Bones of Paris (9780345531773)

by King, Laurie R.

  Another demonic butler gestured him towards a splash of light around the side of the stairs where, like a Kodak Brownie strapped to a dinosaur, a snug elevator waited.

  The lift was unattended; its doorway juddered shut to carry the middle-aged couple upwards. Stuyvesant anticipated some further bit of theatricality—a corpse dropping from the roof perhaps, or water rising up their legs. But in a minute the shaft echoed with the sounds of the door opening, with no further shrieks. Down it came, the door drawing wide in invitation.

  To arrive on the second floor without some jolt of adrenaline was almost a disappointment.

  The lift gates opened at the top of the stairs. Through a pair of doors lay a kind of upstairs entrance hall with a domed ceiling topped with four windows, dark with the night. The room was a perfect square, its floor an expanse of glossy black-and-white tiles, the walls heavily marbled black-and-white travertine. Mirrors threw the room back and forth into infinity, including the glossy black double doors into the center of each wall. One set opened onto the stairs, and hence the lift. The two across the room were shut, as were those to the left, but those to his right spilled a blaze of electric lights and a whole lot of noise.

  He gave his hat and overcoat to a cadaverous butler dressed entirely in black, and walked out into the tile. In addition to the mirrors at the centers, each corner had a statue: two white marble figures, man and woman, and the same in black. However, it was the center of the room that dominated, with an impressive piece of machinery half again as tall as he was. He walked slowly around the thing.

  It was a clock, he decided. Or maybe four clocks put together, since each side had its own face. Before him was a timepiece with an ornate bronze face, its hands pointing, correctly, to 8:16. A complex set of decorative wheels around the outer edges overlapped to further inform him that it was Thursday, 12 September, 1929. The next face, to the left, was of mottled silver resembling the full moon. Its main dial appeared to indicate the moon’s phase, at present slightly more than halfway towards full; there was another dial as well, marked with hundreds of small lines but no explanation. The face after that was of inky black enamel set with scores of tiny diamond chips, over which a glossy black hand set with larger diamonds pointed to a circle of what Stuyvesant was pretty sure were the signs of the zodiac. There were two other dials, of inscrutable purpose.

  The fourth side, facing the noisy ballroom, was golden. One of its dials was a clock like the first side, but showing 24-hour time, now 20:17. Its two other circles had pointing hands, but again, Stuyvesant had no clue what they were trying to tell him.

  On the top of all four faces stood Death with a scythe, ready to sweep it at a small hanging bell, to chime the hours.

  The bell was in the shape of a human skull.

  While he lingered around the clock, the elevator had gone down for another set of guests, a family group of one portly man, his dowdy wife, and their about-to-be-portly young son. The three swept past him with no glance at the clock or its admirer.

  Stuyvesant pulled himself away from the contraption and was turning to follow them towards the open doorway, when a familiar shape caught his eye. He walked over the black-and-white tiles to the wall beside the stairway doors: yet another of those boxes like he’d seen in Pip’s bedroom and Man Ray’s studio. This one seemed linked to the clock at his back: one of the squares was packed with tiny springs, another held an elegant brass cog. The piece of face in this box, occupying the lower right corner, was the photograph of an eye wearing a jeweler’s loupe, a man in his fifties or sixties. Here, the large center box held a rather ominous-looking device that was probably a caliper, but could as easily have belonged to an Inquisitor.

  The doors led to a ballroom larger than the dance floor of most Paris nightclubs. It was slightly below the level of the black-and-white tiles, and started with a bedroom-sized platform surrounded by an ornately carved marble balustrade, with three steps leading down, left and right. There were similar raised areas at either end of the wall of windows opposite, with a potted palm on the right-hand one and a string quartet playing on the left. He could barely hear the music, partly because of the distance, but mostly because the crowd was paying them about as much attention as they were the potted palm. The din was impressive.

  The sea of heads was framed by a spectacular view: the wall was mostly glass, with a lighted formal garden below and the city stretching out beyond. The edges of the garden had the sort of tall, thin trees that made him think of Italy, but the center was a checkerboard, dark and white like the tiles in the entranceway.

  All it needed were life-sized chessmen, he thought.

  He leaned on the balustrade to survey the crowd, hoping to spot Sarah Grey. As often when one walked into a wall of party noise, the mass of people was mildly repellent. He seemed to be the only solitary being in sight. As he stood there, he became aware of the hair along the back of his neck, and the sense of vulnerability that urged him to put his shoulders to the wall.

  His eyes narrowed, searching for the source of his hackles’ raising. It was nothing obvious, and the blatant game played by the building’s exterior was absent here: no hell-mouths, no imps crouched on the blazing electric chandeliers, no dead-faced wraiths circulating with trays of champagne. But there was something. And whatever it was, it was having the same effect on the others.

  High voices, nervy eyes, frozen smiles: there was fear in this room, but he couldn’t find the source. That suggested the fear came from some insider knowledge, something these people knew and refused to acknowledge. It reminded him of a party he’d been to, working undercover at the Bureau, where glancing looks and too-bright conversation had swirled around a crime boss with a dangerously short temper. But when he located Charmentier, standing near the fireplace with a glass in his hand, the glances and brightness seemed no greater there than across the room.

  If Charmentier was a threat, his guests did not know it—and looking at him, neither did he. Le Comte looked like a man who had produced an abundant banquet although he’d have been happy with dry toast. Like a man whose pleasures were always tinged with the bittersweet.

  Stuyvesant couldn’t help resenting that look, just a little. Here was a guy as rich as Croesus, with half of Paris ready to answer the snap of his finger, and the best he could manage was a faint smile and a picturesque air of melancholy. Half the people in the room would give a major body part to take their host’s place for a few nights. Including certain private investigators, who’d had to beg to be put in touch with an old friend, who would go home to a cold-water hotel room, where he’d go to sleep with one ear open in case the local cops decided to drop in for another senseless search and—

  He hadn’t realized how tightly he was focused on his host by the fireplace until a hand touched his sleeve. He whirled, then dropped his raised fist in a hurry. “Sarah! Jesus, sorry, I didn’t hear you coming.”

  “Obviously. Mr. Stuyvesant, are you quite all right?”

  Mr. Stuyvesant, he noted with a pang. He told his body to relax, made himself lean one hip against the hand-rail, put an easy smile on his face. “Yeah, I’m fine, it’s been a funny kind of a week. Hey, I’m really sorry about last night, I just hadn’t realized how much bubbly Bricky’s guys had been pouring into my glass. I hope your … friends are all right?”

  “Mr. Ray is merely an acquaintance, although he said last night that he was fine. As for my employer, he, too, is unhurt.”

  “I hunted him down this morning, to apologize—well, you’ll know that, I guess, since I’m here. I wasn’t sure if he actually was okay, or just being manly about it.”

  “Oh, I think he’d leave those games to you, Mr. Stuyvesant.”

  “Ouch. You really must be mad at me.”

  Her face shifted, becoming ever so slightly embarrassed. “One doesn’t like to see one’s friends brawling in public.”

  “Especially when your boss is the victim of that friend’s idiocy.”

  Her smile
was unwilling, but it was there. In return, he gave her his very best grin. “It’s great to see you, Sarah—you’re looking peachy. What’re you up to? How’s your brother?”

  She was not looking peachy, she was looking thin and modern, but his ready acceptance of being demoted to friend took her tension down a few notches. “I’m very well, thank you. I live here now—‘here’ in Paris, not ‘here’ in Montparnasse—and I’m finding it very much to my taste. As for Bennett, he’s doing pretty well, considering. I had a letter from him this morning, along with a picture of him that had been pressed into a sort of brooch. Whimsical, you know? But he seemed to think it had been taken by an agent of that group, spying on him.”

  “The so-called ‘Truth Project’? I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Of course, he is more than a little paranoid about them, so it could have been just a stray photographer. In any event, his letter sounded more amused than disturbed.”

  Sarah’s brother Bennett was, for lack of a better term, a human lie-detector. Twelve years ago, a bomb on the Western Front had stripped the man of any normal psychic defenses, rendering him excruciatingly sensitive to the world around him. The dissonance of lies, those everyday deceptions of human interaction, caused not just mental distress, but physical pain—Stuyvesant had heard his friend keen with agony at a lie. Grey walked through life as if he’d been flayed raw. The government was thrilled; their interest in his abilities had nearly killed him.

  “Surely they can see that he’s better left alone?”

  “Yes, except he’s no longer such a complete hermit. He even came to see me in the spring.”

  “Your brother comes to Paris?”

  “Just once, so far. It’s partly why I live down in Vaugirard—you know it? A quiet suburb with market-gardens. It’s inconvenient, but I thought he might find it less trying than the center of town. My neighbors—villagers, really—have seen so much shell-shock, they didn’t find his twitches anything out of the ordinary. Bennett developed quite a friendship with the farrier, when he was here.”

  “Now, there’s a picture.” Grey was not much taller than Sarah, with the same pale hair and emerald eyes. From a distance, he could be an adolescent boy—about as far from a blacksmith’s build as one could get.

  “It is a bit Mutt and Jeff,” she agreed.

  “I imagine the blacksmith is a placid sort of a person?”

  “Bennett says that the man could wheedle purrs from a bull.”

  Stuyvesant laughed. “I miss your brother,” he said, unthinking.

  “You could go and see him.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I know, Cornwall is a long way from anywhere. Well, perhaps he’ll come to Paris, one time you’re here. Why are you here, anyway? Are you working? Back with …?”

  “The Bureau? No, I’m long quit of them. I went independent. At the moment I’m looking for a girl. Her mother and uncle haven’t heard from her in too long, so I said I’d help.”

  “Oh dear. Would I know her?”

  “Pip Crosby? Philippa, her name is. American, blonde, blue eyes, about your height, twenty-two years old. Has a flat just off the boulevard de Sébastopol, and seems to have spent more of her time on the Right Bank than I’d have expected.”

  “Is that the person you were asking Dominic about? Does she have some connection with him?”

  “One or two links cropped up, I wanted to ask him about them. Which I did, this morning.”

  “And?”

  “Sarah, I can’t tell you about an investigation.”

  “Was that girl you were with last night helping you ‘investigate’?” He looked at her in surprise, and was pleased to see her blush, just a little. “None of my business,” she said briskly. “No, I don’t think I ever met your Miss Crosby. Or if I did, she’s faded into fifty other young blonde Americans.”

  “Tell me about Dominic Charmentier, then.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because he’s an interesting character.”

  “He works hard to be.”

  He might have interpreted the dry words as scorn, but there was a trace of admiration in her tone of voice. “How do you mean?”

  She reached for her little evening bag, but Stuyvesant got there first, popping open his silver cigarette case. Was her faint hesitation because she wondered if it held her photo?

  She said nothing, merely pried out a cylinder with her fingernail and allowed him to light it for her.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve been to the Grand-Guignol?” She turned her back on the crowd, propping her slimmed-down backside against the railing.

  “I have, in fact.”

  “So you’ll have seen how much of the performance is offstage. The spooky theater, its house doctor, the setting. But have you any idea of the role management plays? As a sort of sub-stratum to the enterprise?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Everyone you see here tonight has been specifically chosen because of his or her influence in Paris society. There are two newspaper owners, with three of their editors and seven journalists, half a dozen fashion designers, the Maires of three arrondissements, five factory owners, the directors or owners of all the major department stores, a few Comtes and Vicomtes, a couple of Barons, and more chevaliers than I can recall. This is in addition to the writers and artists—I don’t even try to keep track of those, since none of them reply to an RSVP, and when they arrive they have uninvited friends.”

  “Like me.”

  “Oh, you were invited. Le Comte gave me your name this morning.”

  “What’s the point? Of gathering all these movers and shakers together?”

  “Ask me that at the end of the evening,” she said.

  “Ah. Do I take it we have a surprise in store for us?”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  The smile that replied to his laughter was a prize, but he wasn’t about to push it. “So tell me about your boss and the … sub-stratum.”

  She glanced at her wrist-watch. “Better if I show you. Come.”

  They stood shoulder to shoulder while a trio of languid women with too much makeup came slinking through the heavy doors. Stuyvesant’s fingers felt the impulse to reach out for her hand, but he stifled it, and let her move in front of him into the black-and-white foyer. There she kicked away the props from the double doors, allowing them to drift shut. When they had done so, she pointed at them, although she herself turned to face the big clock.

  Obediently, Stuyvesant looked at the doors. The carving was ornate, although the light here was not strong enough to … Wait. Was that …?

  Yes. This side of the door—panels, frame, even its brass fittings—was one solid mass of writhing bodies, intertwined legs and arms punctuated by the twin smoothness of buttocks and breasts. When the door stood open, the frieze that might startle a Parisian sophisticate would be all but invisible—although even then, the door latch on the plain side now bore a suspicious resemblance to a male member.

  “Well,” he said. Was she blushing again? Impossible to tell in this light.

  “Yes, I know,” she said. “Although I think this is just his private joke. Come and see the rest.”

  The door was the celebration, albeit somewhat twisted, of lively lust. “The rest” was its opposite.

  The rest was death.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  HARRIS STUYVESANT STOOD in front of a wall of tortured faces and wondered what the hell to say. Sarah’s tour of the house had showed him everything from mummies to a set of Renaissance silver spoons engraved with skulls to a chandelier made out of bones. A drawing room was decorated with African death-masks coated in pale clay to imitate bone, Mediaeval depictions of the tortures of hell, South American pottery of priests removing hearts, and pieces of modern art on a theme of death (Harlequin on his death-bed; a wild man with a descending knife; mourners surrounding a dying man in a claustrophobic room). One wall of the library was covered with a painting by a Bosch imitator that lovingly explo
red the many ways human beings can inflict torture and death. The shelves on either side of it held volumes concerning the extermination of witches, illustrated anatomy books, and medical tomes describing procedures far worse than the illness they were intended to heal. Behind glass was an unpublished manuscript from the Marquis de Sade, rescued from his son’s flames by a servant.

  But of all the Baroque horrors in Charmentier’s living theater of the macabre, this wall of faces in a small side-salon was the worst.

  “What the hell are these?”

  “Strangely enough, they are the work of a well-meaning woman. During the War, an American sculptress came to Paris to make prosthetic masks for soldiers with terrible facial injuries. She made them out of copper, meticulously detailed. The masks made it possible for the men to walk the streets without causing children to scream. These are the molds she worked from, showing the men’s true faces, beneath their masks.”

  “Jesus,” he said. And a minute later, “God, those poor bastards.”

  There were dozens of the stark plaster heads. All showed grotesque perversions of the human visage: faces shattered and crudely glued together, skin grown over missing noses and craters like moss over fallen rock. With their closed eyelids, they looked like death-masks. Having fought beside them, Stuyvesant was in no doubt that every one of those men would have preferred a clean death.

  “What is Charmentier doing with them?”

  “He bought them when the studio was closed, after Miss Ladd moved back to America.”

  “They should have been smashed to dust. But what I meant was, why does your boss collect all this?”

  “I know, as if his life hasn’t been dark enough. I sometimes wonder if by putting it ‘out there’ to look at, he doesn’t have it inside him quite so much. Oh, that doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it?”