Murder in the Sentier

constructed over the Vel d’Hiver, the velodrome that held Jews before shipment to Drancy, then the long train ride to Auschwitz.

“Exactement,” he said. “They refer to it as politesse or good manners. Very simple, very civilized. Upon invitation, a journalist gets access to files the flics or the DST wants them to see. But the real agenda is that the story the flics want published gets published.”

“Selective leaks?”

“From selective files,” he said. “Your papa, a flic, would’ve understood. Take the agit888 file. They trailed Sartre for years; tapped his phone, noted whom he met, where he went. On the surface it looks suspicious, eh? A thick surveillance log, reels of phone tapes, hidden photos … and what did it show? Basically, that he and Simone de Beauvoir had an unsatisfactory love life and he was in trouble with his publisher. Missed his deadlines.”

That dovetailed with what Morbier had told her about Sartre and agit888. And it made sense.

“But my mother probably translated Sartre’s interview in the jail with Haader, and that’s part of the agit888 file, isn’t it?”

“Another nail in Sartre’s coffin, but she didn’t figure in the file or I would have written that.”

So the agit888 file led nowhere.

“What about my father?”

“Same analogy applies,” Caillot said. “Fingers pointed at him after an art heist. They left me in a room with his file and some Action-Reaction articles mentioning your mother. I figured they were helping me and I knew I’d have to repay them someday.”

“So they used you,” Aimee said.

“That’s clear now, but then …” His voice trailed off.

“Did you repay them?”

He rearranged a foam pad on the arm of his chair. “After my tour of duty in the world’s hot spots I came home to a secure job. Or so I thought. But they had another assignment, “like old times,” they said. It backfired and I’m in a chair for life.”

She refrained from asking if that’s why he hid down here. “Did you find proof my father assisted in robberies?”

“For that, Mademoiselle, you’d have to look at police judiciare files … all I saw were the allegations of culpability. And that’s what I reported. Seems I did the damage they intended. Forgive me.”

He wheeled himself out from behind the desk. “For years it haunted me. I’m a reporter first of all. Word came out the investigation was dropped. Whether your father was dirty …” Caillot shrugged. “I don’t know. Sixty percent of the force is rumored to be. But I heard he landed on his feet, ran a detective agency. Again, I’m sorry.”

Caillot must have had a lot of time to think about the past. Aimee stood up. “Merci.”

“Last advice: Narrow Africa down … try Senegal.”

She thought of Idrissa, who came from Senegal. “Why Senegal?”

“The economy’s more stable for intellos who become mercenaries.”

She tried questioning him further but that’s all he would say.

“I understand why you wrote the story, I might have done the same thing,” she said. “But I didn’t, and they’re my parents. Here’s my card, in case you want to talk later.”

It seemed as if all she’d been doing was giving her card to people. People who knew things but would tell her little.

She consulted the microfiche directory at the archive desk on the next floor, searching entries for mercenaries, Senegal, terrorists, and links between European terrorists.

What she found made her glad she’d looked. She’d never have found them otherwise. Few of these articles appeared in Internet archives. They only lived in dank vaults like this one. She copied the relevant ones.

A few hours later, copies in hand, she emerged, glad to feel the sun’s rays again. She pulled the scooter off the kickstand. While she’d been inside, a purple fluorescent sticker had been placed on it, MESSY ART FOR THE MASSES!

Rene would love that!

At a cafe on rue des Colonnes, a shady colonnaded arcade like the rue de Rivoli, she ordered a double cafe creme.

“Why not a grenade?” asked the man behind the counter, flicking a none too clean towel at a fly.

“Grenade?”

“What we call a depth-charge espresso drink,” he said.

“Parfait!” she said, as the man hit the slow, late-summer fly.

She wanted a quiet place to read the articles, digest Caillot’s words, and look at Modigliani prints.

After laying twenty francs on the zinc counter, she drove three blocks, parked the scooter in Place Louvois, which bordered the Sentier, and stepped across the street to the seventeenth-century Bibliotheque Nationale.

She showed her yellow research card then sat down at number 32, her assigned place, a seat away from the tall wood-framed windows in the Occidental manuscript section.

Her favorite section.

She sat fourth from the aisle, overlooking the cobbled courtyard. Floor-to-ceiling books covered the walls.

She took a deep breath, inhaling the musky manuscript smells emanating from the old paper. The aura of the past, the stillness, reassured her in this changing world. During her Ecole des Medicines years she’d studied here on Thursday afternoons. Now the familiar beams of fading lemon light and oversized hard wooden chairs brought back a timeless feeling.

In front of her, the upright wood cradles for books and manuscripts and the oak spindle place holders were covered with a honeylike patina. All nineteenth century. Aimee fingered the book spindle, the pointed tip worn and darkened, aware of the overall hush broken only by the turning of pages and occasional patron’s cough.

Next to her a man studied a tea brown parchment, stiff and oily, with a cracked lump of red sealing wax below an intricate flourish of curlicue script dated 1424.

She sat back, took a deep breath, and began. The copies she’d made from the microfiche took all afternoon to read. Before the last call-up of the day, she’d finished taking notes and listing the possible remaining Action- Reaction and Haader-Rofmein members. Six, counting Jutta and Liane Barolet, had done prison time or gone underground. If Jules Bourdon, who she discovered came from a wealthy intellectual family, and her mother had fled to Senegal … why had Jutta been killed now? The timing was important but she didn’t know why.

She gathered her papers, recovered her card from the reference desk librarian, and trudged to the estampes et photographie room. She found a book of twentieth-century prints. Modigliani’s fluid, elongated lines and curves radiated sensuousness. And a haunting love of his subjects. Mainly women.

An essay accompanying a 1987 exhibition guide to Modigliani’s paintings gave her perspective. A thought crossed her mind. Had Laborde, an Alsatian, identified with Modigliani, also an outsider in France?

She wondered how it all meshed: Modigliani, Laborde’s abduction and death and her father’s subsequent police hearing.

Her father couldn’t be called an art connoisseur though her grandfather qualified as a dilettante. Money had been tight, but her father saw to it her shoes had no holes, her books were new, and the boulangerie honored a standing Saturday morning order of brioches after her piano lesson, since he couldn’t be there to buy them.

She rode back to her office and parked the scooter below. Aimee hurried along the pavement, past the dark green shop-front with PARIS-ROLLERBLADE on it. She climbed the stairs, opened the door of her dark office, switched on the light, then her laptop.

“Working up Michel’s system,” said the Post-It on Rene’s screen. Out of guilt, she put in some time and made a sizable dent in the pile on her desk. A sweet lucrative Media 9 contract would keep the wolf from the door. But