Bones of Paris (9780345531773) (6 page)

She stopped, laying a hand over her mouth.

“What is it?”

“I’m talking as if she’s dead. Oh, God! Poor kid, she comes to Paris to get away from Boston and what does she end up with? A roommate who’s happy to find the apartment empty and a private investigator who’s more interested in girls’ legs than his job. Jesus, Paris can be a shit of a town.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” he protested. “You got no reason to panic like that. Pip’s no wide-eyed innocent. She knows how the world works. And she’s got enough sense to keep out of dark corners.”

“And if she didn’t, then she brought it on herself, is that what you mean?”

If she’d been a man, he’d have punched her. “I never said that. I never
thought
that. And lady, I’m doing my damnedest to find her.”

Her dark eyes welled up. “I’m so sorry. Oh, God—I seem to have spent the last hour apologizing to you. I’m not usually—it’s just—I’m such a useless—oh, why didn’t someone at least
notice
?”

He seized her shoulders, forcing her to look up at him.

“Listen. I will find her. No doubt head over heels in love with some handsome young painter.”

“It’s just, she was so … 
secretive
. And when she did talk she’d come up with some piece of old wives’ hooey and it was just … 
irritating
. I even asked her if she wanted me to move out, but she sounded surprised and said no, she was happy to have me. Like I say, we might as well have been living in separate houses. Mme. Hachette probably knows more about Phil than I do—
she
could tell you when Phil left, which is more than I can! Oh, I should have pushed it.”

“What, moving out?”

“
Talking
to her. If I’d even asked her about her new friends, her strange habits, what she was
doing
 …”

“Nancy, look: if Pip was so set on privacy, do you think she’d have told you any of that?”

Her teary eyes studied him for the longest time. “Thank you,” she said finally.

“For what?”

“For trying to make me feel less of a failure when it comes to friendship.” To his surprise, she stepped forward to plant a kiss on his cheek. To his greater surprise, his hand started to come up and hold the back of her head, pressing that generous mouth into his—but he stifled the motion before it started. She wasn’t even his type.

Still, she was unexpected. And she might tell him more about Pip Crosby, if he distracted her. Fed her booze. “Would you like to go out with me? Dinner, dancing—the movies, if you like.
Innocents of Paris
is still playing, if you like Maurice Chevalier.”

She sniffed, and dug through her pockets for a tissue to blow her nose. Her eyes were red again when she looked up, but dry. “Would this be social, or part of your investigation?”

“What if I said both?”

“Then I suppose yes. But not tonight.”

“Tomorrow, then. Seven?”

“Half past.”

“I’ll wear a shirt with buttons that match,” he said.

She gave him that mournful smile. “And I’ll wear one of my own dresses.”

He watched her go.
Less of a failure when it came to friendship
. Yeah, okay, he might’ve been a little … using towards Pip Crosby, last winter. She’d caught him at a bad time, just after Tim’s death, and he’d been feeling so down he hadn’t really stopped to think why this pretty young thing would want the likes of him. He’d just let himself be convinced. And then she’d been so damned enthusiastic, and …

And maybe
he
should have talked with her a little, too. Asked her about herself. Treated her like a person, not a … not a Lulu.

But, really, how was a man to know? Women these days seemed to like being casual, seemed not to want anything but a good time and a good-bye. And in the end, Pip left
him
rather than the other way around. There was no reason to feel any more guilty about her than he did about Lulu.

Other than her youth. And her scar. And the image of a ten-year-old girl falling through the air with flames in her clothes.

Ah, crap
. What had started as a quick and cushy job wasn’t turning out that way.

He began his bedroom tour, as before, with the photographs on the wall. The first time through, they had struck him as slightly phony, pretentiously arty, like a college freshman with delusions of fame posing his girlfriend for the camera. Reluctantly, now he wondered if they weren’t more than that. Not the close-ups of her scar: those were just morbid. But the others …

Both of the moody photographs rendered Pip’s conventional features dramatic by their severe black and white. In the first, she was lying on a black surface gazing up at the camera lens, hands crossed like a laid-out corpse, hair falling back from her face: expressionless as a mannequin, inscrutable behind heavy makeup. The photograph was disturbing in some indefinable way, and despite the paint and the apparent lack of revelation, seemed more naked than the other one.

In that second picture, a nude Pip was perched on a high stool, right foot coyly tucked onto a rung so the raised knee hid her sex. Her left hand lay on her perfect thigh, while her right arm cradled her breasts, the hand grasping her left biceps. The girl’s breasts were every bit as tasty as he remembered, although it took a while to notice them, because the eye found it hard to pull away from the ugly dark scar tissue under the right elbow, broader than a big man’s outspread hand. Its surface seemed taut, as if a quick motion would split it right open. The eye was fascinated by it, teased away from the pert breasts and the dark fold between her legs to return to that slick, damaged skin. Even a man whose hand didn’t tingle with the memory of (
Go ahead, silly, it doesn’t hurt
.) that strangely compelling slickness (
They like the freaks, you know?
)—even that man might take a while (
Yes, Harris, do
—) to raise his eyes to her face. But when he did …

What expression
was
that? Stuyvesant dug the uncle’s version of Rosalie’s snapshot from his pocket, holding it up between the two pictures on the wall. In it, Pip—wearing a lot less makeup and a lot more clothes—sat on the edge of a Roman fountain, leaning against the
cropped-away Rosalie. She was pretty enough, and had the pleasing vivacity of youth, but there was mistrust there as well. Whether of the camera, the person behind the camera, or life in general, he could not know.

In the starkly naked portrait, however, that wariness was gone. Pip was all but thrusting herself at the lens, chin high with what Stuyvesant had seen as a defiant assertion of her body. You could feel her pleasure at the idea of rubbing the noses of viewers (most especially her mother and uncle) into the damage, anticipating the gasps of polite horror.

Some fluke of the camera lens gave that adolescent defiance gravitas, making Pip look unexpectedly complex. Like one of those trick drawings—first a goblet, then the silhouette of two faces—he could see her juvenile insolence, but he could also, now, see something else.

Pride. Courage. Beauty, even. Yes, this was a willful rich girl playing the flirt; on the other hand, this was also a young woman who had worked hard to get to a place where she liked herself, damage and all.

People came to Paris because it was cheap, but they also came to reinvent themselves, weaving the city’s freedoms—linguistic or racial, artistic or social, and above all, sexual—into a new identity. Here on the banks of the Seine, Pip Crosby was no longer a “good” girl, no longer someone made ugly by a scar. No longer a girl, even.

And now Harris Stuyvesant felt … regret. That he hadn’t been around to watch. Because whatever it was that brought about that young woman’s pride—life in Paris, superstitious rituals, becoming a nude model—he couldn’t say it was entirely a bad thing.

Or maybe he was just being a romantic fool.

He left the nude picture on the wall, but worked the other portrait out of its frame, tucking it into his notebook alongside the snapshot.

The contents of the bookshelf provided more by way of confirmation than surprise: half a dozen racy novels, two in English and four in French; twice that number of books on things like Tarot and astrology, again in both languages; and an assortment of new American fiction sent by her mother—each had a brief note and a date inside its cover, from May to Christmas of last year. Nothing political. Casual bookmarks in some of the thicker French tomes, all in the first quarter of
their book, suggested that Pip had found them hard going. The bookmarks were mostly postcards (Mrs. Crosby from Niagara; Mrs. Crosby from Chicago; a friend—Sally? Susan? The signature was smudged—from the Metropolitan Museum in New York) or ticket receipts: Luna Park, the Folies Bergère, three theaters, and a couple of cinémas. He started to remove them, then changed his mind and wrote down their information, instead.

Not that the cops would ever notice, but if by chance they did come here, they might be unhappy with an American detective who helped himself to evidence.

After he had examined the bottoms of the shelves, he went to the dressing table and did the same. Taking care to make little noise, he removed the drawers, checked behind them, looked at the back of the table and its mirror, and found nothing. He returned the furniture to the original dents in the carpet, and examined the pictures on the wall, taking each down, feeling those with a paper backing.

A small basket on the end of the shelf held a deck of Tarot cards and three Chinese coins with square holes in the middle. The bed-side table held nothing out of the ordinary. The mattress concealed no objects, nor did the carpet.

He took a last glance at the two peculiar boxes with their enigmatic grids of bones and objects, and noticed for the first time faint lines running up the right-hand side of both. He hadn’t seen the pattern earlier, but with the sun edging west, the scratching stood out. He tipped his head, and made out four tiny, geometric capitals: DIDI.

He wrote the word down in his notebook. Perhaps she had actually known the artist—if you could call it
art
. Which made him think: Miss Berger hadn’t answered his question about the artists Pip sat for. Had her claim of tiredness been a little too conveniently timed?

Christ
, he told himself,
you are one suspicious son of a bitch
.

He closed the window, as he’d promised. In the doorway, he turned for a final survey: beds, furniture, drapes; the photographs. Those odd boxes. The sketches, particularly the vivid personality shown by the Spaniard’s wicked and perceptive pen. The nude photograph: Jesus.

If she’d given him a look like that back in February—youth or not,
Rosalie or no—he’d have followed her. He’d have dogged her steps all the way to Rome and back.

He tipped his hat to Nancy’s closed door, dropped a card with his hotel’s number on the table near the phone, and left the apartment. When he had safely negotiated a passage by the gorgon, he checked his watch: 3:40.

Time to see the cops.

But on his way across the Pont au Change—at about the point Victor Hugo had his Inspector Javier throw himself off—Stuyvesant halted to draw the photograph of him and Pip from his breast pocket. He looked at the unlikely pair for some time, a crooked smile softening his features—until his fingers let the scrap of paper go. He watched it dance and drift, down to the water, and away.

No reason to complicate matters. None at all.

B
EGINNING IN
R
OMAN
times, bodies were buried on the Rive Droit near the great north-south road that would one day be divided into the rues Sébastopol, Palais, and Saint-Michel by the Pont au Change and the Pont Saint-Michel. By the twelfth century, Paris had closed in around it, but the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents continued: a field of bones and bodies surrounded by the living. Pits were dug and the city’s dead tumbled in by the hundreds. When one pit was full, it was covered over with soil dug from the next. The stench was appalling; the cemetery was the realm of prostitutes and pickpockets; nearby homes looked directly down at putrefying bodies.

A high stone wall was built around it.

Plagues came and went; the level inside the wall rose, until the ground was more bone than soil. The wall’s arches and recesses proved a convenient place to stack the pieces of skeleton that came to light with every turn of the shovel: an open-air charnel house surrounded what had once been a churchyard.

Calls were made to evict the cemetery, but it remained, a stinking, dangerous, lucrative sore at the very center of Paris.

In the fifteenth century, frescoes were added to the charnel house archways, darkly humorous images with Death as a reaper, harvesting all mankind yet permitting a last playful dance on the way to the pitted earth. Lady in satin or moneylender with bags of gold; learned cleric or
beggar in rags: infant, adolescent, young man, crone: all danced with Death in the end. The Saints-Innocents fresco was the first Danse Macabré; soon, Death’s Merry Dance was seen all over Europe, in fresco and carving, wood-print and oil painting.

And the burials went on. For hundreds of years, the dead of Paris were brought to the Cemetery of the Innocents to be turned into clean bone. The stench gagged and infected those living nearby—who were soon added to the numbers. The exposed flesh fed the rats—who carried diseases, that filled the pits, that fed the next generation of rats. The figures on the walls danced with Death, merry and doomed.

Not until Revolution was in the air did the king take official notice of the killing stench and the half-rotted bodies that spilled through the walls. The cemetery was closed to further burials. The bones were used to fill some inconvenient holes underground; the burial field was cleared for the living; barrels of adipocere—corpse-wax—were shoveled up and turned into candles. For, as Charles Dickens would later write: