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.
“What time, can you remember?”
A bell rang in the shop. “Tante Tonette, a customer for you.”
“I’ll come right back,” said Tonette, rising.
Aimée reached and put her hand on Tonette’s thin arm. “Time’s important. When did you last see Zazie?”
“Yesterday afternoon. Now if you’ll let me help my customer?”
“Her classmate was raped and murdered, and now Zazie’s missing. You might have been the last to see her,” said Aimée. “Isn’t that more important?”
Tonette gasped. Her hand flew to her mouth. After a moment she pointed to rue Notre-Dame de Lorette on the map. “Here, at my place. After lunch we met for tea. To go over her report, but … she didn’t bring it. And she was in a hurry.”
“Around two thirty?”
Tonette nodded. “She left maybe three P.M.”
“No one’s seen her since.”
“Le Weasel, she talked about le Weasel, their suspect, she called him.”
So Zazie had tracked le Weasel, the man she took for the rapist. The real man in the FotoFit?
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“I’m not sure of her friend’s name.”
“Didn’t she mention Sylvaine?”
“A Marie-Jo, maybe. Yes, that’s who she talked about.”
“Did Marie-Jo, this friend, live on rue Chaptal?”
“Close by, that’s all I know,” said Tonette. “Somehow I thought the man they were tracking was her friend’s mother’s boyfriend.”
“Why?” Aimée leaned forward.
“That’s who they chose to surveil for the project.” Tonette shrugged. “Although I know they didn’t like him. I got the idea they were hoping to catch him at something.” Suddenly her eyes widened. “You think he’s this rapist? I read about the attack. Horrible.”
“Please, Tonette, it’s vital … why did they pick him?”
“I don’t know.”
The pieces clicked together in Aimée’s head. If Marie-Jo was the friend on rue Chaptal Zazie’s parents forbade her to see, the girls must have used a Resistance-style system, sans phone, to communicate.
“How did you help Zazie track le Weasel and communicate with her friend?” Aimée said.
The younger woman called again. “Tante Tonette?”
Aimée pushed Tonette’s fuchsia bag toward her on the desk. “Better yet, you’ll show me. Tell your niece you’re taking the afternoon off.”
Tuesday, 10 A.M.
THE POLICE SCANNER crackled in René’s Citro?n as a garbage truck cut in front of him. Merde! He braked and pulled into the first place he could, the open gate of Cité Malesherbes, an elegant lane of townhouses. Listening carefully to the scanner, René took his pen and noted the latest victim’s father’s name and details in the margin of the true-crime book.
Thank God he’d caffeinated and scored another meeting tonight with the waitress. Now to buttonhole this father, who’d finished his police interview and returned to work. But right now René had to cool his heels, stuck until the garbage truck moved. Sun beat down on his streaked windshield. A crow, its body glinting like shiny black satin, cawed from the roof tiles.
After spending all night in the car, his calves ached and his spine felt out of alignment, like his heart. He had to start a new ardoise—a clean slate, get over his feelings for Aimée. Melac could reappear, want to support Aimée and be a father to the new baby. Who knew?
Yet he couldn’t help—in secret—graphing costs of cloth diaper services versus the price of disposable. Enrolling in Lamaze as her partner. Studying the benefits of breastfeeding on infant growth charts.
His phone bleeped. Aimée.
“Any luck, René?” she said, breathless.
“What’s wrong? You’re out of breath.”
“Walking up a hill with a sixty-eight-year-old and I can’t keep up with her,” she said. “Good exercise. And you?”
“The father of the latest victim has finished up with his police interview.” The garbage truck’s loader whined. Pungent aromas drifted through his window. Forget this. He turned the key in the ignition. “I’m off to question him.”
“Where’s that, René?”
“I’m going to l’Opéra.”
RENé WALKED OUT of le parking at Place Edouard VII into an impasse of steam-cleaned limestone buildings festooned with carved nymphs and a naked woman or two—the alabaster almost glowed. Wrought-iron balconies overflowed with pink and red geraniums. Picture parfait.
Beyond the zebra-striped crosswalk, René glimpsed the Palais Garnier, Napoleon III’s gold-cuppola’d, rococo and Empire-style opera house. His detractors derided it as over-the-top, as had the ice-cart deliverymen, who complained that the time it took to circumvent the “monstrosity” to reach Café de la Paix melted their ice slabs.
Artistic furor died down over the years, but not so the grumbling over traffic jams, first from the horse-drawn trolley drivers, then later from motorists and bus drivers. Haussmann had discouraged revolutionaries by demolishing alleys and twisting lanes that were fertile ground for street fighters, with no thought of practical traffic navigation.
Yet in indigo summer twilight, la vieille dame, no stranger to controversy over the centuries, was bewitching.