AL07 - Murder on the Ile Saint-Louis

“Helene bribed her little sister, Paulette, with nougat candy to pick up Helene’s homework from her classmate in Fondation Halphen,” he continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “Flics under Geheime Staatspolizei—Gestapo—orders rounded up Jews who lived there, forty of them children.”

“You mean . . . ?”

“They dragged Paulette out with the others, still holding Helene’s math book. I saw them herded into waiting trucks. Now a plaque marks the building. You see, right there.”

And she knew. She recalled the plaque on the wall. All 112 inhabitants, including children, had been rounded up. And deported.

“Paulette wasn’t even Jewish. But they slammed the truck doors closed.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?”

She saw the pain in his eyes.

“But we all saw what was happening. We knew. People hurried off, trying to melt, to evaporate into the stone buildings. To avoid seeing or being seen. The shame, the fear. Helene came walking down the street. She stood right there, holding her laundry basket.”

How did that fit into this story? “Laundry, Monsieur?”

“It was cheaper if you did it yourself in the bateau lavoir near Pont Marie,” he said, his tone matter-of-fact.

The old laundry barges had been moored in the Seine until the fifties. It was hard to believe the river had once been clean enough to do laundry in.

“Then Helene was screaming . . . her basket fell from her hands, the white sheets lay on the cobbles as she stood on the street, pleading.” He shook his head. “They had quotas, they told her.”

Aimee hated these stories—the pain, the oozing guilt. The helplessness to alter the past.

“Every day Helene and her father went to the Place de l’Opera and waited in line at the Kommandantur.”

The former Kommandantur now housed a Berlitz center, the Royal Air Maroc office, and Aimee’s bank, BNP Paribas. The bank manager had moaned to her one day in his office about the techs finding a rat-chewed cloth swastika while tearing up floorboards to install fiber-optic cables.

“All futile,” Caplan said. “Paulette had left on the Auschwitz-Birkenau convoy number 37 on September 25.”

Aimee couldn’t speak. There was nothing to say.

“Helene blamed herself. Her parents sent her to a cousin in Le Puy. What happened to them later, I don’t know. But there was heavy bombing of the southern train lines . . . so many never came back.”

He scanned the street and shuffled back to his chair. Sat down with a sigh. “After the Liberation, my father bought this shop at auction. It would make me sick to hear him justifying his ‘investment.’ Then the store passed to me.” He gave a tight smile. “I wanted to study medicine. But that’s not your problem. A dozen years ago or so, Helene reappeared. I’d thought she was dead. She wanted to go to sleep in her bedroom. Vacant eyed, she spoke to an imaginary Paulette.”

Aimee wanted to know about the present, not this sad past, the shame clinging to these walls. Here in the dust, a miasma of the forgotten was almost palpable, though his words and the plaque were the only testimony to what had happened long ago in front of his door.

“To survive, you move on. But it’s still here.” He hit his chest. “No one likes remembering. Those who broke, like Helene, live in a twilight of the past. She’ll go for months, rational and even able to work, and then . . .”

He pulled a much-folded Elle magazine from under the cushion of his chair. An issue from the sixties with a young Catherine Deneuve on the cover, pert in Courreges boots in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Now a collectors’ item. He opened it and took out a black-and-white class photo from the Ecole des Garcons around the corner. Another photo showed a street scene with two laughing girls in school smocks, petting a puppy in front of the butcher shop; the butcher in his apron; people sitting in chairs on the street, fanning themselves. “See, that’s how the island used to be, shopkeepers, the aristocrats, talking together, a village.”

She didn’t need a nostalgia lesson; she’d grown up here and heard it before.

“That’s Paulette and Helene.”

Preserved in that moment of joy, playing with a new puppy . . . too bad joy couldn’t be frozen and thawed at will.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but getting back to the present . . .”

“You don’t understand, do you?” he said, putting the photos away under the cushion. “Forget it.”

She’d rushed him. Stuck her foot in it and he’d clammed up, changed his mind. Or his guilt had taken over. Whichever, she’d lost him. Yet this story was relevant somehow. She had to curb her impatience.

“Try to remember what Helene told you while it’s fresh in your mind, Monsieur.”

“Helene’s confused,” he said. “She had shock treatments that left scars. You know what that means.”

Aimee recalled how widespread shock treatments for the depressed and deranged had been once. Now one took a pill.

“I shouldn’t have called the Commissariat,” he said.

“Monsieur, we need your help. No one’s accusing her. Since you’ve told me this much, it’s better I hear from her . . .”

He pulled back in his chair.

“Let me reassure you, Monsieur,” she said. “No questioning at the Commissariat, nothing like that.”

“Questioning, Commissariat?” His voice shook. “They said that, too.”

“Who?”

He gestured to the cobblestone-paved street outside. “The flics who rounded the people up. But no one ever came back.”

“That happened more than fifty years ago. I’m talking about now. A young woman has been murdered and if Helene was there—”

“She’s not insane.” He shook his head. “She can’t be locked in Saint Catherine’s with the loonies. She keeps herself clean and asks for nothing. If she did anything, she’s not responsible.”

Aimee’s jaw dropped as she registered his meaning.

“Responsible! You’re saying Helene may have killed . . . ?”

“I said nothing. Get out!”

His words shook her. Helene had to be in her sixties, or even older. And she recalled the mechanic Momo’s words.

“Did she wear a scarf with butterflies, pink?”

He scratched his head. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

Big jump. Or was it? “You think she may have killed the person who threw the young woman into the Seine, that she may have confused the victim with Paulette, don’t you?”

He turned away from her.

“She’d have to be strong, Monsieur. And then, where’s the killer’s body? Exactly what did Helene say? It’s important.”

“She said, ‘I took care of it.’”

“That could mean she acted in self-defense or even that she did nothing at all.”

“Exactement. Forget it, I’ve got work to do.”

“But there’s been a second murder,” she said. “A man was killed in the theatre. We can’t forget it.”

He clutched the armrest, surprised. “What?”

“I thought you knew why the flics surrounded the quai.” She pulled out the photo. “Have you seen this young woman around?” She pointed at Nelie.

No recognition shone in his eyes. His body deflated. He looked smaller, as if his flesh was retreating into itself. Protected, in a shell.

And then she noticed the silent line of tears trickling down his wrinkled cheeks.

“Monsieur, please.” She put her arm around him. His shoulders were so thin, like a sparrow’s.

He shook her arm off, wiped his face with his sleeve, and sobbed. “Leave . . . just leave.”