The battered desk had one drawer. She opened it. Empty. But the drawer stuck slightly as she pulled it out. Kneeling down, she pulled out her miniscrewdriver and poked the pine strut holding the drawer support. Cheap pine, staple-gunned in places. She felt around, found a knobby spot, pressed it. The pine strut flap popped open.
A hidden drawer in plain view. Aimée was impressed. And if Eugénie had a wireless modem, she would have been more impressed. In France few people did. She and René lusted for one but were waiting for the price to drop.
Aimée reached inside, exploring the crevices and ridges. She felt a smooth booklet and pulled it out. It was a manual for a new laptop. Either the men before had found it, or Sylvie had taken it with her and it had gone up in smoke.
Outwitted or too late; either way it was gone.
Dejected, Aimée knew the only place left to find answers was in the trash. Before she left, she unrolled the felt from the windows.
By the time she got to the corner, Sébastien had loaded two blue garbage sacks in back of his van. He gunned the engine as she opened the door. They took off down rue Jean Moinon, narrowly missing the striped cat.
“Ça va?” he asked, staring at her.
“I’ll know after we check what you found,” she said, the sodium streetlight glistening above her.
They sped into the raw Paris night along rainwashed, cobbled streets.
THE OLD tack room where they unloaded the garbage occupied a courtyard corner of Aimée’s building on He St. Louis. Once used by horses stabled in this former Due de Guise mansion, it now housed discarded window frames, a ganglion of PVC piping, and twenty-five kilogram Placoplâtre Mortier adhisif sacs. On one side stood an old porcelain stove, its broken tiles and legs tilted, canting lazily against the stone wall.
“Having fun yet?” Aimée said as they sifted through the bags of Sylvie’s trash.
Sébastien, intent on his work, hadn’t bothered to look up. They both wore gauze masks. But there was no way of getting around the smell.
“I’ll need a hammam session,” Sébastien said, “after this.”
“Me, too,” she said, visualizing the hammam: hot marble slabs, steam rising to the arched white marble ceiling, her grime scrubbed away by black soap and a loofah, the small cups of mint tea, her body rubbed to mousse-like consistency by the iron-armed masseuse.
“Tiens, Aimée,” Sébastien said, holding up soggy sprigs of something dark green and slimy.
She nodded. “Let’s keep the organic matter over there.”
Aimée’s flashlight shone amid the candles she’d lit, casting a medieval glow under the vaulted seventeenth-century ceiling. Over the industrial-strength clear plastic, they’d spread out the contents of the garbage bags on the stone floor. She and Sébastien were hunched over sorting the contents.
They’d gotten lucky, she realized, to find the uncollected trash. The éboueurs must have figured the building was uninhabited.
Thirty minutes later they’d sorted the bulk into three piles: paper, perishables, and other.
The other consisted of a pair of black Prada shoes. They were marred by a broken heel, but & la mode. The thin arched sole was barely scuffed. Hardly worn by the look of them, Aimée noted. And very nice. Sylvie had expensive taste.
The perishables: apple peels, almond shells, and the green slimy thing. She sniffed. Mint. Cotton balls smudged by tan foundation, sparkly blush and black mascara streaks.
She surveyed a half-used jar of Nutella, a white plastic Viva bottle of sour milk, and a smashed carton of strawberry Danette yogurt.
They bundled the piles back up and shot them in Aimée’s trash bin.
“I know I owe you, Aimée,” Sébastien said, “but next time let me repay you in other ways.”
Together she and Sébastien sifted all the papers into several piles: Monoprix circulars advertising April sales, crumpled receipts and envelopes, and torn gray paper. Aimée picked up a goldenrod sheet, like those plastered on posts around Belleville. Printed on it: AMNESTY FOR THE SANS-PAPIERS—MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD! JOIN THE THE HUNGER STRIKERS’VIGIL—PRESSURE THE MINISTRY—MUSTAFA HAMID’S FAST ENTERS THE19TH DAY.
She sat up. Her heart quickened. She remembered Philippe’s reaction to Hamid on the radio: his anger and how he’d taken off in the car. Had Sylvie picked up this flyer and tossed it—or had she kept it for a reason? Was there a connection?
Aimée turned it over. On the other side was smudged writing. The name “Youssef’ and “01 43 76 89.” She wondered if this could be a phone number of one of the Arabes, whom the baker Denet disapproved of, hanging around Eugénie’s. Aimée put it aside.
Sébastien assembled the gray pieces on an ironing board while she smoothed them with a travel iron. After ironing the strips flat, she set them in rows, adhering them to a clear contact sheet. She did this several times until all the gray paper had a contact front.
“Now for the interesting part,” she said to Sébastien.
They trudged upstairs to her apartment, the temperature only a few degrees warmer.
No welcoming lights, no heat.
And no Yves. Too bad. She’d tried to push Yves out of her mind. But thoughts of him kept popping back in.
Sébastien rubbed his gloved hands together and stamped his feet. They unzipped their jumpsuits and Aimée threw them in her laundry. Someday she’d get to the lavomatique.
Sébastien set the papers on the faded Gobelin carpet. Her grandfather had purchased it at the Porte de Vanves flea market. She’d been twelve and remembered helping him lug his fifty-franc find home on the Métro. “A classic, Aimée,” he’d said. He’d filled the place with “classics”—a bit worn and frayed at the edges.
She flicked her scanner on and began scanning the contact sheets of paper scraps. Now she could bundle up at the computer and run some high-resolution software programs to match paper fibers. After that she’d run another program to fit spatial and numerical characteristics. With a little maneuvering she’d match the paper together in the right order and read the contents.
“Sébastien, why don’t you warm up with some Calvados?” she said. “Or help yourself to vin rouge.”
“And you?”
“Calvados, please, I need a toasty think-drink.”
He poured them both large shots of the amber apple brandy. Tongues of light danced from the dim chandelier.
“Salut.” They toasted each other.
Computer applications clicked across her computer screen, a greenish light haloing her terminal.
“I’ve got a long night ahead of me,” she said.
He grinned, glancing at his watch. “I hope I do too.”
Early Friday Morning
DAWN CREPT WITH TINY footsteps over the Seine. Aimée watched rose slashes paint the cloudless sky. Below her window the black iron boat moorings on quai d’Anjou glistened, beaded by last night’s rain.
She remembered her father, in his old bathrobe, making coffee on mornings like these. He’d throw on a raincoat, nip around the corner to the boulangerie, and bring home warm, buttery croissants. They’d stand at the counter, the Seine glittering below them, and talk. Talk about a case, the price of dry cleaning, or a film she’d seen—all the small threads of life’s fabric, a fabric she’d lost when her father died.
Tired but jubilant, she’d matched 80 percent of the gray paper. Enough to know these were Sylvie’s bank statements from an account at Crédit Lyonnais. Finding a pattern to her withdrawals, her spending, and her habits would take time. Miles Davis stirred on her lap.