Murder in the Marais (5 page)

Thursday Afternoon

A
PUNGENT SMELL OF
cabbage borscht clung to the hallway of 64 rue des Rosiers. Abraham Stein answered Aimee's knock, his faded maroon yarmulke nestled among his gray streaked black curls, a purple scarf riding his thin shoulders. She wanted to turn away, ashamed to intrude upon his grief.

"What do you want?" he said.

Aimee twisted her hair, still damp from swimming, behind her ears.

"Monsieur Stein, I need to talk with you about your mother," she said.

"This isn't the time." He turned to close the door.

"I'm sorry. Please forgive me but murder is never convenient," she said, wedging behind him, afraid he'd shut the door in her face.

"We're sitting shiva."

Her blank look and foot inside the door forced him to explain.

"A ritual mourning. Shiva helps acknowledge our suffering while we pray for the dead."

"Please excuse me, this will only take a few minutes of your time," she said. "Then I promise I'll go."

He put his scarf over his head and led her into the dark-paneled living room. An open prayer book rested on the polished pine sideboard. The dining-room mirror was swathed in black cloth. Lit tapers sputtered in pools of wax, giving off only a faint light. Women clad in black, moaning, rocked back and forth on sticklike chairs and orange crates.

She kept her head down. She didn't want to breathe the old, sad smell of these people.

A young rabbi, his ill-fitting jacket hanging off him, greeted her in a jumble of Hebrew and French as they passed him. She wanted to flee this apartment, so dark and heavy with grief.

She overheard French rap from a radio in a back room, where sulky teenagers congregated by an open door.

The crime-scene tape was gone but the insistent noise of the leaky faucet in the dingy bathroom and aura of death remained. She'd always see the scuffed black shoe with the worn heel and the vacant white face carved by that swastika. An odd, tilted swastika with rounded edges.

The crime-scene technicians had left neat stacks of Lili Stein's personal items on the rolltop desk. The bloated angelfish and tank were gone. A knitting basket full of thick needles and multicolored yarn spilled out across the hand-crocheted bedspread. Issues of the
Hebrew Times
were piled in the corner and beside the bed.

"Yours?" She picked up a folded section. The paper crinkled and a color supplement fell out.

"Maman ignored French newspapers," he said. "Refused to own a television. Her only extravagance was a subscription to the Hebrew newspaper from Tel Aviv."

The boards on the window facing the cobbled courtyard were gone. Ribbons of yellow crime-scene tape crisscrossed the view of the drab light well below.

"Why did your mother board up the window?"

He shrugged. "She always said the noise bothered her and she wanted privacy."

Aimee pulled a wicker chair, the only chair in the room, towards the window. The uneven chair legs wobbled, one didn't touch the floor. She indicated he should sit on the bed.

"Monsieur Stein, let's. . ."

He interrupted. "What were you doing in this room?"

She wanted to tell him the truth, tell him how cornered and confused she felt. After the explosion, when her father's charred remains had been carted away, she had lain in the hospital. No one had talked to her, explained their investigation. Some young
flic
had questioned her during burn treatment as if she'd been the perpetrator.

Mentally, she made a sign of the cross, again begging for the dead woman's forgiveness.

"Frankly, this is classified but, Monsieur, I think you deserve to know," she said.

"Eh?" But he sat down on the bed.

"Your mother was the focus of a police operation mounted to obtain evidence against right-wing groups like Les Blancs Nationaux."

Abraham Stein's eyes widened.

How could she lie to this poor man?

But she didn't know any other way.

Not only Leduc Detective's depleted bank account and overdue taxes forced her to take this case. Part of her had to prove she could still be a detective:
flics
or not, justice would be done her way, administered in a way victims' families rarely saw. The other part was her father's honor.

Abraham cleared his throat, "She was cooperating with the
flics
? Doesn't make sense. Maman avoided anything to do with the war, politics, or police."

"Rare though female detectives are in Paris, Monsieur, I'm one of them. I am going to find out who killed your mother."

He shook his head. She pulled out her PI license with the less than flattering photo on it. He examined it quickly.

Aimee ran a hand over the worn rolltop desk, trying to get the feel of Lili Stein. Yellowed account books were shelved inside.

"Why would a private investigator care?" he asked.

"I lost my father to terrorists, Monsieur. We worked with the Brigade Criminelle, as part of surveillance, until the plastic explosive taped under our van incinerated my father." She leaned forward. "What eats at me still is how his murderers disappeared. The case closed. No one acknowledges the victims' families. . .I know this and I want to help you."

He looked away. From down the hall came the muted moaning of the old women. Medieval and dark, this apartment echoed with grief. Ghosts emanated from the walls. Centuries of birth, love, betrayal, and death had soaked into them.

"Tell me about your mother."

His face softened. Perhaps the sincerity in her tone or the isolation Abraham Stein felt caused him to open up.

"Maman was always busy knitting or crocheting. Never still." He spread his arms around the room, every surface covered by lace doilies. "If she wasn't in the shop below, she'd be by the radio knitting."

Dampness seeped into this unheated room. "Can you tell me why someone would kill her this way?"

Deep worry lines etched his brow. "I haven't thought about this in years but once Maman told me 'Never forgive or forget.'"

Aimee nodded. "Can you explain?"

He unwound the scarf from his shoulders. "I was a child but I remember one day she picked me up after school. For some reason we took the wrong bus, ending up near Odeon on the busy rue Raspail. Maman looked sadder than I'd ever seen her. I asked her why. She pointed to the rundown, boarded-up Hôtel Lutetia opposite. 'This is where I waited every day after school to find my family,' Maman said. She pulled the crocheting from her little flowered basket in her shopping bag, like she always did. The rhythmic hook, pause, loop of the white thread wound by her silver crochet needle always hypnotized me."

He paused, "Now Hôtel Lutetia is a four-star hotel, but then it was the terminus for trucks bringing camp survivors. Maman said she held up signs and photos, running from stretcher to stretcher, asking if someone had seen her family. Person to person, by word of mouth, maybe a chance encounter or remembrance. . .maybe someone would recall. One man remembered seeing her sister, my aunt, stumble off the train at Auschwitz. That was all."

Abraham's eyes fluttered but he continued. "A year after Liberation, she found my
grand-père
, almost unrecognizable. I remember him as a quiet man who jumped at little noises. She told me she'd never forget those who took her family. '
Cheri,'
she told me, 'I can't let them be forgotten. You must remember.'"

Aimee figured little had changed in this dim room with its musty old-lady smell since then. She pulled her gloves back on to ward off the chill. "Why didn't the Gestapo take your mother, Monsieur Stein?"

"Even they made mistakes with their famous lists. Several survivors I know were in the park or at a piano lesson when their families were taken. Maman said she came home from school but the satchels, filled with clothing and necessities in the hallway, were gone. Hers, too. That's how she knew."

"Knew what?"

"That her parents had saved her."

Aimee remembered her own mother's note taped to their front door:
"Gone for a few days—Stay with Sophie next door until daddy comes home."
She'd never returned. But how awful to come home from school and find your whole family gone!

"Your mother stayed here, a young girl by herself?"

He nodded. "For a while with the concierge's help. She never talked about the rest of the war."

Aimee hesitated, then pulled out the photo image she'd deciphered for Soli Hecht. "Do you recognize this?"

He stared intently. After a moment, he shoved a pile of invoices aside to reveal a group of faded old photos on the wood-paneled wall. There was a blank spot.

He shook his head. "There was a photo here. Similar, but no Nazis. Maman hated Nazis. Never touched anything German."

Abraham jiggled the bottom desk drawer open. Inside were several empty envelopes addressed to the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine, the Contemporary Jewish Center, at 17 rue Geoffrey l'Asnier, 75004 Paris.

"She donated to their Holocaust fund." He stood up, rubbing his eyes tiredly. "I can't think of anything else." He shook his head. "I don't believe the past has anything to do with this."

More than ever, Aimee wanted to tell him about Soli Hecht. However, the last thing she wanted was to put Abraham in any danger.

He threw up his hands. "I can't believe she would have gotten involved in some operation. But she did mention recently she had been seeing ghosts."

"The antiterrorist squad. . ."

He interrupted her. "I don't want trouble, I live here," he said. "What about the present. . .the massacres in Serbia? I'm sick of the past, it's over. Nothing will bring her back."

She felt his denial was to avoid pain. Something she had tried to do with her own father's death.

Outside in the light well, a black crow, shiny as licorice, cawed incessantly. She stroked the crocheted bedspread, brushing against the knitting basket, and stopped. A scrap of paper in bold, angular handwriting was stuck in the variegated wool.

"What's this?"

He shrugged.

She carefully spread the wrinkled paper. On it, colors were listed in a row with check marks next to them:

navy blue ivory

dark green

Scribbled on the side were the names.
Soli H, Sarah,

She stopped. Soli Hecht? That name triggered questions about the encrypted photo. More important, she wondered what the photo would have told Lili Stein.

Arrows from the names went off the torn page. She hesitated whether to tell Abraham Stein about Hecht. "Recognize these names?"

Abraham looked puzzled. "I don't know, maybe members of the synagogue."

Before he could say more, there was a faint knock on the open door. She looked up to see a white-haired woman apologetically beckoning to him.

"I'm sorry"—she motioned helplessly with gnarled hands—"but Sinta wants you. More visitors have come."

Abraham nodded. "Thank you, Rachel." He turned to Aimee. "This is Rachel Blum, Maman's friend. Why don't you speak with her while I go to my wife." He left to meet the visitors.

Rachel's hair was stretched tightly back in a bun. Her black dress had a faint odor of lavender mixed with mothballs. She sank down onto the bed, her slightly stooped frame still bent. Sliding off her shoe and rubbing her foot, she sighed. "Bunions! Doctor wants to fix them, but no thank you, no knife for me, I told him. They've carried me this far, they'll carry me the rest of the way."

Aimee nodded sympathetically.

"Lili had no time for fools—I'm like that myself. I lived in Narbonne until my sister passed away last year. Then I decided to come back to the Marais."

"How long had you known her?" Aimee ventured.

Rachel squinted in thought. "Too long."

"Rachel, do you recognize this snapshot?" Aimee asked, passing it to her.

"My glasses, where are they? Can't see without them." Rachel scrabbled down around her neck. "Must be at home."

Aimee reached for a pair of readers from the top of Lili's desk.

Rachel grunted, "That's better." She squinted through Lili's reading glasses. "Hmm, what's this?"

"Anything look familiar, Rachel?"

A wistful look came over her. "The Square Georges-Cain. A lifetime ago." She sighed, then indicated some figures near a tree. "Our school uniform. See the smocks," and she pointed to a girl turned away from the camera.

Rachel seemed grateful to be resting her feet and exercising her mouth. She was vigorously rubbing her other foot now.

"Did you and Lili go to school together during the war?"

Something shuttered behind Rachel's eyes and she turned away. Aimee knew that look, a deliberately vacant stare that came into old people's eyes when the war was mentioned. Rachel shrugged and didn't answer.

Aimee sat down on the bed next to her and smiled. "Were you in class together?"

"Lili was younger than me. I didn't have much to do with her."

"Didn't you know her parents?"

"I'm only half Jewish," Rachel said. "Am I supposed to know everybody? A lot of people disappeared."

Why had Rachel become defensive?

A tingle went up her spine, the same tingling she'd felt when she'd made that promise to Hecht. She edged closer to the old woman and lowered her voice confidentially.

"Rachel, she looked up to you, didn't she?"

Rachel looked surprised but not displeased. "I'm not sure. . ."

She kept going. "Have I embarrassed you, Rachel? You know how schoolgirls idolize older girls!"

Rachel shook her head slightly and paused. "I vaguely remember her father. He came back after the war."

Aimee noticed that Rachel's gaze was focused on the window crisscrossed with crime-scene tape. So there was something, Aimee thought, her heart starting to pound.

"Why did Lili board up the window, Rachel?"

A stony look came over Rachel's face. "The winter of 1943 was cold. No one had coal for heat."

"Lili boarded up the window for warmth?" Aimee said. "But she wasn't here during the whole war, was she?"