Another example of methodical planning.
“Le salaud!” Imbert’s tone hardened. “L’Opéra offers workers’ housing so we union members can live nearby, on call, you know. For our sake I insisted Nelié make a police report. We need to dot the ‘i’s and show the bureau, or they won’t change the codes and locks. Heighten security. I hate that Nelié goes home alone, but what else should I do? I can’t deny her these free lessons with Madame, even if they are late at night, after her paying pupils are done. It would break her heart.”
René heard the man’s anguish. Not a choice a father would want to make. Impending godfatherhood, René realized, came with responsibilities.
A slapping sound, and in the yellow beam René noticed Imbert’s net with a wriggling catfish.
“Edible?” he asked.
“Served with a light hollandaise sauce and a sprig of tarragon, parfait.” Imbert put his fingers to his mouth and smacked his lips.
After making Monsieur Imbert promise to ask his daughter if she knew Zazie, René started to make his way up the dripping, slick stairs.
“I remembered one thing, Monsieur Friant,” Imbert called after him.
René turned, careful not to slip.
“Someone clapped after her playing.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Nelié says it wasn’t the first time she heard someone, a man she thinks, clap outside the window at her violin lesson.”
A stalker? The rapist.
“Does Nelié think he’s the one who followed her?”
“It was the humming. My Nelié said he hummed.”
“Any tune she recognized?”
“The Paganini piece she’s practicing for the Conservatoire de Musique tryout. The piece she’d just played.”
René shivered, and the chill that ran down his spine didn’t come from the damp, sweating walls.
Tuesday, 11 A.M.
AIMéE, DRENCHED AND winded by the time they reached the wedge of park behind Place Saint-Georges, noticed Tonette hadn’t broken a sweat. In the shade of green-leafed branches, blue delphiniums and hollyhocks framed pink, trellised roses. A true breath of paradise, Aimée thought, this secluded oasis between the nineteenth-century limestone buildings.
“Zazie wanted to hear the old stories,” said Tonette.
Aimée hoped this went somewhere. “You mean for her report?”
“All of it.” Tonette’s gaze locked on a hovering blue-purple dragonfly. “How we lycée students marched under the Germans’ noses to the Arc de Triomphe on Armistice Day in 1940. A small protest no one talks about.” She shook her white head. “We took to the Grands Boulevards, just near here, forty-one of us singing La Marseillaise and flying the tricolor until the police appeared. Can you imagine? But that’s what you do when you’re young and foolish. We started a clandestine one-page newspaper, printed in secret in our school’s cellar. Even distributed copies using special signs, signals and drop boxes until our principal caught us. My story fascinated Zazie.”
Tonette unfolded the story her way. Aimée tried not to squirm with impatience.
“So you inspired Zazie to use your techniques,” said Aimée, fanning herself in the heat. “Ways that informed her surveillance?”
“I wouldn’t call it that,” said Tonette, rolling her eyes. “Well, maybe a little.” A shrug of her elegant shoulders. Children ran over the grass. The blue-purple dragonfly fluttered by the rose trellis. “Later we mostly distributed anti-Fascist pamphlets from clandestine printing presses—all run by communists then—at cinemas just before the German newsreels. We threw them from balconies. They floated like butterflies. Then we ran. Kids.”
So far Tonette’s tale had told her little.
“We all went to the cinema then.” Tonette’s gaze softened. “Truffaut grew up right around the corner, you know. We would have been almost the same age. Everyone lived in the cinema. During the Occupation, theaters were heated. At least for the first few winters. But ’40 and ’41 were cruel. No wood or charcoal—the Germans took it, courtesy of French racketeers. Trying to obtain food and rations dominated our lives. In 1942 a D ration ticket got you a half kilo of potatoes. For a K ticket, workers got a liter of wine. Depended on who you knew.” She gave a knowing nod. “My mother heard Mistinguett sing before German troops at the Casino de Paris; a ditty about her cold apartment and empty stewpot. The next day Mistinguett received five bags of charcoal and six lamb gigots. She sold them. Mais alors, everyone did.”
Aimée’s collar stuck to her neck. This heat. “Our history teacher once told us Mistinguett said, ‘My heart is French but my ass is international.’ ”
Tonette shook her head. “That’s Arletty. Mistinguett said, ‘A kiss can be a comma, a question mark or an exclamation point. That’s basic spelling that every woman ought to know.’ ”
Aimée grinned. No wonder Zazie had connected with Tonette. Kindred spirits. And Tonette must have seen her former thirteen-year-old self in Zazie.
“Oh, and butter,” Tonette continued, “color was the only way you could tell if it was the real thing. My mother detested the butcher, a black-market profiteer.” She pointed to an antiquaire shop visible outside of the park. “Gone now. But back then women lined up in the cold, waiting. I remember seeing my teacher shivering—no one had stockings, scarcer than diamonds. But she’d stained her legs with brou de noix, walnut-hull juice, to look like she did. Like a lot of women.”
Old stories of the dark years, as this generation and every generation since had termed it. She needed to listen and focus on what Zazie had gleaned and used.
Tonette shrugged. “We were so hungry, my mother contacted her fifth cousin on a farm, the snob who she hadn’t seen since before the war. Ah, then la cousine became my mother’s closest member of la famille. She furnished us with eggs, once in a while a chicken. We were lucky. We ate.”