She ducked her head and rolled into a somersault. Her shoulders smacked against a parked car's windshield. She inhaled the stench of burning rubber before her head cracked the side-view mirror like a hammer. Pain shot across her skull. She rolled off the hood.
Stunned, she sprawled on the sidewalk, partly wedged between a muddy tire and the stone gutter. The car stopped, then backed up, its engine whining loudly. Dizzy, she crawled over grease slicks and rolled under the parked car. She barely fit. She slid her Glock 9-mm from her jean jacket, uncocking the safety. The car door opened, then footsteps sounded on the pavement near her head.
Afraid to breathe, she saw black boot heels. She'd be lucky if she could shoot him in the foot. Loud police sirens hee-hawed down the street. A cigarette, orange-tipped, was flicked onto the pavement near her and fizzled in a puddle. The door clicked open, then the car sped away.
She flipped the gun's safety back on, then slowly rolled out from under the car, her head aching. Her knees shook so badly she staggered in the gutter and fell. She just lay there, hoping her heart would stop pounding. Grease and oil stains coated her black pants and her hands were streaked with a brown smudge that smelled suspiciously of dog shit. She picked up the soggy cigarette stub. Only a well-paid hit man could afford to smoke fancy imported orange-tipped Rothmans.
AIMÉE KNOCKED at the frosted-glass door. She kept her eyes on the blurry outline visible in the hallway.
"I need to speak with you, Monsieur Rambuteau," she shouted. "I'm not leaving until I do."
Finally the door opened and she stared into portly Monsieur Rambuteau's face.
"Nom de Dieu! What's happened. . .?"
"Do you want to discuss your wife's will in the street?"
Pain and fear shot across his face. He opened the door wider, then shuffled towards the breakfast room.
Her head throbbed with dull regularity. "Do you have any aspirin?"
He pointed to a bottle on the table. Aimee shook out two, gulped them down with water, and helped herself to ice from the freezer.
"Merci," she said. She stuck the ice in a clear plastic bag, twisted it, and applied it to the lump on her head, wincing.
"Who are Thierry Rambuteau's real parents?"
He sat down heavily. "Did my son do this to you?"
"That wasn't my question but he's certainly on my list."
"Leave the past alone," he said.
"That phrase is getting monotonous," she said. "I don't like people trying to kill me because I'm curious."
She pulled out the folder and slapped it on the white melamine-topped table. "If you won't tell me, this lawyer, Monsieur Barrault, will."
"You stole that!" Monsieur Rambuteau accused.
"You offered to let me use this, if you want to get technical." She slowly set her Glock on a sunflowered plate, her eyes never leaving his face. Half of her skull had frozen from the ice and the other half ached dully. "I'm not threatening you, Monsieur Rambuteau, but I thought you'd like to see what the big boys use when they need information. But I went to polite detective school. We ask first," she said.
His hand shook as he reached for a bottle of yellow pills. "I'm preventing the reading of my wife's will with a court order. So whatever you do won't matter."
"I'll contest that as public domain information," she said. "Within three days, Monsieur, it can be published as a legal document. What exactly are you hiding?"
"Nathalie was naive, too trusting." He shook his head. "Look, I'll hire you. Pay you to stop further damage. The war's been over fifty years, people have made new lives. Some secrets are better left that way. My son's certainly is."
"Two Jews have been murdered so far, and I'm next," she said. What would it take to reach him? "You better start talking because everything points to Thierry Rambuteau. Who is he?"
He glanced around furtively, as if someone would overhear.
"I had no idea Nathalie changed her will," he said. "We never agreed over him. Maybe she'd been drinking. Why should the mistakes we make when young stay with us all our life?"
She wasn't sure what he meant but he appeared fatigued and wiped his brow.
"Cut to the chase, Monsieur." Her head pounded and her patience was exhausted. "Who is he?"
"During the war, Nathalie was an actress, I did lighting and camera work for Coliseum. We worked with Allegret, the director, in the same acting troupe with Simone Signoret." A melancholy smile crossed his face. "Nathalie never tired of telling everyone that. Anyway, Coliseum was accused of being a collaborationist film company and later grew to become Paricor. But then we just made movies and Goebbels made the propaganda. And like everyone in France, we had to get Gestapo permission for anything we did. At that time, cutting your toenails required approval from the Gestapo Kommandantur, so I've never understood the uproar about collaborators. We all were, if you look at it like that."
Maybe that was true, but it reminded her of the joke about the Resistance. Fewer than five in a hundred of the French had ever joined, but if you talked to anyone today over sixty, they'd all been card-carrying members.
He paused, sadness washing over his face. "Anyway, at Liberation we had a stillborn child. My wife couldn't get over it, but then, you see, so many babies came out stillborn during the war. Maybe it was the lack of food. But Nathalie felt so guilty. Everyone went crazy happy at Liberation. Our saviors, the Allies, were rolling in and here she was about to commit suicide."
His breath came in labored spurts now and his face was flushed. "On the street we'd see parades of women with their heads shaved. They'd slept with Nazis."
"Monsieur, some water?" she interrupted. She passed the bottle of yellow pills across the table towards him.
"Merci," he said, gulping the water with more pills.
"What does this have to do with Thierry?" she said.
"There was a knock on our door one night. Little Sarah, a girl really, held a baby in her arms. I knew her father, Ruben."
"Sarah?" she said. Where had she seen that name? Then her brain clicked—she'd seen it on Lili's yarn list next to Hecht's! "What was her last name?"
Claude Rambuteau shook his head. "I don't remember. Her father worked on the camera crew before the war, a Jew, but. . ." His eyes glazed, then he continued. "Anyway, it was such a shock, I hadn't seen her for several years. Sarah's head had been shaved and an ugly tar swastika branded on her forehead. She cried and moaned at our door. 'My baby is hungry, my milk has dried up, and he's going to die.' The baby cried piteously. I noticed on her torn dress a dark outline of material where a star had been sewn. 'Where is your family?' I asked. She just shook her head. Then she said, 'No one will give me milk for my Nazi bastard.'
"I told her that I couldn't help her. People might suspect me of collaborating. Especially since I'd worked at Coliseum all during the war. She looked at my wife and said that the baby would die if he went with her and she didn't know anyone else to ask. She said she knew we'd had a baby, couldn't my wife nurse hers, too? I told her our baby had died."
Rambuteau closed his eyes. "She begged me, got on her hands and knees in the doorway. She said she knew he'd be safe with us because we had connections. Bands of Resistance vigilantes roamed Paris, out for revenge. I tell you, it was more dangerous to be on the streets after the Germans left than before, if they thought you'd collaborated."
He took a few deep breaths, then kept talking determinedly. "All of a sudden, my wife took the crying baby in her arms. She opened her blouse and instinctively the infant sucked greedily. Nathalie still had milk and her face filled with happiness. I knew then we'd keep the baby. So you see, Nathalie is his real mother. She gave him milk and life, I've always told her that. I never saw Sarah again. She brought us the baby because we were rightists and no one would ever suspect."