“I know you went to Eugénie’s apartment—did you develop those photos for her?”
Youssefa moved fast, around the corner of the table. She started running, her limp noticeable, out into the hall.
“Please, Youssefa, wait!” She shoved the carton on the floor and took off after her.
Aimée barreled into a stack of old film cans, sending them shooting across the wooden floor. She slipped and fell over the metal canisters, wincing as she landed on her aching hip.
Youssefa was gone.
Aimée got up slowly. She figured Youssefa could only have gone into the warren ahead of her, since the hall dead-ended behind her. The windows overlooking the courtyard parking area were open. She heard an unmistakable voice from below. She stopped and listened. A voice described her hair, her jacket, and how she owed his boss.
Dédé.
How could he have found her, unless he’d seen her leave from the back of her office. Or—her heart quickened. She didn’t like to think of it. Unless he’d gotten to René and threatened him. But René didn’t know where she was going—she hadn’t told him.
She heard scuffling down the dark hallway. That was the only direction Youssefa could have gone. She followed the noise.
Youssefa was pounding on a fire exit door, but it was jammed. When she saw Aimée, she reared back like a cornered animal about to attack.
“Let me help you, Youssefa,” she said. “Someone’s after me too.”
“I destroyed the negatives,” she said, her voice cracking. “Leave me alone.”
Why destroy the proof?
“I’m on your side, but as soon as we get out of here, I will,” she said. “A mec called Dédé’s after me.”
Youssefa blinked her good eye.
“Look out the window, check for yourself,” she said. “Dédé’s determined to find me, but he’s not my type either.”
She figured if they got out of here, she’d corner Youssefa and sit on her chest until she told her what the photos meant and why she’d destroyed the negatives.
She aimed several heel kicks until the exit door sagged open.
“Lead the way,” she said.
“Dédé’s a piece of shit,” Youssefa said, hesitating, then limping ahead.
“No argument there,” Aimée said, following her.
She wondered why the sign said EXIT when this web of narrow halls, roofed by skylights, clearly led to another building instead of outside.
Youssefa opened the last door at the end. They entered a hallway, yellowed and scuffed, passing a dim stairwell. She took out a key and unlocked a door.
Uneasiness washed over Aimée but she figured this had to be better than what lay behind her. They entered the back rooms of a small apartment.
Red-flocked wallpaper, old gas sconces, and small upholstered chairs gave the rooms a busy appearance. But the huge black-and-white photos of Edith Piaf on stage and candid shots, filling the walls, lent the rooms a 1940s feel. A scratchy recording of Piaf played from another room. In the corner, tacked onto a dressmaker’s dummy about shoulder height, hung an old-fashioned black dress. Bizarre.
Everything was on a smaller scale, as if made for a little person. René’ would feel right at home, she thought.
“Where are we?”
“At my friend’s,” Youssefa said.
“What is this place … a shrine to Piaf?”
“Close,” Youssefa said. “It’s the Edith Piaf Museum.” She motioned her toward the back, putting her finger on her lips.
She followed Youssefa into a small modern kitchen, all white and stainless steel.
“Go on.” Youssefa gestured toward the back window. “That leads to rue Crespin du Gast.”
She started toward the window, then turned back and pinned Youssefa’s arms behind her back, sliding her onto a wobbly kitchen stool.
“Tell me what ‘ST 196’means,” she said, leaning over her. “Or I go nowhere.”
A momentary hint of regret hit her as Youssefa’s chest heaved and she burst into frightened sobs. But Aimée couldn’t stop now.
“Youssefa, Eugénie passed something to my friend before her car exploded.” She loosened her grip on her arms. “My God, Youssefa, it happened in front of me! I have to know why,” she said. “Not only Dédé, but someone else is after me and my friend.”
“They’ll k-k-kill me,” she said, choking on her sobs.
“Why?”
“I took those photos—they made me!”
Aimée’s mouth felt dry. “Who did?”
“He’s not a general, but they call him one,” Youssefa said. “He likes people to call him that. He likes to hang around with the military.”
Had he sat in the cirque, wearing a uniform?
“What’s his name?”
“He’s known as the general, that’s all.”
“Youssefa, why did they make you take the photos?” she said. Part of her didn’t want to know why. It was too horrendous to contemplate.
“D-d-documentation.” She closed her eyes.
Aimée remembered the looks on the faces in the photos. The way the numbers were pinned to the shirts or the skin of the bare chested. Pinned to their skin. Like temporary branding.
She sank down on the stool next to Youssefa.
As a child, she’d seen cattle in the pasture next to her grandmother’s Auvergne farm. Numbers were clipped on the cows’ ears to distinguish them from herds en route to the abbatoir. She gasped.
“ST… that stands for ‘slaughter,’doesn’t it?” she said, not waiting for her answer. “And 196 would be the military division of the area, according to Algerian military maps.”
Youssefa covered her face, her body quivering with spasms.
That was answer enough for her.
“They wanted you to record it, didn’t they… or he did, the man they refer to as ‘general?’” she said. “Villagers, dissenters, and anyone they could lump together as fundamentalists, right?”
Finally Youssefa nodded. “My family owned a photo shop. We sold cameras, developed film. Then one day the military rounded everyone up in the square, called us Islamic zealots,” she muttered. “Herded us into grain trucks and took us out in the bled. Dropped us near big hangars storing wheat. Someone had told them 1 knew photography.” Youssefa rubbed her good eye. “They shoved a Minolta in my hand, put a box of film at my feet, and said, ‘Shoot.'”
Horrified, Aimée thought of all those faces.
“It took days,” Youssefa said, her voice growing curiously detached. “At the end my fingers didn’t work, and I couldn’t stand up. They did this.” She pointed to her scars and her eye. “But I lived. I owed the victims. That’s why I hid the negatives. The military didn’t care, all they wanted were prints recorded in black and white.”
Like Cambodia, Aimée thought, sickened. Wholesale mass killings of innocents by the military. Slaughtered by their own forces, which spoke to the madness of the military mind.
“How did you get out?”
“She helped me,” Youssefa said simply.
“Eugénie?”
“She’s my AFL contact’s cousin.”
Of course! Aimée remembered the AFL’s hunger-strike flyer with Youssefa’s name on it, and Sylvie’s membership, starting in the Sorbonne. Now things added up.
“Sylvie Cardet was known as Eugénie Grandet,” Aimée said.
Youssefa shrugged, “I don’t know.”
“But what was she doing with those photos?”
Youssefa looked down.
“I showed them to her, told her about the massacres,” she said. “Then Eugénie found out that everything was a sham.”