Murder in the Marais (Aimee Leduc Investigations, No. 1)

by Cara Black

  In the end he agreed.

  LATER ON, as they were bidding adieu to Georges, she noticed how quiet Morbier had become.

  "Maybe I should retire," he said as he put his hands in his pockets.

  Outside on narrow rue du Bourg Tibourg, she searched her shoulder bag for her Metro pass. "What's that, Morbier?" she asked distractedly. "You've just had too much to drink tonight." Then she looked at his forlorn expression.

  "Never been pulled off a case before," he said.

  "Who exactly pulled you off?" she said.

  He shrugged. "My superintendent informed me on his way out."

  "His way out? Relieved of his post?" She looked directly at Morbier.

  "Promoted. Now I report directly to the antiterrorist unit chief. At the Commissariat, instead of onward and upward, we say wayward and francword. You get the meaning, eh?"

  "Are you talking bribery?" She cocked her head sideways in disbelief. "The chief superintendent of greater Paris?"

  Morbier shrugged. "Well, to be fair, he was up for promotion in a few months anyway. Just happened sooner than expected."

  "So what are you saying, Morbier?"

  "Could be a coincidence or"—he peered at the luminous fingernail of a moon hanging in the cold sky—"vagaries of nature due to the cyclical spheres of the moon. I don't know."

  "Why would someone from the antiterrorism bureau override you?" she asked.

  "Certain things happen and you accept them or leave. That's all. Let's walk."

  She hooked her arm in his and they walked. They walked in silence for a long time. Like she used to with her father. Paris was the city for walking when words failed.

  They walked down past the Hôtel de Ville with the tricolor flags flying from balconies, across the Pont d'Arcole to the floodlit Notre Dame, now camouflaged by sheeted scaffolding, where a crew was giving her a face-lift, down the Ile de la Cite to the Pont Neuf and past the shadowy Louvre and her darkened office, across the shimmery Seine on Pont Royal to the Left Bank.

  Down the elegant rue du Bac they strolled along lively, crowded Boulevard Saint Germain, where even on this cool November night the sidewalk tables were full of smoking, drinking patrons gesturing, laughing, and people-watching. Models, students, tourists, and the cell-phone set.

  On Ile St. Louis, around the corner from her apartment, they stopped for a sorbet at Berthillon, famous for the best glace in Paris. Aimee chose mango lime and Morbier, vanilla bean. Finally they stopped in front of her dark building.

  She kissed him on both cheeks. He clutched her arms, not letting her go. Uneasily, she tried to back away.

  "Invite me up?" he whispered in her ear.

  "We have a beautiful friendship, Morbier, let's keep it that way. Don't forget about our plan," she said. She entered the door before he could make another advance that he would feel embarrassed about in the morning.

  Miles Davis greeted her enthusiastically at her door. She laughed and scooped him up in her arms.

  She picked up her phone on the first ring.

  "Luna?" breathed Yves.

  Aimee's throat caught before she could answer.

  "You left without saying goodbye."

  Aimee paused, what do I do?

  As if he could read her thoughts, he said, "Get back over here. The entry code is 2223. I'm waiting." He hung up.

  He sounded so sure of himself that it made her angry. Well, she wouldn't go. How could a coherent, rational woman voluntarily want to sleep with a member of an Aryan supremacist group?

  Quickly, Aimee unzipped her dress, tossed her pearls in the drawer, and pulled on her ripped jeans and black leather jacket. "You're going to stay with Uncle Maurice," she told Miles Davis. She grabbed his carrier, throwing in extra dog biscuits. "Help him mind the kiosk. You like his poodle, Bizou, don't you?" He jumped in his bag, eagerly wagging his tail. "I thought so." She ran back down her stairway and hailed a taxi.

  Monday Evening

  HARTMUTH SAT WAITING ON the bench in the Square Georges-Cain and watched the shadows lengthen. He'd bought Provencal sweets, the same fruit calissons he used to bring Sarah. But what he really wanted to give her was himself.

  What would she look like? He'd been eighteen and she fourteen the last time he'd seen her. Now they were in their sixties and briefly he wondered if he'd still be attracted to her. But all these years he'd dreamed of her, Sarah. Only her. The one woman who had entered the core of his being.

  He had to take this second chance, no matter what. He refused to die full of regret. He'd draft a letter of resignation to the trade ministry citing ill health. Somehow he'd escape the Werewolves. He'd camp on her doorstep until she accepted him.

  There was a slight rustle and thump in the bushes near him. He went over to investigate and found only pebbles. When he returned to the bench a figure sat huddled in a large cape. He nodded and sat back down. Then Hartmuth turned back to look.

  Those eyes. Cerulean blue pools so deep he started to lose himself again and the years fell away. There was no doubt.

  For a moment he was as shy and awkward as when they'd first touched. A stuttering, gangling eighteen-year-old.

  Wrinkles webbed in a fine pattern from the corners of her eyes. Dark hollows lay under them and her pale skin glowed translucently in the dim streetlight. Exactly how he remembered: pearl-like and shining. A hooded cape covered all but her eyes and prominent cheekbones. And she was still beautiful.

  His plastic surgery hadn't fooled her, he knew. She would notice the deep lines etched in his face and the crepey folds in his neck. And his hair, once black, had turned completely white.

  She searched his face, then spoke quietly. "You look different, Helmut."

  No one had called him Helmut in fifty years.

  "Your face changed but your eyes are the same. I could tell it was you."

  "Sarah," he breathed, hypnotized again by her eyes. "I've l-looked for you."

  "You lied, Helmut, you deported my parents." She lapsed into the jumble of French and German they'd spoken. "They were dead and you knew all the time."

  He'd expected anything but this. In his dreams she was as eager as he. He realized she was waiting for him to say something.

  "W-we d-deported everyone then. I found out later that they were gone but I s-saved you. I kept looking for you after the war, but it was always a d-dead end, because I'd erased your r-records myself." He reached for her hands.

  She pulled away and shook her head. "Is that all you can say?"

  "You're the only one," he said softly, reaching again for her hands. "Ja, I'll never let you g-go again, n-never." His voice shook.

  "You ruined my life," she said hoarsely. "I stayed here. Saw 'Nazi whore' written in everyone's eyes. Fifteen years old and I gave birth on a wooden floor while the concierge used metal ice tongs as forceps to pull our bastard out. At Liberation, they threw us in the street. The mob tried to lynch me while I clutched the baby and they screamed, 'Boche bastard.' Even Lili."

  She paused and took a deep breath. "Of all the collabos, I was the one they hated the most, even though I'd shared your food with them."

  Her eyes glittered in the dim glow of a far-off streetlight. "I stood on a statue's pedestal for eighteen hours. They tarred my forehead with a swastika. Jeering, they asked me how I could sleep with a Nazi while my family burned in the Auschwitz ovens."

  He shook his head in disbelief. "We had a baby? What happened?" he rasped in pain.

  "The baby died when my breast milk dried up. You know, Helmut, I've had so many reasons to hate you it's hard to pick the crucial one. After Liberation, I hid in a freezing farm cellar and fought with the hogs for their food because collaborators with shaved heads had to hide. After a year, the swastika on my forehead finally began to heal. But for years, constant infections occurred. I had to leave Europe, go away. There was nothing here for me. Nothing. No one. The only ship leaving Marseilles was bound for Algeria, so I—once a strict Kosher Jew—ended up cooking for pieds-noi
r, what they call French colonials, in Oran. Fair and decent people. I became part of their large household. They left after the sixties coup d'etat. Later, I married an Algerian with French blood who worked at Michelin. He understood me and we lived well, better than I ever imagined. But for me life held a hole never to be filled."

  She slowly pulled the hood off until it draped in folds on her shoulders. Short, white bristly hair surrounded her head like a halo, highlighting the jagged, pinkish swastika scar on her forehead. It glowed in the dim light.

  Hartmuth gasped.

  Her voice wobbled when she spoke again. "I never really liked men to touch me, after you and after the baby. At first, it was hard even with my husband. He was a good, patient man and put up with me until I was ready. My insides had been butchered with those tongs, I couldn't have children."

  Hartmuth listened in anguish. He took her hand and caressed it but she was oblivious, determined to finish.

  "Algeria changed, I'd grown no roots there. But now I had papers, a little money. After my poor husband died this year, I felt so lonely that I returned to France. In Paris, at least I felt that any ghosts would be ghosts I knew. I wanted to live in the Marais again, the only home I knew. I could walk by my parents' apartment every day, even if another generation born after the war lived there. But it's so expensive here. With my references I found a job. I found out what happened to my family. I found out what you did to the tenants in our building."

  Hartmuth stammered, "A-l-ll I c-could do was save your life and love you, I couldn't save the others, we had to f-follow orders, it was war. I was eighteen and you were the most beautiful being that I had ever t-touched. I wrote poetry after I'd see you. Dreams swam in my head. I wanted to take you to live in Hamburg."

  "You've living in the past," she said.

  He took her face in his hands. "I love you, Sarah."

  She turned her head away for the first time. How could he make her feel like that again? That longing! She almost reached out to him but her parents' faces floated in front of her. She shook her head. "Your mind is in a past we never had."

  "You don't have to speak, I know your heart. You feel guilty that you still love the enemy," he said. "What we have doesn't recognize borders or religion."

  "Rutting in the dirt?" she said. "Eating like pigs while others starved? Hiding in the catacombs, always hiding, afraid to be seen. . .what was that?"

  He hung his head. "I never wanted you to have pain, n-never. Even when there was no hope that you were still alive, you haunted me."

  Her voice quavered. "I want to kill you, I planned to do it but"—she put her head down, defeated—"I can't."

  "Sarah, can you f-ff-orgive me?" Hartmuth sobbed, his head in his hands. When he finally looked up, she was gone. He had never felt more alone.

  Monday Evening

  SARAH BOLTED HER GARRET door and curled up on the bed. Several hours were left until her shift began the next morning. She clutched the spot where her yellow star had been and tried not to remember. Tried to forget but she couldn't.

  It was 1942, the stickiest and most humid day recorded in a September for thirty years. Not a breath of air stirred. School, already started and with compositions due, had settled into a tedious routine. As routine as the Nazi Occupation allowed. Only she and Lili Stein wore yellow stars embroidered on their school smocks.

  "Want to see something?" Lili, plain and pigeon-toed, asked her after school.

  Surprised that a sixteen-year-old would deign to notice her, she'd nodded eagerly and followed. At fourteen, she felt proud that an older girl wanted her company. Cool air wafted from darkened courtyards as they passed quiet rue Payenne. Lace curtains hung lifelessly from windows normally shuttered against the heat.

  At the Square Georges-Cain they sat on benches in the shade of plane trees, by the Roman pillars. No one was out, it was too hot. There was no petrol for cars and horse carts clomped over cobblestones in the distance. Fetid, dense air clung over the Seine in a wide band.

  They took off their white pinafores and dipped them in the urnlike fountain. Giggling, they swabbed their sweaty necks and faces with cool, clear cistern water. Lili sat back, her small eyes full of concern.

  "Something fell out of your satchel before mathematics," Lili said. "But I picked it up so no one would see it."

  She pulled a almond-shaped calisson, a speciality of Aix-en-Provence, from her pocket.

  Sarah stirred guiltily.

  "Where'd this come from?" Lili asked.

  "Look, Lili," Sarah said.

  "Stop." Lili interrupted her. "Don't tell me because then I'd have to turn you in. I might have to do that anyway, Sarah Strauss!"

  Sarah pulled a box out of her satchel and thrust it into Lili's palm.

  Lili squealed in delight, "I can't believe it." She opened the box and popped a sweet in her mouth, moaning. "Luscious!" Savoring the taste, she grabbed some more. "The pink ones taste the best."

  Sarah let Lili finish the sweets in the Provencal metal box painted with fruit and vines. Their legs dangled in the cool, bubbling water. Dragonflies buzzed in the green hedge. Everything felt smooth, peaceful—as if the war wasn't happening.

  Lili's eyes narrowed. "What else do you have?"

  "I can get more if you keep this between us," Sarah said. "Are you ready to leave Paris if Madame Pagnol finds a way to help us escape to the unoccupied zone?"

  "Of course, I'm waiting for her to give the word, she said it might happen next week," Lili confided. "Madame told me trains are still running down south but you have to hike over the mountains to get to the free zone. Village scouts will take you but they want a lot of this." Lili rubbed her fingertips together and gave her a knowing look.

  "Money?" Sarah asked naively.

  "Of course, or jewelry, maybe even food," Lili said.

  Sarah tugged her satchel nervously. She had never traveled outside of the Marais, let alone Paris. "Will we go together?"

  "Two yellow stars at once? Hard to say." Lili eyed her. "Bring more of these. I need to keep the welcome warm with my concierge."

  "But that might draw attention." Uneasy, Sarah shook her head. "I don't want that."

  "You'll get Gestapo attention, Sarah Strauss, if I can't shut her up!"

  The next day at school, their teacher, Madame Pagnol, informed them that an escape opportunity might occur at a moment's notice. So for several weeks after school, they met at the Square Georges-Cain to discuss plans.

  Lili's identity card, with the J for Jewish, had been issued on her sixteenth birthday, as was the custom in France. Sarah knew if Lili claimed ration coupons, the Nazis would demand her identity card and then ship her directly to Drancy prison. She also realized Lili subsisted on whatever food she shared with her.

  Every night Helmut reassured Sarah that he had checked the holding camps for her parents. He promised to find them and do his best to get them food. But he was so generous, she felt guilty. Guilty in taking the food even though she fed Lili and others in her old building.

  Most of the time she succeeded in ignoring her warring emotions—her guilt versus her growing feelings for him. She didn't like to admit to herself how handsome he looked, his dark eyes glowing in the candle-lit cavern, like those of film stars she'd seen in her older sister's cinema magazines before the war. She told herself he'd understand when she escaped. As a Jew, it was her duty to escape.

  Most of Helmut's food was quite exotic, especially for Jews who were raised kosher. She didn't care much for the foie gras in the Fauchon tins.

  "My concierge says Fauchon is the fanciest food store in Paris," Lili said one day, munching eagerly. "The rabbi will excuse us for eating food not kosher, won't he?"

  She heard doubt in Lili's voice for the first time. "There's not much choice. Anyway, it's goose liver, not pork."

  Lili had looked away but not before Sarah saw relief on her face.

  That night another roundup occurred in the Marais. Bottle green open-backed buses rumb
led through the dark streets, full of Jews clutching crying babies and suitcases. She and Lili grew nervous. Every day it became more dangerous to walk on the street with a yellow star.

  An unusual orange dusk had painted the sky, she remembered, in late October. One afternoon after Sarah had said goodbye to Lili she returned to the catacomb. She had always liked coming back to its dark, cool safety. She had even discovered another exit to the Square Georges-Cain and some large marble busts poking through the dirt. One looked like the picture of Caesar Augustus Madame Pagnol had pointed out in their history book. Like the bust they'd seen on a class field trip to the park when Madame took their photo.

  Behind a wooden post, she heard crackling and looked up. Lili stood, wedged in a niche littered with femur bones. "Who are you informing on?" she said matter-of-factly, her mouth half-full of nougat.

  Sarah stood bolt upright in surprise, bumping her head on the earthen ceiling. "How did you get in here?"

  Lili ignored her question. "You must be an informer to get this food. Come on, I won't say anything." She paused. "You better be careful, you don't look so thin anymore."

  "How did you get in here?"

  "I've followed you for days, silly. You're not very observant," Lili said, crawling through the dirt. "Nice and cool in here."

  "You followed me—why?" Then Sarah added it up. "Lili, don't be greedy. I share with others. You get enough."

  "My concierge is greedy. Another family moved into my apartment," Lili said, picking at stones embedded in the dirt wall. "If I don't give her more I can't stay with her."

  Sarah registered the dark shadows under Lili's eyes, her gaunt cheeks, and the patched soles of her shoes. "I'll try to get more. The trains will be running again soon. We'll escape!"

  Lili stared at her. "Who do you inform on?"

  "No one! A soldier trades with me," Sarah said defensively.