The Bones of Paris

by Laurie R. King

  “I’m helping them with a missing persons case.”

  “Does he know you’re looking at his files?”

  “Mais oui.” Sure.

  The clerk was young, and gullible. “Oh, well, in that case.” He dropped another file on the desk.

  “You haven’t heard anything, have you?” Stuyvesant asked, putting an inclusive emphasis on the vous.

  The man shook his head, trying for gloom but betrayed by the thrill. “Just what everyone knows. That he’s unconscious, and they’re operating to remove the bullet.”

  “Anything further on where they found him?”

  “Not yet—everyone’s gone down to help with the search. Strange to have the place so empty, isn’t it?”

  “Sure is.” Stuyvesant wondered how to ask where Doucet had been found without giving away the game. “Any idea what Doucet was doing there?” he tried. “Last I heard he was up in Montmartre.”

  “Maybe he was going to check in to St. Anne’s,” the clerk said, chuckling at his great wit—the mental hospital of St. Anne’s was a stone’s throw from Place Denfert-Rochereau. Then he realized that humor might be inappropriate, what with a shot policeman, and added, “Maybe he was looking at that shooting of the girl, last week? Someone told me it was the same place.”

  Stuyvesant felt that too-familiar cold rush: Lulu! Quick, say something before the cop notices that your jaw’s on your chest. “So why’d they take him to la Charité?”

  “They knew he was a police inspector, of course. They wanted him close to the Préfecture, so everyone could say … Well.”

  Could say good-bye. “Does he have family?”

  “You haven’t met his sister?”

  “Oh, that’s right, his sister. What about his fiancée?”

  The man looked surprised. “L’Inspecteur is engaged?”

  “Look,” Stuyvesant said, “I should finish this. If you hear anything, let me know.”

  “D’accord.”

  Stuyvesant bent over his pages with increased vigor. With a gossip like that around, someone would hear of the stray American at Fortier’s desk. And while he didn’t care if they threw him out, he didn’t want to lose his notes.

  He trotted down the stairs four minutes later, notebook intact. Before he left, he scribbled a message with Bennett’s suggestion:

  Fortier—the presence of Joanna Williams among the missing persons suggests that you compare a list of all unsolved murders as well. If you need me, I’m at the Hotel Benoit.

  Harris Stuyvesant

  Out on the Pont Neuf, his hand raised for a taxi, he was hit by a sudden thought: Nancy.

  He hadn’t phoned her—hadn’t even thought about phoning her. Like the kind of guy he’d told her he wasn’t. He should have the cab take him there first. At least have it stop near a public telephone.

  But what could he say? Hi, sorry I can’t come see you, I’m busy looking for an old girlfriend?

  And anyway, Nancy was a sport. She’d understand.

  He hoped.

  The Place Denfert-Rochereau was its usual bustling daytime self, with half a dozen musicians competing with twice that number of sheet-music sellers. None of the news-boys were shouting about a shot policeman, but when he neared St. Anne’s, uniforms appeared. Pasting on an eager expression, he drifted over to a group of avid young men.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  They told him. Several different stories, in fact, but all had to do with a cop who’d been found in that alleyway over there. In none of them did a blond foreigner play a part.

  It was hard to feel that Grey’s absence was a relief.

  Experienced with the drawbacks of Sarah’s rustic home, he had the taxi driver wait for him at her steps.

  No one answered his knock, but the third flower-pot in the row hid a key. Inside, he felt the stillness.

  “Bennett? Sarah? Either of you home?”

  Silence replied. His note commanding Sarah to call him was untouched. There was no evidence that anyone had been there since last night.

  He’d never been so glad for the absence of bloodstains in his life.

  He added a line to the earlier message:

  I WAS HERE AGAIN, SATURDAY NOON

  Then he picked up Sarah’s telephone. Nancy answered on the third ring.

  “Hi, sweetheart,” he said.

  “Who is that?”

  “Nancy, it’s me, Harris.”

  “Do I know someone named Harris?”

  “Yeah, I’m sorry, this case is getting a little—”

  “Because if I did, it wouldn’t be in a city like Paris with public telephone boxes and post offices and pneumatics about every ten feet. Not if he’s said, ‘Sure, I’ll phone,’ and then leaves a person twiddling her thumbs and feeling like a fool.”

  “Nancy, I’m sorry.”

  “Are lives at stake? Is the safety of the entire—”

  “Yes.”

  “What?”

  “I said, yes. Lives are at stake.”

  Silence, while she considered an appropriate response.

  “Could you have called earlier?” she asked.

  “Was it physically possible? Yes. Would you have wanted to talk to me? No.”

  After a minute, a sigh came down the line. “Harris, I’m not a demanding sort of person. I’m a grown-up. I realize that—No no, let me finish. I realize that adults have jobs to do. But I’ll only tell you this once: I expect my friends to have manners. Any failure of communication in the future will require a first-rate reason. Like, you’re unconscious in the hospital.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “So, does this phone call mean I’m free for the rest of the day?”

  “I … Yes. I’ll phone you tonight. If not, first thing tomorrow.”

  “I look forward to it. I hope you are well?”

  “I actually don’t know.”

  “Well, that is intriguing. Don’t end up in the hospital, Harris.”

  “If I do, you’ll be the first to know.”

  He returned the key to its pot and climbed into the taxi, giving the driver the address of the man who had last seen Grey and Doucet: “La maison de la Comte de Charmentier, s’il vous-plâit.”

  Le Comte was not at home. Or so the butler who answered the gate’s bell claimed. The locked gates made Stuyvesant half believe that Le Comte was indeed out in the country, but in any case, he wouldn’t have a lot of luck climbing over the gates in broad daylight.

  He had the driver take him around the corner to Man Ray’s studio.

  Banging at the door of the pretty building brought Ray’s upstairs neighbor to the window, cursing him soundly. No, he did not know when M. Ray would return, go away or the street would rain flowerpots.

  Okay: Didi Moreau.

  Rounding the corner to Moreau’s street, Stuyvesant saw the activity.

  “Pull over here. No, this is fine, just stop a minute.”

  The driver didn’t care for this shifty behavior, and kneaded the steering wheel nervously as the flics swarmed the gate like flies around a dead rat.

  After a minute, the small figure of Didi Moreau appeared, pushed in front of a sizable uniformed policeman. He was shut into a car; the car drove off.

  Who next? Cole Porter? Natalie Barney? They all had his telephone number, if Sarah appeared. La Charité?

  No: he might not have a chance at the Charmentier mansion until after dark, but Man Ray was still out there, somewhere.

  He leaned forward. “Take me to the Dôme.”

  SIXTY-TWO

  THE LIST OF missing:

  1926:

  6/? f brn Jacqueline-Celeste Delaurier (F)

  1927:

  6/22 f brn Joanna Williams (UK)

  6/23? f black? [Italian woman]

  1928

  1/3 f brn Katrine Aguillard (F)

  2/13? f blonde Lotte Richter (Germ)

  3/2 f black? Ethel Delaney (US)

  3/22 f blonde Margot Jourdain (F)

 
3/26 f blonde Clara Klein (Germ)

  3/30 f brn Holly LeClerc (F)

  5/14 m bald Daniel La Plante (F)

  6/1 f blonde Irma Matthieu (F)

  6/19 f brn Alice Barnes (UK)

  7/21? f brn Elsa Werner (Germ)

  8/7 f blonde Abigail Parker (US)

  9/20 m blond Marc Dupont (F)

  10/30 f blonde Ruth Anne Palowski (Poland)

  10/31 f brn Eulalie Dambrose (F)

  11/5(?) m gray Joseph—? (F)

  12/4 f black Fleur Villines (F)

  12/17 f blonde Viviane Lapierre (F)

  12/19 m black Eduardo Torres (Spain)

  1929

  2/15 f red Louise Hartman (UK)

  2/20 f black Esmé Gasque (F)

  3/1 m brown Raoul Bellamy (F)

  3/21 f blonde Pip Crosby (US)

  3/22 f lt. brn Isabelle Beauchamp (F)

  5/20 f black Gisela Conti (It)

  5/20 f black Norma Lombardi (It)

  6/12 f gray Sylvia Davis (US)

  6/21 f brn Nicole Karon (F)

  6/24 f blonde Josette Achille (F)

  7/19 f brn? Deanne Landry (US)

  8/12 m brn Luc Tolbert (F)

  9/11 f brn Gabriella Faulon (F)

  SIXTY-THREE

  SUCH SURPRISES, THOUGHT Grey: light, sound, dancers. And now, the icy fingers of dread.

  He’d thought he was immune to a fear of death. Sarah worried about him—Harris Stuyvesant, too. That was why she’d chosen a house that might soothe him into visiting, why Stuyvesant continued to send him picture postcards: chain-links binding him to life.

  They were right to worry. He yearned after the stones at the base of the cliff, brooded about one final swim out into the Channel. If he’d just been locked here without food or drink or light, he was pretty certain he’d have been content to curl up on the floor and welcome death.

  Two pulls kept him from that.

  One was hope.

  That damned, inconvenient, pervasive, tantalizing demon that was hope. He could not decide if this prison had been deliberately constructed to make use of it, or if the hope was accidental.

  On Friday night, he’d been forced at gunpoint to abandon Doucet, marched into the depths without explanation, chained to the wall, and left. He kept thinking about Stuyvesant’s four photographs of women driven mad by terror. He tried to picture them left here as he was: with a blanket, some bread, and two full cups of water. He had no doubt that they’d been here: these stones were in all four photographs. Fear, exhaustion: yes. But was this the kind of horror that shattered a mind?

  Dehydration suggested the women had not been given water; their staring madness suggested that light had been taken from them as well. Perhaps after a few encounters with uncontrollable prisoners driven insane by terror—one of whom, he thought, might be responsible for the newness of the bolt at the end of his chains—their captor had discovered the sedative effects of hope? Learned that a prisoner could be subdued by food and water, light and a blanket? Given those, surely the worst one could expect was a temporary, if bewildering, discomfort?

  Hope.

  But it was not the only thing that kept Bennett Grey from turning his face to the wall.

  There was Sarah.

  In his own part of the world—even in London—Grey would never have walked into that ambush. Not knowing Paris, and putting too much trust in Doucet’s judgment, he had. Doucet paid the price: he’d dropped instantly, and before Grey could go to him, a third, warning shot had sparked along the stones. He had looked down the alleyway with Doucet at his feet and asked the gunman one question: “Where is Sarah?”

  If the man had only answered—with “I don’t know” or “Who?” or “She’s fine” or anything—Grey would have known his sister’s fate. If there’d been light on the man’s face—but then they’d heard the gendarmes’ approach, and the man had asked a question of his own: “Will I need to shoot them, too?”

  Grey had dropped the man’s sack over his own head and let himself be pushed into a narrow entranceway.

  To sit, caught between the unasked-for hope and the unexpected dread.

  SIXTY-FOUR

  WHY A SATURDAY at the Dôme should be any different from a Wednesday, Stuyvesant didn’t know—what did a weekend mean to artists and painters? But even at three in the afternoon, the cafés and bars of Montparnasse were thrumming like a beehive, frantically making honey before winter came.

  The laughter and music grated on his nerves, the drinks went down his throat, and no one had seen Man Ray. At 5:00, Stuyvesant trotted down to Ray’s address. He was back within twenty minutes, circulating like a shark.

  At 6:00, he dropped three ten-centimes coins into a phone and listened to the ringing in Sarah’s house. When the coins came back, he looked at them—Nancy?—then slid them back in his pocket.

  By 7:00, Montparnasse was ablaze with light and life, music spilling from every door. Americans ebullient with fat wallets and the freedom of being two thousand miles from Prohibition shouted across the boulevard Montparnasse, summoning waiters and women, shoving past him on the terraces. Their blithe disregard of the shadows drove him mad.

  A night like this had its ups and its downs, when it came to finding a man. Chances were good that Ray was here somewhere, but between the crowds and the smoke, he’d need to be within arm’s reach before Stuyvesant saw him. All he could do was follow Ray’s spoor, a delicate business that required more leisurely chat than his nerves would stand. He finally spotted Kiki at the Coupole—not that he could ask her directly, but she and Ray moved in the same crowd.

  On the edges of her group, he found someone who had been talking to someone who had seen Man Ray and his fiery new girl-assistant, going to the Lilas, or was it the Deux Magots? A waiter at the Lilas had seen M. Ray, but earlier in the day. Then back at the Coupole, a visiting Canadian Stuyvesant had met the week before detached himself from Kiki’s crowd to head for the pissoir. Stuyvesant emptied his glass and moved to cut the man off.

  “Hey, Morley—it is Morley, isn’t it? How are you? You and the wife enjoying Paris?”

  “We’re having a fantastic time, and you? It’s Stuyvesant, right?”

  “That’s me. Say, have you seen Man Ray? Couple of months ago I’d have asked Kiki, but she isn’t too keen on him just now.”

  “Yeah, somebody told me he had a new girl. I haven’t seen him, but—Hold on a minute. Francis! Hey, Francis! Stuyvesant, do you know Francis Picabia?”

  They shook hands. “I don’t think so, although you look familiar.”

  “You’ve seen a film called Entr’acte,” Picabia suggested.

  Stuyvesant bared his teeth in what he hoped looked like a grin. “The cannon on the roof? With the guy wearing a bowler?”

  “Eric Satie.”

  “Great film. You’re a painter, too, aren’t you? I saw your stuff—where was it?”

  “Theophile Briant’s gallery?”

  “Must’ve been.” Stuyvesant had never seen one of the man’s pieces, but Picabia’s fingernails declared him a painter, and the question put him on the fellow’s good side. “Say, I was trying to find Man Ray, he … he said he’d take some pictures of a friend who’s headed back to New York in a few days. Any ideas?”

  “Have you tried Le Boeuf sur le Toit?”

  “Oh. Right! Of course that’s where he’d be, if he didn’t want Kiki underfoot.”

  “I don’t know why he wouldn’t, three-ways work just fine for some of us.”

  “Yeah, maybe he’d like it, but Kiki might feel otherway—otherwise.” Stuyvesant blinked at the difficulty of that last word. “I’ll go check there—it’s still on the rue Pen—er, Penty—Penthièvre?”

  “Unless they’ve moved it since last week.”

  “Ha! Thanks. Great to meet you, and Morley, great to see you, too, hope to see you again, sometime.”

  The city lights spun gently through the windows as the taxi drove him up to the VIII arrondissement. He straightened
his tie, got a cigarette going on the third attempt, and wove his way inside.

  Le Boeuf sur le Toit was, despite its Dada-esque name, a bar with hot jazz and a wide mix of patrons. The first person Stuyvesant saw through the smoke was Man Ray. The second was Lee Miller, a million-dollar baby draped across the artist like a five-and-dime rag doll.

  He slipped into an empty chair at the back: if he waited and followed Mr. Ray home, he’d get some information out of him. One way or another.

  But when he shifted the chair to see across the room, he found Lee Miller’s big blue eyes looking straight at him.

  She winked.

  He instantly turned to the girl at his shoulder and said the first thing that came into his head. “That’s a great pair of earrings you’ve got.”

  They were certainly great in size, golden triangles as big as a baby’s head. She nodded with the amiability of the tipsy. Or maybe she was nodding to the music, it was impossible to tell. In either case, he threw a few more sentences at her until she leaned over and asked if she knew him.

  “No, not yet, but anyone who likes jazz is a friend of mine.”

  “American?”

  “Mais oui,” he said in a bad accent. “From New York.”

  “Bienvenu à Paris, Monsieur. Got a light?”

  He flicked his Ronson a couple of times and aimed it at the cigarette stuck onto ten inches of enameled holder. She thanked him carefully, and turned back to her table.

  With a glance, he could see that Miss Miller was not fooled. What about that girl in New York? he wanted to ask her. You think she considers your boyfriend a genius?

  At least the music was great, and the drinks were strong, and the friends of the earring-girl drew him into their sphere. Every so often, he half-rose to check on Ray’s table; each time, the man was in place.

  Until one time he wasn’t.

  It had been about five minutes since Stuyvesant’s last glance, and he’d been distracted by a lively argument about New Orleans jazz. He idly glanced across the room and saw a quartet of Negroes settling down at the table. Stuyvesant shot to his feet—and found himself nose to hat with a belligerent Man Ray.