Murder in the Latin Quarter (9 page)

“It’s like a museum,” Mireille said, glancing at the shadows on the
trompel’oeil
muralled ceilings.

“Grandfather. . . .” Aimée hesitated: it felt awkward saying this. “. . . bought this place cheap after the war. His seven-teenth-century bargain, with archaic plumbing and nonexistent heating.”

Mireille paced by the window overlooking the interior courtyard and stared out, clutching her hemp bag. “They’re hunting me like a dog. I shouldn’t have come here. . . .”

Not here five minutes, and already she wanted to leave.

“First you’re going to answer my questions,” Aimée said. “Why did you set me up, Mireille?”

Mireille’s shoulders tensed. “Set you up?”

“You’re running a scam—”

“I don’t understand,” Mireille interrupted.

“I found Azacca Benoît’s body. His ear was cut off. You lured me to rue Buffon to take the blame for his murder.”

Mireille made a sign of the cross, then raised the gold cross she wore from her neck to her lips. She rubbed the thin red thread knotted at intervals around her wrist. “You’re serious . . .
mon Dieu.
I didn’t know.”

“You were seen arguing with him, the
flics
suspect you . . . and you don’t know?”

“Forgive me for endangering you.” Mireille’s lip quivered. “I just bring trouble. Bad juju.” She rolled down the waistband of her skirt, revealing a red-pink spiral on her honey-colored hip. “The sign. I’m marked.”

“That’s just a birthmark,” Aimée said.

“Ogoun marks his warriors.”

“Ogoun?”

“That’s what my Auntie said. Ogoun’s the defender, the warrior deity. You call him Saint George the dragon slayer.”

Aimée pointed to the cross around Mireille’s neck. “But. . . .”

“I’m Christian, like everyone in Haiti,
bien sûr.
” Her brow creased. “But where I come from. . . .” She paused. “The spirits, the offerings to deities, our beliefs are all woven together. Like a patchwork. The African gods aren’t separate. I grew up with these beliefs; they’re part of our culture.”

Candle wax dripped down the tarnished silver candlesticks in a slow trail of drops.

“That explains nothing,” Aimée said. “Look, you walk into the office, claim you’re my sister, tell me you have proof and want to meet. Then you bolt from the café, leaving an address on the napkin. I find a dead man, a professor of animal anatomy, there. But you want me to believe you didn’t try to frame me for his murder?”

Mireille crossed herself again. “I didn’t know where else to meet you.” Her chin trembled.

“You sent me to the gatehouse and I found his body. What’s your connection to Professeur Benoît? What do you want of me, Mireille?”

“I had the professor’s address. He came from my Auntie’s village. I was desperate and I begged him to help me. Bound by our ways, he let me stay in the gatehouse so they wouldn’t find me.”

“So
who
wouldn’t find you?”

“The men who stole my papers,” she said. “Benoît offered to help me get a temporary permit and a real job.”

Not according to Dr. Severat’s story. She’d said Mireille was a hanger-on taking advantage of Benoît’s kindness, exploiting a village tie.

“A staff person overheard you arguing with him in the laboratory.”

Mireille looked away, her gaze resting on the frayed edge of the Aubusson rug.

“Do you deny arguing with him?” No answer. “The
flics
believed her. You’re a suspect, Mireille.”

“A suspect?” Her eyelids batted in fear. “I don’t understand this.
Who
told the
flics
this?”

Aimée remembered that brief flicker in Dr. Severat’s eyes. Did it come down to jealousy?

“You didn’t answer my question, Mireille,” she said. “But we’ve got the whole night to find the truth.”

“You always pay,
non?
Nothing’s free.” There was bitterness in Mireille’s voice. She collapsed on the Louis Quinze
fauteuil.
Her fingers raked over the frayed upholstery seat. “Professeur Benoît’s a generous man . . . was. Bit of a womanizer, but. . . .” She shrugged. “Nothing unusual. When I said no, I’d find somewhere else to stay, well, he got mad. That woman must have overheard.”

“When was this?”

Mireille bit her fingernail. “Sunday, I think. But later Benoît apologized to me,” Mireille said. “He told me he’d got-ten too involved with this woman. She’d pressured him to move in with her. But he had so much on his mind . . . he worked all the time. I’d see the lights on in the lab. Then on Monday he asked me to keep a file for him.”

That caught Aimée’s attention.

“You mean the file he left for you with the guard?”

She nodded. “It would be just until he came back, he said.”

“Came back from where?”

“An appointment? I don’t know.” Tears welled in her eyes. “He seemed nervous. Jumpy. He told me he trusted only me.”

“Trusted you, over any of the laboratory staff?”

“I don’t know why, I don’t understand anything they do there,” she said. “He said I owed him a favor, that I should do what he asked and keep my mouth shut.”

“I don’t understand why you didn’t come to find my father earlier.”

A look of shame crossed Mireille’s face. “Call it pride, but I wasn’t going to look him up until I got settled and had a job. It was easier to seek help from a village connection. But Professeur Benoît never came back yesterday,” she said, her voice rising. “Then this man followed me from the laundro-mat on rue Buffon and lurked across the street. When I was in the café waiting for you, I saw him again and ran.”

“What did he look like?”

“Dark glasses, big, filled out his leather jacket.” Aimée remembered the man on the quai, the Peugeot? Same man? “He had a motorcycle.” Mireille shivered and put her hands over her face. Her hair came loose, curly strands escaping down her neck. She looked up and took a breath. “He chased me. I took the wrong Metro train and got lost. By the time I made it back to rue Buffon to meet you, the place was crawling with
flics.
I knew I couldn’t go inside.”

“Why didn’t you tell them this and explain?”

“Me, with no papers? I thought the
flics
had come to arrest me and deport me.”

“Mireille, a lawyer can help you claim asylum,” she said. “I know someone. . . .”

“Do you know how many Haitians petition for asylum, how many are waiting? The quotas won’t even cover
last
year’s appeals.”

Aimée had had no idea.

She held out the old photo of her father, the one of Mireille as an infant with her mother. “Can you explain these photos?”

Candlelight flickered over Mireille’s expression. “
Tim tim.
You want me to explain?
Tim tim.
”

“I don’t understand,” Aimée said.

“We say
tim tim
to indicate a riddle. Like, what goes in white and comes out mulatto. If you give up, you say
bwa seche.
”

“Bwa seche?
”

“Bread. A mulatto’s like toast.”

“How do you know my father is yours too?” Aimée asked. “I need more than this.”

“I never knew him. All I had were the photos, that card. . . .”

“What card?” Aimée remembered René’s words. A third-world country, the poorest in the world . . . Mireille suddenly appearing . . . .

“These photos don’t prove he’s your father.”

The torn photo taken at the Brasserie Balzar with her father smiling, Mireille’s mother sitting next to him in a sleeveless dress . . . a typical scene in the Latin Quarter. They could have been students. Her father would have been a recent police recruit at that time. Who were the other people with them? Who was Mireille’s mother gazing at? Who was missing from this photo?

“They look happy,” Mireille said. “A group of acquaintances, friends . . . see those glasses? There were others. The photo’s torn off.”

Aimée sat down next to Mireille. “Why did you come to the office of Leduc Detective?”

Mireille took a small leather-bound journal from her bag, opened it, and handed Aimée a postcard. On the front was a yellowed map of Haiti, titled “The Pearl of the Antilles.” The other side, dated May 1964, bore a message: “Jean-Claude— all my letters have been returned. They took the farm, I need help. There’s no one else to ask . . . we’re in hiding . . . my baby’s five years old.” The inscription ended with a blotted ink smudge, as if tears had fallen and smeared the surface.

The card was addressed to Jean-Claude Leduc in care of Leduc Detective, rue du Louvre, Paris. But it hadn’t been signed or sent.

“My Auntie gave me this before I left,” Mireille said. “My mother had burned everything else. My Auntie assumed this was addressed to my father. She said it was all they ever found.”

Was this true?

“My mother never told me his name. I was seven years old when we had to hide in the countryside,” Mireille said. “We were always moving around. One day these big men wearing sunglasses and machine guns took
Maman.
The tonton macoutes. They shot her by the water pump.”

“Why?”

“Her face . . . I can’t forget what they did to her face. . . .” Tears dripped down Mireille’s cheeks. Her voice was faint.
“Maman
called me her
princesse.
She said that’s what he’d called her.”

Ma princesse.
The words struck Aimée like a blow.

“He? You mean. . . .”

“My unknown father.”

“That’s what Papa called me too,” Aimée said. “But why did the tonton macoutes—”

“Kill
Maman?
” Mireille interrupted. “For consorting with a Frenchman? Or maybe because Duvalier had woken up on the wrong side of the bed that morning. One never knew. With all the massacres, what did one more murder matter?”

“But it mattered to you.” Aimée leaned forward. “I’m sorry.”

“My grandmother hated my mother.” Mireille wiped her eyes. “As for me, well, it seems having a mulatto bastard grandchild didn’t earn her points with her fancy neighbors in Pietonville.”

Aimée didn’t know what to say. She stared at this woman who she hadn’t known existed two days ago, searching for a resemblance. There could be something. Perhaps the green eyes flecked with brown were shaped like her father’s.

“I didn’t grow up in a place like this.” Mireille gestured around her. “Or have what you had.”

Aimée felt a pang of guilt. But then René’s words about an inheritance reared up in her mind. Did Mireille want money?

“My mother kept writing letters, but he never replied,” Mireille continued.

That was so unlike the Papa she knew. Candlelight flickered; the smell of burning wax lingered in the air. Aimée wondered if she should dig out photo albums with snapshots of her father and show them to Mireille.

“Her letters must have gone astray, Mireille,” Aimée said. “Maybe he didn’t know about you.” That had to be it. “Papa was a good man. I miss him. It’s sad you didn’t know him, Mireille.”

“Maman’s
family didn’t want to know me,” Mireille continued, her jaw set, as if Aimée hadn’t spoken. “To live, I cut sugar cane. I slept in the fields.”

“But you were a child.”

“Oh, I wasn’t the only one.” Mireille shook her head. “When I got taller, I could work in the factory. But an aunt found me. I got lucky; she took me in. She confirmed that my Papa was French but said I had to keep quiet about it. These things were dangerous. Auntie scraped up money for me to attend the
lycée.
I got a scholarship to the
collège
in Gonaives.”

How differently their lives had turned out, Aimée thought. She felt a deep connection to Mireille. She’d been an only child and now, suddenly, it felt as if a vacuum in her existence had been filled. But could she be sure Mireille’s story was true?

“I trained as an accountant and worked in the Banque National office in Port-au-Prince. But, in the last coup, every-thing crumbled. I had to leave.”

“And now?”

“With no papers?” Mireille shrugged. “No one like me got an exit visa from Haiti.”

“I don’t understand. Why would an exit visa matter?”

Mireille blinked in surprise. “Educated people can’t leave unless they have connections and money to grease palms with. Otherwise there would be a mass exodus, and only poor cane-cutters would be left.”

Aimée stared at her. “Yet you made it here.”

“People Auntie trusted smuggled me across the border to the Dominican Republic. For a price. Then I sailed to Guadeloupe.”

“Guadeloupe’s a department of France,” Aimée said. “You could have gotten papers there—”

“With what?” Mireille interrupted. “All my money went to the man who’d made the arrangements to get me to France. Fifty of us spent weeks at sea, hidden in the cargo hold. At the port in Calais they jammed us into huge lorries. The drivers stopped on the outskirts of Paris.” Mireille closed her eyes and took a breath. “They demanded we work off the ‘surcharge’ for all the unexpected bribes they’d had to pay. Liars.”

“You mean they were human traffickers?”

“Traffickers? I don’t know this word. The drivers saw a chance to make money from us. Their cut, they said.”

“Frenchmen?”

“African blacks, muscle men, who spoke French.” She nodded. “I remember their gold chains, bad breath, their drinking. They laughed and refused to give us back our papers.”

“What papers?”

“My ID card from Haiti. That’s all I had. They intended to sell us to pimps or to sweatshops. But I got away.”

Mireille paused. “At least I thought I’d gotten away. They threatened to cut our throats if we tried to escape. To set an example, they said. If they catch me, they’ll kill me.”

Now she had all the pieces of the puzzle, Aimée thought, but she didn’t know how to connect them. It still didn’t make sense. Moments passed, marked by the drip of candle wax.

“When you appeared at my office, I was surprised,” Aimée said. “Forgive me, I should have been more. . . .”

“Like a sister?” Mireille’s voice sounded almost childlike now. She stared at her feet. “I assumed you knew about me.”