The Bones of Paris

by Laurie R. King

  “No?”

  “Monsieur,” the other man said. “I believe you should—”

  Stuyvesant turned to him. “You’re Dominic Charmentier, aren’t you? Your friend here, I think he’s a liar.”

  The Frenchman rose, shooting the seated artist a look that was both amused and alarmed. “I’m sure that’s not true,” he said evenly.

  “And I think you’re in it with him.”

  Now the man looked frankly dumbfounded. “Monsieur?”

  Stuyvesant leaned forward, his thighs bumping the table, and pronounced the name. “Pip Crosby.”

  There was a quick flare of—something in the Frenchman’s face, that three bottles of champagne got in the way of reading. Apprehension? The widening of his eyes, a tiny startled raise of the chin. And that wasn’t all: was it pleasure? Guilt? Pride?

  “You know her!”

  “Of course he knows her.” Man Ray was on his feet, too. “I told you that this morning.”

  “Where is she?” Stuyvesant demanded, directing the question at the artist and the nobleman equally.

  “Oh, who the hell cares?” Ray said.

  “I care!” It was not Stuyvesant’s voice but Nancy’s, indignant at his shoulder.

  “And who are you?” The artist might as well have said it aloud: You’re nothing but chewing gum on the sole of my shoe.

  Stuyvesant wanted to hit that smug face. He might have done so, but for Nancy hanging on to his left arm and trapping him against the table. Instead, he looked down at the drawing—and was startled to see a skeleton having sex with a voluptuous woman.

  With a moment of what felt like clarity, a voice whispered in his ear that there was a better way to knock the artist than on his nose. His right hand picked up the untouched wine glass and dashed it across the ink. Five people went still, watching the ink spread and lose its power, then Ray started around the table towards him.

  Childish.

  You’re drunk.

  Leave now.

  He turned sharply away, his left hand seizing Nancy’s arm and pulling her to one side, his right coming out to straight-arm the truculent little artist out of his way. Man Ray jolted back—directly into Le Comte. The older man staggered, grabbed at the tablecloth, and went down in an explosion of white linen and half-full glasses.

  Cries rose up, waiters came running, to tackle the only man still on his feet: Harris Stuyvesant.

  The band bleated to a halt. In the silence, the crowd listened to the big, unruly American, cursing and trying to tell the men that he was sorry, he was leaving, he was tanked. Then Bricktop herself was there, furious.

  “Yeah, Bricky, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—Yeah, I’m gone.”

  The waiters drew back, allowing him to pick himself up from the floor. He winced at a slice of broken glass across his palm as he brushed his evening suit, then wiped more cautiously across his face, blinking against the sting of booze. Nancy was at his side, half supporting him. He allowed his arm to come to a rest across her shoulder.

  The trio at the overturned table were on their feet, Lee Miller alternating her concern between Ray and Charmentier, who both declared that they were fine. Into this tableau of disaster rushed the missing fourth member of Le Comte’s party, a small woman with short-cropped hair so blonde it was nearly white. She pulled Charmentier’s fingers from his face, reassuring herself that his nose was not flat and bloody, then did the same with the photographer. Finally she whirled on the derelict stranger and the dark-haired woman holding him upright.

  And froze. Her blazing emerald eyes went wide.

  “Harris?”

  Sarah Grey.

  TWENTY

  THAT MORNING

  SARAH GREY STIRRED sugar into her coffee and tried to decide which hand to wear.

  Not the one with the long scarlet fingernails—she hadn’t worn that for months. Not only did her right hand have short nails now, but that particular color of enamel was not to be had in all of Paris. Nor the hand she thought of as The Dancer, with the decorative flair of the fingers: it drew more attention than it deflected.

  What she’d never been able to get the hands’ creator to understand was, a hand should be invisible. In London, she could have worn gloves, but they weren’t as popular here, especially not in the hot weather. It wasn’t fair. Eleven years after Armistice and the streets were still full of men with empty sleeves, men gimping on artificial legs, men whose faces looked like crumpled blossoms. Nobody looked twice at them. But let a pinned-back sleeve be connected to a small blonde woman, and there came The Look: surprise and pity and the tip-of-the-tongue question, What happened to—a question that all but the crudest caught and tucked away.

  But not before she saw the impulse.

  A realistic hand sticking out of her left sleeve at least saved her from some Looks.

  She set down the spoon with a sharp rap and plucked the oldest, most comfortable hand from the macabre display. It was the only one she’d actually asked for, so long ago its paint was chipped and the thumb was cracking. She’d have taken it in for repairs, but conversations with Didi were so … unnerving, it was easier to put up with a few dings and nicks.

  In this, as in so much of life, attitude was all: if you treated it as a hand rather than a foreign object, people tended not to notice it.

  She buckled it on and rolled down her sleeve, then left the house.

  It might have been her imagination, but there seemed to be just a hint of October beneath this unending August heat. This would be her fourth autumn here, in a city that she’d intended to pass through on her way to points exotic and faraway, and somehow never left. Her early visits to museums and theaters had given way to work with theaters and artists—no politics, ever again!—as her schoolgirl French grew brisk and Parisian, along with the clothes in her wardrobe. She sometimes studied the stump of her left wrist and wondered at the young woman who used to be whole.

  Sarah no longer had any interest in politics, no wish to help anyone, no desire to change the world. She had not even been back to England since her mother’s funeral, in the winter of 1927. Most of her friendships had withered. Even Harris Stuyvesant.

  She had met the big American just before her life had changed. Within a day of their meeting, she’d found herself thinking about marriage: if not for the bomb, she might be living in New York with a child. If not for the bomb. If not for running from England and all it represented.

  Not that she blamed Harris, exactly. She had meant to contact him, intended to write and tell him … what? That she forgave him? What was there to forgive, other than his failure to keep her from an act that she herself had chosen? She tried to write, but with each passing day, it became less possible.

  Only her brother remained. She wished Bennett would come to Paris again—he had once, so she was not without hope—but in lieu of actual appearances, he remained a steadfast correspondent. Although even he had changed since … That Day. Sometimes it felt as if he was trying to apologize for not protecting her as a big brother should. Still, he remained the most restful person she knew. A person didn’t have to say things to Bennett. He just knew.

  Their mother’s death meant an inheritance, not enormous but enough that Sarah didn’t have to produce an income. Her first weeks under this luxurious regime, she’d quit her position as assistant to an American millionaire and spent a week wandering the boulevards, where one afternoon she’d happened across a small and charming museum of Renaissance-era arts, entering into a conversation with the director. When she walked out, she found that she had volunteered to help him organize the museum’s records—she might look like a scatter-brain, but in fact she both liked to organize and was good at it. She’d spent two months setting the office straight, then moved on to a struggling Rive Droite bookshop where she was a regular customer, helping them renovate their displays and coming up with ways of attracting more traffic. Since then, she had alternated between unpaid labor and actual employment, some of it quite genero
usly paid. The only requirement was that it interested her.

  She’d first met Le Comte seventeen months ago, when she was sitting in a frigid gallery around the corner from the Café de Flore. She’d thought this would be a way to learn about the city’s artists, and that she did: in no time at all she’d discovered that most of them were children without the innocence, needing constant reassurance as to their genius. There never seemed to be enough air around them, and frankly it was boring. She’d given her notice.

  Her last day in the gallery, Le Comte came in out of a sudden rainstorm, a slim, patrician gentleman in a beautiful coat. He tipped his hat politely, revealing pure white hair, and wandered through the gallery, ending up in the side room in front of Didi Moreau’s weird little boxes.

  “These are intriguing,” he said, hearing her come in.

  “Yes, aren’t they?”

  He gave her face a brief glance, then returned his gaze to the collected oddities: thin bones and a lock of pale blonde hair, the photo of a small girl and one small glass eye, brilliantly blue. “You don’t care for them.”

  “Oh, to the contrary, Monsieur. Some of the Displays have a strange beauty and eloquence about them. They inhabit the boundary between a classical interpretation of art and Duchamp’s readymades.”

  “Objets trouvés,” he murmured under his breath. “Gifts from the universe.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  He turned to look at her face-on, giving Sarah a view of money, breeding, and a startling hint of sorrow. “I’ve never cared for art as an intellectual joke,” he told her. “I always suspect the artist of taking my money with one hand while making a rude gesture with the other.”

  Sarah felt her smile go a bit strained. She told herself not to be so sensitive—and edged her left arm back from his line of sight. “I’m quite certain that Didi Moreau has no such hidden motive.”

  “Would it be possible to meet the artist?”

  “He’s something of a hermit, but he is always willing to make an appointment.”

  She gave Le Comte the artist’s telephone number, and sold him four of the Displays. Whether he returned to the gallery or not, she did not know, having moved on to another position.

  Over the following months, she’d seen him a few times—with the size of Paris society, it was hard not to encounter the basic set of characters over and over, even one less ubiquitous as Le Comte—but she kept to the edges of the events, and indeed of Paris society as a whole. It was more than a year later that she met him again, at a very swank party at the house of Cole and Linda Porter, near the Place des Invalides. Linda introduced them, and when she was then drawn away to see to some detail, Le Comte cocked his head at Sarah.

  “We have met, somewhere.”

  “I was in a gallery when you bought several of Didi Moreau’s Displays.”

  His eyes flicked briefly, but he caught himself before they could actually reach her hand. “As I recall, you didn’t like them much.”

  “The Displays are fine. It’s Didi himself I’m not too crazy about.”

  “He is an odd one, that is for certain. What are you doing now, if not working in the gallery?”

  So she told him, and told him, too, that her time with the old lady whose library had needed cataloging was coming to an end. And he asked about that job, and about some of the others, until after a while she suddenly realized that she had gone on far too long about her not terribly fascinating self.

  She gave an embarrassed laugh. “I mustn’t monopolize you, Monsieur. I’m sure you have friends here who—”

  “One must never disregard a message from the universe.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Mademoiselle, a long and varied life has taught me that key decisions invariably rest on what the thoughtless call coincidence. ‘Coincidences’ are gifts. If the machinery of the universe presents one with such a gift, one overlooks it at one’s peril. But lest you fear you have been cornered by a religious maniac, let me explain.

  “My assistant was in an automobile accident, a few weeks ago. I thought I could do without his services until he returned, but we learned recently that it will be several months, and just today I came to the decision that I must hire someone for that interval.

  “And now you, a person with the skills I require, stand before me and mention that you are about to be leaving your current employ. Surely you agree that I would be a fool to pass up such a gift from the universe?”

  He had probably once been striking, and even in his fifties, those patrician features were handsome, made only more so by the sadness behind his eyes. And because Sarah had spent a year among the skirts of the Paris art world, she knew why.

  People called him simply Le Comte, which, in fact, he was: Count Dominic Pierre-Marie Arnaud Christophe de Charmentier—Dominic to his friends and close associates. He and another nobleman, the Viscount Charles de Noailles, vied informally for who could support the greater number of French artists. But where Noailles and his wife went in for film, Le Comte had been a patron of modern theater long before he turned his eye to the world of art.

  Le Comte’s wife had loved theater. Their elder son had enjoyed amateur dramatics. The son had died in 1917 at the age of nineteen, two days before Christmas, shot by a sniper in the trenches. Le Comte’s beloved little daughter was said to have been a gifted mimic. She sickened and died a few months after her brother was shot. And on the heels of that tragedy, Le Comte’s fourteen-year-old son was killed when a German shell hit a Paris church.

  Then the wife committed suicide.

  A man does not recover from that series of blows. And indeed, after the War, Le Comte disappeared into his house in the XIV arrondissement. He was not seen for two years.

  But he emerged, clearly determined to build some meaning out of the chaos of his life. His first efforts were in a neurological clinic treating soldiers too damaged to function in the world. Oddly enough, he arrived there by art: a painting by Giorgio de Chirico led him to an essay by André Breton, whose wartime work with shell-shock led to the use of “automatic writing” as a therapy. Le Comte became interested. He funded a clinic based on the Breton interpretation of Freud. He bought paintings.

  He resumed his interest in the theater.

  But his eyes had never lost their melancholy.

  “In fact,” Sarah told him, “I do understand acting on impulse. My brother once told me that my mind works faster than my brain.” Not that her snap decisions always turned out so well. “However, I’m not sure what sorts of ‘skills’ you need.”

  “I do not require a typist,” he said, seizing the touchy subject without hesitation. “I need a person with brains and imagination. I think I see those.”

  After that, how could she refuse? They made an appointment for Tuesday morning, and went back to the party.

  She spent the next two days casting out gentle feelers for information, and found that in addition to being an art collector, sad-eyed widower, and bereft father, he was from one of France’s oldest families and a genuine war hero, an amateur painter, a one-time fencing champion, the half owner of four Rive Droite galleries, an occasional lecturer at the Sorbonne, a personal friend of two out of the last four Presidents of France, and the financial support beneath several foundations for the benefit of injured artists and veterans of war. He was known all over the city; the parties in his family mansion were famous, as was the house itself, from the life-sized garden chessboard to one of the world’s most ornate clocks at the mansion’s center. His current passion was said to be an odd French theater up near Pigalle, the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol.

  She’d heard of the theater, but had never considered it the kind of entertainment she would enjoy. But since Le Comte was one of the backers, she felt she should go, before she accepted any kind of job from him.

  She chose a matinee. And sat, stunned motionless, from the curtain’s rise to its final drop. Afterwards, she had walked the streets in a fog, so unconscious of her surroundings
that it was amazing she hadn’t been run down or pick-pocketed.

  Because one of the plays had shown—clearly, lovingly, and so graphically the woman sitting beside her had gagged—a man driven to madness, cutting off his own hand.

  TWENTY-ONE

  SARAH HAD THOUGHT she was over the bomb—over the worst of it, anyway. Yes, she still felt a ghostly hand, occasionally reached to scratch an itch on a missing finger, but there were entire days when a hand was just a hand, and not the end of a life. She’d lost a limb: she’d gone on with her life.

  But that evening after the Grand-Guignol, it was as if the bomb were rolling across her all over again, slowly, inexorably, repeatedly. Without even drugs to muffle the reaction.

  All night, in a fever-dream over endless cups of tea, she relived it all, over and over: Laura’s face, a family’s destruction, that lovely building ripped apart and splattered with blood. Her brother, plunged into hell because of her. Harris Stuyvesant and the death of hope.

  Only the bomb itself was a blank: a profound stillness, as if the world’s heart stopped, followed by a wall of noise. There wasn’t even pain: that didn’t come until she reached the hospital.

  Why even consider a job with this in the background? No. Bury it, shovel the days and weeks on top. She would not keep her appointment with Dominic Charmentier. She would have nothing more to do with the Grand-Guignol or its owners.

  And yet …

  When the sun rose, she bathed and dressed, intending to take a tram as far as she could go in the opposite direction. Maybe a train. She hadn’t been to Chartres in a while; the rose window would be a joy. And yet her feet carried her north: past the tram stops, away from the Gare Montparnasse, to the river and beyond.

  In the end, she was only slightly late for her appointment with Le Comte, in a café around the corner from the theater. He rose. She simply stood in the doorway, unable either to enter or to flee, so after a moment he came forward, gently shepherding her to the chair across from him. If he felt her trembling, he said nothing, merely poured her coffee and laid a fragrant brioche before her.