Murder in the Sentier

Thursday Morning

AIMÉE WOKE UP with a start in Martine’s guest room. Dust motes danced in the slanting sunlight on her pillow. Why hadn’t she thought of it before … the old Interpol wanted posters! She’d find this Jules!

But before that she had to ask the reporter, Jacques Caillot, about the article he’d written. Specifically, how he had obtained his information.

She gulped a bowl of café au lait. Her head was hazy so she followed it with an espresso to help her wake up.

She called the visiting office at Frésnes to find when she could see Liane Barolet again.

“Lockdown,” the officer said. “No visitors or mail.”

“For how long?”

“Depends on the warden’s mood,” he said. “Big riot last night. It could last a week.”

A disappointment. But she’d become suspicious of Liane’s having any letters from her mother. Liane was too good a liar. Still, she’d send the papers proving payment to Liane’s lawyer, as she’d promised.

After several calls she discovered Jacques Caillot no longer worked at Le Figaro but ran the Agence France-Presse archives.

“Sorry,” the switchboard operator said. “Monsieur Caillot only takes appointments with press staff. Our archive is limited to journalists, correspondents, and news wire organizations.”

Saying she was a researcher, Aimée made an appointment. Martine handed over her laminated clip-on Madame Figaro ID and her presse card to Aimée, then offered to take Miles Davis and drop him off at the Leduc office later. Aimée borrowed Martine’s black linen Chanel dress and a straw hat. Ten minutes later, she was speeding along the Seine on her scooter.

“Credentials, s’il vous plaît,” the wiry security man said from the booth at Agence France-Presse’s door. His partner watched the monitors fed by surveillance cameras panning the small glassed-in sixties lobby. Outside, the Bourse and the graffiti-covered squat opposite glimmered in the midmorning heat.

Aimée flashed him Martine’s ID and a large smile.

“Archives, please,” she said.

He studied the card, turned it over. She held her breath, hoping he didn’t ask for another piece of ID.

“Through these doors, Mademoiselle, take the second staircase to the basement.”

“Merci,” she said.

She rushed ahead.

“Mademoiselle!”

She stopped. Afraid.

“Sign in, please.”

“Bien sûr,” she said, and wrote “Martine Sitbon” with a flourish.

She passed through the double-swing doors he buzzed open for her. Photographers gripped portfolios, assistants scurried, and the world of breaking news engulfed her.

To the left, narrow linoleum-tiled stairs led down two dank flights. The cisternlike bowels of the building seemed much older than the modernized floors above. Sixteenth century, or even older, she thought.

At the microfiche desk, a pale-faced woman in overalls took her request.

“Attends, he’s on the phone,” she said, her tone listless. Maybe she’d worked down here too long.

By the time she nodded permission to go in, Aimée had written down her questions.

“First door on the right.”

Aimée held her breath as she entered an arched door. The vaulted rose brick walls and stone floor resembled a medieval abbey. Maybe, originally, it was.

Jacques Caillot sat at a stainless steel desk, halogen beams illuminating an old card file he was sorting. Aimée noticed the framed press clippings on the walls from Saigon, Lagos, and Kabul with his byline. There were even foreign press awards.

“Sorry to intrude, Monsieur Caillot,” she said. “I appreciate your seeing me.”

He looked up. “Sit down,” he said. “One moment, and I’ll be finished.”

The dim room and his greenish blue eyes reminded her of peering into an aquarium. She realized one of Caillot’s eyes focused in slow motion. He shut the card file, noticed her gaze.

“Venetian glass eye. Thanks to the IRA’s Enskillen Rembrance Day bombing in 1987,” he said with a lopsided smile.

“And I was one of the lucky ones. How can I help?”

“I’m researching European terrorism in the seventies for a Montreal journal,” she said. “I came across your article. It made me curious.”

She thrust the copy across his desk.

Caillot scanned the article, nodding. “Of course, I remember,” he said. “Does Lepic still man the Figaro night desk?” he asked without looking up.

He’d got her. She’d only known Martine and her assistant, Roxane, at Le Figaro. He’d tested her and he’d won.

“Tell you what,” she said, gambling. “You can kick me out, but I borrowed this ID from my friend Martine, the former Le Figaro editor.”

“And why, may I ask?”

“Because, Monsieur Caillot, there didn’t seem to be any other way to see you. You see this ‘couple in cahoots’ you described in the article are my parents.” She stood up. “No one will talk to me.” She sat back down, put her elbows on his desk, and leaned forward. “The only files available have been sanitized. At least your article makes me think so. So far, your piece has been the only one to surface.”

“You lied to get in here,” Caillot said, returning her gaze. His glass eye was fixed on a spot below the mole on her neck.

“D’accord,” she agreed. “But I didn’t know what else to do. I need to know about Action-Réaction, Haader-Rofmein terrorists still wanted by Europol, Romain Figeac, and agit888.”

“Impressive,” he said. “You’ve been doing some homework.”

Metal rods behind his back caught the light as he leaned forward. She realized he sat in a wheelchair.

“Not enough,” she said. “Help me out, please.”

“Why do you think I’m down here, Mademoiselle … what was your name?”

“Aimée Leduc.” She pulled out her detective’s badge and carte d’identité with the less than flattering photo. “I’m guessing, but after Enskillen you wanted to let it all settle. Write a book.”

“It’s being printed as we speak. You’re quick.” He gave her another lopsided smile. “Why should I help you, even if I could?”

“You didn’t get into reporting to stay safe,” she said. “It’s all about risks. Finding something, trying out hunches until one pays off. Like a detective.”

The lid over his glass eye quivered.

“What evidence did you find?” she said, leaning over his desk.

“Don’t badger me,” he said. “I’m a pro.”

She wanted to say, So am I, but she didn’t feel like one.

“Please tell me where you got your information,” she said. “Then I’ll leave you alone.”

“Know anybody at the DST?”

Her mind raced. “No one who likes me.”

He tented his fingers. Tapped his index fingers together.

“I’m curious what you’d do with the information,” he said, leaning back in his wheelchair, “if I had any to give.”

She had to make him understand. And there was only one way. Something she hated to do. Reveal herself to a stranger.

“Monsieur Caillot, one day, when I was eight, I came home from school and my mother was gone,” she said. “Papa burned her things. Told me we’d closed a chapter in our life and started another. Wouldn’t talk about her.”

She rubbed her goose-pimpled arms. “Years later, during a routine surveillance contracted for with our detective agency by the police, our van blew up. Papa died. No one gave me any reasons or answers. For years I’ve tried to find out who these terrorists were. All I reached was dead ends. My last shot, an informer in Berlin, gave me zip. But when I returned a few days ago, a former terrorist, Jutta Hald, appeared at my door—straight from a twenty-year prison sentence—telling me she’d been my mother’s cell mate in Frésnes.”

Jacques Caillot’s hands remained tented. His odd gaze never left her face.

“Somehow, searching for leads to my father’s death triggered the arrival of this terrorist who knew my mother. Then Jutta Hald was murdered. But that’s just the beginning, Monsieur Caillot,” she said. “Now it’s your turn. Tell me what you know and how you found it out.”

“But you still haven’t said what you’ll do with the information.”

“All I want to know is who was behind my father’s death and if my mother’s buried in some lime pit in a field or alive in Africa.”

“Africa?”

“It’s personal, Monsieur … I need to know if they’re connected …”

“You mean …?”

“If she caused my father to be killed.” There. She’d said it, then she hung her head. When she looked up, he hadn’t moved. “Guess I’m stubbborn, but I have to know and I won’t leave until you tell me.”

“There are a few life lessons I’ve learned,” he said. “Important ones: When you find the love of your life, never hesitate, grab her; brush and floss every night; and don’t mess with the DST.”

“Thanks for the warning,” she said. “I thought Papa’s files were at the police judiciare.”

“You’re not wearing a wire, eh?”

“Wired? Only on espresso,” she said. She stood up, took off her hat, and opened her backpack. “But you can check.”

He paused, then shook his head. “If you mention anything outside this thick-walled dungeon, I’ll deny it all.”

Dungeon was right.

“You have my word.”

Caillot took a deep breath. “Don’t think I’m proud of the afternoon I spent on rue Nelaton more than twenty years ago.” He shrugged. “But I was starting out, a hungry reporter, ready to chew on anything. Sounds trite, but live and learn.”

“Rue Nelaton,” Aimée said, “you mean where the DST’s housed in the former Elf Oil building?” Aimée had long since dropped off a request to see her father’s files at the Ministry of Interior located in the unmarked building constructed over the Vel d’Hiver, the velodrome that held Jews before shipment to Drancy, then the long train ride to Auschwitz.

“Exactement,” he said. “They refer to it as politesse or good manners. Very simple, very civilized. Upon invitation, a journalist gets access to files the flics or the DST wants them to see. But the real agenda is that the story the flics want published gets published.”

“Selective leaks?”

“From selective files,” he said. “Your papa, a flic, would’ve understood. Take the agit888 file. They trailed Sartre for years; tapped his phone, noted whom he met, where he went. On the surface it looks suspicious, eh? A thick surveillance log, reels of phone tapes, hidden photos … and what did it show? Basically, that he and Simone de Beauvoir had an unsatisfactory love life and he was in trouble with his publisher. Missed his deadlines.”

That dovetailed with what Morbier had told her about Sartre and agit888. And it made sense.

“But my mother probably translated Sartre’s interview in the jail with Haader, and that’s part of the agit888 file, isn’t it?”

“Another nail in Sartre’s coffin, but she didn’t figure in the file or I would have written that.”

So the agit888 file led nowhere.

“What about my father?”

“Same analogy applies,” Caillot said. “Fingers pointed at him after an art heist. They left me in a room with his file and some Action-Réaction articles mentioning your mother. I figured they were helping me and I knew I’d have to repay them someday.”

“So they used you,” Aimée said.

“That’s clear now, but then …” His voice trailed off.

“Did you repay them?”

He rearranged a foam pad on the arm of his chair. “After my tour of duty in the world’s hot spots I came home to a secure job. Or so I thought. But they had another assignment, “like old times,” they said. It backfired and I’m in a chair for life.”

She refrained from asking if that’s why he hid down here. “Did you find proof my father assisted in robberies?”

“For that, Mademoiselle, you’d have to look at police judiciare files … all I saw were the allegations of culpability. And that’s what I reported. Seems I did the damage they intended. Forgive me.”

He wheeled himself out from behind the desk. “For years it haunted me. I’m a reporter first of all. Word came out the investigation was dropped. Whether your father was dirty …” Caillot shrugged. “I don’t know. Sixty percent of the force is rumored to be. But I heard he landed on his feet, ran a detective agency. Again, I’m sorry.”

Caillot must have had a lot of time to think about the past. Aimée stood up. “Merci.”

“Last advice: Narrow Africa down … try Senegal.”

She thought of Idrissa, who came from Senegal. “Why Senegal?”

“The economy’s more stable for intellos who become mercenaries.”

She tried questioning him further but that’s all he would say.

“I understand why you wrote the story, I might have done the same thing,” she said. “But I didn’t, and they’re my parents. Here’s my card, in case you want to talk later.”

It seemed as if all she’d been doing was giving her card to people. People who knew things but would tell her little.

She consulted the microfiche directory at the archive desk on the next floor, searching entries for mercenaries, Senegal, terrorists, and links between European terrorists.

What she found made her glad she’d looked. She’d never have found them otherwise. Few of these articles appeared in Internet archives. They only lived in dank vaults like this one. She copied the relevant ones.

A few hours later, copies in hand, she emerged, glad to feel the sun’s rays again. She pulled the scooter off the kickstand. While she’d been inside, a purple fluorescent sticker had been placed on it, MESSY ART FOR THE MASSES!

René would love that!

At a café on rue des Colonnes, a shady colonnaded arcade like the rue de Rivoli, she ordered a double café crème.

“Why not a grenade?” asked the man behind the counter, flicking a none too clean towel at a fly.

“Grenade?”

“What we call a depth-charge espresso drink,” he said.

“Parfait!” she said, as the man hit the slow, late-summer fly.

She wanted a quiet place to read the articles, digest Caillot’s words, and look at Modigliani prints.

After laying twenty francs on the zinc counter, she drove three blocks, parked the scooter in Place Louvois, which bordered the Sentier, and stepped across the street to the seventeenth-century Bibliothéque Nationale.

She showed her yellow research card then sat down at number 32, her assigned place, a seat away from the tall wood-framed windows in the Occidental manuscript section.

Her favorite section.

She sat fourth from the aisle, overlooking the cobbled courtyard. Floor-to-ceiling books covered the walls.

She took a deep breath, inhaling the musky manuscript smells emanating from the old paper. The aura of the past, the stillness, reassured her in this changing world. During her École des Medicines years she’d studied here on Thursday afternoons. Now the familiar beams of fading lemon light and oversized hard wooden chairs brought back a timeless feeling.

In front of her, the upright wood cradles for books and manuscripts and the oak spindle place holders were covered with a honeylike patina. All nineteenth century. Aimée fingered the book spindle, the pointed tip worn and darkened, aware of the overall hush broken only by the turning of pages and occasional patron’s cough.

Next to her a man studied a tea brown parchment, stiff and oily, with a cracked lump of red sealing wax below an intricate flourish of curlicue script dated 1424.

She sat back, took a deep breath, and began. The copies she’d made from the microfiche took all afternoon to read. Before the last call-up of the day, she’d finished taking notes and listing the possible remaining Action-Réaction and Haader-Rofmein members. Six, counting Jutta and Liane Barolet, had done prison time or gone underground. If Jules Bourdon, who she discovered came from a wealthy intellectual family, and her mother had fled to Senegal … why had Jutta been killed now? The timing was important but she didn’t know why.

She gathered her papers, recovered her card from the reference desk librarian, and trudged to the estampes et photographie room. She found a book of twentieth-century prints. Modigliani’s fluid, elongated lines and curves radiated sensuousness. And a haunting love of his subjects. Mainly women.

An essay accompanying a 1987 exhibition guide to Modigliani’s paintings gave her perspective. A thought crossed her mind. Had Laborde, an Alsatian, identified with Modigliani, also an outsider in France?

She wondered how it all meshed: Modigliani, Laborde’s abduction and death and her father’s subsequent police hearing.

Her father couldn’t be called an art connoisseur though her grandfather qualified as a dilettante. Money had been tight, but her father saw to it her shoes had no holes, her books were new, and the boulangerie honored a standing Saturday morning order of brioches after her piano lesson, since he couldn’t be there to buy them.

She rode back to her office and parked the scooter below. Aimée hurried along the pavement, past the dark green shop-front with PARIS-ROLLERBLADE on it. She climbed the stairs, opened the door of her dark office, switched on the light, then her laptop.

“Working up Michel’s system,” said the Post-It on René’s screen. Out of guilt, she put in some time and made a sizable dent in the pile on her desk. A sweet lucrative Media 9 contract would keep the wolf from the door. But they had to nail it with safeguards for their security setup.

Security, like anything, had to be continually upgraded and maintained. Hackers, crackers, and script kiddies always found a way in … at least she and René did. That’s how they tested their security. But script kiddies, so called because they lacked the finesse of crackers, would manage, sooner or later, to break into a system and wreak havoc. Frugality, shortcuts, and untrained staff cost firms more in the long run. A lot more.

She’d seen it too often. Corporations who wouldn’t pay for a strong lock yet cried when the barn door opened and the horses escaped. She and René refused to do damage control and inserted nonculpability clauses in every contract.

After another hour, she’d written alternatives to the client’s questionable clauses, made René a copy, and faxed the revisions to Media 9.

On the wall she tacked up copies of the old WANTED posters. More than a million of them, printed and distributed in the summer of 1972. The equal numbers of men and women pictured, she imagined, stiffened the patriarchal backbones of Germany and France.

She tried the DST, asking for a status report as to her request for her father’s file. All she got was a recording saying that file series was sensitive and only available to those with high security clearance.

Courtesy of her high-level contract with Equifax, she pulled up a fairly granular, up-to-the-minute credit report. With the password she’d stolen last year on a bank consulting job, she got to work. After entering the number, she found the information she wanted.

She picked up the phone and punched in the number she’d stored in her memory. One she never wrote down. She’d avoided calling it until now. She’d never before had enough material with which to do a deal with the devil.

“Oui?”

“I want to find someone,” Aimée said.

“Then you have to pay,” Léo Frot said at the other end of the line. His nasal voice competed with an occasional metallic ting in the background.

“How much?”

“Price mounts when someone doesn’t want to be found.”

“How do you know that, Léo?”

“Why would you call me if you could find them?”

Léo hadn’t changed. He’d squeeze the venom from a viper and charge the snake for it.

Too bad he was right.

She couldn’t data mine the files at the police judiciare on Quaides Orfèvres. None of them were computerized. Everything before the nineties was handwritten, stored in folders and police blotters. Dossiers. Face it, everything sensitive was done with pen and ink … probably quill pens.

“Someone do a walkabout, eh?” Léo asked.

“Walkabout?” she asked.

“We just came back from Australia,” he said. “That’s what they call an aborigine’s disappearance there.”

Typical Léo. Must be desperate to brag about his trip to someone, she thought. She’d known him for years. They’d gone to the lycée together. His father was her dentist.

“What if I do a systems security scan for you in return.”

Silence.

“Why do I feel that’s unfair?” Léo scraped something in the background.

“Suit yourself,” she said. “But that’s worth more than cash, believe me. You can’t imagine the stuff I find.”

“Like what?”

She knew he’d bite. His credit history lay before her on her screen. “Like the amount overdue on your Visa card. A gold one. And they’re about to pull it.”

“But they said …”

“Forget it,” she said. “The process started six hours ago…. I see bad credit in your future. Very bad.”

“Change it and I’ll help you,” he said.

She thought he caved in too fast.

“Files on Action-Réaction and the Haader-Rofmein gang,” she said. “From the seventies on.” She paused, hesitating. “And my father’s police review.”

A pause.

“Can’t you find them?” Léo asked.

“If they were in the system, I would,” she said. He knew that, too. “But I don’t feel inclined to break into the prefecture at Quaides Orfèvres. Makes me squeamish.”

“So I have to?”

“Tiens, Léo,” she said, “it’s your department.”

There was a long pause.

“Only if you adjust my credit report.”

“I’ll do what I can.”

She hit several keys and his bank balance flashed in front of her. “You’re overdrawn, Léo!”

“Fix that”—he took a deep breath—“and you’ve got my fingers at your disposal.”

“My partner hasn’t broken Banque de France’s encryption algorithms yet,” she said.

But she lied. René had done it two years ago. Even amped up their security system to a faster, better-tested algorithm called Blowfish. As he often said, better to be paranoid than sorry.

“Everything’s automated,” she said. “Programmed for glitches … too late….”

She let that sink in.

“But if I shut down the billing department with a postage-meter problem, that gives you an extra day.”

Pause.

“One day?”

Greedy mec!

“Figure the weekend,” she said, struggling to sound patient. “On Monday you pay the Visa and prevent a lifetime of nasty credit ratings that could screw up your application to refinance your Neuilly house.”

“It’s Chantal,” he said, expelling air in disgust.

Aimée had met his wife, Chantal. Bubbleheaded but she seemed kind.

“Her heart’s set on a Corsican holiday bungalow,” Léo said. “With a hot tub!”

“I’m sure it’s difficult.” Aimée found it hard to feign sympathy for this couple. A vast majority of Parisian families struggled with two jobs even with subsidized day care, to buy necessities and pay the skyrocketing rents for their small apartments.

“But you have to come here to see the records; I’m so busy,” he said, his tone petulant. “When I find them, they go no farther than the lavatory.”

She’d met him in the Art Nouveau men’s lavatory in the Quaides Orfèvres once before.

“Some files might have traveled to the DST,” she said. “Can you check?”

“DST!” Léo groaned. “The ninth-floor division on rue Nélaton?”

“Good place to start.”

“Talk about paranoia,” Léo said. “Everything one says or does there gets classified. Papers must be locked in office safes and even when you take a piss you have to lock your office.”

“I bet you know the combinations of some safes.”

She heard his slow chuckle.

“Or you know someone who does,” she said.

“What did you say you’d do about the Visa?” he asked.

“I’ll see what I can do.”