Murder in the Sentier

blue cover lettered in fine script: Stories of Emil’s Life: a Royal Mouse in the Louvre.

Her heart caught.

“I believe she wrote this for you.”

Something cracked inside Aimee. And those long-ago afternoons flowed back to her, afternoons spent together making up Emil’s story, writing down lists of foods he ate, games he played, and pretending he slept in a matchbox.

“Look,” Jutta Hald said, thrusting the notebook into her moist palms.

Aimee’s hands shook as she grasped the musty cover. Afraid to drop it, she stopped, took a breath, then slowly opened the book.

The first page read, “For Amy.”

“How did you get this?”

“No questions.”

For a moment, Aimee was a little girl again, on her tiptoes tugging her maman’s skirt, trying to see what she drew. Always out of reach.

With her forefinger and thumb she gingerly turned the first page and read: “Chapter One—How Emil Came to Be Born on King Henri’s Throne.”

“You’ve seen my proof,” Jutta Hald said. “Now admit it, she owes me my share.”

“Share … what do you mean?”

Jutta Hald’s lip curled. To Aimee’s horror, she grabbed the book back.

“Wait, please,” Aimee said. “I’ll get the money. Please, be fair.”

“Life’s not fair … then you die,” Jutta Hald said. “Think back. Didn’t your mother ever send you presents, little boxes or keys … maybe drawings?”

“If she did,” Aimee paused, saddened, “I never saw them.” She knew her father would have destroyed them, just as he had destroyed everything else that had to do with her mother.

Jutta dabbed a slight sheen of perspiration from her forehead with a handkerchief. “Pills,” she said. “Awful ones, they make me pee all the time.” She shook her head. “Where’s your bathroom?”

Aimee showed her. She took a long time before emerging.

“Tell me about my mother,” Aimee asked once more. “About the terrorism.”

“Now you’re speaking with negotiation in mind, ja? We can share.”

“D’accord,” Aimee said. Let Jutta Hald think what she wanted.

“She was a courier,” Jutta Hald said.

“A courier?”

“That’s the polite term,” Jutta Hald said. “A drug mule describes it better.”

“My mother, involved with drugs?” Aimee tried to keep her surprise in check. “From where and to whom?”

“Mostly Morocco,” Jutta said, then shrugged. “Some hashish connection. But I knew her before we were sent to prison.”

“How did you know her?” Aimee asked.

“Back then we were all part of a loose network,” said Jutta Hald. “Rumor was her group shifted weapons, set up safe houses and printing presses for the Haader-Rofmein gang.”

Aimee leaned against the wall. It was as if Jutta Hald had struck her. Over the years, she’d imagined various scenarios. But never a mother in league with the notorious seventies Haader-Rofmein radicals, who kidnapped people, bombed jails, and robbed banks.

Were her mother’s terrorist activities connected to the bomb that had killed her father? Her hands shook. But that had happened much later. “This connects to my father, doesn’t it? That’s how you found me.”

“Enough questions,” Jutta Hald’s voice trailed off. “You don’t seem interested in buying the address book.” A look of fleeting remorse crossed the woman’s face. She dropped her gaze, unable to meet Aimee’s eyes.

“One day after school I found a note from my mother taped to the door telling me to stay with our neighbor,” Aimee told her. “That’s the last I heard from her. If the address book will help me find her, I’ll get the money. But I need some time.”

“You have until tonight,” Jutta Hald said. “Then I’m gone.”

“But …”

“I’m leaving the country,” Jutta Hald said, checking her watch. She rose and headed for the hall. “I’ll contact you later. Have you a cell phone?”

Aimee gave her the number. The door slammed behind her.

Aimee sighed. Her checking account held less than a quarter of what Jutta Hald wanted. Leduc Detective had even less.

She ran to the French doors, flung them open, and leaned over the metal railing. The quai before her was empty.

Further up the street Jutta Hald emerged from beneath an overhang, walking with a brisk step. Aimee called out to her. But the incessant beep of a van backing up drowned out her words. At the end of the quai, Jutta Hald stopped. She turned and looked up at Aimee, gave her a half-smile, then disappeared from view.

Aimee pulled on her denim jacket. She was dying for a cigarette and rifled through her pocket for Nicorette gum. But all she came up with was a software encryption manual and a travel-size flacon of Citron Vert. She’d stopped smoking last week. Again.

The longing to see her mother, that bottomless desire dormant for years, had returned. Even if she was dead, just to know where she’d been buried. Constant and nagging, it was like a piece of gravel in her shoe.

Aimee’s worn Vuitton leather wallet held fifty francs. Enough for a taxi to the office of Rene’s friend, Michel. She’d ask him for a loan.

She found a cab on Pont Marie and bummed a nonfiltered Gauloise from the driver. As they sped along the quai, she inhaled the harsh, woody tobacco, enjoying the jolt.

Michel had a cash-flow problem unlike most people’s. He had too much. His fashion-house backers were cyber entrepreneurs in the Sentier, the district had been dubbed “Siliconsentier” by the press. But she and Rene were leery of the New Economy and of software start-ups, so they’d kept to corporate security.

Space came cheap in the Sentier, the hub of the wholesale rag trade and of the flesh trade. In the entire Sentier, green space scarcely existed. Six trees in Place du Caire, a spreading plane tree in square Bidault, and several struggling saplings in the Place Ste-Foy were the most notable exceptions.

The driver let her off on crowded rue Saint Denis, the medieval route to the royal tombs. Traffic had ground to a standstill. The knock of a stalled diesel truck and its exhaust fumes permeated the narrow street.

Dilapidated hotel particuliers, once home to the Marquise de Pompadour, Josephine Bonaparte, and Madame du Barry, had been turned into fabric warehouses. Hookers kept the rent down in the old stomping grounds of Irma la Douce. But that was what attracted the start-ups. Urban decay with a new meaning, Aimee thought.

A dense haze of heat flickered in the late summer afternoon, lit by the still shining sun. She found Michel’s place on rue du Sentier between Paris Hydro, a plumbing shop, and Tissus Arnaud, a fabric store. A welcome chill radiated from the limestone. Inside the seventeenth-century hotel particulier, across from Mozart’s former residence, Aimee rubbed the goose bumps on her arms.

The smell of sawdust and mold rose from the floor. Watermarked walls supported a high ceiling whose paint was peeling in the cavernous foyer.

The tall door stood ajar. Peering inside, she saw expensive state-of-the-art computer monitors on makeshift shelves. Cartons labeled tissus en gros were piled against the window. Remnants of antique industrial sewing machines for punching holes in leather sat by rusted metal clothing racks.

Michel Mamou was reaching high above him for the old gas line on the wall. He balanced on a sawhorse straddled over a three-legged table and a bench. His head just missed the old hanging light fixture.

“Ca va, Michel?” she asked.

“After I cap the gas, I’ll feel happy,” Michel grinned.

“Michel, I need a favor.”

Michel’s black-framed glasses under his wool cap pulled low didn’t hide his pink eyes. Or his white eyelashes.