Read Murder in the Sentier Online

Authors: Cara Black

Murder in the Sentier (20 page)

BOOK: Murder in the Sentier
5.37Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

But RG recruited from every stratum of society … why not a daughter of a notorious terrorist who hated the cause that her mother had embraced instead of her? In the late sixties, RG infiltrated left-wing groups, established files based on phone taps, mail interceptions, and informers in schools and universities. Maybe Gisela was Ulrike Rofmein’s daughter and also an RG agent. But then how could she be mistaken about her own birthday?

René found her like that. Dazed and wet, choking on her sobs.

“Cheap machine,” he said, kicking its carcass with his toe. “Never liked it. We need a new one.” He set down Miles Davis, who beelined for her lap. “Martine dropped him off on her way to work; she told me someone broke into your apartment last night.”

Aimée nodded. She hugged Miles Davis, burying her head in his fur.

“The Bazar Hôtel de Ville department store has a sale on,” René said. “We’ll get a new one at BHV.”

He switched on his computer, then pulled out the broom.

“You’re my family, René,” she said, wiping her face with her sleeve. “This woman threatened me … said you’d be in danger if I didn’t cooperate.”

“Bring them on, I’m ready, I work out at the dojo every day,” he said. “Give me a chance to take names and kick ass.”

“If anything happened to you …”

“I know,” he said. “And vice versa, partner.”

Then she told him about Gisela and what had happened. She ruffled Miles Davis’s stomach fur, then slowly pulled herself up and grabbed the broom from him.

“No luck with Etienne the other night?” René asked.

She shook her head.

“Michel arrived and we met some performance artists with their own ateliers,” he said. “We talked until dawn!”

She was happy for him.

“There were some disturbing things about his uncle Nessim’s letters of credit,” she said, “I meant to show you.”

René nodded. “Always a ‘deal.’ Michel’s father was like that, and
his
father. His great-grandfather carted a sewing machine from the Lodz ghetto. With six mouths to feed, he set up the machine in the doorway fronting the one room the family rented in a crumbling Sentier building.”

“The same building where Michel is now?” Aimée asked.

René nodded. “His great-grandfather sewed for the cloth merchants who passed by. He branched into buying cloth, making garments. Later on, he sold clothes to the burgeoning department stores of Samartaine and Bon Marche. And then he bought the old
hôtel particulier
, cheap and falling apart, but with huge work spaces. He patched it up, put in more sewing machines, hired immigrants newer than himself.

“His family and other Ashkenazi Jews were rounded up during the Occupation,” René continued. “After the Algerian exodus, refugee Sephardic Jews from North Africa moved in. But the family still owned the building and the business, one of the few who returned and remained. These ‘new Jews’ were foreign, uneducated, too ‘Arabic.’ And more devious. Michel’s father sold out to his brother-in-law, Nessim.”

“Why did he do that?” Aimée asked.

“Michel says his father likened Nessim to mafioso; lending and protecting, filing bankruptcies, setting fires for insurance. Michel’s father hated their saying:
Une mauvaise saison qui teminebien
—a bad season that ends well.”

But before Aimée could pull up information as to Nessim on her terminal, loud beeping came from René’s screen. He shook his head and sat down. In the halogen light, his forehead shone with a fine sweat.

“Rogue programmers!” he said, his hands racing over the keyboard. “Concocting new viruses, corrupting data, breaking into private networks, leaving irritating messages on computer displays, posting porn on the Web site. The usual.”

“Our bread and butter, René,” she said.

“We need to work on Michel’s system before the dress rehearsal in Palais Royal. We’ve got work to do, cyber goddess.”

Biting back a smile, she said, “I prefer cyber diva.” She prised off her heeled sandal with her toe and pulled up the cryptographic hashes of the system files. She checked them against their known good backup to determine if any files were changed.

A few hours and several espressos from the downstairs café later, they found a chink in the security fire wall. René plugged it.

Then the fun part: putting the puzzle back together. René loved reconstructing the crackers’ route. Over a bottle of mineral water they identified vulnerabilities that a cracker would exploit and updated Michel’s system.

She didn’t tell him about Léo Frot. No reason for René to know.

Thursday Evening

S
TEFAN WOKE UP
in his car parked by the cemetery, broke and hungry. He realized he’d overreacted the night before when he’d run. Why hadn’t he asked the concierge what had happened to Romain Figeac?

Now, when he reached the concierge’s
loge
, it lay dark. Hesitant, he debated going up the stairs again … would a neighbor notice?

There was only one way to find out.

At the charred door, Stefan saw the yellow police tape, limp and dragging on the wet floor. He hit the timed light switch and his heart skipped. Right where he’d been standing the night before was a gouged hole. And there was a dent in the pillar on his right at eye level. A distinctive graze, like the mark of a bullet’s passing.

His second sense had been right. And all he knew was that he had to get out of there and not be stupid twice. Then he heard scraping from below in the stairwell.

And he ran. He headed up the stairs, onto the roof.

Stefan’s lungs burned. His pulse raced as his legs pumped. As he ran, he shed the raincoat, throwing it over the rooftop. Sweat poured down his shoulder blades.

Why hadn’t he found the exit, planned his escape route like he usually did when entering a new building? Careless, he’d grown too soft and careless. And look what had happened!

He was running for his life and hoping to God he could shinny up the slick roof tiles and climb down to that wrought-iron balcony filled with fat pink geraniums. With luck he could slip in through the balcony door, shoot through the apartment, then hotfoot it to the next street.

At least he’d kept in shape. Lifted those weights, did sit-ups at dawn every morning.

Damn geraniums … he landed, kicking dirt everywhere!

Stefan picked himself up and raced past the half-opened glass door. An old man in a hair net sat reading by dim green light. The cat in his lap hissed.

“Who are you? Get out!” the man sputtered, pushing his glasses up on his nose and trying to ward off the blow he anticipated.

But he spoke to Stefan’s wind.

Stefan slowed, cursing, unable to see in the pitch blackness. He felt his way along the raised linocrust lining the wall. With luck it would be a typical Sentier apartment—bedroom branching from hall to foyer to the front door.

He reached a smooth doorknob. Tried twisting but it didn’t budge.

Locked.

Bright light blinded him. The old man, bowlegged in too-tight long johns and with a rusty meat cleaver, stood in the foyer.

“I fought the
boches
, I can fight you,” he said, taking a step closer.

Stefan tried to flip the brass knob, but it stuck.


Scheisser
!”

“You are a
boche
!” said the old man, startled.

“Get back, old man!”

Behind them, something thudded from the bedroom.

Stefan rotated the latch hard until his fingers hurt. It turned. Then he flipped the dead bolt, ran out, and slammed the door.

He grabbed the metal handrail, guiding himself down the steep serpentine stairs, careful to avoid the light switch. Keep moving, he told himself.

Once he got to the street he’d lose himself in the sidewalk crowds or in the Metro. Then double back to the Mercedes, get his suitcase full of the disguises he’d kept for years, just in case, from the trunk.

Stefan swung open the heavy Art Nouveau—style door, its glass held by curved metal strips. Flashes of red light, reflected on the glass, came from the
flic
car, which sat parked in front of him.

Thursday Night

A
S SHE LEFT THE OFFICE
with René, Aimée carried Miles Davis in her straw bag.

“I’ve got shank bones in the fridge,” René said.

Miles Davis’s ears perked to attention.

“I’m happy to keep him tonight if you need to take care of the apartment.” René grinned.
“Merci,”
she said. “I’ll take you up on your offer.”

A welcome breeze from the Seine sliced down rue du Louvre, rustling the plane trees. She waved goodbye as René, carrying Miles Davis in the bag, hopped the bus on Boulevard de Sébastopol that would drop him by his apartment near the Pompidou Center.

She called the police for information about the break-in but so far they had no news. Before returning home, she needed to think. She walked toward the Sentier.

She saw aging women displaying their wares on rue Saint Denis. When the pimps discarded them, the lucky ones shared a van with others, parked in Bois de Vincennes. Leaning in the shadows. Hiding their age.

A granite-hard life with no retirement benefits. No
sécurité sociale
.

Aimée remembered Huguette, or Madame Huguette, as her father insisted she call her. They’d lived across the hall from her until they moved in with her grandfather. Huguette had minded her after school after her mother left them.

Huguette had buttered thick
tartines
on her kitchen table, let Aimée brush her toffee-colored Pekinese, and strictly enforced homework. Slim, compact, and stylish, Huguette knew more jokes than her father and how to make apple cider
à la
Breton. “I make the best,” she’d said, letting Aimée stir the mixture, “an old recipe from my
belle-mère
in Saint-Brieuc.”

Every evening Huguette—who disguised her long ears with pixie wisps of hair—applied makeup, then poured herself into sparkly evening dresses. What glamorous work, thought eight-year-old Aimée, like going to a cocktail party!

“Bistro Gavroche … I’m a hostess seating customers,” Huguette had said. “Near the Strasbourg Saint Denis Metro, by the big
porte
.”

Aimée’s eyes had gleamed. She knew the huge arch, the old northern gateway of Paris since the fourteenth century.

One night Aimée overheard her father and grandfather talking after she’d gone to bed. “What kind of choice is that … leaving your little girl with Huguette or keeping her with you at the Commissariat?” her grandfather had said. “Put her into boarding school.”

“Did it harm me, hanging around
putes
and
flics
?” she’d heard her father ask. “Huguette’s good for her, she needs someone who can do things I can’t.” Her grandfather had stayed silent.

And her papa had kept her with him, mostly. Until she got older and was sent to boarding school.

Years later on a job, she’d found herself passing through her former neighborhood. She’d walked down the narrow street. In her old building the mailboxes looked new. She hadn’t remembered Huguette’s last name. Or if she’d even known it.

But now curiosity got the better of her, and she walked to the lane behind their old building. Overgrown bushes in a vacant lot shaded the dead end. Once, there had been an Art Nouveau chalet with curving wood supports and an iron-framed glass terrace on the site. She and Huguette had often speculated as to who’d lived there. They’d made up stories about the owner, a Monsieur Roulard who worked at Gare Saint-Lazare and had the officious title
chef d’opérations
painted on his gate.

Now plastic bags whipped over dust and rubble in the wind, spiraled strands of rusted wire coiled around the single tree that stood where a garden had once bloomed. At Huguette’s window she saw an old woman stroking ceramic gnomes on her back window ledge.

Aimée stopped. Each gnome perched on a green base, wore a pointed red cap, and stood in a different pose. The woman patted them, rearranged their order, then noticed Aimée. A half-smile came over the ravaged face. The long ears were recognizable. Aimée gaped open-mouthed, then raised her hand in greeting. But the old woman had bent over the gnomes, rubbing them with a cloth. Time passed, shadows covered Aimée’s boots, and the woman still polished away, not looking up once.

Aimée turned and walked away over the broken cobbles under the night sky encrusted with stars.

Thursday Night

“M
ONSIEUR … ARE YOU WELL
? ” the
flic
asked Stefan.

His legs paralyzed, Stefan realized he was panting, his lungs about to burst.

“Fine,
merci
,” he managed and tried to wave the
flic
off. And wave off his own terror.

But the
flic
, his eyebrows rising in the flashing red lights from the patrol car, stared at him.

Stefan wanted to control his breathing. He tried but he couldn’t, and he clutched the door frame.

“No problem, please,” Stefan said.

Another
flic
alighted from the driver’s seat. His badge shone in the streetlight, his mouth was set in a thin line.

“This your place of residence, Monsieur?”

“Stopped for a nightcap at my friends’, Officer,” Stefan said, his breathing more under control now.

“Aaaah,”
the
flic
nodded. “So you live in the
quartier?”
Stefan thought of his ID; he couldn’t lie.

“Visiting friends who do, Officer,” he said, shifting his leg and keeping his head down.


Bon
. You seem very social,” the
flic
said. “We’d appreciate your help in our inquiries.”

“Inquiries?” Stefan’s heart thumped. He thought it would leap out of his chest. “Like I said, I don’t live in Paris.”

“Actually, you didn’t say, Monsieur,” said the
flic
with the hard mouth. “If you don’t mind, we’d like you to accompany us to the Commissariat.”

“But I’m a visitor here….”

“And probably with a sharper eye than we who take the scenery for granted, eh?”

Stefan wondered if someone had been shot in the building.

“Has something happened?”

The
flic
took his arm as if concerned for his health.

“A homicide, Monsieur,” he said, escorting him to the car.

BOOK: Murder in the Sentier
5.37Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Bless the Child by Cathy Cash Spellman
Hill of Bones by The Medieval Murderers
Up High in the Trees by Kiara Brinkman
A Month by the Sea by Dervla Murphy