Murder in Belleville

“Ca va, Monsieur?” a shiny-faced Asian man asked, menus stuck under his arm. “Do you feel unwell?”

Bernard realized that he stood on the stairs, perspiring and shaking.

“I’m fine, sorry,” Bernard said. He wiped his brow, then gripped the man’s arm. “How long have you owned this restaurant?”

Apprehension shone in the man’s eyes. He pulled away.

“Did you buy this from Aram?”

The man erupted in a volley of Thai, then disappeared up the stairs. Bernard slapped his forehead. How dumb! Of course the man was sans-papiers. And here he was accosting an illegal to find out about the past.

Upstairs the smiling woman who’d served him had turned into a businesslike hostess. Her command of French disappeared and she pointed at the bill, then her watch, indicating closing time. His search for the past scared these people. He tried to explain one more time, but their impassive faces made him give up.

On rue d’Orillon, he paused and looked up at his old window. The peeling shutters were open, and a single line of wash hung outside. An African dialect reached his ears. A child cried, the mother’s placating rejoinder quickly soothed it. Another wave of immigrants, Bernard thought. Some things never changed.

The pager on his hip vibrated. Nedelec’s number at the ministry read ominously on the display. Bernard stopped at the corner phone.

“Directeur Berge, we’re giving you a second chance,” Nedelec said. “Mustafa Hamid wants to negotiate. We expect you at the ministry within the hour.”

Before he could protest, Nedelec had hung up.

Bernard felt cornered again.

He stumbled and lost his dinner in the vacant lot, among the rubble and wire where his neighbor’s building had once stood.

Wednesday Early Evening

MORBIER HAD AGREED TO meet Aimee at a small brasserie on rue Pyrenees after his therapy. He was late. She’d been ordering steadily at the bar.

“My poker game’s waiting, Leduc,” Morbier said, after the smoked trout and escalope de veau. He set his napkin on the table. “Or did you have something to say.”

She’d been debating whether to ask Morbier or not. Maybe it was the Pernod talking, but she had to know. “Why did Papa take the surveillance job? Looking back, it didn’t seem like the ordinary contract.”

Morbier exhaled, blue smoke spiraled in the close air of the brasserie. “Give it a rest, Leduc.”

“How can I?” She leaned forward, her arms resting on the crumb-littered white tablecloth. “I wake up at night thinking there was something he didn’t tell me. Something I missed… how tense he was, how he went first into the van …”

“You’re thinking you should have gone first?”

Sometimes she wondered if she should have.

“If you had, Leduc,” Morbier continued, “your papa, rest his soul, would have been right where you’re sitting, his heart bleeding. Instead of yours. He’d have been hurt more.”

“How can you say that?” She brushed the crumbs aside, forming them into small piles.

“Eh, young people!” he said simply. “Who gets over the loss of a child?”

Morbier had turned into a pocket psychologist. Maybe he’d attended too many sensitivity sessions at the commissariat.

“You know more than you’re telling me, Morbier.”

“And if I do, what would it change?”

She paused, then swept the piles of crumbs into her cupped palm below the tablecloth edge.

“I could sleep at night, Morbier.”

He looked away.

“Going to Place Vendome brought everything up for me again,” she said. “Sorry.” With a quick motion, she flicked the crumbs onto her plate, then got the waiter’s attention.

“L’addition,” she said.

She pulled a Gitane from Morbier’s packet, scratched the kitchen matchbox he always carried, and lit it up. Raw and dense, the smoke hit her as she inhaled.

Morbier eyed her. “Didn’t you quit, Leduc?”

“I’m always quitting,” she said, savoring the jolt.

After paying the check and struggling into her damp raincoat, she and Morbier stood outside on the glistening cobblestones. The yellow foglamps of cars blurred like halos in the mist. She realized Morbier was watching her.

“You’ve got survivor’s guilt, Leduc,” he said. “I’ve seen it too many times. So have you.”

“So that’s what it’s called?” she asked, digging in her bag for her Metro pass. She held it up. Expired. “Morbier, I wasn’t searching for a label. But thanks. Now I can catalog the volume and put it on the shelf, eh?”

“You’ve had too much Pernod.”

“Not enough, Morbier,” she said.

He shook his head. “Once your papa was my partner. It doesn’t go away. But I move on. How do you think I felt?”

Stunned, she looked at him. He’d never alluded to his feelings. Not at the funeral, or the posthumous medal ceremony, or over the years. Never.

“Desolee, Morbier,” she said.

A taxi, its blue light signaling it was free, cruised up the cobblestones. Morbier stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled. Loud. The taxi halted in front of a large black puddle.

“Go ahead,” he said. “I feel like walking.”

She was tired. “Don’t mind if I do.”

She got in. “Seventeen quai d’Anjou, s’il vous plait.”

Before she shut the door, Morbier leaned over.

“Come to terms with it, Leduc, or you’ll be devoured.”

THE TAXI sped along the darkened quai, punctuated by globular street lamps, their beams swallowed in a thick mist. Morbier was right. The time had come to move on. March forward.

The taxi stopped under the leafy branches in front of her apartment. Below flowed the Seine, reflecting pinpricks of light as mist forked under Pont Marie’s stone supports. She paid and tipped the driver twenty francs. Insurance for good taxi karma.

The trouble was that she didn’t feel like moving on. She felt like clinging to the memories, fading and more transparent every year, especially the image of her father’s crooked smile. Most of all she wanted to know who had killed him. Then maybe she could come to terms with it in her own way.

Her apartment lay empty. No sign of Yves. She hadn’t heard from him again. She’d tried forgetting, hard to do since her sheets and towels held a lingering scent of him.

After walking Miles Davis along the quai, she took him upstairs. But she couldn’t face her dark apartment and walked over to her office. Work always put her back on track.

The phone was ringing as she opened her glass-paned office door.

“A1lo?”

“You call yourself my friend, promise to help my sister?” Martine asked angrily as she answered. “But you get her hauled to the commissariat?”

Aimee froze. “The commissariat?”

“Philippe said it’s your fault!” Martine said, her husky voice rising.

“He’s lying, Martine,” she said, startled. She wondered what tale Philippe had spun. But in a way it was