Murder in the Sentier

Friday Afternoon

SHOCKED AT FINALLY SEEING Idrissa, Aimée caught herself before she tripped. She surveyed the girl through the fringed palm leaves. Upon closer scrutiny, she saw that Idrissa wore a colorful African head scarf while, with quick strokes, she plucked the long-handled kora.

At least some luck shone on Aimée. Idrissa sat in the rear, behind a palm-leaf screen, adjusting a microphone and small amplifier. She wouldn’t be going anywhere for awhile. Aimée slid in beside her.

“No more avoiding me, Idrissa,” she said. “We’re going to talk. I just helped Khalifa identify Ousmane at the morgue.”

Fear registered in the girl’s eyes. A wide gulf of panic.

“You were the target, not Ousmane, weren’t you?”

“Not now, we can’t talk now,” Idrissa whispered.

“What was Romain Figeac working on? I must know.”

Idrissa gasped, “He was crazy. I didn’t understand what he wrote.”

“Why don’t I believe you?” Aimée pressed her face close to Idrissa’s. “You’re in danger, so am I.”

Michel beckoned her frantically, pointing to a shimmering outfit. Frustrated, she wanted to handcuff Idrissa to the Doric column or eighteenth-century harpsichord behind her. Keep her here.

“Please, you must wait for me, Idrissa!”

Idrissa nodded.

If the girl fled again, she’d hunt her down with wolfhounds this time.

Aimée stepped into an urban chic black silk tunic decorated with embroidered white lilies and antique Lanvin buttons. The chalky face powder of the Goth designer and a cloying perfume made her sneeze.

Michel looked up in horror. “Don’t sneeze again.”

She pinched her nose. “I’ll try not to. Any orders, Michel?”

His head bobbed, his hands and mouth too busy with pins and stitching her into the gown.

“You have a new career, Aimée,” René grinned. “But if you’re serious you have to stop eating and start smoking again.”

Not a bad idea, she thought. Did chocolate count?

She kept her eye on Idrissa as she catwalked. The rollerblader seemed busy with clients, and she was glad for Michel.

Her last outfit was a miniskirt of fine silver metal mesh, reminiscent of a knight’s chain mail, along with an off-the-shoulder gauze lace top. Michel draped the lace around her lizard tattoo.

“Parfait!” said the Goth designer, admiring her back. “The Marquesan lizard symbolizes change … the perfect accessory.”

Was her life going to change, Aimée wondered, as she cat-walked past the palm screen.

Annika, Michel’s premier model, had revived and now appeared in his variation of the traditional last outfit, the wedding gown. An off-white creation of pearlescent beads embroidered an old-fashioned lace twenties style tunic with a train of tiny ivory ostrich feathers draping down her back. Michel’s low bow met with resounding applause.

Aimée gestured to Idrissa, indicating a mirrored corridor outside the salon’s door.

“Let’s finish our conversation.”

Idrissa’s eyes were large with panic, but she set the kora in its case and stood up.

“Out here, away from the crowd,” she said.

After the hot lights and buzz of the collection, Aimée welcomed the stale air and creaking wood floor. She leaned against the wall, about the same height as Idrissa, in the crocodile pumps. Their reflections, Idrissa in her bright African head scarf and Aimée in the chain-metal-mesh mini, kaleidoscoped in the grainy half-silvered mirrors.

“Talk to me, Idrissa, tell me why you’re in danger. I won’t hurt you.”

Idrissa’s eyes filled with tears. “You killed Ousmane!”

Aimée blinked in surprise. “What gives you that idea?”

“Because you wouldn’t stop looking for me,” Idrissa said.

Talk about guilt transference. “Listen, Idrissa, Christian hired me to find out about the ‘ghosts,’ but I discovered that his father didn’t commit suicide,” Aimée said, with effort keeping her voice patient. “His father was killed. You’d worked with Romain but you wouldn’t talk with me. You ran away. I tried to call you but I couldn’t find you. Then I went to Club Exe. No one had seen you. And in the square beyond, a titi kicked a soccer ball into a garbage bag by mistake and there was poor Ousmane.”

Aimée looked down. The image welled up again, the ebony skin and dried blood on his neck.

“Ousmane was superstitious,” Idrissa said. “He listened to the marabout.”

From the salon, Aimée heard Michel’s laughter. Voices congratulating him.

“Tiens, did something happen in Senegal? Something to do with Romain Figeac and terrorists?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Idrissa said, but her involuntary shudder gave her away.

“You’re a bad liar, Idrissa,” Aimée said. “I should know, I’m a good one.”

Idrissa scanned the mirrored corridor. Her lips worked but no sound came out.

“Of course, you’re scared,” Aimée said. “Stay at my place, I’ll help you. Please trust me.”

“My father’s a doctor in Dakar.” She motioned Aimée to move farther down the corridor, away from the voices. “He treated Monsieur Figeac when they summered there.” The words came slowly, as if she weighed each one. “I knew he was moody, obsessive. He asked me to help him. His memoirs, he said. But he would ask me to go to the market and the docks with him, to translate the gossip in Wolof. He was looking for someone, I knew, but he never told me straight. Some Frenchman.”

She took a deep breath. Then another. “When I transferred here to the Sorbonne, my music wasn’t enough. I needed more work. So Monsieur Figeac hired me to transcribe his memoirs. He’d written most of it, you see, in longhand. With Waterman’s sea blue ink. Like always. The last part he’d spoken on tape. I hadn’t yet finished everything.”

Aimée thought back to the classic red Olivetti on his desk.

“But he had a typewriter.”

“Never used it.”

“Why?”

“It was some famous writer’s—Hemingway’s, I think. The story I heard was that he’d found it at an auction, called it his good-luck charm,” Idrissa said. “But he wouldn’t have the audacity to use it, he said. And he hated computers.”

That fit with the .25 he’d been given by Hemingway, kept framed under glass.

“So, did he find this Frenchman?”

A pause. Idrissa looked around. “A woman came the day Figeac died.” She hesitated. “Then a man. It was right before.”

Jutta? But it couldn’t be Jutta, she’d been released from prison after Romain Figeac was killed.

“What did this woman look like?”

Silence.

Then, “She wore dark glasses,” Idrissa said. “A scarf around her head, a long coat. Seemed bizarre in such heat.”

Her mother? Idrissa’s words reverberated like a tuning fork in Aimée’s head. Her mother alive?

“What did she sound like?” Aimée was surprised at her own question. Of all the things she wanted to know, why had she asked this?

“Never spoke. At least I didn’t hear her.”

“How long did you see her?”

“A few minutes. I left. I never saw Figeac alive again.”

Her mother Romain Figeac’s killer? … But why? She didn’t know whether to hope this stranger was her mother or to fear it.

“But … wait … you said there was a man.”

“Outside, coming up the stairs,” Idrissa said. “A Frenchman. He entered Figeac’s apartment. I was rounding the stairs but he saw me.”

“Saw you?” Aimée asked but didn’t wait for an answer. Now she put it together. “So that’s why you think he’s trying to kill you?”

Idrissa gave a small nod. “He swore at me in Wolof.” Fear pooled in her eyes.

It made sense. Idrissa was terrified.

“But why didn’t you tell Christian?”

“I’d gone to Fontainebleau for my business seminar class,” Idrissa said. “Four days later, when I returned, Christian told me he’d found his father dead. Suicide. Showed me the note. The typewritten note. He said it happened the afternoon I left. And I suspected. But Christian had cremated his father already. He had a horror of the Press after his mother’s suicide. Then we heard the noises and I saw the death fetish.”

“The yellow feathers?”

Idrissa nodded. “But Christian was taking uppers and downers, he made no sense. I kept trying to question him. But where his father was concerned, he saw nothing. Crazy as he was, his father loved him.”

“Why was Ousmane killed?”

“He wasn’t well but he was hiding me.” She blinked back tears. “Maybe a warning … I don’t know. Then one day, when I went back, the man was sitting in the café opposite. So I ran.”

“Can you describe him?” asked Aimée, keeping her hand steady with effort.

Idrissa went rigid.

Behind them in the salon, people milled and conversed.

“What’s wrong?”

Idrissa was backing away from her.

Aimée half turned and saw a crowd coming toward the door into the corridor. Idrissa began to run.

Who had she seen?

“Wait!”

Aimée ran, too, past the mirrors distorting their movements. But she was in heels and Idrissa wasn’t. Idrissa cornered the hall and Aimée had just about grabbed her when her heel caught in a crack in the parquet. She flew, landing in the Goth designer’s arms, which were full of his costumes.

“I’m sorry,” she said, scrambling up.

Michel caught up with her, his face wreathed in smiles.

“Aimée, we’re going to celebrate,” he said, pulling her arm.

“I have to find Idrissa,” she said, to his surprise. By the time she’d gotten up, kicked off the shoes, and run downstairs, the entrance lay empty.

Aimée pushed open the heavy glass doors, rushing over the cobbles down narrow Passage Montpensier.

No one.

She ran back the other way toward the Comédie-Française, listening for footfalls. But only slanted shadows, and the sounds of her feet slapping on the cobbles and the meow of a cat reached her. She ran past the restaurant Grand Vefour into the Palais Royal gardens, blinking in the sunlight and shading her eyes.

Mothers sat on the shaded benches minding their toddlers. A dragonfly buzzed over the sandbox, swooping lazily in the afternoon sun with shimmering blue-green wings. Aimée sat down with her feet in the warm, coarse sand, as she had as a child.

And the strangest feeling came over her. As if someone watched her.

“Did you see a woman running?” she asked a mother who sat nursing her child.

“Just you,” said the mother with a shake of her head. “What a great outfit!”

A few of the mothers had looked up, scrutinizing her bare feet and slinky look.

“Alors, if I ever get my figure back,” she said. “I’d want that.”

“A Michel Mamou design,” Aimée said. “Remember his name, couture contre couture.”

She stood up and backed away, wishing the years had evaporated and she was playing in the sand with her maman watching her.

Going back up the stairs, she ran into the crowd.

Michel stood surrounded by a group of admirers. She scanned the faces, but there were none she recognized. Who had frightened Idrissa?

She found René in the salon working on a laptop. “Twenty-two orders. Not bad for an unestablished kid—”

“Who won a prestigious award,” she interrupted, “and has a surreal and magical design sense. Pretty impressive!”

“That’s you,” a creamy voice said from the tall double doors. “Dirty feet and all.”

Startled, she looked down at her toes, then saw Etienne grinning in the doorway. Beside him stood an older man, tanned, with slicked-back salt-and-pepper hair, smoking a cigar. Familiar looking.

“I wish I could say it was made for me,” she smiled, “but Michel stitched me into it.”

Etienne had exchanged his pinstripes for an olive linen suit. He looked like a model himself, she thought. And she’d like a private showing. But he probably had come with his girlfriend, or this man who could be his father-in-law.

And then an odd thought unnerved her. Had he been here when Idrissa ran away? Suspicion crossed her mind. This older man, where had she seen him? Now she remembered.

“So you’re in the market for couture, Etienne?”

“Didn’t René tell you I was coming?” he asked, surprised. “Your lip-liner number rubbed off, you know. I finally found René at your office, and he said you’d be here.”

René shrugged with a grin.

“Let me introduce my uncle, Jean Buisson,” Etienne said. “He’s visiting on my birthday. Sort of a family tradition.”

Why was she attracted to nice men now?

“But we’ve already met,” Aimée said, shaking his hand, once again on the receiving end of this handsome man’s laserlike smile. “At the Bourse reception room.”

“Of course, but you never joined me for the good champagne across the hall.” His uncle moved forward. “Let me make amends. Downstairs in the Grand Vefour. Both of you, my treat!”

A very seductive offer.

But she was late for her meeting with Léo Frot.

“Désolée,” she said. And she meant it. “I’d like to but I have an appointment at the Quai des Orfèvres.”

René rolled his eyes in disgust.

Stupid. She was being stupid. But she couldn’t get involved with this man. She had no time. She had to see the files on her father, and somehow find Idrissa again.

“Maybe later?” she asked.

“Feel like dinner at my place?” Etienne asked.

She nodded, wondering if he was for real. He even had a Harley.

“Take your chances with the chef,” his uncle said, “but I’ll bring the champagne.”

And they left; only a whiff of the cigar aroma remained.

“Don’t blow it, Aimée,” René said. “Even I can see he’s a catch. And he’s interested.”

“You’ve been talking with Martine.”

“Sometimes she makes a lot of sense,” René said. “This one’s not flying all over the world and making pit stops like Yves.”

Bad boys had always been her downfall, but this Etienne was different.

“I better change clothes.” And retrieve my own shoes, Aimèe thought.

“Michel said it’s yours,” René said. “A gift.”

“Non, I can’t accept.” It was too much.

“But you sold ten of them,” René said. “Michel said it belongs on you.”

SHE PUT the scooter in gear and headed down rue Saint Honoré for the Quai des Orfèvres. At the Pont Neuf she crossed the Seine, sparkling in the sun, and took a left on the Ile de la Cité.

She parked the scooter and showed her carte d’identité to the blue-uniformed flics. Once inside the cobbled courtyard she veered to the left, passed under the portal that bore the inscription DIRECTION DE LA POLICE JUDICIARE, and climbed the five hundred steps to reach the blue insignia of the Brigade Criminelle.

It had been a long time. But she remembered the way well.

After again showing her ID, she was buzzed in. She found the vaulted wooden doors marked toilette. Now it served both sexes since the former ladies’ room had become part of the communication systems control room.

This was no classic hole in the floor or stinky urinal like many in the building but an elegant Art Nouveau lavatory: private wooden stalls with inset stained-glass panels and a glazed ceramic frieze accompanied by an elegant shoe-shine stand circa 1905.

The usual lavatory attendant was off duty, probably at lunch. A box with five franc tips sat on a ledge. A stall door opened a slit and Léo beckoned with a crooked finger.

“Timing is everything,” he breathed, as she joined him.

She slipped his amended credit report, with proof of the postage-meter glitch and three-day grace period for his online account, into his freckled hands.

His small sharklike teeth, crooked nose, and full head of curly brown hair gave him an academic air. “Devious nerd” best described him. And that, she thought, was being generous. Given his proclivity to taunt and blackmail fellow students in the lycée, his skills were wasted in the préfecture’s Records Department.

“Twenty minutes,” he whispered, handing her a manila envelope, “then I’ll come back for them. DST files are shut tighter than a nun’s legs.”

“Léo, that’s not the deal!” She pulled back her file.

He put his finger on his lips. “But I got this. My housecleaner sleeps with the adjutant’s clerk….”

“Look,” she said, making a moue of distaste. “I don’t want to know.”

“No photos.”

She nodded, and set her phone to Vibrate. “Call me when you’re coming back.”

He yanked the brass pull chain. A thunderous flushing noise filled the stall as he slid out the door.

Aimée shut the mahogany toilet lid and leaned on a shiny chrome knob. From her leather backpack, she lifted the portable scanner bar, then connected it to her wireless palm organizer revved up with extra memory by René. She punched in her office fax number. The organizer would simultaneously fax the scanned pages to her office. Scanning wasn’t photographing, was it? Apprehensive, she took a deep breath. She had a terrible thought … what if René hadn’t paid the France Télécom bill? Then she saw the familiar handshake logo indicating Connect on the tiny screen. Thank God!

With a studied calm she didn’t feel, Aimée thumbed open the folder from the IGPN, the disciplinary branch within the police. Inside lay a lined yellow sheet with notes written in an angular hand.

With the bar, she began scanning the notes, which were dated 1976. The first page had a coffee stain and recounted surveillance on rue de Cléry. She recognized the address. Romain Figeac’s apartment.

Her brow beaded with sweat. The air in the lavatory was stifling and the scanner’s speed was only about five pages per minute.

The surveillance entailed the comings and goings from the apartment of a female suspect. The phone tap report stated she’d used Figeac’s phone for calling and receiving calls from a Left Bank gallery owner, known by the police to fence stolen paintings. From what Aimée gathered, the gallery owner was feeding information to the police. There were several blurred black-and-white photos of a woman wearing what looked like a long blond wig, in sunglasses, carrying a shopping bag supposed to contain Modigliani paintings. The woman caught in the act was named—Sydney Leduc.

Her own mother caught (by her father?) in a police sting. Aimée sat in the small cubicle, and the world, as she knew it, crumbled.

Aimée’s mother had been jailed and brought to trial, not for terrorism, but for the theft of Laborde’s paintings. There was no proof of her participation in the kidnapping and murder of Laborde. So that’s why she’d only been in prison a year.

But why hadn’t Aimée known about any of this? She looked at the date … That year she had been sixteen, that was the time she’d been an exchange student at a high school in New York!

Aimée read further. Offered the chance to inform on the gang for a lighter sentence, Sydney had agreed to find out the location of terrorist gang members and their loot. But Aimée read between the lines. Her father had cut a deal for her mother.

Yet at the end of the report, her father had been brought up for disciplinary hearings. Why? That didn’t make sense.

There was no explanation, unless he had been found in possession of the seized paintings on July 15th during the surveillance sting.

On another sheet, with “Surveillance Unit” written across the top, were several names:

Szlovak

Dray

Teynard

Leduc

She recognized Szlovak, a middle-aged man on her father’s Commissariat team who’d retired early. Dray had been kicked upstairs to the préfecture at the Quai des Orfèvres ten years or so before. Teynard had been posted to the STUP, the narcotics branch of the Brigade Criminelle.

Her wrist ached. She managed to scan the Action-Réaction files before her cell phone vibrated. Within two minutes she’d finished, disconnected the scanner bar from her palm organizer, and stood reapplying Chanel red lipstick at the old silver-edged mirror.

The lavatory attendant, an older woman with her white hair in a bun, a copy of Telé-Journal under her arm, appeared as Léo returned. Aimée watched him enter the stall but not before she winked and dropped ten francs in the bowl.

A half hour later, back at her office, she found Szlovak’s number on the Minitel, left a message, looked up Dray in the préfecture, and had no luck finding Teynard at the Brigade.

At the préfecture, the receptionist said Dray had left for vacances the day before. Aimée sat down to reread the pages she’d faxed and to read those she hadn’t had time to.

Something felt off. Way off.

She didn’t know what was bothering her but … and then she looked up. The dates were wrong. They had to be.

She reread the file. On her office wall was her favorite photo of herself with her father, taken the day after Bastille Day in 1976. They’d spent the whole day together before her flight to New York. She looked closer at the surveillance log dated July 15, 1976, containing her father’s name. The day the paintings were recovered.

But Bastille Day was always July 14th.

So her father had been with her on July 15th. Not on stakeout.

He’d been set up. And she was the proof.

She took the photo from the wall and stuck it in her bag with the Modigliani data she’d copied from the Agence France Presse.

A further search showed Teynard had retired. He ran a detective firm with his nephew on rue de Turbigo.

Close. On the edge of the Sentier and a few blocks away.

Forget the scooter. She needed to walk. Work out some angry energy, so she wouldn’t arrive at Teynard’s swinging. At least not at first.

“DESOLÉE, MADEMOISELLE Leduc!” said the secretary, Madame Goroux. “Monsieur Teynard’s evening seems totally booked.”

“Please, can’t you fit me in?” Aimée asked, letting the whine rise in her voice. “Something’s come up, it’s important.”

“He handles cases jointly with his nephew,” Madame Goroux said. “Let me see if he’s available.”

“Merci,” Aimée said. The nephew might help her to get to see his uncle.

An express delivery man wheeled in a package on a dolly. “Bonjour, Madame Goroux, I need the patron’s signature.”

“I can sign, Cédric,” she said.

“Sorry, but the sender specifically required Monsieur Teynard’s signature.”

“Come back in a while,” said Madame Goroux, consulting her schedule. “He marked himself out until his three o’clock appointment.”

Aimée glanced at her Tintin watch.

Twenty minutes. If he was on time.

She left and descended the worn stairs. In the quiet mosaic-tiled lobby of Teynard’s building, her mind raced. She chewed Nicorette furiously, dying for a cigarette. Within ten minutes, a dapper white-haired man in his sixties in a wheat-colored linen suit entered the lobby.

“Monsieur Teynard?” she asked, standing partially behind a pillar.

He removed his sunglasses and blinked, adjusting his eyes from the glare outside to the darkened lobby.

“Mademoiselle, are we acquainted?” he asked, a smile spreading over his face. A whiff of scented aftershave accompanied him. Perhaps he fancied himself a ladies’ man.

“Indirectly,” she said, walking toward him. “That’s what I’d like to talk about.”

He squinted.

Aimée hit the light switch, flooding the lobby with light.

Teynard’s brow furrowed as he stared at her.

“If I didn’t know better,” he said in a low voice, “I’d say the past has come back …”

“To haunt you?” she finished for him. “Let’s go talk.”

Aimée pointed to the café in Passage du Bourg-l’Abbé directly opposite Teynard’s office.

WITH A wary look, Teynard watched her set two espressos on the café table. She pushed the round aluminum sugar cube bowl toward him. The young owner, wearing a Lakers tank top and prayer beads around his wrist, sat behind the counter reading a Turkish newspaper.

Apart from Aimée and Teynard, the narrow cafe, with its yellowed smoke-stained walls, hammered-tin counter, and brown leatherette chairs, was empty. From the corners came the musk-like smell of lingering genteel decay. Wood-framed windows fronted the passage under a glass-and-iron roof probably unchanged from Napoleon’s time.

“Monsieur Teynard,” she said, “you were part of the Galerie Arte surveillance on July 15, 1976, weren’t you?”

“That’s a long time ago,” Teynard said, smoothing back his hair. His ice blue eyes darted over the café.

“I’m interested in your version.”

“My version?”

“You were there along with my father, Dray, and Szlovak.”

“I don’t remember.”

She nodded, unwrapping the sugar cube’s paper. “Good point. Maybe you weren’t there either. I know Papa wasn’t.”

“What’s this all about?”

“Shouldn’t you tell me, Monsieur Teynard?” She stirred her sugar.

“I have appointments….” He smoothed his linen trousers and started to stand up.

“I told Madame Goroux your plans had changed.”

For the first time he looked surprised.

“This might refresh your memory,” she said, wiping the sticky table off with a napkin and spreading the file in front of him. “I’m a visual person. Seeing things in black and white brings it home to me. Maybe you are, too. See, there’s your name.”

Teynard’s chin sagged.

She pointed. “Here’s another visual.” She pulled out the photo of her and her father. “There’s a date. See Le Figaro on the tabac stand behind us—July 15, 1976. I even checked. The old noon edition came out at eleven A.M. Doesn’t fit with the surveillance record, does it? My father was with me July 15, not on surveillance as this shows.”

“You’re talking about ancient history,” Teynard said.

“My father was framed,” she said, “for something he didn’t do.”

“The facts speak for themselves.”

“Pas du tout—they lie,” she said. “But the rumor he was dirty follows him and me, even now.”

“That’s old news,” he said. “If you had more going on in your life you wouldn’t be hung up on the past.”

Rude man. Maybe that was true. But it was none of his business.

“Move on, young lady,” he smiled. “Get a life. Isn’t that how they say it?”

Teynard didn’t like women. Or maybe just her. But something about his dapper persona didn’t match his hard eyes.

“Good advice, Monsieur Teynard,” she said. “I’ll move on to the prosecutor, Edith Mésard.”

She saw a flicker of interest in his eyes.

“And Monsieur Szlovak,” she lied. “He has a better memory than you.”

“Talk with Dray,” he said. “Before you make more of a fool of yourself.”

And then she knew. Dray and Teynard were thick. Pudding thick, like thieves.

“It was you two, wasn’t it?”

Something caught in his throat. “What are you …?”

“Don’t lie again,” she said. “For more than twenty years, you’ve been afraid someone would accuse you of that, haven’t you? But my father took the fall. Maybe he was just convenient, having a terrorist wife and all.”

Teynard shook his head. “You aren’t making sense,” he said in a quiet voice. “I need to get back to the office.”

“But it makes perfect sense,” she said. “Especially if he got my mother to inform, and cut a deal for a light prison sentence for her. He left the force with honors, too. Things don’t often happen like that if a police officer has been under disciplinary review, do they?”

Teynard looked away. “Typical flic’s kid!”

“Matter of fact”—she leaned forward and downed her espresso—“in the Commissariat, you probably bounced me on your knee!”

That should make him feel old. And dried up, like he looked under the tan and his GQ fashion attempt.

“What do you want?”

“Papa’s vindication,” she said. “And what you know about my mother.”

He shrugged. “I’m retired. What makes you think I know anything?” She’d saved the best for last, hoping he’d nibble. Well, he’d sort of nibbled.

“But I know about the Modigliani paintings, you see,” she said, pulling the Figaro article out. “They weren’t lost at all. You signed for their consignment to the police repository. But here they are in a 1984 London exhibition.”

He stood up. “I’m not the bad guy,” Teynard said.

“Maybe from your perspective … what did you and Dray do with the money?”

“I don’t have to listen to this.”

“But the prosecutor will,” she said. “Especially when I reopen the inquiry. You’re in deep, Teynard. Deep and dirty.”

“How? There’s no proof,” he said. But for the first time his eyes were unsure.

“Looks like proof to me,” she said. “Laborde’s stolen paintings confiscated from the Left Bank Gallery by you, then showing up in London … sold to willing buyers. One work was acquired for 379,000 FF^* in a Paris sale in June 1985. The other was bought for 1,737,000 FF^** in March 1991, again at auction.”

Teynard’s shoulders sagged.

^*(US$ 54,930)

^**(US$ 251,739)

“Chump change Teynard … they’d be worth so much more now,” she said. “You should have held onto them.”

He sat down. He looked much older.

“What have you done with the money?” she asked.

“I’ve been tracking Jules Bourdon for years,” he said, his voice flat. “He’s here and I get a bad feeling you’ll try to screw it up.”

“Screw what up?”

“None of your business.”

Is that why Stefan had surfaced?

“My mother went to Africa with him, didn’t she?”

“Fool!” Teynard said. He shoved the espresso away. “There’s more. Much more.”

“More?”

“Diamonds. Investment-quality diamonds from Africa.”

Diamonds … is that what Jutta and Gisela were after? Was that what this had all been about? Were the diamonds what had been in Liane Barolet’s mother’s coffin?

“When the terrorists kidnapped Laborde he was fat with investment diamonds,” Teynard said. “They had perfect planning or a stroke of dumb luck, who knows, but the minister and Laborde’s old Milice comrades were coming for their cut. Laborde had bribed his friends in the government for concessions. They were happy to use the old colonial network and keep the spoils among friends.”

But nothing for the Africans who lived there, Aimée thought.

“That’s why Bourdon’s here, risking his life,” said Teynard.

And she saw it in his eyes, alive and predatory.

“Bourdon’s what you want, isn’t he?” she asked. “Some kind of vendetta?”

“Call it payback time.” Teynard rolled his pant cuff up to midcalf. Above his sock, she saw a flesh-colored prosthesis. “He shot my kneecap to bits. They removed my leg to my thigh and called me lucky. Now it’s my turn to make him lucky.”

“I see,” she said.

“Do you?” Teynard had warmed up. “They’re lice. Punks who called it a political statement when they blew people up or threw bank-robbery money from the Metro windows. Calling it capitalism for the masses. But Jules Bourdon, he was a smart arnaqueur, a con who used the idiots. And he’s never stopped.”

“So Jules Bourdon fled to Senegal … why?”

“Not a lot of options when you’re wanted on several continents,” Teynard said. “He worked there as a mercenary.”

“What does Romain Figeac have to do with it?”

“Figeac had a score to settle, too. Seems his wife’s baby was Bourdon’s. Not his. He wanted the world to know what a con man Bourdon really was.”

“So Jules Bourdon killed Figeac before Figeac could expose him? And Ousmane was killed because he hid Idrissa?”

Teynard’s eyes narrowed. “Something like that. I could have sworn time stood still when I saw you,” Teynard said. His voice had changed. It was low and full of something. Some dark emotion riding near the surface.

“Why?” But she knew.

“She took my breath away,” he said.

Aimée’s hand shook. The way he said it made her sick. Like he had some claim on her.

He took in her reaction. “Has she been in contact with you?”

So he was looking for her mother, too.

Aimée shook her head.

“And you wouldn’t tell me if she had,” Teynard said.

STEFAN RUBBED HIS EYES. His back hurt from sleeping in the stiff chair. He’d ordered a meal from the café opposite, had it brought up. He’d spent the whole night and day watching. A woman had gone into the building. The only things visible now were silhouettes in the Action-Réaction window.

Stefan wished he had company. But he was alone as orange dusk painted the red tile rooftops. He wanted to talk; talk about the past, his feelings, the things he wanted to do. Outline his plan to own a garage specializing in Mercedes restoration.

He fingered the card she’d given him. Turned it over in his grease lined palm, remembered her engaging silence and how she was the spitting image of her mother.

He reached for the old-fashioned black phone.