The Great Train Ride for Bassanda - Ch. 15
A Meeting at the Museum
[Cécile Lapin, October 1906]
I went with the Professor to the Musée d’Ethnographie in the old Trocadero Palace, west and across the Seine on the Right Bank. With its musty neglected halls dedicated to the folk arts of Oceania and Africa, amidst displays of primitive folklore and traditions—sculpture, clothing, artefacts—it was an environment whose colonialist unspecificity and indiscrimination I knew were anathema to him. In 1906, the Musée was not yet the haunt of Cubist and primitif artists like Picasso, who would shortly discover its collection of African masks, though the Fauvists like Matisse and Derain were beginning to evidence themselves. Nevertheless, we felt that this location, well away from my own neighborhoods of Montparnasse, was still less likely to elicit awkward chance-meetings with those who might know him, or us.
The “Trocadero,” as the Museum was often known, was a curious place—one of the only remaining structures which had been built cheaply, of lath and plaster, for the 1878 Exposition Universelle. It was a horrid building, without heating or proper plumbing, but it did hold a vast trove of ill-sorted artefacts from all over l’Empire. I recall particularly the room stuffed with plaster, bronze, and wooden statues of west African and—so the Professor later told me—Caribbean gods. Poor gods! They had traveled far, both in miles and prestige, from the sites where they had been made and imbued with power.
As we entered that chamber, across the space I spied the tall and striking figure of Madame Main-Smith, seemingly engrossed in her examination of a remarkable, almost caricatured full-size sculpture of the vodou God “Gou” (also “Ogun”), who held a blacksmith’s sledgehammer in one hand and a fierce-looking machete in the other. Rendered in what appeared to be sheets of red-painted riveted tin, he wore a long apron and a rakishly tilted hat decorated with its own small votive figures.
Silhouetted against the angular form of Gou, backlit in the dimness by the slanting sun from a dirty overhead skylight, dressed in quiet dark clothes, conservative in design, avoiding attention, there was nevertheless an air of command about this woman which drew, for one who had experienced her in person, one’s immediate attention. For a moment, I thought I saw the vodou sculpture beside her move in the dim light.
Even as we entered the room, more than sixty feet away from Madame, to my right I heard the scuff of soft shoes on marble, and before we had taken more than two steps forward a slender figure in dark plain clothes had slipped forward to contest our way. I hastened to speak up.
“Ca va, Ismail? You will recollect me, I hope, from the Colonel’s flat?”
He looked back for a moment before speaking. He was olive-skinned and fine of feature, with an aquiline face, slanted eyes bearing the epicanthic fold, and long straight black hair. Despite the plainness of his dress—dark clothing, a pullover, loose trousers, and soft shoes, lacking ornament or costly fabric—there was no mistaking the coiled strength of his body or the fierce energy in his penetrating eye. Addressing himself to me but looking at my companion, he said,
“Ca va bien, Mademoiselle. If the gentleman would be good enough to identify himself?” This query I momentarily regretted: knowing his rather abrasive personal manner I was prepared for Habjar-Lawrence to take umbrage at being thus interrogated. But he surprised me, in several ways I could not have expected:
“Bună ziua. Eu sunt profesorul James; numele meu este Habjar.”
Ismail smiled suddenly, and I saw the youthful energy beneath the undemonstrative exterior.
“Bună ziua, domnule profesor. Mi-am dorit să te cunosc. Sunt Ismail, iar eu sunt aici pentru a vă proteja și Madame. Și, desigur, Mademoiselle Cécile.”
The Professor shifted his cane but did not offer to shake hands. He spoke in French. “I know who you are, Monsieur Durang. You are the chess player?”
Surprisingly, the young man appeared to flush lightly with pleasure. “Yes, m’sieu, I do play. And of course I know your own skills.”
The Professor’s expression remained forbiddingly cold. “And, I think, you are also the one some call The Assassin?”
Ismail’s own expression shifted, and he blinked, withdrawing his hand. The Professor continued in the same hard voice.
“You are known to me already, Monsieur Durang. As are your activities, in Budapest and Prague and Paris and London and even, I think, in Boston. The cause of Bassanda should have no congress with violence and murder. I regret those like yourself who conceive that it should.”
For a moment, Ismail’s eyes widened. Then his expression hardened, and he withdrew his offered hand, shifted his gaze, and stepped away.
Deflecting the conversation, Madame spoke in English from close behind us—she moved almost as silently and subtly as did Ismail himself. “Habjar—it is so good to see you again, after this long time.”
At the sound of her voice, the Professor paused for a moment, and then turned—there was a hint of conflicted emotion in his face. But then he took her extended fingertips. “Yes, Algeria, it has been too long. And yet our reunion is perforce mandated by factors other than friendship or nostalgia, not so? Or so I understand from Cécile here.”
I heard the Colonel’s voice, before I saw him step forward, from a dim corner behind and to the left of the door through which we had entered: “Yes, sir, Professor, I’m afraid that’s exactly the situation. Wish it could be simply friendship that brought us to ye in person for the first time, but you know that’s not how it seems to work with Friends of Bassanda.”
The Professor, looking up at the looming presence of our frontiersman friend, clasped his left shoulder with one hand while they shook. “I know, Reverend Sir: it’s all right. Old friends, even if only by correspondence, can certainly make allowances for one another when they finally meet in person. I am happy to see you in Paris—though I understand other, less friendly hosts have already welcomed you.”
A match sputtered in the shadows behind the dusty case of the vodou idol Gou to our right, and the General’s ever-present cigar flared up, lighting his face from below. He shook out the match, broke it in two, and dropped it into his pocket, before doffing his kepi and coming forward to offer his hand in turn. He didn’t speak, but the Professor did: “The General. I have admired your scholarship in the Journal for decades, sir. Though I recognize the ivied halls were not your primary métier, I have appreciated your erudition and the catholicity of your academic interests.”
The General smiled briefly—more with his eyes than lips—and nodded in appreciation. “Thankee, Doctor. As you’ve inferred, though, the task at hand is hardly academic. It’s a little more forbidding than a shoddy edition or a cursory review.”
Astonishingly—in this conversation whose brevity, understated language, and elliptical nature I could only partly follow, and in contrast to most of what I had experienced of the Professor’s mien with peers and contemporaries—he chuckled quietly. “No sir, I do understand that. What was it our friend Mr Clemens said? ‘The reason academic battles are so ferocious is because the stakes are so small’?”
The General nodded. “You’re right there, sir. In the present investigation, the stakes are a little higher. And a lot more permanent.”
The Professor nodded thoughtfully, cocked a critical eye toward Madame, and made to speak, but was interrupted: a door slammed open at the other end of the room, echoing in the dim stillness of the hall, and a crowd of loud and animated young Left Bank aesthetes entered, talking excitedly. The Colonel looked down the room, and then glanced quickly at the General, who nodded. “Time to adjourn, friends. If we’re thinking of getting you three to the Express, we will need every remaining moment for purposes of planning.”
The Professor paused and looked hard at the General. “I am willing to entertain the task that Cécile has suggested you wish to lay upon us. But I will have no part of violence. If that precludes my assent, so be it. I will not make common cause with an Assassin.”
The irony of this statement, directed to the General, of whose ruthless deadliness I had directly testified, was not lost on me, but none of the Brethren showed a reaction. The General said, merely, “If you’ll entertain it, sir, that is good enough for now—the details can be debated. But not here. And not now.”
So while the Colonel led the way, and the General lingered behind with one eye upon the newcomers, the Professor allowed Madame to lead him toward the exit. Durang hesitated for a moment, and then put his hand lightly upon my forearm; I noticed, even in that moment, that his own wrist bore a string of prayer beads.
“Mademoiselle, if you will permit—there is another and a more discreet egress—if you will come this way.”
We stepped through another, nearby door, which took us behind the lath-and-plaster walls of the hall, even mustier, dustier, dimmer and more stifling than the main rooms.
As we sidled lightly, in single file, through the dimness of the back corridor that would take us out into the warm sunlight and fashionable beau monde of the Right Bank, Ismail preceded me to show the way.
I was acutely conscious of the light, yet electric touch of his hand upon my arm.
