Murder in Montmartre (21 page)

It was time to address the feeling she’d sensed behind Zoe Tardou’s hesitant answers, her frightened manner. She’d meant to revisit her earlier—this reclusive medieval scholar who lived in an elegant Deco apartment across from where Jacques was murdered.

The geranium stem. Had Madame Tardou witnessed the murder when she was watering the flowers in her window box and kept silent out of fear? She had mentioned overhearing the names of planets, spoken in another language from the roof. Corsican? And she had let slip that she had spent time in an orphanage. An anomaly struck Aimée. If Zoe was the stepdaughter of the well-known Surrealist Max Tardou, why would she have lived in an orphanage? How did that fit?

If something itched, scratch it, her father had said. She had to probe deeper. What better place to start than online.

She searched under Surrealism and Max Tardou, finding an array of Web sites. She plowed through them. Tardou, a well-known painter, had fled the Occupation to Portugal at the onset of World War II. So much for his later claims of fighting in the Résistance. According to a Surrealist Web site, Zoe’s mother, Elise, had met him after the war.

She searched further. She found photos of Elise; one in profile, taken at a Montmartre Dadaist ball. It showed a crowd in turbans and bowler hats with the Greek letter š painted on their faces. Another showed Elise backlit, her blonde hair pulled high on her head in a halo effect, her mandarin eyes slanted with kohl, draped in a cloak of her own design. A striking woman, renowned for her Dadaist poetry.

Unable to find more current information, Aimée was about to exit, when she noticed a cross-reference. This one listed the name Elise Tardou in a 1980s documentary film about Lebensborn. Strange. Was it the same Elise Tardou? Lebensborn referred to the Nazi stud-farm program to propagate Aryans. It had been established in Norway, Germany, and occupied Europe. Even a member of the seventies group ABBA was listed in the documentary as a child of the Lebensborn. What was the connection here? Was there one?

She downed her espresso and read further. Château Menier, outside Paris in Lamorlaye, bordered the only Lebensborn site in France. Aimée hadn’t known one existed. She was shocked. She read further. The article quoted an excerpt from the account of Elise Tardou, identified as a Dadaist poet, about her captivity there in 1944. What Aimée read astounded her.

“There were French women in the château, though not many,” Elise was quoted as saying. “Few admit it. The shame. It wasn’t our choice, we were captives. Most of the women were prisoners from Poland, and blue-eyed Hungarians. They had a nursery, ran it like a birthing factory.”

Nineteen forty-four. Zoe looked to be in her fifties. A terrible idea entered Aimée’s mind. She printed out the page. And then located an article on a summer art colony, the haunt of the old Surrealist icons in the sixties. It had been located in Corsica.

Corsica! According to an article she’d read previously, the Tardous had spent their holidays in Corsica every August. For years.

She’d caught Zoe Tardou in a lie. Now she thought she knew why. She had to test her theory.

* * *

“MADAME TARDOU! ” she said, knocking on Zoe Tardou’s door.

No answer.

After five minutes of knocking, when her knuckles were sore, the door opened a crack.

“I spoke with you the other day, remember? You had a miserable cold,” Aimée said. “I hope you’re feeling better. I brought you some Ricola cough drops.”

“That’s very kind.”

Aimée put the cough-drop box into Zoe’s hands, noticed the blond-gray hair pulled into a bun, her slim figure under the wool sweater. The striking aqua blue eyes.

“May I come in?”

“I answered your questions,” Madame Tardou said. “I won’t go to the police station.”

Again, that fear of the outside. Agoraphobia?

Aimée put her boot into the doorway. “I just need to clarify a detail, to remove it from the inquiry. That’s all.”

Hesitantly, Zoe opened the door wider. “You’re persistent, Mademoiselle,” she said, “but I have nothing more to say.”

“Please, this won’t take any time at all. You’ll see.” Aimée edged past her and kept walking toward the large room filled with Deco furniture. The room with black blankets hanging over the windows. She felt in her bag for her hairbrush.

Zoe Tardou, reading glasses perched on her chapped nose, stood with a red pencil in her hand. “I’m copyediting proofs on my treatise, you see. I can spare you only a moment.”

Aimée paused to look at the photos on the grand piano. Studied them.

“You spent summers in Corsica, Madame Tardou, didn’t you?”

“Is that a crime?”

“Corsica, L’Ile de Beauté. Yet you told me you summered in Italy.”

“We went to Italy, too.”

Aimée nodded. “Your stepfather, Max Tardou, established an art colony in Bonifacio where he tried to resurrect Surrealism. You went there for years while you were growing up.”

Aimée ran her palm over the smooth blond wood case of the piano. She pointed to a photo. A black-and-white scene of sunbathers with an awninged café in the background.

“Café Bonifacio. It’s still there.”

“What does this have to do with anything?”

“You understand Corsican. And you speak it, don’t you?”

Zoe Tardou’s fingers twisted the red pencil back and forth.

“I was only a child.”

“Even as a teenager you must have summered in Corsica,” Aimée said. “You may even have attended a Corsican school.”

“Yes, I did. How does that matter?”

She’d admitted it!

Aimée moved closer to the woman.

The pencil snapped between Zoe’s fingers.

“The voices you heard from the roof spoke Corsican, didn’t they? You understood them, recognized the names of the planets and constellations.”

Fear shone in those compelling blue eyes. She pushed the glasses up on her nose with trembling fingers.

“Maybe . . . yes . . . I’m not sure.”

“Think. They spoke Corsican. Exactly what did they say?”

Zoe covered her glasses with her hands, then looked up and nodded. “Yes. But it had been so long ago since I heard that language. From another lifetime.”

“Why couldn’t you tell me?” Aimée said, controlling her excitement.

“It was so strange to hear Corsican, I thought I was dreaming, I was unsure—”

“You looked out, pretending to be watering your geraniums,” Aimée interrupted. “That’s natural. You understood what they said. It was quiet, as the storm hadn’t erupted yet.”

Aimée paused. Waited. “It’s all right, we’re telling the truth now,” Aimée said, her tone soothing, urging. “Accounting for all the details, clearing this up, eh? Most investigative work depends on the tedious details, checking and rechecking.”

Zoe watched her. Unmoving. An aroma of
herbes de Provence
and something roasting, Mediterranean style, wafted from the kitchen. Wonderful. Aimée’s stomach growled.

Aimée sighed. “Nothing glamorous in this, believe me.” She tried for a matter-of-fact voice. “Did you hear the glass break in the skylight?”

Zoe shook her head.

“Yet you recognized the men on the roof.”

“But I—” She covered her mouth with her hands, again that little-girl manner, as if she had been caught in a fault.

“—got scared?” Aimée finished for her.

Zoe Tardou nodded.

“Who did you recognize?”

“No trouble, I can’t have trouble,” Zoe said, putting her hands up like a shield and stepping back. “I can’t get involved. Now, I’ve got something cooking on the stove. . . .”

The smell of thyme was stronger now.

“All I need is a name.” Aimée smiled and reached for a notepad in her leather backpack.

“I don’t know his name. The one I recognized—anyway, it doesn’t mean he shot anyone.”

“Of course not, you’re right. But he can help us find the one who did, don’t you see? We need your help.”

Zoe Tardou hesitated.

“Does he live here?”

“I’ve seen him on the stairs, but I don’t know him.”

“What does he look like?”

“He had bleached hair the last I saw him. He changes it. I don’t really know, I don’t think he lives here.”

Aimée wrote in her notepad.

“But he could work in the building? Or for someone who does live here?”

Zoe shrugged. “He’s too coarse.”

Was this the
mec
Cloclo had referred to? Or just a workman, like Theo, who had offended her delicate sensibility?

“Coarse? You mean he was a construction worker? One of the men doing the remodeling?”

“He was not a workman. He made rude comments. But he was dressed in designer black.
Trendy.
”

“A young man?”

“I didn’t pay attention.”

“What about the other man?”

“Just his back, that’s all I saw.”

“Did you hear the gunshot or see the flash?”

Madame Tardou shook her head. “When I heard voices talking about constellations . . . what they said was mixed up with words that didn’t fit.”

“What did you hear?”

“I didn’t tell you before because it doesn’t make sense.” Zoe paused, rubbed her cheek.

“Go on, it’s all right,” Aimée said, trying to control her impatience.

“They said ‘
turrente
,’ a stream; ‘
parolle,’
which means ‘words,’ but it didn’t make sense or seem to mean anything. They spoke about planets and streams. No, there was more . . . that’s right . . .
cincá
, searching for, searching, they said ‘searching.’”

Planets and streams and searching, talking about Corsica, and then murder? “You’re sure?”

“Corsicans don’t articulate, they swallow the consonants at the ends of words.” Zoe’s gaze settled on her piled desk. “They did repeat the old saying, that I recognized.”

“Which is?”

“
Corsica audra di male in peglyu
.” She shook her head.

“‘Corsica will always go wrong,’ typical of their pessimism tinged with pride.” Zoe shrugged, spent. As if she’d run out of things to say. “My head ached, I felt miserable. I lay down and must have fallen asleep watching the
télé
. That’s all.”

Aimée believed her, but she had to check.

“What show did you watch?”

“Show? An old Sherlock Holmes film. Too bad I missed the ending. Now I must work,” she said, eager for Aimée to leave. “I don’t know any more.”

“There’s something else,” Aimée said. How could she phrase this? “I admire your mother. It takes a courageous woman to speak of Lamorlaye, and the Lebensborn. Why did she finally . . . ?”

“Talk about her captivity? The way they used the women?” Zoe asked, all in one breath. And for a moment, Aimée saw the same wistful gaze she’d noted in the photo of Elise.

Aimée nodded.

“The past was too heavy to bear any longer, Maman said. When the filmmaker approached her, she felt it was time. Nothing that horrible was worth all that effort of concealment, my mother said.”

“That took such courage.”

“And the odd thing was: after that, she wrote poetry again. It was as if the weight of her history had lifted.”

“I respect her for speaking out,” Aimée said.

Zoe’s brows knitted in anger. “My stepfather didn’t,” she said. “He threw her out and tried to disinherit me, but he died before he could.”

“To disinherit you because you were fathered by a German?” Aimée asked.

“Those twenty-fifth-hour Résistants who watched the Occupation from afar turn out the most heroic of all!”

“I’m sorry.” Aimée didn’t know what else to say.

“Sorry?” She gave a short laugh. “So were the women, so are we, the children. Children of the enemy. Raised in guilt for who we were. Our very existence was the cause of shame. Whether I was too young, or just misplaced in the chaos of the German retreat in 1944 I’ll never know, but I wasn’t transported to Germany like the others,” she continued. “My mother found me in the room with telescopes, an observatory adjacent to the château that had been turned into an orphanage. I was lucky. Others displaced at the war’s end were reared in group homes with hardly any food or nurturing, ostracized for their background, and became misfits. Bereft of parents who never searched for them, either dead or lost or wanting to forget, many ended up in mental institutions. At least, I found my biological father, alive after all this time.”

Aimée stared, incredulous. “Did you meet him?”

“A sad old gentleman living in Osnabrück. He remembered my mother. After the war, he’d owned a pharmacy,” she said, with a small smile. “He’d studied medieval history at university.”

Thursday Evening

ONCE OUTSIDE , AIMÉE BELTED her leather coat. Zoe’s words haunted her. No wonder she avoided the authorities. Her story didn’t seem to help but at least she’d admitted hearing words spoken in Corsican. Aimée scanned the alleylike street. No Cloclo. No
mec
with a down jacket.

How could she warn Cloclo her “station” was being watched?

Aimée climbed the stairs to Place des Abbesses. There, CRS teams in blue jumpsuits cradling Uzis strolled the streets. This signaled a definite terrorist alert. She felt a tightening in her chest. What was going on?

She entered a warm café and picked up a paper to see if she could find out. She sat at the window overlooking the steps leading to the alley, a perfect vantage point from which to watch for Cloclo.

She rubbed her gloved hand over the fogged-up glass. More worries assailed her. Cloclo bore a grudge against the “crude”
mec,
the one Zoe Tardou had just described. She might say something to get rid of him. Yet if Cloclo did speak to him, Aimée would be ready and only seconds away.

Several young men, unemployed judging by the time of day, played at the Fussball machine. Aimée ordered a
croque-monsieur
from a waitress with red rose tattoos up her arm.

Outside, passersby scurried through the gray evening light just sinking behind the eroding stone buildings. Mist lingered over the steps. Aimée tried to avoid the predatory gaze of a man in black denims and a blue turtleneck near the Fussball machine. She tapped her feet to the beat of the radio’s techno station and opened the newspaper to the headlines to read: COUNTERTER-RORISM POLICE DISCOVER EXPLOSIVES TRACED TO ARMATA CORSA.

Her shoulders tensed. That accounted for the CRS presence outside in the square. And for a moment, she was afraid. Another building mined with explosives?

She read the article: “Today a special counterterrorism unit, acting on a tip, found a cache of detonators and explosives in a government building.”

A grainy photo showed a dismantled detonating device.

She read further.

Corsica has been plagued since 1975 by almost daily machine-gunnings and other attacks by a small but active, nationalist movement. Favored venues for Separatist attacks have been on the island of Corsica, and rarely in France until now. Most bombings have been designed to minimize risk to human life but maximize material damage. Explosions occur in the early morning hours when buildings are unoccupied. Corsican terrorists have targeted police stations, French government buildings, and the property of non-Corsicans on the island. They extort funds from outsiders through the imposition of a “revolution tax,” and punish those who fail to pay. Sources would not reveal the government building in Paris just targeted, only that the
tête de
Maure—a Separatist symbol pic- turing a black face with a white bandanna—was discovered. Links to a known Armata Corsa terrorist cell operating in the eighteenth arrondissement are being pursued. Ministry insiders indicate this was an attempt to embarrass the French government and pressure it into negotiations with fratricidal Mafia-style gangs that have jumped on the Separatist bandwagon.

The
tête de
Maure, like the poster she’d seen somewhere. And Yann had said Lucien was a member of the Armata Corsa.

From what she knew, Corsica had to stay French not only for the security of the holiday homes lining its pristine beaches, but also as a convenient military outpost. A strategic sentinel in the Mediterranean, home to the Mirage-4, the jet that carried an atomic bomb.

Her mind raced into high gear. She took her notebook and wrote down what she knew so far. Zoe Tardou had recognized a man on the roof speaking Corsican about the planets and streams, before Jacques, who was half-Corsican, was murdered. Jacques had an affiliation with Zette, the murdered Corsican bar owner. Laure’s hands had borne traces of gunpowder residue with a high tin content. And she’d found a bullet that she hoped would match the tin content of the residue on Laure’s hands. Plans of a foiled plot on the Mairie in the eighteenth had been found near the place where Jacques was murdered.

Nothing fit! And yet it reeked, worse than sour milk. Had Jacques enmeshed Laure, his unknowing partner, with a gang of Corsican Separatists? If only Laure were to regain consciousness. But what answers would she have if she did?

The newspaper article indicated that a Corsican Separatist cell was operating in Montmartre. She pulled the hairbrush, containing a minirecorder in the handle, from her bag. One of René’s toys; he loved gadgets.

Had it recorded?

She took a toothpick from the ceramic holder standing on the white paper covering the table and stuck it in the rewind pinhole: a low whirr. Then she stuck the toothpick in
Play
. Zoe Tardou’s voice mingled with the shouts of the Fussbol players. Aimée rewound and replayed the conversation: “stream . . . searching,” the names of the planets. What did it mean?

She’d copied it all in her notebook by the time her
croque-monsieur
arrived, a frugal bistro invention. Day-old bread was dipped in egg, fried with a slice of ham, melted cheese, and béchamel sauce, a filling meal on a winter day. She set her map of Zoe Tardou’s building and the courtyard and scaffolding and rooftop of Paul’s on the paper tablecloth. She added in the Dumpster where Yann Marant had found the diagram.

Her cell phone rang.

“Allô?
”

“That
mec
passed by me,” Cloclo said. “Twenty minutes ago.”

Too late. Aimée hadn’t seen her arrive.

“Where are you, Cloclo? I don’t see you on the street.”

“House call for an old client,” she said. “I’m in Goutte d’Or. On rue Custine where it meets rue Doudeauville.”

Or, as one politican commented, “where the bourgeois bohemian
bobos
met the
boubous
, colorful African immigrants’ robes.”

“So he’s gone!”

“Not if his kabob’s still grilling,” she said. “He went into Kabob Afrique. There’s a big line trailing out onto the street.”

“Cloclo, you’re being watched,” Aimée said.

“Men pay me for that, you know.”

“I’m serious. Be careful. Work another beat for a few days.”

“
Vraiment?
” Aimée heard a throaty laugh. “I could use some sun. Cannes, Menton, or do you suggest Cap Ferrat?”

“Can you describe the guy?” She threw some francs onto the table.

Just then the man who’d been ogling her walked over and took Aimée by the elbow.

“Care for a drink?” he asked. “I’m partial to big eyes and long legs.”

She knew his type; any encouragement and he’d be all over her like a rash.

“
Desolée
, I feel the same,” she smiled. “But I’m partial to a brain between the ears.”

She grabbed her coat.

“Oooh, letting the skirt get away?” one of his friends sniggered as she left the café.

She ran, the phone to her ear, into the wet street.

“Like a . . . ,” Cloclo said, her voice wavering, “. . . that lizard that changes color.”

A chameleon changed to fit its background, she thought.

“Why do you say he’s a chameleon, Cloclo?”

“. . . black hair, sideburns today, leather jacket . . .”

“Careful, Cloclo, I mean it . . .”

The line went dead.

At least Cloclo was working somewhere else now and she had given Aimée a description. She ran down the Metro stairs, slid in her pass, and joined an older woman reading
Le Figaro
, waiting for the train. If she made a quick train connection she might get to the kabob place in time.

She changed lines once and exited from Château Rouge station in seven minutes.

Under a weak setting sun filtering through a break in the clouds, she saw awning-covered stands selling all types of bananas: short, thick, green, yellow, red, as well as stubby plantains. Men wearing long
djellabas
stood by upturned cardboard boxes on which tapes and “used” VCRs were displayed for sale. Laundry flapped, hanging from chipped metal balcony railings above, suspended from fissured buildings. As she walked by, women in colorful
boubous
shouted “
Iso, iso
,” hawking barbecued corn in plastic bags. Several discount travel shops advertised flights—Paris-Mali, for two thousand francs—on hand-lettered signs.

The
quartier
reminded her of an Arab medina with its tangle of threadlike alleys, the perfume of oranges, and the cries of hawkers everywhere. She stood in the Goutte d’Or, “the golden drop” on the other side of Montmartre, named for the vineyards that once covered the slope. North African soldiers recruited for the First World War had found cheap lodgings here overlooking the Gare du Nord train tracks, after 1918. And the tradition continued; it was still cheap and even more rundown, teeming with Africans and Arabs and other segments of the “third world” according to conservative rightists and the encroaching
bobos
.

Aimée scanned the street and spied Kabob Afrique midblock.