“Mind if we sit down?” she said, as soon as it seemed sufficiently polite to do so. They sat on a bench by arched windows overlooking the narrow street.
His tense shoulders relaxed as she discussed the photos. Slowly, she began to feed in questions. “Do I remind you of someone, Pascal?” she asked, putting her face closer to his. “From the way you looked at me, I wondered.”
“I used to know a woman,” he said. “Long ago. She looked like you.”
He’d used the past tense. Her hope wavered.
“What was she like?”
He opened his mouth. Then closed it. “Twenty years is a long time. I just was shaken because the resemblance is strong.”
“True. Life can take bizarre turns,” Aimée said. “My mother left when I was eight. Apparently she joined some radical leftists … who knows?” Aimée let her words dangle.
“How old are you?”
She told him.
He leaned forward, tapped his right ear. “Bad ear, speak in this one.”
“My mother was American, perhaps you ran across her.”
It had become less strange to say “my mother.”
He shook his head, looking down at the old floor tiles, but not before she’d seen his eyes flicker in recognition.
She remembered the Frésnes envelope with B. de Chambly on it that Jutta had shown her. “Sydney Leduc was her name but I think she used another one, starting with B.”
She couldn’t read his expression. He kept his head down.
The man knew something. She took a big sip of wine, praying that he’d open up.
“Those were pretty heady times in seventies Paris from what I hear,” she said, aiming for his good ear. “Lots of romance surrounded the radicals, some veered to violence, others to protests.” She kept trying to find the button that would get him to talk. “Our generation seems pretty tame, eh? Even with the World Trade Organization demonstrations.”
Silence.
She wondered if part of his fear stemmed from hearing loss, or the noises around him.
“Talk about a small world,” she said. “Action-Réaction still has a base here in the Sentier. I met some of them, they’re your age.”
He looked up, saw her empty glass. “More wine?” he asked.
“Merci bien,” she smiled.
He didn’t return the smile, just favored her with an intense stare.
He was a hard nut to crack. Harder than the old Nazi collaborator in the Marais! Had she misread the man completely?
Was he simply an older man from the suburbs in the wrong place at the wrong time? Picked up because a homicide happened a block away? After all, she thought, the flics had soon let him go.
He returned and handed her a glass. She’d try one more time.
“You’re kind,” she said, accepting the wine. “I don’t want to burden you too much, but I’ve been thinking of going to therapy over this … to find a way to cope.”
And he was bobbing his head in agreement. “I’m in therapy myself. You know it’s wonderful to be able to talk to someone about things!”
His eyes brightened and he leaned forward. His words gushed forth, as if a peg in a dike had loosened, letting the water flow.
She’d found the right button to push. He spoke of his village, his job, and then she guided him backward to his youth.
“My brother was the smart one. Me, I loved cars. My head was always under a hood. Still is. Mercedes, far as I’m concerned, makes the best engine in the world.”
Aimée nodded. No wonder his hands were grime-stained.
The crowd emptied out of the gallery. Pointed looks were cast in their direction by the staff.
“We better go, Pascal,” she said.
His brow lifted. “Call me Stefan.”
The man was full of surprises.
Down in the street, he motioned her into a darkened apartment doorway. He stood, his face in partial shadows by the letter boxes on the wall. He worried his hands, as if something fought inside him. “I met your mother once,” he said finally.
“What was she like?”
“Sweet, like you,” he said. “She knew how to listen.”
Aimée remembered that about her, too. A quiet attention.
“They told me she went to Africa with Jules,” she said.
He shrugged his shoulders. But he knew, she could feel it.
“I wanted to ask Romain Figeac but he’s dead,” she said. “Murdered.” Stefan averted his eyes. “I don’t know anything about that,” he said. “Now I’ve got to go.
“Stefan, let’s talk more.” She pressed her card into his moist palm. “I appreciate it. No one ever talked to me about her. No one.”
He nodded. Understanding showed in his deep-set eyes.
“It’s not safe to nose around,” he said. “Especially now….” He hesitated. He hailed a passing taxi.
“What do you mean?” She held his arm.
The taxi stopped.
Stefan shook his head. “It means so much to talk with someone. Really talk. But I don’t want you to get hurt.”
He got in the taxi, shut the door, and it sped off.
GREAT! HE fed her a morsel, then he was gone. But not before she got the number, 2173, of the Taxi Bleu.
She walked down rue du Louvre toward her office. The name Stefan repeated in her brain. Where had she seen it? Think, she told herself. But nothing came.
Taxis passed, their blue lights signaling they were free, but she kept walking. Who had murdered Idrissa’s kora player and why? Could Stefan have been involved? Think harder.
Christian said she was in danger. Had the musician been killed to warn Idrissa, or by mistake? And that got her thinking about how Idrissa had disappeared after she’d asked her about Romain Figeac. People hid or disappeared to avoid bills, spouses, jealous lovers, revenge. Or to keep secrets.
She mounted the stairs to her office, flicked on the light. She opened the window onto rue du Louvre and the night sounds: footsteps, the hee-haw of a distant siren, snatches of music from an open car window.
She called Taxi Bleu. But the dispatcher wouldn’t give out the location the taxi had driven to until she’d given him the police number she sometimes used for occasions like this. Morbier’s police number. Montmartre cemetery, the dispatcher finally told her.
She’d gone there to pay for Liane Barolet’s mother’s crypt. Coincidence or …? Something fit here … but what was it? Think! It was as if something stared her in the face.
Cool breezes drifted in, carrying the scent of the Seine.
Her eye rested on the photo of her with her father, the one taken the day before she went to New York as an exchange student. He’d treated her at Angelina’s on rue de Rivoli to the famous hot chocolate so thick one used a spoon.
Then Aimée saw the old Interpol posters fluttering on her wall. One of the black-and-white photos caught her eye. She peered closer. With a jerk, she sat up. She realized she was staring at Stefan.
A younger Stefan, without glasses and gray hair. Very seventies and quite cute.
It said, “Stefan Rohclass="underline" wanted for kidnapping and accomplice to murder of a policeman.” There was no statute of limitations on murder: He was still wanted.
Thursday Night
STEFAN FELT RELEASED, as if the years had lifted and he was floating. It had all bubbled out of him, and it had felt so good. So liberating. He hadn’t told her everything but he’d told her so much. And she’d wanted to hear, like her mother had.
His years of living like a mole were over.
But Jutta’s killer was trying to flush him out. He had to come up with a plan.