Murder in the Sentier

Christian Figeac, the deceased author’s son, was twenty minutes late to the cafe he’d chosen for their meeting. She’d contacted him via his father’s publisher, saying it was a police matter. After her bike ride from the office, she’d ordered an espresso. And waited.

A tall man with stringy sandy hair entered. He was in his late twenties, a few years younger than she was. He wore a synthetic leather jacket, silver and tight, over a black shirt. His deep gray eyes sought her, nailed her, and she knew it was him.

“Christian Figeac,” he said simply and shook her hand. His palms were moist and warm. He looked around, warily then said, “Let’s sit down over there.” He pointed toward an old-fashioned leather banquette.

“For meeting me, merci,” she said, bringing her espresso with her. “I apologize for the bad timing….”

“I only agreed because you can help me,” he said.

Help him?

“Your father might have known my mother,” she said. “That’s why …”

“He knew lots of people,” Christian Figeac interrupted, apparently uninterested.

“Ever heard of Sydney Leduc or a woman named de Chambly?” She remembered the name B. de Chambly from the Fresnes Prison envelope.

Christian Figeac shook his head. He rubbed his nose with his sleeve.

“What about Jutta Hald?” Aimee asked. “Did she call or visit you?”

He waved his hand dismissively. A nervous twitch shook his jaw every so often. “Listen, I can’t go in there anymore.”

“Go in where?” She felt sorry for him but so far this conversation was going nowhere.

He pulled out a thick cigar, Cuban by the look of it, and proceeded to light the end. But his hands shook, a steady tremor.

“It’s Papa’s atelier, you see,” he said, his eyes boring into hers. “Can’t seem to sell it. The realtor told me to spruce it up, you know, the vanilla treatment. But this is the 2nd arrondissement on the tony Right Bank. The place should sell itself.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” she said. “Now, I’m sorry to keep bringing this back to Jutta Hald, but I think she was looking for your father.”

“Now she can find him under the earth with the worms.”

He sounded bitter. And clueless.

“It’s the ghosts, you see,” he leaned forward, a stricken look on his face. “They won’t let me.”

Maybe he was insane. A dead end.

She found a ten-franc piece and slapped it onto the table.

“Look,” Aimee said, opening her backpack, “you’re going through a hard time. I wish you the best, but …”

“Wait, please.” He grabbed her arm. Perspiration beaded his upper lip. She hadn’t seen him order but a white-aproned waiter appeared with an espresso, set it on the table for Figeac, and whisked her ten francs away.

“I’ll think about those names you mentioned. What were they again? Signe? And who?”

“Tiens, I’ve got to go,” she said, trying to slide off the leather banquette. But her leather skirt stuck to the seat, making a sucking noise and riding up her thighs.

“Hear me out.” He grabbed her arm again and wouldn’t let go. His cigar smoke got in her face.

She kept her tone civil. “I came here to find out if there was some connection between your father, Jutta Hald, and my mother—”

“Papa committed suicide last week,” he interrupted. “It was ten years to the day since my mother did the same thing.” He puffed on his cigar.

Now the story came back to Aimee. In the seventies, his mother, an American actress, was rumored to be carrying a French terrorist’s baby. She miscarried and had a breakdown. Her career was over. Several years later, on the anniversary of the miscarriage, her body was found in her car in the Bois de Vincennes. Too many pills.

“Papa wanted to clear her name,” Christian Figeac said. “Reveal how Interpol targeted her.”

“Hadn’t he done that before?” Aimee remembered him being interviewed on television, delivering a tirade against the “establishment.” He had distinctive blue eyes and a long face. A potent cocktail of literary talent and liberal political blunders.

“Papa said there were documents,” he said. “I think he was working on something to do with that. The research had been his reason for living. After that he took his life.”

“Are you sure the book was about Interpol … not about the terrorists?” What if he’d been researching Haader-Rofmein, something dealing with Jutta, or with her mother? She leaned forward, interested. “Did he mention the Haader-Rofmein gang?”

“Haader-Rofmein? Maybe, I’m not sure. He’d had a dry spell,” Christian Figeac said, looking down. He knocked cigar ash into the Ricard ashtray. The ashes missed and particles floated onto his pants. “And then I heard him working.”

“Working on what?”

“He never talked about what he wrote. Taboo. A jinx, he said.”

Aimee thought she could see sadness in Christian Figeac’s eyes. And a kind of defeat. Had he felt sidelined, growing up in the shadow of famous parents who’d been obsessed by the unborn child? Aimee felt sorry for this man.

“Why would your father take his life now?”

Instead of answering her, Christian Figeac shrugged. “Late at night,” he said, his long lashes fluttering, “the time Papa used to work in the breakfast room, I think I can still hear him pounding on typewriter keys. Strange, because he wrote everything in longhand first. I open the door and it’s empty, of course, but it’s like he’s trying to tell me something.”

“Rational consideration would preclude that, Monsieur Figeac,” she said.

Christian Figeac was delusional but maybe she could turn it to her advantage. Find the link to her mother, figure out what Jutta Hald had really wanted. “If you’re the literary executor for your father’s estate,” she said, “may I go through his papers?”

Christian Figeac pulled a crumpled paper from his jacket pocket and smoothed it out on the marble-topped cafe table.

“How much?” he asked, writing her name on the check.

“For what? My field is computer security, data recovery for firms and corporations.”

“Someone’s stalking me,” he said, his eyes huge. “Twenty thousand do for a retainer?”

“A retainer for what?”

“Find out who’s stalking me.”

That got her attention. She leaned back against the banquette. If she took his check maybe she could pay the rent as well as find out about her mother.

Outside the cafe window, a Pakistani man with a pushcart full of cloth rolled his eyes at a burly man making deliveries whose truck blocked the street.

“I’ll take the job on the condition that I can have access to your father’s papers,” she said. “They may contain information about my mother or Jutta Hald.”

“Tant pis but I’ve never heard of them.”

“Think back. Didn’t an older woman, Jutta Hald, come to your …?”

“But it’s so like something my father would do,” he interrupted. “I’ve even heard their noises.”

“Noises?” Aimee felt like standing up. “Is that why you think someone’s stalking you?”

“The funny thing was, when I checked in the morning, the room had been disturbed. Discreetly, but I could tell.”

“How’s that?”

“The dust, of course.” he stared at Aimee. “Footprints in the dust.”

AIMEE AND Christian Figeac reached the door of 107, rue de Clery, a block away. The building occupied the corner of the narrow street where it met rue des Petits Carreaux. The inner courtyard, with ivy-covered facades and deep balconies, seemed like another world, an oasis far removed from the hookers on Saint Denis, from the Metro