Murder in Montmartre

Wednesday Evening

“BIG POUT THIS TIME , Marie-Dominique,” said the longhaired photographer, clicking the Hasselblad. “Show me big lips!”

Her mouth hurt after two hours of thrusting out her Bardot bee-stung lips. His cigarette was burning in the overflowing ashtray. The Gauloise tang hovered thick in the air. The slick-slack of hangers skeeting over the metal rack raised goose bumps on her arms.

“That’s it . . . more! Let me see those cheekbones.”

The techno beat pounded in the antiseptic whitewashed two-story studio, a former dairy reincarnated into l’Industrielle, the cow stalls now home to chrome banks of digital equipment.

“Lean more . . . good!”

Marie-Dominique did the model slouch, multiple black layers rising over her nonexistent hips, rubbing her diamond navel ring. She tried to look bored. Not hard, tottering on stiletto sneakers, the laces tied over fishnet stockings. She baked under the klieg lights in her midriff-baring black turtleneck sweater plus a jean jacket worn under a black leather biker jacket.

“Nom de Dieu . . . she’s shining . . . powder!”

The makeup artist, his hair in short blond braided tufts, rushed to daub Marie-Dominique’s forehead with matte powder.

“His girlfriend threw him out,” he said in a low voice to Marie-Dominique. “He’s camping out in back here. Me, I’d never live on the ground floor. Too dark, too noisy, too many break-ins.” He redefined Marie-Dominique’s lips with a chocolate brown pencil.

“The light’s gone. Impossible!” The photographer ground out his cigarette with his heel. Lit another. “That’s it for tonight.”

“What about the Vénus de Vinyle shoot?” someone asked.

In response, the photographer turned the techno up louder.

Relieved to finish sooner than her booking time, Marie-Dominique hung up the outfit and left her makeup on. Félix would like that, get a kick out of it. Sometimes she thought all he noticed about her was whether or not she’d had a pedicure.

Back in their apartment, along with the faded gardenia scent in the dark hallway, lay a note from Félix. “Another crisis. Off to Ajaccio. Back tomorrow.”

He spent more time with hard hats, union stewards, and ministry officials than he did at home, apart from holding catered parties to entertain clients and grease his connections. No intimate dinners with friends. Their social circle consisted of his business partners and clients.

Another long winter evening alone. Thoughts of Lucien kept coming back to her, his music, the way his hair curled around his ears. His stubborn streak.

She sighed, taking off her boots and stockings, reveling in the smooth texture of the Aubusson carpet, scrunching it between her toes. Until she was six years old she hadn’t owned a pair of shoes. Hadn’t needed to.

Félix didn’t understood her loathing of the runway, the numbing club scene where models’ careers were built based on where and with whom they were seen. Her colleagues subsisted on injections, all kinds; she’d rather chew on a hunk of brown-crusted bread and cured olives. Olives from her family’s olive mill. Her mind went back to the bitter olive essence ground by the granite grinding wheel, the dripping amber oil in the shadowed stillness, and the slow scrape of stone against stone. The path circling it worn by generations of mules. Cool, despite the relentless heat outside. The whir of bees hovering in the rosemary climbing the walls of the stone mill. Where Lucien had helped her father every summer until . . . that day.

Marie-Dominique shoved the image away. At least here she wasn’t the object of constant scrutiny in an isolated hamlet with its archaic code of honor, presided over by a village chief whose other job was running a corner grocery. Paris might be gray, people living on top of one another, yet here the corner café-tabac owner knew her name but not her history. In short, she was free. Until Lucien walked back into her life.

In the huge gourmet kitchen where she never cooked, she tore off a hunk of baguette and smeared a Corsican brébi goat cheese over it, imagining the look of horror the high-strung photographer would give her if he knew. “Salt! You’ll plump up. Diuretics work too slowly, do something immediately.” She’d heard him say this to a beanpole-figured young girl who’d obediently gone and thrown up in the bathroom.

A voice came from Félix’s study. Félix! Had his plans changed? Eager, she opened the door to surprise him and then stared.

Petru, Félix’s factotum, sprawled over the armchair facing the window, murmuring into Félix’s private phone. The way Petru took over in Félix’s absence irritated her. When Félix had hired him this year, she’d nicknamed him “the bodyguard”. His hair was black today. Yesterday it had been white blond; he dyed it more often than the stylists she worked with.

“. . . of course, Lucien’s implicated,” Petru said, with a low laugh.

Implicated? She caught her breath, tugged the smooth brass doorknob back, and put her head to the crack between the door and the wall. What she heard startled her.

“The flics arrest him at the studio,” he was saying.

Will arrest him or he had been arrested? Who was being discussed? Lucien? He’d denied being political. But was he telling the truth?

“Armata Corsa pamphlets, the works.”

Just as she’d thought. Lucien was with the Armata Corsa. The liar!

“Everything’s arranged. I put them there myself.”

Her heart dropped. No wonder his conversation had sounded ambiguous. Petru was sabotaging Lucien.

“In less than an hour,” he said. Then he turned toward the bookcase.

She couldn’t hear the rest. She was about to storm in and confront Petru but she realized that bursting in wouldn’t help Lucien in time if evidence had been planted already. She had to warn him. Thwart Petru’s plans. But how?

Corsicans betrayed each other but never to an outsider. Unless . . . she looked at her Patek Philippe watch, Félix’s wedding gift. She ran to the hallway, grabbed her shoes and coat. Out in the street, she called Félix. Busy.

She left him a message. Her hands trembled as she pushed the numbers. It was happening all over again.