Never Change Montmartre: SEVEN PARIS MYSTERIES, #7

By Peggy Kopman-Owens

Cover Art © Roger Kopman. Who knew? Spies read! Mystery writer Jamie Litton discovers that the worst thing anyone can say to a friend is "Never Change." Sometimes a man must… to stay alive! What first drew Jamie to Paris and to Montmartre, to the true power of Café Society, all becomes clear in this last book in the series. What drove Ben Foulof to abandon his successful career as an investigative journalist, to become a spy for an international organization, and then, suddenly end the dangerous liaison will be revealed. In Never Change Montmartre, lifelong best friends Jamie Litton and Ben Foulof learn, "Sometimes, you can go home, again."

• Language: English
• Publisher: PKOBOOKS LLC
• Release date: Mar 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215944530

Peggy Kopman-Owens

Peggy Kopman-Owens writes suspenseful fiction, gentle mysteries with touches of romance that inspire readers to search for their passports. Her literary properties, reflecting her work in 35 countries, include three series set in Paris. SIMON PENNINGTON MYSTERIES, MRS. DUCHESNEY MYSTERIES, and SEVEN PARIS MYSTERIES now available in eBook, paperback, hardcover, and / or audiobook. (author's photo: © Michael D. Owens)  Cover Art © Roger Kopman. Online gallery at KOPMANPHOTOS.com "My mother wrote stories and songs, becoming my inspiration, teaching that passion and patience are inseparable partners. From my father and mother, both musicians who loved to travel, I learned to embrace a world full of diversity and endless possibilities. I can never thank them enough for bestowing this lovingly unselfish gift of intellectual freedom."

Book preview

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Chapter 1

Never change

THE WORDS WERE WRITTEN in exceptionally small, but legible handwriting on the upper left side of the page in my college yearbook, where his championship debate team photograph appeared. He had signed it, not as an auto­graph, but as if, he were signing a legal document.

Ben Foulof Each letter had been made clearly distinguishable as if I might forget his name years later. How could I ever forget my best friend, the man who had changed my destiny simply by allowing me to write about him?

I ran my fingers lightly over the letters and, then, quickly withdrew them fearing that I might smear the ink, even though, after more than a quarter century they were dried and cracked. The sentiment was a terrible thing to wish for anyone much less to inscribe in a yearbook. To wish for any­one the equivalent of arrested development was a curse not a blessing and it implied one of two things:  that a person could attain any degree of perfection by the age of 21, or worse, that whatever one experienced after the age of 21 could not profoundly change one’s character. I had lived long enough to know that both were false assumptions. Yet my best friend had written the words Never Change.

Looking back, I had to wonder why he had chosen these specific words. Was it a dare? In his presumed supe­riority had Ben thrown down the first of many gauntlets in a challenge to become more than I was? I prefer this inter­pretation, as it fosters the more flattering idea that I could be something more than the Jamie Litton whom he knew at college. If I knew where he was now I would ask him. However, once again, Ben has disappeared without saying goodbye.

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Chapter 2

The Early Years

BEN UPPED THE ANTE by moving to Manhattan after gradua­tion. When I left our small college town to follow him, change was exactly what I hoped would happen. Eager to explore my poten­tial to become that someone whom I hadn’t yet met, I arrived in New York light on luggage and heavy with dreams. Ben was waiting there to show me the way, proudly bragging that he had already blazed the trail. On the ride into Manhattan from JFK airport, he gave an ab­breviated lecture on how to get around in the Big Apple physically and psychologi­cally. You had to walk as if you were a native, otherwise you would have victim written all over you, he cautioned. I would have to learn the city from a map, before I stepped out onto the streets. Standing on the corner looking at a map was just asking for trouble.

Never exhibit fear. Always act as though you know where you’re going, even if you don’t. Hell’s Kitchen was only dangerous in the movies and after midnight, but then, any neighborhood could be dangerous after midnight. I shouldn’t judge a neighborhood by its name or reputation. Too often, the source for the information was dated and no longer true. He named several. I could barely keep up with his dos and don’ts as his verbal tour moved us from Manhattan into the boroughs. As usual, Ben was dishing out too much information too quickly. His mind ran cir­cles around mine. It always had.

Also, I was distracted by the visuals flashing by the windows. Shea Stadium. The iconic grounds of the old World’s Fair. He was speaking too fast, already talking like a native. My heart was beating fast and my head was spin­ning. At first, I discounted the symptoms as excitement, then, remembered that I hadn’t eaten. Later, I would discover it was the start of yet another nasty sinus infection, aggravated by air pressure on the flight into New York.

Despite my first two weeks in Manhattan, being spent in clinics and pharmacies and meeting some of Man­hattan’s finest from the medical community, I was ready for a more thrilling new life in the big city to start. Up to this point in my life I had tasted of only one grand adven­ture, a summer between college semesters spent backpack­ing through Europe, and this, too, I owed to Ben.

As I recall, the week before that trip was spent not packing, but rather in bed with a sinus infection. Sudden changes in my life always affect my head. Psychosomatic? The doctor bills would seem to indicate otherwise, yet, there appeared to be a pattern. It was as though my sub­conscious searched for ways to detour my happiness. For­tu­nately, that summer my mother threw a dozen packages of antihis­tamines into my backpack without my knowledge. It seems my idiosyn­cratic health patterns had become second nature to her.  

One episode came about on a particularly cold winter day at college, and from Ben’s account of it, was due to exposure to the sleet we had both endured during one of his many touch football games. I always watched. He played. I had forgotten my coat. By the time the game had ended, I was drenched and chilled to the bone. He said I should have left. Perhaps, I should have, but I would have missed the drama taking place on the field that was fodder for my latest English paper. The topic was what men do in winter to endure the gloom and boredom.

Winter boredom, to which Ben later admitted, per­suaded him to ask the university’s political science depart­ment to co-sponsor a summer project in Europe. Long gray Midwest winters had made both of us hungry for any change in venue. I loved his suggestion of foreign beaches and saw a Spring Break trip to Mexico. His vision was grander. He was already anticipating the chance to experience life on the Mediterranean. While the thought of going anywhere warm had captured my imagination, read­ing Ian Fleming had captured his. Ben needed adrenalin rushes. I could no longer ignore the evidence of his joy at­tained from getting bruised and bloody playing football on a cold winter day.

In some ways, we were two very different men. However, we could agree, wholeheartedly, on one important subject - that it would be our generation that changed the world. He described his pro­posed pro­ject as our first real opportunity to do just that. We would be work­ing with an interna­tional group of students in Greece to build experi­mental eco-friendly housing. At the time, the ex­pression eco-friendly had not yet been coined. Saving the Earth had.

Ben had read about the group’s three-year struggle to get the program off the ground and learned that they had only recently ob­tained funding from the Greek government. That was all the incentive Ben needed, before boldly, preemptively, offering his Greek contempora­ries the services of students from our university. He failed to mention to them that he was not an official representa­tive of our university or that the Poli-Sci department had not endorsed his proposal. Much later, the university would jump onboard Ben’s train, but only after a great deal of marketing on Ben’s part and, perhaps, more to save face. International newspapers had already picked up the story and were writing of the experimental project with its international team of scholars.

On the backside of the deal (and there was always a backside to any of Ben’s deals), Ben magically finagled a guarantee of college credit and, in addition, a camp site on the beach. He pro­posed that this would encourage an in­ternational exchange of ideas, conveniently leaving the ob­vious unspoken, our chance to cohabitate with the local female population. How could anyone refuse to partici­pate? Certainly not five of our classmates. In fact, Ben’s salesmanship had been so superb, he had successfully convinced the dean of the department to leave his wife for six months and travel to Greece in advance of us on the excuse of setting up his project team’s ob­jectives.

Not surprisingly, we never found the dean at the camp, although, he did show up on campus the following autumn, newly divorced and sporting a deep tan along with a much younger Norwegian girl­friend. Rather than face embarrassing reports of his sum­mer spent AWOL and a veiled threat made by an unnamed someone in our group, he straight away bestowed the promised college credit. None of us actually had earned the additional nine hours towards our degrees, but since his magnanimous (if co­erced) gift moved gradua­tion day that much closer, no one refused to accept it.  

The dean had been the first to discover that our high-flying Greek fantasy had proved dif­ferent from the reality of ground operations. He had managed to stay only one week, long enough to get into an argument with the site director and to meet Inga, before taking off in pursuit of his newly acquired personal project. No doubt, he was following Ben’s advice, encouraging an interna­tional ex­change of sorts. We arrived three days after his reported defection. It didn’t take our stu­dent group long to become equally disillusioned. The first clue was dropped before we ever set foot in camp, when we were abandoned by Ben at the Athens airport, in what would become his first in a life­long series of unexplained disappearances.

Without Ben’s language skills, we were lost and forced to suffer further delays in reaching northern Greece. We had difficulty pinpointing the actual location of the worksite that Ben had circled on our map. Apparently, someone had forgotten to notify our U.S. contingent of volunteers that the camp had been moved away from the beach to a nameless scorpion-infested place high above on parched infertile hills. Once we were on site, we were too confused and tired to protest what we did not understand.

Our late arrival did not bode well with the project’s director and set the tone for the rest of our inter­actions with him. We spent the first night learning from other international team mem­bers about the more depressing revelation, the director awarded no time off for good behavior. They warned us that he had a violent temper and we could anticipate workdays stretching from dawn until well beyond dusk, only to be rewarded with poor food hard beds on the ground and absolute exhaustion. To add insult to injury, we could see the beach, the blue water, and the scantily clothed females in the distance, but we were too far out of range for any of it to matter.

There was no dean, no Ben, to be our champion. There was no one in camp, to whom we could plead our case or ask for advice. We questioned among ourselves whether college credit was worth the seemingly Spartan living arrangements. We no longer spoke of changing the world, sav­ing the Earth, nor how our proposed impulsive withdrawal from the university’s agreement might impact the project’s success or failure. We spoke only of our grievances, protests, and planned our inevitably escape. We never spoke of the shame of retreat.

My language skills consisted of broken high school French. Two others in our group spoke a little German. No one other than Ben had bothered to learn Greek. By default, I was seen as Ben’s co-conspirator, and although not entirely trusted, was thrust into the role of second lieutenant for both of our missing commanders. Escape began to take on the feel of an ill-planned run through a minefield.

What are we going to do about this? was my compatriots’ battle cry becoming as much a threat as it was a plea. Ever the pacifist, I suggested a trip into the city to discuss options with higher-up government officials. My attempt to avoid direct confrontation by going over the head of the camp director turned sour quickly as the government officials taunted us with our obvious and shallow rebellion. We were dismissed as a bunch of spoiled Ameri­cans, who had never wanted to be a part of the project in the first place. I fell out of favor with my classmates, who recognized my apparent lack of leadership skills and an over­all lack of courage.

We would be returning to a project now directed by a man who was not only pissed off by our disappearance from work assign­ments, but who soon would learn of our attempt at mutiny. Adding this to his violent nature, we knew our fate was sealed. One by one, over the next few hours, each volunteer would hastily beat a retreat under cloak of darkness, preferring to take his or her own chances at cap­ture. Not long afterwards, like them, I would abandon the un­anticipated hard labor of camp life in favor of a still-imag­ined summer of la joie de vivre. They weren’t wast­ing their sum­mer. Ben wasn’t wasting his. Why should I waste mine?

My pennies counted, I boarded a bus for the west coast of Greece. My compass was set on Paris, where I had dreamed of spending the entire summer visiting museums, sleeping in parks, sitting in cafés, and finally enjoying slowly my first taste of French wine. However, I traveled only as far as islands in the Ionian Sea near the Strait of Otranto, be­tween Greece’s mainland and the tip of Italy, before setting down my backpack for a month.

My path and timetable had been random, decided solely by the cost of buses and ferries. Flying to Paris in those days was only an option for the rich. Therefore, it was quite by acci­dent, a great relief to my wallet, to stumble across backpackers camping at Pelekas Beach on the island of Corfu. Their living conditions might have been a bit primitive, but their uncondi­tional in­vitation to join them would save a fortune on hotels. There was no hard labor involved, unless volunteering to build the evening bonfire was considered work. I embraced the chance to sleep under the stars, to forget about the failed attempt to save the Earth, and espe­cially to ignore Ben’s abandonment. A month turned into two.

This new group of young vagabonds was organized, loosely, into a ragtag convention of revelers whose sole purpose was to gather each night to celebrate life. Faces constantly came and went, although, a core of a mere dozen seemed content to stay in this magi­cal place without any sense of urgency to depart. I became one of them. Each night brought new arrivals to replace those who had disap­peared on the morning ferry to Brindisi. On one glorious night, I counted 45 happy souls dancing in the moonlight.

The spell of youthful decadence, which we were able to conjure each evening upon the shore, quickly captured my writer’s imagination. Initially, it was the music, the bonfires, and the invariable state of inebriation that drew me in. Then, I realized that this was the first chapter of my adult life and it was being written with the freedom to be simply myself. No one expected any more of me. Having never experienced this before, I would devour it whole­heartedly.

However, there was more to the story. There was a woman. (Isn’t there always?) Within days of my arrival, I had been blessed with a greater awakening, a temptation that had the face of an angel, the body of a Greek god­dess, and a name. Adela was a stunningly beautiful Greek teen­ager who, seemingly, had been waiting her whole life - only for me. Or so, she would say, when we were alone dancing in the moonlight.  

It would be years before I would learn that Adela, like many of her friends, had been waiting for any rich visitor, as they were convinced that a foreign liaison was their only ticket off the island. Perhaps, to her, I looked the most vulnerable. Easy prey. Whatever her motivation, mine was clear and far less complicated. She nearly ac­com­plished her goal, but by end of summer, mine was still left wanting. Perhaps, if she had chosen a more aggressive male, the summer might have ended dif­ferently for both of us.

Adela’s young age proved a barrier to my more er­rant thoughts, although, she did not seem at all inhibited by it. She was a child with a woman’s passions. Only my own lack of experience spared her. I was too embarrassed to pass certain limits. The few weeks that we spent together nearly put an end to my academic career by squelching any previous thoughts of returning to the States. She may have decided to leave Pelekas, but secretly I had decided to stay. It seemed reason­able, as everything learned before arriving on Corfu was forgotten. What would happen if I waited and let our romance take its natural course? I wanted to know.

However, within hours of phoning home in an at­tempt to suggest casually, that I might wish to stay until Christmas, I found myself on a plane off the island. My parents had proved themselves irascible oppo­nents, forcing my return to the States to finish college under threat of cutting off my college fund, which - as they re­minded me - had been paying for my summer abroad. Seeing no viable way to support myself in Greece, my romantic adventure ended with a whimper. Their pre­paid airline tickets were waiting at the airport. I left Corfu with no time to find Adela to explain or even to say goodbye. It was a regret­table youthful blunder. She would reveal, years later, that she felt I had abandoned her. Rightly so. From an emotional standpoint, it was the furthest thing from the truth, but there was no defending my cowardice, for not taking her home to meet my parents.

Within weeks, Ben and I both showed up at college. There would be an awkward silence between us one where I expected an apology or at the very least an explanation, but where he felt none was needed. It was my first real encounter with Ben’s ability to deny his past. Months later, when he finally chose to share part of his summer esca­pades, he could not even remember the name of the wom­an who had inspired his detour from the Athens airport. I had suspected at the time that it had something to do with another woman. He had this one weakness.

Although, he had forgotten the first of his many summer liaisons, he could describe in great detail her Por­tuguese motorcycle. This was quintessentially Ben. A true Gemini. Pure genius with the shortest attention span of any of the astrological signs. Spontaneous. Selfish. Out­rageous. Talented. Intriguing. Generous. Brooding. Mysterious. A complete contradiction with one ex­ception. Always... always, easily bored. Nowhere was this demon­strated more visibly than in his pageantry of women. I had lost count even before graduation.

Over the years, the history of our friendship became punctuated with a long series of short goodbyes almost always unexplained. I learned not to expect apologies. There would be none forthcoming. If I were to share even a small portion of his life, I would be expected to accept him as he was and these were his terms. Don’t ask where he was. Don’t ask why. If there was some­thing I should know, he would tell me. I lived for his scraps of infor­mation, clues, knowing that they would become the only insight ever given into who Ben really was.  

So ... when his unexpected invitation was offered, nearly a year after my deferred graduation, I was excited to quit a boring job at the university bookstore in favor of becoming his roommate in Manhattan. New York was filled with exciting possibilities for a writer. His only con­dition was that I had to be there in less than 24 hours, as he was leaving the next day on assignment. My answer came before he could finish talking. I would do it, whatever his conditions. This leap into the heart of the publishing cen­ter of the world held immeasurable promise, but so too the chance to be with my best friend, again to experience life again through Ben’s eyes.

Up to this point, I held claim to two badly written novels published in very limited editions. It was best that they had been released only on the U.S. West Coast and in a niche market as that greatly reduced the chances of either being read in New York, the place where critics had de­creed only legitimate authors worked. From their newspaper reviews, one was to believe that writers from the heartland could hope only to become self-published amateurs at best. Those wanton derelicts, who had managed to escape to Paris in attempts to disguise holidays as research for the latest great American novel, were considered Hemingway knockoffs. I, however, continued to dream of fol­lowing Papa’s escape route. Somewhere in Mont­martre, in the far distant future, there was a garret waiting with my name on its mailbox. Beneath its many layers of paint lay scrawled:

Hemingway

I ARRIVED IN NEW YORK a few short hours before Ben’s flight, which he bragged was taking him into the glamorous bosom of Hollywood for six days. I reminded him that California bosoms weren’t real. He said that he didn’t care. He also said that my timing could not have been better because he needed someone to housesit and to feed Doris.

Doris?

Ben opened the apartment and introduced us, and it seemed that the new arrangement was perfect for all of us, Ben, me, and Doris, an amicable feline whom Ben had inherited from a girlfriend during their breakup. The girl­friend had left willingly. Her cat, whom Ben immediately renamed from Fluffy to Doris (after Doris Day), refused to leave. The cat was much like the on-screen ver­sion of her namesake, always playing the untouchable bachelorette and determining when, or if, she wanted to be petted. Cats are like that, selecting the people who might be given the honor of feed­ing them or cleaning their litter boxes. This one preferred men. Specifically, she had chosen Ben and, therefore by default, me.

Ben left a hand-drawn map of the neighborhood on the bed, showing where the grocery store, the pharmacy, and his favorite bar were located. Even as I unpacked my two small suitcases under Doris’ close inspection, Ben was already on his way back to the airport. In less than two hours he would be onboard a jet, setting off on an exciting news assignment and leaving me to find my way alone in New York City. The thought was as overwhelming as it was exciting, as I sat down on his bed surrounded by all of his worldly goods. There were 17 boxes of books still left packed in cardboard boxes, a ten-year old television, an older A.M. clock radio, a black leather jacket, and a cat. Every­thing else had come with the apartment. The most amazing man I had ever known lived like a college student, if not a pauper. Yet, his pockets were always full of cash.

When Ben returned to New York three weeks later, I was already into a familiar routine of eating, sleeping, and wandering the neighborhood. I had wandered out of the neighborhood on three occasions:  to check out the train schedules at Grand Central Station, to see the lights at Times Square, and to apply at the employment offices of Macy’s and three other stores. Good jobs in publishing were hard to find without introductions and contacts. Retail entry-level jobs were plentiful. However, my applications produced nothing, but rejections. The only thing that changed, upon Ben’s return, was my mutually agreed upon exile to the lumpy sofa in the living room. Ben’s bed was Ben’s bed, al­though, I would soon learn that he would spend far less time in it than I had.

Ben fancied spending a good portion of his nights in his other living room, a bar down the street called Half-Baked, where he regularly held court, engaging perfect strangers in debates about current issues. Ben could distract a roomful of sports fans from a televised event, only to bet on the outcome of his verbal challenge to some headline story. He could debate anyone on any sub­ject for any length of time. It was a game he always won. He didn’t have to be on the politically correct side of an issue, as he could take either side, and in a burst of half-understood words outwit his opponent.

In my privileged relationship with him, I had learned first-hand, he could lie with the best of them - making one believe that he had just returned from the battlefield, the ball field, or a celebrity-filled ballroom. His repertoire included the strangest episodes, invented spontaneously and described right down to the most minuscule detail. His imagination was exceeded only by his audacity. I might have considered myself a fiction writer, but I stood in awe of Ben at moments like those.

Eventually, I had two choices:  to join the crowd that surrounded him in the bar or stay at home, to wait for him to return in need of clean clothes. In a matter of a few weeks, it became ob­vious that the apartment was simply too small for two men to cohabitate for long periods of time. I might have been the one who suffered from a form of social claustrophobia, but Ben apparently suffered equally from a more intimate form of claustrophobia. Where he felt safe in a crowd, I did not. Therefore, in bad weather, when Ben needed his space, I went to a museum or the library. In good weather, when Ben brought women home, my home became the roof, where I dutifully took a sleep­ing bag to give Ben his privacy.

With the city spread out below for my private view­ing, those entering and departing Half-Baked were placed unknowingly on parade. I learned, long before Ben did, who left with whom and when. It amazed him that I could gather an inordinate amount of information in this surreptitious manner. For me, it became a method of gathering characters for future stories. It helped that I had a camera with a powerful zoom lens allowing an even better view of my subjects. Through the camera lens, I could study body language and wordless expressions that could reveal a great deal about the drama going on below. I prided myself on knowing who might get lucky, even be­fore he or she knew. The grimace, the smile, the laugh all became clues.

One night, Ben challenged me to spot a man he had seen in the bar earlier in the evening. He described him simply as the Russian. I watched the suspect leave the bar about five minutes after Ben left and, then, decided Ben’s choice had been too easy a target. The Russian sported an unusual style of beard and clothing. The next night, I asked Ben to make the game more interesting.

He replied, Find a woman.

I asked, Which one?

Any, was his retort. Ben thought it strange, my sitting on the roof, instead of in the bar where I might actually find a woman and might become a part of a real story. To me, what I was doing seemed perfectly natural. I preferred observing life from a distance, writing about it, hearing it described in