AL07 - Murder on the Ile Saint-Louis

once been. She was clean and neatly dressed . . . only, if one looked closely enough, the shopping bags gave her away as a street person. Yet for periods of time she’d stay in a city-run pension, hold a job, and blend in with the anonymous older generation.

“The baron? Up to his tricks again. Tell me more.”

Someone had to show her kindness, Caplan thought. She’d been traumatized during the Occupation. Out of sync, out of step, after the war. But then, deep down, who wasn’t?

Her family had owned this store on Ile Saint-Louis until Liberation. Now he did. The Wehrmacht’s fault. Their boots had strutted over the bridge, back and forth, between the town house they’d requisitioned—now the Polish Center—and the shops on rue Saint Paul in the nearby Marais. Those were all gone. The bordello, whose attic his family had hidden in after the 1942 raid, was gone, too. The whole block of stores had been torn down and it was a manicured garden now.

“Well, our playboy baron keeps asking me to sell his lower-end furnishings, if you call seventeenth century low end, piece by piece to finance his rent boys.” He leaned back on the marquise chair, his weight straining the curved legs. “He needs more money to attract them the older he gets.”

“You remember the parties . . . the Polish diplomatic receptions and how we’d peek at the guests over the hedge?” she asked.

Jean grinned. A memory they shared from before the time of the marching jackboots. She loved talking about the island as it had once been, long ago.

“If those walls could talk! Remember the masked costumed party, the servants dressed as Nubian slaves?”

She was mixing the eras up. This party had taken place in the seventies; it was still a legend but a legend for a set that was dying out. None of the very rich lived like that anymore. Today socialites mixed Cartier diamond watches and designer jeans. It was another world now, declasse, common.

Jean looked down at the worn soles of his brown shoes. A decade ago Helene had turned up and walked into the shop only to ask with a vacant smile if he had her schoolbooks.

“‘Helene . . . where were you?’” he’d asked.

“Down south,” she’d said.

He’d recognized the burns on her temples. She’d had shock treatments. The part of her brain they hadn’t burned out was living in the past. Guilt had racked him.

“Mustn’t be sad, Jean,” she said now. He came back to the present as she took his chin in her hand, searching his face. There was a puzzled, warm look in those violet-tinged eyes.

“Stay here,” he offered.

“I can’t. The bad one might catch us.” She leaned closer, whispering, “We have to hide.”

“Who are you afraid of? Did someone threaten you or call you names again? I told you I’d take care of —”

“The bad one,” she repeated. “You know, the one who threw the girl in the river. Paulette’s ever so afraid the bad one will toss her in.”

Paulette? Her sister Paulette had been taken in 1942.

“She’s afraid that he’ll kill her, too.”

“What do you mean, Helene?” Jean had overheard talk at the cafe-tabac counter that morning and read the newspaper article: a young woman’s body had been found in the Seine. “You witnessed this?”

She nodded mutely.

In her own way she never lied. But he couldn’t credit this.

“So I took care of the bad one, Jean,” she said, her mouth set in a thin line.

Jean controlled his shudder. He gripped the chair’s threadbare armrest. “Took care . . . how?”

“I couldn’t let the bad one do it again,” she said, shaking her head. “Now I’ve made it safe.”

He wanted to shake information out of her. As he learned toward her, his foot hit the shopping bag at her feet and he looked down. Inside one of the bags he noticed the black handle and ornamental bee of a Laguiole knife.

“Did you use that knife . . . to protect yourself?” he asked her.

She stood, gathered her bags and broken umbrella, and went to the door.

He followed her, putting his arm around her shoulders. “Wait, Helene. What did you see?”

“Merci, Jean.” Her eyes clouded. “There’s a break in the rain. I have to go.”

He stared after her as she padded down the rain-soaked street, mumbling to herself. She’d gone over the edge, he concluded. Next it would be UFOs.

But he couldn’t get her voice out of his head. What if someone had attacked her and in self-defense she’d retaliated? She might have hurt someone. Worse—someone might be attacking women and the homeless on the island. He thumbed through the the phone directory, found the listing he sought, and, with shaking fingers, dialed the Commissariat.

Tuesday Late Afternoon

MARTINE’S RED-SOLED, black-heeled Louboutins clicked across the creaking floor of the Musee des Hopitaux de Paris. She was wearing an orangey peach wool suit and matching blossomlike hat. Breathless, she still managed to kiss Aimee on both cheeks.

“Nice place to meet! These old operating theaters look like torture chambers.” Martine pointed to an exhibit —a gray, tubular iron lung. “Trying to tell me something, Aimee?”

Martine smoked a pack a day.

“You? Never.”

Martine, her best friend since the lycee, did investigative reporting now after her stint at a defunct fashion magazine. She was tamer than she’d been in her student days. Martine shared a huge high-ceilinged flat with her boyfriend, Gilles, and his assorted children, overlooking the Bois de Boulogne in the sixteenth arrondissement. Haute bourgeois, too staid for Aimee.

“Charming.” Martine stared at the enlarged sepia turn-ofthe century photos of barefoot children in line at a milk bar. She grinned. “Gilles’s kids only stand in line at FNAC for the latest CD.”

“What did you find out?” Aimee asked.

Martine opened her pink alligator bag and thrust a batch of printouts at Aimee. “Not much. Last week, certain allegations surfaced. There was enough there for the Army to put Orla Thiers and Nelie Landrou on their wanted- for-questioning list.”

“What kind of allegations?”

Martine consulted a printout. “Sexy stuff,” she said, with a moue of distaste. “Apparently, they acquired knowledge of truck schedules—arrivals and deliveries.”

A far cry from nuclear secrets.

“That’s all?”

“Looks like it,” Martine said. “It’s a favorite tactic of MondeFocus to set up a roadblock to stop a fleet of semis, tanker trucks carrying hazardous materials.”

“The Army steps in if there’s any activity threatening radioactive materials, Martine,” Aimee said.

Martine shrugged.

Aimee stuck the printouts in her bag to study later. If Krzysztof Linski was implicated as well and on the run, too, it would explain his behavior.

“I’ve got to rush.” Martine took Aimee’s arm and they walked through the hall under the painted ceiling showing eighteenth-century surgeons in panels encircled by trompe l’oeil pillars. “The oil conference . . .”

“Wearing that?”

“First, my niece’s baptism. You know Liliane, my youngest sister.”

“You’re a godmother how many times over?”

“Three, or is this one the fourth? Can’t keep track of all of them.” Martine had three married sisters, all with children. “She’s hired another babysitter. To supplement her other nannies.”