whore just the night before, a heavy dark girl named Fortune, who invariably smelled of cigarettes and cassis.
Odile the good versus Fortune the bad—what a contrast, thought St-Cyr, the one tall and fair and clean-edged, slim as a boy, except for the swell of hip and breast, a virgin; the other dark, built low to the ground, musky in her ample nakedness, a whore.
St-Cyr sighed and drank off the last of the café au lait. He had become concerned lately that perhaps he preferred the prostitutes. One didn’t have to spend eternity with them, and they were always waiting in the Rue Sainte for the next visit. St-Cyr pulled out his gold watch, a graduation gift from his father, and popped it open: eight-thirty. Time to make his rounds. He lit another cigarette, stood up, and dropped a few sous on the metal table. He stood for a moment outside, looking out from under the awning at the putty-gray clouds above the buildings. At least the mistral had blown itself out overnight, after three days of whining. St-Cyr did hate Marseille in the winter, maybe in any season. He flipped his cigarette into the gutter, then he walked across the rain-slick street to the Préfecture.
“Bonjour, Sergeant Borely. Lovely to see you, as usual. Lovely day, is it not? And what have you got for me this exquisite day?”
Borely looked down at the young reporter. He was seated on a platform behind a tall counter, and even as short as he was, he was a head taller than his guests. The arrangement was meant to be intimidating, and it worked, except with this scamp.
“Ah, bonjour, St-Cyr. It is a cold, wet morning, as usual. And I have nothing of interest.” Borely looked down at the log book. “Two wife-beatings, a stabbing, the usual vagabonds, and a cut-purse a citizen brought in after beating him up. His face looks like an aubergine, but he will live to atone for his sins.”
St-Cyr took down the superficial particulars of each case as the sergeant recited them: both wife-beatings were fueled by alcohol, as was the stabbing. A Levantine tannery worker, drunk on absinthe, had slashed an Algerian sailor in the face, nearly severing the tip of the nose—the only angle there was that the Algerian was also drunk, a rarity among the North Africans, most of whom were Muslims. The cutpurse entry would be good—the citizens of Marseille were always pleased with vigilante justice. St-Cyr was just about to close his little bound notebook. Not a very good haul, but Tuesdays, even Tuesday nights around the seaport, were pretty quiet. “Anything else, sergeant—anything at all? S’il vous plaît?”
Borely looked down at the young police reporter. There was something about him he didn’t like. St-Cyr had been on the beat for almost two years now, and in that time he had done nothing to offend Borely. He was unfailingly polite, filled with the joie de vivre, and quite bright, and he always got his facts right—something that had never concerned St-Cyr’s predecessor. Yet there was an air of privilege about the reporter that annoyed Borely—even the way he dressed. Today, in the middle of winter, he was wearing a yellow tattersall waistcoat and a scarlet poet’s tie, and a ridiculous wide-brimmed hat that would have embarrassed an Italian. True, he was a handsome devil, with his sparse but trim goatee and small white teeth, and his slim, foppish frame. But it was more at the manners, the politeness, that Borely took offense. They bespoke of good breeding, of—what else?—a life of privilege with that faint tinge of contempt for authority.
Borely himself barely had two sous to rub together, what with a wife and six children, and his consumptive mother who lived with them in a too-small flat behind Cours St-Louis. The plumbing was always broken and the small street was full of garbage from the open-air market. And now the neighbor was threatening to call the police because her cat was missing and she was sure Borely’s oldest boy had thrown it out the hallway window. Imagine that. Calling the gardiens on their own sergeant. Borely shook his head at the thought.
“Well, thanks for the information, sergeant.” St-Cyr seemed to interpret this gesture as a negative. He had put his notepad in his pocket and was screwing the cap on his fountain pen.
Borely watched him with a sigh that was almost affectionate. He did like the young man, in spite of, or perhaps because of, those attributes that annoyed him. And as a police reporter he made far less than even Borely. But perhaps he needed something to do more than he needed money. “We still have the Peau-Rouge,” he said.
St-Cyr had started to leave, but now he turned back, his face blank with confusion.
“The Peau-Rouge. We arrested him Christmas Eve, or rather, early Christmas morning.” Borely smiled. “Of course! You were off for a few days, weren’t you?” While I have been pulling double shifts throughout this season of the nativity, he thought.
“Yes, I went to spend Christmas with my family. In Lyon.” The words were almost abstract, uttered without inflection, as St-Cyr uncapped his pen. “What about this Peau-Rouge? What is he in for?”
“Nothing to get your hopes up about, St-Cyr. Vagabondage. And he left hospital without permission.”
Now St-Cyr was thoroughly confused. “But how does a Peau-Rouge . . .” He stopped himself. The Wild West show. Of course. But how . . . ?
“He was with Buffalo Bill. According to the American vice-consul, and to the records of Hopital de la Conception, he contracted the influenza, and he suffered broken ribs in a fall from his horse. He was hospitalized with these afflictions.” Borely stopped himself to watch a young secretary cross the room to the captain’s office. She wore a long-sleeved white blouse with ruffled shoulders and a long, slim black skirt that just brushed the tops of her narrow-toed shoes. Her black hair was done up in a bun with Chinese sticks shot through it. But it was the front of the blouse that caught Borely’s eye.
“The Peau-Rouge is here, now? In the jail?”
“He has a court appearance next week, or possibly the week after that. With all these holiday revelers, the courts are much backed up, I think.” Borely pursed his lips in a gesture of disdain. “This is not the holy season anymore, Monsieur St-Cyr. It is a season to get drunk and beat your wife or stab a North African, do you not agree?”
“Yes, of course.” But St-Cyr had been writing with careless haste: Peau-Rouge. Vagabondage. Leaving hospital—Conception—without permission. Christmas Eve. Crossed out. Christmas morning. “And does this American Indian have a name?”
Borely pretended to study the logbook, but he was looking right at the name. He was enjoying the suspense of the moment, but he was also a little intimidated by the American language. He didn’t want to butcher the word in front of this young man of privilege, so he ended up spelling it out.
“Charging Elk,” said St-Cyr, who had studied the English language in Grenoble. His father had said English was becoming more and more the lingua franca of commerce, especially the American tongue. St-Cyr had no intention of becoming a capitalist like his father, but he did learn the language to please him. “Does he speak English?”
“According to the vice-consul, he does not. He does not speak English or French. In fact, he has not spoken a word since his arrival. Perhaps the man is a mute.”
St-Cyr tapped his pen against his teeth. This was a story! An American Indian all by himself in Marseille without the ability to communicate with anyone. It didn’t seem possible that it could just fall into the lap of Martin St-Cyr. “You mean, Sergeant Borely, that the Wild West show just left town without him? He’s stranded here?”
“Absolutely. The vice-consul says the show is in Rome, even as we speak. He wanted to send this, this Charging Elk to
