Murder in Belleville

“Go on.” Youssefa gestured toward the back window. “That leads to rue Crespin du Gast.”

She started toward the window, then turned back and pinned Youssefa’s arms behind her back, sliding her onto a wobbly kitchen stool.

“Tell me what ‘ST 196’means,” she said, leaning over her. “Or I go nowhere.”

A momentary hint of regret hit her as Youssefa’s chest heaved and she burst into frightened sobs. But Aimee couldn’t stop now.

“Youssefa, Eugenie passed something to my friend before her car exploded.” She loosened her grip on her arms. “My God, Youssefa, it happened in front of me! I have to know why,” she said. “Not only Dede, but someone else is after me and my friend.”

“They’ll k-k-kill me,” she said, choking on her sobs.

“Why?”

“I took those photos—they made me!”

Aimee’s mouth felt dry. “Who did?”

“He’s not a general, but they call him one,” Youssefa said. “He likes people to call him that. He likes to hang around with the military.”

Had he sat in the cirque, wearing a uniform?

“What’s his name?”

“He’s known as the general, that’s all.”

“Youssefa, why did they make you take the photos?” she said. Part of her didn’t want to know why. It was too horrendous to contemplate.

“D-d-documentation.” She closed her eyes.

Aimee remembered the looks on the faces in the photos. The way the numbers were pinned to the shirts or the skin of the bare chested. Pinned to their skin. Like temporary branding.

She sank down on the stool next to Youssefa.

As a child, she’d seen cattle in the pasture next to her grandmother’s Auvergne farm. Numbers were clipped on the cows’ ears to distinguish them from herds en route to the abbatoir. She gasped.

“ST… that stands for ‘slaughter,’doesn’t it?” she said, not waiting for her answer. “And 196 would be the military division of the area, according to Algerian military maps.”

Youssefa covered her face, her body quivering with spasms.

That was answer enough for her.

“They wanted you to record it, didn’t they… or he did, the man they refer to as ‘general?’” she said. “Villagers, dissenters, and anyone they could lump together as fundamentalists, right?”

Finally Youssefa nodded. “My family owned a photo shop. We sold cameras, developed film. Then one day the military rounded everyone up in the square, called us Islamic zealots,” she muttered. “Herded us into grain trucks and took us out in the bled. Dropped us near big hangars storing wheat. Someone had told them 1 knew photography.” Youssefa rubbed her good eye. “They shoved a Minolta in my hand, put a box of film at my feet, and said, ‘Shoot.'”

Horrified, Aimee thought of all those faces.

“It took days,” Youssefa said, her voice growing curiously detached. “At the end my fingers didn’t work, and I couldn’t stand up. They did this.” She pointed to her scars and her eye. “But I lived. I owed the victims. That’s why I hid the negatives. The military didn’t care, all they wanted were prints recorded in black and white.”

Like Cambodia, Aimee thought, sickened. Wholesale mass killings of innocents by the military. Slaughtered by their own forces, which spoke to the madness of the military mind.

“How did you get out?”

“She helped me,” Youssefa said simply.

“Eugenie?”

“She’s my AFL contact’s cousin.”

Of course! Aimee remembered the AFL’s hunger-strike flyer with Youssefa’s name on it, and Sylvie’s membership, starting in the Sorbonne. Now things added up.

“Sylvie Cardet was known as Eugenie Grandet,” Aimee said.

Youssefa shrugged, “I don’t know.”

“But what was she doing with those photos?”

Youssefa looked down.

“I showed them to her, told her about the massacres,” she said. “Then Eugenie found out that everything was a sham.”

“A sham?” she asked worriedly.

“The humanitarian mission,” she said. “The fund goes to the military—they turn around and buy surplus military ware.”

Aimee shook her head. She had a hard time believing the second part.

“What do you mean?” she said. “How can that work?”

“French military surplus; I saw trucks filled with night-vision goggles,” Youssefa said. “Some idiot boasted there were thirty thousand pairs, at only two francs a pair! So cheap, he said, the General had bought the lot.”

The humanitarian mission—Philippe was involved in that. No wonder he’d wanted to keep her quiet.

“What’s it got to do with the AFL hunger strikers in the church?”

“Eugenie trusted Mustafa Hamid,” Youssefa said. “Several times she told me if I got in trouble to go to Hamid. That’s all.”

“What happened to them?”

“I gave the rest of the photos to Zdanine,” Youssefa said. “He said he’d give them to Hamid, get me time to speak with him.”

Zdanine! For a price he must have hid the photos, left them for Dede in that abandoned house. Dede’s mecs recovered them, but she and Rene had surprised them in the park.

“You didn’t destroy the negatives, did you?”

She averted her gaze. “In good hands.”

“Give me a contact sheet.”

Youssefa turned away.

“I need to have proof if you want me to stop them.”

She shook her head. “That’s what Eugenie said.”

Gently she turned Youssefa’s disfigured face toward her.

“Trust me,” she said, mustering as much bravado as she could. “Believe it or not, I do this for a living. And they’re after me as well.”

She saw agreement in Youssefa’s sad eyes.

Youssefa led her toward the room they’d first entered. The room with the Piaf photos and the black dress. Youssefa opened a wooden armoire. Musty smells laced with lavender wafted out. On the shelves Aimee saw a row of little black shoes, some T-strapped, others open-toed, all from the thirties and forties. She stared. The pairs of shoes couldn’t be bigger than her hand.

“Piaf’s?”

Youssefa nodded.

For such a tiny woman, Aimee thought, Piaf had touched the world.

Youssefa reached to the upper shelf, where rows of yellowed kid gloves lay.

In good hands, she’d said.

Youssefa pulled out an envelope, checked it, then handed it to her. “These show the piles of bodies.” She looked down. “Other than this, the proof lies in the desert, fifty kilometers outside Oran. Bones bleached by the sun.”

She thought about Gaston’s words. His experience in the same part of Algeria. History repeated itself in sad, twisted ways.

AIMEE SLID out of the back kitchen window, climbing down the rusty fire escape to an asphalted yard. Following the yard, she exited onto rue Crespin du Gast and walked the two blocks to Samia’s apartment.

She knocked on the door. No answer.