Murder in the Sentier

“I don’t understand how you found me, Gisela, or why you’re here,” Aimee said.

“We’ve inherited the legacy,” Gisela said. “A badge of shame that I overturned.”

Aimee let the steaming espresso drip into a demitasse cup. As she passed Gisela the faience sugar bowl, their fingers touched, quivered, and held. It felt both intimate and unnerving.

Aimee pulled her hand away. They sipped, quiet for a moment.

She wondered what Gisela’s angle was and why she seemed strangely familiar.

“What do you mean ‘overturned,’ Gisela?”

“We’re going to change Europe,” she said, “for the better.”

“How?”

“Do something to make people understand,” Gisela said.

Her eye rested on Leduc Detective’s client list tacked on a cork board. “Computer security, ja?” She didn’t wait for a response. “When you go home and your boyfriend asks about your day, all you can say is ‘I can’t tell you,’ right?”

If I had a boyfriend, Aimee almost said before she could stop herself.

“Gisela, why don’t you answer my questions? Why have you come to me now?”

Gisela sat back, pushed her glasses up on her nose, and nodded as if she’d made a decision. “When I went to Universitat in Wiesbaden, I lived with my aunt,” she said, her voice flat. “Every week, I washed her car, waxed it, filled up the tank. The owner of the car wash watched me. I thought he was a dirty old man. After Italy, I was used to it. But one Saturday as I paid, he snickered, asked wasn’t I going to stick him up? I asked him what he meant. He said he remembered my mother, how she liked fast BMWs and how he’d keep quiet if I bombed the late-night Turkish grocer.”

“Papa never told us about our mother.” Gisela took a long sip. “So I ignored the man.”

She took a nonfiltered cigarette from her bag. Didn’t light it, just played with the tobacco threads at the tip. Pulled them out with her thumb and ring finger.

“Aber, he was serious. A few days later, going to class, the tram conductor refused my Bahn pass, said I should go steal a car like my mother, Ulrike Rofmein, did. Another fascist! Then a passenger stood up, pointed to me, and said, ‘My brother has glass in his hip from your bombing, he’s never walked the same since.’ I wanted to say I was a little girl—I didn’t do anything—I wasn’t even in the country. My mother was the outlaw on the run. But contempt glared in their eyes. And icy hate. I ran. For years.”

“What about your sister?”

“Marthe married an Italian, buried herself in a slew of bambinos, and won’t even speak German. Then I met someone,” Gisela said, her gaze wistful. “Big mistake. Turns out he was a reporter writing about ‘Terrorist children of Haader-Rofmein—where are they now? Inhabiting society’s fringe like the parents who abandoned them? Will they stike again?’ … same old scheiss. Live and learn, eh?”

Live and learn … Jacques Caillot had said the same thing.

“What was his name?”

“Martin.”

A world-weary sigh escaped Gisela’s lips. She played with the tobacco with her pinkie and offered a cigarette to Aimee.

With an effort, Aimee refused.

Gisela lit up and inhaled deeply.

Aimee wanted to suck in the smoky gray spiral mounting lazily to her high ceiling. Instead, she fingered her pocket for Nicorette gum but found only a crumpled wrapper.

“I met journalists, old colleagues of my mother,” Gisela said. “They once respected her. Even now some believe mother was set up by the Polizei and a bungling Bundeswehr who killed her in prison, fabricated her suicide.”

To Aimee, Gisela’s matter-of-fact tone seemed at odds with her tragic tale.

“I guess I realized we had things in common. And she wasn’t so bad.”

Aimee wondered what she’d have in common with her mother. She had a vague memory of a rally in Boulevard Saint Michel, a candlelit vigil in the biting cold. Aimee wondered if her father had been stationed opposite the protestors, enforcing the other political stance? What kind of couple had they been? She could never remember them fighting. Had she blocked the memory out?

She studied her fingers. Drummed them on her desk. “But you hate your mother, right, Gisela? Hate all of them.”

Gisela squashed her glowing cigarette in the grounds of her espresso. “Don’t you?” Gisela asked.

Aimee finished her espresso in one gulp. “Gisela, don’t you find it hard to hate someone you don’t know?”

Gisela’s eyes flashed. Her lips pursed. “My mother betrayed the cause, so did the others,” she said.

Aimee grew aware of the espresso machine’s escaping steam vapor and the low thrum of the fax machine. Below, on rue du Louvre, the insistent blare of a klaxon sounded.

“Tell me how my mother figures in this, Gisela,” Aimee said. “If you want me to turn helpful.”

“She joined Jean-Paul Sartre to interview Haader in prison. They hooked up there.”

“Tell me something new,” Aimee said. Alain Vigot, Romain Figeac’s editor, had already intimated as much.

“Your mother stole Laborde’s stash,” Gisela said.

Wary, Aimee stood up. Laborde, the industrialist. Had the stash been placed in Liane Barolet’s mother’s coffin?

“Work with me,” Gisela said, “I know people. People who move things, no questions asked.”

“I don’t know anything.”

Gisela leaned forward, intense, confrontational. “But she’s sent you something … something only you can understand.”

Aimee’s spine prickled. Modigliani, in her Emil book?

She noted dark hair growing in, jaggedly, at Gisela’s roots, a bad dye job. Gisela seemed a mixture of chic and seedy, like the Sentier. Like this whole affair. She wanted Gisela gone.

“Just thank me for the coffee, since you know nothing about”—she hesitated, then continued—“my mother. I understand if you must be on your way. I’ve got work….”

Gisela didn’t move. “We’ll share.”

Jutta had said the same thing.

Aimee ruffled her spiky hair. Maybe she was tired and that’s why they all sounded the same. She’d tried to be polite but it hadn’t worked. This woman was getting to her. “Clue me in. Or leave.”

“The tower,” Gisela said.

Tour Jean-Sans-Peur in the Sentier?

An awful feeling hit her. Turned her stomach. Was that why Jutta had set their meeting there?

“You saw Jutta Hald,” Aimee said, her breathing slowed.

“Not in this lifetime,” Gisela said.

“Of course, you thought the Laborde cache was in the tower, but you couldn’t find it. Jutta wouldn’t talk, then you killed her.”

“Not me,” Gisela said. “Maybe it was your mother.”

Her mother?

She couldn’t breathe. Had her mother sent her the book?

The familiar hiss of the espresso machine, the whine of a passing bus below shifted to another plane. A layer where familiarity lied. She floated, adrift in a netherworld of disguised people. Like the old nightmare of her childhood … opening doors, people pulling off masks revealing another mask, then another. No persona real or tangible.

Sweat beaded her lip.

She saw a bulge in Gisela’s open purse. Something glinted dully. How stupid she was … Gisela carried a gun