They were silent as they fought the crowds gawping at the bodies displayed in the front glass of the morgue, one of the more ghoulish recreations of some Parisians. The driver helped them into the carriage and they headed for the hotel, swaying with the clopping of the horse. Serafina’s mood matched the grayness of the sky. She tried to tighten her cape. “I’m freezing.” She glanced at Rosa and added, “But the hat is keeping my feet warm.”
The madam said nothing.
“I knew it. The woman was not with child.” Serafina’s shoulder ached.
“You said that. Proves nothing,” Rosa said. “Not yet. All we know is this: Elena’s friends said that she was pregnant. You know she bent the truth to suit her whim. Whatever she did, whatever she said was for attention. She longed for it. Sad, really, when you think of it. Bizarre. I believe at times Elena is mad. Perhaps she felt she was no longer in the limelight, so she told her friends that she was with child in order to gain their attention. Anything to provoke a shocking response and an exciting way to explain a gain in girth. And the woman was what, at least forty?”
“Not quite. She’s my age.”
The madam gave her a wicked glare. “Dream on. How old were you when the twins were born twenty-two years ago?”
Serafina looked at a seagull flying low over the Seine. The morning traffic was thick and they were stopped near the Pont Neuf. “You’re right. We must find confirmation. If we could prove that Elena was with child on April 16, then perhaps we wouldn’t have to request exhumation, and think of it, Sophie de Masson can sit forever with the body buried in the family crypt, penniless.”
“Why don’t we find Elena? If she’s not lounging about in her coffin, then she must be somewhere,” Rosa said.
There was silence for a moment until the madam with that mind of hers said, “I’ll tell you why we don’t search for Elena, because you’re not convinced that Elena lives.”
As they approached the hotel, Serafina wondered how much Sophie had to gain by deliberately identifying an unknown corpse as the body of her niece. Or was it an honest mistake and Sophie was in fact losing her eyesight? As she turned the key to her door, she glanced at the two policemen guarding her room and went to her desk. She picked up Elena’s address book and sat in the chair, reading and looking up to stare at the wall and think. Perhaps doze.
“Are you mad? Why travel again to the place where you were shot?”
“I need to sit and think.”
“Do that in your room.” Rosa looked at her as if she were wild. Perhaps she was. But there was something in the address book, something she was reading and re-reading and still missing because she hadn’t yet fathomed the mind of Elena. The best way to do that was to sit in the woman’s apartment, breathe the air she’d once breathed, touch her desk, her chair. After all, they weren’t friends, not really, and she needed to get to know Elena in order to ferret out the cryptic notes in her address book. It wouldn’t take long, she explained to Rosa.
This time they took le petite ceinture. It was a much faster way to the sixteenth arrondissement during the day because they avoided traffic.
More important, Serafina saw the people of Paris, listened to them speak in low tones to one another, the words nasal and clipped yet somehow sonorous, especially because she didn’t understand the sense and could therefore concentrate on the sound.
The French loved to talk. Most of the women on the train wore aprons and long cotton dresses, the men, thick corduroy trousers, many with long faces, tired. Maybe they were going home, having worked most of the night and much of the morning as well. Women carried baguettes, clutched in hands cracked and blistering and from harsh soap, callused from work. They were women who worked as laundresses, the sleeves of their blouses rolled up, exposing powerful arms. Serafina remembered what the young sergent de ville had said about the calluses on the dead woman’s hands. The men wore berets on their head, leather aprons over their bleu de travail, and their handlebar mustaches were neatly trimmed. Some had linen kerchiefs rolled and tied around their necks. Their eyes were bloodshot from drink, their hands thick and bruised from work.
They got off at Station de Passy, a quieter section of the city new to Rosa. Serafina marveled at the rows of apartment buildings interspersed with large homes, the noise muffled by the great trees of the Bois de Boulogne. When they arrived at Elena’s apartment, Serafina was struck by two men wearing bleu de travail who pruned the shrubbery near the entrance. They shoveled clippings into a wheelbarrow, their pace slow, pausing to look around, saying a few words to each other, then gazing out at the scene, cigarette butts dangling from their lips.
She smiled. “Do you recognize anyone?” she asked Rosa.
“What are you talking about?”
“The two workers in blue uniforms. Look familiar?”
Rosa smiled. “One’s pulling his sleeve, the other licking his lips, both hardly working-how could I not recognize them?”
They rang the bell.
Instead of the concierge reading Le Figaro, a policeman sat at the desk polishing the visor of his kepi.
“Inspector Valois is expecting us.”
He nodded and pointed to the elevator down the hall. “Eighth floor, mesdames.”
“Liar,” Rosa said, under her breath as they ascended in the slow, creaky lift. “The stairs would have been faster. If we fall and die, it’s all your fault.”
Serafina was surprised to find so many men in the apartment. Several detectives were assigned to each room, some lifting the carpets, some with magnifying glasses, others carefully putting what they’d found in small envelopes and marking them. The French investigators were impressive, she had to admit it.
“Carmela and Tessa went to talk to artists at the exhibit,” Valois told them after greeting them.
Serafina explained why she was here. Any room would do for her purposes, so she sat in a chair in the glassed-in sun room at the back of the apartment. It faced the center of Paris. At first Serafina was enthralled with the view until she settled into a meditative arrangement with herself, unmoving.
Rosa sat for a while, and then became bored. She decided to help the inspector in whatever way she could, but found he was occupied in a corner of the ladies’ parlor talking in low tones to one of his men. Drifting through the kitchen, she opened each drawer, uncertain as to why she did, other than for something to do. As she opened a cupboard full of cut glass, she saw what looked like a pile of notes rolled and stuffed into a small vase in the rear. After spreading the papers out on the table she read one, shook her head, scooped them up, and stashed them in her pocket. She went through all the other drawers, climbing the ladder to root through the high cabinets, but found nothing else of interest.
Slowly she made her way back to the sun room where Serafina sat. She hadn’t moved, so Rosa sat down opposite her, instinctively opting for the most comfortable chair in the room. She put her head back and dozed, waiting for Serafina to finish. When Rosa opened her eyes, the wizard had disappeared.
Valois was still busy, most of his men huddled around the blood stain Serafina had created on the Aubusson carpet, so she made her way to the main foyer and up a winding staircase to the second floor, a glass conservatory and ballroom. It was enormous. Elena must have the exclusive use of the building’s roof. It had a breathtaking view of Paris. She doubted she’d find much of anything up there other than all of Paris spread out before her, but she wanted Rosa to see it, so she went back downstairs and saw Valois talking to a photographer.
When she ascended with Rosa, the madam was enthralled. They looked to the east and saw the Ile de la Cite like a magnificent boat riding the Seine with the statue of Henri IV at its bow, the ruins of the Hotel de Ville on the far bank of the river, the traffic on the bridges, the boulevards, the streets. She saw the Jardin des Tuileries and the destroyed remnants of the Palais des Tuileries, their hotel and the Place du Palais Royal, the Place Vendome, the glittering streets in the first arrondissement where the wealthy from all over the world did their shopping. Her eyes moved across the river to the Palais du Luxembourg and its sweet gardens where she could spend a month, the impressive dome of the Pantheon, even the tiny Rue Cassette which ten days ago held the mystery she hoped to unravel.