Odile closed her eyes.
'Or was it you?' Aimee said.
Anger flashed in Odile's eyes. 'Never.' She pushed the album away.
'Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.' Aimee had had enough. 'That good-old-days stuff doesn't work.'
Odile stared out the window. 'Nothing disappears, eh?'
'Bald and ugly truth doesn't.'
Finally Odile spoke. 'Laurent asked me to inform. Anonymous tips got one hundred francs. The Gestapo offered several hundred francs for outright denunciations. But I wouldn't. I saw the hate and fear in classmates' faces after Laurent walked by. He assumed the Nazis would win the war and protect him.'
'How about you?'
'Wrong person, wrong time. I sheltered that RAF pilot during the Occupation. So they taught me a lesson.' She pointed to her withered legs.
'Who?'
'The Gestapo doctors doing research on spinal nerve endings. They chose me to experiment on. Took me to Berlin, then exhibited me as a freak.'
'Please forgive me.' Aimee shook her head. 'I'm sorry.'
'I was, too.' Odile smiled. 'But I still try to remember the few good old times.'
'What happened to Laurent?'
'Didn't see him towards the end. Disappeared with a lot of people. Who knows?'
'What about his family?' Aimee said.
'Shot.' She pointed out the window. 'Against that wall. His stepmother and father in 1943. Rumor had it that he informed on them.'
Aimee almost choked on her tea.
'Who took over the building?' she finally managed.
'Some cousin from his mother's side. You see, he took his mother's name, she had the money. After she died and his father remarried, he kept her name.'
'Which name?' Aimee said.
'Always called himself de Saux. Hated his father for marrying again.'
Odile Redonnet paused, looking at Aimee for a long moment.
'It's all about him, isn't it?'
Aimee nodded.
'Evil incarnate, but I can't even say that because he was amoral. No conscience. He'd do anything to hold power over someone. But Laurent disappeared, like so many collaborators after the war. He was seventeen or eighteen at Liberation. Who'd recognize him now in his sixties?'
Aimee paused, recalling the torn page from Lili's journal. 'I know it's him. Laurent.' Lili's phrase that Abraham had repeated to her—'Never forget.' Lili had recognized Laurent because he'd sent her family to the ovens. She'd never forgiven him.
'He's back, isn't he?'
'May I have this?' Aimee stood up. 'I have to find out who he is and this should help.'
She put the photo in her bag, then took her teacup to the kitchen and put it in the sink. Odile's kitchen window looked on to a series of dilapidated courtyards. Number 23 was probably one of them.
At the door, Aimee turned. 'Thank you,' she said. 'But I disagree, Odile.'
'How's that?' Odile asked from her wheelchair near the table.
'I'm beginning to believe he never left,' Aimee said.
THE FIRST bell she rang was answered by a fortyish woman in a zebra leotard, with flushed cheeks and a light beading of sweat. Aimee could hear the pounding beats of heavy drums in the background.
'The owner? Don't know. Send my checks to a property management,' she said, out of breath.
'How about the concierge?'
'Isn't one.' Her phone started ringing. 'Sorry,' she said and she closed the door.
None of the other doors she rang answered. She wandered to the back of the building where the garbage cans were kept, hunting for the gas meter. At last she found it behind a rotted wood half door. She wrote down the serial number of the meter. Easy to trace if she accessed EDF—Electricite de France, otherwise a tedious search at the tax office for ownership. Of course, she still might end up going there. Now she needed computer access and pondered breaking back into the Victor Hugo Museum to hit the keys on their state-of-the-art computer.
SHE CALLED ABRAHAM STEIN from a public phone in the Metro station at Concorde since her cell-phone batteries had died. Sinta answered.
'Abraham's talking with some big-nosed
'A chain-smoker, with suspenders?' Aimee asked.
'You got it.'
'Please get Abraham, but don't tell him it's me.' Aimee waited while Sinta fetched him. She heard the radio news broadcast blaring in the background, with a reporter's terse comments. 'Riot police have been called to clear away demonstrators from the Elysee Palace where the European Union Summit Tariff will be signed. Sporadic confrontations between neo-Nazi groups and the Green Party are happening here and in parts of the 4th arrondissement, notably around Bastille.'
The phone scraped something as Abraham picked it up. 'Yes?'
'It's Aimee. Don't say anything, just listen, then answer with yes or no if you can.'
He grunted, then she heard him say, 'Sinta, offer the detective some tea.'
'Is his name Morbier?'
'Yes.'
'Has he mentioned me? Asked when you've last seen me?'
'Yes, doubly so.'
'To do with Lili's murder?'
'Yes.'
All of a sudden she heard Abraham clear his throat and Morbier's gravelly voice came on the line.
'Leduc! Where the hell are—?'
'Why are you setting me up, Morbier?' she said.
'Wait a big minute. You didn't meet me or return my calls and now your partner got shot up,' he said.
'Cut the crap,' she said. 'Who's behind this? I'm clicking off before your three-minute tracer locates me. I've got some questions.'
'By the way, your partner is cranky as hell,' he said. 'Pissed you left him. Seems he might not want to be your partner anymore.'
'Why are you asking Abraham questions when you've been taken off Lili's case?' she said, checking her watch.
'Just curious if he's heard from you,' he said.
'Why the hell ambush me?' she said.
'You're paranoid, what's gotten into you? Listen, Leduc, take a reality pill. No one's after you.'
'The only other explanation is that my phone was tapped, they heard where we were meeting. Javel. . .'
He interrupted her. 'Why are your prints all over his place anyway?'
Her fingerprints were all over the rooms of a supposed suicide. Two minutes and fifty seconds showed on her watch as she hung up the pay phone.
