Murder in the Sentier

“Friends honor commitments, it’s that simple.” Rene snorted. “Your mind’s been somewhere else.”

So he’d noticed.

She was obsessed: her mother, Jutta, the terrorists. Yet, Rene had always been there for her, time and again in the past. She knew she was jeopardizing their relationship.

She hung her head. “You’re right. I’m sorry.” She rocked on her heels. “I’ll catch up. I promise. Forgive me, partner?”

His green eyes fluttered and he dusted invisible lint from his trousers. “Writing code all day bores me but I like to pay the rent and eat out once in a while.”

“We’ve got receivables. Like you said, people owe us! I’ve sent them warnings, next step is the collection agency. They cough up when they get that red-bordered notice.”

She took a deep breath. “Hungry?”

Rene gazed at the sushi bar opposite them on rue du Louvre. “Are you buying?”

She nodded.

“Later,” he said, looking at his pocket watch. “I have to meet our bank manager about a loan.”

“A loan?”

“To tide us over until we get paid.”

Rene was smart. Now she should make a dent in the pile of work on her desk. Upstairs, she filled Miles Davis’s water bowl, then tried Etienne Mabry’s number again. Still no answer.

The door opened. “I forgot my briefcase,” Rene said, looking pointedly at the papers on her desk.

Aimee returned the look as she stuck her detailed Paris Plan into her leather backpack.

“Going someplace again?

“I have to find Etienne Mabry so Christian Figeac can get out of jail.”

Monday Afternoon

TUCKED DOWN BELOW street level, in the hollow of a quarry, the cemetery was a tangle of trees and pompous mausoleums. Stefan blinked as crunching noises sounded behind him. He balled his hand into a fist. Turned around.

But it was just the grave digger shoveling shiny white stones into a wheelbarrow. Near the Virgin Mary marble statue, a squirrel nibbled an old furred chestnut.

Stefan pulled himself up.

Fear curdled his thoughts.

Would he be killed next?

Except for an old bag, the coffin, lined with dirty cobwebs, lay empty.

Jutta had taken the Laborde stash and all the bonds. She’d demolished him.

But whoever killed her would have them … wouldn’t they?

Thoughts crowded his mind. Had Jutta joined forces with some new terrorist fanatics, planning to strike again? Had she blabbed to someone in prison? Or had one of the gang survived and followed her?

Stefan went rigid with terror. As he rubbed the gray stubble on his chin, his mind spun. Everything ruined, his future gone. Greedy Jutta. He remembered. She hadn’t changed.

Despair hit him as he crouched among the gravestones. A bird’s molted gray feathers lay clumped by his elbow. Still on the run. Still wanted after twenty years, and now he had no money.

He hadn’t supported himself with his mechanic’s pay … he’d only done this work because he loved Mercedes engines. Now he couldn’t go back to the garage.

That was the one rule branded into him by the Palestinians about going underground: If anyone makes a mistake, assume your cover is blown. Nine times out of ten, it was. Play it safe. Never go back to your old identity. The police might be waiting.

He’d have to disappear. Once more. Over and over again.

Paris had more than two hundred banks listed in the phone book—triple that, if one counted the branches of the main ones. With the old hunter’s ID, Stefan had opened accounts in many of them over the years. Always in Paris. Never in the countryside—people remembered there. Paris made him nervous but at least he could stay anonymous. Each account held the minimum balance. He maintained them only to enable him to cash the bonds and send his mother money.

He’d waited years before he’d begun cashing the old bonds. Until he figured even if they were numbered and so eventually traceable by Europol, they weren’t high on any priority list. He’d cash them in every few months in a different arrondissement taking care not to follow a pattern. He supplemented this money with his poker winnings, though lately he’d been losing to Anton and others in the garage. A lot.

He picked up a stone, trying to ignore the tremor in his hand. Briefly, he thought of the room he’d lived in for the past seven years. It was sparsely furnished, utilitarian. The reference books on Mercedes engines were the only things he’d miss. He kept nothing in his apartment. He remembered how thorough the Stasi were … the Stasi didn’t exist now but the French equivalent, the DST^*, did. And somewhere, so did the flic who nursed a special grudge against the members of the gang.

He thought of his Mercedes, parked a few blocks over, realizing he’d need to change the license plates. His palms, thick with encrusted grease, the curse of a mechanic, traveled over the rough bark of a plane tree.

^*Direction de Surveillance du Territoire

The headstone opposite read “Alphonsine Plessis,” better known as Dumas’s La Dame aux Camelias. Dumas’s account of his doomed love affair with this courtesan was the one book Stefan remembered from the university. And here lay the courtesan, once the object of a man’s love, now only dust under dried flowers.

He thought of Ulrike’s, Marcus’s, and Ingrid’s graves: they’d been buried three times deeper than usual, for security. He’d only glimpsed the pictures from Ici Paris, the sensational tabloid weekly that had published the forbidden funeral photos, showing Ulrike’s El Fateh scarf draped over her casket.

She had remained defiant to the end.

Stefan remembered that scarf, the red-and-white one given to her by a rifle instructor in the South Yemen camp. She liked to protect her black hair from the sand and biting wind, wear her dark glasses, and pose for photos with the Uzi. It was her only vanity … had it made her feel authentic?

Stefan had liked the training camp in Yemen, put up with the military-like dormitories, daily shooting practice, and spicy Middle Eastern food. Didn’t even mind Marcus. Or his political diatribes and earnest protestations of brotherhood to the PLO and South Yemeni secret service over the campfires.

He remembered the Persian Gulf, a black spot in the distance, and how the wind howled over the desert at night. Like baying wolves. The strange, savage beauty called to him. Stefan never knew so many stars existed, studding the universe. Every night he sat back in the Jeep, staring transfixed into the navy blue night, thousands upon thousands of glimmering pinpricks webbing the sky as if with diamond dust.

Nice mecs, the PLO, he’d thought. They’d put up with his group, didn’t ogle the women too much. The real difference was their seriousness, their purpose. Struggle was reality for these desert men.

The more Stefan saw, the more he realized how they—a scruffy, spoiled bunch of Germans spouting revolution, robbing banks, and stealing BMWs—mocked their hosts’ real struggle.

Yet when he tried to talk to Ulrike about it, she waved him off. “We learn by doing, striking back in our own way. Otherwise the system wins,” she’d said.

But the system had won. Events had proved her right.

The Yemen plane tickets were courtesy of the East German Secret Police, the Stasi. The Stasi had wined and dined the Haader-Rofmein gang as a sort of twisted revenge on West Germany. But that was all before the Wall came down. The Stasi had posed the PLO, portraying them as civilized savages with guns, in the perfect photo opportunity. Everyone was being used … all of them. Stefan had realized the whole thing was to further the East Germans’ political agenda.

Right after that, the PLO had kicked them out.