AL02 - Murder in Belleville Read online

  “Until Eugénie—an angel, that one,” he said, spreading his fingers over the coffee table.

  Aimée’s response caught in her throat. She took a deep breath. “Eugénie sounds very thoughtful, Monsieur Denet.”

  Denet’s eyes held a faraway look.

  “I told her about the boulangerie,” he said. “Looking back, if she was bored, she never let on. Told me it was better than waiting for her boyfriend.”

  “Her boyfriend?”

  “I never saw him,” he said. “Seems he was married. You know the type!”

  Aimée nodded, unsure that her meaning of the “type” matched Jules Denet’s.

  It was hard for Aimée to picture Philippe de Froissart, an aristocrat gone socialist, having a rendevous with Sylvie/Eugénie in this dilapidated building. Why not a hotel? Then again maybe he’d liked slumming in has Belleville.

  “But you saw her girlfriends, of course,” Aimée said. “Did she have a friend with long dark hair?”

  “Not that I remember,” he said. “I’d see Eugénie every few weeks. Maybe a month would pass.”

  “What about her friends?” she asked. “Did you see them?”

  Denet’s face fell. “I wouldn’t call them friends.”

  Aimée sat up. “How’s that, Monsieur Denet?”

  “Arabes,” he said, his mouth tight.

  “Young or older?” Aimée asked.

  “Eugénie had a good heart,” he said and sighed.

  Aimée remembered that Roberge the jeweler had said the same thing.

  “She helped anyone,” Denet said. “I told her, ‘Don’t let those types hang around. They’ll take advantage. Steal.’“

  “What did she say to that, Monsieur?”

  “She’d smile. Say everyone deserved a chance in life. Everyone.” Denet shrugged. “Who can argue with that?”

  Aimée saw that it bothered Denet.

  “Eugénie liked pearls, didn’t she, Monsieur?” she asked.

  He seemed taken aback. “She wore overalls—like my baker’s ones—we used to joke about that. Very down-to-earth.” His smile turned bittersweet. “She seemed sad sometimes. There was a big hurt in her.”

  Was she sad that Philippe, a minister with a family, wanted only an affair in has Belleville while he lived in the heights?

  Aimée noticed Denet’s tapered fingers, trimmed nails, his graceful little movements illustrating his words. Here was an artist who used his hands. Every day.

  She tried to question him further, but he protested, finally revealing he’d seen nothing, only heard noises, and he hadn’t been sure of that since he’d been watching a Jet Li action flick. She wondered how that soothed his nerves to sleep.

  “Here’s my card,” she said. “If you remember anything else, please give me a call.”

  But he’d seemed more concerned about his noise trouble with the Visse family. And that bothered her. She figured he’d heard her and Anaïs in the old garage yard and wanted to get back at the Visses. But at least now she knew when to break into Eugénie’s place.

  Wednesday Midafternoon

  BERNARD HAD FAILED TO deliver the immigrants to the airport. Now he’d be dismissed, relegated to some third-rate office at the ends of the earth.

  Bernard walked away from the church. His feet carried him; his mind was blank. He wished he were numb. He found himself on familiar streets, the haunts of his later childhood. In bas Belleville, where his family had counted themselves lucky to find a cheap apartment after their exodus from Algeria. With no servants or belongings, only the clothes on their backs.

  It had been a frigid, biting April, like this one. One of the coldest in years. Bernard had been surprised at the cold and gray of Paris. He’d never imagined the sheeting rain, density of human habitation, or so many vehicles. Not like Algiers, with the bleaching sun, the clamor of the medina, and the donkey droppings on the stone streets. He’d worn his coat in their small apartment, never feeling warm.

  The nearby Belleville haunts of his childhood had changed. Now the narrow streets were full of discount Chinese shops, cell phone stores with signs in Arabic, even a M. Bricolage do-it-yourself home fix-it chain. Bright green AstroTurf lined the entrance. Once, he remembered, that had been a glass factory.

  His first vivid memory of Paris was seeing the workers in overalls at the glass factory pouring sand into yellow cauldrons—huge, steaming pots made of black cast iron. On his way home from school, he wondered at the crisp and brittle glass sheets lined up for delivery. “Sand into glass?” he asked, and his mother had nodded yes. “But you told me you can’t turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse,” he said. “Of course, that’s different,” she sighed. “How?” he persisted, and she, weary or late for work, would say “Later, Bernard, later.” No one had ever successfully explained it to him. At the polytechnic the dry professor had discussed the chemical process. Secretly Bernard had dismissed the theory, preferring to believe in magic, as he always had. Remembering the stories of the djinn from his Berber nursemaid, and the Aicha qandicha, who, as everyone knew, had goat’s feet and one eye in the middle of her forehead.

  No magic lay in his old apartment building. A restaurant stood on the ground floor where formerly a dark wood brasserie had occupied the corner. The bright, gold-trimmed Thai restaurant advertised EARLY-BIRD DINNER SPECIAL 48 FRS. Memories drew him to the door.

  His stepfather, Roman, a displaced Pole who’d joined the Legion in Algeria, had been a butcher by trade. Roman had supplied the meat and played cards with the owner of the old brasserie, Aram, a Christian from Oran. Roman, he remembered, had resented—as he resented so much else—Aram’s buying the place cheap after the war. But his mother had countered: “The former owners are ashes, Roman, that’s why.” Roman’s eyes had hardened. He’d been quiet after that. His mother too.

  Bernard went inside the restaurant.

  “Monsieur, a party of one?” the smiling black-haired woman asked. Her gold-flecked patung caught the light, a fuchsia band encircled her waist. The scent of lemongrass came from the kitchen. He remembered the wood-paneled walls, the dark interior, and the lack of windows.

  Bernard nodded.

  She showed him to a table set with chopsticks and blue-and-white porcelain bowls and plates. Gold-leaf dragons, like gargoyles, protruded from the ceiling. In the half-full restaurant, low conversations hummed and glasses clinked.

  “Thai iced tea?”

  He nodded again, happy to follow her lead.

  She shoved a plate into his hands. “Help yourself, Monsieur.”

  The buffet table, with steaming soup and heated platters of rice noodles, spring rolls, lemongrass chicken, and other tantalizing dishes made him realize how hungry he was. He remembered that where the buffet stood had been the old birchwood bar. Oiled and polished by Aram every week.

  Bernard was amazed. He hadn’t thought of these things in years. Memories of people and the building opposite, victims of the wreckers’ ball, flooded back to him as he ate. He felt almost giddy. Once it had been different, he remembered. Once it had.

  He helped himself several times to the buffet. A calmness settled over him, like the way he felt from the little blue pills.

  He went to the restroom, passing the kitchen, and looked in. The paint, the grease-spattered tile, even the pipes looked new. Only the arched ceiling downstairs in the lavatory was the same. Bland gray paint covered the old stones where Roman once hung his bloody aprons, the nights he stopped by after work to play cards.

  “Ça va, Monsieur?” a shiny-faced Asian man asked, menus stuck under his arm. “Do you feel unwell?”

  Bernard realized that he stood on the stairs, perspiring and shaking.

  “I’m fine, sorry,” Bernard said. He wiped his brow, then gripped the man’s arm. “How long have you owned this restaurant?”

  Apprehension shone in the man’s eyes. He pulled away.

  “Did you buy this from Aram?”

  The man erupted in a volley of Thai, then
disappeared up the stairs. Bernard slapped his forehead. How dumb! Of course the man was sans-papiers. And here he was accosting an illegal to find out about the past.

  Upstairs the smiling woman who’d served him had turned into a businesslike hostess. Her command of French disappeared and she pointed at the bill, then her watch, indicating closing time. His search for the past scared these people. He tried to explain one more time, but their impassive faces made him give up.

  On rue d’Orillon, he paused and looked up at his old window. The peeling shutters were open, and a single line of wash hung outside. An African dialect reached his ears. A child cried, the mother’s placating rejoinder quickly soothed it. Another wave of immigrants, Bernard thought. Some things never changed.

  The pager on his hip vibrated. Nedelec’s number at the ministry read ominously on the display. Bernard stopped at the corner phone.

  “Directeur Berge, we’re giving you a second chance,” Nedelec said. “Mustafa Hamid wants to negotiate. We expect you at the ministry within the hour.”

  Before he could protest, Nedelec had hung up.

  Bernard felt cornered again.

  He stumbled and lost his dinner in the vacant lot, among the rubble and wire where his neighbor’s building had once stood.

  Wednesday Early Evening

  MORBIER HAD AGREED TO meet Aimée at a small brasserie on rue Pyrenees after his therapy. He was late. She’d been ordering steadily at the bar.

  “My poker game’s waiting, Leduc,” Morbier said, after the smoked trout and escalope de veau. He set his napkin on the table. “Or did you have something to say.”

  She’d been debating whether to ask Morbier or not. Maybe it was the Pernod talking, but she had to know. “Why did Papa take the surveillance job? Looking back, it didn’t seem like the ordinary contract.”

  Morbier exhaled, blue smoke spiraled in the close air of the brasserie. “Give it a rest, Leduc.”

  “How can I?” She leaned forward, her arms resting on the crumb-littered white tablecloth. “I wake up at night thinking there was something he didn’t tell me. Something I missed… how tense he was, how he went first into the van …”

  “You’re thinking you should have gone first?”

  Sometimes she wondered if she should have.

  “If you had, Leduc,” Morbier continued, “your papa, rest his soul, would have been right where you’re sitting, his heart bleeding. Instead of yours. He’d have been hurt more.”

  “How can you say that?” She brushed the crumbs aside, forming them into small piles.

  “Eh, young people!” he said simply. “Who gets over the loss of a child?”

  Morbier had turned into a pocket psychologist. Maybe he’d attended too many sensitivity sessions at the commissariat.

  “You know more than you’re telling me, Morbier.”

  “And if I do, what would it change?”

  She paused, then swept the piles of crumbs into her cupped palm below the tablecloth edge.

  “I could sleep at night, Morbier.”

  He looked away.

  “Going to Place Vendôme brought everything up for me again,” she said. “Sorry.” With a quick motion, she flicked the crumbs onto her plate, then got the waiter’s attention.

  “L’addition,” she said.

  She pulled a Gitane from Morbier’s packet, scratched the kitchen matchbox he always carried, and lit it up. Raw and dense, the smoke hit her as she inhaled.

  Morbier eyed her. “Didn’t you quit, Leduc?”

  “I’m always quitting,” she said, savoring the jolt.

  After paying the check and struggling into her damp raincoat, she and Morbier stood outside on the glistening cobblestones. The yellow foglamps of cars blurred like halos in the mist. She realized Morbier was watching her.

  “You’ve got survivor’s guilt, Leduc,” he said. “I’ve seen it too many times. So have you.”

  “So that’s what it’s called?” she asked, digging in her bag for her Métro pass. She held it up. Expired. “Morbier, I wasn’t searching for a label. But thanks. Now I can catalog the volume and put it on the shelf, eh?”

  “You’ve had too much Pernod.”

  “Not enough, Morbier,” she said.

  He shook his head. “Once your papa was my partner. It doesn’t go away. But I move on. How do you think I felt?”

  Stunned, she looked at him. He’d never alluded to his feelings. Not at the funeral, or the posthumous medal ceremony, or over the years. Never.

  “Désolée, Morbier,” she said.

  A taxi, its blue light signaling it was free, cruised up the cobblestones. Morbier stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled. Loud. The taxi halted in front of a large black puddle.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “I feel like walking.”

  She was tired. “Don’t mind if I do.”

  She got in. “Seventeen quai d’Anjou, s’il vous plaît.”

  Before she shut the door, Morbier leaned over.

  “Come to terms with it, Leduc, or you’ll be devoured.”

  THE TAXI sped along the darkened quai, punctuated by globular street lamps, their beams swallowed in a thick mist. Morbier was right. The time had come to move on. March forward.

  The taxi stopped under the leafy branches in front of her apartment. Below flowed the Seine, reflecting pinpricks of light as mist forked under Pont Marie’s stone supports. She paid and tipped the driver twenty francs. Insurance for good taxi karma.

  The trouble was that she didn’t feel like moving on. She felt like clinging to the memories, fading and more transparent every year, especially the image of her father’s crooked smile. Most of all she wanted to know who had killed him. Then maybe she could come to terms with it in her own way.

  Her apartment lay empty. No sign of Yves. She hadn’t heard from him again. She’d tried forgetting, hard to do since her sheets and towels held a lingering scent of him.

  After walking Miles Davis along the quai, she took him upstairs. But she couldn’t face her dark apartment and walked over to her office. Work always put her back on track.

  The phone was ringing as she opened her glass-paned office door.

  “A1lô?”

  “You call yourself my friend, promise to help my sister?” Martine asked angrily as she answered. “But you get her hauled to the commissariat?”

  Aimée froze. “The commissariat?”

  “Philippe said it’s your fault!” Martine said, her husky voice rising.

  “He’s lying, Martine,” she said, startled. She wondered what tale Philippe had spun. But in a way it was true—if she had made Anaïs go to the flics—but then those men following them had diverted her. “I’ve been trying to reach Philippe and Anaïs for two days. They don’t return my calls!”

  “The only favor I’ve ever asked you, Aimée,” Martine said, disappointment in her voice. “Couldn’t you have helped me once?”

  “Mais, Martine, I helped Anaïs escape,” she said, exasperated.

  “Escape?”

  Aimée set down her bag and hit the light switch in her dark office.

  “Sounds like Philippe neglected to mention the car bomb that exploded in front of Ana’ts and me,” Aimée said, sitting down at her desk, logging on to her computer. “The victim was his ‘former’ mistress.”

  Martine sucked in her breath.

  “Or so Anaïs said, but there’s more to it than that,” she said, checking her answering machine. “Things are smellier than the rat’s head delivered to my door on Monday. Are you sitting down?”

  “I guess I better,” Martine said, her voice sounding worried but calmer.

  Aimée told her what happened since Anaïs had called her: Sylvie’s possible red-haired alias as Eugénie, the Lake Biwa pearl, the Duplo plastique, and Sylvie’s lack of positive ID.

  “Look, Philippe’s never been my favorite,” Martine said. “He loves Anaïs, granted, in his own way. But I know he wouldn’t put her or anyone else in danger. He’s the o
riginal aristocrat turned bleeding heart liberal. Since Simone was born—well—Anaïs says, he’s taken stock of his life, made changes.”

  Aimée remembered Anaïs in the taxi speeding through Belleville. Her bloody leg and her calm acceptance of Philippe’s former infidelity.

  “What charges did the flics pull her in on?” Aimée asked.

  “I don’t know, but you’ve got to help her,” Martine said. “Please! We Sitbon sisters pick such winners, eh?” Her voice had grown wistful.

  Was Martine thinking about Gilles, her former boss and lover at Le Figaro whose job she now held?

  “My track record doesn’t rate any better,” Aimée said. “Yves returned unannounced, I let him spend the night, and then he disappears.”

  “He’s in Marseilles, Aimée,” Martine said. “Covering Mustafa Hamid’s AFL branch in case of repercussions.”

  Mustafa Hamid—Aimée remembered seeing that name from the AFL posters plastered around Belleville.

  She heard Martine take a deep breath. Instead of reassuring words, Martine warned her. “Yves’s ex-wife’s back in the picture,” she said. “Seems she’s making big noises about their apartment.”

  This surprised her. Yves had never mentioned it, but then again she’d never asked.

  “How do you keep so informed?”

  “Because he complained that going to Marseilles was going to get him into trouble with all the women in his life,” Martine said. “Eh, if that’s blunt, sorry. But I know you can take it. You don’t rely on men.”

  Yves could have told her.

  Next time he showed up she’d ask for her key back.

  “Which commissariat’s holding Anaïs?” Aimée said, hoping her tone sounded matter-of-fact.

  “In the quartier Charonne, rue des Orteaux,” Martine said.

  “Good. I know someone there,” she said. “At least I used to.”

  But she wondered why Anaïs was being held. Was this some kind of cover-up?

  JOUVENAL, AN old colleague of Morbier and her father’s, manned the night-desk phone at the commissariat in Charonne. Had done so for twenty years. Too bad he hadn’t been on duty when Martaud had brought her in to the other station: She’d have called him instead of Morbier.