Murder in the Sentier

Thursday Afternoon

AIMÉE TOOK care of Léo’s online account, giving him a three-day grace period, then pulled up the virus she and René had discovered and neutered in Media 9’s site. She wrote new code, programming the virus to self-destruct in twenty-four hours and rescind all its commands and any further ones. After rechecking and running a test, she sent the virus into the Visa postage-metering system. Half of France would thank her if they found out she’d given them a grace period. But they wouldn’t.

Knocks came from her glass-paned office door. She hit Save, then Quit, and closed her laptop.

She opened the door to a woman with slate gray eyes wearing black-framed glasses on a pale, sharp-angled face.

“Fräulein Leduc?” the woman asked. Her silk polka-dotted scarf fluttered in the hall window air, hot and exhaust-laden from the back alley.

“Oui?”

“I’m Gisela. We need to talk.”

“Concerning?”

“My mother and yours.”

Taken aback, Aimée kept her hand rigid on the knob.

“What do you mean … who’s your mother?

“Past tense seems the operative word here,” said the woman. “Ulrike Rofmein.”

Aimée gripped the door handle. “You’d better come in.”

“We’re Hitler’s grandchildren, you know,” the woman said. “The lost generation.”

Aimée flinched. Speak for yourself, she wanted to say—it had nothing to do with her.

“And it affects you,” Gisela said, as if she read Aimée’s thoughts.”

The hair on Aimée’s neck rose.

Gisela strode into the office, stopping at a chair. Her gaze traveled over the filigreed-iron balcony rail, the eighteenth century still life hung above digital scanners, old sepia maps, and Interpol posters.

“May I?”

“Sit down,” Aimée said. She needed a drink. “Like an espresso?”

“Grazie,” Gisela said, smiling. “We were raised in Italy.”

“We?” Aimée twisted the black metal arm off the Lavazza espresso machine.

“My twin, Marthe,” Gisela said. “Papa changed our names. Later, when I was in Universität,” she leaned forward, “I came to the realization.”

“Realization?”

Gisela lowered her voice, as if to highlight the importance of her words. “I don’t need to hide, none of us do,” she said. “We weren’t the criminals. They were. We’re the victims.”

“What do you know about my mother?”

Gisela rubbed her long fingers over Aimée’s desk.

“Who really and truly knows anyone? That’s the point.”

Aimée didn’t know how to reply. Something about this Gisela didn’t feel right.

Aimée slammed the used coffee grounds into the trash.

Gisela didn’t flinch. She fixed Aimée with a long stare.

“The Revolution was their child,” Gisela said. “Not us.”

Maybe that was true.

Aimée pressed the black switch on her machine. A grumbling answered, then a slow measured hiss.

“I don’t understand how you found me, Gisela, or why you’re here,” Aimée said.

“We’ve inherited the legacy,” Gisela said. “A badge of shame that I overturned.”

Aimée let the steaming espresso drip into a demitasse cup. As she passed Gisela the faïence sugar bowl, their fingers touched, quivered, and held. It felt both intimate and unnerving.

Aimée pulled her hand away. They sipped, quiet for a moment.

She wondered what Gisela’s angle was and why she seemed strangely familiar.

“What do you mean ‘overturned,’ Gisela?”

“We’re going to change Europe,” she said, “for the better.”

“How?”

“Do something to make people understand,” Gisela said.

Her eye rested on Leduc Detective’s client list tacked on a cork board. “Computer security, ja?” She didn’t wait for a response. “When you go home and your boyfriend asks about your day, all you can say is ‘I can’t tell you,’ right?”

If I had a boyfriend, Aimée almost said before she could stop herself.

“Gisela, why don’t you answer my questions? Why have you come to me now?”

Gisela sat back, pushed her glasses up on her nose, and nodded as if she’d made a decision. “When I went to Universität in Wiesbaden, I lived with my aunt,” she said, her voice flat. “Every week, I washed her car, waxed it, filled up the tank. The owner of the car wash watched me. I thought he was a dirty old man. After Italy, I was used to it. But one Saturday as I paid, he snickered, asked wasn’t I going to stick him up? I asked him what he meant. He said he remembered my mother, how she liked fast BMWs and how he’d keep quiet if I bombed the late-night Turkish grocer.”

“Papa never told us about our mother.” Gisela took a long sip. “So I ignored the man.”

She took a nonfiltered cigarette from her bag. Didn’t light it, just played with the tobacco threads at the tip. Pulled them out with her thumb and ring finger.

“Aber, he was serious. A few days later, going to class, the tram conductor refused my Bahn pass, said I should go steal a car like my mother, Ulrike Rofmein, did. Another fascist! Then a passenger stood up, pointed to me, and said, ‘My brother has glass in his hip from your bombing, he’s never walked the same since.’ I wanted to say I was a little girl—I didn’t do anything—I wasn’t even in the country. My mother was the outlaw on the run. But contempt glared in their eyes. And icy hate. I ran. For years.”

“What about your sister?”

“Marthe married an Italian, buried herself in a slew of bambinos, and won’t even speak German. Then I met someone,” Gisela said, her gaze wistful. “Big mistake. Turns out he was a reporter writing about ‘Terrorist children of Haader-Rofmein—where are they now? Inhabiting society’s fringe like the parents who abandoned them? Will they stike again?’ … same old scheiss. Live and learn, eh?”

Live and learn … Jacques Caillot had said the same thing.

“What was his name?”

“Martin.”

A world-weary sigh escaped Gisela’s lips. She played with the tobacco with her pinkie and offered a cigarette to Aimée.

With an effort, Aimée refused.

Gisela lit up and inhaled deeply.

Aimée wanted to suck in the smoky gray spiral mounting lazily to her high ceiling. Instead, she fingered her pocket for Nicorette gum but found only a crumpled wrapper.

“I met journalists, old colleagues of my mother,” Gisela said. “They once respected her. Even now some believe mother was set up by the Polizei and a bungling Bundeswehr who killed her in prison, fabricated her suicide.”

To Aimée, Gisela’s matter-of-fact tone seemed at odds with her tragic tale.

“I guess I realized we had things in common. And she wasn’t so bad.”

Aimée wondered what she’d have in common with her mother. She had a vague memory of a rally in Boulevard Saint Michel, a candlelit vigil in the biting cold. Aimée wondered if her father had been stationed opposite the protestors, enforcing the other political stance? What kind of couple had they been? She could never remember them fighting. Had she blocked the memory out?

She studied her fingers. Drummed them on her desk. “But you hate your mother, right, Gisela? Hate all of them.”

Gisela squashed her glowing cigarette in the grounds of her espresso. “Don’t you?” Gisela asked.

Aimée finished her espresso in one gulp. “Gisela, don’t you find it hard to hate someone you don’t know?”

Gisela’s eyes flashed. Her lips pursed. “My mother betrayed the cause, so did the others,” she said.

Aimée grew aware of the espresso machine’s escaping steam vapor and the low thrum of the fax machine. Below, on rue du Louvre, the insistent blare of a klaxon sounded.

“Tell me how my mother figures in this, Gisela,” Aimée said. “If you want me to turn helpful.”

“She joined Jean-Paul Sartre to interview Haader in prison. They hooked up there.”

“Tell me something new,” Aimée said. Alain Vigot, Romain Figeac’s editor, had already intimated as much.

“Your mother stole Laborde’s stash,” Gisela said.

Wary, Aimée stood up. Laborde, the industrialist. Had the stash been placed in Liane Barolet’s mother’s coffin?

“Work with me,” Gisela said, “I know people. People who move things, no questions asked.”

“I don’t know anything.”

Gisela leaned forward, intense, confrontational. “But she’s sent you something … something only you can understand.”

Aimée’s spine prickled. Modigliani, in her Emil book?

She noted dark hair growing in, jaggedly, at Gisela’s roots, a bad dye job. Gisela seemed a mixture of chic and seedy, like the Sentier. Like this whole affair. She wanted Gisela gone.

“Just thank me for the coffee, since you know nothing about”—she hesitated, then continued—“my mother. I understand if you must be on your way. I’ve got work….”

Gisela didn’t move. “We’ll share.”

Jutta had said the same thing.

Aimée ruffled her spiky hair. Maybe she was tired and that’s why they all sounded the same. She’d tried to be polite but it hadn’t worked. This woman was getting to her. “Clue me in. Or leave.”

“The tower,” Gisela said.

Tour Jean-Sans-Peur in the Sentier?

An awful feeling hit her. Turned her stomach. Was that why Jutta had set their meeting there?

“You saw Jutta Hald,” Aimée said, her breathing slowed.

“Not in this lifetime,” Gisela said.

“Of course, you thought the Laborde cache was in the tower, but you couldn’t find it. Jutta wouldn’t talk, then you killed her.”

“Not me,” Gisela said. “Maybe it was your mother.”

Her mother?

She couldn’t breathe. Had her mother sent her the book?

The familiar hiss of the espresso machine, the whine of a passing bus below shifted to another plane. A layer where familiarity lied. She floated, adrift in a netherworld of disguised people. Like the old nightmare of her childhood … opening doors, people pulling off masks revealing another mask, then another. No persona real or tangible.

Sweat beaded her lip.

She saw a bulge in Gisela’s open purse. Something glinted dully. How stupid she was … Gisela carried a gun despite tight French gun control. What if she had come ready to use it?

Aimée clutched her desk. Her compact 9 mm. Beretta was in the drawer. She hooked her fingers around the drawer handle.

Gisela reached into her purse.

“Start talking. Or I’ll get upset,” Aimée said, raising the Beretta slowly. “Quite upset. Put your piece down.”

“Live by the gun,” Gisela nodded. Her gaze held no fear. “Marcus Haader liked to spout that. It was his favorite saying.”

Aimée held her hand steady.

“It’s in our blood,” Gisela said, her eyes gleaming. She laid a stun gun on Aimée’s desk. “We deserve the spoils.”

Only a stun gun! Stop it, Aimée told herself, gain control. This woman unnerved her.

Aimée lowered her Beretta, ignoring the shaking in her other hand.

“Do you have a license for that?”

Gisela grinned. “Do you?”

“I’m a detective,” Aimée said. Too bad the Beretta wasn’t registered. But Gisela wouldn’t know that.

“What happened to your hand?” Gisela said.

“You mean the scar? Terrorists blew up my father, I got in the way.”

“A real daughter of the Revolution.” Gisela’s eyes shone. “You see, we’re meant to carry on. Your mother hid the contents of the industrialist’s safe. Now we need that money to finance our movement.”

So that’s what this was all about.

“If that were true, after twenty years why do you think anything would be left?”

“We’ll carry on. We deserve it. Not all the bonds were cashed. They show up every so often.”

“Bonds?”

“And land and mine deeds, in Africa.”

“Why come to me now?”

Silence.

“So that’s what Jutta Hald was after,” Aimée said. “She thought my mother hid them? So my mother’s alive?”

Gisela said nothing.

Aimée laid the gun back in the drawer. Scooped the tobacco into a pile and into the trash can.

“How old are you, Gisela?”

Gisela hesitated for the first time, unprepared for this question.

“Did you forget when you were born?” Aimée asked.

“1962,” Gisela said.

The woman was a fake. From the clippings, Aimée knew Ul-rike Rofmein had twins in 1963. This woman lied.

“Too late … wrong.” She gestured to the door. “Better luck with the next one on your list. Sorry, I’m not in sympathy with sisterhood and shared terrorist memories. I don’t buy your story.”

“Maybe you don’t like what I have to say,” Gisela shrugged. She stood and walked to the door. “Your mother wasn’t a saint,” she said. “Get used to it.”

Aimée felt like hurling the espresso machine at Gisela.

“If you don’t cooperate, things might get … how do you say it?” Gisela paused. “Sticky for you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your health and your partner’s, for one thing.”

Aimée froze. “He’s got nothing to do with this.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll keep in touch,” Gisela said with a small smile. “I’m good at that.”

By the time Aimée could move again, Gisela had ducked around the door. Her footsteps clicked faintly in the distance.

Aimée backed into the espresso machine, knocking it over. Hot muddy grounds, broken shards of black plastic, and mangled metal mesh littered the wood parquet. A fine chocolate-hued spray arced over her poster of the Miles Davis concert at the Olympia. Like old blood.

Aimée sagged and slid down her desk leg to the floor, fighting tears. She sprawled there, in the damp mess.

Aimée knew Renseignements Generaux indicateurs—informers—were trained to react that way. First lesson in the underground vault near Place Beauvau: With a pistol cocked at your head, keep up the story line, persevere, show sincerity, give nothing away. Classic RG training that appeared in no textbook.

Yet doubt assailed her; it added up wrong. A German trained by the French, undercover? Aimée caught her breath.

But RG recruited from every stratum of society … why not a daughter of a notorious terrorist who hated the cause that her mother had embraced instead of her? In the late sixties, RG infiltrated left-wing groups, established files based on phone taps, mail interceptions, and informers in schools and universities. Maybe Gisela was Ulrike Rofmein’s daughter and also an RG agent. But then how could she be mistaken about her own birthday?

René found her like that. Dazed and wet, choking on her sobs.

“Cheap machine,” he said, kicking its carcass with his toe. “Never liked it. We need a new one.” He set down Miles Davis, who beelined for her lap. “Martine dropped him off on her way to work; she told me someone broke into your apartment last night.”

Aimée nodded. She hugged Miles Davis, burying her head in his fur.

“The Bazar Hôtel de Ville department store has a sale on,” René said. “We’ll get a new one at BHV.”

He switched on his computer, then pulled out the broom.

“You’re my family, René,” she said, wiping her face with her sleeve. “This woman threatened me … said you’d be in danger if I didn’t cooperate.”

“Bring them on, I’m ready, I work out at the dojo every day,” he said. “Give me a chance to take names and kick ass.”

“If anything happened to you …”

“I know,” he said. “And vice versa, partner.”

Then she told him about Gisela and what had happened. She ruffled Miles Davis’s stomach fur, then slowly pulled herself up and grabbed the broom from him.

“No luck with Etienne the other night?” René asked.

She shook her head.

“Michel arrived and we met some performance artists with their own ateliers,” he said. “We talked until dawn!”

She was happy for him.

“There were some disturbing things about his uncle Nessim’s letters of credit,” she said, “I meant to show you.”

René nodded. “Always a ‘deal.’ Michel’s father was like that, and his father. His great-grandfather carted a sewing machine from the Lodz ghetto. With six mouths to feed, he set up the machine in the doorway fronting the one room the family rented in a crumbling Sentier building.”

“The same building where Michel is now?” Aimée asked.

René nodded. “His great-grandfather sewed for the cloth merchants who passed by. He branched into buying cloth, making garments. Later on, he sold clothes to the burgeoning department stores of Samartaine and Bon Marche. And then he bought the old hôtel particulier, cheap and falling apart, but with huge work spaces. He patched it up, put in more sewing machines, hired immigrants newer than himself.

“His family and other Ashkenazi Jews were rounded up during the Occupation,” René continued. “After the Algerian exodus, refugee Sephardic Jews from North Africa moved in. But the family still owned the building and the business, one of the few who returned and remained. These ‘new Jews’ were foreign, uneducated, too ‘Arabic.’ And more devious. Michel’s father sold out to his brother-in-law, Nessim.”

“Why did he do that?” Aimée asked.

“Michel says his father likened Nessim to mafioso; lending and protecting, filing bankruptcies, setting fires for insurance. Michel’s father hated their saying: Une mauvaise saison qui teminebien—a bad season that ends well.”

But before Aimée could pull up information as to Nessim on her terminal, loud beeping came from René’s screen. He shook his head and sat down. In the halogen light, his forehead shone with a fine sweat.

“Rogue programmers!” he said, his hands racing over the keyboard. “Concocting new viruses, corrupting data, breaking into private networks, leaving irritating messages on computer displays, posting porn on the Web site. The usual.”

“Our bread and butter, René,” she said.

“We need to work on Michel’s system before the dress rehearsal in Palais Royal. We’ve got work to do, cyber goddess.”

Biting back a smile, she said, “I prefer cyber diva.” She prised off her heeled sandal with her toe and pulled up the cryptographic hashes of the system files. She checked them against their known good backup to determine if any files were changed.

A few hours and several espressos from the downstairs café later, they found a chink in the security fire wall. René plugged it.

Then the fun part: putting the puzzle back together. René loved reconstructing the crackers’ route. Over a bottle of mineral water they identified vulnerabilities that a cracker would exploit and updated Michel’s system.

She didn’t tell him about Léo Frot. No reason for René to know.