AL07 - Murder on the Ile Saint-Louis

“ . . . scene secured . . . awaiting the Big E.”

The medical examiner, of course. He leaned over to turn up the volume.

“ID intact . . . Edouard Vavin, 32 rue Rocher in the ninth . . .”

Vavin . . . could it be their Vavin who lived in the now-gentrified old Jewish district near the Freemasons lodge?

“ . . . work address, according to ID, 6 rue des Chantiers . . .”

Rene’s clutch ground, and the car jerked and stalled. Aimee had met Vavin there. That was Regnault’s office address.

Wednesday Early Evening

“BONJOUR, ALLO?” AIMEE said, stamping her feet inside the doorway. She shut the door to the secondhand shop, feeling as if she’d been ridden hard and put away wet. Sodden feathers stuck to her black dress and glitter dust sprinkled her damp red high-tops.

This had to be the place Morbier had mentioned. She’d spied it from across the street. Vavin’s keys jingled in her pocket. She pulled out her phone and dialed Regnault’s number. A message told her that the offices had closed for the day. So she might have some time. She hoped so.

She’d dry off and question the shopkeeper until the flics left and she could grab a taxi to Regnault’s.

In the dim shop, she made out a hand-lettered sign: ESTATES PURCHASED AND CONSIGNMENTS WELCOMED—JEAN CAPLAN, PROPRIETOR. An old man was sorting through the contents of a cardboard box. Piles of yellowed newspapers tied in bundles with rotting twine, shelves of dust-covered salt shakers and the odd marble bust, old colored-glass liquor bottles, and a warped eighteenth-century desk. A pewter-tinged suit of armor stood in the corner, a collection of swords mounted on the wall behind it. A mixture of junk and treasure if one was to sift through it, she thought.

“Monsieur Caplan?”

“I’m closed, Mademoiselle,” the man said. His voice was curiously high pitched for someone his age. White hair curled over his shoulders. A half-full glass of red wine sat on a small table next to an uncorked decanter. “Forgot to put the sign up. Come back tomorrow.”

She recalled Morbier’s conversation.

“I’d like to ask you something, Monsieur,” she said, walking toward him and wishing he’d turn on the sagging chandelier. The gaslight fixtures and ocher-patinaed walls looked as if they hadn’t been cleaned since the last century. A framed Honore Daumier print of a laundress with her child on the Quai d’Anjou steps met her eyes.

“What’s that . . . alors, Mademoiselle, I’m busy right now,” he said turning around. “I’ve got this consignment to sort.”

To sort and leave in the dust. She wondered how he did business.

“I’ll make it quick.” She summoned a smile. Sirens sounded outside on the street. She couldn’t go out there yet.

He set down a packet of crumbling violet envelopes addressed in faded ink to “Commandant Sillot, Arsenal.” Old love letters. Amazing the things people find in their attics.”

Great-granny’s hots for a regimental officer didn’t interest her.

“In your conversation with Commissaire Morbier, you mentioned . . .”

“Who?”

“You reported to the Commissariat that an old clochard—” His eyes flashed. “Her name is Helene. I spoke with a young flic who treated me like a senile fool. Whether or not I am, I pay their salaries with my taxes and I demand to be treated with courtesy.”

He took a swig of wine. She needed him to keep calm so he would recount the information that he’d reported.

“Exactement. That’s why I’m here. We’re checking every lead and I apologize.”

“You’re apologizing for the police?” He squinted at her. His wine-tainted breath hit her in the face. “Apologizing, the police?”

“We’ve got our best people on it, I assure you, Monsieur.” She tried not to wince at the trite phrase.

“That’s a first!”

A cynic. Not a typical reaction from his generation, but then perhaps she had laid it on too thick.

He stared at her. Red and purple feather fluff from her jacket floated up with the dust motes, then landed on a warped harpsichord.

“You’re undercover, that’s it,” he said. “I understand.”

She passed this man’s shop all the time. Had seen him on the island, recognized his long woolen coat from the quai where she walked Miles Davis. Cut out of context and in her feathery outfit, he didn’t seem to know her.

“Your a sleeper. That’s what they call it, non?” he asked.

She glanced outside. More police cars and one lane closed to traffic. She was trapped.

She pulled up a stool with three legs, a chair for him. “Tell me about Helene.”

He glanced at the wall clock, a ticking period piece in need of a new glass face. “She comes by if she’s hungry.”

He blinked. A sad look in his long face. “It’s a long story.”

“I’m sure the pertinent details come to you. We don’t have much time.” She didn’t know if this would go anywhere. Yet, as her father used to say, omit the smallest lead and it whacked you in the head later.

“I’m ashamed to say it. Life’s treated Helene hard. You don’t know.”

“Try me.”

“They ridicule her. The young ones most of all,” he pounded his fists together. The veins in his face more pronounced. “But what would they have done . . . how could they know what it was like?”

His gaze was far away, in another time, another place.

She had to pull him back, gently. Coax him.

“I’m listening, Monsieur.”

“We lived next door. Her family owned this shop,” he said, his voice hard and abrupt. “What’s left of it’s hers, I tell her all the time. Take it. Go to court, make a claim, I’ll give her legal rights. No one had the right to auction it at the end of the war. Least of all my father, to buy it for nothing.”

She groaned inside. The story would come out his way. Painful and tortured.

“What did Helene see?” she tried again.

He shrugged.

Great. “According to your report, she has conversations with imaginary people. So why did you call if you . . . ?”

“She talks to Paulette. But the last time I saw Paulette was end of September 1942. Right there.” He stood shuffled to the window. Pointed. “It was a rain-drenched day, like today. She was right there, in front of Fondation Halphen, only then it was a tenement.”

Behind a fence, Aimee saw a soot-blackened building in the throes of gutting and renovation.

“An eyesore to the SS. They requisitioned the town house and its contents—art. Now it’s the Polish Foundation.”

Aimee focused on the flic cars, their blue-and-white lights flashing over the cobblestones. A man she recognized was getting out of one. Morbier.

She moved back from the window.

“I don’t understand, Monsieur.”

His eyes glazed. “The flics came then, like now.”

She had to bring him back to earth, to what the woman—the clochard, whoever she was—had said.

“Monsieur, how is this relevant?”