She motioned to Aimee. They sat together on a wooden bench in the dark paved entrance.
"Walking on stone too much-that does it." She'd taken off her shoe and was rubbing the sole of her foot. "Those stairs going to Lili's used to be wooden. This stone gets my bunions hurting."
"Is that where the bloody footsteps were?" Startled, Aimee remembered Rachel's description. Morbier's men had found evidence of Lili Stein's blood there also.
"You don't give up, do you?"
"No one deserves to die like that," Aimee said, her face flushed. "Yet every time I ask questions about Lili's past, people don't want to talk. Why don't I chase the neo-Nazis, they say, do something concrete?"
Rachel kept rubbing her foot and didn't look at Aimee.
"I don't care where you fit into Lili Stein's past," Aimee said. "You won't talk to me because you think I'll judge you. No one my age would understand what you went through during the Occupation, right?"
Aimee attempted to keep her voice neutral, but she wasn't succeeding. "Who gives you the right to decide? And even if I can't understand, do you want the horror of what happened to be hidden forever?"
Rachel still avoided Aimee's gaze.
"Look at my face, Rachel," Aimee said.
Rachel shook her head.
"Lili's murder wasn't a skinhead special. That swastika was SS Waffen style," she said. "The SS…don't you see that? Or maybe you don't want to."
Rachel shrugged. "You're the one with the big theories."
Aimee sat back, feeling defeated as the hard bench cut into the burned spot on her spine. She shook her head and spoke as if to herself. "Who's next?"
Rachel sighed. "Arlette's murder happened after a big roundup of Jews in the Marais," she said.
Aimee froze.
Rachel's hands sliced the air, punctuating her words. "Jews kept indoors after that. We only bought things at certain hours of the day, we were even afraid to do that. That's when the Gestapo started more night raids. Almost every night. I'll never forget. Middle of the night, the squeal of brakes in the street and footsteps came pounding up the stairs. Would they stop at your apartment? Yell 'Open up' and bash in your door with their jackboots? Or would they keep going and pick on someone else that night? My neighbor down the hall beat them to it. When they were breaking down her door, she grabbed her two sleeping babies and jumped out the window, right onto rue des Rosiers." Rachel pointed to the street. "In front of this building. I like to think those babies slept on through to heaven."
Aimee sensed something odd in the way Rachel spoke, but she couldn't put her finger on it. Rachel took a deep breath and continued. "At Lili's apartment they couldn't get the blood off those wood steps. No one would go upstairs, they ended up just paving them over with stucco." She leaned close to Aimee's ear.
Aimee shifted on the dark, narrow bench.
Rachel whispered, "Some say they were Lili's bloody footprints because they were small. But Lili was gone. She didn't come back until Liberation and so much was going on, no one thought to question her. I asked her once about the concierge's murder she witnessed but she wouldn't elaborate. She never wanted to talk about the Occupation, said the war was over. She liked telling her son how she dealt with collaborators, though." She added, "Lili could be mean sometimes."
"Who found Arlette, the concierge?" Aimee asked.
"Javel. Seems he came courting later in the evening, saw a lot of blood. He found her in the light well, her brains all over."
"What do you mean, 'a lot of blood'?" Aimee said.
"I wasn't there but that's what I heard." Rachel Blum wedged her shoe back on and slowly rose to her feet. "I tell you, people did wonder about Arlette's murder since she wasn't Jewish. Rumor had it she was a BOF, but then everyone in Paris who could did that."
"BOF?"
"Beurre, oeufs, fromage-butter, eggs, and cheese," Rachel said. "That was the currency of the black market. You'd be surprised to know how many supposed Resistance members made fortunes that way. Everyone was jealous of those BOFs. I remember Arlette as silly and greedy. Always talking about her fiance. With Lili gone, I suppose no one will ever know."
Aimee wondered why, if Lili had seen a murder, she hadn't told anyone.
Rachel turned and stared hard at Aimee. "No good comes of bringing all this up again," she said. "Leave the dead alone."
"This isn't the first time I've heard that. Are you going to put more obstacles in my way, Rachel? Threaten me again?"
Rachel shook her head stubbornly.
"You sent me the fax!" Aimee said.
"I'll say it once more." Rachel's eyes hardened. "Forget the past, it's over."
"No, Rachel." Aimee stood up. The story made sense now. "You must relive it every day. Were you an informer? Fifty years isn't punishment enough, is it?"
Rachel's bravado disintegrated and she covered her face with her hands. "It wasn't supposed to happen that way," she wailed. "They got the wrong apartment. I didn't mean to!"
"How can you tell me to forget the past?" Aimee said. "You are haunted by it."
"Three days later they took all of us."
Aimee shook her head. Rachel remained hunched over, her eyes glazed and far off.
Aimee let herself out, emerging into busy rue des Rosiers. Lili's staircase contained answers. How to obtain them was the problem. A big problem.
She approached Abraham, ignoring Sinta's look. He cleared his throat.
"We need to talk," she said.
"D'accord." He turned to Sinta, but she'd already gone.
They walked slowly down the rue des Rosiers, past the Stein shop and towards the rue du Temple. At the Place Ste. Avoie, opposite graffitied Roman pillars, they sat down at an outdoor cafe.
"I apologize, Mademoiselle Leduc. You mean well, I know. The rabbi at Temple E'manuel told me I should be more helpful, not so intolerant." Abraham Stein looked down at his hands.
She kept silent until the waiter served him a mineral water and her a double cafe crème.
"Things are difficult for you now, Monsieur Stein," she said. "I understand."
On the sidewalk, a father grabbed his toddler daughter, who'd tripped on the curb, catching her before she tumbled into an oncoming car. He smothered her tears in a hug, then plopped her on his shoulders.
Aimee recalled her twelfth birthday when she refused to let her father continue chaperoning her to ballet lessons. Oddly, he hadn't been upset. He'd just shaken his head in exasperation, saying, "You may be half French but you're all Parisian, every stubborn bit of you." Then he hugged her long and hard, something he'd done rarely after her mother had left.
"What have you found out?" he said.
She shook off the memories. "Last night I enlisted with Les Blancs Nationaux and almost bashed your synagogue."
Abraham choked on his mineral water. "What?"
She told him about the neo-Nazi meeting at the ClicClac and their target. She neglected the part about her shoulder and Yves.
His eyes opened wide in alarm.
"Please detail for me what your mother did last Wednesday afternoon."
He stopped and thought. "Wednesdays she usually took the afternoon off, ran errands, bought special food for Shabbat."
"Did she cook?"
He shook his head. "Normally we have Wednesday supper at my nephew Ital's apartment. But that evening Maman never showed up. So I came looking for her."
"Ital lives nearby?"
"Around the corner on rue Pavee."
She stirred her coffee excitedly. "Near the cobbler Javel's shop?"
"Next door."
Somehow this all fit, she thought, remembering the newly heeled shoes in the closet Sinta had commented on. "Had she picked up a pair of shoes from Javel's that day?"
He paused. "Ital's daughter's bat mitzvah is next week. Maman mentioned something about shoes. I'm not sure."
"What else did she do?"
"She'd sort the garbage Wednesdays for me to put in the light well, then come over."
Aimee almost dropped her spoon. Morbier's men had found evidence of a struggle near the garbage.