This was overly generous, I thought. I hadn’t anticipated hiring a wet nurse for him. “I will be back in time for when he needs to eat,” I said, “but thank you for the offer.”
We agreed on a very reasonable price. I kissed Liam and told him I’d be back very soon. I heard him crying as I went. I lingered at the bottom of the stairs, not sure about leaving him, but the crying soon stopped and I went about my errands. I asked where to send a cable and was directed to the telegraph office just beyond Pigalle. Then I returned to the Rue des Martyrs and bought vegetables, eggs, and some ham, returning with my string bag full to find Liam sleeping happily on the baker’s bed with pillows around him.
“He is so content. You can leave him longer if you wish,” Madeleine said.
“I should return to the apartment now to see if there is any news from my friends,” I said. I wouldn’t put it past the hostile concierge to turn away a telegram messenger if I wasn’t there. So I carried a now grouchy Liam up all the stairs again and made us a boiled egg for lunch. The afternoon dragged on. I tried not to worry but worry consumed me. There had to be something very wrong. Sid would not have gone away without her cigarette holder. If they had been going away for any length of time they would have cleared up the remains of a meal first. And my overriding reason for concern—they knew I was coming. They were expecting me.
I took Liam back to Madeleine across the street. She was cooking, making dumplings to add to a delicious-smelling stewed chicken, but she wiped her hands on her apron and beamed at us. “Look what I have found, mon petit,” she said to him, going over to a box on the table. “See?” And she held up a Noah’s ark with carved wooden animals. “It was mine when I was a child. My grandfather carved it for me.” I left Liam happily playing with this and crept quietly away. I had no idea how I was going to locate Reynold Bryce but Paris was a city of artists and he was supposed to be the mentor of American artists here. Someone would know where to find him.
I walked down the street, back to Place Pigalle. There was a café at the intersection of two of the streets leading off Pigalle—a narrow building with glass windows and the sign Café de la Nouvelle Athènes painted above the door. There were tables outside but the day was fresh and they were unoccupied. However inside I could see a group of young men clustered around a table. I moved closer to the window. Their attire, ranging from workers’ overalls to shabby jackets to well-cut dark suits, and the way they gesticulated with their hands in animated discussion, indicated that they might well be artists of some kind. Then I spotted a sketchbook that one of them had open and charcoal in his hand. I was about to go in when I also noticed that there were no women among them. I couldn’t think that women were barred from a café, as they were from taverns in New York. The men were only drinking coffee, by the look of it. A perfectly respectable establishment. So I took a deep breath and went in.
Conversation stopped at the table. The man behind the marble counter looked up from the glass he was drying. “Are you looking for someone, mademoiselle?” he asked.
“Luckily he is not here, or there would be hell to pay, no doubt,” one of the young men said.
“I need help,” I began but the young men laughed. “Then you are in the wrong place. None of us has a sou, chérie. That is why we come here. Bernarde is tolerant of us. He lets us sit here all day for the price of a cup of coffee.”
“No, forgive me,” I said. “Perhaps you can tell me how to locate some American painters.”
“There are no American painters in Paris,” one of the men said quickly, then noting my surprise added, “only copiers and dabblers.” At the murmur from his companions he turned to the man beside him. “What? You disagree? I confess that some of them have facility with the brushstroke. La Cassatt is not at all bad.”
“That’s decent of you, Pablo.” The man beside him dug him in the ribs. “She sells her paintings for more money than you, you must confess.”
“But when has an American ever created a new movement, a new school of art?” He waved his hands in dramatic gesture. He was small and dark with black hair flopping boyishly across his forehead and he spoke with a strong accent that clearly wasn’t French. “I hear they still think Impressionism is avant-garde in America.”
And the others grinned and chuckled.
“So you believe that the role of the painter is to constantly come up with something new, do you, Pablo?” one of them asked. “Not to paint with honesty the world as one sees it?”
“Are the two not one and the same?” Pablo demanded.
Before this turned into a philosophical discussion I interrupted. “Messieurs. A minute please. I have to find these American painters. So there are no American artists in your circle here?”