by Cara Black
“But would they hide behind the veil to kill?” Kat shook his head. “It’s not their style. Or the iKK’s.”
Then who was the person who’d killed Yves, and tried to kill Jalenka, working for?
She pushed the folds of the chador back. “Yves’s contact heard rumors at the mosque. The DST are trying to connect the assassination attempt to the Metro bombings.”
“But the Shi’as are claiming responsibility for Jalenka’s assassination attempt,” he said, a calm authority in his voice.
She stiffened. “The Shi’as? How do you know?”
“The rumors are running rampant in the mosque and cafés. An Islamic jihad’s forming. But, Mademoiselle, this is different.”
“Shi’a Iranians against Kurdish Sunnis?” That’s what Sacault had intimated?
“Ask me if I’d be surprised,” he said.
She couldn’t stem her curiosity. “And the fatwa on you?”
“Made me more important than I am. But a man cannot be too careful in his choice of enemies, as Oscar Wilde pointed out.” He gave a little smile. “I’m just a scribbler who has written things that they deem offensive.”
Now she recognized him. Kat Ahmet, the famous Turkish novelist who’d spoken at a UN Human Rights Watch meeting in Switzerland last week about Turkish atrocities against the Kurds. Amazed, she looked around at the simple, bare apartment.
“They banned your books in Turkey.”
“Past tense,” he said. “Due to worldwide sales, the London publisher’s partner in Ankara is publishing an English–Turkish edition. Me?” He gave a little shrug. “Now it’s too embarrassing to eliminate me.”
He took a sip of coffee, indicated that she should do the same. “Please, or it will get cold.”
A curious mixture, this novelist: traditional customs, surprising open worldview, and with a connection to underground Turkey, as well as a fatwa against him.
“But you’re not a Kurd; you’re Turkish,” she said.
He smiled. “That surprises you, I see. But my wife is Kurdish. You saved Jalenka Malat, Mademoiselle. That’s why Vatel brought you here, and for that I must help you.”
Surprised, she realized he trusted her.
“Can you point me to whoever murdered Yves?”
“Look at the contracts the French stand to gain. An investigative journalist worth his salt, as you say, would know about them. Would report them. But where are those stories?”
Mystified, she set the bitter coffee down. “By that, you mean . . . ?”
“Let me tell you the story of the famous cats in Van, a Kurdish city. All the white cats had one blue and one amber eye. Remarkable, everyone said. Unique.” He paused to inhale from the bubbling hookah. “Word spread throughout Turkey about the beautiful Kurdish cats. Poems and stories were written. These cats became famous.”
There was a point to this, she assumed.
“But the government panicked. They weren’t simply cats, you see; they were Kurdish cats. A symbol of the Kurds. And then one day, the cats disappeared. All of them.”
She waited, wondering what conclusion he expected her to draw.
“There was no mention in the newspapers. Later, rumors floated that a garbage man, paid off by the military like everyone else, had poisoned hundreds of them.”
Was he implying that Yves was dirty? Her eyes flashed. “You’re saying Yves took bribes not to report . . . ?”
“I’ve offended you. Forgive me,” he said. His eyes narrowed. He leaned forward. “I’m saying someone might have.”
“Yves wrote articles supporting the Kurds. He produced an exposé of the Yellow Crescent,” she said angrily. “There’s another possibility. Say he’d found out who was taking bribes and somehow it involved these contracts.”
There was a knock on the door. Then another. “Now if you’ll excuse me,” Kat said.
Vatel motioned to her. Awkwardly, she rose to her feet despite the chador folds wrapped around her legs. The bearded man in the corner had not uttered a word. The short audience had ended, but still she had more to ask.
“One last question, please,” she said. “I’m ignorant of your culture, but you said the Yellow Crescent wouldn’t hide behind a woman’s veil.”
“No man in our culture would,” he said. “I hope Vatel’s convinced of that by now. Oh, Jalenka sent word to thank you.”
“But the assassin may try again. Jalenka’s not safe. She needs protection, security.”
“The incident caused your authorities profound embarrassment, I know. If anything happened on French soil, there would be repercussions. But Jalenka hates security and evades it to meet with people. That’s what happened today. . . .” His words trailed off. “However, the student. . . .”
“Iqbal?” she said. Feelings of guilt shot through her. “I feel responsible.”
Kat raised his hand. “Inshallah. You did what you had to do.”
“How do you know?”
“Watch the télé, Mademoiselle,” he said. “They’re showing the video from Institut Kurd. You’re on the news.”
She didn’t own a téle, or want one. Now here she was on the news with an assassin on the loose. A chill invaded her bones.
“There’s something you should read.”
His book? she wondered. But Kat motioned to Vatel, who stood, opened the Turkish–French dictionary, then took an envelope from inside the cover and handed it to her.
She stuck it in her bag.
“For your sake, I’d stay out of sight and never mention our little visit.”
Vatel opened the door to a wizened man with a gray tonsure of hair. Ignoring the heat, he wore a sweater vest and wool trousers. He handed Kat several evening newspapers and then beckoned to Aimée, reached up, and tied the blindfold around her eyes again.
“I’ll escort you, Mademoiselle,” he said. A definite Yiddish accent.
“The blindfold’s unecessary.”
“Desolé, but that’s how all monsieur’s visitors arrive and leave.”
At least she’d gotten a good look at the steep staircase to prepare herself. She reached one hand out to the worn railing, gathered up the chador in her other, and descended in total blackness.
“You work for him, Monsieur?” she asked softly.
“I protect him,” he said.
Again, the rotting smell of age and decay reaching the bottom of the stairs. She wished the chador weren’t so hot and awkward to manage. The old man guided her by touching her arm. Cold air radiated from the stone; there were smooth worn pavers under her feet. The clink of a door unlocking and then the pungent smell of sandalwood incense and what sounded like muffled Hindi coming from somewhere in the hallway. She heard the creak of a door. His hand guided her into a musty-smelling space. “Wait here for a moment, Mademoiselle, until it’s safe to leave.”
The blindfold was untied. She found herself in a neat narrow envelope of a room. A double-ring burner and plug-in Bodum kettle stood on a counter by the window; a faded brocade couch hugged the wall. The many framed photos on the ochre walls caught her eye. Black-and-white snapshots from the forties. Men in caps, women in wooden-soled platform shoes and turbans enfolding their hair, teenage boys wearing work aprons in what looked like a furniture warehouse. In the middle of the photos was a dried corsage wrapped in cellophane, browned stiff petals, tricolor ribbon hanging from it with the faded gold letters FFI.
“Quite a collection,” she said. Like a shrine, she thought, but she kept that to herself.
He followed her gaze.
“I like to remember them. No one else does.”
She stepped closer and stared. Now she noticed the yellow stars on the men’s lapels and the women’s sweaters, the uniformed Wehrmacht soldier to the side.
Her throat caught. “They worked in the quartier?”
“At Lévitan, next door. And at Bassano and Austerlitz, the other labor camps on the Left Bank.”
She’d never heard of these camps.
�
��Labor camps? I had no idea.”
“Few do. Under L’Opération Meuble, the Boches took skilled workers from internment camps: jewelers to repair clocks, artisans to restore furniture and musical instruments, women couturiers to bleach and press linens—you name it—all looted from Jewish deportés apartments.”
“But why?”
“Goering needed to fill his boxcars at Gare de l’Est, hein? After 1943 it was not just paintings. His bombed-out Vaterland needed goods, and these were here for the taking.”
In essence, a goods depot for the Third Reich.
He shook his head. “Quiet as it’s been kept, on the outskirts of Paris there’s still a warehouse with hundreds of pianos. All of them still tagged for Dusseldorf.”
“More than fifty years later?” she asked, shocked. “How’s that possible?”
“No one wants to know, no one knows how to deal with descendants, property claims and the lawsuits it would raise!”
He shuffled to the small oval window and looked out.
“And you, Monsieur, were you one of them?”
“A Resistant, if you call a fourteen-year-old that.” He smiled tightly. “My mother was the concierge here. What better location for sabotage?”
She swallowed hard. “You didn’t wear a yellow star?”
“I took it off for my courier jobs,” he said, his voice matter-of-fact. “But just before Liberation, the Boches deported the last workers to Bergen-Belsen. That’s when we set explosives in the Wehrmacht’s barracks at Republique. You can still see the bullet holes in the walls.”
The old, sad stories of the Occupation. One never got away from them, she thought. For him, the place was redolent of memories.
“Yet you stay here, Monsieur, and help Kat. Why, may I ask?”
“Things never change, do they? He’s in hiding.”
“And you’re saving him, like you tried to save them?”
The small wizened man edged the door open. “It’s safe for you to leave now, Mademoiselle.”
Aimée set the chador on a hook near an age-speckled beveled mirror.
“You won’t visit again, eh, Mademoiselle?”
She shook her head.
Outside, on the limestone façade she saw a plaque about Camp Lévitan and knew she’d been in part of the warren of buildings behind it. Not that she’d ever be able to find this place again. Or want to.
She kept to the shadows and turned right into rue du Chateau d’Eau. The streetlight illuminated a building plaque. Jean Cazard and Pierre Chatenet, both eighteen years old and members of the Red Cross, shot by Germans, August 18, 1944. Just days before the Liberation. There were fresh lilacs in a vase fastened to the plaque. She shivered and hastened her steps. The past clung to these cobblestones and buildings as if it were just yesterday.
SHE WALKED AND walked. Past the yawning, dark windows of vacant hôtel particuliers with chipped cornices, and bearded men clustered on the street, prayer beads clicking through their fingers. She considered the words of the novelist. A different network, the attempt to assassinate Jalenka a jihad, Shi’as against Sunnis . . . the more she learned, the more questions arose. Hoping to clear her mind, she kept walking and found herself on Place de la Bourse, opposite the stock exchange and the Agence France-Presse building, the purple awning of Brasserie Le Vaudeville on her right. Once a theater bar, it was now patronized by stockbrokers, journalists, and taxi drivers
Maybe she’d intended to come here all along, to take a step and ascend the ladder of grief, following the steps René had pointed out she needed to tread. Anger only got her so far.
She’d pump Drieu for information about contracts France stood to gain in the Kurdish territories.
“BONSOIR. ” A SMILING black-suited maître d’ flicked his gaze over her. “You’re joining someone, Mademoiselle?”
“Monsieur Gerard Drieu with Agence France-Presse.”
“His table’s this way.” The headwaiter guided her under the art deco domed ceiling, past the etched glass and intricate ironwork decor. A pianist played an old Charles Aznavour song to the accompaniment of low murmured conversations and the clink of glasses. Small white candles flickered on the white linen tablecloths. At the table by the window, swirling a snifter of brandy, was the man whom Langois had referred to as the “attending” in the AFP newsroom cubicle. The balloon glass of amber liquid caught the light.
“Take a pew,” he said.
She sat on the leather banquette, not knowing what to say. Her feet ached from walking, fatigue made her shoulders ache, and her skin still burned with the memory of the heavy, thick chador.
“Mademoiselle?” said a waiter who’d appeared without a sound at her elbow.
“I’ll have the same, merci.”
“You missed the memorial. Drieu got a phone call, an emergency. He sends his apologies.”
She glanced at the time. Too late to call him with the questions Kat had raised. But maybe this man might furnish some answers.
She shook his hand. “I’m Aimée.”
“Georges.” He raised his brandy snifter. His red-rimmed eyes behind tortoiseshell glasses, sunken cheeks, and gray hair gave him a vulnerable look. “You’re the one Yves talked about.”
“He did?” Pain rubbed her raw. She shouldn’t have come. And she longed for the brandy to hurry up.
“A pitiful good-bye, eh?” He rotated the brandy snifter again, watching the amber liquid swirl in a vortex. “Half of the newsroom’s off, the other half stopped in, then left. Not like the old days when there would have been a good send-off, but then, what is? My retirement’s in two days. Officially, on Friday. I’ll be lucky if anyone shows up.”
Her brandy appeared on the table in front of her.
“Salut.” He clinked her glass with his.
“When did you last talk with Yves?”
“Monday. As usual.”
Surprised, she leaned forward. “You’re sure? Wasn’t the staff meeting on Tuesday night?”
“Yves didn’t show up.”
“But what did he do on Monday?”
“I saw him in the office.”
“At what time?”
He shrugged. “Just before I left.”
“And that was?”
“Around ten.”
Just before he’d met her in the Microimages courtyard. So he’d gone to AFP after Langois left, and before meeting her.
“Did Yves have anything with him?”
“I’m not sure,” he said, then paused in thought. “A laptop.”
“Neither Drieu nor Langois mentioned it.”
“Eh, why would they?”
“I don’t understand. According to Yves, he’d been transferred here.”
“There’s been a big shuffle. ‘Re-organization,’ that’s the term for layoffs these days,” he said. “They were kicking Yves upstairs. The award, for excellence in the field, you know? We’re a news service, we provide in-depth coverage for dailies and the weeklies that don’t have correspondents in the area. It’s cheaper for everyone. And Yves was a star. He could work a bureau desk as well as report from the field. Only a few can do that . . . could. . . .”
Georges’s mouth sagged. Small licks of candlelight reflected in his glasses. She still didn’t follow, and he still hadn’t answered her question.
“I pulled an early shift Monday.” He shrugged. “Yves wasn’t due until Tuesday. He surprised me. I don’t know who else saw him.”
She had to try another tack.
“Did you read the exposé Yves filed on the Yellow Crescent?”
“You’re not drinking.” He pointed to her brandy.
She took a sip. The liquid burned her throat, leaving a toasty aftertaste.
“You’re chasing phantoms. He’s gone.”
She pushed away the horrible feeling that his words were true.
“But didn’t you see the article?” she asked again.
Georges shook his head. “Like I said, he stopped in and then I went off s
hift. He sat down to file his story as I left.”
“Then where’s his laptop?”
“If he didn’t take it with him, it’s still there.”
She clenched the glass stem tight.
“Where?”
“He used the night editor’s office.”
She leaned back, a plan forming in her mind. Then took a deep gulp.
“Alors, I’ve had too much of this,” Georges said, pulling out his wallet. “And my bus line stops running in twenty minutes.”
“And Gerard Langois?”
“A kid, full of promise. I met him for the first time on Tuesday night. . . .” Georges’s words trailed off.
A sad, tired older man.
“As a favor, do you mind checking out the night editor’s desk?” She pulled a card from her bag, pushed it over the white tablecloth into his hands. “See if you can get me a copy of his story. Or anything else he filed.”
“Why?”
“It may have gotten him killed, Georges. That’s why.”
“You have to let this go. Let him go.”
“What do you have to lose, Georges? You’re retiring. Help me out. Dig around a bit.”
She pressed her card into his hand. At least he didn’t give it back.
“This should cover the tab.” He set a fifty-franc bill on the table, shaking his head. “Digging around won’t bring him back, Aimée.” A wistful look appeared in his tired eyes. “No wonder you’re all he talked about.”
THE WAITER SLID another cognac in front of her. “But I didn’t order . . .”
“From the gentleman over there,” said the waiter, lifting his eyebrows. “He’d like to join you.”
A man standing at the bar raised his glass. Tousled long black hair, fashionable stubble on his chin, lean, in white linen shirt and trousers. A hunk, he could have stepped off the cover of the August Vogue Homme.
“Tell the gentleman . . .”
Drieu appeared and slid onto the leather banquette across from her.
“. . . Merci, but I have company.”
The man at the bar shrugged, then grinned.
“Lucky I didn’t miss you,” Drieu said. “We’ve had a crisis at work.”
“What’s happened?”
“Haven’t you seen this?” Drieu set down a copy of Le Figaro. “Marseilles airliner suspect caught in Lyon. President Chirac deploys army.”
