The Bones of Paris

by Laurie R. King

  “Yes, in a way. Although it could also be that he just likes the creepy stuff.”

  She glanced at her watch rather than open an argument. “We need to get back to the party.”

  “Are we waiting for something?”

  “With Dominic, we generally are.”

  “A surprise?”

  “One that even you won’t guess,” she said, sounding smug.

  He opened a door, and they were back in the tiled entryway where the great clock ticked off the age of the universe.

  “That’s quite a device,” Stuyvesant commented.

  “Isn’t it, though? There’s some terribly sad story about it, that the poor clockmaker who built it committed suicide when it was finished, knowing he would never build anything greater.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s probably not true. A lot of the stories about Dominic are sheer fiction—do you know, I overheard a story about him at a party last week that I’d made up myself!”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “It’s part of the act, dear boy. The more people imagine him as a wicked, debauched creature, the more they flock into the Grand-Guignol.”

  “Doesn’t strike me as a very comfortable way to live.”

  “I suppose someone with a notorious name has to choose either to fight against the common belief, or just decide to go with it.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Oh, the usual thing. The French adore their nobles, but the aristocrats are the first to feel the guillotine. There’s all kinds of titillating stories about the nobility: droit de seigneur, cellars full of pretty girls, corruption and perversion. The Charmentiers may have had a few unpleasant characters in their family tree—Dominic thinks there was syphilis in a couple of the generations, and you know what that does to the brain—but no more than any others. You know about the garden chessboard?”

  “I noticed there was one.”

  “That’s a good example of the stories. People will tell you that one of Dominic’s ancestors built that garden feature just before the Terror, when the Vicomte and some close friends used to play with human pieces—except when the pieces were captured, they’d actually be impaled, or decapitated.”

  “Eighteenth-century gladiators,” Stuyvesant commented.

  “Ridiculous, of course. But that’s what I mean, all sorts of mad stories circulate around the aristocracy here. Dominic welcomes them—they all feed back into the Grand-Guignol. He and Man Ray are talking about doing a film in the garden. You know Man’s an ardent chess player?”

  “I saw the chessboards in his studio. I take it the film will involve decapitations?”

  “Probably.”

  “Is that what he was sketching for Le Comte on the tablecloth last night?”

  “No, that was something else.”

  “Can I ask you, what do you think of him? Ray, that is?”

  “He’s a pompous ass, but he’s madly talented. Why?”

  “Oh, just an argument a friend and I were having.”

  “What kind—Oh,” she said with a glance at her watch. “I must go.”

  “What’s behind that door?” he asked, pointing across the entranceway. He’d been through three of the doorways: the grand stairway, the ballroom, and the private residence. This pair remained shut.

  Sarah glanced across the tile where he was pointing. “I suppose it’s more of the residence. Come on.”

  The ballroom had been full before. Now the guests were shoulder-to-shoulder, and the level of what Stuyvesant had taken for fear had risen with the noise. It had to be merely anticipation, these people knowing Charmentier and his Guignol theatrics. Still, it raised his hackles, feeling like anxiety rather than eagerness. He bent his head to Sarah, at his side on the raised entranceway.

  “What’s giving everyone the heebie-jeebies?”

  To his astonishment, she gave him a grin that shot a jolt of familiarity down his spine: the Sarah Grey of old, alive with mischief. “You caught it! I should have known you would. Harris, you wouldn’t believe how much time I spend producing effects that no one notices. Except you, and—well, I’d guess it’s the policeman in you.”

  “Been a while since I was any kind of a cop. And what are you talking about?”

  “The effect. So: how would you go about frightening a crowd of educated, well-to-do people—especially if they’re anticipating it? What subtle influences can one inflict on them to slide under their guards? Look, and tell me what you—what you perceive.”

  Her hesitation gave him a clue. He studied the room, blanking out the cacophony of high-pitched conversations. “Is it something to do with the lights?”

  “Very good. Yes, it’s partly the lights. We tried them with a bluer tint, but that made everything look like the bottom of a swimming pool. With this, they just make people look slightly ill. What else?”

  “Maybe, the music? It’s hard to hear under all the shouting.”

  “You’re close. It’s a wave of vibration being piped in from all four corners of the room. If everyone were to stop talking, you’d hear it, a noise almost too low for the ears, but it gets on your nerves like nothing in the world. And there’s a third thing.”

  He listened, he looked, but in the end had to shake his head. “I don’t see it.”

  “That’s the really dreadful one—and I had nothing to do with it. There’s a smell. Can you catch it? Probably not now, with all the perfume and smoke, but even if the room were empty you might not notice it. Consciously, that is. Dominic says that the mind has dark little pockets that react to certain kinds of odors. One of those is a dead body.”

  “Your boss planted a corpse here? For a party?”

  “Harris! Of course not, what do you think of me?”

  “Sorry. Overreacting. Like I say, it’s been a tough week.” He emptied the glass, wished he had another, and gave her his best deprecating smile. “So if not a body, how did he do it?”

  “He replaced some of the soil around his palms with earth from a graveyard. Which frankly I thought a bit silly, but it’s his house.”

  But no Great War soldier would ever call that reaction silly. The smell brought an instant and bone-deep revulsion, and although graveyard soil might in fact be too dilute, he wouldn’t use the word silly anywhere in its vicinity.

  He fought the impulse to lift his handkerchief to his nose.

  Sarah gave her watch another quick look, but they appeared to have some time left before whatever surprise was scheduled, because she plucked a graceful flute of champagne from a passing tray and took a deep swallow. A reward for her labors, or fortification against what was to come? He shifted, in order to see her better, and she glanced up, eyebrows arched in a question.

  “I just wondered if you were bracing yourself against whatever bit of theater is on its way.”

  “Oh no,” she replied. “I’ve become fairly hardened to it all. Just a long day, is all.”

  “Nearly over.”

  “Not quite. I have to go somewhere with Dominic after this.”

  “What, the Select? Even Bricktop’s will have shut by the time this lot takes off.”

  “No, not a bar. He has a pet … artist he promised to go see.”

  “Doesn’t sound like one of your favorite people.”

  “Oh, he’s all right. I should be grateful, really. He made this hand for me. And half a dozen others. He’s just … even for Montparnasse he’s an odd egg.”

  “I cannot imagine what it takes to be considered odd for Montparnasse. Two heads? Drives around in a cart hitched to a unicorn?”

  “Perhaps not that odd. It’s … Well … You know how some people simply rub you the wrong way, and you can never say why? He’s just … strange. He lives like a hermit, in this house that seems to have more cellar than upstairs, and rarely goes out except for Sunday morning Mass. He has no social graces, although I try to tell myself that it’s not his fault his eyes are bad and he has to stand right up close to one, or that h
is hands are cold and he will insist on touching—”

  She broke off, with an uncomfortable laugh. He said nothing. After a sip at her glass and a survey of the room, she resumed. “As you can tell, I am not fond of the man. But it’s part of my job to deal with him, and there’s no doubt he’s a remarkable artist. Those are his—Oh, you probably can’t see them in this light. If you get a chance, make your way over and look at that collection between the two big portraits.”

  Stuyvesant followed where she was indicating. On the side wall between a pair of larger-than-life paintings of two people so ugly they might be called grotesque were eight or ten small, square shapes. He didn’t have to fight his way across the crowded room to know what they were.

  “The boxes.”

  “Oh, you saw them?”

  “Not those particular ones, no. But there were two similar ones in the bedroom of the girl I’m looking for. Signed DIDI.”

  “That’s right, he calls himself Didi, although I’m not sure why. His name is Hyacinthe—Hyacinthe Moreau. He got started as a taxidermist, and made prosthetic hands during the War, but the last few years, some of the influential names in the art world have taken him on—including Dominic—and his Displays are becoming enormously popular. One never knows what will catch on.”

  Stuyvesant felt a click, somewhere in the depths of his memory. Sarah kept talking (… thanks to Dominic that his pieces are selling so well, which means Didi now has all the time in the world to play with his Displays. That’s what he calls it, “playing”—unfortunate how that always brings to mind the image of a small child playing with the contents of its nappies. Oh, that’s awful of me—you won’t say anything to—) but his mind stood empty, waiting for the connection.

  The word display. In a bar: a conversation, recently overheard. In English—Americans? Artists, he thought—and with that came the flood of recognition: Those three artists, Tuesday night in Frank’s bar: Didi, not titty. The Didi Displays … that disturbing frisson of visceral excitement …

  He blinked, and cut into what she was saying. “I’d like to meet him.”

  “Who, Didi? You wouldn’t like him.”

  “Still. Where does he live?”

  “He won’t see you. He never sees anyone.”

  “Except you and Charmentier.”

  “Well, Dominic is his patron, and … Oh. You want me to introduce you.”

  “Will you?”

  “No!”

  “Please? Sarah, there’s a girl missing. I wouldn’t ask this of you if I didn’t think it might help.”

  The green eyes glared. He thought she was going to walk away. Then they wavered, and looked instead at the half-empty glass in her hand. “Damn,” she began, “and I hadn’t meant to—”

  But he never heard the end of the sentence, and Sarah never tasted the end of the drink, because her hand jerked along with everyone else’s when the piercing, full-throated scream of a woman in terror sliced through the tumult of the room, reducing it to oaths and squeals and the sound of breaking glass.

  TWENTY-NINE

  SILENCE FELL, HEAVY and absolute. Before anyone could even cough, a tight spotlight flared into life. It illuminated two of the astonished musicians, staring out over the crowd. The light jerked. It flitted crazily across the room, pausing on first one small group of frightened faces, than another. One of its apparently random jerks brought it to the fireplace where Charmentier stood, his head turned now to look at the far right corner, at a small dais that duplicated the quartet’s platform. As if in obedience, the light flew across to that corner.

  Besides its palm tree stood a woman. Tall, buxom, dressed in an ivory evening gown. The jewels in her pale hair threw light as only real diamonds could. Behind her was a velvety black background from which sparked similar diamond reflections. The woman stood very still, one arm stretched to point up, her lips slightly parted from that prodigious scream.

  The tiny sound of approval Sarah made snapped Stuyvesant from his shock: here was the production she had been waiting for—had herself planned, in fact, judging by the sound. That it had taken her unawares only proved the effectiveness of the woman’s voice.

  A ripple of murmurs passed through the crowd as they realized that their host had pulled off another of his anticipated coups de théâtre. But before the sound could mount, the woman spoke.

  “Mesdames et messieurs,” she began in formal cadence, “je suis la pleine lune, qui monte le ciel de nuit.” I am the full moon, mounting the night sky, Stuyvesant began translating to himself, but after that he started to lose words, and the sense of what she was saying. Something about the coming equinox, Africa, and some kind of alignment—her French vocabulary was either very colloquial, or very formal. Then she used the word sanglant: bloody. In a flash, the spotlight went crimson. Her gown, her hair, and her sparkling jewels turned to blood, causing another ripple of reaction through the audience.

  Her voice climbed, the words coming faster as she spoke of blood and cleansing. He thought it was blood as a cleansing thing, rather than cleaning off the blood, but what with the speed and the way this damned language tended to drop off all the endings, he couldn’t be sure. Whatever it was seemed to get her all worked up, and he wasn’t especially surprised (having so recently sat in the Grand-Guignol itself) when she reached up her sleeve and drew out an impressive knife. She spent a while caressing it, kissing it, reciting what sounded like a poem about blood. She then held it high. Throwing back her head like an eager lover, she plunged the dagger into her breast. With a strangled cough that brought up the hair on the back of his neck, she collapsed.

  The light jerked away as if the man at the controls had fallen off his chair in shock. And then the red filter was snatched away, and the long white beam traveled across the ceiling, descending, timidly seeking the terrible sight of the full-moon lady, collapsed and ensanglantée. The stripe found the wall and became a circle; the diamond-stars of the backdrop sparked back in response.

  But when the beam touched the stage, all it revealed were bones: bones, and a drift of ancient satin, and the harsh bright-red glitter of the necklace that lay at the chin of the woman’s grinning skull.

  Long after the applause had died away, after the guests, relieved at last by a climax to the evening’s tensions, turned with renewed vigor to drink and food, after the talk had caused the chandeliers to vibrate and the ears to ache, the party began to die away at last. Stuyvesant lingered, spending time with the Displays, standing at the window and gazing down at the grass-and-marble checkerboard in the garden, stubbornly keeping watch over the small, exhausted woman he cared too much about. All the time, Le Comte, with Sarah at his elbow, said long and friendly good-byes to his guests. When the crowd had thinned to the last twenty or so, the big American joined them.

  He thrust out his hand. “Congratulations. That was quite a show.”

  “I am glad you enjoyed it,” the Frenchman answered.

  “Thanks again for inviting me. And your house is, well, magnificent.”

  “For that you should thank several generations of my family.”

  “I admit I didn’t quite catch everything the moon lady was saying. Something about a bloody equinox?”

  “More or less.”

  “Was there a point to it?”

  Sarah answered him. “The theater is about to debut a new play about Africa, with elements of the full moon. You know, the idea of lunacy being tied to the moon? This was by way of introducing the play.”

  “Ah, I see. Get everyone talking.”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “But what was all that she was saying?”

  “Harris,” Sarah broke in, “M. Charmentier needs to say good-night to his other guests.”

  “Oh, of course. Well, thanks for inviting me, it was fun.”

  “You must come again,” he said politely.

  But Stuyvesant deliberately misunderstood. “Oh, are you having another of these shindigs? I’d love to join.”
<
br />   “Pardon.” Charmentier frowned. “ ‘Shindig’?”

  “Soirée. Party, you know?”

  Sometimes, the act of bumpkin could be a tool to disarm. Other times, it achieved the opposite, stirring interest. With Charmentier, it was the latter. He tipped his aristocratic head, hearing the crass attempt at manipulation, and seemed amused.

  “Miss Grey, do we have room for one more for our event next week?”

  “I think we could manage.”

  “Send M. Stuyvesant an invitation, would you please?”

  “Certainly.” She put her hand on the American’s arm, to gently urge him away, but Charmentier was not finished.

  “Oh wait, I nearly forgot,” the Frenchman said, although it appeared to be less a matter of remembering than of deciding. He slid his hand into his pocket. “I saw this on the street, Mr. Stuyvesant. It made me think of you.”

  In the center of the slim palm lay a newly minted ten-centime piece. One half of it was gleaming and perfect, the other appeared to have been run over by a metal cart-wheel heavy with grit. Stuyvesant took it, running his thumb over the deeply scored surface as if to smooth it: fresh, shiny, damaged.

  “You just happened to find this,” Stuyvesant said. “After our discussion about just this manner of damage.”

  “Such things often come to those whose eyes are open.”

  “Hell of a coincidence.”

  “There may be a hell, M. Stuyvesant, but there is no coincidence. Objects are given when one requires them.”

  Bennett Grey would know if this was deception: Stuyvesant couldn’t tell. “Or one makes them, and pretends.”

  “Why would I wish to do that?”

  “To appear omniscient, I’d guess. To show you have God in your pocket.”

  Sarah was following this incomprehensible duel with increasing unease. Before the room could explode in flames, or violence, she again took the American’s arm, firmly this time.

  “Harris, come along now, it’s getting late and the other guests will be wanting their beds.”

  Charmentier’s eyes moved over to his assistant’s face, and he smiled. “You look tired, my dear. You did fine work tonight. Go home now, have a glass of wine with your beau. I’ll say good-bye to my guests and go see Didi on my own.”