“Sergeant Borely will make sure your citizen is cared for. I’m sure a tribunal will hear the case next week, probably a slap on the wrist, nothing more. Bonne nuit, Monsieur Vice-Consul.”
“Thank you for your kind attention to this matter, Chief Vaugirard. I’m sure Monsieur Charging Elk would thank you too, if he could. Joyeux Noël, Chief Vaugirard!” Bell had meant to sound sarcastic but his French wasn’t good enough.
Borely turned to follow his chief out the door; then he stopped and said, “I will inquire about the food, monsieur.”
“Thank you, sergeant.” Bell turned to look at Charging Elk, but the Indian had his eyes closed and he was rocking almost imperceptibly on the wooden chair. Bell couldn’t tell if he was asleep or simply trying to block out the world.
The American Consulate was on Boulevard Peytral in the Sixth District, only a few blocks from the Prefecture. It was four-thirty in the morning and Bell was walking in that direction. His spacious apartment on the second floor of a grand residence was right next door to his workplace. The apartment had been furnished with antiques from the Empire period. Bell didn’t know how the consulate had acquired such grand furnishings, but after his time in the shabby tenement in Panama, his last posting, he wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. His dinner that evening had gone quite well—he had even toasted Napoleon for providing such magnificent craftsmen that could build such magnificent furniture: “To the emperor of good taste and bad judgment.” Margaret Whiston had laughed, to his delight. She was the cultural affairs attaché and a very ample piece. One of the few unmarried Americans (like himself) in Marseille. She did have a fiancé in the embassy in Constantinople, but the distance, and the unwillingness of both to give up their jobs, had created a crisis in their relationship that Bell was only too happy to exploit. So far it had been just talk, but she was considering his offer to spend next weekend in Avignon. She was a very bold young woman.
In spite of the lateness of the hour, Franklin Bell was in relatively high spirits. He had promised Charging Elk that he would return the next day with cigarettes and food. He thought Charging Elk had somehow understood that, but he couldn’t be sure. The Indian had simply nodded without really looking at him. In fact, Bell couldn’t remember the Indian ever looking at him. They were a strange race of people, he thought, still attempting to live in the past with their feathers and beads. But perhaps that was understandable, seeing that they had no future to speak of. He had read an article in La Gazette du Midi just the other day about “the vanishing savages,’ and that just about summed it up. They were a pitiful people in their present state and the sooner they vanished or joined America the better off they would be.
Still, he now wished he had gone to a performance while the Wild West show was in Marseille. He had read Buffalo Bill, King of the Border Men when he was a kid, twenty years ago. He had grown up in Philadelphia, and like all kids then, he had wanted to go west to the frontier to fight Indians. And in 1869, there were plenty of Indians to meet in battle.
Bell crossed into Boulevard Peytral and saw his apartment, with the soft glow of light in the French door behind the wrought-iron balcony. He still hadn’t gotten used to closing the shutters every night the way the French did; he hated to wake up in the morning in a still-dark apartment.
As he fished his keys out of his pocket, he thought again of Charging Elk, but only in the abstract. He had finally met an Indian, but not in the heat of battle; rather, he had met a poor wretch in a shabby coat that didn’t fit him and hospital slippers that were soaked through; he was alone in a country where he could not speak the local language, and worse, he couldn’t speak the language of his own country. He would sit in a French jail for at least four days until the Christmas weekend was over, and maybe longer, given the crowded nature of the French courts. So much for the romanticism of youth. This Indian was thoroughly defeated.
Bell suddenly thought of the other Indian—Featherman. He had been brought to Hopital de la Conception as an influenza case even before Charging Elk, but it turned out he had consumption, which had turned virulent. So he was moved to the tuberculosis ward. It hardly mattered. He would be dead soon enough. And it would be up to Bell to notify his relatives. How does one notify the relatives of a savage? He would have to catch up with the Wild West show somehow. It was all too much.
Bell turned the key and the door swung inward. If only Margaret were there, waiting for him in bed. But—maybe next weekend, in Avignon. He made a silent prayer as he climbed the stairs to his spacious apartment filled with Empire furniture and the pervasive odor of a delicious bouillabaisse that his landlady had created. He would sleep as long as he wanted and perhaps he would dream of Margaret and her abundant offerings. It was Christmas, after all.
CHAPTER FOUR
Martin St-Cyr hated Marseille in the winter and he wondered at the turn of events that had landed him here. He wondered quite often, at least once a week, but he never came up with a satisfactory explanation. The simple explanation was that he had followed a girl here. After their graduation from university in Grenoble in 1886, she had taken a teaching job in a lycée here. Because she was a brave Christian girl with a missionary spirit, she had chosen a school in Le Panier, an old working-class section of Marseille that now attracted immigrants from the Barbary States and the Levant, who worked the worst jobs in the soap and hemp factories, the abattoirs and tanneries.
St-Cyr had graduated with a degree in economics and had been accepted into law school at the Sorbonne for the next semester. But he hadn’t counted on falling in love with Odile despite the fact that his best instincts told him that they were not at all compatible. She was deeply religious and felt compelled to spend at least this part of her life helping the less fortunate. He was not religious at all, in spite of being raised in a Catholic household. His third year in college, he fell in with a group of socialists, many of whom (like him) were more in love with the idea of the working classes than with the actual people who constituted the oppressed. St-Cyr attended the meetings and rallies, passed out leaflets, and played a small part in attempting to organize the meat workers and the draymen in Grenoble. But when the police entered the Place St-André, where the workers and students had gathered to protest the arrest of three leading organizers, two students, and a meatcutter, St-Cyr had ducked into the Palais de Justice, just off the square. From there, he watched the trunchion-swinging gendarmes charge the overpowered, if not undermanned, protest. Much blood was spilled that hot autumn afternoon, and after that, St-Cyr had eased himself to the fringes, then out, of the movement.
But St-Cyr had never been a socialist, activities aside. He told his friends he was going to law school to further the goals of democratic socialism—the movement could always use good, committed lawyers—but he still believed in many of the bourgeois values—his own father was a capitalist, a silk merchant in Lyon, and had provided his family a very good life.
So what was St-Cyr doing, sitting in a small drab café on a Wednesday morning in Marseille, sipping café au lait and eating a brioche? He couldn’t really answer that. Odile had, in fact, become a missionary and was now in Algiers, emptying bedpans in a charity hospital. At the end of one year, she would decide whether to continue her work or come back and marry St-Cyr. But lately he had wondered at the idea of marriage, of committing oneself to another for an eternity on earth. And there was the subject of sex. Although they had their romantic moments—picnics along the Promenade de la Corniche, day trips to the Camargue to see the flamingoes and the agile black bulls that were the stars of Provençal bullfights, overnight to Avignon to tour the Palais des Papes, evenings at the opera or the theater—sex had refused to rear its head, at least for Odile. No matter how much or how fast St-Cyr talked about the joys of the subject, she had remained
