Streets, alleys, and boulevards listed names and addresses. Forty minutes later she found a household at 86 rue Payenne cross-referenced from an Strauss, Ruben with this under it:
A red line ran through the name, like all the others on the page. The Strauss family were routed via the Vel d'Hiver transit camp. Sarah T. Strauss had entered Drancy prison and then was listed on Convoy number 10 to A, meaning Auschwitz. How could this Sarah Strauss be Thierry's mother?
Aimee noticed how bright the red line through Sarah's name was compared to the others. Odd, she thought, every other red line had faded to a rose hue. It almost looked to her as though the A had been squeezed next to the non-Aryan classification column, with its bold black J for Jew. As if the A for Auschwitz had been added later. But that didn't fit with what she'd discovered.
Claude Rambuteau had seen Sarah alive when she handed them the infant Thierry. Aimee remembered Javel's comment. He'd mentioned the bright-blue-eyed Jew who'd given birth to a
As she returned past the desk, wiping her hands of dust, the librarian said that it was their policy for the librarian to reshelve.
'Find what you were looking for?' she inquired.
'Yes, but it raises even more questions,' Aimee replied.
'A lot of people who come here say that. Try the National Library in Washington or the Wiener Library in London. Those are the major sources besides Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.'
Aimee thanked her and slowly walked down the sweeping marble stairway. She felt dirty after touching those pages and her fingers reeked with a special musty smell that clung to the catalog of the dead. At home she collapsed and thought over all the events of the day. She took a long shower and stayed under the hot water until it ran out. But she couldn't get rid of the smell or erase the red lines from her mind.
THURSDAY
'I'VE GOTTEN EVERYTHING CHANGED since the break-in,' Rene said. 'Here's your new access code and keys to the safe.'
'HOPALONG?' She laughed, eagerly punching in her new access code. 'Where do you get these, Rene?'
'My perverted childhood spent with pulp Westerns.' He winked. 'I'm CASSIDY.'
'What a poet!' She frowned. 'Finding the Luminol fingerprint is going to be harder than I thought. Fingerprint files have been centralized. It's all through FOMEX out of Neuilly.'
'Try to interface with LanguedocZZ via Helsinki,' Rene suggested. 'The main menu originated with them.'
'Good thinking, Cassidy,' she said.
Twenty minutes later, she'd accessed FOMEX, the repository of files from the prefecture of police of every city or town in France that had its own prefecture. By the time she got to the main catalog of fingerprints, the only title that was close was FINGERPRINT, BLOODY, of which there were three subsets: Pending, Active, and Deceased, and thousands of files under each. It could fit all three. She called Morbier.
'Where did the bloody fingerprint go?' she said.
'With the experts,' he said.
She heard the scrape of the wooden match on his desk. She knew the videoed fingerprint had been scanned and immediately catalogued on computer files.
'No kidding, Morbier. What's it under?'
'Pending and Interpol. What's it to you?'
She punched in Pending, then Paris, then 4th arrondissement/ 64 rue des Rosiers. Up came a giant index finger on her screen.
'Just like to be included in the twenty-eight percent of the informed population,' she said. She'd like to see the expression on his face if he could see the display filling her screen.
'The higher-ups have spoken again. Seems whatever case I touch they like to take over,' he said.
'Meaning that they didn't like your face on the evening news?'
'Meaning Luminol use falls under strict rules from the ministry at La Defense,' he answered. 'Which I didn't follow. So I'm pushed off that case.'
'That doesn't make sense,' she said.
'Leduc, just a word to the wise. Leave this thing alone.'
'So only the big boys get to play and set up their own rules? Is that what you're saying, Morbier?' Aimee asked.
'They already have,' he said. 'Watch out.'
The fingerprint hadn't even been classified or typed yet, but Aimee could tell by the whorls filling her computer screen that it was common to one third of the population. Such a clear readable print; the swirls over the hump of the center finger pad were unique, as everyone's were. But she could start to classify and discard two thirds of the millions of prints that were stored based on what she saw. She punched into FOMEX on Rene's terminal and scanned the known fingerprints of Nazis from Nuremberg trial files into the computer. That would give her a base to start from. On the other terminal hooked to his Minitel she downloaded the
But that turned into a dead end. She checked other memorandums from the file. Nothing. The Nuremberg trials only yielded prints of those already executed for war crimes and the
At a loss as to where to go, she delved into Republic of Germany classified documents. After forty more minutes of searching, she accessed the Third Reich database, which flooded the screen with a whole plethora of Nazism. Many of the entries had come from charred remnants scanned and entered into the database from the remains left in the burned Reichstag basement smoldering as Berlin fell. Countrywide lists of Hitler Youth group members and the alliance of German Girls were catalogued alongside SA brown shirt organizations, fingerprint files of Gestapo members, and even the names of German women awarded gold crosses for having the most children.
She entered Gestapo files and searched by surname. Nothing came up that matched the ones she wanted. Then she tried locale, searching the three main headquarters in Munich, Hanover, and Berlin. A 'Volpe, Reiner' aged eight years old came up but that was the closest. Then she decided to go year by year. She began in 1933, the first known year on file of an established Gestapo. After an hour and a half she'd found the fingerprints in the Gestapo file of the SS chief and underlings in Paris: Rausch, Oblath, and Volpe. She printed them, amazed at the clear imprints that existed after all this time.
After pulling up the Luminol fingerprints from the FRAPOL 1 file, she peered through her magnifying glass at
