Authors: Cara Black
She could follow her to-do list, hail a taxi, try one more time to trace Zazie’s steps. Or maybe she should listen to her body. Go home, put her feet up and catch some delicious sleep.
She hailed a taxi.
T
HE
L
YCÉE
J
ACQUES
Decour incorporated the former abattoir of Montmartre into part of the gym. The portico’d walkway of the nineteenth-century school’s courtyard enclosed a garden of shooting purple hollyhocks. The school exuded a convent-like ambience—apart from the clumps of teenagers, the running and yelling and the piercing bell. A blur of movement, pounding footsteps, and then the testosterone and chaos evaporated behind high classroom doors.
After a five-minute talk with the
gardien
through the window to the wood
loge
, Aimée knew which classroom to look for. Finding it, she discovered, was another matter. Staircases
on the far side of the courtyard led to an upper floor with long corridors and a warren of rooms. A bit like her old
lycée
in the Marais.
Salle A
led to
Salle A1
, which led to a roomful of students bent over exercise books. Those low wood desks and chairs were exactly how Aimée remembered them, gouged with initials and murder on her long legs. Two teachers stood conferring by the chalkboard. One wore a peach scarf, the other a sundress—no doubt ready for
les vacances.
“
Pardonnez-moi
,” she said. “Is either of you Zazie Duclos’s teacher?”
“That’s Monsieur Sillot.
Là-bas.
”
A small, trim middle-aged man wearing a red vest, bow tie and rimless glasses stood in the corridor, intent on checking off something on a clipboard with his pen. He made clucking noises accompanied by frequent shakes of his head. He reminded her of a nervous robin counting crumbs for the winter.
“Monsieur Sillot,” she said. “I understand you’re Zazie Duclos’s teacher.”
“I can’t talk to you,” he said, giving her a once-over with his sharp, black eyes. “Confidentiality.”
“Monsieur, I’m not a
flic
…”
“That much I figured out,” he interrupted. “A journalist,
non
?”
Tempted to lie, she shook her head. “A concerned friend. I’ve known her since she was in diapers.”
“Zazie’s absent today. That’s all I can say.”
Her attempt at ingratiating herself didn’t work. “She’s missing.” She flashed her PI badge. “Her parents, my close friends, hired me to find her.”
Not that she’d ever charge the Ducloses. They struggled to break even on the café.
“The
flics
asked us a lot of questions.” He shrugged. “Again, confidentiality issues preclude my speaking to you about
students.” A flick of his gaze took in the corridor, the stairway. Instinct told her he had something to share.
Aimée nodded. “
Bien sûr.
” She stepped closer, sensing a thaw in him. “Zazie’s mother shared with me the latest in the
flics
’ investigation. It’s not much. Zero.”
Angling to give him something he’d be willing to comment on, she followed a hunch. “Zazie’s class project fascinated her, she told me.” She pulled out Zazie’s report. What did she have to lose? “I think I can find her,” she said. “There’s a link between the surveillance techniques in Zazie’s project and the ways she tried to trail the rapist. The rapist who murdered Sylvaine Olivet yesterday.”
His birdlike eyes darted down the corridor again. The bell drilled. Aimée felt the reverberations in the soles of her feet.
“My neighbor, Tonette,
une vraie héroïne
, visited our class,” he said. “She inspired this end-of-year project. The
flics
showed no interest in questioning Tonette, although I suggested it.”
“How’s that?”
“Tonette is a Resistance hero. She told my students about how children their age were involved in the Resistance, about how they filled their days during the war and communicated with each other without getting caught. She bet them they couldn’t last a week without video games or phones or computers.”
Somehow this tied in. But how? Down the hallway she spotted a trio of uniformed
flics.
Great. She needed to squeeze something out of this teacher fast.
“And that relates how, Monsieur?”
“From what I understand, Zazie and Tonette formed a friendship. Zazie became very interested in the Resistance, chose it as a topic for her final project. I know she spent some time with Tonette after school to learn more.” He paused. “We’re about to inform our students of Sylvaine’s passing now, at the assembly,” he said. “
Désolé.
I can’t say any more.”
Students lined up in the corridor, ready for attendance check off.
“So how can I get in touch with Tonette, Monsieur?”
Giggles came from the girls, pointing from the boys, all fresh faced, full of energy, like Zazie. Self-conscious, Aimée realized the lip-smacking noises were aimed at her … “His wife …
non
, his
chérie.
”
“Silence!” Monsieur Sillot commanded. A hush descended. In a swift movement, he wrote Tonette’s address on top of Zazie’s report. Winked.
At least this no-nonsense teacher had given her a place to start.
“M
ADAME
T
ONETTE
?”
SAID
the concierge, shaking a rag on the pavement. “Gone out. You just missed her.” She stepped back into the shadowed
porte cochère.
“Where did she go?” Aimée wiped sweat from her forehead. “Shopping, the market?”
“On Tuesdays she works,” the concierge said. She picked up a wet cloth, draped it over her mop and set to wet-mopping the stone
portail.
So early and already humidity clung to the air like a wet sheet.
“The address, please,” Aimée said.
“Who wants to know?” The concierge’s eyes narrowed.
Aimée flashed her PI badge yet again.
“Funny, you don’t look like those PIs on the
télé
.”
“We never do, Madame.”
The concierge shrugged. “Rue de la Grange-Batelière, the street
d’antiquaire.
Le Vieux Lapin.”
T
EN HOT MINUTES
later, she wound down narrow rue du Faubourg Montmartre past Au P’tit Creux du Faubourg—Dédé, the owner, served the best
prix-fixe
lunch in the
quartier
, attested by the regulars who always crowded the place. The old wood, the
mirrors and the smells emanating from within, where the staff were preparing for lunch, were still the same as she remembered. Like her
grand-père
’s time. She felt a stirring of hunger. Farther on she waved at Monsieur Arakian, one of the many
diamantaires
, diamond merchants, whose shops speckled rue la Fayette. In this
quartier
they were all Armenian. She had him to thank for the two-carat studs that never left her earlobes.
Ahead was a
mélange
of philatelic shops and Hôtel Drouot, the auction house—her
grand-père
’s old haunts. He frequented them all, a hound for antiques. The Louis XV tables, Aubusson rugs and chandeliers in her inherited seventeenth-century flat on Ile Saint-Louis were evidence of that.
Growing up, she’d trailed him through the Hôtel Drouot galleries filled with jumbles of treasures and trash: a taxidermied muskrat, Belle Époque escritoires and ’70s plastic cube chairs. She even knew the auction-house porters, all from the Savoy region, known since Napoleon III’s time by their distinctive red collars, their profession handed down from Savoyard father to son.
She made a left and found Le Vieux Lapin mid-block, one of many antique shops on the street. Dealers smoked on the pavement, and she heard snatches of conversation drifting—“… belonged to the Rothschilds …”
Le Vieux Lapin’s interior, dim and cool, gave off a wax-polish smell, just like what
grand-père
used.
“
Bonjour
,” Aimée called, her eyes adjusting to the low light.
“Talking to the whore again?” said a woman’s voice from the shadows. “About that Watteau?
Zut
! Forget it.” Aimée heard a phone slammed down on the receiver.
“
Excusez-moi
, but—”
From the dim interior emerged a young woman with prematurely white hair pulled into a beehive. Maroon lipstick on a smooth, made-up face, lime green cigarette pants, red heels and a white blazer. Right out of
Vogue.
“
Oui
?” she said, her voice clipped.
Aimée pulled out a card. Glanced around the showroom filled with antiques—walls lined with cracked oil paintings; eighteenth-century portraits of powdered, bewigged men; countryside scenes of rolling green and winding rivers.
The woman surveyed Aimée’s card and snorted. “Here about some insurance claim? I’m not a fence. That’s the territory of the red collars, those Savoyards.”
She remembered her
grand-père
negotiating with the red collars amid winks and exchanges under the table. Hence his “deals.” “
Non
,” Aimée said, “I’m not here to see any fences.”
“It’s like that saying,” the woman said, eyeing Aimée with a smirk. “Drouot resembles a wonderful old whore—you know she’s corrupt and full of flaws, yet you keep going because she’s charming and funny and she gives you lots of pleasure.”
She had that right. “I’m here to see Madame Tonette.”
“Busy.” Crisp, to the point, end of discussion.
On closer inspection the woman appeared older; a hint of crow’s-feet, smoker’s lip lines. But Aimée wished to God she could have fit into those cigarette pants. A scallop shell of red embroidery on the seam, last season’s Lacroix.
“Monsieur Sillot, the
lycée
teacher, recommended I speak with her.”
A little expulsion of air. “
Et
alors
?”
She had to appeal to this woman. Somehow. How else could she track Zazie?
She lowered her voice. “His student, Zazie Duclos, whom Madame Tonette knows, is missing. I need Madame Tonette’s help,
s’il vous plaît.
”
Concern crinkled the woman’s brow. A moment later her heels clicked on the hardwood floor. From the rear door to the office Aimée heard, “Tante Tonette, you decent?”
A muffled reply. The woman beckoned Aimée.
“Don’t tire her out,” she said. “She’s got a
cinq à sept
tonight.”
That meant one thing only. A lover over
apéros
between five and seven.
Unsure of what to expect, Aimée smiled. “
Merci
.”
A well-coiffed, white-haired woman, seventy if she was a day, sat at an ebony desk spreading Tarot cards, her trim figure encased in a white linen sheath. A fuchsia
foulard
was knotted around her neck, matching her Chanel sling-back heels.
Fashion genes in every generation in this family.
“
Excusez-moi
, Tonette?”
A bat of her mascara’d lashes at Aimée. Then a wave of her hand as she scooped up the Tarot deck.
“You’re not here for a card reading,” she said, her voice graveled and deep.
A fortune-teller. Another surprise. But then she realized she didn’t understand a lot of what had happened since Zazie disappeared.
“Madame, if I could, this concerns—”
“Aah,
pardonnez-moi.
” She’d pulled on her tortoiseshell reading glasses. “Now I can see better. You’re the attorney representing the Ziegler heirs.”
“Heirs? But …”
“I prepared,” said Tonette, reaching for a worn, leather-bound ledger. “You can see the sale documents of my father’s purchase of Monsieur Ziegler’s shares in the
antiquaire.
Papers, all the Jews needed papers, for Aryanization, you know. So we kept everything for the Zieglers, but they didn’t return. Now it’s ready for the heir claimants.”
Aimée gave a sigh. “Madame Tonette, I think you’ve mistaken—”
“
Attendez
, please hear me out,” she said. The woman wanted to talk. “The ledgers detail every transaction, tax paid. It’s all here,” she said. “For fifty years and up to date.” Tonette shot her a look. “
Dénoncés
, you know. Denounced by their neighbors.”
The Occupation, and what the French did to the French
during that dark time, remained as vivid as the present in those shrewd eyes. But Aimée hadn’t come to dip into the sad past.
“You’ve confused me with an attorney.”
“
Mais oui
… But you look like her. You’re both pregnant.”
Aimée handed her a card, sat down.
“Aah,
la détective
, the one Zazie goes on about.”
Encouraged, Aimée perched on a fragile gilt and red upholstered chair, hoping it would hold her, and spread out Zazie’s map, the report.
“Zazie’s teacher said you inspired his class’s end-of-year project,” said Aimée. “That you and Zazie spent time together. I’m hoping Zazie told you about her subject, a man she practiced surveillance on. Can you help me understand more?”
“Aaah, to catch le Weasel.” Tonette took off her glasses. “Her teacher and I, we had a bet. Challenged the students to get by without electronics, like we did during the Occupation. We encouraged them to partner and communicate. Like a game of spies, to make it fun. Surveil someone in the
quartier
—with their permission, of course. Using techniques of keeping a log, photographing, following and writing a report.”
Now it made sense. “The way you surveilled people in the Resistance,
n’est-ce pas
?”
“Resistance? That’s an overused term.” Tonette shrugged. “I was thirteen in 1943—Zazie’s age,
Vous comprenez
?” A faraway look entered her eyes. “Flirting with a boy in
les communistes.
To us it was game. At first.” Under her rolled-up sleeve, Aimée noticed scars. “Ravensbrück,” she said, noticing Aimée’s gaze. “No tattooed numbers by then. The Nazis didn’t have time. We were on the last convoy in and the last to be liberated.” Her light brown eyes flickered. “Zazie’s so impressionable, such a sweet, smart girl. We met several times, but I hoped after she came to see me yesterday …”
Aimée sat up. Her stomach hit the desk. She turned in the delicate chair, tried to keep it balanced.