Bones of Paris (9780345531773) (29 page)

He started to close up the box, and then stopped. His first impulse was to leave everything untouched; his next, to take it all. So he compromised. He removed one letter and one photograph of each woman. He stirred the envelopes around, hoping that Moreau would not discover his loss, and returned the boxes to their positions.

Penlight in hand, overhead light off, he fitted himself back into the nightmare passageway. Getting the door locked was a tiny bit easier than opening it had been, and he sidled down the stonework, hoping he wasn’t leaving too many betraying threads behind.

Back in the room with the display of hands, he could hear clearly the sounds from overhead. The kitchen, he thought: she was preparing lunch—water running, a clatter of pans.

He headed for the stairs—then froze. Voices came from ahead. He hadn’t heard the door, or footsteps, but one of them was Moreau. He and a woman exchanged words, although he couldn’t make them out.
Go eat your lunch, Didi
, he urged.

But the doorknob at the top of the stairs rattled and Stuyvesant moved fast. Before the door was fully open, he was under the stairs with the corruption boxes, flashlight in his pocket. From his other pocket he drew a long black mask: if he had to hit Moreau and run for it, at least he could keep his face from being seen.

Lights went on above the stairway; feet descended the creaking wooden steps; the tiny legs and jaws of hungry beetles stirred ceaselessly in the corruption boxes against his knees, making his gorge rise. He watched: polished shoes; Sunday trousers; jacket; then the man’s head, moving off into the labyrinth. Silence fell. And stayed. Stuyvesant’s pulse, which had begun to quiet, rose again. Should he head for the door now, while the man was out of sight? Would Moreau visit his safe-room? Would he see …?

“Monsieur!” came the woman’s voice, so immediately above him that Stuyvesant cracked his head on the wall. “Do you wish that I put the roast back into the oven?”

“No, no. I’ll be there in a moment.” The woman’s shoes clacked away again—and Stuyvesant realized that they had not retreated earlier, but lingered at the top of the stairs. Perhaps a reminder to lunch was a regular part of their Sunday routine.

If he’d made a break for it, he’d have come face to face with her.

He wondered if she would need to make a second call, but in a minute, footsteps crunched along the gritty floor and—thank God—up the stairs. Stuyvesant narrowed his eyes against a betraying gleam, but the
artist was studying something in his hands and passed upwards, oblivious. The light went off, the door closed—did not lock—and after four steps on the tile surface, the carpet absorbed the artist’s heels.

Stuyvesant blew out a breath and lunged out from under the stairs, away from those damned, whispering boxes. Once the motions overhead had localized to the dining room, he crept up the steps to ease the door open a crack. When a distant clatter came from the kitchen, he slid through the door, across the tiles, and outside.

No hue and cry was raised in his wake.

He did not stop at the first café he came to, but he did stop soon. He threw the first drink down and was halfway through the second before the heebie-jeebies began to leave his skin. He took the stolen envelopes from his pocket, lining them up on the table.

Real distress, or expert pretense? If he’d seen these in another place and time, he would be convinced that the faces grimaced in genuine agony, the sweat was from true pain and terror. But in 1929 Paris, clever people with twisted ideas about artistic expression were thick on the ground, and he was willing to admit that some of them had the skill to pull one over on Harris Stuyvesant.

He did know one man who could say for sure. But, had he any right to place that burden on an already fragile spirit?

S
TUYVESANT HESITATED OUTSIDE
Nancy’s door to straighten his tie, as if that might settle his thoughts as well.
You hid the photographs under the floor
, he told himself.
Now hide them from your face
.

There was no way he would go on a date with those things in his pocket. What if she—

The door opened.

“Just one minute late,” he greeted her.

“Three, by my clock,” she replied. She stepped back so he could enter.

“Then your clock’s wrong,” he declared stoutly. He turned to close the door, saying, “And on a Sunday, you never know whether the trams are running or not, so I ought to get credit for—”

Her mouth interrupted his. As he turned back to the room, his arms were abruptly filled with warm and muscular femininity, face raised to his in a kiss, and the stifled words exploded into fireworks of internal dispute:
How tall she is and oh, my, not a speck of hesitation about her and—Sarah, what about Sarah, I ought to—but Sarah was surely beyond the hand-holding stage with that cop of hers and—no, Nancy isn’t about to—at least she may not intend to—not quite yet, anyway—

Delicious. And worthy of focus.

The burst of conflict faded, the envelopes faded, as the taste of her demanded his attention, his full attention. The taste of her, and the
languid demands of her mouth, and the full awareness that the body pressing against his knew exactly what it was doing, and precisely what it wanted. His arms gathered her to him, and the days of frustration and revulsion and fear and uncertainty came together in a push, and he bent towards her and in a minute, it was going—

She pulled away; his arms tightened. Her hands came up to push against his chest, and although he felt as though his body was being pulled inside-out, he let her draw back.

There was mischief on her face, but arousal in her eyes.

After a minute, he cleared his throat. “Well, that was certainly … unexpected.”

“I wanted to get it out of the way. Otherwise we’d both be dwelling on it all afternoon: will we, won’t we, when? Now we’ve kissed, we can relax and move on.”

He thought it was too bad that
moving on
did not mean
into the bedroom
, but he had to agree, it made for a considerable shift in how he looked at the next few hours: less stress, greater anticipation.

Nancy Berger was really something.

They began on the river, a view of the city Stuyvesant had only before glimpsed. Nancy led him to the rail of the steamer, callously elbowing aside a family of awe-struck Midwesterners, and taking care to speak only French around them lest they attach themselves to their fellow countrymen.

“Any news?”

It was a question Stuyvesant had spent the weekend dreading, the question that turned disappointment into accusation: Why haven’t you found her? What have you been doing?

What could he say?
I think you’re right: Pip Crosby is dead?

Because once he started telling her what he’d been doing, where did he stop? He might tell her about Le Comte’s party, but how could he not then talk about Sarah? He could confide his problems, but how to explain Lulu? He could talk about Man Ray and Didi Moreau, but
what could he begin to say about Doucet’s frankly terrifying list of the disappeared?

“I have three—” he started, then realized even that route was impossible: I have three men who might have murdered her? He cleared his throat.

“I have three men who might know where she’s gone, but I hope you understand, honey, I can’t go into the details until I’m sure.”

She stared across the river, looking as if he had not spoken. Looking as if she was listening to the hesitation and not the words. She sighed, then changed the subject.

“I’ll bet you’ve never played the tourist.”

“I’m sorry, Nancy. I will tell you, just not yet.”

“I understand. So have you? Played the tourist in Paris?”

He propped his elbows next to hers on the railing. “Not since the War.”

“You were here? With the American forces?”

“For a few months.”

“Where?”

Her brother, it turned out, had volunteered about the same time Stuyvesant had, and had spent time in the same part of the Front. But when she showed him a photograph, fading and worn, he did not know the face—at least, no more than he knew the faces of any stranger in a familiar uniform.

“He died?”

“It took a while, but yes, the War killed him eventually.”

“In France? Or did they ship him home?” He settled one arm back across her shoulders.

“Oh, he sailed home. And he stayed there for five years, before he came back to Paris and put a gun to his head.”

“Sounds like you were close.”

“Ned was my twin.”

His arm gave an involuntary contraction. They stood, watching the city scroll past, and the four envelopes under his floorboards crept back into Stuyvesant’s mind.

“The police came on Thursday,” she said. “To look at Phil’s room.”

Thursday was the day the gendarme had tossed his own room.

“Good. Was it Doucet?”

“A skinny little guy with a turned-in mouth?”

“Sergeant Fortier. Did he find anything?”

“Not that he told me.”

“So, where are we going?” he asked, after they had traveled a while downstream.

“Several places I like,” she replied. “I hope you’re wearing comfortable shoes.”

Stuyvesant later figured they covered ten miles that day. The steamer let them off at Suresnes. They walked to the American cemetery to leave flowers on her brother’s grave, before setting off in a lazy circle through the Parc de Saint-Cloud and across the bridge into the Bois du Boulogne. There they wandered aimlessly, talking all the while, holding hands from time to time, pausing three times in quiet corners to neck.

She’d decided to find another apartment, she told him. She didn’t have to say,
Because Phil is still there
.

Late in the afternoon, they allowed themselves to be pulled along by a drift of crowds heading towards Luna Park. At the entrance, Nancy turned to him.

“Do you skate?”

“What?” he said absently. Looking up at the cheerful sign, he’d had a vision of Pip Crosby, going for a last outing with Charmentier, her … what? Friend? Mentor? Employer?

Murderer?

“Harris?”

Why the hell had he imagined that she might be off in the sun—“Are you all right?”

—or that he’d be able to step in and be the hero, sending her back to her mother and Uncle Crosby, to laugh with them about
That time in Paris when we thought—

“Harris!”

He made an enormous effort, and was back with Nancy. “It’s not exactly the time of year for skating.”

“What is the matter with you?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re thinking about Phil, aren’t you?”

He blew out a breath, and admitted, “I was thinking about her mother and her uncle, yeah.”

She watched a man, a woman, and a little girl with ringlets go into the rink. “We lost two soldiers in my parents’ building, during the War. The son of a family upstairs was killed outright. The son of another family downstairs was declared missing in action. You’d think they would have an easier time of it, since they at least could hope, but in fact, it was far worse for them, not knowing.”

“Like a wound that doesn’t heal.”

“Not finding Phil would devastate her mother,” she agreed.

“And the uncle. He seems close to her.”

“Maybe a little too close.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just, something Phil said once, that her uncle would control what kind of tooth-paste she used if he could.”

“That’s what you meant when you told me she came here to get away from Boston?”

“Did I say that? It’s probably true. She missed her mother. It made her sad when her mother couldn’t travel.” She straightened her back and turned to him. “Look, if Phil’s going to join us, I’d rather go home. Being here with her is just too jarring.”

She was right: it wasn’t fair—to Nancy. With an apology to Pip, he reached for Nancy’s hand and gave her a smile as bright as the sky.

“Nope, I’m okay. Let’s enjoy the sunshine while we can. Speaking of sunshine, isn’t it awfully warm for skating? How do they keep the ice going?”

“It’s roller skating!”

“Really? Oh, it’s been a long time since—”

He allowed her to lead him into the cacophonous rink, strapping on a pair of too-small skates and teetering around the edges before his body remembered. And then Nancy was famished, and they handed back the skates and walked on quivering legs to a sort of biergarten that
had fewer howling infants than most of the surrounding cafés. Once restored, they gravitated to the rides: a roller-coaster where Nancy shrieked along with the Paris shop girls, a spinning tea-cup where Nancy laughed as freely as the children, and a carousel where Nancy claimed a golden lion and Stuyvesant stood at her side. He bought her a pair of red balloons, he won her a doll at the shooting gallery, he let her crash into him all along the undulating floor of the dodgem cars. When night fell and the smaller children were taken away, they moved to the dance hall, which Nancy pronounced “magnificently bourgeois,” donning an air of Edwardian dignity entirely at odds with her clothing.

And all the while, he was mourning Pip Crosby. The previous day, he’d been in a rage, maddened by failure and wanting to hold his gun to someone’s head—anyone’s head. He’d spent the day walking, and by the end, he was no longer angry, he was simply sad, and grimly determined.

So today, while he laughed at Nancy’s antics with a bean-bag toss, he was also feeling the loss of a Clara Bow grin. When Nancy misjudged a kiss on the carousel, the crack of their meeting teeth evoked a memory of a similar mishap with Pip. And when they closed out the park at midnight and claimed two seats on the crowded tram, he was saying good-bye to Philippa Anne Crosby.

His feet ached pleasantly. Nancy fell asleep on his shoulder, beret tipped over one ear, the surviving red balloon bobbing over her head. He woke her when they changed lines, and woke her again when they disembarked, tucking her arm in his, and walking her to her door, up her stairs, into her front room.

She blinked at the familiar surroundings, then sat with a
thump
onto the settee. He lowered his bulk down beside her, physically tired but far from sleep. Unlike Nancy, whose eyes were again drooping.