“I need a personal loan. I’ll pay you back.”
Michel waved his pale arm. “OK, but better to funnel it through the business.”
“What do you mean?”
“My uncle’s company finances us.”
“I thought your Siliconsentier friends helped you.”
“My uncle made me a better offer.” He grinned. “We could really use your expertise.”
An alarm bell sounded in her head. The Sentier was notorious for under-the-table, cash-only deals. No receipts, a little payoff here and there. Voilà! No taxes. Was it wise for Leduc Detective to get involved with a project based on dodgy money? Did they have a choice?
“Let me discuss this with René,” she said. “But I’m in a jam, Michel, I need fifty thousand francs right now.”
“Tiens, come upstairs,” Michel said. He’d crawled to the end of the room, where a scrollwork metal sconce hung above him by a frayed cord.
She followed him up the wide marble stairs, with deep grooves worn in the center. The banister snaked, coiling tighter as they mounted, like a serpent about to strike upward.
On the black-and-white-tiled landing, several bicycles leaned against the ornate wrought-iron railing of vine tendrils twined with grape clusters.
Aimée’s cell phone rang. “Ready to offer me a drink yet?” said Jutta Hald in a dry voice.
Aimée’s heart hammered. She didn’t have the money yet.
“Paris is full of cafés, Jutta,” she said. “There’s probably one in front of you right now. I’m trying to get the money.”
In the background, Aimée heard the hee-haw of a siren.
“There’s something you should know about your mother …” The rest of Jutta Hald’s words were swallowed by the blare of sirens.
“What should I know?” Aimée shouted.
When the noise receded, “… Tour Jean-Sans-Peur in twenty minutes” was all she heard.
“You know where she is?”
Pause. Aimée heard Jutta Hald draw in a deep breath.
“Twenty minutes. Bring the money,” Jutta Hald said.
“But I must know … ,” Aimée said.
But Jutta Hald had hung up.
This was the first chance in years to find out about her mother! Despite her misgivings, she decided to talk with René and, clutching Michel’s check made out for fifty thousand francs, she shouldered her backpack.
Out on the narrow street, pangs of longing hit her. For years, deep down, she’d feared her mother was dead. Yet she couldn’t ignore the tissue-thin shred of hope Jutta Hald offered, at a price.
She cashed the check at Banque Nationale de Paris on the corner. As she turned into the Montorgueil, the tiled pedestrian walkway lined with upscale boucheries, more memories of her mother, with a pencil tucked behind her ear, floated back to her.
She was always drawing, scribbling on anything—brasserie paper napkins, envelopes, the gas meter rate book. All of it had been burned by her father, except for the cardboard box from her fric-frac bicycle lock that had been bordered with doodles by her mother. Aimée had ceased using the awkward lock, insisted on by her father, after her training wheels came off.
Aimée passed a shoe shop and small parfumerie before she reached the fifteenth-century tower abutting what once was part of the old wall of Paris. Medieval dwellers had thrown garbage over the walls. After the population doubled, the next king constructed a new rampart and the centuries-old refuse was paved over. The ground rose higher and higher, hence the hills and buckling streets of the Sentier.
The tower, a four-story narrow rectangle of butterscotch stone with a tiled turreted roof, had been partially restored. She remembered it from a field trip in grade school. Some duke or marquis once hid there. There were so many, she got them mixed up.
The iron grillwork gate scraped as she opened it. Before her stood a leafy plane tree in the fenced stone courtyard sheltered from the busy street. Shadows from the leaves filigreed the stones. Late afternoon quiet hung in the air. On her right, an L-shaped école maternelle faced the tower.
No students. No Jutta Hald. Only darkening rain clouds and a crackle of hot wind.
According to the sign, tower tours were suspended until further restoration. “Welcome to the only remaining fortified feudal tower surviving in Paris,” read the inscription. “Here, Jean-Sans-Peur, the Duc de Bourgogne, built a refuge following his assassination of Louis d’Orleans in the Hundred Years’ War.”
Tools, sandblasting equipment, and a small cement mixer sat under the tree. Work, she figured, had ended for the day.
Aimée cursed under her breath when her shoe caught between the stones. She turned it sideways. The heel of her Prada sandal, a flea-market find, emerged scratched and covered with grit. She scraped it over the iron décrottoir sunk in the stones. Mud-filled streets had been a part of medieval life.
Inside the tower, rays of light slanted in from windows and doors. So many windows. It seemed odd for a medieval structure built for defense, nestled against the old fortified wall. On her right stood a pile of rebar scraps.
Still no Jutta. She mounted the spiral staircase.
Cold air rose up from the stone. She rubbed her arms and looked up. Exquisite carved vaulting, a design of entwined branches with oak and hawthorn leaves and hop vines, wound above her. The circular staircase and open landings were islanded aloft. Shiny black birds perched in the turret. Their sharp cawing grated in Aimée’s ears.
Was Jutta Hald playing games, screwing with her mind? She seemed to think that Aimée was hiding something, had some secret.
Footsteps shuffled below in the courtyard. Aimée peered through the window illuminating what had once been the small chapel. Carved ravens with two figures on a ribbed band supported the ancient ducal crest.
The damn birds had been around even then.
Aimée shifted her feet on the uneven stone. Below, a group of tourists stood in the courtyard.
The noise of churning gravel came from outside as she descended. Perhaps the workmen were starting another shift after all, she figured.
She moved into the pale Camembert-colored light ruminating … afraid Jutta Hald’s words about her mother were true.
And afraid this was connected to her father’s death in some way.
But where was Jutta?
Outside, a trio of Portuguese-speaking tourists wandered and consulted maps on the far side of the courtyard. A workman in blue overalls shoveled sand in the rear. A shovel stood up in the sand pile. And Jutta Hald sat, huddled on a green bench next to the wall, her back to Aimée.
Odd, Aimée thought. She hadn’t been there before.
“Ça va … Jutta?” she asked, sitting down next to her.
Jutta Hald, leaning against the grimy stone wall, said nothing. She smelled of warm hair tinged by the singular vinegary odor she emitted.
Aimée looked closer. Jutta Hald’s eyes were wide with surprise.
“Don’t you hear me?”
No response. What was wrong with her?
She grabbed Jutta Hald’s arm, started to shake her. But the woman’s head slumped over, revealing pink gristle and congealed reddish matter sliding down the stone wall. The rest of her brain was still visible in the back of her skull, the part that hadn’t been blown off.
Aimée reared back, unable to speak. She struggled to breathe. Blood from a black hole seeped through Jutta Hald’s matted hair.
Jutta Hald had been shot at close range. Scarcely a minute ago.
Aimée looked up. She heard a burst of laughter from the tourists, the scrape of the iron gate in the courtyard, and crows cawing in the turrets.
No one had noticed.