Bones of Paris (9780345531773) (8 page)

“A glass of something would be great,” he told her. “Whatever you have.” He could have done with a cold beer, but what she had was wine, red, from a bottle she plucked from the back of the collection. He saluted her with his glass and took a deep swallow. A man knew he was getting old when three nights with a girl like Lulu took out more than it put in. “You’re looking very brown and fit.”

“Arienne and I are just back from Les Déserts—in Savoy?—and Marseilles, so yes, I’m feeling somewhat restored. It has been a hectic year. And Lord, this heat!” She lit a cigarette and dropped into a chair, looking as if it was the first time she’d been off her feet all day. She sucked in a deep lungful of smoke, and let it out on a sigh of appreciation. “But my dear Harris, what can I do for you?”

He handed her the moody portrait he’d taken from Pip’s wall. “Do you recognize her?”

“Yes, she used to drop in from time to time. American, of course. Shy when she first showed up, but that didn’t last long. It never does.”

“You helped her find a roommate.”

“Did I? Oh yes, you’re right—the adorable Nancy. Miss Crosby tacked a note up with her telephone number, and I kept my ears open. They seemed a good fit.”

Adorable?
“When did you last see Pip Crosby?”

“Months ago. She brought me a box of novels her mother had sent.”

“Could you narrow it down?”

“Hmm. Must’ve been after Christmas, since the books had been presents. They were in good condition—I don’t think she’d even opened the covers—so I was happy to have them. Oh! Miss Weaver was here and we were talking about
Orlando
, so that would make it late January, maybe early February.”

“You haven’t seen her since?”

“No—Well, wait, it seems to me I did. But where? Someplace odd.” She sat frowning into the smoke, then rumpled her brown hair irritably. “Too much in my head—if something’s not related to books, I find it increasingly hard to retrieve.”

“Then it’s a good thing your job is books.”

“I’ll think of it. No doubt at three in the morning when my fevered brain is hunting for a distraction from the bills. Why are you looking for her?”

“Oh, I’m just trying to find someone she might have known,” he replied vaguely. “What about the photograph: any idea who took it?”

By way of answer, she jabbed an ink-stained forefinger past his shoulder. He turned, then got up for a closer look at the gathered faces. Some of them he’d drunk with, others he’d seen on the streets or in bars. And as he looked them over, he realized that yes, in a number of the photographs, the camera technique stood out. One might even call it artistic in its attention to dark and light, the abrupt contrast of face and background, the way a subject’s cast shadow would be used to add dimension to the personality.

“Yeah, I remember now. His name is Ray?”

“Man Ray. A New Yorker like you. He’s the only one who photographs the shadows that way.”

“One of the Surrealist school, right?”

“It used to be called Dada, but yes.”

“Don’t they have a hangout up in Montmartre? A drinking hole near the cemetery?”

“Aha! That’s it!”

“What’s what?”

“Where I saw your girl. It was last winter, and she was sitting in a café with an unlikely group of men that included Man Ray.”

“Who else was there?”

“Let me see. Tristan Tzara was one. You know him?”

“The writer.”

“The others were artists. Let’s see, Tanguey was there, and Chaim Soutine. Oh, and Salvador Dalí.”

“That’s quite a crew.”

“They seemed to be planning something.”

“A Surrealistic revolution?”

“No, it was on paper—that’s right, they were playing exquisite corpses.”

“Sorry?”

“You know, where one person does a drawing and folds the paper, and the next person takes the edges and makes another section of the drawing? It’s a parlor game.”

“Guess I don’t spend enough time in parlors. So what was Pip doing there?”

“Watching, mostly. I only saw them for a minute, so I’m not sure, but she had that slightly confused look you see a lot on the faces of what Alice Toklas calls ‘the geniuses’ wives.’ ”

“Was she there with Man Ray?”

“Well, as I remember, she was sitting next to him, but there was a crowd, so she could have come with anyone. And as I said, I was only passing through.”

“Where was this? Up in Montmartre?”

“No, it was the Flore. Although if you’re looking for Man Ray, I’m pretty sure he does most of his socializing closer to home. He likes the Bateau Ivre.”

“So he lives in Montparnasse?”

“Doesn’t everyone? His studio is down near Denfert-Rochereau. Hold on—Myrsine?” she called. “Do you know if Man Ray is back in town?”

Her assistant looked up from wrapping a book. “I saw him on the Boul’ Mich on Sunday. He has a new assistant, over whom he has lost his head. They say she is to be his model. Une blonde Américaine. Très belle.”

“No more Kiki? Well, that’s a change.”

“Do you have his address—for the studio, that is?” Miss Beach was famously hesitant to give out the addresses of her customers, but a studio might be a different matter.

After consideration, she decided it was. “Yes. Yes, I’ll give you the address.” She rummaged through the papers on her desk for a pen and a piece of the store’s stationery, then handed him the number on rue Campagne Première.

He pursed his lips. “Isn’t that across from the Montparnasse cemetery?”

“Yes. Not one of the more cheery cemeteries, I’m afraid.”

“Too much business, not enough park.”

“Exactly. Oh, Harris, my dear man, if only my poets could turn a phrase like you.”

He laughed, and asked her what was new in the book world. They talked for a few minutes, with Sylvia springing up twice to show him new treasures. Guidebooks were a shared passion—although both agreed that few modern guides captured a feeling for the layers of Paris history, built up here, worn thin there. One trip to Paris, doing surveillance on a grifter, he’d spotted her head-down among the second-hand book stalls along the river. To his mind, those stalls were one of the prime temptations of Paris.

“Which reminds me,” she said. “Did you know Kiki has written a guide?”

“Kiki can
write
?”

She burst into laughter. “Apparently. And she talked Hemingway into giving her an introduction.”

“Should sell a few more copies.”

“That’s what she figured. A shrewd businesswoman, our Kiki. No doubt I’ll carry it, when it’s published in English. Oh, and there’s this—It made me think of you.”

She jumped up and came back with a book, a detective novel by a new writer named Hammett. Stuyvesant had his doubts, but other than his subscription to the store’s lending library, buying books was the only way he could pay her for information. He also promised that he’d return for a copy of Hemingway’s upcoming hymn to manliness.

She took the novel over to the cash desk to write up his slip. “Will you be with us for a while, this time?”

“Maybe, if I find another job here. Believe it or not, I was thinking the other day that it might be nice to settle down. Keep my books on a shelf rather than in trunks scattered across Europe.”

“Here?” She sounded dubious.

“Why? Sylvia, don’t tell me you’re growing tired of the City of Light?”

“Me? Never! I adore Paris. The problem is, so do an awful lot of others, and the sheer numbers are making things go a bit … dark. The party’s over, and the sad children and criminals are moving in. The Americans who matter will move on, leaving the rest of us washed up with the other flotsam and jetsam.”

“I don’t know that having the non-mattering Americans move on would be the end of the world for the locals,” he said.

“We Yanks haven’t always been kind to Paris, have we? Less ‘flotsam’ than an occupying army.”

“Even armies go home. Still, I can’t see this one shifting for a long time. Certainly not until the boom fades and the exchange rate drops.”

“Heavens, don’t say that. Where would we be without the stock market?”

“Where, indeed?” he agreed, then took his parcel, and his leave. As he passed through the door, another wan poet slipped inside.

Out on the street, the sun was nearing the rooflines, suggesting that the worst of the day’s heat might be past. Stuyvesant walked down l’Odeon (dodging a bus-load of tourists) and crossed over into the Luxembourg gardens (giving wide berth to a quartet from the Midwest) in
the direction of his hotel. As gardens went, he preferred the Bois de Boulogne—being a Central Park boy, after all—but even these were restful on the eyes. Or they would be, once his countrymen had gone home.

A child with a dripping ice-cream ran across his toes, shrieking wildly. In English.

Yes, Parisians had the right idea when it came to summer: get out. Paris obscured by snow or softened by fog, Paris adrift on fallen blossoms or carpeted in autumn leaves, Paris in the rain, at night, the lights streaking on the pavement—yes. But not Paris with a blast furnace overhead, when five minutes after finishing a beer, a man felt thirsty. Days like this, you kept a close eye on stray dogs, expecting one to come at you with foam-slathered jaws. Days like this, you wondered if winter would ever come again. If a snowdrop would ever bloom in the badlands.

It had been a long summer, in all kinds of ways. He’d begun to feel as tired as Paris, a city worn down by the heat, as used up by foreign invaders as an aging femme de nuit. Maybe even Paris had a limit to her charms. Maybe in another generation, the social and cultural center of the country would shift south, to Lyons, or Marseilles.

And maybe men had been thinking that very thing since the Emperor Julian fell in love with the place, over fifteen hundred years ago.

His thoughts were broken by a loud voice. “Hey, mister, you mind taking our picture?”

“I’spreche kein English,” he snarled and pressed on.

T
HE RUE
C
OLLE
was a truncated attempt at a Paris arcade off the rue Vavin.
Colle
meant glue, and the name probably didn’t help attract the flaneûrs, particularly when the rue Colle’s only shops were a florist’s that specialized in funeral wreaths, a stamp-collector who sold pornography, and a nervy Russian gentleman who made beautiful canes.

Halfway down this glass-roofed tunnel with the sticky cobblestones was the Hotel Benoit, more
pension
than hotel: no flower-boxes, no doorman—no sign, even. Stuyvesant had stumbled across the place in 1917, on leave from the Front, when he’d turned his back on the bustle surrounding the Gare du Nord and kept walking, in search of the darkest corner with a bed.

Mme. Benoit was old then, and each time he returned, he found her a fraction smaller, a bit more absent-minded, a little more emphatic in her devotion to Karl Marx. As coy about her age as any Frenchwoman, she had to be in her eighties: her husband had died in La Semaine Sanglante during the Paris Commune. She had watched the Eiffel Tower rise. She cursed the name of Bruno Haussmann and his destruction of Paris with such vehemence, Stuyvesant thought she believed the man still alive. Only the ferocious loyalty of her permanent residents kept her from starvation on the streets—some of the girls had recently instigated a chitty system after Mme. Benoit had failed to charge one month-long guest and charged another three times.

The Hotel Benoit had hard mattresses, thin curtains, a mix of gas and electric lights, and dingy paint. No two pieces of furniture matched. There was no breakfast service, and the nearest hot water was at the Armenian bathhouse around the corner. Still, the rooms were clean, the locks were great, every floor had a toilet and a cold shower, and nobody minded if he stashed a trunk in the cellar between visits. Best of all, if his preferred room was available—and it had been, this time—there was a loose floorboard under the threadbare carpet, for the concealment of cash and a revolver. And being on the top floor, it had three flights of conveniently noisy stairs, plus a window within climbing distance of the rooftops, should the need arise. Some of the permanent residents were ladies with a striking number of male visitors, but they kept it quiet, and most of them were easy enough on the eyes.

He called out a greeting to Madame, whose door stood open as usual, and trudged up the rackety stairs, tugging at his neck-tie and shrugging out of his jacket as he went. He dropped the brown paper-wrapped book on the table, tossed various garments he never wanted to wear again onto the bed, and fetched the thick envelope containing Pip’s letters from the bed-side table. He looped his suspenders off his shoulders, checked that the letters were there and nothing else, then retied the fastener.

After a glance at his watch, he dug out his notebook and sat at the table to write down a few brief phrases about the day, enough to help him reconstruct events for his employer when time came to make a report. When he capped the pen, Sylvia’s twine-wrapped packet caught his eye. He pulled it open and found
Red Harvest
: “a thrilling detective story.” Two pages in, he found himself tipped back in his chair with a grin on his face—not so much at the story, although it was refreshing to find a detective novel that didn’t start with arsenic-laced tea in the library, but at the little bookseller who had chosen it. “Poisonville”—hah! Was this how Sylvia saw him?

But it was a fine beginning, and it might have distracted him into reading further had he not been covered with sweat, and aware that he stank. He dropped it back into the brown paper and left it on the table.

Parisians seemed perfectly happy with weekly visits to the bathhouse,
but he’d never got used to the ripe smell. Maybe he should change his shirt, for the cop’s sake. And if he was going to spend another night trawling the bars into the wee hours (last night’s search for information having been cut short when Lulu found him), he couldn’t see doing that reeking like he did.

However, he had one clean shirt, and he’d meant to wear it tomorrow, when—thanks to the Crosby check—he was going to his tailor. He didn’t like the idea of forcing the guy to breathe
eau de Stuyvesant
in close quarters.