Murder on the Ile Saint-Louis (17 page)

“Now lower, more
décolletage!
”

A porn video? They wouldn’t see much of her in this agnès b. spaghetti-strap dress. She bent and thrust her chest out while peering through the haze for another door.

“Now jump in place once, then run over there—make space for her, please—as if you’re afraid.”

At this moment, that wouldn’t require her to act.

Someone pounded on the door.

She jumped higher than she’d intended, heard the table vibrate when she landed, then kept running.

“Over here,” someone said. She found herself by a group of women sitting on the edge of a small stage. Some filed their nails; one thumbed a
Marie Claire
magazine. All wore foundation, black eye makeup, and had platinum or dirty-blonde hair reaching below their shoulders.

A number was thrust at her.

“We’re ready. Mount the stage, please, Mesdemoiselles.”

She followed them, out of place except for the number that she—like the rest of them—held. Unlike the others, she had dark spiky hair, wore no heels, and had no
décolletage
to speak of. They stood on the stage like a lineup of Barbie dolls; she was the black sheep.

“One last dip, please.”

What was with this dip?

She watched the others, mimicked them, and thrust her chest out even more. Several men had entered the room. She heard the static of a walkie-talkie. The
flics
.

She was caught in bright lights on stage.

“Number 13.”

She waited for one of the women to step forward. Looked around behind her for a door. Saw a red lighted EXIT sign. But she needed her bag with her laptop, and the man had taken it!

“Number 13!”

“That’s you,” the blonde woman next to her hissed. And she shoved Aimée forward.

“We need to question everyone,” a
flic
was saying.

Her hands shook.

The man who’d taken her bag clutched her arm and guided her to the table, behind which several men were seated. She saw a pile of whips and jackets on the chair. “I’m cold, do you mind?” Without waiting for a reply, she pulled the closest jacket to her—a hand-stitched feathered brocade affair further adorned with a vintage diamanté brooch—and slipped her arms into the sleeves.

“Your portfolio’s not here,” said a man at the table.

The
flics
stood in a circle by the strobe lights. “Auditions, I told you,” a tall man was saying. “We’ve been here all afternoon, Officer. We rent this room by the hour. Now can we get back to work, eh?”

“Who’s your agent?” the man asked her.

Aimée thought quickly. “Her card’s in my bag. Can I have it?” She beamed her brightest smile at him. “I just switched to a new agency.”

Her eyes stung from the smoke and the glare of the lights. Someone thrust her bag and shoes into her lap. She dug into her card case, picked one of her aliases with a Saint Germain address, and handed it to him.

“If you’ll assemble everyone in the courtyard,” the
flic
said, annoyance in his voice. “It won’t take long.”

They’d have a crowd to question with the actors, the women at the audition, and the crew. Before they could proceed, they would try to contain the possible witnesses while waiting for the medical examiner.

“I’ll be in touch,” the man with the tousled hair said, his gaze skimming her legs.

I bet you will, she thought.

“Feel like an aperitif?” he asked.

Fluff from the feather edging on the jacket got in her eyes and she blinked.

“Love to,” she smiled. Glanced at her watch. Shrugged. “But”—she leaned forward—“this will take forever.”

He turned around.
“Merde!”

She grabbed her tube of Stop Traffic Red and swiped it across her lips.

“Unless we go out the back door.” She licked her lips.

He grinned. “Bet you look good in just feathers.”

“I need to make a list,” the
flic
was saying, “Everyone who’s here. Get your things, ladies.” A
flic
gestured to them. “You two, now.”

She lingered at the back of the line filing out, trying to catch the eye of the man with the tousled hair. But the
flic
clapped him on the shoulder and guided him to the front of the line. So much for her hope to use him as cover. What could she do? She leaned down as if to pick up her bag, got onto her hands and knees, and crawled under the table. She could see several pairs of black-stockinged legs and two pairs of solid police brogues just beyond her nose.

The damn feathers kept coming off. She was molting. She crawled sideways, thankful for the dim light. If she could just reach the stage curtains and get behind them . . .

“Wasn’t there another one?” a
flic
asked.

She reached for the loose change in the bottom of her bag and pitched the coins out onto the floor. They hit the surface, then rolled.

“Et alors
, someone dropped a purse,” a voice said.

Heads ducked, eyes focused on the coins, and she crab-walked behind the curtains. She stood against the wall and pulled the dusty curtains around her, trying to cover her toes.

She waited, praying they’d hurry and that she wouldn’t sneeze. Her nose itched and she pinched it hard. The exit door lay behind her, stage left.

“I only count twelve.”

“No, that’s my ten-franc coin.”

“I dropped it; give it back.”

She had to take her chance right now!

She slid from behind the curtain and over to the door, pushed it open, and gently closed it behind her. The exit led to a dank passage, so narrow that her shoulders scraped the sides of the adjacent stone buildings. She broke into a run and found herself on the street next to the post office in a drizzling rain. Several blue-and-white
flic
cars on her right blocked the way to the quai.

Another pulled up to her left. A bus, wipers going, was stuck in traffic in front of her.

She grabbed a real estate journal from a newsstand, put her head down, and shielded her face with it as she put the stopped bus between herself and the theatre. Keep walking, don’t stop, make it to the
brocante
, she told herself. A siren wailed on her right and she heard the squeal of brakes.

Wednesday Afternoon

RENÉ FUMED, TAPPING his short fingers on the Citroën’s steering wheel in time to the baroque chamber music on France2. He sat stalled in traffic at Porte de Vincennes with no reception on his cell phone and looming trucks sending waves of rain over the windshield. His seat was customized for his height. He adjusted the knob that extended the accelerator pedal to ease his aching leg.

Five centimeters did it. Eased the twinge in his right leg. But nothing alleviated the low back pain radiating down his legs after the fall he’d taken at the dojo last week. Even though he had earned a black belt in karate, it still happened.

Not that he’d ever let on about that to Aimée. Or that he hoped they’d become more than partners. He repressed that thought.

He planned on buying a stroller in which to push Stella instead of carrying her. But looking at the dashboard clock, he saw that, due to the unexpected traffic, it was now too late to shop. And all this driving and dampness had exacerbated his hip dysplasia.

A sickening crunch and he lurched forward, feeling a sharp twinge in his chest as it hit the steering wheel.

“
Merde!
” Just what he needed . . . a fender bender. He punched the seat in frustration. Whoever had hit him better have insurance. He switched off the engine, took out paper and pen and his umbrella.

“Not even a dent,” said a red-haired trucker in a rain-beaded slicker after peering at the Citroën’s bumper.

He’d see for himself.

The trucker grinned at him as he took in René’s height. “Where’s the driver,
petit?
”

“There’s a long scratch on the chrome.” René pointed it out, containing his anger. His 1968 Citroën, specially customized, had a huge slash on its bumper. “See.”

“I said, where’s the driver, little man?”

“I hope you have insurance,” René told him. “And I’m the driver.” He wrote down the truck’s license plate number and the model. “Your license and registration, please.”

The truck driver bent down and peered under René’s umbrella. “You must be a dwarf
flic!”

Horns tooted in the pouring rain. Traffic had started to move. Angry shouts came from the cars behind them. The upright row of budding cypresses lining the highway glistened and swayed in the wind.

“
Et alors
, I only tapped you,” the trucker said with a short laugh. Dismissively, he rubbed his hands, big meaty ones, the skin bulging over a wedding ring. “Quit making a big fuss.”

René didn’t relish arguing on the expressway in the beating rain, his Italian shoes and the cuffs of his suit pants getting soaked. “Have it your way. I’ll deal with your firm and mention your rudeness to your supervisor. I doubt that he’ll be happy to hear about the damage and your attitude, Alphonse.”

The truck driver poked René’s shoulder. “How do you know my name?”

“It’s stitched on your jacket lapel. And I’ll know where you live, your hobbies, and your bank balance in an hour or so.”

“That’s harassment,” the truck driver said. His eyes darkened. “What kind of freak are you?” He raised his fist and took a swipe at René.

René jumped back into a puddle and slipped. Pain shot up to his knee. Even though he was a black belt, with his leg pinned behind him at this angle no kick could save him. He clutched the bumper, made himself get up. He tried to will down his fear. A fight in the rain on the shoulder of the wet highway—no way could he win with his leg already throbbing in pain. Right now he couldn’t afford an injury: the Fontainebleau contract, Stella. . . .

He darted a look at the truck’s windshield and saw pictures of children hanging from the visor. Since childhood he’d had to learn how to deal with bullies. Now he fought back the only other way he knew.

“Alphonse, I’ll find out your children’s names, their school, the teachers you have parent conferences with,” he said. “Computers, Alphonse, I work with computers and it’s all there, if you know where to find it.”

For the first time the driver looked unsure. Cars passing them in the next lane rolled down their windows. “A giant and the
petit
making a big jam,” someone laughed. A siren wailed from the other side of the road, red lights from a police car reflecting in the puddles as it slowed down.

The truck driver hesitated. “Hey, let’s talk this over. No need to get them involved.”

René knew any trucker involved in an accident lost his job. Zero tolerance.

“So, Alphonse, I waited six weeks for this customized bumper. You want to hand over the eighteen hundred francs that I paid for it and call it quits?”

“What do you mean?” Alphonse’s eyes narrowed at the mention of money. Scratch the surface and no doubt he was just one generation removed from the land belonging to a frugal farm household.

“Make it nineteen hundred, so it ships faster. Cash.” René pulled out his dead cell phone. “Or I’ll make a report.”

The truck driver reached under his rain slicker, pulled out a wad of francs. “That’s all I have.”

“Not enough, Alphonse,” René said, thumbing the wet bills.

“I’ll check what I have in the truck.”

René climbed back into his car with fifteen hundred francs in cash and four hundred francs’ worth of
ticket de resto
restaurant coupons. Not bad; he’d eat out more often.

He took off his wet shoes and blasted the heater and defroster. At least he hadn’t had to resort to a punch to Alphonse’s middle. As if he could have managed it with his throbbing leg.

He tried his cell phone again. Still no reception. He’d canceled drinks twice this week on Magali, his sometime girlfriend and clubbing companion. He didn’t think she’d understand why he’d rather change a diaper than go to a rave. He couldn’t understand it himself.

Traffic moved, then halted. He turned off the radio and, to keep his mind off the pain in his legs, switched on the alphanumeric police scanner under the dashboard. A birthday gift from Aimée, only installed last weekend. He hadn’t yet had time to crack the scrambled frequencies used for high alerts and terrorist attacks. So far, all he could decipher was the coded
flic
lingo on the unscrambled channel. They all watched American
télé
and liked to throw in veiled
Columbo
style references. Or what they figured were
Columbo
style.

Horns blared behind him. A big space had opened up between him and the car ahead. He brightened up when he saw the cars on the off-ramp moving.

“ . . . bleeder . . . units in the area, respond 41 Quai d’Anjou . . . refresh that sir, victim . . .” came from the police scanner.

René let in the clutch, shifted into first.

“ . . . scene secured . . . awaiting the Big E.”

The medical examiner, of course. He leaned over to turn up the volume.

“ID intact . . . Édouard Vavin, 32 rue Rocher in the ninth . . .”

Vavin . . . could it be
their
Vavin who lived in the now-gentrified old Jewish district near the Freemasons lodge?

“ . . . work address, according to ID, 6 rue des Chantiers . . .”

René’s clutch ground, and the car jerked and stalled. Aimée had met Vavin there. That was Regnault’s office address.

Wednesday Early Evening

“BONJOUR, ALLÔ?”
AIMÉE said, stamping her feet inside the doorway. She shut the door to the secondhand shop, feeling as if she’d been ridden hard and put away wet. Sodden feathers stuck to her black dress and glitter dust sprinkled her damp red high-tops.

This had to be the place Morbier had mentioned. She’d spied it from across the street. Vavin’s keys jingled in her pocket. She pulled out her phone and dialed Regnault’s number. A message told her that the offices had closed for the day. So she might have some time. She hoped so.

She’d dry off and question the shopkeeper until the
flics
left and she could grab a taxi to Regnault’s.

In the dim shop, she made out a hand-lettered sign: ESTATES PURCHASED AND CONSIGNMENTS WELCOMED—JEAN CAPLAN, PROPRIETOR. An old man was sorting through the contents of a cardboard box. Piles of yellowed newspapers tied in bundles with rotting twine, shelves of dust-covered salt shakers and the odd marble bust, old colored-glass liquor bottles, and a warped eighteenth-century desk. A pewter-tinged suit of armor stood in the corner, a collection of swords mounted on the wall behind it. A mixture of junk and treasure if one was to sift through it, she thought.

“Monsieur Caplan?”

“I’m closed, Mademoiselle,” the man said. His voice was curiously high pitched for someone his age. White hair curled over his shoulders. A half-full glass of red wine sat on a small table next to an uncorked decanter. “Forgot to put the sign up. Come back tomorrow.”

She recalled Morbier’s conversation.

“I’d like to ask you something, Monsieur,” she said, walking toward him and wishing he’d turn on the sagging chandelier. The gaslight fixtures and ocher-patinaed walls looked as if they hadn’t been cleaned since the last century. A framed Honoré Daumier print of a laundress with her child on the Quai d’Anjou steps met her eyes.

“What’s that . . .
alors,
Mademoiselle, I’m busy right now,” he said turning around. “I’ve got this consignment to sort.”

To sort and leave in the dust. She wondered how he did business.

“I’ll make it quick.” She summoned a smile. Sirens sounded outside on the street. She couldn’t go out there yet.

He set down a packet of crumbling violet envelopes addressed in faded ink to “Commandant Sillot, Arsenal.” Old love letters. Amazing the things people find in their attics.”

Great-granny’s hots for a regimental officer didn’t interest her.

“In your conversation with Commissaire Morbier, you mentioned . . .”

“Who?”

“You reported to the Commissariat that an old
clochard—
” His eyes flashed. “Her name is Hélène. I spoke with a young
flic
who treated me like a senile fool. Whether or not I am, I pay their salaries with my taxes and I demand to be treated with courtesy.”

He took a swig of wine. She needed him to keep calm so he would recount the information that he’d reported.

“
Exactement
. That’s why I’m here. We’re checking every lead and I apologize.”

“You’re apologizing for the police?” He squinted at her. His wine-tainted breath hit her in the face. “Apologizing, the police?”

“We’ve got our best people on it, I assure you, Monsieur.” She tried not to wince at the trite phrase.

“That’s a first!”

A cynic. Not a typical reaction from his generation, but then perhaps she had laid it on too thick.

He stared at her. Red and purple feather fluff from her jacket floated up with the dust motes, then landed on a warped harpsichord.

“You’re undercover, that’s it,” he said. “I understand.”

She passed this man’s shop all the time. Had seen him on the island, recognized his long woolen coat from the quai where she walked Miles Davis. Cut out of context and in her feathery outfit, he didn’t seem to know her.

“Your a sleeper. That’s what they call it,
non?”
he asked.

She glanced outside. More police cars and one lane closed to traffic. She was trapped.

She pulled up a stool with three legs, a chair for him. “Tell me about Hélène.”

He glanced at the wall clock, a ticking period piece in need of a new glass face. “She comes by if she’s hungry.”

He blinked. A sad look in his long face. “It’s a long story.”

“I’m sure the pertinent details come to you. We don’t have much time.” She didn’t know if this would go anywhere. Yet, as her father used to say, omit the smallest lead and it whacked you in the head later.

“I’m ashamed to say it. Life’s treated Hélène hard. You don’t know.”

“Try me.”

“They ridicule her. The young ones most of all,” he pounded his fists together. The veins in his face more pronounced. “But what would
they
have done . . . how could they know what it was like?”

His gaze was far away, in another time, another place.

She had to pull him back, gently. Coax him.

“I’m listening, Monsieur.”

“We lived next door. Her family owned this shop,” he said, his voice hard and abrupt. “What’s left of it’s hers, I tell her all the time. Take it. Go to court, make a claim, I’ll give her legal rights. No one had the right to auction it at the end of the war. Least of all my father, to buy it for nothing.”

She groaned inside. The story would come out his way. Painful and tortured.

“What did Hélène see?” she tried again.

He shrugged.

Great. “According to your report, she has conversations with imaginary people. So why did you call if you . . . ?”

“She talks to Paulette. But the last time I saw Paulette was end of September 1942. Right there.” He stood shuffled to the window. Pointed. “It was a rain-drenched day, like today. She was right there, in front of Fondation Halphen, only then it was a tenement.”

Behind a fence, Aimée saw a soot-blackened building in the throes of gutting and renovation.

“An eyesore to the SS. They requisitioned the town house and its contents—art. Now it’s the Polish Foundation.”

Aimée focused on the
flic
cars, their blue-and-white lights flashing over the cobblestones. A man she recognized was getting out of one. Morbier.

She moved back from the window.

“I don’t understand, Monsieur.”

His eyes glazed. “The
flics
came then, like now.”

She had to bring him back to earth, to what the woman—the
clochard
, whoever she was—had said.

“Monsieur, how is this relevant?”

“Hélène bribed her little sister, Paulette, with nougat candy to pick up Hélène’s homework from her classmate in Fondation Halphen,” he continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “
Flics
under Geheime Staatspolizei—Gestapo—orders rounded up Jews who lived there, forty of them children.”

“You mean . . . ?”

“They dragged Paulette out with the others, still holding Hélène’s math book. I saw them herded into waiting trucks. Now a plaque marks the building. You see, right there.”

And she knew. She recalled the plaque on the wall. All 112 inhabitants, including children, had been rounded up. And deported.

“Paulette wasn’t even Jewish. But they slammed the truck doors closed.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?”

She saw the pain in his eyes.

“But we all saw what was happening. We knew. People hurried off, trying to melt, to evaporate into the stone buildings. To avoid seeing or being seen. The shame, the fear. Hélène came walking down the street. She stood right there, holding her laundry basket.”

How did that fit into this story? “Laundry, Monsieur?”

“It was cheaper if you did it yourself in the
bateau lavoir
near Pont Marie,” he said, his tone matter-of-fact.

The old laundry barges had been moored in the Seine until the fifties. It was hard to believe the river had once been clean enough to do laundry in.

“Then Hélène was screaming . . . her basket fell from her hands, the white sheets lay on the cobbles as she stood on the street, pleading.” He shook his head. “They had quotas, they told her.”

Aimée hated these stories—the pain, the oozing guilt. The helplessness to alter the past.

“Every day Hélène and her father went to the Place de l’Opera and waited in line at the Kommandantur.”

The former Kommandantur now housed a Berlitz center, the Royal Air Maroc office, and Aimée’s bank, BNP Paribas. The bank manager had moaned to her one day in his office about the techs finding a rat-chewed cloth swastika while tearing up floorboards to install fiber-optic cables.

“All futile,” Caplan said. “Paulette had left on the Auschwitz-Birkenau convoy number 37 on September 25.”

Aimée couldn’t speak. There was nothing to say.

“Hélène blamed herself. Her parents sent her to a cousin in Le Puy. What happened to them later, I don’t know. But there was heavy bombing of the southern train lines . . . so many never came back.”

He scanned the street and shuffled back to his chair. Sat down with a sigh. “After the Libération, my father bought this shop at auction. It would make me sick to hear him justifying his ‘investment.’ Then the store passed to me.” He gave a tight smile. “I wanted to study medicine. But that’s not your problem. A dozen years ago or so, Hélène reappeared. I’d thought she was dead. She wanted to go to sleep in her bedroom. Vacant eyed, she spoke to an imaginary Paulette.”

Aimée wanted to know about the present, not this sad past, the shame clinging to these walls. Here in the dust, a miasma of the forgotten was almost palpable, though his words and the plaque were the only testimony to what had happened long ago in front of his door.

“To survive, you move on. But it’s still here.” He hit his chest. “No one likes remembering. Those who broke, like Hélène, live in a twilight of the past. She’ll go for months, rational and even able to work, and then . . .”

He pulled a much-folded
Elle
magazine from under the cushion of his chair. An issue from the sixties with a young Catherine Deneuve on the cover, pert in Courreges boots in
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
. Now a collectors’ item. He opened it and took out a black-and-white class photo from the École des Garçons around the corner. Another photo showed a street scene with two laughing girls in school smocks, petting a puppy in front of the butcher shop; the butcher in his apron; people sitting in chairs on the street, fanning themselves. “See, that’s how the island used to be, shopkeepers, the aristocrats, talking together, a village.”

She didn’t need a nostalgia lesson; she’d grown up here and heard it before.

“That’s Paulette and Hélène.”

Preserved in that moment of joy, playing with a new puppy . . . too bad joy couldn’t be frozen and thawed at will.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but getting back to the present . . .”

“You don’t understand, do you?” he said, putting the photos away under the cushion. “Forget it.”

She’d rushed him. Stuck her foot in it and he’d clammed up, changed his mind. Or his guilt had taken over. Whichever, she’d lost him. Yet this story was relevant somehow. She had to curb her impatience.

“Try to remember what Hélène told you while it’s fresh in your mind, Monsieur.”

“Hélène’s confused,” he said. “She had shock treatments that left scars. You know what that means.”

Aimée recalled how widespread shock treatments for the depressed and deranged had been once. Now one took a pill.

“I shouldn’t have called the Commissariat,” he said.

“Monsieur, we need your help. No one’s accusing her. Since you’ve told me this much, it’s better I hear from her . . .”

He pulled back in his chair.

“Let me reassure you, Monsieur,” she said. “No questioning at the Commissariat, nothing like that.”

“Questioning, Commissariat?” His voice shook. “
They
said that, too.”

“Who?”

He gestured to the cobblestone-paved street outside. “The
flics
who rounded the people up
.
But no one ever came back.”

“That happened more than fifty years ago. I’m talking about now. A young woman has been murdered and if Hélène was there—”

“She’s not insane.” He shook his head. “She can’t be locked in Saint Catherine’s with the loonies. She keeps herself clean and asks for nothing. If she did anything, she’s not responsible.”

Aimée’s jaw dropped as she registered his meaning.

“Responsible! You’re saying Hélène may have killed . . . ?”

“I said nothing. Get out!”

His words shook her. Hélène had to be in her sixties, or even older. And she recalled the mechanic Momo’s words.

“Did she wear a scarf with butterflies, pink?”

He scratched his head. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

Big jump. Or was it? “You think she may have killed the person who threw the young woman into the Seine, that she may have confused the victim with Paulette, don’t you?”

He turned away from her.

“She’d have to be strong, Monsieur. And then, where’s the killer’s body? Exactly what did Hélène say? It’s important.”

“She said, ‘I took care of it.’”

“That could mean she acted in self-defense or even that she did nothing at all.”

“
Exactement.
Forget it, I’ve got work to do.”

“But there’s been a second murder,” she said. “A man was killed in the theatre. We can’t forget it.”

He clutched the armrest, surprised. “What?”

“I thought you knew why the
flics
surrounded the quai.” She pulled out the photo. “Have you seen this young woman around?” She pointed at Nelie.

No recognition shone in his eyes. His body deflated. He looked smaller, as if his flesh was retreating into itself. Protected, in a shell.

And then she noticed the silent line of tears trickling down his wrinkled cheeks.

“Monsieur, please.” She put her arm around him. His shoulders were so thin, like a sparrow’s.

He shook her arm off, wiped his face with his sleeve, and sobbed. “Leave . . . just leave.”

Guilt pierced her; reducing an old man to tears hadn’t been on her agenda. Her ringing cell phone broke into his muffled sobs.