René climbed. His short legs pumped up the wide stairs. The ache in his hip increased. Tired, he’d resolved to make it the last interview of the day. On the second floor landing, he knocked on the door.
“Oui?”
René’s eyes lifted to the old man’s face, wreaths of smoke coming from his lit pipe. His white hair curled around his ears and down over the collar of a gray wool cardigan. He wore Moroccan leather slippers with turned-up toes and kept one hand in his pocket.
“I’m with Leduc Detective,” René said, flashing Aimée’s detective badge quickly.
“I don’t talk to strangers,” the man said, peering down at René.
“Neither do I,” René said, “but you saw me with Madame Sarnac, didn’t you? I want to help her.”
“A detective, eh? I didn’t know they made them so small.”
René flinched. He’d sat behind the keyboard too long. He’d forgotten it was always like this.
“You seemed the helpful type,” René said. “Guess not. I won’t stay up nights worrying when it happens to you. Being evicted, I mean.”
The old man leaned over and peered closer at René. “Who did you say you work for?”
“Leduc Detective. I’m investigating the reporter’s murder.”
“The landing’s drafty, come in,” he said, tugging at René’s shoulder. “Vite.”
Surprised at his change in attitude and the swift tug at his shoulder, René followed him inside. The scent of sweetish cherry-laced pipe tobacco filled the air.
The old man’s apartment, high-ceilinged and surprisingly tidy, faced the square on two sides.
“Let me introduce myself: Yann Rémouze,” he said, gesturing to a chair. “I didn’t want to talk out there . . . the walls have ears. Please sit down.”
René used a low ottoman to heave himself up onto a comfortable chintz armchair. He’d promised to call Aimée but it would be better to have some information to give her when he did.
“Bet you see a lot from your windows,” said René.
“I hear a lot, too.” Yann remained standing, surveying René.
René noticed a collection of flutes and woodwinds on a shelf ringing the wall. “You’re a musician?”
“Once I had an instrument shop; I made flutes,” he said. “Now I do repairs for a few old clients.”
An antique silver flute gleamed on the shelf.
Yann followed René’s gaze. “That belonged to a man who created color. That’s what a virtuoso flutist does. Plays with a simplicity that’s vivid.”
This old man lived in his memories, but René didn’t share them.
“Monsieur Rémouze, what happened to Madame Sarnac and those in her building?”
“Should I trust you?”
“Why not? You’ve already let me into your apartment.”
“Good point.” Rémouze sank into the chair beside René. His eyelids were heavy, tired. “Last week, the démolition signs went up and the trucks came. But the place had been emptied the week before that. I heard them in the middle of the night.”
“What did you hear?”
“Nothing that hasn’t happened time and again. Only this time instead of flics rounding up the juifs for the Gymnase and deportation or Apaches collecting interest on an overdue loan, it was Romanians hustling them out at three in the morning.”
“Mirador hired them?” René kept his tone even.
The old man nodded. “Let’s put it this way. Not long ago, a man on the fifth floor was offered a cheque to vacate the apartment he’s lived in for forty years. He refused, his neighbors got similar offers and refused too. Everyone was incensed. Suddenly, returning from Marché d’Aligre where he shops every day, he was attacked. Broken bones and bruises, then his heart gave out in L’hôpital Saint Antoine. Now lots of old people are awakened in the middle of the night, told they’re lucky not to get their hips broken. Now they don’t even get an offer of a cheque. They fold like a deck of cards. Intimidated.”
That agreed with what Brault, the architect, had told him.
“But why hasn’t someone gone to the authorities?”
Yann rolled his eyes. He lit a match, stuck the burning tip in the pipe bowl, and puffed in a steady rhythm.
“Think about the complaint system, the forms one has to fill out . . . no one’s stupid enough to identify himself. And for the rest, pockets are lined to look the other way.”
“Give me names,” said René. “Then I can do something.”
“No one will point a finger,” he said, “so it’s all hearsay. One of the flics said the old people are haunted by phantoms from the past. Poetic, probably true, but a nice excuse for inaction.”
“What do you mean, phantoms?” Was the old man going to ramble now? René wished Aimée was listening, instead of him. She had a better take on criminals than he did. She heard old men and women talk and put their stories together. She could find the thread. For such a restless person, she had a fund of intuition.
“Past indiscretions, like informing the Milice,” he said. “Ignoring black shirt thugs looting apartments of the deportees.”
“That’s long ago,” René interrupted. “What does it have to do with now?”
The old man puffed several times then looked up. His eyes were wide and full of an almost palpable sadness.
“What doesn’t it have to do with now? The past informs the present. Memory makes the map we carry, no matter how hard we try to erase it.”
True. René still didn’t see how it related. Paris had legions of the old, sitting on park benches or at kitchen tables telling stories of the war to grandchildren or others hostage to politeness.
“Some talk about it,” Yann said. “Many remain silent.”
René had enough problems without going back to what happened during the war. Leave that to those whose memories stretched that far.
“Can you read it, the plaque?” Yann beckoned René to the window.
To the memory of the more than 600 children, women and men of the 11ième arrondissement, assembled here and then interned in Loiret camp before being deported to Auschwitz. . . .
“Do you know how long it took our association to erect the plaque for our classmates?”
René shook his head.
“Simon was my friend; he lived down the hall,” Yann said. “Big family. Poor, but Simon had a beautiful steelie marble, topaz cat’s eye. Superb. He let me borrow it one day, his treasure, but he was like that. Generous. And I didn’t give it back. He asked me again and I stalled. Kept saying I’d forgotten it. And then one night we heard noises down the hall.”
Yann looked at René, his eyes clouded. But René felt he wasn’t seeing him. Just the past.
“Those noises. The ones making you hide your head under the covers, the frantic whispers of Maman telling me not to look out the window. And they were gone. Never came back. The apartment taken over by someone else, their belongings too.”
“So this is how you return the marble to Simon?”
A bittersweet smile crossed the man’s face. “Fifty years too late.”
True, there was no escaping the past, but René wanted to pull the focus back to the evictions and Josiane Dolet.
“Look, I can’t find out about the thugs unless I know where to look.”
“After they do their job, they don’t stick around for coffee,” he said. “Big mecs, bodybuilders, East European by the look of their clothes.”
“How’s that?”
“Hard to say, but a lot of them wear those track suits, the cheap designer copies with words misspelled.”
René knew the knockoffs sold at street markets. A Tommy Hilfiger with an F missing. Romanian chic.