Bones of Paris (9780345531773) (11 page)

He was waiting for a break in the conversation to pull Pip out of his pocket, when a name made his ears twitch.

“—hired Man Ray to do a film of his house-guests, down in Hyères—Provence, you know? Sounds like a piece of junk to me.” This was the older New Yorker who had dismissed the “titty displays.” A man with a limited critical vocabulary.

“C’mon, that
Sea Star
movie was a work of genius,” the Jersey sculptor argued.

“Oh, sure, but basically Ray’s just a fashion photographer. If Noailles wanted art rather than a home movie, he’d have asked Buñuel.”

“Who’s Noweye?” the younger painter asked.

“Noailles. Viscount Charles de Noailles,” the sculptor explained. “He and his wife are patrons of the arts.”

“Hey, can I get me one of them?”

“You wish.”

The critic cut in, “He’s mostly interested in film. You need the other one, the guy they call Le Comte—he’s newer to the game, and he’s got a lot of cash to throw around. But neither of them are just patrons. If you watch ’em closely, they’re damned clever. Like that Stein woman—she’s got to have a small fortune on her walls by now.”

“Yeah, you just wish she’d discovered
you
,” the sculptor jeered.

The snort the younger man gave as reaction made the critic’s face go red. Stuyvesant interrupted with the Man Ray photo.

None of the three knew Pip, although two of them agreed they’d like to. Stuyvesant left before the discussion grew unbearably raunchy and moved to the next terrace.

One advantage of this tightly-knit American community was that it
was
tight, in both senses. A person found the same faces drinking at the same watering-holes: Coupole, Rotonde, Dôme, the Select, the Jockey, the Dingo, with dozens of smaller places tucked away on the sides—all within convenient staggering distance of that physical and spiritual center of Montparnasse, the Carrefour Vavin. Now a busy intersection, Vavin was originally a rubble heap that Mediaeval students had jokingly dubbed “Mount Parnassus.” The sacred home of Greek Muses became the Parisian home for wine, women, and bad poetry—until eighteenth century city planners flattened the mound in the interest of traffic flow, leaving only the name, and the attitudes.

One disadvantage of this tight community was simple numbers. Take the Coupole: on a busy night, two or three thousand people would cram inside. It could take hours to work your way through the upstairs, the downstairs, and the broad terrace, around the bar, the restaurant, and the dance hall. And that was just one place. The Dôme now had a bar tacked onto it, the Americaine, that was nearly as bad, and although people tended to have their favorite haunts, they also migrated from one terrace to the next.

Tonight, Stuyvesant’s conversation with the Americans gave him an approach: starting at the Coupole bar, he talked movies, of the artistic variety.

It turned out to be a productive entrée into Montparnasse café society. Everyone had an opinion; every second person was either working on a film or considering it. All had recommendations, pro and con, and if he’d tried to see all the pictures that were mentioned, he would have been staring at silver screens until Christmas.

But certain names cropped up time and again, and certain titles: Clair and Picabia, Buñuel and Dalí, Epstein and Dulac, and above all, Man Ray. “Manifesto of the absurd” was bandied about, and “dreamlike sequences” and “the tyranny of the conscious mind.”
Un Chien Andalou
(which was not about a dog, nor was it set in Andalusia);
L’Étoile de Mer
(which was not about sea stars, although it did in fact have a sea star in it, briefly);
La Coquille et le Clergyman
(which had both a shell and a priest, and therefore seemed to be regarded with less respect in this world of sur-reality, just as the “titty display” man was rendered dubious by having actually sold his work).

A couple hours of this, and Stuyvesant was tempted to rise up and overturn the tables—but if he did, the ensuing debate as to the Meaning of his Act might drive him to pound someone’s face in. Instead, he rose up and left a number of conversations.

To his mild surprise, he went all night without spotting Lulu. If she’d appeared, he might have forgotten how tired he was after a long day of cops and bluestockings, but that brassy hair did not catch his eye or that strident voice his ear. To be honest, he wasn’t entirely unhappy. A quiet night would not go unwelcome, and the bank notes she slipped from his wallet—lifting money rather than asking: Lulu liked to think of herself as an amateur—were beginning to add up.

So he walked along to the pub-like comfort of the Falstaff and let Jimmy pour him a glass of his best Scotch. Jimmy Charters had been a British flyweight boxer, and anyone who put on the gloves was a friend of his. Fortunately, Ernest Hemingway wasn’t there.

Jimmy didn’t recognize Pip Crosby.

“Want to leave the picture on the bar?” he asked. “See if anyone knows her?”

“I’ll do that tomorrow—the photographers have been swamped with rolls of film from vacances.”

“Yep, it’s rentrée. Things’ll pick up now.”

“I guess.”

“But not
right
now. I’m afraid it’s closing time, my friend. Time for you to move on to the Select.”

“Nah, I’ve had enough of plastered Yanks. See you tomorrow, Jimmy.”

“Good luck with your girl.”

Stuyvesant stood on rue Montparnasse and lit a cigarette, feeling the girl in his breast pocket. Feeling the weight of the day.

“Pip, sweetheart, I’m all fagged out. I’ll try again tomorrow.”

A
S
S
TUYVESANT CAME
to the rue Vavin, he waited for his feet to turn the corner towards the Hotel Benoit. They did not. The night felt soft after the harsh day, and about the last thing he felt like was settling onto that hard, solitary mattress with Sylvia Beach’s detective story on his belly and Pip’s reproachful snapshot on the desk.

Instead, his feet took him along the boulevard Raspail; up the rue de Rennes; through narrow streets unchanged since students wore doublets. Down the quay to Notre Dame, admiring the massive dance of stone and the reflection of lights and the dark mass of moored barges, then south along that Roman Main Street, the boulevard Saint-Michel
(… a new assistant, over whom he has lost his head)
, where the perpetual energies of students kept the night at bay.

Farther down, the lights dimmed, and he paused at the feet of the Lion of Belfort to smoke a cigarette. In the daytime, the broad plains of the Place Denfert-Rochereau was a chariot race of taxis and trucks, but at this time of night, he and a rag-and-bone man in a horse-cart were the noble lion’s only companions. Old books called this the
Place d’Enfer
, at the
Barrière d’Enfer
: Hell Place, at the Hell Gate. Once upon a time, this was an entrance through the city walls where taxes were paid on incoming goods.

It had another connection to hell, past that of taxation: across the Place lay the entrance to the Paris catacombs.

Practical people, the French. When some long-forgotten quarries collapsed in the late 1700s and sucked buildings and citizens deep into the earth, at around the same time that a huge, stinking cemetery across the river was creating public unrest, the city fathers looked from one problem to the other, and got out their shovels. The quarries were filled with the debris of death; the former cemetery became the wholesale vegetable market of Les Halles. A century later, hell was painted over a second time when Place D’Enfer was changed to Place Denfert-Rochereau, a nice bureaucratic pun employing the name of a war hero.

The catacombs were open to the public sometimes. He’d gone down them one summer’s day, mostly to escape the heat, and found cool stillness, the sound of trickling water, and at the bottom of the spiral stairs, an artistic display of former citizens.

Still, it was unsettling to think of the millions upon millions of dead Parisians under his feet. A reminder that the City of Light had shadowy corners. Some of which swallowed pretty girls.

He got up and crushed the cigarette under his heel, grimly amused at the direction of his thoughts.
You, too, huh? Okay, you want macabre—how about a nice wallow through the gravestones?
So Stuyvesant headed up the street to the Montparnasse cemetery, waiting for his somewhat tattered sense of humor to come to his rescue.

The truth was, he wasn’t dealing well with rootlessness and solitude. He’d never been further from having that fantasy library full of books. He lived out of a series of trunks scattered across Europe, drank more than he should, smoked more, got into more fistfights than was sensible. He no longer had a family, his only partners were temporary ones, and his friends … well, he didn’t have many of those, either. Bennett Grey was the only real friend on this side of the Atlantic, and even Bennett was a long way off, wrapped in hermit-like seclusion at the far end of Cornwall.

As for women, well, he wouldn’t exactly use the word
honorable
. Maybe that was why he’d taken the job of finding Pip. To make up for a few blots on his record. Good Catholic boy, out for a little redemption.

He used to be a good guy, especially towards women. Just like he
used to be cheerful—well, maybe not
cheerful
, exactly, but at least optimistic. Convinced that he would be able to make things come out, in the end.

When he came to the boulevard Edgar Quinet, he paused, considering. To his right stood Man Ray’s studio. To his left, just five minutes from here, beckoned Le Sphinx, the best house of prostitution this side of the river—the French being as practical about filling needs as they were about filling holes in the ground. And although he had no pressing urges, the welcome, the voices—just the
company
of Mme. Lemestre’s ladies teased at him like a cool breeze. He even had the money for a full night of pampering.

But he turned his back on easy pleasure to cross the boulevard Raspail into the rue Campagne. Man Ray’s studio was easy to find: there was a large plaque at the door. It was a beautiful building, ornately tiled and with many tall windows. It was also dark. He continued on his way.

Things
would
come out, in the end.
You’ll find Pip
, he told himself as he passed the still-riotous Select. She really would be living with an artist on the Côte d’Azur, as titillated by her scandalous fling with bohemia as she had been by the novelty of sleeping with a middle-aged bouncer. And once he found her (his story went on) he’d also find that she was growing disenchanted with sin. That she was primed and ready to be sent home to Mama, making Ernest M. Crosby happy and generous and eager to shout the virtues of Harris Stuyvesant to a lot of other wealthy American businessmen who needed a man in Paris, or Frankfurt, or Milan.

Still, Stuyvesant had to admit as he flipped the hotel’s loud minuterie switch to light the stairs, it was a puzzle, how nobody seemed to know Pip Crosby. It would appear that, despite the efforts of Haussmann and his Napoleon, Paris was still a series of villages. That a man could live his life in Saint-Germain and never meet someone from Clichy—or even from Cluny, at its very elbow.

He stopped as a horrible thought occurred to him: he’d been looking in the Quarter’s bars and bistros, but what if she’d gone on the wagon? God, he hoped the girl hadn’t come back to Paris and found religion. That was one particular underworld he had no wish to dive
into: Raymond Duncan’s crew with their dirty feet, home-made sandals, and goats; Madame Blavatsky and her hocus-pocus. As he stood on the stairs, the bulb clicked out.

With a low curse, he took out his Ronson to light his way to the next floor. He used the toilet and came out to find a bald stranger wearing only trousers stepping from his neighbor Anouk’s room. The man looked startled; when Stuyvesant murmured a good night, he looked relieved.

Anouk wasn’t a professional, but she was certainly a busy amateur.

Inside the stifling room, Stuyvesant stripped down to his shorts, threaded a hanger through his suit, draped the tie over the chair, and tossed the shirt against the door where he’d remember it in the morning. He dropped onto the bed, dry-washing his tired face, then looked across at the table, where he’d left the Hammett novel. Instead, his hand picked up the silver cigarette case.

Nine years ago, it had been an expensive gift for a working girl’s salary, made more so by the elaborate engraving. It fit his hand as if designed to be turned over and over like a bar of soap. The tens of thousands of times he had done so had all but worn his initials away.

But the clasp still held. Both of them.

Its hidden compartment had once contained the photograph of the working girl whose present it was: blonde and wind-blown and shining with life, back when Pip Crosby was still in schoolgirl braids. Her name was Helen, and the picture was taken just days before she’d bled to death on a New York street amidst drifts of shattered glass: the Wall Street bomb. September 16, 1920, at 12:01 in the afternoon.

After five and a half years, he’d let the ashes of her picture drift into the Thames River. He’d replaced it with the picture of another girl, also blonde, also shining. This one with green eyes: Sarah Grey.

Who some time after the picture was taken had lost her left hand to another bloody explosion.

He hadn’t looked at Sarah’s photograph in a while. He had last laid eyes on Sarah herself in May 1926; last heard from her three months later, when her brother Bennett handed him a brief letter with the picture.
Three years, two weeks, and a day ago. Not that he was counting or anything.

With Sarah, it had been love. They hadn’t yet been to bed together when the bomb happened, but they would have. If Bennett hadn’t come between them. Bennett Grey, who of all people should have seen catastrophe approach.

Maybe that niggle of a question was why Stuyvesant never found the time for a trip to Cornwall. For a visit to his only friend on this side of the Atlantic.

In any event, despite Europe’s plentiful bed-fillers, and despite having known Sarah for only a handful of days, since her, nothing had really clicked with a woman. He’d never managed to shake Sarah’s green eyes, her incongruous deep laugh, the erotic spray of freckles at the neck of her dress.