Murder in the Marais (Aimee Leduc Investigations, No. 1)

by Cara Black

  "You deactivated the security system after Soli Hecht left?" Aimee said. That didn't make sense. "Why?"

  "If Soli is involved with a project, he works here any time. We close at noon Fridays for Shabbat. However, today, for the deportation memorial services I came in to finish up some work. Sometime after three Soli buzzed the office so I deactivated the alarm, then let him in. I reactivated the alarm but he only stayed a short time. To let him out I had to deactivate again. In doing so, I forgot to disarm his office alarm code."

  "But I just walked in," Aimee interrupted.

  "My mistake." Solange shook her head. "I was supposed to activate the process again. But it's so hard to remember."

  "He has special access?" Aimee asked.

  "Of course!" Solange sounded surprised. "Soli got the grant from the 4th arrondissement for this building space. His foundation maintains an office upstairs. Since the Jews lived and died in the Marais, he always said, their history should be shown here. But this week was the first time I'd seen him in several months."

  Startled, Aimee realized that this information fit if his recent contact with Lili involved his work at the center. Keeping her excitement in check, she asked, "What was he working on?"

  "That's confidential information," Solange said. She glanced at her watch. "I need to close the center."

  "Is there anyone in his office whom I can talk to?" Aimee asked.

  "Only Soli could tell you that. There's no one else in today."

  Why wouldn't Solange talk? Supposedly there'd been an attempt on Soli's life, so why worry about confidentiality?

  "Solange, I need to know about this work he's involved in."

  "I told you it's confidential," she snapped.

  Hecht had slipped her fifty thousand francs to find Lili Stein's killer and now he'd been hurt. There must be a connection to Hecht's foundation, but she wouldn't find out if this braided lackey kept blocking her way.

  "Your director better be more helpful." She leaned close to Solange.

  "She's involved in the memorial at the deportation monument today, but she'll be in Sunday." Solange backed up against the highly polished wood reception desk.

  "What if Soli doesn't make it until tomorrow and you've obstructed my investigation—would you like that on your conscience?"

  Solange's chin quivered. "I don't make the rules, I'm sorry."

  "Answer me this." Aimee crossed her arms. "Did Soli act differently today than before?"

  Solange paused, knotting her fingers. "His rheumatoid arthritis had become worse. He was in constant pain," she said, then sighed, "That's why it seemed unusual."

  "Unusual?" Aimee said, alerted by the change in Solange's tone.

  "That he was at a bus stop," Solange said matter-of-factly. "He told me he was going to take a taxi home."

  Aimee willed her face muscles to stay put, hiding her excitement. Her suspicious feeling about Solange evaporated. "Did you report the accident to the police?"

  "They didn't even respond when I called. Told me to dial SAMU, the emergency. Soli's a special man. This doesn't seem fair."

  Outside, Aimee stared at the now dull brownish spot on the cobblestoned street. It didn't make sense for Hecht, in constant pain, to wait at a bus stop when a taxi stand was a few meters away. Especially since he'd said he would take a taxi. Somehow she'd unearth this mess, cobblestone by cobblestone if need be.

  Late Friday Afternoon

  "YOU SAY SOLI HECHT is in a coma?" Aimee asked Morbier as she stood across from his desk. "Is he going to wake up?"

  "Severe trauma, internal injuries." Morbier shrugged. "Then again, I'm not a doctor."

  "If he wakes, can you arrange it so I talk with him?" she said.

  France 2 droned above them on the TV in Homicide. On the screen, angry demonstrators at the Élysee palace gates paraded near a newscaster who vainly attempted to interview them.

  "A big if. He's in his eighties, amazing that his heart is pumping at all. Round-the-clock surveillance, too," Morbier added.

  Her heart raced. Something was very off here.

  "Wait a minute, weren't you calling this an accident? Not even investigating when I called you. . ."

  Morbier cut her off. "Not me. Word came down the pipe."

  "Meaning what?" she asked.

  "From above. Not my dominion anymore. My men and I have been ordered clear of this investigation for safety and precaution. You, too." He stared at Aimee.

  "Hold on." She hated being told thirdhand. "Does this include Lili Stein's case?"

  "BRI has been assigned to the 3rd and 4th arrondissement," he said.

  If Solange Goutal's emergency call had been ignored but Soli Hecht was abruptly put under hospital surveillance, a lot more was happening than met the eye. Her eye, anyway. "You're no longer handling this case?"

  He shook a nicotine-stained finger at her. "Stick to your computer, Leduc; that's all you need to know."

  "What about getting me the phone numbers dialed from Les Blancs Nationaux's office?"

  He shook his head. "I can't help you."

  Typical Gallic evasion, she thought; the French had perfected the art of sitting on the fence. He cupped his palm and took a deep drag of the Gauloise stub held between his thumb and middle finger. His bushy eyebrows lifted high on his forehead.

  "Talk to me, Morbier," she said. It came out more intimately than she meant it to.

  "First time in twenty-six years I've had a case taken away." He regarded his desk with a sour expression and ignored the tone in her voice. "For what it's worth, I don't like it either."

  She felt her temper erupting, but she thanked him and walked out.

  Late-afternoon traffic had choked to a standstill on rue du Louvre as she walked to her office. Morbier's comment spun in her head and she longed for a cigarette.

  Instead, she bought a baguette at the boulangerie next to her building. In the small supermarche wedged on the other side, she picked up chèvre cheese, local tapenade relish, and a bottle of Orangina. She waved to Zazie, who was doing her homework by the window in Cafe Magritte.

  As she mounted the worn stairs to her office she decided she had to keep investigating, no matter what Morbier said. They might be able to push him around but no one could tell her what to do.

  Inside the office Miles Davis greeted her, excitedly sniffing her bag of food. He'd spent the night with Rene. She fed him some scraps from the butcher's. The only trace of Rene was a message taped to his computer screen with one word: "later."

  Miles Davis fell asleep perched near the heater and Rene's chair. Aimee poured the Orangina into a crystal Baccarat wineglass left over from her grandfather. She folded the cheese and tapenade into the crusty baguette and ate.

  After she finished her meal, she carefully taped the photo image and torn snapshot piece from Lili Stein's room together. She scanned the complete image into her computer and digitally enhanced the photo and printed a copy.

  Aimee placed this image among the spread-out photos from the police folder and her own archive files. Then in chronological order, she tacked them up along her wall and looked for connections to the swastika.

  She peered at them though a magnifying glass. The black-and-white photos cast everything in a timeless past. Each snapshot held a different scene, but they were all views of the Marais. She recognized the cafe, Ma Bourgoyne, she often went to. A group of booted Nazis sat drinking at the corner table. Next to it, women with rolled pompadour hair wearing ankle socks and t-strap shoes stood in line holding ration books.

  Another photo showed the local Kommandantur on the rue des Francs Bourgeois, with armed Nazis guarding the heavy wood entrance doors. She almost dropped her goblet of Orangina.

  On flags flying above the Kommandantur, the swastikas were tilted, with rounded edges, exactly like the one carved in Lili Stein's forehead.

  Miles Davis growled, then someone knocked loudly on the office door. Had Rene forgotten his keys? She slipped her unlicensed Glock 9-mm
from the desk drawer into her back jeans pocket.

  "Who's there?" she said.

  A muffled voice came from behind the door. "Herve Vitold with BRI."

  "Show me your identification."

  A laminated photo identity card with Brigade de Recherches et d'Intervention flashed in front of the peephole.

  "Un moment." She shuffled the photos together and slid them back into a large envelope in her drawer.

  "Excuse the caution." She opened the door slowly. "I've had some threats."

  Aimee had never seen a Saville Row suit before but figured the Nordic-looking man standing at her door wore one. Probably a Turnbull and Asser handmade shirt, too.

  "Of course," he said. His white blond hair glinted in the hall light but his features remained hidden. "Mademoiselle Leduc?"

  Aimee nodded, keeping her hand cocked on the gun's safety.

  "I have no appointment, but I'd like half an hour of your time. With commensurate compensation, of course," he said.

  Aimee opened the door wider and let him in. She tried to appear as professional as possible in her too tight jeans and a torn Asterix vs. Romans T-shirt. A whiff of something expensive laced with lime hit her.

  "Please come in and have a seat, I'll be with you right away," she said.

  "Herve Vitold." He held out his hand as she showed him into her office. "Security administrator." He had gold-green eyes and an expensive tan for November.

  "Please sit down," she said, surprised he didn't wear a uniform.

  He leaned forward, took out a leather checkbook, and flashed a kilowatt smile at her. "Your rates, please. I want to take care of the business first."

  Aimee briefly wondered why a Gentlemen's Quarterly type from the federals at BRI would walk into her office and want to pay money to talk to her.

  "Five hundred francs for a half hour," she said promptly.

  Let him put his money where his mouth was. See if this handsome man in an expensive suit was real or joking.

  Immediately he pulled out a Montblanc pen, filled in the amount, and slid it across the desk, briefly touching her fingertips. She could have sworn his fleshy, manicured fingers lingered a second too long. Shell-shocked at receiving such a check though she was, she didn't react. Her mind was mostly on his very curly blond eyelashes and the green in his eyes. Consciously, she ignored a danger signal in her brain flashing "Too good to be true."

  "How may I help you?" she smiled.

  "First, may I say I appreciate your taking the time. A business like yours. . ." Here he vaguely gestured around the office, not exactly a beehive of activity. "And with a busy schedule, I'm sure." He flashed his brilliant smile. "But I'll get right down to it, shall I?"

  "It's your franc."

  "My branch works with precautionary services, sort of a field unit, out of La Defense," he said.

  Get with it, girl, and ask a question, she told herself. "Sorry to interrupt, but I'm not familiar with government security. Don't you wear uniforms?"

  Again that smile. "No uniforms. We exist and we don't exist, if you get my meaning."

  Talking in tongues was what it sounded like to her. "Not really. Maybe you should get to the point."

  A glimmer of amusement crossed his face.

  The shadows lengthened across her office walls and she stood up to switch on the office lights.

  "Mais bien sûr," he said. "Special branch out of Bourget, responsible for terrorist management, has taken over the Stein case. All inquiries, surveillance, and follow-up are to be handled by us."

  That fit Morbier's dictum. "Why?"

  "Given the present political climate and sensitivity of the issue, Special Branch feels it must be handled with care." Vitold sat back, crossing his trousered legs precisely at a ninety-degree angle. "This is a historic moment. Finally, for the first time since the last war, the European Union delegates will sit together and sign a treaty that binds Europe. Nothing must endanger this or the covert operation we've mounted to nab terrorists intent on destroying this process."

  Too good to be true, all right. "Are you telling me to, let us say, butt out?" she said.

  "Mademoiselle Leduc, I'm asking you." His eyes flickered again with amusement, then hardened. "I know how important the tax extension is to your firm right now and I wouldn't want anything to interfere with the process."

  "Is this some kind of veiled threat?"

  He stood up with a perfect crease down his pant leg and a still wrinkle-free shirt. "Now, now," he clucked patronizingly.

  She stood up, too. "You walk in here, write a check, and expect me to back off a paid case by threatening to interfere with my taxes? Who do you think you are?"

  "Vitold, as I've said, but I neglected to mention that your investigator's license is about to expire, since you've not renewed it."

  "My investigator's license is code orange. Permanent and nonrenewable," she said.

  "Not anymore."

  "Threaten somebody else." She glared at him, ripping his check into franc-sized bites.

  He grabbed her wrists, imprisoning them in a viselike grip. Little white pieces of his check fluttered onto the parquet floor. She realized his large manicured fingers could snap her bones in half like matchsticks.

  "Must be careful of your little hands." He stroked the scar on her palm.

  She jerked her head towards the video camera mounted into the deco molding. "Go ahead, the security camera is capturing our moment as we speak."

  An odd smile washed over his face and he let go.

  Then he was outside her office, striding toward the glass-paned hallway door.

  "Consider carefully. I would if I were you," he said.

  She whipped out the Glock. But he was gone. Only a whiff of lime lingered in the air.

  She was shaking so much she couldn't keep her hands steady. She forced herself to take deep breaths and slip the safety back on. How deep had she waded in—and what kind of trouble was this anyway?

  The indentations where Herve Vitold's fingers had pinched her wrists were still visibly white. She rewound the videotape and printed a photo of him. She remembered that Texas saying "Not fit for dog meat," and wrote that in red across Vitold's image.

  After she grew calm enough to work, she sat back at her computer. She knew access codes changed daily in the security branch at La Defense. Within ten minutes, she had bypassed the "secure" government system, accessed their database, and found Bourget Special Branch.

  The Bourget chain of command, responsible for antiterrorism functions, only crossed municipal police lines in the event of attack bombings, hostage situations, and the like. Not cold bodies of old women with swastikas carved into their foreheads.

  Then she checked BRI's files, but no Herve Vitold came up. She spent two hours logging into all government branches with corresponding security.

  If Vitold was who he purported to be, then Aimee was Madame Charles de Gaulle, God rest her soul. She found no one named Herve Vitold existing in any data bank.

  Friday Evening

  THE GRAVELLY VOICE DIDN'T sound happy.

  "Consider this an order, Hartmuth. The chancellor is very set on this item of the trade agenda."

  Hartmuth kept his voice level. "Jawohl. I've said I'll review the adjunct waiver proposal before I decide."

  He clicked off. Briefly he wondered about Bonn's reaction if he didn't sign the agreement.

  Hartmuth wearily set his briefcase down on the Aubusson carpet, collapsing into the recamier's brocade. All the rooms were furnished in authentic antiques, yet they were so comfortable, he thought. This silver-and-silk-threaded pillow was familiar, like the kind his mother embroidered on winter evenings long ago.

  But that world had been shattered out of existence. Setting his stockinged feet upon the pillow, he lay back exhausted and closed his eyes.

  Yet he couldn't sleep. He relived the journey, the one in which he returned to his father's home on the outskirts of Hamburg. Of ninety-one thousand taken at the defeat o
f Stalingrad he'd been one of the five thousand Germans limping back after the Siberian work camps.

  At the end of the muddy road, rutted with bomb craters, he'd recognized the blistered paint and blown-out windows. Entering the doorless shell, now empty and deserted, he'd seen that even the fireplace bricks had been taken. He shuffled to the back, looking for his fiancee, Grete. His family had arranged their betrothal while they were in the Gymnasium, before the war.

  A steady chopping and then a sound of splintering wood came from a dilapidated outbuilding in the crisp, bitter air. Red-faced, her breath frosty on a chill March afternoon, Grete was chopping down the back garden shed for firewood, using a rusty ax. She clapped a cracked and bleeding hand over her mouth, stifling her cries, and hugged him.

  "You're alive!" she'd finally managed to say, her voice breaking with emotion. "Katia, Papi is here. Your Papi!" Grete said, shivering in the icy wind.

  A child, wrapped in sewn-together burlap sacks, sat in a nearby wheelbarrow. Oddly, he felt no affection for this hollow-cheeked, runny-nosed creature with yellow ooze dripping out of her eyes. The baby had been playing with a warped photo album and his father's violin bow, all that remained of his family. Grete assured him proudly that Katia was his, born of their coupling on his last furlough in 1942. Yes, he remembered that. He'd been so anxious, after his fiancee's doughlike legs and desperate embrace, to return to Paris and Sarah.

  He knew Katia was his and he resented her. He wished he didn't. Guilt flooded through him for not wanting his own child.

  Because of Katia he knew he'd have to stay and take care of them, marry Grete, and keep his promise. She deserved it, for bearing his child, protecting the house. She told him herself what had happened to his parents.

  "Helmut, the snow hadn't melted by April and Muti and Papi couldn't stand to see Katia shiver so badly. They decided to investigate a rumor about black-market blankets in Hamburg. Only one tram was left running, painted white and red to resemble medical transport," she said. "I'm sorry." Grete put her head down. "I'm sure they didn't feel a thing, Helmut. We saw yellow-white light." She pointed beyond the muddy, rutted road. "After the explosion, smoke billowed into the sky and a rain of little red slivers fell on the snowy field."