by Cara Black
“Wasn’t she in the Haader-Rofmein gang?”
“You came here to ask me that?” Liane pounded her hand on the table.
“Jutta Hald was murdered.” Aimée looked down. She realized Liane Barolet’s hand consisted of a thumb, index finger, and pinkie. The middle and ring fingers were stubs.
“When?” Liane asked, as she leaned back in the shadows.
“The day she got out.”
Aimée couldn’t see her reaction. She decided to get to the point.
Her eyes had grown accustomed to the dimness. “Right before her death, Jutta showed up at my apartment. She said she’d shared a cell with my mother,” Aimée said. “She wanted money to tell me more, then she was shot.” She hoped the trembling of her lips didn’t show. “My mother’s name was Sydney Leduc. Did you know her?”
Liane Barolet’s eyes crinkled in amusement. “Mon petit, guess what? Life is hard. Then you die.”
“Jutta said the same thing.”
“But it’s true.”
“I’m not asking for sympathy,” Aimée said.
“So what do you want?”
This wasn’t going well.
“Look, I’m sorry this is confusing,” Aimée said. She drummed her fingers under the wooden table. They came back sticky. “All I want to know is if Jutta talked about my mother in prison.”
“Why ask me?”
“You shared a cell with Jutta, she was excited about getting out. She might have told you something. You’re in the system, you might have heard things. Or whether someone else knows. Then I can lay it to rest.”
“I doubt that,” Liane said.
Startled, Aimée looked up. “What do you mean?”
“If you wanted to forget about your mother, you’d have ignored Jutta.”
Her astute observation rankled. Maybe because it felt true.
“Is it wrong to want to know what’s happened to her?”
Liane Barolet shook her head. “The only wrong part might be the answer,” she said. “What’s that saying … let sleeping dogs lie?”
“Look, I’ll make it worth your while,” Aimée said. That struck home, she could tell.
“How could you do that … sleep with the warden at Clairvaux?” Liane gave a sneer, then shook her head. “Non, mon petit, I wish that on no one.”
The way she said it gave Aimée a chill.
“But you could help me, they threatened to dig her up,” Liane continued. “Even though I only just found out. I paid right away!”
Aimée realized she was talking about a cemetery. When the grave fees were not paid, the bodies were dug up. No wonder she was upset.
“Parloir terminé!” shouted one of the guards, signaling that visiting time was over.
Aimée stood. “Help me and I’ll help you.” If Liane was desperate enough she’d talk. “Did you know my mother, did you ever hear of her?”
“There was a lightweight, an American woman.” Liane waved her hand dismissively.
Aimée’s hopes soared. Then her fear grew.
“What was this American’s name?”
“Who knows? I just remember her saying things like ‘If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution.’”
Her mother? “Can you find out her name … what happened?”
“She wasn’t in long,” Liane said. “Well, compared to me, eh?”
“How long?”
“The system moves prisoners around,” Liane said. “I didn’t keep track.”
“You can do better than that,” Aimée said. “What was she in for?”
“That’s the thing.” Liane leaned forward. “She’d been in on some heist with Jutta. But only Jutta was charged.”
“But everyone gets charged who comes …”
Liane shook her head. “They hold people for months, sometimes years, before arraignment. At least they used to. She was one of those.”
“So they use Frésnes like a jail?”
“Only for the special ones,” Liane said. “That pissed Jutta off.”
“Did she write to Jutta in prison?”
Pause. The bell sounded the second and final warning. Chairs and stools scraped over the concrete floor.
“The letters are in my cell,” Liane said.
“Letters from my mother?”
“Reading material’s scarce here,” Liane said. “Jutta left me her books. She used to keep her letters in them.”
Aimée’s hope rekindled. She tried to keep her voice even. “What do these letters say?”
The cubicle door opened.
“Barolet! Visiting time’s over,” said the guard.
“Help me to keep my mother’s bones beside my father’s,” Liane said. “My lawyer’s in contact with me. I’ll give the letters to him if you get me a receipt from the cemetery for the money they say is overdue.”
“D’accord, here’s my address,” Aimée said, glancing at the paperwork she had been handed. “Matter of fact, I’ll go there now. Your deadline’s passed. But I’ll take care of it and send you the receipt.”
Liane stood up slowly. “Do you know what I’m in for?”
Aimée shook her head. “Whatever you’ve done, you’re being punished for it.”
“You should know,” Liane said. “So you don’t think I withheld anything.”
“As I said …”
“Blowing up banks. Terrorism,” Liane said, her eyes gleaming in the light. “I’m proud of that. No one ever called revolution a dainty proposition. My ideology hasn’t changed. It never will.” She stared at Aimée. “We regard these as acts of war. But I’m not proud about the little children who happened to be too near.”
Aimée shuddered. She wondered if explosives had claimed Liane’s fingers. Or had prison?
Aimée said, “Keep your end of the deal and I’ll keep mine.”
HER THOUGHTS roamed helter-skelter on the way back to Paris. Did Liane have letters to Jutta from her mother? Was her mother alive? During the long journey, Aimée made several calls.
When she reached Montmartre cemetery on rue Rachel, she remembered her schoolteacher saying that corpses had been thrown into an old plaster quarry—which was now the cemetery—during the French Revolution. And how the vineyards of Montmartre had produced an astringent wine with such diuretic properties that a seventeenth-century ditty went: “This is the wine of Montmartre, drink a pint, piss a quart.”
The grave digger she finally located tapped his shovel. “The old bird was heavy,” he said. “That’s for sure.”
Aimée groaned inwardly. She’d have to give him a big tip.
He looked pointedly at his watch, sighed, then said, “It’s too late to put her back but you can see her for yourself.”
They wound over the gravel and dirt, past the graves of Zola and Degas. Midway, the grave digger paused and wiped his brow. “Over there.”
The marble mausoleum’s gate hung open. Dead flies, fossilized bees, and dusty plastic flower bouquets were strewn within.
“Doesn’t the Barolet family own this?”
“Leased for a hundred years,” he said, his tone matter-of-fact.
“Surely, it’s more trouble to dispose …”
“Mademoiselle, there’s a long waiting list of people eager for this space.” For the second time he looked at his watch.
“Her daughter paid,” Aimée said. “Here are the receipts.”
“Then she’s been notified. According to my patron, she wasn’t up to date with payments,” he said. “If she disputes this, let her talk to him on Saturday when he returns.”
A lot of good that would do, with Liane in prison.
“Meanwhile what happens?”
“We take what’s left to the boneyard.”
“Boneyard!”
The grave digger shrugged. “That’s standard procedure.” His blue overalls were stained and muddy.
What if this man was lying, trying to make more money.
“Let me see the coffin.”
He gestured to the right.
“Over there, behind François Truffaut.”
Aimée walked behind the mausoleum. She saw two coffins, one newer and with tarnished brass handles, the other wooden and water-stained.
“Which one?”
“The fancy model,” he said. “Think of this like an eviction, I tell people.”
“Evicting the dead?”
“What do you want me to do, eh?” he sneered. “Someday you’ll be here too, Mademoiselle high and mighty!”
Burn me first, she almost said. Scatter my ashes from my balcony over the Seine, before a dirty old coot like you can rattle my bones.
Of course it all came down to money.
“How much?”
“Take that up with administration,” he said. “All I do is shovel up the leftovers and leave them for the bone men.”
Aimée hoped he didn’t see her shudder.
The cemetery office was closed. Shadows lengthened over the stone houses of the dead.
“Can’t you put her inside the mausoleum until I straighten this out?” she said, placing a hundred francs in his palm.
He rubbed his arms. “She’s heavy, that one!”
“I’ll make it worth your while,” she said, hating to have to smile and to try to coax the favor from him.
In answer, he wheeled a hydraulic lift from a nearby shed. She stared at the coffin, faded sepia images of her mother crowding her mind. Was her mother crumbling in one of these somewhere?
“If there’s no payment in three days, she’s out. Permanently,” he said. “I don’t do this twice.” The grave digger pumped the lift and pushed the coffin toward the mausoleum.
Aimée watched him. She stood perspiring in the heat, and he hadn’t even broken a sweat. “I thought you said she was heavy.”
“Mais she was!”
“Don’t tell me she lost weight since you moved her.”
He leered. “The other day she was heavy … you think I’m lying?”
“But, look, aren’t coffins supposed to be sealed?”
She pointed to the cracked white chips along the coffin lid ledge.
“I didn’t do that.”
“Why so defensive all of a sudden?”
“Freaks,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “Satan worshippers.” He looked over his shoulder, lowered his voice. “We don’t tell the families but cults break in here some nights. I find candles melted on the stones, even a dead chicken once!”
“Do they rob the coffins?”
He wouldn’t meet her eye, but he swiped his dirty finger across his lips. She took it to mean that he wouldn’t say.
“Open it,” she said. “I’m not paying otherwise and I’ll make a big stink with your boss.”
It was the last thing she wanted to see but Liane Barolet should know if she was being ripped off for an already desecrated coffin.
He handed her the crowbar. “Not my job.”
And he shuffled away over the gravel.
The lid moved easily. Too easily.
As the late afternoon sun slanted through the leaves, a bird swooped up into the hard blue sky. She steeled herself to look in the dark, earthy-smelling interior. Instead of a shrouded, decaying corpse she found an empty coffin.
She pushed the lid up further. The only things inside were a crumpled brown plastic bag with Neufarama written across it and dried leaves that crackled as she touched them. She remembered buying a sweater from a Neufarama store but they’d gone out of business in the seventies.
Tuesday Afternoon
OUSMANE SADA, THE KORA PLAYER, wanted to help Idrissa, but first he had to get direction. And only the marabout, the fortune-teller, could point the way.
Ousmane mounted the worn wooden steps of the Sentier hotel. Too bad Idrissa hadn’t come with him, but at least she was safe staying at his place. He knocked twice on the hotel door with the number 5 stenciled on it. From inside he heard a muffled “Entrez.”
He removed his embroidered skullcap, took a deep breath, then opened the door.
“Bonjour,” he said. “I seek guidance.”
The marabout nodded.
In the cheap hotel room on rue Beauregard, maps of star constellations were strewn over the ragged chenille-covered bed. He set an envelope in the marabout’s hollowed-out gourd bowl. The marabout, a bland-faced foreseer of the future, ignored his action. A marabout never acknowledged hadiya, gifts from his taalibe, his followers. In Ousmane’s village outside Dakar in Senegal, the price had been chickens.
The marabout’s taalibe would rebuild their wealth on the path to salvation. Hard work and many hadiyas improved one’s chances of going to Paradise. A spiritual economy, his father had called it.
But Ousmane’s father’s marabout, whose photo he wore in the talisman around his neck, would frown on this visit. Loyalty to one’s marabout was important. Even though Senegal was thousands of miles away, his pulse beat rapidly.
Ousmane inhaled the familiar willow bark and cinnamon scent from the burning cones. He saw the day’s fortune in Arabic letters tacked on the gouged plaster wall. He twitched. He’d felt out of sorts for days now. Must have la grippe—the flu. Sweating and feverish, he felt thirsty.
The marabout would throw the shells, arrange the beads, and interpret the signs. Tell him if his woman, Cheike, still waited to marry him. So he would return home, which was what his heart told him. And the signs would show him how to keep Idrissa safe.
He’d borrow the fare from his cousin Khalifa, a sanitation engineer, to keep him from drinking it away. Khalifa was different, he liked it here. The food clotted with cow’s excrement they called butter, the raw horse meat eaten only by jaguars and tigers in his country, the painted women who preened and sold themselves on the street like pheasants in the market.
Since his childhood, Ousmane had strung fishing lines, patched and woven the nets, to face another day in the tepid ocean. He remembered gripping the flapping fins and shining scales of the fish his family caught in the turquoise waters. At first, his work in the Sentier sewing factory had seemed bearable. He slept alongside other workers on mattresses on the factory floor, like he’d done at home on mats with his siblings. Yet the cold damp from the stone floor seeped into his bones. Stayed there. No crusty vanilla sand caked on his calves. There were no warm orange sunsets laced by the smell of roasting peanuts.
Idrissa had noticed. His music suffered. Some nights he felt so tired after pressing and ironing the clothes in the factory, too tired to pluck the strings of his kora to accompany Idrissa’s songs.
“Ask your question,” said the marabout.
A stained yellow floral drapery flapped in the breeze from the open window. Hesitant at first, Ousmane wiped his brow, then gathered his courage and spoke.
The marabout threw the shells. The sound as the cowries clicked competed with the shouts of cart pullers below in the street. The marabout frowned. “Your question was not framed with a pure heart,” he intoned. He pointed to the shells’ configuration. “Don’t be stingy with the truth.” The marabout’s long brown fingers snaked over the shells. He waited, lost in thought.
“Tell me what the shells say.” Ousmane trembled, asking in their language, Wolof.
“Tiens!” said the marabout, refusing to speak their native tongue. “Your request rebounds on you. Where is your respect?”
“I’m confused.”
The marabout reached over and flipped Ousmane’s shirt collar down. He pointed to the talisman around Ousmane’s neck. “The shells confirm, you belong in another’s following.”
Ousmane cringed.
“It’s forbidden, you know that,” the marabout said. “Now a curse will bite at your heels, as wild dogs guard a village.”
Guilt filled Ousmane. Would the marabout’s curse doom him, or Idrissa?
WEDNESDAY
Wednesday Afternoon
AIMÉE RAN INTO the office of Leduc Detective and threw her leather bag on the settee. “I need to go to Frésnes tomorrow. May I borrow your car, René?”
“What happened?”
“Something bizarre.” She told him about visiting Liane Barolet in Frésnes and the empty coffin in Montmartre cemetery.
“For more than twenty years, Liane’s been paying?” he asked.
Aimée waved the plastic Neufarama bag.
“Pretty expensive just to store a plastic bag,” he said. “I’d demand a refund.”
Now it came back to her. She recalled Jutta’s comment that her mother must have returned to Aimée’s apartment or to the cemetery. At the time, she thought Jutta had been talking in riddles. Now it made sense.
“Wouldn’t Liane have asked Jutta to pay instead of you?” René asked.
“But she’d just found out after Jutta left,” Aimée said. “What if Jutta was looking for something kept inside the coffin?”
René blinked. His fingers paused on the keyboard. “That’s a big jump.”
She perched on her desk. “Not really when you think about it. It’s accessible to anyone who can hop over the walls at night and jimmy the coffin open. No need for storage keys or to evade guards at night. And it could hold something big. The possibilities are endless,” she said. “Did Jutta find the coffin empty … is that why she came to me? Or did she find something, take it away, and hide it?”
“That doesn’t make sense, unless Jutta was hiding it from someone else,” René said. “But you said she insinuated that your mother had sent you something, or hidden it, for you to find, while you were away as an exchange student.”
The old frustration returned. And the hurt of not knowing.
“Papa destroyed everything of hers,” she said. “Nothing’s left. But Liane Barolet hinted that Jutta received a letter from my mother,” she said. “She must be alive!”
“How do you know? The woman could be desperate, lying just to get you to take care of the fees for coffin.” René shook his head. “Face it, Aimée, you’re chasing a trail that’s been cooling for more than twenty years.” He edged himself off the chair with effort and stood. “Your mother left, she never came back, and she’s not going to.”
“She’s alive, René,” she said. “She has to be. I’ll find her.”
René crossed to the coatrack, took his cane, and lifted his linen jacket off its hook with it. She couldn’t see his face.
