At the entrance to the railway station, a bespectacled young man in a greatcoat tried to push a mimeographed pamphlet into Floyd’s hands.
“Read this, monsieur,” he said, his French accent well educated. “Read this, and if you agree with our aims, join us at the demonstration next weekend. There’s still a chance to do something about Chatelier.”
The kid was eighteen or nineteen, the hairs on his chin as fine as peach fuzz. He might have been a medical student or a trainee lawyer. “Why would I want to do something about Chatelier?” Floyd asked.
“You’re a foreigner. I hear it in your accent.”
“The passport in my pocket says I’m French.”
“Very soon, that won’t count for much.”
“Meaning I should watch my back?”
“All of us should,” the young man said. He forced the pamphlet into Floyd’s hand. Floyd crumpled it and was about to throw it away when some moderating impulse made him push it into his pocket, safely out of sight.
“Thanks for the warning, chief,” he said to the boy.
“You don’t believe me, do you?”
“Kid, when you’ve been around the block as many times as I have…” Floyd shook his head, knowing there was a gulf of understanding here that could never be explained, only experienced.
“It’ll start with the usual hate figures,” the young man said. “But it’ll end with anyone they don’t like the look of.”
“Enjoy it, kid. Enjoy feeling that you can make a difference.” Floyd flashed him a smile. “It won’t last for ever.”
“Monsieur…” the young man said, his voice trailing off as Floyd turned around and walked further into the station.
Gare de Lyon had begun the slow, drowsy decline into its nightly sleep. According to the clattering indicator boards, a few trains had yet to arrive and depart, but the evening rush hour was clearly long over. There was a chill in the air, blowing down through broken panes in the latticed metal roof that spanned the station. For the first time in months, Floyd remembered what winter felt like. It was an unwelcome memory that he’d kept boxed away, and he shivered.
He reached into his pocket for Greta’s letter, and came out instead with the political pamphlet the kid had given him. Floyd glanced back, but there was no sign of the young man. He balled the pamphlet and threw it into the nearest wastepaper bin. He found the letter he had been reaching for and re-read it carefully, satisfying himself that there had been no error, and that he was still on time.
“Late as usual, Wendell,” a woman said in heavily accented English.
Floyd snapped around at the instantly familiar voice behind him. “Greta?” he began, as if it could be anyone else. “I wasn’t expecting—”
“I made an earlier connection. I’ve been waiting here for half an hour, foolishly imagining that you might actually arrive more than a minute ahead of schedule.”
“Then that’s not your train pulling in over there?”
“Your detective skills obviously haven’t failed you.” Greta posed elegantly in a black thigh-length fur coat, one hand resting against her hip and the other supporting a cigarette holder at face-level. She wore black shoes, black stockings, black gloves and a wide-brimmed black hat tipped to eyelevel. There was a black feather in the hatband and a black suitcase at her feet. She wore black lipstick and, today, black eyeliner.
Greta was fond of black. It had always made life easy for Floyd when it came to buying her presents.
“When exactly did my letter arrive?” she asked.
“I received it this afternoon.”
“I posted it from Antibes on Friday. You should have had it by Monday at the very latest.”
“Custine and I have been a little busy,” Floyd said.
“That heavy case load of yours?” Greta indicated her luggage. “Help me with this, will you? Did you come by car? I need to get to my aunt’s, and I’d rather not waste good money on a taxi.”
Floyd nodded towards the welcoming glow of Le Train Bleu, a café at the top of a short flight of iron-railinged stairs. “Car’s nearby, but I bet you haven’t eaten anything all day, have you, stuck on that train?”
“I’d appreciate it if you would take me straight to my aunt.”
Floyd bent down to collect the suitcase, remembering what Greta had put in her letter. “Does Marguerite still live in Montparnasse?”
Greta nodded warily. “Yes.”
“In that case, we’ve time for a drink first. Traffic’s murder across the river—we’re better off waiting half an hour.”
“I’m sure you’d have an equally plausible excuse if I’d told you she had moved to this side of the river.”
Floyd smiled and began to lug the suitcase up the stairs. “I’ll take that as a yes. What have you got in here, by the way?”
“Bed sheets. Nobody’s used my aunt’s spare room in years, not since I moved out.”
“You could always stay at my apartment,” Floyd said.
Greta’s heels clicked on the stone steps. “Turf Custine out of his room, is that it? You treat that poor man like dirt.”
“I don’t hear any complaints.”
Greta pushed open the double doors leading into the café, pausing a moment on the threshold as if having her photograph taken. Inside, it was all smoke and mirrors and opulently painted ceiling: a miniature Sistine Chapel. A waiter turned to them with a look of blank refusal on his face, shaking his head once.
Floyd helped himself to the nearest table. “Two orange brandies, monsieur,” he said in French. “And don’t worry—we won’t be staying long.”
The waiter muttered something and turned away. Greta sat down opposite Floyd and removed her hat and gloves, placing them next to her on the zinc-topped table. She flicked the end of her cigarette into an ashtray and closed her eyes in deep resignation or deep weariness. In the light of the café, he realised that she was not wearing eyeliner at all, but was simply very tired.
“I’m sorry, Floyd,” she said. “I’m not in the best of moods, as you might have noticed.”
Floyd tapped the side of his nose. “Detective instinct again. Never lets me down.”
“Not exactly made your fortune, though, has it?”
“Still waiting for the knock on the door.”
She must have heard something in his voice: some crack of hope or expectation. Studying him for a moment, she reached into her purse for another cigarette and slid it into the holder. “I haven’t come back for good, Floyd. When I said I was leaving Paris, I meant it.”
The waiter brought them their brandies, slamming down Floyd’s like a bad chess player conceding defeat.
“I didn’t seriously think anything had changed,” Floyd said. “In your letter you said you were coming back to visit your aunt while she was unwell—”
“While she dies,” Greta corrected, lighting the cigarette.
The waiter was hovering. Floyd reached into his shirt pocket for a note, found what he thought was money and spilled it on to the table. It was the photograph of Susan White, taken at the horse races. It landed face-up, presenting itself to Greta.
Greta took a drag on her cigarette. “Your new girlfriend, Floyd? She’s quite beautiful, I’ll give her that.”
Floyd returned the photograph to his pocket and paid the waiter. “She’s quite dead. You can give her that as well.”
“I’m sorry. What—”
“Our new investigation,” Floyd said. “The woman in the picture threw herself off a fifth-floor balcony in the thirteenth. That was a few weeks ago. She was American, although that’s pretty much all anyone knew about her.”
“Open and shut case, then.”
“Maybe,” Floyd replied, sipping at his brandy. “There isn’t one, incidentally.”
“Isn’t one what?”
“A new girlfriend. I haven’t been seeing anyone since you left. You can ask Custine. He’ll vouch for me.”
“I told you I wasn’t coming back. There was no need for you to become celibate on my account.”
“But you are back.”
“Not for long. This time next week, I doubt I’ll be in Paris.”
Floyd looked through the café’s steamed-up window, beyond the concourse to a platform where a train was inching out into the night. He thought of Greta on a similar train, returning to the south, the last time he’d ever see her unless he counted airbrushed photographs in the music weeklies.
Finishing their drinks in silence, they walked out of Le Train Bleu and back through the iron vault of the station. It was nearly empty now, save for a handful of stragglers waiting for one or other of the last trains. Floyd steered Greta back towards the street, via the entrance he had come in by. Nearing it, he became aware of a commotion: voices raised in anger or defiance.
“Floyd, what’s wrong?” she asked.
“Wait here.”
But she followed him anyway. Rounding the corner, they were confronted by a tableau in light and shade, like a still photograph from a movie. Three hatless young men stood in aggressive postures beneath a streetlamp. They were all dressed in crisp black clothes, their trousers tucked into highly polished boots. Sitting on the ground, pinned in a circle of lamplight with his back against the base of the post, was the young man who had given Floyd the pamphlet earlier. His face was bloodied, his glasses mangled and shattered on the sidewalk.
He recognised Floyd, and for an instant there was something like hope in his face. “Monsieur… please help me.”
One of the thugs laughed and kicked him in the chest. The youth bent double, letting out a single pained cough. One of the other thugs turned from the little scene, shadows sliding across his face. He had very sharp cheekbones, his short, fair hair oiled back from his brow and shaved close to his skull at the sides and back.
“Keep your nose out,” the thug said, something gleaming in his hand.
Greta squeezed Floyd’s arm. “We have to do something.”
“Too dangerous,” Floyd said, backing off.
“They’ll kill him.”
“They’re just giving him a warning. They could have killed him already, if they were serious about it.”
The pamphleteer started to say something, but his words were curtailed by another well-aimed boot to the chest. With a groan, his upper body slumped to the sidewalk. Floyd took a step towards the scene, wishing that he carried a weapon. The first thug waved his knife between them, and then shook his head very slowly. “I said keep your nose out, fat man.”
Floyd turned away, feeling his cheeks tingle with shame. Quickly he led Greta away from the scene, back around to a different part of the station where he knew there was another exit. She squeezed his arm again, just as if they were promenading in the Tuileries Gardens on a Sunday afternoon. “It’s all right,” she said. “You did the right thing.”
“I did nothing.”
“Nothing was the right thing. They’d have cut you up. I just hope they leave that man alone.”
“It was his fault,” Floyd said. “Handing out stuff the way he did… he should have known better.”
“What exactly was he saying?”
“I don’t know. I threw his pamphlet away.”
They reached the Mathis, hidden away in a backstreet. Another pamphlet had been tucked under the wiper. Floyd took it out and pressed it flat against the windshield, examining it under the stuttering glow of a dying sodium light. It was printed on better paper than the ones the young man had been distributing, with a photograph of Chatelier, smooth and handsome in military uniform. The text urged the president’s friends and allies to continue their support of him, before digressing into a thinly veiled attack on various minorities, including Jews, blacks, homosexuals and gypsies.
Greta snatched the paper from him, scanning it quickly. Raised in Paris by a French aunt, she had little difficulty with the language.
“It’s worse now than when I left,” she said. “Back then they never dared to say anything like this so openly.”
“They have the police on their side now,” Floyd said. “They can say what they like.”
“I’m not surprised Custine got out when he did. He was always too good for them.” Greta stamped her feet against the chill, gloves and hat back in place. “Where is Custine anyway?”
Floyd took the paper from her, blew his nose in it then threw it into the gutter. “Taking care of that little homicide investigation.”
“You were serious about that?”
“Did you think I was making it up?”
“I didn’t think murder was quite your thing.”
“It is now.”
“But if she was murdered, shouldn’t Custine’s former associates be showing a little more interest? They can’t all be too busy harassing dissidents.”
Floyd unlocked the car and put Greta’s suitcase on to the back seat. “If she had been French, they might have been more inclined to spend some time on the case. But she was just an American tourist, and that lets them off the hook. They say it’s an open-and-shut case: either she jumped or she fell by accident. The railings weren’t faulty, so there’s no crime either way.” He held the door open for Greta while she settled herself in the front passenger seat and then moved around to the driver’s side and got in.
“But you don’t think it happened like that?”
“I haven’t made up my mind.” Floyd waited for the car to cough itself into life. “Given what we’ve learned so far, I wouldn’t rule out accidental death or even suicide. But there are a couple of things that don’t quite fit.”
“And who’s paying for this independent investigation?”
“Her elderly landlord.” Floyd eased the car out into the street and began to navigate towards the river and the nearest crossing. A police car passed by in the opposite direction, toiling towards the station but in no obvious hurry to get there.
“What does her landlord have to do with it?”
“Took a shine to her, and thinks there was more to this business than meets the eye.” With one hand on the wheel, Floyd reached under his seat for the biscuit tin and passed it to Greta. “See what you make of that little lot.”
Greta removed her gloves to lever off the tin lid. “These things belonged to the dead woman?”
“If the landlord’s on the level, she gave him that box for safekeeping just before she died. Now why would she do that if she didn’t have some concerns for her safety?”
Greta leafed through the bundle of paperwork. “Some of this is in German,” she noticed.
“That’s why I asked you to take a look at it.”
She returned the paperwork to the tin, replaced the lid and put it on the back seat next to her suitcase. “I can’t look at it now. It’s too dark in here and I get sick if I read in cars. Especially the way you drive.”
“That’s all right,” Floyd said. “Take the tin with you and look through it later, when you have a moment.”
“I came to look after my aunt, not to help you with your case.”
“It’ll only take you a few minutes. And you don’t have to look at any of it tonight. I’ll swing by tomorrow, take you out for lunch. You can tell me all about it then.”
“You’re good, Floyd. I’ll give you that.”
He tried to sound casual, as if none of that had been planned. “There’s something in there that looks like a train ticket, and a business letter to do with some kind of factory in Berlin—a steelworks, maybe. I’m wondering why a nice young lady like Susan White had any business with a steel company.”
“How do you know she was a nice young lady?”
“Because they’re all nice until proven otherwise,” he replied, smiling innocently.
Greta said nothing for another three blocks. She just stared out of the window, as if mesmerised by the rushing flow of head- and tail-lights. “I’ll look at this stuff, Floyd, but that’s all I’m promising. It’s not as if I don’t have other things on my mind at the moment.”
“I’m sorry about your aunt,” Floyd said. He steered the car on to the end of the line of vehicles waiting to cross the river, relieved to see that his earlier story of the murderous traffic situation had not been completely fanciful. Ahead, a truck had broken down and some men were bashing away at the exposed cylinder head with spanners. Guards had gathered around the scene, the curved magazines of their cheap machine guns gleaming like scythes. They stamped their feet and passed around the glowing spark of a single cigarette.
Presently, Greta said, “The doctors give her between two and eight weeks, depending on who you speak to. But then what do they ever know?”
“They do their best,” Floyd said. He still didn’t know what was wrong with Greta’s aunt, not that it was likely to make much difference.
“She won’t go to hospital. She’s clear about that. She watched my uncle die in hospital in thirty-nine. All she has left now are her home and a few weeks of life.” The inside of her window was beginning to steam up; he watched Greta scratch her fingernail down the glass, leaving a narrow line in the condensation. “I don’t even know for sure that she hasn’t already died. It’s been a week since I had any news of her. They disconnected her telephone when she couldn’t pay the bill.”
“I hope you’re in time,” Floyd said. “If I’d known, I’d have tried to send you an airline ticket.”
She looked at him hopelessly. “You’d have tried, Floyd, that’s all.”
“What about the rest of the band—couldn’t they have stumped up the cash to get you back to Paris?”
He had inched the car forward another three vehicle lengths before Greta answered. “There is no rest of the band, Floyd. I walked out on them.”
Floyd tried his best to suppress any hint of triumph, any hint of “I told you so,” in his voice. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Why didn’t it work out? They seemed decent enough fellows to me. Hopheads, but no worse than any other jazz men.”
“That’s not much of a recommendation.”
“Well, you know what I mean.”
“There was nothing wrong with them. They treated me all right and the tour wasn’t going too badly. We’d gone down well in Nice, and we had a couple of good engagements lined up in Cannes.”
“So why’d you walk?”
“Because none of it was going anywhere. One night, it hit me with the force of a revelation: they were not going to make it. If I stayed with them, I wasn’t going to make it either.”
“Is that how you felt when you walked out on me and Custine?”
“Yes,” she answered, without a moment’s hesitation.
Floyd eased the car past the broken-down lorry, touching a finger to the rim of his hat as the guards pointed the barrels of their guns in the vague direction of the Mathis. “Well, at least you’re honest.”
“I find it helps,” Greta replied.
They had their papers ready. Floyd watched the guard at the checkpoint grunt through his documents, then pass them back with a look of pursed disapproval, as if Floyd had committed an error of detail but was being let off with a caution. They were always like that, no matter how spick and span the paperwork. He supposed it was what got them through the day.
“Here,” Greta said, passing her documents over Floyd.
The guard took the papers, examining them under torchlight. He moved to hand them back, then hesitated, taking a closer look. He licked a finger and paged through Greta’s passport, pausing here and there like someone examining a collection of rare stamps or moths.
“Been travelling a lot for a German girl,” he said in heavily accented French.
“That’s what a passport’s for,” Greta replied, her Parisian accent flawless.
Floyd felt ice run through his veins and reached for Greta’s knee, squeezing it gently, willing her to silence.
“A mouth on you, too,” the guard said.
“It comes in handy. I’m a singer.”
“You should learn some manners, in that case.” The guard handed the papers back, making a show of giving them to Floyd rather than Greta. “This passport expires next year,” he said. “Under the new arrangements, not everyone will find it easy to obtain a replacement. Especially mouthy German girls. Perhaps you should reconsider your attitude.”
“I doubt it’ll be a problem for me,” Greta said.
“We’ll see.” The guard nodded at his colleague and slapped a hand on the window pillar. “Move on, and learn your girlfriend some manners.”
Floyd did not breathe normally until they had crossed the Seine, putting the river between them and the checkpoint. “That was… interesting,” he said.
“Buffoons.”
“Buffoons we have to live with,” Floyd snapped. Nervous, he crunched the gears. “Anyway, what did you mean, that it won’t be a problem for you?”
Greta shook her head. “It meant nothing.”
“Sounded like it meant something to you.”
“Just drive, Floyd. I’m tired, all right? I’m tired and I’m not looking forward to any of this.”
Floyd aimed the car towards Montparnasse. It started raining, first a light drizzle that softened the city lights into pastel smudges and then a harder rain that had people scurrying for the shelter of restaurants and bars. Floyd tried finding something on the car wireless, sliding past a momentary burst of Gershwin, but when he reversed the dial and tried to find the station again all he heard was static.
Floyd helped Greta carry her things up the stairs, into the spare room next to the small kitchen on the first floor of her aunt’s house. The entire place was cold and smelled faintly of mildew. The light fittings either emitted a feeble, stuttering glow, or failed to work at all. The telephone was dead, as Greta had claimed. The floorboards sagged beneath Floyd’s feet, sodden with damp and beginning to rot. The broken skylight above the stairwell had been repaired with a piece of corrugated iron against which the rain drummed sharp-nailed, impatient fingers.
“Put my things on the bed,” Greta said, indicating the tiny bunk-sized cot squeezed into one corner of the room. “I’ll go and see how Aunt Marguerite’s doing.”
“You want me to come along?”
“No,” she said, after thinking about it. “No, but thanks anyway. From now on I think it’s best if she only sees familiar faces.”
“I thought I counted as a familiar face.”
She looked at him, but said nothing.
“I’ll see if I can scrape up something to eat,” Floyd said.
“You don’t have to wait if you don’t want to.”
Floyd placed her things on the bed, along with the tin box containing Susan White’s papers. “I’m not going anywhere. At least not until this weather clears up.”
They had been let into the house by a young woman who rented a small room on the third floor. She was a French girl called Sophie, a stenographer by profession, with prescription glasses and a nervous, braying laugh that culminated in a nasal snort. Floyd filed her under “perpetual spinster,” and then felt immediately guilty when Greta told him about the girl.
“She’s been an angel,” Greta said, when Sophie was out of earshot. “Buying food, cleaning, writing letters, generally taking care of my aunt’s affairs… all the while still paying her rent. But she’s been offered a job in Nancy, and she can’t delay taking it up any longer. It’s been good of her to stay this long.”
“And that’s it? No other relatives but yourself?”
“No one who can be bothered,” Greta said.
While Greta was upstairs with Marguerite, Sophie showed Floyd around the enamelled metal cabinets in the kitchen. The place was spotlessly clean, but most of the shelves were bare. Abandoning any thoughts of eating, Floyd made himself tea and waited in the spare room, taking in the cracks in the plaster and the tears and stains in the fifty-year-old wallpaper. From somewhere else in the old building he heard very low voices, or rather one very low voice holding up one end of a conversation.
Sophie poked her head around the door and said she was going out to see a film with her boyfriend. Floyd wished her well and then listened to her footsteps descend the creaking old staircase, followed by the click as she closed the front door without slamming it.
As quietly as he dared, he left the spare room and climbed the stairs to the next floor. The door to Marguerite’s bedroom was slightly ajar and he could hear Greta’s voice more clearly now, reading aloud from the local pages of a newspaper, bringing Marguerite up to date on Paris life. Floyd edged closer to the door, freezing as he stepped on a creaking floorboard. Greta paused in her monologue, then turned the page over before continuing.
Floyd reached the door. He looked through the gap and saw Greta sitting on a bedside chair, one leg hooked over the other, the paper spread across her lap. Behind her, he could just make out the bedridden form of her aunt. She was so frail, so drained of life, that at first glance the bed just looked as if it had yet to be made, the bunching of the blankets only accidentally suggestive of a human form. He couldn’t see Marguerite’s head from the doorway; it was hidden behind Greta’s back. But he could see one of her arms, poking like a thin, dry stick from the sleeve of her nightgown. Greta held her aunt’s hand in her own as she read from the newspaper, stroking the old woman’s fingers with infinite kindness. It made something catch in Floyd’s throat, and for the second time that evening he felt ashamed of himself.
He stepped back across the hallway, avoiding the bad floorboard, and returned to Greta’s room. This couldn’t be Marguerite: not the lively woman he had known only a handful of years ago. So little time couldn’t have done so much harm to her.
She had been suspicious when he had first started dating her niece; even more suspicious when it turned out that he wanted her for his band. But by turns the two of them had come to a grudging state of mutual understanding, and that chill had thawed into an unlikely friendship. Oftentimes, when Greta had gone to bed, Floyd had stayed up playing chequers with Marguerite, or talking about the old films from the twenties and thirties that both of them loved so much. He had lost touch with her during the last couple of years, especially once Greta had moved into a flat of her own on the other side of town, and now he felt a wave of sadness pass through him like a sudden chemical change in his own blood.
Looking for a distraction, he opened the tin again and took out the postcard, noting once more the deliberate way in which the words “silver” and “rain” had been underlined. If “silver rain” was indeed a message—and he had no real evidence that it was—what did it mean to the mysterious Caliskan, to whom the postcard was addressed?
He put the card aside as Greta came into the bedroom.
“I told you not to wait,” she said.
“It’s still raining,” Floyd replied. “Anyway, I was just going through this stuff again.” He looked into Greta’s face, noticing that her eyes were wet with tears and fatigue. “How is she?” he asked.
“She’s still alive, which is something.”
Floyd smiled politely, although privately he wondered if the kindest thing would not have been for the woman to have died before Greta arrived. “I made some tea,” he said. “The kettle’s still warm.”
Greta sat down next to him on the bed. “Do you mind if I smoke instead?”
Floyd stuffed the postcard back into the tin. “Go right ahead.”
Greta lit her cigarette and smoked it wordlessly for at least a minute before speaking again. “The doctors call it a respiratory obstruction,” she said, then took another drag on the cigarette. “They mean lung cancer, although they won’t come out and say it. The doctors say there’s nothing anyone can do for her. It’s just a question of time.” She laughed hollowly. “She says it’s all the cigarettes she smoked. She told me I should stop. I told her I already had, for the sake of my singing voice.”
“I think we can allow you one or two white lies,” Floyd said.
“Anyway, maybe it wasn’t the cigarettes. Twenty years ago they had her working on the armament production lines. A lot of women her age are unwell now, because of all the asbestos they had to work with.”
“I can believe it,” Floyd said.
“Sophie spoke to the doctor yesterday. They say a week now, maybe ten days.”
Floyd took her hand and squeezed it. “I’m sorry. I can’t imagine what this is like for you. If there was anything I could do—”
“There isn’t anything anyone can do,” Greta said bitterly. “That’s the point.” She took another hit from the cigarette. “Every morning the doctor comes around and gives her some morphine. That’s all they can do.”
Floyd looked around the dismal little room. “Are you going to be all right here? You don’t sound as if you’re in the best state of mind to be cooped up in here. If you’ve said goodnight to your aunt, she won’t know if you leave and come back first thing in the—”
She cut him off. “I’m staying here. It’s where I told her I’d be.”
“It was just an offer.”
“I know.” Greta waved her cigarette distractedly. “I didn’t mean to sound ungrateful. But even if I hadn’t promised to stay here, I don’t need any more complications in my life at the moment.”
“And I count as a complication?”
“Right now, yes.”
Without wanting to sound confrontational, Floyd said, “Greta, there must have been a reason for that letter. It wasn’t just because you needed a ride to Montparnasse, surely?”
“No, it wasn’t just that.”
“What, then? Something to do with the way you spoke to that jackass at the checkpoint?”
“You noticed?”
“I couldn’t help it.”
Greta smiled thinly, perhaps remembering the way she had spoken: that small, meaningless instant of triumph. “He said that mouthy German girls might have trouble with their passports in a year or two. Well, he’s right—I’m sure of that. But it won’t matter to me.”
“Why not?”
“Because I won’t be here. I’m taking the flying boat to America as soon as I’m finished here with my aunt.”
“America?” Floyd echoed, as if he might have misheard her.
“I knew it wasn’t happening with you and Custine. As I said, that’s why I left Paris. But what I didn’t count on was getting the same feeling with the other band.” Greta rubbed her eyes, perhaps to keep herself from sleeping. “We were in Nice one evening. The show had gone well and we were sitting around in the bar afterwards, accepting drinks from the clientele.”
“Nice work if you can get it,” Floyd said. “After Custine and I finish, we usually go out of our way to avoid the clientele.”
Greta shook her head. “Always putting yourself down, Floyd. Always living in the past and clinging to your own cherished sense of inadequacy. Is it any wonder things don’t work out for you?”
“About this meeting in the bar.”
“A man was there,” Greta said. “An American: a fat man with a bad suit, a worse haircut and a very thick wallet.”
“There are always consolations. Who was he?”
“He didn’t tell any of us at first, just said he was ‘in town’ and that he’d parked his boat in the marina at Cannes. He told us he liked the band, although he made a few pointed remarks about how we needed to keep up with the times if we were ever going to ‘get ahead.’ He meant we were old-fashioned, but good at what we did.”
“I hear that a lot as well,” Floyd said.
“Well, the man kept us in drinks for the evening. But you know what those guys are like—after a few hours they barely knew what planet they were on, let alone what club they were in. With them taken care of, the man started concentrating on me. Said he was a television producer.”
“Television,” Floyd echoed, as if it was something he vaguely recalled someone mentioning once.
“It’s bigger in America than it is here,” Greta said, “and it’s growing by the year. They say that if you can afford a new auto, you can afford a new television.”
“It’ll never catch on.”
“Maybe it won’t, but the point is that I have to try. I have to see for myself if I have what it takes. The man said they’re crying out for new talent.” Greta reached into her jacket pocket and handed Floyd the business card that the television producer had given her. It was printed on good card stock, with the man’s name and business address next to a pair of silhouetted palm trees.
Floyd scanned it for a second and gave it back to her. “Why would they want a German girl?”
“I speak their language, Floyd. And the man said there’d be novelty value in it.”
“They’ll use you up and burn you out.”
“And you’d know, would you?”
Floyd shrugged. “I’m just being realistic.”
“Then let them use me up. I’ll take that over a slow death in some dead-end jazz band, playing music that no one wants to hear any more.”
“You really know how to wound a fellow,” Floyd said.
“Look,” Greta said, “the fact is that my mind’s already made up. I’ve saved enough money to take the flying boat. I’ll give them two years. If it hasn’t happened for me by then, maybe I’ll return to Europe.”
“It’ll never be the same,” Floyd said.
“I know that, but I still have to try it. I don’t want to be lying on my own deathbed fifty years from now, in some damp old house in Paris, wondering what would have happened if I’d taken the one chance life offered me.”
“I understand,” Floyd said. “Believe me, I do. It’s your life and it’s none of my business what you do with it. But what I don’t get is why you’re telling me any of this. You still haven’t answered my earlier question. Why did you send me the letter?”
“Because I’m offering you the chance to come with me. To America, Floyd. To Hollywood. The two of us.”
He supposed that on some level he had known this was coming, ever since she mentioned America. “That’s not a proposition to be taken lightly,” Floyd said.
“I’m serious about it,” Greta said.
“I know. I can tell. And I’m grateful that you asked.” Meekly, he added, “I don’t deserve a second chance.”
“Well, you’re getting one. But I’m serious about leaving as soon as this whole horrible business is over with.”
What she meant was: when her aunt was dead.
Floyd didn’t dare think about the implications yet, didn’t dare allow himself to be seduced by the idea of joining her, with everything that it would mean for his life in Paris.
“How about this,” Floyd said. “I can join you there soon, but I can’t travel with you—not while we’re still working on this homicide enquiry. And even if we solve the case, I’ll still have a lot of business to deal with. I couldn’t just up sticks from one week to the next.”
“I want you to go with me,” she said. “I don’t want some vague promise that you’ll fly out when you’ve cobbled together enough money. Knowing you, that could take the better part of a decade.”
“I just need some leeway,” Floyd said.
“You always need leeway,” she said. “That’s your problem. If money is the issue, I have some spare. Not enough for a ticket, but enough if you sold that car and whatever else you could stand not to take with you.”
“How long afterwards? I mean, after she…” Floyd trailed off, unable to come out and say it. “You mentioned a week to ten days.”
“I’d need a week or so afterwards to deal with the funeral. That gives you at least two weeks, maybe longer.”
“I’d worry about Custine.”
“Give him the business. God knows, he’s worked hard enough to deserve it.”
She had, Floyd thought, obviously given the matter some consideration herself. He imagined her working out the details on the train as she journeyed up from the south, and he felt both flattered and irritated to have been the subject of so much undeserved attention.
“Why are you giving me this second chance?” he asked.
“Because there’s still some part of me in love with you,” she said. “In love with what you could be, if you stopped living in the past. You’re a good man, Floyd. I know that. But you’re going nowhere here, and if I stick with you here then I’m going nowhere either. And that’s not good enough for me. But in America things could be different.”
“Is that true? That you still love me?”
“You wouldn’t have come to the station if you didn’t feel the same way about me. You could have ignored that letter, pretended it never arrived or that it arrived too late.”
“I could have,” Floyd admitted.
“Then why didn’t you? For the same reason I wrote to you—because as much grief and heartache as we cause each other when we’re together, it’s worse when we’re apart. I wanted to be over you, Floyd. I kidded myself that I was. But I wasn’t strong enough.”
“You’re not over me, but you’ll leave me anyway if I don’t agree to come to America with you?”
“It’s the only way. It’s either be together, or not be on the same continent.”
“I need some time to think about it,” Floyd said.
“Like I said, you have a couple of weeks. Shouldn’t that be enough?”
“A week or a year, I don’t think it’d make much difference.”
“Then don’t agonise over it,” Greta said. She moved closer to him, holding his hand tightly and snuggling her head against his shoulder. “I grew up in this room,” she said. “It was the centre of my universe. I can’t believe how small and dark it seems now, how terribly sad and adult it makes me feel.” Her grip on his hand tightened. “I was happy here, Floyd, as happy as any girl in Paris, and now all it makes me feel is that I’m a good way through my life and there’s a lot less of it ahead now than when I was last here.”
“It gets us all in the end,” Floyd said. “Growing up, I mean.”
She slid closer to him, until he could smell her hair; not just the perfume from the last time she had washed it, but the accumulated smells of the arduous journey she had made today: the smoke and the grit and the odour of other people, and, buried in there somewhere, something of Paris.
“Oh, Floyd,” she breathed. “I wish it wasn’t happening like this. I wish there was some other way. But when she’s gone, I don’t want to spend a minute longer in this city than necessary. There’ll be too many sad memories, too many ghosts, and I don’t think I want to spend the rest of my life feeling haunted by them.”
“You shouldn’t,” Floyd said. “And you’re right to make this move. Go to America. You’ll knock them out.”
“Oh, I’m definitely going,” she said, “but I won’t be truly happy unless you come with me. Think about it, Floyd, will you? Think about it like you’ve never thought about anything in your life. It could be your chance as much as mine.”
“I’ll think about it,” Floyd said. “Just don’t expect an answer before morning.”
He thought about making love to her—he had been thinking about it since the moment he opened her letter. He had little doubt that she would let him, if he tried. He also had little doubt that what she most wanted from him was to be held close, until, emotionally and physically drained, she fell into a shallow and uneasy sleep. She muttered things in German that he didn’t understand, imprecations that sounded urgent but which might have meant nothing at all, and then gradually she fell silent.
At three in the morning, he eased her into the bed, pulled the covers over her and walked out into the rain, leaving her alone in the room where she had grown up.