On the landing she paused and listened. She took the back stairs just in case. Narrow winding rusty ones. And all the while she kept talking to Christian, making him move his feet, and slapping him awake.
By the time the pompiers arrived, they’d made it to the boulevard and Christian’s eyelids were fluttering. The blue-suited crew took over, tying him down in their ambulance van and giving him a shot of Narcan, the junkie jaws of life. He struggled to sit upright and almost gave one of the crew a black eye.
“Where am I?” he asked.
“Christian, you’re safe,” she said.
“We’ll stabilize him at the hospital,” the paramedic said, getting an IV going in Christian’s arm. The emergency van took off.
IN THE café’s tarnished wall mirrors, Aimée watched the two men, huddled in conversation. She didn’t know which was Nessim,
Michel’s uncle. She remembered what she and René had found out about his laundering of profits and false bankruptcies.
Where was Jules?
Too bad she couldn’t see their mouths well enough to read their lips. The heavyset one, wearing wire-framed glasses and with a tonsure of graying frizzy hair, drew with his finger on the table. The man across from him, completely bald, nodded his head from time to time.
A certain urgency permeated the late evening crowd, mostly habitues of the quartier. Conversation buzzed at the crowded zinc bar, while the miniskirted cashier with the beehive hairdo made change and shouted orders back to the kitchen through the dense haze of cigarette smoke.
A harried waiter leaned across her table. He whisked aside crumbs, wiped the marble top with a blue cloth.
“Un café noir,” Aimée said.
He cocked his head and disappeared.
Outside, in the narrow street, Aimée saw droplets of water fall on carts parked on the broken pavement. A fitful July rain danced and skirted the façades, teasing Parisians anxious for the arrival of a tepid August that still seemed too far off. Trucks blocked access to the small square.
She surveyed the small Bar Tabac. An Asian man, his cell phone on the table, took orders from a fabric catalog; two shop girls picked at an Auvergnat salad; an older blond hooker she’d seen on Saint Denis ate choucroute, part of the day’s Alsatian sausage special, and kept an eye on the racing results flashing on the télé perched above the bar.
Aimée realized the place stretched from one street to the other; the bar side fronted busy rue d’Aboukir while the restaurant tables opened to narrow rue Ste-Foy. The women, with their clients, disappeared into Passage Ste-Foy, a covered alleyway wedged between peeling buildings. And right across from her table. Perfect for a getaway, Aimée thought.
She watched the two men. Friar Tuck shook his head, pulled a notebook from his pocket, and wrote something. Aimée couldn’t see the other man’s reaction since the waiter had appeared with her café noir and blocked the mirror.
When she could see again, they’d stood up, their chairs scraping the linoleum, and were headed out the glass doors. Aimée took a gulp of espresso and threw some francs on the table.
They paused in front of the old stone portal of the passage by the Roseline sign. She couldn’t see their faces, only their black suit jackets beaded with rain and the frizzy-haired man’s fist pounding his palm. And then the other man violently shook his fist.
Aimée pulled the leather jacket’s collar up for protection against the rain and turned to study the café window. Men clustered in doorways, leaning on their hand trucks and smoking. She tried to appear nonchalant as rain beat down, avoiding a tall African woman in blue leather hot pants sashaying into the passage.
And then they were gone. One man walked toward the square and the other disappeared into the passage.
Whom should she follow?
The heavyset man took off down the street in a waiting black Peugeot.
She slipped into the graffiti-covered sandstone passage. A blackened crust of grime coated the damp walls. Drainpipes leaned crookedly, loose electric wires trailed from the ceiling. The passage opened to an unroofed area lined with green garbage bins, then forked toward some stairs, mounting to vestiges of the ancient ramparts.
On her left was an entrance to the crumbling, flaking stairway. A musty coldness hit her. The stairs sagged and creaked as she mounted them. She heard moans from behind doors, and over the passage roof came the whine of sewing machines.
From a coved window on the small landing she saw the man’s shiny bald dome in the apartment across the way. Instead of a light well where the buildings joined, there was open space. In medieval times, she imagined neighbors conversing with each other across the way or the king’s men leaning out and throttling their enemies.
The bald man turned. And before she could duck, he saw her staring at him. She moved aside.
Opposite her, a door opened. Inside the room, a man combed his stringy hair with his fingers before a cracked mirror. His false teeth on the cheap dresser caught the light.
“Adieu, chéri,” the pute said, tucking franc notes into the tiny pocket of her blue leather hot pants. She shut the door, showing no surprise at seeing Aimée on the landing.
“My horoscope today said quick and easy.” She rolled her eyes. “Not even slow and hard!”
Aimée controlled her shudder at the thought of the old man.
“Know him?” Aimée gestured across the window to the bald man. “Over there.”
“Not as a client but … ” the pute said, her voice trailing off.
Aimée hoped she invited a confidence. She folded a hundred-franc note and gingerly slipped it into the woman’s already stuffed pocket.
“As my landlord,” the woman continued, as if there’d been no pause. “The salaud’s raising our rent and won’t even fix the hall lights. At night, with my johns, I have to use a flashlight.”
“His name?”
“You a flic?”
It was Aimée’s turn to roll her eyes. “Would I hunt small fry like this?”
“Didn’t think so, but then you could be some new type of undercover,” the woman said.
“People hire me,” Aimée said. “Kind of like you. Every job isn’t picture-perfect or smooth sailing but it keeps my interest.” She smiled. “I get bored easily.”
“You mounting a sting?”
He must be a bigger fish than she thought.
Aimée looked down to cover her surprise. The woman’s turquoise platform heels were worn down on the sides. She pounded the cobbles, all right.
“Mais could I tell you even if I wanted to?” Aimée said.
The pute grinned. “Just get Nessim Mamou into hot water … maybe it will warm him up.”
So that was Nessim, Michel’s shady uncle. “I’m looking for Jules, his partner.”
The prostitute shook her head.
“Distinguished, white-haired mec, nice tan.”
The woman nodded. “He’s around.”
She saw Nessim scurry through the passage. Aimée walked down the stairs, and past the overflowing green bins of garbage marked PROPRIÉTÉ DE PARIS.
She strode over the pitted cobbles, toward the punch of machines coming from the rear courtyard, as if she knew where she was going. She didn’t. Her teeth ached from clamping down so tightly. But attitude counted, especially in the Sentier.
She’d lost him.
Reaching the last courtyard, the one with a faded sign saying WASNARD, she veered to the left. She mounted the curved wooden stairs, the treads of which were grooved and worn. A cotton taste filled her mouth. Dry and bland. What if someone asked her why she was here? She had to think of something quickly. And she had to find out where Nessim Mamou had gone.