Cold air rose up from the stone. She rubbed her arms and looked up. Exquisite carved vaulting, a design of entwined branches with oak and hawthorn leaves and hop vines, wound above her. The circular staircase and open landings were islanded aloft. Shiny black birds perched in the turret. Their sharp cawing grated in Aimee’s ears.
Was Jutta Hald playing games, screwing with her mind? She seemed to think that Aimee was hiding something, had some secret.
Footsteps shuffled below in the courtyard. Aimee peered through the window illuminating what had once been the small chapel. Carved ravens with two figures on a ribbed band supported the ancient ducal crest.
The damn birds had been around even then.
Aimee shifted her feet on the uneven stone. Below, a group of tourists stood in the courtyard.
The noise of churning gravel came from outside as she descended. Perhaps the workmen were starting another shift after all, she figured.
She moved into the pale Camembert-colored light ruminating … afraid Jutta Hald’s words about her mother were true.
And afraid this was connected to her father’s death in some way.
But where was Jutta?
Outside, a trio of Portuguese-speaking tourists wandered and consulted maps on the far side of the courtyard. A workman in blue overalls shoveled sand in the rear. A shovel stood up in the sand pile. And Jutta Hald sat, huddled on a green bench next to the wall, her back to Aimee.
Odd, Aimee thought. She hadn’t been there before.
“
Jutta Hald, leaning against the grimy stone wall, said nothing. She smelled of warm hair tinged by the singular vinegary odor she emitted.
Aimee looked closer. Jutta Hald’s eyes were wide with surprise.
“Don’t you hear me?”
No response. What was wrong with her?
She grabbed Jutta Hald’s arm, started to shake her. But the woman’s head slumped over, revealing pink gristle and congealed reddish matter sliding down the stone wall. The rest of her brain was still visible in the back of her skull, the part that hadn’t been blown off.
Aimee reared back, unable to speak. She struggled to breathe. Blood from a black hole seeped through Jutta Hald’s matted hair.
Jutta Hald had been shot at close range. Scarcely a minute ago.
Aimee looked up. She heard a burst of laughter from the tourists, the scrape of the iron gate in the courtyard, and crows cawing in the turrets.
No one had noticed.
Aimee had heard nothing. Neither had anyone else.
Was the killer still here?
She froze.
Jutta Hald’s hands were empty. Her purse and the book she had showed Aimee were gone.
Aimee noticed the pill bottle Jutta must have meant to open, lying on her lap. She carefully picked it up and slipped it into her backpack.
At Aimee and Jutta Hald.
The workman … where was the workman? Aimee looked around. Gone. She heard more shouting in Portuguese.
Quickly she approached one of the tourists, a woman with frizzy black hair, who backed away.
“Where did the workman go?”
Wide-eyed looks of fear greeted her. Aimee pantomimed shoveling.
A salvo of Portuguese rushed toward her.
The Portuguese woman made for the gate. Aimee followed, scrutinizing rue Etienne Marcel, the street she faced.
“I’m reporting a murder,” she said into the phone. “The shooter could be posing as a tourist or a workman.”
“Address and victim?” the dispatcher asked.
Twenty meters away the Portuguese woman had found a
“Tour Jean-Sans-Peur on rue Etienne Marcel,” she said. “A released prisoner from Fresnes, Jutta Hald.”
The
“Your name?” the dispatcher asked.
The
“Call me a concerned citizen,” she said, clicked off, and ran around the corner.
INSIDE THE OIL-PUDDLED GARAGE in a Paris suburb, Stefan adjusted his hearing aid to listen to the radio. “Former seventies radical” had caught his attention as he bent over a Mercedes SL 320 engine. “Jutta Hald, just released today after a twenty-year prison term, was found murdered …”
Stefan went cold. He dropped his wrench and leaned against the engine hood. His jaw worked but nothing came out.
The radio report continued. A police inspector interviewed by the reporter described the homicide location and a woman running from the scene.
The sound faded. Buzzed. Stefan fiddled with his hearing aid.
And then the news bulletin ended.
Stefan glanced nervously at the mechanic working across the garage. But the man in the greasy jumpsuit hadn’t lifted his head from the engine hood he was working on.
Jutta Hald killed … on the day she got out of prison! Who was left who could have gotten to her?
Stefan straightened up. He recalled those days, back in 1972.
He saw the faces frozen with shock as his Red Army gang burst into the bank yelling, “Hands up, we’re relieving you of your capitalist gains…. Long live the PROLETARIAT!”
Forget the ideology. The power had thrilled him.
He’d hated the nightly meetings, typing communiques and discussing manifestos on
But robbing banks had been fun. It was all spoiled when they had decided to aim higher, when they’d become too greedy. Yet it was their mistake. The biggest one.
So for twenty years Stefan had been underground. His Red Army group scattered: Jutta imprisoned, Marcus and Ingrid shot in the head; Ulrike had strangled herself with bedsheets in her cell. Beate and Jules had vanished. Mercenaries in Angola, last he’d heard.
Now Jutta was dead.
He stared down at his callused grease-stained fingers. Lucky thing he’d been good at fixing engines.
Stefan nodded and leaned over the gleaming engine.
Anton kept him despite Stefan’s “dreamy fits,” as he called them. Because if Stefan knew one thing, it was Mercedes engines.
