Bones of Paris (9780345531773) (7 page)

T
HE
P
RÉFECTURE DE
Police was on the Île de la Cité, between a one-time madhouse and cells used during the Terror for guillotine-bound prisoners: one did not expect a bushel of laughs from the Préfecture de Police. Stuyvesant adjusted his tie over the offending mismatched button and walked inside.

“Yes, I saw the message you left yesterday. A missing girl. American.”

The missing persons
flic
had himself been missing when Stuyvesant came by the previous day, another laggardly return from Paris’ August vacances. His name was Doucet, although there was little sweet about him, since he was nearly as tall as Stuyvesant and had a face that had seen nearly the same things in life—certainly his nose had met about as many fists. His English was a shade better than Stuyvesant’s French. “Monsieur, do you have an investigator’s license?”

Stuyvesant handed over the official document—a meaningless but vital piece of paper that he’d got by doing the occasional job for a Paris detective agency—along with his
carte d’identité
. Doucet sourly studied the documents, then shoved them back across the desk. Next, Stuyvesant gave him a copy of the snapshot—the uncle had sent two—and began reciting the girl’s details: physical description; address; work history; date last seen.

“March?” the man interrupted. “Why did the family wait until September?”

“They wrote to the roommate in May. She wrote back saying that Miss Crosby was away for a few days, and then she herself left—she was spending the summer in Greece. By mid-June, Miss Crosby hadn’t answered their letters or telephone calls and the concierge just said both girls were away. So they hired an investigator. He turned out to be a crook. They’re trying again.”

“With you.”

“With me.”

“Have they reported this man, the ‘crook’?”

“I don’t think so.”

With a sigh, Doucet reached into a drawer and started pulling out forms. Stuyvesant revised his earlier assumption: the man might not be freshly back from holiday. Or if so, it had not been a restful one.

While the detective filled out the forms, Stuyvesant studied the cramped, untidy office. One wall intrigued him. It was covered with photographs: men and women, old and young, dark and light. Some had been pinned up so long, the corners curled; one of a lively brown-haired girl might have gone up yesterday. These, he thought, were the unsolved cases, looking over the man’s shoulder.

The
flic
reached the end of the forms, handing over his pen for Stuyvesant’s signature. He pinned the photograph to the form.

Stuyvesant cleared his throat: now came the tricky bit. “In fact, the reason her uncle came to me was that I’d met her. Back in February. I was working in Nice when she and a friend—a girl named Rosalie Perkins—passed through on their way to Rome. When Rosalie mentioned me to Miss Crosby’s uncle, telling him that I was a private investigator, he thought it might simplify things to have someone who knew her slightly.”

Doucet studied him, listening for unrevealed truths. “And was that all you knew her: slightly?”

“Perhaps a little better than that. But,” Stuyvesant said pointedly, “she was fine when she and her friend went to Rome, and she made it back to Paris safely. Her roommate saw her, and Pip—Miss Crosby—wrote
home from here at the end of March. And just in case you’re interested, I myself was three weeks in Nice after the girls left, then in Warsaw for the remainder of March and all of April, followed by two weeks in Clermont-Ferrand and after that, Germany. I did spend two days here on my way to Germany in mid-June, but I haven’t seen Pip Crosby since Nice.”

“You lead a most itinerant life, M. Stuyvesant.” The phlegmatic comment surprised Stuyvesant a little: he hadn’t expected the cop to swallow the story quite that easily.

“I go where work takes me.”

“And today your work brings you to Paris, and to me.”

“I doubt Miss Crosby is still in Paris, but yes, I’ve come here to pick up her trail, as it were. And because I believe in working with the police”—
when I have to
, he added mentally—“I’ve come to share my information and my intentions with you.”

“What a responsible attitude. Where do you think she is, your Miss Crosby?”

“Somewhere her mother wouldn’t approve of. Which would suggest she’s either having such a good time living la vie Bohème that the months got away from her, or she’s got herself involved with drugs and everything that goes with it.”

“Is there evidence for that?”

“She has some pretty expensive art in her bedroom, that’s all. As for travel—”

“What sort of art?” Doucet’s face had not changed, but there was an edge to his voice, as if the word had made his interest go sharp.

“I’m no expert, but she has a small Lautrec and a Chagall pastel, and a funny little piece by that Spaniard, what’s his name?”

“Picasso?”

“No, although there’s a sketch by him, too, on a paper napkin. Miró, that’s it.”

“You are an art expert.”

“Hardly. Museums are good places to get out of the rain.”

Doucet gave him a skeptical look. “You were telling me something about her travel, Monsieur?”

“Was I? Oh right, I was saying that her French paperwork is in her room but her passport isn’t.”

“So if it is a choice between an irresponsible holiday and a life of desperation and crime, towards which of those fates do you lean, Monsieur?”

“To tell you the truth, I think she may be in trouble.” Stuyvesant stopped, listening to his own words.
Was
he worried? No, he didn’t think so, not really. Still, the cop seemed almost human, and there was always a chance that roping him in with a sob story would kick up a few results. He went on.

“I figured, like you: here’s another Yankee Flapper gone off to conquer Europe. But it concerns me that she hasn’t written to her mother—which she did regularly, and more than just dutiful picture postcards. Plus that, the only money that’s gone out of her bank account since April is a regular draft to cover housekeeping expenses. And although there could be plenty of explanations for that, from a rich boyfriend to a bitter family argument her uncle’s too ashamed to admit, until I hear otherwise: yeah, I’d say there’s a chance she’s in over her head.”

“Monsieur?” His English was good, but this phrase was beyond him.

“Sorry. I meant she could be in trouble.”

“Politics?”

Stuyvesant liked the way this guy’s mind worked. “I thought of that when I found she hadn’t been cashing checks. Recent converts to Bolshevism or Anarchism or what-have-you tend to be thrilled about turning their back on the State and its banks. But after five months, I’d have expected somebody to catch on to her bank account and drain it. Plus, there were no political books or pamphlets in her apartment.”

“White slavery? Drug dens? Mere prostitution isn’t illegal.”

“It is if your passport isn’t stamped for work,” he retorted, then backed down. “Okay, that’s stupid, and being locked up for the nefarious use of strange men is downright melodramatic. But you and I both know, bad things do happen to good girls.”

The
flic
rubbed his face. “M. Stuyvesant, my office receives an average of nineteen missing persons complaints from America every month. Of those, fifteen reappear in a few weeks, after the love of their lives
turns them out for another girl; three have got themselves in trouble and are sailing home to maman; and one is up to no good. I have yet to have one of them show up in a white slave ring, pleasuring foreign potentates.

“However,” he said, putting up his hand to interrupt Stuyvesant’s protest. “When I received your inquiry this morning, I looked at the case, and see that we received our first report concerning Mlle. Crosby in late May. Our first act was to question hospitals and brothels. Our second was to compare her name to the passenger lists of ships and airplanes. After preliminary inquiries to the telephone number we had been given, we scheduled a visit to her apartment. Before we could do so, my sergeant spoke with a private inquiry agent, who showed him a letter from Mlle. Crosby’s family retaining him to look into the matter. The following day the agent telephoned to report that she had been found, and please to take her case off our books.”

“But why—? Ah. The crook was milking them.”

“ ‘Milking’?”

With a wrench of mental gears, Stuyvesant switched to French. “If your department had found her, that would be the end of his job,” he explained. “But if he kept you out of it so he could continue sending reports—and bills—to the family, he could stretch it for months. Milking them—like a cow. The family only figured it out by accident a few weeks ago, when a friend of Crosby’s came to Paris and found that the agency address was a bar.”

“Yet they did not report this.”

“I don’t think Mr. Crosby has much faith in foreign police departments.”

Doucet sat back, his eyebrows an invitation to talk. So with a mental shrug, Stuyvesant talked. He began with the original letter, handing it to the cop and waiting while he read the three pages. He then described the packet that had followed, with Photostats of her letters home, two copies of the cropped snapshot, and notes of everything the uncle knew, from the dud investigator to a conversation with Pip’s travel companion.

This last was a four-page typed document beginning with Rosalie’s
vehement declaration that Pip was living a squeaky-clean life in the City of Light, that Pip had no sins and no special boy-friend, although many fine and fascinating companions to justify the money to keep her in Paris, and concluding with a list of friends that mostly lacked surnames. At the end, the uncle had attached a note:

Doucet pursed his lips at that underlined
too
, much as Stuyvesant had. As if a situation could be just a little bit dire without having to fret about it.

“And like I said, there were copies of the girl’s letters home,” Stuyvesant added, having come to the end of his documents. “Twenty-four of them, full of light chat and little information.”

From the first letter (written March 3, 1928: Dearest Mama, Your little Pip is in Paris!!) to the last (undated, but with a Paris
oblitération
of March 20, 1929: Chère maman, Spring is coming to la belle cité), the girl’s prettily written pages were more full of The Romance of Paris than they were of hard fact. Reading between the lines, however, even someone who hadn’t met the girl would suspect an independent young spirit out to create a rich life for herself, an ocean removed from home. A life she didn’t think chère maman needed to have too many details about.

“You did not bring the letters?”

“They’re at my hotel. Do you want to see them? I’ll go get them if you want.”

“I have an appointment. Let us meet later. Not here—there’s a brasserie on rue Monge, near the entrance to the Arènes de Lutèce. Pink geraniums out front. Six o’clock—no, later. Make it half past.”

“I’ll bring them.”

The two men rose and shook hands under the eyes of those rows of faces—an awful lot of whom seemed to be young, blonde women. Out on the baking street again, Stuyvesant turned to look with bemusement at the Préfecture façade. Not your usual cop, French or otherwise. He had a feeling he’d told the
flic
a lot more than he’d intended to.

Still, it was only 4:30. Plenty of time for a literary excursion.

S
YLVIA
B
EACH STOOD
in the doorway of Shakespeare and Company, looking like a wind-blown city sparrow. She was talking to a poet. Stuyvesant knew he was a poet by the hair, not so much cut as pruned—but then, who in Montparnasse wasn’t a poet?

The bookseller spotted him approaching down the rue de l’Odéon and waved broadly. “Hello, Mr. Boxer,” she cried. “Are you looking for your sparring partner?”

“Who, Hemingway? No. I wouldn’t want to be responsible for pummeling the next work of genius out of him.”

She turned to the weedy young man with the limp bow tie. “This is Mr. Harris Stuyvesant, the only American in Paris who neither writes nor paints. Although Hemingway says he’s an artist in the boxing ring. You sure you haven’t taken up bullfighting, too, Harris?”

“I’ll leave that to Hem.”

“He was in earlier—he’s been in Spain working on a bullfighting book.”

“Of course he has.”

“I’ll let him know you’re here, too, shall I?”

“Oh, I expect we’ll come across each other.” Ernest Hemingway was a difficult man to miss in Montparnasse, unless one kept out of the bars entirely.

“We’re anticipating much from his new book. I’m hoping for a shipment any day, if you’d like me to save you one?”

“Maybe when I’m not so busy. Actually, it’s you I came to see.”

“I’m honored. Luis, had we finished?”

The poet gave her a meek tip of the hat and slunk away into the hot sunlight, while Sylvia grasped Stuyvesant’s sleeve and pulled him inside. “Harris, it’s so good to see you, if for no other reason than you’re not about to ask me to publish your poems. How have you been? Would you like a glass of something? Or a cup? I could manage a coffee.”

Sylvia Beach was a diminutive American who had come to Paris during the War and stayed. Her
raison d’être ici
was an English-language bookstore that had quickly become the center of the expatriate community in Montparnasse. And as if selling English books in the heart of France wasn’t challenge enough, she had added “publisher” to her resumé, taking on the task of publishing an enormous—and enormously controversial—novel by an Irish-born English tutor named Joyce. It was just as well for Sylvia Beach that she thrived on the impossible.