Murder in the Sentier ali-3

by Cara Black

  And he ran. He headed up the stairs, onto the roof.

  Stefan’s lungs burned. His pulse raced as his legs pumped. As he ran, he shed the raincoat, throwing it over the rooftop. Sweat poured down his shoulder blades.

  Why hadn’t he found the exit, planned his escape route like he usually did when entering a new building? Careless, he’d grown too soft and careless. And look what had happened!

  He was running for his life and hoping to God he could shinny up the slick roof tiles and climb down to that wrought-iron balcony filled with fat pink geraniums. With luck he could slip in through the balcony door, shoot through the apartment, then hotfoot it to the next street.

  At least he’d kept in shape. Lifted those weights, did sit-ups at dawn every morning.

  Damn geraniums … he landed, kicking dirt everywhere!

  Stefan picked himself up and raced past the half-opened glass door. An old man in a hair net sat reading by dim green light. The cat in his lap hissed.

  “Who are you? Get out!” the man sputtered, pushing his glasses up on his nose and trying to ward off the blow he anticipated.

  But he spoke to Stefan’s wind.

  Stefan slowed, cursing, unable to see in the pitch blackness. He felt his way along the raised linocrust lining the wall. With luck it would be a typical Sentier apartment—bedroom branching from hall to foyer to the front door.

  He reached a smooth doorknob. Tried twisting but it didn’t budge.

  Locked.

  Bright light blinded him. The old man, bowlegged in too-tight long johns and with a rusty meat cleaver, stood in the foyer.

  “I fought the boches, I can fight you,” he said, taking a step closer.

  Stefan tried to flip the brass knob, but it stuck.

  “Scheisser!”

  “You are a boche!” said the old man, startled.

  “Get back, old man!”

  Behind them, something thudded from the bedroom.

  Stefan rotated the latch hard until his fingers hurt. It turned. Then he flipped the dead bolt, ran out, and slammed the door.

  He grabbed the metal handrail, guiding himself down the steep serpentine stairs, careful to avoid the light switch. Keep moving, he told himself.

  Once he got to the street he’d lose himself in the sidewalk crowds or in the Metro. Then double back to the Mercedes, get his suitcase full of the disguises he’d kept for years, just in case, from the trunk.

  Stefan swung open the heavy Art Nouveau—style door, its glass held by curved metal strips. Flashes of red light, reflected on the glass, came from the flic car, which sat parked in front of him.

  Thursday Night

  AS SHE LEFT THE OFFICE with René, Aimée carried Miles Davis in her straw bag.

  “I’ve got shank bones in the fridge,” René said.

  Miles Davis’s ears perked to attention.

  “I’m happy to keep him tonight if you need to take care of the apartment.” René grinned.“Merci,” she said. “I’ll take you up on your offer.”

  A welcome breeze from the Seine sliced down rue du Louvre, rustling the plane trees. She waved goodbye as René, carrying Miles Davis in the bag, hopped the bus on Boulevard de Sébastopol that would drop him by his apartment near the Pompidou Center.

  She called the police for information about the break-in but so far they had no news. Before returning home, she needed to think. She walked toward the Sentier.

  She saw aging women displaying their wares on rue Saint Denis. When the pimps discarded them, the lucky ones shared a van with others, parked in Bois de Vincennes. Leaning in the shadows. Hiding their age.

  A granite-hard life with no retirement benefits. No sécurité sociale.

  Aimée remembered Huguette, or Madame Huguette, as her father insisted she call her. They’d lived across the hall from her until they moved in with her grandfather. Huguette had minded her after school after her mother left them.

  Huguette had buttered thick tartines on her kitchen table, let Aimée brush her toffee-colored Pekinese, and strictly enforced homework. Slim, compact, and stylish, Huguette knew more jokes than her father and how to make apple cider à la Breton. “I make the best,” she’d said, letting Aimée stir the mixture, “an old recipe from my belle-mère in Saint-Brieuc.”

  Every evening Huguette—who disguised her long ears with pixie wisps of hair—applied makeup, then poured herself into sparkly evening dresses. What glamorous work, thought eight-year-old Aimée, like going to a cocktail party!

  “Bistro Gavroche … I’m a hostess seating customers,” Huguette had said. “Near the Strasbourg Saint Denis Metro, by the big porte.”

  Aimée’s eyes had gleamed. She knew the huge arch, the old northern gateway of Paris since the fourteenth century.

  One night Aimée overheard her father and grandfather talking after she’d gone to bed. “What kind of choice is that … leaving your little girl with Huguette or keeping her with you at the Commissariat?” her grandfather had said. “Put her into boarding school.”

  “Did it harm me, hanging around putes and flics?” she’d heard her father ask. “Huguette’s good for her, she needs someone who can do things I can’t.” Her grandfather had stayed silent.

  And her papa had kept her with him, mostly. Until she got older and was sent to boarding school.

  Years later on a job, she’d found herself passing through her former neighborhood. She’d walked down the narrow street. In her old building the mailboxes looked new. She hadn’t remembered Huguette’s last name. Or if she’d even known it.

  But now curiosity got the better of her, and she walked to the lane behind their old building. Overgrown bushes in a vacant lot shaded the dead end. Once, there had been an Art Nouveau chalet with curving wood supports and an iron-framed glass terrace on the site. She and Huguette had often speculated as to who’d lived there. They’d made up stories about the owner, a Monsieur Roulard who worked at Gare Saint-Lazare and had the officious title chef d’opérations painted on his gate.

  Now plastic bags whipped over dust and rubble in the wind, spiraled strands of rusted wire coiled around the single tree that stood where a garden had once bloomed. At Huguette’s window she saw an old woman stroking ceramic gnomes on her back window ledge.

  Aimée stopped. Each gnome perched on a green base, wore a pointed red cap, and stood in a different pose. The woman patted them, rearranged their order, then noticed Aimée. A half-smile came over the ravaged face. The long ears were recognizable. Aimée gaped open-mouthed, then raised her hand in greeting. But the old woman had bent over the gnomes, rubbing them with a cloth. Time passed, shadows covered Aimée’s boots, and the woman still polished away, not looking up once.

  Aimée turned and walked away over the broken cobbles under the night sky encrusted with stars.

  Thursday Night

  “MONSIEUR … ARE YOU WELL? ” the flic asked Stefan.

  His legs paralyzed, Stefan realized he was panting, his lungs about to burst.

  “Fine, merci,” he managed and tried to wave the flic off. And wave off his own terror.

  But the flic, his eyebrows rising in the flashing red lights from the patrol car, stared at him.

  Stefan wanted to control his breathing. He tried but he couldn’t, and he clutched the door frame.

  “No problem, please,” Stefan said.

  Another flic alighted from the driver’s seat. His badge shone in the streetlight, his mouth was set in a thin line.

  “This your place of residence, Monsieur?”

  “Stopped for a nightcap at my friends’, Officer,” Stefan said, his breathing more under control now.

  “Aaaah,” the flic nodded. “So you live in the quartier?”Stefan thought of his ID; he couldn’t lie.

  “Visiting friends who do, Officer,” he said, shifting his leg and keeping his head down.

  “Bon. You seem very social,” the flic said. “We’d appreciate your help in our inquiries.”

  “Inquiries?” Stefan’s
heart thumped. He thought it would leap out of his chest. “Like I said, I don’t live in Paris.”

  “Actually, you didn’t say, Monsieur,” said the flic with the hard mouth. “If you don’t mind, we’d like you to accompany us to the Commissariat.”

  “But I’m a visitor here….”

  “And probably with a sharper eye than we who take the scenery for granted, eh?”

  Stefan wondered if someone had been shot in the building.

  “Has something happened?”

  The flic took his arm as if concerned for his health.

  “A homicide, Monsieur,” he said, escorting him to the car.

  Thursday Night

  AIMÉE’S CELL PHONE VIBRATED on her hip.

  “Allô?”

  “Have you found Idrissa yet?” Christian asked.

  Finally!

  “Where have you been, Christian? You didn’t show up at your appointment to meet Etienne or at the bank. I’ve been calling you,” she said. “Your father’s editor, Vigot, knows more than he’s saying about—”

  “I know,” Christian interrupted, his voice slurred. “Forget that … Idrissa’s in trouble.”

  “Forget it?” she asked, angered at being brushed off. “Do you know if Vigot’s got your father’s manuscript?”

  “No, but Vigot said …”

  She heard a muffled sound, as if Christian had put his hand over the phone.

  And then he hung up.

  Worried, she hit the call-back button but the line was busy. Was he doped up and in trouble himself?

  She’d keep trying his number as she headed toward Mala’s apartment to find Idrissa.

  No one answered the doorbell. Club Exe was a block away, maybe she’d find Mala there.

  The club’s narrow entrance on rue Poissonnière smelled of disinfectant. A sure sign of a health inspection or the rumor of one, Aimée thought. Clubs also spiffed up when they were nervous about immigration authority visits.

  “I’d like to speak with Mala,” said Aimée.

  “She’s not working tonight.”

  Great!

  “Seen Idrissa Diaffa?”

  “Not here anymore,” the voice said. Only a brown elongated neck was visible above the man’s red, yellow, and green Rasta-style tank top. His face was hidden by the Club Exe’s cracked ticket-booth shade. Pounding techno music sounded from within.

  “But the advertisement says she’s still here.” Aimée pointed to the sign. Club Exe advertised Tuesdays through Thursdays as “acoustic nights with Idrissa, accompanied on the kora by Ousmane.”

  “That’s old … but there’s music upstairs,” the voice said. “Remix downstairs. Either way, thirty francs.”

  “Pas de problème,” she said. Fine, she’d see if anyone knew Idrissa’s whereabouts or whether Ousmane had any idea where she was.

  She passed the francs over worn wood. A brown hand took hers and stamped her wrist with the image of a red skeleton key. Inside, the techno beat amped up, savaging Aimée’s ears. Several men with dreadlocks leaned on the bar, an old converted zinc. They nodded at her while sipping orange punch gingembre, a Senegalese drink packing a rum wallop.

  She found the back stairs. By the rear kitchen, she smelled and heard the hiss of palm oil spattering in a pan. The cook, his back to her, stood tasting a pot of tibouaiénne fish and rice.

  On the next landing, past the public telephone, was a room with a small stage at the end. Patrons sat on banquettes around tables below smoky mirrors lining the walls. Some ate, most drank. It was a mixed crowd: young and old, white and black, listening to the strains of griot-inspired music. An old man wearing a long striped orange robe and what looked like a red velvet pillbox hat played the kora. He bore no resemblance to Ousmane in the photo with Idrissa.

  He sang and plucked at the smooth calabash gourd backed by animal skin. Strings held in place by metal studs went up the long-necked instrument.

  Aimée saw no sign of Idrissa. She walked down the side hall and peered backstage. A young woman, short braids poking from her curly hair, stacked rolls of napkins and paper goods over a bricked-in mantel.

  “Bonsoir, I’m looking for Idrissa,” she said.

  The woman shrugged, then moved her hands in what Aimée figured was sign language.

  “Muette?”

  The woman nodded. She was mute.

  “Ousmane Sada?”

  The woman picked up a flyer and pointed to the name Mbouela, a kora player “direct from Côte d’Ivoire.” “So, Ousmane’s gone?” Aimée asked.

  The young woman nodded.

  “What about Idrissa?” Aimée asked, pointing toward a dressing room. Maybe there’d be someone in there who knew her.

  The woman shrugged.

  “Merci.” Aimée smiled. “I’ll just have a quick look.”

  The young woman returned to stacking paper goods.

  The rectangular dressing room lay empty except for the costume of a clown in black and white, a Pierrot. Large windows overlooked the peaks of a wrought-iron-and-glass roof. Beyond that lay the tiled rooftops of the Sentier.

  “The bitch … ,” Aimée heard someone mutter, “where is she?”

  She heard a crash as something fell to the floor. She didn’t feel like waiting around to see whom they were looking for. She ducked out the open window. Below her spread the long glass-covered roof of Passage du Caire, the oldest passage in Paris.

  On her left was an outdoor spiral staircase, remnant of an old conduit to the quarters above the passage where shop owners lived. She stepped out of the window and reached across to the outdoor metal staircase, pulled herself up by the railing, and climbed over. By the time she’d descended the stairs and reached the passage, the shop owners had long since closed and locked their doors. She made it out to the small triangular square of Place Ste-Foy.

  Aimée looked back but no one had followed her. She paused at the dead end of rue Saint Spire. Where had Idrissa gone? She’d found no answers at the club or when she tried phoning her friend’s apartment. If Idrissa was in danger, Aimée didn’t know how to help her or where to look next.

  And what did Christian’s comment about Vigot mean? She hit the call-back button. But the phone rang and rang. No answer.

  Stumped, Aimée sat down on a green bench, the Passage du Caire behind her, and pulled out her notepad. Her mother remained a mystery. As did everything else.

  The Place Ste-Foy lay quiet: the cafe s and wholesale clothing shops shuttered, plastic bags filled to bursting with cloth remnants and overflowing green garbage bins propped under the trees. The only sign of life was a young boy kicking a soccer ball under the watchful eye of an old woman, who wore a babushka. Aimée wondered what the child was doing up so late. Had it been too hot for him to sleep?

  “Attention, Vanya,” the old woman said when his ball bounced against the stone walls of an occupied building. “Kick someplace else.”

  A moped rode by, the tinny-sounding motor echoing in the square. Aimée heard its putt-putting as it sped into the distance. Only an occasional prostitute with her client turned into the ancient Passage Ste-Foy under the Roseline clothing sign.

  Above her, dim lights from the narrow medieval apartments dotted the night. She thought Atget, who photographed the place in the 1900s, would probably still recognize the square. In a quartier with no green spaces but these few skinny trees, this warm pocket, Aimée realized, comprised nature and park to a titi like Vanya.

  On the graph-patterned notebook page, she wrote three names, Christian, Romain, and Idrissa, and put question marks next to them. After Christian’s name she wrote “dope” and “guilt,” then connected the arrows to Romain. Christian had assumed responsibility for his father’s suicide but his father had been murdered.

  She connected Jutta and her mother and wrote “Labordecache—Modigliani paintings?” None of this made any sense. Tired, she figured she better sleep on it. Aimée shouldered her bag and stood. The babushka’s tone rose in anger. The you
ng boy had kicked the ball into a garbage bag, knocking it over. Scraps and garbage swirled in the breeze, littering the deserted square. Cloth bits blew by Aimée’s sandals. She looked over. At first she thought she saw the torso of a dummy, a mannequin. She stared.

  A black mannequin.

  Something was wrong.

  Aimée ran over as the babushka screamed, covering the boy’s eyes with her hands. Aimée tried to shield their view.

  The dreadlocks twined with cowrie shells and yellow and red beads were familiar. Very familiar. Idrissa!

  Aimée gasped. The half-open eyes were visible. There was a band of toche noire, a reddish brown tissue, across the pupils. Not a pretty sight. But a drying effect she recalled from premed.

  She must have been killed several hours ago. Her face was distorted, her neck cocked at an impossible angle. Poor Idrissa, what a waste.

  She knelt down. Something looked peculiar.

  Peeling the bag lower, she saw dried rivulets of blood. But it wasn’t Idrissa.

  It was a man. A man who’d been in the picture with Idrissa at Club Exe. Ousmane, the kora player.

  Don’t get involved, she told herself.

  Ahead, on rue Ste-Foy, she heard the whine of the late night garbage truck. Before the truck hit the square, she took a good look at the man. The pink bra and garter belt he wore were too large. Like an afterthought, Aimée figured. To make him look the Saint Denis type, on the off chance this bag, destined for the garbage truck, might be opened and the body found.

  “We have to get the flics,” she said, still trying to shield the boy.

  Fear shone in the old woman’s eyes. She shook her head, clutching him. She didn’t know or want to know. Maybe she had no papers.

  “S’il vous plaît, before the trashmen come!”

  Aimée didn’t want to do this. Get involved with this.

  But the woman backed up, pulling the boy. What could Aimée do? The woman hobbled toward Passage du Caire. No time to follow them.

  She’d been looking for Idrissa and now she’d found her accompanist. Why had Idrissa’s partner been killed? Had the killer made a mistake?