by Rhys Bowen
“Do not listen to them, madame,” Maxim said. “You come to see for yourself. I go first to make sure that Jojo is dressed properly for your visit.”
He ran up the stairs. I looked around at the group. “I take it that Jojo is his mistress?”
“And very possessive he is about her too,” the fat one replied. “Won’t let a man near her. Won’t let her out alone. Of course, she’s very young and beautiful. A dangerous combination with so many wolves like us around.”
I thanked them for their help then followed Maxim up the stairs back to the top floor. I waited in the hallway, looking across at another door on which was scrawled, in blue chalk Au rendezvous des poètes (“The meeting place of poets”) and realized I could see how Sid and Gus had been excited to come to a city like this, where art and poetry and the bohemian lifestyle were not frowned upon.
“Please enter, madame.” Maxim opened a door behind me and I went into one of the sorriest rooms I’d ever seen. I had grown up in an Irish peasant’s cottage. Our life had been simple in the extreme but we had a good stove, the pots were polished sparkling clean, our battered furniture was also polished and decorated with pillows made from scraps. In short it was a friendly, homey sort of place. This room was barely furnished, with no adornments. The floor was bare, with uneven boards, and in the far corner was an unmade iron bedstead. The only saving grace was a window that looked out across the city, letting light stream in. Under the window was a table with half a loaf of dark bread, next to a palette of paints, a brush still lying across it. A canvas on an easel still glistened with wet paint. There was no sign of the mysterious Jojo. Maxim had spirited her away.
“Madame. Please sit.” He motioned to a wobbly cane chair. “I would offer you some tea, but alas I have no spirit for my little stove. As you can see our life here is … how you say … simple?”
I nodded.
“But if I sell a painting soon, all will be well. Your friend, Mademoiselle Goldfarb, she promises to take some of my paintings back to New York when she departs. She is very kind and very rich, no?”
I was about to say she wasn’t very rich, just comfortably situated, then I realized that to Maxim she would appear to be so. As he spoke I was studying the paintings tacked to the walls. The man downstairs was right—they were gloomy in the extreme. Great gashes of dark colors, mouths open in screams, burning houses, strange flying figures. They were the stuff of nightmare.
“It was a lucky day that we met at the poetry reading, don’t you think? Imagine—Miss Goldfarb searches the whole of Paris for her cousins and doesn’t find them, and then we meet by chance.”
I was still examining the bleakness of the studio. “What about the rest of your family?” I asked. “Are they not still in Paris?”
“All dead.” He sighed. “My parents died when I was a child. I ended up in the orphanage. Not a pleasant place.”
“I’m so sorry. That’s why you paint such sad scenes.”
“I have seen much sadness. Family is important, don’t you think? Family is the most important thing in the world.”
“I suppose it is. I too have no family but my husband and child, so I know how it feels.”
He nodded. “I am so happy to find a cousin. Mademoiselle Goldfarb tells me that my family in New York has done well. I am glad for them.”
“Yes, I believe they have prospered. Sid doesn’t talk about them much. They don’t approve of her lifestyle.”
“Ah.” He nodded. “She too has her problems, then. Life always makes problems, no?”
“So how exactly are you related to her?” I asked.
“My mother, she was also from the family Goldfarb. She told me two brothers left Poland. One went to America, one to Paris.”
“So your grandfathers were brothers?”
“So it seems. So tell me—what do you think of my art?”
“It’s striking,” I said tactfully. “Different.”
“Picasso says it shows genius, and Picasso he is a genius himself. He says the world is not ready for us yet. And that is true. Most people want pretty pictures on their walls. I too can paint pretty pictures if I have to. But I must paint where my soul is.” And he thumped his chest. A most dramatic young man.
“You should paint the occasional pretty picture to pay the rent,” I said. “Every artist has to compromise.”
“I try this. Believe me, I do try this, but it leads only to destruction. So you will buy a painting?”
I gave an embarrassed smile. “I’m afraid I’m not rich like my friends. I’m the wife of a poor policeman.”
“No? A policeman? In America?”
“In New York.”
“Ah, I see.” He nodded. “So you do not come to Paris to buy paintings.”
“No. Actually I came to find you because I’m worried about Miss Goldfarb and Miss Walcott.”
“Worried, why?”
“They’ve vanished. I arrived in Paris, expecting to stay with them and they are not at their apartment. Nobody knows where they have gone. Have you seen them recently? Have they said anything to you about leaving the city?”
Those sorrowful dark eyes turned to me. “No. I know nothing that explains this. Last time I saw them they were happy. The artist lady hopes for one of her paintings to be in the big exhibition. She was working to complete a new canvas. Why should they leave Paris at such a moment? Unless they have been taken ill, do you think?”
“Surely even from a hospital bed they could write to me, or get someone to write to me. And their landlady would know. And is it likely that they are both taken ill at the same time?”
“They could both have eaten bad food and been poisoned. There are bad oysters in the city, so I am told. Many people are sick. Some die.”
My stomach lurched. Food poisoning. Why hadn’t I thought of that? But surely if one has food poisoning it usually strikes at home, several hours after the meal. Wouldn’t the landlady have been consulted about which hospital or doctor they should go to? Still, it was a possibility I hadn’t considered and it gave me a new area to search.
I stood up from the rickety chair. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Noah. I must go. I have left my child with a local woman. I wish you luck with your painting.”
“Thank you.” He took my hand. “And I wish you good fortune in your search for your friends. I pray that nothing happens to them. I could not bear to lose my newly found cousin. I too will ask and search for them everywhere most diligently.”
As I left Le Bateau-Lavoir I sensed, rather than saw, a small dark figure slip in through the front door. So Jojo, the mistress, had been hiding outside until I left. Obviously he didn’t want to give a bad impression to a potential buyer from America.
Twenty-one
An attractive boy, I thought as I picked my way down the flights of steps back to the Rue des Martyrs. Dashing and magnetic, if a little on the tragic side. I could see why Sid was excited to have discovered this long-lost cousin. Perhaps she’d take him back to New York with her and introduce him to her family, if … And I broke off the thought at that if. If she was still in Paris and was all right. I knew I’d have to visit the hospitals and the morgue and I dreaded the thought of it.
I retrieved Liam, clearly not anxious to leave Madeleine, who had now introduced him to the delights of French pastries, and stopped to pick up supplies for our evening meal before I carried him back across the street. As I opened the front door Madame Hetreau darted out of her hiding place—the spider once more catching the fly.
“Ah. So you return,” she said. “You have been enjoying yourself, I suppose. They tell me you leave your child with the baker’s wife and you’re off on your own chatting with men in cafés.”
I bristled at this suggestion that I was ignoring my child because I was off having a good time, but I controlled my voice before I said, “Because I’ve been searching for Miss Goldfarb and Miss Walcott, naturally, and I couldn’t take a child with me all over Paris.” Luckily my rusty Frenc
h had improved during two days of speaking it constantly so that I no longer had to search for words and the sentence came out with the right amount of force.
She recoiled a little at this. “And you still haven’t found them, I take it.”
“Unfortunately no. Miss Goldfarb’s cousin suggested that they might have taken ill after eating bad food—oysters, maybe.”
“I wouldn’t know,” she shrugged, giving me the impression that she wouldn’t be concerned if they had died of bubonic plague as long as it didn’t in any way affect her.
“I can’t think of any other reason that they would have vanished leaving no word for me,” I said. “So I’m afraid my next task will be to visit the hospitals and morgues in the city. Perhaps you can suggest where I should start if my friends were taken ill in this place.”
“I think I would have heard if your friends came down with poisoning,” she said. “And I heard nothing. One minute they were here and the next they were gone. Me, I still think they decided to take a jaunt and left the city. Perhaps they decided to return to New York.”
“Not leaving all their clothing behind.”
Liam squirmed and I attempted to hang onto the bag of groceries. “I must take him upstairs. He’s getting heavy.”
As I turned away she called after me. “One minute, madame. I believe a postcard might have come for you.” She reached into Sid and Gus’s mail slot and held it out to me. “I can think of no one else to whom this might apply.”
I put down the bag of groceries and took it from her. The front was a painting of a woman drinking tea. I turned it over. It was addressed in an elegant hand I didn’t recognize. I was able to translate that it was addressed “To the Lady from New York staying at 35 Rue des Martyrs.…”
The message area was left blank.
I looked up, puzzled, to see Madame Hetreau staring at me. “Is it from the American ladies?”
“No,” I said. “I’ve no idea who it is from. I don’t recognize the writing. And there’s no message. What can it mean? Did it arrive today?”
“This morning. Right after you went out.”
I held it out to her. “You’ve seen it—why would someone send me a blank postcard?”
“I have no idea, madame.”
Liam made a grab for it, and I had to hang onto him lest he tumble from my arms. “I have to take him upstairs,” I said. “Thank you for alerting me to the postcard.”
She almost hadn’t, I thought as I trudged up the stairs. She’d only handed it to me as an afterthought. Was she going to leave it hidden in the mail slot and her conscience finally got the better of her, or had she genuinely forgotten about it? As soon as I entered the apartment I put Liam in his crib, protesting loudly, and sat on the bed, turning the postcard over in my hands. Who could have known I was here and sent me a postcard? And if someone had bothered to do so, why was there no message on it?
I looked at the picture on the front again. An attractive painting in the Impressionist style of a woman drinking tea. That was all. I carried it over to the window and stared at both sides in the light, wondering if there might be some kind of hidden message. But there was none. “To the Lady from New York” … the person who had written this didn’t even know my name. Unless “the Lady from New York” wasn’t intended for me at all, but for either Sid or Gus. Perhaps I was hoping for too much from this postcard, thinking it might be some kind of message for me. Perhaps the simple explanation was that Gus had admired a painting. Someone she had been chatting with had seen a postcard with a rendition of this painting on it and sent it to her as a kindly gesture.
I sighed, put it down on the bed, and went into the kitchen to prepare an evening meal for us. I tried to put it from my mind, but it was the first communication of any sort I had received, even if it made no sense to me. A woman drinking tea from an elegant little cup. Were Sid and Gus in some kind of danger? Did they want me to meet them at a tea salon? Might they have left a message for me there?
I remembered the worrying thought that had occurred to me earlier—that the Cosa Nostra gang in New York had somehow managed to find out I was coming to Paris and had harmed or kidnapped my friends. But then why leave me unharmed, walking around the city for three days? Nothing had made sense since I arrived in Paris. Nobody in the artistic community seemed to have seen Sid and Gus recently. Their cousins were happily going about their business. And yet someone had murdered a fellow artist and I had come to not believe in coincidence. Tomorrow I would make a list of tearooms in Paris and see if that produced any result.
Liam had a bad night. I suspect his stomach could not handle the amount of food that Madeleine had tried to put into him. I took him into bed with me, lying him on my own stomach and feeling the comforting warmth of his body against mine. I longed for Daniel and his arms around me. How soon could I hope for a letter from him, I wondered. I lay there, listening to the noises of the street below—laughter, shouts, singing. It sounded as if the rest of the world was having a good time in Paris. Eventually I drifted off to sleep and dreamed of the woman in the painting. “Really it’s quite obvious, isn’t it?” she said to me and put down her teacup with a bang.
I awoke, realizing that the bang that had woken me had been a shot fired in the street. I laid the sleeping Liam beside me and went over to the window. I opened the shutter but heard nothing more. I remembered all the talk of duels and Picasso saying that he hadn’t shot his pistol for days. This was a violent city. Lots of things could go wrong here. I tried to fall back to sleep, wondering what the woman in my dream had meant when she said it was quite obvious.
The next morning I awoke with a headache that thundery weather and lack of sleep would always bring on in me. Liam seemed quite recovered from his fretful night and was raring to go. I nursed him, fed him farina for his breakfast, and then made myself a boiled egg with yesterday’s stale bread. I wasn’t going down all those stairs just to get a fresh loaf. Then when we were both washed and dressed I took Liam back to the bakery.
“If I am imposing on you too much, please tell me,” I said.
Madeleine looked amused. “Too much? Madame Sullivan, I grew up looking after seven younger brothers and sisters and helping out on the farm. Two small children and one small apartment seems like a holiday for me. Besides, I like to play with your son. My own baby is still too small. All he wants to do is eat and sleep. Your boy makes me laugh.”
So I left him with a clear conscience, knowing that Madame Hetreau would probably be gossiping again with the neighbors about the flighty woman from America who was off gallivanting and leaving her baby to strangers. I had asked the baker whether there might be any tearooms in the neighborhood. He mentioned a couple of cafés that served tea. “But not exactly tea salons, Madame. For those you must go to the better arondissements—the first and the sixth. That is where people do not have to work hard all day and have time to take tea with their friends,” he said.
I thanked him and took the Métro back to the city center. I remembered Ellie mentioning a teahouse on the Rue de Rivoli, so that seemed like a good place to start. I walked the length of the colonnade glancing into all the little shops and cafés until I finally found an attractive establishment called Angelina. It did look very inviting with its display of exquisite pastries and little marble tables. I stood hesitating in the doorway, wondering what to say that would not sound completely mad, when I heard voices echoing from the arched ceiling of the colonnade.
“Really, Mother. You can’t want tea at this hour. I promised Porky that we’d meet him at the Louvre.” And Justin Hartley and his family were coming toward me, only a few steps away. I couldn’t think what to do. If I ran on ahead I would surely be noticed. If I went into the tea shop their mother might well prevail and follow me inside.
“Madame wishes a table?” A chubby little man with an impressive mustache appeared at my shoulder and literally escorted me inside. Out of the corner of my eye I watched Justin and his family go past. So he had
gotten his way again. For once I was grateful. I took the chair the patron had pulled up for me and sat. This was clearly going to be an extravagance, especially for one who has no idea how long her money has to last, but I really couldn’t back out without looking an awful fool, and risk another encounter with the Hartleys. I ordered a pot of tea and the smallest pastry I could find. The café owner joked, “Ah, madame wishes to preserve her excellent figure,” and I didn’t contradict him. When he brought the tea I asked, “I understand that two friends of mine, American ladies, like to frequent this tea salon. I had hoped to run into them here. One of them wears her hair cut short like this. Dark hair. Very striking. You’d remember her.”
He frowned. “No, madame. You must have confused us with another establishment. I do not recall these ladies coming in here.”
“Oh, dear. I am sorry. I wonder which other tearoom they might have meant?”
“Perhaps you are thinking of Ladurée on the Rue Royale,” he said. “Or maybe Maison Cador on the other bank of the river in Saint Germain. They are both fine places, in their way.” He shrugged as if it was almost an insult to compare them to this queen of establishments.
I sat, enjoying every sip of the tea. Being raised in Ireland tea was as familiar to me as mother’s milk and I still hadn’t learned to fully appreciate the coffee that Daniel and Sid and Gus preferred. The little pastry melted in my mouth. Quite heavenly, as Ellie had said. But when I received the bill I realized that I must not be trapped into taking tea at the other establishments. I thanked the proprietor and made my way first to Ladurée and then across the Seine to the Left Bank where I found the Maison Cador. Neither of these teahouses remembered seeing Sid and Gus. I stood for a long while outside each of them, looking around for any kind of clue. The trouble was that I didn’t know what I was looking for.
By the end of the day I had covered every notable tea salon in the city and was none the wiser. If Sid and Gus wanted to convey a message to me from a blank postcard and a picture of a woman drinking tea, they had not succeeded. I had to conclude that the postcard was meant for one of them and had no hidden meaning. I retrieved Liam, bought some vegetables and a neck bone to make soup and went back to number 35. I braced myself for Madame Hetreau’s caustic comments as I came into the front hallway and steeled myself to tackle the stairs. I had already gone up the first three or four before a voice behind me called, “Madame. One moment. I believe I have something else that might be for you.” And she held out another postcard.