The Bones of Paris

by Laurie R. King

  Instead, his feet took him along the boulevard Raspail; up the rue de Rennes; through narrow streets unchanged since students wore doublets. Down the quay to Notre Dame, admiring the massive dance of stone and the reflection of lights and the dark mass of moored barges, then south along that Roman Main Street, the boulevard Saint-Michel (… a new assistant, over whom he has lost his head), where the perpetual energies of students kept the night at bay.

  Farther down, the lights dimmed, and he paused at the feet of the Lion of Belfort to smoke a cigarette. In the daytime, the broad plains of the Place Denfert-Rochereau was a chariot race of taxis and trucks, but at this time of night, he and a rag-and-bone man in a horse-cart were the noble lion’s only companions. Old books called this the Place d’Enfer, at the Barrière d’Enfer: Hell Place, at the Hell Gate. Once upon a time, this was an entrance through the city walls where taxes were paid on incoming goods.

  It had another connection to hell, past that of taxation: across the Place lay the entrance to the Paris catacombs.

  Practical people, the French. When some long-forgotten quarries collapsed in the late 1700s and sucked buildings and citizens deep into the earth, at around the same time that a huge, stinking cemetery across the river was creating public unrest, the city fathers looked from one problem to the other, and got out their shovels. The quarries were filled with the debris of death; the former cemetery became the wholesale vegetable market of Les Halles. A century later, hell was painted over a second time when Place D’Enfer was changed to Place Denfert-Rochereau, a nice bureaucratic pun employing the name of a war hero.

  The catacombs were open to the public sometimes. He’d gone down them one summer’s day, mostly to escape the heat, and found cool stillness, the sound of trickling water, and at the bottom of the spiral stairs, an artistic display of former citizens.

  Still, it was unsettling to think of the millions upon millions of dead Parisians under his feet. A reminder that the City of Light had shadowy corners. Some of which swallowed pretty girls.

  He got up and crushed the cigarette under his heel, grimly amused at the direction of his thoughts. You, too, huh? Okay, you want macabre—how about a nice wallow through the gravestones? So Stuyvesant headed up the street to the Montparnasse cemetery, waiting for his somewhat tattered sense of humor to come to his rescue.

  The truth was, he wasn’t dealing well with rootlessness and solitude. He’d never been further from having that fantasy library full of books. He lived out of a series of trunks scattered across Europe, drank more than he should, smoked more, got into more fistfights than was sensible. He no longer had a family, his only partners were temporary ones, and his friends … well, he didn’t have many of those, either. Bennett Grey was the only real friend on this side of the Atlantic, and even Bennett was a long way off, wrapped in hermit-like seclusion at the far end of Cornwall.

  As for women, well, he wouldn’t exactly use the word honorable. Maybe that was why he’d taken the job of finding Pip. To make up for a few blots on his record. Good Catholic boy, out for a little redemption.

  He used to be a good guy, especially towards women. Just like he used to be cheerful—well, maybe not cheerful, exactly, but at least optimistic. Convinced that he would be able to make things come out, in the end.

  When he came to the boulevard Edgar Quinet, he paused, considering. To his right stood Man Ray’s studio. To his left, just five minutes from here, beckoned Le Sphinx, the best house of prostitution this side of the river—the French being as practical about filling needs as they were about filling holes in the ground. And although he had no pressing urges, the welcome, the voices—just the company of Mme. Lemestre’s ladies teased at him like a cool breeze. He even had the money for a full night of pampering.

  But he turned his back on easy pleasure to cross the boulevard Raspail into the rue Campagne. Man Ray’s studio was easy to find: there was a large plaque at the door. It was a beautiful building, ornately tiled and with many tall windows. It was also dark. He continued on his way.

  Things would come out, in the end. You’ll find Pip, he told himself as he passed the still-riotous Select. She really would be living with an artist on the Côte d’Azur, as titillated by her scandalous fling with bohemia as she had been by the novelty of sleeping with a middle-aged bouncer. And once he found her (his story went on) he’d also find that she was growing disenchanted with sin. That she was primed and ready to be sent home to Mama, making Ernest M. Crosby happy and generous and eager to shout the virtues of Harris Stuyvesant to a lot of other wealthy American businessmen who needed a man in Paris, or Frankfurt, or Milan.

  Still, Stuyvesant had to admit as he flipped the hotel’s loud minuterie switch to light the stairs, it was a puzzle, how nobody seemed to know Pip Crosby. It would appear that, despite the efforts of Haussmann and his Napoleon, Paris was still a series of villages. That a man could live his life in Saint-Germain and never meet someone from Clichy—or even from Cluny, at its very elbow.

  He stopped as a horrible thought occurred to him: he’d been looking in the Quarter’s bars and bistros, but what if she’d gone on the wagon? God, he hoped the girl hadn’t come back to Paris and found religion. That was one particular underworld he had no wish to dive into: Raymond Duncan’s crew with their dirty feet, home-made sandals, and goats; Madame Blavatsky and her hocus-pocus. As he stood on the stairs, the bulb clicked out.

  With a low curse, he took out his Ronson to light his way to the next floor. He used the toilet and came out to find a bald stranger wearing only trousers stepping from his neighbor Anouk’s room. The man looked startled; when Stuyvesant murmured a good night, he looked relieved.

  Anouk wasn’t a professional, but she was certainly a busy amateur.

  Inside the stifling room, Stuyvesant stripped down to his shorts, threaded a hanger through his suit, draped the tie over the chair, and tossed the shirt against the door where he’d remember it in the morning. He dropped onto the bed, dry-washing his tired face, then looked across at the table, where he’d left the Hammett novel. Instead, his hand picked up the silver cigarette case.

  Nine years ago, it had been an expensive gift for a working girl’s salary, made more so by the elaborate engraving. It fit his hand as if designed to be turned over and over like a bar of soap. The tens of thousands of times he had done so had all but worn his initials away.

  But the clasp still held. Both of them.

  Its hidden compartment had once contained the photograph of the working girl whose present it was: blonde and wind-blown and shining with life, back when Pip Crosby was still in schoolgirl braids. Her name was Helen, and the picture was taken just days before she’d bled to death on a New York street amidst drifts of shattered glass: the Wall Street bomb. September 16, 1920, at 12:01 in the afternoon.

  After five and a half years, he’d let the ashes of her picture drift into the Thames River. He’d replaced it with the picture of another girl, also blonde, also shining. This one with green eyes: Sarah Grey.

  Who some time after the picture was taken had lost her left hand to another bloody explosion.

  He hadn’t looked at Sarah’s photograph in a while. He had last laid eyes on Sarah herself in May 1926; last heard from her three months later, when her brother Bennett handed him a brief letter with the picture. Three years, two weeks, and a day ago. Not that he was counting or anything.

  With Sarah, it had been love. They hadn’t yet been to bed together when the bomb happened, but they would have. If Bennett hadn’t come between them. Bennett Grey, who of all people should have seen catastrophe approach.

  Maybe that niggle of a question was why Stuyvesant never found the time for a trip to Cornwall. For a visit to his only friend on this side of the Atlantic.

  In any event, despite Europe’s plentiful bed-fillers, and despite having known Sarah for only a handful of days, since her, nothing had really clicked with a woman. He’d never managed to shake Sarah’s green eyes, her incongruous deep laugh
, the erotic spray of freckles at the neck of her dress.

  Wasn’t that the way things seemed to work in this modern world? You might not have love, but you could have plenty of sex.

  But damn it: if Sarah had wanted to end it, why send him a photograph? Her words had been evasive, but not the picture.

  The words had said that she would travel—Rome, Hong Kong. That she needed to accustom herself to a missing limb and the maddening whine in her ear. To stand on her own, and not risk coming to lean upon him.

  The picture was another matter. It had been trimmed to fit the silver case—Bennett must have told her about the hidden compartment, damn the man’s all-seeing eyes—and although some girls would taunt a fellow with a reminder and a brush-off at the same time, he couldn’t believe it of Sarah Grey.

  Not that Sarah didn’t have good reason to hate him. He’d been slow and he’d been secretive, a deadly combination that cost Sarah her hand, her friend, and her faith in the world. So he’d made no effort to follow her. He’d just made sure that Bennett, hidden away in his stone cottage at the tip-toe of Britain’s boot, always knew exactly where Harris Stuyvesant could be found.

  A part of him still believed that the picture was a tentative request for patience. That the letter was less dismissal than plea. That both had been meant as signs of her continuing affection. Why else bother to write? But the faces of Helen and Sarah—and, yes, Pip Crosby, along with Maryanne and Danuta and Leisl, even Lulu—had begun to blur together in his memory, and he was beginning to suspect that only Sarah’s words mattered: she wanted to stand on her own.

  Time for Harris Stuyvesant to do the same.

  Time to give up the self-delusion. To admit that for three years, he’d been making every decision based on its proximity to England, arranging his life around a summons that would never come.

  Time to set his lighter under Sarah’s photograph and let the ashes drift over the Seine. Time to do his best for Pip Crosby, and then go home.

  He closed the case and went to push open the window, not expecting much. To his surprise, the air moving over the maze of rooftops seemed to hold a faint promise of coolness. Maybe the heat would break. Maybe Pip’s friends would come back from Spain, the butchers return from the contemplation of mountain sheep.

  Maybe he could sleep.

  SIXTEEN

  IT WAS A quick transaction, as those in silent alleyways tend to be. The woman was slightly drunk, slightly annoyed at the inconvenient setting, but happy for the money. Enough for two months’ rent, and a bit more.

  “Oui,” she told the man for a second time. “J’ai fait ce que vous dites, avec son passeporte. Où? À l’intériur d’un livre q’il a acheté, un livre englais. J’ais fixé le papier comme si c’était. C’est tout. Maintenant, où est l’ar—”

  Yes, I did as you said, with her passport. Where? Inside a book that he’d bought, an English book. I fixed the wrapping like it was. That’s all. Now, where’s the mon—

  “Pardonne-moi.” The apology was swallowed by gunshot, shockingly loud in the residential district. Two gendarmes in the Place Denfert-Rochereau dropped their cigarettes and ran, arriving barely a minute after the noise. There was nothing in the alleyway but a woman with brassy blonde hair, dead on the cobblestones.

  SEVENTEEN

  THE RISING TEMPERATURE of his fourth-floor room drove Stuyvesant out of bed by eight, Wednesday morning. As he shaved, he avoided looking at his bloodshot eyes, but he did pause to survey his reflection in the spotted mirror inside the armoire.

  “Harris my boy, you’ll find her today.”

  Harris my boy was not convinced.

  Stuyvesant had to try three places before he found a photographer who would do a rush job on Pip’s photo, and then only the knowledge of Uncle Ernest’s checkbook kept Stuyvesant from voicing his outrage at the price. He promised to be back in three hours, then walked up to the Rotonde terrace, ordering coffee and tackling the morning’s Figaro. His French was pretty colloquial by now, but his mastery of the written language lagged somewhat. For example, everyone he knew thought the American stock market boom was just great, but the Figaro’s coverage seemed to have an edge of cynicism. He puzzled over it, but decided it was probably just the customary French scorn for anything that didn’t begin and end in Paris, and traded the Figaro for an abandoned copy of the Trib’s Paris Edition.

  He read the American football scores while his right ear filled with an argument about the cess-cart an artist had entered into the Autumn Salon and his left ear with a gabfest on the depravity of publishers. Which was fine until the table behind him launched into a discussion in florid French about a shooting that had taken place down in Denfert-Rochereau the night before, and the clash of themes and languages threatened a headache.

  He thumbed some coins into the top saucer, settled his Panama at a bit of an angle, and with a wave of the finger to the waiter, he set off into the city.

  His first order of business was personal: in Berlin, he’d been down to one summer-weight suit, and that had a mend in its knee. One of his first acts upon cashing the Crosby bank draft the week before had been to wire his Paris tailor and have him start a new one, in a fabric of the tailor’s choice.

  It wasn’t as if a man Stuyvesant’s height could buy his suits ready-made, here in France.

  As it happened, the tailor’s wife had taken ill at the end of July, condemning him to Paris for the vacances. He had apparently been desperate to get out of his house, because to Stuyvesant’s amazement, the suit was ready for a fitting.

  The plump little man knew his client, and had chosen a light-weight, tightly woven gray wool with the faintest stripe: fashionable but traditional, handsome but practical. The two men studied the reflection in the triple mirror.

  “You like, Monsieur?”

  “Perfect as always,” Stuyvesant told him. There was no denying that new clothes made for a new man.

  “It is too wide in the body. Perhaps I could take it in, just a tiny—”

  “It’s fine.”

  They had the same argument every time. Stuyvesant only occasionally wore a gun, but he needed his jackets loose, and he’d found this tailor through the Paris detective agency he’d done a couple jobs for. Still, the tailor was a proud man: left to him, a suit’s pockets would be sewn up to prevent lumps. Next thing you knew, the guy would be selling his clients handbags.

  The tailor shook his head, accepting the great burden.

  “Monsieur, I will have this for you by end of day. The shirts, I regret, will not be finished until the end of the week. But you will be pleased with them, the fabric is from a mill that has only recently come back after the War, and the buttons—ah, the buttons, they are spectacular! None of your surface sheen, no. The reflective glint in the shell is deep, giving the finished product a luxurious—”

  The man made good suits that lasted, at a price Stuyvesant could afford—and his method of measuring inseams and eyeing the fit of trousers didn’t leave a man feeling like he’d been groped. But boy, could he ever talk. Stuyvesant cut him off with a reassurance that the laundry would be back in the afternoon, and with it a new shirt (a little short in the sleeve, granted, and the buttons weren’t exactly spectacular).

  The tram was crowded, so it took him a couple of streets to notice that he’d boarded the wrong one. He had to back-track to Saint-Michel and wait for another, which when it arrived was mobbed by his fellow would-be passengers. Another day, he might have stood back and taken the next car; today, he used his size to bully his way on board.

  Plus that, the tram car was stifling—and, when he got down, he found that some disgusting urchin had left a stain on his trouser leg.

  When he reached Man Ray’s studio, he was in no mood to appreciate the building’s pretty front. He just opened an unlocked door and found himself in the chaos of a high-roofed artist’s studio, only with glossy prints and faint chemical smells instead of canvases and turpentine. Photographic prints and paintings hun
g on the walls, shelves were laden with file-boxes and folders. Everywhere lay a jumble of objects and half-unpacked trunks.

  A closer look separated the freshly arrived debris of a summer away from the dusty resident objects waiting for an artistic home: mismatched chess pieces, dried flowers, a topless cigar box holding half a dozen dry wish-bones, a chamber-pot full of old clocks, various tangles of machinery whose purpose Stuyvesant couldn’t guess at, and half a dozen articulated wooden models: four of them hands, three right and a left, and two full human figures, complicated wooden skeletons with brass joints. The pair had been posed flat, the bald one pressed between the legs of the one with the blonde wig.

  Why did avant-garde artists always have such sophomoric humor?

  Not everything in the room was by Man Ray. He recognized a couple of the paintings hanging crookedly on the wall, and damned if there wasn’t one of those collage-boxes like Pip had in her bedroom. This one also had a variety of objets trouvés, although there weren’t any bones, and the closest he saw to painted-on blood was the brilliant red of a tube of lipstick. He puzzled over the little square of face down in the corner, thinking that it looked vaguely familiar, when he realized that the eyebrows had been shaved off and repainted, and knew who it was: Kiki of Montparnasse. Which explained the box’s other square of photograph: a nipple.

  He smiled, and went on with his perusal. Photographs, letters, uncashed checks, a baby shoe. A folder of sketches for what looked like a painting, showing a line of people dancing to a Negro band: one of the dancers was a skeleton, bones flying in what looked like a Charleston. A chewed dog bone, a bowl brimming with mismatched dice.

  The only clear space in the room was a table with a chessboard, arrayed with modernistic shapes ready for action.

  Stuyvesant reached the end of the room. He was opening his mouth to call when he heard the sound of footsteps—and when he saw the source, his mouth remained open.