Bones of Paris (9780345531773)

by King, Laurie R.

  “You dear man!” she said. “Come in, I’d given you up.”

  “Hi, Nancy.”

  “Come in, the upstairs neighbors complain if they hear talking after nine p.m.”

  He stepped inside. She shut the door, and stepped into his arms. A minute later, she leaned back.

  “Harris, what’s the matter?”

  “What’s the matter? Nothing’s the matter. Can I have a drink?” He supposed he should be grateful she’d had a bath, so he didn’t smell the other man.

  “You want a drink?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “I thought—No, let’s have one, by all means. Come in. Isn’t this a nice little hole-in-the-wall? Sylvia helped me again, it belongs to an American writer who’s gone home to his wife while she’s having a baby.”

  He saw the drinks cabinet and walked over to it, his back to her as he looked through the bottles. “You said you thought. What did you think?”

  “Just that you might be a bit more … eager.”

  She sounded disappointed. Jesus, was the woman a nymphomaniac? “I guess I’m enough older than you to have certain expectations about women, and it still comes as a surprise, sometimes, the … attitudes of modern girls.”

  She’d sat down on a settee, and now looked at him across the low table. “Would you mind translating that little speech for me?”

  “I just …” He looked into his glass, swirling the liquid. “You had someone else here until very recently. As soon as he was gone you snapped your fingers for me. I don’t mind, you understand. It just takes me a minute to … get into gear.”

  She gaped, as if he’d been talking in one of the few languages she didn’t know. “What makes you think I had someone here?”

  “You told me yourself. Your visitor.”

  “My—” Her astonishment changed to—could that be a look of outrage? Why? She’d been pretty blunt herself. “You thought—And you—?”

  Her reaction was baffling. Even more so when the bunched eyebrows of outrage began to twitch. In a moment, she lost control of her face, and gave a snort, followed by a coughing sound. She fell back against the settee and let loose with an unladylike bellow of helpless laughter.

  “What the hell?” he asked. “Nancy, what—?” But his every word only made her whoop. “Nancy, for Christ sake!”

  “Oh, Harris,” she cried, “you dear innocent man, have you honestly had no idea what I was talking about?”

  “What, when you sent me your note? You said you had—”

  “Women have a ‘visitor’ every month, you poor idiot.”

  His stunned expression reduced her to choking paroxysms.

  After a while, he went to sit down beside her. And began to chuckle.

  Soon, breathless roars of laughter gave way to the breathlessness of his mouth on hers.

  And in the morning, he wore his previous day’s shirt.

  FIFTY-TWO

  THE AUTUMN MORNING was honey-sweet, as the two of them walked down the rue Suger with linked hands. They drank café au lait in the shadow of Notre Dame, fed each other bits of croissant. Stuyvesant walked Nancy back to the orange door, where he brushed her swollen lips with lingering kisses good-bye.

  The streets were filled with happy people. Concierges swept their sidewalks, beautiful women opened their shutters and leaned out, a fruit vendor piled an artful pyramid of radiant apples. As he crossed out of the Luxembourg Gardens, bicycles whirred merrily and a trio of young men perceived how he had spent the night, smiling their approval. The street-sweeper on the rue Vavin tipped his hat and greeted Stuyvesant’s coin with a burst of Italian song. The bouquets in the florist’s beamed as he passed.

  He was humming the same Cole Porter song under his breath as he trotted up the fourth-floor stairway and spotted his door standing open. “Bonjour, Yvette! Ça va bien?” he called to the maid as he came through—and stopped dead. “Bennett! What are you doing here? And …” He looked from Bennett Grey to the man at the window, and the blood drained from his scalp.

  Doucet turned, but Bennett Grey spoke first.

  “Harris, what have you done with Sarah?”

  FIFTY-THREE

  TWENTY-SIX INTERMINABLE HOURS after Bennett Grey had dropped the four photographs onto burning coals, he closed the door to Sarah’s Paris house. The trip over had been hell. The faces haunted him as he bicycled to Penzance, waited for the train, crossed southern England. He half hoped that the Truth Project’s spies would simply arrest him and save him from any further involvement with Harris Stuyvesant’s problems, but they kept their distance.

  London was a cacophony, the train to Dover a seething mass of men and women trying to hide their loathing of each other and of the crying children. He changed compartments twice before finding one with neighbors who might not shred his nerves—only to be joined at the last minute by a solitary woman whose darting eyes and knotted fingers made him want to scream.

  He spent the journey in the corridor, humming hard, in an attempt to keep from going as mad as that poor woman.

  On the ferry, he took to open air.

  At the Gare du Nord, with a headache setting fire to his skull, he had the foul luck to encounter a series of young men—men who had been children ten years ago when half of France twitched with shell-shock. An older porteur would have treated him gently, knowing too well the tediousness of a weeping man. An older douane official might not have been so … officious. Bennett Grey held on to his failing control, answering their questions—Why only one small valise? Where have you come from? What is your business in Paris?—as tears crept down his face.

  At last, the young official looked up and noticed his state. With a grimace of disgust, he thrust the passport back over the desk and waved his permission to close the disrupted valise, leaving Grey to follow the porter off to the taxi ranks.

  He kept his eyes tightly shut as they drove across Paris, humming tunelessly all the time. He dropped the house key twice before it turned.

  He stood with his back against the inside of Sarah’s door for a long time.

  He liked Sarah’s house. It was a place where his sister had found balance and a degree of happiness, and he could feel it in everything from the lay of the sofa cushions to the flowers in her back garden. He even approved of her choice of man, a person as like Harris Stuyvesant as she could find, without the shared burdens.

  She wasn’t home. Not that he’d expected her to be, since he hadn’t stopped to send a cable. Nor was her housekeeper in, and that was a gift: the woman did love to talk, and if he had to deal with one more human being this morning, he would collapse.

  Stuyvesant’s problems could wait.

  Tea helped: he was English, after all, so tea helped—even though the milk was distinctly foreign, along with the water, and the kettle, and the smell of the gas in the hob. Sarah said she couldn’t tell that the milk came from French cows, but he could. The very air was different here, so of course he could taste a change in water.

  At least the tea on his palate and the cup against his lips were English: he had brought both of those on his earlier, less hurried, visit.

  Also the biscuits, from Fortnum & Mason’s. The combination soothed his nerves and his stomach, allowing him to consider something more substantial to accompany his second cup of tea. Toast?

  But the bread in the bin was three days old. Four, even. It was Sarah’s usual kind, from the baker up the road, but his fingers read its dryness, his nose evaluated its stale aroma. The only reason Sarah would have bread more than two days old was if she intended to cook something calling for dry bread—and there would be a fresh one beside it in the bread-bin. She had not been here yesterday morning, to buy bread.

  Absently, his tongue reflected on the after-taste of the milk. Even a year ago, he would have noticed its age in an instant, but the incremental fading of his sensitivities over the years had continued. It was not as diminished as he made out during his compulsory sessions with the Truth Project’s
technicians, but any degree of dulling was a gift. Five years ago, a prolonged assault like the journey here would have seen him carried off the train on a stretcher.

  But today, he could stand in Sarah’s French kitchen and feel the welcome, letting his skin reassemble itself, letting his nerves embrace the calm.

  Were it not for that faint note of disquiet (Why not pour out the milk before going away?) he might even be nursing a little candle-flicker of happiness.

  His hands went about their task: take the knife from the drawer, carve away the dried end, slice a piece, light the grill, slide it in. When both sides were uniformly brown, he spread it with butter (French) and jam (strawberry—made in June by his neighbor in Cornwall) and took it to the table.

  That he was able to eat it—most of it—and wash it down with the slightly stewed tea proved that he wasn’t worried about his sister. Not really.

  Sarah was busy. She didn’t know he was coming. She was a grown woman with a demanding job. After that party she’d put together for Le Comte, she’d probably gone off for a lighthearted weekend with friends.

  But fear was contagious. Four tormented women and the stress in Harris Stuyvesant’s pen threw an uneasy light on his sister’s absence. His imagination kept presenting Sarah’s black-and-white face, stretched towards the right, contorted by a rictus of terror.

  He abandoned the toast for the telephone.

  The housekeeper lived two doors down from a grocer’s, whose number Sarah kept in the front of her Paris directory. Six long minutes later, the woman was on the line, telling Grey that yes, Mlle. Grey appeared to have gone away, but no, she hadn’t left a message, which was unlike her—although didn’t Monsieur think it marvelous that the young lady had a gentleman?

  He listened to the stream of words exclaiming that Mademoiselle hadn’t let her know that Monsieur would be coming and she hoped his voyage had been confortable and she would be instantly over to make up his bed and bring him some—

  He placed the receiver back in the cradle, walked over to slide the bolt on the door, and went upstairs to his sister’s bedroom. Just a quick look before going, headache or no, to hunt down Harris Stuyvesant.

  He ignored the sound of the key, the rattle of the door handle, the insistent tapping of the thwarted housekeeper. Twenty minutes later, none the wiser as to Sarah’s whereabouts, he was putting on his coat when a very different pounding came on the door, with a man’s voice demanding that he open up.

  Doucet’s panic blew through two inches of wood like artillery fire.

  “She took nothing.” Grey sat in Stuyvesant’s chair, face drawn, fingers knotted together. Doucet stood across the room with his shoulder planted on the window frame, as if needing an anchor to keep him from coming for Stuyvesant. “Her trunks were there, her valises, her passport, and identité. Everything, including her everyday hand.”

  “She can’t have gone home after Le Comte’s party.” Doucet’s voice made Grey flinch: calm and deliberate on the surface, boiling with strain beneath. “When the men I had watching the house said no one went through her door but the housekeeper, I thought Sarah was enjoying a quiet day at home. Then late this morning, the man on duty telephoned to say that a small blond foreigner let himself in with a key, after which the housekeeper could not get in. I went to see what was going on.”

  “Where did those photos come from?” Bennett asked Stuyvesant.

  “What photos?” Doucet asked.

  Stuyvesant overrode both questions. “Why didn’t you put a man on her earlier?” he demanded. “I’d have taken her home myself, if I knew.”

  “She was angry. At both of us,” he added, before Stuyvesant could. He turned to Sarah’s brother. “At the party Wednesday night, your friend here and I were being … difficult.”

  Grey instantly grasped his meaning. “You were being males. And you imagined Sarah would be amused by two men fighting over her?”

  “There was no fight,” Stuyvesant protested. “A mild ruffling of feathers, maybe. But yeah, she was tired and this was an important event for her. Like Doucet says, she wasn’t happy about it.”

  Doucet resumed. “I said I’d wait and see her home, but she told me to leave, that she would make her own way and telephone me in a day or two. And”—he cut Stuyvesant off—“yes, I did wait outside of Le Comte’s front gates. But when two a.m. came and went and she hadn’t appeared, I could either ring the bell and ask if she was still there, or leave. I left.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess I’d have done the same,” Stuyvesant admitted.

  “It didn’t occur to you that she might use a back door?” Grey asked.

  “Of course! I had a gendarme watching the back. At six in the morning, he went off duty. I sent his replacement to her home instead.”

  “So either she’s still in Charmentier’s house,” Stuyvesant said, “or she left by another way.”

  “My sister is no fool. And she knows you both well. She might have figured that she was being watched.”

  “So where would she go?” Doucet asked. “In her evening dress, without so much as a toothbrush?”

  “With a guest-list like that, she could be anywhere,” Stuyvesant said.

  “Someplace welcoming?” Grey suggested. “With someone not apt to crow over her like a rooster?”

  His companions winced.

  “Bricktop was there,” Stuyvesant told him. “They know each other. Cole Porter. And I saw her talking with one of the Academy guys.”

  “ ‘Guys’?” Doucet asked. “I saw three members of l’Académie.”

  “Um, Provost?”

  “Prévost?”

  “That’s it.”

  “I’ll contact him. She also spent some time with Josephine Baker,” Doucet offered.

  Stuyvesant spoke up. “And she had a long conversation with Natalie Barney.”

  An awkward silence fell, as the three men considered the possibility of Sarah Grey seeking shelter from the most notorious lesbian in Paris.

  “No,” her brother said, more in protest than conviction.

  “What was that about photographs?” Doucet was finished with the distraction.

  “Sorry,” Grey murmured.

  “My fault for not warning you,” Stuyvesant told him.

  “Monsieur—”

  “Let me ask you something first. You made a raid on Moreau’s house yesterday? Did you find anything in his secret room?”

  “You know about the room? You said—”

  “I know what I said. Did you find anything?”

  “Three of those hideous shrunken heads they sell at the circus.”

  “Nothing else? No eyeballs, no letters?”

  “Eyeballs? Monsieur, we found nothing, only the heads. Now, I think—”

  “Yeah, yeah, the photos. Just—don’t arrest me until this is all over, okay?”

  FIFTY-FOUR

  STUYVESANT GLANCED TOWARDS the bottle on the table, and decided it was too early.

  “Okay. I broke into Didi Moreau’s house. Sunday morning, when he and his maid were at church. I found the room behind the bookshelves, had the devil’s own time getting in. You didn’t go back there yourself, did you?”

  “Fortier.”

  “Figures. The passage is a dozen feet around a corner and maybe ten inches deep,” he explained to Grey. “I didn’t have a Fortier, so I shoved my way in, and yes, I found those shrunken heads, but with them were a dozen little bottles containing human eyeballs, some leather from what looked like human skin, half a dozen letters regarding specially commissioned boxes—no signature, no identifying name or address—and twenty-three different photographs of four separate women. They had all been carefully torn into twelve pieces, but I took one of each woman and pieced them together. The women looked … tortured.”

  The word spread across the room like frigid oil, and Stuyvesant changed his mind about the drink. He took a healthy swallow, passing it over to Grey. Doucet looked at it askance, but he, too, took a gulp before handin
g it back.

  “Now, we’re dealing with men who know everything there is to know about faking realistic effects—not just Moreau, who does taxidermy, but Man Ray for one, Le Comte for another. Er, have you two been to the Grand-Guignol?” He was surprised when both men nodded. “With Sarah?” Both men shook their heads, emphatically.

  “She wasn’t working for Le Comte yet, when I was here,” Bennett said.

  “So you went on your own?”

  “Grand-Guignol embraces the darkness in men’s souls. I was interested in the theory behind it. Lancing infected psychological wounds.”

  “I don’t know how you could stand it.”

  “What, honest fakery? I have no problem with that. I’ll admit that the audience reactions were less straightforward. People like to hide their pleasures. But for most of them, it was a game, and they were happy with the rules, and they left the theater less burdened than they had gone in.”

  Doucet looked puzzled, but Stuyvesant went on. “Anyway, I found pictures in Moreau’s room, taken at night—or at least in the dark, with a flash—of a series of very frightened women. They didn’t look like actresses made up and pretending, but as I said, there are theater people involved. So I decided to send the photos to a man who could tell for sure. My friend Bennett Grey.

  “Sarah hasn’t told you about her brother, I could see that when I asked you about him. You know I met Bennett three years ago when I went to England in search of a bomber. What you don’t know is that Bennett has a … talent. He knows the truth. Give him a roomful of identical Rembrandts, he’ll point directly at the genuine one. Tell him a long story with three true things in it, he’ll pick them out. Have fifty men march down the street in unison, he knows which trained with the British Army and which with the French, who was wounded, how long they’d spent at the Front. Don’t even think of going up against him in poker.

  “All of which means that if I sent Bennett the photographs, he could tell me whether the emotion on the faces was real, or realistic.”