Le Royal Lieu

The bomb blast at the Bank Leumi had transformed Rue Des Italians to an old daguerreotype of Paris from the 1870s. A tent had been erected under a balcony of the carless street. A young clochard cut vegetables into a pot. The thin bum was better clothed than most derelicts sleeping under the Seine bridges, yet a tremor sizzled in my spine, as he lit his stove. It didn't explode and I flagged a taxi, elated to have survived my fears.

At the atelier Candia was alone. A cigarette lay in the ashtray. The tip was bare of lipstick, but then she didn't smoke. Candia threw it in the trash and packed her bag for Italy. Her good-bye kiss was a peck.

Albert, Serge, and I worked twenty-hour days. Sleep was our only respite. Five minutes before the doors of le Royal Lieu were to open, hastily electricity blew the fuses. Bernard found the breakers and switched on the lights. We were ready for business.

Fun-loving Parisians flooded into Le Royale Lieu. Bernard's DJing drove the teenagers onto the dance floor and they drank with an apocalyptical abandon. Candia showed up unexpectedly with her father. Johnny ran a small boite de nuit in St. Germain. He was considered a gangster. I bought a bottle of champagne. Candia's kiss was warm, but before I could hold her in my arms, Jacques tapped my shoulder.

"Someone to speak with you."

I accompanied him to the door and Jacques pulled apart the curtains.

The young clouchard struggled with a lighter.

"He say why?"

"No," Jacques and I had been working together for two years. He knew my mind. "You want I make him go away?"

"No." Twenty francs bought the bum a bottle of wine and good luck our club. "I'll see what he wants."

Jacques unlatched the ropes for the quartet of well-heeled youths from the 16th Arrondisement and I pulled out a few spare coins.

"Hey, you don't recognize me?" The bum raised a smiling face.

Squinting I scrapped away the filth and hugged Danny Gordon for a short-lived embrace.

"When was the last time you bathed? You smell like a corpse."

"I didn't think the French cared about personal hygiene."

"I'm an American." Parisian men's adherence to one bar of soap per annum didn't excuse his smelling like week-old garbage and I opened the ropes to the amazement of several customers dressed a la mode. "We have a shower in the basement. I'll cuff you a couple of drinks afterwards."

"That's an offer I can't refuse," Danny broke out of his slouch. "I ran into your cousin in New York last year. She said you were here. Didn't you leave right after Viktor Malenski got killed at the Continental?"

"About then." My three-year exile hadn't lessened the danger of telling the truth.

"You were lucky. Another Russian was killed and twenty cops were arrested for an assortment of crimes."

"What about Arthur?"

"He was wearing a wire for the FBI."

"And he was shot?"

"Not at all. He's still the Prince of the Night."

"As you are here."

"My friend started this club. I get paid to act rude to the French. Can it get better than that?"

"You're my new hero." He nodded to the cashier, who held her nose, as I led Danny to the basement changing room.

"So how about a shower?" I opened the taps of the washing room.

"I'll be a new man after that." Danny stripped off his clothes and climbed into the steam-filled shower stall.

"You didn't see Lisa when you in New York?"

"Ha, I was wondering when you were going to ask that." Danny soaped his body. "Aren't you over her yet?"

"Yeah, long ago."

"Right." He didn't believe me and said, "I saw her once. She was with Vadim."

"She ask about me?"

"Didn't get a chance to speak with her." He soaped his hair. "Someone said she and Vadim were living in Russia."

"I haven't heard a thing." I left the washroom with his tattered clothes and dumped them in the trash bin. They had outlived their usefulness several people ago and I rummaged through a backstage closet. I hung a musty suit from the 1950s on the door and went upstairs with two cases of champagne. None of it vintage. Serge waited at the bar.

"You throw Brigitte Bardot out of the club, then you let in a clouchard." Ordering drinks Bernard asked, "So who is your guest?"

"He's a friend from New York." I ordered a whiskey.

"So now the Americans are exporting bums to France." Serge scoffed with the immense pleasure of hearing that an Amerlot had plunged to the bottom. His happiness was short-lived, for a twenty-minute shower and a suit transformed Danny into a modern-day Casanova for Le Royal Lieu's haughty female clientele.

"A new man." I led him to the bar.

"Same old me, just cleaner."

We toasted the East Village. Candia danced with him twice. Her father knew Danny's dad from the Korean War I had another drink. It wasn't my last.

Candia announced her departure and I gave her a sloppy goodnight kiss.

"You are not so handsome as a drunk."

"Everyone else is pretty when I'm drunk, but not me."

"Fool."

"A fool in love with you."

"You say those words so easy."

"I mean every syllable." I escorted her to a taxi.

"Then what is love?" She shut the taxi door before my reply and I stood on the sidewalk trying to come up with answer.

I drank the rest of the night with her father, trying to gather insight into his daughter. Instead he recounted his falling out of plane during the Korean War, "I didn't die either."

He had a lot of stories like that. So did Danny and me too. As the night drew to a close, I asked Danny. "You have anything in your 'room' you want to keep here?"

"No, ain't nothing worth stealing."

"What about your trumpet?"

"I hocked it in Spain."

"Pawn it? You lived for your music."

"Like you used to live for your poetry." Danny chugged his whiskey.

"I couldn't even write in meter." The illiterati might have overlooked this fault, however grammar school nuns had beaten a respect for classical cadence and proper grammar into my knuckles and editors came from the same school.

"Your stopping partially inspired my dumping the horn."

"Please don't follow my failures." My blame plate was full. "You could have been another Chet Baker."

"I'd rather be Freddie Hubbard, but who was I kidding? Our band sucked and no one cared if we sucked. We were young and pretty. I don't regret quitting music and DJing and I bet you don't regret stopping writing either. All that 'art' shit was a monkey on our backs. Now we can live as real men are supposed to live."

Danny spoke with the coolness of a man who had abandoned a woman he didn't love after seeing her with another man.

"Better than pretending to be Hemingway." Ghosts of stories lurked in my skull as half-built ships in dry docks.

"Or Chet Baker." He pushed back his wavy hair.

"But why are you living on the street. Do you belong to a cult giving away their possessions?"

"I'm waiting for my ship to come in. Good crew. Great captain.The ex-trumpeter nearly swooned off the stool. "The whiskey kinda went to my head. I'll be fine once I'm out at sea."

"Your parents bought you a boat?" A 50-foot catamaran was not beyond their means.

"I'm not taking their money anymore."

"Yeah, fuck money," I said, while wishing that his parents had adopted me.

"I'm talking about fishing and not the rod-and-reel shit either. Nets and trawlers and thousands of hooks capable of tearing the flesh off your bones. And tons of fish on the wild sea." His voice climbed an octave with an imagined voyage to the North Atlantic. "Fishing a la Captain Courageous for cod on the deep. Hacking fish from a line, as the ship plows into the sea and resurfaces streaming foam. Fishing in the black of night, the wind___"

"Stop already, I'm already seasick."

"Mal de mer has two cures. Land or drowning." Danny possessed a convert's devotion for his new profession.

"If you love fishing so much, what are you doing in Paris? I mean hanging a line off a bridge into the Seine isn't that exciting."

"No, the sea gives the fears and the fears are many, but next week a long-line boat from Gloucester is supposed to dock in Brest and I'll fish the Georges Bank." Danny picked at a front tooth.

"The deep blue sea." I had lived in Gloucester. Fishing was a tough both on and off shore.

"It has more colors than blue."

"I wish I could offer you a place to stay." A week was a long time on the street. Even longer at my place.

"Thanks, I'm fine in my humble hovel." Danny lifted a hand to forestall any more of my apologies. "You remember what your cousin said about men wanting a virgin or a whore. Well, I have my girl coming from Madrid. Crazy girl. Young like your girlfriend. Her mother was a flamenco dancer. Likes having sex. Her body is insatiable____" Limb by limb Danny reincarnated an ancient sex cult's goddess, finally accusing her of nymphomania. "It's no Roman orgy. It's hard work. You'll see. Believe me, you'll see."

His prediction was almost a curse and that night as I was having sex with Candia, a super 8mm porno movie flickered in the shadows. The teenager noticed my distraction and asked, "What are you thinking?"

"About how much I want you." I thrust harder into her vagina.

"Ouais?" She rolled out of bed to vainly examine my clothes for the telltale signs of infidelity without success, since the only traces of another woman were in my mind.

"I'm tired of living with another woman's ghost." She lay on the bed, fiercely clutching her Mickey doll. "If it's not the skinny blonde from America, then it is someone else."

"There's no one, but you." I reached over to Candia. She wasn't having any of me and I fell asleep on my side of the bed, as dreams of Lisa were replaced by those of Danny's girlfriend.

She sounded too good to be true, but whenever models, dancers from the Paris Ballet, French actresses, artistes, and svelte students from the Sorbonne tried to seduce Danny, he told them, "I'm saving myself for Elana."

One night Danny didn't show at his usual hour and I checked his shack. His canvas sea bag was gone. After the club closed I began to worry, since Paris was as tough a town as New York. When I reported his disappearance to the police on the third night, the gendarme joked that people disappear in Paris all the time.

I didn't laugh, but should have.