Murder on the Champ de Mars (10 page)

He looked at her blankly.

“Apartment?
Maman
lives in a caravan in Avignon. She only comes to Paris sometimes, to do the market.”

“So what’s the address she used at the hospital, on Boulevard des Invalides? Your place?”

“
Moi?
No. No idea. I crash at the artist squat under Pont Alexandre III,” he said. “But I know the atelier she uses to repair cane chairs. I could take you there.”

Now it made sense. At almost every street market,
manouches
could be found hawking services to re-cane chairs, a disappearing art.

Every minute counted. “What are we waiting for? You’ve got the key?”

He pulled a key chain from his pocket.

“My scooter’s out front,” she said.

She waved goodbye to Michel. With Nicu sitting behind her, she eased off the brake, nosed the scooter onto the street and took off. The
quartier
was quiet. In the words of Martine’s
tante
, who owned a shop on rue du Bac, behind these walls,
entre cour et jardin
, lay secrets big and small.

Aimée hoped the atelier held some hint as to Drina’s whereabouts; she needed to find her before it was too late to learn anything about her father’s killer.

Nicu directed her past the modernist UNESCO building, the grounds of the École Militaire and the enclave of antique shops known as Village Suisse. After Avenue de la Motte-Piquet, she wove among traffic on crowded Boulevard de Grenelle under the overhead struts of the elevated Métro, which rumbled above them. Line 6, her favorite line, with its uninterrupted view of the Tour Eiffel.

Following Nicu’s directions, she turned in to Passage Sécurité, a narrow lane of one- and two-story buildings off the broad boulevard. At one end of the lane stood a tall housing block, at the other the grey rivet-dotted Métro structure. On the crumbling stucco wall below the blue sign reading
VOIE PRIVÉE
, a rusting metal sign said
PLOMBERIE, CHAUFFAGE
.

“Here.” Nicu jumped off and inserted a key into the padlock on the grey wooden double door of a small warehouse with butterscotch stucco. Bits of torn newspaper flew through the alley—giving it the abandoned feel of a wind tunnel. She shivered. Not a place she’d choose to frequent.

Inside the musty, skylit atelier was a scene of chaos. Cane chairs overturned, metal tools and empty paint cans littering the cracked concrete floor. The place had been trashed. Pillows slit open, down feathers clumped and matted in a wet corner. Someone had been searching for something. It was the work of a pro.

And it sickened her. Nicu had gone to the back
courette
, a postage stamp–sized courtyard. Aimée saw a white camper van parked there, its door open.

Her breath caught. Could Drina be hiding here, or even be here as a captive? She reached in her bag for her Swiss Army knife, flicked the blade open. “Watch out, Nicu.”

But Nicu came back, shaking his head. “How could they do this?” he said, a stricken look on his face.

Aimée closed her knife. “More importantly, Nicu, why?” she said. “What were they looking for?”

Inside the small caravan, pots and pans, blankets and clothes littered the floor. The cooktop had been overturned, and a bottle of vinegar broken, leaving a dry residue and a tangy odor. The built-in seat and covers had been slashed with a knife.

Nicu picked up a wooden toy wagon that fit in his palm. He spun the small wheels, which were decorated with a metal
band. “She loved these. I carved them for her. The old Gypsy wagons,
les roulottes.
”

“Nicu, if your mother had something that proved who murdered my father, where would she have hidden it?”

Nicu’s shoulders were shaking. “Face it. She’s … passed.” He shook his head. “I thought I’d know, feel her departure. What does it matter now?”

Was he right? Had she been beaten to the finish by the man who murdered her papa—again?

“We don’t know that. Until we find her, we search. Think, Nicu. Where else would she hide something?”

He gave a shake of his head.

“Don’t you at least want to try your best? How can you give up any hope of helping her?” She wanted to mobilize him. But this kid was in shock, his mother likely dead. Pity mingled with her determination. “I’m sorry, Nicu, but please try to think of where she’d keep money, valuables.”

“
Bon
,” he said, catching her urgency. “At the market she’d keep her cash and account books in the caravan. She’d customized it.” He went back into the atelier and returned with a screwdriver, which he used to start unscrewing one of the caravan’s outside panels. Nothing inside. He tried the next one. “This could take a while, Aimée.”

He was focused now. No good her standing here wasting time.

“I’ll ask around in the café, the shops, see if anyone noticed anything. Call me.”

“There’s no phone here. And I don’t have a cell.”

She remembered seeing a phone booth, rare enough these days, half a block away under the elevated Métro. “Use the phone at the Métro.” From her wallet she took out a phone card. “Plenty of credit left.”

The heating-system shop next door was shuttered. At the corner café, she caught the waiter’s attention amid loud shouts directed at the horse races on the
télé
screen overhead. A shrug
when she asked about Drina, the atelier. More shrugs from men at the counter. The produce-shop owner, stocking only tomatoes, shook his head. She glanced at her phone. No call from Nicu yet. Up and down the block she’d gotten the same story—no one had seen anything, no one had heard anything. No one wanted to get involved with a Gypsy.

She had more luck on the opposite corner at the tailor’s.

“I know who you mean, the Gypsy,” said the thin old man, hunched over a thrumming sewing machine as he guided fabric through it under a harsh desk light. “Keep to themselves, those
manouches
. Thieves.”

Great, another bigot. “Monsieur, this woman canes chairs. She is an artisan, not a thief.”

“
Et alors
? Enough of them are. One pickpocketed me on the Métro last week. I filed a report and the
flics
just laughed at me.”

“I’m sorry, but this woman’s dying,” she said. “She was abducted from the hospital, her atelier’s been trashed. People here don’t want to know or to help. Do you know anything that could help me find her?”

“You don’t look like a
flic.
”

“I’m not.” She took out her PI license. “Did you notice anything unusual this morning or last night?”

“What’s it worth, Mademoiselle Columbo?”

A smart ass. But she didn’t have time to shake him down, there was no love-thy-neighbor feeling in this
quartier
. “This look right?” She put a fifty-franc note on the fabric.

“Why don’t you sweeten it?” he said.

She forced a smile. “Give me some juice to sweeten. Do you remember seeing someone at her atelier?”

His foot paused on the sewing-machine pedal as he put the note in his shirt pocket. “My back window upstairs looks onto the passage. Two or three nights ago, looked like the
flics
were there. Unmarked car.”

The
flics
?

“And you know this how?”

“My son-in-law’s a
flic
in Nantes. Did a stint plainclothes.”

“Go on,” she said.

“Odd, I thought, seeing
flics
by her place. Then I see her coming from the Métro with a shopping bag. She stumbled, her bag fell. Looked ill, I thought,” he said. “Left a few minutes later, her hands empty.”

Drina had been well enough to walk. “Like she’d dropped something off, that’s what you mean?”

He nodded, not looking up, guiding the fabric under the punching needle. The hum of the machine filled the small shop.

“Can you remember what day this was? The time?”

He paused. Lifted up his foot and thought.

“I’d just eaten dinner. Spaghetti
vongole
. So Saturday.”

“Why did the unmarked car strike you, Monsieur?”

“Nothing’s open. Barely anyone walks there at night.” He pressed his foot on the pedal. The machine hummed to life. “But there was someone watching the street.”

“How could you tell?”

“Who stands smoking on the corner in the rain for an hour?”

So the night before she went missing from the hospital, Drina returned from the Métro and someone watched her. She’d left something in the atelier, according to the tailor. Hidden it?

Her phone rang. “
Merci
, Monsieur.” She slipped another fifty-franc note down.

She stepped outside the tailor shop to take the call and headed toward the passage.

“Oui?”

“Where are you, Aimée?”

“Coming from the tailor’s. He noticed someone watching the street two nights ago. What have you found?” She turned into the short passage and saw Drina’s locked atelier.

“You need to see this. There’s half of Drina’s notebook.” He sounded excited.

“I’m coming,” she said, breaking into a run. “Let me get my scooter.”

“I’m at the phone booth on the corner, under the Métro.”

She got on her scooter, popped the kickstand and inserted the key with the phone still to her ear. “What’s in the notebook?” she said as she started up the alley.

“You’ll see. Names, numbers, places. It’s torn. It’s sort of like the notebook she keeps accounts in.”

“Anything you recognize, Nicu?”

“I don’t know. Lots of numbers …”

“Phone numbers, Nicu?” she interrupted, trying to crane her neck above the traffic. An old Fiat pulled in front of her, taking its sweet time.

“Ah
non
, like she enters her sales. Five hundred francs every month”—a horn blared, cutting through his words—“entries end in June 1989.”

The year Aimée’s father died. Going on her assumption that Drina informed for her father—maybe a record of payoffs?

“What names?”

Over the line she heard scuffling, shouts. Alarmed, she sped up. “What names, Nicu?”

“Where are you?” he said, terse and distracted.

Traffic had ground to a halt at the red light.

“Right down across the street. Stuck in a wall of cars and taxis.” She fumed inside as a passing bus shot diesel exhaust in her face. “Tell me, Nicu. What are the names?”

“Fifi, Tesla. The last entry says
Tonton JC à six heures du soir Place Vendôme.”

Her gut churned. JC? Like Jean-Claude? Papa had died in the bomb explosion in Place Vendôme.

“I found something else, there’s pictures. My …” His voice cracked. “Come to the corner …” The rumble of the train overhead drowned him out.

“Pictures of what, Nicu? Please, can’t you tell me?”

Only the rumbling of the Métro. Her stomach knotted, her knuckles whitened as she squeezed the handlebars.

“Can you see me?” she yelled into the phone over the noise of the busy two-lane boulevard. So much traffic.

The call had clicked off.

Two cars zipped past her, honking at each other. She saw him now standing at the Métro’s stone pillar support. He waved. She motioned for him to wait, she’d come to him. A van pulled up between them, and she watched more traffic block her way. Buses, cars, trucks, scooters—everyone going somewhere. The Métro added to the urban cacophony.

Her heart was pounding. She felt so close to knowing the truth about her father.

The traffic thinned.

In the crowd of people that had suddenly assembled at the corner, she couldn’t see Nicu anymore. She pulled up. Then she saw why the people were huddling. Nicu lay half sprawled against the pillar, bleeding. His face frightened, he reached out to her.

Non, non
 … It couldn’t …

Someone in the crowd shouted, “Anyone a doctor?”

Aimée dropped her Vespa to the ground and ran toward him. His ripped hoodie was red with blood. His lips moved.

She heard a man on a cell phone demanding an ambulance. She pushed her way past a young woman bending toward him holding out tissues. Aimée knelt down besides Nicu. He was saying, “My bag. They took it.”

“It’s all right, Nicu,” she said, smoothing down his damp matted hair with her shaking fingers.

“Drina … you don’t understand,” Nicu said.

“I’m a doctor,” said a man’s voice, “let me through.”

“Don’t understand what, Nicu?” she said.

“Not my mother … why didn’t she tell me?” His trembling hand reached up to unzip his bloodstained hoodie. She saw an envelope in his shirt pocket. “I found this. Read the … take it.”

Numb, she took the envelope from his pocket as she felt the doctor move her aside.

She watched as the grey-haired doctor pressed his hands together against Nicu’s chest to staunch the blood. “Tell the medics to prepare for a deep puncture from a knife wound to the left sternal border. Ribs involved, possible internal bleeding.” The doctor looked up. Shouted. “Now!”

The man nodded, still on his cell phone.

Aimée shook off the cloud of horror and scanned the crowd. “What happened?”

“The boy was standing right here at the curb—” said the young woman, bloody tissues in hand.

“
Oui
, there was a blue van,” interrupted the woman next to her. “The boy was pulled in. I saw. Next minute, he stumbled out here and fell.”

“Yes, I saw too … he shouted at them. Then the van pulled away in seconds. It cut across the walkway—drove like
un fou.”

The doctor leaned back on his knees. “No pulse.”

Good God, she’d gotten Nicu killed. Guilt flooded her. Then alarm. Was she next?

If something happened to her, who’d take care of Chloé?

She stepped back. Voices in the crowd blended into one around her. “
Oui
, a van stopped, the door slid open …”

“
Mon Dieu
 … The boy was staggering, he knocked my shopping bag …”

“Clutched his stomach … the van took off. I didn’t get a look.”

Aimée made her hands move, righted her scooter. Tried to put the key in the ignition. Her fingers, sticky with Nicu’s blood, kept slipping. Bile rose in her throat.

Get away. She had to get away right now.