He’d met a lot of blondes who were easy on the eye, but this one put the rest in the shade. She was a stunner, slim and tall, her short hair bleached white by the sun. When she came in, she was frowning beautifully over the stack of envelopes in her hand. She looked up, showing him her perfect face, her aristocratic nose, her very white teeth, and her apprehension. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-three; she looked seventeen.
“Oh, Christ, are you here for an appointment?”
“You’re American,” he blurted.
“Yes. So are you, it sounds like. Maybe you’re not on the schedule, then?”
“No. No appointment, that is. I’m looking for Mr. Ray.”
“Oh thank God, I was afraid I’d already failed at the task of keeping the schedule, and on my first day here. He’ll be in shortly, he’s just shaving.”
“You’re new here?”
“Here, yes. We’ve been lovers since June,” she said, trying for casual. “I don’t suppose you see anything that looks like an appointment diary?”
“No, but I’ll help you look. My name’s Stuyvesant, by the way.”
“Lee Miller.” She stuck out a strong hand and they shook across the crowded desk.
It was a novel entrée to an illicit search, but Stuyvesant dove in with gusto, stimulated as much by the physical presence of the lover-assistant as by the underhanded way he was making use of her naiveté: “honorable,” my ass. “Have you known him long, then?” he asked, surreptitiously noting the return addresses on a stack of mail.
“No, like I said, we met in June, as he was leaving for Biarritz. We’re only just back, so I haven’t had a chance to look things over. What about this? No, it’s a sketchbook.”
Stuyvesant moved over to what appeared to be Ray’s current projects: multiple prints of negatives, each one with a tiny difference in the blackness of its shadows and the brilliance of its white spaces. A lot of them were of Lee Miller, from early infatuation to ever more intrusive use of the camera lens. He could only hope the girl’s parents never saw the nudes. There were other pictures that looked remarkably like the photographs from a police file. One of these was particularly disturbing: had it not been unlikely that a dead person could hold her leg in that languorous position, he’d have been certain that the great thick pool the model was lying in was fresh blood.
Stuyvesant’s horrified fascination was cut short by a voice from the stairs.
“Lee, darling one, I need you in the darkroom, if we’re going to—Oh, pardon, Monsieur, may I help you?”
“Man, this is Mr. Stuyvesant, and he’s not an appointment.”
Stuyvesant flipped over the folder’s cover and walked forward to stick out his hand.
Man Ray was, as Sylvia Beach had said, an American, maybe twenty years older than the girl, with little of her looks, height, or coloration. Or indeed, her assurance: the photographer’s immediate response to finding a man with his lover was to bristle with suspicion and move over beside her.
Oh, she was going to lead this one a merry chase before she was finished with him, Stuyvesant reflected.
But he had business with the fellow, so he turned a shoulder to Miss Miller, blatantly dismissing her from consideration as he held out the photograph.
“I think this is one of yours?” he asked.
The photographer took it. He had the kind of dark, intent eyes some women just got all gooey about, like … Like Valentino’s?
Oh, Pip, honey—really? This one, too?
“That’s the girl with the burn. American, Philippa something. She was interesting.”
“Crosby. And how was she interesting?”
The Miller girl had come around to look at Pip’s photo; Ray handed it to her. “She wasn’t what she seemed. That’s rare. With most people, the lens struggles to find something beneath the surface. But this one, who looked like any of a sea of other bright-eyed girls, the minute she sat down you could see her history. Are you following me?”
Stuyvesant put on a puzzled expression: let Ray demonstrate his cleverness.
“It’s like—like Lee, here.” His hand went around the back of the girl’s neck and pulled her face down to his. They kissed, long and hard. A little too long and hard, pressed up against each other. Stuyvesant cleared his throat. Twice. Ray finally pulled away, and spoke over his shoulder to his visitor. “Look at her: those incredible colors in her hair, her eyes; the movement of her; the pulse of life running under her skin and in her every movement.
“But then the camera takes her. Here—” He went to a shelf and plucked off a folder, taking out some pages. “She looks into the lens, and in the stillness, her true self can’t help coming to the surface. You can see pain there, can’t you?”
And when he said that, Stuyvesant could: the sort of caution that inhabited the eyes of soldiers who had lost a limb, or women who had lost a child. He looked away from her, handing the photographer back his images.
“I guess. But what I’m interested in is Pip Crosby. Her mother hasn’t heard from her in a while, and she’s concerned. Do you know where she is?”
“No.”
“What about you, Miss Miller?”
“I never met her.”
“But do you know where she is?”
“How could I, when I don’t know her? Mr. Stuyvesant, you sound like a detective or something.”
What was it with women and detective stories? We should never have taught them to read. “And you sound like a follower of the Nick Carter tales. Mr. Ray, do you remember when you took her photo?”
“February? Maybe early March. An acquaintance brought her to me, said he needed a photo that he could use on programs and flyers.”
“What acquaintance was that?”
“Friend of a friend—you know how things go here. He’s in the theater business. Lee, haven’t you offered him some coffee?”
“I used the last of it, the canister—”
“Well, for God’s sake, go buy some!”
Stuyvesant interposed. “I’ve had plenty of coffee this morning, thanks. Maybe we could just sit and talk for a couple of minutes?”
Ray looked vaguely around the cluttered studio and waved his hand at the stairway. Lee Miller went first, but Ray inserted himself between Stuyvesant and his radiant young girlfriend.
“I have to say, Mr. Ray, I hear about you all over the place,” Stuyvesant said as he followed the artist’s scuffed heels. “Tell me, do you regard yourself as a photographer, or as a film-maker?”
“I am a painter. The others are merely exercises to work the eye.”
“And pay the bills.”
“To some extent,” the artist admitted.
“And your photographs, those portraits you do. They put you in touch with a lot of important people, don’t they?”
“I suppose that depends on your definition of important. Lee, do something with that.”
That was a Spanish shawl matted with white hair, which Lee obediently bundled up and stuck on a shelf, leaving behind an armchair that wouldn’t turn Stuyvesant’s trousers to fur.
“Brancusi was here,” Ray said, as if that explained it. He dropped into a chair and took out cigarettes.
“By important, I suppose I’m thinking of the Surrealists. There’s some fascinating work being done there.”
It was as effective an entrée into Man Ray’s world as Stuyvesant could have found, and it took only regular contributions of Oh, and How fascinating! to keep Ray on track.
The man did like to hear himself talk. He was also fine with Lee Miller venturing her opinions, so long as they were his.
And what opinions they were. Planned art was a sham, film with plot a travesty. The goal of art was to reflect dream back to reality, and vice versa—to explore the ways in which death and pleasure were one, as were ugliness and beauty, the animal and the divine. Art was improvisation and irrationality, based in the wisdom of the unconscious self, and any true artist must declare his mind open to impulse, re
pudiating the tyranny of structure, of planning, of thought itself. Dreams were truth. Accident was purpose; unconscious expression was the greatest form art could take. The body’s urge was the mind’s command: bondage was freedom, pain was pleasure, and the gratification of the body was the very essence of art.
Lee Miller sat with her superb legs curled under her, drinking up all this hooey as if it were epic poetry. Stuyvesant couldn’t resist tweaking the windbag a bit. “So, the photographs you take could as easily be done by a child with a Kodak, or Miss Miller—or me, even?”
“Of course not. An artist has to see the vision in order to realize it. Like your young woman, Philippa … er …”
“Crosby.”
“Yes. She was brought to me for a simple portrait, but my eyes could see much more in the girl. The snap of the camera lens was itself nothing compared to that vision.”
“Who brought her to you?”
Ray studied Lee for a moment, as if considering which part of her to cook first. “I suppose he was her employer, although it seemed to me there was more to it than that. At any rate, he wanted a photograph suitable for publicity, and he’d seen those I did for Paul Poirot and others. However, the reason so many artists come to be consecrated by my camera is because I give them more than a mere photograph. I give them insight.”
“Um, right. This ‘publicity’: she’s an actress, then?”
“If you call it that. A dive of a place up in Montmartre, amusing in a ghastly sort of way. The Grand-Guignol. Know it?”
Stuyvesant shook his head, although he’d vaguely heard of it. Working-class entertainment—and French, not American. However, one of Pip’s bookmarks was a ticket from the Grand-Guignol.
“And your client was the owner of the theater?”
“I don’t think he’s exactly an owner, although he might be a sort of sleeping partner. He calls himself an ‘amateur de la mort.’ An amateur of death.”
No, thought Stuyvesant, that’s not what it means. As a Catholic boy, he’d had his Latin beaten into him: amo, amas, amat. Amateur meant admirer, or enthusiast.
A fan of death.
“So,” he said casually. “What’s this fellow’s name?”
The Théâtre du Grand-Guignol was at the end of a tight little cul-de-sac a couple of streets away from the garish façades of Clichy and the Place Pigalle. Guignol was a puppet, also known as Punchinello. Stuyvesant stood before the uninformative closed doors and wondered how a proper theater could make its income off a puppet show, no matter how grand.
However, there was no one to ask. Pounding brought no result, although a shopkeeper up the street knew the name Ray had given him—Dominic Charmentier—and said that he’d find the theater open tonight, but the only matinees were on Mondays.
He wondered if Nancy Berger would find a puppet show amusing.
In the meantime, perhaps a visit to a different kind of theater.
EIGHTEEN
THREE HOURS LATER, Harris Stuyvesant stepped out of a cinéma and found Paris changed. The air smelled like explosives; the drone of its traffic was as hostile as wasps. Images from the screen wove themselves into the busy street. Any second now, that old woman with the tiny poodle would melt into the pavement; the pigeons atop the street-sign would explode into a million pieces, their feathers turning into a rain of coins; that trio of garçonnes would turn around in unison, stare with their painted eyes, and stalk towards him …
There had been three films, or perhaps five—it was hard to know where one stopped and the next began, since there had been no plot and little continuity of character in any of them. The second and third—or perhaps third and fourth—films in the series had been by Man Ray, one of which was announced by the management as a special showing of a film not yet officially released. Ray’s had no more plot than any of the others, although the first was disturbing from its opening declaration: Les dents des femmes sont des objets si charmants. Women’s teeth are such charming objects. The words made him think of the teeth in those boxes of Pip’s. The second one, the special one, he found simply confusing.
Still, neither were as bad as the film that opened with a knife apparently slicing open a woman’s eyeball and went on to show a group of people on the street, gathered around an amputated hand.
What kind of people would do that? And who the hell would consider it art? He had to agree with Inspector Doucet: arrest all the Surrealists and set them to hard labor for a while, that would rid them of their infatuation with intellectual violence.
They left him feeling … unreal. Like waking from a nightmare, or a Mickey Finn. He needed to move—needed the sensation of heels making hard contact with the paving stones, the squint of his eyes against the afternoon sun.
What he’d really like was to drop by the gym and strap on the gloves for a couple good, fast rounds …
But he had a date with Nancy Berger. So he shook his head and stepped into the flow of pedestrians—ordinary, irritating, sweating, blessedly real Parisians—and went for a drink instead.
He found Kiki holding court at her usual table at the Dôme. Her face, he suddenly remembered, had been designed by Man Ray: shaved eyebrows, exaggerated paint (blue eye-coloring today) in a feminine version of those Japanese masks. She saw him come in and waved him over, raising her rasping voice in an imperious command for one of the younger men to give up his chair. Stuyvesant shook his head.
“I’m only here for a quick drink, honey, not worth fitting me in. Hey, I hear you’ve written a book?”
Kiki reached under her chair and pulled one out. “You like to buy one, ’Arris?” Obediently, he peeled off a stack of francs, and asked her to autograph it. She did so, then lifted the book to her mouth to deposit a crimson kiss onto the page next to her signature, following it up with a lingering kiss on his mouth. She drew back with a giggle, and handed him the book.
He dropped into a chair and told the waiter what he wanted, grateful for the reassuring solidity of Kiki’s commercial transaction. Too many more of those films and he’d start talking like Man Ray, too. The wisdom of the unconscious self. The body’s urge is the mind’s command.
He’d met a handful of thoroughly nasty criminals who would agree with Mr. Ray: I want it, I take it, and the hell with the rest of you.
Settled by the drink, he paid and strode up Raspail and Vavin to rue Colle. The florist at the entrance was optimistically setting out some bouquets for the evening trade, and Stuyvesant tipped his hat at her greeting—then stopped. What kind of flowers would a girl like Nancy Berger like? Something large and strong?
In the end, he bought a mix of autumn chrysanthemums in yellow and bronze, and had the woman wrap a dark red ribbon around them. He got out his money, then had a thought: Nancy liked to read; she’d borrowed Pip’s novels.
“Donnez-moi un autre morceau de cette, s’il-vous plaît,” he asked, gesturing at the ribbon.
Upstairs, he laid the flowers and Kiki’s book on the table and slid the ribbon under the Hammett story. He flipped it over, crossed it, and flipped it again to tie it off in a rough bow. He’d never get a job at the Bon Marché, but the ribbon looked pretty against the dust jacket. He looked at Kiki’s book: would Nancy like that, too? But when he looked inside the cover and saw what Kiki had written, he dropped it back onto Sylvia’s brown paper and twine. He didn’t know the girl well enough to hand her that message.
He took a cold shower, shaved for the second time that day, and climbed into his evening suit, managing to get the tie straight on the third try. He even succeeded in catching a taxi before he’d gone too many blocks.
But as the taxi pulled out into the street, he was hit by the sharp vision of a figure looming up before the hood, a moment from that film with the woman’s eyeball. Crossing the Seine a minute later, they passed a knot of people studying something on the ground. For an instant he thought they were prodding at a hand—and on the heels of that vision came the vivid memory of Sarah Grey, sweet face twisted in agony, pale
hair plastered with gore, her left arm swathed in blood-soaked cloths …
He wrestled open the window and stuck his face to the freshness as they crossed the river. When they reached the Crosby apartment block, Stuyvesant had the taxi wait.
The concierge was impressed neither by his evening suit nor his flowers, but she did telephone to the fourth floor, and gave him permission to go up. He found the door standing ajar and knocked gently before stepping inside.
“Miss Berger?”
Her head came out from her room down the hallway. “Come on in. Have you found out anything? About Phil?”
“Not really. I talked to the cops, I think they’re going to get helpful now.”
“Good,” she said, although there was disappointment in her voice. “I’ll just be a minute. There’s fixings for drinks in the kitchen. Oh—” Her head re-emerged. “And do call me Nancy.”
Another drink or three was a great idea. He didn’t bother with mixing anything for the first one, but as it laid hands over his jangled nerves, he made a more formal attempt with the gin and red vermouth, stirring it over some ice and holding it out as he heard her come down the hall.
“Wow,” he said.
She smiled, accepting both the glass and the compliment. “You’re looking pretty spiffy yourself, Mr. Stuyvesant. Although your enthusiasm tells me I was even more of a mess yesterday than I’d thought.”
“No,” he protested, although by comparison, she had been. “And call me Harris.”
The dress was sleeveless, its waist riding low around her hips. Her arms trim, almost muscular—and, he realized, the tan of her face was unbroken from forehead to wrist and down her chest to the neckline’s V. He had a sudden, clear image of Nancy Berger sun-bathing topless under the Grecian sun, and reached hastily for the flowers and book.
“I brought you these,” he said.
“How lovely! What fabulous colors. And, a book.” She pushed the ribbon aside to see the title.
“I don’t know if you read detective novels?” he asked, suddenly unsure of it. “Sylvia Beach said it was good.” Although come to think of it, she hadn’t, not really.
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