Bones of Paris (9780345531773) (17 page)
Read Bones of Paris (9780345531773) Online
Authors: Laurie R. King
“And as you might imagine, when a theater presents such disturbing fare as ours, the owners are suspected of their own dark doings—and so much the better. When unsavory acts are suspected of one of us—myself, Jouvin the owner, Zibell the director—it contributes to the effect. When I am at the opera, I want those in the boxes around me to wonder if my ring conceals poison or my stick a dagger.”
Sarah couldn’t help chuckling, at the arch to his eyebrow, the faint quirk to his lips. “How very Dada!”
“Truth told through lies—the Surrealists are discovering what the Grand-Guignol has known for years: when art is indistinguishable from real life, it comes alive. And when it lives, it changes the viewer.”
“But what if you’re, I don’t know, out at night with mud on your trousers? Aren’t you afraid someone would report you for burying a corpse in the Bois de Boulogne?”
“Excellent! Precisely the kind of suggestion I expect from my assistant. Though it would be the Parc Montsouris.”
“You don’t live here in Montmartre?”
“My family home is near the Place Denfert-Rochereau. It is but two minutes’ stroll from the public entrance to the Paris Catacombs,” he added with a twinkle.
“How convenient. Still, I’d think the constant act rather, well, all-consuming.”
“Mlle. Grey, I am a mediocre painter, a bad musician, a worse actor. The Grand-Guignol is my art, and my craft. Most of all, it is my service to the mental and emotional well-being of the city. A part of that performance takes place on what one might call the larger stage: Paris itself.”
“So, what do you need an assistant for?”
“To ensure that the machine runs smoothly—on stage or, more often, off.”
“I can imagine that would be a problem. One hitch and the dramatic climax becomes a farce.”
“You are absolutely right,” he said intently. “The Guignol is a precise tool, as exacting and specific as the torture instrument of a Mediaeval Inquisitor.”
And just as the hair on the back of her neck began to rise, his features rearranged themselves into a boyish grin.
Le Comte was a troubling man, and a troubled one. The smooth, easy surface of the aristocrat was his public face, along with the illusionist’s act of delight in wickedness, but the more Sarah knew him, the more she felt the well of despair underlying it all.
A man who sought to find meaning in personal devastation.
A goal Sarah Grey could understand, more than most.
In any event, she’d been hired in May. Since then she had supervised a script, hired two actors, put together and distributed half a dozen flyers, helped actors rehearse, edited three short plays, found a source of taxidermied bats, and bought a thousand cows’ eyes swimming in formaldehyde inside decorative glass urns. She had arranged for the purchase of a car, overseen three elaborate parties, and hired a group of
Satan-worshippers to perform a Black Mass. She had drawn up contracts with several artists for panels to make up a danse macabre in the Charmentier mansion. She fed rumors into conversations like a stoker feeding a firebox. She soothed the engineers who built machines for Le Comte’s beloved stage effects—everyone else hated the complicated devices, which always threatened to fail at key moments, but as far as her boss was concerned, the more complex the better, in effects or plots. She no longer flinched at the terrible screams of the actresses; and although she was not inured to the effects and she closed her ears to the more repulsive perversions, she could sit through a show with a degree of grim humor. In the process, she learned a dozen ways to kill a person.
She had taken the job as an impulse; she had been surprised by how satisfying it was. Not that it was easy. Le Comte was demanding, and empathy was a tool he rarely chose to employ. But as the summer went on, she began to see the good that he did—for Paris, and for her. A prolonged assault of fictional horrors could indeed be as cathartic to the soul as a dose of foul-tasting medicine was to the body: she saw it not only in the faces of the audience as they left, but in the undeniable fact that she was sleeping better than she had for years.
She had spent the hot summer in a state not unlike that of the Grand-Guignol audience, veering between sheer delight and skin-crawling dread: Le Comte definitely participated in all aspects of his adopted theater.
It took a while to catch the correct note of his style, that banter-with-an-edge he used for the press, the sense of
This is a joke … isn’t it?
that permeated his most outré remarks. At least once a week she decided he had gone too far, that he was too … disquieting to be around anymore. Then the next morning he would say something that reduced her to helpless laughter, and she would be captivated anew by his outrageous imagination.
Two weeks ago, as the August vacances were coming to an end, he decided to bring Africa to the Grand-Guignol. A writer was ordered to begin a play on voodoo; the stage crew puzzled over a bit of trick machinery,
to unfold at a key moment; the makeup crew investigated various kinds of blackface; some Nigerians were located, and actors dispatched to consider their gestures and stances. In the meantime, groundwork was laid for the external play: Le Comte bid prominently at an auction of African masks; a few days later, he was seen to buy a Matisse à l’Afrique, followed by a Picasso. He did the rounds of the jazz clubs, befriending musicians around Josephine Baker and Bricktop.
As the play took shape, he was struck by another idea: the Grand-Guignol was limited by its size, but the world was full of cinema houses. Why not adapt the stage production for the screen?
As it turned out, one of the artists doing a panel for the Charmentier danse macabre was a photographer who was interested in film. Tonight, Le Comte was entertaining this ugly little American and his young lover-assistant, a woman so stupefyingly magnificent she made Sarah want to wear one of those all-over Arab robes. Le Comte needed Sarah there, and she would not be able to return home before evening: hence her early-morning conundrum over which hand to wear.
The long day wore on. Sheaves of drawings were produced. The gorgeous lover turned out to actually know nearly as much about photography as Man Ray himself, leaving Sarah feeling like a mouse in the corner. The mismatched quartet settled down for dinner. Long before they reached Bricktop’s, three hours later, Sarah wasn’t sure if she felt more scorn or despair at the dark-eyed photographer’s bombast.
Bricktop’s small club was crowded, as usual. When they were shown to their table, Sarah excused herself to use the lavatory, desperate to permit her aching face to lose its polite smile for a few minutes. She touched up her powder; she
tsked
at a new chip in her hand. She renewed her lipstick, straightened her stocking seams, glanced through her incomprehensible notes.
She delayed as long as she could.
She stepped back into the ferocious noise of the club just as a big man in a cheap evening suit assaulted her employer and his artist, then half-collapsed against a female companion.
Reassuring herself that Le Comte and Ray were not hurt, Sarah whirled to confront the assailant—and stopped, more shocked than any macabre play had left her.
Sandy hair, pugnacious jaw, crooked nose, dots of shrapnel along his cheekbone. A look of astonishment dawning in those cynical blue eyes.
Harris Stuyvesant.
A
LETTER:
Wednesday 11 Sept.
Cornwall
Dearest Sarah, sister mine,
I send you a photograph-pin and a story, both for your amusement.
The photograph comes via an itinerant photographer who just
happened
to be passing through the village yesterday, my usual day of the week to walk up to the shops for fresh milk and the London papers. He had arrived early that morning in an ancient Morris converted into a mobile studio, a display of Autochrome photos on its sides to tempt the peasants into spending their hard-earned shillings for the glories of a colour portrait to hang on Grandmama’s parlour wall. And, for those with fewer resources or less time, he also had a clever device that snaps a picture and instantly manufactures it onto a round button with a pin on the back—I suppose for young lovers wishing to decorate their lapel with the object of their affections? Or perhaps for a farmer proud of his prize hog.
Autochromes, to judge by the man’s display, require long exposure,
resulting in a satisfying solemnity on the faces of his victims. The button camera, on the other hand, is but a snapshot, with the button itself emerging from the device in under a minute.
This, as you might guess, is a more useful means by which to capture the image of a reluctant passer-by, a man willing to take but the most fleeting of looks into a camera lens, a man who is rarely to be found in the more customary hunting grounds of the genus
photographus itinerantus
.
I will say, the Project are nothing if not creative in their efforts: this man clearly knew his business, and was prepared to spend his morning taking photographs of grubby urchins and farmers’ simpering daughters in order to get a chance at me. I might almost have thought him a genuine member of his profession had I not been forced by the placement of his wheeled studio to edge between it and the grocer’s bins.
Close-up, I could not fail to notice the singular lack of wear on his coat shoulder from carrying the long tripod of a portrait camera, and the relative lack of chemical stains on his skin, and the slight deliberation of his fingers when performing actions that should have been automatic, and the lack of a dark tan that one expects on a man who spends his summer following the traveling fun-fairs and seaside crowds. That, and the depths of foreboding in his eyes: God only knows what they told him about me.
I took pity on the poor fellow and did not instantly slip away, but freely granted him the button-snapshot. If I were a good man, I would have played along and posed for one of his Autochromes, that you might admire my green eyes, orange neck-tie, strawcoloured hair (straw-textured, too, if truth be known, after a long summer) and the pretty red bruise on my forehead from where Robbie tried to show me how to play rounders with a rock on Sunday. But I am not a good man (a claim I know you will refute with sisterly indignation), so I made the photographer work for his picture of the Hermit of Land’s End, thus giving you nothing but a button to attach to your pinafore or garden-smock.
This is by way of an answer to your recent question, if the
Watchers are leaving me alone: not as much as I might wish, but without the intrusiveness I might fear.
I hope your time in the country has darkened your freckles and brought a bounce to your step, little Sarah. I look forward to meeting this Comte of yours. I was thinking that I might be able to prise myself out of Cornwall again next year. January or February perhaps—yes, the weather will be abysmal, but since no-one travels then, I might be able to face the ferry without being tempted to commit murder. Or suicide.
Keep well, and give your blacksmith my respects.
Your loving—
Bennett
T
HE LIGHT HAD
that kind of knife’s-point brilliance to it that made a fellow bleed over his sins of the night before. Stuyvesant washed down a palmful of aspirin he’d bummed from the Dôme’s maître d’, and waited for the coffee to do its work.
You absolute mutt
, he berated himself.
You drunken bonehead. The first time you see Sarah Grey, you’re standing there stinking of gin with her two friends at your feet
.
Was there any chance last night of finding out where she lived?
No.
Was there any chance she’d want to see him, ever?
The very slimmest.
But a thread was better than nothing, even if it meant crawling on his belly across Paris to find her.
He managed to choke down a couple of eggs, and the aspirin helped, both with the headache and the bruises he’d got from Bricky’s waiters.
Next stop: the flower shop, totting up a hefty bill.
After that: pick up the new suit, and hope it helped make him look like a grown-up and not a brawling adolescent.
Now to throw himself at Bricky’s feet and hope he hadn’t permanently blotted his copybook with her.
Look on the bright side
, he mused as his taxi grumbled across the river.
At least you didn’t end up in jail this time
.
He arrived at Bricktop’s on the heels of his floral apology: ten dozen multi-colored roses, making the entranceway a glory of color and scent, and although Bricky was clearly steamed, he thought he saw a teensy crack under the very edge of her indignation. He summoned all his Yankee charm, got on the knees of his new suit, and swore he would not rise until she had forgiven him.
But she was harder than that. He was left with no way out, no choice but the ultimate weapon: the truth.
He rose from his knees and took her down the street to a sleepy terrace café where they would not be overheard, and he told her all about it. Almost all.