The Bones of Paris

by Laurie R. King

  He was using a coarse net to strain for minnows: the chances of catching anything was minuscule. But he read and he thought, and when he turned the last page, he looked over at Doucet.

  Who had been quietly snoring into his desk blotter for the last ninety minutes.

  His interior dialogue over whether to wake the man was rendered moot by the noisy entrance of the sergeant who occupied the desk outside Doucet’s office door.

  “Inspecteur, I’m—” the man was saying, until he simultaneously realized that the Inspector was snoozing and that there was a stranger in their midst.

  Doucet snapped upright, holding a paper. “Yes, Fortier, what is it?”

  The alert effect was a bit spoiled by the small note stuck to his left cheek. Fortier—Doucet’s by-the-books Sergeant by reputation, a thin, Caspar Milquetoast–looking fellow in person—shot a surprisingly belligerent glance at the intruder. Doucet said, “Don’t worry about M. Stuyvesant, he’s helping us with our inquiries.”

  In America, the explanation would have been shorthand for, “This guy is one step from being in handcuffs,” but clearly in France the words were taken at face value. Fortier glowered, then told Doucet, “I’m off home for a few hours, my parents are here for dinner, but I’ll be back afterwards.”

  “No, take the night off, we’ll start again in the morning.”

  “You sure? I’ll be fine after a break.”

  “Yes, I’m sure. It’s better to come at it tomorrow with a fresh mind. Go.”

  The baleful glance Fortier shot at Stuyvesant was no doubt intended as a threat, although it looked more like petulance. Still, the man left before l’Inspecteur could change his mind.

  “I was about to go, myself,” Stuyvesant told Doucet.

  “Have you found anything?”

  His immediate impulse was to deny any iota of interest, to keep any and all cards up close to his mismatched buttons. But Doucet had let him in, giving him free access to all kinds of information that he had no right to. He owed Doucet honesty in return—although maybe not complete honesty. He rubbed his tired eyes.

  “Nothing I can be sure of, but there are a couple of things I’d like to follow up, if you don’t mind.” Or even if you do. “I’ve been looking at Pip Crosby’s possessions and talking to her roommate and friends. That took me in two directions: the American photographer Man Ray, who you know, and one of your home-grown nut-jobs, Didi Moreau. In my conversations with both men, one name came up. Sorry to say this, but that was Dominic Charmentier. Sarah’s boss.”

  Then he shut his mouth and waited for the questions.

  They came, fast and furious. Are you suggesting Le Comte might in any way be involved in something unsavory? Le Comte de Charmentier? Is there any scrap of actual evidence that makes you suspect him? Evidence beyond a macabre house décor? And what on earth prompted you to take Sarah to see this crétin Didi Moreau?

  Twice, other cops stuck their heads in to see what was going on; both times Doucet ordered them out. Stuyvesant kept his patience in check, reminding himself that his opinions had been bound to alarm Doucet.

  Eventually, Doucet got to the stage of ordering Stuyvesant to have nothing more to do with the case, with Dominic Charmentier, or with Sarah Grey.

  “I can’t leave Sarah vulnerable,” Stuyvesant protested.

  “She is not vulnerable! And in any event, considering Le Comte’s association with Moreau and Ray, she will no longer be working for him.”

  It was tempting, really tempting, to loose a few verbal lightning-bolts of his own and damn the consequences. Because if he’d wanted to drive a wedge between Sarah and this man, here it was, a wedge as big and sharp as he could ask for.

  But Stuyvesant pushed all his masculine impulse into a box and shut the top, settling for a mild but devastating question. “What’s Sarah going to do when you order her to quit her job?”

  “What?” Doucet, who had been on his feet for the last minute, now peered across his desk at the American.

  “When you try and tell her she can have nothing more to do with Charmentier.”

  “She will resign, of course!”

  “You may not know her as well as you think. Did she ever tell you how she lost her hand?”

  “Of course.”

  “Did she say that she was there because she refused to leave? That she’d decided she was morally obliged to join in an act of public outrage by committing suicide?”

  Doucet’s jaw dropped.

  “Yeah, I didn’t think she did. The Sarah I knew didn’t take well to being ordered about.”

  Slowly, the angry gaze turned inward. Doucet sat down. Stuyvesant lit two cigarettes, and half-rose to hand one to the cop.

  Two men, smoking tobacco while reflecting on the impossibility of women.

  “She will not like it,” Doucet said at last. “Nope.”

  “But she must be warned.”

  “She won’t like that much, either.”

  “She is a sensible woman. She can be made to see the possibility of danger.”

  “She’s a woman who has made some terrible mistakes in judgment, and who won’t want to hear that she’s making another one. She’ll fight you on it.”

  “But she must be told,” Doucet said, sadly.

  Stuyvesant crushed his half-smoked cigarette in the tray and got to his feet. “Better you than me, buddy,” he told the detective, and let himself out of the man’s office.

  He’d intended to ask about the gendarme’s search of his room, but feared the question might push the man over the edge when it came to irksome Americans.

  To his relief, when he got back to his hotel, the cops weren’t waiting and the room hadn’t been searched again.

  It had probably been a mistake: they’d been looking for another big, sandy-headed American.

  Yeah, he should be so lucky.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  IT WAS FRIDAY the 13 in Montparnasse, and darkness was settling in. For the first time, the air felt actually cool: things would be wild tonight.

  Stuyvesant sat at his hotel desk, enjoying the fresh air through the window while he wrote up his case-notes for the last couple of days. When he had done so, he frowned, trying to imagine how he was going to justify all that wandering around to the man with the checkbook.

  Maybe Sylvia Beach had a pet writer who could turn his notes into a pretty story for Uncle Crosby. He tossed the notebook onto the chipped desk and stretched the kinks from his neck. With all of Montparnasse at his feet, unlimited funds in his pocket, and the Quarter looking to return to life at last, Harris Stuyvesant sat, feeling glum.

  He’d spent the last week in and out of Paris bars and cafés, with nothing to show for it. The Paris he’d flirted with on previous trips, the Paris for which he’d played hard to get, the Paris he believed he would return to, once he had his feet under him—why did he feel that he’d missed his chance?

  He stood up with a screech of the chair’s legs. Come on, Harris, he chided. People always insist yesterday was better, yesterday was when the sun shone brighter and the drinks were stronger and the girls were all eager to please. It’s how you show your superiority over the other Tom, Dick, and Johnny-come-latelies.

  He pulled open the door to the wooden wardrobe and looked at what lay there. He’d had the stored trunk brought up from Mme. Benoit’s cellar, so he had his fedora again. Evening wear tonight, or just the dark suit? The suit showed wear in daylight, but with the new Berlin shirt and a silk neck-tie, it would be more adaptable than the evening suit and bow tie. And cheaper to clean if someone threw up on him.

  He left the revolver and lock picks under the floorboard, and although he was tempted to slip the brass knuckles into his pocket, he decided against them, too.

  Brawling was just too hard on the trousers.

  He settled his hat and strolled down the rue Vavin to Raspail, turning south. Nearing the crossroads of the boulevard Montparnasse, a blind man—a blind and deaf man—would have known something
was up: not even eight o’clock, and the corner had the air of a joint where last drinks had just been called, loosing a manic surge towards the bars.

  Two spindly-legged girls in ridiculously tall heels clattered by, their high-pitched and overlapping conversation, more giggle than words, evidence of a visit to the snow dealer that afternoon. Seconds later, two pale youths in ill-fitting suits went by in the other direction, discussing the pawnshop value of the rings that covered their every finger. In their wake came a trio of femmes de nuit with the bodies of twenty-year-olds and the eyes of raddled old refugees.

  Stuyvesant paused at the corner to survey the Times Square of Montparnasse village. Cafés that a few years before had been a bar and six tables of ardent conversation under the chestnuts were now a teeming throng of frantic drinkers, with dozens of tables jammed from window to pavement’s edge, all of them far too noisy for anything resembling a conversation. The chestnuts were dying of alcohol poisoning. The entire street throbbed and heaved, from the depths of the zinc bars to the solid lines of taxis plying the roads. As if you’d dressed a heaving mass of maggots in black suits and silk dresses, Stuyvesant thought, and felt a powerful impulse to turn back to the Hotel Benoit and spend the night with a book.

  Instead, he pushed through the stream of clean, earnest, wistful onlookers—the wide-eyed school-teachers from Ohio, the hopeful college graduates from Detroit—and crossed the street to the Dôme.

  The Dôme was the most American of the American-driven cafés on the boulevard Montparnasse. Every second shouting mouth bore a New York accent, and the rest were from Chicago or Jersey. He pushed his way back, keeping a firm grip on his wallet, until he found a table where he could see the place.

  He greeted the harried waiter by pressing five American dollars into his hand, a guarantee of brisk service from that point forward. He ordered a drink, and dinner, and asked if the fellow had seen Man Ray that night.

  No, he hadn’t. But that tip would guarantee that if Ray appeared, he’d know about it in two minutes flat.

  He drank a boilermaker and ate his way through the platter of duck and frites, watching the crowd. In the hour he sat there, he saw three men go off with femmes de nuit (one of them looking an awful lot like an homme de nuit), one small packet exchanged for money, one flat envelope exchanged for money, and a lot of women putting on their makeup at the table. A pick-pocket worked his way through the room—twice, the second time returning the wallets to their purses and pockets, no doubt somewhat emptier than they’d been at the start of the evening. Stuyvesant caught the man’s eye and gave him a small salute: you had to admire professionalism.

  The only time he intervened was when a slicked-down dandy with sharp eyes dribbled something into the drink of his date, a scrub-faced Midwestern farm-girl in a new Paris dress. That time, he signaled the waiter and pointed out the imminent mugging, and watched with satisfaction while the man in the long apron drove the solitary apache out of the room, then propped the girl up in a corner until she came around.

  That alone earned the waiter another five bucks, even though he never did report the arrival of M. Ray.

  By ten o’clock, things were beginning to grow truly hot. The noise level made the windows seem to bulge outward; the room’s thick smoke made a person think the kitchen was on fire.

  A regular night at the Dôme.

  Stuyvesant paid, resumed his hat, and started threading his way out of the café. Halfway across the room, he looked back, and saw his table already occupied by two pairs of elbows. It was as if he had never been.

  Kiki was at her table under the trees, her husky laugh cutting through even that night’s racket. She saw him, and waved; he tipped his hat, and went on.

  Tonight, he was fishing, trolling a lure up and down the boulevard Montparnasse. In and out of the Coupole and Rotonde, dipping through the Select and the Falstaff, wandering as far up as the Deux Magots, then down to the Closerie des Lilas. He drank and he listened and he prodded the conversation, and drank some more, but the whisky might have been water, and sometimes, the fish just weren’t biting.

  He learned nothing, about no one.

  Four hours after he’d left the Dôme, he came back to the Carrefour Vavin. By then, the Dôme and Rotonde were closed, their tables stacked and dark, but the Select was going strong. The wild revels had changed, giving way to an air of drunken desperation that made Stuyvesant want to keep his back to the wall. As he approached the door, he noticed the same apache go past, surveying the crowd for another potential victim: Stuyvesant wondered if the slick little villain was responsible for some of the names on Doucet’s list. Near the door, one of the Canadians—McAlpin? McAlmon, that was it—was snarling at a pretty young man whose drinks he was paying for. His humor was vicious, excoriating, but the boy, who looked like he needed a square meal and a pair of shoes, kept a fixed smile on his face through the abuse.

  And, of course, it was the kind of night that Hemingway should appear, beery and blustery and ready to take on all comers, be it in words or in arm-wrestling. From the look of him, he was nearing the open obscenity stage where he sought out the homosexuals for his mocking. Stuyvesant moved around the other side of the crowded room, and there he saw the person he’d been looking for all night.

  Man Ray sat pontificating to a table, the spectacular Miller woman draped against his left side. Judging by the exaggerated gesticulations and the way he nearly stubbed his cigarette into a nearby sleeve, the photographer was well oiled. Two of his younger companions were as intent on his words as his lover was, the three of them bent forward over a table buried deep in glasses and ash-trays, their shiny-faced enthusiasm testifying to the newness of their Montparnasse experience. A couple of old-timers Stuyvesant recognized—a writer of grim fiction and a painter of unintelligible canvases—were sitting back in their chairs, catching every third word in the din but preserving the requisite display of apathy.

  Then there was Kiki. The queen of Montparnasse sat two tables away from Ray, back turned, blatantly draped around another painter, her nonchalance betrayed by an occasional swivel in her chair to glare at the oblivious Lee Miller. Her eyes condemned the girl to the torments of a fiery hell.

  And here he’d been concerned about Man Ray’s intentions.

  Lee Miller saw him and waved for him to join them. The gesture interrupted Ray, who paused, saw whom she had issued an invitation to, and scowled.

  Stuyvesant gave an ostentatious look at his watch, made an exaggerated visual scan of the crowd, and with a shrug, wound his way through the hectic room towards them.

  It was a mistake, one that he only woke to a couple of hours later. Ray spent the time flaunting his mistress, flaunting his genius, freely admitting his fascination with death, agreeing that he knew Didi Moreau and Le Comte and pretty much everyone in the Quarter. Stuyvesant could have flat-out accused him of committing murder in the center of the rue Montparnasse and the man would only have laughed and said, “Sure!”

  If Stuyvesant had been able to get drunk, he might have dived into a good old-fashioned brawl and the hell with the effects on his trousers, or his police record. But it was one of those nights when the more he drank, the more sober he felt.

  And so he tipped his hat to Madame Select, and walked away—away from the artists, away from the café, away from Montparnasse and all its smug, loud-mouthed, pretentious temporary citizens.

  It was one of those velvet nights—or early mornings—when the sky seemed to look down and shake its head in affectionate disdain. You are small, it said, but still I enjoy you. At the river, he sat and lit a cigarette, the flare setting off a minor upheaval from the dark recesses of the bridge. A figure emerged—male? female? human?—and thrust out a rag-covered extremity. He gave it the lit cigarette, and it retreated to its den, requiring no more interaction from him than that.

  He reached into his pocket for another cigarette, but instead of the silver case, his hand came out with the snapshot of Pip Crosby. He turned it tow
ards the light from a nearby streetlamp, and looked at the girl.

  Jesus, what a long day it had been. A long week. His skin crawled with drink and disgust and exhaustion, his mind presenting him with a series of stark, clear words and vivid images. Nancy’s despair over Pip, and her unvoiced accusation. Doucet’s bleary eyes; his ring binder swollen with dates and faces and loss. The flash of … something across Le Comte’s face the other night in Bricktop’s. Moreau’s Displays and Man Ray’s women. Lulu dead on the street—sweet, cheerful Lulu, shy about her missing tooth, not at all shy about filching the odd small note, a woman whose murder was too inconsequential for the papers. The invasion of his room.

  The Quarter used to be fun, lively. Now its corners seemed to crawl with menace.

  And on top of it all, he couldn’t even get tanked. Instead, here he sat, as clear-headed as a new morn.

  He looked at the photograph as if he’d never seen Pip before. Looked at the cheerful grin and saw it for what it was: a brave mask hiding the blonde child who screamed away from flames; the broken arm and the long agony of the burn—first the pain and then the scar. The controlling uncle, the sickly mother, and the defiant creation of a new life and a new person: Phil Crosby. Spirited, resolute, answering to no one but herself.

  He wished he’d known her.

  The week began to leak past him like a failing dam—a dam he’d been fighting to sustain, a dam holding back a massive burden of cold, dark images and grim thoughts and the bitter assumptions of others. A dam that finally gave way.