"That would help me, thank you."
"You'll be a treat for Odile, she can hear." Sylvie glanced in Renata's direction. "But she's wheelchair-bound. Around the corner, number 19 rue du Plâtre."
Aimee felt a glimmer of hope when she heard the address.
ODILE CACKLED from five floors above as Aimee huffed up the steep metal-grilled staircase. "One thing I don't have to worry about."
Aimee reached the landing at last. "Odile Redonnet?" she said. Looks certainly did not bless this family, Aimee thought, looking at the shriveled crone in the black steel wheelchair.
"Pleased to meet you, Aimee Leduc, my sister phoned about your visit. Come in." Odile Redonnet wheeled herself ahead of Aimee into the apartment. "Please shut the door behind you."
After two potfuls of strong Darjeeling tea and exquisite freshly baked madeleines, Odile Redonnet let Aimee get to her point.
"I'm looking for someone," she began.
"Aren't we all?"
"A boy named Laurent, his family owned a building on this street. He'd have been about fifteen or sixteen in 1943."
In answer, Odile wheeled over to an oak chest and slid open a creaking drawer. She pulled out a musty album. Several loose black-and-white photos danced to the floor. Aimee bent down to pick them up. In one she saw a radiant Odile standing upright with her arms around an RAF-uniformed man.
Aimee looked at her and smiled. "You're beautiful."
"And in love. That always enhances one's looks," Odile said. "This should help my memory." She laid the heavy album on her dining table and motioned to Aimee. "A ride down memory lane. Can you slip the phonograph on?"
Reluctantly, Aimee went and stood over an old record player that played 78s. She cranked it several times, then laid the needle on the scratched black vinyl. Strains of Glenn Miller and his forties big band filled the room. Odile Redonnet's eyes glazed and she smiled.
"I left the lycee in '44 to work in a glass factory," she said, turning the floppy pages.
"Are there any class photos?"
"Can't say we were so sophisticated then," Odile said, searching the tired pages. She hummed along with the scratchy clarinet solo. "This is the closest thing to a class picture," she said, pulling some gummed photos apart.
Aimee almost spilled her hot tea. It was the same photo she'd deciphered from the encrypted disk Soli Hecht had given her. "Which one is Laurent?"
Odile Redonnet's gnarled finger pointed to a tall boy standing by Lili in the Square Georges-Cain. "Laurent de Saux, if that's who you mean. Lived at number 23, two doors down."
This black-and-white photo showed the cafe with strolling Nazis and the park with students.
"How did you get this?
"Madame Pagnol, our history teacher, took it to illustrate the statue of Caesar Augustus. See." She pointed out the marble statue in the background. "We were studying the Roman Empire."
Of course, Aimee realized now. What had appeared as a random street scene worked as an illustration of the magnificent Caesar Augustus statue. That's why it had been taken.
"Did she give one to each student?"
"Oh, no," Odile said. "Only to those who could afford it. After this I left school. Never finished."
She struggled to contain her excitement-Here was the proof...but proof of what?
"Laurent informed on students during the Occupation."
Odile closed her eyes.
"Or was it you?" Aimee said.
Anger flashed in Odile's eyes. "Never." She pushed the album away.
"Nostalgia isn't what it used to be." Aimee had had enough. "That good-old-days stuff doesn't work."
Odile stared out the window. "Nothing disappears, eh?"
"Bald and ugly truth doesn't."
Finally Odile spoke. "Laurent asked me to inform. Anonymous tips got one hundred francs. The Gestapo offered several hundred francs for outright denunciations. But I wouldn't. I saw the hate and fear in classmates' faces after Laurent walked by. He assumed the Nazis would win the war and protect him."
"How about you?"
"Wrong person, wrong time. I sheltered that RAF pilot during the Occupation. So they taught me a lesson." She pointed to her withered legs.
"Who?"
"The Gestapo doctors doing research on spinal nerve endings. They chose me to experiment on. Took me to Berlin, then exhibited me as a freak."
"Please forgive me." Aimee shook her head. "I'm sorry."
"I was, too." Odile smiled. "But I still try to remember the few good old times."
"What happened to Laurent?"
"Didn't see him towards the end. Disappeared with a lot of people. Who knows?"
"What about his family?" Aimee said.
"Shot." She pointed out the window. "Against that wall. His stepmother and father in 1943. Rumor had it that he informed on them."
Aimee almost choked on her tea.
"Who took over the building?" she finally managed.
"Some cousin from his mother's side. You see, he took his mother's name, she had the money. After she died and his father remarried, he kept her name."
"Which name?" Aimee said.
"Always called himself de Saux. Hated his father for marrying again."
Odile Redonnet paused, looking at Aimee for a long moment.
"It's all about him, isn't it?"
Aimee nodded.
"Evil incarnate, but I can't even say that because he was amoral. No conscience. He'd do anything to hold power over someone. But Laurent disappeared, like so many collaborators after the war. He was seventeen or eighteen at Liberation. Who'd recognize him now in his sixties?"
Aimee paused, recalling the torn page from Lili's journal. "I know it's him. Laurent." Lili's phrase that Abraham had repeated to her-"Never forget." Lili had recognized Laurent because he'd sent her family to the ovens. She'd never forgiven him.
"He's back, isn't he?"
"May I have this?" Aimee stood up. "I have to find out who he is and this should help."
She put the photo in her bag, then took her teacup to the kitchen and put it in the sink. Odile's kitchen window looked on to a series of dilapidated courtyards. Number 23 was probably one of them.
At the door, Aimee turned. "Thank you," she said. "But I disagree, Odile."
"How's that?" Odile asked from her wheelchair near the table.
"I'm beginning to believe he never left," Aimee said.
THE FIRST bell she rang was answered by a fortyish woman in a zebra leotard, with flushed cheeks and a light beading of sweat. Aimee could hear the pounding beats of heavy drums in the background.
"The owner? Don't know. Send my checks to a property management," she said, out of breath.
"How about the concierge?"
"Isn't one." Her phone started ringing. "Sorry," she said and she closed the door.
None of the other doors she rang answered. She wandered to the back of the building where the garbage cans were kept, hunting for the gas meter. At last she found it behind a rotted wood half door. She wrote down the serial number of the meter. Easy to trace if she accessed EDF-Électricite de France, otherwise a tedious search at the tax office for ownership. Of course, she still might end up going there. Now she needed computer access and pondered breaking back into the Victor Hugo Museum to hit the keys on their state-of-the-art computer.
Friday Afternoon
SHE CALLED ABRAHAM STEIN from a public phone in the Metro station at Concorde since her cell-phone batteries had died. Sinta answered.
"Abraham's talking with some big-nosed flic."
"A chain-smoker, with suspenders?" Aimee asked.
"You got it."
"Please get Abraham, but don't tell him it's me." Aimee waited while Sinta fetched him. She heard the radio news broadcast blaring in the background, with a reporter's terse comments. "Riot police have been called to clear away demonstrators from the Élysee Palace where the European Union Summit Tariff will be signed. Sporadic confrontations between neo-Nazi groups and the Green Party are happening here and in parts of the 4th arrondissement, notably around Bastille."