Shadow of a Tiger

5

Eugene Marais had lived in Brooklyn, out in Sheepshead Bay.

New York is a city of “villages,” a series of neighborhoods each with its local life and natives. In these villages there are some who are important to the natives, but who are never really natives themselves-the white shopkeepers of Harlem who live in Queens; the black police captains who rule Bedford-Stuyvesant, but live in New Rochelle. Eugene Marais had been a fixture in Chelsea, but he had lived in Sheepshead Bay.

I took the subway. It was a trip into the past. When I was a boy in Chelsea, Sheepshead Bay was where we had gone fishing. An outing, an adventure; the clean air and the sea. Before I lost my arm and wandered far from Chelsea. Still, I remembered, and the smells of fish and sea came to greet me when I left the subway in the hot sun. But the Bay wasn’t the same anymore.

When I was a boy it had been a fishing village-wooden piers, shops and restaurants on pilings over the water, Italian trawlers tied up drying their nets, hordes of gulls wheeling over the fish refuse dropped into the Bay. Now it was just another part of the city, the Belt Parkway knifing through it. Mayor LaGuardia had started the change; banning the trawlers, making the piers concrete, closing the shops over the water, cleaning it all up. A loss, a tragedy, yet the mayor could do nothing else. The city had been growing too fast. A small population can live casually with nature, its pollution swallowed up. A large one can’t. Too many people must regulate how they live with nature, or destroy nature and themselves. So a fishing village was lost.

But not quite. I found Eugene Marais’s house in a quiet old section not far from the water. Narrow old frame houses with porches and high attic windows. Trees and grape arbors. Out of time-as Eugene Marais himself had been, in a way. I went through the small yard of lawn and hydrangea bushes to the front door. Viviane Marais let me in herself.

She was a small, dark woman of fifty, with an energetic walk as she led me into an old-fashioned living room of delicate furniture, china bric-a-brac, and lace-very French. There was nothing old-fashioned about Viviane Marais. She wore a chic black sheath on a full yet firm figure that could handle it. She wore no jewelry, her fine features and erect carriage needing no adornment. Her eyes were dark and quick as she gave me a chair.

“Eugene spoke of you, Mr. Fortune. He liked you. Now I think I want to hire you.”

“I liked him,” I said.

She didn’t sit. She lit a cigarette, French and masculine.

“Do you believe it was robbery, Mr. Fortune?”

“I’m not sure. Yes and no.”

“I am sure, and it is no.”

Small and determined, she began to pace with a dynamism Eugene Marais had lacked. A quiet, slowish man, and a fiery, energetic wife. Complementary? A good marriage?

“First,” she said, smoked, “I think something had disturbed Eugene lately. I am not sure, he was not a man to trouble me with his worries, but I feel it now. Second, Eugene would not have resisted a thief. Money was not so important to him.”

“He was hit from behind,” I said.

She ignored that. “Too little was stolen, almost nothing of real value. Some cheap rings, some watches, useless objects. I have the police list.”

She gave me the list. I read it. She was right-nothing but a seemingly random grab bag of cheap items, bric-a-brac.

She paced. “In a way, the shop was a charity. Eugene’s idea of how to help small people. He said a pawn shop could help those no one else would-the drunkards, phonies, gamblers; the desperate and the forgotten.”

She looked at me. “We have family money. The shop had to make us only a small income. Our needs were few: this house, food, an occasional night out. We have only Danielle.”

She thought. “Eugene wanted no more children in this world. He said we could help those who were here, not bring more to suffer. He had little faith in values. From the past.”

“What about the past?” I said. “A killer? A motive?”

“I can think of nothing,” she said, paced. “Eugene never acted to hurt anyone. He never fought, had no politics. He did nothing much in this world, Mr. Fortune. A quiet man.”

“A man who has done nothing to anyone,” I said. “Eugene said that to me the night he was killed. Claude said something like it-no enemies, no comrades. Now you say just about the same. Coincidence, Mrs. Marais?”

For a time she was silent. Then she sat down facing me. She lit another cigarette. “Perhaps not. The words seem to be in my mind. I was thinking why that would be. It was Eugene, something he said. A small remark. While reading his newspaper one night, I think, perhaps a week ago. I took little notice, a husband and wife of thirty years, you know? But now?”

“What did he say?”

“That a man can spend his life doing nothing and harming no one, neither monster nor hero, and still there will be reasons for some to want him gone, nonexistent.” She nodded to herself. “Yes, so the thought is in my mind. Perhaps he said much the same to Claude. In all our minds.”

“You don’t know what he might have meant?”

“No.”

“Nothing special happened recently? Anything unusual?”

“Not that I know.” She blew smoke in the room. “We lived a routine life, Mr. Fortune. Here at home. We read, walk, talk, make love. A quiet life, very good. Our only outside life is my church work and Eugene’s Balzac Union-a French cultural club in New York he attended quite often at lunch, sometimes in the evening. Perhaps we lived so because we began in such chaos. The war, the Occupation, the Liberation. We were married in 1942 under German guns, German sneers, their arrogant eyes and boots everywhere. Eugene’s older brother died in the war, my brother vanished in the Occupation, a gendarme cousin was killed by the Maquis, my parents died under your bombs in the Liberation. Chaos and destruction. Is it a wonder we wanted only private quiet?”

I said, “Eugene hadn’t seen his brother in a long time, had he? When did Claude come to New York?”

“A few months ago. You can’t think that Claude-!”

“What do you know about him? His life since Algeria? He’s a closed-up, detached man. He says he worked in remote places where he needed a gun. He’s got some peculiar friends. I heard Eugene say he was a drifter, a bad influence.”

“On Danielle, we thought. But I doubt that anyone can be a worse influence on Danielle than her present friends,” Viviane Marais said. “I am not sure exactly what Claude has done since he left the French army. A mercenary soldier, a pilot, a trader and guard for other traders. What else does he know to do? He was a bitter boy against we who lost to the Germans. He had to defend the honor and glory of France. Eugene had not a high opinion of the honor and glory of France, or of any nation or people. They argued in the old days, saw little of each other over the years. A few months ago Claude appeared here with his wife, moved into that hotel, has done very little since.”

“Waiting?” I said. “For someone or something?”

“I do not know. Eugene talked little about Claude.”

“All right,” I said. “You said Danielle was under a bad influence already. You mean Charlie Burgos?”

“You know about that young animal? What does she see in that one? What will he ever be? So arrogant, and so empty!”

“You and Eugene opposed her seeing Charlie Burgos?”

She threw up her hands. “We hated him, but what can a parent do? To forbid her would be a red flag, yes? We said what we thought, but we did not stop her. She will have to learn.”

“Could Charlie Burgos have tried to rob the shop?”

“I would believe it, but I think not. He would have known Eugene was there. He would have picked a better time, I think.”

“How would Charlie have known Eugene was at the shop?”

“Danielle knew Eugene was staying late.”

I nodded. I didn’t think Charlie Burgos would have tried.

“What do you know about Jimmy Sung?”

“A sad, lonely man who drinks. But Eugene said he worked very hard, very well.”

“Did Eugene play chess with Jimmy Sung?”

“Often. It pleased Eugene very much that Jimmy could play chess. He said Jimmy was good, had learned in some hospital.”

“Did he mention playing with Jimmy that night?”

“No. He said nothing about Jimmy.”

I shook my head now. “I don’t really like the robbery idea, Mrs. Marais, but what else is there? The police have to have at least a hint of some other possible motive.”

“Is the fact that Eugene was at the shop that night to meet someone enough hint, Mr. Fortune?”

“Meet? Who?”

“He did not say who, only that he would be home late because he had to meet someone. He called about six to tell me, and called me again at eleven to say the person had not come. He would wait another hour. That was the last time we spoke.”

She sat silent, hearing her husband’s last call again.

“Claude?” I said.

“Perhaps. He had seen Claude, expected Claude to return. But I had the impression it was someone else he waited for.”

“I met a man at the shop,” I said, and described the tall, military type I had bumped into at the shop. “His name could be Paul Manet. Eugene mentioned that name.”

“Manet? There was a Paul Manet years ago in Paris, a hero in the Resistance. Eugene knew the family. I did not. If he is in New York, Eugene did not mention it.”

“Was Eugene in the Resistance?”

“No, nor did he collaborate. We were small people, we went on living as best we could, as did most.”

“How about a Gerd Exner?” I described the scarred German “associate” of Claude Marais.

“I do not know him.”

I thought it out. “One more thing. Did Danielle know you were calling me last night, planned to hire me?”

“Yes. She did not approve.”

It explained the attack on me in the alley. Charlie Burgos didn’t approve of Viviane Marais hiring me, either. Charlie wanted me safely out of action in some hospital.

“Death did not frighten Eugene,” Viviane Marais said after a moment. “He said he desired to live long only for me, for us. I do not hate that he is dead, it must happen to all, but I do not believe this robbery. I do not want him to be dead for nothing. Some reason, Mr. Fortune, real or imagined. Not the mindless fiat of a mindless world.”

I heard the echo of Marty. Chance was not enough. There must be shape, reason, some conscious direction to life.

“I want you to find that reason,” Viviane Marais said. “I have here a hundred dollars. You will bill me for more.”

She was a middle-class French housewife, and no one is more practical. I took the money, asked the address of the Balzac Union, and left.

I had a job, and I was beginning to want to know more about the death of Eugene Marais myself. The chaser of theories and puzzles. Maybe Marty was right about me.