Paris Noir [Anthology] Read online

  Coming into the club late one evening, I saw him in the company of an American drummer we’d met a few nights before and a couple of broad-shouldered French types, wearing those belted trench coats which made them look like cops or gangsters or maybe both. As soon as he spotted me, Val made a quick show of shaking hands and turning away, but not before I saw a small package pass from hand to hand and into the inside pocket of his suit.

  ‘Don’t look so disapproving,’ he said, when I walked over. ‘Just a few pills to keep me awake.’

  ‘And that’s all?’

  ‘Of course.’ He had a lovely, disarming smile.

  ‘No smack?’

  ‘No smack.’

  I could have asked him to show me his arms, but I chose to believe him instead. It would have made little difference if I had; by then I think he was injecting himself in the leg.

  The next day Val was up before eleven, dressed and ready, stirring me from sleep.

  ‘What’s happening?’ I asked. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing. Just a shame to waste a beautiful day.’

  The winter sun reflected from the stonework of the bridge as we walked across to the Ile St-Louis arm in arm. Val had taken to affecting a beret, which he wore slanting extravagantly to one side. On the cobbles close to where we sat, drinking coffee, sparrows splashed in the shallow puddles left by last night’s rain.

  ‘Why did you do it?’ Val asked me.

  ‘Do it?’

  ‘This. All of this. Throwing up your job—’

  ‘It wasn’t a real job.’

  ‘It was work.’

  ‘It was temping in a lousy office for a lousy boss.’

  ‘And this is better?’

  ‘Of course this is better.’

  ‘I still don’t understand why?’

  ‘Why come here with you?’

  Val nodded.

  ‘Because he asked me.’

  ‘Patrick.’

  ‘Yes, Patrick.’

  ‘You do everything he asks you?’

  I shook my head. ‘No. No, I don’t.’

  ‘You will,’ he said. ‘You will.’ I couldn’t see his eyes; I didn’t want to see his eyes.

  A foursome of tourists, Scandinavian I think, possibly German, came and sat noisily at a table nearby. When the waiter walked past, Val asked for a cognac, which he poured into what was left of his coffee and downed at a single gulp.

  ‘What I meant,’ he said, ‘would you have come if it had been anyone else but me?’

  ‘I know what you meant,’ I said. ‘And, no. No, I don’t think I would.’

  ‘Jimmy, perhaps?’

  ‘Yes,’ I acknowledged. ‘Perhaps Jimmy. Maybe.’

  Seeing Val’s rueful smile, I reached across and took hold of his hand, but when, a few moments later, he gently squeezed my fingers, I took my hand away.

  Patrick was waiting for us at the hotel when we returned.

  ‘Well,’ he said, rising from the lobby’s solitary chair. ‘The lovebirds at last.’

  ‘Bollocks,’ Val said, but with a grin.

  Patrick kissed the side of my mouth and I could smell tobacco and Scotch and expensive aftershave; he put his arms round Val and gave him a quick hug.

  ‘Been out for lunch?’

  ‘Breakfast,’ Val said.

  ‘Fine. Then let’s have lunch.’

  Over our protests he led us to a small restaurant in the Latin Quarter, where he ordered in a combination of enthusiastic gestures and sixth-form French.

  ‘I went along to the club earlier,’ Patrick said, once the waiter had set a basket of bread on the table and poured our wine. ‘Sounds as if it’s going well. They want to hold you over for three weeks more. Assuming you’re agreeable?’

  Val nodded. ‘Sure.’

  ‘Anna?’

  ‘I can’t stay that long,’ I said.

  ‘Why ever not?’ Patrick looked surprised, aggrieved.

  ‘I’ve got a life to live.’

  ‘You’ve got a bedsit in Kilburn and precious little else.’

  Blood rushed to my cheeks. ‘All the more reason, then, for not wasting my time here.’

  Patrick laughed. ‘You hear that, Val? Wasting her time.’

  ‘Let her be,’ Val said, forcefully.

  Patrick laughed again. ‘Found yourself a champion,’ he said, looking at me.

  Val’s knife struck the edge of his plate. ‘For fuck’s sake! When are you going to stop organising our lives?’

  Patrick took his time in answering. ‘When I think you can do it for yourselves.’

  In his first set that evening, Val was a little below pat, nothing most of the audience seemed to notice or be bothered by, but there was less drive than usual to his playing and several of his solos seemed to peter out aimlessly before handing over to the piano. I could sense the tension building in Patrick beside me, and after the third number he steered me outside; there was a faint rain misting. ‘He’s using again,’ Patrick said. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Anna, come on—’

  ‘I asked him.’

  ‘You asked him and he said no?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Scout’s honour, cross my heart and hope to die. That kind of no?’

  I pulled away from him. ‘Don’t do that.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Treat me as though I’m some child.’

  ‘Then open your eyes.’

  ‘They are open.’

  Patrick sighed and I saw the grey of his breath dissipating into the night air.

  ‘I’m not his jailer, Patrick,’ I said. ‘I’m not his wife, his lover. I can’t watch him twenty-four hours of the day.’

  ‘I know.’

  He kissed me on the forehead, the sort of kiss you might give to a young girl, his lips cold and quick. A long, low boat passed slowly beneath the bridge.

  ‘I’m opening a club,’ he said. ‘Soho. Broadwick Street.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Some friends I know, they’re putting up the money. I thought if Val were interested it would be somewhere for him to play.’

  ‘What about the police? Isn’t that a risk still?’

  Patrick smiled. ‘Don’t worry about that. It’s all squared away.’

  How many times would I hear him say that over the years? All squared away. How much cash was shelled out, usually in small denominations, unmarked notes slipped into side pockets or left in grubby holdalls in the left luggage lockers of suburban railway stations? I never knew the half of it, the paybacks and backhanders and all the false accounting, not even during those years later when we lived together - another story, waiting, one day, to be told.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, taking my arm. ‘We’ll miss the second set.’

  When we got back to the club, Val and the American drummer were in animated conversation at the far end of the bar. Seeing us approach, the drummer ducked his head towards Val, spoke quickly and stepped away. ‘It’s not me you have to worry about, you fucker, remember that.’ And then he was pushing his way through the crowd.

  ‘What was all that about?’ Patrick asked.

  Val shrugged. ‘Nothing. Why?’

  ‘He seemed pretty angry.’

  ‘It doesn’t mean anything. That’s just the way he is.’

  ‘How much do you owe?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That bastard, how much do you owe?’

  ‘Look—’

  ‘No, you look.’ Patrick had hold of him by the lapels of his coat. ‘I know him. He was busted in London last year, thrown out of Italy before that, jailed in Berlin. He’s a user and a dealer, the worst kind of pimp there is.’

  ‘He’s OK—’

  Patrick pushed Val back against the bar. ‘He’s not fucking OK. You hear me. Keep away from him. Unless you want to end up the same way.’

  On the small stage, the pianist was sounding a few chords, trying out a few r
uns. ‘I’ve got to go,’ Val said, and Patrick released his grip.

  All of Val’s anger came out on stage, channelled first through a blistering ‘Cherokee’, then a biting up-tempo blues that seemed as if it might never end.

  Patrick left Paris the next day, but not before he’d set up a recording date for Val and the trio at the Pathé-Magellan studio. The producer’s idea was to cut an album of standards, none of the takes too long and with Val sticking close to the melody, so that, with any luck, some might be issued as singles for the many jukeboxes around. Val always claimed to be less than happy with the results, feeling restricted by the set-up and the selection of tunes. Easy listening, I suppose it might be called nowadays, dinner jazz, but it’s always been one of my favourites, even now.

  It was when we were leaving the studio after the last session that the pianist invited us to go along later with him and his girlfriend to hear Lester Young. Val was evasive. Maybe oui, maybe non. The one night off from Le Chat, he might just crash, catch up on some sleep.

  ‘I thought he was one of your favourites,’ I said, as we were heading for the Métro. ‘How come you didn’t want to go?’

  Val gave a quick shake of the head. ‘I hear he’s not playing too well.’

  Young, I found out later, had already been in Paris for several weeks, playing at the Blue Note on the rue d’Artois and living at the Hotel La Louisiane. A room on the second floor he rarely if ever left except to go to work.

  Val had brought a few records with him from England, one of them an LP with a tattered cover and a scratch across one side: Lester Young, some fifteen years earlier, in his prime.

  Val sat cross-legged on his bed, listening to the same tracks again and again. I poured what remained of a bottle of wine and took my glass across to a chair opposite the door; traffic noise rose and faded through the partly opened shutters, the occasional voice raised in anger or surprise; the sound of the saxophone lithe and muscular in the room.

  When the stylus reached the run-off groove for the umpteenth time, Val reached over and set his glass on the floor. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s take a chance.’

  As we entered the club and walked past the long bar towards the stage, a tune I failed to recognise came to an end and Young, caught in the spotlight, stared out, startled, as the applause riffled out above the continuing conversation. Up close, he looked gaunt and ill, dark suit hanging ragged from his shrunken frame, pain all too visible behind his eyes.

  I took hold of Val’s hand and squeezed it hard.

  The drummer kicked off the next number at a brisk clip, playing quick patterns on the hi-hat cymbals with his sticks before moving to the snare, a signal for Young, saxophone tilted at an angle away from his body, to begin. Within the first bars, he had dragged the tempo down, slurring his notes across the tune, the same stumbling phrases repeated and then left hanging as he stepped back and caught his breath, the spaces between his playing wider and wider until finally he turned away and stood, head bowed, leaving the guitarist to take over.

  ‘I Can’t Get Started’ was played at a funereal pace, the sound coarse and almost ugly: ‘Tea for Two’, one of the tunes Val had been listening to back in the hotel, started promisingly before teetering alarmingly off course; only a measured ‘There Will Never Be Another You’ rose from its foggy, thick-breathed beginning to become something that had moments of beauty between the self-doubt and misfingerings.

  ‘If I ever get into that state, poor bastard,’ Val said, once we were back outside, ‘promise you’ll take me out and shoot me.’

  Yet in the succeeding weeks he went back again, not once but several times, fascinated despite himself, watching one of his idols unravel before his eyes. Then there was the time he went along and Young was no longer there; he’d cancelled his engagement suddenly and returned to the States. Two weeks later he was dead.

  The evening he heard the news Val played ‘There Will Never Be Another You’, just the one chorus, unaccompanied, at the beginning of each set. The next day I walked into his room in the middle of the afternoon, and saw him sitting, half-naked on the bed, needle in hand, searching for a vein.

  ‘Oh, Christ, Val,’ I said.

  He looked at me with tears in his eyes then slapped the inside of his thigh again.

  I slammed the door shut, grabbed my coat and purse and ran out on to the streets. For hours I just walked, ending up who knows where. At a corner bar I drank two brandies in quick succession followed by a crème de menthe and was promptly sick. I wanted to go back to the hotel, pack my bag and leave. What the hell was I doing there? What game? What stupid dream? There was vomit on the hem of my dress and on my shoes.

  When finally I got to the club it was late and Val was nowhere to be seen, just his saxophone, mouthpiece covered, on its stand. In answer to my unspoken question, the pianist just shrugged and, still playing, gestured with his head towards the street.

  I heard Val’s shouts, muffled, coming from the alley that ran from close alongside the club down towards the quai Saint-Michel. Val lay curled in on himself, arms cradling his head, while two men took it in turns to kick him in the back, the chest, the legs, anywhere they could, a third looking on.

  The sound of police sirens was too indistinct, too far away.

  When someone helped me to my feet and I walked, unsteadily, to where Val still lay, unmoving, I thought that they had killed him. I thought he was dead.

  For three days I sat by his bed in the hospital and held his hand. At night, I slept in the corridor outside, legs drawn up, on a chair. One of several broken ribs had come close to puncturing a lung. A week later I held his hand again as we walked in the hospital garden, with its bare earth and the stems of roses that had been cut back against the frost.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ I asked him.

  ‘Fine,’ he said, wincing as he smiled. ‘I feel fine.’

  After that there were always dull headaches that prevented him from sleeping and sudden surges of pain, sharp as a needle slipped beneath the skull. Despite the months and years of osteopathy, his back never sat right again, nagging at him each time he played.

  * * * *

  Valentine Collins, jazz musician. Born, 18 September, 1937. Died, 13 April, 1976. Thirty years ago. No need any longer to take the ferry to Calais and then the long, slow journey by train, and not caring to fly, I treated myself to Eurostar, first class. A slightly better than aeroplane meal and free champagne. The centre of Paris in less than three hours. Autumn. The bluest of blue skies but cold enough for scarf and gloves. I feel the cold.

  The Métro from Gare du Nord to Saint-Michel is crowded with so many races, so many colours, Val’s face would not have stood out at all. Not one of us, Patrick had said, and it was true, though not in the way he meant.

  The rue de la Huchette is now a rat-run of kebab houses and creperies and bars, so crowded, here and there I have to walk along the centre of the narrow street.

  Le Chat Qui Pêche is now a restaurant and the sign has been taken down. For a while I think I might go inside and have a meal, reminisce a little with the waiter, if he has a little English to complement my meagre French. But it is enough to stand here at the pavement’s edge with people spilling round me, wondering, some of them, perhaps, what this old woman is doing, just standing there, staring at nothing in particular, none of them hearing what I hear, the sound of Val’s alto saxophone, a ballad, astringent, keening, ‘Every Time We Say Goodbye’.

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  * * * *

  BAR FIGHT

  JASON STARR

  I

  f Omar wasn’t drinking way too much it probably wouldn’t have happened. But that night he’d been drinking Gwenroc for over three hours straight at a bar on rue Oberkampf, and when the skinny man bumped into him, spilling some of his drink on his shoulder, he turned and snapped, ‘Hey, watch where you’re going.’

  The man looked around, like he thought Omar must have been talking to somebody else. But it was after mid
night on a Tuesday and there were only a few other people in the bar.

  ‘Excuse me?’ the man said.

  ‘You spilled your drink on me,’ Omar said, wiping the liquid off his jacket. ‘You should watch what you’re doing, be more careful.’

  The man’s blue eyes narrowed into slits. ‘Drink? You mean this?’ he said, and poured the rest of the drink onto Omar’s head.