Murder in the Sentier

Metro, by the big porte.”

Aimee’s eyes had gleamed. She knew the huge arch, the old northern gateway of Paris since the fourteenth century.

One night Aimee overheard her father and grandfather talking after she’d gone to bed. “What kind of choice is that … leaving your little girl with Huguette or keeping her with you at the Commissariat?” her grandfather had said. “Put her into boarding school.”

“Did it harm me, hanging around putes and flics?” she’d heard her father ask. “Huguette’s good for her, she needs someone who can do things I can’t.” Her grandfather had stayed silent.

And her papa had kept her with him, mostly. Until she got older and was sent to boarding school.

Years later on a job, she’d found herself passing through her former neighborhood. She’d walked down the narrow street. In her old building the mailboxes looked new. She hadn’t remembered Huguette’s last name. Or if she’d even known it.

But now curiosity got the better of her, and she walked to the lane behind their old building. Overgrown bushes in a vacant lot shaded the dead end. Once, there had been an Art Nouveau chalet with curving wood supports and an iron-framed glass terrace on the site. She and Huguette had often speculated as to who’d lived there. They’d made up stories about the owner, a Monsieur Roulard who worked at Gare Saint-Lazare and had the officious title chef d’operations painted on his gate.

Now plastic bags whipped over dust and rubble in the wind, spiraled strands of rusted wire coiled around the single tree that stood where a garden had once bloomed. At Huguette’s window she saw an old woman stroking ceramic gnomes on her back window ledge.

Aimee stopped. Each gnome perched on a green base, wore a pointed red cap, and stood in a different pose. The woman patted them, rearranged their order, then noticed Aimee. A half-smile came over the ravaged face. The long ears were recognizable. Aimee gaped open-mouthed, then raised her hand in greeting. But the old woman had bent over the gnomes, rubbing them with a cloth. Time passed, shadows covered Aimee’s boots, and the woman still polished away, not looking up once.

Aimee turned and walked away over the broken cobbles under the night sky encrusted with stars.

Thursday Night

“MONSIEUR … ARE YOU WELL? ” the flic asked Stefan.

His legs paralyzed, Stefan realized he was panting, his lungs about to burst.

“Fine, merci,” he managed and tried to wave the flic off. And wave off his own terror.

But the flic, his eyebrows rising in the flashing red lights from the patrol car, stared at him.

Stefan wanted to control his breathing. He tried but he couldn’t, and he clutched the door frame.

“No problem, please,” Stefan said.

Another flic alighted from the driver’s seat. His badge shone in the streetlight, his mouth was set in a thin line.

“This your place of residence, Monsieur?”

“Stopped for a nightcap at my friends’, Officer,” Stefan said, his breathing more under control now.

“Aaaah,” the flic nodded. “So you live in the quartier?”Stefan thought of his ID; he couldn’t lie.

“Visiting friends who do, Officer,” he said, shifting his leg and keeping his head down.

“Bon. You seem very social,” the flic said. “We’d appreciate your help in our inquiries.”

“Inquiries?” Stefan’s heart thumped. He thought it would leap out of his chest. “Like I said, I don’t live in Paris.”

“Actually, you didn’t say, Monsieur,” said the flic with the hard mouth. “If you don’t mind, we’d like you to accompany us to the Commissariat.”

“But I’m a visitor here….”

“And probably with a sharper eye than we who take the scenery for granted, eh?”

Stefan wondered if someone had been shot in the building.

“Has something happened?”

The flic took his arm as if concerned for his health.

“A homicide, Monsieur,” he said, escorting him to the car.

Thursday Night

AIMEE’S CELL PHONE VIBRATED on her hip.

“Allo?”

“Have you found Idrissa yet?” Christian asked.

Finally!

“Where have you been, Christian? You didn’t show up at your appointment to meet Etienne or at the bank. I’ve been calling you,” she said. “Your father’s editor, Vigot, knows more than he’s saying about—”

“I know,” Christian interrupted, his voice slurred. “Forget that … Idrissa’s in trouble.”

“Forget it?” she asked, angered at being brushed off. “Do you know if Vigot’s got your father’s manuscript?”

“No, but Vigot said …”

She heard a muffled sound, as if Christian had put his hand over the phone.

And then he hung up.

Worried, she hit the call-back button but the line was busy. Was he doped up and in trouble himself?

She’d keep trying his number as she headed toward Mala’s apartment to find Idrissa.

No one answered the doorbell. Club Exe was a block away, maybe she’d find Mala there.

The club’s narrow entrance on rue Poissonniere smelled of disinfectant. A sure sign of a health inspection or the rumor of one, Aimee thought. Clubs also spiffed up when they were nervous about immigration authority visits.

“I’d like to speak with Mala,” said Aimee.

“She’s not working tonight.”

Great!

“Seen Idrissa Diaffa?”

“Not here anymore,” the voice said. Only a brown elongated neck was visible above the man’s red, yellow, and green Rasta-style tank top. His face was hidden by the Club Exe’s cracked ticket-booth shade. Pounding techno music sounded from within.

“But the advertisement says she’s still here.” Aimee pointed to the sign. Club Exe advertised Tuesdays through Thursdays as “acoustic nights with Idrissa, accompanied on the kora by Ousmane.”

“That’s old … but there’s music upstairs,” the voice said. “Remix downstairs. Either way, thirty francs.”

“Pas de probleme,” she said. Fine, she’d see if anyone knew Idrissa’s whereabouts or whether Ousmane had any idea where she was.

She passed the francs over worn wood. A brown hand took hers and stamped her wrist with the image of a red skeleton key. Inside, the techno beat amped up, savaging Aimee’s ears. Several men with dreadlocks leaned on the bar, an old converted zinc. They nodded at her while sipping orange punch gingembre, a Senegalese drink packing a rum wallop.