by Cara Black
“Who’s after you, Dufard?”
“You have no idea, chérie. Open your pockets.”
“Why?”
The diary was wedged tight under her armpit. She could overtake this old man—kick him in the shin or balls . . .
As though he had read her mind, he stepped back.
“Popular girl,” Dufard said, picking up her pager and scanning the numbers. She’d put it on mute. “So who’s this calling you all the time?”
She had to put him off track, get out of here before the diary slipped out of her armpit.
“My ex-boyfriend.”
He threw her pager against the stone wall, shattering it into pieces which he picked up and put in her hand. “This should stop him for a while, chérie. Royant,” he yelled up the stairs, “get the car started! We’re getting out of here!”
He tossed the wad of cash into her bag. Throwing money at her as if it could make this all go away.
“Alain, what’s taking so long?” Fear quavered in the reedy, old voice that came from the tunnel above the old bomb shelter.
Despite the bravado, these old men were scared. Maybe there was someone they couldn’t bribe anymore.
This stank. Hurt, anger, and disgust made her want to kick herself. Or do serious damage to the old fart.
Up in the tunnel, his colleague Royant was smoking a cigar. He was fatter and wider in a camel-hair coat. A long, white comb-over—a ladies’ man, he must figure himself. Dissipated roué to her. But something cunning, too. Sharp. He reeked of pastis—that licorice smell on top of the cold dank of mildew made her gag.
“She delivered.” Dufard puffed up the steps. “Let’s go.”
Such a damn smug look on his fat, jowly face. These old men were cockier than teenagers. What the hell did they plan on getting away with—and how?
Time to act on a hunch and hope it burst their bubble. “Haven’t you forgotten about the fifth German?”
The Monoprix bag dropped. Photos and notebooks scattered on the dirt floor, kicking up dust motes in the flashlight beam. She’d struck a nerve.
Apart from the dripping water and the fat one’s breathing, silence.
“You know, that missing Boche who never washed up. Back when the sixty villagers in Givaray were shot—the German reprisals.”
“Ancient history.” Dufard got down on his haunches, shuffled things hurriedly back into the bag. “Long gone.”
“Not according to Madame Peltier,” she called after them as they took off down the tunnel. But what else did Madame Peltier know?
The whole time she’d been investigating she’d felt so smart, so organized, documenting her work, thinking about what her father would do. And in the end she’d failed—been an unwitting stooge.
Idiot. Should have listened to her father in the first place. But she’d never tell him that.
She retraced her steps, surprised to find the trapdoor open. The Jagametti kitchen was warm and full of the aroma of coffee. Madame Jagametti, whom she’d shared the train compartment with, was hunched over the kitchen table, holding ice to her eye.
What in the world . . . ? And would this woman start yelling at her for trespassing?
“Pardonnez-moi,” Aimée said, searching for excuses. “Bertrand . . .” She didn’t want to get him in trouble. Nothing for it but to be direct. “Madame, I apologize for intruding, but is this yours?” Aimée pulled out the diary.
A spark of surprise flitted across her dark brows. “Pas du tout. It’s Ninette’s. She’s long gone, it doesn’t matter now.”
“But I think it does, madame. You’ve kept it for years. You knew Ninette wanted the truth remembered. Wasn’t she your best friend?”
She gave a harsh laugh. Shrugged.
“What happened?”
Rain pounded on the windows, wind shook the bare-branched trees outside.
“Ask those two who stormed into my kitchen and did this to me. Your employers.” Her lip trembled. She emanated fear and helplessness.
Aimée shivered.
“Not my employers. Elise Peltier hired me—I have nothing to do with those men. Please, I’m asking you.”
“I don’t want to talk about the past.”
“Where’s Bertrand?”
“Pac-mania, that boy has,” she said. “Since you weren’t invited, I can’t ask you to leave. But I expect you to.”
But this was the person she’d come to see. She couldn’t just walk out.
“Désolée, madame. Can’t you help me? Help me understand what happened here in the war that’s still so important now?”
Madame Jagametti’s thin mouth turned down in defeat. “Open secrets and closed mouths, comprends? It’s about men leading double lives and a village that protected them.”
Aimée sat down uninvited. Should she take the woman’s hand to show she was sympathetic? Would the woman even let her? She reached for rough, calloused, arthritic fingers. Madame Jagametti shook her off. Bad idea.
“Please, just go.”
But she couldn’t give up.
“I will, madame, but you were Ninette’s best friend,” said Aimée. “Et alors, you know more than anyone, I imagine. You’re the only one who can explain how what happened in the war led a bunch of wheat farmers to live in the exclusive quarter of Paris.”
Madame’s arthritic fingers clenched. “What’s it to you? You’re working for them.”
“No, I’m not. Elise used me.”
“Tant pis. You’re surprised? Consider it a life lesson, young woman. In life you buy a ticket and take the journey.”
Aimée shook her head. “It’s not what you think. Vraiment.”
“You don’t know what I think, mademoiselle.”
She’d have to tell the woman the truth. Gamble on getting it in return.
“My father, a detective, didn’t want us involved,” said Aimée. “Elise asked for my father’s help finding a woman involved in her father’s murder. Or so she said. My father didn’t want to take the job. But I went against his wishes and took the job. I never knew this before, but we’re distantly related to the Peltiers. Elise told me she remembered me when I was small.”
The rest she recounted in a brief version. She had to get as much info as she could before this distraught woman kicked her out the door.
“Désolée, I didn’t mean to trespass and pry, but—”
“Of course you did. You talked my grandson into helping you. Not difficult.” A sigh.
Her friend Stephan’s card had disappeared from the table.
“He hates this place and everyone who lives here. Resents them.”
“Sounds like he resents how they treat you, Madame Jagametti.”
“Alors, mademoiselle, I’ll tell you this for free. Farmers and peasants don’t trust banks. In the Peltiers’ case, they bought one.”
“A private bank?” Aimée needed to read further in the diary. She took a guess. “Funding it with the stolen Nazi gold?”
“What does it matter now? They paid everyone off to shut up.” Madame Jagametti’s bitterness had found a release—once she opened her mouth, it all came out. “Ninette wrote down what happened. Minou, her simpleminded brother, the blacksmith . . .” Madame Jagametti sighed. “The things he told her.”
“All those innocents murdered to keep things quiet.” Aimée nodded. “How does it involve Gaubert, the mayor? How did the Resistance executing him figure in this?”
“Someone told you that?”
Aimée nodded again.
Madame’s deep-set eyes were far away. “Didn’t buy it then, and I don’t buy it now.”
“Why’s that?”
“A decorated Great War veteran with a bad leg whose wife’s brother was a Maquis?” Her thin mouth hardened. “Gaubert a traitor? Never.” She took out a handkerchief with that
muguet smell. Readjusted the ice at her temple.
“I haven’t seen Alain or Philbert in ten, twelve years. Connards. But it seems they wanted to tie up loose ends.” She gave a brittle laugh.
“Loose ends as in blackmail? Ninette’s diary gave you enough leverage for them to come to an ‘understanding,’ that it?”
Would this prick the old woman’s conscience?
“And you can prove that—that they paid me and others off, mademoiselle la détective? I don’t think so. C’est fini.” Madame Jagametti’s face shut down.
Aimée’s mind clicked, remembering the meeting agenda she’d seen in the hunting bookshop office. These four old cronies had been on the verge of some kind of business undertaking . . . maybe something to do with their private bank? What if the murders of two of the partners nixed whatever deal they’d been planning? Was the murderer trying to sabotage that?
“Why do you think it’s all coming back up now? Breaking into your house, taking your things—they could have come any time in the last ten years, couldn’t they? Why now, when two of them are dead?”
“Like I know?” She gave a small smile. “I remember those men as simple farmers, hotheads, greedy, couldn’t see beyond their noses. Yet shrewd. Paranoid, too.”
Matched what she’d seen of the two old men.
“Still, madame, they were smart enough to invest,” said Aimée. “They own apartments in le triangle d’or, near the Champs-Élysées. Their neighbors are aristocrats and sheikhs.”
Madame Jagametti shrugged.
“If it were me,” said Aimée, trying to prompt her, “I’d hire a savvy financial advisor to help me invest in property, businesses—to protect the assets and hide them.”
“Me, I just wanted to give Bertrand a good future.”
She tried another tack. “Could Peltier and Baret have been murdered for revenge? Is someone hunting them down?” She waited. Only quiet and the ticking of the old clock on the kitchen wall. “I mean revenge for the executions in Givaray—feelings resurfacing after the German truck was found?”
Thérèse Jagametti’s mouth sagged and the years showed on her face. “Un massacre.” She shook her head. “All those innocents—my teacher, the priest’s parents, so many. I wondered—everyone did—what we’d have done if that had happened here, and it scared me. Scared Alain, Bruno, and Philbert, too. Terrified them, that’s why they moved away.”
She shrugged.
“But who wants to kill the goose who lays the golden egg?” Madame Jagametti pulled her sweater around her shoulders. “My guess is those old rats are just keeping true to form, greedy to the end and killing each other off.”
On the way to the door, Aimée noticed the Sèvres porcelain pieces, the good Turkish rug. Was Madame Jagametti one to throw stones when it came to greed? Maybe she had convinced herself that it hadn’t been blackmail, that she had accepted gifts as thanks for turning the other way?
Aimée paused, her hand on the door handle. “One more question. Wasn’t there a fifth German soldier whose body was never found?”
“So they say,” Madame Jagametti said. “Now shut the door on your way out.”
Berlin · Sunday
The crisp Berlin air sliced cold below a cloudless sky. Harsh sunlight shone on another weed-choked bombed lot. Still so many bombed sites and run-down buildings, Jean-Claude thought, pacing by the Bäckerei-Konditorei.
This place affected him—it was as though the Cold War had frozen the city in the 1940s. He remembered growing up in the Auvergne countryside after the war. Gaunt farmers with no crops to plant. How he and his friends played on an old Allied tank left over from some battle. All that was gone now.
But here, men of his father’s generation who’d survived the war were reminded daily. The younger generation had grown up in rubble. God only knew how difficult it had been for the hungry, defeated city to be occupied by Ivans. With the Wall down, the former East was exposed like a raw, open wound.
Gerhard’s contact had delivered. Now Jean-Claude had the incriminating reports, the files on Sidonie that Interpol and the Hague would never see. Nor would they ever see the names of Sidonie’s contacts in Hezbollah. He’d destroyed them.
His fingers folded and unfolded the card Soli Hecht had given him. Checked the time. Soli’s contact was late.
A telegram had arrived just as he was leaving the hotel. The Hand enlisted him for another job after Place Vendôme. But he had Sidonie’s records—no one could hold them over him or Aimée now. He was done. Decided. After this last job, he wouldn’t let them get away with it anymore.
A flash of brown tweed—Soli was beckoning from across the street, by the long wall on Schönhauser Allee. He suddenly disappeared into what Jean-Claude realized was the old Jewish cemetery. Soli liked his cloak-and-dagger tactics. He better have brought his contact.
Half-sunken, lichen-covered tombstones carved in German and Hebrew sprawled forgotten under a carpet of orange and yellow leaves. How had Hitler missed this, he wondered.
“Always the picturesque with you, Soli,” said Jean-Claude. “Afraid I don’t have time for off-the-beaten-track Berlin.”
“Nor for its ghosts, Jean-Claude?”
“I’d say that’s all that’s left, Soli.” Jean-Claude couldn’t help but notice a tiny, blackened tombstone—tiny for a child. It was dated 1873.
“You’re telling me? I grew up across the street. The building’s gone. A whole world lost.”
“So you came for la nostalgie?” he said. “Where’s your contact, Soli? He should be on time.”
Soli looked around, motioned him toward a clump of peeling birch trees. A yellow-leafed canopy roofed the walkways. Peaceful, quiet. No one here would make any noise. They couldn’t.
“I’m your contact, Jean-Claude,” he said as they walked.
“No surprise, Soli. I figured as much.”
“So let’s finish negotiations, as you said on the phone.”
Jean-Claude took out the envelope and handed it to Soli. A black, satin-shiny crow landed on a tombstone. The taker of souls, they said in the countryside. The crow stared with its yellow eyes.
“That’s all?” said Soli after reading it. “Sidonie’s name on a terrorist training camp roster from the seventies? That’s old news. I want fresh. Don’t hold out on me, Jean-Claude.”
He’d come up with a plan. “For now, Soli. My contact’s contact worked at the Syrian desk. Later he transferred to the Lebanese-Palestinian section. My contact only found out last night and he’s gone back for ‘specifics.’ You know how it works, Soli.”
“How convenient. Specifics like what?”
“This terrorist Abbas Musawi, the Hezbollah raid in the Bekaa Valley—that interested you, right?”
Big fish.
Soli took off his glasses, cleaned the lenses with a handkerchief. Would he take the bait? “Musawi’s in your wife’s network?” Soli asked after a minute. “Or the other way round?”
Jean-Claude squeezed the mark coin in his pocket. Willed his breath to slow, and his eyes not to give him away. Lied as he’d always lied for her. “That’s why I had to cross-reference. Her only contact with him was in Syria. Everyone went through that camp. Don’t tell me you don’t know that.” Keep talking, he had to keep talking, keep Soli satisfied. “Aren’t you retiring, Soli? So I imagine you’d like Musawi on a platter for a coup de grâce. Out in a blaze of glory, that interest you?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way, Jean-Claude. Old dogs like me, we finish the job, c’est tout. Furnish me Musawi’s intel when your contact delivers and we’re done.”
“And what do you have for me, Soli?” His heart pounded.
Soli handed him a plastic shopping bag from KaDeWe, the upscale department store.
“Zut alors, what’s this?”
“Everything discovered on my end.”
Jean-Claude riffled through: reports, index cards, surveillance documentation. The last dated two years ago.
“Only this?”
“Her file’s been cherry-picked.”
“By whom?”
“The cousins, of course—MI5 and across the pond. But you knew that would have happened unless you got there first.”
He had. Sworn to get there first. His stomach churned. He stared at Soli Hecht. Plumbed his eyes, almost black in their deep sockets, half a lifetime of suffering in them. Soli was telling the truth.
Jean-Claude opened his wallet. Soli laid his gnarled hand over it. Shook his head.
“But I owe you Soli. I keep my word.”
“Better for me if I collect in the future. I will collect. D’accord?”
Why did he dread that more than a simple payment?
Jean-Claude stood by a tumbled tombstone, leaning against a slender tree. The sun’s haze lingered over the cracked black-granite mausoleums. The crow, like a sentinel on the tombstone, basked in the slanted rays.
Despite Aimée’s complaints, he knew she had it in her to become a doctor. Carve out a career, a profession—be invulnerable to her mother’s past. But as her father, he had to make sure.
He rubbed a gloved hand over the peeling birch bark, lost in thought. Hadn’t he survived her teenage rebellion years—the boys, the parties, those damn expensive cowboy boots from Texas? All the things he’d done for them to get by. The things he said he’d never do. Bien sûr, he’d survive her travails in medical school. Patience. He had to remember she was a kid facing grueling courses, competition, all kinds of pressure.
A shadow passed in front of him, blocking the sun. The scent of muguet he remembered so well. A delicious shiver traveled up his spine. Took him back to that summer day when he’d almost arrested her at the demonstration on the Left Bank.
His heart beat fast. He felt the blood pumping through his veins. His gaze lingered on the shadowed leaves, postponing that moment he would look to see if it really was her. As long as he delayed he could believe it was Sidonie . . . and when he did look, and saw her standing there in a dark wool coat, he melted once again.
