The Bones of Paris

by Laurie R. King

  In that second picture, a nude Pip was perched on a high stool, right foot coyly tucked onto a rung so the raised knee hid her sex. Her left hand lay on her perfect thigh, while her right arm cradled her breasts, the hand grasping her left biceps. The girl’s breasts were every bit as tasty as he remembered, although it took a while to notice them, because the eye found it hard to pull away from the ugly dark scar tissue under the right elbow, broader than a big man’s outspread hand. Its surface seemed taut, as if a quick motion would split it right open. The eye was fascinated by it, teased away from the pert breasts and the dark fold between her legs to return to that slick, damaged skin. Even a man whose hand didn’t tingle with the memory of (Go ahead, silly, it doesn’t hurt.) that strangely compelling slickness (They like the freaks, you know?)—even that man might take a while (Yes, Harris, do—) to raise his eyes to her face. But when he did …

  What expression was that? Stuyvesant dug the uncle’s version of Rosalie’s snapshot from his pocket, holding it up between the two pictures on the wall. In it, Pip—wearing a lot less makeup and a lot more clothes—sat on the edge of a Roman fountain, leaning against the cropped-away Rosalie. She was pretty enough, and had the pleasing vivacity of youth, but there was mistrust there as well. Whether of the camera, the person behind the camera, or life in general, he could not know.

  In the starkly naked portrait, however, that wariness was gone. Pip was all but thrusting herself at the lens, chin high with what Stuyvesant had seen as a defiant assertion of her body. You could feel her pleasure at the idea of rubbing the noses of viewers (most especially her mother and uncle) into the damage, anticipating the gasps of polite horror.

  Some fluke of the camera lens gave that adolescent defiance gravitas, making Pip look unexpectedly complex. Like one of those trick drawings—first a goblet, then the silhouette of two faces—he could see her juvenile insolence, but he could also, now, see something else.

  Pride. Courage. Beauty, even. Yes, this was a willful rich girl playing the flirt; on the other hand, this was also a young woman who had worked hard to get to a place where she liked herself, damage and all.

  People came to Paris because it was cheap, but they also came to reinvent themselves, weaving the city’s freedoms—linguistic or racial, artistic or social, and above all, sexual—into a new identity. Here on the banks of the Seine, Pip Crosby was no longer a “good” girl, no longer someone made ugly by a scar. No longer a girl, even.

  And now Harris Stuyvesant felt … regret. That he hadn’t been around to watch. Because whatever it was that brought about that young woman’s pride—life in Paris, superstitious rituals, becoming a nude model—he couldn’t say it was entirely a bad thing.

  Or maybe he was just being a romantic fool.

  He left the nude picture on the wall, but worked the other portrait out of its frame, tucking it into his notebook alongside the snapshot.

  The contents of the bookshelf provided more by way of confirmation than surprise: half a dozen racy novels, two in English and four in French; twice that number of books on things like Tarot and astrology, again in both languages; and an assortment of new American fiction sent by her mother—each had a brief note and a date inside its cover, from May to Christmas of last year. Nothing political. Casual bookmarks in some of the thicker French tomes, all in the first quarter of their book, suggested that Pip had found them hard going. The bookmarks were mostly postcards (Mrs. Crosby from Niagara; Mrs. Crosby from Chicago; a friend—Sally? Susan? The signature was smudged—from the Metropolitan Museum in New York) or ticket receipts: Luna Park, the Folies Bergère, three theaters, and a couple of cinémas. He started to remove them, then changed his mind and wrote down their information, instead.

  Not that the cops would ever notice, but if by chance they did come here, they might be unhappy with an American detective who helped himself to evidence.

  After he had examined the bottoms of the shelves, he went to the dressing table and did the same. Taking care to make little noise, he removed the drawers, checked behind them, looked at the back of the table and its mirror, and found nothing. He returned the furniture to the original dents in the carpet, and examined the pictures on the wall, taking each down, feeling those with a paper backing.

  A small basket on the end of the shelf held a deck of Tarot cards and three Chinese coins with square holes in the middle. The bed-side table held nothing out of the ordinary. The mattress concealed no objects, nor did the carpet.

  He took a last glance at the two peculiar boxes with their enigmatic grids of bones and objects, and noticed for the first time faint lines running up the right-hand side of both. He hadn’t seen the pattern earlier, but with the sun edging west, the scratching stood out. He tipped his head, and made out four tiny, geometric capitals: DIDI.

  He wrote the word down in his notebook. Perhaps she had actually known the artist—if you could call it art. Which made him think: Miss Berger hadn’t answered his question about the artists Pip sat for. Had her claim of tiredness been a little too conveniently timed?

  Christ, he told himself, you are one suspicious son of a bitch.

  He closed the window, as he’d promised. In the doorway, he turned for a final survey: beds, furniture, drapes; the photographs. Those odd boxes. The sketches, particularly the vivid personality shown by the Spaniard’s wicked and perceptive pen. The nude photograph: Jesus.

  If she’d given him a look like that back in February—youth or not, Rosalie or no—he’d have followed her. He’d have dogged her steps all the way to Rome and back.

  He tipped his hat to Nancy’s closed door, dropped a card with his hotel’s number on the table near the phone, and left the apartment. When he had safely negotiated a passage by the gorgon, he checked his watch: 3:40.

  Time to see the cops.

  But on his way across the Pont au Change—at about the point Victor Hugo had his Inspector Javier throw himself off—Stuyvesant halted to draw the photograph of him and Pip from his breast pocket. He looked at the unlikely pair for some time, a crooked smile softening his features—until his fingers let the scrap of paper go. He watched it dance and drift, down to the water, and away.

  No reason to complicate matters. None at all.

  NINE

  BEGINNING IN ROMAN times, bodies were buried on the Rive Droit near the great north-south road that would one day be divided into the rues Sébastopol, Palais, and Saint-Michel by the Pont au Change and the Pont Saint-Michel. By the twelfth century, Paris had closed in around it, but the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents continued: a field of bones and bodies surrounded by the living. Pits were dug and the city’s dead tumbled in by the hundreds. When one pit was full, it was covered over with soil dug from the next. The stench was appalling; the cemetery was the realm of prostitutes and pickpockets; nearby homes looked directly down at putrefying bodies.

  A high stone wall was built around it.

  Plagues came and went; the level inside the wall rose, until the ground was more bone than soil. The wall’s arches and recesses proved a convenient place to stack the pieces of skeleton that came to light with every turn of the shovel: an open-air charnel house surrounded what had once been a churchyard.

  Calls were made to evict the cemetery, but it remained, a stinking, dangerous, lucrative sore at the very center of Paris.

  In the fifteenth century, frescoes were added to the charnel house archways, darkly humorous images with Death as a reaper, harvesting all mankind yet permitting a last playful dance on the way to the pitted earth. Lady in satin or moneylender with bags of gold; learned cleric or beggar in rags: infant, adolescent, young man, crone: all danced with Death in the end. The Saints-Innocents fresco was the first Danse Macabré; soon, Death’s Merry Dance was seen all over Europe, in fresco and carving, wood-print and oil painting.

  And the burials went on. For hundreds of years, the dead of Paris were brought to the Cemetery of the Innocents to be turned into clean bone. The stench gagged and infected thos
e living nearby—who were soon added to the numbers. The exposed flesh fed the rats—who carried diseases, that filled the pits, that fed the next generation of rats. The figures on the walls danced with Death, merry and doomed.

  Not until Revolution was in the air did the king take official notice of the killing stench and the half-rotted bodies that spilled through the walls. The cemetery was closed to further burials. The bones were used to fill some inconvenient holes underground; the burial field was cleared for the living; barrels of adipocere—corpse-wax—were shoveled up and turned into candles. For, as Charles Dickens would later write:

  The decay of ages, in some of the coffins, leaves but the food for that lamp which is now burning above us … and many of the quiet inhabitants of the cemetery become more useful to mankind in death than they ever were in lifetime.

  TEN

  THE PRÉFECTURE DE Police was on the Île de la Cité, between a one-time madhouse and cells used during the Terror for guillotine-bound prisoners: one did not expect a bushel of laughs from the Préfecture de Police. Stuyvesant adjusted his tie over the offending mismatched button and walked inside.

  “Yes, I saw the message you left yesterday. A missing girl. American.”

  The missing persons flic had himself been missing when Stuyvesant came by the previous day, another laggardly return from Paris’ August vacances. His name was Doucet, although there was little sweet about him, since he was nearly as tall as Stuyvesant and had a face that had seen nearly the same things in life—certainly his nose had met about as many fists. His English was a shade better than Stuyvesant’s French. “Monsieur, do you have an investigator’s license?”

  Stuyvesant handed over the official document—a meaningless but vital piece of paper that he’d got by doing the occasional job for a Paris detective agency—along with his carte d’identité. Doucet sourly studied the documents, then shoved them back across the desk. Next, Stuyvesant gave him a copy of the snapshot—the uncle had sent two—and began reciting the girl’s details: physical description; address; work history; date last seen.

  “March?” the man interrupted. “Why did the family wait until September?”

  “They wrote to the roommate in May. She wrote back saying that Miss Crosby was away for a few days, and then she herself left—she was spending the summer in Greece. By mid-June, Miss Crosby hadn’t answered their letters or telephone calls and the concierge just said both girls were away. So they hired an investigator. He turned out to be a crook. They’re trying again.”

  “With you.”

  “With me.”

  “Have they reported this man, the ‘crook’?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  With a sigh, Doucet reached into a drawer and started pulling out forms. Stuyvesant revised his earlier assumption: the man might not be freshly back from holiday. Or if so, it had not been a restful one.

  While the detective filled out the forms, Stuyvesant studied the cramped, untidy office. One wall intrigued him. It was covered with photographs: men and women, old and young, dark and light. Some had been pinned up so long, the corners curled; one of a lively brown-haired girl might have gone up yesterday. These, he thought, were the unsolved cases, looking over the man’s shoulder.

  The flic reached the end of the forms, handing over his pen for Stuyvesant’s signature. He pinned the photograph to the form.

  Stuyvesant cleared his throat: now came the tricky bit. “In fact, the reason her uncle came to me was that I’d met her. Back in February. I was working in Nice when she and a friend—a girl named Rosalie Perkins—passed through on their way to Rome. When Rosalie mentioned me to Miss Crosby’s uncle, telling him that I was a private investigator, he thought it might simplify things to have someone who knew her slightly.”

  Doucet studied him, listening for unrevealed truths. “And was that all you knew her: slightly?”

  “Perhaps a little better than that. But,” Stuyvesant said pointedly, “she was fine when she and her friend went to Rome, and she made it back to Paris safely. Her roommate saw her, and Pip—Miss Crosby—wrote home from here at the end of March. And just in case you’re interested, I myself was three weeks in Nice after the girls left, then in Warsaw for the remainder of March and all of April, followed by two weeks in Clermont-Ferrand and after that, Germany. I did spend two days here on my way to Germany in mid-June, but I haven’t seen Pip Crosby since Nice.”

  “You lead a most itinerant life, M. Stuyvesant.” The phlegmatic comment surprised Stuyvesant a little: he hadn’t expected the cop to swallow the story quite that easily.

  “I go where work takes me.”

  “And today your work brings you to Paris, and to me.”

  “I doubt Miss Crosby is still in Paris, but yes, I’ve come here to pick up her trail, as it were. And because I believe in working with the police”—when I have to, he added mentally—“I’ve come to share my information and my intentions with you.”

  “What a responsible attitude. Where do you think she is, your Miss Crosby?”

  “Somewhere her mother wouldn’t approve of. Which would suggest she’s either having such a good time living la vie Bohème that the months got away from her, or she’s got herself involved with drugs and everything that goes with it.”

  “Is there evidence for that?”

  “She has some pretty expensive art in her bedroom, that’s all. As for travel—”

  “What sort of art?” Doucet’s face had not changed, but there was an edge to his voice, as if the word had made his interest go sharp.

  “I’m no expert, but she has a small Lautrec and a Chagall pastel, and a funny little piece by that Spaniard, what’s his name?”

  “Picasso?”

  “No, although there’s a sketch by him, too, on a paper napkin. Miró, that’s it.”

  “You are an art expert.”

  “Hardly. Museums are good places to get out of the rain.”

  Doucet gave him a skeptical look. “You were telling me something about her travel, Monsieur?”

  “Was I? Oh right, I was saying that her French paperwork is in her room but her passport isn’t.”

  “So if it is a choice between an irresponsible holiday and a life of desperation and crime, towards which of those fates do you lean, Monsieur?”

  “To tell you the truth, I think she may be in trouble.” Stuyvesant stopped, listening to his own words. Was he worried? No, he didn’t think so, not really. Still, the cop seemed almost human, and there was always a chance that roping him in with a sob story would kick up a few results. He went on.

  “I figured, like you: here’s another Yankee Flapper gone off to conquer Europe. But it concerns me that she hasn’t written to her mother—which she did regularly, and more than just dutiful picture postcards. Plus that, the only money that’s gone out of her bank account since April is a regular draft to cover housekeeping expenses. And although there could be plenty of explanations for that, from a rich boyfriend to a bitter family argument her uncle’s too ashamed to admit, until I hear otherwise: yeah, I’d say there’s a chance she’s in over her head.”

  “Monsieur?” His English was good, but this phrase was beyond him.

  “Sorry. I meant she could be in trouble.”

  “Politics?”

  Stuyvesant liked the way this guy’s mind worked. “I thought of that when I found she hadn’t been cashing checks. Recent converts to Bolshevism or Anarchism or what-have-you tend to be thrilled about turning their back on the State and its banks. But after five months, I’d have expected somebody to catch on to her bank account and drain it. Plus, there were no political books or pamphlets in her apartment.”

  “White slavery? Drug dens? Mere prostitution isn’t illegal.”

  “It is if your passport isn’t stamped for work,” he retorted, then backed down. “Okay, that’s stupid, and being locked up for the nefarious use of strange men is downright melodramatic. But you and I both know, bad things do happen to good girls.”r />
  The flic rubbed his face. “M. Stuyvesant, my office receives an average of nineteen missing persons complaints from America every month. Of those, fifteen reappear in a few weeks, after the love of their lives turns them out for another girl; three have got themselves in trouble and are sailing home to maman; and one is up to no good. I have yet to have one of them show up in a white slave ring, pleasuring foreign potentates.

  “However,” he said, putting up his hand to interrupt Stuyvesant’s protest. “When I received your inquiry this morning, I looked at the case, and see that we received our first report concerning Mlle. Crosby in late May. Our first act was to question hospitals and brothels. Our second was to compare her name to the passenger lists of ships and airplanes. After preliminary inquiries to the telephone number we had been given, we scheduled a visit to her apartment. Before we could do so, my sergeant spoke with a private inquiry agent, who showed him a letter from Mlle. Crosby’s family retaining him to look into the matter. The following day the agent telephoned to report that she had been found, and please to take her case off our books.”

  “But why—? Ah. The crook was milking them.”

  “ ‘Milking’?”

  With a wrench of mental gears, Stuyvesant switched to French. “If your department had found her, that would be the end of his job,” he explained. “But if he kept you out of it so he could continue sending reports—and bills—to the family, he could stretch it for months. Milking them—like a cow. The family only figured it out by accident a few weeks ago, when a friend of Crosby’s came to Paris and found that the agency address was a bar.”

  “Yet they did not report this.”

  “I don’t think Mr. Crosby has much faith in foreign police departments.”

  Doucet sat back, his eyebrows an invitation to talk. So with a mental shrug, Stuyvesant talked. He began with the original letter, handing it to the cop and waiting while he read the three pages. He then described the packet that had followed, with Photostats of her letters home, two copies of the cropped snapshot, and notes of everything the uncle knew, from the dud investigator to a conversation with Pip’s travel companion.