“Is it far?” I called out to the cabby over the noise of the hoofs and wheels.
“No, madame. Not far at all. Ten minutes.”
We left the noise and bustle of the station and immediately we were in a street more like the Paris I had dreamed of as a child. The street was lined with plane trees and on either side were light-yellow stone buildings, four and five stories high, decorated with wrought-iron balconies. Some of them had shops at street level, with bright awnings hanging over them, and there was a café on the corner with tables outside on the sidewalk. Nobody was sitting at the tables as it was still drizzling, but a man and woman walked arm in arm under his big umbrella—the woman holding the leash of a small poodle dog. On the corner was a flower seller standing beside her barrow of spring flowers. We turned into a treelined square with a lovely ornate gray stone church on one side. Two priests in flat black hats were standing on the steps and a bell was tolling. But right after the church we entered a smaller street and clearly a less salubrious area. There were bars and gaudy signs for cabarets mixed in with greengrocers and bookstores. There was even an occasional girl lounging against a wall trailing a feather boa. I’d seen enough of them in New York to recognize what she was, making it clear that this area might be more active when the sun went down.
I also saw that we were coming into the Paris of artists. We passed three of them, walking together, one of them carrying a canvas while his friends were in animated conversation, gesturing with their hands. We emerged into an open area with a fountain in the middle. A street sign announced it to be the Place Pigalle and I vaguely remembered having heard of it. Then I saw a windmill, illuminated with electric lights and knew why. This was the famed Moulin Rouge cabaret where the cancan was born and the girls wore next to nothing. The boulevard that led from Pigalle was wide and treelined but almost immediately we turned into a narrow side street that ascended a hill. There were shops and cafés close to Place Pigalle but as the street went up the hill it became more residential. The cab halted.
“Is this it?” I asked.
“Oui, madame. Rue des Martyrs.” He climbed down, took Liam from me, and assisted me. “I will bring the baggage,” he said, handing Liam back to me as the child started to cry.
I managed to open the heavy wrought-iron and glass front door with my free hand and entered into a dark foyer. There was a faint smell of drains, and someone had been cooking with garlic. On one side of the foyer a flight of stone stairs curved up. The only adornment was a large, sad-looking potted plant on a marble table and a speckled mirror on the wall. As I stood looking around, wondering which apartment might be Sid and Gus’s, I noticed that there was an open doorway beside the front door, leading to a dark cubbyhole. As I approached it a large woman emerged. She was dressed in a high-collared black dress. Her dark hair was pulled back severely from her sallow face and she wore a black cap with trailing black ribbons perched on her head.
“Bonjour, madame,” I said, smiling at her.
“What do you want?” she asked, staring at me as if I was a worm that had just crawled onto her clean floor. “There are no rooms available if you are looking for one.”
I recoiled at the unfriendly reception. “I’m here to visit my friends, Mademoiselle Walcott and Mademoiselle Goldfarb, who reside here,” I said, my brain wrestling with long-forgotten French. “I am Madame Sullivan, just arrived from America. Perhaps you can tell me the number of their apartment.”
She folded her arms across a large bosom. “They are not here,” she said coldly.
Twelve
“Pardon?” I asked, not sure that I’d understood her correctly.
She repeated it, spitting out the words slowly as if for an idiot.
Of course, I thought, realizing my stupidity. They had gone to the station to meet me as planned and somehow been delayed. I should have waited longer.
“I expect they went out to meet me at the station and somehow we missed each other,” I said in my halting French. “Do they keep their door locked, do you know? Or do you have a key so that I can go up and wait until they come back?”
“I told you, madame. They are not here,” she repeated. “They have gone.”
“Gone? Gone where?” I demanded. I could hear my voice, shrill and echoing in the tall narrow hall.
“How do I know? I have not seen them for one, maybe two days. At least I know they did not return home last night because they were not here when I locked the front door at eleven. This is a respectable household. The door is always locked at night.”