by Black, Cara
“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—Swine 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 con
tinued. “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?
AIMÉE STOPPED at the corner kiosk near her office on rue du Louvre. Maurice, the owner, nodded at her. He had a clipped mustache and bright sparrowlike eyes.
“Usual?” he said.
She smiled and placed some francs on a fat pile of newspapers.
Maurice whisked a copy of Le Figaro with his wooden arm into hers. An Algerian war veteran, he ran several kiosks but wasn’t above dog-sitting Miles Davis occasionally.
She clutched her paper and climbed the old, worn stairs to her floor. All the way up she wondered why Lili would feel guilt over Arlette’s murder she supposedly hadn’t even seen. And if she’d recognized an old Nazi, why hadn’t she talked about it?
Back in her office, she logged onto both her and Rene’s computer terminals. She knew where she had to look. Files not destroyed by the Germans had been centralized. On Rene’s terminal she accessed the Yad Vashem Memorial in Jerusalem and downloaded the R.F. SS Sicherheits-Dienst Memorandum file 1941–45. Thick black Gestapo lightning bolts were emblazoned across her computer screen as the documents came up.
On her terminal she bypassed a tracer link and downloaded GROUPER, the back door into Interpol. She accessed GROUPER and queried under Griffe, Hartmuth, the name under the newspaper photo Lili had written over. A pleasantly robotic, digitally mastered voice said, “Estimated retrieval time is four minutes twenty seconds.”
Rene’s screen displayed a long report in German titled Nachtrichten-Nebermittlung, dated August 21, 1942. Even with her rudimentary grasp of German she could figure out the general idea. Addressed to Adolf Eichmann in Berlin, the subject of the report was “Abtransport von Juden aus Frankreich nach Auschwitz” or “Transportation for French Jews to Auschwitz.” According to Aimee’s rough translation, there had been no provisions made for Jewish transport to Auschwitz in October and the Gestapo chief was asking Eichmann what he was going to do about it.
Well, here was a zealous Nazi, she thought; in August he was already worried about getting enough people to the gas chambers in October. An Adolf brown-noser, he probably stayed up nights worrying about the possibility of empty ovens. The report had been signed R. A. Rausch, Obersturmführer. Two other signatures, those of K. Oblath and H. Volpe, were listed as underling Si-Po Sicherheitspolezei und Sicherheitsdienst responsible for Jewish roundups.
Back on her terminal, she checked for a reply to her GROUPER query. A loud whir, then a reggae version of the 2001: A Space Odyssey theme came on. GROUPER access came via an eclectic server today, she thought. Old Soviet war records flashed on the screen. She ran the names of the three Gestapo she had found: Rausch, Oblath, and Volpe. Each name came up as deceased. That was odd.
Searching deeper, she found each one separately listed as dead in the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943. Why would Rausch, the head of the Gestapo, be sent to the front in 1943, Aimee wondered.
She checked other memorandums from the file. Rausch was still signing memos deporting Jews from Paris in 1944 but he’d been listed as dead in 1943? Aimee sat back and let out a low whistle.
Interpol identity files cross-referenced to the postwar U.S. Documents Center in Berlin, circa 1948, appeared on her screen. In them, a Hartmuth Griffe had been listed dead, as a combatant in the Battle of Stalingrad. That was all.
These records had obviously been tampered with. Here was proof. But not enough proof to identify who, if any, of these Nazis was still alive.
Sinta had told her that Lili felt ghosts were haunting her. But it had been Rachel’s threatening fax that warned her to leave the ghosts alone.
Sunday Evening
“RESERVE A SEAT FOR me on the late flight to Hamburg, please.” Hartmuth’s fingers thumped on the elegant walnut secretary that served as the hotel’s reception desk.
That afternoon he’d realized he’d had enough. He’d placate Cazaux by signing the treaty, and make the Werewolves happy. The European Union agreement sanctioned concentration camps but maybe Cazaux meant it when he’d promised to delete the racist provisions afterwards.
Hartmuth had thought he could stop it. He realized now how futile that was—the Werewolves couldn’t be stopped. Now he just wanted to toe the accepted party line and get back to Germany. The Werewolves would win, no matter what; their claws stretched everywhere.
“Of course, Monsieur, I’ll inform you when the reservations are completed,” the clerk said.
And I can escape the ghost of Sarah hovering in my mind, Hartmuth thought, courteously thanking him. How foolish he’d been to think she might have survived! But deep inside, a tiny hope had fluttered. There would be no records of her either, he’d taken care of that himself in 1943. Hartmuth gazed sadly over Place des Vosges below him.
“Excuse me, Herr Griffe,” the clerk bowed abjectly. “I almost forgot, this came for you.” He handed Hartmuth a large white envelope.
Hartmuth thanked him again absentmindedly and went to the elevator. As he entered and nodded to the other occupants, he idly noticed his name on the envelope. It was scrawled in the familiar cursive script of his time, not how people wrote these days, squat and uniform. The system had changed after the war, like so much else. As the elevator stopped and let a couple off, he looked forward to this evening when his plane took off. Finally he would be safe. He’d make it out of Paris.
Hartmuth noticed a bulge in the envelope. And then he panicked. Had he trustingly picked up a letter bomb? This was Paris, after all. Terrorist attacks happened all the time! His hands started shaking so much he dropped the envelope. But the only thing that happened was that a piece of ivory bone wrapped in faded yellow cloth rolled soundlessly onto the carpeted elevator floor.
He kneeled and gently unfolded the tattered yellow star, the childishly embroidered J with broken black threads that every Jew had been required to wear. Could this be Sarah’s? He’d seen it for so many years in his dreams, reminding him of her. He cupped the bone in his hands. Nothing else was in the envelope. Could she be alive after all these years? Had she survived?
The bone had been their signal. She would leave a bone lying on a ledge outside the catacombs. It had meant “Meet me tonight.” Who else would send a message like this? Tears brimmed in his eyes.
He would go and meet her where they had always met. When night fell and the lights hid behind the marble salamander on the arch.
Hartmuth took the elevator back down and he went to the reception desk.
He smiled. “Excuse me again, there’s been another last-minute change. Cancel that flight for me tonight. Who delivered that last message for me?”
“I’m sorry, Herr Griffe, I just came on duty at two and the message was already here.”
“Of course, thank you,” Hartmuth said. He felt the pounding of his heart must be audible to the clerk. In several hours it would be dark. They had always met just after sunset, the safest time since Jews were forbidden on the streets after 8:00 P.M.
He walked out of the lobby, through the courtyard bursting with red geraniums, to the sun-dappled Place des Vosges. He entered the gate, closed it behind him, and let his feet and mind wander. Duty. Hartmuth knew all about that since most of his life was based on it—his political life, marriage, and being an upright German.
The plane trees still held some fo
liage, but yellow leaves fell and danced in the bubbling fountains. Toddlers bundled in warm jackets chased pigeons and tumbled onto the grass with cries of glee. Like his daughter, Katia, had done once. Before she’d blindly stepped in front of a GI troop truck on the outskirts of Hamburg and died in Grete’s arms. She was only six years old.
But he couldn’t forget the first time he’d seen Sarah. She could have stepped right off the shelf of porcelain figurines that lined his grandmother’s Bremerhaven cottage.
As a young boy, he’d spent every summer at the cottage playing with his cousins near the sea. Sometimes for hours at a time, he would stare at his grandmother’s collection and make up stories about each figurine. Grandmother never allowed him to touch, that was forbidden, but he had been content to look.
His favorite, though it had been a hard decision, was the shepherdess, with her coal black wavy hair, azure eyes with dark blue pinpoints, and white porcelain skin. She held a staff and beckoned to her fluffy sheep, whose hooves were forever poised in flight.
Of course, it was all gone. His grandmother’s cottage, as well as miles of other suburban cottages, had been firebombed during early raids on the Bremerhaven harbor.
But Hartmuth had seen his shepherdess alive and in the flesh that day in 1942. He’d been checking the Marais again near the building with the salamander. In the courtyard with sleepy midday shuttered windows, a figure leaned over, petting an orange marmalade–colored cat.
A girl with wavy black hair had looked up, smiling, as he’d approached. She had incredible sky blue eyes and alabaster skin. Her expression had changed when she saw the black uniform with the lightning bolts of the Waffen SS on his sleeve and his heavy jackboots. He’d ignored her look of terror as she haltingly rose. Hartmuth always remembered her as the only French girl who had ever greeted him with a smile. Love at first sight can happen when you’re eighteen, he thought. It had lasted all his life.