Murder in the Bastille

in the middle of the night, told they’re lucky not to get their hips broken. Now they don’t even get an offer of a cheque. They fold like a deck of cards. Intimidated.”

That agreed with what Brault, the architect, had told him.

“But why hasn’t someone gone to the authorities?”

Yann rolled his eyes. He lit a match, stuck the burning tip in the pipe bowl, and puffed in a steady rhythm.

“Think about the complaint system, the forms one has to fill out . . . no one’s stupid enough to identify himself. And for the rest, pockets are lined to look the other way.”

“Give me names,” said Rene. “Then I can do something.”

“No one will point a finger,” he said, “so it’s all hearsay. One of the flics said the old people are haunted by phantoms from the past. Poetic, probably true, but a nice excuse for inaction.”

“What do you mean, phantoms?” Was the old man going to ramble now? Rene wished Aimee was listening, instead of him. She had a better take on criminals than he did. She heard old men and women talk and put their stories together. She could find the thread. For such a restless person, she had a fund of intuition.

“Past indiscretions, like informing the Milice,” he said. “Ignoring black shirt thugs looting apartments of the deportees.”

“That’s long ago,” Rene interrupted. “What does it have to do with now?”

The old man puffed several times then looked up. His eyes were wide and full of an almost palpable sadness.

“What doesn’t it have to do with now? The past informs the present. Memory makes the map we carry, no matter how hard we try to erase it.”

True. Rene still didn’t see how it related. Paris had legions of the old, sitting on park benches or at kitchen tables telling stories of the war to grandchildren or others hostage to politeness.

“Some talk about it,” Yann said. “Many remain silent.”

Rene had enough problems without going back to what happened during the war. Leave that to those whose memories stretched that far.

“Can you read it, the plaque?” Yann beckoned Rene to the window.

To the memory of the more than 600 children, women and men of the 11ieme arrondissement, assembled here and then interned in Loiret camp before being deported to Auschwitz. . . .

“Do you know how long it took our association to erect the plaque for our classmates?”

Rene shook his head.

“Simon was my friend; he lived down the hall,” Yann said. “Big family. Poor, but Simon had a beautiful steelie marble, topaz cat’s eye. Superb. He let me borrow it one day, his treasure, but he was like that. Generous. And I didn’t give it back. He asked me again and I stalled. Kept saying I’d forgotten it. And then one night we heard noises down the hall.”

Yann looked at Rene, his eyes clouded. But Rene felt he wasn’t seeing him. Just the past.

“Those noises. The ones making you hide your head under the covers, the frantic whispers of Maman telling me not to look out the window. And they were gone. Never came back. The apartment taken over by someone else, their belongings too.”

“So this is how you return the marble to Simon?”

A bittersweet smile crossed the man’s face. “Fifty years too late.”

True, there was no escaping the past, but Rene wanted to pull the focus back to the evictions and Josiane Dolet.

“Look, I can’t find out about the thugs unless I know where to look.”

“After they do their job, they don’t stick around for coffee,” he said. “Big mecs, bodybuilders, East European by the look of their clothes.”

“How’s that?”

“Hard to say, but a lot of them wear those track suits, the cheap designer copies with words misspelled.”

Rene knew the knockoffs sold at street markets. A Tommy Hilfiger with an F missing. Romanian chic.

“One wore a ponytail,” he said, “stringy hair. You know the type.”

“What else?”

“One night I heard this runt below my window calling out. ‘Draz,’ ” he said.

“Draz?”

“That’s all I understood. Then this gorilla, this Draz with the ponytail, beat him into pulp against the wall.”

Rene said, “Here’s my card.” He knew Aimee handed hers out all the time. It looked professional. And ran up a high printing bill. “Please call if you remember anything else.”

By the time Rene reached his car, the line for the outdoor soup kitchen, part of a network organized by Coluche the comedian, snaked up boulevard Beaumarchais. He knew authorities left a Metro station open when severe cold hit. A well-kept secret among the clochards and junkies. He hoped Madame Sarnac wouldn’t end up there.

Thursday Evening

IN THE HOPITAL QUINZE-VINGTS waiting room, Aimee heard the evening sounds from Bastille and inhaled the Seine’s scent from the open window. She remembered seeing a teddy bear floating in the swollen Seine in the spring. After so much rain, the river had overflowed the quais. The image haunted her all day . . . had a child dropped it from a bridge, a spiteful older brother tossed it? Did wet tears soak a pillow and an anxious parent rush off to the Samaritaine Department store to replace it . . . as her father had tried?

When she was ten, her doudou, a ragged mouse named Emil, dropped from her bookbag into the Seine. Emil was the one thing left from her mother. The only thing her father hadn’t had the heart to throw away. Stained and threadbare, with missing whiskers, Emil had been the subject of her mother’s drawings and stories. The day he fell from Ile St-Louis ranked as the second worst day in her life. The first was when her mother left and never came back.

Emil had fallen at twilight; the dusk, a rose-violet slash under the fingernail crescent of a moon. Her papa had told her the moon’s lit face always turns toward the sun. And to imagine Emil in the turquoise-green Mediterranean enjoying the sun-baked sand. She’d shaken her head stubbornly.

She’d begged her papa to call Captain Morvan, an old colleague and police diver, who’d checked with the Seine dredgers. After he’d reported no luck, she insisted they search the water-treatment plant beyond Bercy. But Emil must have floated away.

Then one day a package had arrived, covered with British stamps, official customs forms, and coarse brown twine. It was addressed to her. In it, she found a toffee-furred bear wearing rainboots, blue slicker, and luggage tag from Paddington station, London, on it, saying “Please take good care of this lost bear.”

After her father’s death, in his drawer, she’d found a yellowed receipt from an English department store for a stuffed bear for a Mademoiselle Leduc. And after all these years, her Paddington Bear still stayed on her bed.

Her dog Miles Davis and the stuffed Paddington Bear were the only men in her life. But wasn’t that how it turned out . . . a successful career and money, but a sour love life, or conversely, madly in love, business falling apart and broke?

Was it just her? Or the fact that bad boys were her downfall?

The last time she’d been happy had been with Yves, now a news bureau chief in Cairo. A problematic relationship at best. Then a few flings, all disasters.

Her tastes were simple. Someone who could make her laugh, had nice eyes, and had the same taste in champagne. Veuve Clicquot. And a bad boy side that made up for any other deficiency.

A nurse’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “Dr. Lambert’s ready. I’ll help you to the MRI.”

Why was she thinking about men? It wasn’t as if she’d had a future with anyone before, and now the prospect seemed even more remote. Zero. She couldn’t see and didn’t know if she ever would.