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dark-paneled living room. An open prayer book rested on the polished pine sideboard. The dining-room mirror was swathed in black cloth. Lit tapers sputtered in pools of wax, giving off only a faint light. Women clad in black, moaning, rocked back and forth on sticklike chairs and orange crates.
    She kept her head down. She didn't want to breathe the old, sad smell of these people.
    A young rabbi, his ill-fitting jacket hanging off him, greeted her in a jumble of Hebrew and French as they passed him. She wanted to flee this apartment, so dark and heavy with grief.
    She overheard French rap from a radio in a back room, where sulky teenagers congregated by an open door.
    The crime-scene tape was gone but the insistent noise of the leaky faucet in the dingy bathroom and aura of death remained. She'd always see the scuffed black shoe with the worn heel and the vacant white face carved by that swastika. An odd, tilted swastika with rounded edges.
    The crime-scene technicians had left neat stacks of Lili Stein's personal items on the rolltop desk. The bloated angelfish and tank were gone. A knitting basket full of thick needles and multicolored yarn spilled out across the hand-crocheted bedspread. Issues of the Hebrew Times were piled in the corner and beside the bed.
    "Yours?" She picked up a folded section. The paper crinkled and a color supplement fell out.
    "Maman ignored French newspapers," he said. "Refused to own a television. Her only extravagance was a subscription to the Hebrew newspaper from Tel Aviv."
    The boards on the window facing the cobbled courtyard were gone. Ribbons of yellow crime-scene tape crisscrossed the view of the drab light well below.
    "Why did your mother board up the window?"
    He shrugged. "She always said the noise bothered her and she wanted privacy."
    Aimee pulled a wicker chair, the only chair in the room, towards the window. The uneven chair legs wobbled, one didn't touch the floor. She indicated he should sit on the bed.
    "Monsieur Stein, let's. . ."
    He interrupted. "What were you doing in this room?"
    She wanted to tell him the truth, tell him how cornered and confused she felt. After the explosion, when her father's charred remains had been carted away, she had lain in the hospital. No one had talked to her, explained their investigation. Some young flic had questioned her during burn treatment as if she'd been the perpetrator.
    Mentally, she made a sign of the cross, again begging for the dead woman's forgiveness.
    "Frankly, this is classified but, Monsieur, I think you deserve to know," she said.
    "Eh?" But he sat down on the bed.
    "Your mother was the focus of a police operation mounted to obtain evidence against right-wing groups like Les Blancs Nationaux."
    Abraham Stein's eyes widened.
    How could she lie to this poor man?
    But she didn't know any other way.
    Not only Leduc Detective's depleted bank account and overdue taxes forced her to take this case. Part of her had to prove she could still be a detective: flics or not, justice would be done her way, administered in a way victims' families rarely saw. The other part was her father's honor.
    Abraham cleared his throat, "She was cooperating with the flics ? Doesn't make sense. Maman avoided anything to do with the war, politics, or police."
    "Rare though female detectives are in Paris, Monsieur, I'm one of them. I am going to find out who killed your mother."
    He shook his head. She pulled out her PI license with the less than flattering photo on it. He examined it quickly.
    Aimee ran a hand over the worn rolltop desk, trying to get the feel of Lili Stein. Yellowed account books were shelved inside.
    "Why would a private investigator care?" he asked.
    "I lost my father to terrorists, Monsieur. We worked with the Brigade Criminelle, as part of surveillance, until the plastic explosive taped under our van incinerated my father." She leaned forward. "What eats at me still is how his murderers disappeared. The case closed. No one