Murder in Belleville

“Aimee Leduc.” She pulled a damp business card from her bag and laid it on the sticky zinc counter. “My friend sounded agitated on the phone.”

He studied her, his hand wiping a falling strand of hair back over the bald dome of his head. “I’ve been busy with deliveries.”

“This isn’t like my friend Anais,” she said. “She was very upset. I heard car brakes, loud voices.” She searched his face, trying to ascertain if he was telling the truth.

He hobbled out from behind the large chrome espresso machine to where she stood.

“A blond, wearing designer clothes and gold chains, came in,” he said. “She looked like she’d made a wrong turn coming out of the Crillon.”

That must have been Anais. Aimee maintained her composure—this man was proving to be a helpful observer.

Torn between searching for Anais and hoping she’d return, Aimee decided to wait. She drummed her chipped red nails on the counter. She remembered Martine complaining about her sister: It was always hurry up and wait.

“Did you see her leave, Monsieur?”

He shook his head.

She was dying for a cigarette. Too bad she’d quit five days, six hours, and twenty minutes ago.

“She told me to meet her here. She’ll be back.”

“Doubt it,” he said, studying her as if coming to a decision.

“Why?”

“She gave me a hundred francs,” he said. “Said for you to meet her at 20 bis rue Jean Moinon.”

Aimee stiffened. “Why didn’t you say so?”

“Had to be sure you’re the impatient one with big eyes,” he said. “She said to make sure it was you.”

He nodded his head toward the street. “She knew she was being followed.”

Aimee felt the first hint of fear.

The man gave a half bow. “Retired Lieutenant Gaston Valat SCE, formerly with the intelligence branch of the Franco-Algerian police,” he said. He stood to attention as much as a one-armed man with a limp could. He noticed her gaze. “A votre service. Not half bad, eh?”

Not all that surprised by his change of attitude, she figured an old vet like him would welcome action on his doorstep.

“When did Anais leave, Gaston?”

“Close to an hour ago,” he said.

She shouldered her bag.

“And like I told her,” Gaston said, studying her, “adieu.”

AIMEE HURRIED into the sheets of rain. Her edgy feeling had been growing all week. Paris was bracing itself for terrorist attacks, the radio warned, due to enforcement of the anti-immigration policy. The flics were nervous and, as Aimee knew, when nervous they tended to overreact. Shopping on the quai, she’d noticed the darting flics’ eyes. She’d seen the dark blue suited CRS riot police in her Metro station with machine guns questioning random riders. Even boulangerie patrons in line ahead of her had jumped, startled by the sudden banging of trash cans. It seemed like everyone vibrated with fear.

By the time she reached the boulevard the downpour had ceased. Twilight covered Belleville. Parents tugged children from shop to shop under umbrellas or placated them with baguettes at the crowded bus shelters.

The aroma of cumin from the corner Lebanese restaurant perfumed the rain-freshened air. Aimee had forgotten the bustle and energy in Belleville. African dialects reached her ears. She walked by abandoned, graffiti- covered tum-of-the-century shop-fronts. Taxi klaxons honked, and old men bargained in Arabic at fruit stands. Senegalese women clad in bright-patterned clothing and headresses shared the Metro stairs with black-on-black Parisian sophisticates.

A neighborhood of caractere, she thought, but its working-class origins had suffered the onslaught of the trendy. Chunks of the grime-blackened eighteenth-century buildings in Edith Piaf’s former neighborhood had either been torn down or renovated.

The saucerlike April moon had risen by the time she’d reached the narrow street. In contrast to the busy boulevard, rue Jean Moinon lay quiet. Aimee paused. The smell of wet dog mingled with rose water from a nearby passage. She wondered why Anais would come here.

The streetlamp’s yellow cone of light revealed broken pavement. Parked cars filled one side of the narrow street. Number 20 bis, or 20 and a half—as Aimee remembered her mother explaining the term—consisted of two floors with many bricked-up windows. That was one of the few things she recalled her American mother joking about. Number 7 bis, their old apartment, had been referred to by her mother as “half here and half not, like me.” Not long after that, when Aimee was eight, her mother had tacked a note on the apartment door telling her to stay with the neighbor until her father came home. Her mother had never returned.

Aimee stood back and looked up at the nineteenth-century building. Dark and silent. Only one floor had open windows, their shutters weathered and broken. No concierge or gardien. Just a massive wooden door defaced by silver graffiti.

Gaston could have given her the wrong address.

“Anais?”

Had Anais ever come—or had she already left?

Aimee didn’t know the code for entry so she rang the service bell. She waited, watching the streetlight’s reflection dance in the oily puddles between cobbles. Opposite, several buildings advertised apartments to rent.

No answer. She shifted in her boots, looked around. The street was deserted. Apprehensive, she felt like leaving.

Aimee walked up the uneven pavement to the end of the street, regretting her impulsiveness in following Anais’s trail. This wild goose chase had led nowhere. She wanted to kick herself—why had she agreed to help? She needed to hustle for the EDF contract!

Spousal surveillance really wasn’t her field. Next time she’d think twice before she ran into the rain. She turned to retrace her steps. On her way back to the car she’d try one more time.

In the distance she saw two women emerge from the door of 20 bis. Aimee recognized one as Anais, her blond hair illuminated by the streetlight. The other, a dark-haired woman, wore a shiny black raincoat that swung as she moved. The woman opened the driver’s door of the car parked in front, reached in, then shoved something across the car’s roof to Anais, who waited on the curb.

As Aimee walked closer, she saw that the car was a powder blue Mercedes. Anais stuck the object in her shoulder bag, put on her sunglasses, then rushed off without saying good-bye. Odd, Aimee thought, since it was dark and rainy.

“Anais!” Aimee called out, hurrying to catch up with her.

Anais turned, noticed Aimee, and waved in recognition.

Strains of Arabic music suddenly blared from nearby, loud and piercing. “Shut that crap off!” someone shouted from a window.

The dark-haired woman slammed her car door and started her engine, and with a blinding flash the Mercedes exploded. With a deafening roar, the car burst into a white-yellow ball of flame. Aimee faltered, and everything seemed to move in slow motion, but it could only have been microseconds. Terror flooded her. Tires and doors blew off like missiles, into the stone buildings. She saw Anais rise in the air, as if she were flying, then disappear. The ground reverberated.

The pressure wave knocked Aimee off balance in mid-dive, as she aimed for the nearest car. The backdraft sucked the air as if trying to vacuum her body into a smaller space. Tighter than she could stand. Steel fragments and bloody viscera rained over the street.

Aimee landed on wet cobblestones praying that nothing else would explode. Her heart hammered. She tried to cover her head with her hands. Memories of the Place Vendome terrorist explosion that killed her father came