Bones of Paris (9780345531773) (26 page)

But he’d need to push it away, now. He really couldn’t do with getting himself arrested for decking a policeman.

When he saw Doucet, however, he had less of an urge to punch the man than to bring him a drink, or maybe tuck him into bed for twelve hours.

“You look like hell,” he told the man half-obscured by a desk laden with files.

The bloodshot eyes squinted up, wondering what Harris Stuyvesant was doing in his doorway. Or maybe just wondering who it was.

“We had an appointment,” Stuyvesant reminded him.

Doucet eased back in his chair and dry-washed his unshaven face. “Merde. What else have I forgotten today?”

“What’s up?” He was getting a bad feeling about this.

“A nightmare. I feel as if I’ve stepped in a hornets’ nest, and they’re all pouring out at me.”

“Is this related to Pip Crosby?”

Doucet’s chair screeched back, nearly tipping over, and the
flic
snatched his coat from the hook. “I need some air.”

“You need a drink.”

“I wouldn’t stop at one.”

The Frenchman exploded out of the door as if demons nipped his heels. A pair of
flics
on their way inside looked after him in alarm, and were not reassured by Stuyvesant’s eloquent shrug. He trotted behind the fleeing Doucet out of the Préfecture de Police and through the Palais de Justice, watching Doucet step into the Pont Neuf traffic as if it were three in the morning. Horns blared and brakes squealed as the oblivious cop plunged through the traffic, leaving Stuyvesant to slip through the resulting snarled knots of cars, collecting a series of curses all his own.

Doucet only stopped when he ran out of land. He stood at the prow of the Île de la Cité, facing the setting sun. Stuyvesant slowed as he saw that the man was not about to throw himself off, and caught his breath. After a minute, he took out his cigarette case.

Half an inch of tobacco later, he remarked, “The Vert-Galant used to be a separate island. Called the ‘Île aux Treilles,’ because of all the grape trellises. But you probably know that.”

Another half inch. “You sure you don’t want a drink?”

“The very reason I took the position in the missing persons department,” Doucet moaned. “The very reason.”

If he doesn’t spill it pretty soon, I’ll be forced to beat it out of him
. “You have another Henri Landru on your hands?”

Doucet shuddered. Hardened cop, ex-soldier, and he shuddered. Then he reached for the cigarette case with uncertain hands. “We investigate, M. Stuyvesant. I swear on my soul we investigate all our cases. And because … because of Landru, I am on guard for any faint trace of a pattern. But in a city of this size, people vanish. They travel, they have accidents. Some are matched with bodies in the morgue.” He turned his head to the American. “I swear to you, I never take my task lightly.”

“I believe you. How many?”

“I don’t know. Dozens perhaps. We’ve only worked our way back to the beginning of last year.”

Stuyvesant’s gut lurched. “I … No, I don’t believe it. You’d have noticed.”

“Would I?”

“Yeah.” Stuyvesant dropped his cigarette and crushed it out. “Yes. You’re a good cop, Doucet. Quit beating yourself up over this and let’s get to work.”

The Frenchman went rigid. “What the hell do you think I’ve been doing? I’ve barely left the office in three days!”

“Then it’s high time you have someone else’s eyes look at the problem,” Stuyvesant snapped back. “And for God’s sake, let’s get you something to eat.”

He thought the cop was going to hit him. Then Doucet’s broad
shoulders dropped as if his strings had been cut. “You’re right. You’d think I’d never worked on a major case before.”

Stuyvesant physically turned the man around and pushed him towards the nearest brasserie. “Didn’t Sarah tell you? I’m always right.”

“Yes, she said that she knew you.”

There was so little tension in the statement, Stuyvesant had to wonder just what Sarah had told him. That she and Harris Stuyvesant were just old friends? Because if so, if Sarah was hiding what Stuyvesant had once meant to her, then—

Stop it, Harris. This isn’t the time. Take the poor bastard’s mind off things for five minutes, and let him catch his breath
.

“Did Sarah tell you how we met?”

“Your former colleague told me, on the telephone. You were hunting a terrorist.”

“That’s right. Three years ago. I was still with the Bureau then, more or less, and a roundabout set of connections led me to her brother. He’d been invited—Say, is this place okay? Want to tell the man what you want? Nothing to drink?”

Stuyvesant waited for his companion to make his lunch order, then immediately plunged back into his narrative, keeping the man’s thoughts away from that list of names.

“Bennett had been invited to a country house-party where my suspect was going to be, and said I could tag along and meet him. Have you met Sarah’s brother?”

“He was here briefly, in April. Nice fellow.”

Nice?
Doucet couldn’t know much about Sarah’s brother.
Interesting
would mean he had some clue about Bennett Grey’s odd gifts.
Unfortunate, distressed
, or
poor bloody bastard
would have made it clear—but if Sarah Grey hadn’t told him, Harris Stuyvesant certainly was not about to. “He is, very nice.”

“Shy, wouldn’t you say?”

No, I wouldn’t
. “He had a bad war.”

Doucet’s lips compressed in sympathy, and Stuyvesant went on with his story. When the food came, the
flic
’s reaction made it clear that he had been neglecting more than sleep. Stuyvesant kept talking, avoiding
all mention of bombs but otherwise drawing out the story of Bennett and the General Strike. At last, there was color in the man’s face. When the empty plate had been exchanged for cups of coffee, Stuyvesant lit him a cigarette and finally let the Inspector talk.

“Since speaking with you on Tuesday, my Sergeant and I have reviewed every unsolved missing person report back to January 1928. Every one.”

“Lot of work,” Stuyvesant commented, with feeling. The older the case, the more digging required.

“In the past two days, we have located roughly half of those reported missing. Some were alive and no one bothered to let us know. Others were dead, but again, we weren’t told. Drowned Parisians who only come to light when they hit salt water are a constant source of irritation for the Le Havre police.”

Stuyvesant cocked an eyebrow, but there was no jest in Doucet’s face.

“We have got the list down to forty-seven names.”

“
Forty-seven?
Sweet Jesus. Did any of them have connections to Pip Crosby?”

“We’re working on it.”

“Lived in her neighborhood, went to her bars, worked for the same—”

“I know my job,” Doucet snarled.

“Yeah. Sorry. Can I ask, how many of them are blonde women?”

“It would not appear that a larger proportion of missing persons have been blonde women,” he replied with care. Neither man said the name both were thinking.

“May I see that list of names?” Stuyvesant asked.

Doucet looked around for the waiter. He did not let the American pay l’addition.

The list was, in fact, a ringed notebook bulging with anguish and loss. Daughters reported missing by their mothers; mothers who walked away from their children; fathers whose loss drove a family out onto the
streets. Many were so poor, the person reporting their absence had nothing to show but the name: no picture, not even a birth certificate. At the other extreme was the fiancée of an Indian prince, last seen here with the prince’s English secretary.

The first two pages of the ring binder were the actual list, a running tally of contents that had been amended whenever names were added or crossed out.

There were a lot of amendations.

The tally pages contained: the names; the person’s age, sex, and hair color; his or her home address, including the arrondissement; the place where they were last seen; and their date of disappearance. They were organized according to those dates.

The two names Doucet had already given him, Alice Barnes and Ruth Ann Palowski, appeared halfway down the first page: June and October, 1928. Two women and a man came between them. At the top, Stuyvesant read:

The
inc
he figured meant inconnu: unknown. Working his way along the line, this meant that Katrine Aguillard, a nineteen-year-old French brunette whose home was on rue Charlotte in the XVII arrondissement, had disappeared on January 3, 1928, from an unknown location. The following month, Lotte Richter, a German blonde who had been staying somewhere in the XIII arrondissement, had disappeared from the Pigalle district.

There were mostly women. Brunettes outnumbered blondes, plus assorted grays, blacks, red-head, and one bald (Daniel La Plante, a sixty-four-year-old shoe-shiner). Their homes tended to be in the outer arrondissements; their places of disappearance tended to cluster in Montmartre and Montparnasse. They were mostly between twenty and forty-five.

Behind the brief cover pages were the details of each case, copied in
what he came to know as four different hands. Some of the case notes went on for two or three pages, and these often had photographs of varying quality attached. Others were brief, saying in effect little more than: this person seems to have vanished, and nobody knows why.

The youngest person on the list was six years old.

As he read, he tried to sort out the relevant information—but what was it? The only men who’d brought a twitch to his mental fishing line were Man Ray, Didi Moreau, and Dominic Charmentier. However, Paris was a large pond full of would-be criminals swimming in the depths. It was too early to limit his pool of suspects.

Anyway, what
was
he suspecting the men of? If he wasn’t ready to assume that Pip Crosby was … that
something dire
had happened to Pip, what did that leave? Dirty films? White slavery? Anarchist plots?

He watched for patterns—any patterns. Was that art? Margot Jourdain, a nineteen-year-old brunette from the VI arrondissement, had gone to a party in Montmartre on March 22, 1928, told her friends that she was going to talk to a man about a theater job, and not been seen again. Luc Tolbert (brown hair; twenty-eight years; resident of Orleans; last seen August 12, 1929 at Luna Park) was in Paris visiting a sister who worked as a shop girl, but supplemented her income with work as an artists’ model. Raoul Bellamy (brown; twenty-one; home in the V arrondissement; last seen March 1, 1929, in a bar a quarter mile from the lair of Didi Moreau) had recently played a small role in a modern film. And so on.

He was using a coarse net to strain for minnows: the chances of catching anything was minuscule. But he read and he thought, and when he turned the last page, he looked over at Doucet.

Who had been quietly snoring into his desk blotter for the last ninety minutes.

His interior dialogue over whether to wake the man was rendered moot by the noisy entrance of the sergeant who occupied the desk outside Doucet’s office door.

“Inspecteur, I’m—” the man was saying, until he simultaneously realized that the Inspector was snoozing and that there was a stranger in their midst.

Doucet snapped upright, holding a paper. “Yes, Fortier, what is it?”

The alert effect was a bit spoiled by the small note stuck to his left cheek. Fortier—Doucet’s by-the-books Sergeant by reputation, a thin, Caspar Milquetoast–looking fellow in person—shot a surprisingly belligerent glance at the intruder. Doucet said, “Don’t worry about M. Stuyvesant, he’s helping us with our inquiries.”

In America, the explanation would have been shorthand for, “This guy is one step from being in handcuffs,” but clearly in France the words were taken at face value. Fortier glowered, then told Doucet, “I’m off home for a few hours, my parents are here for dinner, but I’ll be back afterwards.”

“No, take the night off, we’ll start again in the morning.”

“You sure? I’ll be fine after a break.”

“Yes, I’m sure. It’s better to come at it tomorrow with a fresh mind. Go.”

The baleful glance Fortier shot at Stuyvesant was no doubt intended as a threat, although it looked more like petulance. Still, the man left before l’Inspecteur could change his mind.

“I was about to go, myself,” Stuyvesant told Doucet.

“Have you found anything?”

His immediate impulse was to deny any iota of interest, to keep any and all cards up close to his mismatched buttons. But Doucet had let him in, giving him free access to all kinds of information that he had no right to. He owed Doucet honesty in return—although maybe not complete honesty. He rubbed his tired eyes.

“Nothing I can be sure of, but there are a couple of things I’d like to follow up, if you don’t mind.”
Or even if you do
. “I’ve been looking at Pip Crosby’s possessions and talking to her roommate and friends. That took me in two directions: the American photographer Man Ray, who you know, and one of your home-grown nut-jobs, Didi Moreau. In my conversations with both men, one name came up. Sorry to say this, but that was Dominic Charmentier. Sarah’s boss.”

Then he shut his mouth and waited for the questions.

They came, fast and furious. Are you suggesting Le Comte might in any way be involved in something unsavory?
Le Comte de Charmentier?
Is there any scrap of actual evidence that makes you suspect him? Evidence beyond a macabre house décor? And what on earth prompted you to take Sarah to see this crétin Didi Moreau?

Twice, other cops stuck their heads in to see what was going on; both times Doucet ordered them out. Stuyvesant kept his patience in check, reminding himself that his opinions had been bound to alarm Doucet.

Eventually, Doucet got to the stage of ordering Stuyvesant to have nothing more to do with the case, with Dominic Charmentier, or with Sarah Grey.

“I can’t leave Sarah vulnerable,” Stuyvesant protested.