Bones of Paris (9780345531773) (35 page)

He slapped the notebook shut and dropped his head into his hands.

How did he expect to make a pattern out of a million unrelated facts? People simply vanished, for all kinds of reasons. He’d taken a job searching for an American girl, and this was where he’d ended up—searching for some kind of madman killer? It was a waste of Ernest Crosby’s money. An honest man would go straight to the Post Office and cable the man to admit he was a failure: that he’d let Pip Crosby walk away from him in Nice, and she’d met somebody bad, and she had died.

He was crap as an investigator, and he had no business hanging on here in Europe. Pack your bags, sail home. Get a job in a garage, tinkering with engines.

But God damn it, sometimes there
was
a pattern. Doucet suspected one here, and Doucet was no flighty fantasist.

Take the cop’s personal bug-bear, Henri Landru. Landru picked off well-to-do widows for their money. Had anyone happened to notice earlier that each woman replied to lonely hearts notices, lives could have been saved. Or the American known as H. H. Holmes, who’d spent eight years treating an unknown number of women and men—thirty? eighty? hundreds?—as a natural resource, taking pleasure in their torture and cashing in on their wills, their possessions, and even their remains, stripping the flesh from their bodies and selling the skeletons to medical schools. If anyone along the way had asked some questions—insurance agents, the medical school, hotel employees—he’d have been hanged years—and lives—earlier.

At the Bureau, mere mention of the name could silence a room.

But it wasn’t always about money. Men killed for the thrill of it. Or to prove they could—look at Leopold and Loeb, a pair of rich kids who’d committed murder as an intellectual challenge. They made Jack
the Ripper almost comprehensible: the London monster at least seemed to have been driven by some twisted kind of sexual gratification. And Stuyvesant had heard of a Frenchman who preyed on shepherds, murdering them in the fields, doing terrible things to them first. Insanity didn’t always come from a raving lunatic: if it did, the Ripper would have been caught—and if he’d possessed H. H. Holmes’ means of rendering the bodies down, London’s prostitutes might still be quietly disappearing.

Disappearing like Pip Crosby, and Alice Barnes, and Ruth Palowski. Holes in the world. Lulu’s family could at least hold a funeral.

He forced his mind back to the list. What about those points of contact with art and film? Working in a Montparnasse café, taking the odd modeling job, acting a tiny part in a commercial film. One woman was the cleaner in a cinéma.

He did not know what the numbers would be for a random sampling of Parisians, but he suspected you could find that pretty much everyone had some kind of a link to art.

In any event, there was no clear arrow pointing at Man Ray’s studio, at Le Comte’s grim theater, or at Didi Moreau’s disgusting projects.

There was no reason at all, really, to think that the people on this list were related in any way, including their deaths. They certainly hadn’t all been dragged off to be sex slaves. His imagination had been fired by personal matters, and he was wasting his time pursuing monsters under the bed.

Stuyvesant sat, head in hand, feeling the last few days taking over his bones. It wasn’t even 5:00 p.m.: if he went to bed now, he’d be staring at the ceiling at three in the morning. He had nothing new to tell Doucet. He couldn’t face Sarah. And Nancy evidently wanted nothing to do with him.

All he could do was go bash something.

A
CONVERSATION:

“Sir, a report’s come in that Bennett Grey has left his house.”

“This isn’t his usual day for the village.”

“Not the village, sir. Captain Grey was seen cycling towards Penzance half an hour ago. With a valise.”

“What, he’s
traveling
? Oh, Christ.”

“Sir, do you want—”

“No, I do not want you to pick him up. We may find he’s just gone to buy himself a pair of rubber boots.”

“Sir, that letter the other day—”

“The one you lot wanted to open.”

“Yes, sir. Do we even know who it was from?”

“Harris Stuyvesant.”

“Sir?”

“Before your time. American. Used to work for their Bureau of Investigation. He was the one responsible for—well, everything, come to that. The Bunsen affair.”

“Oh.
Oh …
”

“Yes: oh.”

“And you think Captain Grey is going to see him?”

“Possibly. They’re friends. Sort of. The American writes him chatty postcards every few months.”

“Coded?”

“I doubt it. He’s the kind who wouldn’t bother.”

“So, sir, your orders? Concerning Captain Grey?”

“Keep an eye on him. A discreet eye, damn it.”

“And if he gets on a train?”

“Then tell me where he’s going. We’ll decide what to do after that.”

“Yes, sir.”

“God, what a pain in the arse that man can be.”

“Sir?”

“Nothing! Go on, get out of here. Christ.”

T
HE PUNISHMENT OF
the boxing ring was a satisfying counterpart to an afternoon bent over scraps of paper. He’d happened to arrive at the same time as another amateur of about his height but ten years younger and a lot fitter, and it was hard work to keep the guy from wiping the mat with the visiting American. When it was over, and both men were bruised and grinning, he slapped the fellow’s shoulder and took him and half a dozen of his
bons amis
out for a drink or two, which turned into three.

He arrived back at Mme. Benoit’s a little before ten o’clock, nice and sore and tired, looking forward to the hard mattress. His first stop was at the toilet—street-side pissoirs got pretty rank by this hour—and the minuterie was still on when he came out. He pushed open his door—and heard something rustle on the floor.

A petit bleu.

He gave out a cough somewhere between outrage and laughter. He didn’t know if she was working hard to be provocative or if this was just the down-to-earth approach of a modern girl, but it had to be the most remarkable seduction he’d ever been a part of.

The only blunter propositions he’d ever heard had been standing on a street corner with a price tag attached.

Who did she think he was? Sure, sex was cheap in the Jazz Age, especially in Paris, but why would she think he’d be so eager to jump into a bed still warm from another man?

Except … he was. If anything, a good-girl façade over a whore’s lax virtue was every red-blooded boy’s dream. Then again, he wasn’t. Sex with Nancy Berger promised to be a muscular romp, and yet a part of him, that romantic softie he kept well hidden, was sorry she hadn’t at least pretended at the lovey-dovey.

He was half tempted to set the Ronson to the edge of the petit bleu. Or crawl into bed and claim Mme. Benoit hadn’t delivered it until morning.

Wasn’t it supposed to be the girl who played hard to get?

Life could be damned confusing sometimes.

He liked Nancy. He liked her a lot. He was, he realized as he stood looking at her words, disappointed as much as anything, that she would think a blatant offer was all he wanted from her.

So, she would be another Lulu—not, he caught himself instantly, that she was going to die in an alley. Nancy would be one of the string of mostly-blonde, mostly-young women he’d bedded. The string of women who weren’t Sarah.

Why should he feel the least bit disappointed in that?

He glanced at his watch, and snugged up his neck-tie. She’d probably be awake. Maybe not, depending on how much energy she’d spent on her “visitor,” but it would only cost him a few minutes to find out.

He put on his coat, and went back downstairs.

He did not, as she’d suggested, take a spare shirt. He didn’t even take his overcoat. He didn’t expect to be gone long.

He found the orange door, and banged on it, his fist as implacable as his expression. A light went on in the transom overhead, and after a rattle of locks, Nancy was beaming out at him.

She was dressed for bed, although not perhaps for seduction, since she wore neither makeup nor silk. At least she wasn’t wearing the ugly brown dressing-gown she’d had on that first day.

“You dear man!” she said. “Come in, I’d given you up.”

“Hi, Nancy.”

“Come in, the upstairs neighbors complain if they hear talking after nine p.m.”

He stepped inside. She shut the door, and stepped into his arms. A minute later, she leaned back.

“Harris, what’s the matter?”

“What’s the matter? Nothing’s the matter. Can I have a drink?” He supposed he should be grateful she’d had a bath, so he didn’t smell the other man.

“You want a drink?”

“Don’t you?”

“I thought—No, let’s have one, by all means. Come in. Isn’t this a nice little hole-in-the-wall? Sylvia helped me again, it belongs to an American writer who’s gone home to his wife while she’s having a baby.”

He saw the drinks cabinet and walked over to it, his back to her as he looked through the bottles. “You said you thought. What did you think?”

“Just that you might be a bit more … eager.”

She sounded disappointed. Jesus, was the woman a nymphomaniac? “I guess I’m enough older than you to have certain expectations about women, and it still comes as a surprise, sometimes, the … attitudes of modern girls.”

She’d sat down on a settee, and now looked at him across the low table. “Would you mind translating that little speech for me?”

“I just …” He looked into his glass, swirling the liquid. “You had
someone else here until very recently. As soon as he was gone you snapped your fingers for me. I don’t mind, you understand. It just takes me a minute to … get into gear.”

She gaped, as if he’d been talking in one of the few languages she didn’t know. “What makes you think I had someone here?”

“You told me yourself. Your visitor.”

“My—” Her astonishment changed to—could that be a look of outrage? Why? She’d been pretty blunt herself. “You thought—And you—?”

Her reaction was baffling. Even more so when the bunched eyebrows of outrage began to twitch. In a moment, she lost control of her face, and gave a snort, followed by a coughing sound. She fell back against the settee and let loose with an unladylike bellow of helpless laughter.

“What the hell?” he asked. “Nancy, what—?” But his every word only made her whoop. “Nancy, for Christ sake!”

“Oh, Harris,” she cried, “you dear innocent man, have you
honestly
had no idea what I was talking about?”

“What, when you sent me your note? You said you had—”

“Women have a ‘visitor’ every month, you poor idiot.”

His stunned expression reduced her to choking paroxysms.

After a while, he went to sit down beside her. And began to chuckle.

Soon, breathless roars of laughter gave way to the breathlessness of his mouth on hers.

And in the morning, he wore his previous day’s shirt.

T
HE AUTUMN MORNING
was honey-sweet, as the two of them walked down the rue Suger with linked hands. They drank café au lait in the shadow of Notre Dame, fed each other bits of croissant. Stuyvesant walked Nancy back to the orange door, where he brushed her swollen lips with lingering kisses good-bye.

The streets were filled with happy people. Concierges swept their sidewalks, beautiful women opened their shutters and leaned out, a fruit vendor piled an artful pyramid of radiant apples. As he crossed out of the Luxembourg Gardens, bicycles whirred merrily and a trio of young men perceived how he had spent the night, smiling their approval. The street-sweeper on the rue Vavin tipped his hat and greeted Stuyvesant’s coin with a burst of Italian song. The bouquets in the florist’s beamed as he passed.

He was humming the same Cole Porter song under his breath as he trotted up the fourth-floor stairway and spotted his door standing open. “Bonjour, Yvette! Ça va bien?” he called to the maid as he came through—and stopped dead. “Bennett! What are you doing here? And …” He looked from Bennett Grey to the man at the window, and the blood drained from his scalp.

Doucet turned, but Bennett Grey spoke first.

“Harris, what have you done with Sarah?”