Murder in the Sentier

AIMÉE LEDUC OPENED THE tall windows of her apartment overlooking the Seine, which bordered the tree-lined quai. She inhaled the scent of flowering lime. Despite the humidity she was glad to be home.

She knew it was time to let the past go. The hard part was doing it.

She sank into the Louis XV sofa, ruffled her short, spiky hair, and reached for her laptop. Time to concentrate on Leduc Detective’s computer security contracts. Rent loomed. So did other bills.

Her phone rang. “Allô?” she answered irritably.

“Aimée Leduc?” a woman’s voice asked.

“Who is it?”

A pause. “Daughter of Jean-Claude and Sydney Leduc?”

Aimée lost her grip on the phone. No one had referred to her that way in years. She recovered and put the phone to her ear again.

“You were looking for information about your father?” the woman’s heavily German-accented voice asked.

Had word of her inquiries reached the right person … at last?

“You knew him?”

A long pause. Hope fluttered in Aimée’s chest. In the silence, she heard the whine of a passing motor scooter from the quai.

“Nein, I knew your mother.”

Her mother? “Sydney Leduc?”

“Her name was different,” the voice went on. “But she talked about you.”

The last time Aimée had seen her mother, she’d been wearing an old silk kimono, standing at the stove and heating milk. Her long hair, knotted and held in place by a worn pencil, escaped down her neck. Rain splattered against their courtyard windows, steamy from the heat. The Mozart piano concerto theme from the film Elvira Madigan played on the kitchen radio. “Don’t forget your raincoat,” her mother had said, then “Crap,” under her breath, as the milk foamed and overflowed. Those were the last words eight-year-old Aimée remembered her speaking.

Her mother left the apartment that day, while Aimée was at school, and never returned.

“Do you know where my mother is?”

“Maybe we should meet and talk,” the voice said.

“Yes, certainly,” she said.

Then doubt hit her. Could this woman be an Internet crawler, one who searched the personals and got innocent people’s hopes up? Someone with a sick idea of fun? “Excuse my caution,” Aimée said. “But first I need to know …”

“That I’m for real?” the voice interrupted her. “I spent time with your mother. You have a fish-shaped birthmark on your left thigh, do you not?”

Aimée’s hand instinctively went to her thigh. It was true.

“When can we meet?” Aimée asked.

“May I come over?”

Aimée paused, wary. “We could meet at a café …”

The voice interrupted again. “I’m leaving Paris tonight. You live at 7, Quai d’Anjou on L’Ile Saint Louis, yes? I’ll be there soon.”

“First, tell me how you knew my mother.”

A car door slammed in the background.

“We were cell mates.”

Cell mates? Her mother in prison? Her father never spoke of her mother after she left, nor had her grandparents. Now her curiosity was mixed with fear.

She looked over to her writing desk. Her answering machine blinked red, filled with messages. She hit the play button. The first message came from René, her partner in the Leduc Detective agency.

“It’s a go!” he shouted. “I’m about to ink our security systems contract with Media 9! I need to convince them to give us a retainer.”

Finally! Her relief was cut short by the sound of the buzzer.

Miles Davis, her bichon frise puppy, growled as Aimée answered the door. The tall, bony woman at the entrance stared at her. Her brown shoulder-length hair was flecked with gray, and she wore brown pants and a jacket. A nondescript appearance. However, the Danish clogs provided an ambiguous clue: bad feet, or an artist.

“You are Aimée Leduc?” The woman’s eyes, wide set and gray, sized her up.

“Yes.”

“Ja, the resemblance is clear.”

“Who are you?” Aimée asked, the words catching in her throat.

“Jutta Hald,” she said, hefting her bag higher on her shoulder. “Give me five minutes, then decide if you believe me.”

Aimée hesitated, then showed her down the hall into the old wood-paneled dining room.

“Going somewhere?” Jutta Hald pointed to Aimée’s scattered luggage on the floor.

“How did you say you knew my mother?” Aimée asked, motioning for her to sit.

Jutta Hald sank into the couch. Outside Aimée’s window, pinpricks of light reflected from windows on the riverbank opposite. Heat still hung like a damp blanket over the rippling Seine.

“Frésnes, prisoner number 6509,” she said. “We shared a cell in 1976 and 1977.”

Aimée gripped Miles Davis tight. “What had she done?”

“High crimes against the state. Terrorism.”

Terrorism…. Her heart sank.

“Aren’t you going to offer me coffee, something to drink?” Jutta Hald asked, glancing around the apartment. She emitted a faint vinegary odor.

“But that was years ago,” Aimée said. Suspicion fought with her longing to know about her mother. “Maybe you should get to the point.”

Jutta Hald’s lips tightened. She unbuckled a brown leather bag, a ragged remnant from the seventies by the look of it.

“You’re in your early thirties, right?”

“Close enough,” Aimée said. “Look, I need to see some proof that you really knew my mother and that you’re telling the truth.”

“She wrote things. Lots of them,” Jutta Hald said, pulling out an envelope. “The guard confiscated this during a lockdown. Take a look.” Jutta Hald set the envelope on Aimée’s marble-topped claw-footed table. She took out a package of unfiltered Turkish cigarettes, lit one.

The short hairs on Aimée’s neck bristled as she reached for the envelope. “How did you get this?” Aimée asked.

“You don’t know much about prison, do you?” Jutta Hald replied, taking a drag.

The yellowish creased envelope with FRÉSNES PRISON stamped on it seemed to glow in the afternoon light. Aimée reached for it, trying to control the trembling of her hands. What if the mother who deserted her really had been a convicted terrorist?

Her heart hammered. And what if it wasn’t true?

Aimée expected something weighty with answers, reasons, and excuses. But the envelope felt curiously light as she held it suspended aloft in the rays of the sun.

For a moment, the face of her mother appeared to her. The carmine red lips and eyes crinkling in laughter. The warmth of her large hands, the faint smell of lilies of the valley—muguets—clinging to her clothes.

Aimée didn’t want to open the envelope. She wanted to keep her mother hovering in the ether, between reality and her little girl’s fantasy.

Slowly, she opened the envelope.

Inside lay a once-glossy sheet torn from a fashion magazine. Wrinkled and worn. She unfolded the paper carefully.

A washing-machine advertisement covered one side. On the other, a mother, sweater draped around her shoulders with sleeves knotted, strolled hand in hand with a child in the Palais Royal garden. The caption read, “Arpége for the active woman—for every part of her life!”

Under the caption was written in ballpoint pen: “Like Amy, like us … she loved that sandbox.”

Below that, Aimée saw skillful cartoons of a pudgy mouse with long whiskers bordering the bottom of the page.

A dagger went through her heart. Her “Emil,” her stuffed mouse! The ragged little doudou she had hugged to sleep every night. For years. How would anyone know this but her mother?

Aimée emptied the envelope. That was all. She looked at the envelope again. The name B. de Chambly written in pencil was visible in the lower right-hand corner.

“What’s this?”

“Her name,” Jutta Hald said.

“What does ‘B.’ stand for?”

“I forget,” Jutta Hald said.

Not only her language but everything about Jutta Hald seemed stilted, forced.

“Tell me about her,” Aimée said. She pulled Miles Davis closer.

“I was transferred. Later, I heard she’d been released.”

“Released and then?”

“The trail leads to you.” Jutta Hald crossed her spindly legs.

“Trail?”

Jutta Hald looked around again, surveying the faded eighteenth-century murals on the twenty-foot ceilings.

“How do you keep this place clean?” She didn’t wait for an answer, but wiped her palm on the table. “You don’t.”

Not only was the woman rude, she’d come for something and Aimée didn’t know what. Shouldn’t it be the other way around, wasn’t she supposed to give information to Aimée?

“You’ve lived here a long time, haven’t you?”

She didn’t like the woman’s manner or anything about her.

“Instead of offering me information,” Aimée said, “you seem to want something, Madame Hald. What is it?”

The woman’s pale face cracked into a huge and disconcerting smile. She wet her fingers, tamped the cigarette out between them, and put the stub in her pocket. “No one’s called me Madame Hald in years.” Jutta Hald shook her head, still smiling.

For a moment Aimée thought she looked human. “Tell me about her,” she repeated.

“I’m a little short of cash right now.”

“Maybe you just found this piece of paper, just heard some stories….”

“She was released in 1977; she must have come back here or gone to the cemetery.”

Aimée had been in the lycée then. No, she’d been an exchange student in New York! Aimée grasped the table edge and took a deep breath. This woman spoke in riddles.

“What are you talking about?”

Jutta Hald looked down. Aimée wondered if she was assessing the carpet’s price. “What do you want?” she demanded.

“You saw the proof,” Jutta Hald said. “Fifty thousand francs.”

Fifty thousand francs! That was office rent for six months! “What do I get for it?”

“I have more things,” Jutta said. “Her things.”

“Things like her photo? Or a location where I can find her?” Aimée asked, hoping she didn’t sound as desperate as she felt.

“Drawings,” she said. “There’s an anklet chain, an address book.”

“Her address book?”

“Lots of foreign addresses in it,” Jutta said, taking a deep breath. “Aah, free air, like I remember. So sweet after twenty years.”

“But I don’t have that kind of money.”

In theory she did, but Leduc Detective’s assets consisted of a bloated file of accounts receivable that René was trying to collect. He’d had little success with their big corporate clients, who took several months to pay up.

“I’m sure you can find it, if you want to,” Jutta Hald said, jotting something in her notebook, then snapping it shut. “I came straight from prison, just to see you.” She looked out the French doors that stretched from the floor to the ceiling. Then she picked up her bag and took another look around the room.

“You know,” Jutta Hald said, “a little dusting and cleaning would improve this place.”

Aimée bit back her reply.

“Guess you’re not interested. I’m leaving.”

Aimée hesitated. “Non….” She didn’t want the woman to leave. She had an urge to entreat Jutta Hald to stay, to ask what her mother had said about her.

Jutta Hald’s eyes darted around the apartment. Her long fingers pinched and worried the leather bag handle.

Her fidgeting made Aimée uneasy.

“Think about it,” Jutta Hald said. “Maybe when your mother came back to your apartment … she left something?”

Wouldn’t her father have told her? Could her mother have come and gone without wanting to see Aimée, her daughter?

“This should convince you,” Jutta said, pulling out a small bound notebook from her bag. Aimée saw a faded blue cover lettered in fine script: Stories of Emil’s Life: a Royal Mouse in the Louvre.

Her heart caught.

“I believe she wrote this for you.”

Something cracked inside Aimée. And those long-ago afternoons flowed back to her, afternoons spent together making up Emil’s story, writing down lists of foods he ate, games he played, and pretending he slept in a matchbox.

“Look,” Jutta Hald said, thrusting the notebook into her moist palms.

Aimée’s hands shook as she grasped the musty cover. Afraid to drop it, she stopped, took a breath, then slowly opened the book.

The first page read, “For Amy.”

“How did you get this?”

“No questions.”

For a moment, Aimée was a little girl again, on her tiptoes tugging her maman’s skirt, trying to see what she drew. Always out of reach.

With her forefinger and thumb she gingerly turned the first page and read: “Chapter One—How Emil Came to Be Born on King Henri’s Throne.”

“You’ve seen my proof,” Jutta Hald said. “Now admit it, she owes me my share.”

“Share … what do you mean?”

Jutta Hald’s lip curled. To Aimée’s horror, she grabbed the book back.

“Wait, please,” Aimée said. “I’ll get the money. Please, be fair.”

“Life’s not fair … then you die,” Jutta Hald said. “Think back. Didn’t your mother ever send you presents, little boxes or keys … maybe drawings?”

“If she did,” Aimée paused, saddened, “I never saw them.” She knew her father would have destroyed them, just as he had destroyed everything else that had to do with her mother.

Jutta dabbed a slight sheen of perspiration from her forehead with a handkerchief. “Pills,” she said. “Awful ones, they make me pee all the time.” She shook her head. “Where’s your bathroom?”

Aimée showed her. She took a long time before emerging.

“Tell me about my mother,” Aimée asked once more. “About the terrorism.”

“Now you’re speaking with negotiation in mind, ja? We can share.”

“D’accord,” Aimée said. Let Jutta Hald think what she wanted.

“She was a courier,” Jutta Hald said.

“A courier?”

“That’s the polite term,” Jutta Hald said. “A drug mule describes it better.”

“My mother, involved with drugs?” Aimée tried to keep her surprise in check. “From where and to whom?”

“Mostly Morocco,” Jutta said, then shrugged. “Some hashish connection. But I knew her before we were sent to prison.”

“How did you know her?” Aimée asked.

“Back then we were all part of a loose network,” said Jutta Hald. “Rumor was her group shifted weapons, set up safe houses and printing presses for the Haader-Rofmein gang.”

Aimée leaned against the wall. It was as if Jutta Hald had struck her. Over the years, she’d imagined various scenarios. But never a mother in league with the notorious seventies Haader-Rofmein radicals, who kidnapped people, bombed jails, and robbed banks.

Were her mother’s terrorist activities connected to the bomb that had killed her father? Her hands shook. But that had happened much later. “This connects to my father, doesn’t it? That’s how you found me.”

“Enough questions,” Jutta Hald’s voice trailed off. “You don’t seem interested in buying the address book.” A look of fleeting remorse crossed the woman’s face. She dropped her gaze, unable to meet Aimée’s eyes.

“One day after school I found a note from my mother taped to the door telling me to stay with our neighbor,” Aimée told her. “That’s the last I heard from her. If the address book will help me find her, I’ll get the money. But I need some time.”

“You have until tonight,” Jutta Hald said. “Then I’m gone.”

“But …”

“I’m leaving the country,” Jutta Hald said, checking her watch. She rose and headed for the hall. “I’ll contact you later. Have you a cell phone?”

Aimée gave her the number. The door slammed behind her.

Aimée sighed. Her checking account held less than a quarter of what Jutta Hald wanted. Leduc Detective had even less.

She ran to the French doors, flung them open, and leaned over the metal railing. The quai before her was empty.

Further up the street Jutta Hald emerged from beneath an overhang, walking with a brisk step. Aimée called out to her. But the incessant beep of a van backing up drowned out her words. At the end of the quai, Jutta Hald stopped. She turned and looked up at Aimée, gave her a half-smile, then disappeared from view.

Aimée pulled on her denim jacket. She was dying for a cigarette and rifled through her pocket for Nicorette gum. But all she came up with was a software encryption manual and a travel-size flacon of Citron Vert. She’d stopped smoking last week. Again.

The longing to see her mother, that bottomless desire dormant for years, had returned. Even if she was dead, just to know where she’d been buried. Constant and nagging, it was like a piece of gravel in her shoe.

Aimée’s worn Vuitton leather wallet held fifty francs. Enough for a taxi to the office of René’s friend, Michel. She’d ask him for a loan.

She found a cab on Pont Marie and bummed a nonfiltered Gauloise from the driver. As they sped along the quai, she inhaled the harsh, woody tobacco, enjoying the jolt.

Michel had a cash-flow problem unlike most people’s. He had too much. His fashion-house backers were cyber entrepreneurs in the Sentier, the district had been dubbed “Siliconsentier” by the press. But she and René were leery of the New Economy and of software start-ups, so they’d kept to corporate security.

Space came cheap in the Sentier, the hub of the wholesale rag trade and of the flesh trade. In the entire Sentier, green space scarcely existed. Six trees in Place du Caire, a spreading plane tree in square Bidault, and several struggling saplings in the Place Ste-Foy were the most notable exceptions.

The driver let her off on crowded rue Saint Denis, the medieval route to the royal tombs. Traffic had ground to a standstill. The knock of a stalled diesel truck and its exhaust fumes permeated the narrow street.

Dilapidated hôtel particuliers, once home to the Marquise de Pompadour, Josephine Bonaparte, and Madame du Barry, had been turned into fabric warehouses. Hookers kept the rent down in the old stomping grounds of Irma la Douce. But that was what attracted the start-ups. Urban decay with a new meaning, Aimée thought.

A dense haze of heat flickered in the late summer afternoon, lit by the still shining sun. She found Michel’s place on rue du Sentier between Paris Hydro, a plumbing shop, and Tissus Arnaud, a fabric store. A welcome chill radiated from the limestone. Inside the seventeenth-century hôtel particulier, across from Mozart’s former residence, Aimée rubbed the goose bumps on her arms.

The smell of sawdust and mold rose from the floor. Watermarked walls supported a high ceiling whose paint was peeling in the cavernous foyer.

The tall door stood ajar. Peering inside, she saw expensive state-of-the-art computer monitors on makeshift shelves. Cartons labeled tissus en gros were piled against the window. Remnants of antique industrial sewing machines for punching holes in leather sat by rusted metal clothing racks.

Michel Mamou was reaching high above him for the old gas line on the wall. He balanced on a sawhorse straddled over a three-legged table and a bench. His head just missed the old hanging light fixture.

“Ça va, Michel?” she asked.

“After I cap the gas, I’ll feel happy,” Michel grinned.

“Michel, I need a favor.”

Michel’s black-framed glasses under his wool cap pulled low didn’t hide his pink eyes. Or his white eyelashes.

Michel often boasted he was the only albino Jew in Paris. Maybe that was why his family gave him free rein rather than insisting on his working in the wholesale clothing business.

He and her partner, René, a dwarf and a computer genius, had formed an unholy alliance at the Sorbonne, the albino and the dwarf, or “the freak brothers,” as some had called them.

“What do you need?”

Before she could answer, he leaned back on the sawhorse. “Stop me if I’ve told you this one,” he said, grinning. “Écoute, here in the Sentier, a wholesaler pays for his child’s studies. First, the son spends three years in law. Then he studies business for three years at the fancy Hautes Études Commerciales. After that he obtains an M.B.A. from Harvard. Then he wants to study Japanese. But the father says, ‘Listen, my boy. I paid all those years for your studies, but God says you finally have to choose your career: either clothing for men or clothing for women.’”

Michel slapped his thighs and roared. Aimée returned a thin smile as she checked the terminal ports on a nearby computer.

“Just like my uncle Nessim!” said Michel. “Too cheap to fix this place up but he lets me use it. I design upstairs. They figure they’ll make money on me. If my designs never sell, his brilliant son says he can claim it as a tax write-off, a property value loss!”

Michel had placed high in the Concours de Haute Couture, the prestigious fashion competition organized by the Ministry of Culture. His talent hadn’t gone unnoticed. He’d turned down an offer from a couture house in order to be his own boss.

“The ministry’s sponsoring our couture showing in the Palais Royal,” he said. “And my uncle’s fronting the money but I need you and René to help me with my computer system.”

“Michel, I doubt that there’s any juice for the cables and fiber optic hookups,” Aimée said, gesturing to the dusty fuse box.

“Pas grave,” he said. “With the Bourse nearby and Reuters news service in the hôtel particulier across the street, we’ve got plenty of available power.”

But what about the rats who might gnaw through the cables, Aimée thought.

“Michel, about that favor …”

“I call it couture contre couture, couture in reverse,” he said. “Rollerblading assistants, with laptops strapped to their chests, accompany the models to the clients and take orders and measurements. We do it all at once.”

So that’s why he needed the computers.

“Michel, I need to borrow fifty thousand francs.”

But she spoke to Michel’s denim-covered hindquarters. He was on his knees digging for a power source.

She got down on her knees and pulled Michel’s arm.

“I need a personal loan. I’ll pay you back.”

Michel waved his pale arm. “OK, but better to funnel it through the business.”

“What do you mean?”

“My uncle’s company finances us.”

“I thought your Siliconsentier friends helped you.”

“My uncle made me a better offer.” He grinned. “We could really use your expertise.”

An alarm bell sounded in her head. The Sentier was notorious for under-the-table, cash-only deals. No receipts, a little payoff here and there. Voilà! No taxes. Was it wise for Leduc Detective to get involved with a project based on dodgy money? Did they have a choice?

“Let me discuss this with René,” she said. “But I’m in a jam, Michel, I need fifty thousand francs right now.”

“Tiens, come upstairs,” Michel said. He’d crawled to the end of the room, where a scrollwork metal sconce hung above him by a frayed cord.

She followed him up the wide marble stairs, with deep grooves worn in the center. The banister snaked, coiling tighter as they mounted, like a serpent about to strike upward.

On the black-and-white-tiled landing, several bicycles leaned against the ornate wrought-iron railing of vine tendrils twined with grape clusters.

Aimée’s cell phone rang. “Ready to offer me a drink yet?” said Jutta Hald in a dry voice.

Aimée’s heart hammered. She didn’t have the money yet.

“Paris is full of cafés, Jutta,” she said. “There’s probably one in front of you right now. I’m trying to get the money.”

In the background, Aimée heard the hee-haw of a siren.

“There’s something you should know about your mother …” The rest of Jutta Hald’s words were swallowed by the blare of sirens.

“What should I know?” Aimée shouted.

When the noise receded, “… Tour Jean-Sans-Peur in twenty minutes” was all she heard.

“You know where she is?”

Pause. Aimée heard Jutta Hald draw in a deep breath.

“Twenty minutes. Bring the money,” Jutta Hald said.

“But I must know … ,” Aimée said.

But Jutta Hald had hung up.

This was the first chance in years to find out about her mother! Despite her misgivings, she decided to talk with René and, clutching Michel’s check made out for fifty thousand francs, she shouldered her backpack.

Out on the narrow street, pangs of longing hit her. For years, deep down, she’d feared her mother was dead. Yet she couldn’t ignore the tissue-thin shred of hope Jutta Hald offered, at a price.

She cashed the check at Banque Nationale de Paris on the corner. As she turned into the Montorgueil, the tiled pedestrian walkway lined with upscale boucheries, more memories of her mother, with a pencil tucked behind her ear, floated back to her.

She was always drawing, scribbling on anything—brasserie paper napkins, envelopes, the gas meter rate book. All of it had been burned by her father, except for the cardboard box from her fric-frac bicycle lock that had been bordered with doodles by her mother. Aimée had ceased using the awkward lock, insisted on by her father, after her training wheels came off.

Aimée passed a shoe shop and small parfumerie before she reached the fifteenth-century tower abutting what once was part of the old wall of Paris. Medieval dwellers had thrown garbage over the walls. After the population doubled, the next king constructed a new rampart and the centuries-old refuse was paved over. The ground rose higher and higher, hence the hills and buckling streets of the Sentier.

The tower, a four-story narrow rectangle of butterscotch stone with a tiled turreted roof, had been partially restored. She remembered it from a field trip in grade school. Some duke or marquis once hid there. There were so many, she got them mixed up.

The iron grillwork gate scraped as she opened it. Before her stood a leafy plane tree in the fenced stone courtyard sheltered from the busy street. Shadows from the leaves filigreed the stones. Late afternoon quiet hung in the air. On her right, an L-shaped école maternelle faced the tower.

No students. No Jutta Hald. Only darkening rain clouds and a crackle of hot wind.

According to the sign, tower tours were suspended until further restoration. “Welcome to the only remaining fortified feudal tower surviving in Paris,” read the inscription. “Here, Jean-Sans-Peur, the Duc de Bourgogne, built a refuge following his assassination of Louis d’Orleans in the Hundred Years’ War.”

Tools, sandblasting equipment, and a small cement mixer sat under the tree. Work, she figured, had ended for the day.

Aimée cursed under her breath when her shoe caught between the stones. She turned it sideways. The heel of her Prada sandal, a flea-market find, emerged scratched and covered with grit. She scraped it over the iron décrottoir sunk in the stones. Mud-filled streets had been a part of medieval life.

Inside the tower, rays of light slanted in from windows and doors. So many windows. It seemed odd for a medieval structure built for defense, nestled against the old fortified wall. On her right stood a pile of rebar scraps.

Still no Jutta. She mounted the spiral staircase.

Cold air rose up from the stone. She rubbed her arms and looked up. Exquisite carved vaulting, a design of entwined branches with oak and hawthorn leaves and hop vines, wound above her. The circular staircase and open landings were islanded aloft. Shiny black birds perched in the turret. Their sharp cawing grated in Aimée’s ears.

Was Jutta Hald playing games, screwing with her mind? She seemed to think that Aimée was hiding something, had some secret.

Footsteps shuffled below in the courtyard. Aimée peered through the window illuminating what had once been the small chapel. Carved ravens with two figures on a ribbed band supported the ancient ducal crest.

The damn birds had been around even then.

Aimée shifted her feet on the uneven stone. Below, a group of tourists stood in the courtyard.

The noise of churning gravel came from outside as she descended. Perhaps the workmen were starting another shift after all, she figured.

She moved into the pale Camembert-colored light ruminating … afraid Jutta Hald’s words about her mother were true.

And afraid this was connected to her father’s death in some way.

But where was Jutta?

Outside, a trio of Portuguese-speaking tourists wandered and consulted maps on the far side of the courtyard. A workman in blue overalls shoveled sand in the rear. A shovel stood up in the sand pile. And Jutta Hald sat, huddled on a green bench next to the wall, her back to Aimée.

Odd, Aimée thought. She hadn’t been there before.

“Ça va … Jutta?” she asked, sitting down next to her.

Jutta Hald, leaning against the grimy stone wall, said nothing. She smelled of warm hair tinged by the singular vinegary odor she emitted.

Aimée looked closer. Jutta Hald’s eyes were wide with surprise.

“Don’t you hear me?”

No response. What was wrong with her?

She grabbed Jutta Hald’s arm, started to shake her. But the woman’s head slumped over, revealing pink gristle and congealed reddish matter sliding down the stone wall. The rest of her brain was still visible in the back of her skull, the part that hadn’t been blown off.

Aimée reared back, unable to speak. She struggled to breathe. Blood from a black hole seeped through Jutta Hald’s matted hair.

Jutta Hald had been shot at close range. Scarcely a minute ago.

Aimée looked up. She heard a burst of laughter from the tourists, the scrape of the iron gate in the courtyard, and crows cawing in the turrets.

No one had noticed.

Aimée had heard nothing. Neither had anyone else.

Was the killer still here?

She froze.

Jutta Hald’s hands were empty. Her purse and the book she had showed Aimée were gone.

Aimée noticed the pill bottle Jutta must have meant to open, lying on her lap. She carefully picked it up and slipped it into her backpack.

“Veja, veja!” one of the tourists shouted. A woman screamed and pointed.

At Aimée and Jutta Hald.

The workman … where was the workman? Aimée looked around. Gone. She heard more shouting in Portuguese.

Quickly she approached one of the tourists, a woman with frizzy black hair, who backed away.

“Where did the workman go?”

Wide-eyed looks of fear greeted her. Aimée pantomimed shoveling.

A salvo of Portuguese rushed toward her. Policia was all she understood. She tried not to look at Jutta Hald’s slumped corpse while she punched in 17 for SAMU—the Service d’Assistance Médicale Urgente—on her cell phone.

The Portuguese woman made for the gate. Aimée followed, scrutinizing rue Etienne Marcel, the street she faced.

“I’m reporting a murder,” she said into the phone. “The shooter could be posing as a tourist or a workman.”

“Address and victim?” the dispatcher asked.

Twenty meters away the Portuguese woman had found a flic. She was pointing at Aimée.

“Tour Jean-Sans-Peur on rue Etienne Marcel,” she said. “A released prisoner from Frésnes, Jutta Hald.”

The flic began walking toward her.

“Your name?” the dispatcher asked.

The flic’s pace increased.

“Call me a concerned citizen,” she said, clicked off, and ran around the corner.