Bones of Paris (9780345531773)

by King, Laurie R.

  But it wasn’t just perfection that an artist sought. Perfection was commonplace, little more than a foundation—and although the goal of any artist was to shape prosaic syllables into poetry, there were some bones, precious few, that were poems in themselves. Bones that required no artisan’s hand to shine in beauty.

  Some masterpieces simply blossomed into the light as the calyx of flesh drew back, revealing an elegant and articulate beauty. These thrilling treasures bore the indelible marks of their unique history, inflicted on them while they were still warm and pulsing with blood: the gentle bow caused by a poverty diet; the multiple healed fractures of a woman with a bully husband; the faint, tell-tale cracks of the left wrist, testimony that hope is greater than mere physical agony. Even the detritus of age held a kind of poignant message—but oh, the occasional rare length of bone with a flower of cancer along its clean length, or the swell and kink of a long-healed break: a life’s story, carved in mute calcium.

  A story like the one his beetles were currently polishing. Broken in its youth and imperfectly set, the wounded ends had laboriously woven a bridge across the gap. The bone was perfect yet flawed; strong, but with a luscious history of pain. What a shame it would be, to leave such a gem buried under flesh.

  The artist closed the box, and let the beetles get back to work.

  SIX

  HOW MANY STRANGE bedrooms had Harris Stuyvesant stepped into, hoping for some clue to the person who slept there? Agitators and anarchists, gun-runners and rum-smugglers when he’d worked for the Bureau. Twice there’d been armed men waiting—and once, in a cocaine-smuggler’s bedroom, the sound of the closing door had very nearly obscured a tiny tick from across the room, where a bomb sat primed and ready on the dresser.

  The memory of those distant excitements was almost enough to make Stuyvesant regret telling J. Edgar to take a hike.

  Pip Crosby was no bomb-making cocaine-smuggler. Cocaine user, maybe—snow was cheap on every corner here in Paris. She hadn’t been using the stuff back in February—he couldn’t have missed the signs—but if she wasn’t off in Antibes or Madrid with some long-haired poet, or with a troupe of traveling actors, migrating Americans, or passing gypsies, then he’d probably dig her out in some dingy corner with an adored pimp, paying for drugs with her body.

  The one place he didn’t think he’d find her was dead. Drug overdoses had a way of surfacing pretty fast, since a corpse was an inconvenient companion, and it took a lot of work to get rid of one on the sly.

  Of course, there was always politics: Europe was full of poor little rich girls who set out to rebel on a family allowance, working their way through Communism and Anarchism and feminism and any ism that might shock Daddy short of actually joining-the-working-class-ism.

  In any event, his entrance to Pip’s bedroom triggered neither gunshot nor bomb, and his personal feelings about spoiled Americans mustn’t get in the way of earning his pay. He sucked in a breath of the oven-like air and let his eyes run passively over the room, waiting for it to tell him its secrets.

  Bedrooms were where people dreamed, where they spent a third of their life, where they gave themselves up to the vulnerability of sleep. That one room—its contents and its state—gave away more than the whole rest of the house combined. Tidy or slovenly—or, a tidy surface over ground-in filth? Was it a sterile, business-like place to sleep and store clothing, or filled with mementos of a life fully lived? Open to the house, or walled up against the world, the resident’s only safe retreat?

  The rest of this particular residence had been furnished by others. Philippa Anne Crosby lived among the foreign furniture in this foreign city for a little more than a year before she wandered away. Pip Crosby had left Boston a good girl (or at least a conventional one) and a year later was picking up strangers in a bar and sharing not just her body, but its damage. Even by Paris standards, it was quick work.

  So, Pip, honey: where’d you go after you wrote your mama that chatty letter at the end of March?

  Her bedroom was twenty feet square with high ceilings and decorative plaster trim, in a fourth-floor apartment of a block sketched out by old iron-fist Haussmann as he’d brutalized Paris into modern efficiency half a century before. Empty plaster rosebuds showed where gas fixtures had been replaced by electrical lights that looked like gas fixtures. The wall-paper was floral. The furniture reflected the same taste that he’d seen in the rest of the apartment: two narrow beds with padded satin headboards, one of them lightly stained from hair-oil; ornate dressing table with a rococo gilt frame around the mirror and a padded gilt-trimmed chair tucked underneath; a fainting-couch that matched the twin headboards. The curtains were pale blue velour, too heavy for the room.

  On top of all that Paris bourgeoisie lay another stamp entirely.

  For one thing, the art, mostly paintings, all modern—very modern. A couple were by artists he recognized; they would have been expensive, and Uncle Crosby’s letter said nothing about investments in art.

  Did Pip have money on the side, or were these gifts from admirers?

  Then there were the photographs, nicely framed: street scenes, dramatically positioned monuments, objects on a table, people. There were four, carefully arranged into a diamond, whose subject he couldn’t tell: reflections on a pond? A room badly out of focus? In others, startling effects in the developing process seemed to be the main point. Two were moody portraits with more shadow than light: only by putting on his reading glasses could he be sure they were of Pip.

  Beside the art and photographs were an odd pair of items—and he couldn’t have said why these demanded a closer examination than nude pictures of a twenty-two-year-old girl (with, yes, her scar on display). These were a pair of glass-fronted wooden display boxes, twelve inches on a side and an inch and a half deep, divided into grids with the middle missing: twelve squares framing a larger central square.

  The pale wood had a delicate grain and a perfect finish. The glass that covered it was equally flawless, without a hint of ripple. But it wasn’t the painstaking workmanship of the containers that drew the eye, it was their contents.

  The top row of the first had, from left to right: an old ivory chess rook with a richly elongated blood-red drip descending from its miniature crenellations; the eye and nose from a murky photograph; a glass eye with a chip in the blue iris; and three mismatched and damaged tortoiseshell buttons. The bottom row held: two molars, one marred by cavity and the other with bits of dry flesh clinging to the roots; a small silver-topped vacuum tube; the worn cork from a medicine bottle; and a bloody fingertip that would have been startlingly realistic were it not for hollow tin where bone and flesh should have been. The central square cradled the delicate arches of three cat-sized rib bones; the four squares at the sides all had pieces of old stained-glass windows showing various body parts: a delicate hand and its arm in the two right-side squares; a mouth and an eye with a crack across it on the left.

  The other box had a similar mix of objets diverse—pieces of photographs, bits of rubbish, bones—with touches of paint to suggest gore. Its center square held what looked like a miniature city-scape: a bleached Manhattan, its skyscrapers made of stubby little white bones that suggested human phalanges but were no doubt the tail-bones of a dog. Two of the “buildings” were topped with pools of gleaming crimson, like rooftop swimming pools brimming with fresh blood.

  The boxes were … unsettling. One made him think of childhood fears, the other how dangerous loneliness could be: could a boxful of odds and ends provoke such distinct emotions? They were intellectual memento mori overlaid with an almost erotic degree of violence, and his knee-jerk reaction was to take them down and stick them behind the wardrobe. But why? He’d seen modern art a lot weirder, and certainly more graphic.

  “The heat’s melting your brain, Harris, my boy,” he muttered aloud, and walked over to lower his weight onto the gilded chair. The dressing table was dust-free and tidy: silver-handled brush with ivory comb tucked under it to the r
ight, enameled powder box and crystal perfume atomizer on the left, four small silver frames in the center. Three of these depicted a blonde woman, one of them clearly Pip, two others probably meant to be her.

  The fourth sketch looked like a three-stemmed martini glass or a tree split by lightning. It had been done on a paper napkin, and on closer examination, he decided it, too, was meant to show a young woman—although the fractured, light-and-dark, vivid-yet-uncertain personality that came to life in those few lines showed a more complex personality than he’d found in Pip. He didn’t need to look at the signature, that arrogant, underlined Picasso: no living artist had a cleverer eye, or a wickeder pen, than the little Spanish bantam cock.

  He pulled open the dressing table’s wide center drawer: hair decorations—pins, feathers, and fabric bandeaux—and a jumble of cosmetics, American and French. The American containers were older, their packaging considerably less elegant.

  The top drawer on the right did duty as a filing cabinet, with checkbooks from both an American and a Paris bank, Pip’s identité papers, and the like. A new-looking address book had less than a dozen listings: the two banks, a hair-dresser’s, an English-language bookshop, three first names, and the address and telephone number of the couple who owned this apartment. He wrote down various numbers and pawed through the rest of the drawer, finding nothing of interest.

  The presence of her identité was troubling; the lack of a passport was both reassuring and suggestive.

  The next drawer contained a tin box that had once held Scottish shortbread, now filled with matchbooks. Matchbooks weren’t as common here as they were in the States, where bowls of them lay near the cash register of every corner dive and mom-and-pop diner, but even in Paris, nightclubs had taken to handing them out. He recognized most of these: Moulin Rouge, L’Enfer, Bricktop’s—the old one, at number 52—Chaumière, Chat Noir. Some he’d been in, but didn’t know well—La Lune Rousse, Les Deux nes, Le Carillon, Le Boeuf sur le Toit.

  Twenty-seven altogether, with no duplicates. He idly thumbed back a cover: it was missing a match. He hadn’t noticed any ash-trays in the apartment—he’d used his coffee cup for the cigarette he smoked earlier—so these were probably souvenirs.

  The majority bore the names of music halls, bars, dancings, and cabarets in the Right Bank Montmartre district, where Paris went to play and to whore. One was from Luna Park, an amusement gardens with a dance hall out west in the Bois de Boulogne. A handful more originated from the boulevards to the east of Montmartre. Only two of them came from Montparnasse on the Left Bank, which since the War had become Paris’ American village: Au Caméléon, a superior establishment popular with artists celebrating a big sale, and a new one, La Coupole.

  Not exactly the places he’d expect of a Boston girl, even one whose apartment was across the river from what its denizens called the Quarter.

  He left the matchbooks strewn over the table-top and went back to the drawer. Beneath the tin box lay half a dozen letters: five from Pip’s mother, one from Rosalie. He picked up this one first. The girlish handwriting gave him nothing of interest—Thanks for such a lovely time, I hope I can come again next year—but folded inside were some photographs, beginning with Rosalie along the Quai d’Orsay. Next was the full version of the snapshot he had in his pocket—here, Rosalie occupied the left-hand side of the photograph. She looked even more dowdy than he’d remembered, next to Pip’s vivacity.

  The next three pictures showed: the girls together at the front of Notre Dame; Pip atop the Eiffel Tower; and the two girls on the beach in Nice.

  Then he came to the last picture, and nearly dropped it: Pip, with her arms locked around the neck of a large, bemused-looking man in a smoke-filled bar. She was turned towards the camera with an expression of gamine mischief, head cocked like a film starlet, hair tousled every which way. She’d been drinking some peculiar cocktail made with crème de menthe: she’d kissed him a moment after Rosalie had snapped the picture, bathing his tongue in mint.

  He remembered the taste—and the bemusement. Looking back, he seemed to have spent the entire five days of the affair in a state of puzzled enthusiasm. He’d been more than willing to follow along, but even in the whirlwind of music and sun and dancing—and yes, some terrific sex—a corner of his brain had marveled, Why me? She’d made him feel young, but then, he’d never thought of himself as middle-aged before meeting Pip.

  The door behind him shifted in its frame. The photograph vanished into his pocket, the glasses into his hand. He turned.

  “So, are you going to feed me?” the roommate asked.

  SEVEN

  “WOULD YOU COME in for a minute, Miss Berger?”

  Nancy Berger interested Stuyvesant. Not as a woman—three nights of Lulu had sure bled off that pressure—but as an unlikely roommate for a girl like Pip. His initial suspicions of her and the bank account shenanigans had faded, but that did not declare her lily-white pure.

  Nancy Berger stood in the doorway with damp hair, a scrubbed face, and a crisply ironed skirt and blouse in place of the bathrobe. She no longer smelled of booze. Her chapped-looking lips wore a layer of lipstick, and she’d even managed to do something about the red in her eyes.

  Still not to his taste, but at least he didn’t feel the urge to throw a tarpaulin over her head.

  “Did the room look like this when she was here?” he asked.

  “I suppose. Mouette—the cleaner—has been in, but she never puts things away, just dusts around them.”

  “If Pip—Phil—intended to be gone for long, would she have taken any of this?” Stuyvesant gestured at the dressing–table-top and the open drawers.

  The young woman shook her head. “It’s like I wrote to her mother back in May, I didn’t see anything missing, but Phil and I only share the main rooms. I don’t really know her bedroom. She’s big on privacy. Obsessed, even.”

  “In the fifteen months you’ve lived here, you haven’t been in this room once?”

  “I told you, I’ve been away for the last four of those. But yes, of course I’ve been in, once or twice.”

  “When was the last time?”

  “A few days before I left. I needed—I was looking for some ointment I thought she had. I knew she wouldn’t mind if I used some. And her books, I borrowed a few of those—the novels, not the others—and returned them. And a … a wrap, once. She’d let me use it before. I put it back the next day.”

  She was lying, and anyway that was a lot more than once or twice. He let it go for the moment. “Does she smoke?”

  “No, neither of us do.”

  “What drugs does she like?”

  “I can’t believe we’re talking about this.”

  “So she uses drugs?”

  “No. Not as far as I know.”

  “But she does drink?”

  “Sure.”

  “And collect matchbooks from bars?”

  “Does she? Oh yes, I see.”

  “Are these the sorts of places she goes?”

  Nancy reluctantly came inside, looking over his shoulder at the colorful squares, then flicking through them with a short, clean fingernail. “Phil and I used to go out together quite a bit at first, but around Christmas she started to make other friends. It did seem odd that I rarely saw her—you know how tight the Quarter is—but if she goes to these sorts of places, I guess it isn’t. I haven’t been in Montmartre for ages. Its decadence just feels … miserable.”

  He sat back, physically as well as mentally, to look up at the side of her face. Most people would have assumed that by “these sorts of places” he simply meant nightclubs and cabarets: Nancy Berger had picked up instantly on their geographical similarity.

  She reached for the Moulin Rouge, and as Stuyvesant had done, opened the cover. “Good luck, I see.”

  “Sorry?”

  “For some reason, Pip is convinced that if you manage to get your cigarette going with a single match, it’s good luck. All I can say is, she must’ve grown up w
ith some crummy matches.”

  “I’ve heard about it being bad luck to light three off one match, but not the other way around. She’s superstitious, then?” Something else I didn’t notice about her.

  “Madly. Even at first, she was dead serious about things like twisting the stem of an apple to find the first letter of your future husband, or a bird flying through your window meaning someone’s going to die, or it being bad luck to open an umbrella indoors. She went a little crackers when I broke a mirror moving in. I thought she was going to throw me out. Or call in the priests to purify the place.”

  “Why do you say, ‘Even at first’?”

  She dropped the matchbook and picked up another, squinting to make out the name. “She got more so. She left a dinner party once last winter because there were thirteen. Hey, look.” This matchbook, too, had one match torn out.

  Stuyvesant thumbed open the one he held, then another.

  Every book had but a single gap: Pip’s collection of good luck.

  And not a one from Nice.

  He swept the collection into the tin box and closed it back in the drawer, pulling open the last drawer in case it contained rabbits’ feet or horseshoes, but it had only what seemed to be mending—a blouse missing a button, another with a ripped shoulder seam, several stockings—and dust.

  He was not finished with the room, but Miss Berger was looking a bit wan, and he thought he’d get more out of her if he fed her.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  He rolled down his sleeves and walked over to retrieve his coat from the bed. When he turned back to the door, his eyes went from the wooden boxes to the diamond quartet of photos, and he stopped dead.

  They were not reflections on a pond. They were close-ups of Pip Crosby’s terrible scar.

  EIGHT

  THE CONCIERGE GAVE them a sour nod as they went past. As Nancy led him along the shaded pavement, she turned to ask, “Are you absolutely—”