Murder in the Sentier

Thursday Afternoon

MARIUS TEYNARD WALKED past his receptionist, Madame Goroux, who was busy at the keyboard.

“Mark me out for this afternoon,” he said.

“Monsieur Teynard, there’s a late afternoon appointment….”

“Tell the boy to take it,” he said. The boy, as he referred to his nephew, was fifty-five. Teynard slipped on his oatmeal-colored linen jacket, ruffled his white hair back from his temples, and gave her a half-smile. “You know how to handle him.”

He knew Madame Goroux would think he was visiting his mistress, who lived on the next block in the rue de Turbigo. She often covered for him. Let her think what she wanted.

Out on the haze-filled street where the heat hovered, hemmed in by the tall Haussmann buildings, he turned in the opposite direction. Teynard headed toward the prefecture de police on Quaides Orfevres.

Along the broad part of rue de Turbigo that sliced the edge of the Sentier, he passed the Kookai boutique. Salesgirls smoked outside on the steps and the tatouage sign on rue Tiquetonne blinked orange-pink neon in the dusk. A dope haven if he ever saw it, but he knew the flics let it slide as long as their informants checked in with them. And, he reminded himself, that wasn’t his business.

Not anymore.

In the distance he saw the Tour Jean-Sans-Peur nestled behind the sandstone-colored school. The scum had been right here … a stone’s throw from his office. Merde!

He was getting slow, admit it. Not on top of it anymore. Yet no one said that but himself. Be your own harshest critic, he’d learned, then no one else could be.

But that would change. He’d entered the fray. Time to wipe out the degenerate lice once and for all, if it was the last thing he did.

The hunt, the chase—these were the only things keeping him alive. The shivery tingle on the back of his arms … it was what he lived for. Face it, had always lived for.

He’d deluded himself when he retired from the prefecture, started the agency, and kept half-time hours. Even the DST contract work hadn’t filled the need. Keeping a young mistress had become difficult, and so time-consuming. His true mistress was his work.

He needed to get this information face-to-face, without risk of compromised phone lines, big-eared subordinates, or his former cronies from the Quai des Orfevres. Time to mine his old-boy network.

Thursday Afternoon

OUSMANE SADA’S FEVERISH brow was beaded with sweat. He felt worse than before his visit to the marabout. Across from the sewing factory where he worked, he stopped in a Sentier cafe.

A few old men played backgammon at a Formica table. It took a while before the owner excused himself and asked Ousmane, in a brisk tone, what he wanted. Propping himself up at the zinc counter, parched and shaky, Ousmane allowed himself one small luxury. He ordered a steaming glass cup of sweet black tea, mint flavored. So soothing and such a comfort. Then he’d find his straw mattress and sleep his fever off. He’d promised himself he’d try what his maman had always advised … nothing sweats out a fever like hot, sweet mint tea, she’d always said.

Idrissa needed him in a few hours … already he was feeling better. Mandinkas never let the grass grow under a baobab tree, he remembered his father saying. He paid for the tea, and the owner acknowledged his tip with a nod of his head.

Ousmane made his way toward the sewing factory downstairs in the narrow Passage Ste-Foy. The dark passage’s light source was the flickering fluorescent bulbs in an upstairs office. Ousmane saw the yellow feather fetish, an omen of evil, just before he stepped on it. Too late. It crunched under his scuffed shoe. In horror, he clutched the stone wall. No way to reverse it, he knew. He’d been cursed for the second time that week.

Thursday Afternoon

AIMEE TOOK care of Leo’s online account, giving him a three-day grace period, then pulled up the virus she and Rene had discovered and neutered in Media 9’s site. She wrote new code, programming the virus to self- destruct in twenty-four hours and rescind all its commands and any further ones. After rechecking and running a test, she sent the virus into the Visa postage-metering system. Half of France would thank her if they found out she’d given them a grace period. But they wouldn’t.

Knocks came from her glass-paned office door. She hit Save, then Quit, and closed her laptop.

She opened the door to a woman with slate gray eyes wearing black-framed glasses on a pale, sharp-angled face.

“Fraulein Leduc?” the woman asked. Her silk polka-dotted scarf fluttered in the hall window air, hot and exhaust-laden from the back alley.

“Oui?”

“I’m Gisela. We need to talk.”

“Concerning?”

“My mother and yours.”

Taken aback, Aimee kept her hand rigid on the knob.

“What do you mean … who’s your mother?

“Past tense seems the operative word here,” said the woman. “Ulrike Rofmein.”

Aimee gripped the door handle. “You’d better come in.”

“We’re Hitler’s grandchildren, you know,” the woman said. “The lost generation.”

Aimee flinched. Speak for yourself, she wanted to say—it had nothing to do with her.

“And it affects you,” Gisela said, as if she read Aimee’s thoughts.”

The hair on Aimee’s neck rose.

Gisela strode into the office, stopping at a chair. Her gaze traveled over the filigreed-iron balcony rail, the eighteenth century still life hung above digital scanners, old sepia maps, and Interpol posters.

“May I?”

“Sit down,” Aimee said. She needed a drink. “Like an espresso?”

“Grazie,” Gisela said, smiling. “We were raised in Italy.”

“We?” Aimee twisted the black metal arm off the Lavazza espresso machine.

“My twin, Marthe,” Gisela said. “Papa changed our names. Later, when I was in Universitat,” she leaned forward, “I came to the realization.”

“Realization?”

Gisela lowered her voice, as if to highlight the importance of her words. “I don’t need to hide, none of us do,” she said. “We weren’t the criminals. They were. We’re the victims.”

“What do you know about my mother?”

Gisela rubbed her long fingers over Aimee’s desk.

“Who really and truly knows anyone? That’s the point.”

Aimee didn’t know how to reply. Something about this Gisela didn’t feel right.

Aimee slammed the used coffee grounds into the trash.

Gisela didn’t flinch. She fixed Aimee with a long stare.

“The Revolution was their child,” Gisela said. “Not us.”

Maybe that was true.

Aimee pressed the black switch on her machine. A grumbling answered, then a slow measured hiss.