“I suppose so.”
He was lying like a used-car salesman. In my office that Monday morning, Michelle had told me she’d gone to see Sally Owen at nine o’clock. Sally couldn’t have known about the beating by eight, and neither could Davis. Unless—
“How well did you know Sally Owen?”
“Not particularly well.”
“But she chose to reveal this to you?”
“Well, she wanted to talk to Leona, actually.”
“But she settled for you.”
“Well, yes. Any port in a storm, right?” he said, and smiled.
“Did you know Sally well enough to have posed for her?”
“Posed for her?”
“For a painting she made?”
“A what?”
“In black-and-white?”
“I don’t know what you—”
“A painting of Michelle Harper going down on you,” Bloom said suddenly and flatly, and Davis realized in that moment that it had been a trap all along, even his friend and ally was in on the hunt, and the hounds were barking at his heels.
“What... what... makes you think Michelle would ever have... have...?”
“A woman named Kitty Reynolds was there the night Sally made her sketch,” Bloom said, no longer the friendly Jeff, hard as nails now, fire in his eyes and molten steel running through his veins. Davis looked into those eyes and must have known the party was over. But he hung in there, anyway.
“I don’t even know anybody named Kitty Reynolds,” he said.
“Why’d you leave Vero Beach?” Bloom snapped.
“I was sick, I told you.”
“Who phoned you there Sunday morning?”
“Phoned me? Nobody. Who says—”
“Your first sergeant says you got a call there at nine o’clock on Sunday morning. Who was that, Mr. Davis? Was it Michelle Harper?”
“Michelle? I hardly even knew Mi—”
“Calling to say she’d spilled the beans the night before?”
“No, no. Why would—”
“Calling to say her husband was on his way to Miami—”
“No, hey listen—”
“...looking for you?”
“No, that’s wrong. Really, that’s—”
“Looking to kill you, Mr. Davis?”
Davis said nothing.
“Were you afraid he’d found out about The Oreo, Mr. Davis?”
Davis still said nothing.
“Afraid he’d kill you because he knew about The Oreo?”
He was silent a moment longer. Then he said, “Oh, Jesus.”
“Was it Michelle who called to warn you?”
“Oh, Jesus,” he said again, and then, almost as if he were glad to have it over with at last, he buried his face in his hands the way Harper had done in this same office almost three weeks earlier, and began weeping as he told us all of it from the beginning.
The tape unwound unmercifully, and the recent past was suddenly the immediate present.
13
Bonn.
This has been the capital of the Federal Republic of Germany since 1949, its population doubling to 300,000 once it became the seat of government. It sits on one bank of the Rhine, facing the Siebengebirge — the Seven Mountains — on the opposite bank. Adenauerallee, named for Dr. Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of the new democratic state, runs almost parallel to the river. It is said that Adenauer’s single vote caused this formerly quiet university town to become the new capital, and that his vote was premised on the region’s climate, supposedly genial to aging men.
The climate is rainy.
It rains here almost six months out of the year.
It is a rainy night in November, two years ago.
The setting is a bar in the baroque old quarter of the town, near the Kennedybrücke. Davis is sitting at a table with the blonde cabaret singer who is his date, waiting for Harper to arrive with the young girl he has fallen madly in love with, the nineteen-year-old named Michelle Benois, whom he’d met in a bar earlier this month. She comes in on his arm at a quarter past seven. Her long black hair cascades around a face that is beautiful but a trifle too made up. She is wearing a black cloth coat, and beneath that a clingy red dress cut low over her breasts and hugging her ample hips. He recognizes her at once for what she is: there are enough of them in Bonn. Georgie Harper has fallen in love with a hooker. (In bed with Davis later that night, the blonde singer asks, “Ist das Mädchen eine Hure?”)
He is surprised when Michelle calls him at the barracks the next day. She says she must see him. He thinks at once that business must be slow, too much free stuff being handed out to the servicemen by willing young Fräuleins. But he agrees to meet her later, and in a small bar near the Hofgarten, she tells him that she doesn’t know what to do about Harper. He has fallen madly in love with her, but of course she doesn’t care for him, how could anyone return the love of such a “monstre,” she says in French, such a monster. She is not referring to the brutality Davis later attributes to him. He admits to us now, as the tape relentlessly records his words, that he himself was the one who’d used his billy on any drunks they picked up (“I told you it was Georgie ’cause I figured that’d make him beating her up seem more likely, do you see?”). Michelle is referring instead to Harper’s looks, the apelike appearance of this “monstre véritable,” she says again in French.
They linger in the bar for close to two hours while she pours out her heart to him. He is thinking he would like to score with her, but not on her terms. He has never paid for it in his life, not at home, where his wife Leona is waiting for him to complete his four years of active duty, nor here in Germany either, where it can be had free just for the asking. He knows what her business is, but he broaches the possibility of a freebie, anyway, and is surprised when she readily agrees to it. In a hotel room on Koblenzstrasse, they make passionate love for the first time.
“I didn’t know she was going to get crazy later on,” he tells us now.
He continues seeing her. Harper knows nothing about their affair; Harper is blissfully in love with a girl who’s been hooking in Bonn ever since she was thirteen, when she fled Paris and the bourgeois existence she shared there with her French father and German mother. Davis doesn’t care what she is; in fact, her expertise is something new to him. There is never a moment in bed with her that he isn’t learning something he has never experienced before. On New Year’s Eve in Bonn, she pleads illness to get out of a date with Harper and instead arranges a small surprise for Davis. When he shows up at the hotel room she has booked in advance, she is waiting there with a voluptuous black girl who, like herself, is a hooker. “Bonne année,” she says and introduces Davis to what he will later remember as his first “triad.”
That was the real beginning,” he says now. “The real beginning of The Oreo, the beginning of everything.”
It is Davis, not Harper, who leaves Germany without calling Michelle. He considers her nothing more than what she is: a whore with a splendid bag of tricks. He is eager to get home, not to see his wife Leona, whom he considers something of a drudge, but instead “to feast on some soul food” (words he also attributes later to Harper), “the general black female population.” He does not know at the time that Michelle will follow him to the States in three months.
Nor does he know she is pregnant with his child.
She arrives in Miami shortly before Easter last year. She is wearing the same black cloth coat she’d been wearing when first he’d met her in Bonn. The weather is balmy and mild, but she is bundled inside her coat, trying to hide the swell of her pregnancy from the prying eyes of strangers. She does not have an address for Davis; he had refused to give her one before leaving Bonn. But she knows where to find Harper, who’d been asking her constantly to marry him and come live in the States with him. She goes first to the address Harper gave her in Bonn, but only to find out where she can locate Davis. Harper’s mother will not oblige her. Michelle must ask questions all over town before finally she can present herself on Davis’s doorstep with the announcement of her pregnancy and the threat that she will drown herself if he does not marry her. This will later become an inside joke between the lovers, and Michelle will recount with sly pleasure that these were the exact words she said to Harper when finally she proposed to him in Calusa.