Bones of Paris (9780345531773) (12 page)

Wasn’t that the way things seemed to work in this modern world? You might not have love, but you could have plenty of sex.

But damn it: if Sarah had wanted to end it, why send him a photograph? Her words had been evasive, but not the picture.

The words had said that she would travel—Rome, Hong Kong. That she needed to accustom herself to a missing limb and the maddening whine in her ear. To stand on her own, and not risk coming to lean upon him.

The picture was another matter. It had been trimmed to fit the silver case—Bennett must have told her about the hidden compartment, damn the man’s all-seeing eyes—and although some girls would taunt a fellow with a reminder and a brush-off at the same time, he couldn’t believe it of Sarah Grey.

Not that Sarah didn’t have good reason to hate him. He’d been slow and he’d been secretive, a deadly combination that cost Sarah her hand, her friend, and her faith in the world. So he’d made no effort to follow her. He’d just made sure that Bennett, hidden away in his stone cottage at the tip-toe of Britain’s boot, always knew exactly where Harris Stuyvesant could be found.

A part of him still believed that the picture was a tentative request
for patience. That the letter was less dismissal than plea. That both had been meant as signs of her continuing affection. Why else bother to write? But the faces of Helen and Sarah—and, yes, Pip Crosby, along with Maryanne and Danuta and Leisl, even Lulu—had begun to blur together in his memory, and he was beginning to suspect that only Sarah’s words mattered: she wanted to stand on her own.

Time for Harris Stuyvesant to do the same.

Time to give up the self-delusion. To admit that for three years, he’d been making every decision based on its proximity to England, arranging his life around a summons that would never come.

Time to set his lighter under Sarah’s photograph and let the ashes drift over the Seine. Time to do his best for Pip Crosby, and then go home.

He closed the case and went to push open the window, not expecting much. To his surprise, the air moving over the maze of rooftops seemed to hold a faint promise of coolness. Maybe the heat would break. Maybe Pip’s friends would come back from Spain, the butchers return from the contemplation of mountain sheep.

Maybe he could sleep.

I
T WAS A
quick transaction, as those in silent alleyways tend to be. The woman was slightly drunk, slightly annoyed at the inconvenient setting, but happy for the money. Enough for two months’ rent, and a bit more.

“Oui,” she told the man for a second time. “J’ai fait ce que vous dites, avec son passeporte. Où? À l’intériur d’un livre q’il a acheté, un livre englais. J’ais fixé le papier comme si c’était. C’est tout. Maintenant, où est l’ar—”

Yes, I did as you said, with her passport. Where? Inside a book that he’d bought, an English book. I fixed the wrapping like it was. That’s all. Now, where’s the mon—

“Pardonne-moi.” The apology was swallowed by gunshot, shockingly loud in the residential district. Two gendarmes in the Place Denfert-Rochereau dropped their cigarettes and ran, arriving barely a minute after the noise. There was nothing in the alleyway but a woman with brassy blonde hair, dead on the cobblestones.

T
HE RISING TEMPERATURE
of his fourth-floor room drove Stuyvesant out of bed by eight, Wednesday morning. As he shaved, he avoided looking at his bloodshot eyes, but he did pause to survey his reflection in the spotted mirror inside the armoire.

“Harris my boy, you’ll find her today.”

Harris my boy was not convinced.

Stuyvesant had to try three places before he found a photographer who would do a rush job on Pip’s photo, and then only the knowledge of Uncle Ernest’s checkbook kept Stuyvesant from voicing his outrage at the price. He promised to be back in three hours, then walked up to the Rotonde terrace, ordering coffee and tackling the morning’s
Figaro
. His French was pretty colloquial by now, but his mastery of the written language lagged somewhat. For example, everyone he knew thought the American stock market boom was just great, but the
Figaro
’s coverage seemed to have an edge of cynicism. He puzzled over it, but decided it was probably just the customary French scorn for anything that didn’t begin and end in Paris, and traded the
Figaro
for an abandoned copy of the
Trib
’s Paris Edition.

He read the American football scores while his right ear filled with an argument about the cess-cart an artist had entered into the Autumn Salon and his left ear with a gabfest on the depravity of publishers. Which was fine until the table behind him launched into a discussion
in florid French about a shooting that had taken place down in Denfert-Rochereau the night before, and the clash of themes and languages threatened a headache.

He thumbed some coins into the top saucer, settled his Panama at a bit of an angle, and with a wave of the finger to the waiter, he set off into the city.

His first order of business was personal: in Berlin, he’d been down to one summer-weight suit, and that had a mend in its knee. One of his first acts upon cashing the Crosby bank draft the week before had been to wire his Paris tailor and have him start a new one, in a fabric of the tailor’s choice.

It wasn’t as if a man Stuyvesant’s height could buy his suits ready-made, here in France.

As it happened, the tailor’s wife had taken ill at the end of July, condemning him to Paris for the vacances. He had apparently been desperate to get out of his house, because to Stuyvesant’s amazement, the suit was ready for a fitting.

The plump little man knew his client, and had chosen a light-weight, tightly woven gray wool with the faintest stripe: fashionable but traditional, handsome but practical. The two men studied the reflection in the triple mirror.

“You like, Monsieur?”

“Perfect as always,” Stuyvesant told him. There was no denying that new clothes made for a new man.

“It is too wide in the body. Perhaps I could take it in, just a tiny—”

“It’s fine.”

They had the same argument every time. Stuyvesant only occasionally wore a gun, but he needed his jackets loose, and he’d found this tailor through the Paris detective agency he’d done a couple jobs for. Still, the tailor was a proud man: left to him, a suit’s pockets would be sewn up to prevent lumps. Next thing you knew, the guy would be selling his clients handbags.

The tailor shook his head, accepting the great burden.

“Monsieur, I will have this for you by end of day. The shirts, I regret, will not be finished until the end of the week. But you will be pleased
with them, the fabric is from a mill that has only recently come back after the War, and the buttons—ah, the buttons, they are spectacular! None of your surface sheen, no. The reflective glint in the shell is deep, giving the finished product a luxurious—”

The man made good suits that lasted, at a price Stuyvesant could afford—and his method of measuring inseams and eyeing the fit of trousers didn’t leave a man feeling like he’d been groped. But boy, could he ever talk. Stuyvesant cut him off with a reassurance that the laundry would be back in the afternoon, and with it a new shirt (a little short in the sleeve, granted, and the buttons weren’t exactly spectacular).

The tram was crowded, so it took him a couple of streets to notice that he’d boarded the wrong one. He had to back-track to Saint-Michel and wait for another, which when it arrived was mobbed by his fellow would-be passengers. Another day, he might have stood back and taken the next car; today, he used his size to bully his way on board.

Plus that, the tram car was stifling—and, when he got down, he found that some disgusting urchin had left a stain on his trouser leg.

When he reached Man Ray’s studio, he was in no mood to appreciate the building’s pretty front. He just opened an unlocked door and found himself in the chaos of a high-roofed artist’s studio, only with glossy prints and faint chemical smells instead of canvases and turpentine. Photographic prints and paintings hung on the walls, shelves were laden with file-boxes and folders. Everywhere lay a jumble of objects and half-unpacked trunks.

A closer look separated the freshly arrived debris of a summer away from the dusty resident objects waiting for an artistic home: mismatched chess pieces, dried flowers, a topless cigar box holding half a dozen dry wish-bones, a chamber-pot full of old clocks, various tangles of machinery whose purpose Stuyvesant couldn’t guess at, and half a dozen articulated wooden models: four of them hands, three right and a left, and two full human figures, complicated wooden skeletons with brass joints. The pair had been posed flat, the bald one pressed between the legs of the one with the blonde wig.

Why did avant-garde artists always have such sophomoric humor?

Not everything in the room was by Man Ray. He recognized a couple
of the paintings hanging crookedly on the wall, and damned if there wasn’t one of those collage-boxes like Pip had in her bedroom. This one also had a variety of
objets trouvés
, although there weren’t any bones, and the closest he saw to painted-on blood was the brilliant red of a tube of lipstick. He puzzled over the little square of face down in the corner, thinking that it looked vaguely familiar, when he realized that the eyebrows had been shaved off and repainted, and knew who it was: Kiki of Montparnasse. Which explained the box’s other square of photograph: a nipple.

He smiled, and went on with his perusal. Photographs, letters, uncashed checks, a baby shoe. A folder of sketches for what looked like a painting, showing a line of people dancing to a Negro band: one of the dancers was a skeleton, bones flying in what looked like a Charleston. A chewed dog bone, a bowl brimming with mismatched dice.

The only clear space in the room was a table with a chessboard, arrayed with modernistic shapes ready for action.

Stuyvesant reached the end of the room. He was opening his mouth to call when he heard the sound of footsteps—and when he saw the source, his mouth remained open.

He’d met a lot of blondes who were easy on the eye, but this one put the rest in the shade. She was a stunner, slim and tall, her short hair bleached white by the sun. When she came in, she was frowning beautifully over the stack of envelopes in her hand. She looked up, showing him her perfect face, her aristocratic nose, her very white teeth, and her apprehension. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-three; she looked seventeen.

“Oh, Christ, are you here for an appointment?”

“You’re American,” he blurted.

“Yes. So are you, it sounds like. Maybe you’re not on the schedule, then?”

“No. No appointment, that is. I’m looking for Mr. Ray.”

“Oh thank God, I was afraid I’d already failed at the task of keeping the schedule, and on my first day here. He’ll be in shortly, he’s just shaving.”

“You’re new here?”

“Here, yes. We’ve been lovers since June,” she said, trying for casual. “I don’t suppose you see anything that looks like an appointment diary?”

“No, but I’ll help you look. My name’s Stuyvesant, by the way.”

“Lee Miller.” She stuck out a strong hand and they shook across the crowded desk.

It was a novel entrée to an illicit search, but Stuyvesant dove in with gusto, stimulated as much by the physical presence of the lover-assistant as by the underhanded way he was making use of her naiveté: “honorable,” my ass. “Have you known him long, then?” he asked, surreptitiously noting the return addresses on a stack of mail.

“No, like I said, we met in June, as he was leaving for Biarritz. We’re only just back, so I haven’t had a chance to look things over. What about this? No, it’s a sketchbook.”

Stuyvesant moved over to what appeared to be Ray’s current projects: multiple prints of negatives, each one with a tiny difference in the blackness of its shadows and the brilliance of its white spaces. A lot of them were of Lee Miller, from early infatuation to ever more intrusive use of the camera lens. He could only hope the girl’s parents never saw the nudes. There were other pictures that looked remarkably like the photographs from a police file. One of these was particularly disturbing: had it not been unlikely that a dead person could hold her leg in that languorous position, he’d have been certain that the great thick pool the model was lying in was fresh blood.

Stuyvesant’s horrified fascination was cut short by a voice from the stairs.

“Lee, darling one, I need you in the darkroom, if we’re going to—Oh, pardon, Monsieur, may I help you?”

“Man, this is Mr. Stuyvesant, and he’s not an appointment.”

Stuyvesant flipped over the folder’s cover and walked forward to stick out his hand.

Man Ray was, as Sylvia Beach had said, an American, maybe twenty years older than the girl, with little of her looks, height, or coloration. Or indeed, her assurance: the photographer’s immediate response to finding a man with his lover was to bristle with suspicion and move over beside her.

Oh, she was going to lead this one a merry chase before she was finished with him, Stuyvesant reflected.

But he had business with the fellow, so he turned a shoulder to Miss Miller, blatantly dismissing her from consideration as he held out the photograph.

“I think this is one of yours?” he asked.

The photographer took it. He had the kind of dark, intent eyes some women just got all gooey about, like … Like Valentino’s?

Oh, Pip, honey—really? This one, too?

“That’s the girl with the burn. American, Philippa something. She was interesting.”

“Crosby. And how was she interesting?”

The Miller girl had come around to look at Pip’s photo; Ray handed it to her. “She wasn’t what she seemed. That’s rare. With most people, the lens struggles to find something beneath the surface. But this one, who looked like any of a sea of other bright-eyed girls, the minute she sat down you could see her history. Are you following me?”

Stuyvesant put on a puzzled expression: let Ray demonstrate his cleverness.

“It’s like—like Lee, here.” His hand went around the back of the girl’s neck and pulled her face down to his. They kissed, long and hard. A little too long and hard, pressed up against each other. Stuyvesant cleared his throat. Twice. Ray finally pulled away, and spoke over his shoulder to his visitor. “Look at her: those incredible colors in her hair, her eyes; the movement of her; the pulse of life running under her skin and in her every movement.