Chapter XIII. Our Friend, the Assassin
No taste of the night life of Paris is regarded as complete without a visit to an Apache resort at the fag-end of it. For orderly and law-abiding people the disorderly and lawbreaking people always have an immense fascination anyhow. The average person, though inclined to blink at whatever prevalence of the criminal classes may exist in his own community, desires above all things to know at firsthand about the criminals of other communities. In these matters charity begins at home.
Every New Yorker who journeys to the West wants to see a few roadagents; conversely the Westerner sojourning in New York pesters his New York friends to lead him to the haunts of the gangsters. It makes no difference that in a Western town the prize hold-up man is more apt than not to be a real-estate dealer; that in New York the average run of citizens know no more of the gangs than they know of the Metropolitan Museum of Art—which is to say, nothing at all. Human nature comes to the surface just the same.
In Paris they order this thing differently; they exhibit the same spirit of enterprise that in a lesser degree characterized certain promoters of rubberneck tours who some years ago fitted up make-believe opium dens in New York's Chinatown for the awed delectation of out-of-town spectators. Knowing from experience that every other American who lands in Paris will crave to observe the Apache while the Apache is in the act of Apaching round, the canny Parisians have provided a line of up-to-date Apache dens within easy walking distance of Montmartre; and thither the guides lead the round-eyed tourist and there introduce him to well-drilled, carefully made-up Apaches and Apachesses engaged in their customary sports and pastimes for as long as he is willing to pay out money for the privilege.
Being forewarned of this I naturally desired to see the genuine article. I took steps to achieve that end. Suitably chaperoned by a trio of transplanted Americans who knew a good bit about the Paris underworld I rode over miles of bumpy cobblestones until, along about four o'clock in the morning, our taxicab turned into a dim back street opening off one of the big public markets and drew up in front of a grimy establishment rejoicing in the happy and well-chosen name of the Cave of the Innocents.
Alighting we passed through a small boozing ken, where a frowzy woman presided over a bar, serving drinks to smocked marketmen, and at the rear descended a steep flight of stone steps. At the foot of the stairs we came on two gendarmes who sat side by side on a wooden bench, having apparently nothing else to do except to caress their goatees and finger their swords. Whether the gendarmes were stationed here to keep the Apaches from preying on the marketmen or the marketmen from preying on the Apaches I know not; but having subsequently purchased some fresh fruit in that selfsame market I should say now that if anybody about the premises needed police protection it was the Apaches. My money would be on the marketmen every time.
Beyond the couchant gendarmes we traversed a low, winding passage cut out of stone and so came at length to what seemingly had originally been a winevault, hollowed out far down beneath the foundations of the building. The ceiling was so low that a tall man must stoop to avoid knocking his head off. The place was full of smells that had crawled in a couple of hundred years before and had died without benefit of clergy, and had remained there ever since. For its chief item of furniture the cavern had a wicked old piano, with its lid missing, so that its yellowed teeth showed in a perpetual snarl. I judged some of its most important vital organs were missing too—after I heard it played. On the walls were inscribed such words as naughty little boys write on schoolhouse fences in this country, and more examples of this pleasing brand of literature were carved on the whittled oak benches and the rickety wooden stools. So much for the physical furbishings.
By rights—by all the hallowed rules and precedents of the American vaudeville stage!—the denizens of this cozy retreat in the bowels of the earth should have been wearing high-waisted baggy velvet trousers and drinking absinthe out of large flagons, and stabbing one another between the shoulder blades, and ever and anon, in the mystic mazes of the dance, playing crack-the-whip with the necks and heels of their adoring lady friends; but such was not found to be the case. In all these essential and traditional regards the assembled Innocents were as poignantly disappointing as the costers of London had proved themselves.