The play ended, the shift was made to comedy, with the exaggerated relief of too-loud laughter. But after the short-lived farce they were back in the land of horror, with a doctor performing surgery on an unanesthetized and well-endowed young woman, tying her wrists to the table, performing an examination that closely resembled a dance of the seven veils, hunching over her fainting body like one of the art gallery’s taxidermy figures …
And again, the hand came to rest on his leg.
This time, he removed it before it could start its progress in the direction of his crotch. He placed it firmly on her skirt, pushing it down in a command.
But as his hand withdrew, she grabbed it, pulling firmly.
He let her.
He was curious, to see how far she might go. Excited, too—even a man long past adolescence had his fantasies—but mostly curious. Not for long: when a girl takes a man’s hand, tucks it under the edge of her skirt, and eases her knees apart—well, there’s not much doubt about what she has in mind.
He was tempted, if for no other reason than it was an experience he was unlikely to have too many times in life. But in the end, before he could learn just how little she was wearing, he pulled his hand away and leaned over against her ear.
“Désolé, chèrie, but you chose the wrong sort of man for this.”
A professional would have picked up on the catch in his breathing, to say nothing of his shifting to get comfortable, and known he was no pansy. But this one just whipped both hands down to tug at her skirt, then stared fixedly at the stage until the end of the play.
When the lights rose, so did she, pushing her way down the row of seats without looking back.
Too bad, really. It had sure helped take his mind off the stuff on the stage.
In the end, there were seven brief plays, beginning and ending with darkness. The gasps and cries of the audience began to sound more like something you’d hear in a bedroom, and indeed, when the lights came up and the attendees spilled out onto rue Chaptal, the coy glances and flushed cheeks more closely resembled the glances of incautious lovers than the appreciation of playgoers.
He’d been to a brothel one time that had a woman happy to push things, a little further than usual. As it turned out, his preference lay elsewhere, but it had been enlightening to see how a touch of pain could spice things up.
This was something, he reflected, that Sarah Grey would not understand.
But Nancy Berger might.
FORTY-ONE
DESPITE A DAY spent with artistic murder and mutilation, Stuyvesant had a lift to his step as he rounded the corner onto the rue Vavin.
Maybe the Grand-Guignol had a point: nothing like a dose of adrenaline and quease to make a man appreciate life’s promises. He was looking forward to a cool shower. He was looking forward to Nancy. He’d even managed to push the worries about Pip and Lulu and a list of vanished women out of his mind for a few minutes at a time—he found himself humming a tune, one of the Cole Porter songs he and Nancy had danced to at Bricktop’s: “Let’s Do It. Let’s Fall in Love.”
“Even educated fleas do it,” he sang under his breath, trotting up the steps.
“Monsieur!” came a voice through the perpetually open door just inside the building’s entrance.
“Bonsoir, Mme. Benoit,” he replied. The old Communite widow was standing just inside her door, so he stepped right up and took her in his arms, dipping and twirling her cautiously around her cluttered sitting room. “Birds do it, bees do it,” he sang.
She giggled like a schoolgirl and batted at his chest until he let her go. “Monsieur, I am too old for such things.”
“I’ve seen your boyfriends, Mme. Benoit. You’re never too old for love. What can I do for you?”
“Un petit-bleu,” she said, patting her hair back into place and giving a lift of the chin to the small table by the door.
Reluctantly, he picked it up. Like a telegram, a petit-bleu was never good news.
It wasn’t. It contained an apology from Nancy: she had a visitor tonight. Maybe later in the week?
He felt his mood deflate like a leaky balloon.
He’d been holding tonight in front of his nose all day, a carrot to get him through the letter to Grey, the conversation with Doucet, the gallery—to say nothing of those damned plays. If he’d known the day was going to end with another frustration, he’d have let that lady play a little more than whoopee on his leg.
Christ. He needed a drink.
“I need a drink, Jimmy.”
The Falstaff was where you went when you wanted a safe drunk. The one-time prizefighter knew how to keep things from getting out of hand without calling the cops, especially when it came to his occasional sparring partners—Charters was small, but quick despite his years out of the ring.
He poured Stuyvesant a generous whisky, then left his hand on the glass as he studied his customer.
“I’ll give you a drink, but that isn’t what you need.”
“You don’t think so?”
“You look like you need to hit something.”
“Are you going to let me have that?”
The barman took his hand away, and Stuyvesant let the booze sear its way down.
But Jimmy was right. Harris Stuyvesant needed to hit someone. If he hung around the Quarter tonight, he’d end up brawling—and risk a very uncomfortable conversation with Sarah’s cop fiancé.
God, what if it’s Hemingway I take a swing at? Be just my luck to walk into him and end up lacing on the gloves. And it’s damned hard work, climbing into a ring with that bastard: can’t let him see you pulling your punches, but if you knock him out, you’d never hear the end of it. So touchy, you’d swear he was five foot rather than six.
He threw some money on the zinc bar, waved his thanks at Jimmy, and took himself down to one of the French gyms to bash the hell out of a bag, first, and a couple of guys, after.
When he went back to the hotel, he was aching pleasantly from fist to knees, and had great hopes for the temptations of his hard bed. He stripped, climbed between the sheets, and switched off the lights. But as the darkness settled in, the room seemed to fill with reproachful ghosts.
FORTY-TWO
MONDAY’S AGGRAVATIONS PROVED nothing compared to Tuesday’s.
Doucet told him that he’d found no incriminating evidence in Didi Moreau’s house: none. Moreau claimed the finger bones had been left in the offerings box at the gate; that he didn’t even know they were fingers.
Doucet hadn’t found the safe-room; Stuyvesant didn’t dare tell him about it.
He loitered on the street outside Man Ray’s studio for two hours before Ray and Lee Miller came out and walked north along Boulevard Raspail to lunch at the Coupole. He settled down across the street at the Rotonde, and thought all was going well until the Miller woman gave him a little wave of the fingers, looking amused.
Since he’d been spotted, Stuyvesant retreated, going back down Raspail to a photographic supply shop he had noticed a few streets over from the Ray studio. He found that, yes, M. Ray shopped there, and that M. Ray was a regular customer of magnesium powder, being a devoté of flash-photography. Stuyvesant then worked the conversation around to the woman Ray had taken up with, agreeing with the shopkeeper that Mme. Miller was indeed une pêche, but he wondered—just wondered—if perhaps M. Ray was taking advantage of her innocence …
The man’s chattiness ceased; in thirty seconds, Stuyvesant was out on the street.
He then went to see if Dominic Charmentier might be taking a long breakfast at his customary café. He wasn’t sure if he planned on talking with him or just pounding him one, but in either case, he did not get the chance. Rounding the corner, he saw the man standing farther down the street, his hand raised to summon a taxi.
At his side was Sarah Grey; she was laughing as he helped her into the cab.
Which left Nancy Berger. Stuyvesant went back and forth over how best to approach her before finally deciding that showing
up at her door while she was occupied with her damned visitor carried too great a risk of rejection, so he telephoned instead.
At the start of the call she sounded cross; at the end, she had gone coy. She still wouldn’t see him.
And to top the day off, he was stalking past the crowded Dôme terrace on his way to a less-populated brasserie, when what should he hear but the commanding tones of Ernest Hemingway, demanding that Stuyvesant join his coterie.
The cocky writer spent the whole evening crowing about his financial security and pecking verbally at Harris Stuyvesant.
And as he left the bar, the skies opened, turning Harris Stuyvesant’s new suit and Panama hat to sodden burlap.
FORTY-THREE
WEDNESDAY WAS NO better.
In the morning, it rained. Why had he ever complained about the summer?
In the afternoon, he received a letter from Pip’s mother that was so determinedly chipper it made him want to put his gun to his head.
And why the hell hadn’t he heard from Bennett Grey?
FORTY-FOUR
A CONVERSATION:
“I don’t suppose there’s been any reaction from Cornwall?”
“Captain Grey? No, sir.”
“I hope it wasn’t a mistake, letting him have that letter.”
“Sir, I don’t understand why we didn’t open it first.”
“He’d have known.”
“Sir, we could have done it so he’d have been unaware.”
“Anyone else, maybe, but not Grey. Nobody believes how much he sees.”
“Even if that were the case, sir, what would it matter?”
“Because we need him, damn it—and we need him friendly, which he wouldn’t be if he suspected interference. We’re lucky he didn’t raise holy hell last week over that bloody photographer of yours.”
“You honestly think he spotted him, sir?”
“I know he did. Just like he’d spot it if anyone but the postman touched that bloody letter. He’d have known in a flash. You think I’m exaggerating.”
“Sir, I—”
“Never mind. Just follow your orders, and keep everyone away from him except the men with the binoculars. He knows about them, he puts up with them, but that’s it.”
“If you say so, sir.”
“A bloody pain, is what he is. Any rate, I’m off, wake me if the little prick does anything.”
“Sleep well, sir.”
“Not bloody likely!”
FORTY-FIVE
WEDNESDAY EVENING, THE full moon began to push through clouds above the City of Light. It nosed into the city’s dark corners, danced on the Seine, played with the spires of stone and steel. Caused the blood to stir in reply.
Harris Stuyvesant bathed and shaved and dressed with care, making up for the shortcomings of his evening suit by impeccable grooming. He checked his nails and teeth, retied his bow tie, buffed his polished shoes, and looked at the man standing in the mirror.
With luck, no one would mistake him for one of the waiters.
He walked. Down through Montparnasse, heels clicking on the pavement, through the swirls of pedestrians feeling the moon in their bones, he thought about women.
Nancy Berger, who had stepped away from him.
Sarah Grey, who had not—or, not entirely.
Pip Crosby, who had disappeared from life. Poor scarred girl, turning a pretty face to the world, putting on a brave front, always aware—every instant, she must’ve been—of the slick, burned skin that tugged at her side.
And Lulu. Jesus: how can you still not know her last name? All he knew about her was that she’d been warm and spontaneous and fun, exactly what he’d needed after the failures of Berlin. And that now she was dead, leaving two small children and a mother behind.
Pip and Lulu: two women with nothing in common except taking one look at his sorry face and responding with bounce and willingness. He had spent days with both of them and never bothered to look under the surface. Never noticed any unhappiness either might have. Given only fleeting thought to how much trouble they’d been through.
And the other thing they had in common: both were dead. Probably. But why? Lulu might have picked up the wrong man, or crossed one somehow, but what about Pip? If her death was tied to those insane Displays, then how? Even Moreau wasn’t nutty enough to kill a girl in order to harvest her bones.
Was he?
Not many would be.
Unless … could the process itself be the goal? What if the corruption of death was not the means of the art, but the ends: the art itself?
If an amputated hand could be tossed onto the pavement for actors to prod, if a signed urinal or a line of tacks glued on an iron were considered art, when a ballet film opened with rooftop artillery and boxing gloves, who was to say that there weren’t deranged art lovers out there who considered a rotting body the ultimate in avant-garde creativity?
If so, he’d like the chance to make the artist into an artwork of his own.
He walked under the brilliant moon towards the Place D’Enfer, aware of the bones of Paris beneath his feet. Across from the Métro station he turned east, passing the café where he had jousted with Le Comte, and in a minute entered the man’s gates.
The hell-mouth façade and the flaming torches were gone, leaving behind a classical Paris town house attended by mere uniformed footmen—one of whom Stuyvesant recognized by his yellow hair as the tailed demon with the trident.
No one threatened to sweep him inside with a scythe or a bony arm.
Inside the door, six attractive women wearing black evening dresses waited, only their lack of jewels and bare hands suggesting that they were not guests who’d made the faux pas of shopping at the same couturier. One of them took his hat, the next his coat, and a third ushered him to a door opposite the little elevator that had taken guests upwards for the other party.
Inside the door was a narrow but brightly-lit spiral stairway, circling upwards to the right and down to the left: stairs that explained the fourth door in the room with the clock. Another young lady stood two steps above the landing, gesturing for him to descend.
Well, Sarah had said there would be catacombs.
He started down the worn stone steps. They were similar to those he’d seen in the public catacombs. Personally, he’d found the sewers up near the Place de la Concorde a more admirable civic effort. And if it was philosophizing a person was after—well, there was nothing like a well-polished, twenty-foot-wide sewer mains to encourage reflections on mortality.
But evidently, Dominic Charmentier was a man for the catacombs, not the sewers. He seemed even to have his own entrance. Had young Dominic grown up in this house, with the bones of six million fellow citizens beneath his feet?
Well below. He’d forgotten how deep the quarries were. These steps just kept winding down, and down, until the rhythm of descent became disorienting. The electric lights strung on the outside curve, one bulb every four steps, occasionally dimmed, but they did not quite go out. And if they did, as one of Charmentier’s tricks, he had his lighter in his pocket.
He went on. He was far from alone—voices of other guests echoed along the stairway, along with bursts of crowd noises and music from below as an unseen door opened, then drifted shut—but all he saw was an endless series of stone steps unreeling ahead of him, a hand-rail to his right, and the string of lights above it.
He must have descended two hundred steps before one tread did not give way to another. When he reached the bottom, the abrupt cessation of step-step-step made him stumble.
The pair of black-gowned girls waiting at an open set of doors showed neither surprise nor alarm at his entrance: no doubt they had stood there all night watching guests reach the bottom on uncertain feet. He gave the nearest a smile, passed through the doorway …
The smile faded as he saw what lay beyond.
Bones. Off to the left in an inexorable curve, and to the right with a sharper turn half-hidden by a decorative chest-high l
ocker, he was in a world of bones, polished and lovingly arranged. The nearest were femurs, the large double-knobs of their lower ends forming the background, with a double-chevron of lines made of face-forward skulls alternating with lengthwise tibias. The wall behind him was also bones, only here the chevron had been softened into a wave, with the portions above and below the undulations filled with the blunt upper ends of ten thousand tibias; the middle section was made of either pelvises or shoulder blades, arranged to emphasize the up-and-down of the wave.
Here lies the empire of the dead.
The art of death. He wondered how the people whose bones these were would have reacted, had you told them where they would end up.
Suddenly, chaotic life invaded the ossuary quiet. The attendant of the inner door laid hands on a worn brass handle and pulled the massive block of time-blackened wood open, allowing the cacophony of a party to wash across the placid bones. He settled his shoulders inside his suit, and gave a last glance down the corridor before obediently stepping through.
It was a cavern, half again as long as it was wide. Its ceiling, as much as fifteen feet in the center, rested on stone pillars left behind by quarry-men. Other bits of stone, waist-height, protruded from the walls holding tall church candles on them, adding an unexpected honey aroma to the smells of perfume and gin and cigarettes. The room was already crowded, despite his early arrival, with a hundred or so people happily enjoying the unusual venue.
As he stepped into the artificial cave, a full glass was pressed into his hand and a series of things hit his eye: the moon, the fog, and the Lord of Death.
The moon was full and somewhat larger than life, painted on the roof of the cave along with a velvety black sky and an expanse of stars. The fog covered the floor of the cavern, a weird, low-lying mist that swirled around the ankles of the partygoers. As a knot of guests on the other side of the room unraveled and moved away, he traced the phenomenon to its source: a broad silver tureen atop a waist-high protrusion of stone, boiling over like an untended pot, except cold and insubstantial.
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