AL06 - Murder in Montmartre

“You have no ears to hear what I’m saying,” Marie-Dominique said.

She’d changed. Hardened. Where was his Marie-Dominique with the sand-dusted feet and olive-oil-stained hands?

Her heels clicked down the stone steps and when he looked, she’d already turned the corner.

LUCIEN PULLED his coat collar higher and stared at the fingers of mist floating over the buildings below. He was cold and alone, the murmur of Paris below him. He should be recording right now, but Felix was in Corsica, the flics and this Petru were in league against him, and Marie-Dominique had left him again. As they said, a life could fall apart in seconds. And his had.

Bad luck dogged him. His grand-mere would call it “the evil eye.” Superstition, all superstition. He believed in science, empiricism. Still, the image of the old mazzera came to him, “the witch” they called her in the village. She was supposed to know how to lift curses.

He saw the piercing topaz eyes in her lined face, her black shawl redolent of the herbs she used, the tarnished silver cross and amulets she wore around her neck. He’d still been in short pants, sleeping on the platform in the attic under the skylight when he’d visited her. A rash had covered his palms and he’d tried to hide them under his school desk. The older boy he had asked to whittle him a slingshot saw them and ridiculed him: “Leper.”

Desperate to rid himself of the rash, he’d walked through the mazzera’s open door. The one-room stone house smelled of smoke and pork grease. Smoked sausages and cured hams on strings hung in rows from the wood beams. The old crone, huddled by the wood-burning stove with its chipped enamel coffee pot, looked up.

“Petit, you’ve come to buy my sanglier?” she asked in a curious high-pitched voice.

She cured and smoked the best wild boar sausages in the village.

“N-not exactly,” he stammered.

Her eyes, like a young woman’s, penetrated the smoky haze.

“Non, of course not. You need my help,” she said. “Come here. Show me your hands.”

Surprised, he stepped forward, past the sleeping dog curled at her feet.

He lifted his palms, his eyes down, and showed her. “Maman’s tried ointments, olive-oil soap, but nothing works.”

“You want it to go away and your friends to stop making fun of you.”

How did she know? He nodded, shifting his sandaled feet on the uneven wood floorboards.

“It’s a sign, petit. Ask yourself why.”

Perplexed, he backed away. “You’re supposed . . .”

“I see things.” Her voice crackled and the dog thumped its tail. “You’ve forgotten a promise, haven’t you?”

A promise? Hadn’t he fed the chickens this morning?

“I mean forgotten what you know deep inside. So the spirits have sent you a reminder.”

She made the sign of the cross over his forehead and chest three times, murmuring words in some language he didn’t understand. Latin sounding. “Every night for three nights look into the sky and ask your ancestors’ help.” She poured herbs and boar fat into a small mortar and ground them with a pestle into a foul-smelling brown paste.

“Smear this on your palms afterward,” she said. “Three nights, don’t forget.”

He reached in his pocket and pulled out a tied clump of sage he’d gathered in the maquis. He handed it to her.

“Merci, good boy,” she said. “You honor the customs.”

For three nights, staring at the glistening stars, he’d crossed himself. Thought hard. The promise he’d made to his grandfather to carry on the family music tradition came back to him. As he applied the awful paste, his dead grandfather’s face floated above him.

The fourth day he’d sat at his school desk and had seen that his rash had gone. And so had the older boy. “Moved to Bonifacio,” his teacher said. Slingshot and all.

He never knew if the vile paste or his exhortations or both had worked.

But he had no mazzera to lift this curse now. He scattered a handful of bread crumbs for the blackbirds perched on a leafless sycamore branch and made his way down the steps.

Late Wednesday Evening

“BONSOIR,” AIMEE SAID. “Lucien Sarti, s’il vous plait.”

“Who’s calling?” a woman asked.

“Aimee Leduc.”

“He’s gone. Left a few days ago.”

What could she say now? Think fast.

“Doesn’t he work at a club? I’m Felix Conari’s associate. There is a big snag with his music contract,” she said. “I must contact him.”

Pause. A sizzling sound came over the phone. Was the woman cooking?

“Give me your number. If he calls . . .”

“06 57 89 42. Please, as soon as possible.”

She clicked off. A hungry musician should bite at that. She hoped so.

A moment later her phone vibrated in her pocket. Hungry all right.

“Allo?”

“Sorry to call you so late. Yann Marant here,” a voice said, loud conversation buzzing in the background. “I just finished work, but I found something, although maybe it’s nothing, to do with your investigation.”

A break, finally?

“Can we meet? My phone’s acting up,” she said.

“Cafe Noctambule,” he said. “It’s noisy but I’m unfamiliar with the area.”

No problem.” “

YANN S TOOD in the Cafe Noctambule, a dive with seventies-era smoky mirrors on the walls. On the small stage, a bouffant-haired man crooned chansons. The place was packed and couples revolved to the accordion and the beat of the snare drum.

Yann waved. “Over here.”

Next to him, two women argued, snarling at each other like cats in an alley. A smallish mild-mannered- looking man grinned at their show.

Yann covered his ears. “I’m sorry, no place to talk here. Hungry?”

Aimee nodded. She couldn’t remember when she’d last eaten.

A few doors away, they found a cigarette-box-sized bistro, five tables crowded into a dark room with a coal- burning stove. Warm as toast, but full. Reluctant to leave, Aimee suggested that they stand at the zinc counter and order a jambon-beurre.

“I appreciate your calling, Yann. Anything might help.”

“Now I feel silly. I read too many suspense thrillers,” he said, twisting his hands. “It’s probably nothing, but you said . . .”

“Go ahead.” She hoped she hadn’t made the trip for nothing. Patience, she had to have more patience.

Despite Yann’s wrinkled black pants and loosened ponytail, he exuded more appeal than most computer geeks she knew. And was better looking. Had he really recalled some vital detail or was he using this as an excuse to meet? But the warm bistro held more allure than her cold, empty apartment.

“Tonight, after I left Felix’s, I threw a water bottle into the construction’s Dumpster, the one parked in front of the building being renovated,” Yann said. “Everything fell out, a mess. I know it’s forbidden but, well, I scooped it up, climbed up to throw . . .” He paused. “Sorry to bore you, you’ll think I dive Dumpsters at night but I don’t.”

“Bon appetit,” said the white-aproned bistro owner, setting a plate of ham and buttered baguette sandwiches in front of them.