Murder in the Marais

Friday Morning

HARTMUTH'S NIGHTMARE S WERE FILLED with ice tongs and crying babies. Sleep had eluded him.

There was a slight knock on the door from the adjoining suite. It would be Ilse. He pulled on a robe and shuffled to the door.

"Mein Herr," Ilse said, her eyes bright as they quickly swept his room. "You are back! I checked late last night but your room was empty. We missed you!"

Hartmuth forced a grin. "This rich French food, Ilse, I'm not used to it. If I don't walk, it just curdles in my stomach."

"Jawohl, you are so right. Myself," she sidled closer to him, "I miss our German food. Simple yes, but so good and nutritious." Without missing a beat, she continued, "I don't mind telling you, mein Herr, that Monsieur Quimper and Minister Cazaux are of the old school. Because of their sincerity, all the delegates have agreed as of tonight to sign the treaty. But of course, this happens tomorrow at the ceremony. And with your signature to make it unanimous."

"What time is the ceremony, Ilse?" he said in as businesslike a tone as he could summon.

"Nineteen hundred hours, mein Herr," and she smiled. "In time for the CNN worldwide news feed. A nice touch, I thought." She lumbered to the door. "Unter den Linden."

The treaty was as good as signed.

Friday Noon

AIMÉE KNOCKED TWICE, THEN again. Slowly, Javel opened the door wearing a tattered undershirt.

"I'm busy," he said, not smiling. "There's nothing more to say."

Aimee put her foot in the door. "Just a few minutes; it won't take long," she said and slid through the doorway.

He grudgingly stood aside in the hallway.

"Does this go into your shop?" Aimee said, pointing at a damp, moldly door.

He nodded, his eyes narrowing.

She quickly climbed the three stairs and pushed the door before he could stop her.

"Eh, what are you doing?" he said.

By the time he had painstakingly climbed the steps she was back out the door again and had shot past him down the narrow hallway.

He caught up with her in the parlor and found his tongue. "You're just a nosy amateur detective running around in circles," he said.

Aimee stared at him. "You heard the whole thing, didn't you?"

"What are you talking about?" he asked angrily, gripping the back of his only chair.

"In this shop and around the rue Pavee. The spot's so close I bet you can spit that far," she said.

He spluttered, his eyes furtive. "None of this makes any sense. You're all the same!" He hastily shut the drawer in his pine kitchen table and moved to his rocking chair.

"Is that why you decided to take the law into your own hands, be a vigilante for a fifty-year-old crime?" she said.

He was obviously hiding something. She sidled next to the table, opening the single drawer by its rusted knob.

"What are you doing? Get away from there!" he yelled.

Aimee felt under Arlette's hand-embroidered napkins and reached towards the back. She pulled out a string bag and yarn from the drawer. "Why did you keep it?"

"Keep what?" he said.

"Lili Stein's bag and her knitting," she said as she lifted it out of the drawer.

"I-I found it," he said.

"On Wednesday you overheard Lili and Sarah talking about the past," she said. "From what you overheard, you thought Lili had killed Arlette, fifty years ago. After Sarah left, you confronted Lili. Lili vehemently denied killing her but she called Arlette a thieving, opportunistic blackmailer who had it coming to her. Didn't she?" She paused, looking at Javel's glittering hate-filled eyes. "Or words to that effect. You reached in your pocket for the only thing available," she said and pulled a thin wire out of her pocket. "You followed her, then strangled her with one like this from your shop. Finally, you carved the swastika to make it look like neo-Nazis."

She dangled the metal shoe wire in the air. "See the clear plastic at the end of this that protects and makes it easy to lace through the holes. That bit came off next to Lili. The other end is in the police evidence bag," she said.

Shaking his head, he screamed, "Stop this fantasy. Stop these lies!"

Aimee continued, "It's this that puts you at the scene of the crime with a motive!" She held up Lili's bag with her knitting.

His face was florid and he was panting.

"But you had killed the wrong person. Arlette's killer was back in Paris," she said.

"No! Idiot!" he said, furiously shaking his head back and forth. "Never left, I tell you."

She watched him carefully. "You were about to kill Hartmuth, only…"

"Lies, lies," he screamed.

When he rushed at her with an old pipe he'd lifted from behind the chair, she was prepared. Swiftly she twisted the pipe away and tripped him up. He thudded to the ground and she straddled his legs, immediately pinning him down. She felt sorry for him until he ripped out chunks of her hair while he struggled. "Jew lover! Arlette's murderer is still alive!" he said, gasping.

"Are you going to fight me all the way?" she said. "OK, little man, I can fight too." Whereupon she punched him solidly in the head. "That's so you won't cause me any more hair loss."

At least he couldn't fight her now. She stood up, attempting to brush her roosterlike hair down. She lifted his bowlegs and began to drag the semiconscious man awkwardly through his hallway. A stinging whack whipped her off balance and she landed under his old television. She envisioned the TV's rabbit-ears antenna about to spear her as they tumbled off, but she couldn't move.

"Javel, Javel!" she mumbled.

Silence. Then the insistent jingle of bells.

AIMÉE WONDERED why they hadn't even bothered to trash the place. Javel's bulging eyes stared at the ceiling. His head was cocked in a way only a dead man's could. He had been strangled by wire from his own shop, just like the kind used on Lili. Someone had tried to make it look like suicide, dangling him from a rafter. The note looked genuine enough, especially if he'd been forced to write it. I will join you, Arlette.

Only she had heard him scream. She'd come to and passed out again. Why hadn't she been strangled, too? A distant jangling lodged in her brain. The bells. Then she recognized the noise. Bells from the shop door to the street meant customers who came in and out. A voice asked, "Il ya a quel qu'un? Somebody here?" Then the bells jingled and she heard the door shut as the customer left.

She struggled out from under the TV table and felt guilty. Again. She'd accused Javel and when he started telling her that Arlette's killer was alive she'd slugged him. The killer, entering through the connecting shop door, had probably stood right there and silently thanked her. Until sending her across the room, knocking her and her theory to smithereens. Not only had she barked up the wrong tree but she'd helped the killer.

But why go to the trouble of making it look like suicide? Unless the killer had been about to do Aimee when a customer appeared, but even then? Maybe now the feisty little Javel would join his Arlette after all this time.

Lili's string bag was gone. A puffy white cat slinked around her ankles like a feather boa and meowed.

"Poor thing, who'll take care of you?" Aimee said, rubbing its head. She staggered through the blue beaded curtain to fetch milk for the cat, then she stopped. What had Lili carried in her string bag beside her knitting? Javel would have hidden anything else he'd found.

She started searching, pulling drawers and cupboards apart to find out. Might as well make it look like the crime she figured it was. Poor old Javel, he had little and threw little away. His one armoire held unworn starched white shirts and two musty suits. A pair of lambskin handcrafted shoes, the kind few people could afford to wear anymore, sat unworn on the lowest shelf. His hall cupboard held an unused bed linen set, yellowed by age and probably embroidered by Arlette.

She searched every grime-infested nook in his apartment. Nothing but the remnants of a lonely old man.

Maybe Lili didn't have anything else in her bag…or the killer had known what to look for and found it. Frustrated by another dead end, she slumped against the cupboard. The circumstances of Javel's murder puzzled her.

He'd probably spent most of his time in his shop so she decided to search that next. The sharp tang of leather assaulted her as she entered. Under the display of arch supports, she found his cluttered work tray. Tightly wedged against the wall, it took her several tries before the tray came loose. Under leather scraps lay a small book, beat-up and well thumbed. Black spiders crawled over Lili's handwriting. With trembling hands Aimee lifted the journal as skeins of multicolored wool trailed to the wood floor. She brushed the spiders off and stuffed the journal under her designer jacket.

In Javel's room, she poured cat food into the bowl. As she left, she made the sign of the cross, then whispered to Javel, who gazed sightlessly at the ceiling. "You were right. I'll get him this time."

BACK AT Leah's, Aimee read from a torn page of Lili's journal:

I know it's him. Laurent, the greedy-eyed wonder who sat by me and copied my answers on math tests. The one who sniggered at Papa working behind the counter, who called us Yid bloodsuckers to my face then dared me to do something about it. The one whose family owned a building but acted like he owned the block. WORSE than the Nazis, he made sure that everyone in school who'd ever rubbed him wrong paid. Power, pure and simple. Sarah's parents were the first, he even boasted about it. Earned one hundred francs for each denunciation. But me, I killed my parents the day I took a stand and refused to let him cheat. My big moral standing sent them to the ovens. Jewish or not, he informed on anyone. Arlette, greedy and stupid, laughed at him, her big mistake. And he's going to do it again.

Sarah's hand shook as Aimee passed her the torn fragment.

"Would you recognize him after all these years?"

"If Lili could…" She rubbed at the tears in her eyes. "He had a birthmark on his neck, like a brown butterfly."

"Of course he could have hidden it, done something surgically," Aimee said.

"I always wondered who denounced my parents. Laurent was older, in Lili's class. I never said much, tried to avoid him. Something about him I didn't like."

"There has to be proof in black and white," Aimee said. "That's why Lili contacted Soli Hecht. But I need documentation to prove it. Can you recall where he lived, this building Lili mentioned?"

"On rue du Plâtre around the corner from school," Sarah answered right away. "His parents were slumlords; it's the prettiest tree-lined street in the Jewish ghetto."

"Stay here, Sarah. You're not safe on the street."

Frightened, Sarah crossed her arms. "But I can't do that. I have a job. Albertine needs my help, she counts on me."

"Call her," Aimee said. "She'll find someone else for now."

"But there's an important supper party this evening-," Sarah started to say.

"It's not safe for you or anyone with you. You'll put them in danger. Stay here, off the street. Albertine will manage." Aimee could tell Sarah hesitated, still not convinced. "If Lili recognized Laurent and got killed for it"-Aimee paused and spoke slowly-"don't you realize you're next?"

AIMÉE ENTERED the schoolyard off busy rue des Blancs Manteaux to see lines of children filing up the lycee steps. Probably just as they had done fifty years ago. This time there were no yellow stars, only clumps of adolescent dark-skinned children with big eyes walking past taunts and insults.

As she approached, a teacher noticed her and quickly admonished, "Arrête." The jeers subsided.

"Are you a parent?"

"I have business in the office."

"May I see your identification? We take bomb threats seriously." The puffy-faced teacher looked like she needed another night's sleep. "Ministry of education's edict."

"Of course." Aimee showed her.

"Over there and to the right." Behind the teacher a fight had broken out and she left to break it up.

Inside the school office a rotund ebony-faced woman squinted as she checked the computer. "Records are in the basement if we've kept them and the silverfish haven't eaten them," she said.

"Thanks, can you check?"

"Last name?"

"First name is Laurent and the family lived on rue du Plâtre," Aimee said.

The secretary raised her eyebrow. "Years of attendance?"

"Between 1941 and 1945, during the war."

The secretary looked up immediately and shook her head. "After ten years, everything is sent to the ministry of education." She shrugged. "Check back in a couple of weeks."

"But I need it now!"

"Everybody needs it now. Do you know how many children attended the school at the time?" She looked at Aimee. "Frankly, I'd say don't waste your time, nothing got put on microfiche until the sixties."

"Any teacher or custodian who might have gone to school here?" Aimee said.

"Before my time," the secretary paused, "but Renata, a woman in the cafeteria, has worked here as long as I remember. That's all I can suggest."

In the yellow-tiled cafeteria, Renata, a woman with a thick gray braid wound across the nape of her neck, narrowed her eyes in suspicion.

"Who did you say you were?" she asked.

Aimee told her.

Renata just shook her head.

One of the servers, a prune-faced woman, walked over to Aimee and nudged her. "She forgets to turn on her hearing aid."

Aimee thanked her and pointed to Renata's ear. Renata only scowled.

"She's quite vain about it. Thinks none of us know," the woman, whose name tag said Sylvie Redonnet, confided. "As if we cared. Half the time we go around yelling at her since she can't hear."

Renata stirred the ladle of a steaming pot of lentils.

Aimee turned to Sylvie, who grinned. "Maybe you can help me?"

After Aimee explained, the woman nodded her head. "Believe it or not, I'm too young to have been here in the forties," she chuckled. "Now my sister, Odile, a few years older than me, was. Go ask her-she loves to talk."

"That would help me, thank you."

"You'll be a treat for Odile, she can hear." Sylvie glanced in Renata's direction. "But she's wheelchair-bound. Around the corner, number 19 rue du Plâtre."

Aimee felt a glimmer of hope when she heard the address.

ODILE CACKLED from five floors above as Aimee huffed up the steep metal-grilled staircase. "One thing I don't have to worry about."

Aimee reached the landing at last. "Odile Redonnet?" she said. Looks certainly did not bless this family, Aimee thought, looking at the shriveled crone in the black steel wheelchair.

"Pleased to meet you, Aimee Leduc, my sister phoned about your visit. Come in." Odile Redonnet wheeled herself ahead of Aimee into the apartment. "Please shut the door behind you."

After two potfuls of strong Darjeeling tea and exquisite freshly baked madeleines, Odile Redonnet let Aimee get to her point.

"I'm looking for someone," she began.

"Aren't we all?"

"A boy named Laurent, his family owned a building on this street. He'd have been about fifteen or sixteen in 1943."

In answer, Odile wheeled over to an oak chest and slid open a creaking drawer. She pulled out a musty album. Several loose black-and-white photos danced to the floor. Aimee bent down to pick them up. In one she saw a radiant Odile standing upright with her arms around an RAF-uniformed man.

Aimee looked at her and smiled. "You're beautiful."

"And in love. That always enhances one's looks," Odile said. "This should help my memory." She laid the heavy album on her dining table and motioned to Aimee. "A ride down memory lane. Can you slip the phonograph on?"

Reluctantly, Aimee went and stood over an old record player that played 78s. She cranked it several times, then laid the needle on the scratched black vinyl. Strains of Glenn Miller and his forties big band filled the room. Odile Redonnet's eyes glazed and she smiled.

"I left the lycee in '44 to work in a glass factory," she said, turning the floppy pages.

"Are there any class photos?"

"Can't say we were so sophisticated then," Odile said, searching the tired pages. She hummed along with the scratchy clarinet solo. "This is the closest thing to a class picture," she said, pulling some gummed photos apart.

Aimee almost spilled her hot tea. It was the same photo she'd deciphered from the encrypted disk Soli Hecht had given her. "Which one is Laurent?"

Odile Redonnet's gnarled finger pointed to a tall boy standing by Lili in the Square Georges-Cain. "Laurent de Saux, if that's who you mean. Lived at number 23, two doors down."

This black-and-white photo showed the cafe with strolling Nazis and the park with students.

"How did you get this?

"Madame Pagnol, our history teacher, took it to illustrate the statue of Caesar Augustus. See." She pointed out the marble statue in the background. "We were studying the Roman Empire."

Of course, Aimee realized now. What had appeared as a random street scene worked as an illustration of the magnificent Caesar Augustus statue. That's why it had been taken.

"Did she give one to each student?"

"Oh, no," Odile said. "Only to those who could afford it. After this I left school. Never finished."

She struggled to contain her excitement-Here was the proof...but proof of what?

"Laurent informed on students during the Occupation."

Odile closed her eyes.

"Or was it you?" Aimee said.

Anger flashed in Odile's eyes. "Never." She pushed the album away.

"Nostalgia isn't what it used to be." Aimee had had enough. "That good-old-days stuff doesn't work."

Odile stared out the window. "Nothing disappears, eh?"

"Bald and ugly truth doesn't."

Finally Odile spoke. "Laurent asked me to inform. Anonymous tips got one hundred francs. The Gestapo offered several hundred francs for outright denunciations. But I wouldn't. I saw the hate and fear in classmates' faces after Laurent walked by. He assumed the Nazis would win the war and protect him."

"How about you?"

"Wrong person, wrong time. I sheltered that RAF pilot during the Occupation. So they taught me a lesson." She pointed to her withered legs.

"Who?"

"The Gestapo doctors doing research on spinal nerve endings. They chose me to experiment on. Took me to Berlin, then exhibited me as a freak."

"Please forgive me." Aimee shook her head. "I'm sorry."

"I was, too." Odile smiled. "But I still try to remember the few good old times."

"What happened to Laurent?"

"Didn't see him towards the end. Disappeared with a lot of people. Who knows?"

"What about his family?" Aimee said.

"Shot." She pointed out the window. "Against that wall. His stepmother and father in 1943. Rumor had it that he informed on them."

Aimee almost choked on her tea.

"Who took over the building?" she finally managed.

"Some cousin from his mother's side. You see, he took his mother's name, she had the money. After she died and his father remarried, he kept her name."

"Which name?" Aimee said.

"Always called himself de Saux. Hated his father for marrying again."

Odile Redonnet paused, looking at Aimee for a long moment.

"It's all about him, isn't it?"

Aimee nodded.

"Evil incarnate, but I can't even say that because he was amoral. No conscience. He'd do anything to hold power over someone. But Laurent disappeared, like so many collaborators after the war. He was seventeen or eighteen at Liberation. Who'd recognize him now in his sixties?"

Aimee paused, recalling the torn page from Lili's journal. "I know it's him. Laurent." Lili's phrase that Abraham had repeated to her-"Never forget." Lili had recognized Laurent because he'd sent her family to the ovens. She'd never forgiven him.

"He's back, isn't he?"

"May I have this?" Aimee stood up. "I have to find out who he is and this should help."

She put the photo in her bag, then took her teacup to the kitchen and put it in the sink. Odile's kitchen window looked on to a series of dilapidated courtyards. Number 23 was probably one of them.

At the door, Aimee turned. "Thank you," she said. "But I disagree, Odile."

"How's that?" Odile asked from her wheelchair near the table.

"I'm beginning to believe he never left," Aimee said.

THE FIRST bell she rang was answered by a fortyish woman in a zebra leotard, with flushed cheeks and a light beading of sweat. Aimee could hear the pounding beats of heavy drums in the background.

"The owner? Don't know. Send my checks to a property management," she said, out of breath.

"How about the concierge?"

"Isn't one." Her phone started ringing. "Sorry," she said and she closed the door.

None of the other doors she rang answered. She wandered to the back of the building where the garbage cans were kept, hunting for the gas meter. At last she found it behind a rotted wood half door. She wrote down the serial number of the meter. Easy to trace if she accessed EDF-Électricite de France, otherwise a tedious search at the tax office for ownership. Of course, she still might end up going there. Now she needed computer access and pondered breaking back into the Victor Hugo Museum to hit the keys on their state-of-the-art computer.

Friday Afternoon

SHE CALLED ABRAHAM STEIN from a public phone in the Metro station at Concorde since her cell-phone batteries had died. Sinta answered.

"Abraham's talking with some big-nosed flic."

"A chain-smoker, with suspenders?" Aimee asked.

"You got it."

"Please get Abraham, but don't tell him it's me." Aimee waited while Sinta fetched him. She heard the radio news broadcast blaring in the background, with a reporter's terse comments. "Riot police have been called to clear away demonstrators from the Élysee Palace where the European Union Summit Tariff will be signed. Sporadic confrontations between neo-Nazi groups and the Green Party are happening here and in parts of the 4th arrondissement, notably around Bastille."

The phone scraped something as Abraham picked it up. "Yes?"

"It's Aimee. Don't say anything, just listen, then answer with yes or no if you can."

He grunted, then she heard him say, "Sinta, offer the detective some tea."

"Is his name Morbier?"

"Yes."

"Has he mentioned me? Asked when you've last seen me?"

"Yes, doubly so."

"To do with Lili's murder?"

"Yes."

All of a sudden she heard Abraham clear his throat and Morbier's gravelly voice came on the line.

"Leduc! Where the hell are-?"

"Why are you setting me up, Morbier?" she said.

"Wait a big minute. You didn't meet me or return my calls and now your partner got shot up," he said.

"Cut the crap," she said. "Who's behind this? I'm clicking off before your three-minute tracer locates me. I've got some questions."

"By the way, your partner is cranky as hell," he said. "Pissed you left him. Seems he might not want to be your partner anymore."

"Why are you asking Abraham questions when you've been taken off Lili's case?" she said, checking her watch.

"Just curious if he's heard from you," he said.

"Why the hell ambush me?" she said.

"You're paranoid, what's gotten into you? Listen, Leduc, take a reality pill. No one's after you."

"The only other explanation is that my phone was tapped, they heard where we were meeting. Javel…"

He interrupted her. "Why are your prints all over his place anyway?"

Her fingerprints were all over the rooms of a supposed suicide. Two minutes and fifty seconds showed on her watch as she hung up the pay phone.

Aimee heard the whine of metal grinding metal and whish of air brakes as the train pulled in. She slid through the door of the train bound for Porte de Vanves, full of Parisians going home from work. She clutched the overhead rail as her head spun and she felt sick to her stomach. Who was telling the truth? Could Rene, her partner and friend since the Sorbonne, have turned on her? Had he really been protecting her when he told her to run? Of course he was. His protective behavior ran consistent with how he always treated her. Usually to her annoyance.

Then there was Morbier. He'd lied about investigating Lili and had certainly been acting out of character.

She got off at Châtelet. At the kiosk she bought a recharger for her dead cell phone. Commuters washed around her like a wave on the platform, parting before her at the last minute. In the black designer suit she blended in well with the professionals at rush hour. After she had inserted the charger her phone beeped immediately.

"Yes." She looked at her wristwatch.

"About time," Thierry said. "You're a hard lady to reach. Found her?"

"We need to meet," she said.

"Bring Sarah to my office in Clingancourt," Thierry said.

No way in hell would she do that.

"Meet me at Dessange in Bastille, thirty minutes."

"You mean that hair place? How can…?"

"In thirty minutes. After that I'm gone." She clicked off and called Clotilde.

JUST BECAUSE she was on the run, with skinheads and the police all searching for her and unable to return to her apartment, it wasn't reason enough to have greasy hair. Clotilde lathered Aimee's hair with henna as Francoise, the proprietress, escorted Thierry to the shampoo area.

Nonplused, Thierry asked, "What's this all about?"

"Sit down. You could use a trim," said Aimee.

He snorted. "Cut the smart remarks."

"A full-service salon, nails, facials. Why not take advantage?" she said beneath the suds, smiling at Clotilde, who massaged her scalp. Thierry fiddled with his hands and looked uncomfortable. She indicated a space in the light and airy salon, bustling with colorists in lab coats, women with tin foil wrapped in strands like antennas from their heads, and huge blown-up photos of waiflike models on the walls. Hair dryers and vintage disco music kept the beat in the background along with the hot ammonia smell of permanent waves.

Thierry either had to stand and talk down to Aimee or lie back on a chair and get a shampoo. He chose to stand. "Have you found her?"

"If I have, what does that mean to you?" Aimee said as Clotilde rinsed her warm soapy hair.

"That's your job. I asked you to help me," he said. "Now that we found my father. My real father."

"Why do you want to meet her?" she said.

"It's only natural, isn't it?" he said.

As Aimee sat up and Clotilde dried her hair, she noticed his bloodshot eyes and jerky movements. He clutched and unclutched the leather belt of his storm-trooper coat. She would never engineer a reunion between Sarah and Thierry in his present condition.

"Look, I'm going back to the demonstration at the Élysee Palace," he said. "We're forcing the Greens to back down. Showing those idiots that people will take a stand. The agreement will be signed."

He sounded petulant and whiny for a fifty-year-old man. And scary.

"Do you mean the European Union Trade Agreement?"

He nodded. "Let me see her, talk with her."

"I'll ask her. Why did that scum in lederhosen have a heat-seeking rifle?"

Thierry's eyes narrowed. "What?"

"Tried to pepper me with bullets like a rabbit. In the courtyard of Hôtel Sully." Aimee slouched under the warm wet towel as Clotilde kept tousling her hair.

Thierry reluctantly followed them to a hydraulic chair that Clotilde pumped with her foot. As she looked in the mirror, Aimee found she resembled a drowned furry creature while he looked predatory and disheveled.

"Maybe you want to tell me about it," she said.

"Sounds like you're getting paranoid," he said, shaking his head. "He's busy organizing the demonstrations."

"Not anymore," she said. "And it's too late to ask him."

Thierry twisted the chair around so fast that Clotilde's scissors and set of combs went flying. Canisters of mousse and styling gel clattered to the floor. All eyes turned to her, straitjacketed in a barber's smock, and a nearly frothing Thierry, who gripped the armrests, shoving his face into Aimee's. Several stylists automatically picked up hairbrushes and one clutched a heavy-duty hair dryer defensively.

"You took out Leif?" Thierry eyes opened wide in disbelief.

"Him or me. That's what it came down to," she said uneasily. "Leif looked too greasy to be Nordic."

"Idiot!" he said. "A recognized Korporal in our corps."

"He shot at me from the roof," she said. "I won't apologize for making it out alive."

All of a sudden, Thierry looked up and noticed the stylists watching him with raised beauty implements.

His voice dropped to a whisper. "Bring the Jew sow," he hissed. "Meet me at the office tonight. If not, the dwarf won't make the morning."

It was her turn to be surprised.

"Room 224 in St. Catherine Hospital-your partner, Rene Friant."

And then he was gone, leaving a whiff of stale sweat.

Francoise rushed over. "Should I call the flics?"

"No, please," said Aimee. "Thanks, but nothing really happened."

Francoise nodded. "Bad news, eh?"

"In more ways than one," Aimee agreed.

With dripping hair, she grabbed her cell phone and immediately called St. Catherine's Hospital.

"Friant, Rene? He was discharged five minutes ago," the floor nurse told her in a flat voice.

She called their office. No one answered but she left a message in a code they'd worked out. She warned Rene and told him to meet her at her cousin Sebastian's later. She left the same message at his apartment. Now she felt somewhat reassured. If she couldn't find Rene, she doubted Thierry could. At least not right away.

The hum and buzz of a busy salon had returned and Clotilde looked at her expectantly, comb and scissors poised.

"Let's talk about color, this brown's too mousy," Aimee said.

Clotilde just winked and pulled out some swatches. Aimee pointed at several. With a new hair color, dark glasses, and the tailored suit, no one would recognize her in a crowd. In her radical departure from jeans, leather jacket, and scuffed boots she could sing the computers electric anywhere.

While Aimee sat there, she played out all the scenarios in her head. Even though she wanted to blame Thierry for the attack on her, he had seemed genuinely surprised.

Suppose Leif worked for Laurent, whoever he was. Could Laurent, with Leif's help, have disposed of Lili, shut Soli Hecht up, tried to kill her, supposedly shut down Morbier's investigation, trailed Sarah, strangled Javel, and made it look like suicide? To do all that, they'd have needed more help.

One part she didn't get-why not put the rope in her hand, make it look like she killed Javel? The only reason she could think of was that maybe a customer had come in and the killer didn't have the time.

Or the killer wanted attention deflected from Arlette's murder in the past. Make Javel out as morose; after missing Arlette all these years, he'd decided to join her in memorial. That would make sense, Aimee thought. Ever since the TV and morbid tabloid coverage of the Luminol extravaganza, things had heated up. The killer or killers had certainly been working overtime.

And that all brought her back to Laurent. She had to ferret out his identity and protect Sarah.

Her cropped hair now streaked with pale blond highlights, Aimee stepped out into the small cobbled street. A loud appreciative whistle came from the old man behind the nearby fruit cart. She winked at him and smiled to herself.

Opposite the salon, a well-dressed Yves came out of the wrought-iron entrance doors of Brasserie Bofinger. For once she knew her hair looked fantastic and she was dressed to match it. Nervous and delighted, she wondered what to do.

He looked dapper and businesslike in a navy blue double-breasted suit. Not like a neo-Nazi. Clotilde had brushed off the lint so the black suit looked runway-ready. A few buttons, remnants of the dumpster, had rained on the floor of the salon, and Aimee had told Clotilde the story as they giggled.

She seriously contemplated raising her arm to hail Yves, when an unmarked Renault screeched to a halt beside him in the small street.

The car wedged him into a doorway. Two plainclothes types pulled him, struggling and kicking, into the backseat. The doors slammed and the Renault screeched down the street.

She leaned against a window, shaken. She assumed they'd been undercover cops. After all, he was a neo-Nazi…wasn't he?

Friday Afternoon

HARTMUTH AND THIERRY S AT across from the Victor Hugo Museum by the playground in Place des Vosges. Children's laughter erupted from the swings under the barren-branched plane trees. The vaulted stone arcades surrounding the gated square, filled with fountains and grassy patches, reflected the late autumn sun's last rays. Over the worn stone cobbles wafted the smell of roasted chestnuts. Hartmuth's hands shook as he folded the newspaper he'd been pretending to read.

"I only agreed to meet because you said it's important," he said. "What do you have to say to me?"

"Millions of things. You are my father," Thierry's eyes shone, almost trance-like. "Let's start by getting to know one another. Tell me about my German family?"

Hartmuth stirred guiltily. "You had a sister once," he said after a long pause as he watched the children. "Her name was Katia. I wasn't a very good father."

Thierry shrugged.

"Who raised you?" Hartmuth asked.

"Some conservatives who lied to me." Thierry kicked at a pigeon anxious for crumbs. "But I've always been like you, believed in what you fought for. Now I know why I joined the Kameradschaft, it's natural that I would carry Aryan beliefs like you."

Hartmuth shook his head. He stood up and walked along the gravel path. He stopped at a slow gurgling fountain near the statue of Louis XIII on his horse.

Thierry stirred at the memories of Claude Rambuteau handing him crumbs for the pigeons at this very statue. Why hadn't the Rambuteaus told him his true identity?

"I said goodbye to her," Hartmuth said. "Here."

Startled, Thierry asked, "Who do you mean?"

"Your mother, before my troop shipped out to the slaughter at the front." He paused. "She's still beautiful," he murmured wistfully.

"How can you say that?" said Thierry, aghast. This wasn't how he imagined his Nazi father would act.

"I loved her and I still do," Hartmuth said. "She thinks it's all in my mind. Let me show you where we used to meet." Hartmuth strode across the square, pulling Thierry along.

None of the scurrying passersby paid much attention to them, a piercingly blue-eyed man and slender silver-haired gentleman, who, if one looked carefully, had a definite resemblance.

Halfway down the rue du Parc Royal, Hartmuth turned and pointed up at the arms of Francois the First, the marble salamander sculpted into the archway.

"I first saw her here, on these cobblestones," Hartmuth said. "But over there is where you were conceived, underground."

"Underground? What are you saying?" Thierry asked uneasily. Opposite, on rue Payenne adjoining Square Georges-Cain, Hartmuth agilely climbed over the locked gate. He started rooting in the plants among the ancient statuary. Thierry could hear clumps of dirt landing in the bushes. He was afraid Hartmuth was losing his mind.

"What are you doing?" Thierry asked, after he climbed in behind him.

"Come help me," Hartmuth said. He beckoned to Thierry, his eyes shining as if possessed. "Move this pillar." Hartmuth tried to push the broken marble column. "It's got to be around here."

"You're crazy. What are you going on about?" Thierry raised his voice.

The dusk was settling and the street lamps came on one by one.

"The entrance to the catacombs!" Hartmuth said. "We'll find it, they've been here since the Romans. They haven't gone away. This city is honeycombed with the old Christian tunnels." He took Thierry's hand and stared at him. "I used to hide in them with your mother every night."

Thierry felt embarrassed by the longing evident in Hartmuth's eyes. "Why do you call her my mother? I never knew her, she abandoned me, she was a filthy Jew!" His hysterical laugh climbed to a high pitch. "Filthy, that's perfect! Rutting in the dirt with an Aryan."

"Odd. She said the same thing." Hartmuth shook his head sadly. "You mustn't hurt her. You do understand, don't you?"

"That an Aryan could sleep with a Jew?" Thierry said accusingly. "Was it because you were far from home and lonely? Maybe she seemed exotic and seduced you?"

Tears welled in Hartmuth's eyes. "Where did you get all this old hate?"

"I know Auschwitz was a lie," Thierry said. "My responsibility has been to expose those death-camp coverups."

"I smelled the stench of too many of them," Hartmuth said wearily and leaned against the broken marble column. "Your grandparents, Sarah's parents, ended up there."

Stunned, Thierry shouted, "No, no! I don't believe you."

A few passersby on the sidewalk turned to stare, then moved on.

"Our regiment troop train was bombed somewhere in Poland," Hartmuth said. "We had to rebuild the tracks in the snow while partisans shot at us from the woods. There was a terrible smell, out in that godforsaken forest, that never went away. We didn't know what it was because we saw no villages, only tunnels of black smoke. When the train ran again we passed a spur track. An arrow pointed to a sign saying Bergen-Belsen. Rotten corpses of those who'd jumped off the train littered the side of the tracks. I'll never forget that smell." Hartmuth spoke in a faraway voice.

Thierry glared at him. "You're lying, Jew lover!"

He climbed over the fence and ran off down the street. Hartmuth sank to his knees among the ruins but he had no more tears left. From deep inside came the old lullaby that his grandmother sang to him: Liebling, du musst mir nicht böse sein, Liebling, spiele und lach ganzen Tag.

He sang the words as he dug earth and moved stones. Long after the streetlights shone he was still digging.