Free Bones of Paris (9780345531773) by Laurie R. King Page A

canes.
    Halfway down this glass-roofed tunnel with the sticky cobblestones was the Hotel Benoit, more
pension
than hotel: no flower-boxes, no doorman—no sign, even. Stuyvesant had stumbled across the place in 1917, on leave from the Front, when he’d turned his back on the bustle surrounding the Gare du Nord and kept walking, in search of the darkest corner with a bed.
    Mme. Benoit was old then, and each time he returned, he found her a fraction smaller, a bit more absent-minded, a little more emphatic in her devotion to Karl Marx. As coy about her age as any Frenchwoman, she had to be in her eighties: her husband had died in La Semaine Sanglante during the Paris Commune. She had watched the Eiffel Tower rise. She cursed the name of Bruno Haussmann and his destruction of Paris with such vehemence, Stuyvesant thought she believed the man still alive. Only the ferocious loyalty of her permanent residents kept her from starvation on the streets—some of the girls had recently instigated a chitty system after Mme. Benoit had failed to charge one month-long guest and charged another three times.
    The Hotel Benoit had hard mattresses, thin curtains, a mix of gas and electric lights, and dingy paint. No two pieces of furniture matched. There was no breakfast service, and the nearest hot water was at the Armenian bathhouse around the corner. Still, the rooms were clean, the locks were great, every floor had a toilet and a cold shower, and nobody minded if he stashed a trunk in the cellar between visits. Best of all, if his preferred room was available—and it had been, this time—there was a loose floorboard under the threadbare carpet, for the concealment of cash and a revolver. And being on the top floor, it had three flights of conveniently noisy stairs, plus a window within climbing distance of the rooftops, should the need arise. Some of the permanent residents were ladies with a striking number of male visitors, but they kept it quiet, and most of them were easy enough on the eyes.
    He called out a greeting to Madame, whose door stood open as usual, and trudged up the rackety stairs, tugging at his neck-tie and shrugging out of his jacket as he went. He dropped the brown paper-wrapped book on the table, tossed various garments he never wanted to wear again onto the bed, and fetched the thick envelope containing Pip’s letters from the bed-side table. He looped his suspenders off his shoulders, checked that the letters were there and nothing else, then retied the fastener.
    After a glance at his watch, he dug out his notebook and sat at the table to write down a few brief phrases about the day, enough to help him reconstruct events for his employer when time came to make a report. When he capped the pen, Sylvia’s twine-wrapped packet caught his eye. He pulled it open and found
Red Harvest
: “a thrilling detective story.” Two pages in, he found himself tipped back in his chair with a grin on his face—not so much at the story, although it was refreshing to find a detective novel that didn’t start with arsenic-laced tea in the library, but at the little bookseller who had chosen it. “Poisonville”—hah! Was this how Sylvia saw him?
    But it was a fine beginning, and it might have distracted him into reading further had he not been covered with sweat, and aware that he stank. He dropped it back into the brown paper and left it on the table.
    Parisians seemed perfectly happy with weekly visits to the bathhouse,but he’d never got used to the ripe smell. Maybe he should change his shirt, for the cop’s sake. And if he was going to spend another night trawling the bars into the wee hours (last night’s search for information having been cut short when Lulu found him), he couldn’t see doing that reeking like he did.
    However, he had one clean shirt, and he’d meant to wear it tomorrow, when—thanks to the Crosby check—he was going to his tailor. He didn’t like the idea of forcing the guy to breathe
eau de