despite tight French gun control. What if she had come ready to use it?
Aimee clutched her desk. Her compact 9 mm. Beretta was in the drawer. She hooked her fingers around the drawer handle.
Gisela reached into her purse.
“Start talking. Or I’ll get upset,” Aimee said, raising the Beretta slowly. “Quite upset. Put your piece down.”
“Live by the gun,” Gisela nodded. Her gaze held no fear. “Marcus Haader liked to spout that. It was his favorite saying.”
Aimee held her hand steady.
“It’s in our blood,” Gisela said, her eyes gleaming. She laid a stun gun on Aimee’s desk. “We deserve the spoils.”
Only a stun gun! Stop it, Aimee told herself, gain control. This woman unnerved her.
Aimee lowered her Beretta, ignoring the shaking in her other hand.
“Do you have a license for that?”
Gisela grinned. “Do you?”
“I’m a detective,” Aimee said. Too bad the Beretta wasn’t registered. But Gisela wouldn’t know that.
“What happened to your hand?” Gisela said.
“You mean the scar? Terrorists blew up my father, I got in the way.”
“A real daughter of the Revolution.” Gisela’s eyes shone. “You see, we’re meant to carry on. Your mother hid the contents of the industrialist’s safe. Now we need that money to finance our movement.”
So that’s what this was all about.
“If that were true, after twenty years why do you think anything would be left?”
“We’ll carry on. We deserve it. Not all the bonds were cashed. They show up every so often.”
“Bonds?”
“And land and mine deeds, in Africa.”
“Why come to me now?”
Silence.
“So that’s what Jutta Hald was after,” Aimee said. “She thought my mother hid them? So my mother’s alive?”
Gisela said nothing.
Aimee laid the gun back in the drawer. Scooped the tobacco into a pile and into the trash can.
“How old are you, Gisela?”
Gisela hesitated for the first time, unprepared for this question.
“Did you forget when you were born?” Aimee asked.
“1962,” Gisela said.
The woman was a fake. From the clippings, Aimee knew Ul-rike Rofmein had twins in 1963. This woman lied.
“Too late … wrong.” She gestured to the door. “Better luck with the next one on your list. Sorry, I’m not in sympathy with sisterhood and shared terrorist memories. I don’t buy your story.”
“Maybe you don’t like what I have to say,” Gisela shrugged. She stood and walked to the door. “Your mother wasn’t a saint,” she said. “Get used to it.”
Aimee felt like hurling the espresso machine at Gisela.
“If you don’t cooperate, things might get … how do you say it?” Gisela paused. “Sticky for you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Your health and your partner’s, for one thing.”
Aimee froze. “He’s got nothing to do with this.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll keep in touch,” Gisela said with a small smile. “I’m good at that.”
By the time Aimee could move again, Gisela had ducked around the door. Her footsteps clicked faintly in the distance.
Aimee backed into the espresso machine, knocking it over. Hot muddy grounds, broken shards of black plastic, and mangled metal mesh littered the wood parquet. A fine chocolate-hued spray arced over her poster of the Miles Davis concert at the Olympia. Like old blood.
Aimee sagged and slid down her desk leg to the floor, fighting tears. She sprawled there, in the damp mess.
Aimee knew
Yet doubt assailed her; it added up wrong. A German trained by the French, undercover? Aimee caught her breath.
But RG recruited from every stratum of society … why not a daughter of a notorious terrorist who hated the cause that her mother had embraced instead of her? In the late sixties, RG infiltrated left-wing groups, established files based on phone taps, mail interceptions, and informers in schools and universities. Maybe Gisela was Ulrike Rofmein’s daughter and also an RG agent. But then how could she be mistaken about her own birthday?
Rene found her like that. Dazed and wet, choking on her sobs.
“Cheap machine,” he said, kicking its carcass with his toe. “Never liked it. We need a new one.” He set down Miles Davis, who beelined for her lap. “Martine dropped him off on her way to work; she told me someone broke into your apartment last night.”
Aimee nodded. She hugged Miles Davis, burying her head in his fur.
“The Bazar Hotel de Ville department store has a sale on,” Rene said. “We’ll get a new one at BHV.”
He switched on his computer, then pulled out the broom.
“You’re my family, Rene,” she said, wiping her face with her sleeve. “This woman threatened me … said you’d be in danger if I didn’t cooperate.”
“Bring them on, I’m ready, I work out at the dojo every day,” he said. “Give me a chance to take names and kick ass.”
“If anything happened to you …”
“I know,” he said. “And vice versa, partner.”
Then she told him about Gisela and what had happened. She ruffled Miles Davis’s stomach fur, then slowly pulled herself up and grabbed the broom from him.
“No luck with Etienne the other night?” Rene asked.
She shook her head.
“Michel arrived and we met some performance artists with their own ateliers,” he said. “We talked until dawn!”
She was happy for him.
“There were some disturbing things about his uncle Nessim’s letters of credit,” she said, “I meant to show you.”
Rene nodded. “Always a ‘deal.’ Michel’s father was like that, and
“The same building where Michel is now?” Aimee asked.
Rene nodded. “His great-grandfather sewed for the cloth merchants who passed by. He branched into buying cloth, making garments. Later on, he sold clothes to the burgeoning department stores of Samartaine and Bon Marche. And then he bought the old
“His family and other Ashkenazi Jews were rounded up during the Occupation,” Rene continued. “After the Algerian exodus, refugee Sephardic Jews from North Africa moved in. But the family still owned the building and the business, one of the few who returned and remained. These ‘new Jews’ were foreign, uneducated, too ‘Arabic.’ And more devious. Michel’s father sold out to his brother-in-law, Nessim.”
“Why did he do that?” Aimee asked.
