19 Purchase Street

by Gerald A. Browne

  She just missed being chic. On her the expensive clothes did not appear to their best advantage. Her blond hair needed a touch-up. The ruby pin on her collar was real but still somehow unbelievable. She asked how Monsieur White was.

  Gainer told her Monsieur White was better.

  “Oh, has he been ill?”

  “No, but he’s better.”

  She smiled tolerantly, led Gainer into the salon.

  Any moment he might be meeting one of his men, he thought. Maybe this woman’s husband or the man around this house. He sat in the chair he was offered. The woman left the room, not excusing herself.

  Within minutes two young girls entered and sort of collapsed rather than sat on the deep sofa opposite Gainer. They were barefoot, had on simple white cotton panties and camisole tops laced loosely with pink silk ribbons. Additional ribbons tangled in their long hair.

  They were very pretty.

  Gamins was the word for them, Gainer remembered. Thirteen- or fourteen-year-olds was his guess.

  They pretended to ignore him, to be preoccupied only with themselves, but he caught their glances. One sat with her legs drawn up so her chin could rest between her knees. Surely an immodest position from Gainer’s point of view. The crotch of her panties stretched tight over her mound, a few little coils of pubic hair showing. The other girl was sprawled on her side, just awkwardly enough to cause her camisole to ride up, exposing her rounded tummy and navel.

  No doubt they were posturing for him, Gainer thought. They certainly were a couple of teasers. He tried to look elsewhere in the room.

  That caused them to take other measures.

  They intertwined their slender legs.

  Kneeled and bowed so their bottoms seemed offered.

  Stuck out a slow tongue at him.

  Decided to exchange camisoles, took them off.

  Examined a nipple, touched it with a forefinger and thumb.

  Gainer got up.

  The girls made room between them on the sofa.

  He went past them, out to the foyer.

  The blond woman was seated there reading L’Officiel.

  “Is something wrong, monsieur?”

  Gainer decided he’d risk describing one of his adversaries to see where that got him. “I’m looking for a man,” he said.

  “Oh?” the woman arched.

  “A certain man—”

  “You have come to the wrong place, monsieur, definitely the wrong place.” She was brusque and rude the way most French get when they lose money that was practically in their pockets. She wouldn’t hear another word.

  When Gainer got back to the car Leslie gathered from his attitude that nothing had been accomplished. He did not tell her what had happened only because he didn’t feel like going through it at the moment. All he said was: “Let’s try the other address.”

  Boulevard de Menilmontant.

  Leslie took a moment to look it up in the little red book: L’indispensible Repertoire des Rues.

  The boulevard was in the Twentieth Arrondissement. The most direct way to it was the Rue de la Roquette. Leslie timed most of the traffic lights and disregarded many of those she did not get right. Along the way Gainer noticed all but a few shops were closed pour les vacances, windows covered by solid metal shutters. Hardly any pedestrians. Like a city expecting enemy planes, he thought.

  Boulevard de Menilmontant gave less of such an expression because of the bistros and tabac stands still open. Leslie cruised slowly while Gainer looked for Number 82. On the east side of the boulevard a high, cut-stone wall ran for several long blocks, so he concentrated on the west side. There was Number 115 and Number 103 and after a short ways, Number 83. Next door to 83 was Number 81.

  Where the hell was 82?

  There was no 82.

  Seemed that Rodger’s man at the consulate had come up wrong.

  “What’s that over there?” Gainer wondered aloud as he looked across the boulevard.

  Leslie made a U-turn over to where the high, neatly masoned stone wall gave way to a pair of square columns and a grillwork gate heavily chained and padlocked. Immediately beyond the gate was a stone structure that appeared to be an office.

  Chiseled deep into one of the columns were the numerals 82, and beneath that cut in the same manner:

  CIMETIÈRE DE L’EST

  DIT DU PÈRE-LACHAISE

  Gainer sank.

  What it had come down to was a minor league brothel and a graveyard.

  LATER that night, at the house on Avenue Foch, Gainer was again high up on the library ladder.

  Searching for Lord Jim.

  It wasn’t where he thought he’d replaced it and in his frame of mind he blamed the book. It was purposely eluding him, hiding among all its confederates so similarly, smugly leather-bound. To hell with it. He pulled out Camus’s L’Homme Revolte, opened it to any page. A paragraph held him for three sentences before his eyes went over the crease of the binding to Leslie below.

  She was within the central medallion of an eighteenth-century Kashan carpet, seemed to be held afloat by twines of blue flowers. She was wearing a wrap-robe of creamy crêpe de chine bordered in matching maribou. She had nothing else on. The silk tie of the robe had slipped its knot several times until now she was just letting it have its way. There were several books around her, and she was presently so engrossed in a large, thick one that she nearly tipped over her wine glass when she reached for it.

  Gainer asked what was so interesting.

  “I’m boning up on that cemetery,” she said, not realizing the pun. “It was named after the Jesuit priest who served as confessor to Louis quatorze.”

  That really helps, Gainer thought unhappily.

  “Père-Lachaise was opened in 1804. Before that, for eight hundred years, the main cemetery was the Cimetière des Innocents. More than two million people were buried there.

  “Big popular place.”

  “Only two acres, actually. People were buried on top of one another. In stacks thirty feet deep, seven feet above street level. Imagine.”

  Gainer tried. He got World War II concentration camp pictures.

  “The parish of Saint Germain was paid a fee when anyone was buried at Innocents. It was the only holy ground around and they weren’t about to give up their good thing.”

  “Figures.”

  “Then it happened.”

  Gainer’s grunt asked the expected what.

  “Innocents had a big landslide. Two thousand of its corpses crashed through the walls of apartments. That was in 1780, and that was how Père-Lachaise came to be.”

  “I thought you said it was started in 1804.”

  “The French government argued about it for twenty-five years.”

  “Call what’s his name again.”

  “Grocock.”

  “Hard to forget. Call him.”

  “He’ll be calling me. Not to worry.”

  “I still think he’s confused.”

  “I don’t.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Intuition.”

  “Intuition tells a woman she’s right whether she is or not.”

  “What’s that from, the Bible?”

  Gainer reached down and ran the hard edge of the Camus over his shins, left and right several times. His soccer sores were healing and itching.

  Leslie told him: “All kinds of famous people are buried at Père-Lachaise. Even Heloise and Abelard. Lots of artists—Ingres, Corot, Pissarro, Delacroix, Daumier, Seurat, Modigliani. Did you know Modigliani’s mistress killed herself the day after he died? She was buried in Père-Lachaise with him. Her name was Jeanne Hebuterne. She was only twenty-two.”

  Gainer read a few more lines of L’Homme Revoke but couldn’t keep his mind on it. He put it back into its space and reached for his glass of wine that precariously balanced on the top edges of The Memoirs du Marquise de Montespan, which, Gainer thought when he noticed, would have been more suitable for warming brandy.

&
nbsp; “Here’s a map of the place!” Leslie exclaimed, discovering and unfolding it. “Come down and look at it with me.”

  They took the map of Père-Lachaise and another bottle of Chateau Cheval Blanc 1947 to bed with them. It was their third such bottle from Rodger’s cellar since dinner. It got to Gainer, rounded his mood considerably.

  Leslie lay inside his arm. She held up one edge of the map while he held the other so that Père-Lachaise was spread in front of them. According to the map, the cemetery covered forty-three hectares, twenty-five centiares, fifty-six acres, which Gainer converted via acres to an area around a half-mile by a half-mile.

  Leslie traced its outline with a fingernail. “It’s shaped like the head of a man.”

  “Or woman.”

  “Or woman,” she conceded.

  “With a next-to-nothing nose.”

  “No upper teeth.”

  “Pugnacious son of a bitch, the way the lower lip and jaw juts out.” Gainer imitated it.

  Leslie said he didn’t look so tough. She indicated the various ways inside the lower half of the cemetery, the chemins and allées and circulaires. “It’s like a cross-section, and those are veins.”

  “Grocock hasn’t called.”

  “He will.” Leslie pointed to an area marked Number 89. “Oscar Wilde is buried there.”

  Altogether the map showed ninety-seven numbered divisions. An accompanying list indicated by division where the most notable were buried.

  “Sarah Bernhardt is in 44. Where’s 44?”

  Gainer found it for her, told her, “Balzac is in 48.”

  “Know what happened to Oscar Wilde’s monument?” She took a quick gulp of wine, spilled a drop on the linen sheet that spread like a live pink sea creature. “I read about it. His monument is a sculpting of a nude winged sphinx. Two very proper English ladies became so indignant when they saw it, they found a stone and knocked its balls off.”

  “You believe that?”

  “Sounds likely. Seems they were a sizable pair.”

  “The English ladies.”

  “Uh uh. The conservateur of Père-Lachaise retrieved them and used them as a paperweight.”

  “Everything you say is true.” He kissed her as he hadn’t kissed her since Martha’s Vineyard. But he stopped there.

  CHAPTER TEN

  AT eleven Monday morning Gainer and Leslie were at Père-Lachaise.

  They had not heard from Grocock, but rather than wait on edge for his call Gainer decided he might as well follow through on this lead.

  Leslie was more sanguine about it. She was dressed for a cemetery, in a black Giorgio Armani suit, black stockings and black Frizon low-heeled pumps, a white blouse with a high neckline and a square of white silk chiffon flowing from her breast pocket. The jacket of the suit was amply cut and easily accommodated her holstered ASP automatic. The silencer went inside the waistband of her skirt, where the concavity of her backbone left a little room. It was taped there.

  Gainer was also very conservatively dressed and had his ASP harnessed on underneath. For an extra touch Leslie urged him to wear one of Rodger’s hats. A black homburg. Gainer never wore a hat and he especially didn’t want to put his head under one belonging to Rodger—even if it did fit. But he went along with it.

  He brought along the shiny metal container that held the ashes of what had been Norma. With the metal container in the crook of one arm and Leslie holding onto his other, they went in through the main gate of Père-Lachaise and down a wide, smoothly cobbled way. On both sides tall trees stood between impressive-looking private mausoleums that Gainer thought looked like miniature versions of solid old bank buildings. Other people were walking along there with guide maps in hand. Evidently tourists come to hover over fame in its ultimate impotence.

  A sedate sign directed Gainer and Leslie to the Bureau de la Conservateur, which was a small building in keeping with the funerary monuments around it. Inside, a varnished oak counter ran the entire length of the main room. No chairs and a gritty marble floor. Behind the counter was a clerk, a man with a rodentlike face and overgrown sideburns to make up for the absence of hair from his forehead to crown. At the moment he was impatiently explaining to a Polish couple how they could locate the grave of Frederic Chopin.

  Aside, in a low tone, Leslie told Gainer: “Only most of Chopin is buried here. His heart is in Warsaw.”

  Finally, the Polish couple departed.

  Gainer and Leslie faced the clerk, who said the automatic: “Monsieur, madame.”

  “I want to inquire about a place for my sister,” Gainer told him, tapping the crematory container.

  “C’est impossible.”

  The common French reaction. Everything was first of all impossible and, if one accepted that, for the French it avoided all the bother that might otherwise follow.

  “She always wanted to be here, at Père-Lachaise.”

  The clerk shook his head no.

  “Surely—”

  Another no headshake from the clerk, so emphatic it made his mouth flap.

  “Money’s not a concern,” Gainer said.

  The clerk cocked his head, quickly took in the black homburg and the size of the diamond on Leslie’s wedding finger and said: “You must see the conservateur.” He went into an inner office for a moment, returned, lifted away a section of the counter and showed them in.

  The conservateur was standing behind a municipal desk. He was tall, gaunt-featured, about forty. Had sunken eye sockets and a dry, merciless mouth. A very pronounced Adam’s apple.

  Gainer knew immediately that this was one of them. The man locked right into the description. More, Gainer sensed it, as though his hate provided a special antenna. He had the urge to draw the ASP and blow the fucker away. He might have done that if Leslie hadn’t been along, no need to incriminate her to that extent.

  The conservateur introduced himself as Eugene Becque.

  Gainer introduced himself as Mr. Douglas and Leslie as his wife. He placed the can containing Norma’s ashes on Becque’s desk, indicated it with a nod. “My sister.”

  “My condolences,” Becque said.

  Gainer looked at Becque’s hands, and thought what they had done.

  “You wish her remains to be placed here at Père-Lachaise?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your family has a plot here, perhaps?”

  “No.”

  “We have not been accepting ordinary internments for twenty years. It is a matter of space—”

  “James Morrison was buried here in 1971,” Leslie put in.

  “Who?”

  “James Morrison, the musician, one of The Doors.”

  “There are always exceptions, naturally.”

  “This is an exception.”

  “Exceptions are determined by committee.”

  Gainer tried to look past Becque’s eyes, to see the perverse quirk that had brought him to killing Norma.

  What Becque saw in Gainer and Norma was a pair of wealthy foreigners who could provide money for many enjoyable days at Long-champ. He also had another “order” coming up. In London. Between the two he would be able to bet and win heavily. “How much … do you wish your sister here?” he asked.

  “Five thousand. Dollars, of course.”

  Becque shrugged as though he had just been paid a small insult.

  On the wall above his desk was a huge map of Père-Lachaise, showing by name each grave site. A few were marked with red stick-pins.

  “There are certain plots that have gone into default.” Becque removed one of the red stick-pins. “Fees for upkeep have not been paid for as long as ten to twelve years. Most often the reason is a family has ended, there are no survivors to continue a line. It happens.” He replaced the stick-pin.

  Gainer waited.

  “As conservateur, only I know which sites are delinquent. Not even the comptabilité knows, because out of sympathy, of course, I see that the required fees are paid. From my own pocket.”

  Big
-hearted son of a bitch, Gainer thought.

  Becque told him: “It would be a most unusual exception, but perhaps it could be arranged for you to assume responsibility of one of those neglected sites for your sister.”

  “How much?”

  “The site I have in mind is in arrears ten thousand. Cash dollars, of course.”

  “Let’s go have a look at it.”

  “At closing time,” Becque said. “We will have more privacy then. Come back at six o’clock. With the money.”

  THE ten thousand.

  It took Leslie three minutes to withdraw it from the Pickering personal account at the Paris branch of Morgan Guaranty Trust. Gainer was hesitant about her doing that. After all, it was his affair, not hers, and certainly not Rodger’s. Leslie counterreasoned that such a small amount wouldn’t be missed and it could, if Gainer’s conscience was so sensitive, be put back—afterward.

  While there at Place Vendôme they had lunch at the Ritz, did their best not to discuss Becque. By then, it was three o’clock. They drove back to Boulevard de Menilmontant, where they sat at an outside table of a bistro opposite the cemetery. Drank citron pressés. The bistro was called, Mieux Ici Qu’en Face (Better Here Than Across the Way).

  At four they decided to go over into Père-Lachaise and walk around. For one thing, Leslie had learned that Alain Kardec was entombed there and she wanted to see the spot.

  Gainer had never heard of him.

  Kardec, Leslie explained on the way, was practically the pope of spiritualism. He’d done more than anyone to make people realize there were things beyond normal consciousness, such as reincarnation. Also bilocation and contacting those on the other side and all sorts of divining.

  “What’s bilocation?” Gainer asked.

  “Being in two places at the same time.” Said as though he should have known.

  Now that they were deeper in Père-Lachaise they realized what an incredible place it was. The major walkways and most of the small allées that ran from them were vaulted by mature trees. Black walnuts, elms and beeches, chestnuts, sycamores, and cherries transformed the sun into a Pointillism. High, thick hiding places for birds that chattered and sang.