Bones of Paris (9780345531773) (23 page)

When the figure rounded the bottom of the stairs and turned towards them, he recognized Stuyvesant, raising his hand in a brief gesture. Sarah took a step towards the late-comer, but Stuyvesant caught her hand for a last, urgent remark—taking care to keep his manner light, even teasing. “Nice to be called your beau.”

She shot a glance at the approaching man. “Harris, I—I’m sorry. I should have told you this earlier. Dominic wasn’t talking about you. Harris, I …”

But the late-comer was there. He needed a shave and had bruised-looking circles under his eyes, but his face relaxed as he approached. Sarah waited until he was standing beside her. Until he had bent down to give her raised cheek an affectionate kiss. Until he’d held out his hand to Stuyvesant, looking puzzled. She took a breath.

“Harris, this is Émile Doucet. My … fiancé.”

A
CLOCK COUNTS OFF
the seconds of a human life.

There is satisfaction, one
tick
carrying the echoes of a countless number yet to come.

There is disquiet, one
tick
taking a person ever closer to cessation: when measured by Time, we are but a swing of the pendulum.

Olivier Lambert was a clockmaker. He began as a locksmith, with a small shop on the Rive Droite, where he might have continued building locks and answering late-night summonses to let keyless people into their houses, except that one day, a Danish locksmith-turned-clockmaker named Jens Olsen happened in. The two men fell to talking; the conversation grew into friendship. Over a series of amiable nights and mornings, Olsen told Lambert of fabulous clocks that measured not only the day, but the eons. During his months in Paris, he taught Lambert many of the clockmaker’s skills.

When Olsen left Paris, Lambert closed his shop for a pilgrimage to Strasburg and Prague. He studied the great cathedral clocks and talked his way into their intricately calibrated works. His sketchbooks filled.

Back in Paris, he started to build: astronomical clocks measuring seconds, minutes, years; clocks that parsed the phases of the moon and positions of the stars; mechanisms that knew their way to eclipses and breathed in and out with the motions of the tides.

In 1913, a wealthy Parisian nobleman—home on leave from the
Front’s carnage and desperate for a promise of the future—hired Lambert to make the greatest clock of his career.

It would have a central drive stem, from which grew four faces. It could be as ornately worked as the clockmaker wished, money being even less of an object for the aristocrat than it was for Lambert.

He spent twelve years building his masterpiece. His workshop was a room in this employer’s Paris mansion. There he made his tools, cut the gears, experimented with metals, engraved the faces. Whatever he asked for—gold, precious stones, experts in champlevé and basse-taille enamel—he received. During the War, progress was slow, but each time the nobleman came home on leave, he would spend long hours studying the mechanism taking form at the very center of the house. And each time he went back to the Front, he urged Lambert to continue his work.

The war ended, the clock grew, until in the autumn of 1925, it was finished at last. Just in time for the nobleman’s fiftieth birthday. A party was planned.

As Lambert took apart his workshop and packed away his tools, he fretted over what future there might be for a fifty-nine-year-old clockmaker who had held one job in the past dozen years. There had been some communication—a wealthy Englishman with a derelict clock that needed rebuilding—but Olivier Lambert did not want merely to repair a mechanism, not when his mind was bubbling with new ideas.

On the night of the party, he wound Le Comte’s clock and stood by as his employer set it to ticking, to the cheers of his gathered friends. Later, in the wee hours of December 22, for the last time Olivier Lambert ran his hands over the magnificent four-faced clock that had been his life for all those years.

His drowned body surfaced a week later, in Le Havre.

T
HE HOUSE OF
Hyacinthe Moreau was at first sight unexpected. Having seen Didi’s work, Stuyvesant wouldn’t have been surprised by a haunted mansion with shuttered windows, or a garret above a mortuary. An
appartement
in the catacombs, maybe.

Instead, Sarah led him to a neat, two-story house set back from a tree-lined street in the XIII arrondissement. Looking over the stone wall, he saw what looked like the home of a bank teller with a buxom wife and three very average children—or it would have, had the paint been fresher and the tiny front garden better tended. As it was, the rose-bushes that had originally lined the walk now reached thorny fingers towards the iron gate, catching at the clothing as one entered. And as they picked their way through the garden, Stuyvesant saw the cracks in the window trim.

“You suppose Sleeping Beauty lives here?” he asked.

Sarah’s reply was an exclamation, at the branch of stickers attaching itself to her sleeve. He went to rescue her, but she pulled away with a jerk.

She was either impatient or frightened, and had been since she met him at the Métro stop ten minutes before. Of course, he had been late: not only did it take Mme. Benoit some time to wake him for the phone call, since he’d spent most of the night shooting awake at every creak of the stairs, but he’d also been delayed by having to hunt through her
stack of morning papers before he found even a small piece about a shooting near Denfert-Rochereau: three lines. That’s all Lulu got.

Still, he thought the problem was less his tardiness than her disclosure about Émile Doucet.

He kept quiet. Time enough to talk when they were finished with the maker of hands.

They ran the rose-bush gauntlet without bloodshed. The door knocker assured him that they were at Moreau’s house and not Snow White’s: it was a metal gargoyle with a movable upper jaw. Sarah plucked the maxilla gingerly from its rest and let it fall. They listened to the echoes die away. After a minute, she repeated the act. Nothing.

“You sure he’s home?”

“The note said ten o’clock,” she replied. “Oh, and I should warn you about the smell—it’s from what he calls his ‘corruption boxes.’ Part of the taxidermy process.”

Great
, thought Stuyvesant:
another source of eye-watering summer stink
. He raised his fist to the door, but before he could pound, it clicked, and opened. A tiny house-maid all in black looked through the gap, like a child with a pinched face. She nodded at Sarah and sniffed at him, saying in a stuffed-sounding voice, “Bonjour, Mademoiselle.”

“Bonjour, Madame Jory. Nous avons un rendez-vous avec M. Moreau,” Sarah said in fluid French. We have an appointment with Monsieur Moreau.

“Vraiment?” The woman’s thin eyebrows rose.

Sarah dug the note out of her handbag and gave it to the maid, who snuffed again, read it closely, and returned it with what might have been a shake of the head.

“Il semblerait donc,” she agreed: so it would seem. “Venez avec moi.”

Had her initial reaction not told them that guests were unexpected here, her failure to take their coats confirmed it. She just led them across a foyer that looked like an illustration for The Classic French Home, knocked on a closed door, opened it without waiting for an answer, and put her head inside to shout, “Monsieur, vos visiteurs sont ici.”

Then she stood back with a long, drawn-out sniff—a nasal condition, he decided, rather than an expression of disapproval. By the musky
smell that welled from the doorway, a blocked nose might be a requirement for employment here.

The stairs inside were narrow, steep, and uncarpeted, lit by a small bulb dangling from a wire overhead. Stuyvesant had seen entrances to servants’ quarters that were less enticing, and there was no question here of “ladies first.” He tried each step before committing his weight to it, tense with the anticipation of attack.

He reached the bottom without incident, and emerged from the tunnel of stairs into a low-ceilinged room. An odor of damp was inevitable, given the basement setting, but this was far worse. The place smelled as if rats had died in the walls.

The cellar’s occupant was nowhere in sight. This was definitely his lair: in one corner was a stack of the wooden frames he used for his Displays, empty and glassless. A work table had boxes in progress: one was filled with the skulls of what could only be birds, fragile and delicate, displayed against a background of color—even in the dim light one could see colors from cardinal red to peacock blue. Another held the pelt (if that was the word) of a hummingbird behind an impossibly tiny, needle-beaked skull. The room’s only other furnishing was a cheaply built chest of drawers some three feet high and two wide.

Stepping forward to examine the three boxes brought a passageway into view. There he found another work-room, and following that, a third. The place was a labyrinth. And it would appear that many, if not all, of the pieces on the walls were unfinished, since few had glass over the contents, and each room had a cabinet of drawers. Opening a few, Stuyvesant discovered objects similar to those of the nearby boxes. And bones: many, many bones.

A man’s echoing voice broke the damp stillness. Stuyvesant turned, but Sarah was not behind him, and he realized in a panic that the labyrinth had more than one way around. He hurried towards the voice—two voices now—but came to a dead end. Backtracking, he found another room without an exit … until finally he rounded a corner, to be met by the sight of Sarah and a very peculiar little man, framed against a wall of amputated hands.

The sight set him back on his heels—but they were not human taxidermy,
they were prosthetic limbs, kith and kin to the wall of plaster faces in Charmentier’s house.
Christ
, he thought,
what next: a wall of buttocks?

There must have been a hundred of them, in all colors and sizes, ranging in extent from a glove to a full sleeve: here, a cluster of various attitudes of hand for a long-fingered man, ending at the wrist; there, a row of five arms that were fitted just below the armpit, their elbows bent at five slightly different angles. A surprising number were for women, their fingers posed for everything from a near-hook to open and relaxed.

He blinked, and looked at Sarah. The little man was holding her hand. Not with affection—and definitely not on her part, since she was looking at the fellow like she had his pesky rose-bushes. But even he had an attitude less of a lover than of a palm-reader.

In any case, she was in no immediate threat. Stuyvesant cleared his throat to cover his alarm. “The place is a maze,” he said. “I couldn’t see where you’d gone.”

“Harris, this is Hyacinthe Moreau. As you can see, he is among other things a maker of prosthetic hands. Didi, this is an old friend, Harris Stuyvesant.”

Reluctantly, it seemed, the creature of the cellars let go of Sarah and permitted Stuyvesant’s hand to wrap around his. It was a fragile thing, its fingers as bird-like as the bones he used. The rest of the man was similar: narrow shoulders, thin wrists, and a nose like a beak. His blue eyes were so pale they looked white, set in pasty skin that might never have been introduced to sunlight.

The artist winced at having his hand shaken, and retrieved his fingers with an air of having to count them. He returned his attention to Sarah.

Stuyvesant was amused to see her tuck her own extremity away, then fail to notice Moreau’s attempts at retaking it.

“My dear Mlle. Grey, you must permit me to touch up your hand,” the night-dweller protested in a reedy voice. “It is a thing of such loveliness, attached to a lovely lady, to permit it to grow worn is a great pity.”

“Didi, you have better things to do than fuss with my tin hand,”
Sarah replied with a satisfactory firmness. “I brought Mr. Stuyvesant here to talk to you about a girl he’s looking for, whom he thinks you might know.”

“A girl?”

Stuyvesant caught himself before he could respond with,
Yes, girls—you know, prettier than boys and with bumps under their shirts?
Instead, he took out a copy of Pip’s snapshot. The thin fingers closed on it like the appendages of some wall-climbing lizard, and Moreau bent over the photo. Myopic, but no glasses. Vain?

“Mlle. Crosby,” he said.

“That’s right. You know her?”

“I cannot say I know her. I have met her. Briefly, once.”

“How did that come about?”

“She came with one of my … friends.”

“Which friend?”

“Just … a friend.”

Sarah broke in. “Was it Le Comte?”

“A kind man. He brings me many useful gifts.”

“What sorts of things are those?”

Reluctantly, the pale gaze left Sarah to look—briefly—at her companion before continuing down the room to the work table. “He knows what I like, what I need, to make my art. And he goes everywhere in the city. When he notices a promising object, he takes possession of it, and brings it to me.”

Stuyvesant took it as an invitation to step across to the table and look into the small crate that sat on top. Inside were a tiny bird’s nest with three half eggshells, a once-white infant shoe, a tangle of half a dozen delicate rib-bones, and two washed-leather bags like the one he’d kept his marbles in as a boy. The first one contained, remarkably enough, marbles, although new-looking and a lot fancier than those he’d kneeled over, forty years before. The larger bag held shards of broken glass. He fished one out and held it to the light. An eye looked back at him, part of the face from an old stained glass window. With that piece were two more eyes, some fingers, and a large toe with a sandal-strap across it.

Moreau had stood at his elbow while he went through the box, unwilling to protest but clearly anticipating disaster from clumsy hands. When Stuyvesant had returned everything to its place, the artist pulled the crate over and picked out one of the rib-bones, smoothing it under his fingers to reassure himself that it had not been harmed by the American brute. Moving the box revealed another crate with a similarly odd assortment of objects: a cigar box containing a large handful of pulled teeth, most of them pitted with decay; a stuffed mouse, sitting up on its haunches with its forepaws lifted, something in the process of taxidermy having caused the creature’s face to twist as if in agony; a ladies’ brooch about two inches high, intricately woven from some black thread-like material. It took him a moment to recognize it as a memento mori, made from the hair of a beloved dead person. He let it drop to the table, causing Moreau to hiss in protest.