Murder in the Sentier

by Cara Black

  Aimée looked down. The image welled up again, the ebony skin and dried blood on his neck.

  “Ousmane was superstitious,” Idrissa said. “He listened to the marabout.”

  From the salon, Aimée heard Michel’s laughter. Voices congratulating him.

  “Tiens, did something happen in Senegal? Something to do with Romain Figeac and terrorists?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Idrissa said, but her involuntary shudder gave her away.

  “You’re a bad liar, Idrissa,” Aimée said. “I should know, I’m a good one.”

  Idrissa scanned the mirrored corridor. Her lips worked but no sound came out.

  “Of course, you’re scared,” Aimée said. “Stay at my place, I’ll help you. Please trust me.”

  “My father’s a doctor in Dakar.” She motioned Aimée to move farther down the corridor, away from the voices. “He treated Monsieur Figeac when they summered there.” The words came slowly, as if she weighed each one. “I knew he was moody, obsessive. He asked me to help him. His memoirs, he said. But he would ask me to go to the market and the docks with him, to translate the gossip in Wolof. He was looking for someone, I knew, but he never told me straight. Some Frenchman.”

  She took a deep breath. Then another. “When I transferred here to the Sorbonne, my music wasn’t enough. I needed more work. So Monsieur Figeac hired me to transcribe his memoirs. He’d written most of it, you see, in longhand. With Waterman’s sea blue ink. Like always. The last part he’d spoken on tape. I hadn’t yet finished everything.”

  Aimée thought back to the classic red Olivetti on his desk.

  “But he had a typewriter.”

  “Never used it.”

  “Why?”

  “It was some famous writer’s—Hemingway’s, I think. The story I heard was that he’d found it at an auction, called it his good-luck charm,” Idrissa said. “But he wouldn’t have the audacity to use it, he said. And he hated computers.”

  That fit with the .25 he’d been given by Hemingway, kept framed under glass.

  “So, did he find this Frenchman?”

  A pause. Idrissa looked around. “A woman came the day Figeac died.” She hesitated. “Then a man. It was right before.”

  Jutta? But it couldn’t be Jutta, she’d been released from prison after Romain Figeac was killed.

  “What did this woman look like?”

  Silence.

  Then, “She wore dark glasses,” Idrissa said. “A scarf around her head, a long coat. Seemed bizarre in such heat.”

  Her mother? Idrissa’s words reverberated like a tuning fork in Aimée’s head. Her mother alive?

  “What did she sound like?” Aimée was surprised at her own question. Of all the things she wanted to know, why had she asked this?

  “Never spoke. At least I didn’t hear her.”

  “How long did you see her?”

  “A few minutes. I left. I never saw Figeac alive again.”

  Her mother Romain Figeac’s killer? … But why? She didn’t know whether to hope this stranger was her mother or to fear it.

  “But … wait … you said there was a man.”

  “Outside, coming up the stairs,” Idrissa said. “A Frenchman. He entered Figeac’s apartment. I was rounding the stairs but he saw me.”

  “Saw you?” Aimée asked but didn’t wait for an answer. Now she put it together. “So that’s why you think he’s trying to kill you?”

  Idrissa gave a small nod. “He swore at me in Wolof.” Fear pooled in her eyes.

  It made sense. Idrissa was terrified.

  “But why didn’t you tell Christian?”

  “I’d gone to Fontainebleau for my business seminar class,” Idrissa said. “Four days later, when I returned, Christian told me he’d found his father dead. Suicide. Showed me the note. The typewritten note. He said it happened the afternoon I left. And I suspected. But Christian had cremated his father already. He had a horror of the Press after his mother’s suicide. Then we heard the noises and I saw the death fetish.”

  “The yellow feathers?”

  Idrissa nodded. “But Christian was taking uppers and downers, he made no sense. I kept trying to question him. But where his father was concerned, he saw nothing. Crazy as he was, his father loved him.”

  “Why was Ousmane killed?”

  “He wasn’t well but he was hiding me.” She blinked back tears. “Maybe a warning … I don’t know. Then one day, when I went back, the man was sitting in the café opposite. So I ran.”

  “Can you describe him?” asked Aimée, keeping her hand steady with effort.

  Idrissa went rigid.

  Behind them in the salon, people milled and conversed.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Idrissa was backing away from her.

  Aimée half turned and saw a crowd coming toward the door into the corridor. Idrissa began to run.

  Who had she seen?

  “Wait!”

  Aimée ran, too, past the mirrors distorting their movements. But she was in heels and Idrissa wasn’t. Idrissa cornered the hall and Aimée had just about grabbed her when her heel caught in a crack in the parquet. She flew, landing in the Goth designer’s arms, which were full of his costumes.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, scrambling up.

  Michel caught up with her, his face wreathed in smiles.

  “Aimée, we’re going to celebrate,” he said, pulling her arm.

  “I have to find Idrissa,” she said, to his surprise. By the time she’d gotten up, kicked off the shoes, and run downstairs, the entrance lay empty.

  Aimée pushed open the heavy glass doors, rushing over the cobbles down narrow Passage Montpensier.

  No one.

  She ran back the other way toward the Comédie-Française, listening for footfalls. But only slanted shadows, and the sounds of her feet slapping on the cobbles and the meow of a cat reached her. She ran past the restaurant Grand Vefour into the Palais Royal gardens, blinking in the sunlight and shading her eyes.

  Mothers sat on the shaded benches minding their toddlers. A dragonfly buzzed over the sandbox, swooping lazily in the afternoon sun with shimmering blue-green wings. Aimée sat down with her feet in the warm, coarse sand, as she had as a child.

  And the strangest feeling came over her. As if someone watched her.

  “Did you see a woman running?” she asked a mother who sat nursing her child.

  “Just you,” said the mother with a shake of her head. “What a great outfit!”

  A few of the mothers had looked up, scrutinizing her bare feet and slinky look.

  “Alors, if I ever get my figure back,” she said. “I’d want that.”

  “A Michel Mamou design,” Aimée said. “Remember his name, couture contre couture.”

  She stood up and backed away, wishing the years had evaporated and she was playing in the sand with her maman watching her.

  Going back up the stairs, she ran into the crowd.

  Michel stood surrounded by a group of admirers. She scanned the faces, but there were none she recognized. Who had frightened Idrissa?

  She found René in the salon working on a laptop. “Twenty-two orders. Not bad for an unestablished kid—”

  “Who won a prestigious award,” she interrupted, “and has a surreal and magical design sense. Pretty impressive!”

  “That’s you,” a creamy voice said from the tall double doors. “Dirty feet and all.”

  Startled, she looked down at her toes, then saw Etienne grinning in the doorway. Beside him stood an older man, tanned, with slicked-back salt-and-pepper hair, smoking a cigar. Familiar looking.

  “I wish I could say it was made for me,” she smiled, “but Michel stitched me into it.”

  Etienne had exchanged his pinstripes for an olive linen suit. He looked like a model himself, she thought. And she’d like a private showing. But he probably had come with his girlfriend, or this man who could be his father-in-law.

  And then an odd th
ought unnerved her. Had he been here when Idrissa ran away? Suspicion crossed her mind. This older man, where had she seen him? Now she remembered.

  “So you’re in the market for couture, Etienne?”

  “Didn’t René tell you I was coming?” he asked, surprised. “Your lip-liner number rubbed off, you know. I finally found René at your office, and he said you’d be here.”

  René shrugged with a grin.

  “Let me introduce my uncle, Jean Buisson,” Etienne said. “He’s visiting on my birthday. Sort of a family tradition.”

  Why was she attracted to nice men now?

  “But we’ve already met,” Aimée said, shaking his hand, once again on the receiving end of this handsome man’s laserlike smile. “At the Bourse reception room.”

  “Of course, but you never joined me for the good champagne across the hall.” His uncle moved forward. “Let me make amends. Downstairs in the Grand Vefour. Both of you, my treat!”

  A very seductive offer.

  But she was late for her meeting with Léo Frot.

  “Désolée,” she said. And she meant it. “I’d like to but I have an appointment at the Quai des Orfèvres.”

  René rolled his eyes in disgust.

  Stupid. She was being stupid. But she couldn’t get involved with this man. She had no time. She had to see the files on her father, and somehow find Idrissa again.

  “Maybe later?” she asked.

  “Feel like dinner at my place?” Etienne asked.

  She nodded, wondering if he was for real. He even had a Harley.

  “Take your chances with the chef,” his uncle said, “but I’ll bring the champagne.”

  And they left; only a whiff of the cigar aroma remained.

  “Don’t blow it, Aimée,” René said. “Even I can see he’s a catch. And he’s interested.”

  “You’ve been talking with Martine.”

  “Sometimes she makes a lot of sense,” René said. “This one’s not flying all over the world and making pit stops like Yves.”

  Bad boys had always been her downfall, but this Etienne was different.

  “I better change clothes.” And retrieve my own shoes, Aimèe thought.

  “Michel said it’s yours,” René said. “A gift.”

  “Non, I can’t accept.” It was too much.

  “But you sold ten of them,” René said. “Michel said it belongs on you.”

  SHE PUT the scooter in gear and headed down rue Saint Honoré for the Quai des Orfèvres. At the Pont Neuf she crossed the Seine, sparkling in the sun, and took a left on the Ile de la Cité.

  She parked the scooter and showed her carte d’identité to the blue-uniformed flics. Once inside the cobbled courtyard she veered to the left, passed under the portal that bore the inscription DIRECTION DE LA POLICE JUDICIARE, and climbed the five hundred steps to reach the blue insignia of the Brigade Criminelle.

  It had been a long time. But she remembered the way well.

  After again showing her ID, she was buzzed in. She found the vaulted wooden doors marked toilette. Now it served both sexes since the former ladies’ room had become part of the communication systems control room.

  This was no classic hole in the floor or stinky urinal like many in the building but an elegant Art Nouveau lavatory: private wooden stalls with inset stained-glass panels and a glazed ceramic frieze accompanied by an elegant shoe-shine stand circa 1905.

  The usual lavatory attendant was off duty, probably at lunch. A box with five franc tips sat on a ledge. A stall door opened a slit and Léo beckoned with a crooked finger.

  “Timing is everything,” he breathed, as she joined him.

  She slipped his amended credit report, with proof of the postage-meter glitch and three-day grace period for his online account, into his freckled hands.

  His small sharklike teeth, crooked nose, and full head of curly brown hair gave him an academic air. “Devious nerd” best described him. And that, she thought, was being generous. Given his proclivity to taunt and blackmail fellow students in the lycée, his skills were wasted in the préfecture’s Records Department.

  “Twenty minutes,” he whispered, handing her a manila envelope, “then I’ll come back for them. DST files are shut tighter than a nun’s legs.”

  “Léo, that’s not the deal!” She pulled back her file.

  He put his finger on his lips. “But I got this. My housecleaner sleeps with the adjutant’s clerk….”

  “Look,” she said, making a moue of distaste. “I don’t want to know.”

  “No photos.”

  She nodded, and set her phone to Vibrate. “Call me when you’re coming back.”

  He yanked the brass pull chain. A thunderous flushing noise filled the stall as he slid out the door.

  Aimée shut the mahogany toilet lid and leaned on a shiny chrome knob. From her leather backpack, she lifted the portable scanner bar, then connected it to her wireless palm organizer revved up with extra memory by René. She punched in her office fax number. The organizer would simultaneously fax the scanned pages to her office. Scanning wasn’t photographing, was it? Apprehensive, she took a deep breath. She had a terrible thought … what if René hadn’t paid the France Télécom bill? Then she saw the familiar handshake logo indicating Connect on the tiny screen. Thank God!

  With a studied calm she didn’t feel, Aimée thumbed open the folder from the IGPN, the disciplinary branch within the police. Inside lay a lined yellow sheet with notes written in an angular hand.

  With the bar, she began scanning the notes, which were dated 1976. The first page had a coffee stain and recounted surveillance on rue de Cléry. She recognized the address. Romain Figeac’s apartment.

  Her brow beaded with sweat. The air in the lavatory was stifling and the scanner’s speed was only about five pages per minute.

  The surveillance entailed the comings and goings from the apartment of a female suspect. The phone tap report stated she’d used Figeac’s phone for calling and receiving calls from a Left Bank gallery owner, known by the police to fence stolen paintings. From what Aimée gathered, the gallery owner was feeding information to the police. There were several blurred black-and-white photos of a woman wearing what looked like a long blond wig, in sunglasses, carrying a shopping bag supposed to contain Modigliani paintings. The woman caught in the act was named—Sydney Leduc.

  Her own mother caught (by her father?) in a police sting. Aimée sat in the small cubicle, and the world, as she knew it, crumbled.

  Aimée’s mother had been jailed and brought to trial, not for terrorism, but for the theft of Laborde’s paintings. There was no proof of her participation in the kidnapping and murder of Laborde. So that’s why she’d only been in prison a year.

  But why hadn’t Aimée known about any of this? She looked at the date … That year she had been sixteen, that was the time she’d been an exchange student at a high school in New York!

  Aimée read further. Offered the chance to inform on the gang for a lighter sentence, Sydney had agreed to find out the location of terrorist gang members and their loot. But Aimée read between the lines. Her father had cut a deal for her mother.

  Yet at the end of the report, her father had been brought up for disciplinary hearings. Why? That didn’t make sense.

  There was no explanation, unless he had been found in possession of the seized paintings on July 15th during the surveillance sting.

  On another sheet, with “Surveillance Unit” written across the top, were several names:

  Szlovak

  Dray

  Teynard

  Leduc

  She recognized Szlovak, a middle-aged man on her father’s Commissariat team who’d retired early. Dray had been kicked upstairs to the préfecture at the Quai des Orfèvres ten years or so before. Teynard had been posted to the STUP, the narcotics branch of the Brigade Criminelle.

  Her wrist ached. She managed to scan the Action-Réaction files before her cell phone vibrated. Within two minutes she
’d finished, disconnected the scanner bar from her palm organizer, and stood reapplying Chanel red lipstick at the old silver-edged mirror.

  The lavatory attendant, an older woman with her white hair in a bun, a copy of Telé-Journal under her arm, appeared as Léo returned. Aimée watched him enter the stall but not before she winked and dropped ten francs in the bowl.

  A half hour later, back at her office, she found Szlovak’s number on the Minitel, left a message, looked up Dray in the préfecture, and had no luck finding Teynard at the Brigade.

  At the préfecture, the receptionist said Dray had left for vacances the day before. Aimée sat down to reread the pages she’d faxed and to read those she hadn’t had time to.

  Something felt off. Way off.

  She didn’t know what was bothering her but … and then she looked up. The dates were wrong. They had to be.

  She reread the file. On her office wall was her favorite photo of herself with her father, taken the day after Bastille Day in 1976. They’d spent the whole day together before her flight to New York. She looked closer at the surveillance log dated July 15, 1976, containing her father’s name. The day the paintings were recovered.

  But Bastille Day was always July 14th.

  So her father had been with her on July 15th. Not on stakeout.

  He’d been set up. And she was the proof.

  She took the photo from the wall and stuck it in her bag with the Modigliani data she’d copied from the Agence France Presse.

  A further search showed Teynard had retired. He ran a detective firm with his nephew on rue de Turbigo.

  Close. On the edge of the Sentier and a few blocks away.

  Forget the scooter. She needed to walk. Work out some angry energy, so she wouldn’t arrive at Teynard’s swinging. At least not at first.

  “DESOLÉE, MADEMOISELLE Leduc!” said the secretary, Madame Goroux. “Monsieur Teynard’s evening seems totally booked.”