Murder in the Sentier

“But I don’t …”

“There’s someone now. If you want to know about Jules, he’s the one to ask,” Georges interrupted.

“Who?”

“No names.”

He was right. It was better not to know.

“And my mother …?” She felt Georges had deliberately left things out, withheld information.

“Her life was revolution and art,” he said. “So you’ll help?”

She looked down and nodded. She had to find out about Jules. “Call me,” she said and gave him her cell phone number.

“Is your name Marie?”

“Non.”

“I didn’t think so,” he said, his mouth in a lopsided grin. “Like mother, like daughter.”

SHE CHECKED her messages. Only one from Etienne, to meet at Rouge.

The bouncer, a massive, bald, ebony-skinned man with an earring and leather vest, stood guard at the door. A line of fashionable people waiting to enter the members-only club trailed around the corner.

“Your name?” The bouncer gripped her by the shoulder.

“Aimee, Etienne Mabry’s guest.”

“Let me check,” he said. He spoke into a walkie-talkie.

Outside the club, the faded blue letters of an old hotel sign trailed across lichen-covered stone.

“Just left on his ’arley,” he said in a broad Guadeloupe accent.

“Alone?”

His eyes shuttered.

“Masculine or feminine, that’s all I want to know,” Aimee said, wondering if he’d met up with Christian. “Several of us were meeting.”

“Very feminine.”

“For your help, merci.” Aimee smiled. Of course, he’d attract women like Velcro. She’d had her chance, sort of, but the timing had been off.

The bouncer winked, then turned to open the door of a Mercedes limo that had just pulled up.

* * *

AIMEE WANTED to go home and research Jules but something nagged at her. On her way back, she stopped at Romain Figeac’s apartment on rue de Clery. Despite the darkness, she’d try once more to discover tapes, or anything she might have overlooked.

She stepped over the police tape. Using her penlight and the one remaining lamp that shone, she pulled latex gloves from her bag and shuffled through the charred debris. Wet ash, muck, and smokiness pervaded the gutted rooms. Romain Figeac’s leather chair was turned upside down. She pulled out her Swiss Army knife, righted the chair, and checked the seams. But someone else had beaten her to it. A clean slice round the leather. She reached in, felt only soggy ticking and wire springs.

What a waste, she thought. Figeac’s work, gone or destroyed. Everything floated midair, aloft. Out of her reach. She wasn’t even sure of what she searched for.

This fire made no sense to her … if someone was seeking valuables in the apartment, why burn it up?

She turned the chair upside down again, leaned against its wooden legs, and thought over what Georges had said. His conversation reinforced feelings she’d kept buried. Or tried to.

Her mother had risen above a mundane life of domestic worries and child care, devoting her time to fighting injustice. Imbibing new-found excitement in the heady seventies radical existence. Taking lovers, living in a commune, making art.

Her mother was no innocent. She’d been a drug mule, according to Jutta. A terrorist.

An addict?

Jutta had probably touched only the tip of the iceberg. Too bad her brains had been splattered on the stones of the Tour Jean-Sans-Peur before Aimee could find out what she’d known.

No answers. Only thoughts of a skinny woman with a faint, lingering scent of muguets, who at this moment could be roaming the backstreets of Africa.

She found a broom in a closet. With slow strokes, she swept the muck into a pile, then sifted it through her gloved hands.

All she found were blackened rattan and burnt jacquard drapery pieces. Mildewed, and home to a mouse nest.

But what if the arsonist hadn’t found Romain Figeac’s work either?

She tried to think as if she were Figeac … tried to relate to a washed-up writer, once a radical, who’d nursed thoughts of revenge upon those who ruined his wife. For the next hour, she raked through every crackled drawer, charred closet, and blistered wallpaper seam, even climbing on piled-up chairs to unscrew the faux ceiling plate from which the blackened and dust-covered chandelier hung.

Nothing.

In the kitchen, she checked the bottom of every dish, behind the cupboards, behind the old refrigerator, and in the flour bin in the pantry.

All she came up with was a white coating on her greasy, blackened latex gloves.

The pompiers had broken the glass to Christian’s mother’s room; her seventies jumpsuits and Afro wigs were smoke-and water-damaged. Little remained in the musty room besides stained and faded peach satin sheets on the four-poster bed. Despite the years, Aimee felt a disturbing sense of intimacy with this woman.

Smelling of soot and with blackened bits under her broken nails, Aimee left. Tired and discouraged, she went to the familiar marble stairs. She’d been here three times and grown no wiser.

She was convinced she’d missed something. Christian had paid her to find his father’s killer and his work and it looked like the fire had been set by an arsonist who couldn’t find the work either.

And she’d come no closer to her mother. Most of her life she’d been haunted by this woman who, it seemed more and more obvious, wanted nothing to do with her. Otherwise, why wouldn’t she have come back?

Better to get rid of the smoky smell, soak in a long, hot bath, and warm her bones.

At the foot of the staircase, by the cellar door, a shrunken woman struggled with a case of empty champagne bottles. Whether she was bent over from its weight or osteoporosis, Aimee couldn’t tell.

“Tant pis!” the old woman mumbled under her breath.

“Let me get the door for you,” Aimee said.

“Commes vous-etes gentille,” the woman said, glad of assistance. Her hair, pulled back in a tight chignon, was bone white and a scarf draped her caved-in shoulders despite the heat. “If you’d be so kind as to unlock it.”

Aimee turned the big key, shoved the door open, and reached for the light switch.

“Madame, please let me help you get them downstairs.”

“I won’t protest, Mademoiselle. My great-grandson’s baptism party,” she said, as if the bottles needed an explanation. “I have to get them downstairs, can’t stand them in my apartment anymore!”

Aimee hefted the crate and edged down the shadowy, steep steps. She wondered how the frail, elderly woman would have negotiated them. The jiggling bottles and the damp odor of mildew and rat traps on the beaten dirt floor made her regret her impulse. Then she spotted the gated tenant lock-ups with numbers on the rotting wood doors.

Of course … why hadn’t she thought of this?

“Voila.” She set down the full crate. A low-watt bulb illumined one end of the cellar, casting shadows over the vaulted stone.

“Merci,” the woman said.

“Do these numbers correspond to the apartments?” Aimee asked, looking around and dusting off her hands.

“Let me see, it’s been so long since I came down here.” The woman took the glasses hanging from a chain around her neck and peered up.

Aimee pulled out her penlight and shone the thin beam about her. Stone arches supported an aqueductlike