Murder in the Sentier

Saturday Afternoon

“TATOUAGE,” FLASHED THE ORANGE-PINK neon sign around the corner from the tower on rue Tiquetonne. The area was full of apartments and shops, combed by narrow alleys, and courtyards. Sirens wailed in the distance. From a doorway, Aimée saw the flic round the corner, then stop and question a woman with shopping bags. Quickly, Aimée slipped inside the tattoo parlor.

The dust-laden velvet curtains had known better days. Muggy air, tinged by sweat and old wine, clung in the corners. An insistent, low whir competed with a Gypsy Kings tape.

In the large room, a woman in a violet smock, her back to Aimée, filled jars with varying shades of makeup. Aimée stepped into a long curtained cubicle.

Seated before the mirror, a tanned, topless woman fanned herself with a Paris Match magazine. From the edge of her left shoulder to the top of her spine, an intricate lizard design was etched in green-blue. Fine droplets of blood beaded the edges. Hunched behind her, a man with a whirring instrument stared intently at her back.

Aimée winced. The price of adornment was minimal to some.

Not to her.

A muscular man in a tight white T-shirt ducked inside. Tattoos covered his arms: His bald head shone under the reddish heat lamps. He smiled at Aimée, revealing a row of gold-capped teeth.

“Have you chosen?” He pointed to a seat like a dentist’s chair, hard and metallic.

“Chosen?” she said, edging back toward the curtain.

“Your design,” he said, pointing to the walls lined with photos of tattoos.

The coppery smell of blood made her uneasy.

Outside the curtain, she heard the flic questioning the makeup artist in the next room. No way could she go out there now.

The tattooist tapped his fingers on a Formica table lined with instruments.

“So, what would you like?”

Nothing, she wanted to say.

“Try the old Pigalle gangster designs,” he said. “A rooster symbolizing hope, the butterfly with a knife dripping blood for joie de vivre….”

“Like hers,” she whispered, pointing to the tanned, topless woman.

She pulled up her shirt and put her finger midback to the left of her spine. “Here. I don’t want to look.”

“Aah, a Marquesan lizard,” he said. “The symbol of change. With the sacred tortoise inside?”

“Oui, delicate and trés petit.”

The man’s smiled faded. His lips pursed. “That motif doesn’t work in less than a six-millimeter format.”

Footsteps approached.

“Go ahead.” She nodded, then put her head down. She covered her face with a towel and pulled a sheet over her leather skirt, praying it would be over quick. And that the flic would leave.

“I trained with Rataru in Tahiti,” he said, as if Aimée would know. “Of course, he’s the master of the Marquesas.”

Not only would it hurt, René would never let her forget this.

He swabbed her back with alcohol. Cold and tingling. He rubbed his hands, probably in glee.

“Tout va bien, Nico?”

So the tattooist was Nico.

“No complaints, Lieutenant Mercier,” he said.

From the direction of the conversation, she figured the flic stood a meter away. Keep going, she thought, don’t stop.

“Any news for me … anybody run in here?”

Aimée’s heart hammered. Something clattered in the metal tray by her ear. If she bolted, she’d send the tattoo machine flying but she wouldn’t make it to the door.

“We sent runners for coffee,” Nico said, “but they’re not back yet.”

So Lieutenant Mercier was the friendly type, taking the pulse of his quartier. Maybe he contacted his informers here. Or he was on the take. Or looking for her.

The tattoo needle ripped her flesh like a fine-toothed hacksaw.

Twenty tears to the minute, searing and precise, the needle punched tiny holes in her skin. She blinked away tears, gritting her teeth, praying it would end soon.

After what seemed like forever, Aimée heard Mercier move away. A long while later the tattoo artist switched off his torture machine.

Aimée got up slowly and reached for her wallet. “In case service isn’t included,” she said, slipping him an extra hundred-franc note.

“Like a complimentary makeover?” a woman’s voice asked. “You’ll love it.”

Aimée turned and saw a petite smiling woman standing near the chair. Beyond the curtain, another flic had joined Mercier.

“Seems it’s time for me to get a new image,” Aimée said, her mouth compressed.

“Speed bump … like it?” the makeup artist asked, as she traced the arch in Aimée’s brow using a tapered makeup brush. “It does wonders for those lines.”

Aimée’s shoulders tightened in pain. The tattoo hurt. In the outer room, Mercier’s voice competed with the whirring of the tattoo needle.

“Try this too,” the woman said, holding out swabs of glittery peach powder. “This brightens up your skin tone and makes you glow. Positively glow.” She brushed a velvety sheen over Aimée’s arms, shoulders, and neck. “I’m writing a book,” she said, talking nonstop, “called How to Look Like a Goddess When You Feel like a Dog. Full of useful hints for fast-living people who have to look good at airports even in times of excess or trauma.” The woman grinned. “You know, big sunglasses, fur collars to make you appear frail and exotic, that sort of thing.”

By the time Aimée got out of the tatouage parlor, her back ached and she positively glowed. The flics were gone and she’d signed up for a copy of the book.

Aimée’s uneasiness followed her all the way home. She shuddered, thinking of Jutta Hald. Pathetic, desperate Jutta. As greedy and evasive as she’d been, Jutta didn’t deserve to have her brains splattered on a stone wall. No one did. After twenty years of prison, she’d paid her dues.

Part of Aimée wanted to forget she’d ever met Jutta. Another part of her said Jutta’s killer might be able to lead to her mother.

From her backpack she pulled out Jutta’s pill bottle. Inside was a balled-up sketch of the tower along with a torn magazine photo. In it, a salt-and-pepper-haired man was holding an award.

The caption read “Romain Figeac.”

She recognized the name. Romain Figeac, the monstre sacre, Prix Goncourt—winning author, and sixties radical. In the seventies he’d been the ruine du jour and in the eighties, passe. Now the old man was still a bleeding liberal, according to his own autobiography. Or was that his wife, an actress … she couldn’t remember.

She ran her fingers over the smooth blue tiles on the basin counter. Was what Jutta Hald told her the truth … any of it?

Aimée wondered if the address book Jutta had waved by her had really been her mother’s.

She turned on the tap and stuck her head under the cold water. Squeezing her lavender soap, she washed the tattoo parlor smell out of her hair, then shook her wet locks like a dog. But it didn’t clear her head. Her mind was spinning.

Jutta Hald’s words kept coming back. She had asked if Aimée’s mother had sent her something. And then Aimée realized a bathroom drawer had been left half open, her towels hastily folded, and the medicine cabinet ajar. Nothing was missing but what had Jutta been searching for?

Then the realization hit her. Someone had killed Jutta. She could be next!

Nothing made sense, yet it connected to her mother.

Since the day her mother left, Aimée had been desperate to know what happened to her. Now she had a chance to find out. Slim at best. But more than before. She had to pursue it.

She went to the kitchen and plugged in the small refrigerator. It was empty and emitted the hiss of slow-leaking Freon. She filled Miles Davis’s chipped Limoges bowl with steak tartare left from the train trip. He sniffed, then cocked his head as if to say, “What’s this?”

“Sorry, furball,” she said. “I’ll pop into the charcuterie later.”

Her seventeenth-century apartment needed an overhaul: central heating instead of feeble steam radiators for bone-chilling winters; plumbing more current than the nineteenth century; enough juice to keep a chandelier, computer, fax, scanner, DSL line, and hair dryer on concurrently; and access to her basement cave for storage. Too bad the cave had been declared a historical treasure because it had provided an underground escape route to the Seine for nobility during the Revolution, and had been closed for repairs. Closed for as long as she could remember.

She kept buying lottery tickets. Someday, she told herself, Architectural Digest would visit. But maybe not in her lifetime.

She remembered her mother calling her Aamée in a flat American monotone, unlike her father’s French A-yemay, his syllables dipping at the beginning. Had he refused to speak of her mother, because of shame that he, a flic, had a wife in prison?

Aimée consulted the Minitel. No listing for Romain Figeac. She tried his publisher, Tallimard.

“Can you help me reach Romain Figeac?”

“Tiens, this is a joke, right?” the receptionist said.

Taken aback, Aimée paused. “If you can’t give his number, his address …?”

“Such bad taste,” the receptionist interrupted.

“Look I need to talk with him,” said Aimée.

“Don’t you know?” the receptionist said.

“Enlighten me.”

“His funeral was yesterday.”