Murder in Belleville (24 page)

The woman headed quickly toward the back.

“But please, can’t you—”

“Excuse me,” the woman said, her mouth tight and compressed. “I’ve got a production schedule to meet.”

By the time Aimee made her way toward the back near the van, she’d come up with a plan. She jiggled the van door open, grabbed some large boxes of photographic papers, then entered the back.

Loud arguing in Arabic reached her ears. The scarf-clad woman stood by another stocky woman, pointing toward the front counter. In front of Aimee a massive printing machine spat out large-format posters, shooting them onto a spinning wheel. Aimee knew she had to move quickly. The women would throw her out before she found Youssef.

Men filled cartons as the posters came off the wheel. None of them sported spiky hair like Denet had described, so she kept going. Mounting the spiral staircase in back, leading to more of the lab, she discovered a warren of cluttered offices.

“Youssefs supposed to check this order,” she mumbled to an older man busy working an ancient adding machine.

“Let me see,” he said, pushing his glasses up his forehead.

Aimee leaned the carton on the edge of his desk, making a show of how heavy it was.

The man’s phone rang; he picked it up and immediately began punching the adding machine.

“Sorry, but I’ve got more deliveries,” she said, tapping her nails on the box.

He looked up, then motioned Aimee toward a long hallway.

“Down there. I don’t recognize the order,” he said. “Check with me on your way out.”

Aimee shot ahead before he changed his mind. She figured that this nineteenth-century building joined apartments in the back. Below her the floor vibrated from the machines.

After checking four dusty offices in the next wing, she saw a figure hunched over a photo layout, marking shots with red pen.

“Youssef?” she asked, setting down the cartons.

A young short-haired woman in her mid-twenties looked up, her eyes unsure.

“I’m Youssefa,” she said. “What do you need?”

Now it made sense. No wonder the women downstairs had told her there was no Youssef here.

Denet had mistakenly taken Youssefa for a man in Eugenie’s courtyard. Youssefa looked young, Aimee thought. Her dark skin stood out against her chalk white hair. Half-moon scars crossed from her temple to her left eye.

“Where’s Samia?”

“She left,” Youssefa said, her look guarded. “Who are you?”

“Her friend.”

Youssefa’s eyes flicked over her outfit. “You don’t seem her type,” she said.

“Samia left a message. She sounded frightened,” Aimee said.

Youseffa shrugged.

“Can you tell me about the ‘ST196’photos?”

Youssefa’s brown face passed from curiosity to terror in seconds. She dropped the pen, backed into a chair.

“I know you went to Eugenie’s apartment—did you develop those photos for her?”

Youssefa moved fast, around the corner of the table. She started running, her limp noticeable, out into the hall.

“Please, Youssefa, wait!” She shoved the carton on the floor and took off after her.

Aimee barreled into a stack of old film cans, sending them shooting across the wooden floor. She slipped and fell over the metal canisters, wincing as she landed on her aching hip.

Youssefa was gone.

Aimee got up slowly. She figured Youssefa could only have gone into the warren ahead of her, since the hall dead-ended behind her. The windows overlooking the courtyard parking area were open. She heard an unmistakable voice from below. She stopped and listened. A voice described her hair, her jacket, and how she owed his boss.

Dede.

How could he have found her, unless he’d seen her leave from the back of her office. Or—her heart quickened. She didn’t like to think of it. Unless he’d gotten to Rene and threatened him. But Rene didn’t know where she was going—she hadn’t told him.

She heard scuffling down the dark hallway. That was the only direction Youssefa could have gone. She followed the noise.

Youssefa was pounding on a fire exit door, but it was jammed. When she saw Aimee, she reared back like a cornered animal about to attack.

“Let me help you, Youssefa,” she said. “Someone’s after me too.”

“I destroyed the negatives,” she said, her voice cracking. “Leave me alone.”

Why destroy the proof?

“I’m on your side, but as soon as we get out of here, I will,” she said. “A
mec
called Dede’s after me.”

Youssefa blinked her good eye.

“Look out the window, check for yourself,” she said. “Dede’s determined to find me, but he’s not my type either.”

She figured if they got out of here, she’d corner Youssefa and sit on her chest until she told her what the photos meant and why she’d destroyed the negatives.

She aimed several heel kicks until the exit door sagged open.

“Lead the way,” she said.

“Dede’s a piece of shit,” Youssefa said, hesitating, then limping ahead.

“No argument there,” Aimee said, following her.

She wondered why the sign said EXIT when this web of narrow halls, roofed by skylights, clearly led to another building instead of outside.

Youssefa opened the last door at the end. They entered a hallway, yellowed and scuffed, passing a dim stairwell. She took out a key and unlocked a door.

Uneasiness washed over Aimee but she figured this had to be better than what lay behind her. They entered the back rooms of a small apartment.

Red-flocked wallpaper, old gas sconces, and small upholstered chairs gave the rooms a busy appearance. But the huge black-and-white photos of Edith Piaf on stage and candid shots, filling the walls, lent the rooms a 1940s feel. A scratchy recording of Piaf played from another room. In the corner, tacked onto a dressmaker’s dummy about shoulder height, hung an old-fashioned black dress. Bizarre.

Everything was on a smaller scale, as if made for a little person. Rene’ would feel right at home, she thought.

“Where are we?”

“At my friend’s,” Youssefa said.

“What is this place … a shrine to Piaf?”

“Close,” Youssefa said. “It’s the Edith Piaf Museum.” She motioned her toward the back, putting her finger on her lips.

She followed Youssefa into a small modern kitchen, all white and stainless steel.

“Go on.” Youssefa gestured toward the back window. “That leads to rue Crespin du Gast.”

She started toward the window, then turned back and pinned Youssefa’s arms behind her back, sliding her onto a
wobbly
kitchen stool.

“Tell me what ‘ST 196’means,” she said, leaning over
her.
“Or I go nowhere.”

A momentary hint of regret hit her as Youssefa’s
chest heaved
and she burst into frightened sobs. But Aimee couldn’t stop
now.

“Youssefa, Eugenie passed something to my friend
before her
car exploded.” She loosened her grip on her arms. “My
God,
Youssefa, it happened in front of me! I have to know why,” she said. “Not only Dede, but someone else is after me and my friend.”

“They’ll k-k-kill me,” she said, choking on her sobs.

“Why?”

“I took those photos—they made me!”

Aimee’s mouth felt dry. “Who did?”

“He’s not a general, but they call him one,” Youssefa said. “He likes people to call him that. He likes to hang around with the military.”

Had he sat in the
cirque,
wearing a uniform?

“What’s his name?”

“He’s known as the general, that’s all.”

“Youssefa, why did they make you take the photos?” she said. Part of her didn’t want to know why. It was too horrendous to contemplate.

“D-d-documentation.” She closed her eyes.

Aimee remembered the looks on the faces in the photos. The way the numbers were pinned to the shirts or the skin of the bare chested. Pinned to their skin. Like temporary branding.

She sank down on the stool next to Youssefa.

As a child, she’d seen cattle in the pasture next to her grandmother’s Auvergne farm. Numbers were clipped on the cows’ ears to distinguish them from herds en route to the
abbatoir.
She gasped.

“ST… that stands for ‘slaughter,’doesn’t it?” she said, not waiting for her answer. “And 196 would be the military division of the area, according to Algerian military maps.”

Youssefa covered her face, her body quivering with spasms.

That was answer enough for her.

“They wanted you to record it, didn’t they… or he did, the man they refer to as ‘general?’” she said. “Villagers, dissenters, and anyone they could lump together as fundamentalists, right?”

Finally Youssefa nodded. “My family owned a photo shop. We sold cameras, developed film. Then one day the military rounded everyone up in the square, called us Islamic zealots,” she muttered. “Herded us into grain trucks and took us out in the
bled.
Dropped us near big hangars storing wheat. Someone had told them 1 knew photography.” Youssefa rubbed her good eye. “They shoved a Minolta in my hand, put a box of film at my feet, and said, ‘Shoot.’”

Horrified, Aimee thought of all those faces.

“It took days,” Youssefa said, her voice growing curiously detached. “At the end my fingers didn’t work, and I couldn’t stand up. They did this.” She pointed to her scars and her eye. “But I lived. I owed the victims. That’s why I hid the negatives. The military didn’t care, all they wanted were prints recorded in black and white.”

Like Cambodia, Aimee thought, sickened. Wholesale mass killings of innocents by the military. Slaughtered by their own forces, which spoke to the madness of the military mind.

“How did you get out?”

“She helped me,” Youssefa said simply.

“Eugenie?”

“She’s my AFL contact’s cousin.”

Of course! Aimee remembered the AFL’s hunger-strike flyer with Youssefa’s name on it, and Sylvie’s membership, starting in the Sorbonne. Now things added up.

“Sylvie Cardet was known as Eugenie Grandet,” Aimee said.

Youssefa shrugged, “I don’t know.”

“But what was she doing with those photos?”

Youssefa looked down.

“I showed them to her, told her about the massacres,” she said. “Then Eugenie found out that everything was a sham.”

“A sham?” she asked worriedly.

“The humanitarian mission,” she said. “The fund goes to the military—they turn around and buy surplus military ware.”

Aimee shook her head. She had a hard time believing the second part.

“What do you mean?” she said. “How can that work?”

“French military surplus; I saw trucks filled with night-vision goggles,” Youssefa said. “Some idiot boasted there were thirty thousand pairs, at only two francs a pair! So cheap, he said, the General had bought the lot.”

The humanitarian mission—Philippe was involved in that. No wonder he’d wanted to keep her quiet.

“What’s it got to do with the AFL hunger strikers in the church?”

“Eugenie trusted Mustafa Hamid,” Youssefa said. “Several times she told me if I got in trouble to go to Hamid. That’s all.”

“What happened to them?”

“I gave the rest of the photos to Zdanine,” Youssefa said. “He said he’d give them to Hamid, get me time to speak with him.”

Zdanine! For a price he must have hid the photos, left them for Dede in that abandoned house. Dede’s
mecs
recovered them, but she and Rene had surprised them in the park.

“You didn’t destroy the negatives, did you?”

She averted her gaze. “In good hands.”

“Give me a contact sheet.”

Youssefa turned away.

“I need to have proof if you want me to stop them.”

She shook her head. “That’s what Eugenie said.”

Gently she turned Youssefa’s disfigured face toward her.

“Trust me,” she said, mustering as much bravado as she could. “Believe it or not, I do this for a living. And they’re after me as well.”

She saw agreement in Youssefa’s sad eyes.

Youssefa led her toward the room they’d first entered. The room with the Piaf photos and the black dress. Youssefa opened a wooden armoire. Musty smells laced with lavender wafted out. On the shelves Aimee saw a row of little black shoes, some T-strapped, others open-toed, all from the thirties and forties. She stared. The pairs of shoes couldn’t be bigger than her hand.

“Piaf’s?”

Youssefa nodded.

For such a tiny woman, Aimee thought, Piaf had touched the world.

Youssefa reached to the upper shelf, where rows of yellowed kid gloves lay.

In good hands, she’d said.

Youssefa pulled out an envelope, checked it, then handed it to her. “These show the piles of bodies.” She looked down. “Other than this, the proof lies in the desert, fifty kilometers outside Oran. Bones bleached by the sun.”

She thought about Gaston’s words. His experience in the same part of Algeria. History repeated itself in sad, twisted ways.

A
IMEE SLID
out of the back kitchen window, climbing down the rusty fire escape to an asphalted yard. Following the yard, she exited onto rue Crespin du Gast and walked the two blocks to Samia’s apartment.

She knocked on the door. No answer.

“Samia, it’s Aimee.”

All she heard was pounding Rai music with a techno-beat.

She tried the handle. Locked.

If Samia was scared, why play the music so loud?

Aimee tramped back down to the courtyard. The rain was coming down hard. She rolled up her collar, passing the boarded-up butcher shop. Peeling posters lined the facade. She headed toward the spot overlooked by Samia’s kitchen window.

And then she saw the orange-pink phosphorescent watch on the stones. She bent down, picked it up, her heart quickening.

“Are you here?”

Water rushing from a rain gutter answered her.

She edged toward the passage, reeking of urine, that bordered the
hammam.
And then she saw Samia sprawled against the stone wall.

“Samia,
ca va?”

But when Aimee got closer she froze.

A dark red wound blossomed on Samia’s chest, staining her peach twinset, her eyes open to the falling raindrops. Aimee gasped and knelt beside her. “You’re too young,” Aimee whispered, reaching for Samia’s hands. Cold.