Murder in the Bastille (13 page)

She uttered the passage again and again, faster and faster. René watched her, unsure of what to do. How could he help?

A blue uniform turned the corner. A young
flic
on his beat. “
Bonsoir,
Madame,” he said, taking in the situation. “The gym’s closed now.”

“But the tutor’s supposed to meet me. He’s waiting . . .”

“Not tonight, eh, it’s late. Let me accompany you.”

The old woman gave him a toothless smile. “Maman would like that.”

“Bon,
” said the
flic
, taking her arm gently, “let’s take you home, it’s time for your supper,
non?
”

“But they won’t let me back in,” she said. “I tried.” She pointed her ragged glove at a bricked-up, soot-coated, eighteenth century
hôtel particulier
facing the square. A jewel in its heydey, René thought. Fronted by doric columns, with arabesques of rusted iron balcony railings and nymph-bordered plaster detail. A crane with a dirty black wrecking ball stood suspended over the building. Large placards across the door said “Villa Voltaire—Luxury Apartments Ready Soon.”

“Alors,
” said the
flic
, “they’ve moved you someplace,
non?”

The old woman shook her head. “I want to go home.”

“We’ll just go find out now.”

The
flic
noticed René. “Do you know Madame?”

Before René could shake his head, a second floor window opened and an old man leaned out, a pipe in the side of his mouth. “Madame Sarnac’s lived in the
quartier
all her life,” he said. “Right there.” He took the pipe from his mouth and pointed at the
hôtel particulier.

“Can you help, monsieur?” the
flic
asked, his tone polite. “She’s confused.”

“That was where she lived. She worked in the
magasin
below,” he said. “She went to school here. So did I.”

“But where does she stay now? I don’t want to bring her to the Commissariat.”

“It’s sick, throwing old people out.
Armée du Salut
sheltered some and the Maison des Femmes, too. But just the ones who had no families to take them,” he said. “She’s here everyday, doesn’t know what else to do. Me, I took action. It was I who got them to put up that plaque.”

He pointed to the plaque on Gymnase Japy that was just visible in the fading daylight. René could only read the last part. It was signed the ASEJD:
Association en souvenir des enfants juifs déportés du XI
.

The
flic
walked away, escorting the old woman, and the man shut his window. But now René knew who to ask about Mirador.

Looking around, René observed BANQUE HERVET lettered in silver, a small beauty salon and dimly lit brasserie. Beyond was a fire-gutted building—scorched black stone and broken windows— overlooking the gym opposite the center of the square.

He turned and stood under the rippled glass awning held by curlicues and spokes of wrought iron. A chipped and faded hotel sign was wedged inside an iron circle. The bubbled glass of the door was covered by a metal grillework pattern of flower bouquets and palmettes. He pushed the buzzer.

The door opened to display a diamond-patterned black-and-white tile foyer. The tiles were cracked and worn but the period staircase of white marble and swirls of scrolled ironwork retained its grandeur.

René climbed. His short legs pumped up the wide stairs. The ache in his hip increased. Tired, he’d resolved to make it the last interview of the day. On the second floor landing, he knocked on the door.

“Oui?”

René’s eyes lifted to the old man’s face, wreaths of smoke coming from his lit pipe. His white hair curled around his ears and down over the collar of a gray wool cardigan. He wore Moroccan leather slippers with turned-up toes and kept one hand in his pocket.

“I’m with Leduc Detective,” René said, flashing Aimée’s detective badge quickly.

“I don’t talk to strangers,” the man said, peering down at René.

“Neither do I,” René said, “but you saw me with Madame Sarnac, didn’t you? I want to help her.”

“A detective, eh? I didn’t know they made them so small.”

René flinched. He’d sat behind the keyboard too long. He’d forgotten it was always like this.

“You seemed the helpful type,” René said. “Guess not. I won’t stay up nights worrying when it happens to you. Being evicted, I mean.”

The old man leaned over and peered closer at René. “Who did you say you work for?”

“Leduc Detective. I’m investigating the reporter’s murder.”

“The landing’s drafty, come in,” he said, tugging at René’s shoulder.
“Vite.
”

Surprised at his change in attitude and the swift tug at his shoulder, René followed him inside. The scent of sweetish cherry-laced pipe tobacco filled the air.

The old man’s apartment, high-ceilinged and surprisingly tidy, faced the square on two sides.

“Let me introduce myself: Yann Rémouze,” he said, gesturing to a chair. “I didn’t want to talk out there . . . the walls have ears. Please sit down.”

René used a low ottoman to heave himself up onto a comfortable chintz armchair. He’d promised to call Aimée but it would be better to have some information to give her when he did.

“Bet you see a lot from your windows,” said René.

“I hear a lot, too.” Yann remained standing, surveying René.

René noticed a collection of flutes and woodwinds on a shelf ringing the wall. “You’re a musician?”

“Once I had an instrument shop; I made flutes,” he said. “Now I do repairs for a few old clients.”

An antique silver flute gleamed on the shelf.

Yann followed René’s gaze. “That belonged to a man who created color. That’s what a virtuoso flutist does. Plays with a simplicity that’s vivid.”

This old man lived in his memories, but René didn’t share them.

“Monsieur Rémouze, what happened to Madame Sarnac and those in her building?”

“Should I trust you?”

“Why not? You’ve already let me into your apartment.”

“Good point.” Rémouze sank into the chair beside René. His eyelids were heavy, tired. “Last week, the
démolition
signs went up and the trucks came. But the place had been emptied the week before that. I heard them in the middle of the night.”

“What did you hear?”

“Nothing that hasn’t happened time and again. Only this time instead of
flics
rounding up the
juifs
for the Gymnase and deportation or Apaches collecting interest on an overdue loan, it was Romanians hustling them out at three in the morning.”

“Mirador hired them?” René kept his tone even.

The old man nodded. “Let’s put it this way. Not long ago, a man on the fifth floor was offered a cheque to vacate the apartment he’s lived in for forty years. He refused, his neighbors got similar offers and refused too. Everyone was incensed. Suddenly, returning from Marché d’Aligre where he shops every day, he was attacked. Broken bones and bruises, then his heart gave out in L’hôpital Saint Antoine. Now lots of old people are awakened in the middle of the night, told they’re lucky not to get their hips broken. Now they don’t even get an offer of a cheque. They fold like a deck of cards. Intimidated.”

That agreed with what Brault, the architect, had told him.

“But why hasn’t someone gone to the authorities?”

Yann rolled his eyes. He lit a match, stuck the burning tip in the pipe bowl, and puffed in a steady rhythm.

“Think about the complaint system, the forms one has to fill out . . . no one’s stupid enough to identify himself. And for the rest, pockets are lined to look the other way.”

“Give me names,” said René. “Then I can do something.”

“No one will point a finger,” he said, “so it’s all hearsay. One of the
flics
said the old people are haunted by phantoms from the past. Poetic, probably true, but a nice excuse for inaction.”

“What do you mean, phantoms?” Was the old man going to ramble now? René wished Aimée was listening, instead of him. She had a better take on criminals than he did. She heard old men and women talk and put their stories together. She could find the thread. For such a restless person, she had a fund of intuition.

“Past indiscretions, like informing the
Milice
,” he said. “Ignoring black shirt thugs looting apartments of the deportees.”

“That’s long ago,” René interrupted. “What does it have to do with now?”

The old man puffed several times then looked up. His eyes were wide and full of an almost palpable sadness.

“What
doesn’t
it have to do with now? The past informs the present. Memory makes the map we carry, no matter how hard we try to erase it.”

True. René still didn’t see how it related. Paris had legions of the old, sitting on park benches or at kitchen tables telling stories of the war to grandchildren or others hostage to politeness.

“Some talk about it,” Yann said. “Many remain silent.”

René had enough problems without going back to what happened during the war. Leave that to those whose memories stretched that far.

“Can you read it, the plaque?” Yann beckoned René to the window.

To the memory of the more than 600 children, women and men of the 11ième arrondissement, assembled here and then interned in Loiret camp before being deported to Auschwitz. . . .

“Do you know how long it took our association to erect the plaque for our classmates?”

René shook his head.

“Simon was my friend; he lived down the hall,” Yann said. “Big family. Poor, but Simon had a beautiful steelie marble, topaz cat’s eye. Superb. He let me borrow it one day, his treasure, but he was like that. Generous. And I didn’t give it back. He asked me again and I stalled. Kept saying I’d forgotten it. And then one night we heard noises down the hall.”

Yann looked at René, his eyes clouded. But René felt he wasn’t seeing him. Just the past.

“Those noises. The ones making you hide your head under the covers, the frantic whispers of Maman telling me not to look out the window. And they were gone. Never came back. The apartment taken over by someone else, their belongings too.”

“So this is how you return the marble to Simon?”

A bittersweet smile crossed the man’s face. “Fifty years too late.”

True, there was no escaping the past, but René wanted to pull the focus back to the evictions and Josiane Dolet.

“Look, I can’t find out about the thugs unless I know where to look.”

“After they do their job, they don’t stick around for coffee,” he said. “Big
mecs
, bodybuilders, East European by the look of their clothes.”

“How’s that?”

“Hard to say, but a lot of them wear those track suits, the cheap designer copies with words misspelled.”

René knew the knockoffs sold at street markets. A Tommy Hilfiger with an F missing. Romanian chic.

“One wore a ponytail,” he said, “stringy hair. You know the type.”

“What else?”

“One night I heard this runt below my window calling out. ‘Draz,’ ” he said.

“Draz?”

“That’s all I understood. Then this gorilla, this Draz with the ponytail, beat him into pulp against the wall.”

René said, “Here’s my card.” He knew Aimée handed hers out all the time. It looked professional. And ran up a high printing bill. “Please call if you remember anything else.”

By the time René reached his car, the line for the outdoor soup kitchen, part of a network organized by Coluche the comedian, snaked up boulevard Beaumarchais. He knew authorities left a Métro station open when severe cold hit. A well-kept secret among the
clochards
and junkies. He hoped Madame Sarnac wouldn’t end up there.

Thursday Evening

IN THE HÔPITAL QUINZE-VINGTS waiting room, Aimée heard the evening sounds from Bastille and inhaled the Seine’s scent from the open window. She remembered seeing a teddy bear floating in the swollen Seine in the spring. After so much rain, the river had overflowed the quais. The image haunted her all day . . . had a child dropped it from a bridge, a spiteful older brother tossed it? Did wet tears soak a pillow and an anxious parent rush off to the Samaritaine Department store to replace it . . . as her father had tried?

When she was ten, her
doudou,
a ragged mouse named Émil, dropped from her bookbag into the Seine. Émil was the one thing left from her mother. The only thing her father hadn’t had the heart to throw away. Stained and threadbare, with missing whiskers, Émil had been the subject of her mother’s drawings and stories. The day he fell from Île St-Louis ranked as the second worst day in her life. The first was when her mother left and never came back.

Émil had fallen at twilight; the dusk, a rose-violet slash under the fingernail crescent of a moon. Her papa had told her the moon’s lit face always turns toward the sun. And to imagine Émil in the turquoise-green Mediterranean enjoying the sun-baked sand. She’d shaken her head stubbornly.

She’d begged her papa to call Captain Morvan, an old colleague and police diver, who’d checked with the Seine dredgers. After he’d reported no luck, she insisted they search the water-treatment plant beyond Bercy. But Émil must have floated away.

Then one day a package had arrived, covered with British stamps, official customs forms, and coarse brown twine. It was addressed to her. In it, she found a toffee-furred bear wearing rainboots, blue slicker, and luggage tag from Paddington station, London
,
on it, saying “Please take good care of this lost bear.”

After her father’s death, in his drawer, she’d found a yellowed receipt from an English department store for a stuffed bear for a Mademoiselle Leduc. And after all these years, her Paddington Bear still stayed on her bed.

Her dog Miles Davis and the stuffed Paddington Bear were the only men in her life. But wasn’t that how it turned out . . . a successful career and money, but a sour love life, or conversely, madly in love, business falling apart and broke?

Was it just her? Or the fact that bad boys were her downfall?

The last time she’d been happy had been with Yves, now a news bureau chief in Cairo. A problematic relationship at best. Then a few flings, all disasters.

Her tastes were simple. Someone who could make her laugh, had nice eyes, and had the same taste in champagne. Veuve Clicquot. And a bad boy side that made up for any other deficiency.

A nurse’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “Dr. Lambert’s ready. I’ll help you to the MRI.”

Why was she thinking about men? It wasn’t as if she’d had a future with anyone before, and now the prospect seemed even more remote. Zero. She couldn’t see and didn’t know if she ever would.

“Nervous?”

“Me?” she said, hoping her voice didn’t crack with tension.

Chantal had taught her to endow someone with a face or a feature, to “give looks to voices.” She turned to the voice and nodded. The movement felt more natural, less odd than before.

“
Ba wey,”
said the young nurse for
bien oui,
with that hesitant Parisien drawl. Aimée felt her slowly expelled breath. “Can’t stand enclosed spaces myself, but Dr. Lambert will be staying with you. That’s quite unusual, you know.”

An eye surgeon and head of the department at the MRI? Didn’t they have technicians for that? But she was reassured. She wouldn’t mind having him explain what he saw or giving her the chance to ask questions.

A buzz of voices met them in the imaging department.

“Dr. Lambert, the cranial sac shows distension . . .”

“Here’s the case we’re going to study: female suffering severe blunt trauma to the head, partial asphyxiation, and subsequent vision blurring and loss.”

Great. She was to be his guinea pig for students. And he hadn’t even told her.

“You forgot the resulting concussion, Dr. Lambert,” she said.

Silence.

“So I did, Mademoiselle Leduc,” he said. “Anything else slip my mind, or does that about cover it?”

A snicker came from somewhere in the shuffling group she felt standing ahead of her.

“You’re the doctor,” she said. “I hope you explain everything. And the real prognosis.”

“This is the type of patient, doctors, that will be your rare curse and luck to treat,” he said, his voice serious. “Strong-willed and a fighter.”

What about smart?

And despite the fear gnawing at her insides, she focused on his voice explaining the neurons, ganglia, arteries, veins, and whatnot causing the trouble. Or what seemed to.

“Notice the nice embolizing technique of Robards, the neurologist at hôpital Saint Antoine,” Dr. Lambert said. “He redirected the bloodflow and supported the blood vessel at the weakened site. Not in a textbook, but it makes good sense. Remember that.”

Aimée concentrated on Dr. Lambert’s words, but even with a few years of pre-med, she felt lost. Nevertheless, she could appreciate Lambert’s observations, his way of injecting guidance, of teaching them to think. Maybe if she’d had a professor like that in the
école des médicins
she’d have stayed. But then the dissection of corpses had gotten to her.

She took a deep breath as the gurney wheeled ahead. They wrapped sheets over her and slipped her into something that echoed. Drafts of air shot across her. And from all around the noise of the giant machine, as it powered up, enveloped her. As if she’d been shoved inside a wind tunnel.

From outside came the muted clacking of equipment, moving of knobs and other adjustments.

“Try these earplugs; it gets noisy,” said a loud voice. “Small space bother you?”

“A little.” She was terrified.

“Try to remain still.”

The nurse had given her small sponges, telling her to let out her tension by squeezing them. At least they kept her fingernails from digging into her palms.

THE STUDENTS had gone and Dr. Lambert stood near her. Elevator bells pinged down the hallway. The smell of the hospital laundry soap clung to his lab coat. She managed to sit up, then to stand.

“Got a clearer idea of the problem, Doctor?”

“Right now I’ve got a clearer picture of what’s
not
the problem,” he said. “The brain stem’s a complicated highway. But, to tell you the truth, the doctor who reads the MRIs won’t analyze the films and report until tomorrow.”

Great. Her knowledge had increased by zero.

“Let me reexamine your eyes. I want to check something,” he said. “Tell me if anything changes.”

She felt his hand on her chin, lifting it up. He must be tall. His fingers lifted the edge of her eyelid. Gently. A metallic clicking sounded by her nose.

Desperately she wanted to see. Anything. A blur, something. She tried.

Only darkness.

He pushed her hair off her forehead. His hands were warm.

“You want it straight?”

“Will I need a drink to hear this?”

“Are you always so . . .?”

“Feisty?” she interrupted. “Only when I’m scared, only when my life’s collapsing. Otherwise I’m easy.”

“Your life will change, it has to,” he said. Something moved on the linoleum, as if his feet shuffled. “But it doesn’t have to fall apart. Shall we have that drink?”

Now she was really scared.

“Fine, let’s hit an Orangina machine in the lobby,” she said. “My treat.”

She thought back to books she’d read about Helen Keller, all unkempt and wild with rage before she learned Braille, and that movie,
Wait Until Dark
, with Audrey Hepburn, blind and gorgeous in Givenchy, defeating killers. But she wasn’t like either of them.

It hit her like a load of bricks. Her vision loss was permanent. She didn’t need him to spell it out. She needed to find somewhere to fall apart, but not in front of him. Then somehow she’d manage to call René.

She realized how nice Dr. Lambert was. He’d cared enough to find her a place to stay. He’d tried. Above and beyond his duty. The poor guy must have a heavy schedule, case overload, and a wife and kids dying to see him after a long workday.

“Look, let’s make it some other time. You’ve got a life, probably a big day of surgery and appointments tomorrow,” she said, giving him a way out. “We can talk when the detailed MRI report comes in. Unless, of course, I wake up to a halo of miraculous light and can finally do my nails. Then I’m out of here.”

“You know that’s the first time I’ve seen you smile,” he said.

Had she smiled? She felt warmth spreading over her hand. From his.

“Let’s go,” he said. He placed her hand on his bended arm. “Amaze me with all the tricks Chantal’s taught you.”

Perform like a circus animal?

“What do you mean?” Dumbfounded, she stood paralyzed.

“Relax. You’re pretty uptight. Show me how you walk on rue Charenton to the
bar-tabac
on the corner of rue Moreau, for a start,” he said. “Or do you have stage fright?”

She didn’t want to go to a lighted, noisy bar full of people. Or to pass by the passage where she had been attacked. She wanted to crawl into a hole, curl up, and cry.

“Scared?”

“Me? Where’s that bar?” She strode ahead, pulling him along with her and prayed to God she didn’t run into a pillar or stone wall.

BY SOME odd quirk of fate, she’d been to the
bar-tabac
on the corner of rue Moreau. It was on the rainy night she’d parked in the Opéra parking lot and the attendant had showed her the shortcut through hôpital Quinze-Vingts. She’d stopped for a quick espresso, knowing she was late for the impromptu Populax meeting but figuring she’d need to key up with caffeine to match Vincent’s nervous energy.

She remembered the fifties-style bar, but not its name. Comfortable and utterly Parisian, like the one around the corner from her apartment. They still existed. Timeworn, with a stumpy, rounded counter. The soccer calendars with team schedules on the nicotine-burnished walls. The smudged, beveled mirror with the specials written in white over the Lavazza coffee machine, crowned by rows of cups. Upside-down liquor bottles anchored to the wall with silver stop-cocks that gave metered doses. The brown mosaic tile floor littered with sugar cube wrapping and cigarette butts, where one bumped elbows with neighbors. Not chic but centime-conscious.

“Later on they sing,” Dr. Lambert said, taking her elbow and guiding her onto a leather banquette. “Clothilde shuts the place at midnight, the accordion player hands out sheet music, and people stay until dawn.”

Clothilde. Where had she heard that name?

“The new generation craves a whiff of the past. To sing their grandparents’ songs, to dance the
bourrée
from the countryside in three quarter time.”

She knew the past could reassure. Or frighten.

“You know most people in Paris come from somewhere else,” he said. “What about you?”

“A Paris rat,” she said, leaving out the fact her mother was American. “And you?” she asked.

“Born in Chambery. The snowy Savoy.”

What did he look like?
she wondered.

“But my grandparents . . .” she went on.

“Let me guess,” he said. “Auvergne?”

She nodded. “That’s easy.”

Paris was filled with Auvergnats. Between the wars and during the Depression, Auvergnats, nicknamed
bougnats,
had fled the mines and their bleak farms in the Massif Central, migrating in droves to Paris. The well-known tale: coal merchants, hoping to make their fortune in Paris, often ending up carrying coal on their backs. The more affluent opened bistros, accounting for the large number of Auvergnat-based menus one still saw. She remembered her grandmother telling her how in Cantal, the calcium carbonate-rich springs coated any object put under them with a shiny translucent layer. Like the pervasive
bougnat
influence in Paris.

Her senses had been pared to the essence. People, slapping eath other’s backs, and smoking, involved in discussions, as they were all over Paris tonight. Their energy hit her. And she felt curiously part of it.

“Pastis?”

She needed something strong.

“Double, please.” She shoved a fistful of francs at him.

While Dr. Lambert got drinks, she pulled out Josiane’s cell phone, found the number pad, and called René.

“
Allô?
”

Aimée heard klaxons and the revving of engines in the background.

“
Ça va
, René?”

“I’m stuck in the motorcycle rally in Bastille,” he said.

“But that’s on Friday nights.”

“Maybe you should let
them
know.
Alors,
traffic’s jammed,” he said. “Where are you?”

“Not far, buying my doctor a drink,” she said.

Pause.

“Aren’t there ethical considerations . . . doctor and patient, eh?”

“It’s after my MRI. He’s trying to break it gently to me,” she said.

“MRI?”

“Standard procedure. He’ll know more tomorrow.” She didn’t want to tell René she’d be blind forever. “Look, he feels sorry for me.” She felt the edge of the table, worn and sticky. “What did you find out?”

The revving of engines increased. She wished he’d shut his window.

“Aimée, get this. Romanians intimidate residents and old people, using strong-arm tactics to force them out. They don’t even try and evict them legally,” René said, his voice rising with excitement. “Seems a construction company moves in then and restores or demolishes the building. Josiane was working on a story about this.”

“Would that have got her murdered?”

“Makes more sense than that she was a victim of the Beast of Bastille,” said René.

René was good. A natural.

“Quite the detective, aren’t you? Tell me more.”

And he did. The architect Brault’s allegations, the roller-blading astrologer’s predictions, his friend Gaetan’s evasions, and the old woodwind maker’s information.