by Cara Black
"I'm flattered," he said. "Others are more qualified than I."
"Politicians can't afford to be modest." Cazaux winked and patted him on the back. "Of course, the commission gets in place after the treaty is signed. First things first."
Quimper, the rosy-cheeked Belgian delegate, joined them. "This pâte is superb!" he said, gently dabbing at his mustache with a napkin.
Cazaux grinned. "May I offer you the privacy of my office to conduct your perusal of the treaty clauses?"
Hartmuth had already seen the addendum. He figured Cazaux wanted to get Belgium's and Germany's approval first, then convince other delegates to agree.
"My understanding, Minister Cazaux," Hartmuth said, "is that the European Union delegates, as a body, are presented with the treaty tomorrow and we discuss any details or changes before we ratify."
A shadow passed briefly over Cazaux's face but it was gone in an instant.
"But of course you are right, Monsieur Griffe." He nodded his head sadly. He put his arms around their shoulders and steered them away from the babbling crowd.
"You know and I know, this isn't the best answer," Cazaux said. "However, France's economy and our relationship with you, our close European neighbors, will suffer if this isn't signed." He sighed. "Mass unemployment—well, that's just the tip of it."
Quimper nodded in agreement. Cazaux dropped his arms and studied the floor.
Hartmuth stared at Cazaux. "This treaty sidesteps due legal proceedings for immigrants. The mandate allows them to be held in detention centers indefinitely, without trial by judge or jury. No high court will sanction this."
"High court? No, dear Monsieur Griffe, it will never come to that. Once the treaty is passed and signed, discouraging new immigrants, we begin proceedings to strike those clauses." Cazaux smiled expansively. "The clauses will be deleted, like they never were there! Immigration will have slowed to a trickle. Eh, voila, our consciences will rest quietly after that."
"Plenty of time for us to deal with that tomorrow," Hartmuth said.
"Of course, gentlemen." Cazaux smiled, putting his arms again around both of them. "As the host, where are my manners? And where is that pâte?"
Hartmuth felt Cazaux's clawlike grip on his shoulder. More than ever, he wished he was far away.
Sunday Noon
SARAH PULLED THE HAT lower over her eyes. She felt disoriented, grappling with the old Paris she knew and the changes in the fifty years since she'd left.
"Bonjour, Monsieur, the evening Le Figaro, please."
She paid and passed under the damp colonnades of Place des Vosges. The Marais felt oddly the same yet different, memories accosting her at every corner.
The wind whipped crackly brown leaves around her legs and she pulled her raincoat tightly around her thin body. The smell of roasting chestnuts wafted across the square. At the bottom of the back page, she saw the article she'd been looking for. Marais Murder Lili Stein, sixty-seven years old, of 64 rue des Rosiers, was found dead on late Wednesday evening. According to autopsy findings she was a victim of homicide. Police inquiries are centered in the Marais and surrounding 4th arrondissement. The Temple E'manuel has posted a reward for information leading to the conviction of person/s involved.
Here was Lili's murder, confirmed in black and white! She must have missed the first mention during the week. Above her, the strains of a violin, playing "Coeur Vagabond," drifted from an open window.
Her mother had hummed that old song on laundry days before the French garde mobiles, supervised by the Gestapo, rounded up her family in The Velodrome d'Hiver raid and deported them to Auschwitz in July 1942. She trembled and it wasn't from the chill November wind. Were they after her, too? Or was Helmut?
Sunday Noon
AIMÉE FOUND ABRAHAM S TEIN in the storefront synagogue Temple E'manuel on rue des Écouffes, a sliverlike street crossing rue des Rosiers. Formerly a stationery store, the synagogue stood next to a vegetable shop that displayed bins of dark purple aubergines, shiny green peppers, and scabbed potatoes on the curb.
Abraham looked thinner, if that was possible. Dark circles ringed his eyes and his dark blue striped shirt gave him the appearance of a concentration-camp inmate from old newsreels. Lili Stein's memorial service had brought the small community together inside this tiny dark synagogue.
Everything bespoke tradition to Aimee—the low tones, the smell of fat before it got skimmed off chicken soup somewhere in a nearby kitchen, the gleam from brass candlesticks, and the feel of the rough wooden bench. Present time faded.
She became a little girl again, with ankle socks that always slid down and itchy wool sweaters that scratched her neck. Fidgety as usual. Trying to be as French as everyone else, the continual struggle of her childhood. Her mother holding her hands, making the sign of the cross, telling her to stop speaking English mixed with French. "Mais, Maman, I can't help it!" she had begged. "Stop that Frenglish, Amy, you're old enough to know," her mother had said. But that was as foreign to her as feeling French. "Sooner you learn, the better it is," she remembered her mother saying. "You can take care of yourself!"
"Baruch hatar adonhai."
She slowly came back to the present, while a pair of wizened hands gripped hers and helped her make hand motions. But it wasn't her mother. It was a white-haired woman, eyes clouded by cataracts, whom she'd never seen before.
"Très bien, mon enfant!" the old woman with misfitting dentures beamed, hugging her.
Aimee sank back in disappointment. Her childhood was gone and her mother wasn't coming back. She took a deep breath and gently, she extricated herself, clasping the woman's gnarled hands in thanks.
Outside, she nodded at Sinta and approached Abraham Stein on the curb. He appeared melancholy as usual.
Rachel Blum, stooped and clad in an old sagging floral-print dress, disappeared behind a wooden door opposite the storefront synagogue.
"Excuse me," Aimee said to Abraham. She knocked on the wooden door several times. Finally a wooden slat slid open a crack.
"Hello, Rachel, it's Aimee Leduc. May I come in a few moments?" she said.
Rachel didn't smile as she peered out. "Why?"
"I forgot to ask you something."
Rachel slowly pulled open the heavy, creaking door.
"How are you, Rachel?" Aimee said, walking inside the moldy smelling entrance.
Rachel sighed. "Fallen arches, that's what the doctor calls it now. Can't take too much standing, my feet can't anyway, not like I used to."
She motioned to Aimee. They sat together on a wooden bench in the dark paved entrance.
"Walking on stone too much—that does it." She'd taken off her shoe and was rubbing the sole of her foot. "Those stairs going to Lili's used to be wooden. This stone gets my bunions hurting."
"Is that where the bloody footsteps were?" Startled, Aimee remembered Rachel's description. Morbier's men had found evidence of Lili Stein's blood there also.
"You don't give up, do you?"
"No one deserves to die like that," Aimee said, her face flushed. "Yet every time I ask questions about Lili's past, people don't want to talk. Why don't I chase the neo-Nazis, they say, do something concrete?"
Rachel kept rubbing her foot and didn't look at Aimee.
"I don't care where you fit into Lili Stein's past," Aimee said. "You won't talk to me because you think I'll judge you. No one my age would understand what you went through during the Occupation, right?"
Aimee attempted to keep her voice neutral, but she wasn't succeeding. "Who gives you the right to decide? And even if I can't understand, do you want the horror of what happened to be hidden forever?"
Rachel still avoided Aimee's gaze.
"Look at my face, Rachel," Aimee said.
Rachel shook her head.
"Lili's murder wasn't a skinhead special. That swastika was SS Waffen style," she said. "The SS. . .don't you see that? Or maybe you don't want to."
Rachel shrugged. "You're the one with the b
ig theories."
Aimee sat back, feeling defeated as the hard bench cut into the burned spot on her spine. She shook her head and spoke as if to herself. "Who's next?"
Rachel sighed. "Arlette's murder happened after a big roundup of Jews in the Marais," she said.
Aimee froze.
Rachel's hands sliced the air, punctuating her words. "Jews kept indoors after that. We only bought things at certain hours of the day, we were even afraid to do that. That's when the Gestapo started more night raids. Almost every night. I'll never forget. Middle of the night, the squeal of brakes in the street and footsteps came pounding up the stairs. Would they stop at your apartment? Yell 'Open up' and bash in your door with their jackboots? Or would they keep going and pick on someone else that night? My neighbor down the hall beat them to it. When they were breaking down her door, she grabbed her two sleeping babies and jumped out the window, right onto rue des Rosiers." Rachel pointed to the street. "In front of this building. I like to think those babies slept on through to heaven."
Aimee sensed something odd in the way Rachel spoke, but she couldn't put her finger on it. Rachel took a deep breath and continued. "At Lili's apartment they couldn't get the blood off those wood steps. No one would go upstairs, they ended up just paving them over with stucco." She leaned close to Aimee's ear.
Aimee shifted on the dark, narrow bench.
Rachel whispered, "Some say they were Lili's bloody footprints because they were small. But Lili was gone. She didn't come back until Liberation and so much was going on, no one thought to question her. I asked her once about the concierge's murder she witnessed but she wouldn't elaborate. She never wanted to talk about the Occupation, said the war was over. She liked telling her son how she dealt with collaborators, though." She added, "Lili could be mean sometimes."
"Who found Arlette, the concierge?" Aimee asked.
"Javel. Seems he came courting later in the evening, saw a lot of blood. He found her in the light well, her brains all over."
"What do you mean, 'a lot of blood'?" Aimee said.
"I wasn't there but that's what I heard." Rachel Blum wedged her shoe back on and slowly rose to her feet. "I tell you, people did wonder about Arlette's murder since she wasn't Jewish. Rumor had it she was a BOF, but then everyone in Paris who could did that."
"BOF?"
"Beurre, oeufs, fromage—butter, eggs, and cheese," Rachel said. "That was the currency of the black market. You'd be surprised to know how many supposed Resistance members made fortunes that way. Everyone was jealous of those BOFs. I remember Arlette as silly and greedy. Always talking about her fiance. With Lili gone, I suppose no one will ever know."
Aimee wondered why, if Lili had seen a murder, she hadn't told anyone.
Rachel turned and stared hard at Aimee. "No good comes of bringing all this up again," she said. "Leave the dead alone."
"This isn't the first time I've heard that. Are you going to put more obstacles in my way, Rachel? Threaten me again?"
Rachel shook her head stubbornly.
"You sent me the fax!" Aimee said.
"I'll say it once more." Rachel's eyes hardened. "Forget the past, it's over."
"No, Rachel." Aimee stood up. The story made sense now. "You must relive it every day. Were you an informer? Fifty years isn't punishment enough, is it?"
Rachel's bravado disintegrated and she covered her face with her hands. "It wasn't supposed to happen that way," she wailed. "They got the wrong apartment. I didn't mean to!"
"How can you tell me to forget the past?" Aimee said. "You are haunted by it."
"Three days later they took all of us."
Aimee shook her head. Rachel remained hunched over, her eyes glazed and far off.
Aimee let herself out, emerging into busy rue des Rosiers. Lili's staircase contained answers. How to obtain them was the problem. A big problem.
She approached Abraham, ignoring Sinta's look. He cleared his throat.
"We need to talk," she said.
"D'accord." He turned to Sinta, but she'd already gone.
They walked slowly down the rue des Rosiers, past the Stein shop and towards the rue du Temple. At the Place Ste. Avoie, opposite graffitied Roman pillars, they sat down at an outdoor cafe.
"I apologize, Mademoiselle Leduc. You mean well, I know. The rabbi at Temple E'manuel told me I should be more helpful, not so intolerant." Abraham Stein looked down at his hands.
She kept silent until the waiter served him a mineral water and her a double cafe crème.
"Things are difficult for you now, Monsieur Stein," she said. "I understand."
On the sidewalk, a father grabbed his toddler daughter, who'd tripped on the curb, catching her before she tumbled into an oncoming car. He smothered her tears in a hug, then plopped her on his shoulders.
Aimee recalled her twelfth birthday when she refused to let her father continue chaperoning her to ballet lessons. Oddly, he hadn't been upset. He'd just shaken his head in exasperation, saying, "You may be half French but you're all Parisian, every stubborn bit of you." Then he hugged her long and hard, something he'd done rarely after her mother had left.
"What have you found out?" he said.
She shook off the memories. "Last night I enlisted with Les Blancs Nationaux and almost bashed your synagogue."
Abraham choked on his mineral water. "What?"
She told him about the neo-Nazi meeting at the ClicClac and their target. She neglected the part about her shoulder and Yves.
His eyes opened wide in alarm.
"Please detail for me what your mother did last Wednesday afternoon."
He stopped and thought. "Wednesdays she usually took the afternoon off, ran errands, bought special food for Shabbat."
"Did she cook?"
He shook his head. "Normally we have Wednesday supper at my nephew Ital's apartment. But that evening Maman never showed up. So I came looking for her."
"Ital lives nearby?"
"Around the corner on rue Pavee."
She stirred her coffee excitedly. "Near the cobbler Javel's shop?"
"Next door."
Somehow this all fit, she thought, remembering the newly heeled shoes in the closet Sinta had commented on. "Had she picked up a pair of shoes from Javel's that day?"
He paused. "Ital's daughter's bat mitzvah is next week. Maman mentioned something about shoes. I'm not sure."
"What else did she do?"
"She'd sort the garbage Wednesdays for me to put in the light well, then come over."
Aimee almost dropped her spoon. Morbier's men had found evidence of a struggle near the garbage.
"Your mother had already been down in the light well."
Stein shook his head. "Maman never went in there. Refused."
Something clicked in her brain—the closeness of Javel's shop, the light well where his fiancee had been found, and now where Lili Stein's blood traces were fifty years later. Everything was pointing to Javel.
She braced herself to explore an ugly avenue. "Monsieur Stein. . ."
"Abraham." He smiled for the first time.
"D'accord. Call me Aimee." This made it harder. Too bad, she liked this man, felt his pain almost as her own. "Please don't be offended. I'm sorry to ask this. Many women who fraternized with the Nazis got branded with swastikas on their foreheads after Liberation. Would there be a connection?"
Abraham sighed. "I've heard that, too. But Maman was definitely not a collaborator. On the contrary, she pointed them out, as she self-righteously told me one time."
His eyes squinted in pain and he buried his face in his hands. Aimee reached over to him and stroked his arm. She waited until he stopped shaking and gave him a napkin.
Giggling students scurried across the cobbled street, past the almost empty sidewalk cafe. She reached in her backpack and pulled out the first thing her hand touched. It was the wrinkled copy of The Hebrew Times she'd wrapped Lili Stein's coat in.
She gasped. Cochon l'assassin—Swi
ne assassin—in bold angular handwriting was scrawled across a small photo and accompanying article. She smoothed the newspaper. Politicians and ministers were outlined by fat red lines in that writing. Aimee couldn't make out the faces but she could read the names.
She thrust the paper at him. "Your mother wrote that, didn't she?"
"Ah yes, Maman ranted about this one night. A Nazi liar strutting in black boots, she knew all about him. She carried on so but when I asked her particulars, she shut up. Wouldn't discuss it. Maman wasn't the easiest person to deal with." Abraham grimaced. "But family is family, you know how that is."
Aimee nodded as if she did, but she didn't.
He continued. "Last week, Sinta noticed Maman went out a lot." Abraham paused to drink some mineral water. "Sinta remembers her saying that she wasn't going to be put off by ghosts anymore." He stopped, hesitating.
"Go ahead, Abraham." She wondered what he was afraid to tell her.
"I doubted you before, Aimee." He looked down. "Blame it on my old-fashioned thinking about women. But now, wrong or right, I worry for you."
She was touched by his concern and didn't know what to say.
Abraham spoke in a measured tone. "The last words I can remember Maman saying were 'I'll come to Ital's later,' as if she was expecting something."
Aimee felt conflicted, wanting to tell Abraham that his mother had been expecting her. But if she did, that could put Abraham in danger and put her no closer to Lili's murderer.
Abraham continued. "Then Maman said, 'You will take the boards down from my window tonight.'"
She sat up. "What did she mean by that, Abraham?"
"I don't know," he said.
"Obviously it struck you as unusual," she said. "What do you think she meant?"
"With Maman you never knew. . .but maybe she felt guilty."
"Guilty? For what?"
"That's just a feeling I got," he said. "No concrete basis."
He looked upset. "I have to get back." He slapped some francs on the table and hurried away.
She rose, carefully putting the folded newspaper in her backpack, more confused than before. What did the boarded-up window have to do with the photo she'd deciphered?
