“Like one?”
“We’re not supposed to accept food from strangers,” he said.
“Of course, but I’m Toulouse-Lautrec.” René winked. “You know me, eh?”
The boy nodded. René put the warm pastry bag in the boy’s cold hands.
“Voilà.” René nodded. “Share them with friends.”
The boy shook his head. “We haven’t been there long. But I know the concierge; I help him with jobs.”
A loner? René noticed now the boy kept apart from the others crowding around the teacher.
“Jobs, like what?”
“I carried his hammer when he fixed the gutter.”
The gutter bordering the roof? René remembered the layout Aimée had described. Had the boy seen something?
“So your apartment looks out onto the roof with the scaffolding?”
The boy nodded.
“Dangerous, non. Climbing at that height for a little boy!”
“Easy,” he said. “Maman says I climb like a monkey.”
“Even for someone with short legs, like me?”
The boy’s eyes sparkled for the first time. “You can see everything from up there. The roofs, the Tour Eiffel, even people cooking and getting undressed!”
A lonely, mischievous boy who watched life from the rooftop? René thought fast.
“But you couldn’t have seen those men on the roof with the scaffolding last night. You must have been in bed.”
“I go to bed when I want!” The boy pointed again to the pastel René held. “She looks sad,” he said, his mouth full. “Like Maman looks,” he went on, brushing his hair from his eyes. He had no gloves.
René looked for the teacher. She stood surrounded by a group of bundled-up children, explaining how the accordion music came from ivory keys and a sound box.
“What happened to your legs? Why didn’t they grow?” The boy licked the crumbs from his chapped lips.
René had asked the same question when he’d realized he’d never grow like other children and would always have to reach up for door handles, get on his tiptoes to grasp a boiling kettle, hike himself up to sit on a chair from which his legs always dangled.
“When I was young, something happened and my legs never caught up with my body,” René said.
“Sometimes things shouldn’t catch up, my maman says, or we’d be in the street.”
René wanted to steer this conversation back to the roof. But he didn’t feel much like a detective, questioning a little boy who looked as though he wore the clothes he’d slept in. Still, he had to try.
“So you didn’t see what happened last night, you were asleep.”
“Mais non, I heard a shot, saw a flash like on the télé. Then another flash. Maman got mad, said I shouldn’t talk about it.”
Then the boy clapped his hand over his mouth.
Two flashes. Did that mean two shots?
“You’re sure?”
He nodded.
Had the boy witnessed the murder?
“Back to school, children,” the teacher said, gathering the group. “Paul, allez-y! Thank Monsieur Toulouse-Lautrec for his help. I’m sure you gathered a lot of information for your report.”
The boy stiffened. René saw the fear in his eyes. What should he do? He slipped a Toulouse-Lautrec guide into Paul’s hand and grinned at the teacher.
A look of relief flooded Paul’s pale face. René waved goodbye, pulled out his phone, and called Aimée.
“I found a witness,” he said.
“Good job!” she said. “So you did some poking around.”
René heard pride in her voice. He’d never tell her about this foolish costume.
“Can you get this person to come forward and testify?” Aimée asked.
René hesitated. “There’s a catch. Paul’s maybe nine years old. He lives across from the murder site. He said he saw two flashes on the roof.”
“Two, you’re sure?”
“That’s what he said. He was with a school group. He’s doing a report on Toulouse-Lautrec.”
Pause.
“You mean you . . .” Pause.
Why had he admitted that?
“Bet he could use some homework help,” she said.
“But, Aimée—”
“I’m sure you can handle it, René. Talk to his mother. I’ve got other fish to fry at the Préfecture.”
RENÉ SPENT the next freezing hour shifting from foot to foot on the cobblestones, keeping watch on the building and avoiding the tourists. The only people he saw enter the building were a team from EDF, Electricité de France, two men who spent ten minutes inside and then left.
As dusk fell, shading the buildings, René trudged up the long staircase of Paul’s house armed with more warm pastries. Up six flights of worn wooden steps, the smells of fried onions and garlic permeating the stairwell. It was an old building with a WC shared by two floors on alternate landings.
His hip ached and he wished for an elevator, even one like the wire-framed, grunting affair at their office. He’d speak with Paul’s mother first; he’d have to overcome Paul’s fear in order to coax him to elaborate on what he’d seen.
René knocked on the first door. No answer. The second was answered by a toothless old man bundled in sweaters.
“Try next door,” the old man said, his gums working.
At the third, he heard reggae music. He knocked. The music lowered and the door scraped open. He saw a dark, low-ceilinged room with beaded curtains partitioning off a galley kitchen.
“Oui?” said Paul, halfway behind the door.
“Remember me?” René smiled.
Paul’s large brown eyes blinked. “Maman’s sleeping.”
Too bad, he would have liked to speak with her.
René handed Paul the bag of pastries. “I can’t stay long but I forgot to tell you about my accident and why I painted horses. See?” René pulled out the book he’d bought at a shop on Place des Abbesses. He flipped open to the page of Toulouse-Lautrec’s early sketches.
“Beautiful . . . they look like they’re breathing.”
René agreed. The rounded flanks and flared nostrils brought the racehorses to life.
“Let’s look at it on the roof.”
Paul shook his head. “Why?”
“Didn’t you say it was easy to go there?”
Reluctance gave way to a mischievous look in his eyes. He opened the door wider. “Shhh!” Bottles clinked behind him, one crashed to the floor.
“Let’s go,” René said.
René followed Paul to the skylight at the end of the hall, helped him take down the ladder, and together they steadied it.
“After you,” René said, groaning inwardly.
Paul climbed the ladder, popped open the skylight. “The lock’s simple, I can open it myself. The concierge showed me how.”
A lonely boy with a roof for a playground? The darkening view, an expanse of jagged rooftops framing the Paris skyline, made the aching climb worth it. He dealt with heights every day, knew how to balance the awkwardness of his ill-proportioned body and, when climbing, to look up, to concentrate on his goal. He followed a nimble Paul, climbing the rusted iron rungs protruding from the cement wall.
René trained his binoculars, hanging from a strap around his neck, on the scaffolding. He took a Paris Match magazine from his pocket, set it on the damp ledge, and sat.
“My teacher says you’re an actor,” Paul said. “You act like Monsieur Toulouse-Lautrec so we can understand his work.”
“She’s right.” René nodded. “I was going to tell you.”
“Tell me about the horses,” Paul said.
And René told him how Toulouse-Lautrec had fallen from a horse. Due to genetic weakness resulting from family intermarriages, his bones had been too weak to knit together. “His father, the comte, had stables of racing horses, heavy-footed Clydesdales for work, and even ponies for visiting children. All that summer after the accident, Toulouse-Lautrec sat in a special wicker wheelchair and drew them. They were his friends. His only friends.”