City of Darkness and Light (21 page)

“I suppose not.” She twisted a strand of hair around a finger, staring at the open door of the Bateau-Lavoir hanging crookedly. “Look, why don’t we go back to the city. I know a heavenly little tearoom on the Rue de Rivoli. They make cakes to die for. Won’t you come with me?”

“I can’t,” I said. “I have to find my friend’s cousin and see what he can tell me. But you don’t have to come with me. I understand.”

“If you’re really sure.” She stared at me, then at that half-open door. “I have to go now,” she said. “You’ll be all right on your own, won’t you?”

“I’m sure I will.”

I watched her go down the hill with her dainty little steps. There was something I didn’t quite understand about Ellie—and I realized I didn’t even know her last name.

The front door opened with a creak and groan. I went in and looked around, not knowing which door to knock on. Then I heard the sound of male voices and laughter from down below. I descended a narrow staircase with care, as there were broken boards and little light. The building didn’t smell too savory, as if there were no drains and someone had burned their cooking. And in the background that ever-present odor of oil paints, linseed oil, and dark cigarettes.

Down one flight I went, then a next. Then on the very bottom floor a door was open and I heard voices coming from inside.

“What do you think?” a voice asked. “Is it good?”

“Not bad, Guillaume. Not your best.”

“It needs more work, doesn’t it?”

I approached the door and tapped on it. “Pardon me,” I said.

They looked up at me, startled as if they were naughty schoolboys who had been caught out doing something wrong.

“Madame? You look for someone?”

“I do,” I said. “I am looking for the painter Maxim Noah? Do you know where I might find him?”

“Maxim? Is he awake? Go and bang on his door. Tell him a foreign lady is here.”

“He lives here?” This was a stroke of luck.

One of them got up and I heard the stairs creak as he went up one flight. The fat one nodded to me with recognition. “I remember you. You came to the Nouvelle Athènes the other day. Did you find your friends?”

“I’m still looking. Maxim Noah is a cousin of one of them so I thought that maybe…”

“Oh, so she is the American lady he was talking about. Quite excited to have met her. I suppose these Jews feel rather vulnerable at the moment, all alone here at a time when…”

He broke off as heavy workman’s boots clomped down the stairs.

“Someone to see me?” he asked. “Is it my newfound American relative?” He came into the room, a handsome black-eyed boy with tousled hair and a jacket patched at the elbows.

“Mr. Noah?” I held out my hand. “I am a friend of your cousin Elena.”

“Enchanted.” He didn’t sound particularly enchanted and the hand that took mine was wary.

“I’m sorry to disturb your work,” I began.

This produced a chuckle all around. “Work? He was in bed with Jojo, no doubt.”

“How is Jojo, by the way?” the fat one asked. “We haven’t seen her for days. Have you grown so jealous that you hide her away from us?”

“She hadn’t been well. A mere cold but she stays in bed.” He looked at me again. “How can I help you, madame? Has my cousin sent you to look at my paintings, perhaps? You wish to buy one? I have many for sale.”

“Enough to paper the walls,” one of them said and they laughed again.

Maxim’s eyes flashed dangerously. “You insult my art because you do not understand it. Ask Picasso. He understands. He knows that art must move away from representation and the artist must have freedom to express his inner soul.”

“Then your inner soul must be quite murky,” one of them said. “Your paintings are terribly dark and gloomy. If this lady put them on her wall she would want to commit suicide instantly.”

“Do not listen to them, madame,” Maxim said. “You come to see for yourself. I go first to make sure that Jojo is dressed properly for your visit.”

He ran up the stairs. I looked around at the group. “I take it that Jojo is his mistress?”

“And very possessive he is about her too,” the fat one replied. “Won’t let a man near her. Won’t let her out alone. Of course, she’s very young and beautiful. A dangerous combination with so many wolves like us around.”

I thanked them for their help then followed Maxim up the stairs back to the top floor. I waited in the hallway, looking across at another door on which was scrawled, in blue chalk
Au rendezvous des poètes
(“The meeting place of poets”) and realized I could see how Sid and Gus had been excited to come to a city like this, where art and poetry and the bohemian lifestyle were not frowned upon.

“Please enter, madame.” Maxim opened a door behind me and I went into one of the sorriest rooms I’d ever seen. I had grown up in an Irish peasant’s cottage. Our life had been simple in the extreme but we had a good stove, the pots were polished sparkling clean, our battered furniture was also polished and decorated with pillows made from scraps. In short it was a friendly, homey sort of place. This room was barely furnished, with no adornments. The floor was bare, with uneven boards, and in the far corner was an unmade iron bedstead. The only saving grace was a window that looked out across the city, letting light stream in. Under the window was a table with half a loaf of dark bread, next to a palette of paints, a brush still lying across it. A canvas on an easel still glistened with wet paint. There was no sign of the mysterious Jojo. Maxim had spirited her away.

“Madame. Please sit.” He motioned to a wobbly cane chair. “I would offer you some tea, but alas I have no spirit for my little stove. As you can see our life here is … how you say … simple?”

I nodded.

“But if I sell a painting soon, all will be well. Your friend, Mademoiselle Goldfarb, she promises to take some of my paintings back to New York when she departs. She is very kind and very rich, no?”

I was about to say she wasn’t very rich, just comfortably situated, then I realized that to Maxim she would appear to be so. As he spoke I was studying the paintings tacked to the walls. The man downstairs was right—they were gloomy in the extreme. Great gashes of dark colors, mouths open in screams, burning houses, strange flying figures. They were the stuff of nightmare.

“It was a lucky day that we met at the poetry reading, don’t you think? Imagine—Miss Goldfarb searches the whole of Paris for her cousins and doesn’t find them, and then we meet by chance.”

I was still examining the bleakness of the studio. “What about the rest of your family?” I asked. “Are they not still in Paris?”

“All dead.” He sighed. “My parents died when I was a child. I ended up in the orphanage. Not a pleasant place.”

“I’m so sorry. That’s why you paint such sad scenes.”

“I have seen much sadness. Family is important, don’t you think? Family is the most important thing in the world.”

“I suppose it is. I too have no family but my husband and child, so I know how it feels.”

He nodded. “I am so happy to find a cousin. Mademoiselle Goldfarb tells me that my family in New York has done well. I am glad for them.”

“Yes, I believe they have prospered. Sid doesn’t talk about them much. They don’t approve of her lifestyle.”

“Ah.” He nodded. “She too has her problems, then. Life always makes problems, no?”

“So how exactly are you related to her?” I asked.

“My mother, she was also from the family Goldfarb. She told me two brothers left Poland. One went to America, one to Paris.”

“So your grandfathers were brothers?”

“So it seems. So tell me—what do you think of my art?”

“It’s striking,” I said tactfully. “Different.”

“Picasso says it shows genius, and Picasso he is a genius himself. He says the world is not ready for us yet. And that is true. Most people want pretty pictures on their walls. I too can paint pretty pictures if I have to. But I must paint where my soul is.” And he thumped his chest. A most dramatic young man.

“You should paint the occasional pretty picture to pay the rent,” I said. “Every artist has to compromise.”

“I try this. Believe me, I do try this, but it leads only to destruction. So you will buy a painting?”

I gave an embarrassed smile. “I’m afraid I’m not rich like my friends. I’m the wife of a poor policeman.”

“No? A policeman? In America?”

“In New York.”

“Ah, I see.” He nodded. “So you do not come to Paris to buy paintings.”

“No. Actually I came to find you because I’m worried about Miss Goldfarb and Miss Walcott.”

“Worried, why?”

“They’ve vanished. I arrived in Paris, expecting to stay with them and they are not at their apartment. Nobody knows where they have gone. Have you seen them recently? Have they said anything to you about leaving the city?”

Those sorrowful dark eyes turned to me. “No. I know nothing that explains this. Last time I saw them they were happy. The artist lady hopes for one of her paintings to be in the big exhibition. She was working to complete a new canvas. Why should they leave Paris at such a moment? Unless they have been taken ill, do you think?”

“Surely even from a hospital bed they could write to me, or get someone to write to me. And their landlady would know. And is it likely that they are both taken ill at the same time?”

“They could both have eaten bad food and been poisoned. There are bad oysters in the city, so I am told. Many people are sick. Some die.”

My stomach lurched. Food poisoning. Why hadn’t I thought of that? But surely if one has food poisoning it usually strikes at home, several hours after the meal. Wouldn’t the landlady have been consulted about which hospital or doctor they should go to? Still, it was a possibility I hadn’t considered and it gave me a new area to search.

I stood up from the rickety chair. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Noah. I must go. I have left my child with a local woman. I wish you luck with your painting.”

“Thank you.” He took my hand. “And I wish you good fortune in your search for your friends. I pray that nothing happens to them. I could not bear to lose my newly found cousin. I too will ask and search for them everywhere most diligently.”

As I left Le Bateau-Lavoir I sensed, rather than saw, a small dark figure slip in through the front door. So Jojo, the mistress, had been hiding outside until I left. Obviously he didn’t want to give a bad impression to a potential buyer from America.

Twenty-one

An attractive boy,
I thought as I picked my way down the flights of steps back to the Rue des Martyrs. Dashing and magnetic, if a little on the tragic side. I could see why Sid was excited to have discovered this long-lost cousin. Perhaps she’d take him back to New York with her and introduce him to her family, if … And I broke off the thought at that
if.
If she was still in Paris and was all right. I knew I’d have to visit the hospitals and the morgue and I dreaded the thought of it.

I retrieved Liam, clearly not anxious to leave Madeleine, who had now introduced him to the delights of French pastries, and stopped to pick up supplies for our evening meal before I carried him back across the street. As I opened the front door Madame Hetreau darted out of her hiding place—the spider once more catching the fly.

“Ah. So you return,” she said. “You have been enjoying yourself, I suppose. They tell me you leave your child with the baker’s wife and you’re off on your own chatting with men in cafés.”

I bristled at this suggestion that I was ignoring my child because I was off having a good time, but I controlled my voice before I said, “Because I’ve been searching for Miss Goldfarb and Miss Walcott, naturally, and I couldn’t take a child with me all over Paris.” Luckily my rusty French had improved during two days of speaking it constantly so that I no longer had to search for words and the sentence came out with the right amount of force.

She recoiled a little at this. “And you still haven’t found them, I take it.”

“Unfortunately no. Miss Goldfarb’s cousin suggested that they might have taken ill after eating bad food—oysters, maybe.”

“I wouldn’t know,” she shrugged, giving me the impression that she wouldn’t be concerned if they had died of bubonic plague as long as it didn’t in any way affect her.

“I can’t think of any other reason that they would have vanished leaving no word for me,” I said. “So I’m afraid my next task will be to visit the hospitals and morgues in the city. Perhaps you can suggest where I should start if my friends were taken ill in this place.”

“I think I would have heard if your friends came down with poisoning,” she said. “And I heard nothing. One minute they were here and the next they were gone. Me, I still think they decided to take a jaunt and left the city. Perhaps they decided to return to New York.”

“Not leaving all their clothing behind.”

Liam squirmed and I attempted to hang onto the bag of groceries. “I must take him upstairs. He’s getting heavy.”

As I turned away she called after me. “One minute, madame. I believe a postcard might have come for you.” She reached into Sid and Gus’s mail slot and held it out to me. “I can think of no one else to whom this might apply.”

I put down the bag of groceries and took it from her. The front was a painting of a woman drinking tea. I turned it over. It was addressed in an elegant hand I didn’t recognize. I was able to translate that it was addressed “To the Lady from New York staying at 35 Rue des Martyrs.…”

The message area was left blank.

I looked up, puzzled, to see Madame Hetreau staring at me. “Is it from the American ladies?”

“No,” I said. “I’ve no idea who it is from. I don’t recognize the writing. And there’s no message. What can it mean? Did it arrive today?”

“This morning. Right after you went out.”

I held it out to her. “You’ve seen it—why would someone send me a blank postcard?”

“I have no idea, madame.”

Liam made a grab for it, and I had to hang onto him lest he tumble from my arms. “I have to take him upstairs,” I said. “Thank you for alerting me to the postcard.”

She almost hadn’t,
I thought as I trudged up the stairs. She’d only handed it to me as an afterthought. Was she going to leave it hidden in the mail slot and her conscience finally got the better of her, or had she genuinely forgotten about it? As soon as I entered the apartment I put Liam in his crib, protesting loudly, and sat on the bed, turning the postcard over in my hands. Who could have known I was here and sent me a postcard? And if someone had bothered to do so, why was there no message on it?