AL01 - Murder in the Marais ali-1

by Cara Black

  Late Friday Afternoon

  "YOU SAY SOLI H ECHT is in a coma?" Aimee asked Morbier as she stood across from his desk. "Is he going to wake up?"

  "Severe trauma, internal injuries." Morbier shrugged. "Then again, I'm not a doctor."

  "If he wakes, can you arrange it so I talk with him?" she said.

  France 2 droned above them on the TV in Homicide. On the screen, angry demonstrators at the Élysee palace gates paraded near a newscaster who vainly attempted to interview them.

  "A big if. He's in his eighties, amazing that his heart is pumping at all. Round-the-clock surveillance, too," Morbier added.

  Her heart raced. Something was very off here.

  "Wait a minute, weren't you calling this an accident? Not even investigating when I called you. . ."

  Morbier cut her off. "Not me. Word came down the pipe."

  "Meaning what?" she asked.

  "From above. Not my dominion anymore. My men and I have been ordered clear of this investigation for safety and precaution. You, too." He stared at Aimee.

  "Hold on." She hated being told thirdhand. "Does this include Lili Stein's case?"

  "BRI has been assigned to the 3rd and 4th arrondissement," he said.

  If Solange Goutal's emergency call had been ignored but Soli Hecht was abruptly put under hospital surveillance, a lot more was happening than met the eye. Her eye, anyway. "You're no longer handling this case?"

  He shook a nicotine-stained finger at her. "Stick to your computer, Leduc; that's all you need to know."

  "What about getting me the phone numbers dialed from Les Blancs Nationaux's office?"

  He shook his head. "I can't help you."

  Typical Gallic evasion, she thought; the French had perfected the art of sitting on the fence. He cupped his palm and took a deep drag of the Gauloise stub held between his thumb and middle finger. His bushy eyebrows lifted high on his forehead.

  "Talk to me, Morbier," she said. It came out more intimately than she meant it to.

  "First time in twenty-six years I've had a case taken away." He regarded his desk with a sour expression and ignored the tone in her voice. "For what it's worth, I don't like it either."

  She felt her temper erupting, but she thanked him and walked out.

  Late-afternoon traffic had choked to a standstill on rue du Louvre as she walked to her office. Morbier's comment spun in her head and she longed for a cigarette.

  Instead, she bought a baguette at the boulangerie next to her building. In the small supermarche wedged on the other side, she picked up chèvre cheese, local tapenade relish, and a bottle of Orangina. She waved to Zazie, who was doing her homework by the window in Cafe Magritte.

  As she mounted the worn stairs to her office she decided she had to keep investigating, no matter what Morbier said. They might be able to push him around but no one could tell her what to do.

  Inside the office Miles Davis greeted her, excitedly sniffing her bag of food. He'd spent the night with Rene. She fed him some scraps from the butcher's. The only trace of Rene was a message taped to his computer screen with one word: "later."

  Miles Davis fell asleep perched near the heater and Rene's chair. Aimee poured the Orangina into a crystal Baccarat wineglass left over from her grandfather. She folded the cheese and tapenade into the crusty baguette and ate.

  After she finished her meal, she carefully taped the photo image and torn snapshot piece from Lili Stein's room together. She scanned the complete image into her computer and digitally enhanced the photo and printed a copy.

  Aimee placed this image among the spread-out photos from the police folder and her own archive files. Then in chronological order, she tacked them up along her wall and looked for connections to the swastika.

  She peered at them though a magnifying glass. The black-and-white photos cast everything in a timeless past. Each snapshot held a different scene, but they were all views of the Marais. She recognized the cafe, Ma Bourgoyne, she often went to. A group of booted Nazis sat drinking at the corner table. Next to it, women with rolled pompadour hair wearing ankle socks and t-strap shoes stood in line holding ration books.

  Another photo showed the local Kommandantur on the rue des Francs Bourgeois, with armed Nazis guarding the heavy wood entrance doors. She almost dropped her goblet of Orangina.

  On flags flying above the Kommandantur, the swastikas were tilted, with rounded edges, exactly like the one carved in Lili Stein's forehead.

  Miles Davis growled, then someone knocked loudly on the office door. Had Rene forgotten his keys? She slipped her unlicensed Glock 9-mm from the desk drawer into her back jeans pocket.

  "Who's there?" she said.

  A muffled voice came from behind the door. "Herve Vitold with BRI."

  "Show me your identification."

  A laminated photo identity card with Brigade de Recherches et d'Intervention flashed in front of the peephole.

  "Un moment." She shuffled the photos together and slid them back into a large envelope in her drawer.

  "Excuse the caution." She opened the door slowly. "I've had some threats."

  Aimee had never seen a Saville Row suit before but figured the Nordic-looking man standing at her door wore one. Probably a Turnbull and Asser handmade shirt, too.

  "Of course," he said. His white blond hair glinted in the hall light but his features remained hidden. "Mademoiselle Leduc?"

  Aimee nodded, keeping her hand cocked on the gun's safety.

  "I have no appointment, but I'd like half an hour of your time. With commensurate compensation, of course," he said.

  Aimee opened the door wider and let him in. She tried to appear as professional as possible in her too tight jeans and a torn Asterix vs. Romans T-shirt. A whiff of something expensive laced with lime hit her.

  "Please come in and have a seat, I'll be with you right away," she said.

  "Herve Vitold." He held out his hand as she showed him into her office. "Security administrator." He had gold-green eyes and an expensive tan for November.

  "Please sit down," she said, surprised he didn't wear a uniform.

  He leaned forward, took out a leather checkbook, and flashed a kilowatt smile at her. "Your rates, please. I want to take care of the business first."

  Aimee briefly wondered why a Gentlemen's Quarterly type from the federals at BRI would walk into her office and want to pay money to talk to her.

  "Five hundred francs for a half hour," she said promptly.

  Let him put his money where his mouth was. See if this handsome man in an expensive suit was real or joking.

  Immediately he pulled out a Montblanc pen, filled in the amount, and slid it across the desk, briefly touching her fingertips. She could have sworn his fleshy, manicured fingers lingered a second too long. Shell-shocked at receiving such a check though she was, she didn't react. Her mind was mostly on his very curly blond eyelashes and the green in his eyes. Consciously, she ignored a danger signal in her brain flashing "Too good to be true."

  "How may I help you?" she smiled.

  "First, may I say I appreciate your taking the time. A business like yours. . ." Here he vaguely gestured around the office, not exactly a beehive of activity. "And with a busy schedule, I'm sure." He flashed his brilliant smile. "But I'll get right down to it, shall I?"

  "It's your franc."

  "My branch works with precautionary services, sort of a field unit, out of La Defense," he said.

  Get with it, girl, and ask a question, she told herself. "Sorry to interrupt, but I'm not familiar with government security. Don't you wear uniforms?"

  Again that smile. "No uniforms. We exist and we don't exist, if you get my meaning."

  Talking in tongues was what it sounded like to her. "Not really. Maybe you should get to the point."

  A glimmer of amusement crossed his face.

  The shadows lengthened across her office walls and she stood up to switch on the office lights.

  "Mais bien sûr," he said. "Specia
l branch out of Bourget, responsible for terrorist management, has taken over the Stein case. All inquiries, surveillance, and follow-up are to be handled by us."

  That fit Morbier's dictum. "Why?"

  "Given the present political climate and sensitivity of the issue, Special Branch feels it must be handled with care." Vitold sat back, crossing his trousered legs precisely at a ninety-degree angle. "This is a historic moment. Finally, for the first time since the last war, the European Union delegates will sit together and sign a treaty that binds Europe. Nothing must endanger this or the covert operation we've mounted to nab terrorists intent on destroying this process."

  Too good to be true, all right. "Are you telling me to, let us say, butt out?" she said.

  "Mademoiselle Leduc, I'm asking you." His eyes flickered again with amusement, then hardened. "I know how important the tax extension is to your firm right now and I wouldn't want anything to interfere with the process."

  "Is this some kind of veiled threat?"

  He stood up with a perfect crease down his pant leg and a still wrinkle-free shirt. "Now, now," he clucked patronizingly.

  She stood up, too. "You walk in here, write a check, and expect me to back off a paid case by threatening to interfere with my taxes? Who do you think you are?"

  "Vitold, as I've said, but I neglected to mention that your investigator's license is about to expire, since you've not renewed it."

  "My investigator's license is code orange. Permanent and nonrenewable," she said.

  "Not anymore."

  "Threaten somebody else." She glared at him, ripping his check into franc-sized bites.

  He grabbed her wrists, imprisoning them in a viselike grip. Little white pieces of his check fluttered onto the parquet floor. She realized his large manicured fingers could snap her bones in half like matchsticks.

  "Must be careful of your little hands." He stroked the scar on her palm.

  She jerked her head towards the video camera mounted into the deco molding. "Go ahead, the security camera is capturing our moment as we speak."

  An odd smile washed over his face and he let go.

  Then he was outside her office, striding toward the glass-paned hallway door.

  "Consider carefully. I would if I were you," he said.

  She whipped out the Glock. But he was gone. Only a whiff of lime lingered in the air.

  She was shaking so much she couldn't keep her hands steady. She forced herself to take deep breaths and slip the safety back on. How deep had she waded in—and what kind of trouble was this anyway?

  The indentations where Herve Vitold's fingers had pinched her wrists were still visibly white. She rewound the videotape and printed a photo of him. She remembered that Texas saying "Not fit for dog meat," and wrote that in red across Vitold's image.

  After she grew calm enough to work, she sat back at her computer. She knew access codes changed daily in the security branch at La Defense. Within ten minutes, she had bypassed the "secure" government system, accessed their database, and found Bourget Special Branch.

  The Bourget chain of command, responsible for antiterrorism functions, only crossed municipal police lines in the event of attack bombings, hostage situations, and the like. Not cold bodies of old women with swastikas carved into their foreheads.

  Then she checked BRI's files, but no Herve Vitold came up. She spent two hours logging into all government branches with corresponding security.

  If Vitold was who he purported to be, then Aimee was Madame Charles de Gaulle, God rest her soul. She found no one named Herve Vitold existing in any data bank.

  Friday Evening

  THE GRAVELLY VOICE DIDN'T sound happy.

  "Consider this an order, Hartmuth. The chancellor is very set on this item of the trade agenda."

  Hartmuth kept his voice level. "Jawohl. I've said I'll review the adjunct waiver proposal before I decide."

  He clicked off. Briefly he wondered about Bonn's reaction if he didn't sign the agreement.

  Hartmuth wearily set his briefcase down on the Aubusson carpet, collapsing into the recamier's brocade. All the rooms were furnished in authentic antiques, yet they were so comfortable, he thought. This silver-and-silk-threaded pillow was familiar, like the kind his mother embroidered on winter evenings long ago.

  But that world had been shattered out of existence. Setting his stockinged feet upon the pillow, he lay back exhausted and closed his eyes.

  Yet he couldn't sleep. He relived the journey, the one in which he returned to his father's home on the outskirts of Hamburg. Of ninety-one thousand taken at the defeat of Stalingrad he'd been one of the five thousand Germans limping back after the Siberian work camps.

  At the end of the muddy road, rutted with bomb craters, he'd recognized the blistered paint and blown-out windows. Entering the doorless shell, now empty and deserted, he'd seen that even the fireplace bricks had been taken. He shuffled to the back, looking for his fiancee, Grete. His family had arranged their betrothal while they were in the Gymnasium, before the war.

  A steady chopping and then a sound of splintering wood came from a dilapidated outbuilding in the crisp, bitter air. Red-faced, her breath frosty on a chill March afternoon, Grete was chopping down the back garden shed for firewood, using a rusty ax. She clapped a cracked and bleeding hand over her mouth, stifling her cries, and hugged him.

  "You're alive!" she'd finally managed to say, her voice breaking with emotion. "Katia, Papi is here. Your Papi!" Grete said, shivering in the icy wind.

  A child, wrapped in sewn-together burlap sacks, sat in a nearby wheelbarrow. Oddly, he felt no affection for this hollow-cheeked, runny-nosed creature with yellow ooze dripping out of her eyes. The baby had been playing with a warped photo album and his father's violin bow, all that remained of his family. Grete assured him proudly that Katia was his, born of their coupling on his last furlough in 1942. Yes, he remembered that. He'd been so anxious, after his fiancee's doughlike legs and desperate embrace, to return to Paris and Sarah.

  He knew Katia was his and he resented her. He wished he didn't. Guilt flooded through him for not wanting his own child.

  Because of Katia he knew he'd have to stay and take care of them, marry Grete, and keep his promise. She deserved it, for bearing his child, protecting the house. She told him herself what had happened to his parents.

  "Helmut, the snow hadn't melted by April and Muti and Papi couldn't stand to see Katia shiver so badly. They decided to investigate a rumor about black-market blankets in Hamburg. Only one tram was left running, painted white and red to resemble medical transport," she said. "I'm sorry." Grete put her head down. "I'm sure they didn't feel a thing, Helmut. We saw yellow-white light." She pointed beyond the muddy, rutted road. "After the explosion, smoke billowed into the sky and a rain of little red slivers fell on the snowy field."

  He wondered if she was telling the truth or was the truth too painful to tell? It sounded like the explosions in the Siberian oil field where he'd been a POW. Working at the camp in the frozen tundra, men had been burnt by eruptions of fire on ice into charred cinders before his eyes. He wore gloves to cover the skin grafts crisscrossing the old burns on his hands.

  He sat up in a cold sweat. Loyal and steadfast Grete, she hadn't deserved his gift of an empty heart. But he couldn't very well go back to France then—he, an ex-Nazi just out of a POW camp, to search for a Jewish girl, a collaborator.

  Postwar Germany had no services, no food. Grete cooked the roots and tubers he found by clawing under the snow. Scavenging in the forest, he dreamed of Sarah, seeing her face in the catacombs as they shared tins of black-market pâte.

  But all around him, people boiled and ate their shoe leather if they had any. He sold his mother's pearls for a sack of half-rotten potatoes that kept their hunger at bay. Gangs of children ran after the few running trains, fighting over burned pieces of coal that fell onto the tracks, hoping to find some only half-burned. They weren't allowed back into the basements under the rubble
until they brought something to eat or burn.

  Hollow and numb most of the time, he survived by his wits and by scavenging. At night, spooned between Grete and Katia for warmth, he'd see Sarah's curved white thighs, feel her velvety skin, and imagine her blue eyes.

  Grete knew right away he didn't love her, that he loved someone else. But they married with no regrets. No one had time for regrets in postwar Germany, and he and Grete worked well together. They were a team of two dragging Katia along. Her eyes never seemed to heal. One eye stayed closed and continually dripped. There was no penicillin to be had and no money for the black market.

  Grete appeared one day with tubes and packets stuffed in the pockets of her too-small winter coat. She pulled out a fat tube of metallic-smelling ointment.

  "Helmut, hold her, please. This will help her eyes," Grete said. Firmly she rubbed it around and inside Katia's lids as much as she could, while he held his squirming child. Then Grete pulled some huge yellow-and-black pellets out of a paper packet. "Good girl, Katia, now just swallow these. Here's some cold tea to help them go down," Grete said soothingly.

  Katia made a face and spit them out. Grete stuffed them back in her mouth.

  "Grete, Grete, what are you doing?" He thought Grete had gone crazy and was giving Katia dead bees to eat because she was so hungry.

  Her eyes flashed angrily, "It's medicine! She has to take them or she'll be blind, Gott im Himmel, help me!"

  And he did. He never forgot what those huge penicillin tablets looked like and how Grete's face had looked as they got them down Katia. Only the GIs had them. Katia's eyes got better and he never asked Grete how she had got the penicillin.

  SATURDAY

  Saturday Morning

  AIMÉE, IN BROWN wool jacket and pants, strode through the narrow passage behind the rue des Rosiers. She rested her gloved hand in her lined pocket, keeping it warm. Fog crept through the Marais, almost to Place des Vosges. Centuries-old stone, worn smooth by countless footsteps, lined the alley. Above her, red geraniums spilled from window boxes.