Thursday Afternoon
OUSMANE SADA’S FEVERISH brow was beaded with sweat. He felt worse than before his visit to the marabout. Across from the sewing factory where he worked, he stopped in a Sentier café.
A few old men played backgammon at a Formica table. It took a while before the owner excused himself and asked Ousmane, in a brisk tone, what he wanted. Propping himself up at the zinc counter, parched and shaky, Ousmane allowed himself one small luxury. He ordered a steaming glass cup of sweet black tea, mint flavored. So soothing and such a comfort. Then he’d find his straw mattress and sleep his fever off. He’d promised himself he’d try what his maman had always advised … nothing sweats out a fever like hot, sweet mint tea, she’d always said.
Idrissa needed him in a few hours … already he was feeling better. Mandinkas never let the grass grow under a baobab tree, he remembered his father saying. He paid for the tea, and the owner acknowledged his tip with a nod of his head.
Ousmane made his way toward the sewing factory downstairs in the narrow Passage Ste-Foy. The dark passage’s light source was the flickering fluorescent bulbs in an upstairs office. Ousmane saw the yellow feather fetish, an omen of evil, just before he stepped on it. Too late. It crunched under his scuffed shoe. In horror, he clutched the stone wall. No way to reverse it, he knew. He’d been cursed for the second time that week.
Thursday Afternoon
AIMÉE TOOK care of Léo’s online account, giving him a three-day grace period, then pulled up the virus she and René had discovered and neutered in Media 9’s site. She wrote new code, programming the virus to self-destruct in twenty-four hours and rescind all its commands and any further ones. After rechecking and running a test, she sent the virus into the Visa postage-metering system. Half of France would thank her if they found out she’d given them a grace period. But they wouldn’t.
Knocks came from her glass-paned office door. She hit Save, then Quit, and closed her laptop.
She opened the door to a woman with slate gray eyes wearing black-framed glasses on a pale, sharp-angled face.
“Fräulein Leduc?” the woman asked. Her silk polka-dotted scarf fluttered in the hall window air, hot and exhaust-laden from the back alley.
“Oui?”
“I’m Gisela. We need to talk.”
“Concerning?”
“My mother and yours.”
Taken aback, Aimée kept her hand rigid on the knob.
“What do you mean … who’s your mother?
“Past tense seems the operative word here,” said the woman. “Ulrike Rofmein.”
Aimée gripped the door handle. “You’d better come in.”
“We’re Hitler’s grandchildren, you know,” the woman said. “The lost generation.”
Aimée flinched. Speak for yourself, she wanted to say—it had nothing to do with her.
“And it affects you,” Gisela said, as if she read Aimée’s thoughts.”
The hair on Aimée’s neck rose.
Gisela strode into the office, stopping at a chair. Her gaze traveled over the filigreed-iron balcony rail, the eighteenth century still life hung above digital scanners, old sepia maps, and Interpol posters.
“May I?”
“Sit down,” Aimée said. She needed a drink. “Like an espresso?”
“Grazie,” Gisela said, smiling. “We were raised in Italy.”
“We?” Aimée twisted the black metal arm off the Lavazza espresso machine.
“My twin, Marthe,” Gisela said. “Papa changed our names. Later, when I was in Universität,” she leaned forward, “I came to the realization.”
“Realization?”
Gisela lowered her voice, as if to highlight the importance of her words. “I don’t need to hide, none of us do,” she said. “We weren’t the criminals. They were. We’re the victims.”
“What do you know about my mother?”
Gisela rubbed her long fingers over Aimée’s desk.
“Who really and truly knows anyone? That’s the point.”
Aimée didn’t know how to reply. Something about this Gisela didn’t feel right.
Aimée slammed the used coffee grounds into the trash.
Gisela didn’t flinch. She fixed Aimée with a long stare.
“The Revolution was their child,” Gisela said. “Not us.”
Maybe that was true.
Aimée pressed the black switch on her machine. A grumbling answered, then a slow measured hiss.
“I don’t understand how you found me, Gisela, or why you’re here,” Aimée said.
“We’ve inherited the legacy,” Gisela said. “A badge of shame that I overturned.”
Aimée let the steaming espresso drip into a demitasse cup. As she passed Gisela the faïence sugar bowl, their fingers touched, quivered, and held. It felt both intimate and unnerving.
Aimée pulled her hand away. They sipped, quiet for a moment.
She wondered what Gisela’s angle was and why she seemed strangely familiar.
“What do you mean ‘overturned,’ Gisela?”
“We’re going to change Europe,” she said, “for the better.”
“How?”
“Do something to make people understand,” Gisela said.
Her eye rested on Leduc Detective’s client list tacked on a cork board. “Computer security, ja?” She didn’t wait for a response. “When you go home and your boyfriend asks about your day, all you can say is ‘I can’t tell you,’ right?”
If I had a boyfriend, Aimée almost said before she could stop herself.
“Gisela, why don’t you answer my questions? Why have you come to me now?”
Gisela sat back, pushed her glasses up on her nose, and nodded as if she’d made a decision. “When I went to Universität in Wiesbaden, I lived with my aunt,” she said, her voice flat. “Every week, I washed her car, waxed it, filled up the tank. The owner of the car wash watched me. I thought he was a dirty old man. After Italy, I was used to it. But one Saturday as I paid, he snickered, asked wasn’t I going to stick him up? I asked him what he meant. He said he remembered my mother, how she liked fast BMWs and how he’d keep quiet if I bombed the late-night Turkish grocer.”
“Papa never told us about our mother.” Gisela took a long sip. “So I ignored the man.”
She took a nonfiltered cigarette from her bag. Didn’t light it, just played with the tobacco threads at the tip. Pulled them out with her thumb and ring finger.
“Aber, he was serious. A few days later, going to class, the tram conductor refused my Bahn pass, said I should go steal a car like my mother, Ulrike Rofmein, did. Another fascist! Then a passenger stood up, pointed to me, and said, ‘My brother has glass in his hip from your bombing, he’s never walked the same since.’ I wanted to say I was a little girl—I didn’t do anything—I wasn’t even in the country. My mother was the outlaw on the run. But contempt glared in their eyes. And icy hate. I ran. For years.”
“What about your sister?”
“Marthe married an Italian, buried herself in a slew of bambinos, and won’t even speak German. Then I met someone,” Gisela said, her gaze wistful. “Big mistake. Turns out he was a reporter writing about ‘Terrorist children of Haader-Rofmein—where are they now? Inhabiting society’s fringe like the parents who abandoned them? Will they stike again?’ … same old scheiss. Live and learn, eh?”
Live and learn … Jacques Caillot had said the same thing.
“What was his name?”
“Martin.”