Bones of Paris (9780345531773) (44 page)

He didn’t kill me
.

“Of course not. I meant, he didn’t know … he tried, that morning. I stopped him, from going to help you.”

Yes, I know
.

“Do you forgive me?”

Dear heart, there is nothing to forgive
.

“Stop dancing, please, Sarah. Those skeletons, they shouldn’t be able to dance like that.”

Bennett Grey took his eyes from the dancing, and saw the flame move.

“H
ARRIS
! W
HAT ON
earth—?” Sarah pushed herself away from Stuyvesant’s chest.

“Where the
hell
have you been?” he shouted.

“Visiting friends. Harris, what’s happened to your face?”

“Jesus. We all thought—Oh my God, what a relief!”

“Come in—bring the paper. And your hat.”

He picked up the newspaper from the mat and his fedora from a bush. Only when he turned again did he notice that she was wearing a dressing-gown and her boyish hair-cut was all on end. She looked so gorgeous he wanted to sink into her arms and stay there for a week.

Instead, he stepped inside. Followed her to the kitchen. Placed his coat over the newspaper. And watched, as Sarah walked and filled the kettle and lit the hob, talking the whole time. “What on earth are you doing out so early? Here, let me move those things. Do you know where Bennett is? He’s been here, there’s dishes in the sink and his valise in the guest-room, but …” She froze, then jerked around. “Harris, has something happened to Bennett? Is that why you’re here?”

Bennett. Doucet.

He couldn’t.

If he told her, she would fling herself out the door. And he desperately needed information—information only she could give.

He stuck a smile on his face. “Bennett? No, he’s fine. Not sure where he is, though. Why didn’t you phone me? I left you a note.”

“I did phone you, about five minutes ago. I think I woke up your concierge. Harris, you really look terrible. Were you in a fight?”

He glanced at the wreck of his evening clothes. “That’s where it started.”

“Are the police after you?”

“Sort of.”

“Well, sit down. You look like you could use some coffee.”

She reached for the coffeepot, giving Stuyvesant his first glimpse of the stub on her left arm. He looked away. “Where were you?”

“Oh, I was
so
angry with the two of you at the party, squabbling over me like adolescent boys! Cole Porter told me that he and Linda were going to a friend’s place in the country for a few days, and I said it sounded like a dream. He invited me along.” She reached for cups, sugar. “And I thought,
He’s right, Dominic’s given me a few days off, why not go away?
I was going to come home to pick up some things, but they were leaving immediately the party was finished, and Cole swore there was no need, there’d be everything a last-minute guest could possibly require, from tooth-brush to rubber boots. I never do
anything
like that, so … I did.”

“Thank God. You just disappeared.”

Her green eyes blazed across the room at him. “Émile
did
watch, didn’t he? I
knew
he would—so I went out through a little gate in the neighbor’s garden. Oh, he treats me like a child!”

“We were worried. Both of us were.”

“Good,” she said tartly. “I hoped all this silliness would be over when I got back. If you and Émile are still at each other’s throats, I shall be truly cross.”

The clash between Sarah’s half-flirtatious concerns and the grim realities of the past seventy-two hours felt like being drawn through the gears of a steam locomotive. Stuyvesant dry-washed his face, hearing three days of bristles:
Think! Ignore how furious she’ll be, and
think!

“Harris, what is it? You weren’t
really
worried?”

“Of course not. Did you have a good time? You look like you had some sun.”

“It was glorious. There’s a tennis court and a swimming pool and Cole played music half the day—he wrote a song for a stage revue in New York this November. And you’ll think me shallow for having such a lighthearted holiday.”

“Sweetheart, you deserve every minute of pleasure life can give you.”

She went pink. “What about you? What have you been up to, other than fisticuffs?”

“Looking for Pip Crosby.”
Looking for you
.

Her hand, in the act of setting out spoons, drifted to a halt. “How terrible. I’d forgotten. It seems a long time ago.”

“You’ve been busy.”

“Are you any nearer to finding her?”

“I think so.”

“That sounds like, ‘I’m afraid so.’ Oh, Harris. I am sorry.”

“Can I ask you a few questions?”

“I never met her, I told you.”

“Sure, but you know a lot of people in Montparnasse. Finish making the coffee, your water’s boiling.”

She made the coffee and opened a cupboard. “Ah, the last of the biscuits. I wish Bennett had let me know he was coming, I’d have asked him to bring some. I know—he’s gone somewhere with Émile! Émile was here, he found his birthday present. I had a picture done by Man Ray,” she explained with a gesture at the wrapping paper. “For some reason he took the picture and not the frame. I guess for his wallet.”

“What did you think of Ray?”

“Brilliant photographer, provocative film-maker. Not much of a painter, to my mind, although that’s what he considers himself.”

“He’s popular with the ladies.” Lee Miller; Pip Crosby.

“Some of them. It’s those dark eyes. Makes him seem so intense.”

“Isn’t he?”

“Pablo Picasso is intense. Man Ray … looks intense. Don’t tell him I said that—he has a short fuse. I saw him in a rage one time after some casual tourist sat down on the Dôme terrace and beat him at chess.”

“Like Hemingway and his boxing.”

“Of course, everyone had been drinking.”

“That goes without saying. So, he’s big on chess? I saw a really modernistic set in his studio, all circles and triangles.”

“He and Marcel Duchamp play a lot.”

“Funny he doesn’t use more chess in his art—Man Ray, I mean. There was a film I saw the other day, started out with, um …”

“With what?”

“Dice. Played by a, er, wooden model hand.”

She pointedly overlooked his embarrassment. “Yes, Man Ray has a bit of a ‘thing’ for hands. That’s what he and Le Comte were talking about at Bricktop’s the other night, a film project based on hands. He wanted an opening scene of … well, my hands playing chess. Ray had heard of that Terror game I told you about, the one in Le Comte’s garden, and he wanted to re-enact it. Complete with decapitations and shots of Didi’s hand collection.”

“You didn’t agree to it?”

“ ’Course not. However, there are plenty of amputees in Paris.”

“And Le Comte liked the idea?”

“He loved it. Think how many people a Grand-Guignol film could reach, compared to that tiny theater.”

“I’m trying to picture Le Comte and Man Ray working together.”

“Wild, right? But you know, they do have a similar style. Meticulous preparation mixed with a dose of chaos. The Grand-Guignol’s as tightly choreographed as a ballet, but Le Comte’s favorite productions are when something goes wrong and the actors are forced to improvise. Like when he deliberately removed a key prop and no one noticed until halfway through.”

“Hard on the actors.”

“Or that party in the ballroom. I spent
weeks
planning every detail—the music, the food, the script for La Lune’s interruption, all of it having to turn around his timing demands—but when it came to the guests, he wouldn’t let me send RSVPs! I had absolutely no idea who was going to show up until they walked in.”

“And six days later, he does it to you again. No wonder you took some time off.”

“Life as theater, complete with disasters. He cherishes surprises, calls them ‘the gift of the machine.’ The curse of the machine, is more like it.”

“What were his ‘timing demands’?”

“For the party? He’s a devoté of astrology, you know.”

“Is he?”

“Sure—you’ve seen that clock. He adores making things coincide—like a danse that culminates at the moment the moon goes full. That’s his ‘machine.’ The other side is the ‘gift’—the random and uncontrolled element. So you have a precision timing of the clock linked to an arbitrary act of kissing whomever you happen to be standing beside.”

“Or not so arbitrary, for those in the know.”

This blush was not as heavy. “Yes, it’s convenient to have a man like Cole around.”

“So why isn’t …”

Sarah didn’t notice how Stuyvesant’s voice trailed off, merely chattered about the modern marriage of Cole and Linda Porter, its freedoms and affections.

But to Stuyvesant, it was a distant buzz of words, farther away than the ticking of the great Charmentier clock.

Precise timing
.

The four-faced clock at the center of the mansion. A drowned clockmaker. Dark and light; sun and moon; black-and-white tiles and a human chessboard in the garden. The stones and bones of Paris. A clock that struck the full moon.

No. That was—

A conversation:
a full moon event … underground … and with the equinox only five days later …

Oh, sweet Jesus above: dark, and light, and the gifts of a machine.

“Harris!”

“Sorry?”

“I said, I’m going to get dressed. I decided to put Émile out of his misery by showing up for lunch.”

He forced himself to stay in his chair until her feet hit the stairs. Then he leapt up to pat wildly through his pockets. If that damned Sergeant had done anything to his notes—

But no, here they were: the single sheet that began with the third day of 1928 and ended last Wednesday with Gabriella Faulon (f/brown/31). March, 1928—and, yes, March, 1929. June, 1928, and June, 1929.

September, 1928 … 
oh sweet Jesus
.

Two coincidences aren’t proof. They’re little more than suspicion
. But there was a piece of evidence that could prove it. Water began to run upstairs. He picked up the phone.

Fortier was in his office. He seemed to live there.

“Sorry I missed your men at the hotel this morning,” he told the
flic
.

A moment passed. “M. Stuyvesant. Where are you?”

“Doesn’t matter, since I won’t be here long. I need a piece of information.”

“We would like to clear up a couple of points regarding—”

“Sergeant Fortier, I’d like to propose a deal: I turn myself in tomorrow, if you give me one piece of information now.”

“Turn yourself in for what, Monsieur?”

“Don’t be cute. Do we agree? Or do I hang up and let you spend the next few weeks turning the city upside-down?”

Stuyvesant counted to six before the response came: “What piece of information would that be, Monsieur?”

“You were working on the missing persons list from 1927. I don’t know how much you’ve done since Saturday, but I need to know if there’s a man reported missing in September of that year?”

He reached eleven before Fortier admitted defeat. “You swear you will present yourself at the Préfecture no later than tomorrow noon?”

“I swear to you on—” He couldn’t very well swear on his affection for l’Inspecteur’s fiancée. “—on my American passport.”

“Yes. Albert Gamache went missing on September the twentieth, 1927.”

“Do you have his details?”

“Monsieur, I—”

“Was he blond?”

Stuyvesant listened to one word before hanging up on Fortier’s squawking voice. He snatched Sarah’s newspaper out from under his coat.

He ignored the screaming headlines, the French equivalent of which had hounded him across Montparnasse—POLICE DETECTIVE SHOT—and hunted for the page with odds and ends like the hour of sunrise and the stars in the sky.

He found it. The time jumped out at him: 12:52.

If he was wrong, Harris Stuyvesant was going to win the prize for idiocy. If he was wrong, he’d have to choose between turning himself in and running for the border …

But he did not think he was wrong.

Dark and light; men and women; summer and winter. All the machinery of the sun’s progress.

He looked at his wrist-watch, and yelped with alarm. Hat on head, coat over his arm, he stopped.

He had to tell her.

Stuyvesant bounded up the stairs to the bathroom door, knocking lightly. Sarah’s voice called a question.

“I have to go,” he told her. “Will you be long?”

“Two minutes.”

He eyed the doorknob. “Hurry,” he whispered.

C
OUNT
D
OMINIC
P
IERRE
-M
ARIE
Arnaud Christophe de Charmentier entered the tapestried prison as he entered any room: calm, straight, and with the melancholy air that followed him like yesterday’s perfume. He slid the bolt on the door, and picked up the wooden chair, carrying it across the floor to sit just out of his prisoner’s reach.

“Good morning, Monsieur,” he said.

“Do you have my sister?”

Le Comte looked surprised. “Your sister? Why would I want your sister?”

After a minute, the green eyes relaxed. “What about Doucet?”

“It appears the Inspector is still alive. Something of a relief, I admit.”

Grey frowned at the reply.

“Your choice of position interests me,” Le Comte said. “Most of my gifts take pains to sit as far as possible from the source of their imprisonment.”

Gifts?
“Most?”

“All.”

“And when you take your photographs,” Grey said, “you will find that I do not mimic their stance, either.”

“You have seen the photographs?”

“The police are after you, Comte. It won’t be long.”

The man was either unconvinced, or unconcerned. “Your sister tells me—Ah, Monsieur, don’t glare so, she is quite safe from me, certainly until the spring. Your sister tells me that you had a difficult time of it in the War.”

“I doubt she told you anything more.”

“No, she was most reticent. Perhaps you would like to tell me yourself?”

“Why would I?”

“Because the machinery is connected.”