Bones of Paris (9780345531773) (15 page)

Stuyvesant couldn’t blame him.

“Come on, honey, let’s have another dance.” Stuyvesant pulled Nancy to her feet.

“I don’t think—” she protested, but his arms were already around her.

Running surveillance on a person from a dance floor was tricky, especially since his feet had grown unusually clumsy, but looking past Nancy’s shoulder, he could see the party.

Nancy squeaked. “Sorry,” Stuyvesant said, and loosened his grip.

“Who are you looking at?”

“Just a guy I thought I recognized.”
Just a guy who really rubs me the wrong way. A guy who might have something to do with my missing girl
.

“A friend?”

“Wouldn’t say that.” Ray seemed to be lecturing the count, his hands sketching shapes in the air, looking impatient when Charmentier did not appear to follow what he was saying. He dashed his cigarette into the tray and pulled out a pen to draw on Bricky’s pristine tablecloth.

Le Comte watched; Lee Miller stretched around Ray’s shoulder to see; Stuyvesant steered Nancy into one set of dancers, then another. Nancy apologized both times. After a third near-collision she took her hands from his shoulders. “Why don’t we just go talk to them?”

“No.”

The waiter came with a tray of drinks, placing one before each of the trio and one at the empty chair. Ray dropped his pen and exchanged it for the drink, squinting at the black lines as if to say that he knew the world would consider the sketch a work of genius, but then, he was the only one remotely qualified to actually judge.

It was just too tempting.

“On the other hand,” Stuyvesant told Nancy, “why the hell not?”

He dropped his hands from Nancy’s body to shoulder his way through the dancers, dimly aware of Nancy’s protests and apologies following him across the floor. Dimly aware, too, of an internal voice telling him that this was
such
a bad idea, that Bricky was going to blow her top, that there was always tomorrow …

But he’d had too many tomorrows, too many days of heat and frustration, with Berlin and Paris and five nights with Pip looking over his shoulder and
nobody knowing her
and the loathsome films and that gorgeous young woman with the boots of the great photographer resting on her back, and too much drink and not enough food and the club’s mad energy—

It was like teasing a burning match over a pool of gasoline. How was it possible to look down your nose at someone standing above you? Something in those bushy eyebrows, it had to be—something that just tempted a man’s fist …

Not tonight, though. Tonight was just for a verbal jab.

The three seated figures looked up, glasses in mid-air. The music jived on around them, the dancers whirled and stamped, as Stuyvesant
fixed his eyes on the dark-eyed artist, swaying slightly
(Jesus, Harris, are you tight?)
as he felt the two pairs of blue eyes from either side of Ray.

“Mr. Ray,” he said, “I don’t think you were telling me the whole truth this morning.”

“No?”

“Monsieur,” the other man said. “I believe you should—”

Stuyvesant turned to him. “You’re Dominic Charmentier, aren’t you? Your friend here, I think he’s a liar.”

The Frenchman rose, shooting the seated artist a look that was both amused and alarmed. “I’m sure that’s not true,” he said evenly.

“And I think you’re in it with him.”

Now the man looked frankly dumbfounded. “Monsieur?”

Stuyvesant leaned forward, his thighs bumping the table, and pronounced the name. “Pip Crosby.”

There was a quick flare of—
something
in the Frenchman’s face, that three bottles of champagne got in the way of reading. Apprehension? The widening of his eyes, a tiny startled raise of the chin. And that wasn’t all: was it pleasure? Guilt? Pride?

“You know her!”

“Of course he knows her.” Man Ray was on his feet, too. “I told you that this morning.”

“Where is she?” Stuyvesant demanded, directing the question at the artist and the nobleman equally.

“Oh, who the hell cares?” Ray said.

“I care!” It was not Stuyvesant’s voice but Nancy’s, indignant at his shoulder.

“And who are you?” The artist might as well have said it aloud:
You’re nothing but chewing gum on the sole of my shoe
.

Stuyvesant wanted to hit that smug face. He might have done so, but for Nancy hanging on to his left arm and trapping him against the table. Instead, he looked down at the drawing—and was startled to see a skeleton having sex with a voluptuous woman.

With a moment of what felt like clarity, a voice whispered in his ear that there was a better way to knock the artist than on his nose. His
right hand picked up the untouched wine glass and dashed it across the ink. Five people went still, watching the ink spread and lose its power, then Ray started around the table towards him.

Childish
.

You’re drunk
.

Leave now
.

He turned sharply away, his left hand seizing Nancy’s arm and pulling her to one side, his right coming out to straight-arm the truculent little artist out of his way. Man Ray jolted back—directly into Le Comte. The older man staggered, grabbed at the tablecloth, and went down in an explosion of white linen and half-full glasses.

Cries rose up, waiters came running, to tackle the only man still on his feet: Harris Stuyvesant.

The band bleated to a halt. In the silence, the crowd listened to the big, unruly American, cursing and trying to tell the men that he was sorry, he was leaving, he was tanked. Then Bricktop herself was there, furious.

“Yeah, Bricky, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—Yeah, I’m gone.”

The waiters drew back, allowing him to pick himself up from the floor. He winced at a slice of broken glass across his palm as he brushed his evening suit, then wiped more cautiously across his face, blinking against the sting of booze. Nancy was at his side, half supporting him. He allowed his arm to come to a rest across her shoulder.

The trio at the overturned table were on their feet, Lee Miller alternating her concern between Ray and Charmentier, who both declared that they were fine. Into this tableau of disaster rushed the missing fourth member of Le Comte’s party, a small woman with short-cropped hair so blonde it was nearly white. She pulled Charmentier’s fingers from his face, reassuring herself that his nose was not flat and bloody, then did the same with the photographer. Finally she whirled on the derelict stranger and the dark-haired woman holding him upright.

And froze. Her blazing emerald eyes went wide.

“Harris?”

Sarah Grey.

S
ARAH
G
REY STIRRED
sugar into her coffee and tried to decide which hand to wear.

Not the one with the long scarlet fingernails—she hadn’t worn that for months. Not only did her right hand have short nails now, but that particular color of enamel was not to be had in all of Paris. Nor the hand she thought of as The Dancer, with the decorative flair of the fingers: it drew more attention than it deflected.

What she’d never been able to get the hands’ creator to understand was, a hand should be invisible. In London, she could have worn gloves, but they weren’t as popular here, especially not in the hot weather. It wasn’t fair. Eleven years after Armistice and the streets were still full of men with empty sleeves, men gimping on artificial legs, men whose faces looked like crumpled blossoms. Nobody looked twice at them. But let a pinned-back sleeve be connected to a small blonde woman, and there came The Look: surprise and pity and the tip-of-the-tongue question,
What happened to
—a question that all but the crudest caught and tucked away.

But not before she saw the impulse.

A realistic hand sticking out of her left sleeve at least saved her from some Looks.

She set down the spoon with a sharp rap and plucked the oldest,
most comfortable hand from the macabre display. It was the only one she’d actually asked for, so long ago its paint was chipped and the thumb was cracking. She’d have taken it in for repairs, but conversations with Didi were so … unnerving, it was easier to put up with a few dings and nicks.

In this, as in so much of life, attitude was all: if you treated it as a hand rather than a foreign object, people tended not to notice it.

She buckled it on and rolled down her sleeve, then left the house.

It might have been her imagination, but there seemed to be just a hint of October beneath this unending August heat. This would be her fourth autumn here, in a city that she’d intended to pass through on her way to points exotic and faraway, and somehow never left. Her early visits to museums and theaters had given way to work with theaters and artists—no politics, ever again!—as her schoolgirl French grew brisk and Parisian, along with the clothes in her wardrobe. She sometimes studied the stump of her left wrist and wondered at the young woman who used to be whole.

Sarah no longer had any interest in politics, no wish to help anyone, no desire to change the world. She had not even been back to England since her mother’s funeral, in the winter of 1927. Most of her friendships had withered. Even Harris Stuyvesant.

She had met the big American just before her life had changed. Within a day of their meeting, she’d found herself thinking about marriage: if not for the bomb, she might be living in New York with a child. If not for the bomb. If not for running from England and all it represented.

Not that she blamed Harris, exactly. She had
meant
to contact him,
intended
to write and tell him … what? That she forgave him? What was there to forgive, other than his failure to keep her from an act that she herself had chosen? She tried to write, but with each passing day, it became less possible.

Only her brother remained. She wished Bennett would come to Paris again—he had once, so she was not without hope—but in lieu of actual appearances, he remained a steadfast correspondent. Although even he had changed since … That Day. Sometimes it felt as if he was
trying to apologize for not protecting her as a big brother should. Still, he remained the most restful person she knew. A person didn’t have to
say
things to Bennett. He just knew.

Their mother’s death meant an inheritance, not enormous but enough that Sarah didn’t have to produce an income. Her first weeks under this luxurious regime, she’d quit her position as assistant to an American millionaire and spent a week wandering the boulevards, where one afternoon she’d happened across a small and charming museum of Renaissance-era arts, entering into a conversation with the director. When she walked out, she found that she had volunteered to help him organize the museum’s records—she might look like a scatter-brain, but in fact she both liked to organize and was good at it. She’d spent two months setting the office straight, then moved on to a struggling Rive Droite bookshop where she was a regular customer, helping them renovate their displays and coming up with ways of attracting more traffic. Since then, she had alternated between unpaid labor and actual employment, some of it quite generously paid. The only requirement was that it interested her.

She’d first met Le Comte seventeen months ago, when she was sitting in a frigid gallery around the corner from the Café de Flore. She’d thought this would be a way to learn about the city’s artists, and that she did: in no time at all she’d discovered that most of them were children without the innocence, needing constant reassurance as to their genius. There never seemed to be enough air around them, and frankly it was boring. She’d given her notice.

Her last day in the gallery, Le Comte came in out of a sudden rainstorm, a slim, patrician gentleman in a beautiful coat. He tipped his hat politely, revealing pure white hair, and wandered through the gallery, ending up in the side room in front of Didi Moreau’s weird little boxes.

“These are intriguing,” he said, hearing her come in.

“Yes, aren’t they?”

He gave her face a brief glance, then returned his gaze to the collected oddities: thin bones and a lock of pale blonde hair, the photo of a small girl and one small glass eye, brilliantly blue. “You don’t care for them.”

“Oh, to the contrary, Monsieur. Some of the Displays have a strange beauty and eloquence about them. They inhabit the boundary between a classical interpretation of art and Duchamp’s readymades.”

“Objets trouvés,”
he murmured under his breath. “Gifts from the universe.”

“I beg your pardon?”

He turned to look at her face-on, giving Sarah a view of money, breeding, and a startling hint of sorrow. “I’ve never cared for art as an intellectual joke,” he told her. “I always suspect the artist of taking my money with one hand while making a rude gesture with the other.”

Sarah felt her smile go a bit strained. She told herself not to be so sensitive—and edged her left arm back from his line of sight. “I’m quite certain that Didi Moreau has no such hidden motive.”

“Would it be possible to meet the artist?”

“He’s something of a hermit, but he is always willing to make an appointment.”

She gave Le Comte the artist’s telephone number, and sold him four of the Displays. Whether he returned to the gallery or not, she did not know, having moved on to another position.

Over the following months, she’d seen him a few times—with the size of Paris society, it was hard not to encounter the basic set of characters over and over, even one less ubiquitous as Le Comte—but she kept to the edges of the events, and indeed of Paris society as a whole. It was more than a year later that she met him again, at a very swank party at the house of Cole and Linda Porter, near the Place des Invalides. Linda introduced them, and when she was then drawn away to see to some detail, Le Comte cocked his head at Sarah.

“We have met, somewhere.”

“I was in a gallery when you bought several of Didi Moreau’s Displays.”

His eyes flicked briefly, but he caught himself before they could actually reach her hand. “As I recall, you didn’t like them much.”