Murder on the Quai

by Cara Black

  Aimée blew her nose, wrote up her notes into a report. She would attach the photos once they were ready. She mulled over her situation. As much as she wanted to get her report to Elise so she could try to get those family photographs of her mother before her father came home, she decided she couldn’t rush this anymore, now that she thought there was another related murder. She wanted to confer with her father and see the developed photos first. Her father had forbidden her to take any action on Elise’s case, but God knows she needed his advice now. He’d understand, wouldn’t he?

  But her father wouldn’t be in Berlin yet. She could leave a message at the hotel, but which damn hotel? Gerhard would know. Now what was Gerhard’s last name?

  She thumbed through her father’s Rolodex. After five minutes she found Köhler, Gerhard in Berlin. Hoped it was the right guy.

  She punched in the country code and listened to the ringing for what felt like a long time.

  “Ja?” a sleepy voice answered.

  “I’m Jean-Claude Leduc’s daughter, Aimée.”

  “Do you know what time it is?”

  “Désolée, Gerhard,” she said, glancing at the clock. 11:30 p.m. Oops. “Forgive me for calling so late.”

  “A problem? Are you all right, Fräulein—I mean, mademoiselle?”

  Finding a murdered man floating by the quai had altered her evening. No need to bring that up. “Fine.”

  “Mein Gott, when I get a call in the middle of the night—”

  “No, I’m okay, it’s just—désolée, but where’s my father staying? I need to get in touch with him.”

  “Hotel Altdorf . . .” His voice faded. Came back. “I haven’t found those files yet. My contact’s gone incommunicado.”

  She wondered if the files had anything to do with the German couple and that missing husband he’d mentioned before he left.

  “The Stasi center’s . . . Si . . .” He fuzzed out.

  “We’ve got a bad connection. Please repeat that, I’m writing it down.” Not her business, but she should leave the info for her father.

  “Sydney Hartman. His relative, he said.”

  Her breath caught. Her mother.

  “Her Stasi file’s thick,” Gerhard was saying. “Already interest from the Americans. They’re willing to pay.”

  Pay? Pay for files? The news hit her like a punch to the stomach.

  “What files do you mean?” Her voice came out broken and small. “Wh . . . where is she?”

  “It’s . . . bad connection.” The phone line or to do with her mother?

  Think. Get information before he hung up.

  “Who else’s interested?”

  “Vas . . . ?” His voice wavered.

  “Who’s interested in her files?”

  “Mossad. Tell your father I’ll know more tomorrow. Auf Wiedersehen.”

  Gerhard hung up.

  She clenched the phone, shaken. Her knuckles were white.

  After her mother had left them when Aimée was eight, Jean-Claude had refused to speak of her, burned her things, acted as if she’d never existed. Had he known where she was all this time? Why had he hidden this from Aimée—why? What else had he lied about?

  This gaping pit of sorrow and guilt and rage opened, the pain that never went away.

  She rang Hotel Altdorf and left a message with the concierge, asking her father to call her at home as soon as he arrived in the morning.

  Sunk in her dark thoughts, she jerked when the phone rang.

  “I don’t do snuff photos, Aimée,” Vortek’s voice rumbled with anger.

  She’d forgotten to warn him. An amateur mistake. Merde, he’d tell her father. Her father, who’d lied to her.

  “I’m sorry, Vortek,” she said. “I meant to say those photos go to the police.”

  “Or to a tabloid or Le Parisien, who would pay a lot for something like this, eh? You skimming off your father now?”

  “Mais non, Vortek. I wouldn’t do that. I came on this accidentally. My cousin—”

  “I don’t care, Aimée. A child shouldn’t have pictures like these.”

  Child?

  He hung up.

  She took her boots from the sputtering radiator. Still damp. Her grandfather’s jacket was damp, too, but the sheepskin lining was soft and dry. She wrapped her father’s wool scarf around her and trudged out in the wet street. Thank God the rain had stopped.

  Vortek stood in the alley under the passage, smoking. She pulled out a fifty-franc note, almost the last of her stash, to keep him quiet and exchanged it for the envelope he held. Checked that the photos and negatives were inside.

  Gruesome. She suppressed a shiver.

  “My father was a partisan during the war,” Vortek said, blowing a puff of smoke. “Fighting in the forest outside Lodz.”

  “Et alors?”

  “The old man in your photo—that’s the way they used to shoot collabos during the war. Tied up, bullet to the back of the head. A warning to anyone who thought about turning them in.”

  “But it’s 1989. The war’s been over for more than forty years.” She tucked the envelope in her bag.

  He flicked his cigarette into a puddle. “You think the past goes away?” said Vortek. “I see it every day, people rummaging through our stock looking for their history. Even on télé last night there was a movie about a man who takes revenge for an old war crime.” He gave a twisted grin. “But you’re the detective now.”

  At that moment, it struck her that nothing she had ever done in her life had gotten her blood rushing like her little surveillance job tonight had—nothing had ever made her feel this way before. And she wasn’t half bad at it.

  “You could say that, Vortek.” Didn’t she have a doctored PI license to prove it?

  Chambly-sur-Cher · November 1942

  “The commandant at Givaray has some questions, Gaubert.” Rouxel, the reputed German informer, stood in the farmhouse doorway, his beret cocked. He’d always been the village bully; now he’d found his vocation as a Party fascist. A Citroën idled out front, the motor powered by a gazogène cylinder mounted on its hood.

  Gaubert clutched his fist behind his back. Wished to God he could grab the German rifle they’d salvaged last night from the Boches. Shoot this damned collaborator.

  “We’re in Vichy, as you well know. I don’t report to—”

  “But Maréchal Pétain has called for cooperation, so bring your Ausweis and get moving.”

  “Why?”

  “Ask the commandant. He said he wants to confer with the mayor.”

  If he didn’t go, it would look suspicious.

  Gaubert took his time finding dry boots and his wool coat, made a show of going through his drawers for his papers. He wanted to give Fanny as much time to escape as he could.

  Gaubert avoided the barn, directing Rouxel to drive the Citroën toward the side road. But the tires stalled in the mud rifts, so the two men ended up walking five minutes to the bridge over the Cher River—the demarcation line dividing la zone libre from Occupied German territory.

  “Some German soldiers washed up on the Givaray bank,” said Rouxel as they walked. “Know anything about it?”

  “Not my business,” Gaubert said warily. “That’s across the river.”

  “The commandant’s in a tizzy. Can’t figure out where they came from. Or why he wasn’t notified of a convoy.”

  With the confusion of the bombing and rainstorm, maybe no one had followed up?

  “Hitler didn’t notify me either,” said Gaubert. “What’s it to do with us, anyway, in la zone libre? All that bombing last night . . .”

  “Between you and me, as a Frenchman, do you see tears in my eyes?”

  Just greed, Gaubert thought. The rat sensed something. He picked up his pace so Rouxel would be discouraged from furt
her talk.

  At the wooden sentry hut, Gaubert presented his Ausweis, printed in both languages, to the French customs official. The official studied it, nodded his braid-trimmed blue hat, and raised the bars to let them onto the bridge. Twilight had descended on the flowing river and the rain had stopped. The bone-chilling damp made Gaubert shiver. The scent of rotten leaves rose from underneath the bridge.

  After they’d taken a few steps away from the customs official, Rouxel seized his arm. “You, Philbert, Alain, and Bruno were out last night piling sandbags.”

  So the rat knew.

  “No secret. And with no help from you, Rouxel,” Gaubert said, stopping in the middle of the bridge. “We could have used your muscle. Now that the fields have flooded, God knows what we’ll eat.”

  Looking at the swollen, khaki-colored river, he felt mired in guilt. As illogical as it would be to confide in the rat, part of him wanted to pour out the truth, confess so no more innocents would be shot. No more cheesemongers or elderly parents dying for their secret. Only he, Alain, Philbert, and Bruno deserved to die.

  “The wheat fields are ruined,” said Gaubert. “Cornfields, too. You, me, we’ll all go hungry unless . . .”

  Rouxel’s eyes on him were calculating. Everyone knew he dealt on the black market. And as mayor, Gaubert had to come up with something, some plan for food.

  “Unless what?”

  An RAF formation droned overhead, drowning his answer. Then several planes broke off and swooped down. A burst of machine-gun fire clattered, strafing the German side of the bridge. Pings sounded off the metal. Gaubert dove in the mud. A cry as Rouxel grabbed his leg.

  “I’m hit.”

  Rouxel was shouting, his voice high with pain. “Help me, don’t leave me here.”

  Tempted, he was tempted. Gaubert grabbed him under the arms and dragged him back to the Chambly side. Rouxel, heavy and moaning, made it difficult. He called to the French sentry post for help, but the border guard had fled. The damn coward.

  Once he’d gotten him off the bridge into the shelter of trees on the slippery bank, he tore Rouxel’s sleeve and used it like a tourniquet to staunch his bleeding leg.

  “Gaubert,” Rouxel wheezed, “I can help you supply food to the village.”

  Gaubert snorted. “You mean via your German connections? What, you’ll sell us their rations for double what you pay?”

  “Say what you like,” said Rouxel, anger and pain in his eyes. “The commandant’s men saw you on the river last night. They’re convinced you had something to do with those dead men.”

  So that’s why they wanted him in their occupied zone, to interrogate him until he cracked. He remembered the lights he’d seen in the distance. They couldn’t know for sure, though, could they? “So the Boche offered you a cut and you believe him?”

  “I’m not stupid,” Rouxel gasped. “Boches don’t share. They do business. You need my help.”

  Business. Rouxel would sell him, the entire village, even his own mother out.

  Farther down the river, the explosions and strafing continued. Dark smoke clouds billowed up into the sky.

  Rouxel was bleeding like a stuck pig and clutching his jacket.

  “Hiding something, Rouxel?”

  Gaubert pulled Rouxel’s jacket open and his hands came back sticky with blood. A bullet hole gaped in the man’s chest. There was a blood-smeared letter folded and tucked into the jacket. Gaubert seized it, ignoring Rouxel’s bleats of protest, and moved out of the man’s reach to read it. In passable French, Commandant Niedhofer was offering Rouxel three hundred francs to bring Gaubert, the mayor, over to the German side. Rouxel had been selling him out.

  “Gaubert?”

  Alain’s head popped up from the bushes. Where had he come from?

  “Have you gone crazy? Crossing the bridge under fire?”

  Alain crawled up the bank, tore more branches from the bushes to cover them. “I saw that scum go to your door. What does he want?”

  Gaubert thrust the note in Alain’s hand. “Look.”

  “Alors, we’ll work this out,” Rouxel sputtered. “You think I believe the Boches. I’m on your side.”

  “Like hell you are.” Continued strafing by the RAF on the other side of the bridge and the answering German antiaircraft fire kept everyone inside. No one in their right mind would get near a window.

  “They want to know who murdered these German soldiers,” Rouxel said, gasping. “I can fix it with them, tell them—”

  Alain shoved Rouxel further behind the bushes. He lifted his arm and brought it down on Rouxel’s head—over and over, like one possessed. It took Gaubert too long to realize Alain was holding a rock, which was stained bright red with Rouxel’s blood.

  Horrified, Gaubert grabbed his arm. “What’ve you done now?”

  Alain felt for Rouxel’s pulse. “Dealt with a loose end.” Alain dragged the corpse the rest of the way into the brush, arranged branches to hide it. “You should feel relieved.”

  Relief and guilt at the same time. And claustrophobia—he was stuck in a secret with this hothead, who’d get them all shot. Last night Gaubert had murdered a soldier, a boy. Robbed Nazi gold. Now he’d been separated from his wife, his child—he was trapped in a web of death and deceit.

  “God knows who will come looking for him.”

  Alain’s small eyes scanned the riverbank. “Tonight I’ll come back and bury him so deep God won’t find him.”

  Gaubert wanted this all to go away. Rouxel’s sticky blood on his fingers, the mud, the bombing. And the damn gold.

  A siren whooped in the village, rattling his nerves. At the checkpoint on the bridge, Gaubert saw the German guards. Their rifles rose.

  “Don’t you understand?” he said to Alain. “Rouxel wasn’t a loose end. The Germans know.”

  Paris · Friday, Midnight

  Back at Leduc Detective, Vortek’s words spun in Aimée’s head—could the old men be executed in revenge for a past crime? But why now? she could hear her father ask.

  Toujours le sceptique, he’d say, look at both sides. What other possible motive could she find?

  She thumbed through the photos she’d taken a few hours ago: the brass mailboxes at Suzy’s apartment building; Suzy at the café counter, her silhouette half obscured by Aimée’s bag; under the Alibaba club marquee; a slice of the cute bartender Marc’s shoulder; Laurent’s reservation page at cockeyed angles.

  The last several horrific shots of the man bobbing against the quai, a dark red hole in the back of his sopping wet head, blood-stained rag in his mouth, one bare foot. The tied hands.

  Staring more closely, she noticed that the fingers on one hand had bloated like white sausages against the rope, but the other hand’s fingers were smooth, slender, flesh-colored. She tried to recall her anatomy lectures and whether there might be any reason for one hand to bloat and not the other. The only thing she could think of was—could the arm be a prosthesis?

  What should she do now, at this hour? It was late, she felt tired. And she wanted her father’s advice before she did anything else. About to call it quits, she noticed the red light blinking on the answering machine. When had this been left and why hadn’t she noticed it?

  She hit play. “Allô? I’m sorry to call so late,” said the voice she recognized as Elise’s, “but I need to reach Jean-Claude as soon as possible. Can you let me know how to contact him? I’m at home. The police called me . . . I’m afraid.” A loud click as the phone hung up.

  Aimée’s throat tightened. Had the flics recovered evidence tonight on the quai linking the new body to Elise’s father’s murder? Did the second murder put Elise in danger?

  What had she gotten into? Nervous, she debated a moment, then grabbed her bag.

  Ten minutes later she parked her grandfather’s motorcycle in the shadows by the gold-tipped fence tha
t ringed the square around Chapelle Expiatoire. Dense rotting-leaf smells filled the wet night. The Greco-Roman-style chapel, bracketed by stone arcades, mushroomed from the undergrowth, reminding her of ruins, an archeological discovery. The square stood over the ancient Cimetière de la Madeleine where, in 1793, Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were dumped in a mass grave after being guillotined at nearby Place de la Concorde. Later the royals were disinterred—their bodies were identified by the queen’s garters, rumor went—and reburied in the royal Basilique Cathédrale de Saint-Denis. Aimée had always thought it was eerie passing by this chapel, with its famous history, but it was smack dab in the middle of the eighth arrondissement and the bus ran right by.

  Elise’s rue Lavoisier address—a mansion with a baroque plasterwork façade—straddled the corner and continued down both streets. How could people afford to live in these anymore? Most had been taken over by banks who, Aimée had read somewhere, sold the upper floors as flats. Sodden yellow-brown leaves gave off a damp odor of decay and clung to her boots. She pressed the button by the name Peltier.

  “Who’s there?”

  She leaned close to the grilled microphone. “Elise, it’s Aimée Leduc. I must talk to you. I came as soon as—”

  “Not here,” interrupted a woman’s voice.

  “Madame Peltier?”

  “Not here.”

  Hadn’t Elise just left a message? A gust of wind shook the few leaves off the trees over the chapel.

  “Who’s this?”

  No answer. She didn’t like this.

  “I need to drop off what Elise asked me to bring.” A lie, but close to the truth.

  “This late?” said the woman. “Do you realize the time?”

  Aimée didn’t like having this conversation on the dank street. Or the tone of whoever this was.