by Cara Black
“Looking for anyone in particular?” he asked.
“You tell me,” Anna said, tasting from a wooden spoon. She grabbed a handful of chopped garlic, tossed it in.
Calm down, he had to calm down. Not overreact.
“Some detective asked the vegetable seller about you,” Anna said. “Those capitalist lackeys always harass those who protest!”
The flics, now a detective!
“What do you mean? Who’s looking for me?”
“Stay somewhere else for a few days,” Anna said, her mouth turned down in a disapproving frown. “I don’t want to know where, don’t want to hear about it. At my age, I have all the excitement I need.”
It was a frigid evening and Lucien had counted on waiting tables, on earning some tips and a bowl of that hot stew.
“Mecs? Who?”
Anna ladled out a heaping bowlful of fish stew and handed it to him. “Looked like rent-a-thugs. Zut alors, I don’t want to know what you do.”
“Merci, I play music, that’s what I do,” he said, running his hand over his worn cetera case.
“Far as I’m concerned, you’re as political as an ant,” she said. “But I never give up hope that soon Corsica will be free and run by true Socialists. Egalitarian. No more medieval fiefdoms, but an agriculture system that works.”
His people, a proud people, were driven by the fierce love of their land and a stubborn desire to live as they had since time immemorial. The Genovese and French had erected columns and towers and thought they ruled the island. But the real Corsica, then as now, was governed by familial clans, bound by tribal ties and by obligations granted and repaid. That had never changed.
Anna had been away from Corsica too long. She liked to forget the unchanging clannisme that was at odds with her Socialism. Yet, appreciating her help, he couldn’t point this out to her. Words were not his métier. When he played music his fingers found the way to express his thoughts, layering the sound with jazz, lacing in harmonic polyphony. Plucking his cetera, he could give ancient threshing songs an electronic beat. Let Félix call it world music or whatever he liked. He gave voice to the breath of rosemary-scented air hovering over sun-warmed limestone, to a chapel bell echoing off the granite mountains. He played the poetry of everyday life: a woman sweeping, the gaiety of feast days, the backbreaking toil on the hard earth, a code of honor despite years of oppression and now this new invasion by land-gutting developers.
His music said that; he couldn’t. Lucien spooned up the last bite of the stew and buttoned his leather coat.
“If Félix Conari calls—”
“I didn’t see you,” she replied.
“Non, Anna, he’s offered me a contract,” Lucien told her. “Now my music will get heard.”
“A bourgeois corporate pig who will take advantage of you, more like,” she said. “Stay true to the voice inside you, Lucien.”
She was wrong. Félix appreciated his music. The only other display of interest had come from the ethnic music festival at Chatelet.
“Your eyes give you away, Lucien,” Anna said, shaking her head. “They’re the doors to your soul. Don’t jump at the first offer you get.”
He grabbed the nub of a baguette from the day-old bread bag, stuck it in his pocket, and bid Anna au revoir. Outside on the street, he crumbled the hard bread and scattered crumbs to the gray-and-white feathered pigeons on the cracked pavement. They looked as cold and hungry as he’d felt.
He caught the bus to Place Pigalle, passed the Bistrot du Curé next to the Sexodrome, run by a priest for street people who needed a warm meal, and walked up the steep street into Montmartre. He had to get ready for his DJ gig, then sign the contract with Félix.
The club, formerly a bathhouse, was locked. The thirties sign of now-rusted neon reading Pigalle Bains Douches protruded from the white-tiled wall. He paced in front of the door, the light crust of snow crunching under his worn boots, wondering why a detective was looking for him and wishing more than five public baths remained in Paris. He’d like to warm up, get the chill out of his bones.
“You’re late,” said Pascal, the owner of the club, meeting him at the door.
So was he, Lucien wanted to say.
Pascal, all in black, pulled a key chain from his suede jacket and unlocked the wooden door. He switched on the lights illuminating the tiled walls, red-and-silver-velvet-wallpapered bar cove, faux-zebra-skin seat covers, and gilt-framed mirrors. The decor exuded a faint air of bordello.
“I’ll set up,” Lucien said, pulling out his compact turntable.
“You spin lounge, followed by acid jazz, and then the playwright reads,” said Pascal, a gruff, no-nonsense Auvergnat, who watched every centime and ran a tight ship, like most bougnats, who had migrated from the Auvergne countryside at the turn of the century. They still operated a good number of cafés. Pascal consulted a ledger on the counter. “A mec’s been looking for you.”
Here, too? Lucien kept his hand steady. “The mec have a name?”
Pascal ran his finger over the ledger. “A foreign type, maybe Corsican, with bleached-blond hair.”
The waiter from Bastia who had served at Félix’s? Good news! Then Félix was still anxious to sign the contract.
Lucien connected the turntable and his equipment in a hurry. “May I use your phone?”
“Make it quick,” Pascal said. Paused. “No trouble, eh? I don’t want any trouble here.”
Little did Pascal know that once he signed the contract, he’d be out of here so fast.
“Can’t I have friends, Pascal?”
“Friends like that?”
Lucien left it alone, ignoring his barbed question. “Allô, Félix?” he said into the telephone.
“My boy, you disappeared last night,” Félix said.
Hadn’t Marie-Dominique explained? But why should she mention an inconvenient old lover who’d appeared, then disappeared.
“Things got sticky, Félix. I didn’t have ID. . . .”
“Make it up to me, eh? Stop by my home and sign the contract before you go to the theatre. Kouros, from SOUNDWERX, will come to hear your show tonight.”
LUCIEN DESCENDED the ice-crusted staircase from Place des Abbesses with eager steps on his way to sign Félix’s contract. He pulled his collar up against the wind and that’s when he saw the flic on the corner of rue Veron. The flare of a match illuminated the face of the man he’d seen questioning partygoers last night. The flic was only a few feet away. Lucien ducked into a doorway. Above him, a carved plaque stated, “1872, site of the first free theatre” and he realized he stood under a nude reclining female reading a book sculpted in the stone portal.
“No sign of him. Not yet,” the flic said into his phone. “Copy me on the bomb alert.”
Were they looking for him? Some mecs, a detective, and now the flics? When a couple passed arm in arm under the globed light, he hurried behind them back up the steps. At Place des Abbesses, outside a bookshop, he saw the headlines in France Soir: CORSICAN BOMB THREATS—ARMATA CORSA SEPARATIST RING ROUNDED UP.
Again?
He bought a paper and scanned the article. “Reports of bombing threats in Ajaccio and on the French mainland have sparked heightened security by the DPJ. Several Paris targets have been named by the Armata Corsa. . . .”
He shuddered. “Find and round up the Corsicans” time. If he signed the contract, would it give him credibility? But he couldn’t tell Félix his problems, at least until he in turn had signed. He’d avoid Marie-Dominique, sure she would do the same, unable to face her disdain or his feelings for her. At a phone cabin, he inserted a calling card with ten francs left on it. Félix’s answering machine responded.
“Félix, something’s come up. I’m sorry but please meet me at the theatre with the contract” was the message he left.
Lucien hurried into the dusk, avoiding the green street sweepers’ spray on the cobbles.
Tuesday Afternoon
RENÉ SHIFTED ON THE wet cobblestones.
Thank God he’d worn his thermal underwear and several layers under the painter’s smock. So far he’d seen no prostitute or anyone else in or around the building.
He shouldn’t have followed through on his big idea. What a joke. He’d just wasted an afternoon.
Had he really believed he could pull this off? Feeling sheepish, he’d hidden his online PI class from Aimée. If he kept at it, in a year or more he’d have enough credits to earn a PI license. The difficulty had been the undercover work required for field research credit. This had seemed to be a golden opportunity.
But a freezing afternoon spent with no result . . . . Delusional, that’s what he was. No one his size could do undercover surveillance. After all this effort, it rankled. He’d worked a deal with an acting troupe, rented a costume—all in all a costly project just so he could stand outside in the cold. He felt like an idiot, but without the costume to impersonate Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the crippled artist famous for sketching Montmartre nightlife, he’d never have fit into the neighborhood.
One of the actors pumped an accordion, his fingers racing over the keys. A tall thin woman with bright red hair piled on her head 1890s style, black skirt and ruffled pantaloons à la Jane Avril from a Moulin Rouge poster, did the cancan on the slick pavement. A cluster of small schoolchildren divided their attention between her and René. Le vieux Paris! Something they’d heard of in between bouts of video games. Most stole glances at the fun fair carousel being set up near the Metro exit.
A pale-faced boy close to René’s height nudged him. “Can I see?”
René showed him a prepared pastel, a print of one Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec had done while studying in an atelier nearby. Now the atelier was part bathroom-fixture warehouse and part dance studio.
He’d heard the teacher identify the group. They were from the local école primaire around the corner and he figured the boy must live nearby. This was René’s first chance to question someone and it turned out to be a little poulbot, a pint-sized Montmartrois with too-short jacket sleeves revealing a dirty shirt beneath.
“You live on the square?” René asked.
The boy shook his head. “Over there.” He pointed to a building down the steps from the Abbesses. “But we’ve lived lots of places.”
René’s interest heightened. Establish rapport, wasn’t that what the detective manuals said? “You mean the building with scaffolding?”
The building where Jacques had been shot.
“Across the street, on the top floor,” the boy said. “I pull my book bag up by a rope.”
René controlled his excitement.
“I move a lot, too,” said René. Toulouse-Lautrec had lived all over Montmartre, his landlords kicking him out when he’d been too drunk to pay his rent bill.
From a wax-paper bag in his pocket, René pulled a villageoise, Montmartre’s brioche-type specialty. The small boy sniffed and looked with longing at what René held.
“Like one?”
“We’re not supposed to accept food from strangers,” he said.
“Of course, but I’m Toulouse-Lautrec.” René winked. “You know me, eh?”
The boy nodded. René put the warm pastry bag in the boy’s cold hands.
“Voilà.” René nodded. “Share them with friends.”
The boy shook his head. “We haven’t been there long. But I know the concierge; I help him with jobs.”
A loner? René noticed now the boy kept apart from the others crowding around the teacher.
“Jobs, like what?”
“I carried his hammer when he fixed the gutter.”
The gutter bordering the roof? René remembered the layout Aimée had described. Had the boy seen something?
“So your apartment looks out onto the roof with the scaffolding?”
The boy nodded.
“Dangerous, non. Climbing at that height for a little boy!”
“Easy,” he said. “Maman says I climb like a monkey.”
“Even for someone with short legs, like me?”
The boy’s eyes sparkled for the first time. “You can see everything from up there. The roofs, the Tour Eiffel, even people cooking and getting undressed!”
A lonely, mischievous boy who watched life from the rooftop? René thought fast.
“But you couldn’t have seen those men on the roof with the scaffolding last night. You must have been in bed.”
“I go to bed when I want!” The boy pointed again to the pastel René held. “She looks sad,” he said, his mouth full. “Like Maman looks,” he went on, brushing his hair from his eyes. He had no gloves.
René looked for the teacher. She stood surrounded by a group of bundled-up children, explaining how the accordion music came from ivory keys and a sound box.
“What happened to your legs? Why didn’t they grow?” The boy licked the crumbs from his chapped lips.
René had asked the same question when he’d realized he’d never grow like other children and would always have to reach up for door handles, get on his tiptoes to grasp a boiling kettle, hike himself up to sit on a chair from which his legs always dangled.
“When I was young, something happened and my legs never caught up with my body,” René said.
“Sometimes things shouldn’t catch up, my maman says, or we’d be in the street.”
René wanted to steer this conversation back to the roof. But he didn’t feel much like a detective, questioning a little boy who looked as though he wore the clothes he’d slept in. Still, he had to try.
“So you didn’t see what happened last night, you were asleep.”
“Mais non, I heard a shot, saw a flash like on the télé. Then another flash. Maman got mad, said I shouldn’t talk about it.”
Then the boy clapped his hand over his mouth.
Two flashes. Did that mean two shots?
“You’re sure?”
He nodded.
Had the boy witnessed the murder?
“Back to school, children,” the teacher said, gathering the group. “Paul, allez-y! Thank Monsieur Toulouse-Lautrec for his help. I’m sure you gathered a lot of information for your report.”
The boy stiffened. René saw the fear in his eyes. What should he do? He slipped a Toulouse-Lautrec guide into Paul’s hand and grinned at the teacher.
A look of relief flooded Paul’s pale face. René waved goodbye, pulled out his phone, and called Aimée.
“I found a witness,” he said.
“Good job!” she said. “So you did some poking around.”
René heard pride in her voice. He’d never tell her about this foolish costume.
“Can you get this person to come forward and testify?” Aimée asked.
René hesitated. “There’s a catch. Paul’s maybe nine years old. He lives across from the murder site. He said he saw two flashes on the roof.”
“Two, you’re sure?”
“That’s what he said. He was with a school group. He’s doing a report on Toulouse-Lautrec.”
Pause.
“You mean you . . .” Pause.
Why had he admitted that?
“Bet he could use some homework help,” she said.
“But, Aimée—”
“I’m sure you can handle it, René. Talk to his mother. I’ve got other fish to fry at the Préfecture.”
RENÉ SPENT the next freezing hour shifting from foot to foot on the cobblestones, keeping watch on the building and avoiding the tourists. The only people he saw enter the building were a team from EDF, Electricité de France, two men who spent ten minutes inside and then left.
As dusk fell, shading the buildings, René trudged up the long staircase of Paul’s house armed with more warm pastries. Up six flights of worn wooden steps, the smells of fried onions and garlic permeating the stairwell. It was an old building with a WC shared by two floors on alternate landings.
His hip ached and he wished for an elevator, even one like the wire-framed, grunting affair at their office. He’d speak w
ith Paul’s mother first; he’d have to overcome Paul’s fear in order to coax him to elaborate on what he’d seen.
René knocked on the first door. No answer. The second was answered by a toothless old man bundled in sweaters.
“Try next door,” the old man said, his gums working.
At the third, he heard reggae music. He knocked. The music lowered and the door scraped open. He saw a dark, low-ceilinged room with beaded curtains partitioning off a galley kitchen.
“Oui?” said Paul, halfway behind the door.
“Remember me?” René smiled.
Paul’s large brown eyes blinked. “Maman’s sleeping.”
Too bad, he would have liked to speak with her.
René handed Paul the bag of pastries. “I can’t stay long but I forgot to tell you about my accident and why I painted horses. See?” René pulled out the book he’d bought at a shop on Place des Abbesses. He flipped open to the page of Toulouse-Lautrec’s early sketches.
“Beautiful . . . they look like they’re breathing.”
René agreed. The rounded flanks and flared nostrils brought the racehorses to life.
“Let’s look at it on the roof.”
Paul shook his head. “Why?”
“Didn’t you say it was easy to go there?”
Reluctance gave way to a mischievous look in his eyes. He opened the door wider. “Shhh!” Bottles clinked behind him, one crashed to the floor.
“Let’s go,” René said.
René followed Paul to the skylight at the end of the hall, helped him take down the ladder, and together they steadied it.
“After you,” René said, groaning inwardly.
Paul climbed the ladder, popped open the skylight. “The lock’s simple, I can open it myself. The concierge showed me how.”
A lonely boy with a roof for a playground? The darkening view, an expanse of jagged rooftops framing the Paris skyline, made the aching climb worth it. He dealt with heights every day, knew how to balance the awkwardness of his ill-proportioned body and, when climbing, to look up, to concentrate on his goal. He followed a nimble Paul, climbing the rusted iron rungs protruding from the cement wall.
René trained his binoculars, hanging from a strap around his neck, on the scaffolding. He took a Paris Match magazine from his pocket, set it on the damp ledge, and sat.