Bones of Paris (9780345531773) (34 page)

Without thinking, Stuyvesant slammed his glass onto the nearest flat surface and pushed across the room towards them.

Closer, he could tell that she was both tired and annoyed. Doucet was not so much grabbing her arm as he was holding it to keep from being jostled apart, but Stuyvesant saw her mood and the hand, and common sense gave way to his overactive sense of chivalry.

“You two look like you’re having an argument,” he said in loud joviality.
Well, he had to speak loudly, over the noise and the crowd, but his voice was stronger than he’d intended.

They both frowned at him. And all three then spoke at once.

“She proposes to make her way home alone,” was from Doucet.

“Maybe you should take your hand off her,” was Stuyvesant.

“I do not require a man to take care of me,” Sarah announced. Which would in fact do for either of the men looming over her.

She looked from one to the other. “If either of you imagine that this show of possessiveness is—Oh, for God’s sake, would you both just leave me alone!” And with that, she burrowed into invisibility among the shoulders.

The two men faced each other, hackles bristling, then as one, turned away.

For the next quarter of an hour, Stuyvesant pursued the red-and-black bandeau on the yellow head, but she seemed to have an instinct for pursuit, and disappeared behind one back or another. He finally saw her standing beside Cole Porter, checking the watch strapped over her black glove. As Stuyvesant moved forward, a sound came. A chime.

A swell of reaction moved across the floor, people cutting off their conversation and turning to orient themselves to the moon overhead. By some trick of lighting, its earlier glow had increased ten-fold, with the flecks of stars sparkling like diamonds. The clock sounded twelve times—no, thirteen—and into the silence that followed, the voice of Dominic Charmentier penetrated the chamber, in elegant rolling French.

“Mesdames and messieurs, thirteen chimes mark the true moment of the full moon, a gift to us from the heavens. Ladies, will you all please turn to the man who happens to be on your right, and greet him most warmly.”

Stuyvesant had no female to his immediate left, but watching Sarah, he saw her turn to the man on her right and give his cheek a quick peck. It was Cole Porter.

She’d known the stroke of the clock was coming. She knew, and had deliberately positioned herself not beside her fiancé, nor her former
lover, but next to one of the few men in the place whose affections she was in no danger of stirring.

When Stuyvesant left, a while later, Doucet was still lingering in the background. From the cold set of Sarah’s face, Stuyvesant did not think her fiancé was going to be seeing her home.

A
CONVERSATION:

“Yes?”

“Sorry to wake you, sir, but you wanted to know if Captain Grey—”

“Tell me.”

“It’s nothing, sir, just that he left his house and walked to that lookout rock he sits on. I wouldn’t have rung if—”

“I take it he hasn’t stepped off the cliff yet?”

“I, er, that is, sir, do you want me to inquire?”

“Of course not. Let me know if he does.”

“But sir, why would he?”

“That bloody photographer is why! You keep playing clever buggers with Grey, you’re going to push him off that cliff.”

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. Would you like—”

“I’d like to finish my night’s sleep, if it’s all the same with you.”

“Yes, sir. I won’t disturb you—”

“Yes you will. If Grey does anything but walk back to his house, I want to know, no matter what time it is.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m surrounded by idiots.”

“Yes, sir.”

O
N
T
HURSDAY MORNING
, the autumn sun rose.

Paris woke, flung open her shutters, downed her chicory-laced coffee, and set about the eternal business of business.

Harris Stuyvesant snored on.

So did Man Ray and Lee Miller.

Inspector Émile Doucet swore at his Sergeant, Fortier, who told those who worked nearby to watch out, l’Inspecteur had a sore head.

Didi Moreau went into his overgrown garden to find his donation box stuffed with old shoes, which he examined, then carried down the stairs to his workshop.

Dominic Charmentier stirred his coffee and considered the nature of gifts from the universe.

Sarah Grey’s housekeeper, come to begin the day’s tidying, frowned when she found that her employer’s bed had not been slept in the night before. Mlle. Grey usually let her know, if she would not be coming home.

And across the Channel, Bennett Grey’s emerald eyes winced away from the sight of four pieced-together faces, out of an envelope mailed in Paris.

T
HURSDAY MORNING, IT
took the combined efforts of the Dôme kitchen and the bathhouse around the corner to restore Harris Stuyvesant to a state where he could even consider a conversation with Inspector Doucet. Having been fed, boiled, pummeled, and shaved within an inch of his life, he settled his fedora on his new haircut and stepped back into the sunlight.

He felt almost human.

On his way to the Île de la Cité, he stuck his head in at the hotel. Non, Mme. Benoit reported, nothing had arrived for him.
Damn
. He should’ve written to Bennett on Sunday instead of going skating with Nancy. Surely the Post & Telegraph reached as far as Cornwall?

No way around it: time for Doucet.

The
flic
was Stuyvesant’s only source of information and protection within the force. He’d been a fool to antagonize him. But arriving at the Préfecture, he was pleased to find Doucet in even worse shape than he’d been.

Stuyvesant’s immediate impulse was to say something clever like,
Looks like Sarah led you on a merry chase last night
. Fortunately, his brain caught his tongue, and turned the words to, “Bonjour.” He stuck out his hand for shaking, dropped into the chair, took out his cigarette case, got one going, and set the case and lighter on the desk in front of Doucet.

“I may be getting too old for parties like that,” he said.

After a minute, Doucet’s face relaxed a notch. He picked up the case, opened it, used the lighter.

“What are you going to do about Sarah?” Stuyvesant asked.
You
, not
we
, seemed only politic.

“I have a man on her home. The only person who has gone in or out was her housekeeper.”

“It won’t be easy to keep her under surveillance without her noticing.”

“I very much hope it will not be for long.”

“Can you tell me what you have in mind?”

“I’m going to take Moreau’s house apart.”

Stuyvesant put on a thoughtful frown. “When Sarah and I were there, talking to Moreau in the room with all the hands—you know the one I mean?—he gave a sort of meaningful glance at that bookshelf in the corner. It occurred to me there might be some kind of hidden panel behind it. Did you happen to look back there?”

“No.” Doucet’s expression was eloquent with disbelief, but Stuyvesant’s face gave nothing away. Nor did he tell the big cop to take a can of grease.

“Well, you might. And what about Man Ray and Charmentier?”

“Sergeant Fortier has gone to speak with Mr. Ray. But my juge d’instruction has specifically forbidden me to investigate Le Comte.”

Two men who didn’t trust each other when it came to a woman could nonetheless hold a long and eloquent silent conversation about other matters. Stuyvesant leaned forward to flick off a length of ash. “Well, I may be seeing Charmentier myself.” He held his breath: perhaps offering Doucet a tool his superiors didn’t control would make up for the stupidity of the night before.

“I must forbid you from harassing him,” Doucet said, in a voice so forceless, he might have been sounding out words on a page.

Stuyvesant smiled. “I wouldn’t think of it. What about the missing persons list?”

Doucet, as relieved as his visitor to have negotiated the trickier bits
without ending up in a shouting match, tapped the page he had been scowling at when Stuyvesant came in.

“We have removed sixteen more names.”

“That’s some good work.”

“Seven were accidental deaths and four died of natural causes, all of them far from home—Scotland, Germany, America. Three were fleeing arrest warrants that we didn’t know about, and two are a mother and daughter who left at the same time funds went missing from the bank where the father worked. Rumor has them in Mexico.”

“Which leaves, what? Thirty?”

“Thirty-one.”

“Can I see?” Stuyvesant threaded his fingers together to keep them from grabbing the file.

“A private investigator is not permitted access to an official police investigation,” Doucet said, in that same forceless voice. He stood up. “I must take my lunch now. I generally am away one hour. I don’t expect to see you here when I return.”

Stuyvesant was in Doucet’s warmed seat before the door clicked shut, uncapping his pen.

There was a lot of new information: dates, home, family, education, jobs, physical descriptions. Where a photograph had been added, he noted any distinctive characteristics—hair color, eyes, moles, scars. He hesitated over the men, of whom there were five, but in the end included cursory notes on them as well. Given the time limit, he did not pause much to think about what he was reading, merely winnowed as much information as he could from each pinned-together report before turning to the next.

Fifty-eight minutes later, he finished recording the sketchy facts of the last missing person in the file (Gabriella Faulon, black hair, crooked eyebrows, small mole on the side of her nose, arrested in 1924 for public drunkenness, married, no children, last seen on Tuesday at the Musée Grévin—the wax museum—on the boulevard Montmartre). He flipped her records shut, put the other thirty cases on top of her, straightened them a little, and closed the file.

He stretched the kinks out of his neck. This was just the kind of slog
he hated, paperwork and cold recorded facts—the thing he missed least about his former job under J. Edgar Hoover. Give him a suspect to grill, any day. But he knew how to handle information, and he did it scrupulously, even though his only pleasure was in the finishing.

He passed Doucet on the stairs, exchanging a polite nod.

S
TUYVESANT HEADED FOR
what was becoming his usual place for reflection, the little pointy park of the Vert-Galant. He gave the bronze Henri le Grand a tip of the hat and settled onto a bench, to let his mind chew on the list. Instead, his thoughts went sideways, to a pair of women.

He wished to hell women were as easy to understand as rum-runners and anarchists. He’d thought Nancy was interested—more than interested, very nearly promised to him. Was there something about his kiss that put her off? Halitosis? Or was the visitor she’d been entertaining the past three days an old lover whose return pushed Harris Stuyvesant to the side?

Enough. Turn to something you might be able to understand.

Thirty-one names, men and women who had walked away, or been carried, from their lives—one of whom was Pip Crosby. (The child on the original list had been located: her father was awaiting trial.) They began on January 3, 1928, when young Katrine Aguillard was now known to have set off to visit a friend in Rouen without telling her parents, and ended last Tuesday or Wednesday with Gabriella Faulon, whose drunken female housemate noticed she wasn’t in her room near the Place Pigalle, then took three days to report Gabriella’s absence to the police.

Five men, twenty-six women, mostly French, predominantly Parisian,
scattered across the city, more or less evenly distributed over the twenty-one months covered by the list. Many of them had some connection with the art world—but then, who in Paris did not? He began to flip at random back and forth through his notes, hoping his eyes would happen across a pattern his brain was overlooking.

The dates? Half were vague, and some told nothing but the day a disappearance had been reported. Lotte Richter, for example, a blonde woman from Hamburg, was reported missing after a birthday holiday in Paris, when a surprisingly conscientious hotelier brought her belongings to the Lost Property Office in March. He could only say that she had been there on February 13, when she’d paid him.

What about hair color? Eleven brown, ten blonde, six black (one of those with a question mark), two gray, and one each red and bald. That seemed like a lot of blondes to him, considering how rare it was in France, but then he was bound to be a bit wary of threats to blonde women. Did it make any difference if the blonde hair was bleached?

How about nationalities, then? Seventeen French, five Americans, three Germans, two each for England and Italy (the Italians were a pair of women, from the same town, who disappeared the same day, leaving an unpaid hotel bill and two suitcases of clothing) and one each for Poland and Spain. The Germans were Lotte Richter, Clara Klein, and Elsa Werner; blonde, blonde, and brunette; Hamburg, Frankfurt, and a village near Berlin. That all three women had dates in the first seven months of 1928—February 13(?), March 26, and July 21 or thereabouts—might be significant, or a statistical anomaly.

What about the five men—did they have anything in common? Four had gone missing in 1928. Daniel La Plante and a man known only as Joseph (disappeared May 14 and early November, respectively) were older than the others, and worked as a shoe-shiner and a beggar. Marc Dupont (blonde; September 20; born and lived in Montmartre) was twenty-two years old and worked as a waiter and occasional actor. Eduardo Torres, a swarthy, handsome, nineteen-year-old native of Valencia, was believed to be working in Paris as late as November: his family reported him missing in January after he failed to make it home for Christmas. The only man gone missing this year, on March 1, was
Raoul Bellamy, a medical student at the Sorbonne, born in Brittany, who supplemented his family’s stipend by the occasional modeling job.

Five men and twenty-six women. The numbers could mean that women were more vulnerable, or that their absence was reported more often. And, there were a lot of arrests on the lists, mostly for petty theft and drunkenness. And …