Murder in the Sentier

Wednesday Afternoon

AIMÉE RAN INTO the office of Leduc Detective and threw her leather bag on the settee. “I need to go to Frésnes tomorrow. May I borrow your car, René?”

“What happened?”

“Something bizarre.” She told him about visiting Liane Barolet in Frésnes and the empty coffin in Montmartre cemetery.

“For more than twenty years, Liane’s been paying?” he asked.

Aimée waved the plastic Neufarama bag.

“Pretty expensive just to store a plastic bag,” he said. “I’d demand a refund.”

Now it came back to her. She recalled Jutta’s comment that her mother must have returned to Aimée’s apartment or to the cemetery. At the time, she thought Jutta had been talking in riddles. Now it made sense.

“Wouldn’t Liane have asked Jutta to pay instead of you?” René asked.

“But she’d just found out after Jutta left,” Aimée said. “What if Jutta was looking for something kept inside the coffin?”

René blinked. His fingers paused on the keyboard. “That’s a big jump.”

She perched on her desk. “Not really when you think about it. It’s accessible to anyone who can hop over the walls at night and jimmy the coffin open. No need for storage keys or to evade guards at night. And it could hold something big. The possibilities are endless,” she said. “Did Jutta find the coffin empty … is that why she came to me? Or did she find something, take it away, and hide it?”

“That doesn’t make sense, unless Jutta was hiding it from someone else,” René said. “But you said she insinuated that your mother had sent you something, or hidden it, for you to find, while you were away as an exchange student.”

The old frustration returned. And the hurt of not knowing.

“Papa destroyed everything of hers,” she said. “Nothing’s left. But Liane Barolet hinted that Jutta received a letter from my mother,” she said. “She must be alive!”

“How do you know? The woman could be desperate, lying just to get you to take care of the fees for coffin.” René shook his head. “Face it, Aimée, you’re chasing a trail that’s been cooling for more than twenty years.” He edged himself off the chair with effort and stood. “Your mother left, she never came back, and she’s not going to.”

“She’s alive, René,” she said. “She has to be. I’ll find her.”

René crossed to the coatrack, took his cane, and lifted his linen jacket off its hook with it. She couldn’t see his face.

“Say it, René.”

Instead of sympathizing, René seemed bitter.

“I’m going to my tae kwon do workout,” he said. He picked up his bag with the Yuan Dojo label and paused at the door. “Have you ever thought, Aimée,” he said from the door, “that if she is alive maybe she doesn’t want to be found?”

RENÉ’S WORDS sliced her to the quick. She couldn’t work. It seemed like the very walls mocked her. She walked to the mail pile, rifled through the bills, and found a fat brown envelope addressed to “A. Leduc—Personal.”

She slit open the bulky envelope. Stuffed inside, she found one folio of her mother’s small bound notebook. On it, in thick block letters, were written six words: “Cooperate and the rest is yours.”

For a moment, joy rushed over her. Then came the awful realization that Jutta’s killer had sent her this as a bargaining chip. She slipped on gloves, took the kit from her bottom desk drawer, and dusted for prints. Just in case.

Aimée looked at the postmark: Hôtel des Postes on rue Etienne Marcel. Two blocks from where Jutta was killed.

She swept papers off her desk, then gingerly set down the notebook pages. These pages were different from those Jutta had shown her. The book had been halved, or quartered, the binding ripped and split. Below a drawing of Emil with red suspenders was what looked like a diagram for a mouse house with tiny platforms, running wheels, and a spiral staircase, a tiny box, an arrow.

Aimée looked closer. Under the Emil drawing, was another, with a sketch of horizontal lines, banked. Slanted. She stood back. Was it some kind of pattern?

She walked over to the window. Faint warm breezes from the Seine brushed over her, then dissipated. Yet even at this distance, she couldn’t make out the pattern.

With care she scanned all eight pages into her computer. Then lifted the prints. Blurry and indistinct … the fingers of hundreds who’d handled the envelope. Not a print came from the notebook, it had been wiped clean.

Of course.

Darting a furtive look around her office, she lifted the notebook pages, pressed them to her lips. Inhaled the old paper scent. Silly. No one could see her. Then she sat at her terminal, and tried to make sense of the lines.

She ran Viva-1, an industrial art program. She played with the lines. Stretching, bending, and looping them. All she got was psychedelic-colored bands when she enlarged them.

Of course, she thought. Enhance, then reduce them.

inailgidom

An anagram?

She played around, trying to form the letters into words, substituting letters.

Nothing.

Then she simply reversed the letters.

modigliani

Amedeo Modigliani was a sculptor, painter, and friend of Picasso. An Italian, from a Jewish ghetto, who came to Paris and dissipated—or enhanced—his talents, depending on whom one read.

Had her mother admired Modigliani? She looked closer and saw elongated figures in the lines … an odd complementary fit. On each roof corner of the diagrammed mouse house were elongated gargoyles.

Aimée went online and did a search on Modigliani. His pieces were in museums, though a majority were in private collections. She dug further. An auction at Sotheby’s a few years ago had netted hundreds of thousands. But some paintings had been missing since the war … several from the Laborde collection.

Something clicked in her head.

Laborde … Laborde … where had she heard that name?

Of course, he’d been kidnapped by Haader-Rofmein. She found a bottle of Badoit, poured the sparkling water into her espresso cup, and got to work.

She searched newspaper databases for information about the industrialist Paul Laborde. Born in Mulhouse, on the French-German border, of a French father and a German mother, he’d amassed great wealth after the war, rebuilding steel foundries along the Rhine. He’d made gobs of money. Smelled dirty, as her papa used to say.

Haader-Rofmein took a particular dislike to him and his business, especially after his firm acquired several steel foundries, then mines in Africa. They targeted his company, pointing out that his steel, reworked, of course, ended up as bayonets in Vietnam.

Laborde wasn’t the only target, of course. The Krupp and Thyssen families suffered extortion and kidnap attempts. But Haader-Rofmein discovered the address of one of Laborde’s homes and burgled it as well as kidnapping Laborde. News coverage dried up after a shoot-out in the forest and Laborde’s death.

A light went on in her head. Her mother, the Modigliani paintings, Laborde, and the radicals who’d kidnapped him were all connected. Somehow.

Here was Laborde’s tie-in to Haader-Rofmein. From what Jutta had said, the Action-Réaction and Haader-Rofmein gangs had melded together. But how did, or could, Romain Figeac’s manuscript fit in with Sartre’s old interview with Haader about agit888, perhaps with her mother as interpreter?

She called Martine. Told her what she found and the connection she suspected.

“Laborde didn’t get in bed with terrorists, Aimée,” Martine said. “Quite the oppposite. His shady past included Vichy collaboration and using mercenaries for his African investments.”

“Right, but they took over his house—”

“Whoa,” Martine said. “You’re right. They kidnapped him, then he went Stockholm Syndrome.”

“Stockholm Syndrome?”

“Lots of hostages come to identify with their captors after a while. It was named after the Stockholm embassy incident.”

“He couldn’t have identified too long,” Aimée said. “The gang killed him, didn’t they?”

“Never proved, and no one was charged,” Martine said.

Strange, Aimée thought.

“What about Laborde’s art collection?”

“Give me some time,” Martine said and hung up.

While Aimée downloaded more information, she turned the notebook pages. Her heart caught. Only one more drawing of Emil, his whiskers running off the page.

She wished the book hadn’t been torn apart and ruined. She clutched her knees and rocked back and forth, lost in old thoughts. Here she was, an adult with a successful business and a partner, yet she was still obsessed with her mother. She had to admit it, she had no life beyond René, Miles Davis, her computer, and this obsession.

René was probably right. Liane Barolet might be leading her on. But that wouldn’t stop her from finding out the truth, from finding her mother.

And what had Jutta wanted … what did her killer want … what had her mother left or hidden?

The phone rang.

“Allô?”

“So glad I caught you, Mademoiselle Leduc.”

That dense, creamy voice. “Anything new with Christian, Monsieur Mabry?”

“Some issues came up,” he said. “Can you meet me tonight?”

“Would this be a consultation?”

“You could call it that.”

“What time?”

“Eight P.M.”

She let a pause hang in the air, long enough, she hoped, to seem busy. “I’ll fit you in.”

“Let’s meet opposite the Bourse in the Yabon art squat. He’ll join us.”

“So Christian’s all right?” she asked. “I’ve been worried.”

“No more of a crisis than usual,” Etienne Mabry said. “Third floor, Hubert’s salon.”

Pleased and immediately panicked about what to wear, Aimée hung up.

SHE NEEDED to get back on good terms with René and to get up to speed with Michel’s computer system. After tackling the pile of papers on her desk, she checked Michel’s database and was struck by the volume of his supply orders, many dating from early spring, that showed up as unpaid.

How could Michel, a struggling new designer, obtain that kind of credit? She searched and discovered one of his uncle Nessim’s companies, Kookie Mode, had guaranteed his line of credit and received the invoices for his supplies; leather, fabric, and sewing needs.

She dug further. The scary thing was, Kookie Mode had sought protection from its creditors. Wasn’t that the first step on the road to bankruptcy? She made a note to check further.