Half-Blood Blues (33 page)

The pigeons was swarming the long grass, pecking like mad.

Delilah opened to a clipped page and there was our papers. She stared at them like she didn’t believe what all she seeing. Slowly, her hands trembling, she begun thumbing through them.
Delilah Natasha Fummerton Brown. Charles Chippewah Jones. Sidney Roscoe Griffiths.
All typed and retyped in standard red ink. Our passports was fixed to each packet of papers. ‘Jesus,’ Delilah murmured. ‘Oh my god.’

‘Falk’s is not in there,’ the schoolteacher said flatly.

I give her a quick look. There was voices on the path, then two janes bicycled past in the sunlight. They ain’t glanced our way.

‘Where’s Hiero’s?’ I said.

She sighed, the edges of her mouth turning down. ‘His is a little more complicated, I am afraid.’

‘How much more complicated?’

She reached over, and closing the magazine, rolled it tight before arranging Delilah’s hands back over it. ‘Keep those safe,’ she said. ‘Complicated. It will take a bit longer. He needs an identity as well as visas. And passports are harder to come by. We have been working with some people on this though. It will happen.’

‘
Make
it happen,’ I said. ‘It
got
to happen.’

‘It will.’ She turned those unsettling, unfocused eyes direct on me. I wasn’t sure where to look. ‘Keep him safe until we bring them to you. You are nervous. You should not be, we will find you.’

‘I guess we just got to trust you a little longer,’ I said, feeling a old bitterness in me.

‘Yes. You do.’

‘And we
do
,’ Delilah said quickly. ‘We do, Simone. We’re just nervous.’

‘You must wait five minutes after I have left. Leave by the east entrance.’ The schoolteacher stood without another word, smoothed her long wool skirt, and turned her spectacled face to the sun. ‘Good day.’ Very casually, without looking at us, she walked away.

Delilah leaned over, give my shoulder a squeeze.

‘It’s starting,’ she whispered. ‘Sid? It’s really going to happen.’

But a strange sensation seemed to hover over everything in that garden. A sad feeling, maybe. I watched the sun-streaked heads of the young janes, strolling in their summer dresses through the heat. I stared across at the wrought iron tables on the patio, at the elderly jacks laughing there in Sunday shirtsleeves. It all seemed so slow, sad at that languid hour. Bitterness passed over me like a shadow of days half remembered. Hell. All of this, I known, was fated to ruin.

We come back up our street to catch old Chip leaning in a doorway across the way. Like he just getting some damn air.

‘What you doin, brother?’ I called.

He stood up straight, knocked the dust off his trousers, come over toward us. ‘Any luck? You get them?’

I slapped my jacket pocket. ‘Hand in glove, buck. Hand in glove.’

‘Well, well.’

‘Not Hiero’s though,’ said Delilah soft-like. She looked up at her windows and I followed her gaze up. The kid was standing, a dark figure, behind the far pane, his eyes on us. I shivered a little. I ain’t even felt him looking at us.

‘What’s he doing up there?’ said Delilah.

‘Ernst’s Horch been stolen,’ said Chip.

I couldn’t damn believe it. I turned round, glanced up the street. ‘But there ain’t even any damn gas. What the hell. They goin
push
it to Bordeaux?’

Delilah frowned, shaking her head. ‘We’ve got to get out of here, I mean it. In a week Paris will be a wasteland.’

‘Tell it to the kid,’ said Chip. ‘He the one holdin us up.’

‘It’s not his fault.’

‘No. But it his doin.’

She give him a dark look, crossed the street, gone inside. I stared up at the flat, but I couldn’t see the kid no more. Cupping a hand over my eyes, I looked round the street. Wasn’t no automobiles in sight, not a one. The buildings loomed hugely, deserted, dark.

‘You get the feelin folks know somethin you just don’t?’ I said.

Chip shrugged. ‘I guess so.’

We could see smoke pouring up over the city to the south.

‘Someone’s burnin somethin,’ Chip muttered.

Next morning Chip got it into his head to report Ernst’s old Horch. Wasn’t no damn way to dissuade him. But we no sooner step inside the government offices than I known something was wrong, our footsteps echoing over the polished marble. The halls was silent, the chandelier sparkling darkly above that mahogany reception desk. We gone past the big elevators, made our slow way up to the third floor. There was papers stacked in the halls, filing cabinets standing open in the offices. Not one damn official in sight.

‘Hello?’ I called.

‘Holy hell, buck,’ Chip muttered. ‘Somethin goin on.’

‘It already
gone
on, brother.’ I swallowed hard. We ankled on through the gloomy halls, glancing into offices, all of it looking ransacked, overturned, abandoned. At last we found a clerk in a small outer boardroom, standing before a untidy table. With the care of a gent testing silk, he was holding a sheath of paper in his hand. Chip stiffened in the doorway, knocked twice.

‘We lookin to report a stolen car,’ he said.

That damn jack just frowned, jerking his pencil toward the clock on the far wall. In rushed English, he snapped, ‘I will come on work in ten minutes. You will wait over there.’ He glared pointedly at a row of chairs.

‘Hell.’ Chip scowled. ‘Their whole damn civilization comin to a end, and this jack still mindin his damn
clock
?’

The clerk look up then, give Chip a long, appraising frown. ‘You are American, yes? Why your country don’t send us planes?’

I just shook my head. Everything done gone to hell, and here this jack ain’t got nothing to do but nag some Yanks. I dragged Chip away by his sleeve.

When we got back to the flat, it was empty. I banged through the rooms, hollering for the kid. No one hollered back, and I found a note from Delilah on the sideboard, next to a envelope holding our papers:
The Germans are coming. The government left Paris last night. We are going to the gare d’Austerlitz to secure passage on a train. Meet us there when you get this. Don’t delay.

‘She took her damn visas,’ I said.

‘She left us ours. That got to be tellin you somethin.’

‘What?’

Chip give me a look like I was all kinds of stupid. ‘What you mean, what? That she wants us to get out. Whether we find her or not.’

‘Kid still don’t got a visa.’

‘I know,’ Chip said grimly.

You could hear the low stream of voices from blocks away. But even that ain’t prepared us for the sight of the gare d’Austerlitz. The chaos was stunning. A horde of terrified folk writhing in a wild crush of bodies, scrambling over each other and hauling trunks, cases and crates as janes fainted, kids screamed. All of it washing up hard against the spiked iron gates of the station. The stink of that wretched crowd like to knock a man down. And always the wave of shouts, screams, cries, the high shrieking of kids agonized by the savage heat. When I lifted my eyes, I seen the clouds roiling overhead in long plumes of yellow smoke, like the air done turn to poison up there. A jaundiced light filtered down over everything. I felt my heart lurch in my chest.

‘Aw, hell,’ I said.

Chip give me a sharp punch. ‘What is it, brother? You ain’t never been to a Orioles game? It just a crowd.’

‘A crowd with
teeth
. We ain’t never goin find Delilah in all that.’

‘Folk got a way of findin each other. You see. Now stay close.’

He plunged right in. We was jounced and shoved and dragged apart, and then Chip was grabbing my damn shirt front and popping the buttons as he hauled me close. The heat streamed over us in sharp waves of foul air, and I breathed deeply, trying to catch even the smallest piece of oxygen in all those fumes. Sweat run down my temples. Chip dragged me forward.

All a sudden a man was shouting in my damn ear. ‘Senegal, from Senegal,’ he hollered. He grab old Chip by the back of the neck, shouted some damn thing in Frog. Chip like to rip the old bastard’s arm from its socket. I seen a hard fist hit the jack’s kidney, and then he was crumpling.

‘Get the fuck off,’ Chip shouted in English. ‘Goddamn son of a bastard. Get
off
.’

In the madness we was jostled and shoved and pulled away from him. I seen the blood on Chip’s collar where the old git torn his shirt.

‘You alright?’ I shouted.

‘What?’

‘You alright?’

He just shrugged, like he still ain’t heard, and pushed farther in.

We ain’t seen no sign of Lilah or Hiero. None. There was
thousands
in that crowd, and we wasn’t nowhere near the big iron gates. We come to a halt, unable to jostle no deeper in. We stood there in the brutal heat, sweat glistening on our necks and arms, not looking at each other. I was blinking my stinging eyes when I felt a hand on my shoulder, and turned.

I don’t know, I guess I was hoping maybe it be Delilah. But it was a young woman, holding a child high up over her head. She shouted something at me in Frog.

‘English?’ I called at her. ‘You speak English?’

‘
Le bébé
,’ she said, ‘
passez-lui aux portes
.’

‘What?’

A tall man in a blue shirt was looking at us. He shouted in Frog.

‘
Le bébé
,’ she said again. ‘
Ils les laissent passer à la salle d’attente. C’est trop dangereux pour eux ici
.’ And she ain’t even waited for me to understand, just dumped this soft wet thing in my arms and gestured over my head to the next jack. It start to squalling. I handed it along.

‘Hell,’ Chip shouted after a minute. ‘We ain’t gettin nowhere in this.’

He started dragging me again through it all, rolling past all them damp shoulders. I stumbled on something soft underfoot. Glancing down, my stomach wrenched at the sight of a woman just lying there, trying to protect her face with mud-caked hands. Before I could reach down for her, some other jack hauled her up and we was shoved onward. A sea of panting faces, women in shawls clutching bundles in raw hands, men with suitcases grasped hard against their chests. The heat was strong and moist, and with every step a new smell rolled over me like a strong current. A stink of onions, boiled eggplant, something riper and fouler than pungent leather. And hovering over everything, the sharp, acidic reek of piss.

We finally climbed out of it. Shaking Chip off, I leaned over in a doorway and begun retching. It was disgusting, all that fear.

‘Come on, brother.’ Chip was breathing hard. ‘We got to find another way. Ain’t goin be nothin when the Krauts arrive.’

Once we got away from the station, the sudden silence was near overwhelming. Wasn’t another soul in the street. We started making our way toward boulevard Saint-Michel, where all the damn refugees from the north been streaming through these past weeks. We known we get south of the city that way. We heard the crowds before we seen them. An incredible roar, as thousands of damn Parisians pushed on southward. Crowds thick as a river, dragging boxes, wheel-barrows, bicycles piled high with suitcases. Cars clogged the roads, going slow, mattresses tied to their roofs like to stop bullets from Stukas.

You couldn’t hear none of the cannonfire now, only people. The crowd poured out through the city gates, streaming up round automobiles run out of gas, round trucks with punctured tires, a singe of rubber on the air. Car doors stood open, their backseats loaded down with broken wall clocks, soup spoons, boxes of salted herring. There was a overturned cart, its axle snapped, a dead horse already stinking in the heat. In folks’ faces you read this quiet terror, a fierce, single-minded desperation as they trudged onward.

Chip and me, we stumbled into that storm. We ain’t brought nothing, no water, no food, and I already seen the foolishness of it. My skull throbbed. Chip squinched up his eyes, grimacing. I felt this grand helplessness go through me. A old jane passed by us, her back crooked as a hat hook, wheeling her crippled old husband in a cart. I just looked away.

Chip seized my sleeve, gestured across the boulevard. A old man ran his damn wheelbarrow hard up against my thigh, shoved on past.

‘That the kid?’ shouted Chip.

‘Where?’

‘There. Under that damn tree. On the grass. There.’

I looked and looked. ‘No,’ I shouted, ‘that ain’t him. Now come on.’

But Chip started pushing through that mass of folk.

‘Chip,’ I called. ‘Hell. Chip!’

He ain’t stopped.

Cussing, I waded on after him.

But, hell, it
was
the kid. He was sitting with his head slouched down between his knees, his hands clasped loose before him. Delilah was crouched in front of him, her back to the crowd. His clothes hung slack, like he just stolen them from some damn laundry line, and sitting there in that pool of fabric he looked totally shrunken. There was other folk, families, destitute men, sitting up under that tree. The yellow light shone on Delilah’s cheekbones. Her face look sharp, angular, grim.

‘Hi, girl,’ said Chip. ‘How the view from here?’

‘You got my note,’ she said tiredly.

Chip scrunched up his small eyes. ‘Yeah. And Sid here was especially damn glad to get one this time.’ His oyster lips widened.

I just looked away. It was too damn hot, just awful. ‘You give up on the station too I guess.’ It wasn’t a question.

Delilah run a hand along Hiero’s smooth neck.

‘Kid’s sick?’ said Chip. He crouched on his haunches.

But when Hiero lifted his head we seen the blood. Someone had smashed his damn nose in, split his lip.

‘Son of a bitch,’ Chip muttered. ‘Let me see that.’

‘He’s fine,’ Delilah said sharply. ‘I cleaned it already. As best I could.’

I just stared at him, at his head lolling on his shoulders there, like he been into the damn rot all day.

Chip got a strange look on his face. ‘What happen? Someone take him for a African?’

Delilah nodded. ‘A Senegalese soldier. Thought he was abandoning the city.’

I kept staring out at that mass of fear, at all them damn folk shuffling on with their crazy belongings. Thinking,
A Stuka come, you ain’t got a chance. You all just be mowed down like grass. Like a comb pickin out lice.