Cara Black - Murder in Belleville

Poor Elymani, faced with his manhood in question or her interrogation, stood mute and uncomfortable. Aimée heard the click of worry beads in his pocket.

“Look, Hassan, let’s have coffee and walk to the boulevard, please,” Aimée said, her voice low, crooking her arm under his.

“Allez-y” Beni grinned. “Only Allah knows what she sees in you. Make some time before she wakes up, eh?”

ELYMANI ACCEPTED the café, his mouth tight. Halfway down avenue Parmentier they turned into narrow rue Tesson.

He shook her arm off and glared at her. But there was fear in his eyes.

“I work hard, mind my own business,” Elymani said, his voice cracking. “Yet you step in and make my life…” he stopped searching for the word.

“Compliqué?” she said. “My intention isn’t to get you in trouble.”

“I have to take care of my father. Last month he got injured on the job site,” he said, his voice different. “Look,” he said, almost pleading, “My family in Oran relies on me.”

Elymani’s eyes were large with fear.

“We’re having a private conversation. No one will know,” she said. “I promise.”

“The Maghrébins,” he said, scanning the deserted street, “they know.”

Aimée’s stomach fluttered with apprehension, but she shook her head. “You can’t be sure, now can you, Hassan?” She went on before he could answer. “Someone was blown up, you saw something, and you’re nervous. Anyone would be.”

He looked down, scraping the sides of his muddy boots on the cobbles.

“They’ll know soon enough,” he said.

“How?”

Elymani took a sip of café, sighed, then gestured toward the building opposite. Cracked plaster facades, scrolled grills fronting tall windows, and black grime in almost a trompe l’oeil design covered the ground floor of a once exquisite Haussmann-style apartment. Now the windows were cinderblocked and a permis à démolir sign hung above the massive doors covered with graffiti.

“In the back courtyard of that building,” he said, “they run a makeover business.”

She rubbed her arms again in the biting chill. What did Elymani mean?

“Makeover?” she asked.

“Say your permis de conduire was revoked. You visit with a roll of francs, et voilà, the Maghrébins furnish you with a new driver’s license,” he said. “At least they used to. They moved on.”

So Elymani fed her information, not current but true.

The warrens of old Belleville, honeycombed by courtyards, passages, and stone cellars in deserted buildings held the Maghrébins network. At least that’s what she figured from Elymani’s conversational pirouette. And that could be how Sylvie had gotten ID as Eugénie. To open a bank account, she needed ID.

“So would you say they live in the housing projects?” she asked, lifting her eyes toward the tall concrete buildings a block away. “But run their business where they won’t be disturbed?”

He nodded. “They find a place, maybe a building ready to be torn down or renovated. The rent’s cheap. Full of Yugoslavs, Hindus, or retired people who don’t ask questions. The tenants ignore who goes in and out, until problems erupt over turf or money. Things get noisy. Then the Maghrébins move on.”

“So you’re saying Eugénie was involved in this?”

A tidy hypothesis, even plausible, but how would it fit Sylvie’s murder—even if they’d furnished her with a new identity?

“For good reasons, I keep my nose out of it,” he said. “Those hittistes want easy money, a nice life. But in the end life reckons with them.”

Elymani had his own survival code.

“You better be careful,” he said. “You’re being watched.”

“By whom?”

“Look, my jobs are on the street. All I do is listen and keep my eyes down. I don’t want to know what goes on.” His eyes darted down the street. “What I really want to do is sleep for a week. Ahrs, the foyer is noisy, my mattress is lumpy, and I miss my wife.” He shrugged. “When my papers come through I’ll bring her over.”

“What did you hear about Eugénie?” Aimée said, stamping her feet in the cold, wishing she had a cigarette.

“My next job starts in a few hours,” Elymani said, turning to walk away. “Mercf for the caféV’

“Are you a lookout or do they pay you to keep your mouth shut?”

He stiffened.

“My family would be here if I did that,” he said his voice low with anger. “But dirty money brings no honor or peace.”

“My friend’s in danger, and now they’re after me,” she said. “Don’t you understand? Tell me what you saw, Elymani, then I’ll leave you alone.”

“All I know is that Eugénie used the place. She lived somewhere else. Sometimes Dédé dropped by.”

“Who’s Dédé?” Aimée asked, forgetting how ice-like the air had become.

“An old-fashioned mec who’s got a finger in every pot,” he said. “Like a giclée, a fine ink spray coating the surface—know what I mean?”

She wasn’t sure but figured Dédé bent with the wind.

“Where can I find him?”

“Café la Vielleuse.” He turned toward the streetlight. “Now, leave me alone.”

Saturday Evening

YOUSSEFA BOUGHT HAIR DYE at the Casino market around the corner from the apartment. Behind her chador it was as if she were invisible. But she had to be careful; few women in chadors frequented this kind of shop.

In the twenty-franc bargain bin on boulevard Belleville she found a black denim coat. Back at the apartment, she mended the broken crutches she’d found discarded in the trash.

At the bathroom sink, she read the instructions. But when her scalp started burning, she realized the chemicals had been on too long: Her hair had turned orange. Bleach was bleach, she’d thought. She did it again. In the end, when she looked in the mirror, she’d done a good job by accident. She’d fit in with the trendy crowd at Café Charbon, who sported the same white-hair, black-roots look.

Youssefa felt a measure of relief. No one paid attention to a woman in a chador or a fashionable type with a broken leg. Then the sobering thought hit her that if Eugénie’d had another identity, it hadn’t helped her.

In the church Zdanine had agreed to help her. But first, he’d said, he wanted to see the photos. He’d seemed eager when she told him why she had to speak with Hamid. After Zdanine saw them, he’d acted uninterested but promised to try and get her five minutes with Hamid.

Youssefa finished her prayers, rolled up her prayer mat, and felt ready. She headed toward the church, hoping Zdanine had paved the way.

Saturday Night

AIMÉE STARED AT THE mirror to the left of the bar, cracked in four or five places, in crowded Café la Vielleuse. Painted on the mirror was a faded image of a woman holding a vielleuse, an old-fashioned hurdy-gurdy. The woman’s blue puff-sleeved blouse and white tie bespoke turn-of-the-century fashion. The timeworn burnished wood, mosaic floor, and stumpy bar competed with seventies modernizations in the front. Café la Vielleuse straddled the broad boulevard de Belleville and the uphill, two-lane rue de Belleville, choked with buses, cars, and hurrying pedestrians.

“There must be a story behind that,” she said in a conversational tone, smiling to the busy waiter behind the counter.

He nodded and stuck his pencil behind his ear, then flicked the milk steamer into high gear, filling the café with a muffled whining. Then a slow hiss as the milk frothed.

“The manager, Dédé, would know,” he said.

“Have I missed Dédé?”