The Merry Month of May (31 page)

“They’ve got over a hundred more in there now than they had on Wednesday,” Weintraub said. He got two grimy looking cups. “They just won’t turn themselves in to the regular hospitals because the police keep a check on them all and arrest everybody.” He poured the hot black coffee for us both and then sat down against the wall on a mat at the other end from the necking couple. I sat down beside him, nursing the hot cup of horrible coffee.

“Hill Gallagher is flipping his lid,” Weintraub began.

“Oh?” I said. “How so? Why?”

“You mean you don’t know about Harry taking Samantha off to Cannes with him?”

“Do you know that?” I asked. “Or is it a supposition?”

“Well, I don’t have any signed letters from either of them, if that’s what you mean,” Weintraub said. “And I haven’t tried to call down there. But it’s pretty damned obvious. Where else would she have disappeared to?”

“Lots of places. Well, if he did,” I said, “I think it was a damned silly thing for a man in his position to do.”

“I’ll concede that,” Weintraub said and again I saw that odd pained, battered look come onto his face that I was to see so many more times. “I guess I knew I could never keep her. Of course, she was shtumping Hill, and a lot of the other guys up here I suppose, but at least she was bunking up with me.” He drank from his steaming cup. “She’s still looking for that loot to get her down to Israel. Though I don’t know how she would get out of Paris now if she had it. Shit, only a damned diplomat can get out now, from those military fields that are still operating, or a big big-business man.”

“But what about Hill?”

“Well, I guess he’s flipped over her,” Weintraub said sadly. “I don’t know how
he
found out. I certainly didn’t tell him.” I felt a twinge. “But then he was bound to find it out sooner or later.”

“And you’re absolutely sure about this, Weintraub,” I said.

“As sure as I am about anything I’ve ever seen or done.”

“Listen, Weintraub. If you ever intimate so much as one word about this, ever, to Louisa, I’ll—I’ll do something terrible to you,” I said.

“Not to worry!” He raised his hand. “Poor Louisa is no concern of mine.”

“Well, just remember that. I swear I’ll hound you out of Paris.”

He shook his head. “Of course, that is not to say that Hill might not tell her.”

“No he wouldn’t,” I said. “Never.”

Weintraub shrugged. “Who’s to say? In any case, he’s been flipping his lid around here.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, you know they voted in the Committee about Harry’s proposal he made before he left. Well, Hill came out against it. Everybody was clearly in favor of it, but Hill makes this long wild gnashing speech against it in the discussion about how his father was a commercial, revisionist bourgeois, who wanted to use commercial, revisionist bourgeois methods to make the Committee’s film, and that it would destroy the honor, the very precepts of the Committee, its film, and the Revolution itself, if they let his father make it his way, or even work on it at all. His father was a commercial hack, a paid pawn of the Establishment. He went wild. I mean, really wild. Waving his arms, and hollering, and grinding his teeth. I was there at the time.”

“That’s all due to Samantha,” I said judiciously.

“I don’t know if it all is,” Weintraub said. “But certainly some of it is, I’m sure.”

“He’s fallen madly in love with her.”

“Well, he ought to know better than to fall for a chick like that,” Weintraub said, sadly. “She’s not about to tie herself up with some guy. And certainly not some guy like Hill.” Or you, I thought. He had implied it. “Anyway, she certainly knows her business in the bed,” he said, “and maybe that got to him. He’s so young.” He sat musing for a moment, his back against the wall.

“Well anyway, they finally got the floor away from him, and some other kids made short speeches about why they were in favor of the idea, Harry’s idea. It was plain they were all against him. But Hill couldn’t leave it alone. He kept breaking in out of order, and trying to make more speeches, and Daniel kept having to gavel him down. Man I mean but he really lost his cool, man,” the 45-year-old Weintraub said. (I suspect him of being much closer to 50 than 45, if not already 50.) My sadness for him over Samantha increased. He was taking it really well.

“Anyway finally, they voted, and voted him down almost unanimously. The only two who voted with him were Terri and Bernard. And they clearly did it out of friendship, knowing they would lose beforehand.” He grinned suddenly. “After all, Terri is going to be the star of it if they do it Harry’s way.

“And since then he hasn’t been the same boy. He just mopes around. The kids who crew with him say he isn’t doing half the job he used to do on his assignments. That’s why they didn’t send him out tonight. I think he’s in a pretty bad way.”

We both sat in silence for a while, nursing our hot cups. I simply could not get that vile coffee down, though it did not seem to bother Weintraub. There just was not anything I could say about Hill that would do any good or help.

“Is there anything you can do to help him?”

“I never have been able to talk to him about Harry,” I said finally. “And not now either, about Samantha.”

Weintraub appeared not even to have heard me. “Then there’s been another development. You know they stored all those cans of shot film at my place during that scare about a police raid. Well, they came and took them back, and all of them were kept out in the office there in those two big refrigerator boxes. There’s no way to get them developed here in France without the police and the Government confiscating them.

“Well, about ten days ago one of the kids on the Committee came in here and took almost all of them, more than fifty, maybe sixty cans— that’s a lot of film—saying he had a ride to Italy that night in a private car and he would take the film to Italy with him and have it developed and bring it back. There was only one girl in the office, alone, at the time. She had no authority to say yes or no and she let him take them. They’ve had no word from him at all since then, and they’ve been beginning to get worried about the film. Do you know about all that?”

“No, I don’t,” I said. I had not heard anything about it at all

“Well, now they’ve got some garbled message back from Italy saying that he lost them all, in Rome. They were ‘stolen’ from the back seat of his car during a riot, or after a demonstration that he went to, or something. It’s a pretty garbled message. The kid who brought it back doesn’t even know him. And the kid himself who took them hasn’t come back. He’s still in Rome, trying to get a fix on where they went.” Weintraub smiled a bitter smile. “There seems to be some suspicion among the kids on the Committee that he just swiped them and sold them in Rome.”

“Jesus!” I said. “But that’s irreparable.”

“One bad apple in the barrel,” Weintraub said. “That kind of a story. It sure is irreparable. Almost all the stuff they’ve shot from the beginning up to then. All the stuff that Hill shot on the barricades of the Friday night of Gay-Lussac. All the demonstrations. All the stuff shot inside the Sorbonne. It’s more than irreparable. It’s a catastrophe.”

“The idealistic students,” I said. “The idealistic students of the
Comité du Cinéma de la Sorbonne et Odéon.”

“Yeah,” Weintraub sighed. “The idealistic students, and one bad apple. They don’t really know yet what really happened. They’re just waiting to hear.” He shoved himself up from against the wall. He had emptied his cup. I got up myself.

“That must not make Hill too happy either,” I said.

“I very much doubt if he’s even aware of it,” Weintraub said. “What with his misery over Samantha.”

“Where can I throw this?” I said, holding up my cup.

“There’s a little sink there in the corner,” he said. It was so dark and dingy in the corner that I had not seen the tiny sink before.

“I wonder what’s happened to his live-and-let-live, screw-and-let-screw, anti-monogamy philosophy?” I said coming back.

“I suppose, after the first time in your life you fall in love big, you’re more prepared for it,” Weintraub said thoughtfully. “You’re more prepared for the loss and the big knock.”

“But you’ve got to survive that first time, though.”

Weintraub sighed. “Yeah. That’s true. And you really don’t think there’s anything you can do to help him, hunh? Look. Do you want to go down and take a look at the old Boul’ St.-Michel? Have you been down there yet tonight? We can get that boy Raymond to steer us all around. He’s well known just about everywhere in the Quartier now.”

“No, I haven’t yet,” I said. “I’ve been around other places but not there. Okay, sure. Why not?”

The boy Raymond was out in the office, where some other heated democratic discussion was going on chaired by the tireless Daniel.

Raymond had sort of become my official conductor everywhere since he had first shown me the Committee’s offices and the balcony over the theater. He said he would be glad to take us down to St.-Michel.

“You’ll probably need a handkerchief if we get anywhere near to the Carrefour,” he smiled.

I nodded and said I had one, and then he took us down past the moaning hospital and out through the kids with the chains around their necks, who were certainly not students. Grammar school dropouts or not, they were having the time of their lives guarding the Revolution with their chains.

As we went down I saw Jean-Luc Godard, Truffaut, and William Klein all wandering around separately in the crowded corridors. Only one of them, Godard, had a camera with him. There was still the same tension and sense of happy elation all over.

Out in the street we made our way across the crowded
Place
toward rue Racine and down it past the
barricade pure
to the Boulevard. There was room to get past it on the sidewalk. At the Odéon there had been gangs of students up on the high Odéon roof, armed with garbagecan lids for shields and wearing weird-looking Roman or Gothic or Frankish helmets. They had found stores of these among the theater’s costuming department. They shouted down from the high roof unintelligible comments while brandishing their shields. It was a real bedlam.

Along Racine and on St.-Michel we found more gangs of similarly uniformed students moving along toward the fight or else away from it. There seemed to be little order to their movement. They all wore handkerchiefs around their necks ready to be pulled up over their noses in the tear gas.

Raymond really was quite small. He spoke no English at all and we spoke to him all the time in French. He was considerably older than the others, 25 or 26. He seemed to be more reflective. He was sweeter-looking and more nonviolent-looking than anyone I had seen around. He had been doing graduate studies in Cinema at the Sorbonne before the Revolution. He wanted to be a film director. As we moved along, he was hailed by students from all the groups we passed.

“Tell me,” I said. “Do you think Daniel the Chairman could perhaps be a foreign agent?”

We were standing on the corner of the Boulevard now, by the little bookshop there. The wide street was jammed with people. Small civilian cars with red crosses painted on their sides and hoods, driven by shouting students, were honking and trying to get through the press. Some were going toward the fighting and some away from it.

“I have thought of that.” Raymond looked at me with smart eyes and smiled his gentle smile. “No, I do not think he is. He has a strange accent. That is all. Well, he is Swiss.”

“He also has the look of a dedicated Commissar,” I said. “And those ancient style steel-rimmed glasses of his. Very Russian.”

“That is true,” Raymond smiled. “But no, I do not think he is. In any case we must use what we have at hand. Shall we go on? Or stop here?”

“No, let’s go on.”

We were able to get down to the Carrefour. It was only a short distance, and the actual fighting at the moment was further down toward the river. We could see the flashes, smoke and bursts of tear gas coming up down there nearer to the Place St.-Michel, and hear the shouts and the chanting.

Across St.-Germain gangs were ripping up what was left of the street, pulling down traffic signs and streetlamps to make a barricade. Up St.-Germain 200 yards, at the rue Danton, a police cordon blocked that boulevard, but they were not moving.

Suddenly, in front of us, at the Carrefour, four tough but vicious ratlike-looking individuals, in their early 20s I guessed, snaked out across the sidewalk and began dismantling with great efficiency the protective pedestrian railings that ran around the corner of the sidewalk. These consisted of eight or ten iron pipes set into the concrete and connected by chains. One individual opened the end links with a large switchblade as a lever, then carefully closed the links and draped the chains around his neck. Two others equipped with hacksaws began sawing off the pipes at the ground to use as clubs. The fourth collected the pipes as they came loose. They were dressed in what appeared to be Army fatigues and they wore the round-topped American-style forage caps pulled far down onto their ears with the brims turned flat up. They did not talk and their faces were absolutely cold, concentrated and expressionless.

When they had demolished the pedestrian railing, they snaked back across the sidewalk and disappeared as they had come, down toward the fighting.

“Did you see those types!” I said. I could not help exclaiming. They were like real rats, totally inhuman.

Raymond, beside me, made an embarrassed gesture. “It is no longer under our control, you know. It has not been since last night.”

“But you have a lot of them working for you at the Odéon.”

Again Raymond made an embarrassed smile. “That is true. And not only at Odéon.”

“They gave me a chill up my back,” I said.

“Me, too,” Weintraub said simply.

“I would gladly knock those four young gentlemen off with a machine-pistol, and feel no qualms,” I said. I was absolutely furious for some reason.

“And they would do the same for you,” Weintraub said. Then he laughed, in his deepest voice.

“I am sure they would,” I said.