Murder in Belleville (25 page)

Dead cold.

Guilt stabbed at her. And was supposed to protect the streetwise, childlike Samia.

She closed Samia’s eyes, saying a prayer, promising her justice.

She punched in 17 for SAMU on her cell phone, gave the location, then waited until she heard the siren scream before she slipped into the street.

Where had Samia been going? Why here? But that was for the
flics
to chase, she thought grimly. Dede had been two blocks away looking for her; he’d meant business when he’d warned her others would die.

She dreaded calling Morbier, debating when to tell him. But in the end she stood on the rainswept corner a block away on rue Moret and tried him on her cell phone. She didn’t want him hearing it on the news or over the
flic’s
radio.

“I messed up, Morbier,” she said.

“Any good news, Leduc?”

She heard the flick of a match, and heard him inhaling.

“Bad. Samia’s gone.”

Morbier’s silence seemed to last forever. She knew this news had pierced him.

“Nom de Dieu,”
he sighed. “I’m so stupid.”

“Desolee,
Morbier.” The tears welled in her eyes. “My fault.”

Why hadn’t she made Samia stay in the car, baby-sat her until she’d made the
plastique
connection.

“You took a bullet too, didn’t you, Leduc,” Morbier said finally, his voice sad and tired. “Where are you?”

She told him.

“Get out of there, Leduc. Start walking. Now!”

She stumbled against the street sign, then ran all the way to rue de Belleville and flagged a taxi. They’d be after her now, double strength. An icy determination took over; she could play hardball too. She handed the taxi driver a hundred francs and told him he’d make another if he got to the Ministry of Defense in under thirty minutes.

T
WENTY MINUTES
later in the ministry reception area Ai-mee told Philippe’s secretary, in a hushed polite tone, that she needed to see
le Ministre immediatement!

The secretary reluctantly acknowledged that the minister was busy. He had high-level meetings but would get back to her within the day.

Aimee continued, her tone just above a whisper, that if she couldn’t be accommodated the secretary would have the blood of innocent people staining her silk blouse. No amount of dry cleaning could take care of that.

The secretary blinked but still refused.

However, when Aimee threatened to burst into the meeting she rose up in alarm and showed her into an adjoining office.

“Oui?”
Philippe said, coming in a moment later.

His haggard eyes and stooped shoulders projected an air of defeat. A new experience for Philippe. Pathetic, she thought, and pitied him. But only briefly.

“Philippe, I’ve got proof that the humanitarian mission’s bogus,” she said. “And someone’s blackmailing you.”

Alarm shone in Philippe’s eyes. He stepped back. Voices buzzed in the background, papers rustled under a glowing chandelier. He turned and shut the door.

“There’s a conference going on, officials from my department,” he said, his voice tight. “I can’t talk.”

He hadn’t denied it. And he looked pale.

“Don’t talk, Philippe,” she said. “I can help. Just listen.”

He’d changed after his threats on Canal Saint Martin. He looked almost tame and so beaten. Maybe she had a chance. She pulled a gilt upholstered Louis XV chair close to him.

“Sit down. Give me three minutes,” she said easing him toward the seat.

For a moment, she thought he’d refuse, but he sat down. That was a start.

“You didn’t know the funds went to the Algerian military, did you?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Of course not, you trusted Hamid, Kaseem, and Sylvie. Why not? They’d been your friends since the Sorbonne. When the late sixties revelations about French repression came to light, the legacy left in war-torn Algeria—you joined what became the AFL.”

She watched Philippe. He blinked and rubbed his thumbs together.

“What proof do you have?”

“Hear me out, Philippe,” she said. “Hamid followed Islam his own way. I’m sure you admired his peaceful means and how he embraced a broader humanity. You contributed discreetly to the AFL as you rose in the ministry.”

She paused: now the ugly part.

“Kaseem had returned to Algeria. Made money supplying the military, somehow. But you didn’t know that. Six years ago Syl-vie came back into your life.”

Philippe shook his head. “She wasn’t my mistress.”

“I know. She talked you into funding this humanitarian mission while sweetening your bank account. The project revitalized the 196 sector, a land ravaged and barren since the Algerian war in the sixties. Provided irrigation, remapping the area, building roads, a power station, and housing. After all, it helped those most affected, you thought. You believed in the mission, wanted it to succeed. This was for the disenfranchised tribes in the
bled,
not the politicians or the military. You believed Kaseem. So did Sylvie and Hamid. He was your friend. Your old friend.”

She had Philippe’s attention, she was reaching him.

“But the reality hit when the photos of ‘ST 196’appeared. No new settlements, roads, or irrigated fields. Just death-squad executions and weapons for the military. Sylvie grew a conscience quickly. You did, too, Philippe. But Dede, one of the generals’ hired
mecs,
blew her up when she threatened to expose the truth.”

His shook his head.

“You stopped funding the project. That’s why you’re hiding Anais,” she said. “They planned to kidnap her, use her as bait to force you to fund the project. But I got in the way.”

Anger blazed in Philippe’s eyes. “You’re always in the way!”

The door opened, and the light from the hallway streamed in.

“Philippe, we’re waiting,” said Guittard, the blond man she recognized from Philippe’s kitchen. He ignored Aimee, tapping his designer loafers, and faced Philippe. “They’ve tabled the resolution. Get up, man! Unless you propose a new initiative, the mission goes down the
pissoir.”

“Why shouldn’t it, Monsieur?” she said.

But she spoke to their backs.

Two women had been murdered but that didn’t seem to grease the wheels of the government. Money did. At least the mission wouldn’t be funded. But someone had to pay, Aimee told herself.

B
ERNARD STOOD INSIDE THE
gate of the Vincennes detention center, where a busload of men awaited forced repatriation. Other buses had taken those without any papers to chartered planes at Creil, a military air base. Bernard stamped his feet on the frigid packed earth. Cold—he always felt cold. His body never warmed up until July. Then there were one or two fitful months of what they called “heat” until the cold resumed again.

The barred media waited outside like hungry carrion to fill their newsfeeds. Inside Bernard was numb. These men had come to France years ago, seeking asylum from repression, and stayed on illegally after their applications were rejected. What could he do?

“Directeur
Berge, please sign the transport receipt,” said the hawk-faced detention official.

Bernard hesitated. He wished he could disappear.

“Just a formality,
Directeur
Berge,” the official put the pen in his hand. “But we’ve got regulations.”

Bernard could have sworn the man guided his hand, forcing his signature.

Then it was over. Officials marched him through the receiving yard, past the buses disgorging the eighty or so
sans’papiers.
They formed into lines waiting to be processed. Bernard felt like a war criminal, like a Nazi who’d been released because he’d agreed to talk. Hadn’t he acted, as his mother had pointed out, like the Gestapo?

And then above him he heard the sound of helicopter blades. Grit and sand shot over the yard, spraying everyone as it landed. A RAID officer jumped out and ran toward them.

“Directeur
Berge,” he shouted, making himself heard over the rotor blades. “
Ministre
Guittard needs you.”

Bernard stumbled.

The officer caught him.

“But why?” Could things get worse?

“Hostage situation,
Directeur
Berge. Orders are to proceed immediately.”

Bernard began to shake his head but the officer held his arm, propelling him to the waiting helicopter.

A
IMeU WALKED FROM
P
HILIPPE’S
office all the way to her own. She kept alert down the narrow streets. No one followed her. The biting wind had risen from the Seine. She pulled her coat closer.

The scent of flowering lily of the valley reached her from a walled garden nearby. For a moment her mother’s blurred face floated before her. All her mother’s clothes had been scented with lily of the valley, the room full of it long after she’d left. And then the image was gone. The gusty wind snatched the scent and her memories away.

Aimee’s cell phone rang in her pocket.

“Allo,”
she said, her frozen fingers fumbling with the keypad.

“Everything’s my fault, Aimee,” Anais sobbed.

“What do you mean?” Aimee was surprised. “I thought you were in the hospital?”

“Hostage situation … Simone,” Anais’s voice faded, then came back, “
Ecole maternelle
… in the Twentieth Arrondisse-ment. I need you.”

Aimee’s blood ran cold.

“Rue l’Ermitage, up from Place du Guignier.” Anais’s voice broke. Aimee heard the unmistakable rat-a-tat-tat of a semiautomatic, people screaming, and then the shattering of glass.

“Anais!” she shouted.

Her phone went dead.

A
IMEE RUSHED
to the tree-lined nineteenth-century street, buzzing with
La Police
and the elite paramilitary group RAID.

To her left the
ecole matemelle,
a building with iron-railed balconies bordered the north side. The adjoining
ecole elementaire
held the entrance for both schools on rue Olivier Metra.

Nervous and scared, she wondered where Anais and Simone were. What could she do?

An old man, his winter coat thrown over a bathrobe, clutched a parrot cage and complained loudly at being evacuated from his apartment across the street. Paris in April still hadn’t shaken off winter’s cold cloak, she thought. Frost dusted the cobblestones and wedged in the cracks of the pavement.

“I must speak with the commissaire in charge,” she began.

The businesslike plainclothes
flic
listened to Aimee’s story, checking her PI credentials. He spoke into a microphone clipped to his collar, then finally directed her past a police barricade. Somewhat relieved, she ran ahead. She knew she had to persuade the officer in charge that she could help.

Inside a Belle-Epoque building housing the temporary com-missariat command post, she waited for the inspector in charge. Glad of her wool sweater and parka, she rubbed her hands together in the mirrored building’s foyer, the hallway echoing with the tramp of boots and radio static.

She felt another presence and looked up. From the spiraling marble staircase expanding like a nautilus shell, Yves stared down at her.

For a moment the world stopped; scurrying police and walkie-talkie static around her ceased. “What’s going on here?” she said.

He edged down the stairs toward her.

“Who wants to know?” said a stocky blue-uniformed policeman beside her.

She turned and showed the
flic
her PI license, glancing at the badge with his rank. “Sergeant, my friend Anais de Froissart called me from inside the
ecole matemelle.
Is she in danger?”

“You could say that,” he said. “Attends, I’ll get the inspector.” He walked over to a knot of uniformed men in deep discussion.

Yves’s deep brown eyes met hers.

“Some things never change,” he said, coming down the stairs and standing beside her.

“I thought you were in Marseilles,” she said returning his look, taking in the flak jacket over his bullet-proof vest. “You’re still undercover, aren’t you?”

“And you’re still smack in the middle of things,” he said.

She felt her face grow warm. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Certain things are better left unsaid.”

“Like your wife?” she said. Right away, she wished she’d bitten her tongue.

“My ex-wife?” he said, his eyes narrowed. “Did you think—?”

“Policy must have changed,” she interrupted, “if they let you come front-line on hostage situations.”

“I pulled up before the area got cordoned off,” Yves said. “To meet Martine when she dropped Simone at school. We planned to interview Hamid.”

She didn’t believe him for a minute. A brown curl escaped from his jacket collar. She’d almost forgotten the curving nape of his neck.

“Why was Anais taken hostage?” Aimee asked.

“Everything’s unclear,” he said, rubbing his eyes. He shook his head. “The
sans’papiers
were removed from the church, and Ha-mid’s been taken to the hospital. I’m going to meet Martine there.”

The smell of burnt grease hovered near the marble staircase. Someone had forgotten to shut off their stove. Aimee struggled to look away from Yves’s face. A man motioned to Yves from the barricades. “There’s my colleague. I’ve got to go,” he said. “But I know where to find you.”

“Don’t count on it, Yves,” she said turning away, now determined. “If you can’t speak the truth, forget me.”

“The less you know the better,” Yves said. “The other part doesn’t work.”

“What doesn’t work?”

“Trying to forget you.”

Why did everyone have secrets and keep her in the dark?

“I forgot you until you popped up in my flat,” she said, unable to meet his gaze.

“Liar.”

But she’d turned and strode toward a knot of men in the foyer. By the time she looked back, he was gone.

Technicians and RAID teams speaking into headsets hurried past her. The hell with Yves. She had to get back on track, talk to the head honcho to find out how to help Anais.

“Who’s the commissaire in charge here?” she asked.

“Mademoiselle Leduc, I understand a hostage has been in contact with you,” the clipped voice of Hubert Sardou, a former commissaire in the Twentieth Arrondissement, came from behind her. His long, sallow face hovered near hers.

“Please elaborate as to whom and when,” he said.

She recalled Sardou, once a colleague of her father’s, from his three-inch platform shoe, which fooled few as to his clubfoot. But now he wore the distinctive badge identifying him as part of DST, the French Internal Security Service. “Hubert feels he must prove he’s the equal to the rest of us,” her father had said. “Every day.”

“Oui,
Monsieur Sardou,” she said. “Anais called me on my cell phone twenty minutes ago. She wants my help. Why has she been taken hostage?”

“Seems the AFL wants a bigger audience,” he said.

In stunned disbelief she stepped back. “But the AFL policy is peaceful.” Aimee wondered if Hamid’s power had been usurped by factions. Or if the “ST196” photos played into this.

“We believe an AFL member’s holding everyone in the school hostage, but so far,” Sardou shrugged, “there’s been no contact.” Sardou crinkled his face, whether in distaste or indigestion, she found it hard to tell. “We’ll take it from here. Your cell phone, please,” he said, snapping his fingers at her.

“Won’t help much,” she said, keeping her expression neutral with effort and handing it to him. “Dead battery.”

Sardou studied her phone, raised it in the air, and barked,
“Alors,
anyone have a battery for this phone?”

Aimee could have sworn everyone in the foyer reached in their pocket to check. The French obsession with phone communication produced a matching battery. Sardou inserted it, beckoning to a man with NEGOTIATOR in large black letters on a flak jacket. An officer copied down the number while another hooked a wire from the cell phone into a tape recorder. Several pairs of headphones were connected, and the commissaire donned one quickly.

“Call Anais, tell her—and this is very important—to identify which room they’re being held hostage in. An experienced negotiator wants to speak with him.” He hit Call Return and nodded to Aimee as he handed her the phone.

She heard the phone ring several times before it was answered.

“Anais?”

No answer, only heavy breathing.

“This is Aimee, Anais’s friend. Who is this?”

Sardou nodded, then put his finger to his lips.

A sob erupted, sniffles, then a child’s voice lisped. “I made pee-pee … on my new dress. Maman will be mad at me!”

Surprised looks painted the commissaire and police officers’faces. The negotiator put his hand forward but Aimee shook her head.

“Simone?” Aimee asked. “I’m Aimee, remember me? I’m your maman’s friend.”

Loud crying answered her. Obviously Simone knew her mother was in the building. Had Anais come to see Simone after being released from the clinic?

Aimee kept her voice even. “Simone, that’s happened to me before too. I’ll clean your dress. Where are you?”

“Can you?” The sobbing ceased.

“Of course. I’ll do a good job,” Aimee said. “No one will know the difference. Where’s your maman?”

“The clown took her.”

“A clown?”

“He took her away.”

“Took her where?”

Aimee looked to Sardou, who signaled to keep talking. Outside the window, apart from the sun-dappled trees, no sign of life showed behind the school windows. Near Aimee in the foyer, a line of marksmen stood, checking their rifles and telescopic sights.

“Maman gave me her phone. The clown got angry with her and pushed her. She whispered it was part of the game, we were playing hide-and-seek with him, so we should all run away.”

Aimee wondered what had happened to Anais.

The commissaire’s face tightened. A worried expression appeared in the negotiator’s eyes.

“Where are you and the other children now?” Aimee asked.

“I’m in the closet under the stairs. Everyone else ran away with my teachers,” she said. “The clown looked funny. Not like a real clown.”

“What do you mean, Simone?”

“He didn’t have balloons,” she said. “Only fat sticks that you can light like candles. He said they’ll go
bouml”

Dynamite.

Aimee froze. How would they defuse a terrorist carrying dynamite in a preschool full of hiding children?

Sardou barked an order to the waiting marksmen, who straightened to attention. Blue lights flashed outside in the narrow street as a truck screeched to a halt. That meant only one thing in Paris these days: the bomb squad. Aimee forced herself to keep her voice steady.

“Simone, you’re being such a big girl! Can you remember if your maman said something? Maybe something the clown wanted?”

“He wants Bernard, the bad man. If Bernard comes we get a big
glace.”

She heard sniffling. “You’re so brave, Simone. I’ll get you an ice cream too. Did you see where they went?”

She heard rustling. Aimee figured Simone was shaking or nodding her head. “Can you tell me yes or no, Simone?”

“Up the stairs. I thought he was going to hurt her, but she said it was part of the game. I must remember one thing.”

“One thing?”

“It’s secret.”

Aimee’s knuckles were white from gripping the phone so hard. Her hands trembled. “Of course! But I can keep a secret, I’m your
tante
Martine’s best friend—you can tell secrets to best friends.”

“How do I know you can keep a secret, Aimee?” lisped Simone.

Aimee felt the air stir as the row of marksmen single-filed past her in their stiff military boots toward the roof. Another RAID team assembled near her. For a moment Aimee wanted to shout, “Do what your maman told you—get out, run like hell!” But she needed little Simone to guide them.

“Martine and I used to make pinkie promises. Can we pretend to do that over the phone?”

The phone tinkled, then scraped.
“D’accord,
Aimee. Pinkie promise.”

Aimee paused. Sardou nodded to her and motioned to keep talking. “Good, Simone. What was the secret?”

“That’s between you and her.”

“What do you mean, Simone?” Exasperated, Aimee managed to keep her voice level.

“Maman said, ‘Aimee knows how to do this, she’ll get us out.’”

“Do what, Simone?”

No answer.

“Allo? Simone?”

Simone must have set the phone down, because Aimee heard quick little footsteps, as if running, fainter and fainter. With difficulty she unclenched her fingers and handed her phone to Sardou.

Aimee watched Sardou, his head down deep in conversation with a blond-haired man.

“Pardon, Monsieur, may I talk with you?” she said.

Sardou looked up briefly, his eyes small and squinty in annoyance or anger.

“Simone is
Ministre
de Froissart’s daughter,” she said, “and Anais is his wife. Does he know?”

“That’s just been brought to my attention,” he snapped. “The minister’s en route.”

“Please, I have to go inside the
ecole matemellel”

He seemed to ponder briefly, then shook his head. “Trained personnel will be more effective.”

“Anais wants me. Simone’s message …”

“Impossible,” he interrupted. “Only the bomb squad and the special mine sweeping unit can enter the target area.”

“I don’t like going over your head, Monsieur Sardou, but who’s your superior?”

“That would be me, Mademoiselle,” the blond man said, straightening up.

Startled, Aimee stared into the face of Guittard, the man who’d ushered Philippe back into the meeting. He wore a navy blue pinstriped suit and was holding a pair of padded overalls stenciled with
BOMBE BRIGADE
in large letters.

“Minister Guittard of the Ministry of the Interior,” he said. His hard green eyes crinkled in amusement. “I neglected to catch your name, Mademoiselle.”

“Leduc, Aimee Leduc. But we’ve met twice,
Monsieur le
Mmistre,” she said. “A week ago in Philippe de Froissart’s kitchen.” Already she liked him less than before, and that wasn’t much. It had nothing to do with his perfectly brushed hair or onceover look of appraisal.

“But of course,” he said, perplexed for an instant. “Aren’t you an actress?”

“Does this hostage situation involve the project you were meeting about in de Froissart’s office?”