Murder on the Ile Saint-Louis

Tuesday Night

IN THE GALLEY kitchen in the back of his brocante, or secondhand shop, Jean Caplan sighed and smeared a knife full of Nutella onto a warm baguette. Better humor her as usual, he thought. The poor thing.

He shuffled past a chair piled with melamine ware, cracked Ricard ashtrays, and old Suze liquor bottles, all layered with a film of dust.

“Voilà, Hélène.” He set the chipped Sarguemines plate on the marble-topped table next to which the old woman sat. Rain pattered outside on the courtyard, streaming from the gutter, beating a rhythm on the metal well cover.

“So thoughtful, Jean!” Hélène said, reaching a thin blue-veined hand out to help herself. Her nearly transparent paper-white skin barely covered her protruding bones.

He’d been sweet on her then, he was sweet on her now. Hélène had sat in the wooden school desk in front of him and he’d dipped the tip of her ribbon-tied braid in his inkwell. He still saw traces of that feisty young girl although the long braids were now white and tied together at the back of her head with string.

“Haven’t seen you for a few days,” he said, combing back his thick white hair with his fingers. He’d worried with all the rain . . . where was she living now? He pressed a wad of francs into her hand.

“Jean, non! This kind of money I can’t take from you.”

“I sold the armoire—you know the seventeenth-century one the baron gave me on consignment, eh? And you never let me take you for a meal.”

“Merci.” She rolled her dark blue eyes, violet ringing the irises. There wasn’t a wrinkle on her smooth face; her skin was that of a young woman, only her jaw was more pronounced than it had once been. She was clean and neatly dressed . . . only, if one looked closely enough, the shopping bags gave her away as a street person. Yet for periods of time she’d stay in a city-run pension, hold a job, and blend in with the anonymous older generation.

“The baron? Up to his tricks again. Tell me more.”

Someone had to show her kindness, Caplan thought. She’d been traumatized during the Occupation. Out of sync, out of step, after the war. But then, deep down, who wasn’t?

Her family had owned this store on Ile Saint-Louis until Libération. Now he did. The Wehrmacht’s fault. Their boots had strutted over the bridge, back and forth, between the town house they’d requisitioned—now the Polish Center—and the shops on rue Saint Paul in the nearby Marais. Those were all gone. The bordello, whose attic his family had hidden in after the 1942 raid, was gone, too. The whole block of stores had been torn down and it was a manicured garden now.

“Well, our playboy baron keeps asking me to sell his lower-end furnishings, if you call seventeenth century low end, piece by piece to finance his rent boys.” He leaned back on the marquise chair, his weight straining the curved legs. “He needs more money to attract them the older he gets.”

“You remember the parties . . . the Polish diplomatic receptions and how we’d peek at the guests over the hedge?” she asked.

Jean grinned. A memory they shared from before the time of the marching jackboots. She loved talking about the island as it had once been, long ago.

“If those walls could talk! Remember the masked costumed party, the servants dressed as Nubian slaves?”

She was mixing the eras up. This party had taken place in the seventies; it was still a legend but a legend for a set that was dying out. None of the very rich lived like that anymore. Today socialites mixed Cartier diamond watches and designer jeans. It was another world now, déclassé, common.

Jean looked down at the worn soles of his brown shoes. A decade ago Hélène had turned up and walked into the shop only to ask with a vacant smile if he had her schoolbooks.

“‘Hélène . . . where were you?’” he’d asked.

“Down south,” she’d said.

He’d recognized the burns on her temples. She’d had shock treatments. The part of her brain they hadn’t burned out was living in the past. Guilt had racked him.

“Mustn’t be sad, Jean,” she said now. He came back to the present as she took his chin in her hand, searching his face. There was a puzzled, warm look in those violet-tinged eyes.

“Stay here,” he offered.

“I can’t. The bad one might catch us.” She leaned closer, whispering, “We have to hide.”

“Who are you afraid of? Did someone threaten you or call you names again? I told you I’d take care of—”

“The bad one,” she repeated. “You know, the one who threw the girl in the river. Paulette’s ever so afraid the bad one will toss her in.”

Paulette? Her sister Paulette had been taken in 1942.

“She’s afraid that he’ll kill her, too.”

“What do you mean, Hélène?” Jean had overheard talk at the café-tabac counter that morning and read the newspaper article: a young woman’s body had been found in the Seine. “You witnessed this?”

She nodded mutely.

In her own way she never lied. But he couldn’t credit this.

“So I took care of the bad one, Jean,” she said, her mouth set in a thin line.

Jean controlled his shudder. He gripped the chair’s threadbare armrest. “Took care . . . how?”

“I couldn’t let the bad one do it again,” she said, shaking her head. “Now I’ve made it safe.”

He wanted to shake information out of her. As he learned toward her, his foot hit the shopping bag at her feet and he looked down. Inside one of the bags he noticed the black handle and ornamental bee of a Laguiole knife.

“Did you use that knife . . . to protect yourself?” he asked her.

She stood, gathered her bags and broken umbrella, and went to the door.

He followed her, putting his arm around her shoulders. “Wait, Hélène. What did you see?”

“Merci, Jean.” Her eyes clouded. “There’s a break in the rain. I have to go.”

He stared after her as she padded down the rain-soaked street, mumbling to herself. She’d gone over the edge, he concluded. Next it would be UFOs.

But he couldn’t get her voice out of his head. What if someone had attacked her and in self-defense she’d retaliated? She might have hurt someone. Worse—someone might be attacking women and the homeless on the island. He thumbed through the the phone directory, found the listing he sought, and, with shaking fingers, dialed the Commissariat.