Bones of Paris (9780345531773) (21 page)

She was not looking peachy, she was looking thin and modern, but his ready acceptance of being demoted to
friend
took her tension down a few notches. “I’m very well, thank you. I live here now—‘here’ in Paris, not ‘here’ in Montparnasse—and I’m finding it very much to my taste. As for Bennett, he’s doing pretty well, considering. I had a letter from him this morning, along with a picture of him that had been pressed
into a sort of brooch. Whimsical, you know? But he seemed to think it had been taken by an agent of that group, spying on him.”

“The so-called ‘Truth Project’? I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Of course, he is more than a little paranoid about them, so it could have been just a stray photographer. In any event, his letter sounded more amused than disturbed.”

Sarah’s brother Bennett was, for lack of a better term, a human lie-detector. Twelve years ago, a bomb on the Western Front had stripped the man of any normal psychic defenses, rendering him excruciatingly sensitive to the world around him. The dissonance of lies, those everyday deceptions of human interaction, caused not just mental distress, but physical pain—Stuyvesant had heard his friend keen with agony at a lie. Grey walked through life as if he’d been flayed raw. The government was thrilled; their interest in his abilities had nearly killed him.

“Surely they can see that he’s better left alone?”

“Yes, except he’s no longer such a complete hermit. He even came to see me in the spring.”

“Your brother comes to Paris?”

“Just once, so far. It’s partly why I live down in Vaugirard—you know it? A quiet suburb with market-gardens. It’s inconvenient, but I thought he might find it less trying than the center of town. My neighbors—villagers, really—have seen so much shell-shock, they didn’t find his twitches anything out of the ordinary. Bennett developed quite a friendship with the farrier, when he was here.”

“Now, there’s a picture.” Grey was not much taller than Sarah, with the same pale hair and emerald eyes. From a distance, he could be an adolescent boy—about as far from a blacksmith’s build as one could get.

“It is a bit Mutt and Jeff,” she agreed.

“I imagine the blacksmith is a placid sort of a person?”

“Bennett says that the man could wheedle purrs from a bull.”

Stuyvesant laughed. “I miss your brother,” he said, unthinking.

“You could go and see him.”

“Yeah.”

“I know, Cornwall is a long way from anywhere. Well, perhaps he’ll
come to Paris, one time you’re here. Why
are
you here, anyway? Are you working? Back with …?”

“The Bureau? No, I’m long quit of them. I went independent. At the moment I’m looking for a girl. Her mother and uncle haven’t heard from her in too long, so I said I’d help.”

“Oh dear. Would I know her?”

“Pip Crosby? Philippa, her name is. American, blonde, blue eyes, about your height, twenty-two years old. Has a flat just off the boulevard de Sébastopol, and seems to have spent more of her time on the Right Bank than I’d have expected.”

“Is that the person you were asking Dominic about? Does she have some connection with him?”

“One or two links cropped up, I wanted to ask him about them. Which I did, this morning.”

“And?”

“Sarah, I can’t tell you about an investigation.”

“Was that girl you were with last night helping you ‘investigate’?” He looked at her in surprise, and was pleased to see her blush, just a little. “None of my business,” she said briskly. “No, I don’t think I ever met your Miss Crosby. Or if I did, she’s faded into fifty other young blonde Americans.”

“Tell me about Dominic Charmentier, then.”

“Why should I?”

“Because he’s an interesting character.”

“He works hard to be.”

He might have interpreted the dry words as scorn, but there was a trace of admiration in her tone of voice. “How do you mean?”

She reached for her little evening bag, but Stuyvesant got there first, popping open his silver cigarette case. Was her faint hesitation because she wondered if it held her photo?

She said nothing, merely pried out a cylinder with her fingernail and allowed him to light it for her.

“I don’t suppose you’ve been to the Grand-Guignol?” She turned her back on the crowd, propping her slimmed-down backside against the railing.

“I have, in fact.”

“So you’ll have seen how much of the performance is offstage. The spooky theater, its house doctor, the setting. But have you any idea of the role management plays? As a sort of sub-stratum to the enterprise?”

“Probably not.”

“Everyone you see here tonight has been specifically chosen because of his or her influence in Paris society. There are two newspaper owners, with three of their editors and seven journalists, half a dozen fashion designers, the Maires of three arrondissements, five factory owners, the directors or owners of all the major department stores, a few Comtes and Vicomtes, a couple of Barons, and more chevaliers than I can recall. This is in addition to the writers and artists—I don’t even try to keep track of those, since none of them reply to an RSVP, and when they arrive they have uninvited friends.”

“Like me.”

“Oh, you were invited. Le Comte gave me your name this morning.”

“What’s the point? Of gathering all these movers and shakers together?”

“Ask me that at the end of the evening,” she said.

“Ah. Do I take it we have a surprise in store for us?”

“I couldn’t say.”

The smile that replied to his laughter was a prize, but he wasn’t about to push it. “So tell me about your boss and the … sub-stratum.”

She glanced at her wrist-watch. “Better if I show you. Come.”

They stood shoulder to shoulder while a trio of languid women with too much makeup came slinking through the heavy doors. Stuyvesant’s fingers felt the impulse to reach out for her hand, but he stifled it, and let her move in front of him into the black-and-white foyer. There she kicked away the props from the double doors, allowing them to drift shut. When they had done so, she pointed at them, although she herself turned to face the big clock.

Obediently, Stuyvesant looked at the doors. The carving was ornate, although the light here was not strong enough to … Wait. Was that …?

Yes. This side of the door—panels, frame, even its brass fittings—was
one solid mass of writhing bodies, intertwined legs and arms punctuated by the twin smoothness of buttocks and breasts. When the door stood open, the frieze that might startle a Parisian sophisticate would be all but invisible—although even then, the door latch on the plain side now bore a suspicious resemblance to a male member.

“Well,” he said. Was she blushing again? Impossible to tell in this light.

“Yes, I know,” she said. “Although I think this is just his private joke. Come and see the rest.”

The door was the celebration, albeit somewhat twisted, of lively lust. “The rest” was its opposite.

The rest was death.

H
ARRIS
S
TUYVESANT STOOD
in front of a wall of tortured faces and wondered what the hell to say. Sarah’s tour of the house had showed him everything from mummies to a set of Renaissance silver spoons engraved with skulls to a chandelier made out of bones. A drawing room was decorated with African death-masks coated in pale clay to imitate bone, Mediaeval depictions of the tortures of hell, South American pottery of priests removing hearts, and pieces of modern art on a theme of death (Harlequin on his death-bed; a wild man with a descending knife; mourners surrounding a dying man in a claustrophobic room). One wall of the library was covered with a painting by a Bosch imitator that lovingly explored the many ways human beings can inflict torture and death. The shelves on either side of it held volumes concerning the extermination of witches, illustrated anatomy books, and medical tomes describing procedures far worse than the illness they were intended to heal. Behind glass was an unpublished manuscript from the Marquis de Sade, rescued from his son’s flames by a servant.

But of all the Baroque horrors in Charmentier’s living theater of the macabre, this wall of faces in a small side-salon was the worst.

“What the hell are these?”

“Strangely enough, they are the work of a well-meaning woman. During the War, an American sculptress came to Paris to make prosthetic
masks for soldiers with terrible facial injuries. She made them out of copper, meticulously detailed. The masks made it possible for the men to walk the streets without causing children to scream. These are the molds she worked from, showing the men’s true faces, beneath their masks.”

“Jesus,” he said. And a minute later, “God, those poor bastards.”

There were dozens of the stark plaster heads. All showed grotesque perversions of the human visage: faces shattered and crudely glued together, skin grown over missing noses and craters like moss over fallen rock. With their closed eyelids, they looked like death-masks. Having fought beside them, Stuyvesant was in no doubt that every one of those men would have preferred a clean death.

“What is Charmentier doing with them?”

“He bought them when the studio was closed, after Miss Ladd moved back to America.”

“They should have been smashed to dust. But what I meant was, why does your boss collect all this?”

“I know, as if his life hasn’t been dark enough. I sometimes wonder if by putting it ‘out there’ to look at, he doesn’t have it inside him quite so much. Oh, that doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it?”

“Yes, in a way. Although it could also be that he just likes the creepy stuff.”

She glanced at her watch rather than open an argument. “We need to get back to the party.”

“Are we waiting for something?”

“With Dominic, we generally are.”

“A surprise?”

“One that even you won’t guess,” she said, sounding smug.

He opened a door, and they were back in the tiled entryway where the great clock ticked off the age of the universe.

“That’s quite a device,” Stuyvesant commented.

“Isn’t it, though? There’s some terribly sad story about it, that the poor clockmaker who built it committed suicide when it was finished, knowing he would never build anything greater.”

“Really?”

“It’s probably not true. A lot of the stories about Dominic are sheer fiction—do you know, I overheard a story about him at a party last week that I’d made up myself!”

“Why would you do that?”

“It’s part of the act, dear boy. The more people imagine him as a wicked, debauched creature, the more they flock into the Grand-Guignol.”

“Doesn’t strike me as a very comfortable way to live.”

“I suppose someone with a notorious name has to choose either to fight against the common belief, or just decide to go with it.”

“How do you mean?”

“Oh, the usual thing. The French adore their nobles, but the aristocrats are the first to feel the guillotine. There’s all kinds of titillating stories about the nobility: droit de seigneur, cellars full of pretty girls, corruption and perversion. The Charmentiers may have had a few unpleasant characters in their family tree—Dominic thinks there was syphilis in a couple of the generations, and you know what that does to the brain—but no more than any others. You know about the garden chessboard?”

“I noticed there was one.”

“That’s a good example of the stories. People will tell you that one of Dominic’s ancestors built that garden feature just before the Terror, when the Vicomte and some close friends used to play with human pieces—except when the pieces were captured, they’d actually be impaled, or decapitated.”

“Eighteenth-century gladiators,” Stuyvesant commented.

“Ridiculous, of course. But that’s what I mean, all sorts of mad stories circulate around the aristocracy here. Dominic welcomes them—they all feed back into the Grand-Guignol. He and Man Ray are talking about doing a film in the garden. You know Man’s an ardent chess player?”

“I saw the chessboards in his studio. I take it the film will involve decapitations?”

“Probably.”

“Is that what he was sketching for Le Comte on the tablecloth last night?”

“No, that was something else.”

“Can I ask you, what do you think of him? Ray, that is?”

“He’s a pompous ass, but he’s madly talented. Why?”

“Oh, just an argument a friend and I were having.”

“What kind—Oh,” she said with a glance at her watch. “I must go.”

“What’s behind that door?” he asked, pointing across the entranceway. He’d been through three of the doorways: the grand stairway, the ballroom, and the private residence. This pair remained shut.

Sarah glanced across the tile where he was pointing. “I suppose it’s more of the residence. Come on.”

The ballroom had been full before. Now the guests were shoulder-to-shoulder, and the level of what Stuyvesant had taken for fear had risen with the noise. It had to be merely anticipation, these people knowing Charmentier and his Guignol theatrics. Still, it raised his hackles, feeling like anxiety rather than eagerness. He bent his head to Sarah, at his side on the raised entranceway.

“What’s giving everyone the heebie-jeebies?”

To his astonishment, she gave him a grin that shot a jolt of familiarity down his spine: the Sarah Grey of old, alive with mischief. “You caught it! I should have known you would. Harris, you wouldn’t believe how much time I spend producing effects that no one notices. Except you, and—well, I’d guess it’s the policeman in you.”

“Been a while since I was any kind of a cop. And what are you talking about?”

“The effect. So: how would you go about frightening a crowd of educated, well-to-do people—especially if they’re anticipating it? What subtle influences can one inflict on them to slide under their guards? Look, and tell me what you—what you perceive.”

Her hesitation gave him a clue. He studied the room, blanking out the cacophony of high-pitched conversations. “Is it something to do with the lights?”

“Very good. Yes, it’s partly the lights. We tried them with a bluer tint, but that made everything look like the bottom of a swimming pool. With this, they just make people look slightly ill. What else?”