Designs on the Dead Read online

  Designs on the Dead

  A Death in Paris Mystery

  EMILIA BERNHARD

  Arrondissements of Paris

  For Roselyn Farren

  Acknowledgments

  First, as always, enormous thanks to my agent, Laura Macdougall, who is responsible for my writing career and to whom I am permanently grateful. Second, profuse thanks to Olivia Davies, who shepherded me through moments of crisis, then made sure I was happy with the results. Thanks also to Chelsey Emmelhainz, who gave me some of the soundest writing advice I’ve received, and to Julian Isaacs, who provided invaluable guidance on the (literal) ins and outs of heroin usage, as well as rock ’n’ roll anecdotes that impressed and cheered me when I was down. And many thanks to James Bock, who had the unenviable task of editing me and performed it with grace and perspicacity.

  Thanks to Andy Peers, my first listener; Jennifer Piddington, my first reader; Ashley Bruce, my weekly supporter, and Kirsty Martin, my soothing and relaxing confidant. I give special thanks to and for Stephen Dineen, the very first person to introduce me to strangers as “a novelist.”

  Even more than usual, this book wouldn’t have been possible without Google Maps and Google Street View. In pandemic times, these made it possible for me to walk the streets of Paris. And thanks to the Paris France Hôtel, which I stayed in on the brief research trip I was able to manage before COVID changed everything. It was the first time I stayed in a hotel on a research trip, and I felt classy.

  The art market in France during and after World War II is a complex and difficult subject, one that’s still being unraveled today. For help understanding it, I used Hector Feliciano, The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World’s Greatest Works of Art (Basic Books, 1997); Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944 (Oxford University Press, 2001); “Art Life in Occupied France, 1940–1944,” Modern Art Consulting; Lynn H. Nicholas, The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994). Any inaccuracies in this book are mine, not theirs.

  Rachel’s puzzling over the morality and worth of bringing ancient Nazis to trial are my own, as is the great-uncle. It’s a topic I’ve long wrestled with, and in the writing of this book I had some help from Elizabeth Kolbert’s article “The Last Trial: A Great-Grandmother, Auschwitz, and the Arc of Justice,” in the New Yorker’s February 16, 2015, issue; Eva Mozes Kor, “‘Bookkeeper of Auschwitz’ guilty of accessory to 300,000 murders” (https://www.itv.com/news/update/2015-07-15/auschwitz-survivor-disappointed-by-groening-jail-term/); Eliza Gray’s “The Last Nazi Trials” (https://time.com/nazi-trials/); Melissa Eddy, “Why Germany Prosecutes the Aged for Nazi Roles It Long Ignored” (New York Times, February 9, 2021); and the wonderful film, The Eichmann Show (BBC TV, 2015).

  In the more mundane but integral area of private detection, particularly private detection on the web, I used Kevin Beaver, Hacking for Dummies (John Wiley & Sons, 2018); Jean-Emmanuel Derny and Samuel Mathis, Les Detective Privés pour les nuls (Editions First, 2016). I also consulted Benjamin Sobieck’s The Writers Guide to Weapons (Writer’s Digest Books, 2015), and Eugene Vidocq’s Memoirs of Vidocq (Whittaker, 1859). To understand, at least to a degree, the cut-throat world of fashion design, I consulted Fashionary: The Fashion Business Manual (Fashionary, 2018); Oriole Collin and Connie Karole Burks, Christian Dior (V&A, 2018); Lesley Ellis Miller, Balenciaga: Outside In (V&A, 2017); Désirée Sadek and Guillaume de Laubier, Inside Haute Couture: Behind the Scenes at the Paris Ateliers (Adams, 2016); and André Leon Talley’s absolutely riveting The Chiffon Trenches: A Memoir (Penguin Random House, 2020).

  As always, I made extensive use of Pekka Saukko and Bernard Knight’s Knight’s Forensic Pathology, 3rd edition (Arnold, 2004). This terrific book has given me more hours of enjoyment than its title might suggest.

  Chapter One

  On a gray Saturday morning in Paris, a woman sat alone and mourned the death of a man who made clothes.

  Roland Guipure Dies

  read the headline on the front page of Le Figaro. The obituary continued,

  Designer of Artful Power Found Dead

  16 avril 2016

  Roland Guipure, the fashion designer who consistently broke ground and raised the stakes as head of Sauveterre, the fashion label he founded, died on Thursday night. He was 40.

  Guipure was found dead yesterday morning near the LaLa Lounge in the third arrondissement, where he had been celebrating his birthday. He had recently completed treatment for heroin addiction at a rehab facility in Greece. His death has been confirmed by the House of Sauveterre.

  Roland Guipure began his design career at age 24, when he showed his “Nereid” collection during Paris Fashion Week in 2000. Critics called the collection “revolutionary” and “a challenge to anyone who thinks they know what fashion means.” Over the years that followed, Guipure’s rise was meteoric. He funded Sauveterre with an inheritance from his grandfather Maximilien Sauveterre, the much-admired art dealer, but the label soon became self-supporting under the financial management of his twin sister Antoinette. Sauveterre’s trademark double S, surrounded by guillemets—»§«—became a familiar sight on pieces worn by chic women. As the house became more established, Guipure’s designs became more serious, known for clean lines that were almost sculptural and often startling.

  Although Guipure never had formal fashion training or worked under another designer, he apprenticed to a tailor after his graduation from secondary school, and this may account for his lack of interest in standard fashion expectations. His prêt-à-porter was as likely to feature square-cut suitings with peplums of burlap and leather as his haute couture was to feature a bridal gown created from gold-pinstriped red flannel (both feature in the house’s autumn/winter 2007 collections). His Ne Touche Pas dress, with its elaborate lapels of pleated organza and wired-back collar reminiscent of antlers or tentacles, is currently on display in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.

  Over the last two years, however, Guipure became increasingly dependent on heroin. His health suffered, Sauveterre’s sales began to drop, and his 2015 collections were poorly received. Last year he entered a rehabilitation facility in Greece. Sauveterre showed no collections for spring/summer 2015 and no haute couture collection this January, but for spring/summer 2016 prêt-à-porter they presented looks Guipure designed while in recovery. Reactions were positive, with WWD calling it “a fresh revisioning that promises a strong future.”

  Guipure’s recent autumn/winter 2016 prêt-à-porter collection, his first completed after emerging from désintoxification last November, was greeted rapturously. Based on this success, the house had decided to recommence showing haute couture next season.

  The fashion world is reeling from this unexpected tragic afterword to what had seemed to be a happy ending. “Roland was a bright beacon,” said Marianne Faubois of French Vogue. “His death leaves a gaping hole in the future of couture.”

  Roland Guipure was born on 12 April 1976 to Genevieve (née Sauveterre) and Paul Guipure, and died on 15 April 2016. He is survived by a sister, Antoinette Guipure.

  It was silly, Rachel Levis knew. She had never met Roland Guipure. She couldn’t afford any of his haute couture fantasies, and at five foot two and a hundred and thirty pounds she wouldn’t have fit into them anyway. Yet she knew and loved his designs. Every woman in Paris with any kind of interest in fashion knew them: the early miniskirts and shirts that looked like Chanel jackets ripped apart and stuck back together at random; the combinations of angles and flow that made up his more recent collections. And a month ago his prêt-à-porter collection, the first he’d staged since finishing rehab, had made critics reach for new superlatives. She hated cl
ichés, even when she only used them to herself, but Guipure genuinely had been full of promise, a talent that made fashion both surprising and significant.

  Normally, she would have pointed out the obituary to her husband, Alan, but he was on his annual visit to his parents in Florida and wouldn’t be back for another month. As a poor substitute, she bit into her croissant and remembered the previous spring when, during a visit to London, she and her best friend Magda had seen the Ne Touche Pas dress in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The tight column of heavy marigold-colored silk had been lit from above, making its red organza ruffles and huge wired collar almost iridescent. They looked like the wings of a bold Elizabethan insect or the petals of an enormous glass poppy balanced on a golden stem. Although she had loved clothing for as long as she could remember, her encounter with the dress was the first time that she understood how fashion could blend nature and artifice to enhance life in the ordinary world.

  The ring of her portable cut across this memory. The screen told her Magda was calling. She swiped at the green icon and took the call.

  “Roland Guipure—”

  “I know,” Rachel said, cutting her off. “I’m just reading the obituary now.”

  Magda sighed. “Remember when we went to the V and A?”

  For a few minutes they rehashed the day Rachel had been remembering, reminding each other about the dresses in the exhibition and the glossy hardback catalogue neither of them had felt rich enough to buy. Then Magda said with finality, “Well, it’s the curse of rehab, isn’t it? People seem great when they get out, but wait a couple of weeks and they fall right off the wagon.”

  “You can’t be sure it happened that way,” Rachel protested, although she’d been thinking much the same. Still, she hated to think of anyone she admired, no matter how far removed, dead in an alley from an overdose. “The obituary just said he’d died, not how he died.”

  “Oh, please! Dead outside a nightclub after his birthday party? If you say that, you don’t need to say overdose.”

  What can I say? Rachel thought. She couldn’t disagree; she was as familiar with the clichés as Magda was. So instead of responding she moved the conversation onto another topic. After all, like all people who speak to each other daily, they had plenty to talk about.

  Chapter Two

  The rest of the week passed as the first weeks of spring do, with an overwhelming sense that change is coming and a corresponding sense that it isn’t coming quickly enough. Rachel noticed that the trees had begun to put out the little yellow leaves that would turn dark green in summer. Spring was her favorite season in any country, but here it almost made the late Paris winter, with its drizzle and its slushes, worthwhile. In the mornings she watched the new leaves from the window of her séjour as she drank her tea, marveling, as she did every year, over their combination of tenderness and precision, the way their bright edges seemed perfectly etched against the blue of the newly sunny sky.

  She had the same thought on Thursday afternoon as she walked home after meeting a friend for lunch near the Place des Vosges. The crisp square of the Place, neatly bisected on each side by paths that met in the middle, always soothed her, and walking under the trees now she saw that their leaves had already shaded into a firmer green. The air on her cheeks was fractionally warmer than it had been two hours before, and as she breathed in, she smelled the faint scent of earth from the thawing ground. Spring was staking its claim. She would walk home in it.

  As she crossed the Rue de Turenne heading toward the Rue St. Paul, she saw that the corner news kiosk fluttered with the latest issues of the weekly gossip magazines. All the cover headlines were about Roland Guipure: “Twenty-First-Century Dior: We Will Not See His Like Again,” the cover of Paris Match mourned; “Sad Day for Fashion!” bellowed Closer. She thought about the rituals of death in the celebrity age. These same headlines would be used with slight changes when the next famous or semi-famous person died, and in a year—or less—Roland Guipure would be just a name.

  My God, she said to herself. Such mournfulness on such a day! The sun was out; the air was soft; she would Skype her beloved husband that evening … Cheer up, she told herself.

  She became aware of a male voice shouting behind her.

  Any woman in Paris quickly learns to ignore the sound of a man yelling on the street. Keeping her head down, Rachel sped up into a brisk speed-walk that usually outran any street harassment. But the voice only seemed to come closer. Now it was saying, “Father’s friend! Hey, father’s friend!”

  A hand landed on her shoulder.

  She spun around, tensed for action. At first she didn’t recognize the man in front of her, tall and thin, skin stretched tight over his cheekbones. Then she remembered an elevator door opening onto a landing, a snaggle-toothed smile, and this same skull-like face asking her if she’d ever seen Scarface. Matthieu Mediouri, drug dealer and briefly a suspect in the murders of Rachel’s former boyfriend Edgar Bowen and his son David two years earlier—murders that she and Magda had solved. When she and Mediouri had first met, on the landing outside that open elevator door, she’d identified herself only as “a friend of David’s father.” Mediouri had decided this would make an excellent nickname, and now he stood there smiling, as if the irritating phrase were a delightful shared joke. She felt her stomach tighten.

  “You don’t remember me,” he began. “I am—”

  “Monsieur Mediouri. I remember you.”

  His smile widened. She saw that he’d had his teeth straightened. “Well, well! Good to know I am not forgettable. Just like you were not forgettable to me. I recognized you right away. What are you doing here, father’s friend?”

  “I might say the same to you. Or do you have a lot of customers in this area?” Let him see that she remembered what he was.

  He laughed, a sharp bark. “Absolument! But not in the way you’re thinking. I’m a legitimate businessman now.” He pointed behind him. “I own that pressing.”

  Rachel could just make out a storefront halfway down the street with Pressing Saint Paul written on it. Mediouri had left drug dealing to become a dry cleaner?

  He must have sensed her disbelief, because he said, “Come see my premises. I invite you for a coffee.”

  “I don’t drink coffee.”

  He shrugged. “Tea then. Moroccan mint tea. I make it in a special way.” In the heavily accented English she vividly remembered he said, “It is delicious!”

  It didn’t seem wise to leave a public location with a known criminal, even one who claimed to be reformed. On the other hand, it didn’t seem wise to refuse a known criminal’s invitation either. And she was curious. Squinting down the street, she saw that the pressing had a large plate glass window, easy to see and be seen through. She would simply refuse to go into any back rooms.

  The tea was good: hot but not too hot, and sweetened with sugar that Mediouri added in careful increments with a tiny brass spoon. Its mint taste was bracing; the silent ritual of mixing, oddly soothing. She took a few silent sips and rested her elbows on the pressing’s front counter.

  “You are surprised, eh?” Mediouri’s words blew steam off his miniature gold cup. “You thought I would be in jail, or dead.”

  Embarrassed at being so easily read, she blushed.

  He laughed again. “The movies and the TV, they make you think we all die in a shoot-out or with a needle in the arm. And that does happen. But more often one just … moves on.”

  Rachel couldn’t help herself. “But dry cleaning?”

  He shrugged. “It’s the family business. My grandfather was a tailor in Morocco, and my father owned a laundry out in Clichy sous Bois when he first emigrated. Besides”—a quick flash of gleaming teeth—“this business isn’t completely unconnected to my old work. I let some of my old friends use it as a kind of laundry too.”

  Rachel smiled back at him before she could stop herself. Warm, witty, frank: he was completely different from the sinister lounge lizard she’d encountere
d outside Edgar’s appartement all those months ago.

  “And your friend? Uh …” She could see his stubby sidekick in her mind’s eye, wearing his baseball cap and puffa vest, but she couldn’t remember his name.

  “Laurent. L-Brah. He died.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “That was a cinema death. He was shot. And that made me realize it was time. If you stay too long in the business the police come to recognize you. It gets harder to do your work. And kids coming up want to use you to prove something. And all the hustling for customers, running around making the deliveries—it’s a young man’s job.” He shrugged again. She concentrated on her tea, stirring its green depths with her tiny spoon.

  “And you?” he said after the pause had lengthened into a silence. “What are you doing here on the Rue St. Paul?”

  She might be warming to him, but she still wasn’t going to tell him the specifics of her life. “Just walking home from a visit to a friend.”

  “In between catching murderers?” Again he clearly enjoyed her shock. “Yes, I heard you caught the killer of the father. And then another one last year.” He must have seen that she was trying to figure out his source, because he gave a little smirk. “I have some flic friends too. So now you are a detective privé?”

  She forced herself not to imagine him sharing tea with Capitaine Boussicault, her police connection. “Yes.” She made her voice firm. “I am a private detective.”

  It was almost true. Eight months earlier, she and Magda had solved what Magda liked to call “our second murders,” two employees of the Bibliothéque Nationale killed to cover up thefts of priceless engravings. Feeling that unmasking two murderers in a row must mean they had some kind of talent for detection, they’d decided to set up as private investigators, Rachel handling what Magda defined as “the more material aspects of investigation,” while Magda, who ran a successful online business, appointed herself “the digital division.” Still filled with American optimism, no matter how long they lived in France, they’d assumed the process would be relatively simple given their experience. But they had forgotten to factor in the French love of bureaucracy and documentation. There were courses they had to enroll in and exams they had to take, and only after could they submit the long and complex form that, along with a description of their experiences and attached affidavits from reliable witnesses, might result in certification. Still, Rachel thought, If you can’t try out a new identity with a drug dealer turned questionable dry cleaner, who can you try it out with?