Bones of Paris (9780345531773) (20 page)

And bless Mme. Benoit in all her crusty Commune-ism. He should buy her something extravagant. Wait a few days first, then buy it. Did she like chocolates?

What the hell had the search been about? What documents could Harris Stuyvesant have other than his own
identité
? Or had Mme. Benoit got that wrong, too? Maybe Doucet had sent a
flic
down for something—any other letters from Uncle Crosby perhaps—and the cop had misunderstood the order? Or the concierge had misunderstood the message?

It made no sense.

Worst of all, he couldn’t think how he should respond. Would an innocent man phone up Doucet and shout at him? Would he howl in the street? Shrug and go about his way?

He didn’t know. It had been too long since Harris Stuyvesant had been an innocent man.

T
HE BONES OF
Paris are beautiful.

At the end of the eighteenth century, two events coincided to make them so. In 1774, a long stretch of the rue d’Enfer simply opened from below, tugging in paving stones, houses, and residents, leaving a gaping chasm. A commission was ordered. The Inspector General of Mines mapped out hundreds of kilometers of abandoned mines and quarries, dating back to Roman times, where the limestone marrow had been extracted from the earth to shape the city’s magnificent buildings.

While the work of mapping and reinforcing was under way, disease and stench from the literally bulging cemetery of Saints-Innocents, north of the Seine, were becoming intolerable, adding their unease to the spirit of revolution in the air. Further burials were forbidden. The cemetery’s Danse Macabré mural—oldest in Europe, built over a plague pit—had long since vanished, but now the Innocents’ skeletons began their own dance across Paris: at night, by cartfuls, accompanied by the clop of hooves and the somber chants of priests. It took two years to empty the cemetery and pack the bones into the city’s one-time quarries.

A generation later, the Inspector General of Quarries found the rude tangle an offense to sensibilities, and ordered them tidied. Vast underground hallways were transformed into works of art: walls of tibias,
mosaics of femurs, neat façades of gleaming skulls. And lest a visitor miss the point, its entrance at the Place D’Enfer bore a warning:

Yes, the bones of Paris are beautiful, indeed.

“W
OW
,”
SAID
S
TUYVESANT
.

A century and a half ago, one of the Charmentier family had stripped twenty or thirty kilometers of stone from under the ground to build himself a house: two hundred meters of stone wall; a gateway a little smaller than the Arc de Triomphe; the mansion itself forty feet high with gargoyles over the windows, half a dozen balconies, windows gleaming with silken drapes and rich furniture, the gleam of crystal chandeliers …

Almost made a man forget to be nervous about a gendarme’s tap on his shoulder.

A car debouched a sleek couple, she wearing enough diamonds to buy a small South American country. The man nodded, the woman gave Stuyvesant the kind of look a lady might bestow on a street-sweeper, and they set off across the acre of cobbles. Stuyvesant adjusted his tie, and followed.

Inside the gates, a broad cobblestone yard surrounded a circle of grass with waist-high hedges and a fountain. More lawn and hedges circled the sides of the yard, disappearing around the
hôtel particulier
itself.

The mansion’s entrance was flanked by torches—actual fire, not gas replicas. As he approached, he saw how odd the entrance was. But, he’d seen the place before, hadn’t he? No, that was its twin brother: a Montmartre
café called “L’Enfer”—Hell—with a gigantic fanged mouth surrounding its entrance and scenes from a Mediaeval descent into hell dripping both from the three-story façade and from the interior ceiling.

A lot of hells in his life, at the moment.

This one proved both less permanent, being of plaster and canvas rather than stone, and more disturbing. He didn’t remember the one up on Pigalle being quite so … emphatic. Maybe it was the eyes? There, they had stared off over a person’s head, but here the focus was clear. Or it could be the mouth: the Café L’Enfer’s hell-mouth surrounded the delivery door, allowing the customer to slip in a few feet to one side, but here, it was the entrance. There was even a lower lip, with sharp teeth one had to step over, and a sinuous forked tongue waiting to slurp a victim within.

Then there was the trio of doormen, two of them animate: on the left, a slim yellow-haired demon with a long tail looped over his left arm used a trident to urge partygoers inside. On the right, an enormously tall figure draped in black leaned on the handle of a scythe, his face invisible under the shadow of his hood, the
Do come in
gesture of his hand as much threat as promise.

The third doorman was a fully articulated skeleton dressed only in a silk hat and bow tie. He didn’t do a whole lot of gesturing.

The diamond-woman hesitated, an understandable response, until Death stretched out one long arm to her; she giggled as her escort hurried her in past the jabbing trident. When the figure made to do the same with Stuyvesant, the big American held up a warning finger. The long arm paused, then drew back, allowing him to enter unmolested.

The entrance hall was vast, dim, and almost unpopulated, apart from the family portraits hanging on the walls, many of whom had that same disdainful nose. Instead, light and noise poured down the monumental stairway directly ahead of him, a structure that had taken a regiment of men a couple of years to complete, what with the carvings and plaster, the curlicues of wrought iron, the square meters of gilding—and, anticlimactically, the velvet rope across the bottom.

Another demonic butler gestured him towards a splash of light
around the side of the stairs where, like a Kodak Brownie strapped to a dinosaur, a snug elevator waited.

The lift was unattended; its doorway juddered shut to carry the middle-aged couple upwards. Stuyvesant anticipated some further bit of theatricality—a corpse dropping from the roof perhaps, or water rising up their legs. But in a minute the shaft echoed with the sounds of the door opening, with no further shrieks. Down it came, the door drawing wide in invitation.

To arrive on the second floor without some jolt of adrenaline was almost a disappointment.

The lift gates opened at the top of the stairs. Through a pair of doors lay a kind of upstairs entrance hall with a domed ceiling topped with four windows, dark with the night. The room was a perfect square, its floor an expanse of glossy black-and-white tiles, the walls heavily marbled black-and-white travertine. Mirrors threw the room back and forth into infinity, including the glossy black double doors into the center of each wall. One set opened onto the stairs, and hence the lift. The two across the room were shut, as were those to the left, but those to his right spilled a blaze of electric lights and a whole lot of noise.

He gave his hat and overcoat to a cadaverous butler dressed entirely in black, and walked out into the tile. In addition to the mirrors at the centers, each corner had a statue: two white marble figures, man and woman, and the same in black. However, it was the center of the room that dominated, with an impressive piece of machinery half again as tall as he was. He walked slowly around the thing.

It was a clock, he decided. Or maybe four clocks put together, since each side had its own face. Before him was a timepiece with an ornate bronze face, its hands pointing, correctly, to 8:16. A complex set of decorative wheels around the outer edges overlapped to further inform him that it was Thursday, 12 September, 1929. The next face, to the left, was of mottled silver resembling the full moon. Its main dial appeared to indicate the moon’s phase, at present slightly more than halfway towards full; there was another dial as well, marked with hundreds of small lines but no explanation. The face after that was of inky black enamel set with scores of tiny diamond chips, over which a glossy black
hand set with larger diamonds pointed to a circle of what Stuyvesant was pretty sure were the signs of the zodiac. There were two other dials, of inscrutable purpose.

The fourth side, facing the noisy ballroom, was golden. One of its dials was a clock like the first side, but showing 24-hour time, now 20:17. Its two other circles had pointing hands, but again, Stuyvesant had no clue what they were trying to tell him.

On the top of all four faces stood Death with a scythe, ready to sweep it at a small hanging bell, to chime the hours.

The bell was in the shape of a human skull.

While he lingered around the clock, the elevator had gone down for another set of guests, a family group of one portly man, his dowdy wife, and their about-to-be-portly young son. The three swept past him with no glance at the clock or its admirer.

Stuyvesant pulled himself away from the contraption and was turning to follow them towards the open doorway, when a familiar shape caught his eye. He walked over the black-and-white tiles to the wall beside the stairway doors: yet another of those boxes like he’d seen in Pip’s bedroom and Man Ray’s studio. This one seemed linked to the clock at his back: one of the squares was packed with tiny springs, another held an elegant brass cog. The piece of face in this box, occupying the lower right corner, was the photograph of an eye wearing a jeweler’s loupe, a man in his fifties or sixties. Here, the large center box held a rather ominous-looking device that was probably a caliper, but could as easily have belonged to an Inquisitor.

The doors led to a ballroom larger than the dance floor of most Paris nightclubs. It was slightly below the level of the black-and-white tiles, and started with a bedroom-sized platform surrounded by an ornately carved marble balustrade, with three steps leading down, left and right. There were similar raised areas at either end of the wall of windows opposite, with a potted palm on the right-hand one and a string quartet playing on the left. He could barely hear the music, partly because of the distance, but mostly because the crowd was paying them about as much attention as they were the potted palm. The din was impressive.

The sea of heads was framed by a spectacular view: the wall was
mostly glass, with a lighted formal garden below and the city stretching out beyond. The edges of the garden had the sort of tall, thin trees that made him think of Italy, but the center was a checkerboard, dark and white like the tiles in the entranceway.

All it needed were life-sized chessmen, he thought.

He leaned on the balustrade to survey the crowd, hoping to spot Sarah Grey. As often when one walked into a wall of party noise, the mass of people was mildly repellent. He seemed to be the only solitary being in sight. As he stood there, he became aware of the hair along the back of his neck, and the sense of vulnerability that urged him to put his shoulders to the wall.

His eyes narrowed, searching for the source of his hackles’ raising. It was nothing obvious, and the blatant game played by the building’s exterior was absent here: no hell-mouths, no imps crouched on the blazing electric chandeliers, no dead-faced wraiths circulating with trays of champagne. But there was something. And whatever it was, it was having the same effect on the others.

High voices, nervy eyes, frozen smiles: there was fear in this room, but he couldn’t find the source. That suggested the fear came from some insider knowledge, something these people knew and refused to acknowledge. It reminded him of a party he’d been to, working undercover at the Bureau, where glancing looks and too-bright conversation had swirled around a crime boss with a dangerously short temper. But when he located Charmentier, standing near the fireplace with a glass in his hand, the glances and brightness seemed no greater there than across the room.

If Charmentier was a threat, his guests did not know it—and looking at him, neither did he. Le Comte looked like a man who had produced an abundant banquet although he’d have been happy with dry toast. Like a man whose pleasures were always tinged with the bittersweet.

Stuyvesant couldn’t help resenting that look, just a little. Here was a guy as rich as Croesus, with half of Paris ready to answer the snap of his finger, and the best he could manage was a faint smile and a picturesque air of melancholy. Half the people in the room would give a major body
part to take their host’s place for a few nights. Including certain private investigators, who’d had to beg to be put in touch with an old friend, who would go home to a cold-water hotel room, where he’d go to sleep with one ear open in case the local cops decided to drop in for another senseless search and—

He hadn’t realized how tightly he was focused on his host by the fireplace until a hand touched his sleeve. He whirled, then dropped his raised fist in a hurry. “Sarah! Jesus, sorry, I didn’t hear you coming.”

“Obviously. Mr. Stuyvesant, are you quite all right?”

Mr. Stuyvesant
, he noted with a pang. He told his body to relax, made himself lean one hip against the hand-rail, put an easy smile on his face. “Yeah, I’m fine, it’s been a funny kind of a week. Hey, I’m really sorry about last night, I just hadn’t realized how much bubbly Bricky’s guys had been pouring into my glass. I hope your … friends are all right?”

“Mr. Ray is merely an acquaintance, although he said last night that he was fine. As for my employer, he, too, is unhurt.”

“I hunted him down this morning, to apologize—well, you’ll know that, I guess, since I’m here. I wasn’t sure if he actually was okay, or just being manly about it.”

“Oh, I think he’d leave those games to you, Mr. Stuyvesant.”

“Ouch. You really must be mad at me.”

Her face shifted, becoming ever so slightly embarrassed. “One doesn’t like to see one’s friends brawling in public.”

“Especially when your boss is the victim of that friend’s idiocy.”

Her smile was unwilling, but it was there. In return, he gave her his very best grin. “It’s great to see you, Sarah—you’re looking peachy. What’re you up to? How’s your brother?”