by Rhys Bowen
The scene along the riverbank was quite delightful with more gardens and what looked like a palace beside me, more impressive buildings on the far bank and a procession of little steamers, tugboats, and barges making their way up and downstream. And there ahead of me that improbable edifice, Mr. Eiffel’s tower, soaring over the rest of the city. How could those women not have been impressed by it? To me it was a marvel and I would have liked to have had time to go up it.
I should have been excited to finally be living my geography and history lessons but I was too engulfed in worry to really appreciate what I was seeing. Now it wasn’t only a question of finding what had happened to Sid and Gus. It was also the additional fear of being found by Justin Hartley. And I had to complete my task and get back to Liam. It was a greater distance than the man at the Ritz had suggested. My feet were beginning to hurt and I was feeling hot and thirsty by the time I came to the sign saying Quai de Billy and saw the club with its stars and stripes hanging over the front entrance. I hoped that there might be cold drinks or maybe even an ice-cream soda to be had at the club as I went up to the front door and knocked. The elderly porter who opened it stepped back in surprise at seeing me.
“Yes, ma’am. May I help you?” I was glad to hear an American accent and not to have to speak French any longer.
“You may. I’m trying to find Mr. Reynold Bryce. Is he a member here?”
“Mr. Bryce is indeed a member,” he said. “But he’s not here at the moment, I’m afraid. In fact…” then he paused.
“Perhaps you’d be good enough to find me his address.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am but it is against club rules to give out the address of a member.”
“Look,” I said. “It’s very important that I speak to him soon. I’ve come over from America—” I decided to stretch the truth a little, “—with a message from his family. But I omitted to bring his address with me.”
He stood, effectively barring the door to me.
“May I come in and speak to the club secretary?” I stepped forward, wondering if I could force my way past him. “I’m sure he’d be able to assist me.”
“Come in?” He bristled. “Madame, women may not enter the club except on special ladies’ nights.”
My frustration was now threatening to boil over. “I had no idea that people in Paris could be so unhelpful and that a fellow American would be so rudely received at the American Club. I thought it was a city of good manners.”
“You could go to the Prefecture of Police,” he suggested. “All foreigners must register with them when they move here. Perhaps they will be able to tell you more.”
“And how far is it to this prefecture?” I snapped.
“On the Île de la Cité. If you walk up to the Champs-Élysées you can find the Métro and it will take you. Or if you cross the Seine you will find an omnibus that takes you along that bank, but the Métro would undoubtedly be quicker—”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” I muttered. “I don’t have all the time in the world, you know. I have left my baby and have to get back to him. And I’ll certainly let Mr. Bryce know how unhelpful you were to a visitor from New York.”
“What’s going on, Harry?” A man in unmistakably American tweeds came to the front door. He gave me a friendly smile. “Is old Harry here being as stuffy and difficult as usual?”
“I’m trying to find the address of one of your members,” I said. “I have an important message to deliver to him. But apparently Harry is not allowed to give out information about members and I, as a woman, am not allowed in.”
The man laughed. “Quite right. If they relaxed those rules we’d have every wife in Paris hunting down her husband when he needs to escape for a bit of peace and quiet.”
“This is no joking matter,” I said coldly. “I have an important message for one of your members and it needs to be delivered to him immediately.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Don’t get upset. Look, if you’d care to write it down, I’ll make sure he gets it when he next shows up.”
“It’s Mr. Reynold Bryce,” I said. “Does he come in often?”
“Reynold Bryce?” The expression on his face changed. “Oh, I see.” He exchanged a glance with the doorman that I didn’t quite understand.
“Is something wrong?” I asked.
“Are you a family member?” he asked.
“No, just a friend of the family.”
“Look here,” he said. “We think there might be something strange going on. Mr. McBride, the newspaperman from New York, went around to see Bryce a couple of days ago. But when he got there he found policemen stationed outside the house. They wouldn’t let him in and they wouldn’t tell him anything. We’ve checked the newspapers since and no mention of Reynold Bryce, so we can’t think what might have happened.”
“All the more reason for me to go there myself,” I said. “I have to find out what’s happening, for his family’s sake.”
“Of course you do,” he said. “I’d escort you there myself, but I’m due at a meeting with my bank manager. And one does not keep one’s bank manager waiting, especially if one wants to eat next month.”
“So you know Mr. Bryce’s address?”
“It’s on Rue François Premier,” he said. “I don’t know the number, but I presume you’ll deduce which one it is if it still has policemen outside. If not, the neighbors will know. They are a nosy lot, the French. They like to keep an eye on what’s going on around them.”
“And the Rue François? Is it far from here? I have to get back to my child and…”
“No, not too far, is it, Harry?”
Harry was looking most displeased that the young man was betraying a club confidence in this way. He simply shrugged. “Not for me to say, sir,” he said.
The young man grinned. “Go back along the quay until you get to the bridge. I believe it’s called the Pont de l’Alma. It’s the first proper bridge you’ll come to. Then take the Avenue Montaigne away from the river until you come to Rue François Premier. Not far at all.”
“Thank you, you’ve been most kind,” I said.
“Not at all.” He tipped his homburg to me. “Always delighted to assist a damsel in distress. Are you alone in the city or is your husband with you?”
“No, unfortunately. His business keeps him in New York,” I said.
“If you need a gentleman to escort you, I’d be happy to show you some of the best night spots.” He held out a hand. “Frank Lahm at your service.”
“Mrs. Molly Sullivan,” I said. “I’m delighted to make your acquaintance, but I don’t think I’ll be wanting to visit any night spots in the near future. I’m staying with friends.”
“Ah, I see.” His face fell. “Well, you can always find me here if you need anything.” He touched his hat again and set off. I gave the porter a barely civil nod and turned on my heel. By now my heart was really thumping and it wasn’t just from tiredness after walking so far at such a great clip. The nagging worry that I had tried to keep at bay had risen to the surface again. Something was wrong at Reynold Bryce’s house. Police were standing outside. Had Reynold Bryce committed a crime or had something bad happened to him?
Fifteen
The late afternoon sun was now blazing down on my back, and I was glad when I could move into the dappled shade of trees. Paris was a wonderful city for trees, I thought. Hardly any streets in New York were treelined, but this city appeared to be all parks and boulevards. No wonder Sid and Gus were so—I broke off this thought as a sob hiccupped into my throat. Something had gone wrong at Reynold Bryce’s house. And only a few days ago he had sent Gus a postcard with the words “Absolutely not” scrawled across it. That showed they had been in recent communication and that he didn’t need to explain what those words meant. Had he been threatened in some way? Had she begged him to go to the police, or escape from the city? And he had emphatically refused. In which case were she and Sid also in danger from this threat?
&nb
sp; I walked faster and faster, my shoes pinching horribly. They were a pair I had accepted from Dodo and in truth a little tight for me. But I had taken them as the pair I had been wearing at the time of the fire were fit for nothing but housework and shopping. Finally I came to the bridge and found the Avenue Montaigne. More lovely buildings in good repair. Clearly an affluent neighborhood—an automobile with a chauffeur was idling outside one of the houses. I remembered that Reynold Bryce came from a monied family and wondered how much of his wealth came from his paintings. He really was a world away from those threadbare young men in the café. No wonder they knew so little about him and despised him as old fashioned and out of touch.
I saw the sign for the Rue François Premier and turned left, finding it hard to breathe now. Was I about to find out what had happened to Sid and Gus? I walked the length of the street and found nothing. In frustration I turned and realized that the Rue François Premier went in both directions across Avenue Montaigne. So I retraced my steps, crossed the avenue, and came at last to an attractive circle with a fountain in the middle. The houses around the circle had shrubs and trees in front of them, enclosed in wrought-iron fences, and outside one of these an enclosed black carriage was stationed as well as an automobile. As I approached I spotted a blue-uniformed policeman standing just inside the front entrance. So it appeared that I had finally found the right house. I walked boldly up the three steps and the young policeman stepped out to intercept me.
“What do you wish, madame?” he asked.
“Is this not the residence of Mr. Reynold Bryce?” I asked.
“It is.”
“Then I should like to enter. I have come from America and wish to speak with Mr. Bryce.”
“I am afraid that is not possible,” he said.
“Why? What has happened? Is something wrong?”
“I’m sorry, madame, but Mr. Bryce may not receive visitors,” he said, looking extremely uncomfortable now.
“Do you have a superior officer present?” I demanded, not about to be shoved aside for a third time. “I should like to speak with him. I have come all this way. It is most important that I see Mr. Bryce.”
“Wait here, please,” he said. “I will see if anything can be done.”
I stood alone in the cool shadow of a foyer. It was not one private home but another apartment building with an elevator in an attractive wrought-iron cage ascending through the middle of the foyer while a red-carpeted staircase snaked up around it. Beside the front door were four bells, the bottom one with the name Bryce beside it. I was tempted to press it and see if I could summon Mr. Bryce for myself, but at that moment a door opened and my policeman returned, this time followed by a thin, middle-aged man dressed in a dark suit. He had a long lugubrious face with bags under his eyes that made him look like a bloodhound.
“Madame?” he said. “I understand that you come from the family of Monsieur Bryce in America?”
I decided that this little lie would be the only way of getting information. I pushed the word perjury to the back of my mind. “That is correct. I was asked to deliver a message to him from his family.”
“May I ask what that message was?”
“Certainly not,” I said. “It is a private message, meant for Mr. Bryce’s ears alone, and I am growing rather tired of being thwarted like this. I’m sure Mr. Bryce would not be happy if he found I’d been kept waiting in the front hall.”
He stared at me, looked around, then said, “You had better come in.”
He led me through to the ground-floor apartment. Once inside there was a grander foyer than the communal one—furnished with two gilt chairs with a small bronze sculpture of a ballerina between them, potted palms, and gilt-framed paintings lining the walls.
“We will sit here, if you don’t mind,” he said, indicating the two chairs. “My men are still working in the other rooms.”
A door was open on my left and I saw the back of a policeman who appeared to be dusting the back of a chair with a feather duster. I had seen this done before. “You’re looking for fingerprints,” I said. At least I tried to say it, but the word was outside the scope of my vocabulary. I tried saying, “impressions de doigts” meaning “impression of fingers.” He looked confused. I mimed the making of a fingerprint and he nodded, understanding.
“Ah. Les empreintes digitales—this is new science for us. How in the name of God do you know of such things?” he demanded.
I was about to say that my husband was a police captain in New York, but didn’t want word of this getting back to Daniel. “I am acquainted with the methods of the police,” I said. “We know all about fingerprints in America.” I didn’t add that they had never been allowed as admissible evidence in court, in spite of the police insisting they were the only infallible tool the detective had. Then the import of that police work struck me. “But that must mean that a crime was committed here.”
He nodded. “This must remain confidential for now, but I am afraid to report to you that Monsieur Bryce is dead.”
“Dead? You mean murdered?”
“It would appear so. I am sorry to be the reporter of bad news.”
I nodded. I neither knew nor cared about Reynold Bryce, but my immediate thought was that if someone had killed him, his death might have had something to do with Sid and Gus’s disappearance. Were they now in danger, or … I hardly dared to frame the thought … were they also dead? I swallowed hard. “When was he killed?”
“Two days ago now. We have kept this knowledge to ourselves hoping to identify the killer before the press might learn of it, and we had the American ambassador breathing down our necks.”
I tried to keep my face calm and composed. “And do you have any idea who might be responsible?”
He looked at me strangely. I suppose I had become so used to questioning people that I had forgotten it was neither normal nor ladylike. Most women would have had the smelling salts out by now, swooning at the mention of a dead body.
“Suppose I start asking the questions,” he said. “I am Inspector Henri of the Sûreté.”
In spite of the gravity of the situation I had a ridiculous urge to grin, because his name, pronounced in French was on-ree, and the words “on ri” mean “one laughs.” I’d never seen anyone who looked less like laughing.
“And you are?” he continued, taking a small black notebook from his jacket pocket.
“Madame Sullivan.”
“And you come from?”
“New York.”
“But Monsieur Bryce he was from Boston, no? So how are you connected to him? You are a family member?”
“No, not a family member.” I decided not to stretch the truth too far. It always had a way of coming back and biting me. “I am acquainted with several Bostonian families.” This was true. Gus came from Boston.
“And you came to Paris specifically to deliver a message to Mr. Bryce?” he went on.
“No. I came to Paris to stay with friends. A family member asked me visit Mr. Bryce.”
“I understood he had no family.” He stared at me, long and hard.
“No immediate family,” I said. “The people I know are cousins.”
“And the message?”
“Is no longer relevant, now that he is dead.”
He frowned. “It might well be very relevant.”
“Why?” I asked. “How could a message from America affect a murder in Paris?”
“We are trying to find out who might have a reason to kill Reynold Bryce,” he said. “We can fill in details of his life in Paris but we have no knowledge of his life in America. For all we know he had enemies over there.”
“Mr. Bryce has not lived in America for many years,” I said.
He shrugged. “Maybe he had swindled someone, or he stood to inherit money, or was leaving his fortune to the wrong person. There are many reasons that might make a person choose to kill. Old hatreds can simmer on for years.” He paused. Apart from the ticking of a clock in a nearby ro
om and the sound of a chair being moved, there was silence in that foyer.
“I’m sorry, I can’t help you with any of this,” I said, now desperately racking my brains for a message that would not implicate me in any way. “My message was simply from a young cousin, thanking Cousin Reynold for the picture that he painted for her tenth birthday.”
“I’ll need the names of these cousins,” he said. “And you say you’ve just arrived in Paris. Are you sure you haven’t attempted to see Mr. Bryce before?”
“Of course not. I’ve only just arrived in Paris.”
He was continuing to stare hard at me. “The housekeeper reported an American woman visitor on the day he was killed. Where were you two days ago?”
“That is easy to answer. I was at a pension in Le Havre with a group of American women. I was recovering from a very bad case of seasickness and too weak to travel.”
“I see.”
“I only arrived in Paris yesterday.”
“And your first task in a strange city, after you had been sick and too weak to travel, was to come straight to Reynold Bryce, whom you apparently don’t know, to deliver a message from a child about a painting.” He paused and stroked his mustache. “Interesting, don’t you think? If it was my first day in Paris I’d be enjoying the sights, sitting in a café, going to the Louvre, and I’d wait for a convenient moment to visit a man I didn’t know. Unless, of course, the message wasn’t quite so innocent—a warning maybe? A threat? You did say it was no longer relevant.”
“No. Absolutely not.” And as I said the words I felt a chill run down my spine. They were Reynold Bryce’s words to Gus, scrawled across the postcard. “And I don’t know why you seek motives from America when surely it is most likely that the murder was committed for the simplest of reasons.”
“Such as?”
I looked around me. “It appears that Mr. Bryce was a rich man. He could have surprised a thief.” I didn’t know the French word for burglar.
“There are no signs of a break-in.”
“You spoke of his housekeeper. Was she not here?”
