"Why?"
Aimee looked at it wistfully. Her mother had worn a coat like this. "Don't you feel this coat was from a happier time in her life?"
Rachel snorted awake. Her eyes brightened, seeing what Aimee held. "Ah, the new look from Dior. . .1948! Lili sewed a coat for me like this one. Mine had bows down the back seam."
"Schmates! Rags! Everything goes to the synagogue; Serbian refugees will use the cloth. Make it functional and useful, not just a moth-eaten memory."
Aimee felt something intensely personal from Lili Stein emanated from that coat. "Instead, let me keep the coat and I will donate money to the synagogue fund. In honor of my mother. I didn't know her either."
Sinta stood back. "I'm supposed to feel sorry for you?" Her black eyes glittered. "Grieving for a mother you didn't know?" She planted herself close to Aimee. "My sympathy market is closed. I had a mother born in Treblinka. As far as I'm concerned, mentally she never left. Couldn't leave the past. Kept scratching for lice and begging for food even on the kibbutz in 1973. . ." She stopped as Abraham came in.
He glared at Sinta.
"That's enough." He picked up the coat and handed it to Aimee. "Maman hadn't worn it in years. Take it."
"Thank you, Monsieur Stein," she said. She picked some piled Hebrew newspapers from the corner and wrapped the coat in them.
Down the hallway, she heard Sinta's raised voice, which she knew was meant to be heard. "She doesn't look like a detective. . .why did you take that shiksa's side, Abraham?"
Sinta's words in her ears, Aimee retraced her steps down the stairs. Out in the courtyard, garbage bins blocked the light well. She pushed them to the side, trying to ignore the rotten vegetable smell. Inside the circular space, a patch of weak light shone. Lili's boarded-up window had looked right down to where she stood.
Mentally, she filed away Rachel's comment about the bloody footsteps to check out later. Right now, it was time to pay Les Blancs Nationaux a visit.
Thursday Evening
"TOTAL SHUTDOWN," MINISTER CAZAUX said under his breath. "The left Confederation Francaise du Travail, the trade unions, promise stoppages across the board if the trade treaty passes." He shrugged. "On the other hand, the rightists lead the popular vote."
Hartmuth had learned techniques for controlling his stutter; clenching his fists was one of them. He was using it now.
"A work shutdown is a socialist tradition here," Hartmuth said, keeping his hands in his pockets. He knew who wielded real power. Parliament belonged to the right, not the CFDT. "It's purely a statement, and then it's over."
"This is true," Cazaux nodded. "But there will be lots of unpleasantness first."
They stood under the chandeliers in the partially refurbished eighteenth-century Salle des Fêtes in the Élysee Palace. In the reception line, Hartmuth had noticed uneasily how Cazaux assessed him with laserlike intensity. He could all but hear the gears shift in Cazaux's brain amid the clink of cutlery and low buzz of conversation. Like an astute diplomat. Like Hartmuth himself.
Tall windows overlooked the Élysee's neglected back garden. Ahead in the Salon des Ambassadeurs, which was closed for renovations, the ornate ceiling sagged alarmingly. He had been surprised to see the palace, a national symbol, in such disrepair. In Germany, it wouldn't be allowed. But he'd never understood the French and doubted he'd understand them any better now.
Across from him he noted Ilse, in beige polyester, chatting amiably with Quimper's wife, in tailored Versace.
The red and white wine flowed freely. He picked at his food and tasted almost nothing.
He pretended this ornate banquet room was in Hamburg, not Paris. He pretended he was safe. But being in the Marais made it harder to shut the memories out. Sunday, too, he would pretend at the opening of the trade summit, the symbolic gesture ordered by Bonn to weave harmony. Unter den Linden.
Cheese and fruit were served on an ice sculpture in the shape of La Marianne, the French Republic symbol, while the orchestra played "La Marseillaise." Cazaux slid in next to him, his cheeks flushed. Television makeup couldn't quite hide his uneven complexion. He offered a flute of champagne to Hartmuth.
"I must do lip service to pacify the conservatives, it's the only way," Cazaux said.
Hartmuth held back. "Essentially, these provisions validate concentration camps for immigrants. We need to rework and rethink. . ."
"More riots will erupt if this treaty doesn't pass. But that's only the beginning. . ." A loud buzzing of voices caught Cazaux's attention and he stopped. He turned to the crowd and smiled. "Let us toast a harmonious working relationship."
Hartmuth raised his glass, which sparkled in the light from the drooping chandelier. The photographer caught them lifting their tulip-shaped champagne glasses to each other in a toast.
Hartmuth was about to lunge at the photographer when the flash went off again. Quimper's tipsy wife appeared, giggling, and wrapped her arms around them both. After that, everything was a blur of congratulations and backslapping.
As a trade advisor, he shaped policy, wielded power, but remained in the shadows, out of the public eye. He had never allowed his face to appear in newspapers. Never.
Would anyone be alive today who remembered him? Hadn't the Auschwitz-bound convoys taken care of them? Of course, the surgery on his burned face after Stalingrad changed his appearance. Nevertheless he was worried the rest of the evening.
Later that night he got up and went to his window. He couldn't sleep. Everything about Sarah that had been dead and buried for so many years bobbed to the surface.
As he stared out to the Place des Vosges, hazy globes of light shone through the tree branches, illuminating the metal grill fence and spurting water fountains. Every impulse told him to give in to what he really wanted to do. Their meeting place was so close. When he closed his eyes he saw it again. Hidden under some branches like it had been in 1942, when she'd shown it to him. When Sarah had been there, slipping inside, beckoning him with her almond-shaped eyes.
Only time for a brief goodbye before his troop was shipped to Stalingrad in 1943. Stuck in a POW camp in Siberia for two years, he'd gone snow-blind and whimpered from frostbite. Until the Werewolves helped him escape, giving him a new identity and part of a new face.
They'd used him to sabotage and infiltrate the allies. With their help, he'd prospered in the new Germany. He had slowly been eased into more powerful and influential positions in the Bonn government. Bonn was peppered with others like him. Hartmuth had never cared much either way. He was alive, but he'd lost what he really wanted. Sarah.
If the French detectives he'd hired through diplomatic channels hadn't been able to find her in the 1950s, how could she be here now? Probably shot dead in a field as a collaborator, they'd said, or had her head shaved and been sent to a work camp in Poland to die.
Inside his briefcase he released a hidden spring. Gingerly, he took out a thick envelope. Dog-eared and yellowed with age, this was all that was left of Sarah, except for the ache that hadn't gone away. He spilled the contents onto the hotel desk and began to methodically sort through his memories.
After seven months of dogged work, the Parisian detective agency had found only these few musty-smelling documents. But he always carried the torn photo, a faded sepia print of just half her face, ripped from her family dossier, when his superior's head was turned. The detectives' report had stated that prisoners didn't last long in Polish work camps. What wouldn't he do for even the chance to visit her grave? Hartmuth sighed. His little Jewess had made him a man and she'd only been fourteen.