Murder in the Marais

by Black, Cara

  Aimee reached for a pair of readers from the top of Lili’s desk.

  Rachel grunted, “That’s better.” She squinted through Lili’s reading glasses. “Hmm, what’s this?”

  “Anything look familiar, Rachel?”

  A wistful look came over her. “The Square Georges-Cain. A lifetime ago.” She sighed, then indicated some figures near a tree. “Our school uniform. See the smocks,” and she pointed to a girl turned away from the camera.

  Rachel seemed grateful to be resting her feet and exercising her mouth. She was vigorously rubbing her other foot now.

  “Did you and Lili go to school together during the war?”

  Something shuttered behind Rachel’s eyes and she turned away. Aimee knew that look, a deliberately vacant stare that came into old people’s eyes when the war was mentioned. Rachel shrugged and didn’t answer.

  Aimee sat down on the bed next to her and smiled. “Were you in class together?”

  “Lili was younger than me. I didn’t have much to do with her.”

  “Didn’t you know her parents?”

  “I’m only half Jewish,” Rachel said. “Am I supposed to know everybody? A lot of people disappeared.”

  Why had Rachel become defensive?

  A tingle went up her spine, the same tingling she’d felt when she’d made that promise to Hecht. She edged closer to the old woman and lowered her voice confidentially.

  “Rachel, she looked up to you, didn’t she?”

  Rachel looked surprised but not displeased. “I’m not sure…”

  She kept going. “Have I embarrassed you, Rachel? You know how schoolgirls idolize older girls!”

  Rachel shook her head slightly and paused. “I vaguely remember her father. He came back after the war.”

  Aimee noticed that Rachel’s gaze was focused on the window crisscrossed with crime-scene tape. So there was something, Aimee thought, her heart starting to pound.

  “Why did Lili board up the window, Rachel?”

  A stony look came over Rachel’s face. “The winter of 1943 was cold. No one had coal for heat.”

  “Lili boarded up the window for warmth?” Aimee said. “But she wasn’t here during the whole war, was she?”

  “Water froze in the pipes,” Rachel said woodenly.

  Aimee prayed for patience. “Wasn’t it hard for Lili here after her parents were taken?”

  “We chipped ice off the fountains. Boiled it for cooking and washing,” Rachel continued.

  “What about Lili?”

  “She stayed with the concierge. Downstairs when…” Rachel stopped and covered her mouth.

  Aimee leaned forward and gripped Rachel’s arm.

  “Go ahead, Rachel, what were you about to say?”

  Aimee was surprised to see fear in Rachel’s eyes.

  “Why are you afraid?”

  Rachel nodded and spoke slowly. “You think I’m just a silly old woman.”

  “No, Rachel. Not at all.” Aimee reached for her hand and held it.

  Finally, Rachel spoke. “They found the body.”

  “A body? Who?” Aimee asked. Startled, she leaned forward. Why hadn’t Abraham Stein mentioned this to her?

  “Down in the light well.” Rachel twisted her neck as far as her bent back would allow.

  “Whose body?”

  “This window looked right out on it.”

  “Yes, Rachel, but who was it?”

  “Things happened in 1943,” she said.

  Aimee gritted her teeth and nodded. “I know it must be difficult to talk about the Occupation. Especially to my generation, but I want to understand. Let me try.”

  Rachel turned to her, her eyes boring into Aimee’s. “You’ll never understand. You can’t.”

  Aimee put her arm around the thin stooped woman. “Talk to me, Rachel. What did Lili see?”

  “We had to survive. We did what we had to do.” Rachel’s stale breath hit Aimee’s face. “She told me once that she saw the murder.”

  “A murder that happened in the light well?” Aimee said, keeping her excitement in check. “So that’s why she boarded up the window?”

  Rachel nodded.

  Aimee willed her face muscles to be still and kept her arm around Rachel’s shoulder.

  “That’s all she said, wouldn’t talk about it after that,” Rachel said finally. “There’s not many people around who’d remember, there were so many deportations.”

  “Was it the Nazis?” Aimee said.

  “All I know is Lili’s concierge was murdered.” Rachel shook her head. “It’s not something people talk about.” Her eyes were far away.

  “What do you mean, Rachel?”

  “Only Felix Javel, the cobbler, he’d remember the bloody footsteps…” She trailed off, lost in thought. “Past is past. I don’t want to talk anymore.”

  Sinta, Abraham’s wife, clomped into the room. “Listen, Mademoiselle Detective—” She planted her feet apart as if supporting her wide hips and repinned her thick black hair with tortoiseshell combs. Loud beeping interrupted from the folds of her faded apron. “Alors!” she muttered, pulling a Nintendo Game Boy out of her pocket. She clicked several buttons then slid it back inside her apron.

  “Neo-Nazi salopes!” Her voice rang curiously melodic, with a strong Israeli accent. “Day and night, they harass us in the shop,” she continued matter-of-factly. “Lili always yelled at them to go away. Told me she wasn’t afraid of them, but I guess she should have been.”

  “A gang? What did they look like?” Aimee asked. The damp cold permeated her wool jacket. Why couldn’t they turn the heat on?

  “Never paid much attention,” Sinta shrugged. “I baked in the back kitchen and she handled the customers.”

  “Your husband mentioned that she’d been seeing ghosts,” Aimee said.

  “Yes, old people do that.” Sinta rolled her eyes at Rachel, who nodded knowingly.

  “I don’t speak ill of the dead, she was my mother-in-law. We lived under the same roof for thirteen years,” Sinta said. “But she could be difficult. Lately she’d taken to seeing shadows everywhere—in her closet, out the window, on the street. Ghosts.”

  “Shadows?”

  Sinta had turned away, as if dismissing her. Aimee stood up and grasped Sinta’s elbow, forcing the woman to turn and face her directly.

  “What do you mean by that?” Aimee asked.

  Reluctantly, Sinta spoke. “Talking about the past, seeing ghosts around the corner.” She shook her head and sighed. “Imagining some collaborator had come back to haunt her.” Sinta cocked her head and rested her hands on her hips. “She grew so agitated the other day that I finally said, ‘Show me this ghost,’ so we walked to rue des Francs Bourgeois and up rue de Sevigne to that park with Roman ruins. We sat there for a long time, quietly. Then she seemed calm and said, ‘It comes full circle in the end, always does,’ and that was that. No more mention of ghosts.”

  “Collaborators?” Aimee said, surprised.

  Sinta repinned a lock of hair that wouldn’t behave. “Yes, all that old talk.”

  “Why wouldn’t you believe her?” Aimee said.

  “Up and down rue des Rosiers, Les Blancs Nationaux spray graffiti and smash windows. Seems obvious.”

  This was the second time she had heard Les Blancs Nationaux mentioned.

  Sinta paused and looked around the room. Rachel’s eyes had closed, low snores rattling from her open mouth.

  “Lately, Lili had become very paranoid.” Sinta lowered her voice. “Between you and me, she didn’t have many friends. Poor Rachel put up with her, the others wouldn’t. Go investigate that trash, that’s where you should be looking.” Sinta sighed. “I don’t have time for the past anymore.”

  Sinta opened Lili’s cracked wooden wardrobe and a strong whiff of cedar came out. Sinta shoved some black skirts together and moved aside a pair of freshly heeled shoes, a repair tag hanging off them. “Too bad. She had just picked these up from the cobbler’s.” Sinta s
hook her head. “All this goes to the synagogue sale benefiting Jews in Serbia.”

  “What’s the hurry, Sinta?”

  “Time to clean things out,” Sinta said with determination. “No more living in the past.”

  As Sinta reached in the back, Aimee noticed a coat half-covered in yellowed paper with an old cleaning tag labeled MADAME L. STEIN pinned to it. The cut and drape spoke couture, but the combed wool with nubby black tufts resembled a postwar concoction of available materials.

  “That’s beautiful,” she said.

  Sinta grabbed it from the wardrobe and threw it in the pile.

  Aimee stared into Sinta’s eyes as she lifted the coat up. “Maybe you should keep this.”

  “Why?”

  Aimee looked at it wistfully. Her mother had worn a coat like this. “Don’t you feel this coat was from a happier time in her life?”

  Rachel snorted awake. Her eyes brightened, seeing what Aimee held. “Ah, the new look from Dior…1948! Lili sewed a coat for me like this one. Mine had bows down the back seam.”

  “Schmates! Rags! Everything goes to the synagogue; Serbian refugees will use the cloth. Make it functional and useful, not just a moth-eaten memory.”

  Aimee felt something intensely personal from Lili Stein emanated from that coat. “Instead, let me keep the coat and I will donate money to the synagogue fund. In honor of my mother. I didn’t know her either.”

  Sinta stood back. “I’m supposed to feel sorry for you?” Her black eyes glittered. “Grieving for a mother you didn’t know?” She planted herself close to Aimee. “My sympathy market is closed. I had a mother born in Treblinka. As far as I’m concerned, mentally she never left. Couldn’t leave the past. Kept scratching for lice and begging for food even on the kibbutz in 1973…” She stopped as Abraham came in.

  He glared at Sinta.

  “That’s enough.” He picked up the coat and handed it to Aimee. “Maman hadn’t worn it in years. Take it.”

  “Thank you, Monsieur Stein,” she said. She picked some piled Hebrew newspapers from the corner and wrapped the coat in them.

  Down the hallway, she heard Sinta’s raised voice, which she knew was meant to be heard. “She doesn’t look like a detective…why did you take that shiksa’s side, Abraham?”

  Sinta’s words in her ears, Aimee retraced her steps down the stairs. Out in the courtyard, garbage bins blocked the light well. She pushed them to the side, trying to ignore the rotten vegetable smell. Inside the circular space, a patch of weak light shone. Lili’s boarded-up window had looked right down to where she stood.

  Mentally, she filed away Rachel’s comment about the bloody footsteps to check out later. Right now, it was time to pay Les Blancs Nationaux a visit.

  Thursday Evening

  “TOTAL SHUTDOWN,” MINISTER CAZAUX said under his breath. “The left Confederation Francaise du Travail, the trade unions, promise stoppages across the board if the trade treaty passes.” He shrugged. “On the other hand, the rightists lead the popular vote.”

  Hartmuth had learned techniques for controlling his stutter; clenching his fists was one of them. He was using it now.

  “A work shutdown is a socialist tradition here,” Hartmuth said, keeping his hands in his pockets. He knew who wielded real power. Parliament belonged to the right, not the CFDT. “It’s purely a statement, and then it’s over.”

  “This is true,” Cazaux nodded. “But there will be lots of unpleasantness first.”

  They stood under the chandeliers in the partially refurbished eighteenth-century Salle des Fêtes in the Élysee Palace. In the reception line, Hartmuth had noticed uneasily how Cazaux assessed him with laserlike intensity. He could all but hear the gears shift in Cazaux’s brain amid the clink of cutlery and low buzz of conversation. Like an astute diplomat. Like Hartmuth himself.

  Tall windows overlooked the Élysee’s neglected back garden. Ahead in the Salon des Ambassadeurs, which was closed for renovations, the ornate ceiling sagged alarmingly. He had been surprised to see the palace, a national symbol, in such disrepair. In Germany, it wouldn’t be allowed. But he’d never understood the French and doubted he’d understand them any better now.

  Across from him he noted Ilse, in beige polyester, chatting amiably with Quimper’s wife, in tailored Versace.

  The red and white wine flowed freely. He picked at his food and tasted almost nothing.

  He pretended this ornate banquet room was in Hamburg, not Paris. He pretended he was safe. But being in the Marais made it harder to shut the memories out. Sunday, too, he would pretend at the opening of the trade summit, the symbolic gesture ordered by Bonn to weave harmony. Unter den Linden.

  Cheese and fruit were served on an ice sculpture in the shape of La Marianne, the French Republic symbol, while the orchestra played “La Marseillaise.” Cazaux slid in next to him, his cheeks flushed. Television makeup couldn’t quite hide his uneven complexion. He offered a flute of champagne to Hartmuth.

  “I must do lip service to pacify the conservatives, it’s the only way,” Cazaux said.

  Hartmuth held back. “Essentially, these provisions validate concentration camps for immigrants. We need to rework and rethink…”

  “More riots will erupt if this treaty doesn’t pass. But that’s only the beginning…” A loud buzzing of voices caught Cazaux’s attention and he stopped. He turned to the crowd and smiled. “Let us toast a harmonious working relationship.”

  Hartmuth raised his glass, which sparkled in the light from the drooping chandelier. The photographer caught them lifting their tulip-shaped champagne glasses to each other in a toast.

  Hartmuth was about to lunge at the photographer when the flash went off again. Quimper’s tipsy wife appeared, giggling, and wrapped her arms around them both. After that, everything was a blur of congratulations and backslapping.

  As a trade advisor, he shaped policy, wielded power, but remained in the shadows, out of the public eye. He had never allowed his face to appear in newspapers. Never.

  Would anyone be alive today who remembered him? Hadn’t the Auschwitz-bound convoys taken care of them? Of course, the surgery on his burned face after Stalingrad changed his appearance. Nevertheless he was worried the rest of the evening.

  Later that night he got up and went to his window. He couldn’t sleep. Everything about Sarah that had been dead and buried for so many years bobbed to the surface.

  As he stared out to the Place des Vosges, hazy globes of light shone through the tree branches, illuminating the metal grill fence and spurting water fountains. Every impulse told him to give in to what he really wanted to do. Their meeting place was so close. When he closed his eyes he saw it again. Hidden under some branches like it had been in 1942, when she’d shown it to him. When Sarah had been there, slipping inside, beckoning him with her almond-shaped eyes.

  Only time for a brief goodbye before his troop was shipped to Stalingrad in 1943. Stuck in a POW camp in Siberia for two years, he’d gone snow-blind and whimpered from frostbite. Until the Werewolves helped him escape, giving him a new identity and part of a new face.

  They’d used him to sabotage and infiltrate the allies. With their help, he’d prospered in the new Germany. He had slowly been eased into more powerful and influential positions in the Bonn government. Bonn was peppered with others like him. Hartmuth had never cared much either way. He was alive, but he’d lost what he really wanted. Sarah.

  If the French detectives he’d hired through diplomatic channels hadn’t been able to find her in the 1950s, how could she be here now? Probably shot dead in a field as a collaborator, they’d said, or had her head shaved and been sent to a work camp in Poland to die.

  Inside his briefcase he released a hidden spring. Gingerly, he took out a thick envelope. Dog-eared and yellowed with age, this was all that was left of Sarah, except for the ache that hadn’t gone away. He spilled the contents onto the hotel desk and began to methodically sort through his memories.

  After seven
months of dogged work, the Parisian detective agency had found only these few musty-smelling documents. But he always carried the torn photo, a faded sepia print of just half her face, ripped from her family dossier, when his superior’s head was turned. The detectives’ report had stated that prisoners didn’t last long in Polish work camps. What wouldn’t he do for even the chance to visit her grave? Hartmuth sighed. His little Jewess had made him a man and she’d only been fourteen.

  He couldn’t stand it any longer. He had to go and see. Why not? Maybe it would put some of the devils and ghosts to rest. As he left the lobby he politely informed the night porter that he’d keep his key. After all, he was just taking a walk around the square. He patted his stomach and the night porter smiled and nodded knowingly.

  She wouldn’t be there, of course, he kept telling himself; this all happened fifty years ago. He wondered at time’s passing, as his footsteps echoed down the narrow rue des Francs Bourgeois.

  The only other people out were a laughing, entangled couple who stopped to embrace every few meters until they reached their door and disappeared inside. He followed rue des Francs Bourgeois until he found the building he recognized as the old Kommandantur where he’d worked.

  Now it was the Marais post office. He turned right into the dark cobbled alleyway he remembered all too well.

  Much of the Marais was honeycombed with medieval passageways and cramped courtyards like this, damp and smelling of the sewer. He stopped and listened, but there was no one behind him. The occasional dull glow behind a drawn curtain was the only light beside the street lamp.

  Hartmuth looked up but there were no watchful eyes as in the past, just the carved marble salamander above the courtyard entrance. His stomach constricted in an even tighter knot.

  He remembered the salamander very well and the family that had lived behind it. The French police he supervised had hurried them along, yellow stars sewn on their coats, while they protested that there was some mistake. The roundup had happened in the daytime, while she’d been at school. But the neighbors had seen everything as they hid behind the closed windows. He’d known they would be watching. The van had been parked right where he was standing under the arcade off the rue du Parc Royal with the marble salamander sculpted into it, bearing Francois the First’s royal arms.