Paris City of Night by David Downie

Author:David Downie [Downie, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-0302-4
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2013-10-03T00:50:00+00:00

Haldemann, Erlichman, Mitchell and Dean, put them together, what does it mean … Haldemann, Erlichman, Mitchell and …

The anti-Nixon chant tormented Jay for years. He’d heard it time and again in the early 1970s, during the Watergate investigation, when he thought he’d never again be able to bridge what people called the Generation Gap and talk to his father. William had called him a Commie and Jay had called him a Fascist, an agent of repression.

The political chant had become a riff in a jazz standard Jay hummed in his senior year at Bensonhurst. Compared to What? It was an act of unconscious subversion. He’d heard the song that spring day in 1974 when an impeachment march had passed under his father’s windows in Manhattan. The marchers waved banners showing Tricky Dick Nixon, his nose erect. They shouted Haldemann, Erlichman, Mitchell and Dean, put them together, what does it mean?

What did it mean? He remembered now that William Grant was drunker than usual that day and shouted down from the ninth floor at the anti-Vietnam, anti-Nixon protesters. You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, William had roared. You can’t even dream what the real world would be like if we hadn’t gone in.

He’d leaned out of the window and thrown a beer bottle and gone on a rampage through the apartment while Jay, his visiting teenage son, sat motionless in a corner. William had shouted names, names from the past, his dead wife’s name, and others Jay struggled now to remember. They were German names, Arabic-sounding names and French names. Georges, she loved Georges, not me … for all I know you’re not even my son.

Not even your son?

The police had come around. The embarrassed officers had advised William Grant the CIA operative that it was illegal to throw beer bottles from a ninth-floor window. “Sir,” one of the policemen had said, “you might hurt someone.”

“You don’t get it sonny boy. I want to hurt someone. You know what they’re calling you? Pigs. Pigs!”

When the officers had seen the distinguished service awards from Langley, Virginia, scattered and splintered on the living room floor they’d let William off with a reprimand, ruffling Jay’s long hair in a pathetic gesture of what? Solidarity?

Jay sat silent now in the Peugeot’s bucket seat. Amy drove slowly, methodically across town toward Terminus Nord. But he didn’t hear her conversation or the sound of traffic. The chant resonated in his head, reformulated with a contemporary French lilt. Gonflay, Georges, Yves and me, put it together what can it mean …What can it mean?

The other names ruined the rhythm, Jay decided. He’d never been strong on scansion or meter. The other names were Madeleine, d’Arnac, Lamartine, Les Anges, Opus Angeli, Jean-Paul, Manuela Santiago, Charles, Marie-Anne, Debra … Put the names together, he spurred himself. Put them together because if you don’t very soon someone else will. Someone who’s out to get you.

But his mind rebelled. The irrational drumming of the Nixon-era chant returned. “I don’t know what it means,” he shouted.

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