The Bones of Paris

by Laurie R. King

  With a wrench, he forced his eyes to do their job.

  Wide bed, tables on either side. English watercolors on the walls, English oak dresser on one side, English-looking dressing table on the other. Three hands stood on the dresser, painted tin with padded ends and complicated leather straps. Two were hardly worn, although the third was bent and chipped, with heavy marks of wear on the buckles.

  One bed-side table held a small clock, tissues, a carafe and glass. Stuck into the lamp-shade was a small round lapel pin showing—he bent to see—an image of Bennett on a village street. On the other side of the bed, the table held an ash-tray, a pad with a pencil, and a brightly wrapped package the size of a small book. He pushed back its folded card:

  Happy birthday, darling Emile!

  —Your Sarah

  Why hadn’t the flic opened it?

  In an abrupt decision, Stuyvesant yanked the ends of the ribbon. Not a book: the framed photograph of a woman with pale, close-cropped hair, her right hand clasping together a luxurious fox-fur collar. Her hair and the fur’s highlights made sharp contrast against the dark background, as her unsmiling mouth was belied by the amusement pushing at her eyes.

  Sarah had been photographed by Man Ray.

  “Of course he saw the gift,” Grey told him. “He said he’d wait until she was here. Why are you angry?”

  “Look, I have no concrete reason to suspect the photographer of anything but a brutal imagination and a habit of slapping around his women. But—”

  “All women?” Grey broke in.

  “No. There was just one, that I know of. But when a name keeps cropping up during a mur—during an investigation, you pay attention. And his does.”

  Grey let the slip pass. “Montparnasse is a village. Don’t the same names crop up all the time?”

  “Of course.”

  “Like Man Ray.”

  “I know.”

  “You might as well suspect Fitzgerald, or Hemingway.”

  “Maybe not Scott. If he hasn’t throttled Zelda by now, he’s not the murdering kind.”

  “But Man Ray is all over the Quarter. Even I’ve met him, and I was here exactly three weeks.”

  “Where was that?”

  “Sarah and I were feeding the ducks in Montsouris when we saw him and Kiki—you know Kiki?”

  “Sure.”

  “—coming out of the park café. As out of place as bats in daylight.”

  “I can imagine. Do you know when he took this photograph?”

  “Recently, judging by the hair. But Ray photographs everything from couture to perfume. One would expect him to be known all over Paris.”

  “Precisely. So will you go with me, while I question him?”

  “Now?”

  “Yes. No—Doucet needs you. But if nothing comes of tonight—and if Sarah doesn’t return—then first thing tomorrow.”

  “If you say so. I think you’ll find he’s just another artistic oddball.”

  “Doucet thinks Ray is a flea in my ear.”

  “One might as well suspect Doucet,” Grey commented.

  Stuyvesant cocked an eyebrow. “Why do you say that?”

  “He’s all over Paris, too. You know how he and Sarah met?”

  “He was questioning people about one of his missing persons.”

  “My point exactly. Even innocent people have all kinds of links, especially in Montparnasse.”

  “Yeah, but criminals leave patterns, if only you can see them. Speaking of which, anything jump out of my notes at you?”

  Grey shook his head. “It’s only facts.” Stuyvesant hadn’t really expected much—Grey’s talents were more about producing information than processing it—but the Englishman wasn’t finished. “I did wonder if Doucet shouldn’t expand his search outside of missing persons. He could look at unsolved murders and assaults. In case the man tried, and failed.”

  He’s talking about the missing, about assaults and abductions—and every other word in that speech was Sarah’s name. “He may be working on that now—the art connection only cropped up when I came to him with Pip, ten days ago.”

  “What started him looking in that direction, do you know?”

  “There were two women who went missing last—”

  The telephone’s jangle startled both men to their feet. Grey dove to answer, but it was not Sarah. The brief conversation consisted of, “Yes? What time? You want to come here? Fine.” The telephone went back onto its cradle.

  “Eleven-fifteen,” Grey said. “Le Comte is going to his country house for the weekend, but he agreed to meet us on his way out of town.”

  Stuyvesant looked at the clock: 10:40.

  “What about afterwards? Do you want me to wait here?”

  “No, you go and spend some time with your young lady.”

  (Sarah …)

  “Not while Man Ray’s wandering the bars,” Stuyvesant said. “I don’t think I’ll wait for you. I want to know where he’s been, what he has to say about Sarah. It’s Friday night, he’s sure to be out there.”

  “Go, then. I’ll ring you in the morning.”

  Grey glanced at the clock on the wall and started rolling down his shirtsleeves. He was looking positively haggard.

  “You have one of your headaches, don’t you?” Stuyvesant asked. “You should go to bed. Let Doucet meet the Count on his own.”

  “Well,” Grey said, doing up his cuff buttons, “we may discover that Sarah is being pampered in one of Le Comte’s fifteen guest suites, and I’ll be back for a blissful night’s sleep.”

  “If so, have Doucet stick a note through Mme. Benoit’s door and you can sleep in. Oh, that reminds me.”

  Stuyvesant found a piece of paper and wrote in capital letters:

  SARAH

  IF YOU COME HOME

  CALL ME

  He added the phone number of the Hotel Benoit, and was propping the card on the kitchen counter when the rattle of a car in the street heralded the flic’s arrival.

  Stuyvesant looked down at Sarah’s present to her lover. “Do you mind if I borrow that picture?”

  “Go ahead.”

  The two men caught up their hats and stepped into the night. While Grey locked the door, Stuyvesant bent to rap on the taxi window. Doucet wound it down.

  “Are you taking a gun?”

  “M. Stuyvesant, please. American police may be in the habit of gunfire across a sitting room, but this is Paris.”

  The window rose, Grey got in, and the car moved off down the damp paving stones.

  “So I’ll take that for a ‘no,’ ” Stuyvesant muttered.

  He returned to the Hotel Benoit for his evening wear, then threw back the carpet to pry up the floorboard. When he went back down the stairs with thirty-six ounces of steel under his arm, he felt a little more cheerful about matters. But when he returned at 3:00 a.m., the only thing he felt cheerful about was that he hadn’t actually used the revolver.

  Although if pulling it had led to Man Ray, he wouldn’t have hesitated.

  FIFTY-NINE

  “MADAME?” EARLY SATURDAY morning, Stuyvesant stood at Mme. Benoit’s door. His third knock brought her response, if not her person. A sleep-thick voice replied: No, there had been no telephone calls for him, no visitors, no messages. So he fished through his pockets for some ten-centimes coins to phone the Préfecture. Doucet’s sergeant answered.

  The Milquetoast-Fortier was surprisingly brusque. “L’Inspecteur n’est pas ici.”

  “Don’t hang up! Your boss said he’d phone me this morning with the results of a meeting. Have you heard from him at all?”

  “No, but it is Saturday. His hours vary on Saturday.” Fortier’s English was good.

  “Would you please phone him at home, and find out when he’s coming in?”

  “No.”

  “Sergeant Fortier, you and I met the other day. I have been helping Inspector Doucet with a case. You know me.”

  “I do not know you. I remember meeting you.”
r />   “And do you know Sarah Grey?”

  “Je sais le nom.” I know the name.

  “Last night your boss went to see Sarah’s employer, Dominic Charmentier, because Sarah has not been seen since a party Le Comte held Wednesday night. Doucet took Sarah’s brother, Bennett Grey, with him. I expected to hear from one or the other of them before this. I have not.” The silence went on. “Sergeant?”

  “Come in and see me.”

  And the line went dead.

  Doucet’s loyal Sergeant was the sort of unimaginative and inexorable cop who could be a nightmare if he was set against you, and more valuable than a herd of informants if he was on your side. Things hadn’t started out all that well between them, but Stuyvesant was willing to pant like a lap-dog to convince Sergeant Fortier that he could be helpful.

  He started by leaving his revolver under the floorboards.

  Fortier was at his desk next to Doucet’s office, neat stacks of file folders on three corners. The man glowered over his half-glasses like a dyspeptic old woman.

  “Any news?” Stuyvesant asked.

  Deliberately, Fortier took off the glasses, placing them in the center of the page before him. “Inspector Doucet did not return home last night.”

  Stuyvesant sat down. “Well, he wasn’t with Miss Grey. You see, her brother came over from England yesterday, and he and Doucet came to see me. I’d been out the night before, but when I got back …”

  As Stuyvesant talked, he did not think the flic was hearing a word of it. When Fortier reached for his glasses, Stuyvesant stopped.

  “Your presence,” the sergeant pronounced, “coupled with l’Inspecteur’s absence, make for an awkward decision. I am, in fact, required to hand an ongoing investigation over to another officer of his rank. And yet, the prospect of the inevitable delay … concerns me.”

  Stuyvesant made a sympathetic noise.

  “L’Inspecteur was willing to bring you into his investigation, to an extent I personally would not have considered. He appeared to find your assistance worth the … unorthodoxy.”

  “How can I help?”

  Fortier fiddled with papers. About two seconds before Stuyvesant stormed the desk, the cop placed two pages before him on the blotter: the two brunettes from the Moreau photographs. One was the young woman Doucet had tentatively identified as the missing Sorbonne student, Jacqueline-Celeste Delaurier; the other was the English woman with stained teeth.

  “Yesterday afternoon, the Inspector gave me one set of pieced-together photographs and another set of reproductions, telling me to have the originals examined for fingerprints. We found many prints, although it is possible they belong to one individual.” Now that the Sergeant’s verbal pump had been primed, the words seemed to flow more freely.

  “Didi Moreau?”

  “So I understand.”

  “Is that the Delaurier girl?”

  “I believe so. Because of the missing portion of the photograph, I cannot be certain, but the resemblance is striking. When it came to the other woman, l’Inspecteur had me take the photograph to the British Consulate-General. An hour ago, I received a telephone call. The woman’s name is Joanna Williams. She was not on our books because she was not a missing person, but a murder victim. Her body was found on the twenty-second of June, 1927, near the Place de Montrouge, wearing little more than a torn chemise. Her hands were filthy and bleeding, looking, to quote the report, ‘as if she had dug herself out of a grave.’ Her left hand and wrist were broken and contused. She died without regaining consciousness. Cause of death was exhaustion and severe dehydration.”

  Stuyvesant looked at the Delaurier girl’s photograph. “The list Doucet gave me only went back to the beginning of 1928.”

  Fortier picked up a sheet of paper. “My current task is a survey of missing persons dating back to the spring of 1927. This is the beginning.”

  Stuyvesant, astonished but grateful, ran his eyes over a dozen names and brief descriptions. “What’s this question mark, on June 23?”

  “An Italian woman left a bar late that night to use the facilities, and did not return. From the sounds of it, she was a femme de nuit who drank a lot of her client’s champagne then stepped out, and he only reported her because he felt he’d been robbed.”

  “No name?”

  “No names, of either the woman or the client. I imagine he had second thoughts, as he started to sober up. It was a bar up near Pigalle, I’m not sure it even has a—Yes, Massey?”

  The uniformed man at the door gestured at the telephone. “Je pense que c’est important.”

  Fortier said to Stuyvesant, “Un moment,” and spoke his name into the telephone.

  Stuyvesant continued reading—until the weighty silence across the desk made him look up.

  Fortier had the instrument pressed against his ear as if his very life depended on it. His eyes were staring straight across the desk.

  Stuyvesant found it suddenly hard to breathe.

  Nine days—nine very difficult and complicated days—after some gendarme had searched his room, Stuyvesant had by no means forgotten the episode, but it had been pushed to the back, fading from urgently bewildering to one more puzzling question. He no longer shot upright with every creak of the stairs.

  Now, with Fortier’s gaze fixed on him, Stuyvesant’s gut went cold. If there weren’t a hundred cops between him and the street, he’d have bolted for the door.

  But since it was hopeless, he had to stay in his chair and bluff his way out—and since he stayed put, he quickly saw that the Sergeant was not staring at him, but through him.

  “Où?” Fortier asked, then, “Quand?” A minute later he said, “Oui. Dix minutes.” He hung up.

  Where? When? Yes. Ten minutes.

  “Je dois partir.” Fortier sounded as if he was talking to himself.

  “Where do you need to go?” Stuyvesant asked, but Fortier just stared at the telephone. When he raised his head to the man at the door, his face was as shocked as a soldier who looked down to discover that a blast had taken his leg. “L’Inspecteur,” he said in wonder. “Il a été abattu.”

  The Inspector. He’s been shot.

  SIXTY

  IT WAS NOT what Bennett Grey expected of an underground prison. For one thing, the light. The photographs’ flash had suggested darkness, but one tall ecclesiastical candle burned on a stone podium near the door.

  For another, there was little stench of death. The floor had been scrubbed, the walls and shackle sluiced down—his nostrils could taste putrefaction in the air, but it was little more than a memory beneath the honey-smell of the candle and the mingling of wine and tobacco, perfume and sweat.

  And there was sound. Beneath the minuscule hiss of wax being turned to smoke lay the bone-deep vibrations of life above—wheels and feet, machines and tools. The rhythm of two hammers occasionally coming together. A sewer main, with a half-second delay between the rush of water leaving the pipes and that water hitting the stones.

  He even, bizarrely enough, knew what time it was. A clock-face protruded from the stone, the tick, tick of its moving hands almost comforting, a reminder of home.

  However, the most unexpected feature of his prison was the people.

  All around the wide room, figures danced. On this side, tapestry women in elaborately sleeved gowns lined up with tapestry men in velvet and lace, their merriment come from the looms three centuries ago. At the edges of the candle’s light, slim girls in beads and sleek young men in black and white flung up their heels, brought to life so recently, he could smell turpentine. Some dancers were mere ghosts: two tapestry panels had been hung near a window, washing out their figures to pale outlines, while across the cavern, the ghosts of dancers-yet-to-be showed as charcoal lines on gessoed wood.

  Two of the newer panels were by artists who could never have seen an actual human skeleton.

  Here in the oldest section of the Danse where Grey was shackled, the tapestries had been pulled back from the stone like curta
ins from a stage. His left wrist was bound in steel, yet he sat with the shiny anchoring bolt to his right. The chain stretched across his chest like a sash of chivalry, heavy, cold, and uncomfortable, but he refused to stretch away from it in terror.

  Eleven years since his first death in the trenches: plenty of time to consider the role of dignity when time came for the second.

  SIXTY-ONE

  THE COP IN the doorway and Harris Stuyvesant spoke simultaneously.

  “Where is he?” asked the flic.

  “Was there anyone with him?”

  Fortier cocked an eye at the big American, but answered his colleague first.

  “They took him to la Charité. Who would be with him?”

  “Small Englishman, pale blond hair and green eyes.”

  “They didn’t say, but—”

  The other cop interrupted. “Is l’Inspecteur alive?”

  “He was when they got to the hospital.”

  “Who shot him?”

  “They don’t know.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s unconscious.”

  “Sergeant, do you—” But Fortier was moving, fast. He shouldered the other man out of the way and was gone. Stuyvesant reached for his hat, then stopped. Nobody would let him see Doucet. Bennett Grey didn’t seem to be with him. And in no time at all, someone would come to throw Stuyvesant out.

  He dropped his hat. He’d rather be tearing apart Man Ray’s studio or Le Comte’s house—or Didi Moreau’s face—but he scribbled as fast as his pen would move: names, dates, and descriptions. He included the English murder victim and the alleged Italian prostitute from 1927. His notes were sketchy, but he was nearly at an end when a clerk came through the door. The fresh-faced young man stopped in surprise.

  “Sorry, I was looking for Sergeant Fortier,” he said in rapid-fire French.

  “He’s gone to the hospital to see Doucet. Something I can do for you?”

  “Who are you?”