Murder in Pigalle

by Cara Black

  “His daughter’s at her grandmother’s.” He gave a knowing nod. “Whole thing stressed him out. He goes fishing when he needs to think.”

  “You mean along the quai of the Seine?” The only other fishing spot René knew of was along the Marne outside Paris. He hoped that wasn’t where Monsieur Imbert had gone, or tracking him down would involve bumper traffic on the périphérique—meaning this could take all day.

  “It’s important?”

  “Otherwise I wouldn’t be taking your time,” said René, impatient. “I’m investigating a missing girl.”

  “Behind makeup,” the man said. “Twelve floors down. Salle A, then the stairs. You’ll find it.”

  “Find what?”

  “Our cistern.” He grinned. “You know, the supposed Phantom of the Opera’s lake. The firemen dive train down there. We drain it every ten years.”

  “Like they’ll let me down there?”

  “Tap in the code ‘Fantome 1900.’ ”

  Twelve floors of stairs. René groaned inside. All night in the car and now this.

  The cistern under the Opéra was a dark and vaulted channel. Not the fabled lake—Gaston Leroux had made that up. René inhaled the algae and water smells while feeling for footholds on the slippery, wet stone. He grasped the wall and looked for a ledge. How did people get around beside swimming or a boat?

  Then everything plunged into darkness. Damned timed light had gone off.

  René’s foot slipped. Those expensive handmade leather soles weren’t famous for their traction. He grabbed out and heard splashing.

  “Monsieur Imbert?”

  A yellow beam of light illuminated the semi-transparent, greenish water. René noted white catfish, their whiskers lazy swirls in the water. There stood a man in hip-high waders attached by suspenders and a bicycle helmet mounted with a flashlight.

  “Who wants to know?”

  “Hit the lights and I’ll tell you,” said René.

  Imbert’s chuckle echoed off the damp stone vaults. “No lights down here. Just the fish. They’re blind.”

  René edged back a few centimeters at a time until he reached more solid footing.

  “You accompanied your daughter this morning when she gave a statement at the Commissariat,” said René. “I’m investigating the disappearance of another girl, Zazie Duclos. I’d appreciate your help, Monsieur.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?” He pointed to a niche with a carved stone ledge. René hoisted himself until he’d maneuvered inside, perspiration beading his upper lip.

  “A detective, eh?” said Imbert, reading René’s card in the beam of the flashlight. “I guess you come in all sizes these days.”

  Imbert told him his daughter, Nelié, had sensed the attacker’s presence and known to run. She heard him following her home from her violin lesson but never saw his face.

  “Did she see anything at all? His clothing, shoes? Or hear his voice?” asked René.

  Nothing. In the dark and the rain, she’d concentrated on getting away. Zazie? He’d never heard his daughter mention her.

  Despite the dank cistern and his wet socks, René was determined to prolong the conversation. He knew there had to be something. He just wasn’t asking the right questions.

  “Smells? Did he wear cologne or give off the smell of alcohol?”

  The rapist hadn’t gotten that close, thank God, Imbert said. “Nelié feels the world differently. It’s lucky she noticed the attacker because she can’t always process other people’s presences like we do. She said he gave off a color, like anthracite—cold, hard. You see, my Nelié, she’s got this synesthesia.” He paused, searching for the words. “Her music teacher says it’s a gift. She sees colors for letters, numbers and musical notes. People give off a color to her. The doctor calls it a neurological condition.”

  René nodded. He knew many artists experienced synesthesia—Berlioz, Billy Joel, some argued Vuillard.

  “She could play the violin before she could read. Played by ear. Won every scholarship they have. Such a gifted girl, my Nelié. Her teacher’s suggested her for the Conservatoire de Musique.”

  “Madame de Langlet?”

  “The old dame herself.”

  René needed to speak to this woman.

  “But the attacker knew our place on Cité de Trévise.”

  “Eh, how’s that?” asked René, recalling this secluded, narrow, passage-like enclave with a fountain festooned with nymphs. A chic address. “Do you mean he’d watched your daughter and knew her schedule?”

  Like the other victims?

  “No doubt, especially as the concierge found paper wedged in the gate to prevent it from closing.”

  Another example of methodical planning.

  “Le salaud!” Imbert’s tone hardened. “L’Opéra offers workers’ housing so we union members can live nearby, on call, you know. For our sake I insisted Nelié make a police report. We need to dot the ‘i’s and show the bureau, or they won’t change the codes and locks. Heighten security. I hate that Nelié goes home alone, but what else should I do? I can’t deny her these free lessons with Madame, even if they are late at night, after her paying pupils are done. It would break her heart.”

  René heard the man’s anguish. Not a choice a father would want to make. Impending godfatherhood, René realized, came with responsibilities.

  A slapping sound, and in the yellow beam René noticed Imbert’s net with a wriggling catfish.

  “Edible?” he asked.

  “Served with a light hollandaise sauce and a sprig of tarragon, parfait.” Imbert put his fingers to his mouth and smacked his lips.

  After making Monsieur Imbert promise to ask his daughter if she knew Zazie, René started to make his way up the dripping, slick stairs.

  “I remembered one thing, Monsieur Friant,” Imbert called after him.

  René turned, careful not to slip.

  “Someone clapped after her playing.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Nelié says it wasn’t the first time she heard someone, a man she thinks, clap outside the window at her violin lesson.”

  A stalker? The rapist.

  “Does Nelié think he’s the one who followed her?”

  “It was the humming. My Nelié said he hummed.”

  “Any tune she recognized?”

  “The Paganini piece she’s practicing for the Conservatoire de Musique tryout. The piece she’d just played.”

  René shivered, and the chill that ran down his spine didn’t come from the damp, sweating walls.

  Tuesday, 11 A.M.

  AIMÉE, DRENCHED AND winded by the time they reached the wedge of park behind Place Saint-Georges, noticed Tonette hadn’t broken a sweat. In the shade of green-leafed branches, blue delphiniums and hollyhocks framed pink, trellised roses. A true breath of paradise, Aimée thought, this secluded oasis between the nineteenth-century limestone buildings.

  “Zazie wanted to hear the old stories,” said Tonette.

  Aimée hoped this went somewhere. “You mean for her report?”

  “All of it.” Tonette’s gaze locked on a hovering blue-purple dragonfly. “How we lycée students marched under the Germans’ noses to the Arc de Triomphe on Armistice Day in 1940. A small protest no one talks about.” She shook her white head. “We took to the Grands Boulevards, just near here, forty-one of us singing La Marseillaise and flying the tricolor until the police appeared. Can you imagine? But that’s what you do when you’re young and foolish. We started a clandestine one-page newspaper, printed in secret in our school’s cellar. Even distributed copies using special signs, signals and drop boxes until our principal caught us. My story fascinated Zazie.”

  Tonette unfolded the story her way. Aimée tried not to squirm with impatience.

  “So you inspired Zazie to use your techniques,” said Aimée, fanning herself in the heat. “Ways that informed her surveillance?”

  “I wouldn’t call it that,” said Tonette, rolling her eye
s. “Well, maybe a little.” A shrug of her elegant shoulders. Children ran over the grass. The blue-purple dragonfly fluttered by the rose trellis. “Later we mostly distributed anti-Fascist pamphlets from clandestine printing presses—all run by communists then—at cinemas just before the German newsreels. We threw them from balconies. They floated like butterflies. Then we ran. Kids.”

  So far Tonette’s tale had told her little.

  “We all went to the cinema then.” Tonette’s gaze softened. “Truffaut grew up right around the corner, you know. We would have been almost the same age. Everyone lived in the cinema. During the Occupation, theaters were heated. At least for the first few winters. But ’40 and ’41 were cruel. No wood or charcoal—the Germans took it, courtesy of French racketeers. Trying to obtain food and rations dominated our lives. In 1942 a D ration ticket got you a half kilo of potatoes. For a K ticket, workers got a liter of wine. Depended on who you knew.” She gave a knowing nod. “My mother heard Mistinguett sing before German troops at the Casino de Paris; a ditty about her cold apartment and empty stewpot. The next day Mistinguett received five bags of charcoal and six lamb gigots. She sold them. Mais alors, everyone did.”

  Aimée’s collar stuck to her neck. This heat. “Our history teacher once told us Mistinguett said, ‘My heart is French but my ass is international.’ ”

  Tonette shook her head. “That’s Arletty. Mistinguett said, ‘A kiss can be a comma, a question mark or an exclamation point. That’s basic spelling that every woman ought to know.’ ”

  Aimée grinned. No wonder Zazie had connected with Tonette. Kindred spirits. And Tonette must have seen her former thirteen-year-old self in Zazie.

  “Oh, and butter,” Tonette continued, “color was the only way you could tell if it was the real thing. My mother detested the butcher, a black-market profiteer.” She pointed to an antiquaire shop visible outside of the park. “Gone now. But back then women lined up in the cold, waiting. I remember seeing my teacher shivering—no one had stockings, scarcer than diamonds. But she’d stained her legs with brou de noix, walnut-hull juice, to look like she did. Like a lot of women.”

  Old stories of the dark years, as this generation and every generation since had termed it. She needed to listen and focus on what Zazie had gleaned and used.

  Tonette shrugged. “We were so hungry, my mother contacted her fifth cousin on a farm, the snob who she hadn’t seen since before the war. Ah, then la cousine became my mother’s closest member of la famille. She furnished us with eggs, once in a while a chicken. We were lucky. We ate.”

  They were walking now. “You told Zazie all this?”

  “If we don’t inform the next generation, who will?” She waved her hand at the garden, the townhouses surrounding them. “Until twenty-some years ago, all this lay derelict, boarded up.”

  Aimée stared.

  “Hard to believe, eh? But there by the old lavoir is where we hid underground papers.”

  Aimée noted the open-sided washhouse holding stollers and tricycles.

  “And clothing for stranded RAF fliers,” Tonette was saying, “men escaping from service du travail obligatoire in Germany.”

  “You brought Zazie here?”

  “I showed her how to make a drop. See. That’s hers.”

  Under a weathered stone support Aimée saw a smudge of chalk. An X. Yet Aimée found nothing in or near the stone.

  “Only use a place once, I told Zazie,” said Tonette, noticing Aimée’s frustration.

  “So they did follow, surveil and drop off info about this man le Weasel? Marie-Jo’s mother’s boyfriend?”

  “Zazie said something about proving le Weasel wasn’t who he said he was, something like that.”

  Le Weasel … the rapist? Was that Zazie’s connection to the attacks? What about the violin lessons? How did they fit in?

  “I wish I could help you more,” said Tonette.

  Something niggled in Aimée’s mind. Something Zazie had said, something that chimed with Tonette’s story … If only she could hold a thought in this humidity.

  Tonette, oblivious to the heat, pointed to a church spire peeping over grisaille-blue tin rooftops. “We always met in bistrots, musées, department stores with more than one exit. Irony of ironies, in the building on Boulevard Haussmann, the Nazis’ office was on the third floor, above Simexco, a cover for the Red Sympathy organizers.”

  Their walk took them back to Tonette’s building. Its dark green double doors could fit a horse-drawn carriage, and once had.

  Aimée’s mind went back to le Weasel. Did the rape boil down to something close to home? Suppose the girls had discovered in their surveillance that this boyfriend, le Weasel, had assaulted their schoolmates?

  “Don’t you want to come upstairs? Take a load off your feet? Drink something cold?”

  Aimée nodded, grateful for the invitation.

  But her legs balked at the winding Charles X staircase. Eight flights up at the dome-ceilinged last landing, Tonette reached in her mailbox and came out with a stack of envelopes. A slip of paper fluttered onto the black-and-white checkerboard tiles, landing at Tonette’s Chanel fuchsia sling-back heel.

  Aimée picked it up. “Yours?”

  Tonette shook her head.

  Aimée recognized it as a receipt from the photo shop on Boulevard de Magenta. It was for a roll of Ilford black-and-white, high-speed film. Her mind went back to Zazie’s black-and-white telescopic photo of men standing around the Wallace fountain.

  At least the receipt gave her an address to check.

  “You trained Zazie well. May I take that, Tonette?”

  “Bien sûr,” said Tonette. “Some things never change.”

  AIMÉE STOPPED AT the one-hour developing shop on Boulevard de Magenta. The girl behind the counter shook her head. “Not ready, désolée, professional film like this takes two days. The customer was told that.”

  “Ah. Do you remember her?”

  “I started this morning,” she said. A big smile. “Ready tomorrow,” she said, trying to be helpful.

  AIMÉE RETRACED THE route she’d taken with Tonette, alert at every corner, shop doorway and intersection for a trace of Zazie.

  The humidity and the heat—a cotton-like layer of dense, still air—wilted the irises and melted her mascara. All the walking, getting nowhere. She felt a sharp cramp. The baby turning? Better sit down.

  Back in the square behind Place Saint-Georges, she checked her messages. None.

  Lost in thought, she watched a young woman pushing a stroller, a toddler in a yellow dress clasping her other hand. A bouquet of red balloons was tied with red ribbon to the stroller handle.

  Her eye caught on the smudged chalk X she had noticed earlier on the stone. But that could have been yesterday. Still, she checked the area again: riffled through the soil, under leaves and gravel. Nothing but dirt under her fingernails.

  And what good would that film at the developer’s do if it showed more scenes of the same?

  Yet she couldn’t assume anything. This was all moving like drying glue. Her hormones, this heat … she wanted to kick something.

  Police procedure, plodding investigation, waiting, checking, matching took too long. All of the many reasons she hated this kind of work. Almost twenty-one hours had elapsed since Zazie’s last sighting by Tonette.

  She took Zazie’s map from her bag, dotted in pen the points she and René had marked on the map he’d enlarged. Now she added dots for the locations Tonette had showed her.

  But she needed to try Madame de Langlet, leave a message even if the woman was away. She punched in the number René gave her.

  Several rings later a woman answered with a breathless “Allô?”

  Finally.

  In the background Aimée heard violin notes. “Madame de Langlet,” she said, “I’m Aimée Leduc. Last night your pupil—”

  “I don’t talk to journalists,” she interrupted.

  “Smart, Madame. I’m a detective.”

&nbs
p; “I don’t talk to detectives.”

  “But Madame Vasseur told me to speak with you.” In a manner of speaking. “It’s important, please, your pupils have been attacked. I’m sure you’re more than concerned about the connection.”

  “Connection?” Pause. “I’m teaching right now.”

  She hadn’t denied it.

  “And I’m sorry to bother you, but Sylvaine’s death—”

  “Horrendous,” she interrupted. “A tragedy. The flics questioned me this morning.”

  Merde! Instead of listening to René last night, she should have listened to her gut and tracked the woman down. “But now four of your students—”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Of course you do. Or you don’t want to.

  “Weren’t the other two victims also your students?”

  “I’m not supposed to talk about this,” she said, her voice quavering. “Désolée. I want to help, but I can’t now.”

  “The investigators told you that, Madame?”

  “I’m teaching. Must go.”

  Strains of a violin rose in the background.

  “Can we meet when your lessons finish, Madame?”

  “I can talk tomorrow.”

  Aimée had to persist. “Madame, it’s important. Another girl has disappeared. Just a few minutes of your time.”

  A sigh. “Call me later.” Then Aimée heard a click. She’d hung up.

  She wanted to throw the damn phone. Crucial time passed with no leads to Zazie.

  Frustrated, she studied the map again. The location dots formed a pattern, like the facets of an eight-carat stone. Zazie had to be in this hexagon. She felt it in the marrow of her bones.

  A child’s crying interrupted her thoughts. The red balloons had become untied, escaping. “Maman!” The balloons hovered above the toddler in the yellow dress, floating out of her reach.

  Aimée caught two, reached and caught another that was stuck in the lime-tree branches.

  “Merci, Madame,” said the mother. “You saved the birthday party from disaster.”

  “Good exercise.” Aimée’s eyes caught on the tiny pink toes peeping from the stroller. A little ball in an orange onesie.