“Exactement. That’s why I’m here. We’re checking every lead and I apologize.”
“You’re apologizing for the police?” He squinted at her. His wine-tainted breath hit her in the face. “Apologizing, the police?”
“We’ve got our best people on it, I assure you, Monsieur.” She tried not to wince at the trite phrase.
“That’s a first!”
A cynic. Not a typical reaction from his generation, but then perhaps she had laid it on too thick.
He stared at her. Red and purple feather fluff from her jacket floated up with the dust motes, then landed on a warped harpsichord.
“You’re undercover, that’s it,” he said. “I understand.”
She passed this man’s shop all the time. Had seen him on the island, recognized his long woolen coat from the quai where she walked Miles Davis. Cut out of context and in her feathery outfit, he didn’t seem to know her.
“Your a sleeper. That’s what they call it, non?” he asked.
She glanced outside. More police cars and one lane closed to traffic. She was trapped.
She pulled up a stool with three legs, a chair for him. “Tell me about Hélène.”
He glanced at the wall clock, a ticking period piece in need of a new glass face. “She comes by if she’s hungry.”
He blinked. A sad look in his long face. “It’s a long story.”
“I’m sure the pertinent details come to you. We don’t have much time.” She didn’t know if this would go anywhere. Yet, as her father used to say, omit the smallest lead and it whacked you in the head later.
“I’m ashamed to say it. Life’s treated Hélène hard. You don’t know.”
“Try me.”
“They ridicule her. The young ones most of all,” he pounded his fists together. The veins in his face more pronounced. “But what would they have done . . . how could they know what it was like?”
His gaze was far away, in another time, another place.
She had to pull him back, gently. Coax him.
“I’m listening, Monsieur.”
“We lived next door. Her family owned this shop,” he said, his voice hard and abrupt. “What’s left of it’s hers, I tell her all the time. Take it. Go to court, make a claim, I’ll give her legal rights. No one had the right to auction it at the end of the war. Least of all my father, to buy it for nothing.”
She groaned inside. The story would come out his way. Painful and tortured.
“What did Hélène see?” she tried again.
He shrugged.
Great. “According to your report, she has conversations with imaginary people. So why did you call if you . . . ?”
“She talks to Paulette. But the last time I saw Paulette was end of September 1942. Right there.” He stood shuffled to the window. Pointed. “It was a rain-drenched day, like today. She was right there, in front of Fondation Halphen, only then it was a tenement.”
Behind a fence, Aimée saw a soot-blackened building in the throes of gutting and renovation.
“An eyesore to the SS. They requisitioned the town house and its contents—art. Now it’s the Polish Foundation.”
Aimée focused on the flic cars, their blue-and-white lights flashing over the cobblestones. A man she recognized was getting out of one. Morbier.
She moved back from the window.
“I don’t understand, Monsieur.”
His eyes glazed. “The flics came then, like now.”
She had to bring him back to earth, to what the woman—the clochard, whoever she was—had said.
“Monsieur, how is this relevant?”
“Hélène bribed her little sister, Paulette, with nougat candy to pick up Hélène’s homework from her classmate in Fondation Halphen,” he continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “Flics under Geheime Staatspolizei—Gestapo—orders rounded up Jews who lived there, forty of them children.”
“You mean . . . ?”
“They dragged Paulette out with the others, still holding Hélène’s math book. I saw them herded into waiting trucks. Now a plaque marks the building. You see, right there.”
And she knew. She recalled the plaque on the wall. All 112 inhabitants, including children, had been rounded up. And deported.
“Paulette wasn’t even Jewish. But they slammed the truck doors closed.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?”
She saw the pain in his eyes.
“But we all saw what was happening. We knew. People hurried off, trying to melt, to evaporate into the stone buildings. To avoid seeing or being seen. The shame, the fear. Hélène came walking down the street. She stood right there, holding her laundry basket.”
How did that fit into this story? “Laundry, Monsieur?”
“It was cheaper if you did it yourself in the bateau lavoir near Pont Marie,” he said, his tone matter-of-fact.
The old laundry barges had been moored in the Seine until the fifties. It was hard to believe the river had once been clean enough to do laundry in.
“Then Hélène was screaming . . . her basket fell from her hands, the white sheets lay on the cobbles as she stood on the street, pleading.” He shook his head. “They had quotas, they told her.”
Aimée hated these stories—the pain, the oozing guilt. The helplessness to alter the past.
“Every day Hélène and her father went to the Place de l’Opera and waited in line at the Kommandantur.”
The former Kommandantur now housed a Berlitz center, the Royal Air Maroc office, and Aimée’s bank, BNP Paribas. The bank manager had moaned to her one day in his office about the techs finding a rat-chewed cloth swastika while tearing up floorboards to install fiber-optic cables.
“All futile,” Caplan said. “Paulette had left on the Auschwitz-Birkenau convoy number 37 on September 25.”
Aimée couldn’t speak. There was nothing to say.
“Hélène blamed herself. Her parents sent her to a cousin in Le Puy. What happened to them later, I don’t know. But there was heavy bombing of the southern train lines . . . so many never came back.”
He scanned the street and shuffled back to his chair. Sat down with a sigh. “After the Libération, my father bought this shop at auction. It would make me sick to hear him justifying his ‘investment.’ Then the store passed to me.” He gave a tight smile. “I wanted to study medicine. But that’s not your problem. A dozen years ago or so, Hélène reappeared. I’d thought she was dead. She wanted to go to sleep in her bedroom. Vacant eyed, she spoke to an imaginary Paulette.”
Aimée wanted to know about the present, not this sad past, the shame clinging to these walls. Here in the dust, a miasma of the forgotten was almost palpable, though his words and the plaque were the only testimony to what had happened long ago in front of his door.
“To survive, you move on. But it’s still here.” He hit his chest. “No one likes remembering. Those who broke, like Hélène, live in a twilight of the past. She’ll go for months, rational and even able to work, and then . . .”
He pulled a much-folded Elle magazine from under the cushion of his chair. An issue from the sixties with a young Catherine Deneuve on the cover, pert in Courreges boots in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Now a collectors’ item. He opened it and took out a black-and-white class photo from the École des Garçons around the corner. Another photo showed a street scene with two laughing girls in school smocks, petting a puppy in front of the butcher shop; the butcher in his apron; people sitting in chairs on the street, fanning themselves. “See, that’s how the island used to be, shopkeepers, the aristocrats, talking together, a village.”
She didn’t need a nostalgia lesson; she’d grown up here and heard it before.