by Cara Black
“Time takes people away.”
“Not the past,” she said. “What if the past connects to Xavierre’s murder?”
“All those people went to prison.” A sigh frosted the air. “Like my brother.”
“Look, I tried to talk to Xavierre last night,” she said. “To find out if something was wrong. My turn to feel guilt. I couldn’t even do that.”
“You take your job to heart, Mademoiselle. I respect that.”
“Not a job,” she said. “A promise I made. A deep debt I owe to a person close to me.”
If none of her other words got through to him, she sensed these would.
“You see, Agustino,” she said, “I’ve already made one mistake. If I’d known the trouble Xavierre was in.… ”
“Giving one’s word.… ” He spoke as if to himself, shaking his head. “But what if you gave it long ago and now it goes against everything you know is right, that you believe in?”
And she thought she understood. “Ask yourself this. Haven’t hundreds of innocent people been killed in ETA actions? As you asked me yourself, will killing more people help the Basque movement?”
A flicker of his eyelid.
She pursued it. “There’s ways to keep your word and yet help me without saying a thing.”
Agustino stood dead still. A long moment passed. Then a little shake of his head.
He closed the door to his atelier. One light went on, a dim glow in the dark valley of green. Only afternoon sounds, the soft cooing of pigeons, a siren’s distant wail, could be heard. Not only was he a sad man scarred by regrets, but he was also hiding something. She slipped her card back under the door.
* * *
RUBBING HER COLD hands together, Aimée shivered in the allée overhung with chestnut trees near Xavierre’s high wall. She turned the corner. Xavierre’s neighbor’s window provided a view of the back garden and the driveway. This woman, Madame de Boucher—a busybody, according to the concierge—had been born in the building, had lived here eighty years. Aimée mounted the building staircase hoping for a font of information.
“My neighbor’s comings and goings?” Madame de Boucher leaned on her ebony walking stick and gave a dismissive wave with her other blue-veined hand. “Ask the concierge.”
“But I did, Madame, and she suggested I speak with you.” Aimée gave a wide smile and flashed her PI license with the less-than-flattering photo. In the background she heard high-pitched singing and recognized “Leaves of Autumn,” based on the Verlaine poem.
“I spoke to the flics already,” the old woman said. “Told them like I’m telling you, I saw nothing, heard nothing. C’est tout.”
Aimée groaned inside. After Agustino, for the past two hours she’d questioned the lane’s inhabitants: a retired professor, a musician, several cleaning women and maids, all of whom had said the same thing. People either hadn’t been home last night or had drawn their shades. She’d hit another wall.
“A shame, Madame.” Arms weary, she set her bag down. “The family’s devastated that they can’t even hold a service, but I thought—”
“Is that for me?” interrupted Madame de Boucher, staring at the gâteau Basque on top, which was emanating a fragrance of cherries.
Aimée saw a way in the door. “Of course, but let me heat it up. Seeing as you’ve got a.… ” She paused. Was it a recital? Singing lessons? “There’s plenty for your guest.”
“Guest?” Then a look of understanding on the old woman’s face, crinkling in a web of fine lines. “You mean Hector? I’m busy cleaning, Mademoiselle.”
At her age? And in this quartier resplendent with hired help?
“Come back tomorrow, Mademoiselle.”
She had to get inside in the door.
“But I can help and warm this for you in the kitchen.”
“Comme ça? In that outfit?”
So her standby funeral suit, a flea-market-find black wool Givenchy, would go to the dry cleaners. “No problem, Madame.”
Madame de Boucher tapped her stick on the newspapers piled on the threadbare hall carpet runner. Another wave of her hand. “Into the parlor, then, s’il vous plaît.”
Humor her, Aimée thought: she might know a detail, might have noticed something over the past few days. Aimée scooped up the rustling, yellowed newspapers and followed Madame de Boucher.
The cracked leather-bound volumes filling a wall of bookshelves and worn, brocaded Louis chairs couldn’t mask the faded charm of the nineteenth-century parlor. A chandelier with missing crystals cast a dim glow on the high-ceilinged, carved-wood boiseries bordering the cream wood-paneled walls and dried flower arrangements under glass globes.
She felt like she’d entered a Proust novel. Except for the chrome high-tech medic alert remote-control device and the blue-and-yellow-plumed singing parrot perched near a matching cloisonné vase on a claw-footed table.
“Hector’s particular, you know,” Madame said, pointing to the dirty wire cage.
The parrot’s repetitive singing grated on Aimée’s ears. She set the gâteau Basque down on the table.
“He’s my companion of twenty-five years now,” she said.
Aimée’s nose crinkled as she pulled out the birdcage tray clumped with bird feces dotted with feather fluff. Slants of light from the window lit the faded Turkish carpet, turning it a dull red, reminding her of old blood.
She changed the newspaper lining and jerked her chin toward the window. “What a wonderful view over the garden.” She paused, pretending to put it together. “That’s Xavierre’s garden, non?”
“They use it like a parking lot these days. Disgusting.”
Aimée nodded. “Of course you notice the comings and goings. How can you miss seeing, eh? Especially last night, Irati’s big party, the noise, guests.… ”
“My stupid cousin widened the gate. In my grandfather’s time it was just wide enough for a fiacre.”
A horse-drawn carriage from the last century.
“Nowadays they’re garages,” she continued.
“I suppose you knew Madame Xavierre?”
“What’s it to you?” The old woman bristled, her tone changed.
Bad tactic. “Madame, I’m—”
“Snooping and asking questions, like they did,” Madame de Boucher interrupted.
Aimée’s ears perked up. The parrot’s tone shrilled. She shoved the clean newspaper-lined tray back inside the cage and tried not to sneeze. If only the damned bird would shut up.
“Who do you mean, Madame?”
“I told them nothing, you understand. Like always.”
“But weren’t you worried? Upset? Your neighbor’s murdered in her garden almost outside your window?” She tried to keep her voice level.
“Et alors, I heard nothing.” Madame de Boucher’s mouth tightened.
“Help me understand the timeline, Madame,” she said. “The report places the murder at seven forty-five. A Mercedes pulled out of that driveway minutes later. Did you hear—”
“The Bomb could drop while I listen to my program on Radio Classique and I wouldn’t hear it,” Madame de Boucher interrupted. “I knew the poor woman to say ‘Bonjour’ in the morning, that’s all.”
Disappointed, Aimée knew she needed to change tactics. This woman, who’d lived here eighty years, had to know something. And didn’t like the flics.
“But it’s a person like you, Madame, who knows the quartier, the rhythm of life here, who can help me the most.” She smiled, determined to ingratiate herself. “So quiet and peaceful here.”
Madame de Boucher snorted. “C’est un village ici.”
Aimée nodded. “Bien sûr. Maybe you noticed a person you hadn’t seen before in the past few days?”
Madame de Boucher guided Hector, now perched on her ebony stick, into the cleaned cage. With one hand she covered the cage with a black flannel cloth, and the parrot quieted at once. She sighed, sinking into the armchair brocaded with fleurs-de-lis, setting her stick against th
e armrest.
“A detective?” said Madame de Boucher, her eyes hooded with suspicion, glaring at Aimée’s suit. “Since when do the flics wear couture? Or do my taxes pay for that?”
Aimée didn’t bother to enlighten Madame as to the fact that private detectives didn’t work for the flics. And wished she had a tissue to wipe off the grit clinging to her hands.
“On my salary I shop at Réciproque, the dépôt-vente consignment shop, Madame.” Aimée winked. That store was the quartier’s bargain-hunter mecca of gently worn couture from wives who cleaned out their closets every season.
“You’re some special investigator?” she said, still suspicious.
Aimée sat down. The chair leg creaked under her. “Nothing so exciting, I’m afraid.” She leaned forward as if in confidence. “You’ve heard of Internal Affairs?”
Madame de Boucher shook her head.
“La police des polices. We check irregularities in police investigations. But that’s between you and me.”
“You’re all the same. Lists. Always lists,” said Madame de Boucher, waving her hand. “We just follow the directives and go by the list, they said.”
What did a list have to do with Xavierre’s murder?
“Madame, what list?”
“Nineteen forty-three, the hottest July I can remember,” she said. The old woman’s gaze leveled somewhere in the distance. A past Aimée couldn’t see.
“Beat the record,” Madame said. “Humid like a steam room. Not even a breeze. I’d closed the shutters, but that didn’t keep out the heat. At six A.M. they came pounding on the door. Within two hours they’d ransacked our building, looted every apartment.”
Aimée opened her mouth to speak, but Madame de Boucher continued.
“The Milice, the French Gestapo, arrested my brother. Criminals, all of them. Felons released from prison to do the dirty work.”
Madame gave a little shrug. “More Nazis lived here than in any other quartier. Six hundred ninety-two official German-requisitioned buildings, according to surviving records,” she said. “They lusted after the town houses, made the Hotel Majestic a Kommandantur. Forbade us calling them boches, preferred Fritz. Regardless of what we called them, les Fritz requisitioned whatever they wanted. Apartments, hôtels particuliers, garages, hotels, clinics, bars, restos, theaters. Four Gestapo bureaus, even a soldatenheim on the Champs-Elysées.”
“But Madame,” Aimée interrupted.
“They had taste, I’ll say that for them.” The old woman continued as if she hadn’t heard. “After Liberation, I had to share this apartment with the family of a Milicien who took my brother. Can you imagine?”
Aimée shook her head, hoping this was leading somewhere.
“That too went according to a list. A housing-shortage list. I got a pittance after the war. A few pieces. That one.”
She gestured to the blue-and-white cloisonné vase.
“The Milice forced my brother to work in the Bassano, a hôtel particulier, outfitted like a restoration studio but an internment camp,” she said. “Just blocks away. Who knows now, eh? He restored the looted pianos stored under the Palais de Chaillot. Pleyels, Bechsteins, Steinways, all confiscated from Jewish apartments.” A shuttered look crossed her eyes. “Took Madame Morgenstern’s baby grand. She lived on the second floor. Later, they took her.”
Impatient, Aimée wondered how this connected to Xavierre— or if it even did. Was it just another sad reminiscence of the war by an old woman who kept a parrot for company, death taking everything but her stories? Or had Xavierre’s murder jogged loose the old stories, some with a parallel to the present? She had to draw Madame from the past, discover some detail from this eagle-eyed woman who, she suspected, didn’t miss a thing.
“So the man, or men, you spoke to wore uniforms?”
“Uniforms?” The old woman shook her head. “They wanted to rent space for their car.”
Aimée contained her frustration. The woman dipped back and forth in time. Not that this was leading anywhere. But she had to try.
“Was that before or after Xavierre’s murder?”
“Everything’s political, you know.”
What did that mean? Aimée gritted her teeth. But she nodded, determined to persist.
“You’re a Socialist, Madame?”
“Picasso said that. My father collected some of his smaller works. All taken, phhft.” She expelled air from her mouth. “A nasty little man, that Picasso, but I agree.” Her tone dismissive. “So does Irati. It’s those protests she attends.”
Alert, Aimée leaned forward. A new angle to consider. “Protests? Irati doesn’t strike me as political.”
“Phfft! The young these days,” Madame said, as if that explained it. “We met at the poll during the last election. We both voted Socialist. Irati joked that we’re the only two Socialists in the quartier. Our mayor’s a Taittinger, the Champagne seigneur; we’re his fiefdom.” Madame de Boucher’s chignon loosened as she nodded. A strand of white hair fell, softening the contours of her thin face. “C’est tout. Then I get this! A mistake. No interest to me.”
Aimée sat up.
“May I see?”
Madame de Boucher used an aluminum rod with pincers at the end to clutch some papers on the divan.
Aimée took the white paper, folded pamphlet-style, titled Euskadi Action. The Basque-language leaflet didn’t make sense to her either. But an address on rue Duban and the date Sunday at 6:30 P.M., that much she understood. The rest she’d find out.
Madame de Boucher nodded, staring at the gâteau Basque. “Aren’t you going to cut me a slice?”
* * *
“CRIME IN OUR quartier?” Dubouchet, the on-duty sergeant in the Passy Commissariat, grinned, showing yellowed teeth. “Just the usual: rich teenagers thrill-shoplifting, domestiques stealing from their employer. What goes around comes around, eh?”
She’d come to check with Thesset about the Mercedes, but he’d gone off duty. “But on the télé, the news announced this crime of passion.… ”
“I can’t talk about ongoing investigations, Mademoiselle.” Dubouchet’s voice turned serious.
Great: now he’d clammed up. And Thesset, her source, was gone. The smell of hot printer toner wafted from behind her. An old-fashioned heater rumbled, sending out dribbles of heat.
“Zut!” Gandon, a middle-aged lieutenant sitting at a desk, ground out his cigarette in his demitasse saucer. “Dubouchet forgets the glory days, our unrivaled crimes.” He opened a drawer, pulled out a thick stapled manuscript with relish. “Bit of a history buff myself. My little opus, which I hope to publish next year, could enlighten you.”
“Might want to finish writing the thing first, Gandon,” Dubouchet said in a tired voice.
“Mademoiselle, our arrondissement encompasses two zip codes, with a Taittinger as reigning mayor. Despite our current haut bourgeois reputation, I recount our long history. It’s fascinating reading.” Gandon thumbed the pages, warming to his subject. “Eighteen seventy, the anti-Bonapartist Victor Noir’s assassination by Napoleon III’s nephew. A Républican hero. Legend goes women visit his tomb for fertility; go figure, but it adds glamour, eh, a footnote to history.” Gandon winked.
She shifted her feet, hoping this would lead somewhere.
“The attempt on Clemenceau’s life, 1919,” he said. “I’ll have you know we’ve even had our own serial killer, Dr. Marcel Petiot, a charmer who dismembered his patients, hid the bits in the courtyard well, then, copying his heroes the boches, incinerated them in his homemade crematorium. Of course, the real ‘French Connection’ heroin king, André Condemine, was gunned down not ten blocks from here.”
Gandon’s face was suffused with pride. Aimée unwound her silk scarf, wishing for an open window to ventilate the tepid, stale air.
“Who would have thought?” She hadn’t bargained on an earful. But the eager Gandon knew his turf. “Anything interesting on the political front?”
“Bien sûr, we’v
e had our share.” Gandon thumbed the pages. “The 1980 synagogue bombing on rue Copernic, terrible. Four dead. I carried out what was left of the bodies.” He shook his head. “We had political terrorists—Action Directe, who’d hooked up with Carlos the Jackal. Not to mention a cannibal.” He looked up for Aimée’s admiration. “Name me another quartier that had a Japanese student cut up his teacher and eat her, eh?”
Aimée tried to look impressed.
“Even René Bousquet couldn’t hide his Vichy past. It caught up with him right in his doorway on Avenue Raphaël. Not two months ago, Princess Di departed on our patch too … don’t forget that.”
Gandon pulled out a map. “See, I color-coded and cross-referenced the crime locations on the chart below.”
Not a book she’d pick from the bookstore shelf. “Amazing,” she said, “such work and documentation.”
“But I have more.… ”
“Any action from the Basque Cultural center, your neighbor on rue Duban?” she smiled.
Gandon snorted. “Loud fêtes, noise-disturbance complaints. Unlike the eighties, when ETA came over the Pyrénées for sanctuary from Franco, robbed banks, bought guns.” Gandon rifled under the papers on his desk, found a copy of the current Le Parisien. “A sea change. Look at this: a French Basque leader ready to broker peace negotiations!”
Aimée stared at the small article midway down the front page. Basque referendum agreement … negotiations set for Bayonne area … military units pull back … celebrating a reception at Musée Marmottan.
“Merci, Gandon,” she said.
A sea change? She’d find out. It might mean nothing, but right now she had little else to go on.
She hit Morbier’s cell phone number on her speed dial, praying he’d been released. Already late afternoon, and still no answer—nor any message from him on her phone.
In order to vindicate Morbier, she needed a suspect. Another angle. Minutes later, she headed down rue Duban, a narrow shop-lined street, feeding into the heart of the old village of Passy. Midway, she found the Basque Cultural Center in a courtyard near the rear staircase. After climbing the winding narrow stairs to the fourth floor, she knocked on the office door.
