The late afternoon sun was now blazing down on my back, and I was glad when I could move into the dappled shade of trees. Paris was a wonderful city for trees, I thought. Hardly any streets in New York were treelined, but this city appeared to be all parks and boulevards. No wonder Sid and Gus were so—I broke off this thought as a sob hiccupped into my throat. Something had gone wrong at Reynold Bryce’s house. And only a few days ago he had sent Gus a postcard with the words “Absolutely not” scrawled across it. That showed they had been in recent communication and that he didn’t need to explain what those words meant. Had he been threatened in some way? Had she begged him to go to the police, or escape from the city? And he had emphatically refused. In which case were she and Sid also in danger from this threat?
I walked faster and faster, my shoes pinching horribly. They were a pair I had accepted from Dodo and in truth a little tight for me. But I had taken them as the pair I had been wearing at the time of the fire were fit for nothing but housework and shopping. Finally I came to the bridge and found the Avenue Montaigne. More lovely buildings in good repair. Clearly an affluent neighborhood—an automobile with a chauffeur was idling outside one of the houses. I remembered that Reynold Bryce came from a monied family and wondered how much of his wealth came from his paintings. He really was a world away from those threadbare young men in the café. No wonder they knew so little about him and despised him as old fashioned and out of touch.
I saw the sign for the Rue Fran?ois Premier and turned left, finding it hard to breathe now. Was I about to find out what had happened to Sid and Gus? I walked the length of the street and found nothing. In frustration I turned and realized that the Rue Fran?ois Premier went in both directions across Avenue Montaigne. So I retraced my steps, crossed the avenue, and came at last to an attractive circle with a fountain in the middle. The houses around the circle had shrubs and trees in front of them, enclosed in wrought-iron fences, and outside one of these an enclosed black carriage was stationed as well as an automobile. As I approached I spotted a blue-uniformed policeman standing just inside the front entrance. So it appeared that I had finally found the right house. I walked boldly up the three steps and the young policeman stepped out to intercept me.
“What do you wish, madame?” he asked.
“Is this not the residence of Mr. Reynold Bryce?” I asked.
“It is.”
“Then I should like to enter. I have come from America and wish to speak with Mr. Bryce.”
“I am afraid that is not possible,” he said.
“Why? What has happened? Is something wrong?”
“I’m sorry, madame, but Mr. Bryce may not receive visitors,” he said, looking extremely uncomfortable now.
“Do you have a superior officer present?” I demanded, not about to be shoved aside for a third time. “I should like to speak with him. I have come all this way. It is most important that I see Mr. Bryce.”
“Wait here, please,” he said. “I will see if anything can be done.”
I stood alone in the cool shadow of a foyer. It was not one private home but another apartment building with an elevator in an attractive wrought-iron cage ascending through the middle of the foyer while a red-carpeted staircase snaked up around it. Beside the front door were four bells, the bottom one with the name Bryce beside it. I was tempted to press it and see if I could summon Mr. Bryce for myself, but at that moment a door opened and my policeman returned, this time followed by a thin, middle-aged man dressed in a dark suit. He had a long lugubrious face with bags under his eyes that made him look like a bloodhound.
“Madame?” he said. “I understand that you come from the family of Monsieur Bryce in America?”
I decided that this little lie would be the only way of getting information. I pushed the word perjury to the back of my mind. “That is correct. I was asked to deliver a message to him from his family.”
“May I ask what that message was?”
“Certainly not,” I said. “It is a private message, meant for Mr. Bryce’s ears alone, and I am growing rather tired of being thwarted like this. I’m sure Mr. Bryce would not be happy if he found I’d been kept waiting in the front hall.”
He stared at me, looked around, then said, “You had better come in.”
He led me through to the ground-floor apartment. Once inside there was a grander foyer than the communal one—furnished with two gilt chairs with a small bronze sculpture of a ballerina between them, potted palms, and gilt-framed paintings lining the walls.