Murder in the Sentier (8 page)

“But you do it so well, Morbier,” she said, “and you always come out on top.”

Morbier reached into his pocket, found an empty packet of cigarettes, and crumpled the cellophane on the table. He reached again, pulling out a half-full packet.

“You quit, remember?”

He nodded, threw the packet on the table, and picked up another toothpick. A glimmer of a smile passed over his face.

“Include yourself, Leduc,” he said. “At payback time.”

Morbier ran true to form. Nothing came free.

“I’ll make some calls, but no promises,” he said, hitching up his suspenders.

He’d lost weight. A lot.

“You’ve slimmed down,” she said. “Gone for your annual checkup, Morbier?”

“I’ll ignore the last part and take that as a compliment.”

She doubted but asked anyway. “On a diet?”

“Grapefruit, seaweed, and raisin capsules!” he said. “Drains the toxins, fatty lipids, eliminates cellulite buildup.”

Morbier … talking about cellulite?

“You might try it,” he said.

She’d struggled with the zipper in her leather skirt that morning.

“My new concierge, Madame Guegnon, told me. She buys them in bulk at the Carrefour.”

Before she could recover he stood up. “I must get the train tickets; I’m taking Marc to Brittany for
les vacances
.”

A doting grandfather? Morbier certainly was full of surprises.

Guilt flooded her. Morbier’s daughter, Samia, a young half-Algerian prostitute, had been killed by the underground before Aimée could protect her. The image of Samia’s eyes open to the rain in the Belleville alley, the red bullet hole in her peach-colored twinset, flashed before her.

Marc, her honey-faced son, attended Catholic boarding school and had made his first Communion under the proud eyes of his grandfather, Morbier.

Her face reddened. Determined, she pushed her guilt aside. “I’ll keep my cell phone on,” she said. “You know the number.”

B
ACK IN
the Leduc Detective office she tried Etienne Mabry again.

Still no answer. And none at Christian Figeac’s apartment.

Worried, she wondered if he was still in custody.

She looked up from her computer terminal as René entered, wearing a tailored straw-colored linen suit, wiping perspiration from his large forehead.

“Diuretics!” he said. “The humidity’s equal to the temperature and the doctor prescribed diuretics!” He unbuttoned the linen jacket, tailored to his four-foot height. “I need another glass of Evian!”

She passed him bottled water and one of the Baccarat tumblers, the only glasses they had left from her grandfather’s time.

“I heard you borrowed money from Michel. But I’ve learned that his uncle Nessim needs extra laundry service,” he said, rolling his eyes. “We need to play it safe.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nessim’s wholesale fabric business needs outlets besides the Deauville casinos in which to launder money.” René shrugged. “And Michel’s couture is one of them.”

“But I want to help Michel.”

“So do I,” he said. “A lot of questionable bankruptcies are declared in the Sentier. I wouldn’t want Michel to be a victim of his uncle. We should see what security his computer system needs.”

René pushed up his shirtsleeves. “The Société Générale’s account is overdue. They owe us but the manager keeps stalling me.”

Insurance companies were the worst when it came to paying for contracted services.

“It takes two weeks to authorize issuance of a check.” René tugged on his goatee, something he did when worried. He mounted his orthopedic chair and swiveled to face his computer screen.

She gathered up papers and stuffed them in her black leather backpack.

“In the meantime, rent’s due,” René said, looking at the pile of bills on her desk. “What’s our Media 9 contract status?”

“Pending,” she said, pointing to the thick folder labeled MEDIA 9 on his desk.

“
Attends
, let me look at Nessim’s business structure,” he said.

“There’s tons of legalese. I’ll have to decipher it after I return.”

“Return?” He peered at the dated Post-Its on the pile. “This was due yesterday.”

She paused, feeling guilty. “
Désolée
, René, but these things …”

He tugged his goatee. “It’s more than that, about your father, Aimée. All that time poking around government departments, then the trip to Berlin. I thought you’d pick up the slack when you returned. Now, this new wild goose chase …”

“René, I know I need to be here more, helping you out.”

Remorse assailed her. But she couldn’t postpone investigating this lead to her mother.

She stood up, paced to their office window overlooking rue du Louvre. Below, leafy lime trees shifted in an arid breeze, throwing shadows over a roadwork crew. Her hands shook. She didn’t want René to see.

But he did. “What’s wrong?”

Aimée hesitated. “It’s worse than bad.” She told him about Jutta Hald, her suspicions concerning Romain Figeac’s suicide, and her mother. “I can’t stop now, René. This woman was murdered almost in front of me. And there’s news about my mother. After all these years, I have a chance to find out what happened to her.”

“I know, but …” He looked away. “But you borrowed money from Michel and
we
need it!”

“Yes, of course we do,” she said, conflicted. With Jutta gone she might as well use the money, think of it as a temporary business loan. “And we’ll use it for the business. We’ll survive, we always do.” She pulled out all but five thousand francs of the fifty she’d borrowed from Michel. “Here, this should help.” She stuffed her laptop in her bag, then made for the door. But she had to make him understand. She turned around. “René, you know I have given everything I have to the business. But for once, this has to come first.”

René’s eyes flashed. “Dot-coms court me, Aimée,” he said. “All the time. Offering me nice sign-up packages, stock options. The works.”

Shocked, she sat down. She’d had no idea. She felt stupid. Of course they would, but she’d been too distracted to notice.

“What are you saying, René?”

He opened his mouth to speak, then shut it, his goatee quivering.

He slid down from his orthopedic chair, grabbed his jacket, and walked out the office door. She’d never seen him so upset.

“René!”

No answer. She ran into the hallway after him. The wire-cage lift rumbled and creaked below her. She ran down the spiral steps, her high-heeled sandals clattering, meeting René as he opened the curlicue-work metal door.

“Look, René,” she said. “We’re in this together, I need you. Please understand….” She wasn’t prepared to tell him she simply couldn’t focus on anything else.

“Friends honor commitments, it’s that simple.” René snorted. “Your mind’s been somewhere else.”

So he’d noticed.

She was obsessed: her mother, Jutta, the terrorists. Yet, René had always been there for her, time and again in the past. She knew she was jeopardizing their relationship.

She hung her head. “You’re right. I’m sorry.” She rocked on her heels. “I’ll catch up. I promise. Forgive me, partner?”

His green eyes fluttered and he dusted invisible lint from his trousers. “Writing code all day bores
me
but I like to pay the rent and eat out once in a while.”

“We’ve got receivables. Like you said, people owe us! I’ve sent them warnings, next step is the collection agency. They cough up when they get that red-bordered notice.”

She took a deep breath. “Hungry?”

René gazed at the sushi bar opposite them on rue du Louvre. “Are you buying?”

She nodded.

“Later,” he said, looking at his pocket watch. “I have to meet our bank manager about a loan.”

“A loan?”

“To tide us over until we get paid.”

René was smart. Now she should make a dent in the pile of work on her desk. Upstairs, she filled Miles Davis’s water bowl, then tried Etienne Mabry’s number again. Still no answer.

The door opened. “I forgot my briefcase,” René said, looking pointedly at the papers on her desk.

Aimée returned the look as she stuck her detailed Paris Plan into her leather backpack.

“Going someplace again?

“I have to find Etienne Mabry so Christian Figeac can get out of jail.”

Monday Afternoon

T
UCKED DOWN BELOW
street level, in the hollow of a quarry, the cemetery was a tangle of trees and pompous mausoleums. Stefan blinked as crunching noises sounded behind him. He balled his hand into a fist. Turned around.

But it was just the grave digger shoveling shiny white stones into a wheelbarrow. Near the Virgin Mary marble statue, a squirrel nibbled an old furred chestnut.

Stefan pulled himself up.

Fear curdled his thoughts.

Would he be killed next?

Except for an old bag, the coffin, lined with dirty cobwebs, lay empty.

Jutta had taken the Laborde stash and all the bonds. She’d demolished him.

But whoever killed her would have them … wouldn’t they?

Thoughts crowded his mind. Had Jutta joined forces with some new terrorist fanatics, planning to strike again? Had she blabbed to someone in prison? Or had one of the gang survived and followed her?

Stefan went rigid with terror. As he rubbed the gray stubble on his chin, his mind spun. Everything ruined, his future gone. Greedy Jutta. He remembered. She hadn’t changed.

Despair hit him as he crouched among the gravestones. A bird’s molted gray feathers lay clumped by his elbow.
Still on the run. Still wanted after twenty years, and now he had no money.

He hadn’t supported himself with his mechanic’s pay … he’d only done this work because he loved Mercedes engines. Now he couldn’t go back to the garage.

That was the one rule branded into him by the Palestinians about going underground: If anyone makes a mistake, assume your cover is blown. Nine times out of ten, it was. Play it safe. Never go back to your old identity. The police might be waiting.

He’d have to disappear. Once more. Over and over again.

Paris had more than two hundred banks listed in the phone book—triple that, if one counted the branches of the main ones. With the old hunter’s ID, Stefan had opened accounts in many of them over the years. Always in Paris. Never in the countryside—people remembered there. Paris made him nervous but at least he could stay anonymous. Each account held the minimum balance. He maintained them only to enable him to cash the bonds and send his mother money.

He’d waited years before he’d begun cashing the old bonds. Until he figured even if they were numbered and so eventually traceable by Europol, they weren’t high on any priority list. He’d cash them in every few months in a different arrondissement taking care not to follow a pattern. He supplemented this money with his poker winnings, though lately he’d been losing to Anton and others in the garage. A lot.

He picked up a stone, trying to ignore the tremor in his hand. Briefly, he thought of the room he’d lived in for the past seven years. It was sparsely furnished, utilitarian. The reference books on Mercedes engines were the only things he’d miss. He kept nothing in his apartment. He remembered how thorough the Stasi were … the Stasi didn’t exist now but the French equivalent, the DST
^*
, did. And somewhere, so did the
flic
who nursed a special grudge against the members of the gang.

He thought of his Mercedes, parked a few blocks over, realizing he’d need to change the license plates. His palms, thick with encrusted grease, the curse of a mechanic, traveled over the rough bark of a plane tree.

^*
Direction de Surveillance du Territoire

The headstone opposite read “Alphonsine Plessis,” better known as Dumas’s
La Dame aux Camélias
. Dumas’s account of his doomed love affair with this courtesan was the one book Stefan remembered from the university. And here lay the courtesan, once the object of a man’s love, now only dust under dried flowers.

He thought of Ulrike’s, Marcus’s, and Ingrid’s graves: they’d been buried three times deeper than usual, for security. He’d only glimpsed the pictures from
Ici Paris
, the sensational tabloid weekly that had published the forbidden funeral photos, showing Ulrike’s El Fateh scarf draped over her casket.

She had remained defiant to the end.

Stefan remembered that scarf, the red-and-white one given to her by a rifle instructor in the South Yemen camp. She liked to protect her black hair from the sand and biting wind, wear her dark glasses, and pose for photos with the Uzi. It was her only vanity … had it made her feel authentic?

Stefan had liked the training camp in Yemen, put up with the military-like dormitories, daily shooting practice, and spicy Middle Eastern food. Didn’t even mind Marcus. Or his political diatribes and earnest protestations of brotherhood to the PLO and South Yemeni secret service over the campfires.

He remembered the Persian Gulf, a black spot in the distance, and how the wind howled over the desert at night. Like baying wolves. The strange, savage beauty called to him. Stefan never knew so many stars existed, studding the universe. Every night he sat back in the Jeep, staring transfixed into the navy blue night, thousands upon thousands of glimmering pinpricks webbing the sky as if with diamond dust.

Nice
mecs
, the PLO, he’d thought. They’d put up with his group, didn’t ogle the women too much. The real difference was their seriousness, their purpose. Struggle was reality for these desert men.

The more Stefan saw, the more he realized how they—a scruffy, spoiled bunch of Germans spouting revolution, robbing banks, and stealing BMWs—mocked their hosts’ real struggle.

Yet when he tried to talk to Ulrike about it, she waved him off. “We learn by doing, striking back in our own way. Otherwise the system wins,” she’d said.

But the system had won. Events had proved her right.

The Yemen plane tickets were courtesy of the East German Secret Police, the Stasi. The Stasi had wined and dined the Haader-Rofmein gang as a sort of twisted revenge on West Germany. But that was all before the Wall came down. The Stasi had posed the PLO, portraying them as civilized savages with guns, in the perfect photo opportunity. Everyone was being used … all of them. Stefan had realized the whole thing was to further the East Germans’ political agenda.

Right after that, the PLO had kicked them out.

Upon their return they’d been sheltered at the Stasi training camps near Berlin, Star I and Star II, where their cadres learned the use of explosives and various weapons: 9mm Heckler & Koch submachine gun, the G-3 automatic rifle, .357 Smith & Wesson, the AK-47 Kalashnikov rifle, and the Soviet RPG-7 antitank rocket weapon. Experts on explosives demonstrated bomb-triggering devices consisting of battery-fed photoelectric beams that could be employed against moving objects—interruption of the beam would detonate the bomb. A technique they used often.

The Stasi later helped the terrorists “retire” in East Germany. But Jutta had been imprisoned in France. Had ex-Stasi members still watched her? Or had she been killed by that rabid
flic
who’d wanted them all dead and gone long ago? Teynard, the
flic
who’d planted the informer.

Now Stefan had to escape. He scanned the cemetery. If someone had gotten to Jutta, they could get to him.

Anxiously, he paced under the tree, ignoring the crunch of the grave digger’s shovel. There had been only four of them who knew of this place.

Now there were three. He had to leave, get away. What if the killer was one of them?

Stefan pulled his beret low, edged among the headstones. He surveyed the cemetery. Besides the grave digger, there was only an old lady, bent and black-clad, who swept the path.

He knew who he had to see.