The First Volume is available as an Amazon/Kindle e-original here.
Here E.P.'s notebooks break off. To trace the Mime's subsequent career and his revenge against Raj Singh we must turn to the man who knew Edward best, namely Phillipe Noir. As I described in my preface, I had been unable to contact Noir, even as I edited down the blue cahiers for private publication -- merely as a curiosity, I told myself, for my personal amusement and edification (and also, I must confess, because I felt they should not be lost; I felt the tug of some obscurely compelling sense of duty to their author, my earstwhile great uncle). Meantime I read and reread the Noir-authored tales in Black Mask and Savage Mysteries and other fading pulp periodicals from the twine-bound bundle that had first landed on my doorstep long before that dark Quebec winter, and sometimes I copied passages, and in this way I grew to admire a style I would never myself presume to emulate. But the stories were, after all, fast pulp adventures, written i' the heat, so to speak, and while they provided clues as to the aftermath of E.P.'s notebooks, they were too fragmentary and inconclusive to serve as anything more solid that a colorful basis for speculation. I wondered how much Noir had fashioned out of his imagination, and how much was real, yet I thought I could never learn the truth, and so for me the yellowing pulps took on an air of poignancy I feel sure they had never exuded in the hands of their original readers. Each time I flipped through one of these crackling magazines, a page or two was sure to detach, or a corner to break loose; they were that frangible. Piled on my desk in the light of the green shaded banker's lamp, it sometimes seemed to me they might, at any moment, turn to a puff of brown dust. Sometimes I stared through my reflection and the glow of my lamp out into the chill darkness of the Montreal night, and with a thrilling sensation up the spine envisaged the face of the Mime appearing suddenly, quite close to the glass. He would have climbed the fire-escape silently, gliding in his ninja-stealth, barely disturbing its frozen skin of snow, and there he was now in the coat of white grease-paint and motorcycle goggles and long black leather Nazi coat. Did I wish for such a meeting? I must have, I imagined it so intensely. Yet very gradually and with some reluctance I gave up on the idea of ever learning the truth, and let the Mime become, for me, another sad myth. My little edition of the blue notebooks was published, not to any fanfare, by a small house in Montreal, with a facing translation into French, and I gave away nine of my ten copies to bemused and disbelieving friends who assumed it was all my trite invention, and I assumed that was that: nothing more to be had from out of the past. Soon after, I published my own debut novel, a work of detective fiction with a postmodern flair and an inconclusive ending. It was reviewed nicely on a few Internet sites. The slender volume of Edward's memoirs and extracts from Noir's pulps received no attention at all but on a blog titled Le Blog, where under the heading "we have no idea what this is" the blogger, whose name now escapes me, raved that it reminded him of H.P. Lovecraft. That's all. I taught English, lecturing before a stark room in which a single radiator wheezed and groaned -- oddly, I cannot even remember the faces of my gum-chewing students, only their scornful attitudes, their young bodies twisted in boredom on the hard chairs, the occasional derisive laugh or bored whisper -- and at twilight walked home through a park in which the trees were perpetually bare and glistened under a skin of ice. Then one morning, a Saturday I think, my buzzer fizzed, and I went down to open the door and saw that my visitor was an aged fellow in a wheelchair, his nose a Gallic beak, his lap covered by a tartan blanket, his eyes blue and steady as twin revolver barrels under a green leather billed hunter's cap. I wiped the sleep from my eyes and, yawning, asked this old bird his business with me. He pushed the wheelchair forward a few inches over the glazed snow on the sidewalk and stuck out his hand, and when I shook it, my God, the man's vice grip almost broke my fingers. And he said, in a Corsican accented French, Je suis Monsieur Phillipe Noir. I am Phillipe Noir. I stared at him for a long, long time then finally shook the cobwebs (actually it was snow) out of my hair and invited him up to my apartment, out of the freezing March cold. As the lift was broken yet again, I had to back him up bumping step by step in his wheelchair, four flights to the door of my cozy little coal-heated atelier with its view of the frozen river. He coughed and hacked a little but offered no complaint and showed zero fear. Once in my book lined home (never mind that they were all paperbacks), I offered him a taste of cognac, to which he assented with a swift nod. I took my Napoleon bottle out from behind the Balzac and poured us two little glasses and we clinked then and drank. Then I refilled the glasses and tossed heaped newspapers from my chair and sat facing him, eager to hear whatever he might have to say. I viewed this old French gentleman, I am ashamed to confess, not so much as a person as an emissary from a mythic world I had despaired of ever hearing news of ever again. Corked up in him was the Mime's saga, the complete arc. I couldn't have been happier to see my own long lost brother, if I'd had a brother and if he'd ever been lost. So let us now cut to the high speed chase.
Noir produced from his weathered corduroy jacket a distinguished looking walnut pipe and a yellow leather tobacco pouch and tapped the bowl full and lit it with a shaking match, and once he had sucked in a few lungfuls of pungent turkish smoke, the bowl hissing, he sat back and straightened the lap- blanket and asked me in that sonorous, yet quavering voice if I would be interested in learning the rest of the Mime's story -- if I still yearned to know how my great-uncle's quest for revenge against the ultra-nefarious Raj Singh had ended up, even if no one would ever be able to tell me (himself least of all) what it all meant. I said I did. My God yes. And by the procedural by I asked Noir if he would mind being tape-recorded. No, he wouldn't. Pas de probleme. So I found my little tape recording machine and plunked in a fresh cassette and set it down between us with the spools turning and we were off. Hell-bent for motorcycle leather. Plunging pell-mell into the acrid inglorious past.
I am not going to bore you, my boy, with the details of my birth or my rough upbringing in the slums of Marseilles, or what happened to my mother, or if I even knew my father; feh. It should suffice that at nineteen I killed a man with an overzealous application of Savate, the Corsican art of kick-boxing, at which I was already adept. His skull cracked on the paving stone like the shell of an egg. I fled Marseilles for Algeria, where, in a wild drunken unshaven state, I signed my life away to the French Foreign Legion. There ensued much marching back and forth in the desert, whoring, breathing sand, drinking arrack, fighting native tribesmen, and so on. I am sure you have seen the silent movie many times. I survived; was pinned repeatedly with pretty medals and gold braided epaulets by a walrus-moustached general; rose steadily in rank, decoration, and plain viciousness. I drank and I drank and I whored and I whored my way across the blank expanses of North Africa, and no Gallic mercenary was ever more feared or despised.
But when I saw the newsreel of those neat lines of German soldiers goose-stepping under the Arc de Triomph and marching smartly behind their drummer boys down the Champs d'Elysees, all the while giving the Hitler salute to the sky, I became an instant patriot and deserted to join the Free French. My regiment followed me as gladly as they had against the Bedouins. All that winter and the summer after we fought like howling maniacs in the desert against General Rommel's tank corps. The British gave us our own clanking tanks and trucks and plenty of petrol and ammunition for our machine guns, and the Luftwaffe swept down and shot them full of holes and blew up our convoys, and Rommel was always appearing out of nowhere and blasting us to pieces. I watched most of my men die in black smoke and flames. This was the real war. I stopped drinking, I wised up, I became a ruthless and ultra-methodical killer. That has how I survived the North African campaign with a few dozen other french fools, all personally decorated with pretty ribbons and medals by De Gaulle. I landed in Sicily with American Marines and chased the jerries all the way to Messina. Then I drove my tank onto a swell beach in Normandy named for the capital of Nebraska. In the City of Lights, a few months later, we had a big party, emptying the restaurant cellars of all the champagne. We were all french, all free, all brothers. We danced. We ate flowers. We dragged collaborators out of their homes and stood them up against the nearest wall and shot them. Who ever said war wasn't easy? It's the aftermath that gives you a canard.
So, my dear boy, after the war I found myself depressed, maybe it was just nervous exhaustion, in any case I was suffering, so numb I could barely breathe, let along think about my life, all I could do well was spill blood, I was a murdering bastard and oh how well I knew it. I kicked about in Corsica hiking the remote mountains with a pack on my shoulders and a sturdy oak stick in my hand until my trousers fell to pieces then I bought new ones and went on to the Greek islands Corfu and Paros and Samos and a few others where I had some mighty odd experiences in old ruins and caverns devoted to the oracles of Delphi thence onto the mainland but we won't dwell upon all that right now for I've come to tell you everything I can about Edward P., Edward Parnassus a.k.a. the Mime, the world's deadliest and spookiest assassin, shrouded even while living in a thick coat of white grease-paint and a Nazi coat, whose name and life I perversely love and do not wish to be forgotten. I was trying to be young again in those snowcapped Greek mountains but it didn't work and in any case I'd stumbled on the war that was still blazing and roaring on, the one I thought we'd won but really hadn't, for just as in Spain the Greek Fascists (the Nazi collaborators and Nazi mercenaries) were busy as hornets hunting down the so-called Communists (the gallant Greek anti-Nazi fighters, in fact the whole so-called Resistance, along with a number of distasteful Soviet-trained apparatchiks who were trying to turn the whole desperate situation to the advantage of the Comintern), hunting them down, torturing them in cellars, hanging them young and old from trees, or putting them into "camps" and such to wither and die of typhus. The almighty Americans and British you see had jumped in on the side of the Fascists with airlifts and arms and stunts and infusions and intelligence officers and torture and killing consultants of all kinds -- I saw it with these watery eyes and the eyes wept. The truth is I'd come to Greece too late to do any good, it was now just the mopping up operations now, but I did manage to smuggle a few hundred people out to the East through safe houses in Athens and Salonika, god bless them, I hope they prospered, but I suspect Stalin killed the good ones. So I went on to north Africa by freighter because I was very tired and sick of the whole stinking mess, merde merde merde as we say in Marseilles, I hope I'm not boring you boy. There I poked and wandered and kicked about the deserts as an ordinary everyday kind of mec, no longer a Legionnaire with a sword-edge to grind and shiny black boots and a gold insignia, just ma petite Phillipe, exhausted and heart-sick, keening for another life, you know. I started up a bar in Morocco and that kept me busy for a few years and on my days off I dressed in white and went to learn at the feet of a Sufi teacher named Mustafa Q'bay. His teachings cleared my mind like a sky driven free of clouds by a gust of icy cold wind. Also, it was as a direct result of becoming Mustafa's student that I refused to do shady dealings with a local criminal headman who wished to use my bar as a drug smuggling channel. And so I found myself, one night, trapped at the wrong end of a crooked dead-end stone alley in the Casbah facing about twenty hashish-hopped young toughs armed with swords, sickles, clubs, and the like. Whirlwind that I was then as a Savate fighter, I still couldn't quite keep up with the sheer number and ferocity of assaults they were throwing at me, and I was taking blows and cuts as they backed me up to the bare wall, blood and sweat stinging my eyes. If I were a Sioux Indian I would have started chanting my death-song. I was truly ready. I had no regrets. I was grateful for my life, even such as it had been. Then I heard the thrum and throttling roar of a motorcycle, it sounded like a bull in heat as it shot of the tar-black night, sleek and fast, a Triumph, and astride it a figure all in goggles and black leathers crashed right into the fray knocking aside the crimelord's men like tenpins. When they swarmed at him he drew a pair of Mauser machine pistols and, well, that was the hasty end to a fine engagement, as they say in Tours. I slid down the wall watching all this -- the Angel of Death come to save my pitiful life. I saw him finish off every single howling assailant with a short rattlesnake burst from those German pistols or, when the ammunition petered out, a chop of his gloved hand. He was merciless. And oddly beautiful.
