“So you’ve just arrived in Paris, have you?” the young redhead asked, eyeing me with interest.
“I have and I’m trying to locate a couple of friends. One is also a poet, a Miss Elena Goldfarb from New York, and the other is the painter Willie Walcott.”
“I met the Goldfarb woman once at a reading,” another of them said. “A week or so ago. She read a poem. Not at all bad.”
“But you haven’t seen her since?”
“Can’t say that I have.”
“What about Willie Walcott then?”
“Oh, him. He’s in here all the time,” the red-haired one said. “Stay put and he’ll show up. Especially if it’s around mealtime and someone might treat him to food. Willie is a great cadger, in spite of the fact that he must be dripping with family money.”
“I heard his father had cut off his allowance because he dropped out of Harvard,” the dark one at the end of the table said. “So he has to rely on selling his paintings or the charity of his friends.”
“Rather the latter than the former, I suspect,” Booth Tarkington said. “From what I saw the boy didn’t have too much talent. More a copier than an innovator—still stuck in Impressionism. At any rate he hasn’t managed to impress any of the top name dealers. Vollard won’t touch him.”
“Reynold Bryce seemed to take a shine to him,” someone suggested.
Two of the others looked at each other and laughed. “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?”
“You mean because his painting style is in imitation of Bryce’s?”
The man was still smiling. “Of course. That’s exactly what I mean.”
Booth Tarkington put a hand over mine. “Sorry, we shouldn’t be making fun of a guy if he’s a friend of yours. That’s not quite kosher, is it.”
More laughter. “Booth, you can hardly use the words ‘kosher’ and ‘Bryce’ in the same sentence, old man.”
“Did you know that Reynold Bryce is dead?” I asked.
They nodded, their faces growing somber. “We just read about it in the paper this morning. We’ve been talking about it. We’re not entirely surprised.”
“Why is that? I’ve never actually met Mr. Bryce myself.”
“Let me put it this way—he wasn’t shy about expressing his opinions. Not just about Jews, but about art and literature too. If he didn’t like something he’d not only trash it, he’d try to get everyone else to do the same.”
“The paper said that a young Jewish man was seen running from his house.”
“That’s the most likely,” the redhead said. “A hotheaded young guy fresh from Russia, I’ll wager. They do things like that. Rush in and stab someone. Thank God we live in America where we behave in a civilized fashion.”
“And dispatch people neatly with guns,” Tarkington said. We all laughed.
At that moment we were hit with a blast of cold air and someone said, “Talk of the devil.”
I saw the resemblance to Gus immediately but Willie was decidedly the more handsome of the two. Actually Miss Stein’s description of him as a golden boy was not wrong. He had that same angelic air to him that I’d seen in Bryce’s paintings and in Ellie, whom I’d met on the boat. His face was framed with light blond curls. He had clear blue eyes and an overall look of surprise. He also looked very pale.
“Hail and well met, fellows,” he called, waving a hand to them as he came over to our table.
“It must be almost lunchtime. Willie’s here,” one of them called.
“I had to get out of the house today,” Willie said. “I just heard about poor old Reynold. I’m completely in shock. I can’t believe it. Who would kill him? How could anyone just walk into his apartment in that neighborhood and stab him? It doesn’t make sense.”
He looked around the group. “It had to be someone he knew, don’t you think? I mean, he had servants there and probably a coachman standing outside. Did they steal anything, do you know?”
“The papers seemed to indicate it was a Jew, taking revenge,” one of the group said.
Willie sighed. “That’s probably the most likely. Reynold was becoming more rabidly anti-Semitic by the minute. He said if they reinstated Dreyfus to his former rank he’d leave Paris and go home and if you knew what Reynold felt about home, that was indeed a rash statement. But what a stroke of bad luck for me. He had promised to put two of my paintings in his next exhibition.”
He came over to the table and gave me an inquiring look.
“A friend of yours, Willie,” Booth Tarkington said. “Asking after you. Came all the way from America to catch up with you. Did you leave a broken heart behind?”
Willie frowned as he stared at me. “I’ve never seen her before in my life.”