AL01 - Murder in the Marais

Here was Lili's murder, confirmed in black and white! She must have missed the first mention during the week. Above her, the strains of a violin, playing 'Coeur Vagabond,' drifted from an open window.

Her mother had hummed that old song on laundry days before the French garde mobiles, supervised by the Gestapo, rounded up her family in The Velodrome d'Hiver raid and deported them to Auschwitz in July 1942. She trembled and it wasn't from the chill November wind. Were they after her, too? Or was Helmut?

Sunday Noon

AIMEE FOUND ABRAHAM STEIN in the storefront synagogue Temple E'manuel on rue des Ecouffes, a sliverlike street crossing rue des Rosiers. Formerly a stationery store, the synagogue stood next to a vegetable shop that displayed bins of dark purple aubergines, shiny green peppers, and scabbed potatoes on the curb.

Abraham looked thinner, if that was possible. Dark circles ringed his eyes and his dark blue striped shirt gave him the appearance of a concentration-camp inmate from old newsreels. Lili Stein's memorial service had brought the small community together inside this tiny dark synagogue.

Everything bespoke tradition to Aimee—the low tones, the smell of fat before it got skimmed off chicken soup somewhere in a nearby kitchen, the gleam from brass candlesticks, and the feel of the rough wooden bench. Present time faded.

She became a little girl again, with ankle socks that always slid down and itchy wool sweaters that scratched her neck. Fidgety as usual. Trying to be as French as everyone else, the continual struggle of her childhood. Her mother holding her hands, making the sign of the cross, telling her to stop speaking English mixed with French. 'Mais, Maman, I can't help it!' she had begged. 'Stop that Frenglish, Amy, you're old enough to know,' her mother had said. But that was as foreign to her as feeling French. 'Sooner you learn, the better it is,' she remembered her mother saying. 'You can take care of yourself!'

'Baruch hatar adonhai.'

She slowly came back to the present, while a pair of wizened hands gripped hers and helped her make hand motions. But it wasn't her mother. It was a white-haired woman, eyes clouded by cataracts, whom she'd never seen before.

'Tres bien, mon enfant!' the old woman with misfitting dentures beamed, hugging her.

Aimee sank back in disappointment. Her childhood was gone and her mother wasn't coming back. She took a deep breath and gently, she extricated herself, clasping the woman's gnarled hands in thanks.

Outside, she nodded at Sinta and approached Abraham Stein on the curb. He appeared melancholy as usual.

Rachel Blum, stooped and clad in an old sagging floral-print dress, disappeared behind a wooden door opposite the storefront synagogue.

'Excuse me,' Aimee said to Abraham. She knocked on the wooden door several times. Finally a wooden slat slid open a crack.

'Hello, Rachel, it's Aimee Leduc. May I come in a few moments?' she said.

Rachel didn't smile as she peered out. 'Why?'

'I forgot to ask you something.'

Rachel slowly pulled open the heavy, creaking door.

'How are you, Rachel?' Aimee said, walking inside the moldy smelling entrance.

Rachel sighed. 'Fallen arches, that's what the doctor calls it now. Can't take too much standing, my feet can't anyway, not like I used to.'

She motioned to Aimee. They sat together on a wooden bench in the dark paved entrance.

'Walking on stone too much—that does it.' She'd taken off her shoe and was rubbing the sole of her foot. 'Those stairs going to Lili's used to be wooden. This stone gets my bunions hurting.'

'Is that where the bloody footsteps were?' Startled, Aimee remembered Rachel's description. Morbier's men had found evidence of Lili Stein's blood there also.

'You don't give up, do you?'

'No one deserves to die like that,' Aimee said, her face flushed. 'Yet every time I ask questions about Lili's past, people don't want to talk. Why don't I chase the neo-Nazis, they say, do something concrete?'

Rachel kept rubbing her foot and didn't look at Aimee.

'I don't care where you fit into Lili Stein's past,' Aimee said. 'You won't talk to me because you think I'll judge you. No one my age would understand what you went through during the Occupation, right?'

Aimee attempted to keep her voice neutral, but she wasn't succeeding. 'Who gives you the right to decide? And even if I can't understand, do you want the horror of what happened to be hidden forever?'

Rachel still avoided Aimee's gaze.

'Look at my face, Rachel,' Aimee said.

Rachel shook her head.

'Lili's murder wasn't a skinhead special. That swastika was SS Waffen style,' she said. 'The SS. . .don't you see that? Or maybe you don't want to.'

Rachel shrugged. 'You're the one with the big theories.'

Aimee sat back, feeling defeated as the hard bench cut into the burned spot on her spine. She shook her head and spoke as if to herself. 'Who's next?'

Rachel sighed. 'Arlette's murder happened after a big roundup of Jews in the Marais,' she said.

Aimee froze.

Rachel's hands sliced the air, punctuating her words. 'Jews kept indoors after that. We only bought things at certain hours of the day, we were even afraid to do that. That's when the Gestapo started more night raids. Almost every night. I'll never forget. Middle of the night, the squeal of brakes in the street and footsteps came pounding up the stairs. Would they stop at your apartment? Yell 'Open up' and bash in your door with their jackboots? Or would they keep going and pick on someone else that night? My neighbor down the hall beat them to it. When they were breaking down her door, she grabbed her two sleeping babies and jumped out the window, right onto rue des Rosiers.' Rachel pointed to the street. 'In front of this building. I like to think those babies slept on through to heaven.'

Aimee sensed something odd in the way Rachel spoke, but she couldn't put her finger on it. Rachel took a deep breath and continued. 'At Lili's apartment they couldn't get the blood off those wood steps. No one would go upstairs, they ended up just paving them over with stucco.' She leaned close to Aimee's ear.

Aimee shifted on the dark, narrow bench.

Rachel whispered, 'Some say they were Lili's bloody footprints because they were small. But Lili was gone. She didn't come back until Liberation and so much was going on, no one thought to question her. I asked her once about the concierge's murder she witnessed but she wouldn't elaborate. She never wanted to talk about the Occupation, said the war was over. She liked telling her son how she dealt with collaborators, though.' She added, 'Lili could be mean sometimes.'

'Who found Arlette, the concierge?' Aimee asked.

'Javel. Seems he came courting later in the evening, saw a lot of blood. He found her in the light well, her brains all over.'

'What do you mean, 'a lot of blood'?' Aimee said.

'I wasn't there but that's what I heard.' Rachel Blum wedged her shoe back on and slowly rose to her feet. 'I tell you, people did wonder about Arlette's murder since she wasn't Jewish. Rumor had it she was a BOF, but then everyone in Paris who could did that.'

'BOF?'

'Beurre, oeufs, fromage—butter, eggs, and cheese,' Rachel said. 'That was the currency of the black market. You'd be surprised to know how many supposed Resistance members made fortunes that way. Everyone was jealous of those BOFs. I remember Arlette as silly and greedy. Always talking about her