by Black, Cara
She’d recoiled in fear, but he’d put a finger to his lips and knelt down to pet the cat. Its fur was uneven and it had scaly patches of mange, which probably explained why no one had eaten it. He opened his heart to her and smiled. Then she nodded, kneeling down beside the cat and next to him.
Her schoolbooks peeked out of the worn satchel on the cobblestones. Something about her was so defenseless that he decided to ignore the yellow star embroidered on her school smock. They took turns petting the cat, who was purring furiously now and hoping for something to eat. She had the biggest blue eyes he’d ever seen. Hartmuth couldn’t stop staring into them. When she looked up at him he pulled a bit of chalk out his pocket. He drew a whiskered cat and they both smiled. His French was so minimal and his urge to communicate so desperate that he did the only thing he could think of.
“Woof, woof,” he barked.
Her incredulous look gave way to stifled giggles and then outright laughter as he stood up and started scratching like a monkey and jumping around. Hartmuth didn’t care how he embarrassed himself, he just wanted to make her laugh. She was so beautiful. He remembered something his uncle, a bachelor who had many mistresses, had said: once you’ve got them laughing, they’re yours.
It was important to him that she want him, too, that he wasn’t just her captor. He gently put his hand on her shoulder, feeling bones and her thinness, and gestured with his other hand. Trembling, she reached into her satchel and handed him her school card with the ausweis permit attached to the back. He recognized the address. His men had raided it during the Vel d’Hiver roundup in July. He gestured forward with his arm and led her through the courtyard, up the staircase with a winding metal rail.
“Ja. C’est bien, kein problem.” He smiled and patted her arm to reassure her.
Just as they approached the apartment, a door across the hall opened and an old man hobbled out using a cane. His rheumy eyes took a long look as he stopped and clicked his tongue in disapproval. Sarah had looked up in fear, but Hartmuth purposely ignored the old man, who shuffled down the hall. In front of her door, Hartmuth pantomimed eating, trying to make her understand that he would bring food.
Hartmuth used the little French he knew and motioned with his hands for her to wait. He showed her his watch and what time he would be back. She seemed to understand and nodded vigorously. He took her chin in his hand, it was warm and smooth, and he smiled. He still couldn’t stop staring at her. Then he left.
The apartment was empty when he came back. She’d run away from him.
So he waited and watched in the Marais. He would find her. On the third day he saw her, emerging from the boarded-up courtyard of a derelict mansion, an hôtel particulier, off the rue de Pavee. Dusk had fallen when she finally returned. He stood waiting. Waiting to follow her. She wouldn’t get away this time. He watched her pick her way through debris, then disappear behind a pile of rubbish.
Clutching his parcel of food, he slicked his dark hair under his cap, brushed the dust off his epaulets, and buffed his black leather jackboots quickly with his handkerchief. He approached the bushes, his boots crunching branches and bits of broken furniture as he walked.
He came face to face with an old rusted wire bed frame. He kicked it aside, the wire rattling drunkenly askew, and he saw the opening. He found the footholds and climbed down, realizing he’d entered a candle-lit cavern sprinkled with bones, part of the old Roman catacombs that honeycombed Paris. She was curled up in a fetal position in a dim corner, wedging herself into the damp earth. Her hands quivered as she tried to ward him off.
“Non, s’il vous plaît. Non!” she pleaded.
“Mangez, mangez.” He smiled, putting his fingers to his lips to indicate food.
In a corner of the catacomb, a patched blanket lay spread over a lumpy mattress while a battered wooden tea chest doubled as a table. He beckoned to her and pointed to his package of food. From under his arm he pulled out some dog-eared books.
“Ja. Amis. Étudiez f-francais?”
He removed his Gestapo dagger from its hilt, setting it flat on the tea chest. Eagerly, he motioned with his arms and she slowly crawled forward, her eyes never leaving the dagger shining in the candlelight.
Her eyes widened as he opened the parcel and spread out tins of foie gras, chewy Montelimar nougat, calisson d’Aix from Provence, and crusty brown bread.
In the primitive French he’d rehearsed he said, “Let’s be friends, share.”
As if to offer hospitality in return she spread her arms, thrust bottled water into his lap, and kept her eyes down.
At first, she was reluctant to eat but after he opened the bottle of red wine, she almost inhaled the contents of the chewy nougat tin. Hartmuth started talking in German while she ate. Constantly consulting a French-German dictionary, standard Third Reich army issuance, and an old phrase book he’d found in a book stall on the quai Celestin, he tried to relax her. He punctuated each word with looks in the dictionary to make sure.
She would raise her eyes when he stuttered. It had begun when he was ten and his father died. Now his mouth wasn’t cooperating again. Watching him intently, she saw his frustration. Then she took his hand and put it on her lips to feel how she formed the words with her mouth.
“Je m’appelle Sarah. SA’ RAH.”
“Ich b-b…bin He…Helmut. HELM’ MOOT,” he stammered as he held her small white hands on his mouth, kissing them.
She pulled her hands away immediately and said seriously, “Enchante, HELM’MOOT.”
“Enchantee, S-SARAH.” He bowed as low as he could with his knees crunched beneath him.
A faint odor of decay clung to the cavern walls pocked with bits of bone. Damp chill crept from the darkness beyond the candlelight.
“I w-won’t hurt you, S-SARAH,” he whispered. “N-never.”
His night shift at the Kommandantur began at midnight, and he left her just in time to walk the few blocks there. Eighteen families on her street had been turned in by a collaborator, she’d said. He had promised to search for her parents but that would be an exercise in futility.
Everyone had boarded convoy number 10 bound for Auschwitz.
The only thing he could do was save her. If he was careful. Fear, gratitude, and a promise of safety might be all she had now. But he would wait.
Every night before his shift he visited the catacombs. His loneliness would evaporate as he climbed down and met Sarah’s face. Hopeful and grateful.
In 1942 all the detainees from Drancy prison had been required to send home a cheerful missive before being herded into the trains. The next week he’d found the card from her parents and brought it to her. Ecstatically happy, she’d hugged him and cried. Quickly she’d sent her one extra blanket to the prison.
Hartmuth knew he could never tell her the truth. Sarah would not understand why he lied. It was all he could do to bring the food with his meager army pay swallowed in bribes. The evening his Kommandant visited the opera, Hartmuth had slipped into the office at the Kommandantur where Missing-Active Search files were kept. He’d crossed out her name, the only thing he knew to do to save her.
MONDAY
Monday Morning
MARTINE SITBON, AIMÉE’S FRIEND since algebra class in the lycee, sounded tired. Her graveyard shift at the newspaper Le Figaro had fifteen minutes left.
“Ça va, Martine? Got a minute or two?” Aimee said.
“Well, Aimee, long time no hear,” came the husky voice. “Is this a friend-in-need-is-a-friend-indeed call?”
“You could say that and I’ll owe you dinner big-time,” Aimee chuckled.
Martine yawned deeply. “Hit me now before I fade; you’re keeping me from the warm body in my bed, about whom I’ll tell you more at dinner. We’ll go to La Grande Vefour—the pâte and the veal d’agneau are superb.”
Aimee flinched. A meal without wine began at six hundred francs. But Martine, a gourmet, always dictated the restaurant.
“Agreed, you’ll definite
ly earn your dinner on this stuff. First, you still have that friend in social security?”
“Bien sûr! I love and nurture my connections, Aimee. I’m a journalist.”
“Great. Need everything you can get on some members of Les Blancs Nationaux. I want to know where their money comes from.” She gave Martine Thierry’s and Yves’s names.
Martine paused. “What’s this about, Aimee?”
“A case.”
“Aimee, Aryan supremacist types don’t play by the rules. This EU trade summit is causing lots of rats to surface. Just a word of caution.”
“Merci. One more thing. Check on a non-Jew murder in 1943 on the rue des Rosiers, reported or not. And while you’re at it, collaborators in the Marais.”
“As in Nazi collaborators?” Martine said. “Touchy stuff! No one likes to talk about them. But I’ll sniff around if you promise to be careful.”
“Careful as lice staring at delousing powder,” Aimee said.
“Keep that smart mouth in line. I know that during the Occupation all newspapers were taken over, turned into essentially rote German propaganda. Some arrondissements printed their own one-pager cheat sheets with local info such as births, deaths, electricity rates. But I’ll check on that and get back to you. One more thing.”
“I’m listening, Martine.”
“Make three reservations, in case my boyfriend wants to come.”
Aimee groaned. This really would cost.
“MONSIEUR JAVEL, you remember me, right?” Aimee smiled brightly at the cobbler. “How about something to drink? Let’s discuss our mutual interest.” She held up an apple green bottle of Pernod.
“Eh, what could that be?” Felix Javel growled, swaying on his bowed legs.
“Arlette’s murder,” she said. “Maybe if we share information, things will be mutually beneficial.”
Before he could hesitate, she nudged herself between him and the door leading out the back of his shop. She was determined to find out what he really saw in 1943. Despite the Gallic genius for evasion, she counted on the Pernod to loosen his tongue.
He shrugged. “As you like. I don’t have much to say.” He scrubbed the back of his neck with a grayish flannel washcloth as he led her down the narrow hallway lit by a yellowed bulb. Sliding off his shoes, he indicated that she should do the same before entering a parlor sitting room.
This room, suffocatingly warm due to a modern oil heater, smelled of used kitty litter. A Victorian rocker plumped with threadbare chintz cushions sat in front of a sixties greenish chrome television set. A bent rabbit-ear antenna sat on top of it. Cascading strands of blue crystal beads formed an opaque curtain that hung from the door frame to the floor, separating the small cooking area. Javel returned from the kitchen balancing a tray with two glasses and a pitcher of water. Aimee willed herself not to get up and help him while he laboriously set the rattling tray on a scrubbed oak table. She pulled a small tin of pâte out with the bottle and his eyes lit up.
“I have just the thing to go with that,” he said.
He clinked past the beads again, carrying a chipped Sèvres bowl full of stale, damp soda crackers. Aimee watched him set out embroidered lace-fringe linen napkins and picked one up.
“These are almost too beautiful to use,” she said, noting the ornately intertwined A and F.
“Arlette did these. The whole set is still stored in our wedding chest. I don’t have guests much, figured might as well use them.”
“You knew Lili Stein,” she said. “Why keep it a secret from me?”
Slowly he mixed the water with Pernod until it became properly milky. He rubbed some pâte on a cracker. “Why are you snooping around?” he said.
“Doing my job.” She moved her chair closer to his. “Lili’s murder is connected to Arlette’s.”
He chuckled and poured himself more Pernod. “The prewar Pernod absinthe got made with wormwood and ate one’s brain away.”
“Who killed Arlette?” she said.
He drank it down and poured himself another glass.
“Aren’t you the detective?” he said.
“But you have your own theory,” she said. “Something you saw that the flics didn’t?” she said.
Surprise flitted briefly across his face.
“What did you see?” she said, excited by the look in his eyes.
A long, loud burp erupted from deep in his stomach.
“Buggers,” he said. “Beat me.”
“Why? Why did they beat you, Javel?”
His eyes narrowed. “You’re a Jew, aren’t you?”
She shook her head. “What if I was?”
“I don’t like your type,” he said. “Whatever it is.”
“Then don’t vote for me at the Miss World pageant,” she said.
He smeared pâte on more stale crackers and shoveled them on the plate.
There had to be some way to reach this concrete-headed little man. “Aren’t you afraid, Javel? I mean, you mentioned hate attacks and random neo-Nazi violence in the Marais. But you don’t seem very nervous to me.”
He sputtered, “Why should I be?” He poured himself another glass.
“Exactly. Especially if you knew that Lili’s murder had something to do with the past.”
“Leave me alone,” he said. “Go away.” He turned, his mouth twitching.
“Tell me what you saw.”
He shook his fist in the air but still wouldn’t look at her.
Now she wanted to shake it out of him.
“Look, I know you don’t like me but holding it in won’t bring Arlette back! You want justice, so do I. And we both know we have to find it ourselves. Right? Did the flics do anything but beat you?”
She couldn’t see his face. Finally he spoke, his back still turned toward her. “Everything started with that damned tinned salmon,” he said.
“What do you mean?” she asked, surprised.
“Stuffed in her wardrobe. Everywhere,” he said.
“Black market?”
He turned and reached for his glass. She slowly poured him another. Rachel Blum’s words spun in her head.
“Arlette sold black-market food. She was a BOF, right?” she said.
Shaken, he looked up. “I haven’t heard that term in years.” He sighed. “She graduated to petrol, watches, even silk stockings. I told Arlette these things were too dangerous.”
“Did Lili help her?” she said.
Saliva bubbled at the corner of his mouth.
“Where was Lili? Did you see her?”
“I tried to apologize,” he shrugged. “But there were so many bloody footsteps. All over.”
“Why were you sorry? Did you and Arlette argue?”
He nodded.
“The footsteps went upstairs?” Aimee asked. “You thought they were Lili’s?”
He raised his eyebrows.
“Javel, Lili saw what happened. Why didn’t you ask her?”
He shook his head. “She was gone. There were so many footsteps by the sink.”
“Lili wasn’t there? Maybe hiding somewhere?”
His eyes had narrowed to slits. She was afraid he was about to pass out. She took a gulp of Pernod to combat the pervasive ammonia smell from the kitty litter.
“Javel,” she said loudly and tiredly. “Tell me why.”
“I told the inspector.” He spoke more lucidly, unaware of the tears trickling down his cheeks in thin silvery lines. “They beat me bloody at Double Morte. Called me a cripple. Said I couldn’t get it up and laughed at me. First inspector got too greedy for a black-market collabo.”
“What was his name?” Aimee asked.
“Lartigue. Run over by a Nazi troop truck accidentally, they say.”
“Lili knew who killed Arlette, didn’t she?” she said.
He shoved the empty glass towards her and she poured him more Pernod with a generous dash of water.
“Rachel said Lili knew,” Aimee said. “Come on, Javel, who else would know?”
He shrugged, then leaned forward. “That Yid collabo who slept with a boche.” He whispered, squinting his eyes, “With her bastard baby.” His shoulder sagged. “Had the same eyes.”
“Same eyes?” Who was he talking about?
“Such bright blue eyes for a Jew!” he said.
“When was the last time you saw her?” Aimee asked excitedly.
His head landed heavily on the table. Passed out. Only when he was snoring did Aimee tuck the crocheted blanket around him. She put milk in a bowl for the missing cat, rinsed out the glasses in his dingy sink, and shut the door quietly behind her.
Monday Evening
LE RENARD, “THE FOX,” was a relic of Les Halles in the fifties. Somehow it had missed the wrecking ball that had swung on rue du Bourg Tibourg when they razed the old central market of Les Halles. There, Violette and Georges served their famous soupe a l’oignon gratinee at 5:00 A.M. for the few fish sellers who still plied their trade nearby.
Aimee had arranged to meet Morbier here. After Javel’s information, she counted on getting Morbier’s approval to set her plan in motion.
She entered the haze of cigarette smoke and loud laughter. Georges winked as she smoothed down her black dress, inched her toes comfortably in the black heels, and adjusted her one good strand of pearls. She slid around the corner of the zinc bar to kiss him on both cheeks.
“Eh, where have you been? The snooping business keep you too busy to shoot the bull with old flics?” Georges teased with a straight face.
“I had to raise my standards sometime, Georges, my reputation was getting tarnished,” she threw back affectionately.
Morbier perched at the counter, poking in his pants pockets for something. He found an empty pack of Gauloises, crumpled the cellophane, then searched his overcoat.
“Any chance of Violette’s cassoulet for me and this one?” She nudged Morbier as she said it.