Murder in Pigalle

by Cara Black

  “Zazie’s absent today. That’s all I can say.”

  Her attempt at ingratiating herself didn’t work. “She’s missing.” She flashed her PI badge. “Her parents, my close friends, hired me to find her.”

  Not that she’d ever charge the Ducloses. They struggled to break even on the café.

  “The flics asked us a lot of questions.” He shrugged. “Again, confidentiality issues preclude my speaking to you about students.” A flick of his gaze took in the corridor, the stairway. Instinct told her he had something to share.

  Aimée nodded. “Bien sûr.” She stepped closer, sensing a thaw in him. “Zazie’s mother shared with me the latest in the flics’ investigation. It’s not much. Zero.”

  Angling to give him something he’d be willing to comment on, she followed a hunch. “Zazie’s class project fascinated her, she told me.” She pulled out Zazie’s report. What did she have to lose? “I think I can find her,” she said. “There’s a link between the surveillance techniques in Zazie’s project and the ways she tried to trail the rapist. The rapist who murdered Sylvaine Olivet yesterday.”

  His birdlike eyes darted down the corridor again. The bell drilled. Aimée felt the reverberations in the soles of her feet.

  “My neighbor, Tonette, une vraie héroïne, visited our class,” he said. “She inspired this end-of-year project. The flics showed no interest in questioning Tonette, although I suggested it.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Tonette is a Resistance hero. She told my students about how children their age were involved in the Resistance, about how they filled their days during the war and communicated with each other without getting caught. She bet them they couldn’t last a week without video games or phones or computers.”

  Somehow this tied in. But how? Down the hallway she spotted a trio of uniformed flics. Great. She needed to squeeze something out of this teacher fast.

  “And that relates how, Monsieur?”

  “From what I understand, Zazie and Tonette formed a friendship. Zazie became very interested in the Resistance, chose it as a topic for her final project. I know she spent some time with Tonette after school to learn more.” He paused. “We’re about to inform our students of Sylvaine’s passing now, at the assembly,” he said. “Désolé. I can’t say any more.”

  Students lined up in the corridor, ready for attendance check off.

  “So how can I get in touch with Tonette, Monsieur?”

  Giggles came from the girls, pointing from the boys, all fresh faced, full of energy, like Zazie. Self-conscious, Aimée realized the lip-smacking noises were aimed at her … “His wife … non, his chérie.”

  “Silence!” Monsieur Sillot commanded. A hush descended. In a swift movement, he wrote Tonette’s address on top of Zazie’s report. Winked.

  At least this no-nonsense teacher had given her a place to start.

  “MADAME TONETTE?” SAID the concierge, shaking a rag on the pavement. “Gone out. You just missed her.” She stepped back into the shadowed porte cochère.

  “Where did she go?” Aimée wiped sweat from her forehead. “Shopping, the market?”

  “On Tuesdays she works,” the concierge said. She picked up a wet cloth, draped it over her mop and set to wet-mopping the stone portail. So early and already humidity clung to the air like a wet sheet.

  “The address, please,” Aimée said.

  “Who wants to know?” The concierge’s eyes narrowed.

  Aimée flashed her PI badge yet again.

  “Funny, you don’t look like those PIs on the télé.”

  “We never do, Madame.”

  The concierge shrugged. “Rue de la Grange-Batelière, the street d’antiquaire. Le Vieux Lapin.”

  TEN HOT MINUTES later, she wound down narrow rue du Faubourg Montmartre past Au P’tit Creux du Faubourg—Dédé, the owner, served the best prix-fixe lunch in the quartier, attested by the regulars who always crowded the place. The old wood, the mirrors and the smells emanating from within, where the staff were preparing for lunch, were still the same as she remembered. Like her grand-père’s time. She felt a stirring of hunger. Farther on she waved at Monsieur Arakian, one of the many diamantaires, diamond merchants, whose shops speckled rue la Fayette. In this quartier they were all Armenian. She had him to thank for the two-carat studs that never left her earlobes.

  Ahead was a mélange of philatelic shops and Hôtel Drouot, the auction house—her grand-père’s old haunts. He frequented them all, a hound for antiques. The Louis XV tables, Aubusson rugs and chandeliers in her inherited seventeenth-century flat on Ile Saint-Louis were evidence of that.

  Growing up, she’d trailed him through the Hôtel Drouot galleries filled with jumbles of treasures and trash: a taxidermied muskrat, Belle Époque escritoires and ’70s plastic cube chairs. She even knew the auction-house porters, all from the Savoy region, known since Napoleon III’s time by their distinctive red collars, their profession handed down from Savoyard father to son.

  She made a left and found Le Vieux Lapin mid-block, one of many antique shops on the street. Dealers smoked on the pavement, and she heard snatches of conversation drifting—“… belonged to the Rothschilds …”

  Le Vieux Lapin’s interior, dim and cool, gave off a wax-polish smell, just like what grand-père used.

  “Bonjour,” Aimée called, her eyes adjusting to the low light.

  “Talking to the whore again?” said a woman’s voice from the shadows. “About that Watteau? Zut! Forget it.” Aimée heard a phone slammed down on the receiver.

  “Excusez-moi, but—”

  From the dim interior emerged a young woman with prematurely white hair pulled into a beehive. Maroon lipstick on a smooth, made-up face, lime green cigarette pants, red heels and a white blazer. Right out of Vogue.

  “Oui?” she said, her voice clipped.

  Aimée pulled out a card. Glanced around the showroom filled with antiques—walls lined with cracked oil paintings; eighteenth-century portraits of powdered, bewigged men; countryside scenes of rolling green and winding rivers.

  The woman surveyed Aimée’s card and snorted. “Here about some insurance claim? I’m not a fence. That’s the territory of the red collars, those Savoyards.”

  She remembered her grand-père negotiating with the red collars amid winks and exchanges under the table. Hence his “deals.” “Non,” Aimée said, “I’m not here to see any fences.”

  “It’s like that saying,” the woman said, eyeing Aimée with a smirk. “Drouot resembles a wonderful old whore—you know she’s corrupt and full of flaws, yet you keep going because she’s charming and funny and she gives you lots of pleasure.”

  She had that right. “I’m here to see Madame Tonette.”

  “Busy.” Crisp, to the point, end of discussion.

  On closer inspection the woman appeared older; a hint of crow’s-feet, smoker’s lip lines. But Aimée wished to God she could have fit into those cigarette pants. A scallop shell of red embroidery on the seam, last season’s Lacroix.

  “Monsieur Sillot, the lycée teacher, recommended I speak with her.”

  A little expulsion of air. “Et alors?”

  She had to appeal to this woman. Somehow. How else could she track Zazie?

  She lowered her voice. “His student, Zazie Duclos, whom Madame Tonette knows, is missing. I need Madame Tonette’s help, s’il vous plaît.”

  Concern crinkled the woman’s brow. A moment later her heels clicked on the hardwood floor. From the rear door to the office Aimée heard, “Tante Tonette, you decent?”

  A muffled reply. The woman beckoned Aimée.

  “Don’t tire her out,” she said. “She’s got a cinq à sept tonight.”

  That meant one thing only. A lover over apéros between five and seven.

  Unsure of what to expect, Aimée smiled. “Merci.”

  A well-coiffed, white-haired woman, seventy if she was a day, sat at an ebony desk spreading Tarot cards, her trim figure encased i
n a white linen sheath. A fuchsia foulard was knotted around her neck, matching her Chanel sling-back heels.

  Fashion genes in every generation in this family.

  “Excusez-moi, Tonette?”

  A bat of her mascara’d lashes at Aimée. Then a wave of her hand as she scooped up the Tarot deck.

  “You’re not here for a card reading,” she said, her voice graveled and deep.

  A fortune-teller. Another surprise. But then she realized she didn’t understand a lot of what had happened since Zazie disappeared.

  “Madame, if I could, this concerns—”

  “Aah, pardonnez-moi.” She’d pulled on her tortoiseshell reading glasses. “Now I can see better. You’re the attorney representing the Ziegler heirs.”

  “Heirs? But …”

  “I prepared,” said Tonette, reaching for a worn, leather-bound ledger. “You can see the sale documents of my father’s purchase of Monsieur Ziegler’s shares in the antiquaire. Papers, all the Jews needed papers, for Aryanization, you know. So we kept everything for the Zieglers, but they didn’t return. Now it’s ready for the heir claimants.”

  Aimée gave a sigh. “Madame Tonette, I think you’ve mistaken—”

  “Attendez, please hear me out,” she said. The woman wanted to talk. “The ledgers detail every transaction, tax paid. It’s all here,” she said. “For fifty years and up to date.” Tonette shot her a look. “Dénoncés, you know. Denounced by their neighbors.”

  The Occupation, and what the French did to the French during that dark time, remained as vivid as the present in those shrewd eyes. But Aimée hadn’t come to dip into the sad past.

  “You’ve confused me with an attorney.”

  “Mais oui … But you look like her. You’re both pregnant.”

  Aimée handed her a card, sat down.

  “Aah, la détective, the one Zazie goes on about.”

  Encouraged, Aimée perched on a fragile gilt and red upholstered chair, hoping it would hold her, and spread out Zazie’s map, the report.

  “Zazie’s teacher said you inspired his class’s end-of-year project,” said Aimée. “That you and Zazie spent time together. I’m hoping Zazie told you about her subject, a man she practiced surveillance on. Can you help me understand more?”

  “Aaah, to catch le Weasel.” Tonette took off her glasses. “Her teacher and I, we had a bet. Challenged the students to get by without electronics, like we did during the Occupation. We encouraged them to partner and communicate. Like a game of spies, to make it fun. Surveil someone in the quartier—with their permission, of course. Using techniques of keeping a log, photographing, following and writing a report.”

  Now it made sense. “The way you surveilled people in the Resistance, n’est-ce pas?”

  “Resistance? That’s an overused term.” Tonette shrugged. “I was thirteen in 1943—Zazie’s age, Vous comprenez?” A faraway look entered her eyes. “Flirting with a boy in les communistes. To us it was game. At first.” Under her rolled-up sleeve, Aimée noticed scars. “Ravensbrück,” she said, noticing Aimée’s gaze. “No tattooed numbers by then. The Nazis didn’t have time. We were on the last convoy in and the last to be liberated.” Her light brown eyes flickered. “Zazie’s so impressionable, such a sweet, smart girl. We met several times, but I hoped after she came to see me yesterday …”

  Aimée sat up. Her stomach hit the desk. She turned in the delicate chair, tried to keep it balanced.

  “What time, can you remember?”

  A bell rang in the shop. “Tante Tonette, a customer for you.”

  “I’ll come right back,” said Tonette, rising.

  Aimée reached and put her hand on Tonette’s thin arm. “Time’s important. When did you last see Zazie?”

  “Yesterday afternoon. Now if you’ll let me help my customer?”

  “Her classmate was raped and murdered, and now Zazie’s missing. You might have been the last to see her,” said Aimée. “Isn’t that more important?”

  Tonette gasped. Her hand flew to her mouth. After a moment she pointed to rue Notre-Dame de Lorette on the map. “Here, at my place. After lunch we met for tea. To go over her report, but … she didn’t bring it. And she was in a hurry.”

  “Around two thirty?”

  Tonette nodded. “She left maybe three P.M.”

  “No one’s seen her since.”

  “Le Weasel, she talked about le Weasel, their suspect, she called him.”

  So Zazie had tracked le Weasel, the man she took for the rapist. The real man in the FotoFit?

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “I’m not sure of her friend’s name.”

  “Didn’t she mention Sylvaine?”

  “A Marie-Jo, maybe. Yes, that’s who she talked about.”

  “Did Marie-Jo, this friend, live on rue Chaptal?”

  “Close by, that’s all I know,” said Tonette. “Somehow I thought the man they were tracking was her friend’s mother’s boyfriend.”

  “Why?” Aimée leaned forward.

  “That’s who they chose to surveil for the project.” Tonette shrugged. “Although I know they didn’t like him. I got the idea they were hoping to catch him at something.” Suddenly her eyes widened. “You think he’s this rapist? I read about the attack. Horrible.”

  “Please, Tonette, it’s vital … why did they pick him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The pieces clicked together in Aimée’s head. If Marie-Jo was the friend on rue Chaptal Zazie’s parents forbade her to see, the girls must have used a Resistance-style system, sans phone, to communicate.

  “How did you help Zazie track le Weasel and communicate with her friend?” Aimée said.

  The younger woman called again. “Tante Tonette?”

  Aimée pushed Tonette’s fuchsia bag toward her on the desk. “Better yet, you’ll show me. Tell your niece you’re taking the afternoon off.”

  Tuesday, 10 A.M.

  THE POLICE SCANNER crackled in René’s Citroën as a garbage truck cut in front of him. Merde! He braked and pulled into the first place he could, the open gate of Cité Malesherbes, an elegant lane of townhouses. Listening carefully to the scanner, René took his pen and noted the latest victim’s father’s name and details in the margin of the true-crime book.

  Thank God he’d caffeinated and scored another meeting tonight with the waitress. Now to buttonhole this father, who’d finished his police interview and returned to work. But right now René had to cool his heels, stuck until the garbage truck moved. Sun beat down on his streaked windshield. A crow, its body glinting like shiny black satin, cawed from the roof tiles.

  After spending all night in the car, his calves ached and his spine felt out of alignment, like his heart. He had to start a new ardoise—a clean slate, get over his feelings for Aimée. Melac could reappear, want to support Aimée and be a father to the new baby. Who knew?

  Yet he couldn’t help—in secret—graphing costs of cloth diaper services versus the price of disposable. Enrolling in Lamaze as her partner. Studying the benefits of breastfeeding on infant growth charts.

  His phone bleeped. Aimée.

  “Any luck, René?” she said, breathless.

  “What’s wrong? You’re out of breath.”

  “Walking up a hill with a sixty-eight-year-old and I can’t keep up with her,” she said. “Good exercise. And you?”

  “The father of the latest victim has finished up with his police interview.” The garbage truck’s loader whined. Pungent aromas drifted through his window. Forget this. He turned the key in the ignition. “I’m off to question him.”

  “Where’s that, René?”

  “I’m going to l’Opéra.”

  RENÉ WALKED OUT of le parking at Place Edouard VII into an impasse of steam-cleaned limestone buildings festooned with carved nymphs and a naked woman or two—the alabaster almost glowed. Wrought-iron balconies overflowed with pink and red geraniums. Picture parfait.

  Beyond the zebra-striped
crosswalk, René glimpsed the Palais Garnier, Napoleon III’s gold-cuppola’d, rococo and Empire-style opera house. His detractors derided it as over-the-top, as had the ice-cart deliverymen, who complained that the time it took to circumvent the “monstrosity” to reach Café de la Paix melted their ice slabs.

  Artistic furor died down over the years, but not so the grumbling over traffic jams, first from the horse-drawn trolley drivers, then later from motorists and bus drivers. Haussmann had discouraged revolutionaries by demolishing alleys and twisting lanes that were fertile ground for street fighters, with no thought of practical traffic navigation.

  Yet in indigo summer twilight, la vieille dame, no stranger to controversy over the centuries, was bewitching.

  René loved it.

  Now the orchestra had decamped to l’Opéra Bastille, but ballet performances thrived. Les Rats, the corps of young ballerinas, rehearsed in the attic, and a beekeeper attended the beehives on the roof. There was a whole world here: costumers, make-up artists, lighting technicians and stage-set designers, stage crew and in-house firemen.

  Courtesy of Saj’s connections, René had obtained an entrée backstage, where the latest victim’s father worked.

  “I’m looking for Monsieur Imbert?” asked René

  A rail-thin arty type wearing a bleu de travail and the typical loose work jacket, appeared under hanging chandeliers. He was carrying antlers and chewing the pencil hanging from his mouth.

  “That you?” asked René.

  A shake of his head.

  René tried again. The antlers looked heavy. “They told me Monsieur Imbert works here in props.”

  The arty type renegotiated the antlers to rest on his hip and stuck the pencil behind his ear. “Imbert’s gone fishing.”

  Fishing?

  Maybe his daughter’s attack was grounds for taking time off. Of course, how upset the whole family must be. Not a parent, René hadn’t thought of that. He’d need to work on developing his paternal instinct. Especially since Aimée had hinted she’d chosen him for godfather.

  “I understand he gave a statement at the Commissariat this morning after his daughter was attacked.”