Bones of Paris (9780345531773) (24 page)

“So, Charmentier brings you things,” Stuyvesant said, unconsciously wiping his fingers on his coat-front as he moved on down the table. “And you put them into your boxes.” He bent over a trio of buff-colored stones. Two of them were just stones; the third was amber containing a fossilized insect.

“Many people bring me gifts. Neighbors, shopkeepers—I keep a box for their offerings, near my gate. Artists—the artists have been so generous. Duchamp gave me a box of shells, Picasso the sketch of a mask, Foujita—you know Foujita?—he brought me these.” The Japanese Surrealist’s gift was a bundle of used chopsticks. “Man Ray brought me some fascinating spoiled negatives last week. I’m trying to work out how to mount them in a Display with a light behind them.”

Moreau held up a strip of exposed film to the electric bulb, admiring the tiny images. When he laid it down again, Stuyvesant picked it up, and after a minute realized the similarity to the photograph in Ray’s studio: a nude woman with skin draped like a taut garment over her hip-bones, lying in a puddle of thick liquid that looked like blood. These showed her from different angles, and the film had been overexposed in the processing, but there was no doubt they were from the same session.

“Do you have a lot of pictures like this?” he asked the box-maker.

His question was rewarded by a flick of those odd pale eyes—the briefest flick—off to the left, in the direction of an open doorway. Stuyvesant did nothing to indicate he had noticed the look.

“I … well, any number of things. The teeth: I have been working a lot with teeth, of late. The coins on the shelf were from him. They’re Roman. From the time of Julian, he says.”

Sarah spoke up. “Dominic is a devoté of found objects. He tried to explain it to me, that the universe comes together in a moment of revelation to present a person with some key object. The attentive see it, but most people just walk right past, oblivious.”

“He said something like that last night, about the coin.”

“It’s like a religion with him. ‘Being aware of the world’s machinery,’ he calls it.”

“What about this? How is this rock part of the world’s machinery?” Stuyvesant picked up a lumpy rock some three inches long that looked just like a bit of dog’s dropping.

Moreau answered him. “Coprolite. I was telling Le Comte about my idea for a box concerning permanence, and the very next day, he brought me that. It made the ideas just flower. The ugly side of permanence. Permanence as corruption and decay.”

“Why? What is it?”

“Fossilized dung.”

The American set the object down.
I really have to stop picking things up
.

Moreau returned to his previous concern over Sarah’s hand, and Stuyvesant heartlessly abandoned her to the artist’s disquieting attentions to make a further circuit of the rooms.

They were, he decided, one of the artist’s boxes writ large, a number of smaller rooms surrounding the main workshop with the hands on the wall. Each held boxes in various stages of completion, from bare wood through everything but the glass covering. He suspected that the contents of the rooms were linked in Moreau’s mind, although it was impossible to connect them into any kind of theme: one room had bones, but also a dozen woven baskets containing nails and snips of wire. In another, all the contents were circular, from coins to tiles to the
decorative ends of stick-pins. A third room had a lot of bird-related objects—skeletons, feathers, and broken eggshells—but also contained a sheaf of photographs showing opera singers, moving-picture actresses, young children of both sexes, and apparently random shots of streets, many of them blurred as if a camera’s shutter had gone off accidentally. They could easily have been the work of Man Ray, but none were of Pip Crosby.

Sarah’s voice in the next room had taken on the strangled accents of desperation—Moreau seemed to be exhorting her to pull off her hand, that he might examine it—and even though Stuyvesant was not finished, he laid down the photos and went to her rescue. He had seen what he needed—or rather, he had seen what he was not permitted.

Moreau’s guilty glance had been in the direction of a sturdy set of shelves that almost looked as if they were mounted against a wall. Almost.

“Thank you, M. Moreau,” he said, heartily plunging his own grip between the man and Sarah. “I have to say, your Displays have that … how could I put it? That
frisson
of visceral excitement that a person only encounters in the presence of True Art. If I happen to find any exciting objects, I’ll be sure to keep you in mind. C’mon, Sarah, let’s leave the man to his work.”

And before Moreau could object, Stuyvesant retrieved the photograph of Pip Crosby which the artist had quietly tucked in beneath the others: he wasn’t about to leave the girl with this weird man. He then herded his accomplice back the way they had come, through the rooms and up the stairs to the startlingly bright entranceway.

At the gate, he spotted a box with a hinged top, mounted against the wall. Gingerly, he lifted the top, then leaned forward to see what was inside: a dead rat with one black ear. He dropped the lid and trotted to catch up with Sarah, already halfway down the block.

As he drew near, her steps slowed, and she shot Stuyvesant a glance under the brim of her cloche. “Thank you for coming to my rescue.”

“No, thank
you
, for distracting him so I could have a look around. What a lunatic!”

“And what on earth was that you said, about a
frisson
of excitement?”

“
Visceral
excitement, don’t forget the visceral. Some artists were talking in the bar the other day, must have been about Moreau’s boxes.”

“Ah, that explains it. I could hardly keep a straight face when you came out with that, it was so unlike you.”

“What, you don’t think I have an appreciation for art?”

“I know you do, but not for Didi’s sort of contraptions.”

“I will admit, they have a way of getting under your skin. Which I guess is what those guys were trying to say, but—Jesus. Fossilized crap? I can see why the neighbors put a rat in his box.”

“The rat is a gift, not a comment. That’s how Didi will view it, anyway.”

“What does he do with dead rats?”

“Puts them in one of his corruption boxes. I suppose I should have shown them to you, but really, I can’t bear thinking about them. There’s a kind of beetle that eats flesh, and he has a bunch of them that he uses to clean the bones.”

“Inside his house? That’s … disgusting.”

“I know. And something even more disturbing? Do you know what he said to me, the first time I met him? I came to see if he could make me a hand, and he’d been examining my wrist, making a mold, and doing sketches of my right hand for comparison. He said, ‘I regret I do not have your bones.’ At the time, I thought he meant there was some way he could rebuild my hands around the bones.”

“He didn’t?”

“I think he just wanted the bones. He buys … bits from the hospital, when—Oh, really, that’s enough. I can’t talk about it. Do you think it’s too early for a drink?”

But again Harris Stuyvesant was not listening to her. Harris Stuyvesant was staring off into the Paris street, his eyes seeing a box full of beetles.

If you had a body on your hands, and you wanted its bones …

He shook himself.
Jesus Christ, Harris, your imagination is going berserk around all these artsy types
.

I
T WAS NEVER
too early for a drink in Paris, although the tables were mostly empty. He pulled out a chair for Sarah well away from the only other customers, an elderly couple with matching glasses of wine and a tiny quivering dog on the woman’s lap. When they had ordered, he offered Sarah his silver case, and lit their cigarettes.

She closed her eyes and tipped her face to the sun.

The contrast with Nancy Berger’s gesture three days earlier was striking—Sarah Grey wasn’t about to give a public moan of pleasure—but more than contrast, Stuyvesant was hit by a memory. The first time he’d seen Sarah was also in sunlight, the bright spring sunshine of an English garden in bloom: pale hair blazing, a tilt of mischief to her head, laughter in her eyes. A sight guaranteed to lift a man’s heart. Even a man not already inclined towards small, curvy, golden-haired women.

“So, Harris, what have you been up to all this time?”

Waiting for you
. “Like I said, doing odd jobs for odd people. Right now I’m looking for Pip Crosby.”

“Without much success.”

“Unfortunately. Although at least it brought me to you.”

The feeble joke made her turn away from the sun; made her sit forward to scrape cigarette ash into the little tray. Made her raise her defenses against him.

He’d known since he saw her at Bricktop’s on Wednesday. He’d seen
it last night, and it had been standing in front of him for the past hour. No, be honest: it had been in front of him for three years, in Sarah’s absence and Bennett’s silence.

This was not the sunlit young woman he’d fallen in love with. That Sarah was gone.

The Sarah Grey before him was someone else entirely, her personality as radically transformed as her poor body. He’d tried—he was still trying, like mad—to cling to that vision of Sarah, the shining, carefree, blaze of a girl; trying to look past the thin face and guarded eyes to the exuberance that had captured his soul.

And he failed.

Because her eyes? He’d seen that look before, in soldiers coming back from the Front; in the victims of violence; in those whose trust had been betrayed.

Sarah Grey had walked through dark places, alone. A part of her would forever remain in darkness.

Oh, God. If he’d moved faster, in April 1926. Just a little faster …

“Harris, you look unhappy. What’s wrong?”

He studied her face, and saw both fear of what he was going to say, and the determination to let him say it. Courage like that took a man’s heart and wrung it out.

So he smiled, and he lied. “There’s nothing wrong, honey. I just was thinking, I feel like I ought to introduce myself.”

Whatever she saw in his face gave her pause. After a moment, she set her defenses aside along with her cigarette, to extend her hand across the table.

“How d’you do,” she said in a posh accent. “My name is Sarah Grey.”

At the touch of her, that warm little paw in his, feelings threatened to spill back, but he forced them down. “Harris Stuyvesant, at your service.”

“Are you an American, sir?”

“Sure as shootin’, ma’am. And you like Americans.”

“I did, once upon a time. These days, I know rather too many of them to be impressed by a mere accident of nationality.”

“How sensible of you.”

“I am a sensible person, Mr. Stuyvesant.”

It was a warning. He smiled. “I can see that.”

After a moment, she returned his smile, and if it lacked the wattage of a spring day in an English garden, it was nonetheless real.

Peace, declared and accepted.

The glasses arrived, and he watched as she grabbed hers and put half of it down her throat. “You really don’t like that little man, do you?”

“I loathe him. Although as I said, his lack of social graces is hardly reason enough to shun him.”

“It’s a lot more than bad manners and standing too close. If I were you—if I were any woman—I’d take care never to be alone with him.”

“Oh, Harris, you can’t think …”

“I can. I do.”

“But my dear man, the fellow is an absolute invertebrate. Even I could knock him cold.”

“So long as you didn’t accept a drink from him first.”

Her green eyes went wide. “You really believe …? I couldn’t imagine … Well, actually I sort of could imagine. How awful of me. But you may be right. Although I’m not sure how I’d explain to Dominic that I can’t make any more deliveries to his pet artist.”

“Tell him your fiancé objects.”

“Ah,” she said. “Yes. About that …”

“Are you actually engaged? You don’t have a ring.”

“I’m going to marry him,” she said firmly.

“I take it he doesn’t know? About me?”

“He does now, more or less. I hated to do it, because he has something that’s taking up all his time at the moment, but he had to know. Look, Harris—”

“I’m happy for you, really. Even though I’d love to rip out his guts and decorate the Pont Neuf with them.”

She chose to see only the joke, and let her eyes give him a low-wattage sparkle.

“So, tell me about your cop,” he said. “How’d you meet?”

He took great care to keep his face polite, interested. That of a friend, not of a man. With no trace of the dreams inhabited by green eyes, the
string of noncommittal affairs, the three years of sticking close to London …

Friends.

And whatever else she saw in his face, whatever memories she had or suspected in him, she did see the friendship.

“Coincidentally, he was doing what you are now: looking for a missing girl. But then, that’s his job, missing persons.”

“When was that?”

“Almost exactly a year ago,” she said. She’d been sitting with a book in the Jardin des Plantes when Doucet came through the park with the photograph of a pretty, pale-haired girl. The conversation had quickly wandered from his missing girl to her book, and her nationality, then to the weather (Sarah being, after all, British). Before long they found themselves at a table with cups in front of them, followed somewhat later by a second table, with glasses. The next day there was a visit to the girls’ school where she was working, and the following day, he enlisted her help in a tour of Montparnasse cafés, and after that …

He’d been clever, Stuyvesant had to give Doucet that. He’d seen at once that although Sarah would instantly reject a romantic advance, she might be cajoled into helping him. And once under her guard, he could work on her softer side.

The sympathy in his face may have slipped, just a little, after several minutes of besotted conversation, because Sarah stopped. “Oh, Harris, you don’t care for all that! What about you? Has it really been three years of odd jobs?”

“Hasn’t your brother mentioned what I’ve been up to?”