Murder in Montmartre

Tuesday Afternoon

LUCIEN PAUSED BY THE industrial stove. Steam rose from copper pans, the high blue flame licking the blackened edges. He stepped over gunnysacks of red potatoes and cardboard boxes half-filled with carrots lining the clapboard-sided kitchen of Strago. Above them hung Lenin’s stern-jawed photo and thirties Moscow State Theatre posters with their bold Constructivist geometric designs.

Anna had run this Communist Corsican restaurant for years, letting him sleep in the back room when times were rough, as they had been recently. She read manifestos to him while she fried onions or cured prisuttu ham.

“Lucien, some mecs were nosing around here.” Anna, stout and with graying hair, stirred the pot of ziminu spicy fish stew on the iron stove as she spoke. “Good thing I’d sent Bruno next door to the marché for eggplant.”

Lucien’s hand clenched in his pocket. His eyes rested on his cetera, the sixteen-string lute-like instrument in his open bag next to the compact sound mixer he’d packed for DJing later. Should he grab it and run, forget his clothes stored in the pantry?

“Looking for anyone in particular?” he asked.

“You tell me,” Anna said, tasting from a wooden spoon. She grabbed a handful of chopped garlic, tossed it in.

Calm down, he had to calm down. Not overreact.

“Some detective asked the vegetable seller about you,” Anna said. “Those capitalist lackeys always harass those who protest!”

The flics, now a detective!

“What do you mean? Who’s looking for me?”

“Stay somewhere else for a few days,” Anna said, her mouth turned down in a disapproving frown. “I don’t want to know where, don’t want to hear about it. At my age, I have all the excitement I need.”

It was a frigid evening and Lucien had counted on waiting tables, on earning some tips and a bowl of that hot stew.

“Mecs? Who?”

Anna ladled out a heaping bowlful of fish stew and handed it to him. “Looked like rent-a-thugs. Zut alors, I don’t want to know what you do.”

“Merci, I play music, that’s what I do,” he said, running his hand over his worn cetera case.

“Far as I’m concerned, you’re as political as an ant,” she said. “But I never give up hope that soon Corsica will be free and run by true Socialists. Egalitarian. No more medieval fiefdoms, but an agriculture system that works.”

His people, a proud people, were driven by the fierce love of their land and a stubborn desire to live as they had since time immemorial. The Genovese and French had erected columns and towers and thought they ruled the island. But the real Corsica, then as now, was governed by familial clans, bound by tribal ties and by obligations granted and repaid. That had never changed.

Anna had been away from Corsica too long. She liked to forget the unchanging clannisme that was at odds with her Socialism. Yet, appreciating her help, he couldn’t point this out to her. Words were not his métier. When he played music his fingers found the way to express his thoughts, layering the sound with jazz, lacing in harmonic polyphony. Plucking his cetera, he could give ancient threshing songs an electronic beat. Let Félix call it world music or whatever he liked. He gave voice to the breath of rosemary-scented air hovering over sun-warmed limestone, to a chapel bell echoing off the granite mountains. He played the poetry of everyday life: a woman sweeping, the gaiety of feast days, the backbreaking toil on the hard earth, a code of honor despite years of oppression and now this new invasion by land-gutting developers.

His music said that; he couldn’t. Lucien spooned up the last bite of the stew and buttoned his leather coat.

“If Félix Conari calls—”

“I didn’t see you,” she replied.

“Non, Anna, he’s offered me a contract,” Lucien told her. “Now my music will get heard.”

“A bourgeois corporate pig who will take advantage of you, more like,” she said. “Stay true to the voice inside you, Lucien.”

She was wrong. Félix appreciated his music. The only other display of interest had come from the ethnic music festival at Chatelet.

“Your eyes give you away, Lucien,” Anna said, shaking her head. “They’re the doors to your soul. Don’t jump at the first offer you get.”

He grabbed the nub of a baguette from the day-old bread bag, stuck it in his pocket, and bid Anna au revoir. Outside on the street, he crumbled the hard bread and scattered crumbs to the gray-and-white feathered pigeons on the cracked pavement. They looked as cold and hungry as he’d felt.

He caught the bus to Place Pigalle, passed the Bistrot du Curé next to the Sexodrome, run by a priest for street people who needed a warm meal, and walked up the steep street into Montmartre. He had to get ready for his DJ gig, then sign the contract with Félix.

The club, formerly a bathhouse, was locked. The thirties sign of now-rusted neon reading Pigalle Bains Douches protruded from the white-tiled wall. He paced in front of the door, the light crust of snow crunching under his worn boots, wondering why a detective was looking for him and wishing more than five public baths remained in Paris. He’d like to warm up, get the chill out of his bones.

“You’re late,” said Pascal, the owner of the club, meeting him at the door.

So was he, Lucien wanted to say.

Pascal, all in black, pulled a key chain from his suede jacket and unlocked the wooden door. He switched on the lights illuminating the tiled walls, red-and-silver-velvet-wallpapered bar cove, faux-zebra-skin seat covers, and gilt-framed mirrors. The decor exuded a faint air of bordello.

“I’ll set up,” Lucien said, pulling out his compact turntable.

“You spin lounge, followed by acid jazz, and then the playwright reads,” said Pascal, a gruff, no-nonsense Auvergnat, who watched every centime and ran a tight ship, like most bougnats, who had migrated from the Auvergne countryside at the turn of the century. They still operated a good number of cafés. Pascal consulted a ledger on the counter. “A mec’s been looking for you.”

Here, too? Lucien kept his hand steady. “The mec have a name?”

Pascal ran his finger over the ledger. “A foreign type, maybe Corsican, with bleached-blond hair.”

The waiter from Bastia who had served at Félix’s? Good news! Then Félix was still anxious to sign the contract.

Lucien connected the turntable and his equipment in a hurry. “May I use your phone?”

“Make it quick,” Pascal said. Paused. “No trouble, eh? I don’t want any trouble here.”

Little did Pascal know that once he signed the contract, he’d be out of here so fast.

“Can’t I have friends, Pascal?”

“Friends like that?”

Lucien left it alone, ignoring his barbed question. “Allô, Félix?” he said into the telephone.

“My boy, you disappeared last night,” Félix said.

Hadn’t Marie-Dominique explained? But why should she mention an inconvenient old lover who’d appeared, then disappeared.

“Things got sticky, Félix. I didn’t have ID. . . .”

“Make it up to me, eh? Stop by my home and sign the contract before you go to the theatre. Kouros, from SOUNDWERX, will come to hear your show tonight.”

LUCIEN DESCENDED the ice-crusted staircase from Place des Abbesses with eager steps on his way to sign Félix’s contract. He pulled his collar up against the wind and that’s when he saw the flic on the corner of rue Veron. The flare of a match illuminated the face of the man he’d seen questioning partygoers last night. The flic was only a few feet away. Lucien ducked into a doorway. Above him, a carved plaque stated, “1872, site of the first free theatre” and he realized he stood under a nude reclining female reading a book sculpted in the stone portal.

“No sign of him. Not yet,” the flic said into his phone. “Copy me on the bomb alert.”

Were they looking for him? Some mecs, a detective, and now the flics? When a couple passed arm in arm under the globed light, he hurried behind them back up the steps. At Place des Abbesses, outside a bookshop, he saw the headlines in France Soir: CORSICAN BOMB THREATS—ARMATA CORSA SEPARATIST RING ROUNDED UP.

Again?

He bought a paper and scanned the article. “Reports of bombing threats in Ajaccio and on the French mainland have sparked heightened security by the DPJ. Several Paris targets have been named by the Armata Corsa. . . .”

He shuddered. “Find and round up the Corsicans” time. If he signed the contract, would it give him credibility? But he couldn’t tell Félix his problems, at least until he in turn had signed. He’d avoid Marie-Dominique, sure she would do the same, unable to face her disdain or his feelings for her. At a phone cabin, he inserted a calling card with ten francs left on it. Félix’s answering machine responded.

“Félix, something’s come up. I’m sorry but please meet me at the theatre with the contract” was the message he left.

Lucien hurried into the dusk, avoiding the green street sweepers’ spray on the cobbles.