Read Online The Rose Café by John Hanson Mitchell - Free Book Online

it?” he asked suddenly.
    â€œSorry, don’t know,” I said. “I don’t have a watch, actually. The only clock is in Jean-Pierre’s bedroom.”
    â€œOdd, isn’t it? I have a watch. After I came here I put it in a drawer. I don’t use it. Who needs it, I suppose.”
    â€œWhen did you move here?” I asked, turning the tables.
    Before he could answer (if indeed he intended to answer) I saw his eyes light up, and Micheline appeared.
    â€œMonsieur le Baron,” she said with mock grandeur. “And how is it with you?”
    â€œOh, you know,” he said, smiling sheepishly now. “The same, always the same. Living day to day. Dawn. Midday. Dusk. The year round. And you, Madame Green Eyes, how are you?”
    â€œBusy busy,” she said.
    â€œAlways busy. Give me another drink, please,” he said to Micheline.
    The weather had changed decidedly with le Baron, and the sexual repartee began to dart back and forth across the bar. I thought it time to retreat to my lowly scullery and the dessert dishes, and I said goodbye.
    He lifted his glass to me as I departed.
    Later, after the card game commenced, I joined Micheline while she sat smoking at a remove from the players. She would commonly sit in a lighted corner of the verandah after hours, reading novels and cutting the pages with a long kitchen knife.
    â€œWhat about him?” I asked, lifting my head toward le Baron, who sat with his back to us, eyeing his deck through a drift of cigarette smoke.
    â€œOh him,” she said, indifferently. “He’s just another dog in the pack, although he believes himself to be from some old line of counts. He’s from some industrial nouveau riche family up in Belgium. They made a huge lot of money selling coal, exploiting the miners and so on. They had a big villa and a title—so he says—but they probably purchased it from some defunct noble family. Then the Nazis came along. The story is that they took over his family compound as a command center and kicked them all out. They went down to Paris where they had a big apartment. After that le Baron came south, to Nice, I think. But who knows? Now he’s just another crook.”
    â€œA crook?” I exclaimed. “Him? That classy old man?”
    She shrugged. Blew out a cloud of smoke.
    â€œMaybe not. I don’t know. But he lost all his money in the war, and now he’s rich? Never works? Lives in Corsica. So what do you think? He’s generous, though. He privately funded a medical clinic near here,” she said. “He has also paid off the debts of a few doltish peasants from the interior. He has even helped us out from time to time.”
    â€œThe barber told me he came out here during the war. He didn’t say why, though.”
    â€œHe did come out here. Twice. But we don’t ask why. Better not to ask, sometimes.”
    I wanted to ask, of course. I never did like unanswered questions; they only served to sharpen my curiosity, and I never had been able to leave things alone when told to. But so be it, I thought, and went to bed.
    There was a light cloud cover that night; you could just see the silvery pale moon to the east, riding through the cloud breaks. The high peaks were obscured, but the three nuns were throwing off a dull, sandy-colored light and seemed to have drawn closer. You could see them hunched there above the town with its little glittering lights winking along the harbor shore. Silent. Ever present. Reproachful.
    Somewhere up there in the hills, beyond the nuns, in the twisted little valleys of the mountains, the old Corsican ghosts must still have lingered. Here roamed the restless spirit of the old liberator Sampiero Corso, who strangled his wife, believing—wrongly—that she had betrayed him to his enemies. Here was the bombastic self-proclaimed German nobleman, King Theodor, who, on the run from marriages, gambling debts, and political