“The younger brother, not in the Resistance, died,” I said, “and the older brother, active against the Germans, survived?”
“It happened in those days. It was all chaos, no one knew what would happen to whom. I think Paul Manet was captured, came back a year or so later. It is hard to know about those days. People vanished, reappeared, died, survived; no one knew how, or why, or what went on minute to minute.”
“And papers were lost, destroyed,” I said. “Faces changed with scars and suffering. If a man was captured by the Gestapo, did they announce it? Did they announce executions? Deaths?”
“No, a man simply disappeared. The Nazis themselves did not always know what happened to whom or where. Not at the end.”
“Chaos,” I said. “Stay here. Wait.”
Claude Marais nodded. Li stood beside him.
23
Lieutenant Marx wasn’t in his office. I talked to one of the other detectives.
“Tell Marx to contact Paris right now. Check out a younger brother of Paul Manet. Find out what happened to him, what Paul Manet did at the end of World War Two, where Paul was and where the younger brother was. Have them check records, photos, fingerprints if there are any. Find out if Paul Manet lived in Paris after the war, if he returned to his family and old friends. Especially check all records on the younger brother.”
“You have something, Fortune?” the detective asked.
“I think so, a hunch. Tell Marx I’m going to try to find Charlie Burgos and Danielle Marais. A condemned building on Nineteenth Street, near the river. He’ll know it.”
The abandoned brownstone looked like any other building in the hot sun. No ghosts by day, only a shabby building with boards at the windows, people hurrying past on their important business, flowers on some of the weeds. No cars were in the alley.
Inside, the derelict building was dim and hot, and on the third floor there was no sound. In the room where I had been held, dark behind its blanketed windows, the mattresses were still there-but nothing else. Stripped, all the clothes and cheap possessions of the street boys gone. An empty room, as abandoned as the building itself.
Not quite.
Somewhere to the rear of the dark room there was a sound. A low sound-half like a whine, half a moan. I walked back, slowly and carefully.
She was kneeling on the bare floor-Danielle Marais. In tight blue jeans and an old shirt. She was crying, her head down, sitting back on her legs where she kneeled. She heard me behind her after a moment, looked back and up at me. Her heavy, petulant, juvenile face was anguished.
“He’s dead. Someone killed him.”
Charlie Burgos lay on his back, oddly flat like an animal with the meat sucked out. His sharp young face was etched in deep planes and furrows; somehow younger in the perpetual age of death. His wide eyes were shining as if he saw something very interesting on the ceiling of the barren room with its bare mattresses and blanket-covered windows. The handle of what looked like a hunting knife stuck up out of his chest like a cross, or the rifle of some soldier buried where he had fallen in an empty desert.
“I came to meet him,” Danielle Marais said. “We were all going to meet. They ran, the others. Grabbed what they had, and ran. No one would stay with him. No one.”
What else could they do, Charlie Burgos’s brothers of the street? Powerless in a vast city, they could only run and hide and hope no one would think about them. Mice in a burning field, afraid of the flames and of the hawks that would soon come to hover over the blackened field looking for something to eat, preying on the exposed because they needed a victim.
“We were going away, it was going to be fine now,” Danielle Marais said. “Fine, no more problems.”
I knelt down over the body. There was a lot of blood. It had only just started to congeal, blacken. The knife handle was some kind of wrapped material-leather or plastic or a treated canvas that would give no fingerprints. A straight, colorless knife with only a small guard and a narrowish blade, but heavy. I felt Charlie Burgos. He was soft and limp, still vaguely warm. No more than two hours, even in the heat of the city, but probably not less than an hour.
“How long have you been here?” I asked Danielle.
She shook her head, back and forth. “I don’t know. Maybe an hour, maybe more. I don’t know. They just ran. They didn’t even look at Charlie after they saw. Grabbed their dirty junk, and ran! His friends!”
“He’s got no friends, he’s dead,” I said harshly. “That’s the rules, Danielle. The law of the streets. He doesn’t exist, and he never did now. That’s the world you were going into, the world your father and mother wanted to save you from. You were going into it, and everyone in it wants only to escape into what you already have. You’re lucky, a second chance.”
She glared her hatred at me, but that would pass. To the young, poverty and clawing against an established world were exciting. But poverty is only pain, clawing only bleeds, and there is excitement and strength only when there is a choice.
“He’s dead, Danielle,” I said. “It’s over. Do you know who killed him?”
“No,” she said, stared down at Charlie Burgos dead in an empty building.
“But you know why, don’t you? What was he doing, Danielle? What were you both doing?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know! He never said-”
“Damn it, girl, you know, and whoever killed Charlie’ll have to kill you too! Tell me! You saw something that night, right? Blackmail?”
“Yes, yes, yes!” she cried, rocked on her knees. “But I don’t know who! Charlie didn’t tell me who. He said it was better that way, safer. He was protecting me.”
“Charlie Burgos? Nuts, he protected no one except himself. You weren’t with him outside the pawn shop that night?”
“Not all the time,” she said, tears in her eyes now as if the mention of that night made her remember all her times with Charlie Burgos. Maybe she had really loved him in her child’s way-the worst, deepest way. “We’d gone to my father to borrow some money for an idea Charlie had. Dad wouldn’t give us any. He was nice, he was always nice, but he said that Charlie was wrong for me, he wouldn’t help Charlie to ruin me. We went out, we had nothing to do, you know, so we hung around. After the Chinaman came out, Charlie got restless waiting for Dad to come out. He sent-”
“Charlie was waiting for your father to come out? Why?”
She looked away. “I… I think he was going to rob the cash drawer. We knew there was money in it. I have a key.”
“That sounds like Charlie,” I agreed. “Why didn’t he?”
“He… he saw someone. I… I think he did go into the shop, he had my key. I think that’s why he sent me off.”
“Sent you where?”
“He told me to come back here to the room to see if any of the boys were around and maybe had some money. He said he was thirsty, wanted a drink. But I think he sent me really because he didn’t think I’d let him rob Dad’s shop.”
“What happened when you went back?”
“It took a while, you know? Over an hour. I waited here for one of the boys who was supposed to have money. Charlie got mad if he sent me for money and I didn’t get any.”
“I can believe that,” I said. “An hour? Between eleven and twelve that night?”
She shook her head. “More like eleven-thirty to one A.M. He didn’t send me right away after Jimmy Sung came out.”
“When you did go back, what was Charlie doing?”
“Nothing-he wasn’t there. I looked around, looked inside the shop. I… I found my Dad. He was in the chair- dead! I didn’t know what to do. I thought-”
