Murder in the Sentier

Thursday Night

AS SHE LEFT THE OFFICE with René, Aimée carried Miles Davis in her straw bag.

“I’ve got shank bones in the fridge,” René said.

Miles Davis’s ears perked to attention.

“I’m happy to keep him tonight if you need to take care of the apartment.” René grinned.“Merci,” she said. “I’ll take you up on your offer.”

A welcome breeze from the Seine sliced down rue du Louvre, rustling the plane trees. She waved goodbye as René, carrying Miles Davis in the bag, hopped the bus on Boulevard de Sébastopol that would drop him by his apartment near the Pompidou Center.

She called the police for information about the break-in but so far they had no news. Before returning home, she needed to think. She walked toward the Sentier.

She saw aging women displaying their wares on rue Saint Denis. When the pimps discarded them, the lucky ones shared a van with others, parked in Bois de Vincennes. Leaning in the shadows. Hiding their age.

A granite-hard life with no retirement benefits. No sécurité sociale.

Aimée remembered Huguette, or Madame Huguette, as her father insisted she call her. They’d lived across the hall from her until they moved in with her grandfather. Huguette had minded her after school after her mother left them.

Huguette had buttered thick tartines on her kitchen table, let Aimée brush her toffee-colored Pekinese, and strictly enforced homework. Slim, compact, and stylish, Huguette knew more jokes than her father and how to make apple cider à la Breton. “I make the best,” she’d said, letting Aimée stir the mixture, “an old recipe from my belle-mère in Saint-Brieuc.”

Every evening Huguette—who disguised her long ears with pixie wisps of hair—applied makeup, then poured herself into sparkly evening dresses. What glamorous work, thought eight-year-old Aimée, like going to a cocktail party!

“Bistro Gavroche … I’m a hostess seating customers,” Huguette had said. “Near the Strasbourg Saint Denis Metro, by the big porte.”

Aimée’s eyes had gleamed. She knew the huge arch, the old northern gateway of Paris since the fourteenth century.

One night Aimée overheard her father and grandfather talking after she’d gone to bed. “What kind of choice is that … leaving your little girl with Huguette or keeping her with you at the Commissariat?” her grandfather had said. “Put her into boarding school.”

“Did it harm me, hanging around putes and flics?” she’d heard her father ask. “Huguette’s good for her, she needs someone who can do things I can’t.” Her grandfather had stayed silent.

And her papa had kept her with him, mostly. Until she got older and was sent to boarding school.

Years later on a job, she’d found herself passing through her former neighborhood. She’d walked down the narrow street. In her old building the mailboxes looked new. She hadn’t remembered Huguette’s last name. Or if she’d even known it.

But now curiosity got the better of her, and she walked to the lane behind their old building. Overgrown bushes in a vacant lot shaded the dead end. Once, there had been an Art Nouveau chalet with curving wood supports and an iron-framed glass terrace on the site. She and Huguette had often speculated as to who’d lived there. They’d made up stories about the owner, a Monsieur Roulard who worked at Gare Saint-Lazare and had the officious title chef d’opérations painted on his gate.

Now plastic bags whipped over dust and rubble in the wind, spiraled strands of rusted wire coiled around the single tree that stood where a garden had once bloomed. At Huguette’s window she saw an old woman stroking ceramic gnomes on her back window ledge.

Aimée stopped. Each gnome perched on a green base, wore a pointed red cap, and stood in a different pose. The woman patted them, rearranged their order, then noticed Aimée. A half-smile came over the ravaged face. The long ears were recognizable. Aimée gaped open-mouthed, then raised her hand in greeting. But the old woman had bent over the gnomes, rubbing them with a cloth. Time passed, shadows covered Aimée’s boots, and the woman still polished away, not looking up once.

Aimée turned and walked away over the broken cobbles under the night sky encrusted with stars.