Bones of Paris (9780345531773) (45 page)

The clock ticked, the candle whispered.
Machinery
, Grey thought.
Gifts
.

“Very well,” Le Comte said. “Because if you do, I will refill your water.”

“I’ll have the drink first.”

“You don’t trust me?”

“Whose hand controls the key?”

The clock hands spoke:
tick, tick
.

Charmentier walked back over to the door to fetch the enamel jug that had sat at the foot of the chair for the past two and a half days. Grey had wondered about the jug—another element of hope? A cruel game? He discovered now that yes, it held water.

He gulped half the cup straight off, nursing the remainder against his chest. “What do you mean, ‘The machinery is connected’?”

“You first.”

Grey took another swallow, feeling the liquid push into his veins. “I was blown up in the spring of 1918. A shell landed in the mud under my feet, and went off. I died.”

Le Comte considered that last word. “You were revived.”

“I was reborn.”

“Interesting distinction. What happened next?”

“The hospital; rehabilitation. I was too … damaged to go back to my men. Afterwards I went to Cornwall and became a farmer.”

“You hid.”

“What about you? You weren’t too old for service.”

“M. Grey, I have paid my country’s blood tax in so many ways.”

He wants to talk
. Bennett could hear that, in the heaviness of the man’s voice.
Talk, then. Tell me how to stop you
. “Was it the War?”

“It was the machine. One son died of a sniper’s bullet on the winter solstice of 1917. My daughter died of the influenza, on March 21. After her funeral, my wife and our younger son stayed with her parents up in Saint-Gervais. They went to Good Friday services there.”

“Should that mean something?”

“German’s Paris gun?” Grey shook his head. “The Germans had a gun that could reach 120 kilometers. In the last spring’s push, they threw shells at Paris. One of them hit the church of St. Gervais et St. Protais. One shell. Eighty-eight people died. Eighty-seven people, and my younger son.”

Tick. Tick
.

“And your wife?”

“My beloved wife. She had the most beautiful hair: dark brown, with threads of copper in the sun. It was her death that proved the machine, although it took me years to realize it. After the children died, despite being under close watch, my darling got her hands on a knife. And on the longest day of the year, she slit her lovely wrists.”

“I am sorry for your loss. But how is that the machine?”

Le Comte gave his prisoner a quizzical look. “Do you know, you’re the first one who has asked about any of this?”

“The first of how many?”

“Sixteen, Monsieur. You will make sixteen.”

S
ARAH TROTTED DOWN
the stairs. Her affectionate smile just broke Stuyvesant’s heart.
Fresh, shiny—and about to be damaged, yet again
.

The smile began to fade when she saw him standing, hat in hands. “What’s up?”

“Sarah, I have some bad news. Your friend Doucet was hurt—he’ll be fine, but he’s in the hospital. La Charité. You need to go see him.”

A young eternity later, her starved lungs drew a gasping breath.
“Émile?”

“He’s going to be all right. He took a bullet in his left shoulder, and another grazed his head. Sarah, you hear me? Émile is going to be fine.”

“And Bennett?”

“I … we can’t be …”

She continued shakily down the stairs until she was before him, so close his neck bent and his arms yearned for her. “Harris. Was my brother with Émile?”

“They were together when they left here.”

“I heard your voice—the phone, right? If this just happened, how can they be—”

“It happened Friday night. I … I’ve known since Saturday.”

Her face crumpled. “And you just
sat
here? You sat and let me rattle on about Cole Porter and
tennis courts
?”

“Sarah, I’m so sorry. I needed to—”

He saw the blow coming, and made no move to avoid it. Her slap was full-handed, with all the power in her small body, and in his current state, it blinded him. When he’d blinked the tears from his eyes, he found her pulling on her hat.

“I’ll find him,” he promised.

Her eyes were bleak. “You’d better.”

And she was gone.

Dear God, couldn’t he just curl up on the floor and die for a while? He was so tired he was stupid. Look at the idea his feverish brain had come up with. Nuts, right? Impossible.

So, what if he was wrong?

If he was wrong with this cockamamie theory, Bennett Grey would walk in and present Harris Stuyvesant with a choice between giving himself to Fortier or heading for Germany.

And if he was right?

Then he had less than four hours to prevent Bennett’s murder.

“S
IXTEEN DEAD MEN
and women,” Bennett Grey remarked, “and I’m the first who has talked with you? Perhaps you’d like to tell me about the machine.”

“The universe is a mechanism, Monsieur. It requires maintenance, like any other.”

“How?”

Le Comte hesitated. “If I tell you, you will think me mad.”

“Sir, I already think you mad.”

The older man’s sad little sigh might have touched Bennett Grey, under other circumstances. “You may be right. Very well. Do you recall the dates of the tragedies in my life?”

“December, March, Good Friday, and June,” Grey replied.

“Followed by my father’s death in September. But as I say, it took me a shamefully long time to realize the pattern. For one thing … oh, but Monsieur, we lack the time, to tell the complete story. Had I known of your interest … Suffice to say that when I did see the pattern, and when I accepted my responsibilities as a member of the blood aristocracy of France, the machinery began to turn smoothly at last.”

There was no arguing with the insane: Grey knew that. Still: “Monsieur Le Comte, soldiers have rituals; children avoid pavement cracks. My neighbor in Cornwall became a Spiritualist after losing her only son.”

“You believe it is mad to find order in the universe?”

“I believe it is human to find order in the universe. But the reverse—to imagine that one’s act might impose order—is … delusion.”

“We are as gods, Monsieur. Those of us with the power to act have no choice.”

No choice
. The phrase rang through Bennett Grey’s body like a blow to a tuning fork. Here lay Charmentier’s truth, a truth that had waited too long to be heard: Le Comte prayed that he was wrong. His voice swam with regret and self-loathing—but until someone stopped him, he was driven to continue.

“Do I take your silence as skepticism, Monsieur?”

“You may take my silence as the manners imposed by chains.”

“Monsieur, I take no pleasure in this.”

“And the clocks?” Grey asked. “The one in your house, the one here.”

Charmentier glanced up at the clock face. “Oh, but they are one and the same. The hands here are tied to the central mechanism that Olivier Lambert built for me.”

“The clock sounds important.”

“The clock is everything. Monsieur, my clock stands at the center of the house. It divides the room into four faces, reflecting all aspects of time’s motion. Its faces alternate light and dark, its figures alternate male and female. As I, the owner, am required to do. Hence, the given lives that keep the machinery in motion, alternating and encircling the year.”

The chill of revelation passed along Bennett Grey’s spine.

Oh, you poor, mad, soul
. If he hadn’t been so desiccated, Bennett Grey might have wept.

S
TUYVESANT WASTED SIX
minutes in a frenzied search for something—anything—that might be useful. Not that he expected a gun, but couldn’t the damned woman have a decent flashlight?

In the end, he shoved a stale roll into his pocket and added a third sentence to his note:

Stuyvesant shoved the key under the pot and threw himself in front of the nearest taxi, demanding that it take him to Montparnasse.

11:04.

“D
O YOU KNOW
what proved it, finally?” Le Comte asked his prisoner. “My clock?”

“Tell me.”

“The machine itself.”

“Olivier Lambert finished work in early December. We chose the night of the solstice as an appropriate time to start it up. I planned a dinner party. After the midnight ring, my guests left. I thought he would stay with me for the solstice ring—at 2:45—but to my surprise, he wished to go home, saying he had an early train to catch. I agreed to drive him.

“On the way we argued, over the … sanctity of the clock. He revealed that he had been offered a job, which might involve duplicating parts of its design. I forbade him. He swore he had the right to do what he wished.

“As we came to a bridge—the Pont Royal—he demanded to be let out of the car, saying he would walk. We both got out, continuing to argue. The champagne speaking, no doubt. In any event, I reached the end of my patience, and gave him a shove.

“I intended no harm, but he went over the side of the bridge into the river. I waited for the cries, but it was freezing cold and the shock must have killed him outright.

“When I looked at my pocket-watch, I saw that it was precisely
2:45. And that was when I understood: a gift would be given, that the machine might be served.”

Grey felt the lie grate across his nerves.
It was not precisely 2:45
. Charmentier knew it, but chose not to. However, that was his only lie.
The poor bastard believes this demented conglomeration
, Grey thought.
Believes it to his bones
.

“And did M. Lambert have brown hair?” he asked.

“You do see it!” Le Comte was pleased. “Artists have known it forever: spring is a woman, the year’s end is a man. The year begins with the light, and ends in the dark. September is when the year turns—with the light of the first half, but the masculinity of winter.

“You are quite right, Monsieur: September’s gift is a light-haired man.”

The Comte de Charmentier let his gaze run tenderly over Bennett Grey’s pale head.

S
TUYVESANT KNEW OF
three ways in and out of the Charmentier mansion. The front gate was too exposed for a daytime breach. The exit through the neighbor’s garden that Sarah used to evade her cop fiancée meant two front gardens to cross. The third, used by Le Comte alone, was somewhere near a little-used alleyway—an alleyway where free-living blondes and too-trusting police inspectors could be drawn. Two shootings inside of a week guaranteed that entrance would be under police eyes.

However, no rich man wants the butcher pulling up to his front doorstep. There was sure to be a delivery lane behind the mansion.

He found it—blocked by five people and a horse-drawn grocer’s van, who didn’t look as if they’d be shifting any time soon. So he headed back to the main road, hoping an unshaven bum in the remains of an evening suit didn’t attract too much attention. The front gates were locked tight—a pair of gardeners weeded the flower beds—but when he reached the other end of the lane, the only person facing his direction was the horse.

Halfway down the narrow alley, near a set of sagging gates, a trio of barrels waited for collection. He stole down the left-hand walls and, cursing his battered muscles, clambered on top of a barrel.

On the other side of this section of wall there had once been a garden, now a jungle of unpruned trees doubling as the neighborhood
dump. He strained, kicked, cursed, and finally heaved his bulk over the wall, dropping onto the mold-stained carpet beyond. The stink of cat piss enveloped him, and he stifled coughs and groans as he fought his way across the woven hillocks.

Once on solid ground, the next Everest loomed: the wall separating him from the Charmentier garden was even higher. Next to it grew an ancient apple tree, but in his current state, he honestly didn’t think he could climb the thing. His other option was a shed that had leaned against the wall since the Terror. So he crawled—up the remains of a gardener’s barrow, onto the shed’s cracking tiles, across its swaying roof. He seized the stone wall like a life-preserver, bracing himself for a second agonizing drop.

It took a while to get upright.

It was another world, orderly and fragrant. It was also part of the formal gardens rather than a service yard: soft ground instead of naked cobblestones, and mature shrubbery to conceal an intruder. He pushed his way forward until the shrubs ended.

The sun was overhead; the checkerboard and its terrace stood open to the house. If some house-maid chose today to shine the ballroom chandeliers, he’d be back in jail by noon.

But confidence was everything in an illegal entry. He assumed a bored look and set out across the checkerboard. No one tackled him; no one shouted. At the terrace doors he grasped the handle—and nearly fell into the billiards room beyond when the doors proved unlocked.

A table like an ocean liner held a neat triangle of balls. The room smelled of fresh wax; his shoes squeaked faintly as he moved.

He yanked them off and forced them into his coat pockets.

Outside the billiards room, the grand stairway ascended to his right, an invitation to the black-and-white clock-room. The front door was off to the left. And he needed to be on the other side of the stairs.

His sock-clad feet padded silently over the marble, but just as he cleared the bottom of the stairway, a door opened somewhere and heels began to tap their way towards him. He dropped behind the statue of a much-draped woman, every muscle screaming in protest. As the heels
tap, tap, tapped
past, he risked a glance: the blond demon-footman. The
front door opened, and Stuyvesant shambled towards the far side of the stairway.

The door was locked.

Shit
. Stuyvesant fished out the lock picks—at least Fortier hadn’t confiscated those—and bent over the mechanism. The servant would return any instant. He could hear voices: the man was talking to someone. The gardener? Yes, he heard the words
feuilles
and
pelouse
, something about—