Murder in Passy (22 page)

Martine nodded. “If this Basque agreement ties somehow to Xavierre’s murder, and Agustino knew … ?”

“Martine, he knows something, but—”

“He’s a small fish,” Martine interrupted. “I want the big fish. Trust me,” she said. “That
mec
, by the way, the charmer without expression?”

Aimée nodded. Monsieur Blandface.

“Warned me off the story.” Martine ground the cigarette out with her toe. “Thinks he can muzzle the press? Not me. But you’re on to something: there’s more to this. The way I write this up … well, if you find me ammunition, I’ll load it Morbier’s way. But I need proof,
compris?
Why should those boys have their sick fun?”

Aimée wished that made her feel better. She revved the engine, popped into first, and took off into the night.

Wednesday Evening

M
ARIA STRUGGLED, TRYING
to see through the grainy darkness of the burlap bag over her head. Cold dampness sent shivers up her arms, bare but for her spaghetti-strap silk mini. She strained to hear, listening for traffic or voices, but heard only the echoing of footsteps. Hers and another.

Then a low, short toot. The recognizable whistle of a barge.The smell of algae. They were by the Seine.

She tripped on metal pipes, losing her balance and sending them clanging and rolling. Hands jerked her bound wrists behind her.

“Get up!”

Trussed and bound like a pig, she couldn’t move sideways. Or yell with her mouth duct-taped shut. She kicked out her foot and hit a pipe.

Sharp pain shot up her leg. And the terror she’d tried to fight took over. Hot, panicked breaths from her nose filled the bag with warm suffocating air. She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t open her mouth.

She felt herself rolled over, pulled upright, leaned against wet freezing metal. The bag was pulled off her head.

Water dripped from a broken pipe, and puddles reflected the sputtering glow of a kerosene lamp. The reek of kerosene and mildew was everywhere. A man leaned over the lamp, adjusted the flame brighter. She gasped at his face. Silhouetted against the darkness, a blood-soaked bandage covered his eye.

She felt a searing stinging as he ripped the duct tape from her mouth. Her lips were raw, and chunks of her black hair had been pulled out. Her eyes teared and her body shook with cold.

“Where’s Lucas … where am I?”

No answer.

“Let’s pretend this didn’t happen. Take my bag.” She turned her face away. “I didn’t see you. I don’t know you.”

“But you already have.” She heard the accent, the Basque way of saying
b
for a
t
, the
r
turning into
err.
He squatted next to her on the flaking rusted pipes. “Be a good girl. Do what I say.”

“You’ve got to let me go.” Her voice rose. This wasn’t happening. Couldn’t happen. “The ambassador will raise hell if I’m not back. I won’t say anything.”

He took a pistol from his brown leather jacket pocket. “Do I have to use this?”

She gulped. Shaking, she couldn’t stop shaking, or her teeth from chattering. She’d lost her shoes, her stockings were ripped, and her bare feet were going numb from the cold.

“What do you want?”

He turned away.

“Don’t you understand they’re expecting me? I’ll get in trouble.”

Like the last time.

He gave a small smile. “You don’t call this trouble?”

She let out a scream. Screamed again and again. Only the piercing echoes from the steel rafters responded.

“No one can hear you,” he said. “Quit moving.”

“I c-c-can’t, too cold.”

“Call this cold?” He snorted. “Try living a winter in the mountains. Wind like ice cutting over the Pyrénées, through the valley, and only boiled snow to drink.”

A Basque. That didn’t stop her shaking. Her memories of the Basque country came from summers in her friend’s mother’s village. Pine branches heavy with rain, their crisp scent wafting over the whitewashed farmhouses and red-tiled roofs bordering the green sheep meadows. Not this bone-chilling, damp-permeated, rusting warehouse.

He was a fine one to talk. He wore a jacket, boots, and wool scarf. Her dress was soaked, a copper-tinged reeking mess. What did he expect? She was without a coat.

“B-b-but you’ve got warm clothes.”

“Complaining?”

At the look on his face, she tried to make herself small. Fear coursed through her veins.
“Non
.
“

“Prove it. Can you?”

She nodded.

He unzipped his jacket, threw it on her shaking bare legs. “You sew?”

Nonplussed, she stared, shivering.

He unwound the blood-soaked bandage covering his eye. Pulled the kerosene lantern closer. She gasped. Clotted blood surrounded his bruised left eye, which was swollen shut. His shirt collar was stained dark with blood.

He reached over and untied her hands. She inhaled a metallic whiff of blood, his perspiration.

“Use this.” He handed her a travel-sized sewing kit. A small bottle of liqueur, airplane-sized, and a white embroidered towel. “Clean it right.”

She didn’t want to touch him.

“Or I use this.”

One hand held the gun; the other pulled back the matted black hair from his temple.

She winced. “Bring the light closer so I can see.”

The kerosene lantern scraped over the stained concrete floor.

Black slivers studded his eyelid; deep red cuts scored the edge of his eye. She sucked in air. “I need tweezers.”

“Eh? Just clean and sew it up.”

“But there are pieces of something in there. If you don’t take them out, you’ll get an infection. Now if I had my bag with twee … zers.… ” Her teeth chattered again.

He reached over, took her vanilla leather Birkin bag, and dumped out the contents: her new Vuitton wallet, agenda, checkbook, receipts, key ring, and cell phone tumbled on the rust flakes.

Her cell phone.

Her hopes lifted. A chance now. She’d help him, gain his confidence, and call for help.

“Check the side pocket for the tweezers,” she said. “Beside my lipstick.”

She pulled his jacket around her legs, glanced up. Giant tarnished metal cranes loomed over them, suspended in the air, like giraffes caught in flight. A slanted industrial glass roof above what looked like an assembly line. Wheels and rubber conveyor belts strewn on the floor. A familiar insignia with an
R
molded into one of the iron pillars.

R
for Renault. She realized they were in the derelict Renault auto works on Île Seguin. The old production plant on the outskirts covered the island in the Seine. It had been abandoned for years. She’d gone by the plant countless times on the way to school when her father was posted to the Paris embassy. As a little girl she’d watched the finished cars loaded onto barges, fascinated.

She had to get her phone. Give the location. Grab a taxi and slip in the embassy back door, no one the wiser.

She poured the liqueur on the tweezers and over his cheekbone. He made a light intake of breath. Considering the blood he’d lost, he should be ready to pass out.

He grabbed the bottle, took a long drink. Then another.

If he passed out drunk, even better.

“Hurry up.”

She got to work. Instead of clubbing, she found herself in a freezing abandoned auto works swabbing a terrorist’s wound. But she had a plan.

“My friend’s mother’s people come from Basse Navarre,” she said, chewing the thread off with her teeth, determined to make conversation, relax him and lull him to carelessness. “Know it
?
”

“Why?” His chest muscles flexed. Hard. He grabbed her hair.

“Oww … your accent’s like her uncle’s. That’s all.”

“Rich brat, what do you know?” He relaxed the grip on her hair. “What’s this?” He picked up papers from her bag, her student card mired in the puddle. He stared at it. “You study?”

“No, I’m just a spoiled brat shopping and lunching with my girlfriends.” Anger flushed her cheeks. “I take design courses. Function in architecture. Model a bit on the side. Not.… ” She stopped before she said “a kidnapper like you.”

“Impressive. Maybe you’ll give me design tips.”

He nudged her with the gun.

Feeling more confident now, she tried to keep the conversation going. “I’m moving in with my boyfriend next year.”

“Does your father know?”

“My boyfriend’s a photographer,” she said. “An artist.”

“Art’s political.”

What did that mean? Art went on the wall. “Ready?” She probed deep with the tweezers.

He squinted, closing his eyes, his teeth grinding.

Her pink phone gleamed in the beams of kerosene light just a reach away. She edged toward it.

His left hand grabbed hers in a grip like steel.

“What’s this?” Her tweezers held a blackened sliver of sharp metal.

“Shrapnel.” The lines in his brow relaxed. “Take it all out.” He drank more.

“Shrapnel … you mean from a bullet?”

Horrified, she dropped the tweezers, which clattered on the wet cement.

“Did you kill someone?”

He leaned back, still pointing the gun at her. “Struggle has to be seen within the political context,” he said. “There are people who choose nonviolent struggle; and then us, who have another vision and use other tactics.”

He’d never before said so many words in a sentence. He reminded her of her friend’s uncle, a stocky farmer with long ears who was short on conversation.

“The government outlaws the Basques’ right to decide our future,” he said. “No one wants violence. But struggle demands sacrifice.”

She’d seen the bombings on the
télé
. The rehearsed speeches and demands by men in ski masks with guns. Like him.

“But deep down, you can’t mean you’d shoot—”

“Ask the seven hundred prisoners held in Spanish jails, the corrupt French
flics
who rule Basse Navarre,” he interrupted, letting out a deep breath. “Or ask my brother. Tortured. My father. A cripple for life.”

She didn’t know what to say.

“But the law … ?”

“Welcome to the real world,” he said sarcastically. “It gets down and dirty outside the palace.”

“What palace? My father works. So does my mother.”

An awful fear filled her. What if Lucas and these terrorists meant to hold her for ransom?

“Take the pieces of shrapnel out. Now.” He held the gun, his fingers looser. His Adam’s apple bobbed. She rubbed her hands in the cold. Trying not to look at her phone. So close. How with one little reach … maybe with her toe.…

He growled. “What are you waiting for?”

She hid her disgust. Coating crime with politics got no sympathy from her. Just a renegade, like all the bandits, those smugglers high in the Basse Navarre. A Basque stronghold. Since time immemorial, holing up in remote villages, banding together, spitting in the eye of authority and the government. Robbing pilgrims, the innocent, the desperate, whether they were fleeing from the Inquisition, the Bourbons, or the Nazis along the ancient paths and escape routes through the Pyrénées.

“Pull more splinters out, understand?” he said, gasping in pain.

Her breaths frosted in the air. She edged her numb foot forward. Further. Her big toe touched the pink casing.

Loud crashing noises. Then the tramp of boots.

“Why the hell didn’t you answer?” asked a gravel-voiced man in a black ski mask.

Terror gripped her. Another man leaned down, riffling through the strewn contents of her bag. Grabbed her cell phone. “Pink?”

Mud rimmed his boots. The mixed smell of earth and algae as he kicked the bloody bandages. “Letting her play doctor, Joxi?” he said. “And messy. I don’t like messy.”

The gravel-voiced one gestured to the
mec
. “Pick this up. All of it.”

Panic sliced across her like a blade.

Joxi groaned and fell back.

“Time for a real doctor.” His black eyes glittered behind the eyeholes in the mask. “Tape her back up. Put her in the van.”

“W-wh-where?” Her voice chattered with cold.

He looked at her, back at the other
mec
, and just laughed.

Wednesday Evening

M
IST HOVERED LOW
over the hedgerows, silent and damp. A gust of wind stirred the dead leaves. Not even a twitter came from the bushes. A wave of relief passed over her as she saw Sebastian’s secondhand van, a Berlingo, at the curb.

She switched off the scooter’s ignition, pulled off her helmet, and noticed a run in her black stockings. A new pair, too.

“Tool set, like you ordered, all loaded in back,” Sebastian said.

Sebastian, her younger cousin, stood a head taller than Aimée. He sported a wool cap over his dark blond hair, jeans and a hand-knit fisherman’s sweater accentuating his lean frame. A former junkie, he’d been clean for several years.