Free Coq au Vin by Charlotte Carter Page A

he stopped mid-note, the queerest look on his face.
    â€œWhat?” I said, pulling myself out of the reverie.
    â€œI just got the greatest idea.”
    Wasn’t it wonderful, my beloved had an idea.
    â€œWhat idea?”
    â€œYou know ‘Sentimental Mood,’ don’t you?”
    â€œSure,” I said.
    â€œOkay. And—let’s see—what else? Do you know ‘Blue Room’?”
    â€œOf course.”
    â€œGo get your sax.”
    Duets!
    Why the hell not? Talk about your peas in a pod. Two jazz-drunk African-American neo-francophiles.
    I’d never given much thought to jazz violinists before I met Andre. Now I kicked myself for not making an effort to see artists like Regina Carter or Maxine Roach and the all-female group she was involved in back in New York: the Uptown String Quartet.
    I was now of the opinion that violinists made the perfect musical colleagues. Stuff Smith had collaborated most successfully with Dizzy, and with Nat Cole and Ella. Who else? Joe Venuti, of course. Then there was the old gentleman they called “Fiddler”—Claude Williams, who, if he only had four arms, could accompany himself on the guitar. And, almost too obvious to mention: the Grappelli-Reinhardt combination.
    The world thought I was just little old me from Queens. Ha! Little did they know, I was Django’s illegitimate gypsy granddaughter.

CHAPTER 6
    Lush Life
    It was time for a bold move.
    Time was flying away from me. Before Vivian became nothing more than a memory, I had to do something forceful, something concrete. And I had to do it now.
    That is why I made the decision to dip into the murky end of the pool, going once again to Pigalle.
    As far as we knew, Vivian wasn’t dead or dying. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t still in trouble. The way I saw it, if she was indigent, hungry, unable to go back to the hotel for her money, and surely unable to get any kind of job over here, she might well have turned to something not so legit, if not outright felonious. And so I decided to seek help from the only French criminal I knew—make that knew of .
    The first bold step I took was to tell a whopping big lie to Andre. I said that I’d run into an old classmate in the drugstore. She was living in Paris and she and I were going to get together for a night of drinking, roasting men, and catching up. It was to be girls-only, I told him; next time we got together, I’d ask him to join us.
    See, I knew he would go nuts if I told him what I was really planning to do. So he spent the evening playing with a couple of other musicians way out in Passy, while I joined my mythical girlfriend for dinner.
    The newspaper accounts of the murder of Mary Polk, the American businesswoman, had made Le Domino, the club where she was killed, sound like sin central. But in fact it was sort of like the French version of the dive where my friend Aubrey danced in New York. A lot of drunks. A few ambulatory junkies. Watery booze and skinny whores and a bunch of randy men who ought to know better.
    I chatted up the bartender and tipped outrageously and hung around long enough drinking donkey-piss beer to get my reward: Gigi Lacroix, the ex-pimp who had been questioned and released in the Mary Polk investigation, put in an appearance about one A.M.
    Yeah, he was a bit oily. But I had been prepared for that. I didn’t expect a guy in a beret carrying a marked-up copy of Nausea or humming Jacques Brel’s greatest hits. I predicted a certain sleaze factor and I got it. Gigi was a thin fellow with a thin mustache, a bad haircut, and a line of bullshit as long as a summer day in Stockholm.
    The thing was, with his big Charles Aznavour eyes and Popeye swagger, he was kind of adorable along with it.
    Gigi said he had not run a stable of hookers in more than ten years; “that nonsense” was all in the past. To hear him tell it, he was an old coot now—enjoying his retirement,