Murder on the Quai

by Cara Black

  “That’s sold out.” His bored look evaporated.

  Aimée pulled out a card from her worn Vuitton wallet and flashed it. “My old classmate Stephan works there. He always finds me a ticket if I ask him.”

  Bertrand’s eyes popped. “Vraiment?”

  “Do me a favor and I’ll do one back.”

  “Like what?”

  “Tell me what you know about what happened here during the war. Has your grandmother ever talked about it?”

  “They talk all the time, the old folks, when they’re playing belote or drinking at the café. You think I listen?”

  Bertrand, she figured, didn’t want to appear uncool.

  “But if you did?” She put Stephan’s card down on his homework. “Should I call Stephan for a ticket?” she said. “After I sit down and you tell me what your grandmother knows? Or should I just go talk to her at the church?”

  He shook his head. “She’ll lie. They all do. Pay homage to the Peltiers, the aristocrats.”

  “Then this better be good, Bertrand.”

  He pulled out a chair, gestured for her to sit down. He offered her a Carambar from a pile by his mathematics book. She unwrapped the paper twisted around the caramel and glanced at the comic inside.

  “I’m listening.”

  “There’s always been this thing—we can’t offend the Peltiers. Never talk about the dark times. But the villagers do.”

  She ran her tongue around her molars, checking for caramel. “What do you mean, the dark times?”

  He rubbed his fingers together. Money. “They’ve paid off my grand-mère and her friends for years.”

  Surprised, she sat up. “For what?” And why was he revealing this to her? Unless those Styx tickets meant more to him than his grandmother.

  “Silence is golden,” he said meaningfully.

  The second time gold had come up since last night.

  “I’m tired of platitudes and riddles.” She tapped Stephan’s card. “Give me something or this goes back in my wallet. Who’s paying whom to keep quiet about what?”

  “Listen,” he said. “My parents died in a car accident when I was twelve. I came to live here. My clothes, my extra lessons, my tutor—all paid for by the grace of the seigneur—not God, but Peltier. There are regular deposits made into grand-mère’s bank.”

  “But what leads you to think she’s covering something up?”

  “Secretive, her and all her friends. At first I thought they were Freemasons.”

  “So what exactly is it that your grandmother knows that Bruno Peltier has paid her to keep quiet about all these years?”

  His brows knit. He blinked. He was trying to play cool, but he was nervous, she realized.

  “She won’t know what you tell me. I promise, Bertrand.”

  “There was a traitor, a collaborator during the war. A villager killed him.”

  “Old news. You mean the mayor who was killed by the Resistance?”

  “That’s just the story. After a bottle of eau de vie, though, my grand-mère would tell you how the mayor was honorable, that the others stole his share, had his wife committed and made his kid disappear.”

  That corresponded to Clément’s words.

  “Share of what, Bertrand?”

  He checked his watch. Shrugged uncomfortably.

  “Does it connect to the reprisals in Givaray in 1942, the sixty people executed, this German truck that’s been found?”

  Bertrand stood up and parted the lace curtain. Checked his watch again. “I don’t know, but I know where we can find out.”

  She followed him into the kitchen. By the pantry he pulled open a cellar trapdoor in the wood floor. “After you.”

  Did she trust him?

  “My grand-mère doesn’t believe in bank deposit boxes. Keeps stuff down there.”

  “Stuff like what?”

  “You interested or not?” He glanced at his watch again.

  She nodded, pulled out her penlight. Shook it until the thing lit.

  She wished she had René’s martial arts skills. But that didn’t stop her from stretching the truth. “Don’t get ideas, I do judo.”

  The dark cellar was lined with canned goods, jam jars, crocks of preserves, some dated as far back as 1975, others from last season.

  “Enough food to feed an army here,” she said.

  “She’s afraid of going hungry, like during the war. As if that would ever happen.” Bertrand latched the trapdoor from the stairs. “A sickness, that old war mentality.”

  Aimée passed a card table covered with a red-and-white checked cloth. On top were a pack of cards, and full tins of foie gras and truffles. A kerosene lantern, chintz-covered armchairs. A vaulted stone underground refuge.

  “Gourmet taste, eh?”

  “The old fogies gamble for goose liver, can you believe it?”

  Expensive goose liver.

  “Why bring me down here?”

  “The houses connect by tunnels dug during the war,” said Bertrand, “from the barn near the river.”

  Aimée thought. The barn. Somehow this was important. “Whose barn?”

  “The murdered mayor’s barn. Been for sale for years.”

  “Tell me what the men stole from the mayor, according to your grandmother.”

  He never answered. A high-pitched voice was calling him from upstairs.

  “Bertrand! I know you’re down there. Why aren’t you studying?”

  He put a finger to his lips.

  “Get back up here.”

  “Wait here,” Bertrand said to Aimée. “She’ll get mad if she knows I showed you this place.” He scurried up the wooden steps. “Give me two minutes to get rid of her.” The next thing she heard was the trapdoor closing.

  Panic prickled her skin. She was stuck. Stupid to trust him. Idiot, what had she been thinking?

  The jolt of fear caused her to perspire in the dank air. Caused her shirt to stick to her back. How could she get out? Bertrand had said the tunnel led to other houses. Shuddering in the damp, she hitched up her bag. With her penlight marking yellow rays over the stained earth walls, she made her way. She didn’t know what she was looking for, but Bertrand’s grandmother and her village cronies felt safe down here in this hidden lair.

  The bank deposits, the inexplicable wealth, the villagers’ silence all spun in her mind.

  Was there some kind of treasure buried down here?

  Farther on she found a wormholed door with a shiny new lock. Above it was a faded sign: Abri—an old bomb shelter. Curious, she pulled her lock-picking set out of her makeup bag and got to work. Japy, her father’s friend the thief, had taught her to pick locks the summer she was fourteen.

  Jiggle here, toggle there, squeeze, et voilà.

  The wormholed wooden door creaked open. Behind it was an old-fashioned storm door with another lock. A tougher one. She groaned. No wonder it had seemed easy. More security than the Banque de France.

  Perspiring from anxiety despite the chill, she fanned herself with the newspaper from the Peltier’s kitchen. Tried toggling with a slim hook and pressing down with the double-ended straight pick. The whole time she listened for noises, for anyone coming down here.

  No one. Only a steady drip, drip in the distance.

  The kid probably got wrapped up in his computer game. Or his grandmother had wrestled him down to study.

  On the fifth try the lock yielded. Her penlight shone on stone walls as she descended more wooden stairs, breathing in the earthy, mold-tinged smell.

  A niggling uneasiness crept up her neck. She had no right to be breaking into the old bomb shelter—did she? She didn’t even know if there was anything down here worth finding, despite the grandson’s implications. Maybe he was playing a game; maybe she should forget this and turn around and get the hel
l out of here.

  Her eyes spied another door, a key set hanging from a nail. Might as well investigate since she’d climbed down here. And then she saw the thin orange thread in the door jamb.

  She’d seen that in a spy movie—a trick to mark if someone had entered. With her tweezers she removed the thread and stuck it in a crack in the wall.

  The key turned in the well-oiled lock.

  She hit the cracked porcelain light switch and stepped into a past era. The wartime shelter, buttressed by wood beams, was clean and freshly dusted. The vaulted stone cellar ran a quarter of the length of what she figured was the street above. She explored, noting an old charcoal stove, canned food, framed black-and-white photos on a tidy notary-style desk. Plastic Evian bottles were the only concession to the present day.

  Someone had been down here very recently. She caught a whiff of muguet, lily of the valley—the scent her mother wore. For a moment her mother’s laugh floated in her mind, low and silvery.

  The smell drew her to a desk, where she found a handkerchief embroidered with a T. On a notepad was written Baret, Peltier, Royant, Dufard. Those same names—a hit list?

  The drawers held a tin pastille box of photos, a Clairfontaine ledger with amounts entered in old francs, a leather-bound diary held together by a rubber band.

  She removed the band and thumbed open the diary. Pages of blue ink, still vivid, with entries in sections from 1942, 1943, 1944.

  She thumbed back to the front page. Ninette Minou’s diary. That name . . . why did she know it? And then she remembered—Clément said the blacksmith Minou had been one of the men to find the mayor’s body by the river, that Minou had died at Liberation.

  In a photo similar to the one she’d seen at the bookstore office were the same men, and a younger version of Madame Jagametti. Beautiful. Was she his sister? Cousin? His widow, who’d remarried?

  Fascinated, she sat down on a creaking wood chair, set down the photo and started reading.

  Pasted on the first page was a picture of three teenagers swimming in the river. The photo was labeled Thérèse, me, and Minou on my birthday and showed a young Madame Jagametti, a freckle-faced Ninette, and a stocky, short man.

  Dear Diary, you are my birthday present from my best friend, Thérèse, today, August 14, 1942.

  So Madame Jagametti—Thérèse—had kept her best friend Ninette’s diary. But why?

  Aimée read through the wartime descriptions of how Ninette’s mother scraped together a chocolate crème cake, trading Minou’s horseshoeing with the chicken farmer for eggs. Normal teenage entries that went on for pages—crushes on the postman, black-market cotton her mother sewed into a dress for her, the kittens born in Thérèse’s cellar. A life of a young girl—unremarkable apart from the German soldiers in the occupied zone across the river who eyed her when she went swimming. Little line drawings of cats filled the margins. A yellowed picture of a movie star Aimée had never heard of cut from a magazine.

  A sweet girl, Ninette.

  Aimée skipped to November. Now Ninette’s entries expressed horror at the executions across the river. Four dead German soldiers had washed up on the riverbank. Everyone lived in fear. Ninette’s parents feared letting her go outside or to see Thérèse. The baker was spreading a rumor that there had been a fifth German soldier who had gotten away—that he would come back for revenge.

  Aimée paused as she read that. Her heart was racing.

  Dated December, after Christmas, was an entry about how Ninette had woken up at night and overheard Minou telling their father he’d been melting gold bars. He wasn’t supposed to tell anyone—it involved those four dead German soldiers and how Alain, Philbert, and Bruno were afraid of the people in Givaray. How the Resistance shot the mayor but her friends didn’t believe it.

  Aimée pulled her coat around her, rubbed her hands together for warmth. Read more. How did this connect to why the men were being killed off now?

  In 1943 Ninette’s entries concerned how daily life got harder. In January, the Germans occupied the town. Minou was angry all the time, always shouting at her. She wrote about her mother’s TB.

  Later, in the spring, Ninette wrote about how Philbert Royant, Alain Dufard, and Bruno Peltier paid people good money to dig tunnels for bomb shelters. Everyone was grateful for their generosity—the wheat harvest had been ruined and the winter was hard. No one was asking where the money came from, but Ninette thought Minou knew. Ninette didn’t help with the tunnels—she worked replanting the fields. She heard noises from the cellars at night, but she was supposed to pretend not to hear.

  Aimée paged ahead to 1944. In August 1944, at Liberation, only one entry:

  Dear Diary, I should be happy—the Allies are coming, people are dancing in the street. But they murdered Minou—the greedy bastards—in cold blood. Took his share of the gold.

  Her jaw dropped.

  Angry and devastated, Ninette had wanted the truth remembered, and she had put it all down here. Aimée flipped ahead; there were still pages of feverish writing. A thought curdled her stomach: Had Thérèse Jagametti been paid off for hiding the incriminating evidence in her best friend’s diary? Had she been using the diary to blackmail the conspirators?

  Cold air wafted as if from an open window. Or from the door above? Someone was coming. Shuffling footsteps, not the kid, Bertrand.

  Quickly she stuffed the diary into her jacket just as an old man with a silver froth of hair burst into the shelter. Huffing, he shook his cane at her, smiling. He was stout and square in his cashmere coat, full-faced, with the red-veined nose of a drinker.

  She stared at the photo of the men she’d set on the desk and then back at him. “Monsieur Royant, I presume.”

  He blinked. His blue, rheumy eyes teared in the cold.

  “Close. I’m the one next to him.”

  “Dufard?”

  “And you’re Peltier’s brat. Good job, kid.” He stuck out a Monoprix plastic bag. “Fill that up with everything in the desk, and don’t slam the door on your way out.”

  Was Dufard the killer? Her heart beat so hard it almost jumped out of her chest. The pieces flashed in front of her—the men in the picture, the gold, the mayor murdered on the bank.

  She tried to make sense of this—two of the four men had been murdered. Wasn’t Dufard in danger? Or had she read this wrong? Like an idiot, had she put herself in front of the killer?

  She stood. Eyed the door to escape. “Don’t you realize you could be next? You and Royant.” Keep talking and get to the door. “Peltier and Baret’s murderer is ready to tick your dance card.” That old phrase of her grandmother’s had popped into her head.

  A muscle in Dufard’s jowly cheek jumped.

  “I need you to give me everything you’ve found, young lady.”

  She needed to get out of here. “I’m afraid not. Elise hired me.”

  “And paid you well for it, I know.” He grinned. Stepped in front of the exit, blocking her. “Haven’t you figured out we’ve been following you, mademoiselle la détective?”

  Old men had her under surveillance and she hadn’t even known? Talk about amateur. “Following me?” Now the centime dropped. How could she have been so stupid? “So you had a gypsy taxi attack me outside Baret’s bookstore last night. Now you’re here to finish the job.”

  Surprise crossed Dufard’s face. What she took for fear. Then it was gone. “What? No. I drove Elise’s mother to the hospital yesterday afternoon. Elise was a basket case, so I had to do the paperwork to get her mother admitted.”

  Easy enough to check. Though she didn’t like him, she believed him. “Why follow me, then? Didn’t you know this shelter was here all the time?”

  “Did I?” Dufard scanned the desk. “Let’s say I’m tying up loose ends I didn’t know about.”

  Loose ends? Had he assumed Madame Jagametti kept valuables—or th
e diary—in a safety deposit box?

  “What’s so important to you?” Aimée squeezed the diary tighter under her arm. Shivered. “Has this woman been blackmailing you and the others?”

  “We had an understanding. Always have. As I said, loose ends.”

  “Why didn’t you just come down here yourself and take them?” She bit her tongue before adding, “They’re your tunnels.”

  “I heard you’re smart. A medical student. Too busy to worry about what you don’t understand. So let’s keep it that way.” He shoved the crinkled Monoprix shopping bag toward her. “Keep earning your fric.”

  Fric, slang for money—a kid’s term at his age? This old man trying to act au courant sickened her.

  “Empty the drawer in here like a good little girl.”

  Like hell she would. “Do it yourself,” she said, backing toward the wooden steps.

  Dufard’s cane shot out across the doorway. “Not so fast, young lady.”

  Should she kick it away, knock over an old man? Outrage battled with fear inside her. “Stealing a woman’s war mementos—that’s criminal.”

  And even worse criminal activity was alleged in the diary. Part of her didn’t want to believe this old man and his cronies were murderers, war profiteers who had corrupted the village. The other part—reason, deduction, and her gut—knew it only made sense.

  “You’ve saved me time.” Dufard stepped closer, pulled out a long-handled flashlight and a wad of cash. “Glad Elise found you to lead us to what we needed.”

  Her insides wrenched. She felt she’d been socked in the gut. Used, she’d been used by Elise, sucked in by a family sob story to lead these old crooks to what they were looking for. Naïve.

  Her father had been right.

  Tired of waiting for her to act, Dufard was pulling out the drawers and scooping the contents into his Monoprix bag. Without an excusez-moi he’d reached in and riffled through her bag on the floor.