AL06 - Murder in Montmartre

“He was not a workman. He made rude comments. But he was dressed in designer black. Trendy.”

“A young man?”

“I didn’t pay attention.”

“What about the other man?”

“Just his back, that’s all I saw.”

“Did you hear the gunshot or see the flash?”

Madame Tardou shook her head. “When I heard voices talking about constellations . . . what they said was mixed up with words that didn’t fit.”

“What did you hear?”

“I didn’t tell you before because it doesn’t make sense.” Zoe paused, rubbed her cheek.

“Go on, it’s all right,” Aimee said, trying to control her impatience.

“They said ‘turrente,’ a stream; ‘parolle,’ which means ‘words,’ but it didn’t make sense or seem to mean anything. They spoke about planets and streams. No, there was more . . . that’s right . . . cinca, searching for, searching, they said ‘searching.’”

Planets and streams and searching, talking about Corsica, and then murder? “You’re sure?”

“Corsicans don’t articulate, they swallow the consonants at the ends of words.” Zoe’s gaze settled on her piled desk. “They did repeat the old saying, that I recognized.”

“Which is?”

“Corsica audra di male in peglyu.” She shook her head.

“‘Corsica will always go wrong,’ typical of their pessimism tinged with pride.” Zoe shrugged, spent. As if she’d run out of things to say. “My head ached, I felt miserable. I lay down and must have fallen asleep watching the tele. That’s all.”

Aimee believed her, but she had to check.

“What show did you watch?”

“Show? An old Sherlock Holmes film. Too bad I missed the ending. Now I must work,” she said, eager for Aimee to leave. “I don’t know any more.”

“There’s something else,” Aimee said. How could she phrase this? “I admire your mother. It takes a courageous woman to speak of Lamorlaye, and the Lebensborn. Why did she finally . . . ?”

“Talk about her captivity? The way they used the women?” Zoe asked, all in one breath. And for a moment, Aimee saw the same wistful gaze she’d noted in the photo of Elise.

Aimee nodded.

“The past was too heavy to bear any longer, Maman said. When the filmmaker approached her, she felt it was time. Nothing that horrible was worth all that effort of concealment, my mother said.”

“That took such courage.”

“And the odd thing was: after that, she wrote poetry again. It was as if the weight of her history had lifted.”

“I respect her for speaking out,” Aimee said.

Zoe’s brows knitted in anger. “My stepfather didn’t,” she said. “He threw her out and tried to disinherit me, but he died before he could.”

“To disinherit you because you were fathered by a German?” Aimee asked.

“Those twenty-fifth-hour Resistants who watched the Occupation from afar turn out the most heroic of all!”

“I’m sorry.” Aimee didn’t know what else to say.

“Sorry?” She gave a short laugh. “So were the women, so are we, the children. Children of the enemy. Raised in guilt for who we were. Our very existence was the cause of shame. Whether I was too young, or just misplaced in the chaos of the German retreat in 1944 I’ll never know, but I wasn’t transported to Germany like the others,” she continued. “My mother found me in the room with telescopes, an observatory adjacent to the chateau that had been turned into an orphanage. I was lucky. Others displaced at the war’s end were reared in group homes with hardly any food or nurturing, ostracized for their background, and became misfits. Bereft of parents who never searched for them, either dead or lost or wanting to forget, many ended up in mental institutions. At least, I found my biological father, alive after all this time.”

Aimee stared, incredulous. “Did you meet him?”

“A sad old gentleman living in Osnabruck. He remembered my mother. After the war, he’d owned a pharmacy,” she said, with a small smile. “He’d studied medieval history at university.”

Thursday Evening

ONCE OUTSIDE , AIMEE BELTED her leather coat. Zoe’s words haunted her. No wonder she avoided the authorities. Her story didn’t seem to help but at least she’d admitted hearing words spoken in Corsican. Aimee scanned the alleylike street. No Cloclo. No mec with a down jacket.

How could she warn Cloclo her “station” was being watched?

Aimee climbed the stairs to Place des Abbesses. There, CRS teams in blue jumpsuits cradling Uzis strolled the streets. This signaled a definite terrorist alert. She felt a tightening in her chest. What was going on?

She entered a warm cafe and picked up a paper to see if she could find out. She sat at the window overlooking the steps leading to the alley, a perfect vantage point from which to watch for Cloclo.

She rubbed her gloved hand over the fogged-up glass. More worries assailed her. Cloclo bore a grudge against the “crude” mec, the one Zoe Tardou had just described. She might say something to get rid of him. Yet if Cloclo did speak to him, Aimee would be ready and only seconds away.

Several young men, unemployed judging by the time of day, played at the Fussball machine. Aimee ordered a croque-monsieur from a waitress with red rose tattoos up her arm.

Outside, passersby scurried through the gray evening light just sinking behind the eroding stone buildings. Mist lingered over the steps. Aimee tried to avoid the predatory gaze of a man in black denims and a blue turtleneck near the Fussball machine. She tapped her feet to the beat of the radio’s techno station and opened the newspaper to the headlines to read: COUNTERTER-RORISM POLICE DISCOVER EXPLOSIVES TRACED TO ARMATA CORSA.

Her shoulders tensed. That accounted for the CRS presence outside in the square. And for a moment, she was afraid. Another building mined with explosives?

She read the article: “Today a special counterterrorism unit, acting on a tip, found a cache of detonators and explosives in a government building.”

A grainy photo showed a dismantled detonating device.

She read further.

Corsica has been plagued since 1975 by almost daily machine-gunnings and other attacks by a small but active, nationalist movement. Favored venues for Separatist attacks have been on the island of Corsica, and rarely in France until now. Most bombings have been designed to minimize risk to human life but maximize material damage. Explosions occur in the early morning hours when buildings are unoccupied. Corsican terrorists have targeted police stations, French government buildings, and the property of non-Corsicans on the island. They extort funds from outsiders through the imposition of a “revolution tax,” and punish those who fail to pay. Sources would not reveal the government building in Paris just targeted, only that the tete de Maure—a Separatist symbol pic- turing a black face with a white bandanna—was discovered. Links to a known Armata Corsa terrorist cell operating in the eighteenth arrondissement are being pursued. Ministry insiders indicate this was an attempt to embarrass the French government and pressure it into negotiations with fratricidal Mafia-style gangs that have jumped on the Separatist bandwagon.

The tete de Maure, like the poster she’d seen somewhere. And Yann had said Lucien was a member of the Armata Corsa.

From what she knew, Corsica had to stay French not only for the security of the holiday homes lining its pristine beaches, but also as a convenient military outpost. A strategic sentinel in the Mediterranean, home to the