“He will?”
“Trust me. Buy a pay-as-you-go cell phone. Call me. I have a plan.”
She checked the peephole, then tossed her lipstick tube to Meizi. “A little color does wonders, Meizi. Keep it.”
She opened the door and smiled at René.
“Merci, Aimée.” His brow was beaded with perspiration. He held a bouquet of blue forget-me-nots.
Aimée leaned, kissed René on both cheeks.
“Expect room service in a few minutes.” She winked. “And a few hours alone.”
A man in a windbreaker huddled with the receptionist at the lobby desk. His stance, the way he nodded, pricked up Aimée’s antennae. A moment later he sat behind a wilting palm and pulled out a newspaper.
This didn’t feel right. Listen to your gut, Morbier always said. Instead of crossing the lobby, she kept to the wall by the manager’s office and slipped into the door marked Service.
She hurried down a corridor full of room-service trays to another flight of stairs. As with most hotels, the back environs never matched the exterior. Cracked concrete partially covered the faded whitewashed brick walls leading to a turn-of-the-century laundry, complete with airing cupboards and ancient ironing boards.
She followed a faded red-and-yellow line to the next level. Evidence of an exit or an old bomb shelter, she figured. Matching painted arrows led down the stairs to a subterranean series of brick rooms. Bed frames, chairs, racks with dust-furred wine bottles. Hotel storage.
Notausgang—emergency exit, from the little German she remembered—was painted above an alcove. She waded through plastic bags and old pipes to find a padlocked slatted-wood gate.
Cold gusts of mildewed air came through it. At least it was a way out. With a padlock shim from her lock-picking kit, it took less than a minute to gain entrance to a dark, wet cavern. Her penlight revealed browned notices in German script with SS lightning bolts. And a partially bricked-up staircase.
A prickle ran up her spine. No time to linger among Nazi ghosts. The bricks yielded after several kicks. Up the staircase, to another gate that jiggled open. She found herself in a smoke-filled room. Poker players sat around a table under a low-hanging green light. She nodded to the surprised men and kept going.
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER she entered the courtyard of the neo-Renaissance mairie, the town hall laid out like an H in the florid style favored in the nineteenth century. She mounted the marble staircase of honor, passing the acting sentinels: two buxom female bronzes. Over-the-top, as most of these architectural homages were. Promoting a feeling of grandeur where citizens of the quartier attended to mundane affairs: school registration, housing, senior services, marriage and death certificates.
In the Salle Odette Pilpoul, Mademoiselle Samoukashian sat on a gilt-backed chair that was all but swallowed up in the grandeur of the room: maroon velvet floor-length curtains, stained-glass windows, a massive fireplace at one end, a stage at the other. Why meet here? Aimée wondered.
“I did my homework.” Mademoiselle Samoukashian gestured to a pile of newspapers. “They archive them downstairs.”
Copies of Libération, headlined “Kidnapped Spanish Princess Found” and “Basque Terrorists Linked to ETA Discovered by Leduc Detective.”
“I knew I remembered you from the papers,” the old woman said.
Outed, Aimée shrugged, then pulled up a little gilt chair. “It was personal, Mademoiselle.” A little over a month ago she’d almost lost Morbier, her godfather. She’d protected him and saved his career by a hair’s breath. Too close. “My godfather—”
“Bien sur, family, I understand,” she said. “I accessed Pascal’s safe deposit box.”
“Vraiment? Aren’t the banks closed on the weekend?”
“Not if you know the manager,” said Mademoiselle Samoukashian. “He’s Armenian.” She waved her age-spotted hand. “Not only did I change his diapers, I hid his father during the war. With Odette Pilpoul.”
Aimée was impressed, and wondered what memories this musty salle brought back to her. “Mademoiselle, it sounds like you’re connected to the quartier’s history.”
A small sigh. “Not that I care to remember those days.” She shook her head. “All the hotels requisitioned for the Wehrmacht’s telegraphists, their drivers, the Luftwaffe pilots, bordellos for the soldiers. Even took over the Conservatoire.” A shrug. “Odette and I printed false identification papers in the printing press below my family’s apartment. We targeted disruptions at the Centre Téléphonique et Télégraphique, their communications headquarters on rue des Archives. A ‘nest of saboteurs’ was what the Gestapo called the quartier.” Her eyes were far away. “We rendezvoused at the pharmacy on Boulevard de Sébastopol, next to the German recruiters. Who’d know it now?”
Mademoiselle Samoukashian shrugged. “But some of us paid.”
Was another old war story coming? Aimée crossed her legs on the small, creaking chair.
“My cousin Manouchian, a poet. And the man I loved, a Jew. Others. But I missed the bus and was too late to warn them,” she said, her voice trailing off. “Alors, all that’s left now is the plaque on the building, a mass grave.”
An almost palpable sadness radiated from this little woman.
She pointed to a sealed manila envelope on the table with the words: “to be opened in case of my death only by one whom my great-aunt trusts.” “I’m late again,” she said. “But please read what’s inside, Mademoiselle. I haven’t opened it.”
Aimée’s brow lifted. She was intrigued. “Why?”
“Pascal made me promise,” she said. “If you don’t help me, no one will. His project will be ruined.”
Aimée stiffened. “A project? You think it connects to his murder?”
“I want you to find out.”
Pause.
“The museum fascinated him,” the old woman said. “I told you. He’d volunteered the past two years, cataloging their holdings during their renovation. He was so excited last week about some discovery there. Alors, won’t you respect his wishes?”
Aimée stalled, uneasy. “First tell me why he gave Meizi a recommendation for a job there.”
“This Chinese girl?” Madame Samoukashian shrugged. “Bien sûr, the Chinese are immigrants like us. I raised Pascal to think of others, not just himself. But look what it got him.”
What did that mean? “I don’t understand, Mademoiselle.”
“Non, I shouldn’t say that. Who knows? Find this girl and ask her.”
“I did.”
“And?” Mademoiselle Samoukashian leaned forward, expectant.
“She heard noises and ran away. At least, that’s what I’ve learned so far.” And she believed Meizi.
“Of course, she had no papers,” Mademoiselle Samoukashian said. “I told you. Who’d stick around?”
Aimée took the manila envelope off the table. “Shouldn’t you give this to the flics?”
“Like I trust them?” A bitter laugh. “Now it’s the Chinese. Before it was the Jews, Eastern Europeans, and us Armenians. But it hasn’t changed. They don’t like people to know they held deportees here, downstairs at the old commissariat. My father and mother were in a cell until they had enough to fill a train for Drancy. Next stop the ovens.” The anguish hardened in Mademoiselle Samoukashian’s brown eyes. “But we’re not here to talk about that.”
Aimée slit the sealed flap open. Inside she found a note, dated two weeks earlier: