Murder in the Sentier

He swabbed her back with alcohol. Cold and tingling. He rubbed his hands, probably in glee.

“Tout va bien, Nico?”

So the tattooist was Nico.

“No complaints, Lieutenant Mercier,” he said.

From the direction of the conversation, she figured the flic stood a meter away. Keep going, she thought, don’t stop.

“Any news for me … anybody run in here?”

Aimee’s heart hammered. Something clattered in the metal tray by her ear. If she bolted, she’d send the tattoo machine flying but she wouldn’t make it to the door.

“We sent runners for coffee,” Nico said, “but they’re not back yet.”

So Lieutenant Mercier was the friendly type, taking the pulse of his quartier. Maybe he contacted his informers here. Or he was on the take. Or looking for her.

The tattoo needle ripped her flesh like a fine-toothed hacksaw.

Twenty tears to the minute, searing and precise, the needle punched tiny holes in her skin. She blinked away tears, gritting her teeth, praying it would end soon.

After what seemed like forever, Aimee heard Mercier move away. A long while later the tattoo artist switched off his torture machine.

Aimee got up slowly and reached for her wallet. “In case service isn’t included,” she said, slipping him an extra hundred-franc note.

“Like a complimentary makeover?” a woman’s voice asked. “You’ll love it.”

Aimee turned and saw a petite smiling woman standing near the chair. Beyond the curtain, another flic had joined Mercier.

“Seems it’s time for me to get a new image,” Aimee said, her mouth compressed.

“Speed bump … like it?” the makeup artist asked, as she traced the arch in Aimee’s brow using a tapered makeup brush. “It does wonders for those lines.”

Aimee’s shoulders tightened in pain. The tattoo hurt. In the outer room, Mercier’s voice competed with the whirring of the tattoo needle.

“Try this too,” the woman said, holding out swabs of glittery peach powder. “This brightens up your skin tone and makes you glow. Positively glow.” She brushed a velvety sheen over Aimee’s arms, shoulders, and neck. “I’m writing a book,” she said, talking nonstop, “called How to Look Like a Goddess When You Feel like a Dog. Full of useful hints for fast-living people who have to look good at airports even in times of excess or trauma.” The woman grinned. “You know, big sunglasses, fur collars to make you appear frail and exotic, that sort of thing.”

By the time Aimee got out of the tatouage parlor, her back ached and she positively glowed. The flics were gone and she’d signed up for a copy of the book.

Aimee’s uneasiness followed her all the way home. She shuddered, thinking of Jutta Hald. Pathetic, desperate Jutta. As greedy and evasive as she’d been, Jutta didn’t deserve to have her brains splattered on a stone wall. No one did. After twenty years of prison, she’d paid her dues.

Part of Aimee wanted to forget she’d ever met Jutta. Another part of her said Jutta’s killer might be able to lead to her mother.

From her backpack she pulled out Jutta’s pill bottle. Inside was a balled-up sketch of the tower along with a torn magazine photo. In it, a salt-and-pepper-haired man was holding an award.

The caption read “Romain Figeac.”

She recognized the name. Romain Figeac, the monstre sacre, Prix Goncourt— winning author, and sixties radical. In the seventies he’d been the ruine du jour and in the eighties, passe. Now the old man was still a bleeding liberal, according to his own autobiography. Or was that his wife, an actress … she couldn’t remember.

She ran her fingers over the smooth blue tiles on the basin counter. Was what Jutta Hald told her the truth … any of it?

Aimee wondered if the address book Jutta had waved by her had really been her mother’s.

She turned on the tap and stuck her head under the cold water. Squeezing her lavender soap, she washed the tattoo parlor smell out of her hair, then shook her wet locks like a dog. But it didn’t clear her head. Her mind was spinning.

Jutta Hald’s words kept coming back. She had asked if Aimee’s mother had sent her something. And then Aimee realized a bathroom drawer had been left half open, her towels hastily folded, and the medicine cabinet ajar. Nothing was missing but what had Jutta been searching for?

Then the realization hit her. Someone had killed Jutta. She could be next!

Nothing made sense, yet it connected to her mother.

Since the day her mother left, Aimee had been desperate to know what happened to her. Now she had a chance to find out. Slim at best. But more than before. She had to pursue it.

She went to the kitchen and plugged in the small refrigerator. It was empty and emitted the hiss of slow- leaking Freon. She filled Miles Davis’s chipped Limoges bowl with steak tartare left from the train trip. He sniffed, then cocked his head as if to say, “What’s this?”

“Sorry, furball,” she said. “I’ll pop into the charcuterie later.”

Her seventeenth-century apartment needed an overhaul: central heating instead of feeble steam radiators for bone-chilling winters; plumbing more current than the nineteenth century; enough juice to keep a chandelier, computer, fax, scanner, DSL line, and hair dryer on concurrently; and access to her basement cave for storage. Too bad the cave had been declared a historical treasure because it had provided an underground escape route to the Seine for nobility during the Revolution, and had been closed for repairs. Closed for as long as she could remember.

She kept buying lottery tickets. Someday, she told herself, Architectural Digest would visit. But maybe not in her lifetime.

She remembered her mother calling her Aamee in a flat American monotone, unlike her father’s French A-yemay, his syllables dipping at the beginning. Had he refused to speak of her mother, because of shame that he, a flic, had a wife in prison?

Aimee consulted the Minitel. No listing for Romain Figeac. She tried his publisher, Tallimard.

“Can you help me reach Romain Figeac?”

“Tiens, this is a joke, right?” the receptionist said.

Taken aback, Aimee paused. “If you can’t give his number, his address …?”

“Such bad taste,” the receptionist interrupted.

“Look I need to talk with him,” said Aimee.

“Don’t you know?” the receptionist said.

“Enlighten me.”

“His funeral was yesterday.”

SUNDAY

Sunday Morning

AIMEE SURVEYED THE MIRRORED Cafe d’Or on busy rue d’Aboukir and tapped her chipped red nails. A fly landed on the sugar bowl tongs and she shooed it from the counter. Few patrons were inside on this sun-filled day, most sat under the awning on the terrasse. Shadows from the few clipped the trees on Place du Caire dappled the sidewalk.