Cara Black - Murder in the Sentier

Dedicated to the ‘real’ Romain, Nina, my father

and all the ghosts, past and present.

Every capitalist has a terrorist in the family.

—Anarchist interviewed by Jean-Paul Sartre

in Libération , a newspaper

PARISLATE JULY, 1994

SATURDAY

Saturday Afternoon

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.