Murder in Belleville

AFTER AIMÉE’S REPEATED GENTLE coaxing, the cylinder lock opened. Relieved, she took a deep breath, then pulled out her Beretta. Breaking into a dead person’s apartment didn’t guarantee it was vacant.

Eugénie’s door creaked open. Aimée hoped the apartment would surrender the woman’s secrets. Brisk currents emanated from the windows, hung with tattered lace. Aimée motioned to Sébastien.

Alert for another presence, they padded into the apartment. Aimée almost tripped over a pile of building notices. Luckily Sébastien caught her arm. A musty odor trailed by faint whiffs of decay hit her.

The place had been trashed. By the look of things, this was definitely professional.

Aimée saw the detritus of the woman’s life in her ransacked apartment. It was as if Sylvie had been violated again, even in death. Aimée wanted to leave. But she had to put her feelings aside, get on with the job. Find something to point her toward the killer or killers whether it felt good or not.

She padded into the front room, its windows facing rue de Jean Moinon. A bottle of Evian water had fallen on the floor, its contents long evaporated.

The apartment reminded her of an old-fashioned waiting room in a doctor’s office—impersonal, bereft of life. She wondered why a well-off mistress of a minister would use this place. If Sylvie stayed here as Eugénie, there had to be a reason. And if the ransackers had found something, she wouldn’t have a clue.

Frustrated, Aimée scanned the rooms, but no answers came to her. Looking down from the window into the courtyard, she felt a strange sensation. She pulled her jumpsuit collar tighter around her neck.

Aimée unrolled more sheets of felt. She nodded to Sébastien and they tacked them up over the windows. Better than the flimsy blackout curtains provided during the war, her grandfather had told her, and the felt material kept the heat inside. Always keep some handy, he’d winked. You never know when you’ll need to make an unannounced visit.

Now she felt safer and took out her large flashlight. The period and layout of the apartment appeared identical to Madame Visse’s. However, in contrast with Madame Visse’s apartment cluttered with boxes, bright yellow walls, toys, and furniture, Eugénie’s was austere. Stark and deserted.

Several cracks in the plaster flaked onto the floor. She figured the nicotine-stained brown walls hadn’t seen a new coat of paint since the 1930s or before. In the hallway faint pink rose-patterned wallpaper peeled in places. Former gas fixtures converted to electricity showed frayed wires. To her this didn’t seem like a love nest or rendezvous spot for a minister and his mistress.

Aimée nodded to Sébastien and pointed to the old workshop down in the courtyard. He’d agreed to search for the blue garbage bags if they were still there. He made an okay sign with his fingers, pulled out his tools, and padded downstairs.

Back out in the hallway, the air was stale and frigid. But her gloved hands, clammy and moist, and the perspiration sticking the jumpsuit to her neck, made her feel like she was in a steambath.

She shined her flashlight inside the narrow kitchen, with barely enough space for one person to stand and reach the drawers. A double gas ring cooker and scorched aluminum kettle were tossed on the floor. By the old enamel sink, an upside-down bottle of Maison Verte dish soap had run green in the sink, leaving a perfumed soapy gunk. Every drawer was pulled out. Strewn teabags littered the chipped Formica table. Grease-stained linoleum tiles, curling up at the edges, lined the floor.

Apprehensive, Aimée stared at the bare hallway, noticing that chunks of the plaster were gouged out, creating gaping holes in the faded wallpaper. Whoever had trashed this place was looking for something—blowing up Sylvie hadn’t been enough.

In the shadowy bedroom, a shredded black sleeping bag leaked feathers over the floor. An Ikea pine desk, the kind requiring self-assembly, had been pulled apart, one of the legs smashed and splintered against the wall. Below the window, she noticed a phone jack in the wall. She searched the room. No telephone.

She found it hard to imagine the woman hadn’t had a telephone.

Inside the bedroom closet was an orange crate filled with a pair of denim overalls, white shirt, and black sweater, turned inside out and ripped at the seams. A long black nylon raincoat hung from the only hanger, slit to ribbons. Aimée looked for a label.

None.

Curious, she edged further. Inside the cubicle-size bathroom was a shredded two-roll pack of Moltanel pink toilet paper. Pink tissue bits and cotton balls carpeted the stained tub. A large pump bottle of Sephora makeup remover, the expensive kind, had been emptied. The aluminum pipe under the sink had been removed, clumps of black hair and wet matter lay on the old tile floor.

Aimée went to the window overlooking the courtyard. From below, Sébastien flashed a thumbs-up at her, then left to fetch the van.

She turned, ready to untack the felt from the windows and leave, when something red by the empty coatrack caught her eye.

She centered the flashlight beam and peered forward.

Long wisps of what appeared to be red hair peeked out from the hall closet door.

Why hadn’t she asked Sébastien to wait? Her flashlight beam centered on the closet door. She willed her hands steady and slowly coaxed the door open wider.

A shag-style red wig lay on the warped linoleum.

Nothing else. Aimée peered closer. The wig looked as if it had been tossed in as a casual afterthought. It had to be the one Sylvie used as Eugénie.

A lot of things bothered her, but one thing in particular cried out. She walked back into the shadowed bedroom. It was the phone jack with no phone. But perfect for a modem. Had Eugénie used a laptop and gone on-line?

She searched among the clothes in the closet. In the back pocket of the overalls she found the phone cord. The laptop had to be somewhere close.

She shone her flashlight and began searching the closet. Testing each floorboard to see if it had been pried up recently, feeling each wallpaper seam for bubbles or uneven joining.

Nothing.

She sat back on her heels. Where would she have hidden a laptop?

What spot could she have shifted the laptop to if she’d been caught off guard, with only time to slip the phone cord in her pocket?

The battered desk had one drawer. She opened it. Empty. But the drawer stuck slightly as she pulled it out. Kneeling down, she pulled out her miniscrewdriver and poked the pine strut holding the drawer support. Cheap pine, staple-gunned in places. She felt around, found a knobby spot, pressed it. The pine strut flap popped open.

A hidden drawer in plain view. Aimée was impressed. And if Eugénie had a wireless modem, she would have been more impressed. In France few people did. She and René lusted for one but were waiting for the price to drop.

Aimée reached inside, exploring the crevices and ridges. She felt a smooth booklet and pulled it out. It was a manual for a new laptop. Either the men before had found it, or Sylvie had taken it with her and it had gone up in smoke.

Outwitted or too late; either way it was gone.

Dejected, Aimée knew the only place left to find answers was in the trash. Before she left, she unrolled the felt from the windows.

By the time she got to the corner, Sébastien had loaded two blue garbage sacks in back of his van. He gunned the engine as she opened the door. They took off down rue Jean Moinon, narrowly missing the striped cat.

“Ça va?” he asked, staring at her.

“I’ll know after we check what you found,” she said, the sodium streetlight glistening above her.

They sped into the raw Paris night along rainwashed, cobbled streets.

THE OLD tack room where they unloaded the garbage occupied a courtyard corner of Aimée’s building on He St. Louis. Once used by horses stabled in this former Due de Guise mansion, it now housed discarded window frames, a ganglion of PVC piping, and twenty-five kilogram Placoplâtre Mortier adhisif sacs. On one side stood an old porcelain stove, its broken tiles and legs tilted, canting lazily against the stone wall.

“Having fun yet?” Aimée said as they sifted through the bags of Sylvie’s trash.

Sébastien, intent on his work, hadn’t bothered to look up. They both wore gauze masks. But there was no way of getting around the smell.

“I’ll need a hammam session,” Sébastien said, “after this.”

“Me, too,” she said, visualizing the hammam: hot marble slabs, steam rising to the arched white marble ceiling, her grime scrubbed away by black soap and a loofah, the small cups of mint tea, her body rubbed to mousse-like consistency by the iron-armed masseuse.

“Tiens, Aimée,” Sébastien said, holding up soggy sprigs of something dark green and slimy.

She nodded. “Let’s keep the organic matter over there.”

Aimée’s flashlight shone amid the candles she’d lit, casting a medieval glow under the vaulted seventeenth-century ceiling. Over the industrial-strength clear plastic, they’d spread out the contents of the garbage bags on the stone floor. She and Sébastien were hunched over sorting the contents.

They’d gotten lucky, she realized, to find the uncollected trash. The éboueurs must have figured the building was uninhabited.

Thirty minutes later they’d sorted the bulk into three piles: paper, perishables, and other.

The other consisted of a pair of black Prada shoes. They were marred by a broken heel, but & la mode. The thin arched sole was barely scuffed. Hardly worn by the look of them, Aimée noted. And very nice. Sylvie had expensive taste.

The perishables: apple peels, almond shells, and the green slimy thing. She sniffed. Mint. Cotton balls smudged by tan foundation, sparkly blush and black mascara streaks.

She surveyed a half-used jar of Nutella, a white plastic Viva bottle of sour milk, and a smashed carton of strawberry Danette yogurt.

They bundled the piles back up and shot them in Aimée’s trash bin.

“I know I owe you, Aimée,” Sébastien said, “but next time let me repay you in other ways.”

Together she and Sébastien sifted all the papers into several piles: Monoprix circulars advertising April sales, crumpled receipts and envelopes, and torn gray paper. Aimée picked up a goldenrod sheet, like those plastered on posts around Belleville. Printed on it: AMNESTY FOR THE SANS-PAPIERS—MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD! JOIN THE THE HUNGER STRIKERS’VIGIL—PRESSURE THE MINISTRY—MUSTAFA HAMID’S FAST ENTERS THE19TH DAY.

She sat up. Her heart quickened. She remembered Philippe’s reaction to Hamid on the radio: his anger and how he’d taken off in the car. Had Sylvie picked up this flyer and tossed it—or had she kept it for a reason? Was there a connection?

Aimée turned it over. On the other side was smudged writing. The name “Youssef’ and “01 43 76 89.” She wondered if this could be a phone number of one of the Arabes, whom the baker Denet disapproved of, hanging around Eugénie’s. Aimée put it aside.

Sébastien assembled the gray pieces on an ironing board while she smoothed them with a travel iron. After ironing the strips flat, she set them in rows, adhering them to a clear contact sheet. She did this several times until all the gray paper had a contact front.

“Now for the interesting part,” she said to Sébastien.

They trudged upstairs to her apartment, the temperature only a few degrees warmer.

No welcoming lights, no heat.

And no Yves. Too bad. She’d tried to push Yves out of her mind. But thoughts of him kept popping back in.

Sébastien rubbed his gloved hands together and stamped his feet. They unzipped their jumpsuits and Aimée threw them in her laundry. Someday she’d get to the lavomatique.

Sébastien set the papers on the faded Gobelin carpet. Her grandfather had purchased it at the Porte de Vanves flea market. She’d been twelve and remembered helping him lug his fifty-franc find home on the Métro. “A classic, Aimée,” he’d said. He’d filled the place with “classics”—a bit worn and frayed at the edges.

She flicked her scanner on and began scanning the contact sheets of paper scraps. Now she could bundle up at the computer and run some high-resolution software programs to match paper fibers. After that she’d run another program to fit spatial and numerical characteristics. With a little maneuvering she’d match the paper together in the right order and read the contents.

“Sébastien, why don’t you warm up with some Calvados?” she said. “Or help yourself to vin rouge.”

“And you?”

“Calvados, please, I need a toasty think-drink.”

He poured them both large shots of the amber apple brandy. Tongues of light danced from the dim chandelier.

“Salut.” They toasted each other.

Computer applications clicked across her computer screen, a greenish light haloing her terminal.

“I’ve got a long night ahead of me,” she said.

He grinned, glancing at his watch. “I hope I do too.”