Murder in the Sentier

Friday Noon

STEFAN ENTERED THE FLEABAG hotel, the kind rented by the hour. He hadn’t stayed in a hotel for years, but doubted the police checked the registers here.

And it was in a perfect location, standing on the edge of the Sentier. Leaning seemed a more appropriate word. Little had changed from the fifteenth century, Stefan figured, except for the ocher-painted Sheetrock and inexplicable fluorescent pink trim inside the foyer. The closet-sized hotel reception, illuminated by only a dim blue light, held room keys hung on nails from the greasy back wall.

“Anyone here?” he asked.

In the background, a conversation in Turkish continued without stopping.

He leaned on the thin board that served as a counter. “Service, s’il vous plaît!” he said louder.

The conversation paused, a door opened, and a small mole of a man appeared. He held a bottle of vinegar in one hand and a flashlight under his arm. Stefan wondered what the vinegar was for.

“Sign here,” he said without looking at Stefan, shining the flashlight on the ledger.

Stefan scribbled something illegible below all the other illegible signatures.

“How long?” the man asked.

“I’ll pay for the night.” Stefan shoveled one hundred francs into the waiting palm. “I’d like a room with a view. Street view.”

The man pulled a key from a nail. “Number 49, top floor.” His small molelike eyes raked over Stefan for the first time. “Enjoy your stay.”

Stefan took his time mounting the creaking wood stairs. He paused and listened. No one followed so he kept going. On the top landing was a pile of stained sheets.

Stefan unlocked the door. The previous occupants hadn’t left long before. He smelled cheap perfume and the mildew from the damp bathroom. He pulled the tattered lace curtain over the glass, then opened the window, hoping to avoid other pungent odors.

The faded rose chenille bedspread, rucked and torn on the bottom, barely covered the mattress. Tired, he sank down on the wooden chair.

Outside the sweltering room’s windows, rue Beauregard resounded with the blare of a car alarm going off and a loud conversation being held across the narrow street. Stefan dimmed the one bed lamp, draping a towel over the patched, yellowed shade. It cast a muted cocoa light over the room.

He pulled the wooden chair with uneven legs to the window and trained his eye on the lighted windows in Action-Réaction’s headquarters. He’d been underground for so long he felt like the feral urban creature he’d become. Jumping at every noise his limited hearing registered, wary of every glance or comment.

Funny, twenty years later, he was back in almost the same spot. Again in the Sentier, near the cache. Or so he assumed.

His mind went back to the journey from the château with Jutta and Beate. It had taken them several hours to drive from Mulhouse, near the German border, to Paris.

In the rearview mirror Stefan had watched the two of them sorting and rooting through the papers. At least they’d driven out of Mulhouse without being followed. But Stefan kept checking.

“Figeac’s sympathetic to the cause, his wife, too. We leave him the papers and some of the money. Figeac puts it all in a safety deposit box,” Jutta said. “Slowly, when we need it, he sends some to us. No one’s the wiser.”

“Look at all this stuff,” Beate had said, pulling dossiers and bundles of papers from a garbage bag. Her eyes widened. “Property and mine ownership in Africa. He’s a bigger rat than we thought.”

The papers blew all over since the windows had been opened to get rid of the smell of Laborde’s blood.

“We can’t do anything with African land deeds,” Beate said.

“Not now,” Jutta said. “But down the road, who knows?”

Jutta lifted up several stacks of compact paper bundles. Her face cracked into a smile. “Bearer bonds. We can do a lot with these.”

“Can’t they trace them?” Stefan asked.

“Not bearer bonds like these.” She threw a wad over the seat onto his lap. “My God, there’s more. Another box! He must have intended to pay people in bonds. So no one could trace them.”

And, looking back, Stefan realized that was the moment. The moment he sensed that for him, Beate, and Jutta, the Revolution had changed.

“How can all these fit into a safety deposit box?” Beate asked.

“We just need to find a safe place and dip in from time to time.”

They were fugitives in a Mercedes speeding into Paris, with loads of untraceable bearer bonds and Pink Floyd blaring on the radio.

Stefan had never been more thrilled in his life.

Arriving in Paris, he’d parked in a garage around the corner from Romain Figeac’s apartment. For all Figeac’s liberal tendencies, once they arrived at his door, he seemed nervous and then point-blank refused to help them. Told them to leave.

But when his wife saw them she welcomed them with open arms. She jumped into the fray, calling it the first real worthwhile thing Figeac could do with his life. The rest of the time she spent shaming him into hiding them, into participating in “the most exciting and life-changing event ever to happen to them.”

Events, Stefan realized, proved her right.

Liane Barolet, an Action-Réaction groupie dressed in black, dropped by, en route to her mother’s funeral. And that’s when, sitting on the floor with a magnum of champagne on ice in Figeac’s son’s sand bucket, they came up with the idea.

“There are empty vaults in my family’s mausoleum,” Liane had said. “Who’d look there?”

Thinking back on it over the years, Stefan had figured Liane hadn’t wanted to be the only one at her mother’s funeral in her melancholy state. Nothing deeper or more revolutionary than that. And they drank champagne all afternoon, which probably helped.

Liane, Jutta, and Beate divvied up the contents of the plastic bags in Romain’s son’s bedroom. A holiday atmosphere reigned. They left the uncashable items in the little boy’s toy chest for Romain to deposit in the bank.

He had erupted later, after he found the radicals playing with his son. Stefan felt sorry for the little boy with the big eyes who craved attention from his tipsy mother. She’d ignore him, then smother him with kisses after he’d become engrossed in a puzzle. Erratic, immature, but a breathtaking blonde.

She made a game of outfitting them in all the black clothing in her closets, then hiring a limo to ferry them to the funeral. Figeac had refused to attend.

Twenty years later, the funeral remained a haze to him. A wild haze. The simple ceremony consisted of the grave digger announcing, upon seeing the crowd, that he’d return later to seal the crypt.

Stefan had stayed outside in the sunlight with the little boy, who chased butterflies among the tombs. He never knew how it transpired that Liane’s mother ended up in another vault while the bonds and most of the remaining contents of the plastic bags were entombed in the musty casket bearing her name, Emilie Barolet.

On the way back, the limo was stalled in traffic: a routine police check on drivers. But they’d panicked. Jutta jumped out of the car with Beate, tugging a bag between them. They ducked behind construction on the Metro. All he remembered was a medieval tower of sandstone.

Back at the apartment, Romain Figeac had greeted Stefan with an ultimatum.

Leave.

The police had identified the Mercedes in the garage around the corner. Not only that, they had rough composite sketches of them from descriptions by Laborde’s staff. By the time Jutta and Beate turned up at the apartment, Figeac insisted on driving all of them to a suburb outside Paris to fend for themselves. They were to take a bus to the safe house and meet the other terrorists there.

His actress wife winked when they left, implying she could handle her husband and the safe deposit box. But en route, when Jutta told Figeac about the cache in his son’s toy chest, he pulled over and pounded the steering wheel.

“If my wife acts crazy, that’s one thing,” he said. “Don’t involve my son.”

“Look, we’ve laid our life on the line for the Revolution,” Jutta said. “Struck a blow for the proletariat against a scumbag Nazi collaborator who’s stealing diamonds from our African brothers.”

Stefan had never heard Jutta so political, so impassioned, or so drunk.

“The cause needs your help to continue!”

Later on, when Romain Figeac found out his wife was pregnant by one of them, Jules Bourdon, he cooperated.

But Stefan knew it was with hate in his heart. And, after his wife’s suicide over the miscarriage, with revenge in his mind.

For the first five years, Stefan hid deep underground, moving all the time. He was terrified. But for the past fifteen years, he’d dipped into the coffin modestly, always leaving a pile of cash for Jutta or Liane or Beate. The wads of bonds had never varied, until now. Now they were all gone.