CHAPTER NINE:The Night Of Three Kings
1113 Words
Chapter Nine — The Night of the Three Kings
Le Chat Bleu was raided on a Friday.
It happened at eleven-forty — between sets, when the room was full and hot and the crowd was three cognacs into the evening. The police arrived with a quiet efficiency that Henri Dumont later said was worse than noise, because it meant they had been planned for. Four officers in the front, two at the back door, and a police lieutenant named Inspector Gaston Vrel who moved through the room with the unhurried confidence of a man who believed the law was the same thing as justice.
Élise was at her table. She had arrived late that night, having spent two hours at a dinner with her parents and the Fontaines — Armand had been particularly warm, having just secured a significant contract, and her mother had watched her across the table with the satisfaction of someone watching a plan come together.
She saw the police enter before most of the room did. She looked at the stage.
Jimmy was already watching the door.
Their eyes met across the room for one full second — a second that contained something that would have taken paragraphs to say — and then he turned back to the band, said something to Lionel, and they began to play again. A slow, deliberate number. As if nothing were happening.
Théo appeared at Élise's elbow. "You need to go," he whispered. "Out the back, through the kitchen. Now, mademoiselle, while the inspector is still at the front."
"The band — "
"Please." His voice was young and urgent and genuinely frightened. "I'll explain to him. Go."
She went. Through the kitchen, past the cook, Madame Fabre, who did not look up from her dishwater, past the coats, out into the alley behind Rue Lepic that smelled of the Seine on warm nights. She stood in the dark and listened to the music continue inside — Jimmy still playing, the melody drifting through the wall — and felt a specific, adult fear she had not encountered before: the fear not for herself, but for someone else.
The music stopped twenty minutes later.
Théo found her in the alley an hour after that, cold and refusing to leave.
"What happened?" she asked.
"They took Henri's license. Temporary suspension." Théo's voice was careful. "The band was questioned and released. Gabriel and Rémi have gone home." A pause. "Jimmy and Lionel were held for an hour. They've been released. But —"
"But?"
"Inspector Vrel told Jimmy that his residency permit is under review. He told him that Paris has been very — " Théo seemed to struggle with the word. "Patient. That was the word he used. Patient."
Élise understood what that meant.
"Where is he now?"
"I sent him to the café on Rue des Martyrs. I told him you might come." Théo looked at her with the serious eyes of a nineteen-year-old who had seen enough of the world to be sad about it. "Be careful, mademoiselle. Coming and going."
"I know."
"I mean with him. He is a good man. And this city —" He stopped. "Just be careful."
* * *
Jimmy was at the back booth, a cup of coffee cooling before him, his jacket still on. He looked up when she came in, and the expression on his face — something between relief and resignation, between gratitude and warning — was the most real she had ever seen from him.
She sat across from him.
"I'm fine," he said, before she could ask. "They questioned us. Standard intimidation. Nothing charged."
"Your permit —"
"Is a problem." He said it evenly, the way a doctor names a diagnosis. "I have a contact at the Ministry — a man named Clément Brossard who owes me a favor. I'll talk to him next week. It may be resolvable." He paused. "Or it may not be."
"What happens if it's not?"
He looked at her. "Then I go somewhere else. London, maybe. Or I go back."
The word 'back' contained everything. New Orleans. Vernon Cade. The specific violence of a place that had decided what he was allowed to be.
"You can't go back," she said.
"People do things they can't do all the time." He picked up his coffee, set it down without drinking. "Élise. I need to tell you something, and I need you to hear it without the part of you that makes things better taking over."
She nodded.
"What's between us is real. I have never been more certain of anything." He said this with the directness of a man who did not offer certainties lightly. "And what's between us is also — it is very difficult. Not impossible. But I would be lying to you if I said I know how it works. How it goes forward. The world outside this café is not — it is not on our side."
"I know."
"And your September —"
"I'm not marrying Armand Fontaine," she said.
Silence.
"You haven't told them."
"I will." She heard the slight tremor in her own voice and steadied it. "I've been afraid. I'm still afraid. But that —" She stopped. Restarted. "I realized something tonight, standing in that alley listening to you play through a wall while police were inside because of people like me walking through your door. I realized that being afraid of the consequences of my real life is not actually safer than living it. It just means I suffer without anything to show for it."
He looked at her for a long time.
"You're going to break something when you tell them," he said gently.
"I know."
"It won't be recoverable. Your mother. Fontaine. Maybe your father."
"I know that too."
"And I can't promise you — " His voice shifted slightly, became very quiet. "I can't promise you Paris. I can't promise you stability. I can't promise you anything your family would recognize as a life."
"I'm not asking you to promise me things," she said. "I'm telling you who I am. What you do with that is yours to decide."
Another silence, longer this time. The café was nearly empty. The waiter, a young man named Pascal, was wiping tables with the elaborate tact of someone pretending not to be listening.
"Then I decide," Jimmy said, "that I am also not going to pretend to be someone smaller than I am because the world finds it more convenient."
He reached across the table. She took his hand.
They stayed until Pascal gently indicated, at two in the morning, that he needed to close.
- Writer
