Murder on the Ile Saint-Louis

by Cara Black

  “In your conversation with Commissaire Morbier, you mentioned . . .”

  “Who?”

  “You reported to the Commissariat that an old clochard—” His eyes flashed. “Her name is Hélène. I spoke with a young flic who treated me like a senile fool. Whether or not I am, I pay their salaries with my taxes and I demand to be treated with courtesy.”

  He took a swig of wine. She needed him to keep calm so he would recount the information that he’d reported.

  “Exactement. That’s why I’m here. We’re checking every lead and I apologize.”

  “You’re apologizing for the police?” He squinted at her. His wine-tainted breath hit her in the face. “Apologizing, the police?”

  “We’ve got our best people on it, I assure you, Monsieur.” She tried not to wince at the trite phrase.

  “That’s a first!”

  A cynic. Not a typical reaction from his generation, but then perhaps she had laid it on too thick.

  He stared at her. Red and purple feather fluff from her jacket floated up with the dust motes, then landed on a warped harpsichord.

  “You’re undercover, that’s it,” he said. “I understand.”

  She passed this man’s shop all the time. Had seen him on the island, recognized his long woolen coat from the quai where she walked Miles Davis. Cut out of context and in her feathery outfit, he didn’t seem to know her.

  “Your a sleeper. That’s what they call it, non?” he asked.

  She glanced outside. More police cars and one lane closed to traffic. She was trapped.

  She pulled up a stool with three legs, a chair for him. “Tell me about Hélène.”

  He glanced at the wall clock, a ticking period piece in need of a new glass face. “She comes by if she’s hungry.”

  He blinked. A sad look in his long face. “It’s a long story.”

  “I’m sure the pertinent details come to you. We don’t have much time.” She didn’t know if this would go anywhere. Yet, as her father used to say, omit the smallest lead and it whacked you in the head later.

  “I’m ashamed to say it. Life’s treated Hélène hard. You don’t know.”

  “Try me.”

  “They ridicule her. The young ones most of all,” he pounded his fists together. The veins in his face more pronounced. “But what would they have done . . . how could they know what it was like?”

  His gaze was far away, in another time, another place.

  She had to pull him back, gently. Coax him.

  “I’m listening, Monsieur.”

  “We lived next door. Her family owned this shop,” he said, his voice hard and abrupt. “What’s left of it’s hers, I tell her all the time. Take it. Go to court, make a claim, I’ll give her legal rights. No one had the right to auction it at the end of the war. Least of all my father, to buy it for nothing.”

  She groaned inside. The story would come out his way. Painful and tortured.

  “What did Hélène see?” she tried again.

  He shrugged.

  Great. “According to your report, she has conversations with imaginary people. So why did you call if you . . . ?”

  “She talks to Paulette. But the last time I saw Paulette was end of September 1942. Right there.” He stood shuffled to the window. Pointed. “It was a rain-drenched day, like today. She was right there, in front of Fondation Halphen, only then it was a tenement.”

  Behind a fence, Aimée saw a soot-blackened building in the throes of gutting and renovation.

  “An eyesore to the SS. They requisitioned the town house and its contents—art. Now it’s the Polish Foundation.”

  Aimée focused on the flic cars, their blue-and-white lights flashing over the cobblestones. A man she recognized was getting out of one. Morbier.

  She moved back from the window.

  “I don’t understand, Monsieur.”

  His eyes glazed. “The flics came then, like now.”

  She had to bring him back to earth, to what the woman—the clochard, whoever she was—had said.

  “Monsieur, how is this relevant?”

  “Hélène bribed her little sister, Paulette, with nougat candy to pick up Hélène’s homework from her classmate in Fondation Halphen,” he continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “Flics under Geheime Staatspolizei—Gestapo—orders rounded up Jews who lived there, forty of them children.”

  “You mean . . . ?”

  “They dragged Paulette out with the others, still holding Hélène’s math book. I saw them herded into waiting trucks. Now a plaque marks the building. You see, right there.”

  And she knew. She recalled the plaque on the wall. All 112 inhabitants, including children, had been rounded up. And deported.

  “Paulette wasn’t even Jewish. But they slammed the truck doors closed.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry?”

  She saw the pain in his eyes.

  “But we all saw what was happening. We knew. People hurried off, trying to melt, to evaporate into the stone buildings. To avoid seeing or being seen. The shame, the fear. Hélène came walking down the street. She stood right there, holding her laundry basket.”

  How did that fit into this story? “Laundry, Monsieur?”

  “It was cheaper if you did it yourself in the bateau lavoir near Pont Marie,” he said, his tone matter-of-fact.

  The old laundry barges had been moored in the Seine until the fifties. It was hard to believe the river had once been clean enough to do laundry in.

  “Then Hélène was screaming . . . her basket fell from her hands, the white sheets lay on the cobbles as she stood on the street, pleading.” He shook his head. “They had quotas, they told her.”

  Aimée hated these stories—the pain, the oozing guilt. The helplessness to alter the past.

  “Every day Hélène and her father went to the Place de l’Opera and waited in line at the Kommandantur.”

  The former Kommandantur now housed a Berlitz center, the Royal Air Maroc office, and Aimée’s bank, BNP Paribas. The bank manager had moaned to her one day in his office about the techs finding a rat-chewed cloth swastika while tearing up floorboards to install fiber-optic cables.

  “All futile,” Caplan said. “Paulette had left on the Auschwitz-Birkenau convoy number 37 on September 25.”

  Aimée couldn’t speak. There was nothing to say.

  “Hélène blamed herself. Her parents sent her to a cousin in Le Puy. What happened to them later, I don’t know. But there was heavy bombing of the southern train lines . . . so many never came back.”

  He scanned the street and shuffled back to his chair. Sat down with a sigh. “After the Libération, my father bought this shop at auction. It would make me sick to hear him justifying his ‘investment.’ Then the store passed to me.” He gave a tight smile. “I wanted to study medicine. But that’s not your problem. A dozen years ago or so, Hélène reappeared. I’d thought she was dead. She wanted to go to sleep in her bedroom. Vacant eyed, she spoke to an imaginary Paulette.”

  Aimée wanted to know about the present, not this sad past, the shame clinging to these walls. Here in the dust, a miasma of the forgotten was almost palpable, though his words and the plaque were the only testimony to what had happened long ago in front of his door.

  “To survive, you move on. But it’s still here.” He hit his chest. “No one likes remembering. Those who broke, like Hélène, live in a twilight of the past. She’ll go for months, rational and even able to work, and then . . .”

  He pulled a much-folded Elle magazine from under the cushion of his chair. An issue from the sixties with a young Catherine Deneuve on the cover, pert in Courreges boots in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Now a collectors’ item. He opened it and took out a black-and-white class photo from the École des Garçons around the corner. Another photo showed a street scene with two laughing girls in school smocks, petting a puppy in front of the butcher shop; the butcher in his apron; people sitting in chairs on the street, fannin
g themselves. “See, that’s how the island used to be, shopkeepers, the aristocrats, talking together, a village.”

  She didn’t need a nostalgia lesson; she’d grown up here and heard it before.

  “That’s Paulette and Hélène.”

  Preserved in that moment of joy, playing with a new puppy . . . too bad joy couldn’t be frozen and thawed at will.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but getting back to the present . . .”

  “You don’t understand, do you?” he said, putting the photos away under the cushion. “Forget it.”

  She’d rushed him. Stuck her foot in it and he’d clammed up, changed his mind. Or his guilt had taken over. Whichever, she’d lost him. Yet this story was relevant somehow. She had to curb her impatience.

  “Try to remember what Hélène told you while it’s fresh in your mind, Monsieur.”

  “Hélène’s confused,” he said. “She had shock treatments that left scars. You know what that means.”

  Aimée recalled how widespread shock treatments for the depressed and deranged had been once. Now one took a pill.

  “I shouldn’t have called the Commissariat,” he said.

  “Monsieur, we need your help. No one’s accusing her. Since you’ve told me this much, it’s better I hear from her . . .”

  He pulled back in his chair.

  “Let me reassure you, Monsieur,” she said. “No questioning at the Commissariat, nothing like that.”

  “Questioning, Commissariat?” His voice shook. “They said that, too.”

  “Who?”

  He gestured to the cobblestone-paved street outside. “The flics who rounded the people up. But no one ever came back.”

  “That happened more than fifty years ago. I’m talking about now. A young woman has been murdered and if Hélène was there—”

  “She’s not insane.” He shook his head. “She can’t be locked in Saint Catherine’s with the loonies. She keeps herself clean and asks for nothing. If she did anything, she’s not responsible.”

  Aimée’s jaw dropped as she registered his meaning.

  “Responsible! You’re saying Hélène may have killed . . . ?”

  “I said nothing. Get out!”

  His words shook her. Hélène had to be in her sixties, or even older. And she recalled the mechanic Momo’s words.

  “Did she wear a scarf with butterflies, pink?”

  He scratched his head. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  Big jump. Or was it? “You think she may have killed the person who threw the young woman into the Seine, that she may have confused the victim with Paulette, don’t you?”

  He turned away from her.

  “She’d have to be strong, Monsieur. And then, where’s the killer’s body? Exactly what did Hélène say? It’s important.”

  “She said, ‘I took care of it.’”

  “That could mean she acted in self-defense or even that she did nothing at all.”

  “Exactement. Forget it, I’ve got work to do.”

  “But there’s been a second murder,” she said. “A man was killed in the theatre. We can’t forget it.”

  He clutched the armrest, surprised. “What?”

  “I thought you knew why the flics surrounded the quai.” She pulled out the photo. “Have you seen this young woman around?” She pointed at Nelie.

  No recognition shone in his eyes. His body deflated. He looked smaller, as if his flesh was retreating into itself. Protected, in a shell.

  And then she noticed the silent line of tears trickling down his wrinkled cheeks.

  “Monsieur, please.” She put her arm around him. His shoulders were so thin, like a sparrow’s.

  He shook her arm off, wiped his face with his sleeve, and sobbed. “Leave . . . just leave.”

  Guilt pierced her; reducing an old man to tears hadn’t been on her agenda. Her ringing cell phone broke into his muffled sobs.

  Torn, she didn’t know what to do. She didn’t even have a

  tissue. In her bag, she found a moist towelette pack, LÉON, BRASSERIE BELGE, with a green mussel imprinted on it. She tore it open and put it in his hands. Her phone kept ringing. Something wrong with Stella? Or Nelie calling?

  “Allô?” she answered.

  “It’s on the scanner, Aimée. Vavin’s been murdered,” René said, breathless.

  “I know, René.”

  In the pause she heard bleeps from the scanner.

  “They’re on the lookout for a woman with spiky hair, wearing a red feather-trimmed jacket. . . .”

  That damn security guard! Her heart sank to her wet high-tops.

  “That’s me.” She couldn’t even go back to her apartment to change.

  “What?”

  “I found him.”

  “What the hell’s happened? And Stella?”

  “Later, René,” she said. “Stella’s with the babysitter at Martine’s.” She had to work fast. “I’m going to Regnault.”

  “And run right into the flics? I heard the office address; that’s how I recognized him.”

  “The flics will need to get a search warrant and that takes time,” she said. “I figure whoever killed Vavin is en route to his office. But I have the keys. That should give me some advantage.”

  “Don’t go there alone,” René said.

  “There’s not much choice. Or time.”

  She heard the police scanner crackle in the background, glanced again at the wall clock. She’d have to hurry.

  “I’ll meet you,” René said.

  “You don’t have to, René,” she said, but she appreciated his offer.

  “Where?”

  “On the second floor,” she said. “Women’s restroom. Bring your laptop and a coat for me.”

  “In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m a—”

  “Then meet me by the fire door next to it. Hurry, René.”

  The old man had sat in the chair again and he was far away, lost in his memories. “Monsieur . . .”

  “Leave me alone.” He shrugged her hand off his shoulder and drained the wineglass with shaking hands.

  She set her card down on the table, her fingertips blackened with surface grime. “I doubt that Hélène killed anyone, but if she witnessed the murder, call me. I’ll use your back door if you don’t mind.”

  In his galley kitchen piled with dirty pots, she opened the back door to a small courtyard. She looked back but he hadn’t moved.

  She took a headband from her pocket, pulled it over her hair, fished out big black sunglasses from her bag. Put the jacket on inside out, on the red-and-orange-fiber side. Not bad. She looped a scarf around her throat to cover the Christian Lacroix label.

  Several doors opened onto the small courtyard. She tried the one labeled HÔTEL and walked through an even narrower passage—once the seventeenth-century tennis court of Louis XIII, who liked the fashionable sport à l’anglaise—that led into the lobby of the four-star Hôtel du Jeu de Paume.

  In the restored medieval timbered lobby, tapestries lined the walls and tall floral arrangements in Lalique vases adorned the tables. A woman whose face Aimée recognized from an eighties Louis Malle film stared at her. There was no time to waste.

  She smiled at the young doorman, wishing the old White Russian who’d worked here for years was standing there instead. “Taxi, please.”

  “You’re a hotel guest, Mademoiselle?” he asked.

  “A guest of a guest,” she said. “I’m in a rush.”

  “Pardon, Mademoiselle, but service extends to our guests only.”

  That meant he wanted a big tip.

  “He’ll appreciate my disappearance,” she said, palming fifty francs into the doorman’s hand. “Before the photographers arrive!”

  One-upmanship was the only way to handle his type.

  After a blast of his whistle, she stepped in a taxi and sat back on the leather seat.

  “Six rue des Chantiers.”

  She slouched down as the taxi sped past the flic cars
.

  Wednesday Early Evening

  KRZYSZTOF RUBBED HIS goose-pimpled arms in the chilly lab. He stared at the row of labeled chemicals. Easy, so easy. He’d seen recipes for explosives on the Internet using HTH, the swimming-pool chlorination compound, Vaseline, and simple table salt. Concoct an explosive, plant it at the oil conference reception, threaten to detonate it unless they canceled the agreement. It should be easy.

  Stop . . . what was he thinking? Violence against one of the hydra-headed corporations who polluted the world? Disable one and another would spring into its place. There had to be another way. He wished he knew what it was.

  NIGHT THREW SHADOWS over the farm compound as Krzysztof entered the dark kitchen. It was deserted. The only evidence of the red-haired artiste was her welding torch on the scorched floor by her twisted pipe sculpture. Art—she called that art?

  He climbed into his sleeping bag in the corner, exhausted. His cell phone bit into his side. He took it out, turned it on . . . no messages. His mind drifted in the enveloping down bag’s warmth.

  Voices, guttural and low, invaded his dreams. “Explosives enough for a nice little scare.” Then low laughter. He blinked. A dim light from the artiste’s studio cast oblong shadows on the table. He realized that he wasn’t dreaming.

  He sat up, rubbing his eyes. Saw beads of rain on the shoulders of huddled figures in raincoats. Craned to get a better look. Two men, crouching, The taller one stood and left. Krzysztof caught only the outlines of the other’s face; he was blond and hawk nosed. The face looked familiar, he’d seen him before but couldn’t place him. Then footsteps, the slam of a door, and the man was gone.

  Krzysztof got to his feet, stiff from sleeping on the floor, and walked into the studio. The redhead, a shawl around her lace halter top, was stuffing something into the pocket of her torn jeans.

  Cold drafts whistled under the warped window frames. Her welding torch was hooked onto a dark green gas canister, her protective visor was on the floor.

  “Who was that?” Krzysztof asked.

  “Quoi?” Her gray-speckled eyes darted from side to side. “How long have you been here?” she asked irritably. She put her hand over her jeans pocket but not before he saw the wad of francs.

  Scattered pieces of copper wire snaked across the floor near metal pipes and smudges of black powder, like a clump of ants. He stiffened. Gun powder. How could he have been so naive?