Murder in the Sentier

by Cara Black

  “Say it, René.”

  Instead of sympathizing, René seemed bitter.

  “I’m going to my tae kwon do workout,” he said. He picked up his bag with the Yuan Dojo label and paused at the door. “Have you ever thought, Aimée,” he said from the door, “that if she is alive maybe she doesn’t want to be found?”

  RENÉ’S WORDS sliced her to the quick. She couldn’t work. It seemed like the very walls mocked her. She walked to the mail pile, rifled through the bills, and found a fat brown envelope addressed to “A. Leduc—Personal.”

  She slit open the bulky envelope. Stuffed inside, she found one folio of her mother’s small bound notebook. On it, in thick block letters, were written six words: “Cooperate and the rest is yours.”

  For a moment, joy rushed over her. Then came the awful realization that Jutta’s killer had sent her this as a bargaining chip. She slipped on gloves, took the kit from her bottom desk drawer, and dusted for prints. Just in case.

  Aimée looked at the postmark: Hôtel des Postes on rue Etienne Marcel. Two blocks from where Jutta was killed.

  She swept papers off her desk, then gingerly set down the notebook pages. These pages were different from those Jutta had shown her. The book had been halved, or quartered, the binding ripped and split. Below a drawing of Emil with red suspenders was what looked like a diagram for a mouse house with tiny platforms, running wheels, and a spiral staircase, a tiny box, an arrow.

  Aimée looked closer. Under the Emil drawing, was another, with a sketch of horizontal lines, banked. Slanted. She stood back. Was it some kind of pattern?

  She walked over to the window. Faint warm breezes from the Seine brushed over her, then dissipated. Yet even at this distance, she couldn’t make out the pattern.

  With care she scanned all eight pages into her computer. Then lifted the prints. Blurry and indistinct … the fingers of hundreds who’d handled the envelope. Not a print came from the notebook, it had been wiped clean.

  Of course.

  Darting a furtive look around her office, she lifted the notebook pages, pressed them to her lips. Inhaled the old paper scent. Silly. No one could see her. Then she sat at her terminal, and tried to make sense of the lines.

  She ran Viva-1, an industrial art program. She played with the lines. Stretching, bending, and looping them. All she got was psychedelic-colored bands when she enlarged them.

  Of course, she thought. Enhance, then reduce them.

  inailgidom

  An anagram?

  She played around, trying to form the letters into words, substituting letters.

  Nothing.

  Then she simply reversed the letters.

  modigliani

  Amedeo Modigliani was a sculptor, painter, and friend of Picasso. An Italian, from a Jewish ghetto, who came to Paris and dissipated—or enhanced—his talents, depending on whom one read.

  Had her mother admired Modigliani? She looked closer and saw elongated figures in the lines … an odd complementary fit. On each roof corner of the diagrammed mouse house were elongated gargoyles.

  Aimée went online and did a search on Modigliani. His pieces were in museums, though a majority were in private collections. She dug further. An auction at Sotheby’s a few years ago had netted hundreds of thousands. But some paintings had been missing since the war … several from the Laborde collection.

  Something clicked in her head.

  Laborde … Laborde … where had she heard that name?

  Of course, he’d been kidnapped by Haader-Rofmein. She found a bottle of Badoit, poured the sparkling water into her espresso cup, and got to work.

  She searched newspaper databases for information about the industrialist Paul Laborde. Born in Mulhouse, on the French-German border, of a French father and a German mother, he’d amassed great wealth after the war, rebuilding steel foundries along the Rhine. He’d made gobs of money. Smelled dirty, as her papa used to say.

  Haader-Rofmein took a particular dislike to him and his business, especially after his firm acquired several steel foundries, then mines in Africa. They targeted his company, pointing out that his steel, reworked, of course, ended up as bayonets in Vietnam.

  Laborde wasn’t the only target, of course. The Krupp and Thyssen families suffered extortion and kidnap attempts. But Haader-Rofmein discovered the address of one of Laborde’s homes and burgled it as well as kidnapping Laborde. News coverage dried up after a shoot-out in the forest and Laborde’s death.

  A light went on in her head. Her mother, the Modigliani paintings, Laborde, and the radicals who’d kidnapped him were all connected. Somehow.

  Here was Laborde’s tie-in to Haader-Rofmein. From what Jutta had said, the Action-Réaction and Haader-Rofmein gangs had melded together. But how did, or could, Romain Figeac’s manuscript fit in with Sartre’s old interview with Haader about agit888, perhaps with her mother as interpreter?

  She called Martine. Told her what she found and the connection she suspected.

  “Laborde didn’t get in bed with terrorists, Aimée,” Martine said. “Quite the oppposite. His shady past included Vichy collaboration and using mercenaries for his African investments.”

  “Right, but they took over his house—”

  “Whoa,” Martine said. “You’re right. They kidnapped him, then he went Stockholm Syndrome.”

  “Stockholm Syndrome?”

  “Lots of hostages come to identify with their captors after a while. It was named after the Stockholm embassy incident.”

  “He couldn’t have identified too long,” Aimée said. “The gang killed him, didn’t they?”

  “Never proved, and no one was charged,” Martine said.

  Strange, Aimée thought.

  “What about Laborde’s art collection?”

  “Give me some time,” Martine said and hung up.

  While Aimée downloaded more information, she turned the notebook pages. Her heart caught. Only one more drawing of Emil, his whiskers running off the page.

  She wished the book hadn’t been torn apart and ruined. She clutched her knees and rocked back and forth, lost in old thoughts. Here she was, an adult with a successful business and a partner, yet she was still obsessed with her mother. She had to admit it, she had no life beyond René, Miles Davis, her computer, and this obsession.

  René was probably right. Liane Barolet might be leading her on. But that wouldn’t stop her from finding out the truth, from finding her mother.

  And what had Jutta wanted … what did her killer want … what had her mother left or hidden?

  The phone rang.

  “Allô?”

  “So glad I caught you, Mademoiselle Leduc.”

  That dense, creamy voice. “Anything new with Christian, Monsieur Mabry?”

  “Some issues came up,” he said. “Can you meet me tonight?”

  “Would this be a consultation?”

  “You could call it that.”

  “What time?”

  “Eight P.M.”

  She let a pause hang in the air, long enough, she hoped, to seem busy. “I’ll fit you in.”

  “Let’s meet opposite the Bourse in the Yabon art squat. He’ll join us.”

  “So Christian’s all right?” she asked. “I’ve been worried.”

  “No more of a crisis than usual,” Etienne Mabry said. “Third floor, Hubert’s salon.”

  Pleased and immediately panicked about what to wear, Aimée hung up.

  SHE NEEDED to get back on good terms with René and to get up to speed with Michel’s computer system. After tackling the pile of papers on her desk, she checked Michel’s database and was struck by the volume of his supply orders, many dating from early spring, that showed up as unpaid.

  How could Michel, a struggling new designer, obtain that kind of credit? She searched and discovered one of his uncle Nessim’s companies, Kookie Mode, had guaranteed his line of credit and received the invoices for his supplies; leather, fabric, and sewing needs.

  Sh
e dug further. The scary thing was, Kookie Mode had sought protection from its creditors. Wasn’t that the first step on the road to bankruptcy? She made a note to check further.

  Wednesday Afternoon

  STEFAN UNSCREWED THE license plates of an old Renault parked near the cemetery. Once burgundy colored, the car now looked like a faded wine stain. He’d chosen Paris district plates ending in 75, figuring he’d fade into the scuffed woodwork of a teeming quartier like the Sentier. Blend in with the blue-collar crowd, the immigrants and the traffic of the sex and garment trades.

  He’d worry about sending money to his old maman later. Poor Maman with her bad leg. He told himself to remain invisible, like he always did. Not to panic. First things first.

  He drove with caution through Place de Clichy, past Café Wepler’s outdoor tables. Jules, he remembered, had delighted in playing the tour guide. He’d pointed out to Stefan that in the thirties Henry Miller had nursed an espresso there for hours and during the Occupation it had been a Kantine and Soldatenheim for the Wehrmacht.

  He followed the bus route past Gare Saint-Lazare, down the once grand Boulevard Haussmann, built on the old ramparts of Paris, behind the gold dome of the Opera Garnier toward the Sentier. Stefan parked on rue de Clery, behind a wide blue van with broken rear lights.

  He loosened his raincoat, feeling conspicuous. So many wore only tank tops in this heat. The one-way street was crammed with parked cars packed tighter than herrings in a barrel. A delicious coolness came from the leaning stone buildings that lined the sloping street.

  He passed the ancien Hôtel de Noisy, elegant despite cheap wholesale clothing stores taking up the ground floor. His goal, the building on rue de Clery, was almost the same as Stefan remembered it, except for the blackened windows and smoky smell. He wondered what had happened. Stefan walked past.

  He waited until dusk painted the tops of the stone buildings. Until early evening shoppers returned, climbing the narrow Sentier stairways. Until he smelled garlic frying in olive oil emanating from open windows and heard the clatter of plates at dinner tables.

  Snatches of Hebrew came from the storefront on rue d’Aboukir as a man in a yarmulke carried out the trash. On the narrow street the putes clustered in the doorways, just as he remembered. Only now they carried cell phones and more were of African and Arab origin. Still the rag and shag trade carried on much the same as before.

  Stefan stood until the street lamps furred with a dense glow, then he shoved open the tall dark green door of Romain Figeac’s building. In the cobbled courtyard, dark shapes contoured the walls. The glass-paned door to the main staircase stood ajar. By the time he reached the third floor, the burnt smell alerted him. Blackened wood and yellow tape forbade him to cross the charred entrance of Figeac’s apartment.

  Too late … why was he always too late?

  Whether because twenty years of being on the lam made him more aware or it had become second nature at the hint of danger, Stefan’s hair rose on the back of his neck, his nerves tingled. The metallic sound, like the snick of a cartridge being loaded, echoed off the the stone.

  Or he could have sworn it did.

  He knew he had to run. And run he did. Without looking back or pausing to see if his instincts were right.

  If he had, he would have heard the bullet whiz. Seen a large hole blown in the plaster where he’d just stood, bleeding chunks of grit and mortar over the parquet.

  Wednesday Afternoon

  AIMÉE PUNCHED in René’s door code at the house on the rue de la Reynie. She mounted his creaking stairs, which smelled of wax polish and stepped softly, mindful of his neighbor’s sleep. He was a female impersonator who worked in Les Halles.

  “Damn cyber squatters!” René greeted Aimée as she walked inside his apartment. His eyes raced up and down the screen almost as fast as his fingers did. “We registered click.mango.fr as a domain name before they did.”

  “Going to boot them out?” she said.

  He nodded, tugging his goatee. “It won’t be pretty.”

  “Talking about squats,” she said, “we’re invited to the collectif Yabon d’Arts.” She wanted René to come and meet Christian.

  René hit Save. His head turned.

  “Looks like I got your attention. Now get dressed.”

  ALIGHTING FROM René’s bullet gray Citroën, customized for his four-foot height, Aimée looked around. “Any fashionistas here?” she asked.

  “You’ll fit right in,” René grinned, buttoning his black frock coat, then pointing to the artists’ squat. “Tomboys in lace are en vogue.”

  She tucked her ruffled cuffs inside her leather biker jacket sleeves, pinched her cheeks for color, and tried for an appearance of sang-froid.

  Before them, the Haussmann-era building stood out. Throbbing lime, violet, and silver graffiti mocked the staid financial district, home to the Bourse. Caricatures spread a floor high; filigreed iron balcony railings held signs emblazoned TURN EMPTY SPACE INTO ART and FIGHT POLITICAL CORRECTNESS—A NEW FORM OF TERRORISM TO THE ART WORLD.

  “Talk about visual aggression!” René said. “The whole six floors are tagged.”

  Aimée hid her smile. “This collectif even occupied space across from the Musée Picasso,” she said. “They claimed ‘free space for artists in Paris’ and baptized it Galerie Socapi, Picasso in verlan,” she said. “No one can afford ateliers today, like those Picasso and the Cubists found at the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre. They take over buildings abandoned by banks and insurance companies that have deserted Paris for the cheaper suburbs.”

  René expelled a burst of air in disgust. “Arrogant artists.”

  “You can tell them how you feel at dinner.”

  This was the Paris Aimée had grown up in … grimy and full of caractère. Where stalls of white summer Montreuil peaches perfumed blackened stone facades, where concierges sat fanning themselves in the doorways, exchanging gossip while cats slunk around their legs. And everyone said Bonjour on the street. Where the tang of pissoirs and Gauloises hit her on the corner coming home from school, café patrons argued philosophie, and the only phones were the ones in the café that took jetons. Where individuals made statements. Statements that were heard.

  She and René stepped over crunching brick to a hole punched in the flat end of the building. Above them, the flat pignon, the wall, sliced Parisian style, held peeling wallpaper and traces of chimney flues’s snaking to the roof. Alongside grinned a three-story Barbarella caricature.

  Inside, the worn marble staircase crawled with razor-thin men and young blondes. DEMYSTIFY ART was spelled out in multicolored floor tiles.

  Renée’s eyes widened. “Junkies and debutantes by the look of it,” he whispered in her ear.

  “Like the old days,” she grinned, “when the Sorbonne was interesting.”

  “You liked those parties,” René said.

  “But you were the one who got lucky.” Aimée leaned forward and saw a smile struggle across René’s mouth.

  A few golden boys, day traders from the Bourse, stood looking embarrassed, holding their briefcases, loosening their ties.

  They saw the birdcage lift was stranded between floors. Aimée groaned. Why had she worn leopard-print high-heeled mules instead of her red high-tops?

  René jerked his thumb upward. In the corners of the steps were syringes and dead pigeons. “I’m not hungry,” he said.

  By the time they had trudged up to the third floor, the crowd had grown more eclectic. Room after room held paintings, metal sculptures, and installations. The thrum of an electric generator powered the dim lights and pounding techno-beat. From the cavernous hallway came the sizzling crackle of cooking and the aroma of garlic.

  A group of skinny models, working proletariat, and aristos sat drinking wine together at a long candlelit table. Conversation buzzed amid the clink of wineglasses. A man in tight black denim pants and a black shirt appeared. A slit-eyed iguana was draped over his arm.

  “We’re Etienne’s
friends,” Aimée said, unable to pull her gaze from the candlelight flickering on the iguana’s iridescent scales.

  “Welcome, I’m Hubert,” he said, planting bisous on both her cheeks and René’s. “Ça va?” Hubert’s thin shoulders twitched.

  She hoped he was keeping time with the music and not in need of a fix.

  She dropped her scarf and bent to pick it up. Her shirt rode up, revealing the lizard design on her back.

  “Nice tattoo! Nico?” Hubert asked.

  Aimée nodded, and saw René’s mouth drop open.

  “Take that place, just in time,” he said, sweeping them forward to a bench. She had the feeling she’d risen several notches in Hubert’s estimation.

  A man with thick black hair wearing a corduroy jacket with leather-patched elbows made space for them. He gestured, his mouth full, toward a wineglass and poured from a carafe of red wine. He raised his glass. “Salut, mes amis,” he managed, then attacked a salade frisée pomaded with glistening avocado vinaigrette.

  Etienne appeared in the doorway. He wore a skinny black T-shirt and frayed jeans, and swiped his shock of reddish brown hair across his forehead. In nonwork clothes, he looked more like Aimée’s bad-boy type. She didn’t see Christian.

  “Bonsoir,” she said as Etienne joined them. “Meet René, my partner.”

  “A pleasure.” He shook René’s hand. Then hers. His long fingers enveloped hers with soft, warm pressure, his lips forming a smile.

  That wonderful smile. Her fingers retained his warmth after he let go.

  Most likely Etienne enjoyed a steady income and visited his parents in the countryside on major holidays and weekends.

  But he didn’t look boring now.

  Opposite, their dinner partner was arguing with the woman seated next to him. “Five thousand francs … do I look loaded, Madame? Ask me when I win Thursday night at keno.”

  “Didn’t Christian come with you?” Aimée asked.

  Etienne shrugged. “I hoped he’d be here, waiting.” He sat next to Aimée. “He’s notorious for being late.”