He turned the corner, abruptly bouncing into a stocky black-suited figure ahead of him.
"Ça va, Monsieur Griffe? So wonderful you are here," said Henri Quimper, rosy-cheeked and smiling.
Too late to escape. Henri Quimper, Hartmuth's Belgian trade counterpart, embraced and kissed him on both cheeks. He nudged Hartmuth conspiratorially. "The French think they can put one over on us, eh?"
Hartmuth, his brow beading with sweat, nodded uneasily. He had no idea what Quimper meant.
Heralded by prodigious clouds of cigar smoke, a group of delegates walked towards them down the hall.
Cazaux, the French trade minister and probable appointee for the prime minister, strode among them. He beamed, seeing Quimper and Hartmuth together.
"Ah, Monsieur Griffe, bienvenu!" he said, greeting Hartmuth warmly and gripping his shoulder. His cheeks were mapped by spidery purple veins. "Spare me a few words? All these meetings. . ." Cazaux shrugged, smiling.
Hartmuth had forgotten how Frenchmen punctuated their sentences by throwing their arms in the air. The muscles in Cazaux's ropy neck twitched when he spoke.
Hartmuth nodded. He knew the election was to take place the next week, and Cazaux's party was heavily invested in the trade issue. Hartmuth's job would be to bolster Cazaux by signing the trade agreement. The Werewolves had ordered it. Unter den Linden.
Cazaux and Hartmuth moved to an alcove overlooking the limestone courtyard.
"I'm concerned," Cazaux said. "This new addendum, these exclusionary quotas—frankly, I'm worried about what might happen."
"Minister Cazaux, I'm not sure of your meaning," Hartmuth replied cautiously.
"You know and I know parts of this treaty carry things a bit far," Cazaux said. "I'll speak for myself. The quotas border on fascism."
Mentally, Hartmuth agreed. After being in diplomatic circles for so many years, however, he knew enough to keep his real feeling to himself. "After a thorough review I'll have a better understanding," he said.
"I feel our thinking is probably very close on this," Cazaux said, lowering his voice. "A dilemma for me because my government prefers to maintain the status quo, reduce unemployment, and pacify les conservatives. This treaty is the only way we can pass economic benefits on throughout Europe, standardize trade, and get uniform guidelines."
"I understand," Hartmuth said, not eager for Cazaux's added pressure. No more needed to be said.
The two men rejoined Quimper and the other delegates in the hall. More kissing and jovial greetings were exchanged. Hartmuth excused himself as soon as it was diplomatically possible and escaped down the staircase. He paused on the marble landing, a floor below, and leaned against an antique tapestry, a forested scene with a naked wood nymph stuffing grapes into her mouth, juice dribbling down her chin.
As he stood there, alone between floors, Sarah's face appeared to him in a vision, her incredibly blue eyes laughing. What he wouldn't give to change the past!
But he was just a lonely old man full of regrets he'd tried to leave behind with the war. I'm pathetic, he thought, and waited for the ache in his heart to subside to a dull throb.
Thursday Afternoon
A PUNGENT SMELL OF cabbage borscht clung to the hallway of 64 rue des Rosiers. Abraham Stein answered Aimee's knock, his faded maroon yarmulke nestled among his gray streaked black curls, a purple scarf riding his thin shoulders. She wanted to turn away, ashamed to intrude upon his grief.
"What do you want?" he said.
Aimee twisted her hair, still damp from swimming, behind her ears.
"Monsieur Stein, I need to talk with you about your mother," she said.
"This isn't the time." He turned to close the door.
"I'm sorry. Please forgive me but murder is never convenient," she said, wedging behind him, afraid he'd shut the door in her face.
"We're sitting shiva."
Her blank look and foot inside the door forced him to explain.
"A ritual mourning. Shiva helps acknowledge our suffering while we pray for the dead."
"Please excuse me, this will only take a few minutes of your time," she said. "Then I promise I'll go."
He put his scarf over his head and led her into the dark-paneled living room. An open prayer book rested on the polished pine sideboard. The dining-room mirror was swathed in black cloth. Lit tapers sputtered in pools of wax, giving off only a faint light. Women clad in black, moaning, rocked back and forth on sticklike chairs and orange crates.
She kept her head down. She didn't want to breathe the old, sad smell of these people.
A young rabbi, his ill-fitting jacket hanging off him, greeted her in a jumble of Hebrew and French as they passed him. She wanted to flee this apartment, so dark and heavy with grief.
She overheard French rap from a radio in a back room, where sulky teenagers congregated by an open door.
The crime-scene tape was gone but the insistent noise of the leaky faucet in the dingy bathroom and aura of death remained. She'd always see the scuffed black shoe with the worn heel and the vacant white face carved by that swastika. An odd, tilted swastika with rounded edges.
The crime-scene technicians had left neat stacks of Lili Stein's personal items on the rolltop desk. The bloated angelfish and tank were gone. A knitting basket full of thick needles and multicolored yarn spilled out across the hand-crocheted bedspread. Issues of the Hebrew Times were piled in the corner and beside the bed.
"Yours?" She picked up a folded section. The paper crinkled and a color supplement fell out.
"Maman ignored French newspapers," he said. "Refused to own a television. Her only extravagance was a subscription to the Hebrew newspaper from Tel Aviv."
The boards on the window facing the cobbled courtyard were gone. Ribbons of yellow crime-scene tape crisscrossed the view of the drab light well below.
"Why did your mother board up the window?"
He shrugged. "She always said the noise bothered her and she wanted privacy."
Aimee pulled a wicker chair, the only chair in the room, towards the window. The uneven chair legs wobbled, one didn't touch the floor. She indicated he should sit on the bed.
"Monsieur Stein, let's. . ."
He interrupted. "What were you doing in this room?"
She wanted to tell him the truth, tell him how cornered and confused she felt. After the explosion, when her father's charred remains had been carted away, she had lain in the hospital. No one had talked to her, explained their investigation. Some young flic had questioned her during burn treatment as if she'd been the perpetrator.
Mentally, she made a sign of the cross, again begging for the dead woman's forgiveness.
"Frankly, this is classified but, Monsieur, I think you deserve to know," she said.
"Eh?" But he sat down on the bed.
"Your mother was the focus of a police operation mounted to obtain evidence against right-wing groups like Les Blancs Nationaux."
Abraham Stein's eyes widened.
How could she lie to this poor man?
But she didn't know any other way.
Not only Leduc Detective's depleted bank account and overdue taxes forced her to take this case. Part of her had to prove she could still be a detective: flics or not, justice would be done her way, administered in a way victims' families rarely saw. The other part was her father's honor.
Abraham cleared his throat, "She was cooperating with the flics? Doesn't make sense. Maman avoided anything to do with the war, politics, or police."