The Bones of Paris

by Laurie R. King

  So he took the Métro back across the river and went to the Dôme for a belated lunch. Kiki was there again, her painted-on eyebrows heavy today, and uneven, with the lids an odd yellow-green. She waved a flirtatious hand, and although Stuyvesant had planned on eating a sandwich at the counter, he decided he could do with something more substantial. And certainly she would offer a welcome distraction from thought.

  He kissed her cheek, and this time let her order an admirer to give up his chair. Not until he sat did he realize how tired he was.

  His drink came faster than his food, but he refused a second: tonight, facing Sarah Grey, was no time to get sloppy. When his steak frites came, he ate quickly, listening with half an ear to the conversation around him.

  It was the talk of modern Montparnasse: the hangers-on, the painters who rarely finished a canvas, the writers whose only publishing history was in one of the small literary journals that paid in copies. Five years ago, this table might still have held economic failures, but it would have been bristling with creativity. All these boys could do was snipe at their betters and complain of their tight-fisted parents.

  Halfway through his steak, the talk circled around to Man Ray, which might have surprised him—most women considered former paramours a sensitive topic—had he not known Kiki. Instead, he wouldn’t be surprised if she’d brought it up herself, for a chance to declaim her complete lack of interest, her pity for the American replacement, and her detailed predictions of abuse and catastrophe.

  “You wait,” she told her fervent audience. “M. Ray, il a des mauvaises habitudes. In no time at all, l’Américaine will bear the scars of his depravity.”

  Stuyvesant wondered where she had picked up that particular English phrase, since her English tended towards the monosyllabic and inadvertently spoonerist. But the distressed exclamations of the young men made her preen, and he smiled as he ran the last of the frites through the juice on his plate.

  Kiki saw his expression, and bristled. “Est-çe que tu ris de moi, M. ’Arris?”

  “No, no,” he protested. “I wasn’t laughing at you, I was thinking of something else. I’m very sorry, Kiki mon amour.” He’d seen Kiki assault a man with a wine bottle, and although she wasn’t that boozed up now, she still had a quick temper.

  But her feathers went down slowly, and only after she had informed everyone in hearing what a terrible man M. Ray was, and that any girl with less fortitude than Kiki of Montparnasse was at a grave risk of coming to harm.

  “You should watch that, Kiki,” he warned as he signaled the waiter for l’addition. “Ray could sue you for defamation of character.”

  “Is it defamation if it is true?” she shouted. “He comes here, he sleeps with the beautiful women, he takes the pictures and gets rich, he says rude things about the French—yes, he does! And if he does some wicked thing, pouf! He is l’artiste, he is expected to make the bad comportement, to make dark things with women, and no one has a soupçonne que lui.”

  “Oh, come on, Kiki, what is there to suspect the man of?” he chided, counting out money into the saucer. “Having the ego of an elephant? When Man Ray is long forgotten, Paris will still be singing the praises of Kiki of Montparnasse.”

  She didn’t know whether to be offended or pleased, but Stuyvesant took advantage of her silence to get to his feet. He bent, kissing her cheek again. “Sweetheart, you are the queen.”

  That, she understood. She glowed in pleasure, while around her the courtiers seized her discarded accusations to play with them.

  “—dark photographs, I know what she means.”

  “—really disgusting thing to Maisie the other night, when all she wanted was to have him take a snapshot with her own camera.”

  “—suppose he had anything to do with that girl who went missing?”

  “Girls go missing all the time. Boys, too.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “—about Lulu, poor thing? She was only in here the other night.”

  Stuyvesant’s head snapped around, finding himself staring down at one of Kiki’s young artists with scarcely enough facial hair for a mustache. “What did you say?”

  The boy’s eyes went wide, and Stuyvesant forced his shoulders to relax, pasting a smile on his mouth. “Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you. I just heard you say something about Lulu, wondered what she was up to.”

  “She was shot.”

  The crowded terrace became very silent and still, although no one but Stuyvesant appeared to notice: waiters in slow motion delivered trays; mouths gaped open, then drew shut. Exactly the sensation that followed the zip of an unexpected bullet overhead: an infinitely heavy dive for cover, muffled shouts, lethargic return of fire …

  He blinked, and the activity around him started up again. He might as well have been sitting in the dark theater watching characters poke at an amputated hand.

  He cleared his throat. “Shot.”

  “Yes. She’s dead, poor thing. On Tuesday night.”

  “But I just—” With a huge effort, Stuyvesant caught the words back.

  The boy nodded. “I know, she was just in here the other night, so happy and alive. What will her little boy do now?”

  “She … she had a child?”

  “Two. Hard to imagine a woman like that as a mother, isn’t it?”

  A bearded Jesus in a faded pink beret spoke up. “So irresponsible. The kiddies were left alone half the time.”

  “No,” a third boy objected. “They all lived with the grandmother, so whenever she got arrested or stayed the night with someone, the kids barely noticed.”

  “Sounds like you knew her really well,” the pink beret mocked.

  “We were modeling together, one day, and we got to talking. She was sweet, really.”

  “She was a whore, or as good as.”

  The sparse mustache objected before Stuyvesant had to. “Hey, don’t insult a poor dead woman.”

  Kiki had permitted the conversation to go on without her long enough. “She picked up the wrong man, it sounds like.”

  “Hey, we ought to start up a donation, don’t you think?” The mustached boy glanced at his companions, who nodded their agreement. “Shall we put you down for a contribution, Mr.…?”

  He stood up and pushed his way out of the café, onto the street, away from the crowds. In the rue Vavin, he leaned up against a wall and lit a cigarette with shaking hands.

  Jesus Christ: shot. Lulu! Hours after he’d last bedded her, she was dead in … where? A bar? Someone’s bedroom? Why hadn’t he asked?

  He hadn’t asked because he didn’t want anyone to see he cared. Didn’t want anyone to put together a dead Lulu with an interested American. He’d met her on Saturday night at the Coupole, one of hundreds of drinkers, and they’d gone back to the hotel. Sunday they spent together, in and out of bed. Monday they might have been seen, but it was late when they’d met at the Coupole (after putting her kids to bed? Oh, Christ) and they hadn’t stayed there long.

  There was no way he could go to the police. And in any event, why? He was a cop himself—near enough—and he was certain that nothing had happened during his hours with Lulu that would give any hint of her killer: she’d mentioned no names, said hello to no friends, told him no secrets. Going to the flics would just waste their time.

  Besides which, even if they didn’t lock him up while they thought things over, the French had a bad habit of throwing troublesome foreigners out of the country. You disrupt the neighbors, you’re invited to leave. You go to the wrong political demonstration, sign the wrong manifesto, you’re shown the door.

  And he couldn’t leave France, not yet. Not only because he hadn’t found Pip Crosby, but he was also on the brink of seeing Sarah Grey. He’d waited three years: he wasn’t going to leave her with the image of him drunkenly leaning on Nancy Berger.

  He stood away from the wall, dropped his cigarette to the street. Best to act as if nothing had happened. Go to your party, work your case. If accused with having
spent three nights with the woman (Would they believe he had no idea of her last name?), he’d have to put on a look of shock at the news: Lulu? Dead?

  Easy enough: just remember how he’d felt on the Dôme terrace.

  He put back his shoulders and walked down rue Vavin, turning into little rue Colle and tipping his hat at the flower seller.

  His confident plan lasted precisely three steps inside the hotel’s entranceway.

  “M. Stuyvesant!”

  “Bonjour, Mme. Benoit.”

  “La police était ici.”

  How often could a man have the breath knocked out of him before his lungs ceased to work? Stuyvesant’s raised foot came down, very slowly.

  The police. Were here. Looking for that wrong man Lulu had picked up? Take a deep breath: be casual, even if the words squeak a little. “Oui? Je travaille avec un Inspecteur Doucet—c’était lui?” I’m working with Doucet, was it him?

  “Non, c’était le gendarme du quartier.”

  Shit. The local cop. But that was good, wasn’t it? If they were after him for Lulu, they’d have sent more muscle than a single gendarme. Maybe Bricky had reported him for the fight. Shit again—he’d be out of the country on the next boat.

  Do not panic. Take a breath.

  “Vraiment? Huh. Que voulait-il?”

  “Des documents volés.”

  Stolen documents? Why would a local cop be looking for stolen documents in his hotel room? But Mme. Benoit didn’t know, and she wasn’t about to throw his things onto the street because of some cop. If anything, the pointless accusation endeared him to her Parisian heart.

  And it had been pointless. She’d shown the guy into Stuyvesant’s room herself, kept her eye pinned on him lest he steal something—or plant it. And when he’d found nothing, she’d locked the door again and escorted him out onto the rue Colle. The triumph of la Révolution beamed from her wrinkled face.

  Stuyvesant summoned the appropriate enthusiasm. “Mon héroïne!” He seized her gnarled hand to kiss the age-spotted skin, causing her to titter like a girl.

  “Vous êtes si charmeur, Monsieur!”

  “I save my charms for you, Madame.”

  “Oh? Et la jeune fille blonde que j’ai vu dans l’escalier le mardi?” She shook a finger at him, and although it had been Monday, not Tuesday, that Lulu had last come up the stairs, he did not want to distress the old woman by pointing out her failing memory.

  “Elle n’est seulement un substitute pour vous, Madame.”

  She slapped his head, then surprised him by putting her hands against his ears and pulling him down for a kiss on his cheek, so soft it felt like being kissed by a cloud.

  He forced his feet up the stairs at a more carefree pace than he felt. In his room, he closed the door, turned the lock, set his back against it—and let the bewilderment take him.

  Sure enough, the room had been searched: rumpled bedding, a drawer slightly ajar, wardrobe door hanging open, Kiki’s book to one side of the brown paper where he’d left it.

  At least the flic hadn’t looked under the carpet. Hadn’t found the loose floorboard, the lock picks, the revolver.

  He pulled out the hard little desk chair and sat down. After a while, he opened the drawer where he kept the bottle, and took a swallow, then another.

  Jesus. First Lulu, then this.

  Tuesday night, the kid had told him. Down in Denfert-Rochereau, where a big American had been sitting and smoking a cigarette for any insomniac resident.

  Had anyone heard him come in that night? Yeah—that bald guy, coming out of Anouk’s for a piss. She probably didn’t even know his name.

  Why was it a person only had alibis for when he didn’t need them?

  Lulu wasn’t the first person he knew to die violently, but he didn’t think he’d ever been sleeping with one a few hours beforehand. “Ferme les rideaux putain!” she’d grumbled at him. Shut the whoring curtains? Shut the curtains, whore? He couldn’t ask her now—and what was he doing wondering about that?

  God he was tired. Two mornings ago, she’d told him to shut the curtains and curled up against his knee, inviting him back between the sheets. And two nights ago somebody had set a gun to her head—or maybe not her head. How could he know? Did it matter?

  He had to stop thinking about it. Nothing to do with him, and nothing he could do about it, anyway. He had enough of a job searching for a twenty-two-year-old American, without stopping to hunt down the killer of a brass-blonde Parisienne in her thirties, or forties. That was for the cops. His only responsibility was to make sure they didn’t put him in the frame for it.

  And bless Mme. Benoit in all her crusty Commune-ism. He should buy her something extravagant. Wait a few days first, then buy it. Did she like chocolates?

  What the hell had the search been about? What documents could Harris Stuyvesant have other than his own identité? Or had Mme. Benoit got that wrong, too? Maybe Doucet had sent a flic down for something—any other letters from Uncle Crosby perhaps—and the cop had misunderstood the order? Or the concierge had misunderstood the message?

  It made no sense.

  Worst of all, he couldn’t think how he should respond. Would an innocent man phone up Doucet and shout at him? Would he howl in the street? Shrug and go about his way?

  He didn’t know. It had been too long since Harris Stuyvesant had been an innocent man.

  TWENTY-SIX

  THE BONES OF Paris are beautiful.

  At the end of the eighteenth century, two events coincided to make them so. In 1774, a long stretch of the rue d’Enfer simply opened from below, tugging in paving stones, houses, and residents, leaving a gaping chasm. A commission was ordered. The Inspector General of Mines mapped out hundreds of kilometers of abandoned mines and quarries, dating back to Roman times, where the limestone marrow had been extracted from the earth to shape the city’s magnificent buildings.

  While the work of mapping and reinforcing was under way, disease and stench from the literally bulging cemetery of Saints-Innocents, north of the Seine, were becoming intolerable, adding their unease to the spirit of revolution in the air. Further burials were forbidden. The cemetery’s Danse Macabré mural—oldest in Europe, built over a plague pit—had long since vanished, but now the Innocents’ skeletons began their own dance across Paris: at night, by cartfuls, accompanied by the clop of hooves and the somber chants of priests. It took two years to empty the cemetery and pack the bones into the city’s one-time quarries.

  A generation later, the Inspector General of Quarries found the rude tangle an offense to sensibilities, and ordered them tidied. Vast underground hallways were transformed into works of art: walls of tibias, mosaics of femurs, neat façades of gleaming skulls. And lest a visitor miss the point, its entrance at the Place D’Enfer bore a warning:

  ARRETE! C’EST ICI L’EMPIRE DE LA MORT

  Stop! Here lies the empire of death.

  Yes, the bones of Paris are beautiful, indeed.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “WOW,” SAID STUYVESANT.

  A century and a half ago, one of the Charmentier family had stripped twenty or thirty kilometers of stone from under the ground to build himself a house: two hundred meters of stone wall; a gateway a little smaller than the Arc de Triomphe; the mansion itself forty feet high with gargoyles over the windows, half a dozen balconies, windows gleaming with silken drapes and rich furniture, the gleam of crystal chandeliers …

  Almost made a man forget to be nervous about a gendarme’s tap on his shoulder.

  A car debouched a sleek couple, she wearing enough diamonds to buy a small South American country. The man nodded, the woman gave Stuyvesant the kind of look a lady might bestow on a street-sweeper, and they set off across the acre of cobbles. Stuyvesant adjusted his tie, and followed.

  Inside the gates, a broad cobblestone yard surrounded a circle of grass with waist-high hedges and a fountain. More lawn and hedges circled the sides of the yard, disappearing around the hôtel particulier itsel
f.

  The mansion’s entrance was flanked by torches—actual fire, not gas replicas. As he approached, he saw how odd the entrance was. But, he’d seen the place before, hadn’t he? No, that was its twin brother: a Montmartre café called “L’Enfer”—Hell—with a gigantic fanged mouth surrounding its entrance and scenes from a Mediaeval descent into hell dripping both from the three-story façade and from the interior ceiling.

  A lot of hells in his life, at the moment.

  This one proved both less permanent, being of plaster and canvas rather than stone, and more disturbing. He didn’t remember the one up on Pigalle being quite so … emphatic. Maybe it was the eyes? There, they had stared off over a person’s head, but here the focus was clear. Or it could be the mouth: the Café L’Enfer’s hell-mouth surrounded the delivery door, allowing the customer to slip in a few feet to one side, but here, it was the entrance. There was even a lower lip, with sharp teeth one had to step over, and a sinuous forked tongue waiting to slurp a victim within.

  Then there was the trio of doormen, two of them animate: on the left, a slim yellow-haired demon with a long tail looped over his left arm used a trident to urge partygoers inside. On the right, an enormously tall figure draped in black leaned on the handle of a scythe, his face invisible under the shadow of his hood, the Do come in gesture of his hand as much threat as promise.

  The third doorman was a fully articulated skeleton dressed only in a silk hat and bow tie. He didn’t do a whole lot of gesturing.

  The diamond-woman hesitated, an understandable response, until Death stretched out one long arm to her; she giggled as her escort hurried her in past the jabbing trident. When the figure made to do the same with Stuyvesant, the big American held up a warning finger. The long arm paused, then drew back, allowing him to enter unmolested.

  The entrance hall was vast, dim, and almost unpopulated, apart from the family portraits hanging on the walls, many of whom had that same disdainful nose. Instead, light and noise poured down the monumental stairway directly ahead of him, a structure that had taken a regiment of men a couple of years to complete, what with the carvings and plaster, the curlicues of wrought iron, the square meters of gilding—and, anticlimactically, the velvet rope across the bottom.