Bones of Paris (9780345531773) (10 page)

“He’s not exactly a friend.”

“This I could tell. In addition to describing you as honorable, he made it quite clear that if I did not wish to have you underfoot, the only way to make you abandon a case would be to jail you or deport you. And even then, he would not bet on my being able to keep you away.

“I am pleased to find that you are not ‘milking’ Miss Crosby’s family by failing to bring your information to the attention of the police. Nonetheless …”

He leaned forward across the table, locking onto the American’s gaze. “M. Stuyvesant, I will permit you to continue working in my city only if you stay in communication with me. If you withhold information,
any
information that might help me locate these girls, if you try to act the cowboy, I will come down on you with all the weight of the Sûreté Nationale. Do we understand each other?”

“Absolutely. I wouldn’t want your Sergeant mad at you.”

The weak joke fell on deaf ears. “You may keep that Man Ray photograph, Monsieur. I expect to hear from you regularly.”

And he got up abruptly and left, an impressive, untidy, curiously likable cop with a bum leg.

Stuyvesant watched him go, and then signaled the waiter for another drink.

Jesus Christ
, he thought.
How’d we go so fast from a girl on a yacht to a maniac killer?

A
CONVERSATION:

“You want me to do a danse macabre for you?”

“Just one of the panels. I shall call it ‘A
Totentanz
for the Twentieth Century.’ You and a selection of eminent modern artists, joining in a Dance of Death around a large, semi-circular room.”

“Not very cheerful wallpaper.”

“Ah, but you are wrong. A dance is a thing of joy, is it not? Passion and life? A dance and its music celebrate the physical. But would the music be so bright, the dancing so animated, if Death did not stand ready to snatch it away at any moment?”

“That’s getting a little philosophical for me.”

“Its origins are anything but. The classical Danse Macabrés were frescoes in the round showing Death—a skeleton or decaying body—leading all the world’s citizens in his Dance. Pope and prostitute, merchant and monk, plowman and beggerman’s child, all join hands with Death in the end.”

“Very Breughel.”

“Dozens of artists have addressed the theme, from its beginnings at the time of the Black Death. Bosch, of course. There’s a book of Holbein woodcuts with captions about each victim, seized by Death and shown the steps of the Dance.”

“Death and dancing. Sounds like Montmartre on a Saturday night.”

“So are you interested?”

“I don’t know much about popes and plowmen.”

“Those were the fourteenth century. Ours would see mayors and street-sweepers, movie stars and newspaper boys.”

“High-society blondes. Negro trumpet players.”

“Precisely.”

“Could still have the prostitutes. They probably haven’t changed much.”

“You may be right.”

“Would the thing have to be painted?”

“Painting, collage, photographs. Didi Moreau is looking into the possibility of doing one made from human bones. Each must fit onto a twelve-by-fifteen-foot panel, with the dimensions of the figures life-sized to make the end result more seamless.”

“Linking together. Ah—is that why you had us playing ‘exquisite corpses’?”

“Precisely.”

“And the theme is Death’s Dance.”

“Yes.”

“You care how graphic they are? How realistic?”

“Chaim Soutine is doing a panel along the lines of his carcass paintings.”

“Well, that’s about as graphic as you can get. In that case, sure, I’d be interested.”

“I will have my assistant send you a contract. And may I say, M. Ray, how much I look forward to your panel?”

“It’ll be a killer, all right.”

“C’
EST MORTE
,” S
TUYVESANT
said.

The bartender gave the American one of those wide French nods of shared desolation as he placed the brimming
blonde
on the zinc bar.

“Ira mieux, mon ami,” he said, and followed his damp cloth down the long bar to his other thirsty customers.

Harris Stuyvesant looked glumly at the glass. It was ten at night, and he didn’t think it was going to get better. Paris was dead. The heat had killed it.

He’d known how it would be before he left Berlin—knew that in August, the city’s tailors and hat-makers and butchers all closed their shops to escape the heat. He just hadn’t thought that the vacances could stretch this far into September—theaters slow to open, the rich lingering in the south. Even the butchers were still in the mountains, settled on their broad derrières with a glass of vin ordinaire, casting their professional eyes across the grazing moutons while they tried to decide if they could stretch out their vacances until the heat broke down by the Seine.

Ridiculous. Ten days into the new month, and it seemed that only the dirt-poor locals and the ever-naïve tourist wandered the sweltering streets. Pip’s friends—those he’d been able to track down from her address
book before it grew too late for doorbell-ringing—seemed to be off with all the other scrubbed-face leeches, in Spain playing bullfighter like Hemingway. In the South of France drinking like the Fitzgeralds. In the States raising money like, well, everyone else.

The bartender—“François, call me Frank”—brought his cloth back to Stuyvesant’s end of the bar.

“You have not found your Peep,” he said, with professional sympathy. Old women and bartenders did love to gossip.

“Nope. Saturday and Sunday here and in the Quarter, yesterday in Saint-Germain, and nothing. I figured I might as well come back here tonight.” In a move so well practiced his hand did it without consulting his brain, Stuyvesant slid the snapshot from his breast pocket and snapped it down next to his glass, facing the other man.

Frank had seen it before—he was one of the first Stuyvesant showed it to on Saturday—but still he leaned over to take a closer look at the grinning blonde with the trace of wariness about the eyes.

“Pretty girl,” Frank commented. “A … friend?”

“Just a job,” he lied.

“Her eyes, they are blue, n’est ce pas?”

“Green,” Stuyvesant corrected, then immediately reversed himself. “No, you’re right—blue. Sorry. Blue eyes, blonde hair, five-six, slim, slightly chipped left upper incisor, speaks pretty good French, did a year of college, likes books, music, daisies, and chocolate.” The bartender was unlikely to have seen evidence of the broken arm and the burn scar. Unless he, too, was a painter. Or a coroner.

The two men scowled at the image, Frank searching his memory, Stuyvesant thinking that, since this no longer looked to be a quick job, he’d better have copies made before the photo got any more ragged.

“I thought I’d found a lead,” he told the bartender, “but it turned out to be another American girl.”

“There are so many,” Frank said mournfully. He seemed to like Americans—their dollars, anyway—but Stuyvesant figured the USA’s conquest of Paris must be getting annoying. Maybe the early wave was good for a laugh, after the War, but as Sylvia had said, the actual writers
and painters were now outnumbered by hangers-on, common criminals, chronic alcoholics, and open-mouthed rubberneckers. God knows he found it a damned nuisance, and it wasn’t even his city.

He shook his head in a return of sympathy. “If the stock market keeps on like this, pretty soon somebody’ll build a link between the subway and the Métro.”

“That will be the day I retire,” Frank said, sounding grim. He raised his eyes from the picture of the missing girl. “You have been to, you know …?”

“The morgue? What the hell is it with everyone? She’s just missing, not dead. She’s probably gone back to America.”

“Some would say that was the same thing, Monsieur.”

“Hah, hah.”

“Mais non, Monsieur—in fact I meant, have you been to the police?”

“Oh. Well, yes, them, too. And the American Embassy. None of them were very interested in one more missing Flapper. And last night I went through Saint-Germain, in case her blood was a little rich for the likes of Montparnasse. Nothing.” He made a mental note to go back to the Embassy when he had copies of the photo to leave.

A group of Americans came in and Frank went to serve them. Stuyvesant watched idly, elbow propped on the bar. Three men, one from Brooklyn, two sounding more like Jersey—painters, judging by the state of their clothes, the New Yorker maybe a sculptor. Artists tended to take the first shift in Montparnasse’s night-life, finishing work when the sunlight faded. The Quarter’s writers, on the other hand, were probably just thinking about their breakfast.

This trio were in the midst of some urgent discussion, and Stuyvesant listened with half an ear. Art talk, the older of the two painters—a man wearing a paint-spattered suit, no neck-tie, and sandals on his horny-looking feet—declaring vehemently that no matter how much money they brought in (whatever “they” might be) they weren’t art, just junk in a frame, while the sculptor (corduroy trousers, flax blouse, and a single heavy turquoise earring that dangled wildly with every gesture)
took the opposite position with equal certainty, blathering on about something called “readymades,” although it didn’t seem to have much to do with clothing. The third man—shorter, younger, dressed in blue jeans and what looked like a Romanian peasant shirt—nursed his drink for a while before venturing an opinion that the titty displays were certainly intriguing, and did seem to have that disturbing
frisson
of visceral excitement (
Jesus: who talked like that? And sure, naked girls could be artistic, but he wasn’t sure how they might be called “junk in a frame.”
) that a person felt only in the presence of True Art—

His fellow New Yorker would have none of it, and their voices climbed until Frank touched the sculptor’s wrist and suggested, perhaps outside?

They turned to the door, seeming well accustomed to the request. Before they got there, the argument broke off as they stood back to let a pair of women come in. Frank’s waiter followed the two, took their order, and came back smiling: they were regulars. One looked familiar, and when the waiter had given the order—white wine and a fancy cocktail—Stuyvesant stopped him.

“Those two who came in? One of them models, for artists, doesn’t she?”

“That’s not all she does for artists, Monsieur.”

Stuyvesant returned his grin, but stayed where he was. No point asking a pair of hard-working girls anything until they’d had their first drink.

Instead, he rotated the picture on the bar, studying the crooked smile and untidy blonde head. As Frank said, there were a lot of American girls here in gay Paree. The crazy exchange rate made it as cheap for women to live here as it did men—nearly as cheap—and although fewer girls might come to experiment with painting or writing, they sure came to experiment. In the process, many of them discovered that girls were every bit as good at having fun as the boys were.

Like Pip Crosby.

He took out the other photo and put on his glasses, comparing the two versions of the girl he’d known. The snapshot that had seemed at
first the very image of an expatriate good-time girl seemed to have darkened under the influence of the other photo, as if the character had leaked across the pages.

The Man Ray photo made Pip look older and more mysterious—but then the guy was an artist, a clever one. He could probably make a salt cellar look Deep. The snapshot showed a young girl with wind in her hair. Maybe her smile was a bit … knowing, but was there really mistrust in her eyes?

And why the hell did he persist in thinking of them as green? Oh, he knew why, but damn it, Pip Crosby’s eyes were blue.

Irritably, he caught up the squares of paper and went back to work.

The models’ table had a pair of extra chairs, just in case friends showed up, and they were happy to let him claim one. He said hello, broke the ice for a minute, and before they could begin to wonder if he had something in mind with one (or both) of them, he took out the snapshot.

The older one didn’t recognize Pip, but made it clear that she would be pleased to talk about the picture for a while, if the American wished to buy her another drink. He obliged, and when the drinks were on the table the younger one asked to see the picture again. She held it close to her eyes, squinting a little: he’d never yet seen a French woman in glasses.

“Connaissez lui?” he asked.

She shook her head, reluctantly. “I thought perhaps, but no. It is that she looks like a girl who used to come here, oh, two years ago? Three?” She consulted with her friend for a while in rapid-fire French, and while the details may have passed Stuyvesant by, he could tell they were talking about a singer named Mimi who had lived in Paris for a while. Finally, she turned back to Stuyvesant. “The picture made me think of someone, but it is not her.”

“Her name was Mimi?”

“We called her that, but I don’t think—”

“Elle s’appelait Marie,” the older one interrupted.

“Non,” the first protested. “Michèle.”

“Michèle? Pas du tout. Mais, peût-être Martine?”

The two peppered the air with various names starting with M, but the matter wasn’t helped by the surname also beginning with an M. Michelle? Michaud?

He thanked them, and moved on to the next table, and the next.

The place was filling up, and the stink of unwashed bodies was doing battle against the cigarette smoke, and winning. Gratefully, he finished his round of the tables and escaped to the terrace, where the smoke was somewhat diluted.

It took some doing to get the attention of the three artists, now hunched over an iron table under the trees, but they either didn’t know Pip, or they were unwilling to detach themselves from the argument to really look at the photograph.

So he went back to the bar and asked Frank to send them a round of drinks. On the waiter’s heels, he pulled up a chair and sat.

“Evening, gentlemen,” he said. “Mind if I join you?”

The trio had not been warned about Greeks and gifts, because they didn’t bother with introductions, just took the full glasses and incorporated their benefactor into the conversation—or, argument. The topic had moved on from displays of women’s breasts to a consideration of modern film, although Stuyvesant thought the two might not be unrelated.