The Bones of Paris Page 7

  After a glance at his watch, he dug out his notebook and sat at the table to write down a few brief phrases about the day, enough to help him reconstruct events for his employer when time came to make a report. When he capped the pen, Sylvia’s twine-wrapped packet caught his eye. He pulled it open and found Red Harvest: “a thrilling detective story.” Two pages in, he found himself tipped back in his chair with a grin on his face—not so much at the story, although it was refreshing to find a detective novel that didn’t start with arsenic-laced tea in the library, but at the little bookseller who had chosen it. “Poisonville”—hah! Was this how Sylvia saw him?

  But it was a fine beginning, and it might have distracted him into reading further had he not been covered with sweat, and aware that he stank. He dropped it back into the brown paper and left it on the table.

  Parisians seemed perfectly happy with weekly visits to the bathhouse, but he’d never got used to the ripe smell. Maybe he should change his shirt, for the cop’s sake. And if he was going to spend another night trawling the bars into the wee hours (last night’s search for information having been cut short when Lulu found him), he couldn’t see doing that reeking like he did.

  However, he had one clean shirt, and he’d meant to wear it tomorrow, when—thanks to the Crosby check—he was going to his tailor. He didn’t like the idea of forcing the guy to breathe eau de Stuyvesant in close quarters.

  And why bother to change, anyway? If tonight was anything like last night, the damn bars would all be empty.

  But sitting on the bed with two-day-old sheets, smelling his own body, the thought of facing the world in this state was suddenly revolting.

  He kicked off his shoes, emptied his pockets onto the table, and caught up his soap and towel, walking down the hall to the cold shower. His current employer would have paid for a proper hotel—expenses reimbursed, after all—but he couldn’t count on a loose floorboard and convenient rooftop in the Ritz.

  Of course, there was nothing to keep him from billing Crosby for the Ritz and pocketing the difference.

  This time of day, the tiles were still clean and the tepid water pleasant against his skin. He rubbed himself head to toe with the bar of soap, then propped his arms against the wall and just stood, letting the sputtering stream run over his hair, letting his mind drift over the day. Sylvia’s quizzical face, Nancy Berger’s flexible mouth. The dragon, Mme. Hachette: looked like a hatchet, too. Doucet the cop: interesting guy. He was looking forward to seeing more of him. A cop with tired eyes that didn’t seem to look at the world with complete disgust. Blue eyes, they’d been. Unusual in France. Maybe not as unusual as green—

  He jerked upright so abruptly his skull knocked the shower-head sideways, shooting water over the pile of clothing. He slapped off the flow with a curse. The towel was drenched, but he found a dryish corner, then pulled on his slightly damp shorts and undershirt. He peered at his chin in the speckled mirror. Any point in shaving? Not really.

  Like he’d said, he would probably be in bed by nine, anyway. With or without Lulu.

  Back across the Luxembourg gardens, he crossed boulevard Saint-Michel without being knotted into a tangle of bicycles, then set off across the heart of the Latin Quarter in the direction of the Arènes de Lutèce. Lutetia was Rome’s name for the city, and the one-time arena was a restful spot in the Quarter—if one ignored the ghostly sounds of lions and dying gladiators.

  He spotted the pink geraniums on the rue Monge. Inside the brasserie mingled the clean smells of Pernod, shellfish, and garlic.

  No Doucet.

  Stuyvesant ordered a beer and stretched out his legs, listening to the conversations around him. A trio of Italians were debating fiercely, hands waving; a young couple sipped wine and flirted with glances and gestures, and occasionally with a caress of shoe-leather amongst the sawdust from the escargot baskets. Two Americans droned on and on about the stock market: how much they’d made, how high it might go.

  Jesus, he thought. Would it be entirely a bad thing for the market to drop a little, if it meant that places like this could be returned to the inhabitants of Paris?

  “Comment ça va, monsieur?” a voice said at his shoulder.

  Stuyvesant rose to shake Doucet’s hand. Sure is tall for a Frenchman, he thought. Wonder where he buys his suits? “Not too bad. Feels like it’s going to cool a little. What’ll you have?”

  The cop was known here, the waiter standing in attendance before Doucet had settled his stiff leg under the table. “Bring me one of those.” He gestured at Stuyvesant’s half-empty lager.

  “How would you feel about an oyster or ten to go with it?”

  Doucet’s eyes lit up, and he put his head together with the waiter over the types available, now that September was here. Personally, Stuyvesant would just as soon slurp cold mud, but he’d never met a French cop who didn’t go all soft at a platter of salty-glop-on-a-shell.

  “Thank you for meeting me outside of the office, Monsieur. It is true that I had a meeting, but my sergeant is also somewhat, how do you say, ‘by the book.’ He disapproves if he thinks I am about to share information with those outside the department.”

  A share of information had a promising ring to it, but Stuyvesant had seen that bait before, and he knew better than to snap at it too eagerly. “No problem,” he said.

  “Tell me about your search for Mlle. Crosby, M. Stuyvesant.”

  “Oh, you know how it goes: you spend days gathering odd pieces before you can start fitting them together. I’ve found a number of places she isn’t, and where she hasn’t been seen, and have a few names of people who might have seen her somewhere else.” Doucet looked expectant, so Stuyvesant went on, warning himself against the temptation to open up: Doucet wasn’t a partner.

  “When I got to Paris on Saturday, I headed for Montparnasse, because that’s where you look for an American like Pip Crosby. I worked my way through the bars in the Quarter, but nobody seemed to remember her. Sunday things were pretty dead, but last night I shifted up to Saint-Germain. Of course, things haven’t picked up yet after the summer, but even so, nobody seems to know her—or if they remember her, they haven’t seen her in a long time. Which I thought strange until I saw Pip’s—Miss Crosby’s—room, and found a bunch of matchbooks from clubs up in Montmartre.”

  “How is her French?”

  “I guess better than I noticed.”

  “Better than the average American visitor’s, would you say?”

  “Since the average American visitor can only manage Bonjour, Combien? and Voulez-vous coucher avec moi? then yes. She has French novels on her bookshelf, with tickets to French theaters stuck in as bookmarks.”

  “I very much hope—” Doucet’s hopes were interrupted by the arrival of a square meter of iced oyster bed and another pair of beers. Following several ounces of both, he finished the question. “I hope you did not remove anything from her possessions?”

  “You’ll be happy to find everything waiting for you, looking just like it did four months ago. As,” Stuyvesant said pointedly, “you might have gone to see for yourself.”

  Doucet was suddenly very interested in the oyster balanced between his fingers.

  “M. Stuyvesant, I am given to understand that you are an honest man.”

  “Who told you that?”

  The name he said made Stuyvesant’s grin fade. It was not one most Paris cops would have known—or known how to reach.

  “What the—what were you doing talking to him?”

  “You left your card with my sergeant yesterday, and do you know, these international telephone lines, they are so useful when a strange man comes asking questions. Particularly a strange man who is on the books as having spent a night in a Paris jail. And because I have been in contact with so many Americans over the years, it is not a difficulty to get certain questions answered. The man would appear to know you well.”

  “And yet he told you I was honest.”

  “His words were, ‘Stuyves
ant is an honorable man.’ ”

  Honorable? Hah—tell that to the string of Lulus. Tell it to Pip. “I’m not sure that’s the same thing as ‘honest.’ ”

  “It is sufficiently close that I am willing to believe that you are not … what was your word? A ‘crook.’ ” Doucet chose another oyster, waiting to see if the American would pick up the test he’d set before him.

  One of Stuyvesant’s problems, these past three years, had been that no agency but the Pinkertons—who wanted his muscles and his English, but not his experience—would hire him without a recommendation from his former boss. And since that boss was Bureau director J. Edgar Hoover, and the two men had not parted on the best of terms, it meant doing without a recommendation.

  He wasn’t about to explain that history of animosity here—but if Doucet had talked to the man he’d just mentioned, then he’d heard both sides of the story, and was sending out a little feeler: was Stuyvesant honest, or no?

  “You’re right,” Stuyvesant said, reaching for his notebook. “I didn’t take anything from Miss Crosby’s apartment but information—and, this.” He dropped the dramatic photo on the table. “I’d planned on returning it to its frame tomorrow, when I go back.”

  The detective picked it up by the corner. “Man Ray’s work.”

  “You know him?”

  “My district includes Montparnasse, Monsieur. I know all the troublemakers.”

  “What kind of trouble does he make?”

  “None that I know of. But M. Ray moves among the radical outskirts of the artist community. Surrealists live to shock. They are infatuated with crime, the more bizarre and offensive, the better. Dismembered bodies, toilet humor, perverted sex. They have made a hero of the Marquis de Sade—as if the abuse of servants and the poor is a noble calling.”

  “Lots of people find the idea of murder entertaining,” Stuyvesant commented. “Hell, they’ll even put down good money for it, and the more outrageous, the better. The guy who writes those Fantômas stories must be making a fortune, and those’ll raise a man’s hair.”

  “Which is why we do not arrest M. Ray and his Surrealist friends. However, we do keep an eye on their activities. Because sooner or later, I believe one of them will decide to make the fantasy real.”

  Stuyvesant eyed the cop: hadn’t they got a little off-track, here? “What’s that got to do with Pip Crosby?”

  The shells had grown empty, the glass also; before Doucet could respond, the waiter came to clear the table and bring them coffee. When he had gone, Doucet accepted a cigarette, and a light. He twirled the burning end against the tin tray. “Do you know the name Henri Landru, Monsieur?”

  Stuyvesant’s jerk scattered sugar over the table. “Hey, you’re not suggesting …? Jesus, just because she’s moving with a fast crowd doesn’t mean someone has slit her throat.”

  “So you know the name.”

  “Sure. You guys sent him to the guillotine six or seven years ago for murdering a bunch of women.”

  “Ten women and the seventeen-year-old son of his first victim. Landru was a—how do you say?—‘most unprepossessing’ figure, who took advantage of the state of widows during the War. He wooed them, stole what he could from them, and disposed of their bodies in his kitchen stove. A cold-blooded monster of a man. I worked on the investigation, soon after I was demobilized. Nothing was found of his victims but fragments of bone and the buttons and hooks of their clothing. I attended his trial. The Surrealists made it a cause célèbre, sitting in the court and reveling in every word, making Landru a hero of the unprivileged. I came away from the trial determined that no man would again get away with killing a series of women. Comprenez?”

  “I understand.” Stuyvesant was glad he hadn’t gorged on the oysters: this rapid escalation from drug parties to bodies in a furnace was making him queasy.

  “I am not suggesting this is the fate of your young friend, Monsieur.”

  “I’m really glad to hear that.”

  “What I am saying is that I have become a believer in the small details of an investigation, and in patterns. Whether a man intends to kill a woman or to take possession of her through the use of drugs, there is a system to his behavior. An interest in those patterns is a large reason why I work in the department of missing persons, that I might be the first to see the traces of a monster.

  “Monsieur, a predatory man does not in general snatch his victim off the street. You know this. It is the reason you have been asking in the bars. Once a girl has begun to flirt with that type of person, she is vulnerable.”

  “Do you have any reason to believe—”

  “No. I have seen no such pattern. I have found a marginally higher number of unsolved cases than in previous years, but there can be many explanations for that.”

  “But if there is a pattern, you think … what? It has to do with Surrealism?”

  “Monsieur, men kill for many reasons. Anger, fear, even pleasure. I believe that sooner or later, some … creature who thinks himself an artist will step past the limits of theory and decide to commit murder as an artistic expression. Will decide not simply to honor Landru and de Sade, but to emulate them. I tell you this, Monsieur, to explain my alarm over the disappearance of a young woman with connections to the art community.

  “I have thought about what you told me this afternoon, and I admit, I was wrong, to accept the word of a voice on the telephone. We should have sent a man to see that the young lady was at home. We will change the way we do this.”

  Stuyvesant stared across the tiny table. An official police detective, admitting a mistake? Impossible.

  The flic dropped his cigarette and slid his hand into his breast pocket. He held out an unsealed envelope. Something in the way he held the thing made Stuyvesant hesitate.

  But he took it, and lifted the flap, seeing the edges of two photographs. Only two, he tried to tell himself as he slid a pair of fingers in. Tried.

  Two women, one a pretty blonde in her early twenties, standing in the shade of a tree with a wide-brimmed hat in her hand. The other, in her thirties, had dark hair, and sat on a carousel horse looking a bit horsey herself, long of face and teeth. But she was having a good time, and it had been a sunny day. He turned that one over, and read:

  Alice Barnes

  née 23 April 1905, Chicago, États Unis

  vue le 19 juin 1928

  And on the back of the younger, prettier girl:

  Ruth Ann Palowski

  née 2 July 1908, San Francisco, California vue (?) octobre 1928

  “These are two missing women we have confirmed did not go home to Mama,” the policeman told him, “and the dates they were last seen here. Mlle. Barnes had been here for three weeks. She spent much of that time in museums and galleries, meeting any number of artists, buying several paintings and sculptures. Mlle. Palowski came to do a course in art at the Sorbonne. She lived in the VI arrondissement for a year, and was an habituée of the Dôme and the Select.”

  At the center of the Montparnasse art world.

  “As I said to you, much of my … attention in my job lies in watching for patterns. Several of my missing persons have links to the art world—mostly tenuous, but not with these two women.

  “I have begun inquiries into a number of others whose cases are still open, to see if perhaps your Miss Crosby shares any characteristics with them. I hope to God they are with their families.” He took the photographs from Stuyvesant and put them back in his breast pocket. “M. Stuyvesant, it is not my habit to bring outsiders into the business of the police department. I do so now because of the other thing your friend said to me.”

  “He’s not exactly a friend.”

  “This I could tell. In addition to describing you as honorable, he made it quite clear that if I did not wish to have you underfoot, the only way to make you abandon a case would be to jail you or deport you. And even then, he would not bet on my being able to keep you away.

  “I am pleased to find that you are not �
��milking’ Miss Crosby’s family by failing to bring your information to the attention of the police. Nonetheless …”

  He leaned forward across the table, locking onto the American’s gaze. “M. Stuyvesant, I will permit you to continue working in my city only if you stay in communication with me. If you withhold information, any information that might help me locate these girls, if you try to act the cowboy, I will come down on you with all the weight of the Sûreté Nationale. Do we understand each other?”

  “Absolutely. I wouldn’t want your Sergeant mad at you.”

  The weak joke fell on deaf ears. “You may keep that Man Ray photograph, Monsieur. I expect to hear from you regularly.”

  And he got up abruptly and left, an impressive, untidy, curiously likable cop with a bum leg.

  Stuyvesant watched him go, and then signaled the waiter for another drink.

  Jesus Christ, he thought. How’d we go so fast from a girl on a yacht to a maniac killer?

  THIRTEEN

  A CONVERSATION:

  “You want me to do a danse macabre for you?”

  “Just one of the panels. I shall call it ‘A Totentanz for the Twentieth Century.’ You and a selection of eminent modern artists, joining in a Dance of Death around a large, semi-circular room.”

  “Not very cheerful wallpaper.”

  “Ah, but you are wrong. A dance is a thing of joy, is it not? Passion and life? A dance and its music celebrate the physical. But would the music be so bright, the dancing so animated, if Death did not stand ready to snatch it away at any moment?”

  “That’s getting a little philosophical for me.”

  “Its origins are anything but. The classical Danse Macabrés were frescoes in the round showing Death—a skeleton or decaying body—leading all the world’s citizens in his Dance. Pope and prostitute, merchant and monk, plowman and beggerman’s child, all join hands with Death in the end.”