Murder in Montparnasse by Kerry Greenwood

Raphael, the concierge, who had a body like a box. From Edouard l’Anglais, one slight, delicate watercolour, a nymph with short hair staring into a pool, very airy and shadowless. That was she? So slim, so graceful? Sarcelle signalled to Véronique, his wife, and she flicked the cloth off the oil painting. Phryne gasped.
    A naked woman, lying in a landscape composed of coloured blocks, blurred at the edges. Purples and blues faded into a dim distance. The body of the woman was perfect, pale as a pearl, her nipples lipstick pink, her hair and pubic hair black as pitch, redeemed from doll-like prettiness by the direct gaze of the eyes, which stared straight at the viewer, challenging, intelligent and bright spring green.
    ‘Had you never known how beautiful you are?’ asked Véronique, hugging Phryne. Véronique was a plump, pretty, comfortable woman, much tried by her highly strung husband. Sarcelle had been caricatured in the newspaper as all hair, beard, bones and high-collared Russian shirt. Everyone had instantly recognised him. His fellows were good artists in their way. Picasso had been kind about Anton’s cubism and Miss Stein had bought two of English Edouard’s delicate decorative nymphs. But Sarcelle, while he liked Phryne and his co-tenants and probably loved the devoted Véronique, adored Art with his whole passion, and seldom thought of anything else. He left the bargaining between Sardou and Dupont to his wife, who was from Burgundy and could squeeze a sou until it squeaked.
    ‘I will finish the painting and lay on the gold leaf tomorrow,’ said Sarcelle. ‘But you must not leave me. You are the most beautiful model in Paris, it is well known.’
    ‘I have a contract with DeBain, downstairs. He is doing a water nymph fountain,’ said Phryne, still astounded. No one had ever told her she was beautiful. First she had been a street Arab with scabbed knees, then a sulky schoolgirl (too thin and too disagreeable) and then an ambulance driver, valued for her strong wrists and good sense of direction under fire. But the woman in the painting was undeniably beautiful.
    ‘You are a great success,’ Véronique told her. ‘They all want you to pose for them, ever since Sarcelle discovered you. You are the body of the future; they dote upon you. Triple your fees,’ the Burgundian woman advised. ‘Except for Atelier Sarcelle,’ she added, for even artists must eat.
    ‘Madame,’ said Phryne from the depths of her dog-smelling blanket, ‘I will do as you say.’
    ‘I am not surprised that you were a success,’ commented Lin Chung. ‘But I am surprised that you had to discover your beauty. Although, come to think of it, it came upon me as a great shock, that night in Little Bourke Street, when I first saw you. Grandmother thought that you might be a deity of some kind, and I thought so too. A silver lady, with perfect Manchu colouring except for those strange, compelling eyes. Beautiful and strange.’
    ‘Precisely what I thought about you,’ returned Phryne, taking a deep gulp of the champagne. ‘Strange and beautiful, like and unlike.’
    ‘Paris taught you that you were beautiful,’ prompted Lin Chung. Phryne lit another cigarette.
    René poured her another glass of thin colourless liquid.
    ‘It will make you warm,’ he urged. ‘Drink it in one gulp, or it will burn your mouth. And it is such a beautiful mouth,’ he added, tilting his head in a bird-like gesture to absorb her countenance. Phryne gulped, gasped, and sat down on René’s knee.
    All around the friends of Adelie were getting rapidly drunk and talking and crying. Phryne had cried herself out on the walk back from the cemetery. The drink mounted rapidly to her head. All she could taste was aniseed.
    ‘Raki,’ said Toupie, reclining massively on two chairs by the wall. The café was packed. Outside it was beginning to snow. Inside the brass glittered and the palm trees swayed their fronds in the hot air. Phryne took off her coat and