Coq au Vin (17 page)

“There's that couple,” Andre said, pointing to an elderly man and woman not far from us. “You know, they always give us a hundred francs at Bricktop's.”

“Yes, they're nice people,” I agreed, not looking.

“I wonder if I should try to interview them sometime. They're not black, but they are Americans who've been over here for something like forty years. Maybe they could fill in a few blanks for me. Maybe they knew some people I can't quite nail in that chapter on the fifties.”

“Good idea,” I said, still searching the room. I signaled the bartender for refills.

“I guess Jacques didn't lie about all the Bricktop people being here. Those actors who always come in late are here, too,” Andre noted. One of the women in the troupe was waving at us—well, at Andre. I knew what that was about.
In your dreams, bitch
.

“I bet I know what all this is about, Nan,” he said a few minutes later. He was grinning like a Cheshire.

“What?” I said.

“This is some kind of complicated trick you're pulling. A surprise. For me. Somebody is about to walk in here—somebody who's so famous and so great that it's going to knock me off this chair. And you knew all along they were coming. The scene with Jacques was just part of the plan. You knew everybody'd be over here tonight because whoever's coming is going to be here tonight. I'm the only one out of the loop. Isn't that it? Some eminence is just about to walk in, and I'm going to be totally knocked out. Right?”

I looked at him. Be careful what you wish for, is what I was thinking. “Sweetie,” I said, “I wish that was true.”

“Then what the fuck is it, Nan? You expecting somebody from your wild past?”

“Just be patient a little longer,” I begged. “Hang in there. I almost have it figured out, Andre. Have some more wine.”

“No problem if you're looking for Morris,” he said. “There he is—over there.”

Yes. On the far side of the room Melon was holding court, as usual, the center of attention in his fraying London-tailored jacket. He and four other people were hunched around a little pin dot of a table and the old man was serving up some obviously tasty star-filled gossip. And, like always, the drinks were flowing nonstop. Lots of raucous laughter. Looked like a good time was being had by all.

Andre knocked off the guessing game for a while and began to weave this elaborate plan for making us and a number of his street music buddies famous. Something about an album featuring a miscellany of street performers playing all kinds of music. What was it he wanted to call it—
Street Smart, Street of Dreams
—something. Not a bad idea, I guess, unless somebody had already thought of it. I nodded my “that's nice, dear” approval.

“See, this wouldn't be so bad if I really was a legal resident.”

“What wouldn't be so bad?” I asked.

“Your insanity. They've got socialized medicine here, you know. We could have a shotgun wedding and I could check you directly into the clinic. Ah, Jesus, Nan, I've had it. You tell me what's going on, and tell me right now.”

“Okay,” I said, “I'm going to try to. But keep looking around while I'm talking.”

“Look around for what, girl?”

At that very moment, my eye had fallen on a female server. Not a young person like all the others. And not wearing the ubiquitous white apron. She was walking briskly across the length of the club, tray in hand.

“The waitress—” I said slowly. I broke off there.

“What waitress?”

I grabbed his head and turned it toward the woman.

“Forget her,” he said. “Why don't you ask the bartender if you want a drink?”

“No! The waitress, Andre! That woman with the tray!”

I meant the one with the automatic weapon resting next to the highball glasses. Vivian still had nice taste. She had chosen something in understated gray—very sleek, very expensive looking, and definitely not a toy.

“That's Vivian! She's going to kill him!”

I leapt off the barstool and began to rush toward Morris Melon's table. “Stop her, Andre!” I screamed as I ran. “It's Vivian! Stop her!”

Viv let the glass-laden tray fall to the floor with a crash. The important item on the tray, the gun, she was now holding with both hands as she strode like the Jolly Green Giant, closer and closer to Melon.

He and his party were so high, and so wrapped up in their own fun, they had paid no attention to the shattering glass. But now, with screams breaking out all over the place as one by one the patrons spotted Viv and realized what was happening, Melon was turning in the chair, bringing his chest full into Vivian's line of fire. He might as well have been wearing a bull's-eye on his breast.

Still a few feet away from him, I already had my arm extended so as to grab the back of his collar and pull him to the floor.

Andre was closing in on Viv using the same M.O. I heard him call her name crazily. I know she must have heard him. But she never broke stride.

The old man had bounded out of his chair before I could reach him. The others in his party were diving for cover—uselessly. Those little tin café tables wouldn't have provided decent cover for a tadpole.

The first shot rang out then, roaring past the clumsily moving Melon and exploding a glass-fronted cabinet.

Melon tried a serpentine footballer's move. Pitiful. Loping like an old dog.
Pitiful
—it was almost funny.

More screams. We were in it now.

But then, switching tactics, Melon suddenly turned back to face Vivian. He raised his arms, begging, as if a heartfelt plea was going to stop her next bullet.

Everyone seemed to freeze then, waiting for what would come next.

“Listen to me, Vivian!” Melon cried out. “I had to do it. Jerry showed up at my place. Told me he was broke, desperate. He had to have money, he said—eighty thousand dollars. I almost spat in his face. When you and Jerry took off with that hundred and fifty thousand dollars, I wanted to kill you—all of you. And now, twenty some years later, I'm supposed to bail him out of whatever trouble he's in? I laughed at him. Where was I going to get it anyway? I'd have to sell Bricktop's to raise that kind of money. But he didn't care. You know what he was like—you of all people. He said if I didn't come up with the cash, he'd start making calls—and not just to the police—he said that he'd tell—everything. I'm too old to lose everything again, Vivian. I
had
to kill him.”

Vivian broke into hideous laughter. “So you had to. So what? What do I care about that? I'm glad you killed the son of a bitch. But you know this ain't about Jerry Brainard, Morris. You are
not
going to hell thinking that.”

He swallowed with great effort and his eyes went neon.

“No,” she stated simply. “Not for Jerry. This is for the country nigger. Isn't that what you always called him?”

Whang! went the next shot, into the amp up on stage. That caused a sort of Vietnam-movie boom that seemed to shake the club to its foundation. The people rolling around on the floor were now trying to cover their ears as well as their asses.

Melon limped on. Looking for shelter. Hollering.

Before she got off the third shot, Andre was on her. They twisted and lurched together, both of them keening and cussing as they struggled for the gun.

As I took the first step toward them, the gun began to splutter madly. I ducked, then began to crawl toward them through the bedlam.

Another burst of bullets. And then I heard Andre's roar of shocked pain.

I stood up just in time to see him go down, blood on his shirtfront.

I tried to rush Vivian, but it was no good. With a clear field now, she was aiming at Morris Melon's back, and she sent out a long, clean volley straight into him. He crumpled at the mouth of the small kitchen.

What the hell did I think I was doing? I went for her, screeching, my hands out like cat's claws.

“Get back!” she commanded, the gun now on me. “It's over, Nan. Get back!” She was shaking so hard I almost took the gamble of reaching for the weapon.

Over. How right she was.

I heard myself repeat the words I had uttered to her in the Volkswagen: “I hate you, Vivian.”

Through a flood of tears she tried to say something.

I heard Andre moan deeply then, and fell on my knees beside him. When I looked up again, Vivian was disappearing through the front doors.

While the crowd scattered like frightened cockroaches, I covered Andre with my body, begging no one in particular to get help, and to let him live.

A minute or two later I heard a muffled explosion outside the walls of the café. A single burst of gunfire.

Yeah. I knew that was coming, too.

How else could something like this end?

CHAPTER 16

I Want to Talk About You

I had to go. Soon. Vivian was rotting in the municipal hospital.

Luckily, I was free to suffer the agony of all the hard decisions I had to make from the relative luxury of the rue Christine. Thanks to Monsieur Simard's friend in the department, I wasn't in a jail cell on an obstruction charge.

My last look at my once-beloved aunt was a horror show in itself. She lay all curled into herself on the stones out behind the kitchen of Parker's. Most of her face was gone. Deal with that. I'd never seen anything worse. Yet all I could think was: My God, how little she looks—she must be so lonely. But, touch her? No. Nuh-uh. She was family, my father's flesh and blood; she and I had loved each other once; and I knew I'd forgive her someday for all the pain and mayhem she had caused. But I would not touch her. I know I should have found some way to say good-bye to her. I guess I could have prayed over her, or something, but I didn't. I was stupefied by then and I had to get to the hospital to be with Andre.

They found a letter addressed to me in Viv's skirt pocket. But not the ten thousand dollars. The message, written on the back of a café menu, was less a suicide note than a cryptic, telegraphic kind of poem:

Nanette—

Forgive all the lies. But that's what liars do. So now I've got only one truth to give you. Six months ago. In Chicago. Down and out. As usual. Trying to figure a way out. As usual. I've got a job not worth having and a man not worth the trouble—but a damn sight better than me. They tell me over at the clinic I got cancer and nothing they can do about it. Nothing I can do rather.

A lot of thinking about it all. Everything I did and everything I didn't do. My father. Your father. Jerry and the rest of the stupid parade. Out of all of them, only one really loved me. And that was the one I betrayed. He never did make up his mind what side of the fence he should be playing on. But that didn't matter. I always knew he loved me. Traveling Viv, always on the move. I say to myself, Girl, it's time for one last trip before Miss Cancer comes by for tea. Time to make amends.

You'll never look up to me again baby. But please don't look down on me either. I love you Nan and I'm sorry.

One of our street musician acquaintances had brought a keyboard by the apartment. Andre sat up in bed for hours on end picking out tunes on it with one hand. He was going to be just fine. Andre did not appreciate being told that his wound was not particularly “serious,” and in his place neither would I. After all, getting
shot
is by definition serious when it's your body the bullet has ripped through. But he did need to let the wound near his left nipple heal. Playing the violin would have to wait for at least a month. There was no reason he couldn't go outside if he took it easy, though…walk, sit in the café. He just didn't want to.

I fed him soup and gave him his antibiotics and, as if I weren't already guilty enough, broke his heart all over again every time we argued about me going back to New York. That argument seemed to take up about twenty out of every twenty-four hours. In the heat of the moment he called me a few names I knew he didn't mean, and so I never responded in kind.

“Look, Andre! I know you're deep into being Mr. Black Paris Exile. But for god's sake, baby, even Sidney Bechet came home once in a while—didn't he?”

“Stop calling it home, Nan.”

“But it is!”

“Bullshit. Home is someplace where you belong. Where you're wanted, and respected, and loved. Unconditionally. Home is where there's a place for you.”

“I have a place for you, idiot. I have a home for you. We can work, Andre. We can get back here.”

“To visit, you mean.” He said it as though there was spoiled milk in his mouth. “Dabble, you mean. That's not me, Nanette. I'm not into vacationing. I want to belong. I'm for real.”

“And I'm not? Just because I can see it's my place to take Viv's body home—be with my parents over this. I not only let her die alone, I threw away ten thousand dollars, man! I couldn't turn away from Viv while she was alive, and I can't turn away now.”

“But from me you can. Right?”

“But I don't want to, Andre. I don't want to.”

“Well, you have to. Understand that. You have to either turn away from her or turn away from me.”

After a while he just stopped talking. He put on a pair of blue-tinted wire-rim shades that just covered his eyeballs, and sat there looking like a banjie-boy CIA operative.

I tried to play it for laughs. I tried reasoning with him. I tried to play it from every angle in the book. But he wasn't having it. I was “leaving him,” that's how he saw it. “Leaving. Period.” The silent treatment became his way of leaving me before I left him.

I knew how miserable he was. Because I knew how miserable I was.

When Inspector Simard phoned to say he was in Paris and wanted us to join him for lunch, I begged Andre to get dressed and come. But he wouldn't budge.

“I'm bringing back some ice cream for you,” I told him as I slipped on my shoes and picked up the folding umbrella. “What flavor do you want? Pistachio?”