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

by Cara Black

  "Who are Thierry Rambuteau's real parents?"

  He sat down heavily. "Did my son do this to you?"

  "That wasn't my question but he's certainly on my list."

  "Leave the past alone," he said.

  "That phrase is getting monotonous," she said. "I don't like people trying to kill me because I'm curious."

  She pulled out the folder and slapped it on the white melamine-topped table. "If you won't tell me, this lawyer, Monsieur Barrault, will."

  "You stole that!" Monsieur Rambuteau accused.

  "You offered to let me use this, if you want to get technical." She slowly set her Glock on a sunflowered plate, her eyes never leaving his face. Half of her skull had frozen from the ice and the other half ached dully. "I'm not threatening you, Monsieur Rambuteau, but I thought you'd like to see what the big boys use when they need information. But I went to polite detective school. We ask first," she said.

  His hand shook as he reached for a bottle of yellow pills. "I'm preventing the reading of my wife's will with a court order. So whatever you do won't matter."

  "I'll contest that as public domain information," she said. "Within three days, Monsieur, it can be published as a legal document. What exactly are you hiding?"

  "Nathalie was naive, too trusting." He shook his head. "Look, I'll hire you. Pay you to stop further damage. The war's been over fifty years, people have made new lives. Some secrets are better left that way. My son's certainly is."

  "Two Jews have been murdered so far, and I'm next," she said. What would it take to reach him? "You better start talking because everything points to Thierry Rambuteau. Who is he?"

  He glanced around furtively, as if someone would overhear.

  "I had no idea Nathalie changed her will," he said. "We never agreed over him. Maybe she'd been drinking. Why should the mistakes we make when young stay with us all our life?"

  She wasn't sure what he meant but he appeared fatigued and wiped his brow.

  "Cut to the chase, Monsieur." Her head pounded and her patience was exhausted. "Who is he?"

  "During the war, Nathalie was an actress, I did lighting and camera work for Coliseum. We worked with Allegret, the director, in the same acting troupe with Simone Signoret." A melancholy smile crossed his face. "Nathalie never tired of telling everyone that. Anyway, Coliseum was accused of being a collaborationist film company and later grew to become Paricor. But then we just made movies and Goebbels made the propaganda. And like everyone in France, we had to get Gestapo permission for anything we did. At that time, cutting your toenails required approval from the Gestapo Kommandantur, so I've never understood the uproar about collaborators. We all were, if you look at it like that."

  Maybe that was true, but it reminded her of the joke about the Resistance. Fewer than five in a hundred of the French had ever joined, but if you talked to anyone today over sixty, they'd all been card-carrying members.

  He paused, sadness washing over his face. "Anyway, at Liberation we had a stillborn child. My wife couldn't get over it, but then, you see, so many babies came out stillborn during the war. Maybe it was the lack of food. But Nathalie felt so guilty. Everyone went crazy happy at Liberation. Our saviors, the Allies, were rolling in and here she was about to commit suicide."

  His breath came in labored spurts now and his face was flushed. "On the street we'd see parades of women with their heads shaved. They'd slept with Nazis."

  "Monsieur, some water?" she interrupted. She passed the bottle of yellow pills across the table towards him.

  "Merci," he said, gulping the water with more pills.

  "What does this have to do with Thierry?" she said.

  "There was a knock on our door one night. Little Sarah, a girl really, held a baby in her arms. I knew her father, Ruben."

  "Sarah?" she said. Where had she seen that name? Then her brain clicked—she'd seen it on Lili's yarn list next to Hecht's! "What was her last name?"

  Claude Rambuteau shook his head. "I don't remember. Her father worked on the camera crew before the war, a Jew, but. . ." His eyes glazed, then he continued. "Anyway, it was such a shock, I hadn't seen her for several years. Sarah's head had been shaved and an ugly tar swastika branded on her forehead. She cried and moaned at our door. 'My baby is hungry, my milk has dried up, and he's going to die.' The baby cried piteously. I noticed on her torn dress a dark outline of material where a star had been sewn. 'Where is your family?' I asked. She just shook her head. Then she said, 'No one will give me milk for my Nazi bastard.'

  "I told her that I couldn't help her. People might suspect me of collaborating. Especially since I'd worked at Coliseum all during the war. She looked at my wife and said that the baby would die if he went with her and she didn't know anyone else to ask. She said she knew we'd had a baby, couldn't my wife nurse hers, too? I told her our baby had died."

  Rambuteau closed his eyes. "She begged me, got on her hands and knees in the doorway. She said she knew he'd be safe with us because we had connections. Bands of Resistance vigilantes roamed Paris, out for revenge. I tell you, it was more dangerous to be on the streets after the Germans left than before, if they thought you'd collaborated."

  He took a few deep breaths, then kept talking determinedly. "All of a sudden, my wife took the crying baby in her arms. She opened her blouse and instinctively the infant sucked greedily. Nathalie still had milk and her face filled with happiness. I knew then we'd keep the baby. So you see, Nathalie is his real mother. She gave him milk and life, I've always told her that. I never saw Sarah again. She brought us the baby because we were rightists and no one would ever suspect."

  Incredulous, Aimee asked, "How could you accept the baby with the way you feel about Jews?"

  "I've always regarded him as Aryan, because half of him is."

  "Half-Aryan?" Aimee sat up.

  "The product of a union between a Jew and a German soldier. Evidently, my wife had made some foolish promise to reveal the past to Thierry. Sometimes her drinking got her into trouble." Wearily, he raised his hand and brushed his thinning gray hair behind his ears. The man had no tears left. Aimee recalled the cobbler Javel mentioning a blue-eyed Jewess with a baby.

  "Did this Sarah have bright blue eyes?" she said.

  Monsieur Rambuteau looked surprised, then wrinkled his brow. "Yes, like Thierry." He shrugged. "He's as much my son as if he came from my loins. And he's all I have left."

  "Tell him the truth. Be honest," she said.

  Monsieur Rambuteau looked horror-stricken. "I don't know if I could. You see, he would have such a reaction."

  "You mean a violent reaction?" She thought he seemed afraid of his own son.

  He shook his head sadly. "His real parentage is against everything I've raised him to believe. And now it's come back to haunt my life. I never meant to be so anti-Semitic when he was growing up. I just felt the races should live separately. And I spoiled him, I could never say no to him. He's very strong-minded, I just don't know what to do."

  Aimee was struck by this irony in Monsieur Rambuteau. But his obvious love for his son, even though he was half-Jewish, touched her.

  After a minute of quiet, his labored breathing had eased and he smiled faintly. "I'm sorry. I'm a sick old man. And I'm desperate. The truth would destroy him." He sighed. "My son is not the easiest person to deal with. If he asks you lots of questions, tell him that all records of births were destroyed by the Nazis when they abandoned Drancy prison. That's the truth."

  "You love him," she said. "But I can't help you."

  "The records were destroyed, there's nothing left," he said.

  Aimee pulled out a Polaroid of the black swastika painted on her office wall. "This is your son's handiwork."

  He shook his head. "Wrong, Detective."

  "How do you know, Monsieur Rambuteau?" She searched his face.

  "Because that's how Nazis painted them in my day."

  Taken aback, she paused and studied it again.

  "He could have copied
the style," she said.

  But even though Aimee pressed him, he just shook his head. "As far as I'm concerned, young lady, we never had this conversation. I'll deny it. Take my advice, no one wants the past dug up."

  Wednesday Afternoon

  THIERRY RAMBUTEAU, LEADER OF Les Blancs Nationaux, paced impatiently in front of a sagging stone mausoleum. Where was his father? They'd arranged to meet before his mother's funeral.

  This was ridiculous. He wasn't waiting any longer. Striding between the narrow lanes of crooked headstones in Père Lachaise cemetery, he realized he was lost. Every turn he took seemed to take him further away from where he wanted to go. A trio of seniors involved in a heated discussion stood on the gravel path, their breath puffy clouds in the crisp air.

  "Alors, is this the western section?" Thierry asked of the one with a shovel. "I'm looking for Row E."

  The old man looked up and nodded knowingly. "A new burial, eh? You're in the east corridor, young man, made a wrong turn a few turns back."

  The old man pulled his heavy work gloves off, reached into his vest pocket, and pulled out a fluorescent orange map. On it were the faces of celebrities buried in Père Lachaise. Like a Hollywood map to stars' homes Thierry had seen sold in Beverly Hills. Only these stars were in homes of the dead. Just then, a group of tourists wandered past them, rattling away in Dutch and consulting their own maps.

  "What is this, a tourist stop?" Thierry asked in disgust.

  The old man had lit a Gauloise. "The dead don't mind it." He shrugged and pointed at his map. "Anyway, go left at Oscar Wilde—it's very obvious with the angel; he's a big draw, you know—and then straight until the marble crypt. If you hit Baudelaire you've gone too far. Then go just to the right past Colette and you should be there."

  The old man put the map in Thierry's hands. "Someone in your family?" he asked.

  "My mother," Thierry said. He'd been amazed that her love affair with the bottle hadn't killed her. Cancer had done that.

  "Ah, well, my condolences. You must have an old family vault; no new space here anymore. But you'll enjoy visiting her. Never a dull moment here, especially over by that rock star Jim Morrison's grave, lots of all-night parties there."

  Thierry started on his way and paused at the angel, as the old man had pointed out to him on the map. The name Oscar Wilde and the dates 1854–1900 were carved into the marble with the inscription "For his mourners will be outcast men and outcasts always mourn."

  A single red rose lay at the angel's foot. Bleakly, Thierry concurred. He knew how it felt to be an outcast.

  WHEN THIERRY reached the burial site chosen for his mother, he waited for a long time. His father finally shuffled towards him. Monsieur Rambuteau was red in the face and out of breath.

  "Even with a map, this place was hard to find," he puffed. "But at least your mother is in good company." He pointed to the graffitied tombstone of Jacques Brel a few plots over.

  "Why don't they charge admission like the Eiffel Tower?" Thierry said angrily.

  Fifteen people attended the ceremony. Nathalie Rambuteau, an agnostic, had requested a simple graveside service with her family and some friends. Several old hands from her theatrical and film days appeared.

  As Thierry and his father walked away from the grave, Monsieur Barrault, the attorney, reminded them that he would be in his office later to read Madame Rambuteau's will.

  As they passed the sagging gravestone of Stendhal, blackened and weedy with neglect, Thierry shook his head. "How could they let Jews in here?"

  His father's grip on his arm had tightened until it hurt and he leaned heavily on Thierry for support. Surprised, Thierry looked at his father's face and saw his pained expression.

  "Papa." Thierry hadn't called him that for a long time. "You look ill. Why don't you go home and rest?"

  Monsieur Rambuteau didn't answer.

  In Thierry's Porsche on the way back to the apartment Monsieur Rambuteau was quiet. Then he spoke in an odd voice. "Close our joint account, Thierry. I've been meaning to tell you for some time," he said. "It's much safer if you route the funds another way."

  "Why, Papa?" Thierry said.

  "One can never be too cautious," Monsieur Rambuteau said. His voice changed. "Do you remember how we used to feed the pigeons crumbs in Place des Vosges?"

  Thierry was shaken by the softness in his father's voice. "But that happened long ago, Papa. I was a little boy."

  "You loved to do that. Every night after supper you begged me to take you," he said. "You told me you were the happiest boy in the world when you sprinkled bread crumbs near the statue of Louis XIII on his horse."

  Thierry grinned. "I haven't thought about that in years. What made you bring. . ."

  Monsieur Rambuteau had covered his face in his hands. His shoulders shook.

  "Papa, what is it?" Thierry reached over, patting his father's arm. "We'll have good times again." He meant like the frequent times his mother had dried out at the Swiss clinic.

  Claude Rambuteau nodded, rubbing his eyes. "Thierry, look for a blue envelope near your maman's picture."

  Thierry glanced at him quizzically, as his father slumped in the bucket seat.

  "In the breakfast room, don't forget!" Monsieur Rambuteau was gasping now.

  "My son," he gurgled as Thierry pulled over.

  Thierry frantically searched his father's pockets. "Of course, don't worry. . .Papa!" he cried in alarm.

  Claude Rambuteau's face was turning from beat red to purple. His knees spasmodically jerked against the leather dashboard.

  "Where are your pills? Your pills?" Thierry screamed.

  But Claude couldn't hear him as Thierry raced through the half-empty streets to the emergency entrance of St. Catherine's Hospital.

  Wednesday Afternoon

  AIMÉE CHANGED INTO CRISP wool trousers and a tailored cashmere cardigan. She looped the silk Hermes foulard, another treasure found at the flea market, around her neck. She popped more aspirin as she downed a generous shot of Ricard. Her head felt sore but the ice had prevented any major swelling. The dull throb had subsided and if it recurred she would drink more vermouth. Around the corner from her apartment she climbed onto the open-backed bus bound for the Palais Royal.

  The law offices of notaire Maurice Barrault were located at street level of what had once been an hôtel particulier on rue du Temple. Renovated probably in the seventies, the high-ceilinged salon had been chopped into office suites. Much of the charm had been lost but not the cold drafts, Aimee noted with discomfort.

  "Monsieur Barrault is in conference," the clipped secretarial voice behind designer wire-frame glasses informed her.

  "Oh, what can I do?" Aimee sighed. "My aunt's will is supposed to be read today. Of all days!"

  "I'm sorry. Would you like to reschedule?" The secretary pushed some files to the side of her desk and pulled out an appointment book.

  Aimee parted her sleek black shoulder-length wig with her fingers. "But I have a reservation on the TGV to Bordeaux in two hours."

  She eyed the framed baby photos lining the secretary's desk. French people loved children, giving excessive warmth and attention to any child.

  "My one-year-old came down with croup! The doctor is worried about complications with pneumonia."

  The secretary's concerned gaze radiated from behind the wire frames. "I understand. Your name, please." she said.

  "Celine Rambuteau," she said. "Nathalie Rambuteau was my aunt."

  "I'll see what I can do." The secretary patted the chair next to her desk and there was warmth in her voice. "Calmez-vous."

  The secretary disappeared behind a wooden partition. Aimee heard a door open, then click shut. She stood up quickly and scanned the file of some fifteen legal briefs piled next to the baby photos. Nothing. Then she rifled through a stack next to them labeled "To be transcribed," fuming to herself. The will was probably right on the lawyer's desk and she'd never be able to get a look at it.

  In the secretary's
open drawer, she saw hanging files. Under the "To file for probate section," a folder hadn't been shoved in completely. She peeked, then started in excitement. In the middle was a file labeled NATHALIE RAMBUTEAU.

  Beside her, the telephone rang loudly on the desk. She jumped. The red light blinked on and off. She wouldn't have time to pull Nathalie Rambuteau's file out. Her hands shook. She knew the secretary would be on her way to answer.

  Suddenly the light stopped blinking and went off. Aimee took a deep breath. Deftly, she slid the file out, flipped the cover, and scanned the sheets. She turned the pages hurriedly, looking for anything about Thierry. Deeds of property and legalese. Nothing about Thierry. Behind the wooden partition, she heard a door close and the click of heels. What story had Rambuteau been feeding her? Had he lied about this whole thing to throw her off the track?

  Stapled to the back of the will was an envelope with THIERRY RAMBUTEAU in black spidery writing. Aimee coughed, covering the noise as she tore it off and slipped it in her pocket. As the secretary rounded the partition, Aimee dropped the will back in the hanging folder.

  "I'm afraid there's been a complication, Madame Rambuteau." The secretary looked worried. "Your aunt's will goes into probate."

  "But why?" Aimee said.

  "Monsieur Barrault wanted to tell you; unfortunately, he is in conference. He'll call you later this afternoon."

  "Probate?" Aimee raised her eyebrows.

  "I apologize if this seems unexpected. . .," the secretary began.

  "Unprofessional is what it seems to me." Aimee stood up, adjusted her silk scarf, then made for the lawyer's door. "I need an explanation."

  The secretary barred the way but her eyes were evasive. "Monsieur Barrault is meeting with a vice president of the Bank of France. As soon as he's finished he'll call and explain."

  Aimee was about to make a scene and barge through the tall oak doors but she stopped herself. The reason a will went to probate clicked in her brain.