Murder in Montmartre (23 page)

Thursday Night

“SO , MUSICIAN, WHY’ S THE
mec
following you, or is it the other way round?” Aimée said. Her breath, a vapor trail, dissipated in the night air over the lighted outdoor ice rink at Rotonde de la Villette. “I need to know.”

“You and me both,” Lucien Sarti said, leaning on the rail, looking down.

A few skaters, mostly couples at this time of night, crossed the ice. The music almost drowned out the distant screeching of brakes from the overhead Metro line at Stalingrad.

“He’s the one trying to frame me.”

“For terrorism?” she asked. “Is he part of your Separatist cell, gone rogue?”

He shook his head.

Behind them loomed the domed rotunda of La Villette, a circular arcade fronted by Doric columns, a barracks during the Commune, later a salt depot. Ahead lay the wide dark-water basin that funneled below them and narrowed into Canal Saint Martin.

They were in an open public place at least, although only a few figures, huddled against the bone-chilling cold, waited in line at the crêperie stall.

Her cold thigh still felt the warmth of his pressing against her. Instinct screamed that it must be the other
mec
who Cloclo had meant. Hadn’t Lucien Sarti defended her? But “Never assume,” had been her father’s dictum.

He pulled the knife from his pocket, holding it low. A worn wooden hilt, a serated blade. “A fish gutter,” he said. “The weapon of choice on the Bastia docks.”

She knew they were also used in restaurant kitchens. Then her cell phone trilled. René? She pressed
Answer
.

“Aimée, forgive the late notice.” The husky voice of Martine, her best friend since the
lycée
, boomed over the line. “Gilles shot more pheasant than we can eat in a lifetime. They’re plucked, herbed, and roasting. And there’s a perfect Brillat-Savarin for after dinner. Say you and Guy will come, please.”

These days, Martine inhabited the world of the Sixteenth Arrondissement. Soirées and châteaux on the weekend. Courtesy of her boyfriend, Gilles. But that milieu was staid and lifeless to Aimée.

“Martine, I can’t talk,” she whispered, turning toward the canal.

“Did you and Guy fight again?”

“Eh, what’s that?”

“You heard me, Aimée.”

No use pretending. Might as well come clean. She could never keep the truth from Martine for long.

She cupped her hand over her mouth. “Guy moved out, Martine,” she whispered. “This is not a good time.” She squirmed, embarrassed that Lucien Sarti might overhear her.

“Then, of course, you must come!” Martine said, her husky voice rising. “Gilles’s colleague from
Le Point
’s here. You’d like him.”

The conservative right-leaning journal, known for nostalgic articles on the de Gaulle era? Not likely.

“Look, this
mec’s
chasing me. . . .” Aimée whispered.

“Lust often, love always, as they say. You sure don’t let the grass grow under your heels!” Martine said. “A bad boy?”

“Bad-bad
.”

“Tiens!
You mean . . . nom de Dieu!
Not this again . . . you’re not getting involved!”

“Later, Martine.” She clicked her phone off and turned back.

“Your man moved out, eh?” Lucien said.

She wanted the metal sewer lid under her feet to open up.

Sarti leaned his long legs against the skating-rink fence. The glittering quayside lights reflected in his eyes. Faraway eyes. “My woman . . . once she was my woman . . . belongs to someone else now.”

“I’m sorry.” Caught off balance, she didn’t know what else to say. These things happened. As she well knew.

“Life’s like a train,” he said, his voice low. “I got off too soon.”

Maybe she had, too. Not tried hard enough with Guy. Now, in some way, she felt that she and Sarti shared something, as if they paddled in the same boat.

She had to get back to the point.

“Let’s discuss that guy, the one framing you. Your doppel-gänger? How do you know him?”

“Petru?”

“If he’s the one who looks so much like you.”

“He’s from another clan,” Lucien Sarti told her. “He’s different from me.”

Clan? Sounded old-fashioned, insular.

“What do you mean?” she asked. She kept her eye on the sparse crowd at the crêpe stall under the arcade. A kerosene lantern hung from the cart. She heard the scraping of ice skates, scattered laughter of couples, and the strains of a Strauss waltz wavering on the wind.

He should have been fearful, but Lucien Sarti appeared sad and wistful. He didn’t seem like a killer.

“I miss the rhythm of village life,” he said. “Here the horns beep at a red light, one runs from one Metro stop to the next. Rushing, always rushing. In Corsica the pace of life is human.”

“Petru appears to have adapted pretty well,” she said. “Who does he work for?”

“You should know,” he said.

She thought quickly. Of course. Yann Marant had said Lucien Sarti had arrived at the party later. “You were at Monsieur Conari’s party. How do Petru and his goons fit in?”

“Goons? All I know is that she . . . someone warned me Petru had planted terrorist pamphlets in the recording studio and arranged for the
flics
to arrest me.”

“Do you believe this woman?”

His eyebrows rose. “Why should I doubt her?”

Why frame him as a terrorist? How did that connect to Jacques’s murder? Too many pieces—odd, disparate ones. How to connect them?

“Why would Petru implicate you, then follow you?”

“Like I said, he’s not from my village.” Lucien paused with a tight smile. “Who knows? My great-uncle could have stolen his father’s mule. Eh, it’s just like you Parisians characterize us.”

“Interesting angle, musician. You’re the one stereotyping.”

“So, you willing to hang out with an alleged Corsican Separatist?” He interrupted, shooting her a look.

Cut the sarcasm, she wanted to say.

“Not if I can help it.” No reason for him to know she made a beeline for bad boys, once even a Neo-Nazi who’d turned out to be a good guy in disguise. “Convince me you’re not one.”

“To you, we’re goatherds with shotguns, taking care of vendettas, savage and wild like our island, eh?”

“Let’s get back to the point. What did you see the night Jacques Gagnard was killed?”

“You, handcuffed, being herded into the police van,” he said, not skipping a beat.

There was more, she sensed it.

“Did you hear shots?”

His hand trembled for an instant on the ice-coated railing.

“I think you saw something,” she said.

“You’re not a
flic
.”

“I told you, I’m a private detective,” she said. “Someone framed my friend but I’m going to get her off.”

“That’s what this is about?” His fingers relaxed.

She nodded. “I found Jacques Gagnard, dying, on the snow-covered roof. His heart still responded, his eyes blinked.” She looked down at a hole in a patch of gray snow. “He tried to tell me something. His eyes communicated. It’s hard to describe.”

The
flics
had dismissed it as a dying person’s involuntary response. Why was she telling him this? She should shut up, ask the questions.

Lucien rubbed his arms and leaned on the railing. “They gunned down my grandfather in the village. He bled to death under a chestnut tree,” he said, his voice low. “It took a long time. I sat with him as the shadows lengthened. A dragonfly fluttered, attracted to the blood on his chest. His three fingers moved . . . and moved . . . my brother told me I imagined it. I was young.” He paused, rubbed the growth of stubble on his cheek. “A week later my uncle found the murderers, three of them, hiding in a lemon grove.”

He shrugged. “I still see the branches swollen with fruit, lemons fallen split and pulped on the dirt, their citrus scent mingled with the metallic tang of blood. Revenge, that I would have taken, an obligation to my grandfather. . . .”

His eyes seemed faraway. He spoke hesitantly yet he was confiding something deeply felt. No stranger had ever spoken to her like this—by turns intimate, sarcastic, then sad.

She was sure he knew more than he was telling about Jacques Gagnard.

“Let’s try again. Tell me what happened. Why weren’t you questioned at the party?”

He turned away, his face in shadow.

“You need my help, musician. Assuming you’ve told me the truth.”

“Revenge, that’s in my culture. I helped you, didn’t I? Let it go. I’ll get by on my own.”

“With the CRS roaming everywhere? There’s probably an alert out on you already if you’re a member of Armata Corsa.”

“Not me. Not anymore. You are misinformed. I play music. That’s what I do.”

“How do I know you weren’t working with Petru? You could have killed Jacques Gagnard, and set another
flic
up, then double-crossed Petru. And maybe that’s why he’s after you.”

Was that hurt in his eyes?

“I’m sick of this,” he said. “I’ve never fired a gun in my life. You’ve got the wrong person.”

“Convince me.”

“Few have a code. Honor.” He leaned close to her; his breath touched her face. “Should I trust you?”

“Why not? Who else can you trust?” she said. “I’m interested in neither your political nor nonpolitical views. My friend’s in a coma. She’d never shoot her partner. All I care about is clearing her.”

He studied her. Deciding.

Bon,
she’d say it the way he’d understand. “That’s
my
code, Lucien.”

So he told her what happened: Félix, the party, the woman, and how he’d forgotten his ID and had to sneak away. She remembered the list of party participants who had been interviewed. There were no Corsican names.

She nodded. “Now try again. Tell me everything you saw. Tell me what you left out.”

“Left out?” He closed his eyes. Thought. “An old man came out to walk his dog. And I saw light,” he said. “A flickering light, escaping from holes in the ground.”

“You mean the construction site? Here?” she asked, excited.

She pulled out her diagram.

She pointed and he nodded.

“After the shot, I heard breaking glass.”

The skylight. Their escape.

“The fence around the construction is low there. I saw the lights.”

It made sense. She remembered seeing the glowing tip of a cigarette on the ground. She’d wondered where those damp footprints had led. Now she knew; they hadn’t gone out into the street, but down somewhere in the construction site.

“What’s in your backpack?”

He blinked in surprise. Then gave her a wide smile and leaned his leather-clad elbows on the railing. “Search it. Be my guest. I have nothing to hide.”

She ignored his mocking gaze, his long legs. “Why don’t you show me?”

He pulled out his wooden music case, unlatched it.

“My
cetera
,” he said lifting out the wooden instrument. The bowed wood face was smooth and worn from playing, the strings new. “A traditional instrument, our variation of a lute.”

From his case rose the scent of bergamot and was that currant?
Non,
deep and dense, more like a dark fig.

“Our tradition makes music out of everyday life; it’s music with its feet on the ground.”

She’d heard a Corsican polyphonic chorus coming from the church around her corner one evening, and stood, transfixed. Ancient, yet timeless, resonating somewhere deep within.

He plucked his
cetera
. The high melodic notes carried on the crisp air, evoking another world, another time.

A couple, arm in arm on the ice, paused and listened.

He laid the instrument back in the case with care.

“You don’t trust me, do you?” he said. “Because I’m Corsican.”

“As long as we help each other, I do,” Aimée said.

“More Corsicans live in France than in all of Corsica. It’s a diaspora. There are villages with only twenty people left, old peo- ple. Mountains cover eighty-five percent of the island. Rich Parisians come for vacation eager to imbibe nature, wine, and organic honey.” Sarcasm layered his voice. “But haven’t you heard, we’re integrated now? Pasqua is the Minister of the Interior; that model, the one for Marianne, is Corsican; even the quay by the Préfecture’s named after Corsica.”

“Did Petru know Jacques Gagnard? Or did you?” she asked, keeping her voice even with effort.

He shook his head, but he turned away and she couldn’t read his face. There was a thick roll of paper in the back pocket of his backpack.

Plans, copies of blueprints for targeted buildings?

“What’s that?” she asked warily.

“My once-brilliant career,” he said. “Ruined by the Separatists.”

He unfolded the thick sheets. SOUNDWERX was engraved on the top of the pages.

“They forgot the Isadore after Lucien,” he said. “Close enough; Lucien Sarti. A contract that will never be executed.”

Her cold hands dropped her penlight and the contents of her bag spilled out in the slushlike snow: sand from the Brittany beach, her kohl eye pencil, Nicorette patches, worn Vuitton wallet, dated Hôtel Dieu pass to Laure’s ward, well-thumbed cryptography manual, the holy card from her father’s funeral, a black leather neck cord with a knotted silver teardrop pendant, a worn Indian take-out menu, and her cell phone. She dried the items off with her gloves and scooped them back inside.

Lucien had picked up the penlight. “You’re one of those career types, live for your work? Don’t clean house, eh. Bet you don’t even cook.”

Aimée felt her cheeks burn. Was it so obvious? As Guy had observed, making espresso was her only culinary skill?

“Restos were invented to eat in, weren’t they?” she said, taking the penlight, shining it on the thick document.

“‘Multipackaging,’ ‘tape and vinyl,’ ‘promotional materials,’ ‘SOUNDWERX label,’ ‘large venues,’” she read from the contract. “Impressive. Talk about hitting the big time.”

“Not anymore,” he said. “Petru put a spoke in that wheel.”

”Why?”

“Who knows? I met him once, then the second time with you.”