Murder in the Sentier (13 page)

“Blowing up banks. Terrorism,” Liane said, her eyes gleaming in the light. “I’m proud of that. No one ever called revolution a dainty proposition. My ideology hasn’t changed. It never will.” She stared at Aimée. “We regard these as acts of war. But I’m not proud about the little children who happened to be too near.”

Aimée shuddered. She wondered if explosives had claimed Liane’s fingers. Or had prison?

Aimée said, “Keep your end of the deal and I’ll keep mine.”

H
ER THOUGHTS
roamed helter-skelter on the way back to Paris. Did Liane have letters to Jutta from her mother? Was her mother alive? During the long journey, Aimée made several calls.

When she reached Montmartre cemetery on rue Rachel, she remembered her schoolteacher saying that corpses had been thrown into an old plaster quarry—which was now the cemetery—during the French Revolution. And how the vineyards of Montmartre had produced an astringent wine with such diuretic properties that a seventeenth-century ditty went: “This is the wine of Montmartre, drink a pint, piss a quart.”

The grave digger she finally located tapped his shovel. “The old bird was heavy,” he said. “That’s for sure.”

Aimée groaned inwardly. She’d have to give him a big tip.

He looked pointedly at his watch, sighed, then said, “It’s too late to put her back but you can see her for yourself.”

They wound over the gravel and dirt, past the graves of Zola and Degas. Midway, the grave digger paused and wiped his brow. “Over there.”

The marble mausoleum’s gate hung open. Dead flies, fossilized bees, and dusty plastic flower bouquets were strewn within.

“Doesn’t the Barolet family own this?”

“Leased for a hundred years,” he said, his tone matter-of-fact.

“Surely, it’s more trouble to dispose …”

“Mademoiselle, there’s a long waiting list of people eager for this space.” For the second time he looked at his watch.

“Her daughter paid,” Aimée said. “Here are the receipts.”

“Then she’s been notified. According to my
patron
, she wasn’t up to date with payments,” he said. “If she disputes this, let her talk to him on Saturday when he returns.”

A lot of good that would do, with Liane in prison.

“Meanwhile what happens?”

“We take what’s left to the boneyard.”

“Boneyard!”

The grave digger shrugged. “That’s standard procedure.” His blue overalls were stained and muddy.

What if this man was lying, trying to make more money.

“Let me see the coffin.”

He gestured to the right. “Over there, behind François Truffaut.”

Aimée walked behind the mausoleum. She saw two coffins, one newer and with tarnished brass handles, the other wooden and water-stained.

“Which one?”

“The fancy model,” he said. “Think of this like an eviction, I tell people.”

“Evicting the dead?”

“What do you want me to do, eh?” he sneered. “Someday you’ll be here too, Mademoiselle high and mighty!”

Burn me first
, she almost said.
Scatter my ashes from my balcony over the Seine, before a dirty old coot like you can rattle my bones.

Of course it all came down to money.

“How much?”

“Take that up with administration,” he said. “All I do is shovel up the leftovers and leave them for the bone men.”

Aimée hoped he didn’t see her shudder.

The cemetery office was closed. Shadows lengthened over the stone houses of the dead.

“Can’t you put her inside the mausoleum until I straighten this out?” she said, placing a hundred francs in his palm.

He rubbed his arms. “She’s heavy, that one!”

“I’ll make it worth your while,” she said, hating to have to smile and to try to coax the favor from him.

In answer, he wheeled a hydraulic lift from a nearby shed. She stared at the coffin, faded sepia images of her mother crowding her mind. Was her mother crumbling in one of these somewhere?

“If there’s no payment in three days, she’s out. Permanently,” he said. “I don’t do this twice.” The grave digger pumped the lift and pushed the coffin toward the mausoleum.

Aimée watched him. She stood perspiring in the heat, and he hadn’t even broken a sweat. “I thought you said she was heavy.”

“
Mais
she was!”

“Don’t tell me she lost weight since you moved her.”

He leered. “The other day she was heavy … you think I’m lying?”

“But, look, aren’t coffins supposed to be sealed?”

She pointed to the cracked white chips along the coffin lid ledge.

“I didn’t do that.”

“Why so defensive all of a sudden?”

“Freaks,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “Satan worshippers.” He looked over his shoulder, lowered his voice. “We don’t tell the families but cults break in here some nights. I find candles melted on the stones, even a dead chicken once!”

“Do they rob the coffins?”

He wouldn’t meet her eye, but he swiped his dirty finger across his lips. She took it to mean that he wouldn’t say.

“Open it,” she said. “I’m not paying otherwise and I’ll make a big stink with your boss.”

It was the last thing she wanted to see but Liane Barolet should know if she was being ripped off for an already desecrated coffin.

He handed her the crowbar. “Not my job.”

And he shuffled away over the gravel.

The lid moved easily. Too easily.

As the late afternoon sun slanted through the leaves, a bird swooped up into the hard blue sky. She steeled herself to look in the dark, earthy-smelling interior. Instead of a shrouded, decaying corpse she found an empty coffin.

She pushed the lid up further. The only things inside were a crumpled brown plastic bag with Neufarama written across it and dried leaves that crackled as she touched them. She remembered buying a sweater from a Neufarama store but they’d gone out of business in the seventies.

Tuesday Afternoon

O
USMANE
S
ADA, THE KORA PLAYER
, wanted to help Idrissa, but first he had to get direction. And only the marabout, the fortune-teller, could point the way.

Ousmane mounted the worn wooden steps of the Sentier hotel. Too bad Idrissa hadn’t come with him, but at least she was safe staying at his place. He knocked twice on the hotel door with the number 5 stenciled on it. From inside he heard a muffled
“Entrez.”

He removed his embroidered skullcap, took a deep breath, then opened the door.

“Bonjour,”
he said. “I seek guidance.”

The marabout nodded.

In the cheap hotel room on rue Beauregard, maps of star constellations were strewn over the ragged chenille-covered bed. He set an envelope in the marabout’s hollowed-out gourd bowl. The marabout, a bland-faced foreseer of the future, ignored his action. A marabout never acknowledged
hadiya
, gifts from his
taalibe
, his followers. In Ousmane’s village outside Dakar in Senegal, the price had been chickens.

The marabout’s
taalibe
would rebuild their wealth on the path to salvation. Hard work and many
hadiyas
improved one’s chances of going to Paradise. A spiritual economy, his father had called it.

But Ousmane’s father’s marabout, whose photo he wore in the talisman around his neck, would frown on this visit. Loyalty to one’s marabout was important. Even though Senegal was thousands of miles away, his pulse beat rapidly.

Ousmane inhaled the familiar willow bark and cinnamon scent from the burning cones. He saw the day’s fortune in Arabic letters tacked on the gouged plaster wall. He twitched. He’d felt out of sorts for days now. Must have
la grippe
—the flu. Sweating and feverish, he felt thirsty.

The marabout would throw the shells, arrange the beads, and interpret the signs. Tell him if his woman, Cheike, still waited to marry him. So he would return home, which was what his heart told him. And the signs would show him how to keep Idrissa safe.

He’d borrow the fare from his cousin Khalifa, a sanitation engineer, to keep him from drinking it away. Khalifa was different, he liked it here. The food clotted with cow’s excrement they called butter, the raw horse meat eaten only by jaguars and tigers in his country, the painted women who preened and sold themselves on the street like pheasants in the market.

Since his childhood, Ousmane had strung fishing lines, patched and woven the nets, to face another day in the tepid ocean. He remembered gripping the flapping fins and shining scales of the fish his family caught in the turquoise waters. At first, his work in the Sentier sewing factory had seemed bearable. He slept alongside other workers on mattresses on the factory floor, like he’d done at home on mats with his siblings. Yet the cold damp from the stone floor seeped into his bones. Stayed there. No crusty vanilla sand caked on his calves. There were no warm orange sunsets laced by the smell of roasting peanuts.

Idrissa had noticed. His music suffered. Some nights he felt so tired after pressing and ironing the clothes in the factory, too tired to pluck the strings of his
kora
to accompany Idrissa’s songs.

“Ask your question,” said the marabout.

A stained yellow floral drapery flapped in the breeze from the open window. Hesitant at first, Ousmane wiped his brow, then gathered his courage and spoke.

The marabout threw the shells. The sound as the cowries clicked competed with the shouts of cart pullers below in the street. The marabout frowned. “Your question was not framed with a pure heart,” he intoned. He pointed to the shells’ configuration. “Don’t be stingy with the truth.” The marabout’s long brown fingers snaked over the shells. He waited, lost in thought.

“Tell me what the shells say.” Ousmane trembled, asking in their language, Wolof.

“Tiens!”
said the marabout, refusing to speak their native tongue. “Your request rebounds on you. Where is your respect?”

“I’m confused.”

The marabout reached over and flipped Ousmane’s shirt collar down. He pointed to the talisman around Ousmane’s neck. “The shells confirm, you belong in another’s following.”

Ousmane cringed.

“It’s forbidden, you know that,” the marabout said. “Now a curse will bite at your heels, as wild dogs guard a village.”

Guilt filled Ousmane. Would the marabout’s curse doom him, or Idrissa?

W
EDNESDAY

Wednesday Afternoon

A
IMÉE RAN INTO
the office of Leduc Detective and threw her leather bag on the settee. “I need to go to Frésnes tomorrow. May I borrow your car, René?”

“What happened?”

“Something bizarre.” She told him about visiting Liane Barolet in Frésnes and the empty coffin in Montmartre cemetery.

“For more than twenty years, Liane’s been paying?” he asked.

Aimée waved the plastic Neufarama bag.

“Pretty expensive just to store a plastic bag,” he said. “I’d demand a refund.”

Now it came back to her. She recalled Jutta’s comment that her mother must have returned to Aimée’s apartment or to the cemetery. At the time, she thought Jutta had been talking in riddles. Now it made sense.

“Wouldn’t Liane have asked Jutta to pay instead of you?” René asked.

“But she’d just found out after Jutta left,” Aimée said. “What if Jutta was looking for something kept inside the coffin?”

René blinked. His fingers paused on the keyboard. “That’s a big jump.”

She perched on her desk. “Not really when you think about it. It’s accessible to anyone who can hop over the walls at night and jimmy the coffin open. No need for storage keys or to evade guards at night. And it could hold something big. The possibilities are endless,” she said. “Did Jutta find the coffin empty … is that why she came to me? Or did she find something, take it away, and hide it?”

“That doesn’t make sense, unless Jutta was hiding it from someone else,” René said. “But you said she insinuated that your mother had sent you something, or hidden it, for you to find, while you were away as an exchange student.”

The old frustration returned. And the hurt of not knowing.

“Papa destroyed everything of hers,” she said. “Nothing’s left. But Liane Barolet hinted that Jutta received a letter from my mother,” she said. “She must be alive!”

“How do you know? The woman could be desperate, lying just to get you to take care of the fees for coffin.” René shook his head. “Face it, Aimée, you’re chasing a trail that’s been cooling for more than twenty years.” He edged himself off the chair with effort and stood. “Your mother left, she never came back, and she’s not going to.”

“She’s alive, René,” she said. “She has to be. I’ll find her.”

René crossed to the coatrack, took his cane, and lifted his linen jacket off its hook with it. She couldn’t see his face.

“Say it, René.”

Instead of sympathizing, René seemed bitter.

“I’m going to my tae kwon do workout,” he said. He picked up his bag with the Yuan Dojo label and paused at the door. “Have you ever thought, Aimée,” he said from the door, “that if she is alive maybe she doesn’t want to be found?”

R
ENÉ’S WORDS
sliced her to the quick. She couldn’t work. It seemed like the very walls mocked her. She walked to the mail pile, rifled through the bills, and found a fat brown envelope addressed to “A. Leduc—Personal.”

She slit open the bulky envelope. Stuffed inside, she found one folio of her mother’s small bound notebook. On it, in thick block letters, were written six words: “Cooperate and the rest is yours.”

For a moment, joy rushed over her. Then came the awful realization that Jutta’s killer had sent her this as a bargaining chip. She slipped on gloves, took the kit from her bottom desk drawer, and dusted for prints. Just in case.

Aimée looked at the postmark: Hôtel des Postes on rue Etienne Marcel. Two blocks from where Jutta was killed.

She swept papers off her desk, then gingerly set down the notebook pages. These pages were different from those Jutta had shown her. The book had been halved, or quartered, the binding ripped and split. Below a drawing of Emil with red suspenders was what looked like a diagram for a mouse house with tiny platforms, running wheels, and a spiral staircase, a tiny box, an arrow.

Aimée looked closer. Under the Emil drawing, was another, with a sketch of horizontal lines, banked. Slanted. She stood back. Was it some kind of pattern?

She walked over to the window. Faint warm breezes from the Seine brushed over her, then dissipated. Yet even at this distance, she couldn’t make out the pattern.

With care she scanned all eight pages into her computer. Then lifted the prints. Blurry and indistinct … the fingers of hundreds who’d handled the envelope. Not a print came from the notebook, it had been wiped clean.

Of course.

Darting a furtive look around her office, she lifted the notebook pages, pressed them to her lips. Inhaled the old paper scent. Silly. No one could see her. Then she sat at her terminal, and tried to make sense of the lines.

She ran Viva-1, an industrial art program. She played with the lines. Stretching, bending, and looping them. All she got was psychedelic-colored bands when she enlarged them.

Of course, she thought. Enhance, then reduce them.

inailgidom

An anagram?

She played around, trying to form the letters into words, substituting letters.

Nothing.

Then she simply reversed the letters.

modigliani

Amedeo Modigliani was a sculptor, painter, and friend of Picasso. An Italian, from a Jewish ghetto, who came to Paris and dissipated—or enhanced—his talents, depending on whom one read.

Had her mother admired Modigliani? She looked closer and saw elongated figures in the lines … an odd complementary fit. On each roof corner of the diagrammed mouse house were elongated gargoyles.

Aimée went online and did a search on Modigliani. His pieces were in museums, though a majority were in private collections. She dug further. An auction at Sotheby’s a few years ago had netted hundreds of thousands. But some paintings had been missing since the war … several from the Laborde collection.

Something clicked in her head.

Laborde … Laborde … where had she heard that name?

Of course, he’d been kidnapped by Haader-Rofmein. She found a bottle of Badoit, poured the sparkling water into her espresso cup, and got to work.

She searched newspaper databases for information about the industrialist Paul Laborde. Born in Mulhouse, on the French-German border, of a French father and a German mother, he’d amassed great wealth after the war, rebuilding steel foundries along the Rhine. He’d made gobs of money. Smelled dirty, as her papa used to say.

Haader-Rofmein took a particular dislike to him and his business, especially after his firm acquired several steel foundries, then mines in Africa. They targeted his company, pointing out that his steel, reworked, of course, ended up as bayonets in Vietnam.

Laborde wasn’t the only target, of course. The Krupp and Thyssen families suffered extortion and kidnap attempts. But Haader-Rofmein discovered the address of one of Laborde’s homes and burgled it as well as kidnapping Laborde. News coverage dried up after a shoot-out in the forest and Laborde’s death.

A light went on in her head. Her mother, the Modigliani paintings, Laborde, and the radicals who’d kidnapped him were all connected. Somehow.

Here was Laborde’s tie-in to Haader-Rofmein. From what Jutta had said, the Action-Réaction and Haader-Rofmein gangs had melded together. But how did, or could, Romain Figeac’s manuscript fit in with Sartre’s old interview with Haader about agit888, perhaps with her mother as interpreter?

She called Martine. Told her what she found and the connection she suspected.

“Laborde didn’t get in bed with terrorists, Aimée,” Martine said. “Quite the oppposite. His shady past included Vichy collaboration and using mercenaries for his African investments.”

“Right, but they took over his house—”

“Whoa,” Martine said. “You’re right. They kidnapped him, then he went Stockholm Syndrome.”

“Stockholm Syndrome?”

“Lots of hostages come to identify with their captors after a while. It was named after the Stockholm embassy incident.”

“He couldn’t have identified too long,” Aimée said. “The gang killed him, didn’t they?”

“Never proved, and no one was charged,” Martine said.

Strange, Aimée thought.

“What about Laborde’s art collection?”

“Give me some time,” Martine said and hung up.

While Aimée downloaded more information, she turned the notebook pages. Her heart caught. Only one more drawing of Emil, his whiskers running off the page.

She wished the book hadn’t been torn apart and ruined. She clutched her knees and rocked back and forth, lost in old thoughts. Here she was, an adult with a successful business and a partner, yet she was still obsessed with her mother. She had to admit it, she had no life beyond René, Miles Davis, her computer, and this obsession.

René was probably right. Liane Barolet might be leading her on. But that wouldn’t stop her from finding out the truth, from finding her mother.

And what had Jutta wanted … what did her killer want … what had her mother left or hidden?

The phone rang.

“Allô?”

“So glad I caught you, Mademoiselle Leduc.”

That dense, creamy voice. “Anything new with Christian, Monsieur Mabry?”

“Some issues came up,” he said. “Can you meet me tonight?”

“Would this be a consultation?”

“You could call it that.”

“What time?”

“Eight
P.M
.”

She let a pause hang in the air, long enough, she hoped, to seem busy. “I’ll fit you in.”

“Let’s meet opposite the Bourse in the Yabon art squat. He’ll join us.”

“So Christian’s all right?” she asked. “I’ve been worried.”

“No more of a crisis than usual,” Etienne Mabry said. “Third floor, Hubert’s salon.”

Pleased and immediately panicked about what to wear, Aimée hung up.

S
HE NEEDED
to get back on good terms with René and to get up to speed with Michel’s computer system. After tackling the pile of papers on her desk, she checked Michel’s database and was struck by the volume of his supply orders, many dating from early spring, that showed up as unpaid.

How could Michel, a struggling new designer, obtain that kind of credit? She searched and discovered one of his uncle Nessim’s companies, Kookie Mode, had guaranteed his line of credit and received the invoices for his supplies; leather, fabric, and sewing needs.

She dug further. The scary thing was, Kookie Mode had sought protection from its creditors. Wasn’t that the first step on the road to bankruptcy? She made a note to check further.