Bones of Paris (9780345531773) (2 page)
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Authors: Laurie R. King
Jesus: not yet ten, and already a furnace.
Stuyvesant managed to get his feet to the carpet, waiting out the secondary explosion inside his skull before he rose to stumble a path through discarded clothing to the corner basin. The water was disgustingly warm, but he drank a glass anyway, then bent to let the tap splash over his face and hair. He wrestled with the aspirin bottle for an hour or so, palmed three pills and washed them down with a second glass, then reached out to part the curtains a fraction.
A dizzying panorama of rooftops: tiles and tin, brick and timber, steeples and drying laundry; centuries of chimneypots, with a narrow slice of stone magnificence in the distance. Children’s voices and taxi horns competed with a tram rattle from the rue de Rennes and a neighbor’s
accordion, mournfully wading through a lively tune. His nose filled with the pervasive stink of an unemptied septic tank.
Summer in Paris.
He went back to his seat on the side of the bed, picking up his cigarette case and lighter.
The tap of the Ronson touching wood set off a convulsion in the bed. A hand emerged from the sheets, then a tangled head of brassy blonde hair, followed by blue eyes blinking in outrage.
“Ferme les rideaux putain!”
He wasn’t sure if she was calling him a whore, or the curtains, and he didn’t think he would be able to shape the question without coffee. Even the French swill that was mostly chicory.
“Doesn’t help any to shut them, honey. They’re like tissue paper.”
“Eh?”
“Nothing,” he told her. “I have to go to work.”
She understood that, and yanked the covers back over her matted hair. Stuyvesant swiveled around on the bed to rip them off her. “Really,” he said. “It’s time to rise and shine.”
But instead of complaining, or assaulting him with curses, she gave a sinuous writhe to curl against his leg, looking up at him as coquettishly as a person could when her mascara was smeared like something from a German horror film.
“You take me for breakfast, ’Arris?” One soft breast pressed into his knee, two firm fingers walked a path up the inside of his bent thigh.
He smashed the cigarette out against the ash-tray, then bent over the smeared horror-eyes. “I try never to disappoint a lady,” he told her.
Be nice if he could remember this one’s name.
A
CONVERSATION:
“You knew that Crosby girl, didn’t you?”
“Crosby? I don’t believe I …”
“Peggy? Patricia? There was something about photographs and a scar—this was some time ago.”
“Ah, yes: Philippa. What about her?”
“Is she still around?”
“I haven’t seen her in months. Why?”
“There was an American asking about her, last night. He claims he was hired by her parents, though he looked a real brute to me. I thought if you were still in touch, you might let her know.”
“As I say, it’s been months. Did you talk to the fellow?”
“No, but he’s around the Quarter if you want him. That girl, Lulu? The one with the light fingers? He’s spending time with her.”
“Sounds a suitable match.”
“Better than the Crosby girl—too naïve for her own good.”
“A description fitting half the women in Montparnasse.”
“Certainly the Americans. Why on earth do their fathers let them leave the house?”
“Madness.”
“I know—they’re just asking for trouble. They come to town, sleep with as many boys as they can find, and are shocked as lambs when they
get hurt. I suppose that’s why so many of them drift away. I can’t think how many times someone has said, ‘Has anyone seen Daisy?’ or Iris or whoever. The girls here seem to make a habit of flitting in and out, and …”
The other man nodded.
And in the background, a machine began to tick.
T
HIS SEEMED TO
be Stuyvesant’s day for drunken women. Well, it was Paris; it was 1929. What else could he expect?
Two hours after he’d taken Lulu for breakfast (there: he’d even remembered her name), Harris Stuyvesant rapped on a polished wooden door. The Rive Droite apartment was half as old and ten times as clean as his hotel room across the Seine, and even three flights up from street level, its hallways smelled like money. No septic tanks around here.
He knocked again.
The girl had to be back from the Riviera (or Monte Carlo or wherever she’d spent the summer)—and the building’s gorgon of a concierge had spoken on the telephone with someone in apartment 406 before reluctantly permitting him to pass, two minutes ago.
So unless the resident had made a break over the roof tiles …
He changed from knuckles to fist and pounded, hard. In response, a long extended grumble welled gradually from within. Locks rattled. The door swung open.
The girl was tall and brown: dark eyes, chestnut hair, sun-tanned skin, dressed in a man’s chocolate-colored dressing-gown. The most colorful things about her were two heavily bloodshot eyes, explained by the stale-wine smell oozing from her pores.
Colorful eyes, and vocabulary. Three years ago when he’d come to France, Stuyvesant wouldn’t have understood a thing the girl was saying—and even now he missed a few phrases. Those he did get made him blink.
“Yeah, sorry,” he interrupted loudly, in English. “I woke you up and you’re not happy with me. I need to ask you about Pip Crosby.”
“Who?” The accent sounded American, suggesting this was the roommate, but he’d need more than a monosyllable to be sure.
“Pip—Philippa. Crosby.”
“Phil?” The red eyes squinted against the brightness, and the wide, dry lips emitted another expletive. Thought appeared to be a challenge, but he caught no flare of guilty panic across her angular features.
“Are you Nancy Berger?”
“Uh.”
He took that for an affirmative, and planted one broad hand against the door, pushing gently. “How ’bout I come in and fix you some coffee?” She swayed. He caught her elbow, then hooked his Panama over the coat-rack and walked her inside to a seat, finding a roomy, light-filled apartment, comfortably furnished and clean beneath what appeared to be an exploded suitcase.
He located the kitchen and a coffee percolator, along with a package of grounds that, although stale-smelling, at least wasn’t chicory. While the pot gurgled, he snooped through drawers and flipped through a crate of unopened mail. It dated back to June.
When the glass button showed dark, he poured two cups and stirred sugar into both, carrying them out to the next room. The brown girl sat, unblinking, on a bright orange settee, the gap in her robe creating a provocative degree of cleavage (though personally, he preferred freckles to sun-tan). He pushed a cup into her hand, removed a pair of silk undergarments from the chair, and sat down in front of her.
“Drink,” he ordered. “It’ll help.”
Her eyes focused on the cup. She tried to speak, cleared her throat, tried again. “Milk?”
“There isn’t any.” Her robe kept sagging; in a minute, one side or the other would be unfettered.
She blew across the top, sipped, and croaked, “I don’t take sugar.” American, yes. She took another swallow.
Soon, she looked more alive and less queasy—and more crucial, her straighter posture restored a degree of closure to her garments. He handed her the note that he’d left with the concierge on Saturday afternoon, which he’d found on the counter under a dusty boot.
“I’m the one who wrote this, Miss Berger,” he told her. “Harris Stuyvesant. I’ve been hired by Pip’s—Phil’s—mother and uncle to find her. Do you know where she is?”
She shook her head, and kept shaking it back and forth until Stuyvesant sharply repeated the question.
“No,” she responded. “Sorry. I don’t. She went off with a friend … God, months ago.”
“Which friend is that?”
“How would I know? I never met him.”
“Then how—” Stuyvesant stopped.
First things first
, he told himself. “When did you see her last?”
“March,” she said mechanically. “Any idea when?”
“A couple days after my birthday party.”
“When is your birthday?”
“March twelfth.”
“So you last saw her around the fourteenth or fifteenth.”
“Later.” The girl’s face contorted with effort. “Maybe the twentieth?”
“But your birthday party was the twelfth.”
“My
birthday
is the twelfth. The party was the Sunday after.”
Stuyvesant’s hands twitched. If she’d been a man, he’d have grabbed her by the collar. If she’d had a collar. “Fine, the twentieth of March. So if you haven’t seen Pip since then, why have you been taking money from her every other week?”
She gave him an even blanker look. “Money?”
“Yeah, you know: francs, centimes. There’s a standing order transferring money from her Paris bank account to yours.”
“You mean the household accounts? Phil’s terrible about paying bills. I have to do it for us.”
He still saw no spark of alarm or deceit cross her face—although for the umpteenth time, Stuyvesant wished he had the shrewd eyes of his friend Bennett Grey.
“Okay, you last saw her the end of March. What did she say then, about being gone?”
“She had a job. Wait.” Her face screwed up as an idea bubbled to the surface like gas in a swamp. “Phil’s missing?”
“That’s what I’ve been saying.”
“Missing as in,
gone
?”
“Missing as in her mother wants to know where she is.”
“Her mother doesn’t know?”
“I told you: that is why I am here.” He really was going to shake her.
“Who
are
you?”
“Jesus Christ, lady—are you a moron or do you need me to shove you under a cold shower? My name is Stuyvesant. I’ve been hired by your roommate’s uncle to find her. How complicated is that?”
“Why should I tell you anything? You could be anyone.”
It actually was a little impressive, that someone in her condition could come up with an original thought. “Is there anyone other than her family who might be looking for her?”
The question was too complex for her addled state, but instead of allowing him to push his way past her conversationally as he had physically, she set her lips together and clammed up.
He smiled, rueful but approving: girls in general were too damned trusting these days. Still, he could’ve done with this one playing dumb a bit longer. He dug out the letter that had bounced from Nice to Warsaw before catching up with him in Berlin, the week before. She stretched her eyes wide a couple of times, and started to read.
Dear Mr. Stuyvesant,
If I have reached the correct person, I believe you know—or knew—a young woman named Philippa Crosby, Pip to her friends. You would have met her in the company of another young American, Rosalie Perkins, in the south of France last February. It was Rosalie who gave me your name.
I write because we cannot locate Pip, and I wonder if you can help. Rosalie said that you worked as a private investigations agent in Europe, and subsequent inquiries assured me that you are both competent and reliable. I also understand that you are fluent in French, and have spent much of the last few years working in that country.
Philippa is my brother’s daughter (he was killed in the War). She moved to Paris sixteen months ago. She was in the habit of writing home every two or three weeks. However, her last letter arrived in early April.
We—that is, Philippa’s mother and I—made inquiries in May, but I have recently discovered that our hired agent was, not to mince words, a crook. My sister-in-law, who is not well, was so distraught that she proposed to sail for France herself until I stepped in and said I would find the girl. I am told by colleagues that you might be trusted, as our other investigator could not.
Pip is a very bright girl of twenty-two who, although cherishing the unconventional attitudes of youth, has always demonstrated a level head and a firm degree of responsibility. (Indeed, those qualities are what convinced her mother and me to permit her to travel to Europe in the first place.) It is
highly unlike her
to simply cease communicating.
I have written to the American Embassy in Paris, and directly to the police, as well as to Pip’s own address, but have been frustrated on all counts: by the slowness of the Embassy, the vagueness of the police, and a completely unresponsive roommate. I am told that some of this is due to the widespread August holidays; however, even the building’s concierge was unhelpful. In hopes that having a physical representative there will press my urgency on the various fronts, I ask that you consider becoming my agent.
If you are willing to take on this job and are free to do so
soon
, please cable your reply.
Yours,
Ernest M. Crosby II
Stuyvesant kept his eyes glued on Miss Berger, judging her response to the letter. His own reaction to the thing had been … well, a wild mix: a thump of distress at hearing of Pip’s troubles—distress tempered by exasperation—followed by a stronger jolt, this one of apprehension. Was Crosby accusing him of something? Then came a queasy surprise—Pip really
had
been young. But his final and humiliating gut response, had been: relief. Because Ernest M. Crosby was offering Stuyvesant an escape from the seedy Berlin hostelry where his last job had stranded him.
So here he was a week later, tracking the eyes of that “completely unresponsive” roommate as they worked their way down the pompous words on the pricey paper. He saw when she reached Crosby’s grumble about her—the dry lips half parted in protest—but at the end of it, her reaction again surprised him. She looked up, aghast.
“Jesus. Phil’s
missing
!”
The distress on her ravaged face hit him straight in the gut. As if someone told him that a no-care-in-the-world starlet had a dying mother, or that the hard-as-nails prostitute leaving the bar was putting her kid through college.
It’s always a shock, when someone cares more about a thing than you do.
He’d liked Pip, sure, but a lot of life had washed over those five days in February. Since taking Crosby’s job, he’d thought of Pip mostly as a case—an increasingly frustrating case at that. Suddenly, with a look on Nancy Berger’s face, the missing girl blazed into life before his eyes, vivid and gay and in trouble.
