about what has happened on the ship. Captain Fried and the ship’s physician were taken into my confidence before we sailed. No one else but we three, the captain, the ship’s physician, and Soledad Soleil, know that Saul Gold was poisoned. It’s for your own protection as well as for the sake of others that you must keep this to yourselves.”

  Mr. Benchley got to the heart of our immediate concern. “All right, our lips are sealed. But what happens to the Duchess now? Does she go into hiding as planned?”

  “In light of what’s just happened, there is all the more urgency to get her to a safe house, although I’m reluctant to bring her to the one we had planned. Its location may have been compromised. I’ll have to find someplace else, and quickly—someplace they won’t think to look for her while I make permanent arrangements. And from now on, you and Dorothy have no further contact with me. We met casually on the crossing. We say goodbye at the station, ‘Have a lovely trip,’ and all that, and that’s all anybody who might be watching you will ever know happened between us. Do I make myself clear?”

  “I think I know where the Duchess could stay for a day or two, a place that has no connection to her past, and as you have never had contact with the persons I’m about to suggest, there is no link to them.”

  “Bob, did either of the kidnappers see you or Dorothy during the scuffle?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “Their backs were to us when we arrived at the compartment, and then they jumped off the train by way of the exterior door.”

  “I’m concerned that you two might be made pawns in this game.”

  “How? The kidnappers didn’t see us,” I said. “Don’t worry, we’ll do as you say.”

  “Good. And it’s best you never know the American agent I had the conversation with out on deck, so don’t try to figure that out, Dorothy.”

  “Do you think there are other Soviet agents on the train,” asked Mr. Benchley, “or on the crossing with us?”

  “On the crossing, yes. He’s been arrested.” said Richard.

  “Who?” I asked. “Would we know him?”

  Richard said, “No. Stop asking me these things. Just help me get the Duchess to a safe house.”

  With that he ended the conversation.

  “Who’s that fat man walked right out of Lautrec’s ‘Aristide Bruant’ poster?” asked Richard when we pulled into the Paris Gare Saint-Lazare.

  I turned to see the haughty and hefty Aleck, wrapped in his usual costume of black cape, red scarf wrapped around his many chins, and slouchy black felt hat.

  “Yes, that rotund fellow,” he repeated, “standing alongside that slow-witted young boy making faces and waving an American flag?”

  “Why, that’s the famous Alexander Woollcott, and the idiot is his unofficially adopted son, Harpo Marx.”

  “Woollcott! My goodness . . . .”

  “Yes, the Devil himself.”

  I looked at Richard’s wonderstruck face. “Why, you’re speechless,” I said, “and you have yet to be verbally garroted.”

  Mr. Benchley said, “It’s all been arranged; she should be safe there.” He took Richard’s hand to shake and slipped a door key into his palm.

  “Goodbye, Bobby.”

  “We are in Paris, now: It’s au revoir!

  “Yes, au revoir!”

  And with that, Mr. Benchley hopped off onto the platform to greet Aleck and Harpo and to attend to our luggage.

  “This is where we part ways, Dorothy, for now,” said Richard.

  Our eyes locked, and I saw his regret. It matched my own. He moved in closer. I tilted my face for a kiss, but a voice broke the spell. Richard turned to attend to Duchess Sofia, who was accompanied by Major Arbuthnot and Claude Dubois. I acknowledged them all with a little nod, and then they disappeared into the crowd.

  I had regrets, so many regrets, as I watched them blend into the crowd.

  I scrutinized the many faces on the platform, looking for sinister or unnatural behavior. Everyone was suspect; anyone could be a Soviet agent. A scuffle caught my attention. It was an arriving American from our train loudly accusing a young man of lifting his billfold.

  “Dorothy, my dearest wretch!” boomed the familiar voice of Alexander Woollcott. I turned to see my friend, his arms extended for an embrace. “Little Acky’s here!”

  I was sucked into his arms like a long-lost child, even though it had been barely a month since we last lunched together with our gang at the Algonquin.

  “How was the crossing, my love?”

  “Rough,” I said. “The only thing I could keep on my stomach was the first mate.”

  “Did you bring the maple syrup?”

  “Yes, of course, a quart, and your pepper jelly, two cans of corn chowder, your special-formula toothpowder, and an entire grocery shelf of Ritz crackers.”

  I turned to greet Harpo, who, in imitation of Aleck’s bear-hug, pulled me into his arms. He drew me back to take a good look at me and then pinched my cheek. (No, a lower cheek.)

  “We’re in Paris, for cryin’outloud, not in Rome, you two-bit masher, you!”

  When he pinched again, I affectionately slapped his hand and then his face. We laughed, and then he slapped my hand and then my face. “If you want a slap-out-slam-down fight, Harpo, I’ll introduce you to Ernest; he’s always game.”

  “Where is the Wunderkind I’ve heard so much about?” asked Woollcott.

  I looked around. “There,” I said, pointing as I called his name. Hem looked over at the sound of my voice, smiled, and waved. He and Mathew were chatting with a handsome couple who looked as if they’d walked out of a magazine fashion page. I could make a good guess as to who they were. Judging by their elegant deportment—she blonde and graceful, he tall, slim, and possessing an easy, dignified bearing—they had to be none other than Gerald and Sara Murphy, American expatriates living the artistic life in France with their three children.

  Mr. Benchley had come to know them well. Gerald was heir to the Mark Cross empire, and a brilliant artist of the new abstract style who’d designed spectacular sets for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, alongside Picasso, Braque, and Derain. Influenced by the Dadaists, four of his monumental works depicting the precise interior workings of machines hung in exhibition at the Grand Palais beside those of Léger and Bonnard and Goncharova and Max Ernst.

  He and his delicately beautiful wife, Sara, left New York for Paris a half-dozen years ago to lead unconventional lives in the pursuit of arti
stic endeavors. Unencumbered by the demands of conventional American lifestyles, they sought a freer environment where they might work shoulder-to-shoulder at whatever they chose to create, whether it be a garden, a home, or a canvas. It was an idyllic plan, and from what I had heard from Mr. Benchley, Aleck, Donald Ogden Stewart, and other mutual friends, they had since been enjoying a charmed existence in Paris and at their summer home, Villa America, on the Côte d’Azur. What was admirable about them was how they embraced, encouraged, and very often financially supported so many striving artists and painters and their families, including John Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish, Fernand Léger, Pablo Picasso, and Ernest Hemingway.

  But, I thought as they walked over to us alongside Hemingway and Mathew, with the size of their incomes, a charmed life is easy to buy.

  I realized sometime later, though, that they gave so much more than they received from their patronage, when I considered their great affection for the Fitzgeralds. Gerald and Sara Murphy served as the loving and patient parental figures the younger couple so needed in their often-turbulent and undisciplined lives.

  Hemingway made my introduction, and I was immediately drawn to the Murphys’ gracious manners. But although Mr. Benchley had told me lots about Gerald’s artistic and scholastic achievements—he was voted Best Dressed at Yale and a member of DKE and Skull and Bones—I was a little put off by Gerald’s upper-crust Standard American speech—rich people’s high-falutin’ speech. All right, cultured speech. In my experience people who spoke like this were generally bores. For, when Gerald said, in dulcet tones, “This is the first time we meet, Mrs. Parker, but I have heard such wonderful things about you from Bobby and Aleck, that I feel we are already friends, ’far ’s I’m concerned,” I thought the word first should have had an umlaut in it!

  I introduced Hem and Mathew to Aleck and Harpo. Harpo behaved himself and Aleck sized up the brawny Ernest.

  “Where’s the Lady and her rich tramp,” Soledad asked Hemingway, appearing from behind a baggage cart loaded with a dozen Louis Vuitton steamers, shoe cabinets, and valises.

  “Daphne and Ronnie are checking into the Gallia. We’ll probably see them tomorrow.”

  “Can’t wait,” replied Soledad, dripping sarcasm in her vividly purple paisley coat and matching hat, trimmed all around with yards and yards of black mink. “I’m at George Cinque, Dorothy.”

  I introduced Soledad to my friends and the Murphys.

  Aleck, eyes wide with wonder at such a glamorous sight, was, for once, flummoxed by her shamefully flattering greeting: “Why, you’re the man everyone in America talks about!”

  Harpo pulled a face, flapped his tongue out like a dog, panted, circled her wagons, as predicted. She left to follow her trunks.

  We all soon parted company—Aleck and Harpo with me and Mr. Benchley to our hotel, Hem and Mathew to the Hemingways’ rooms on the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, where Mathew would have a bed for the night, and the Murphys to their small pied-à-terre on quai des Grands-Augustins, which had a wonderful view of the river and the Tuileries, and where they had agreed to install the Duchess and the Major on Mr. Benchley’s request.

  As soon as all of us were settled in our rooms we would meet at Michaud’s for supper.

  I once read in a travel brochure that Paris has been dubbed the city of lights for a couple of reasons. During the Age of Enlightenment it was the place to be—to be enlightened, that is. Later, Paris was one of the first cities to convert from gas to electric lights, so again it was the place to be for “illumination.” Nothing beats the glaring brilliance of The Great White Way, of course, but this city had a particular beauty all its own and was unlike any American city I had ever deigned to visit.

  Looking out from the taxi windows, as we barreled along wide thoroughfares and boulevards, I marveled at the size and expanse of its monuments: Napoléon’s Arc de Triomphe dwarfed New York City’s Washington Square Park memorial to George Washington, and the Louvre sprawled on for acres, much larger than our Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue. And the fountains! All lit up at night! Spectacular!

  Aleck relished the role of tour guide, pointing left and right from one landmark to another for my edification. He instructed the driver to take a different route: “Suivez le Boulevard Haussman jusqu’au Champs Elysées et puis allez au Place de L’Etoile.” He told the driver where to slow down, and after we drove past the Tuileries, to move on with the little tour.

  “I have made plans for us to tour the Louvre—”

  As we drove under the brilliantly lit arch, Aleck instructed the driver to circle another boulevard toward the river. And what should my eyes behold as we approached the bridge, the Pont de l’Alma, but the graceful ironwork candlestick of the Eiffel Tower, ablaze in all its glory!

  “—and if the weather holds, we’ll take a stroll through the Luxembourg Gardens after lunch. And on Monday we might venture out to Versailles—but the big event is l’Académie des Cinq Arts Festival of Fools on Tuesday night to ring in Ash Wednesday. What’s the address of the hotel, Bob?”

  Once off the major avenues, the taxi twisted around a labyrinth of narrow streets, bordered with buildings of old stone blocks, a style unlike anything I’d seen in Manhattan, where all is brick and mortar and brownstone and concrete over steel guts. Courtyards everywhere, louver shutters and balconies and wrought-iron grillwork dressing their edifices. And everywhere, cafés and restaurants, one after the other, a yellow glow washing out onto the cobblestone streets, each distinctive and alive with music and crowds of neighborhood patrons looking for a laugh, a drink, and a friend after a long day’s labor. This neighborhood was loud and vibrant; the yells of frustrated arguments, cheers of happy greetings, screams of stubborn children and reprimanding parents rang out from windows and sought escape into the night sky above the city but were trapped in the narrow passages to reverberate in echoes.

  From some of the cafés tables and chairs spilled out onto the pavement. Aleck told us that the weather had been unusually warm for this time of year, when it might otherwise have been cold and damp and rainy. I had to laugh when I saw a sign over one establishment. “Les Deux Maggots!” I said, interrupting Aleck’s five-franc tour. “Imagine naming a café such a thing!”

  “The title of a play from last century,” said Aleck.

  “Typical French humor,” said Mr. Benchley, “but then, the French language is, in itself, an exercise in humor.”

  “What are you talking about, Bob?”

  “Well, think about it, Aleck: The French have the vowels a, e, i, o, and u, and the three accents, the acute e, the grave e, and the circumflex e—all of which are pronounced ong. And so: a equals ong, e equals ong, i equals ong, o equals ong, and, of course, it goes to follow that u equals ong. Lots of vowels equals one ong!

  “So,” I asked, “I should forget about how the language is written—is that what you say—and I should just learn to throw in the ong sound in between the consonants?”

  “That’s about the gist of it, Mrs. Parker. But there are a few phrases that you must learn by heart to survive in this city, so, ecoutez! Repeat after me:

  “When you want breakfast you ask the waiter, ‘N’avez-vous pas des griddle-cakes?’ You are asking him, ‘Haven’t you got any griddle-cakes?’

  “When you take a sip of demitasse, you could say, ‘Appelez-vous cela coffee?’ In English you would spit and yell, ‘You call that coffee?!’

  “When the waiter scowls at you, you say, ‘De tous les pays goddams que j’ai vu!’ which, of course, all tourists have learned to say, and means: ‘Of all the goddam countries I ever saw!’

  “And you’ll hear this spoken by Americans everywhere you go: ‘Quelle espèce de dump is this, anyhow?’ Which will be on the tip of your tongue a dozen times a day, and means: ‘What kind of dump is this, anyhow?’

  “‘Ici est où nous used to come quand j’étais ici pendant la guerre.’ Now, with a limp and a cane and a scar, it will buy you a wish and a prayer.
It means, ‘Here is where we used to come when I was here during the war.’

  “When you are feeling a bit lonely you might say, ‘Je n’ai pas vu une belle femme jusqu’à présent!’ In English it means, ‘I haven’t seen a good-looking woman yet!’ Oh, yes, for you, my dear lady, throw in ‘le bel homme’ for ‘belle femme.’

  “And when all else fails, strike out with: ‘What’s the matter? Don’t you understand English?’ Which in French is pronounced, ‘What’s the matter, don’t you understand English?’ Now that’s enough for your first lesson, Mrs. Parker. I see we’ve arrived at our hotel.”

  We got out of the taxi and Aleck paid the driver, who then saw to our hand luggage. Our trunks would arrive later, so we walked into the hotel’s little lobby.

  Harpo, who had remained silent throughout the ride, now looked up and down and all around the shabby interior and said: “Quelle espèce de dump is this, anyhow?”

  Harpo hit it on the nose. The hotel was a dump, all right. Thank you, Ernest Hemingway, for arranging our stay here at Chez Le Crappé. Tomorrow morning we would look for accommodations that offered hot running water, heat, and, if we were lucky, bathrooms with porcelain fixtures, instead of the rank-smelling apertures at the end of each floor that were nothing better than foul outhouses brought in and placed on each landing, just disgusting holes in the floor. I didn’t realize that this was the norm for bathrooms throughout the city, and later, upon my inquiry, I was told, “Boot, tzare ahh no sooch ting as de plumb-iere in Paree.”

  There would be no bath tonight.

  After pulling up the bedsheets to check for bugs—I didn’t see any in the lumpy, stained mattress—I washed my hands and face using the pitcher and bowl provided. I changed out of my navy-blue travelling suit and quickly threw on a simple wool shift, which I dressed up with strings of crystal beads. I fixed my hair and strapped on a pair of leather pumps that could handle the cobblestone streets. From one of my hatboxes I took out a chocolate-colored cloche adorned all around its hatband with floral sprays constructed of cleverly twisted colors of contrasting felt and ribbons. After I’d added mascara and a bright lipstick, Woodrow and I knocked on Mr. Benchley’s door to tell him I was going downstairs to the lobby to meet the awaiting Aleck and Harpo, so he should move his carcass. Gay Paree awaited me!