She had to reach the button factory on rue de Turenne across the roofs of Place des Vosges. With her skirt hiked up over her thighs she climbed the peaked eaves and straddled corbels. The spiky ears and tails of gargoyles perched below her on the right. She made her way across the rooftops sliding over ancient slate tiles, her high heels scrabbling for purchase on the sleek surface. Open windows and skylights exhaled vestiges of classical music, the clatter of cooking pots, the scattered moans of lovemaking. She gripped a moldering brick exhaust cone and felt a wet mushy turd under her palm. Rodents.
Steamy, greasy vapor shot out of the cone as Aimee grabbed at rusty iron rungs leading over a high bricked abutment. Climbing, breathing hard, she pulled herself up each rung slowly. The smell of frying onions from a lighted kitchen below assailed her nostrils as a little boy cried out, "I'm hungry, Maman!"
At another series of roofs she stopped, kneeling high above the Marais, to catch her breath. More rungs led to a sloping roof over the button factory courtyard. Spread-eagled, she worked her way along the chipped shingles, using her toes to find niches when the rungs twisted or came loose. Slipping along, clutching at oily slate shingles broken off in places, she reached a metal overhang above the courtyard. Probably a twenty-foot drop. If she could clamp on to the rusty fire-escape ladder and slide down, it might just be a ten-foot drop.
She aimed for the tin gutter next to it. Lying facedown, she scooted herself forward a few feet at a time until she finally grasped the chute leading to the rain gutter.
She had to say one thing for this designer wear, it held up under tough conditions. If the chute couldn't bear her weight she'd have to reach out, push off the gutter, and grab the fire escape quickly. Which happened as soon as she'd thought it. She grabbed at the tin gutter which squealed as her fingernails raked over it.
She tried desperately to hold on to the narrow ridge of the gutter as her legs swung wildly in the air. Cold air rushed around her as she reached for the fire-escape rail with her other hand. This is it, I'm done for, she thought. A wild circus act before I splatter on the cobblestones in an Issey Miyake suit hiked over my thighs. Her father's grinning face next to a faded sepia likeness of her mother flashed through her mind. Her only chance was a dumpster below her filled with God knew what.
She screamed as the gutter broke and she dove towards the dumpster.
And plunged, somersaulting, into the cold night air.
She landed sitting upright in a dumpster full of buttons that cushioned her fall. Red, green, and yellow ones. Glossy and shining in the moonlight that peeked over the trees. The buttons ground against each other as she reached up to the dumpster rim. Her hand slipped and she was buried under mounds of buttons. Jesus, would she be suffocated by these colored disks after she'd survived a twenty-foot fall from the roof?
She finally managed to pull herself up, crunching scores of buttons. The courtyard seemed amazingly quiet. Pulling her skirt down, she shook herself, and a myriad red, green, and yellow pellets rained on the cobblestones. She'd landed in a batch of defective button rejects. She tramped into the side door of Mon Bouton.
"Ça va, Leah?" Aimee kissed her.
Leah's eyes opened in wonder at her appearance. "Such a nice suit!" She came closer, being myopically shortsighted from sorting buttons for so many years. "Is it…?"
"Murder." Aimee nodded, feeling guilty for abusing Leah's trust.
At that moment the door opened slightly and Aimee turned.
"I'm here." Albertine Clouzot's housekeeper, Florence, hesitated. "I almost didn't come."
Aimee gently took her arm. "You're safe here, Sarah."
The former Sarah Strauss wore a black pageboy wig framing her startling blue eyes. Gaunt and tall, her beauty still glowed. She stuck her trembling hands in the pockets of her raincoat.
She stared at Aimee. "But I noticed the same man who'd been out front when I returned from shopping. He was still there after you called."
"We need to talk. Coffee?"
The only other noise came from the hissing espresso maker on the gas stove top. Leah turned off the workroom lights, leaving only a dim spotlight on the cooktop. She nodded conspiratorially and left the room.
Aimee guided Sarah to a long wooden refectory table, gouged and scarred, alongside galvanized metal tubes and cylinders that sorted buttons. She poured steamy black espresso into two chipped demitasse cups and slid the bowl of brown sugar cubes across the table.
"Someone's out to kill you." Aimee sipped her espresso. "They're after me, too."
Sarah looked up from the demitasse cup, startled.
"What does the swastika carved into Lili Stein's forehead mean?" Aimee said, rubbing her hand on the wooden table.
Sarah shook her head.
Aimee had to get her to talk. "Sarah, this is all about the past. You know it!"
Fear and mostly sadness shone in Sarah's eyes. She whimpered, "A curse, that's what it is. Following me all my life. Why does God allow this? I read the Torah, trying to understand, but…" And she collapsed, crying.
Aimee felt guilty for her outburst. "Look, I'm sorry." She leaned over and put her arm around the woman. "Sarah-do you mind if I call you that?" She lifted Sarah's chin up. "I never would judge your actions fifty years ago. I wasn't alive then. Just tell me what happened." Aimee paused. "Tell me about you and Lili."
"You found her body, didn't you?" Sarah said.
Aimee's stomach tightened.
Sarah looked down, unable to meet Aimee's eyes. "She'd changed."
Aimee's curiosity had been colored by fear. Ever since she saw the photo of Lili in the crowd when Sarah was tarred with the swastika.
Sarah spoke slowly. "That's all so long ago. Some of us spend our lives making up for the past," she sighed.
"Did she…" Aimee couldn't finish.
Sarah pulled off her black wig. "Do this?"
The scarred swastika across her forehead showed even in the dim light. Sarah nodded. "If Lili hadn't, someone else in the mob would have."
Aimee was amazed at the weary forgiveness in her voice.
Sarah read her eyes. "But she stopped them from hurting my baby. She persuaded the crowd to leave us alone. Helped me find shelter." Sarah sighed. "After fifty years, I saw her again, it must have been just before…"
Aimee bolted to attention. "Before she was murdered?"
"I recently moved back to Paris." Sarah nodded. "As you know, I'd only just begun working at Albertine's. Lili still lived on rue des Rosiers. I followed her. But I couldn't deal with the past."
Aimee asked, "You followed her?"
"She'd been terrified during the Occupation. Filled with jealousy and loathing toward me. Being young, I didn't realize that; I believed Lili abandoned me when she escaped Paris."
She shook her head. "But that day we bumped into each other at the cobbler's. Somehow I got the courage and told her who I was. Jew to Jew, for the first time, we talked. Then she told me about Laurent."
"Laurent?" Aimee said. She felt confused.
"She was afraid of Laurent," Sarah said.
Aimee shook her head. "Who's Laurent?"
"That troublemaker from Madame Pagnol's class so many years ago!" Sarah said. "Rumor had it he informed on parents of children he didn't like. A vicious type. Lili said she'd recognized him and had gone to talk with Soli Hecht."
Aimee stood up and started pacing, her high-heeled pumps crunching loose plastic chips and partial button forms on the floor. "You mean, Lili had recognized Laurent. Now…in the present day?"
Sarah rubbed her tired eyes. "Soli Hecht advised her to keep it quiet," she said. "Until he could come up with evidence. Documentation or something to do with her concierge. Help her prove that he wasn't who he said he was. Expose his identity."