"So, you knew her before she met Gerard?"
"As I've said, her apartment was very near. She would shop here, we would talk. We were of one spirit, do you understand?"
Maggie nodded. Elise had, of course, never mentioned this woman in any letter or phone conversation to Maggie or her family.
"I was older but we were both artistes, in our own ways. We met when she came into the shop one day after her art classes. Your sister was very beautiful, Mademoiselle. She would have made a wonderful model. We talked and became friends. Soon, we would shop together, have dinner together. She was so different from my other French friends, yes? Her...American-ness made her blunt and forward. I found it charming." Michele smiled at the memory. "Elise wanted so much to be French and, in many ways, she was very French. But it was the, how can I say this? her straightforwardness, yes? that I found beguiling and valuable."
"She shot from the hip," Maggie suggested.
"Exactement. To be so beautiful and so honest..."
"Elise didn't always tell the truth," Maggie added gently.
Zouk laughed. "No, of course not. I wasn't talking of honesty in that way. Elise had many secrets and some of them so bad that I feared they would end up killing. But we resonated, she and I. The beautiful American artiste. Tortured, intelligent. And the most loving of friends." She glanced at Maggie to see her reaction. "I loved her very much," she said.
"And Gerard?" Maggie prompted.
"When Elise met Gerard," Zouk said, her cheeks darkening in anger. "everything started to die for her. We saw less and less of each other until, poof! Nothing. He moved her to his apartment--filthy pigsty!--in Montmarte. She would write me. We live in the same city, but she would only write me!" Michele Zouk's eyes were wide and indignant. "Then, he drags her and the child south--"
"You knew Nicole too?"
Zouk got up to rummage through a bureau drawer standing against a wall in the cramped little room. She returned holding a small photograph. She examined it carefully herself and then handed it to Maggie. Maggie felt her heart squeeze to see Elise, a few years younger and smiling sweetly at the camera. In her lap was eight-month old Nicole, a thin and pallid baby with large eyes and dark hair. Maggie scrutinized the tiny face of the baby in an attempt to see a resemblance to the Nicole now living in Atlanta.
"May I keep this, please?" she asked the woman. "I...I'll have a copy made and return it to you, okay?"
Zouk sat back down. "Keep it," she said, straightening out the long, languid pleats of her skirt with pale, tapered fingers. "After they moved to the Cote d'Azure," she continued. "I never saw her again."
"But she still wrote to you?"
"She did." Zouk tossed a small wadded-up paper napkin at the tea tray perched on the tasseled hassock. "Monsieur Dubois is a swine and a jackal," she said. "He is your murderer, Mademoiselle. I am sure of it." Michele Zouk's eyes were a deep, frigid blue.
"Do you know Monsieur Dubois very well?" Maggie asked the French woman.
Michele's face hardened into a frown. "You are looking to find him in Paris, are you not?"
"I am."
Zouk contemplated Maggie briefly and held her teacup to her lips.
"I know where you can find him," she said grimly.
Chapter Eighteen
1
The little china plate that held her two over-sized croissants was obviously antique, Maggie noted, as she spread freshly-made jam on her rolls. She had risen early to breakfast in the hotel before the rush of tourists and travelers, and had the pleasure of a solitary meal in a very sunny and very French dining room.
After she had left Chez Zouk, Maggie had come directly back to her hotel and gone to bed. Now, refreshed and ready to begin her investigations, Maggie ticked off her to-do list on a small pad of paper. The walls of the little dining room were lavishly papered in a country French mini-fleur design combined with an elaborate border and ribboned panels. It was pretty in a confusing sort of way, Maggie decided. The same unpleasant young woman who worked the front desk served her coffee and croissants and was no less cross in this new role. Maggie was determined to ignore her while being as cheerful as possible herself during her stay at L'Etoile Verte.
After breakfast, Maggie dropped off her room key at the front desk and left the hotel, heading north again toward Notre-Dame. There seemed to be even more people out this sunny, but cool, Saturday morning and Maggie picked up her pace to join them in their hustle. All their hurry and urgency was in sharp contrast to the numerous cafés filled with happily idle coffee-drinkers, smoking and arguing politics and philosophy. As she hurried along, Maggie had another twinge of missing Laurent and wishing they were just another couple mooning over each other and a cup of café-au-lait at one of the crowded tables.
She hesitated when she reached Notre-Dame and had to fight the impulse to again take a seat on one of the stone benches in the cathedral gardens facing the Seine. The roses, in tender colors of pink and violet, were still in full bloom in early October and the air felt cool and invigorating. Even at eight in the morning, there were lovers strolling the sidewalk bordering the Seine, and solitaires reading L'Express and munching on crusty baguettes. Maggie forced herself to move on. Hurrying across the Seine on Pont St.-Louis, she spotted a Metro sign and jogged down its steep stairs to board the train to Montmartre.
Maggie emerged from the underground station and entered a seedy world of cheap strip shows, porn cinemas and sex shops. Although still wearing its late-nineteen twenties Bohemian artist's garb of darks and sooty grays, Montmartre had long since become mired in the oily underworld of drug lords and panderers. The streets were filthy, the few reputable shops sold leather-studded costumes or pizza-by-the-slice, and "Ne Rodez Pas" signs hung from most doorways. No loitering.
As Maggie wandered through the squalid avenues, once teeming with easels and colorful characters and stories, she could almost believe that she was about to bump into one of Pinnochio's "Donkey boys" fresh from Paradise Island.
She could see the milky-white dome of the Basilica Sacre-Coeur peering between the high windows of tattered apartment buildings. Her mother had taken her and Elise to Mass there as well. She wondered if Elise had ever taken her own daughter there. The church would easily have been walking distance from their flat. Turning away from Sacre-Coeur, Maggie headed west up Rue de Steinkerque, passing two-penny instant portrait artists and paper-etchers busily snipping out a living doing die-cut portraits for the throngs of tourists who were gripping their cameras and fanny bags. Noisome, shabby hucksters flapped the air with "original" Montmartre landscape watercolors and etchings. Maggie kept her eyes on the next street block and trudged ahead.
She turned north onto Rue des Martyres and continued down it until it dead-ended into the Rue des 3 Frères, stopping only once to check the address on the slip of paper that Madame Zouk had given her. There, at the intersection, was the hospital. A small, dilapidated structure held together by what paint had not yet peeled off and the oil and grit of the neighborhood. L'Hopital des Martyres. This is where Elise had gone to give birth to Nicole.
Maggie drew in a long breath and marched up the front steps. Inside, she had the feeling she was stepping back in time. The velvet, buttery smell of wood oil permeated throughout the reception room. So strong and pleasant was the scent, in fact, that it succeeded in blotting out any aural hint of medicine or antiseptics in the small hospital. The loose wooden-slatted floor was polished to a satiny gleam. The admitting desk was as tall and forbidding as was the severe-faced nun who manned it. Her eyes were small and unfriendly, and her broad face, though smooth and unlined--almost like a canvas pulled tight behind her wimple--was still quite obviously the face of an old woman.
"Bonjour, ma Soeur," Maggie said in a tiny voice as she approached the woman behind the desk. "Est-ce que je vous demande une question, s'il vous plait?" May I ask you a question?
The nun, dressed in blue-black capes and a starched white headdress looked at Maggie as thoug
h she did not understand.
Maggie berated herself for not taking Zouk up on her offer to come along and interpret. She had been so keen to do this alone, almost as if the errand were a crusade with the final understanding of her sister as some kind of personal Holy Grail. Maggie took in a determined breath. No, she thought stubbornly, as difficult as everyone in Paris was obviously going to make this for her, she knew she wanted to do it alone.
"Le archives de patients?" Maggie asked, smiling in the face of the stone wall in a habit. "Est-ce que je peux voir le archives de patients enciente Americaine, s'il vous plait? Pour l'annee de une mille dix-neuf quartre-vingt six, merci." Might I see the files for any American patients giving birth within the last five years?
The nun looked away from Maggie and flipped through a large book on the desk. Abruptly, the Sister left her post altogether, leaving Maggie standing on tiptoe on the other side of the counter not knowing whether she was heard or understood or dismissed. She noted there was very little activity in the waiting room area. A young mother sat with her baby, both gazing, as if hypnotized, out the front window. Faintly, Maggie could hear a hoarse moaning drift down one of the four corridors that emptied into the main reception area where she stood. The entrance hall was studded with high, ornately-carved wooden columns, perhaps twenty in all, each buffed and kneaded to a glossy, copper-colored sheen. The waiting room chairs were rickety, wooden affairs--likewise brutally polished and oiled--and topped with hand-made green velveteen cushions. Maggie got a mental image of a whole convent full of women sitting around stitching green velour pillows for the hospital waiting room when it was certainly cheaper and easier to buy pre-fab foam seat pads. Maggie found herself reaching out to touch one of the immaculately glimmering columns. Her eyes met those of the young mother.
After a few moments, the stern-faced Sister returned. She looked directly at Maggie.
"A quelle annee?" she said in a sweet voice that belied her harsh face.
"Uh...nineteen...er, quarant-huit?" Maggie said lamely. Oh, man, why didn't I get Zouk or Laurent to write this stuff out for me, she thought miserably.
The nun made an exasperated noise and spun out a rapid-fire reprimand in complicated, incomprehensible French. She slapped down a piece of paper and a pencil on the counter in front of Maggie.
Maggie scrawled out the date and under that, the name "Newberry.” The woman snatched it up and read it. Making another sound in her chest that must have caused some discomfort, the nun twisted on her heel and disappeared again. Maggie turned to look around her and noted that the bored young woman in the waiting room was now watching her openly.
Within moments the nun was back with a folder. She indicated that Maggie was to take the folder to a straight back wooden chair to the immediate left of the counter where the nun would be able to keep her in sight at all times. Maggie took the folder and settled into the uncomfortable chair, smiling gratefully at the Sister.
She opened the folder and found only one slip of paper inside. It was Nicole's birth certificate. It read: Nèe l8 May. Mere: Elise Stevenson Newberry. Pere: inconnu. Unknown. Maggie felt a surge of anger at Gerard's refusal to be accounted as the father and then corrected her emotion. The last thing any child would want was a document that linked her to that creep, she reasoned. Her face lightened into a smile. This meant that Gerard had no legal claim to Nicole! In the middle of the certificate was the full name of Elise's baby, handwritten, no doubt, by one of the nuns, in full-flowery scroll: Margaret Nicole Newberry. Maggie stared at the words. Elise had named her baby after Maggie.
Swallowing her emotion, Maggie looked around for a copier machine, knowing she would not find one and then looked over at the scowling nun who was bending over a large ledger. Maggie tucked the birth certificate into her jacket pocket and closed the file.
Returning the empty file to the counter, Maggie thanked the nun brightly and fled out the front door.
Once outside, the sunshine hit her full in the face as the cool breeze of the late morning sent her hair billowing around her shoulders like a loose silk scarf. Elise had never told anyone Nicole's full name, Maggie thought as she hurried away from the shambling old hospital. No one knew and no one would ever have known unless they came to this desolate street in degenerate Montmartre. Even Michele Zouk hadn't known that Elise had named her only child after Maggie, her only sister.
Maggie touched the pocket which held Nicole's birth certificate. Her mother would be glad to see this, she thought. She would be glad to safely file this document away in the Newberry archives along with all the other family documents.
She stopped at a stand-up pizzeria and bought a slice of pizza and a can of Coke and consumed her lunch as she walked down Boulevard de Clichy, a street as cheerless and ugly as any she'd found in Montmartre so far. Pigeons flocked and crowded her until she finally gave up the bulk of her lunch to them, scattering it in handfuls in the air and stepping away from the frenzy of feathers that resulted.
The address that Zouk had given her for Elise and Gerard's old apartment was 1/2 Bijoux in Montmartre. She had been warned that it wasn't a proper street and didn't appear on any maps of the neighborhood so she was prepared to have to hunt for it. Across from the Moulin Rouge, with its gaily-lighted blades, and before Clichy jammed into Rue Caulaincourt, Maggie could see the ghostly spires and columns of Montmartre Cemetery and she knew she was close. Zouk had said that Elise would often write of the view of the celebrated cemetery from her flat. Maggie approached it slowly, looking around, trying to find in the rows and rows of ancient, towering apartment buildings the window that might have been Elise's perch as she wrote to her friend, Michele.
A large orange neon-painted bread truck pulled away from the curb in front of Maggie, quickly revealing the alleyway. 1/2 Bijoux. Barely wide enough to allow two mopeds abreast, it was paved with large, rough cobblestones bordered on both sides by a long, thin gutter. The alley entranceway smelled of stewed cabbage.
A long row of colored wooden doors lined each side of the small street. Bright colors of blue and red and yellow, the paint peeled off in big gouging wedges to reveal gray, depressing portals to the lives that lay within. A small boy emerged from one of the painted doors. He glimpsed Maggie and ran squealing down the alley to dart into another door. The stone steps of the street echoed his laughter until it seemed to Maggie, that it nearly drowned out the traffic noises from the main street.
She looked for numbers by the doors but there were none that she could see. The very brick of the buildings seemed to envelope her. She began to feel suffocated, even nervous. Elise lived here, she thought? It was just one more wretched street in a whole wretched neighborhood. But the fact that Gerard could bring Elise here--where she would live with her baby, little Nicole--was, in Maggie's eyes, further evidence of the man's guilt and general uselessness as a human being.
An old woman swept mindlessly at the dust and dirt on a broken threshold. Maggie approached her.
"Pardon, Madame?" Maggie said. "Uh...je cherche pour une apartment. Est-ce que vous m'aider, peut-etre?" Maggie didn't care how her French came out. She knew she couldn't speak it well enough not to escape a Parisian’s scorn so she didn't care to obsess about it. Get the right verbs out and who cares what tense they're in, she reasoned. They'll get the idea.
Usually.
The woman stopped sweeping and stared at Maggie.
Maggie tried again. “Je voudrais l'apartment de demi Bijoux. Comprenez-vous, Madame?"
Within seconds another woman appeared in a nearby doorway. She was about Maggie's age but her face looked crushed by time and harsh weather. Her eyes were a beautiful light blue which negated the travesty of her life. She was dressed in a soiled daydress of bright poppies. She was very thin with wiry gray hair that hunched on her shoulders like a diseased Pomeranian. And, like the broom-woman who had resumed her sweeping, her face appeared ravaged and old before its time. She crossed her thin arms in front of her chest and stared at Maggie. A
strong odor of urine and cooking food drifted from her doorway.
"Madame?" she barked at Maggie.
"Oui, Madame." Maggie licked her lips and tried to smile. "Je voudrais l'apartment de demi Bijoux," she said. "Je cherche--"
"Madame is renting the apartment?" the woman interrupted nasally.
Maggie swallowed and forced another smile to her lips.
"Pas exactement, Madame," she said. Not exactly. She held out the scrap of paper with Elise's name and Cote d'Azure address scrawled on it.
The woman in the flowered poppy dress took the paper and scrutinized it. She motioned for Maggie to follow her.
The doorway was about four and a half feet high and Maggie instantly got a picture of her tall sister having to stoop every time she entered the building. It was no wonder these women looked twenty years older than they should, Maggie thought, as the woman unlocked the miniature door and gestured for Maggie to enter.
Maggie bent over and took a step inside. She heard the scurrying of tiny feet and then not-so-tiny feet as if little animals had been interrupted in the midst of some activity. It was dark and her eyes could just make out the profile of a short staircase in the gloom. Behind her, her guide slammed the door shut on the dim sunlight, immersing them into complete darkness. She then snapped on a feeble overhead lamp and led Maggie up the stairs.
At the top of the stairs was another door, this time of normal height.
"Poussez-vous!" the woman urged from behind.
Maggie placed her hand against the rough wood, careful of splinters, and gave a gentle push. It yielded against her hand. There was no lock, no latch, not even a shutting mechanism to keep the door firmly against its jamb. Had Elise lived here with just the downstairs lock on her door? Maggie wondered, as she stepped into the room beyond.
Inside, light seeped into the room through the slits of the loosely shuttered windows. Maggie squinted and waited for Madame to find the light switch. Instead, the woman pushed past Maggie and strode to the window. With a loud grating sound, she unlatched the shutters and whipped them outward. The room filled with the gray light from the alley. Madame moved across the room and began working on the opposite window.
The Complete Maggie Newberry Provençal Mysteries 1-4 Page 24
