Murder on the Champ de Mars (27 page)

Pause. “Why should I believe you since you’ve already told me you’re a liar?”

“It was no hate crime, Rose. I was there.” Pause. “Come meet me and tell me what you know. Eighteen rue du Louvre. Sign says Leduc. Third floor, right. I’ll have an espresso waiting.”

“N
ICU HAD BEEN
accepted at the Sorbonne for next semester. Religious studies. He’s … he was an Evangelical Christian, you know.” Rose stirred her espresso with a shaking hand. “I can’t believe … Such a waste.”

Aimée nodded. Rose was tall, like her mother, with long, straight brown hair. In her boots, tailored jacket and denim skirt, Rose looked like any other Sciences Po student. She’d worn sunglasses to hide her red-rimmed eyes.

“Didn’t Nicu live in that art squat, the place where the fight happened?”

“Sometimes.”

Quiet all of a sudden, Rose looked away.

“Nothing you say goes any further than me, okay? Please, Rose, I need information, and holding back doesn’t help me work out who took his life.”

“You won’t tell my
maman
?”

The last person she’d tell. Aimée shook her head.

Five minutes later, Rose’s secret emerged. She’d given Nicu the key to the
chambre de bonne
in the Uzes’s building so he could stay there when it was cold.
That’s all
, she insisted, but her blush said otherwise. It didn’t seem like that blush had much to do with what Aimée wanted to know. “
D’accord
, your secret’s safe. Did Nicu talk about where he grew up, why he came back to Paris?”

“
Non
, we mainly talked about rights for
les manouches.
”

Maybe Rose did, but Nicu hadn’t struck her as political. Sheltered, and a bit naïve, Rose seemed a product of an ancien-régime family with a social conscience.

“We’re going to publish an essay of his in the Sciences Po newsletter.”

“An essay?”

“I helped him. But it’s in his words. Robert used some of the material in his Avignon documentary. Nicu talks about
les manouches
and music. He was a really talented musician.” She sniffled. “He talked about how his mother’s struggles helped him find God.”

“Did he mention his Uncle Radu, who runs a circus?”

“The one he called a liar? Nicu had little to do with his extended family. When he was little, they threw them out. He and his mother had to hide.”

“Did he say why?”

Rose shook her head. “I don’t think he knew.”

“Any idea why Nicu came back to Paris?”

“Work? For his interviews at the Sorbonne?” Rose shrugged. “What did you mean when you said Nicu’s murder wasn’t a hate crime? That you were there?”

Aimée uncapped an Evian, sipped. It wouldn’t do to get this girl in more trouble; her arrest last night was more than enough. Her name had no doubt made it onto a list at the
commissariat
.

She gave Rose an edited version.

“Hit men?” Rose gasped. “I don’t understand why anyone would target Nicu. He is … was … gentle, non-violent.”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out. Can you remember anything that seemed off with Nicu in the last few days? Or anything that stuck out as strange?”

But Rose had dissolved into tears. “How could anyone do that …?”

“Please, Rose. I need your help.”

She had to persist, get something from this girl. She pulled out the snapshot Nicu had given her. “Rose, look at this picture. That’s me, my father, Drina and Nicu. He must have been about six or seven.”

Rose wiped her eyes. Stared. “That’s you? Whoa, your hair is so eighties.”

Aimée felt older by the minute. “Rose, I should tell you that Nicu asked for my help because—”

“Mais oui,”
she interrupted. “I saw this. He liked him, your father. That’s right, I remember. Nicu told me how his mother … yes, she had an arrangement with your father. She hid until your father told her it was safe.”

And then once her father had given Drina the all clear, she became his informer. But it brought her to more questions—Who was it Drina had been collecting information on? Who were Fifi and Tesla, and what secret did they want to keep so badly that they had resorted to murder?

“Aimée, don’t you remember all this?” Rose was saying. “You’re in the picture.”

Aimée wished she remembered. “What else did Nicu tell you? Anything else about my father?”

“He felt sorry for Drina, Nicu said.”

Sorry he couldn’t solve her sister Djanka’s murder even after he’d been pulled off the case? So like her papa.

Rose was standing up. “I’ve got class, then I’m working on the newsletter and trying to get petition signatures.”

Think
; she had to remember what kept slipping from her sleep-deprived brain. These days she was so quick to anger, to jump into things and reflect later—but then she’d always been this way, as René often reminded her. Only it had gotten much worse since Chloé. Could it be postpartum? She grabbed at the question swimming through the grey matter. An idiot not to think of it sooner.

“When did you last see Nicu?”

“We spoke on …”

“
Non
, Rose, I mean in person—when and where?”

“Sunday,
non
, Saturday he met me in the courtyard at Sciences Po.”

“Did he mention Drina, her sickness?”

“He was going to meet her, to convince her to go to the hospital. That’s all. I had an afternoon lecture.” She pulled her bag onto her shoulder.

“So he seemed sad?”

Rose nodded. Thought. “But it wasn’t just about his mother, Drina had told him she didn’t have long. There was something more than that. I don’t know. Nervous and worried.” Tears welled in her eyes.

“Nervous because he sensed they were being watched?” Aimée took Rose’s hand. “He told me someone had been following him.”

Rose’s lip quivered. “I thought … he always …” She shook her head. “I thought he was just being paranoid. Gangs pick on Gypsies and beat them up. I’ve seen it happen at the market, the Métro.” Tears slid down her face as she shook her head. “But he wasn’t paranoid. I was wrong.”

Rose’s phone trilled. She glanced at it. “My mother.”

“Think back, Rose. Picture Nicu in the courtyard at Sciences
Po the last time you saw him,” said Aimée. “Where you were standing while you talked, the people nearby. Close your eyes. Can you describe what you remember?”

Rose muted her phone. Closed her eyes. “I remember … the white blossoms of the
marronniers
on the stone wall. We walked over the squished blossoms in the courtyard. Gross. Nicu waited while I went to my locker to get my books. But when I got back, he was leaving, going out the courtyard gate. He saw me. I waved, but he didn’t wave back. I figured he’d remembered his appointment with Drina. He was terrible at keeping track of time.”

He didn’t wave back because he wanted to protect her.

Afternoon sunlight pooled on the herringboned wood floor. A horn blared from below on rue du Louvre.

Rose opened her eyes, which shone with tears. “That’s the last time I saw him.”

“Who did you see, Rose?” Aimée forced herself to breathe. Count to three. “Because you did see someone, maybe behind him? You do remember.”

Rose blinked. “I don’t know. Maybe at the gate?” Pause. “That’s right, he left right behind Nicu. I didn’t think anything of it.”

“Can you describe him? Maybe another student, or did he look like a teacher?”

“I’m not sure.”

One of René’s monitors started to beep. Time to re-loop. She walked over and double-clicked a key. Walked back to her desk and turned back to Rose.

“Think, Rose … try to think back to what he was wearing. You can, I know, because you remembered he left right behind Nicu.”

“Maybe older, maybe a suit?”

“That’s good, Rose. What else?”

“All I remember thinking is that he might have been someone’s grandfather.”

P
RIORITIZE
.

Time to summon her sleep-deprived, hormone-addled, over-stimulated brain to order. Get a handle on what Rose had told her and make sense of Nicu’s murder. Draw the big picture. She needed to make a timeline, visualize and connect the events. If she could work through her anxiety about Chloé, the pain in her ribs, and her tiredness, and make connections, assemble the pieces, she’d get the whole.

She taped a roll of white butcher paper, courtesy of the butcher who sold her Miles Davis’s horsemeat, to the wall. Then she closed the window against the noise, took her colored markers and wrote down names, grouping them according to what she’d learned:

Then she graphed a timeline beginning in 1978 with Djanka/Aurélie’s murder and Pascal Leseur’s supposed suicide. She taped the two black-and-white photos roughly where they’d fall on the timeline.

She tried to make connections. After ten minutes she sat down and stared. So far, she’d drawn a series of crisscrossed lines. What had she missed or forgotten?

She added Dr. Estienne, Ninette the faux nurse, Pons and Grévot, the mystery grandpa at Sciences Po. Under a question mark she wrote
Tesla, Fifi
.

She rubbed her eyes, filled with shame and guilt. Imagined
the struggles Nicu had faced. How Drina had raised him in hiding, then worked at the market, caning furniture and informing for her father to put food on the table. Somehow Nicu had pulled himself up and got accepted to the Sorbonne, his whole life ahead of him. Her father had promised their help, yet when Nicu had asked her for it, she’d failed him.

Her brain stalled.

Walk away
, her father would say. Let it simmer until your mind clears. She had a business to run—it was her second day back in the office and she had only another twenty minutes to check and program their daily anti-virus scans before Babette would bring the girls so she could nurse Chloé. Then she’d have to change and head out for tonight’s surveillance.

Before she forgot, she left Maxence a detailed phone message about how to remotely hook up Roland Leseur’s tracker feed. Thank God she’d had the backup tracker ready and primed for tonight’s surveillance. She counted on Maxence to bring another, and keep it from René. These trackers cost a bundle.

A
IMÉE CUDDLED WITH
Chloé on the recamier in the office, fighting sleep. Chloé’s warm fingers tightened against her clavicle, her eyelashes fluttered and her intent mouth sucked like a little machine. Aimée’s shoulders sagged; her lids were so heavy. She wanted to let it all go and surrender to sleep. But she couldn’t. The red marks on her arm from Leseur’s grip still showed, her bruised rib hurt and her thoughts whipped like a gale through a wind tunnel. Enveloped in Chloé’s sweet baby smell, she must have nodded off. The next thing she felt was a coldness. An emptiness. She sat up.

No Chloé in her arms. Good God, had she dropped her baby? She reached down to the creaking wood floor. Only the heels she’d kicked off. Was this a nightmare? She shook her head, splashed mineral water from a bottle on her face. She was awake.

“Babette?”

No answer. Only her deserted office, the door to the hallway open.

Panicked, she adjusted her Agent Provocateur bra and noticed the envelope propped on her desk, addressed to
“Aimée Leduc”
in that familiar angular handwriting.

Melac. He’d come in and taken a nursing Chloé from her arms. The snake stopped at nothing.

Shaking with fear and anger, she ran in her stocking feet to the open office door. Grabbed her coat … 
non
, she had to read what was in the envelope first.

A notice summoning her to appear at an appointment with his lawyer; the notice stated that a nonappearance could force a court-ordered one. Stealing her baby and threatening a court order—he couldn’t do that. She doubted it was even legal.

What did legality matter? Her baby was gone.
Chloé
. She had to get her back.

A moment later she stood on the landing, hyperventilating in front of the wire-cage elevator shaft, stabbing the button. Scrolling with frantic fingers through her cell-phone contacts for Melac’s number.
Merde
, she’d deleted it.

“Bonsoir,”
said the smiling man who stepped out of the elevator.

Her eyes brimmed, her lip quivered. Waves of helplessness washed over her. “Please, you have to help me … quick … my baby …”

“Ah, Benoît, you’re early.” Babette stood wiping her hands outside the WC in the hall. On her hip was Gabrielle, shaking a rattle, and in front of her was the baby stroller with a smiling Chloé. Aimée’s knees turned to jelly as relief washed over her.

“We had a spit-up and diaper change times two, so I just took care of the girls here in the WC.” Babette flashed a look at Aimée. “You just missed the fun, Benoît.”

Benoît, Gabrielle’s father, whom she’d never met. And now she looked a fool. A neurotic fool.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Sorry, I must have dropped off and woken up disoriented.”

“Glad you tried that power napping we were talking about, Aimée.” Babette smiled meaningfully. “If you’ve gone into a deep REM state, ten minutes’ sleep is like an hour. Snap and you’re ready to go.”

Aimée nodded, feeling like an idiot and desperate to repair her first impression. Gabrielle’s father would tell his wife she was unhinged.

“Sorry to come early, but my last meeting was near here,” he said, adjusting his messenger bag, “and I’m watching Gabrielle tonight.”

She liked him—tall, bright eyes, lean hipped, longish brown hair. He wore a white shirt under a jean jacket; not the stuffed shirt of an academic that Madame Cachou had painted Gabrielle’s father to be.

“Please come into my office; I should introduce myself. I’ve met your wife, Carine. I’m—”

“I know who you are,” he said, averting his gaze.