“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 s?r.” 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 héro?ne, 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.
“MADAME TONETTE?” 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.”
TEN 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 H?tel 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 H?tel 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.