The Death of a Century by Daniel Robinson

Author:Daniel Robinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2015-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

VIII

Here, during two strenuous years, has taken place some of the fiercest fighting of the great war. Here, too, are some of the finest vineyards of the world; for this was in Roman days the Campania which later gave its name to the province of Champagne.

—Frederick Dean, Muncey’s Magazine, September 1916, “Champagne and the Great War,”

SOMETIME BETWEEN MIDNIGHT AND MORNING, JOE LEFT THE Gentilhomme with the café’s music still strong and Quire still drinking. He walked up the cobblestone street to his hotel, less steady on his feet than he would have preferred. The city was wrapped in a cold night fog that could have been imported from London, brackish and impenetrable. He felt wary as he walked, watching within the shadows and measuring the gait of Parisians walking near him. In the moonlit night, icy puddles shined and curtained windows veiled the few building lights still lit. In the air he could smell the wisps of late-night or early-morning warming fires.

Someone stepped from the recess of a hotel entrance as he passed and touched his arm. He recoiled, reaching for the small revolver in his pocket, but the hammer caught as he tugged.

“Pardon, Monsieur,” a woman said, her voice raspy from cigarettes, drink, and age. “Ont besoin de compagnie ce soir?”

“What?” Joe said, his mind, startled, did not make the translation. “Quoi?” he added.

“Are you in need of company?” she said in broken and heavily accented English.

“Non,” was all Joe said, and he walked away.

A block farther, he stopped under a streetlight and leaned against the post to catch his breath. Fear had its own rhythm, and he rested for a moment to regain his composure. He thought of Marcel—why the man relied so on intermediaries. From Huntington’s short biography of Marcel, Joe knew the man was something of a recluse, affected like so many others by the war. Joe knew other men, men that he had served with who had retreated in life to some cabin the wilderness of Maine or the Olympic Peninsula of Washington. People had come out of that war changed, irrevocably changed, and their lives were separated like a concrete dam between what once was and what now is. Just like the bodies of water on each side of that dam, they were never the same. So he understood Marcel’s inclination toward hiding from a world that had so irrevocably changed him and his world, but there was something more to Marcel’s deceit. A greater reason to his desire for anonymity—his cowardice.

If Marcel had wanted Joe dead, then Joe would have been killed on the boat with Huntington or he would have burned in a fire like Dillard. Something in Gresham’s manuscript had Marcel nervous enough to want it, even though Dapper claimed otherwise. For the time being, at least, as long as Marcel believed he had the manuscript, the Frenchman might not act. They had searched his room and not found it, and Joe felt that his bluff in the café had worked, convincing enough that Dapper would report that he still had a copy squirreled away.

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