by Cara Black
Roman had said both sides paid and made bad mistakes. “France will reap the dividends in the future,” he’d said. For a former soldier that seemed charitable. In fact it was the only charitable thing about Algerians Bernard ever heard him say.
And he’d been right, Bernard thought. He dealt with that dividend in Notre-Dame de la Croix.
Saturday Early Evening
TWILIGHT DIMMED THE BELLEVILLE sky, canceling the magenta and orange slashes left from the fading sunset. Aimée sniffed the algae accompanying the biting wind blowing from Canal Saint Martin. The breath of spring she’d felt the other day had disappeared. Passengers erupted from the Métro like particles from a jet stream, erratic and windblown.
The security guard by the Crédit Lyonnais ATM near the Métro steps looked familiar. Very familiar, even with a leashed German shepherd beside him. Most of the guards in Paris were African, but he was of Algerian descent. It had to be Hassan Elymani, the custodian she spoke with on Sylvie/Eugénie’s street.
And she had to get him to talk.
She entered the nearest café, rubbing her arms and wishing she’d worn her leather coat. She planned to watch him from a warm and caffeine-laden environment. However, the fogged-up windows blocked her view of the corner. Too bad. Over the conversational hum and tinkling of demitasse spoons, she ordered two café-crèmes to go. Back out on the corner of avenue Parmentier, she approached him.
“So this is your second job, Monsieur Elymani,” she said, offering him a café. “Do you have a moment to talk?”
“I’m on duty, Mademoiselle,” he said, his voice stiff, refusing to return her gaze.
He rubbed his hands together.
She could play this game, too. But it was a shame they were outside and it was so cold.
“And I’m a customer with questions,” she said, still holding the cup. “Take it, please.”
He ignored her gloved hand with the coffee.
“Don’t you have something better to do than hound me?”
“Not right now,” she said. “I want to know about Eugénie.”
“You talk like an amateur!” Elymani snorted.
She certainly felt like one. And wasn’t he a rent-a-flic?
“The men who blew Sylvie up threatened my friend,” Aimée said. “They’re after her.”
Elymani shook his head. “You’ve even got the victim’s name wrong.”
“How’s that?” she asked.
He kept silent but rolled his eyes as if she were too stupid to comprehend. His breath frosted in the air.
She pulled out the fax from the Fichier in Nantes. “According to this the body from the explosion has been identified as Sylvie Coudray.”
“Eh,” he said, then shrugged. “Call her what you want.”
His remark disturbed her. Elymani had made a kind of sense, since it seemed to her the dead woman had a dual persona. Aimée popped the lid and sipped her café. The hot, sweet jolt burned the roof of her mouth.
“What time’s your shift over?”
“None of your business,” Elymani snapped.
A tall man tapped Elymani on the shoulder. The man’s chiseled dark face shone in the sodium streetlight.
“Go make up with your lady friend, Hassan, and be nice,” he said, with a West African accent. He winked at Aimée. “I don’t mind starting a few minutes early, eh, camarade.”
Elymani shifted in his work boots. “Beni, that wouldn’t be fair.”
The German shepherd growled, but the new man, BENI AN-OUR labeled on his shirt, took the dog’s leash.
“You crazy, camaradel” Beni said to Elymani, grinning. He eyed Aimée up and down. “A real woman and your shift’s over, no one in your dormitory waitin’ for ya! Has life been this sweet to ya in a while?”
Poor Elymani, faced with his manhood in question or her interrogation, stood mute and uncomfortable. Aimée heard the click of worry beads in his pocket.
“Look, Hassan, let’s have coffee and walk to the boulevard, please,” Aimée said, her voice low, crooking her arm under his.
“Allez-y” Beni grinned. “Only Allah knows what she sees in you. Make some time before she wakes up, eh?”
ELYMANI ACCEPTED the café, his mouth tight. Halfway down avenue Parmentier they turned into narrow rue Tesson.
He shook her arm off and glared at her. But there was fear in his eyes.
“I work hard, mind my own business,” Elymani said, his voice cracking. “Yet you step in and make my life…” he stopped searching for the word.
“Compliqué?” she said. “My intention isn’t to get you in trouble.”
“I have to take care of my father. Last month he got injured on the job site,” he said, his voice different. “Look,” he said, almost pleading, “My family in Oran relies on me.”
Elymani’s eyes were large with fear.
“We’re having a private conversation. No one will know,” she said. “I promise.”
“The Maghrébins,” he said, scanning the deserted street, “they know.”
Aimée’s stomach fluttered with apprehension, but she shook her head. “You can’t be sure, now can you, Hassan?” She went on before he could answer. “Someone was blown up, you saw something, and you’re nervous. Anyone would be.”
He looked down, scraping the sides of his muddy boots on the cobbles.
“They’ll know soon enough,” he said.
“How?”
Elymani took a sip of café, sighed, then gestured toward the building opposite. Cracked plaster facades, scrolled grills fronting tall windows, and black grime in almost a trompe l’oeil design covered the ground floor of a once exquisite Haussmann-style apartment. Now the windows were cinderblocked and a permis à démolir sign hung above the massive doors covered with graffiti.
“In the back courtyard of that building,” he said, “they run a makeover business.”
She rubbed her arms again in the biting chill. What did Elymani mean?
“Makeover?” she asked.
“Say your permis de conduire was revoked. You visit with a roll of francs, et voilà, the Maghrébins furnish you with a new driver’s license,” he said. “At least they used to. They moved on.”
So Elymani fed her information, not current but true.
The warrens of old Belleville, honeycombed by courtyards, passages, and stone cellars in deserted buildings held the Maghrébins network. At least that’s what she figured from Elymani’s conversational pirouette. And that could be how Sylvie had gotten ID as Eugénie. To open a bank account, she needed ID.
“So would you say they live in the housing projects?” she asked, lifting her eyes toward the tall concrete buildings a block away. “But run their business where they won’t be disturbed?”
He nodded. “They find a place, maybe a building ready to be torn down or renovated. The rent’s cheap. Full of Yugoslavs, Hindus, or retired people who don’t ask questions. The tenants ignore who goes in and out, until problems erupt over turf or money. Things get noisy. Then the Maghrébins move on.”
“So you’re saying Eugénie was involved in this?”
A tidy hypothesis, even plausible, but how would it fit Sylvie’s murder—even if they’d furnished her with a new identity?
“For good reasons, I keep my nose out of it,” he said. “Those hittistes want easy money, a nice life. But in the end life reckons with them.”
Elymani had his own survival code.
“You better be careful,” he said. “You’re being watched.”
“By whom?”
“Look, my jobs are on the street. All I do is listen and keep my eyes down. I don’t want to know what goes on.” His eyes darted down the street. “What I really want to do is sleep for a week. Ahrs, the foyer is noisy, my mattress is lumpy, and I miss my wife.” He shrugged. “When my papers come through I’ll bring her over.”
“What did you hear about Eugénie?” Aimée said, stamping her feet in the cold, wishing she had a cigarette.
&n
bsp; “My next job starts in a few hours,” Elymani said, turning to walk away. “Mercf for the caféV’
“Are you a lookout or do they pay you to keep your mouth shut?”
He stiffened.
“My family would be here if I did that,” he said his voice low with anger. “But dirty money brings no honor or peace.”
“My friend’s in danger, and now they’re after me,” she said. “Don’t you understand? Tell me what you saw, Elymani, then I’ll leave you alone.”
“All I know is that Eugénie used the place. She lived somewhere else. Sometimes Dédé dropped by.”
“Who’s Dédé?” Aimée asked, forgetting how ice-like the air had become.
“An old-fashioned mec who’s got a finger in every pot,” he said. “Like a giclée, a fine ink spray coating the surface—know what I mean?”
She wasn’t sure but figured Dédé bent with the wind.
“Where can I find him?”
“Café la Vielleuse.” He turned toward the streetlight. “Now, leave me alone.”
Saturday Evening
YOUSSEFA BOUGHT HAIR DYE at the Casino market around the corner from the apartment. Behind her chador it was as if she were invisible. But she had to be careful; few women in chadors frequented this kind of shop.
In the twenty-franc bargain bin on boulevard Belleville she found a black denim coat. Back at the apartment, she mended the broken crutches she’d found discarded in the trash.
At the bathroom sink, she read the instructions. But when her scalp started burning, she realized the chemicals had been on too long: Her hair had turned orange. Bleach was bleach, she’d thought. She did it again. In the end, when she looked in the mirror, she’d done a good job by accident. She’d fit in with the trendy crowd at Café Charbon, who sported the same white-hair, black-roots look.
Youssefa felt a measure of relief. No one paid attention to a woman in a chador or a fashionable type with a broken leg. Then the sobering thought hit her that if Eugénie’d had another identity, it hadn’t helped her.
In the church Zdanine had agreed to help her. But first, he’d said, he wanted to see the photos. He’d seemed eager when she told him why she had to speak with Hamid. After Zdanine saw them, he’d acted uninterested but promised to try and get her five minutes with Hamid.
Youssefa finished her prayers, rolled up her prayer mat, and felt ready. She headed toward the church, hoping Zdanine had paved the way.
Saturday Night
AIMÉE STARED AT THE mirror to the left of the bar, cracked in four or five places, in crowded Café la Vielleuse. Painted on the mirror was a faded image of a woman holding a vielleuse, an old-fashioned hurdy-gurdy. The woman’s blue puff-sleeved blouse and white tie bespoke turn-of-the-century fashion. The timeworn burnished wood, mosaic floor, and stumpy bar competed with seventies modernizations in the front. Café la Vielleuse straddled the broad boulevard de Belleville and the uphill, two-lane rue de Belleville, choked with buses, cars, and hurrying pedestrians.
“There must be a story behind that,” she said in a conversational tone, smiling to the busy waiter behind the counter.
He nodded and stuck his pencil behind his ear, then flicked the milk steamer into high gear, filling the café with a muffled whining. Then a slow hiss as the milk frothed.
“The manager, Dédé, would know,” he said.
“Have I missed Dédé?”
“He’s in back. Dédé!” the waiter yelled over the noise.
A stocky man sat behind a large adding machine at the rear, picking his nose. The machine droned continuously, spitting out a roll of adding tape. “Merde!” he barked, giving the machine a shove and switching it off.
“The mademoiselle has questions about La Vielleuse,” the waiter said, jerking his thumb at Aimée.
Dédé, a squat fireplug of a man who was a head shorter than Aimée, fluffed his thinning hair as he walked toward her. His cropped suit jacket didn’t meet his checked trousers. He wore pointed-toed heeled boots.
“Tiens, there’s quite a story to that,” he said, then extended his hand to shake hers.
Aimée dropped her purse on the floor, “Je m’excuse,” she said, quickly stooping to pick it up. The linoleum was littered with sugar-cube wrappers, cigarette butts, and lottery stubs. But anything was better than shaking Dude’s hand!
When she stood up, Dédé lit a cigarette, set down his gold lighter, and leaned on the zinc counter. She smelled wine on his breath. “In 1914 les Aliemands encamped at Fontainebleu. Their cannon flattened the shop next door and shattered la viell kuse, comme ga” Decle said. “We left her like that so people would remember.”
Outside on rue de Belleville, Chinese children, a heavy-set Arab woman, and Jews in yarmulkes thronged the sidewalk. Gawking at something. Aimée wondered what drew their attention. Then she saw a figure on stilts juggling what looked like bowling pins.
“Rumor has it that the Germans’ big gun got pulled back for duty on the front,” Dédé said, fingering a soccer ball on the end of a keychain, “and that saved Paris from bombing.”
“Lots of history here.” Aimée kept a smile on her face, her tone neutral. She figured she’d better buy him a drink.
“Would you like a drink?”
“I wouldn’t mind a biere Iambic, Belgian style.”
“Make that two,” she said.
Dédé smiled and snapped his fingers. Every so often he jangled the keychain, as though he needed to know it was still there. Aimée wondered if he’d tell her about Edith Piaf.
She didn’t have long to wait. As the froth-topped glasses of beer appeared, Dédé recounted the “Sparrow’s” birth on the steps of 72 rue de Belleville. He said a plaque now proclaimed: EDITH PIAF SANG FIRST ON THE STREETS OF BELLEVILLE. MUCH LATER HER SONGS TRAVERSED THE BOULEVARDS OF THE WORLD.
A nice way to put it, she thought.
“To tell the truth, Piaf s mother made it to Hospital Tenon, behind Gambetta,” Dédé said. “But the other makes a better story.”
Dédé had a point. Aimée sipped the biere Iambic letting the toasty hops mingle with the sweetness of raspberry.
Not bad.
She noticed, as they stood at the counter and Dédé recounted the story, how he’d nod to patrons, send a wink across the café, or raise a hand in greeting. He never broke his conversational thread or lost her attention. Or missed noticing a spilled glass or conveying a sharp glance to a waiter who hadn’t noticed a patron ready to pay the bill. Elymani’s description, the slick giclie type, came to her mind.
“My old boss told me that Piaf sang out front, but then so many did in those days,” Dédé shrugged. “Truth to tell, she wasn’t anything special until her cabaret-owner boyfriend was killed and the police judiciare hauled her in for questioning. Brought her major publicity.”
He grinned.
“Things haven’t changed, eh?” Aimée said. “People get famous any way they can.”
“Belleville was different then, all populaire, working class. The populaire worked hard, played hard,” he winked, draining his glass. “My papa inspected rail lines, and my mama shoved a vegetable barrow in the market. So I say I grew up in between the market and the tracks.” He let out a bark of laughter and palmed his empty glass. “Raised on this like mother’s milk.”
Several of the staff behind the counter joined his laughter. To Aimée the guffaws sounded brittle and forced.
“Encore, s’il vous plaît,” she said, realizing she’d need to keep buying to hold Dédé’s mouth open. Dédé seemed to relish portraying himself as a populaire descendant. And he probably drank all day, nourishing his memories. But he stayed razor sharp and seemed to make it his business to nurse acquaintances, know people. She wondered how he knew Eugénie.
“They say Piaf never stopped, had the energy of a hummingbird,” Dédé continued as he raised his Here. “Salut.”
Aimée saw her opening.
“My friend Eugénie, who lives right near here, is just lik
e that,” Aimée said, nodding. “Sometimes it’s tiring to be around her.”
Dédé sipped his biere. His eyes had narrowed. He didn’t respond.
Maybe he was used to doing all the talking, or maybe he didn’t like how she’d turned the conversation. A chirping noise sounded in his pocket, and he plucked out his cell phone. Red and compact, a new Nokia. He answered, mumbled something Aimée couldn’t hear, clicked it off, and slipped it back in his pocket.
“Eugénie’s got a place on rue Jean Moinon,” Aimée said, smiling. “Bien sûr you probably know her, Eugénie Grandet.”
“We’re the busiest café” on the boulevard. There are so many people,” Dédé said. His small dark eyes crinkled as he threw up his arms, revealing a gold watch and a thick rose-gold chain circling his wrist.
“Tiens, Dédé, be honest! You know everyone who comes in here,” the young waiter piped, while he rinsed glasses and dried them.
If he’d meant to curry points with Dédé, Aimée figured the effect had been the opposite.
“Unfortunately I can’t put a face to every name,” Dédé said, his tone now self-deprecating. “But I make sure things run smoothly and all our clients feel at home, eh—that’s my job! Thank you for the drinks, next time it’s my round.” He winked, giving her an oily smile. “Now if you’ll—”
She had to stop him before he bolted.
“You’re too humble,” Aimée said. She laid her hand firmly on his wrist, covered with wiry black hairs, to hold him. “Eugénie’s got short hair, like mine, only bright red.”
“The one in the tight overalls,” the waiter said. “She comes here—”
Dédé’ shot him a look that shut him up.
“Mes enfants,” Déde” gave a loud chuckle, squeezed Aimée’s hand with his, then removed it. “I can’t keep up with you kids. Meanwhile I’ve got to check on the unloading. Pascal, I need your help.” He gestured to the young waiter, and with the ease of a lizard removed himself.
She wanted to disinfect her hands.
But as she glanced down her eye caught a slim lighter, a luminescent pearl set on it. No ordinary pearl.
