Cara Black: Murder in Belleville

“When did Anaïs leave, Gaston?”

“Close to an hour ago,” he said.

She shouldered her bag.

“And like I told her,” Gaston said, studying her, “adieu.”

AIMEE HURRIED into the sheets of rain. Her edgy feeling had been growing all week. Paris was bracing itself for terrorist attacks, the radio warned, due to enforcement of the anti-immigration policy. The flics were nervous and, as Aimée knew, when nervous they tended to overreact. Shopping on the quai, she’d noticed the darting flics’ eyes. She’d seen the dark blue suited CRS riot police in her Métro station with machine guns questioning random riders. Even boulangerie patrons in line ahead of her had jumped, startled by the sudden banging of trash cans. It seemed like everyone vibrated with fear.

By the time she reached the boulevard the downpour had ceased. Twilight covered Belleville. Parents tugged children from shop to shop under umbrellas or placated them with baguettes at the crowded bus shelters.

The aroma of cumin from the corner Lebanese restaurant perfumed the rain-freshened air. Aimée had forgotten the bustle and energy in Belleville. African dialects reached her ears. She walked by abandoned, graffiti-covered tum-of-the-century shop-fronts. Taxi klaxons honked, and old men bargained in Arabic at fruit stands. Senegalese women clad in bright-patterned clothing and headresses shared the Métro stairs with black-on-black Parisian sophisticates.

A neighborhood of caractere, she thought, but its working-class origins had suffered the onslaught of the trendy. Chunks of the grime-blackened eighteenth-century buildings in Edith Piaf’s former neighborhood had either been torn down or renovated.

The saucerlike April moon had risen by the time she’d reached the narrow street. In contrast to the busy boulevard, rue Jean Moinon lay quiet. Aimée paused. The smell of wet dog mingled with rose water from a nearby passage. She wondered why Anaïs would come here.

The streetlamp’s yellow cone of light revealed broken pavement. Parked cars filled one side of the narrow street. Number 20 bis, or 20 and a half—as Aimée remembered her mother explaining the term—consisted of two floors with many bricked-up windows. That was one of the few things she recalled her American mother joking about. Number 7 bis, their old apartment, had been referred to by her mother as “half here and half not, like me.” Not long after that, when Aimée was eight, her mother had tacked a note on the apartment door telling her to stay with the neighbor until her father came home. Her mother had never returned.

Aimée stood back and looked up at the nineteenth-century building. Dark and silent. Only one floor had open windows, their shutters weathered and broken. No concierge or gardien. Just a massive wooden door defaced by silver graffiti.

Gaston could have given her the wrong address.

“Anaïs?”

Had Anaïs ever come—or had she already left?

Aimée didn’t know the code for entry so she rang the service bell. She waited, watching the streetlight’s reflection dance in the oily puddles between cobbles. Opposite, several buildings advertised apartments to rent.

No answer. She shifted in her boots, looked around. The street was deserted. Apprehensive, she felt like leaving.

Aimée walked up the uneven pavement to the end of the street, regretting her impulsiveness in following Anaïs’s trail. This wild goose chase had led nowhere. She wanted to kick herself—why had she agreed to help? She needed to hustle for the EDF contract!

Spousal surveillance really wasn’t her field. Next time she’d think twice before she ran into the rain. She turned to retrace her steps. On her way back to the car she’d try one more time.

In the distance she saw two women emerge from the door of 20 bis. Aimée recognized one as Anaïs, her blond hair illuminated by the streetlight. The other, a dark-haired woman, wore a shiny black raincoat that swung as she moved. The woman opened the driver’s door of the car parked in front, reached in, then shoved something across the car’s roof to Anaïs, who waited on the curb.

As Aimée walked closer, she saw that the car was a powder blue Mercedes. Anaïs stuck the object in her shoulder bag, put on her sunglasses, then rushed off without saying good-bye. Odd, Aimée thought, since it was dark and rainy.

“Anaïs!” Aimée called out, hurrying to catch up with her.

Anaïs turned, noticed Aimée, and waved in recognition.

Strains of Arabic music suddenly blared from nearby, loud and piercing. “Shut that crap off!” someone shouted from a window.

The dark-haired woman slammed her car door and started her engine, and with a blinding flash the Mercedes exploded. With a deafening roar, the car burst into a white-yellow ball of flame. Aimée faltered, and everything seemed to move in slow motion, but it could only have been microseconds. Terror flooded her. Tires and doors blew off like missiles, into the stone buildings. She saw Anaïs rise in the air, as if she were flying, then disappear. The ground reverberated.

The pressure wave knocked Aimée off balance in mid-dive, as she aimed for the nearest car. The backdraft sucked the air as if trying to vacuum her body into a smaller space. Tighter than she could stand. Steel fragments and bloody viscera rained over the street.

Aimée landed on wet cobblestones praying that nothing else would explode. Her heart hammered. She tried to cover her head with her hands. Memories of the Place Vendôme terrorist explosion that killed her father came back: his burned body ejecting from the surveillance van, her hand holding the molten door handle, and the fireball that engulfed the van as it smashed into the Place Vendôme column.

And then she realized the danger—gas tank vapors from the parked cars could ignite from the flames. She pulled herself up. Made her legs move. Made them go past the Mercedes’s metal skeleton, burning furiously and bulging like an accordion. The intense heat singed her eyebrows. She had to find Anaïs, get out of here.

Her ears rang, and she choked on the billowing smoke. She tripped on the cobblestones, greasy with oil and antifreeze. Her hands were bloody and shaking. Like five years ago when her father had been blown up in front of her eyes—the same horrible nightmare.

Monday Early Evening

BERNARD BERGE, FORTY-FIVE YEARS old and prematurely gray, stared out from his ministry office window onto Place Beauvau, dreading the imminent phone call. He pushed his round-rimmed glasses up on his forehead and rubbed his weary eyes. He felt in his pockets again for the blue pills. Only two left.

Across the square the flickering blue lights of the Elysée presidential palace blurred in the spring night. Bernard hadn’t slept in days. Sixty-two hours, to be exact, and he didn’t think he would ever sleep again. The sleeping pills had stopped working.

A loud knock sounded on his office door. He’d left instructions not to be disturbed. Who could this be?

“Oui,” he said. “Is this urgent?”

In answer the heavy wooden door opened slowly. His mother, a small white-haired sparrow of a woman with deep-set black eyes, strode in. Without removing her wrinkled raincoat, she planted herself in front of his desk in the chilly office.

“Maman!” he said. “What are you doing here?”

From the reception area beyond his open door, several heads looked up. He hurried to the door and shut it.

“Bernard, as God is my witness,” she said, “I can’t believe you will allow this.”

“Sit down, Maman.”

His mother remained standing and pulled open her bag with difficulty, then set a much-thumbed carte de sejour down on his desk. “Your stepfather earned this residence permit. And Bernard, you studied the Bible. You know God’s higher law.” Her voice quavered, but her gaze held steady. “Put your hand on it; swear to me you will not deport any victims.”