Bones of Paris (9780345531773) (31 page)

“And if you cut them from the person against their will?”

“It’s just a bone,” the cop said. “No indications of violence.”

“Inspector Doucet, I don’t have the keenest imagination in Paris, but I have no trouble seeing Moreau as a guy who would happily amputate a hand to get at the bones.”

The two men looked at each other, then looked away.

Stuyvesant was tempted to ask how Sarah had reacted at being told to steer clear of her boss. However, he didn’t think a direct question would be a great idea.

“How’s Sarah?”

“Fine,” Doucet said automatically. “Busy. Le Comte is having a party Wednesday—the night of the full moon.”

“I know, he invited me.”

“He did?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Oh, nothing. It’s just that, I understand the venue is small and the invitation list … equally so.”

“Too exclusive for the likes of me, you mean?”

“No, I’m sure you are …”

“Sarah was there. I think he asked me because he knew I was a friend of hers.”

The
flic
slapped shut the file on his desk. “Anyway. She’s very busy planning it. I’m thinking of taking her off for a few days, after she’s finished.”

Stuyvesant’s internal smile faded at this deft reversal of claims. “Good plan,” he said politely. “She does have a tendency to work too
hard.” Then he caught himself: one-upmanship was a stupid game to play with this man. He slumped back against the chair. “Sorry, I’m being petty. I like Sarah a lot. I’m glad she’s happy.”

Doucet eyed him with mistrust, but after a minute, he took out his cigarettes. “I will look into the lives of Moreau and this American photographer. If I take the police pathologist along with me to Moreau’s house, it could save some time. As for M. Ray, it might be simpler to have his visa revoked.”

“Sending him back to New York, free to carry on?”

“If he is, in fact, guilty of anything.”

“As you say.”

Doucet tapped at his cigarette a few times. “My responsibility is to Paris, not New York. Still, I would not wish that on my conscience. He may stay, for the present.”

“And you suggest we don’t even look at Charmentier?”

“If I did see any evidence that he should be investigated,” Doucet said reluctantly, “I would do so. Even though my superiors would not make it easy for me.”

“On the other hand,” Stuyvesant supplied, “who’d be surprised if a blunt American were to stumble into Charmentier, here and there?”

Doucet fixed him with a long, hard gaze, which Stuyvesant moved to deflect.

“I take it you haven’t talked Sarah into quitting?”

“She refuses to consider it until after the party.”

“So she is vulnerable.”

“In any number of ways.”

“You know my history, Doucet. You know I’m good at what I do.”

“When you are not stumbling drunk in a night-club.”

Ouch. “That was before I knew what was involved,” he pointed out. “
Who
was involved.”

“There can be no more such mistakes.”

“No.”

“And you will inform me immediately, if you turn up any pertinent information.”

“Yes.”

Both men stood. Stuyvesant waited, to see if Doucet would put out a hand, but the cop had one more thing on his mind. “Monsieur, you are aware that the police disapprove of civilians carrying hand-guns?”

“Yeah, I’m aware of that.”

Doucet listened and looked for the hidden meaning, and found it. The two men exchanged a firm clasp, and Stuyvesant left.

He dodged across the Pont Neuf to the pointed end of the Île de la Cité, where he leaned on the rail, watching a fisherman put together his long pole.

He was glad for a declaration of truce, between him and the cop. But Doucet was right, there could be no more slips. Any careless word or gesture could put Sarah in danger. Any failure of attention could let a key fact slip away—and put Sarah in danger.

Exactly as he and Bennett between them had done, three years ago.

T
WENTY MINUTES LATER
, Harris Stuyvesant was standing in an art gallery.

At least, it was supposed to be an art gallery. Sarah had given him the address, saying there were several Didi Displays on the walls, but the place looked more like a junk dealer’s.

A nicked and dust-impregnated elephant’s foot umbrella stand with a spray of peacock’s feathers in it, one of which was splattered with something he hoped was only brown paint. Three stuffed finches with jeweled eyes, threaded onto the sort of metal skewer used by Turkish restaurants. A boot—just a plain old boot with mended laces, but displayed inside an ornate gilt frame more suited to a Renaissance painting. On a long display shelf stood a skeleton, but of what? After a closer look, he decided the object included the remains of three or four different animals, pieced together to create an impossible creature: the skull of a small crocodile and front feet of some paddling creature, its back feet had the blunt nails of a dog, and it all came to an end in a long prehensile tail of some kind of monkey.

As he wandered through the exhibits, the room’s original odor—surprisingly fresh and citrusy, as if someone was making lemonade in a back room—gave way to the smell of damp earth, although there was no sign of a garden, or even an open window. He gave a mental shrug,
walked on—then jerked to attention as the next breath plunged him into the icy panic of the trenches.

The bespectacled organism who had greeted his entrance sniggered. “Monsieur, do not be concerned, it is not a gas attack, merely the Odorama.”

Stuyvesant stared, first at him, then at the direction of his pointing finger. Indeed, the terrifying smell was already fading, and it did seem to emanate from a peculiar contraption in the corner.

A bicycle wheel, ticking gently clockwise, its spokes mounted with fifteen perfume atomizers. As he watched, one of the bulbs edged into the noon position, where a miniature set of paddles waited, and a ridged trigger wire. The bulb pressed the trigger, and the paddles snapped down, releasing a puff of scent.

Banana.

“Un opéra d’odeur,” the man explained, then translated in heavily accented English: “A symphony of scent.”

“Un polyphonie de puanteur,” Stuyvesant commented. The man giggled.

“Yes, Monsieur, the odors of life are not always pleasant.”

The current one was cloyingly sweet, as if he’d stuck his head into a vat of candy floss. He moved away, before it could change to rotting corpses or dog shit.

“I’m interested in Didi Moreau,” he told the man.

“Are we not all? This piece is by Le Didi.” The gallery owner made a proud gesture at the skewered songbirds. “And this here.” His hand displayed the glories of the unnatural skeleton. “And in the next room, we have more.”

The adjoining room contained several Moreau boxes, and as he studied them, Stuyvesant had to admit that they did contain that artistic je ne sais quoi, a sensation that insinuated itself into the viewer’s mind and touched off a note of response. One of the boxes, for example, focused on a childhood day at the beach: sand, a square of faded postcard, a doll-sized beach umbrella. One of the squares was empty, although its sides and back were painted; after a while, he decided that its pink was the exact color of sunburn. The pain of nostalgia, he guessed.

“Would Monsieur care to see some of Didi’s … older work?”

The man might have been offering dirty postcards. Stuyvesant summoned the appropriate enthusiasm, and waited while the man unlocked a door.

He looked around the room in surprise. “This is taxidermy.”

“Yes, Monsieur, much as I enjoy the Displays, I find it a pity that Didi has moved on from his Tableaux. We are fortunate to have a few.”

Stuyvesant could see why the door was kept locked, even in Paris.

The Victorians had been big on taxidermy tableaux, dressing up thirty stuffed mice, for example, like a classroom of schoolchildren, or arranging elaborately dressed kittens into a formal wedding. They also had a peculiar fondness for freaks: two-headed sheep, puppies with an extra pair of legs coming from their shoulder blades.

Moreau’s work might have given even Victorians pause.

A bloody murder scene in an old-fashioned kitchen, enacted by red squirrels; a battlefield littered by dozens of tiny uniformed white mice, sprawled in death or advancing with bayonets fixed; a Mediaeval torture conducted by two lizards on a ginger kitten stretched on a miniature rack.

Any impulse to black laughter died at the sight of the room’s other pieces.

Somehow, rape, sodomy, and mass orgies lost any amusement value when the contorted figures were all six inches high and covered by baby-soft fur.

Stuyvesant cleared his throat. “As you say, these are certainly … unique. Surrealists must find them, er, viscerally exciting.”

The man clapped his hands in the thrill of finding a kindred spirit. “Precisely! Oh, Monsieur, I will admit that I have great hopes for these. Monsieur Didi was here just the other day, in conversation with another artist, discussing how the Tableaux might be used in a film.”

Stuyvesant turned, seeing his own face in the man’s thick glasses. “Oh yes? And who might that be?”

“Monsieur Man Ray. Do you know him? A genius, his film on …”

Stuyvesant let the man run on. But as he studied the frozen twist of
the features on the tortured kitten, he could not help seeing the agony in the pieced-together photographs.

With a group of artists whose highest ambition was the outrageous and the offensive, who was to say where they drew the line? When the most basic tenet of a man’s philosophy was that society’s mores and values were there to be smashed and pissed upon, why not extend that to human life?

So what if a girl’s mother and uncle were in an agony of uncertainty? So what if a little boy went to bed without his mother’s brassy blonde head bending down to kiss him good-night? What did that matter—so long as the great God Art prevailed over the City of Light?

Forty minutes after walking away from the de Sade orgy of hamsters, Stuyvesant stepped inside the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol.

The audience was different from the previous week. A lot more women, for one thing, their nervous laughter dominating the room even before the curtain rose.

No, not nervous: anticipatory. They knew what was coming, he decided, and were looking forward to it. And, he saw, many of those in the confessional-like boxes had men at their sides, with a great deal of physical contact going on, even with the lights still up.

The lights dimmed, and he braced himself, calling to mind what both Nancy and Sarah had told him: the shock was deliberate, the emotional equivalent of a Scandinavian sauna and icy bath.

It was a different play from the one he’d seen with Nancy the week before, although it had much the same effect: relentlessly horrific, startlingly realistic, utterly disturbing. This one had an unexpectedly Amazonian edge to it, with two women trapping a handsome young—

Stuyvesant jumped when something touched his leg. He stared at his neighbor, but her eyes were fixed on the stage. He looked down, and indeed, it was her slim hand, resting above his knee. Could she possibly be unaware …?

Then the hand moved, and he was in no doubt. The fingers slid gently down the inner side of his leg, then traced a circle up again, then down.
Each time, they traveled a fraction of an inch closer to his fly. Another minute, two at the most, and things would have got out of hand.

He peeled up her fingers and returned her arm to her lap, sitting back amused, if physically uncomfortable.

The play ended, the shift was made to comedy, with the exaggerated relief of too-loud laughter. But after the short-lived farce they were back in the land of horror, with a doctor performing surgery on an unanesthetized and well-endowed young woman, tying her wrists to the table, performing an examination that closely resembled a dance of the seven veils, hunching over her fainting body like one of the art gallery’s taxidermy figures …

And again, the hand came to rest on his leg.

This time, he removed it before it could start its progress in the direction of his crotch. He placed it firmly on her skirt, pushing it down in a command.

But as his hand withdrew, she grabbed it, pulling firmly.

He let her.

He was curious, to see how far she might go. Excited, too—even a man long past adolescence had his fantasies—but mostly curious. Not for long: when a girl takes a man’s hand, tucks it under the edge of her skirt, and eases her knees apart—well, there’s not much doubt about what she has in mind.

He was tempted, if for no other reason than it was an experience he was unlikely to have too many times in life. But in the end, before he could learn just how little she was wearing, he pulled his hand away and leaned over against her ear.

“Désolé, chèrie, but you chose the wrong sort of man for this.”

A professional would have picked up on the catch in his breathing, to say nothing of his shifting to get comfortable, and known he was no pansy. But this one just whipped both hands down to tug at her skirt, then stared fixedly at the stage until the end of the play.

When the lights rose, so did she, pushing her way down the row of seats without looking back.

Too bad, really. It had sure helped take his mind off the stuff on the stage.

In the end, there were seven brief plays, beginning and ending with darkness. The gasps and cries of the audience began to sound more like something you’d hear in a bedroom, and indeed, when the lights came up and the attendees spilled out onto rue Chaptal, the coy glances and flushed cheeks more closely resembled the glances of incautious lovers than the appreciation of playgoers.

He’d been to a brothel one time that had a woman happy to push things, a little further than usual. As it turned out, his preference lay elsewhere, but it had been enlightening to see how a touch of pain could spice things up.

This was something, he reflected, that Sarah Grey would not understand.

But Nancy Berger might.

D
ESPITE A DAY
spent with artistic murder and mutilation, Stuyvesant had a lift to his step as he rounded the corner onto the rue Vavin.