'You're in danger. Go out the back of your building, there's a courtyard in the rear, right?' Aimee didn't wait for an answer. 'Bring a hammer or chisel. Find the door to the alley, there's always one. It's where the horses were stabled; break it open. Do you understand so far?' Aimee waited but all she heard was a sharp intake of breath over the phone.
She continued, 'Go to the button factory Mon Bouton, around the corner from Place des Vosges on rue de Turenne. Tonight it's open late. Go inside, but nowhere near a window. Leave now and I should get there just when you do.' Still silence at the other end. 'Whatever happened between you and Lili Stein is in the past. I'm doing this because she didn't deserve to be murdered. They're after you now. Leave immediately.' Aimee hung up.
Aimee's brightly lit goal, the button factory, twinkled from over the rooftops and through the trees. One street over from the Place des Vosges, Mon Bouton inhabited a small courtyard.
Victor Hugo's canopied bed bordered on comfortable and apart from the scurrying noises, she felt safe. But now Aimee had to leave the museum without setting off the alarm. She tied assorted cleaning smocks and rags from a utility closet together with sheets she'd found under the bed of the great writer. She grabbed the guard's chair and slung it over the toilet. Few museums bothered to include skylights more than three stories high in their alarm systems. Here, two metal bars were strung across the thick, webbed glass. She swung the roped rags over the bars and hoisted herself onto the chair. Hunched below the rectangular skylight, she aimed her right foot and kicked one of the bars.
She wished she wore boots instead of several-hundred-franc high heels. After several attempts, the bar loosened enough for her to slowly wedge it out. But it was still too narrow for her to slide through. She kicked again and again. Finally she kicked the second bar loose and pulled herself up slowly. As she released the handle, the skylight popped open. The night air was clear and crisp amid the chimney pots and slanted roofs.
She had to reach the button factory on rue de Turenne across the roofs of Place des Vosges. With her skirt hiked up over her thighs she climbed the peaked eaves and straddled corbels. The spiky ears and tails of gargoyles perched below her on the right. She made her way across the rooftops sliding over ancient slate tiles, her high heels scrabbling for purchase on the sleek surface. Open windows and skylights exhaled vestiges of classical music, the clatter of cooking pots, the scattered moans of lovemaking. She gripped a moldering brick exhaust cone and felt a wet mushy turd under her palm. Rodents.
Steamy, greasy vapor shot out of the cone as Aimee grabbed at rusty iron rungs leading over a high bricked abutment. Climbing, breathing hard, she pulled herself up each rung slowly. The smell of frying onions from a lighted kitchen below assailed her nostrils as a little boy cried out, 'I'm hungry, Maman!'
At another series of roofs she stopped, kneeling high above the Marais, to catch her breath. More rungs led to a sloping roof over the button factory courtyard. Spread-eagled, she worked her way along the chipped shingles, using her toes to find niches when the rungs twisted or came loose. Slipping along, clutching at oily slate shingles broken off in places, she reached a metal overhang above the courtyard. Probably a twenty-foot drop. If she could clamp on to the rusty fire-escape ladder and slide down, it might just be a ten-foot drop.
She aimed for the tin gutter next to it. Lying facedown, she scooted herself forward a few feet at a time until she finally grasped the chute leading to the rain gutter.
She had to say one thing for this designer wear, it held up under tough conditions. If the chute couldn't bear her weight she'd have to reach out, push off the gutter, and grab the fire escape quickly. Which happened as soon as she'd thought it. She grabbed at the tin gutter which squealed as her fingernails raked over it.
She tried desperately to hold on to the narrow ridge of the gutter as her legs swung wildly in the air. Cold air rushed around her as she reached for the fire-escape rail with her other hand. This is it, I'm done for, she thought. A wild circus act before I splatter on the cobblestones in an Issey Miyake suit hiked over my thighs. Her father's grinning face next to a faded sepia likeness of her mother flashed through her mind. Her only chance was a dumpster below her filled with God knew what.
She screamed as the gutter broke and she dove towards the dumpster.
And plunged, somersaulting, into the cold night air.
She landed sitting upright in a dumpster full of buttons that cushioned her fall. Red, green, and yellow ones. Glossy and shining in the moonlight that peeked over the trees. The buttons ground against each other as she reached up to the dumpster rim. Her hand slipped and she was buried under mounds of buttons. Jesus, would she be suffocated by these colored disks after she'd survived a twenty-foot fall from the roof?
She finally managed to pull herself up, crunching scores of buttons. The courtyard seemed amazingly quiet. Pulling her skirt down, she shook herself, and a myriad red, green, and yellow pellets rained on the cobblestones. She'd landed in a batch of defective button rejects. She tramped into the side door of Mon Bouton.
'
Leah's eyes opened in wonder at her appearance. 'Such a nice suit!' She came closer, being myopically shortsighted from sorting buttons for so many years. 'Is it. . .?'
'Murder.' Aimee nodded, feeling guilty for abusing Leah's trust.
At that moment the door opened slightly and Aimee turned.
'I'm here.' Albertine Clouzot's housekeeper, Florence, hesitated. 'I almost didn't come.'
Aimee gently took her arm. 'You're safe here, Sarah.'
The former Sarah Strauss wore a black pageboy wig framing her startling blue eyes. Gaunt and tall, her beauty still glowed. She stuck her trembling hands in the pockets of her raincoat.
She stared at Aimee. 'But I noticed the same man who'd been out front when I returned from shopping. He was still there after you called.'
'We need to talk. Coffee?'
The only other noise came from the hissing espresso maker on the gas stove top. Leah turned off the workroom lights, leaving only a dim spotlight on the cooktop. She nodded conspiratorially and left the room.
Aimee guided Sarah to a long wooden refectory table, gouged and scarred, alongside galvanized metal tubes and cylinders that sorted buttons. She poured steamy black espresso into two chipped demitasse cups and slid the bowl of brown sugar cubes across the table.
'Someone's out to kill you.' Aimee sipped her espresso. 'They're after me, too.'
Sarah looked up from the demitasse cup, startled.
'What does the swastika carved into Lili Stein's forehead mean?' Aimee said, rubbing her hand on the wooden table.
Sarah shook her head.
Aimee had to get her to talk. 'Sarah, this is all about the past. You know it!'
Fear and mostly sadness shone in Sarah's eyes. She whimpered, 'A curse, that's what it is. Following me all my life. Why does God allow this? I read the Torah, trying to understand, but. . .' And she collapsed, crying.
Aimee felt guilty for her outburst. 'Look, I'm sorry.' She leaned over and put her arm around the woman. 'Sarah—do you mind if I call you that?' She lifted Sarah's chin up. 'I never would judge your actions fifty years ago. I wasn't alive then. Just tell me what happened.' Aimee paused. 'Tell me about you and Lili.'
'You found her body, didn't you?' Sarah said.
Aimee's stomach tightened.
Sarah looked down, unable to meet Aimee's eyes. 'She'd changed.'
Aimee's curiosity had been colored by fear. Ever since she saw the photo of Lili in the crowd when Sarah was tarred with the swastika.
Sarah spoke slowly. 'That's all so long ago. Some of us spend our lives making up for the past,' she sighed.
'Did she. . .' Aimee couldn't finish.
Sarah pulled off her black wig. 'Do this?'
The scarred swastika across her forehead showed even in the dim light. Sarah nodded. 'If Lili hadn't, someone else in the mob would have.'
Aimee was amazed at the weary forgiveness in her voice.
Sarah read her eyes. 'But she stopped them from hurting my baby. She persuaded the crowd to leave us alone. Helped me find shelter.' Sarah sighed. 'After fifty years, I saw her again, it must have been just before. . .'
Aimee bolted to attention. 'Before she was murdered?'
'I recently moved back to Paris.' Sarah nodded. 'As you know, I'd only just begun working at Albertine's. Lili
