Only she had heard him scream. She'd come to and passed out again. Why hadn't she been strangled, too? A distant jangling lodged in her brain. The bells. Then she recognized the noise. Bells from the shop door to the street meant customers who came in and out. A voice asked, "Il ya a quel qu'un? Somebody here?" Then the bells jingled and she heard the door shut as the customer left.
She struggled out from under the TV table and felt guilty. Again. She'd accused Javel and when he started telling her that Arlette's killer was alive she'd slugged him. The killer, entering through the connecting shop door, had probably stood right there and silently thanked her. Until sending her across the room, knocking her and her theory to smithereens. Not only had she barked up the wrong tree but she'd helped the killer.
But why go to the trouble of making it look like suicide? Unless the killer had been about to do Aimee when a customer appeared, but even then? Maybe now the feisty little Javel would join his Arlette after all this time.
Lili's string bag was gone. A puffy white cat slinked around her ankles like a feather boa and meowed.
"Poor thing, who'll take care of you?" Aimee said, rubbing its head. She staggered through the blue beaded curtain to fetch milk for the cat, then she stopped. What had Lili carried in her string bag beside her knitting? Javel would have hidden anything else he'd found.
She started searching, pulling drawers and cupboards apart to find out. Might as well make it look like the crime she figured it was. Poor old Javel, he had little and threw little away. His one armoire held unworn starched white shirts and two musty suits. A pair of lambskin handcrafted shoes, the kind few people could afford to wear anymore, sat unworn on the lowest shelf. His hall cupboard held an unused bed linen set, yellowed by age and probably embroidered by Arlette.
She searched every grime-infested nook in his apartment. Nothing but the remnants of a lonely old man.
Maybe Lili didn't have anything else in her bag…or the killer had known what to look for and found it. Frustrated by another dead end, she slumped against the cupboard. The circumstances of Javel's murder puzzled her.
He'd probably spent most of his time in his shop so she decided to search that next. The sharp tang of leather assaulted her as she entered. Under the display of arch supports, she found his cluttered work tray. Tightly wedged against the wall, it took her several tries before the tray came loose. Under leather scraps lay a small book, beat-up and well thumbed. Black spiders crawled over Lili's handwriting. With trembling hands Aimee lifted the journal as skeins of multicolored wool trailed to the wood floor. She brushed the spiders off and stuffed the journal under her designer jacket.
In Javel's room, she poured cat food into the bowl. As she left, she made the sign of the cross, then whispered to Javel, who gazed sightlessly at the ceiling. "You were right. I'll get him this time."
BACK AT Leah's, Aimee read from a torn page of Lili's journaclass="underline"
I know it's him. Laurent, the greedy-eyed wonder who sat by me and copied my answers on math tests. The one who sniggered at Papa working behind the counter, who called us Yid bloodsuckers to my face then dared me to do something about it. The one whose family owned a building but acted like he owned the block. WORSE than the Nazis, he made sure that everyone in school who'd ever rubbed him wrong paid. Power, pure and simple. Sarah's parents were the first, he even boasted about it. Earned one hundred francs for each denunciation. But me, I killed my parents the day I took a stand and refused to let him cheat. My big moral standing sent them to the ovens. Jewish or not, he informed on anyone. Arlette, greedy and stupid, laughed at him, her big mistake. And he's going to do it again.
Sarah's hand shook as Aimee passed her the torn fragment.
"Would you recognize him after all these years?"
"If Lili could…" She rubbed at the tears in her eyes. "He had a birthmark on his neck, like a brown butterfly."
"Of course he could have hidden it, done something surgically," Aimee said.
"I always wondered who denounced my parents. Laurent was older, in Lili's class. I never said much, tried to avoid him. Something about him I didn't like."
"There has to be proof in black and white," Aimee said. "That's why Lili contacted Soli Hecht. But I need documentation to prove it. Can you recall where he lived, this building Lili mentioned?"
"On rue du Plâtre around the corner from school," Sarah answered right away. "His parents were slumlords; it's the prettiest tree-lined street in the Jewish ghetto."
"Stay here, Sarah. You're not safe on the street."
Frightened, Sarah crossed her arms. "But I can't do that. I have a job. Albertine needs my help, she counts on me."
"Call her," Aimee said. "She'll find someone else for now."
"But there's an important supper party this evening-," Sarah started to say.
"It's not safe for you or anyone with you. You'll put them in danger. Stay here, off the street. Albertine will manage." Aimee could tell Sarah hesitated, still not convinced. "If Lili recognized Laurent and got killed for it"-Aimee paused and spoke slowly-"don't you realize you're next?"
AIMÉE ENTERED the schoolyard off busy rue des Blancs Manteaux to see lines of children filing up the lycee steps. Probably just as they had done fifty years ago. This time there were no yellow stars, only clumps of adolescent dark-skinned children with big eyes walking past taunts and insults.
As she approached, a teacher noticed her and quickly admonished, "Arrête." The jeers subsided.
"Are you a parent?"
"I have business in the office."
"May I see your identification? We take bomb threats seriously." The puffy-faced teacher looked like she needed another night's sleep. "Ministry of education's edict."
"Of course." Aimee showed her.
"Over there and to the right." Behind the teacher a fight had broken out and she left to break it up.
Inside the school office a rotund ebony-faced woman squinted as she checked the computer. "Records are in the basement if we've kept them and the silverfish haven't eaten them," she said.
"Thanks, can you check?"
"Last name?"
"First name is Laurent and the family lived on rue du Plâtre," Aimee said.
The secretary raised her eyebrow. "Years of attendance?"
"Between 1941 and 1945, during the war."
The secretary looked up immediately and shook her head. "After ten years, everything is sent to the ministry of education." She shrugged. "Check back in a couple of weeks."
"But I need it now!"
"Everybody needs it now. Do you know how many children attended the school at the time?" She looked at Aimee. "Frankly, I'd say don't waste your time, nothing got put on microfiche until the sixties."
"Any teacher or custodian who might have gone to school here?" Aimee said.
"Before my time," the secretary paused, "but Renata, a woman in the cafeteria, has worked here as long as I remember. That's all I can suggest."
In the yellow-tiled cafeteria, Renata, a woman with a thick gray braid wound across the nape of her neck, narrowed her eyes in suspicion.
"Who did you say you were?" she asked.
Aimee told her.
Renata just shook her head.
One of the servers, a prune-faced woman, walked over to Aimee and nudged her. "She forgets to turn on her hearing aid."
Aimee thanked her and pointed to Renata's ear. Renata only scowled.
"She's quite vain about it. Thinks none of us know," the woman, whose name tag said Sylvie Redonnet, confided. "As if we cared. Half the time we go around yelling at her since she can't hear."
Renata stirred the ladle of a steaming pot of lentils.
Aimee turned to Sylvie, who grinned. "Maybe you can help me?"
After Aimee explained, the woman nodded her head. "Believe it or not, I'm too young to have been here in the forties," she chuckled. "Now my sister, Odile, a few years older than me, was. Go ask her-she loves to talk."