Lost in Paris: A Novel

by Betty Webb

Genres: Historical Mysteries

Synopsis

"Lovers of post-WWI Paris will have fun." —Publishers Weekly

"It's perfectly frothy fun supported by a wealth of tasty historical tidbits." —Booklist

Pulsing with the glamour and excitement of the Jazz Age, Lost in Paris explores a young woman's journey to redeem herself from the heartaches of her past, while finding her way forward in tumultuous, unprecedented times.

NO ONE CAN HURT YOU LIKE FAMILY

PARIS, 1922: Zoe Barlow knows the pain of loss. By the age of eighteen, she'd already lost her father to suicide, and her reputation to an ill-fated love affair—not to mention other losses, too devastating for words. Exiled from her home and her beloved younger sister by their stepmother, she was unceremoniously dumped in Paris without a friend to help her find her way.

Four years later, Zoe has forged a new life as a painter amidst fellow artists, expats, and revolutionary thinkers struggling to make sense of the world in the aftermath of war. She's adopted this Lost Generation as her new family, so when her dear friend Hadley Hemingway loses a valise containing all of her husband Ernest's writings, Zoe happily volunteers to track it down. But her search for the bag keeps leading to murder victims, and Zoe must again face hard losses—this time among her adopted tribe. If she persists in her reckless quest to find the killer, the next life lost may be her own.

 

 

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Release date: April 4, 2023

Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press

Print pages: 325

Sample

Chapter One

Zoe

December 1922

Paris

Despite the sudden snowstorm, Poker Friday was going well at the pretty little house on Rue Vavin. Zoeline Eustacia Barlow—“Zoe” to her friends—was almost fourteen hundred francs up. But then the marquis had to go and ruin everything.

“Too bad about Hemingway, is it not?” Fortier said, in that aristocratic nasal twang that always grated on Zoe’s nerves. “His poor wife will certainly pay the price.” Although well into his forties, Fortier’s patrician face was clear of wrinkles, and despite the long scar on his cheek from German shrapnel—he’d fought bravely in the War to End All Wars—he was still handsome.

But handsome is what handsome does.

“What are you talking about, Antoine?” Zoe asked, trying to keep the annoyance out of her voice. She held two pairs, treys and fives, and a lonely jack, but had been counting the cards and knew Fortier held two eights and at least one ace. Her friend Jewel Johnson, lead dancer at the Moulin Rouge, appeared to be hoping for a flush, and the infamous artist’s model, Kiki of Montparnasse, didn’t have much of anything. Neither did Kiki’s escort, Nick Stewart, of the filthy rich Boston Stewarts.

Zoe couldn’t decide what to do. Raise? Hold? Draw?

Outside, a cruel gust of December wind rattled the house’s tall windows, giving a twinge to her left leg, the one she’d broken as a child, but Zoe had fed enough coals into the ceramic-faced iron stove to keep the sitting room toasty. Even if a finger of chill did manage to creep inside, the excellent Montrachet they were drinking tasted robust enough to fight it off. With good friends, fine wine, and a possibly winning poker hand, all should have been well, but thanks to Fortier, it wasn’t. Maybe she should stop inviting the old bore to her Poker Fridays.

Fanning away the cigarette smoke wafting toward her from his stinking De Reszke, she said, “The last I saw of the Hemingways, they were fine.”

Fortier lifted one edge of his lip in a sneer, which irritated Zoe even more than his voice did. On one of her many trips to the Louvre, she’d come across a portrait of Fortier’s lordly ancestor, the sixth Marquis Antoine Phillippe Fortier de Guise, who’d lost his head in the French Revolution. The current marquis’s sneer was the same as his ancestor’s.

Zoe tried her best to concentrate on her cards, but Fortier’s comment stirred the other players, too. Count Sergei Ivanovic Aronoffsky—who had folded early—said, “You truly haven’t heard of your friend Hadley’s misfortune, Zoe? Why, all Paris is abuzz!”

Dominique Garron, the war artist who’d lost an eye covering the Battle of the Marne, glared at Fortier with her remaining hazel orb. “Who cares about the Hemingways? Shut up and play your cards, Antoine, so we can get started on another hand.” Like the count, Dominique had already folded, recognizing danger when she saw it. Same as sculptor Karen Wegner, with whom Dominique was finishing off a bottle of Cognac Gélas to drown her poker sorrows.

As the war artist leaned back against her chair, a glowing shred of tobacco from her Gitane drifted down to the chair’s maple arm. The expensive fifteen-piece art nouveau dining set had only been delivered last week, and Zoe was quite proud of it. Trying not to think about her new chair’s fate, she said to the count, “Since Fortier’s so busy smirking, perhaps you could tell me what’s going on with the Hemingways. I’ve been too busy painting to keep up with the latest gossip.”

The count gave her a gentle smile. She’d always seen a touch of El Greco in Sergei Ivanovic Aronoffsky’s gaunt, hollow-cheeked face. His arms and legs were thin, too, testaments to the hungry months he’d spent on the run from the Bolsheviks. “You

announce you’ve been painting? Ha! As if we couldn’t tell, dear Zoe. We can smell the turpentine and linseed oil from here. I don’t understand why you can’t copy the others of your kind and maintain a separate studio. It’s certainly not because you’re hurting for money.”

At this, Kiki giggled. Zoe didn’t.

Your kind?

One aristocrat at the poker table was bad enough, but whenever two of them showed up on the same evening, snobbery ran rife, and Zoe sometimes found herself in sneaking sympathy with the mobs who’d dragged her friends’ lordly forebearers to their deaths on the guillotine. True, the count’s woes were more recent than Fortier’s. Only five years earlier, when the Bolsheviks took over Russia, the poor man lost his wife, his grand estate, and two Rembrandts. In the odd way of the world, his luck had almost immediately turned. Upon reaching the welcoming arms of Paris, he’d met and married a wealthy French widow. Shortly thereafter, he found himself widowed again. Despite the count’s travails, he still looked down his nose on the untitled. One would think that Jewel’s love would cure him of his snobbery, but it hadn’t happened yet.

Zoe sighed, thinking it was no wonder the Bolsheviks had shot his kind against their tapestried walls. However, it was rumored Sergei had managed to escape the bloodbath with a small hoard of diamonds, and since he was a laughably bad poker player, she’d grown to appreciate the extra pin money his inclusion at her Poker Fridays earned her. Besides, despite his occasional bouts of arrogance, she’d grown fond of the man. Unlike other aristocrats she could mention, at least the count had a heart.

Feeling the need to defend the acrid aromas in her snug little house, she said, “Now, now, Sergei. I’m a painter, and like most painters, I keep odd hours. Two and three a.m. often find me working, so having my studio here keeps me from walking the streets in the wee hours and being confused with another sort of woman.”

At this, everyone laughed, but the mischievous Kiki pretended to find more than humor in Zoe’s off-color joke. “Walking the streets? But, Zoe, chérie, it would be fun! Perhaps you and I could do that together.”

Since the raven-haired model’s spat with her lover, photographer Man Ray, she’d been attending Zoe’s Poker Fridays with a variety of new suitors, all of whom had loads of money. Zoe didn’t mind. The young men were always good for a laugh, and wasn’t that what Paris was all about? Laughter and good times? Nick Stewart, Kiki’s suitor-of-the-moment, wasn’t a half-bad artist himself, despite the color bl

indness that ran amok through his inbred Boston family. But color blindness had never hampered a Dadaist, what with the urinals, hair clippings, and other nonsense objects they hung on gallery walls and called Art with a capital A. Few of them bothered to paint anymore, including Nick, who was currently working on an installation combining shoelaces and chicken bones.

Kiki’s outré comment begged an answer. “Walk the streets together, Kiki? Sorry, but I must decline. I don’t have what you French ladies call savoir faire or your beauty, and I’d wind up with a less-than-top-notch clientele. And who wants to have sex with hobos?” Directing her attention back to the marquis, Zoe asked, “Now, what were you saying about Ernest and Hadley?”

Not that Zoe cared about Ernest Hemingway, having once observed the bully sucker punch an inoffensive young man in La Closerie des Lilas café just for the thrill of seeing him fall. But she did care about Hadley. She’d often wondered how such a sweet-natured woman could put up with the ill-tempered man, who remained far from the success he imagined himself to have attained. Love, probably. Love, that old betrayer. Love, that old destroyer. For the past four years, Zoe had taken pains to avoid it. One broken heart was enough.

Oblivious to his hostess’s feelings, Fortier was more than happy to expound on the Hemingway scandal. “The story I hear is that Hadley lost all of Ernest’s manuscripts. Every word he ever wrote, even that certain-to-be-terrible novel he was working on.”

Zoe frowned. “That makes no sense. How could Hadley lose his manuscripts? She’s not his secretary.”

“I know the answer to that,” the count said, his mournful countenance buoyed by a semi-smile. “It happened aboard a train. One of the porters at the Gare de Lyon, a Russian like myself, gave me chapter and verse of the incident.”

“Do tell, since we’re all agog,” snapped Fortier, jealous that Sergei had stolen his place on the soapbox.

With an indulgent nod, the count cleared his throat. The story he then related was a troubling one, in which poor Hadley did indeed emerge as irresponsible. A few days earlier, while Ernest was in Switzerland reporting on the Lausanne Conference, he’d run into a publisher who asked to see some of his fiction. Thrilled, as any aspiring novelist would be, Ernest immediately telegraphed Hadley, who had stayed behind in Paris, to post him a few stories and his unfinished novel.

Under most circumstances, this would have been a sensible enough request.

But Hadley had fallen ill with the flu, Sergei continued, which is why she hadn’t accompanied Ernest to Lausanne in the first place. Anxious to please her husband, she’d staggered around their tiny apartment collecting the manuscripts, and in her delirium, packed up the carbons as well. She stuffed everything into a valise. Hoping to surprise him, she hitched a ride with their landlord to the Gare de Lyon, where she bought a ticket on the Paris-Lausanne Express. Once aboard, Hadley placed the valise under her seat. Still feverish, she went back out on the platform to purchase a bottle of Evian for the long journey.

“The porter told me that when the poor woman returned to her seat, the valise was gone,” Sergei finished. “So I ask you, Zoe, an important question, one for which you, as her most trusted friend, should have the most informed answer. Yes, all Paris is aware of Ernest’s habit of knocking down unsuspecting men in cafés, but do you know if he is also in the habit of knocking down his wife? Given the enormity of her crime, should we worry about pretty Hadley’s safety?”

Zoe was so miffed it took her a moment to answer, and when she did, she discovered she’d lost the poker hand. Kiki, the little sneak, had been holding an inside straight and had been too foxy to let it show. The sly cat was still raking in the francs when Zoe finally found her voice.

“Ernest may be a bullyboy in the cafés, Sergei, but I doubt he hits Hadley. She’s the one with the money, remember. Ah, did I hear you say she packed the originals and carbons?”

“Everything.”

As much as Zoe hated to admit it, Sergei might be right.

Poor Hadley.

Zoe had met Hadley earlier in the year, when the marquis, already a poker-playing regular, invited Zoe to accompany him to one of Gertrude Stein’s famous “evenings.” Gertrude, who looked and acted more like a Roman emperor than a woman, had gained fame for her foresight in championing the talents of Picasso, Matisse, and others while they were still unknowns, and now she reigned supreme in the salons of Paris. To be granted entrée into one of her gatherings signaled that your work was being taken seriously, so Zoe was thrilled to accept Fortier’s invitation. A meeting with Gertrude would surely turn her luck around!

It hadn’t worked out that way.

The evening had started off promisingly enough, with everyone feasting at a table spread with rare delicacies. But after the housekeeper whisked away the remnants, the mood changed. Instead of allowing Zoe to join in the conversation with the other artists and writers—all male, she noted—Gertrude insisted she join the wives and mistresses in a small adjoining room. With a condescending smile, the big woman explained, “Ladies always enjoy talking to Alice. She knows so much about running a household—sewing and cooking and such.”

Sewing and cooking and such? Oh, bushwa!

Deeply offended, the only reason Zoe hadn’t sloshed her wine into Gertrude’s face was because she didn’t want to further humiliate Fortier. The moment Gertrude made her pronouncement, he’d flushed with embarrassment, and his mouth opened and closed and opened again as he tried to find the proper words to decry their host’s prejudice. Taking pity on him, Zoe stood up, and with the rest of the ladies, filed out of the room. She was spoiling for a fight, though, and was looking forward to giving Alice a piece of her mind. But once she was settled in a room overstuffed with paintings and furniture, Hadley, who sat next to her on the uncomfortable horsehair sofa, leaned over and whispered, “Patience, Zoe. It’ll be ugly, but you’ll survive. We all will.”

Zoe had noticed Hadley earlier, her enviable porcelain skin—much smoother than Zoe’s own—the glorious auburn hair cut into a flapper’s bob, and the dance of intelligence in those blue-gray eyes. She appeared several years older than her husband and nowhere near as pretty, and Hadley’s long, slender fingers revealed the gifted pianist she was reputed to be.

“Does Gertrude do this oft

en?” Zoe whispered back. “Banish the females to purdah?”

“Every damned time.”

“But…”

Hadley placed a beautifully manicured forefinger against her lips. “Shh. Here comes Alice.”

Zoe found Alice Toklas less condescending than Gertrude. If anything, the small woman seemed a bit shy. But the following discussions of petit point and the proper mincing of truffles bored her, and only Hadley’s witty asides made the experience bearable. By the time the evening was over, Zoe realized she’d found a kindred spirit. Since then, hardly a week passed when she and Hadley did not share a drink or three at La Rotonde. Sometimes Hadley would even visit the little house on the Rue Vavin and serenade her with mini concerts of Bach or Handel on Zoe’s Gaveau upright. When in a particularly rebellious mood—usually after another humiliating visit to Gertrude’s with her vain husband—she’d pound out jazz.

Now Zoe’s friend was in big trouble.

 

Chapter Two

Friends do not allow friends to suffer alone, but since Hadley was still in Switzerland with Ernest, the next morning Zoe decided she could best help her friend by tracking down those lost manuscripts. After helping Madeline, her housekeeper, clear away the debris from last night’s poker party, Zoe scribbled a quick telegram, then paid Dax, the most trustworthy of the waifs who lurked at the end of the street, to run it over to the telegraph office.

TAKE HEART—STOP—WILL FIND MISSING MS

–STOP—GIVE ERNEST MY LOVE—STOP

ZOE

The GIVE ERNEST MY LOVE bit was pure nonsense, but politesse was the wisest part of friendship. Zoe would never let Hadley know how much she disliked Ernest.

“The valise is gone, and those manuscripts have long been scattered to the wind,” Madeline said, when Zoe told her of Hadley’s misfortune. Today, the housekeeper’s artificial arm appeared to be giving her trouble, sticking here and there when it should have been wheeling effortlessly through the required motions to finish the cleanup.

“Should Karen Wegner look at that?” Zoe asked, pointing to the offending apparatus.

The studio where Karen worked stood just off Boulevard de Edgar-Quinet, not far from Zoe’s little house on Rue Vavin. After Madeline’s government-issued arm proved less than satisfactory, Karen, who specialized in the new art of kinetic sculpture, cobbled together a more suitable prosthesis, a wondrous collage of steel, wire, and pullies. But nothing could have performed as well as the original muscle and bone, which had been blown off at the Somme while Madeline tended to the wounded during the Great War.

Madeline shook her head. A plump woman with features too blunt for beauty, she was richly endowed with fortitude. “A good oiling should fix it.”

After fetching a bottle of linseed oil from the studio, Zoe found her housekeeper was correct. A few daubs here, a few daubs there, and the contraption moved smoothly enough for the washing-up to be finished in record time.

“You’re probably right about Hemingway’s valise, too,” Zoe said, putting the last wineglass away. “But I at least owe Hadley the attempt.”

“Hmm.”

With Madeline’s “hmm” still ringing in her ears—like good housekeepers everywhere, she was a devout worshipper at the Church of Minding Your Own Business—Zoe put on her weatherproof boots, the pair with the built-up heel on the left, and bundled up in layers of wool. Thus defended from whatever insult the weather might throw at her, she set off for the Hemingways’ flat.

Being from Alabama, Zoe was relatively new to snow, and she didn’t really mind it. If anything, the brisk walk was refreshing after last night’s smoky poker game. And, truth be told, after moving from a thirty-room plantation house to a four-room pied-à-terre, the broad Parisian avenues gave her room to breathe. Enjoying the day, she took the long way to the flat where the Hemingways lived. Cutting through the hordes of shoppers, tourists, and boulevardiers, she turned north, enjoying the sounds of horses as they clip-clopped around the grrr-grrr-grrr of green omnibuses. Despite the cold, street singers were out. One of them, a thin girl not yet into her teens, sang “Mon coeur est un palais de glace,” My heart is a palace of ice, which touched Zoe enough that she half-filled the child’s bowl with francs.

Once Zoe entered Le Jardin du Luxembourg, the street noise dropped away. Above, a canopy of horse chestnut trees stretched their bare limbs to the snow-speckled sky. Come spring, they would be lush with blossoms.

Halfway through the park, she arrived at the big water basin and paused for a few minutes to study the icicle-draped Carpeaux fountain, where rays from the winter sun turned the icicles into colorful prisms. As she watched the colors dance against the gray stone, several young boys ran up to the pond and began breaking up its icy surface with long sticks. She enjoyed their energy, and their yips of happiness. Last summer she’d watched a couple of them sail toy boats in the sam

e spot.

Zoe recognized the tow-headed boy. He was around seven years old, and his freckles reminded her of Leeanne, her younger sister. Little Lee-Lee hated her freckles and couldn’t wait until she got old enough to cover them with makeup. Was she doing that now, Zoe wondered? They hadn’t seen each other since Zoe’s banishment from Beech Glen, although they’d managed to communicate through a complicated chain of letters. Thinking of Beech Glen, Zoe’s smile faded. With her stepmother now ruling the roost, the chances of seeing Lee-Lee again weren’t good. Maybe once the woman died…

No, strike that fantasy. If Anabelle died, Beech Glen would fall into the hands of Zoe’s brother, Brice, who was no better.

And there was nothing Zoe could do about it.

Sometimes Zoe missed Beach Glen so much it hurt. That didn’t mean she didn’t love Paris—her love of the city would always win over the Alabama plantation—but that didn’t mean she could forget her birth home. She remembered watching red, gold, and purple sunsets from the wide veranda. Remembered the calls of whip-poor-wills at dusk. Remembered the fireflies dancing in the night.

Whenever Zoe’s mood grew glum—usually during solitary evenings—she would walk to her studio’s big glass wall and look out at the gas lamps as they came alive along Boulevard Montparnasse. This fabled city was her home now, and it had embraced her as Mercy, Alabama, never would.

But, oh, the memory of those fireflies.

Zoe turned away from the freckle-faced boy and diagonally crossed the park, continuing on its gravel paths until she exited at Rue Soufflot. From there, it was only a few more blocks until she was brushing snow off her shoulders at the entrance to 74 Rue du Cardinal Lemoine. The gray limestone building, with its important-looking entryway, appeared little different than any other apartment building in Paris, despite the fact that its neighbor was a loud dance hall. Maybe lack of sleep contributed to Ernest’s touchiness.

Oh, well. Everyone had problems these days, didn’t they? Resisting the temptation to excuse Ernest’s bad behavior, Zoe rapped on the door. It was immediately opened by the building’s concierge, a kind-faced woman of about fifty. “May I help you?” she asked.

“It’s rather complicated,” Zoe said. What she was about to request might strike this woman as outlandish, but she had no choice.

“Complicated?” Instead of being wary, the concierge appeared intrigued and invited her into a small room filled with family mementos. Chief among them was the photograph of a smiling young man in a soldier’s uniform. Did he survive the Great War? If so, did he return with his body and mind intact?

Zoe knew better than to ask. Instead, she explained the purpose for her visit.

The concierge listened carefully, then nodded. “Oh, yes, Mademoiselle Zoe Barlow! Madame Hemingway has mentioned you many times—her friend, the artist!—so of course I’ll allow you access. But I assure you it’s hopeless. Why, Monsieur Hemingway himself came back here only two days ago, all the way from Switzerland! He searched and searched and found nothing.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “I heard him cry, you know. He got drunk and he cried for hours. The poor man was so distraught I feared he might do himself harm.”

Zoe frowned. “Is he still he

re, then? If so, I should probably…”

“No, no. He went back to Switzerland the very next morning. I think he is working there at that big peace conference. The one about the Turks, I think.”

Relieved, Zoe said, “Then perhaps I can have a go at it. An artist’s eye, you know. I might see something he missed.”

The concierge nodded sagely. “A woman’s eye.”

A few minutes later, they were huffing their way up four flights of stairs made odorous by the pissoirs at the end of each hallway. It was so unpleasant that despite Zoe’s dislike of Ernest, she found herself sympathizing with him. If there was ever a fire in her studio and she lost her paintings… It didn’t bear thinking about.

Their climb finished, the concierge unlocked the door to the Hemingways’ flat, and escorted Zoe in. After a moment of shock, she stared at the place Hadley called home. It explained something that had puzzled her over the past year. Although a frequent visitor to Zoe’s little house, Hadley had never issued an invitation to hers. Now Zoe understood why. The tiny sitting room, little more than closet-sized, was furnished only with a couple of shabby chairs, an ancient cupboard, and Hadley’s rented piano. The alcove-type bedroom looked even smaller, with its sagging bed and a two-seater dining table. Zoe found the sanitation situation even more worrying. Maybe there was a communal pissoir at the end of the hall for the male residents, but why should a refined woman like Hadley be forced to use a bucket in the bedroom corner for a toilet?

“It is a simple flat,” the concierge said, obviously embarrassed by the lack of comfort. “But they are young, and very much in love.”

Love. There was that deadly word again.

Biting back what she really wanted to say, Zoe just grunted, then began her search. After only a few minutes, having looked under the bed, the mattress, and through each drawer and shelf in the tiny flat, she admitted defeat. Not one word written by Ernest remained in this place.

Her nascent sympathy for the man fled as she recalled a recent conversation with Hadley over a glass of wine at La Rotonde. Hadley complained that Hem had begun renting a private writing room for himself in a nearby building so the sound of her voice wouldn’t intrude upon his lofty thoughts. Here was a man living on his wife’s inheritance, yet disallowing her even the barest of modern conveniences while he found more comfortable working quarters for himself.

As the French would say, oh le cochon! The swine.

There remained one more place Zoe might search. After leaving the grim flat at Cardinal Lemoine, Zoe set out for the taxi stand at the intersection of boulevards Montparnasse and Raspail. In the past, she had used the services of Avak Grigoryan, an Armenian taxi driver who, for a few francs, would ferry anyone anywhere in his 1918 black Avions Voison motorcar nicknamed the Grim Reaper. The Reaper, which did not always heed its driver’s orders, had survived several accidents its passengers almost hadn’t. But the price was right.

Avak and the Grim Reaper were awaiting their next victim when Zoe approached.

More of a gentleman than some actual gentlemen she knew, the man with the magnificent black mustache tipped his hat when he saw her. “Where I drive you this handsome day, Mademoiselle Barlow? To shop for the Christmas?” Although Avak was a man of the world who spoke several languages—Armenian, Turkish, German, French, and English—the structure of his French and English sentences remained creative.

“No shopping today, Avak,” she replied, “but plenty of errands. First, I need to hunt up a train porter. It probably won’t take long and, whatever happens after that, ...