Murder in the Sentier ali-3

by Cara Black

  The longing to see her mother, that bottomless desire dormant for years, had returned. Even if she was dead, just to know where she’d been buried. Constant and nagging, it was like a piece of gravel in her shoe.

  Aimée’s worn Vuitton leather wallet held fifty francs. Enough for a taxi to the office of René’s friend, Michel. She’d ask him for a loan.

  She found a cab on Pont Marie and bummed a nonfiltered Gauloise from the driver. As they sped along the quai, she inhaled the harsh, woody tobacco, enjoying the jolt.

  Michel had a cash-flow problem unlike most people’s. He had too much. His fashion-house backers were cyber entrepreneurs in the Sentier, the district had been dubbed “Siliconsentier” by the press. But she and René were leery of the New Economy and of software start-ups, so they’d kept to corporate security.

  Space came cheap in the Sentier, the hub of the wholesale rag trade and of the flesh trade. In the entire Sentier, green space scarcely existed. Six trees in Place du Caire, a spreading plane tree in square Bidault, and several struggling saplings in the Place Ste-Foy were the most notable exceptions.

  The driver let her off on crowded rue Saint Denis, the medieval route to the royal tombs. Traffic had ground to a standstill. The knock of a stalled diesel truck and its exhaust fumes permeated the narrow street.

  Dilapidated hôtel particuliers, once home to the Marquise de Pompadour, Josephine Bonaparte, and Madame du Barry, had been turned into fabric warehouses. Hookers kept the rent down in the old stomping grounds of Irma la Douce. But that was what attracted the start-ups. Urban decay with a new meaning, Aimée thought.

  A dense haze of heat flickered in the late summer afternoon, lit by the still shining sun. She found Michel’s place on rue du Sentier between Paris Hydro, a plumbing shop, and Tissus Arnaud, a fabric store. A welcome chill radiated from the limestone. Inside the seventeenth-century hôtel particulier, across from Mozart’s former residence, Aimée rubbed the goose bumps on her arms.

  The smell of sawdust and mold rose from the floor. Watermarked walls supported a high ceiling whose paint was peeling in the cavernous foyer.

  The tall door stood ajar. Peering inside, she saw expensive state-of-the-art computer monitors on makeshift shelves. Cartons labeled tissus en gros were piled against the window. Remnants of antique industrial sewing machines for punching holes in leather sat by rusted metal clothing racks.

  Michel Mamou was reaching high above him for the old gas line on the wall. He balanced on a sawhorse straddled over a three-legged table and a bench. His head just missed the old hanging light fixture.

  “Ça va, Michel?” she asked.

  “After I cap the gas, I’ll feel happy,” Michel grinned.

  “Michel, I need a favor.”

  Michel’s black-framed glasses under his wool cap pulled low didn’t hide his pink eyes. Or his white eyelashes.

  Michel often boasted he was the only albino Jew in Paris. Maybe that was why his family gave him free rein rather than insisting on his working in the wholesale clothing business.

  He and her partner, René, a dwarf and a computer genius, had formed an unholy alliance at the Sorbonne, the albino and the dwarf, or “the freak brothers,” as some had called them.

  “What do you need?”

  Before she could answer, he leaned back on the sawhorse. “Stop me if I’ve told you this one,” he said, grinning. “Écoute, here in the Sentier, a wholesaler pays for his child’s studies. First, the son spends three years in law. Then he studies business for three years at the fancy Hautes Études Commerciales. After that he obtains an M.B.A. from Harvard. Then he wants to study Japanese. But the father says, ‘Listen, my boy. I paid all those years for your studies, but God says you finally have to choose your career: either clothing for men or clothing for women.’”

  Michel slapped his thighs and roared. Aimée returned a thin smile as she checked the terminal ports on a nearby computer.

  “Just like my uncle Nessim!” said Michel. “Too cheap to fix this place up but he lets me use it. I design upstairs. They figure they’ll make money on me. If my designs never sell, his brilliant son says he can claim it as a tax write-off, a property value loss!”

  Michel had placed high in the Concours de Haute Couture, the prestigious fashion competition organized by the Ministry of Culture. His talent hadn’t gone unnoticed. He’d turned down an offer from a couture house in order to be his own boss.

  “The ministry’s sponsoring our couture showing in the Palais Royal,” he said. “And my uncle’s fronting the money but I need you and René to help me with my computer system.”

  “Michel, I doubt that there’s any juice for the cables and fiber optic hookups,” Aimée said, gesturing to the dusty fuse box.

  “Pas grave,” he said. “With the Bourse nearby and Reuters news service in the hôtel particulier across the street, we’ve got plenty of available power.”

  But what about the rats who might gnaw through the cables, Aimée thought.

  “Michel, about that favor …”

  “I call it couture contre couture, couture in reverse,” he said. “Rollerblading assistants, with laptops strapped to their chests, accompany the models to the clients and take orders and measurements. We do it all at once.”

  So that’s why he needed the computers.

  “Michel, I need to borrow fifty thousand francs.”

  But she spoke to Michel’s denim-covered hindquarters. He was on his knees digging for a power source.

  She got down on her knees and pulled Michel’s arm.

  “I need a personal loan. I’ll pay you back.”

  Michel waved his pale arm. “OK, but better to funnel it through the business.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My uncle’s company finances us.”

  “I thought your Siliconsentier friends helped you.”

  “My uncle made me a better offer.” He grinned. “We could really use your expertise.”

  An alarm bell sounded in her head. The Sentier was notorious for under-the-table, cash-only deals. No receipts, a little payoff here and there. Voilà! No taxes. Was it wise for Leduc Detective to get involved with a project based on dodgy money? Did they have a choice?

  “Let me discuss this with René,” she said. “But I’m in a jam, Michel, I need fifty thousand francs right now.”

  “Tiens, come upstairs,” Michel said. He’d crawled to the end of the room, where a scrollwork metal sconce hung above him by a frayed cord.

  She followed him up the wide marble stairs, with deep grooves worn in the center. The banister snaked, coiling tighter as they mounted, like a serpent about to strike upward.

  On the black-and-white-tiled landing, several bicycles leaned against the ornate wrought-iron railing of vine tendrils twined with grape clusters.

  Aimée’s cell phone rang. “Ready to offer me a drink yet?” said Jutta Hald in a dry voice.

  Aimée’s heart hammered. She didn’t have the money yet.

  “Paris is full of cafés, Jutta,” she said. “There’s probably one in front of you right now. I’m trying to get the money.”

  In the background, Aimée heard the hee-haw of a siren.

  “There’s something you should know about your mother …” The rest of Jutta Hald’s words were swallowed by the blare of sirens.

  “What should I know?” Aimée shouted.

  When the noise receded, “… Tour Jean-Sans-Peur in twenty minutes” was all she heard.

  “You know where she is?”

  Pause. Aimée heard Jutta Hald draw in a deep breath.

  “Twenty minutes. Bring the money,” Jutta Hald said.

  “But I must know … ,” Aimée said.

  But Jutta Hald had hung up.

  This was the first chance in years to find out about her mother! Despite her misgivings, she decided to talk with René and, clutching Michel’s check made out for fifty thousand francs, she shouldered her backpack.

  Out on the narrow street,
pangs of longing hit her. For years, deep down, she’d feared her mother was dead. Yet she couldn’t ignore the tissue-thin shred of hope Jutta Hald offered, at a price.

  She cashed the check at Banque Nationale de Paris on the corner. As she turned into the Montorgueil, the tiled pedestrian walkway lined with upscale boucheries, more memories of her mother, with a pencil tucked behind her ear, floated back to her.

  She was always drawing, scribbling on anything—brasserie paper napkins, envelopes, the gas meter rate book. All of it had been burned by her father, except for the cardboard box from her fric-frac bicycle lock that had been bordered with doodles by her mother. Aimée had ceased using the awkward lock, insisted on by her father, after her training wheels came off.

  Aimée passed a shoe shop and small parfumerie before she reached the fifteenth-century tower abutting what once was part of the old wall of Paris. Medieval dwellers had thrown garbage over the walls. After the population doubled, the next king constructed a new rampart and the centuries-old refuse was paved over. The ground rose higher and higher, hence the hills and buckling streets of the Sentier.

  The tower, a four-story narrow rectangle of butterscotch stone with a tiled turreted roof, had been partially restored. She remembered it from a field trip in grade school. Some duke or marquis once hid there. There were so many, she got them mixed up.

  The iron grillwork gate scraped as she opened it. Before her stood a leafy plane tree in the fenced stone courtyard sheltered from the busy street. Shadows from the leaves filigreed the stones. Late afternoon quiet hung in the air. On her right, an L-shaped école maternelle faced the tower.

  No students. No Jutta Hald. Only darkening rain clouds and a crackle of hot wind.

  According to the sign, tower tours were suspended until further restoration. “Welcome to the only remaining fortified feudal tower surviving in Paris,” read the inscription. “Here, Jean-Sans-Peur, the Duc de Bourgogne, built a refuge following his assassination of Louis d’Orleans in the Hundred Years’ War.”

  Tools, sandblasting equipment, and a small cement mixer sat under the tree. Work, she figured, had ended for the day.

  Aimée cursed under her breath when her shoe caught between the stones. She turned it sideways. The heel of her Prada sandal, a flea-market find, emerged scratched and covered with grit. She scraped it over the iron décrottoir sunk in the stones. Mud-filled streets had been a part of medieval life.

  Inside the tower, rays of light slanted in from windows and doors. So many windows. It seemed odd for a medieval structure built for defense, nestled against the old fortified wall. On her right stood a pile of rebar scraps.

  Still no Jutta. She mounted the spiral staircase.

  Cold air rose up from the stone. She rubbed her arms and looked up. Exquisite carved vaulting, a design of entwined branches with oak and hawthorn leaves and hop vines, wound above her. The circular staircase and open landings were islanded aloft. Shiny black birds perched in the turret. Their sharp cawing grated in Aimée’s ears.

  Was Jutta Hald playing games, screwing with her mind? She seemed to think that Aimée was hiding something, had some secret.

  Footsteps shuffled below in the courtyard. Aimée peered through the window illuminating what had once been the small chapel. Carved ravens with two figures on a ribbed band supported the ancient ducal crest.

  The damn birds had been around even then.

  Aimée shifted her feet on the uneven stone. Below, a group of tourists stood in the courtyard.

  The noise of churning gravel came from outside as she descended. Perhaps the workmen were starting another shift after all, she figured.

  She moved into the pale Camembert-colored light ruminating … afraid Jutta Hald’s words about her mother were true.

  And afraid this was connected to her father’s death in some way.

  But where was Jutta?

  Outside, a trio of Portuguese-speaking tourists wandered and consulted maps on the far side of the courtyard. A workman in blue overalls shoveled sand in the rear. A shovel stood up in the sand pile. And Jutta Hald sat, huddled on a green bench next to the wall, her back to Aimée.

  Odd, Aimée thought. She hadn’t been there before.

  “Ça va … Jutta?” she asked, sitting down next to her.

  Jutta Hald, leaning against the grimy stone wall, said nothing. She smelled of warm hair tinged by the singular vinegary odor she emitted.

  Aimée looked closer. Jutta Hald’s eyes were wide with surprise.

  “Don’t you hear me?”

  No response. What was wrong with her?

  She grabbed Jutta Hald’s arm, started to shake her. But the woman’s head slumped over, revealing pink gristle and congealed reddish matter sliding down the stone wall. The rest of her brain was still visible in the back of her skull, the part that hadn’t been blown off.

  Aimée reared back, unable to speak. She struggled to breathe. Blood from a black hole seeped through Jutta Hald’s matted hair.

  Jutta Hald had been shot at close range. Scarcely a minute ago.

  Aimée looked up. She heard a burst of laughter from the tourists, the scrape of the iron gate in the courtyard, and crows cawing in the turrets.

  No one had noticed.

  Aimée had heard nothing. Neither had anyone else.

  Was the killer still here?

  She froze.

  Jutta Hald’s hands were empty. Her purse and the book she had showed Aimée were gone.

  Aimée noticed the pill bottle Jutta must have meant to open, lying on her lap. She carefully picked it up and slipped it into her backpack.

  “Veja, veja!” one of the tourists shouted. A woman screamed and pointed.

  At Aimée and Jutta Hald.

  The workman … where was the workman? Aimée looked around. Gone. She heard more shouting in Portuguese.

  Quickly she approached one of the tourists, a woman with frizzy black hair, who backed away.

  “Where did the workman go?”

  Wide-eyed looks of fear greeted her. Aimée pantomimed shoveling.

  A salvo of Portuguese rushed toward her. Policia was all she understood. She tried not to look at Jutta Hald’s slumped corpse while she punched in 17 for SAMU—the Service d’Assistance Médicale Urgente—on her cell phone.

  The Portuguese woman made for the gate. Aimée followed, scrutinizing rue Etienne Marcel, the street she faced.

  “I’m reporting a murder,” she said into the phone. “The shooter could be posing as a tourist or a workman.”

  “Address and victim?” the dispatcher asked.

  Twenty meters away the Portuguese woman had found a flic. She was pointing at Aimée.

  “Tour Jean-Sans-Peur on rue Etienne Marcel,” she said. “A released prisoner from Frésnes, Jutta Hald.”

  The flic began walking toward her.

  “Your name?” the dispatcher asked.

  The flic’s pace increased.

  “Call me a concerned citizen,” she said, clicked off, and ran around the corner.

  Saturday Afternoon

  INSIDE THE OIL-PUDDLED GARAGE in a Paris suburb, Stefan adjusted his hearing aid to listen to the radio. “Former seventies radical” had caught his attention as he bent over a Mercedes SL 320 engine. “Jutta Hald, just released today after a twenty-year prison term, was found murdered …”

  Stefan went cold. He dropped his wrench and leaned against the engine hood. His jaw worked but nothing came out.

  The radio report continued. A police inspector interviewed by the reporter described the homicide location and a woman running from the scene.

  The sound faded. Buzzed. Stefan fiddled with his hearing aid. Scheisser … only a low buzz. His bad hearing was the reward of his life of crime.

  And then the news bulletin ended.

  Stefan glanced nervously at the mechanic working across the garage. But the man in the greasy jumpsuit hadn’t lifted his head from the engine hood he was working on.

  Jutta Hald killed
… on the day she got out of prison! Who was left who could have gotten to her?

  Stefan straightened up. He recalled those days, back in 1972.

  He saw the faces frozen with shock as his Red Army gang burst into the bank yelling, “Hands up, we’re relieving you of your capitalist gains…. Long live the PROLETARIAT!”

  Forget the ideology. The power had thrilled him.

  He’d hated the nightly meetings, typing communiqués and discussing manifestos on organized armed resistance and spreading the class struggle.

  But robbing banks had been fun. It was all spoiled when they had decided to aim higher, when they’d become too greedy. Yet it was their mistake. The biggest one.

  So for twenty years Stefan had been underground. His Red Army group scattered: Jutta imprisoned, Marcus and Ingrid shot in the head; Ulrike had strangled herself with bedsheets in her cell. Beate and Jules had vanished. Mercenaries in Angola, last he’d heard.

  Now Jutta was dead.

  He stared down at his callused grease-stained fingers. Lucky thing he’d been good at fixing engines.

  “Alors!” said Anton, the barrel-chested owner, waving a socket wrench in his face. “Come back to earth, a carburetor’s waiting.”

  Stefan nodded and leaned over the gleaming engine.

  Anton kept him despite Stefan’s “dreamy fits,” as he called them. Because if Stefan knew one thing, it was Mercedes engines.

  He’d repair a thrown rod and make it smooth as lambskin, get a grinding gearbox purring in no time. If Anton suspected shadows in his workman’s past, he ignored them. Ignored them in favor of the forty percent markup he made on Stefan’s installation of Bulgarian-made parts stamped MADE IN GERMANY.

  “Fits like a woman’s stocking,” Anton said loudly. He shouted at Stefan as if he were half-witted, not just partly deaf.

  Stefan slid in the fuel injector, the socket wrench ratcheting with a grating noise side to side. Suddenly, his co-worker’s air gun shot lug nuts onto the tires on the huge Mercedes truck opposite.

  Like bullets.

  Stefan jumped. He always did. He couldn’t help it.