The 13th Fellow: A Mystery in Provence Read online

  Praise for Tracy Whiting’s (T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting’s) just-released nonfiction work, “Bricktop’s Paris”:

  “Bricktop’s Paris vibrantly recreates and reimagines the fascinating world of Jazz Age Paris by placing black women at the center of the story. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting gives us a valuable new perspective on Ada “Bricktop” Smith, giving her the prominence usually attributed to Josephine Baker. She also provides detailed portraits of other singers, musicians, writers, and artists who left America for the French capital. Written with enthusiasm and insight, Bricktop’s Paris underscores the importance of women to transatlantic black modernity.”

  —Tyler Stovall, author of Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light

  “Bricktop’s Paris is a remarkable feat. Sharpley-Whiting’s book is a woman’s story about dreaming and making dreams happen. It is a political story, a story about migration, and re-creation. It is a dazzling account of bold women reshaping their lives as New Women/Modern Women and black women in Europe. A woman’s place is not only viewed in the sphere of domesticity through Sharpley-Whiting’s writing, she also reimagines the complexity of life far away from home and on stage, in the studio, and in the nightclub. She captures their spirit and desires and walks us through this history arm and arm, singing, writing, dancing, and making art. I fell in love with these women as I empathized with their struggles, some of them I knew through other writings but through Sharpley-Whiting I felt as if I knew them intimately as they made their lives count some fifty years after Reconstruction. She restores their voices and their bodies and makes them present for the contemporary reader. Brilliant!”

  — Deborah Willis, author of Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present

  Also by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting

  Black Venus is a feminist study of the representations of black women in the literary, cultural, and scientific imagination of nineteenth-century France. Employing psychoanalysis, feminist film theory, and the critical race theory articulated in the works of Frantz Fanon and Toni Morrison, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting argues that black women historically invoked both desire and primal fear in French men. By inspiring repulsion, attraction, and anxiety, they gave rise in the nineteenth-century French male imagination to the primitive narrative of Black Venus.

  Pimps Up, Ho’s Down pulls at the threads of the intricately knotted issues surrounding young black women and hip hop culture. What unravels for Tracy D. Sharpley-Whiting is a new, and problematic, politics of gender. In this fascinating and forceful book, Sharpley-Whiting, a feminist writer who is a member of the hip hop generation, interrogates the complexities of young black women’s engagement with a culture that is masculinist, misogynistic, and frequently mystifying.

  The 13TH FELLOW

  BY

  TRACY WHITING

  booksBnimble Publishing

  New Orleans, La.

  The 13TH Fellow

  Copyright 2015 by Tracy Whiting

  All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-9904543-9-7

  www.booksbnimble.com

  First booksBnimble electronic publication: April 2015

  Digital Editions (epub and mobi formats) produced by Booknook.biz

  Contents

  Start Reading

  Full Table of Contents

  “Even a lie is a kind of truth.”

  —Robert Penn Warren, Who Speaks for the Negro?

  Author’s Note

  In three dimensions, there is no Félibrige Foundation, no Félibrige board, not one single Félibrige member. When the members of the society of poets founded by Frédéric Mistral died, the Félibrige Society, along with their little movement promoting the Occitan language in Provence, went with them. French is the language of France; and only French must be spoken in France. (Vive la France?) There are no new members or 21st century manifestations— certainly none so colorful (and criminally inclined) as the ones depicted herein! No boards, nothing, zilch. The Félibrige is dead. Long live the Félibrige!

  PART I

  The Briar Patch

  I

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  Paris, France, Monday, June 21st, 2010

  As she bounced up the steps of the Vavin metro stop, Havilah Gaie could see the sky was about to open up. The network of trains comprising Paris’s underground metro system had transported over a century of bodies. The Métro had a smell unto itself. Not quite funky or stale but certainly cavernous, slightly musty, and definitely old. So she inhaled deeply, filling her lungs with fresh air.

  The morning had started out sunny and warm. Now tepid droplets pelted her. They began wetting the unprotected tablet of paper filled with the meticulous notes she had taken two days earlier after spending four hours in the Cabinet des Estampes at the Bibliothèque nationale. She had raced through the library’s cobblestone courtyard that morning in anticipation of collecting photocopies of several pages of a rare manuscript from its reproduction services.

  The library opened at 9 a.m. She was there at 9:10, greeted by that French brusqueness that some call surly. She was glad her work took her to the archives at Rue Richelieu. She preferred the neoclassical architecture of the Richelieu library with its fine masonry, columns, and vaults. Though she decidedly favored the late president François Mitterrand’s leftist politics, the steel and glass monstrosity of a library named in his honor felt a bit too cold, modern, and functional. She thought libraries should have a whiff of the Old World. They were for her romantic places that kept history and secrets. A lover of knowledge could go there to discover the surreptitious, the serendipitous. And they would be sated.

  She glanced down briefly to see the red ink on the page chasing a clear droplet. Flipping the tablet on its cardboard side, she made it into a makeshift umbrella and picked up the pace of her stride. She contemplated stopping at one of the cafés to grab a bite to eat. A few more streets, she thought, as she hustled between raindrops in the Carrefour Vavin and turned onto Rue Notre Dame des Champs. She looked down occasionally, remembering the travails of walking in Paris. She had barely skipped over a noted fixture on French city streets— a mound of brown goo left by the canine best friend of some Parisian. Dog shit. Everywhere. It was the one thing she couldn’t understand about France.

  Her long legs shuttled her quickly to the large, cast-iron gated door fronting a complex of apartments. 6247b, 6247b. She punched the keypad. A click allowed passage into a neat stone courtyard filled with leafy green plants. Clusters of red, orange, yellow, and pink spilled out of balcony flower boxes in every direction.

  She pushed through the first of two sets of glass doors to the building, opening the second with her key. The elevator door opened and whisked her to the sixth floor. As she rounded the corner, she could hear the apartment phone jangling. Three turns of three locks and the orange steel door gave way to a gleaming white-furnished loft apartment. Whoever decorated the apartment had been channeling Phillip Starck.

  It was spacious, with two levels, and light-filled from the ceiling to floor windows that ran along an entire wall. In the evenings, she could see the twinkling lights of the upper observation platform of the Eiffel Tower from the apartment’s outside balcony.

  She lunged for the telephone, skidding on the droplets she tracked onto the tumbled travertine tiles. The ringing stopped. Havilah still picked up the receiver only to hear the dial tone. She glanced at her watch. She
had a 3:45 flight to Marseille. She would have taken the high speed TGV, but the times didn’t work for her. So air travel it was. Her driver to Orly airport was scheduled for a 12:30 pick up.

  * * *

  Havilah went to the compact kitchen area to retrieve a paper napkin. Her pastel-flowered Converse sneakers squeaked on the floor. Removing them, she placed the sneakers on the doormat to dry and began wiping the area where she had just walked. She then dashed up the stairs to the spacious loft where a queen-sized bed and full bath were. She grabbed a medium-sized, croc-trimmed, buttery calf-skinned carry-on from a large closet that also stored bed and bath linens. The apartment intercom sounded. She looked at the wall clock. Ten minutes after twelve. The driver was early.

  “Professeure Gaie?” a French male voice inquired.

  “Oui, c’est qui à l’appareil?” she asked though fully knowing the answer.

  “C’est Capitaine Jacques Noubard avec la Préfecture de police,” the bureaucratic voice intoned.

  Stunned, she pressed the buzzer to open the building’s main door.

  * * *

  The two officers excused themselves profusely as they entered the apartment.

  “You speak French very well, Mademoiselle. Je suis désolé. I am sorry, Professor,” the dwarfish blond stumbled over protocol as he complimented her, his eyes still canvassing her hands and the apartment.

  There were two things that she had come to find quite endearing about the French. An American had only to attempt to speak French and you were generously complimented. Havilah Gaie, though, was a polyglot with native fluency in French, Italian, and German. She was also conversant in Arabic and Hindi. Her training as a specialist in global conflicts and comparative democracy and citizenship required fluency in several languages.

  That second endearing French quality involved the use of Mademoiselle. Clearly the captain was looking for some symbol of matrimony. She had found that even those who never saw her hands, male or female, often referred to her as Mademoiselle. She looked much younger than her 34 years.

  “Merci, monsieur.”

  She had responded almost mechanically to his compliment about her French, noting the insignia of the French national police as well as the rank on the blond man’s uniform. The other officer of the law was dressed like a very well-heeled French civilian, all in black.

  “Professor Havilah Paige Gaie, I am Thierry Gasquet,” the tailored suit offered. “I am with the Service de protection des hautes personnalités, a special division of the French National Police, and this is Captain Jacques Noubard. He is with the Paris prefecture.”

  It was rare that she encountered a Frenchman taller than her five feet nine inches, but this Thierry Gasquet was a good three inches taller, and his English was Americanized with barely a trace of a French accent. He didn’t even drop the ‘H’ in her first name.

  “Can I ask why you are here? Forgive me. But I am not a high-ranking personality in need of special police services.” She nervously grabbed a handful of dark brown curls and placed them behind an ear.

  The two men looked curiously at one another. The agent nodded to the blond captain. “You underestimate how greatly we admire your work, Professor. You are part of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques, which makes you a very esteemed guest in France.”

  Havilah smiled sheepishly now. It was a high honor, but one she rarely thought about. She was merely doing what she loved— research and writing. She often forgot how seriously the French took the life of the mind and valued the academic enterprise. This was the land of the Panthéon, the Académie Française, Rousseau, and Jean-Paul Sartre, among others, after all.

  “But more to the point,” the captain continued, “you have ’eard of a Monsieur Latan Conor Beirnes, n’est-ce pas?” It was a statement more than a question from the captain.

  “Why yes. Lathan ‘Kit’ Beirnes is my colleague at Astor University in the U.S. I intend to see him this evening in Cassis at a dinner.” She didn’t know why she felt the need to return the dropped ‘h’ to her colleague’s name. The th and h were bedeviling consonants for the French, as was their rolling r for Americans. “We are both giving remarks at a centennial celebrating William Knowlton, the founder of the Félibrige Foundation. I’m also on the foundation’s board. In fact, I have a plane to catch shortly and my driver should be arriving in a few minutes.”

  It was actually a centennial plus ten. But who was counting? She had suddenly become Chatty Cathy. She rationalized that it was because she wanted to get this interview— or whatever it was— over with and catch her plane. And yet, Havilah was more curious still regarding their inquiry about Kit.

  “We know about your travels, Professor Gaie. Your colleague was murdered last evening.” Sensing she had been trying to speed this along, Agent Gasquet apparently thought he’d help. He cocked his head slightly, as if studying her reaction.

  “Murdered?” Havilah took two steps back, bumping up against the table where the telephone sat. The receiver slid out if its base. She righted it and then walked a few more paces to take a seat on the white sofa sleeper.

  She felt a welling up of sadness thinking about this very solitary, but seemingly contented, man. Kit had severed all ties with whatever family he had had back in Elkton, Kentucky. His mother died while he was in graduate school. He hadn’t known his father, which for him made it easier to plow forward. And he had never really sought out the company of his poorer relations who still lived in those trailer parks along Pond River and Dowdy Roads and Highway 68 East. He was a deliberately rootless man; he liked moving through the world light. He believed he walked lighter in the world because he didn’t have those “Kentucky rednecks” as he called them, with their arcane twang hanging on to him, dragging him down. He was a Princeton Ph.D. He’d swum through his family’s Kentucky muck to the other side of genteel, southern aristocracy. He abhorred poverty: overflowing toilets that needed buckets of water to make the waste go down, roaches, hot water heated by a stove, hand-me downs so worn that they were patched over five times or more, and bluegrass music. All of it he hated except when he wrote about it in his poetry. Kit was always magnanimous in his poetic descriptions of those unwashed Southern whites, even in his condescension, even in his single-minded ambition. He was pulling them out in order to pull himself up.

  Havilah then remembered his last book of poetry, My Southern Way, which had been panned in The New Poetry Review, the Bible of poets, by the truculent critic Clarence Towdaline. Towdaline called him a “poet of mere regional celebrity whose most interesting work revolves around his attempts to merge his poor Irish-American southern roots— which he has left as far behind him as his days as a Yale undergraduate— with those of the blacks whose blues he appropriates.” Kit, whose fastidiousness bordered on vanity, was none too amused to have been found out. Havilah had come to believe that his was the kind of personality that others found too difficult to really dislike, or to like. He certainly did not inspire a froth of ill will, animus, or even ambivalence, or so she had thought until this afternoon’s visit by French law enforcement.

  She looked up again from the officers and out the panoramic living room windows. The rain had stopped, and sunlight was now streaming in, picking up the reddish-gold hints in the soft, thick brown curls that fell almost to her shoulders.

  Agent Gasquet interrupted her thoughtfulness: “Professor Gaie…”

  Just then she noticed there were gold flecks in his green eyes as well as in his softly curled chestnut hair. He stared so intensely at her, she reasoned, that she had no choice but to look at him dead on. Fidgeting would have only made her seem guilty. Guilty! About what!? She quietly stamped her socked foot.

  “Yes?” she acknowledged weakly.

  “Were you and Professor Beirnes especially close?”

  “We were colleagues. Close? In a way. Yes. Of course.” She was shaking her head in disbelief, as she spoke of Kit Beirnes in the past tense.

  “Did you communicate frequently?�
� Gasquet pried.

  “Meetings. Memos. Occasional cups of tea and lunch. Things like that.”

  “When is the last time you spoke with Professor Beirnes?” Noubard followed up.

  “He called me yesterday evening. I…” she paused a beat, “returned his telephone call later that evening.”

  “You were the last person Professor Beirnes called. You were the last person who called him before he died,” Noubard rattled on. He also said the last word “died” as “di-ed” in the way the French sometimes overemphasize certain syllables when mispronouncing words in English.

  “I didn’t speak with Kit.” She trembled slightly at Noubard’s revelation.

  “Yes, but when you called, somehow, Professor Gaie, his cell phone answered the call,” Noubard brayed.

  “What are you saying?” Her voice was now a low level grumble. She wondered if he was accusing her of something sinister.

  “You called Professor Beirnes two times, did you not? We have his cell phone records.”

  “Yes. That’s true. I thought he had answered. But Kit didn’t respond when I called his name. I assumed I had the wrong number. So I hung up and called back. I got his voicemail the second time.”

  “No!”

  She startled a bit, shifting up from the small sofa to face the reedy Frenchman.

  Noubard bellowed, “You dialed the correct telephone number the first time. When you called Professor Beirnes was more than likely being murdered.”

  “What?!” She exclaimed as if someone had struck her. Her head was beginning to throb.

  Gasquet glared at Noubard and then asked, “Did you hear anything? Can you remember hearing anything?”