Murder on the Ile Saint-Louis (15 page)

Unsure of what to do, she ducked inside a doorway and scanned the street, but she saw only a meter maid writing a ticket in her little book and the bent old man shuffling to the stone stairs leading down to the riverbank. She had to control her nerves.

On impulse, she followed him. She wanted to ask if he’d seen anything unusual the previous night. The algae-scented breeze rustled the budding plane-tree branches. The old man clutched the stone balustrade as he made his way downward with slow, painful steps. Odd. She wondered why he was descending since the Seine’s gray-green water lapped over the bank and rose above the bottom step. No one else was out walking on the quai now.

Pont Louis Philippe arched ahead of her, decorated with carved stone wreaths of intertwined sculpted leaves. Buses trundled overhead, their green sides flashing above the stone wall.

When she looked down again, the old man had disappeared.

“Monsieur?” she called out. Anxious now, she took the steps two at a time, hesitated, then tiptoed through the swirling eddies of water. Useless. Her shoes were soaked. And she couldn’t see the old man on the bank or in the river. Before she waded ankle deep in water to explore, she had better relieve René. She mounted the stairs. Her cell phone vibrated in her pocket.

“Allô?”

“Mademoiselle Leduc?” said a familiar voice. She searched her memory, came up blank. The guitar of an old Georges Brassens song played in the background, punctuated by an engine starting.

“Oui?”

“You asked about a tire iron. Well, one’s missing from the garage stockroom.”

Momo, the mechanic from the garage near Pont de Sully. Chances were the figure in Place Bayre had stolen the tire iron while Nelie was telephoning Aimée, and had then used it to attack Orla. Not a comforting thought.

“Momo,” she said. “Can you remember anything more about the woman who used the garage phone?”

No, I’m sorry
,”
he said.
“

Too bad.

“But I thought I saw her,” he said as she was about to click off.

She gripped the phone tighter. “You did? Where?”

“The scarf . . .” The sound was muffled as he put his hand over the phone, speaking to someone.

She controlled her frustration. “Her scarf, Momo, you’re sure? Do you remember the color, the design?”

“Chic, you know,” he said. “Never saw one embroidered like that. But I’m not sure. Just an old
w
oman. They’re like crows, you know; they go through the garbage—”

“What color?” she interrupted.

“Chic, with
papillons,
pink butterflies. I’ve got to go.”

He hung up.

INSIDE HER APARTMENT, all was still except for the strains of a lullaby. From the doorway, she saw René sprawled on the
recamier
, eyes closed, mouth open. Miles Davis was curled on the floor by René and faint whistles of sleep came from the bundle in the hammock. She checked on Stella. And sat, watching her, lost contemplating the little balled fists and feathery eyelashes until she noticed a note in René’s handwriting. It read,
Never wake a sleeping baby.
Nesting all right. And in this case, it was a tired René who was catching up on his sleep. The old lullaby on the tape deck played over and over again.

His laptop screen showed a program running a standard virus check.
Bon
. Again René had it all under control.

Still, she prepared a bottle, in case, then sat down, expectant. But Stella’s little peeps of breath came measured and slow. She glanced at the clock, then tiptoed to her bedroom, riffled through the hangers in her armoire. A white military-style frock coat with a double row of buttons, over-the-knee boots, striped black-and-white trousers with a Left Bank mottled brown leather oversized doctor’s bag? Or a more
soignée
Right Bank assembly of cropped wool Chanel jacket and rope of pearls worn over dark washed jeans and stilettos with a metallic python-skin handbag?

Neither. Her role was that of a concerned eco journalist. She chose the jeans, stilettos, frock coat, a T-shirt silk-screened with Che Guevara’s chiseled face and her leather backpack, pinched her cheeks for color, and daubed a drop of Chanel No. 5 in the hollow of her throat.

“
SANTÉ
. ” AIMÉE CLINKED her wineglass against Claude’s. The bottle of Chinon sat open and breathing on the wooden West African manioc-kneading table. At least her pants were dry and she wouldn’t drip puddles on the floor this time.

“I am so sorry the video didn’t come out more clearly. But take it with you.” Claude brushed his hair back. His long legs were clad in black leather pants and he wore a black V-neck sweater and a small silver hoop in his ear. “Did Brigitte help you reach Nelie?”

She felt stupid. He looked as if he had dressed for a date. She thought she had better leave now.

“
Non,
but I’ll keep trying.
Merci.”
She downed the wine in one gulp and picked up her bag.

“Wait a minute—why rush off? I’ve got a joke to tell you.” He threw his arms up in mock supplication. “I’ve practiced it all afternoon.”

Was this part of his “lighten up” campaign?

“Sit down again,” he said, refilling her glass.

“Do I have to laugh?” She took a sip. The wine slid down her throat, smooth and full bodied.

“In Dakar, a steamroller operator’s at work flattening the dirt for the highway. He is injured. His friend goes to visit him in the hospital. ‘What room’s my friend in?’ he asks the nurse. ‘Rooms 15, 16, and 17.’”

Aimée grinned dutifully but she didn’t find his joke very amusing.

“OK, I tried,” he said.

She hoped he wasn’t going to pull out some cowrie-shell game to teach her.

“Now it’s your turn.”

Jokes . . . she didn’t know any clean enough, or politically correct enough, for a documentary filmmaker.

She pointed to the tattoo of a lizard on his arm. “Nice. From Africa?”

“Marseilles, on the dock. Young, dumb, and drunk,” he said. He ran his hand up her arm. “Do you have any tattoos?”

She averted her face, blushing.

“Look at me.” He grinned. “You do!”

She couldn’t lie before that intense dark gaze.

“A Marquesan lizard,” she said, “the symbol of change, with the sacred tortoise inside.”

“
Et donc,
didn’t I say we were the same? Both branded with lizards. Show me.”

She took another sip of wine, shook her head, and stared at the tribal rug under her feet.

“From Marseilles, too?”

“It’s a secret,” she said, loath to admit that she had once had to hide from a
flic
in a Sentier tattoo parlor and wound up with one.

When she looked up, his face was almost touching hers, so close his eyelashes feathered her cheek. “We all have secrets,” he breathed in her ear.

His finger traced her mouth. Soft and warm. The only sound in that moment was the patter of rain on the glass roof over the courtyard. She inhaled his sandalwood scent, stronger now, engulfing her.

A tentative look shone in his dark eyes. “What’s in your mind right now?”

Her fingers explored his shoulders. “You really want to know?” The wine was talking, she couldn’t believe she’d said that.

Then his arm was around her waist. His hand dropped to the small of her back.

“I know what’s in mine,” he said.

His hair brushed her chin, his warm lips finding her neck.

“Time to see your lizard.” His arms were tightened around her, pulling her toward him. His mouth was on hers, tasting it.

“Then you’ll have to find it.”

Wednesday Afternoon

KRZYSZTOF SENSED THE presence of the plainclothes
flic
leaning against the scuffed wainscoting of the engineering lecture hall before he recognized him. He’d noticed the man shifting from one foot to the other in his fresh white Nikes. It was the same
flic
who had showed him Orla’s body in the morgue. He turned on his heel, suppressed a shudder, and merged with a laughing group of Sorbonne students heading out of the hall.

Brigitte had turned him in.
And the
flics
had lost no time in tracing him here. He had to move fast, to get away. He broke from the group by the reception desk, eased down a passage toward a sign saying ÉLECTRICITÉ BUREAU, and opened the door. Inside, he balled up his sweatshirt jacket, pulled a brown ribbed sweater from his backpack, and put it on. Then he studied the diagram on the wall that showed the exits from the building in case of fire.

Growing up under the Communists in Warsaw, where apartment blocks had been filled with informers and nightly ESKEK—secret police—visits were the rule had honed his senses. Some things one never forgot. His thoughts went back to the unfamiliar faces on the street; men sitting and smoking in their telltale Trabant sedans; the day his father was taken to Bialoleka, the political prison. All gulags were hell, but the Soviets had taken particular delight in torturing his father, an intellectual of aristocratic lineage.

His uncle never wanted to hear about real Warsaw life, which had been governed by the
kartki—
coupons. Standing in line for gas, sugar, and clothes, his mother had used her maiden name. A title had meant nothing without a
kartki
. Or
bony towarowe,
dollar bonds printed by the government and exchanged for goods only in special stores. Reality had been quite unlike the romantic vision of prewar Warsaw his uncle nurtured.

The physics lab lay at the south end of the building; a nearby fire exit to rue Descartes was indicated in small red letters. Perfect. He avoided the electrical panel with its green lights and levers, opened another metal door, and found himself in a peeling brown stucco tunnel breathing warm, fetid air tinged with dry rot. Safe for a moment, he began to feel his anger mounting, overcoming the hurt and shame. After his uncle’s accusations, the long hours of work, his commitment to MondeFocus, now he’d been accused of betraying the cause. He’d been disgraced and would likely be expelled as well, when all he’d done in reality was skip his engineering exam to organize the vigil! And Brigitte, whom he’d regarded as a mentor, had informed on him to the
flics
. His life was ruined. He had no hope of finishing his studies and obtaining a degree. Now he was being hunted, condemned to hiding.

And despite everything, the Ministry would sign the agreement with Alstrom tonight. If he didn’t do something, they’d win.

Perspiration dampened his sweater by the time he found the physics lab. Empty. Lab classes were over for the day. The last rays of weak light reflected off the slanted slate roofs opposite. The hour of dusk,
entre chien et loup
, when a dog and a wolf were indistinguishable, as the saying went. He set his backpack down. Above him, arched ceilings were frescoed with portraits of the forebears of physics and science: Pasteur, Curie, Fourier. By the old stained porcelain sinks, beakers and test tubes had been rinsed and left to dry on the drain board. He stared at the liter bottles and vials of chemicals and reactive agents.

Bottle bombs? He snorted, kicking the cabinet. How primitive. On the Internet, recipes for destruction written by fourteen-year-olds were more sophisticated! They involved remote ignition triggered by cell phones, and the explosions packed far more punch. He could rig something twenty times more effective if he had a mind to.

But he’d been caught on video, probably laughing and singing, carrying the backpack with bottle bombs.

Not only ruined, he faced prison like his father. Except that his father, finally recognized for his work after the overturn of the Soviet regime, lay under a gravestone in Warsaw’s Powazki Cemetery.

He took stock of the chemicals on the shelf, the solutions packed in the drawers. If a candlelit vigil against the oil-company negotiations had ended with Gaelle in the hospital after a beating, MondeFocus labeling him a saboteur, and now the
flics
hunting him, then what had peaceful means accomplished?

The heavy hand always worked . . . in Warsaw and here, too. Didn’t they say the end justified the means? And now he had nothing to lose.

Wednesday Morning

AIMÉE REACHED OUT her arm. Instead of Claude’s taut chest she felt something wet against her hand and she blinked. Light streamed through the window. Something was ringing near her head. Beside her, half under the duvet, Stella cooed like a little pigeon with a leaking diaper. Time to change the sheets. Again.

Warm air floated through the open window. She groped under the pillow, fumbled in the damp sheets, and found the phone.

She stretched her legs, inhaled the baby’s smell and the sandalwood scent of Claude still on her skin.

She rubbed her eyes and pressed the answer button.
“Allô?”

“Mademoiselle Leduc,” Vavin said. “I’m concerned. Have any more firewall attacks occurred?”

She sat up, grabbing her father’s old flannel robe, still dotted with spit-up. She was awake now. Not many heads of departments worried about this kind of detail once they’d hired a consultant.

“Un moment.”
She hurried to the laptop on her desk. Thank God she’d forgotten to turn it off last night. She clicked on Regnault’s system.

“Right now we’re working on your new workstations setup, Monsieur Vavin,” she said. She had to act as if she was on top of the assignment and to be polite, she reminded herself. And enthusiastic, too; they were paying Leduc Detective big francs. “I’ll check with my partner. Can you give me ten minutes?”

She’d come back so late last night. Stella, wide awake and hungry, had given her no time to discuss anything with a grumpy René but getting the formula temperature right. Not even the time to decipher the odd look in his eyes. “I’ll call you right back,” she promised.

“Meanwhile, there’s another detail,” Monsieur Vavin said, his voice tentative.

New user account configurations filled her screen.

“Of course, we’re making great progress.” She glanced over at Stella’s kicking feet. Slants of sunlight played over her pink toes.

“Glad to hear it,” he said. He cleared his voice. The clinking of cutlery and the sounds of chairs scraping were in the background.

Some breakfast meeting?

“I’d appreciate a favor,” Vavin said. “This involves accessing a colleague’s e-mail. It’s very confidential. Can you help me?”

As system administrators, she and René controlled the domain and e-mail server. Their clients often asked them for this kind of service: evidence of a colleague’s wasting time in chat rooms or visiting dodgy sites. But spying on his colleague’s e-mail wasn’t her kind of thing.

“Monsieur Vavin, we’re on a tight schedule,” she reminded him. “We run on deadlines, you know.”

“I appreciate that,” he said.

Stella would need a bottle soon; the little thing packed away more than Aimée had imagined.

“Newborns lose weight, then gain almost a kilo in the first few weeks,” René had quoted from the birth-to-one year book he’d bought. Thank God she could read up on breaks, try to get some handle on why babies spit up and what infant gas was all about and how to avoid it.

“It won’t take but a minute for you, I’m sure,” he said.

Her fingers typed at 120 strokes a minute; one didn’t get much faster than that. His request seemed to be made with the assumption that she had nothing better to do with her time than snoop. But it would be impossible to refuse him.

“This sounds odd,” he continued,“but certain negotiations . . . well, it’s difficult to go into right now.” He lowered his voice, she heard the sound of a door being closed. “I’ve heard some disturbing information. But I can’t say anything until I know what’s being concealed from the public.”

This sounded cryptic and not like anything she wanted to get involved in. Probably some promotion blackmail or a hatchet job he wanted the skinny on.

“The e-mails I’m concerned with could have been read by hackers who got past our firewalls. Please, take a look. I’ll hold on. The name’s de Laumain.”

She turned to her second laptop, which was already logged on. She hit some keys and entered a back door in systems administration mode.

In minutes she had accessed de Laumain’s e-mail.

“So, de Laumain’s a lacrosse aficionado?”

“How’d you know?”

“De Laumain subscribes to five lacrosse newsletters.”

The baby’s coos had turned into faint cries. She stretched her feet to touch the edge of the bed and began to bounce it. The cries escalated.

“You have a baby, Mademoiselle Leduc?” he asked.

She didn’t want to sound unprofessional. “My neighbor had to rush to the pharmacy. The baby’s got a fever, so I . . . I’m helping her out for ten minutes.”

There was a pause. She sensed there was something else he wanted to say. There were shuffling noises in the background.

“De Laumain’s the one,” he said. “Look for the word ‘Darwin’ on the subject line.”

She found two messages with “Darwin” as part of the subject.

“Copy them and send them to my e-mail account,” he ordered. “Can you make their status ‘unread’ and exit without any traces?”

“Not a problem, Monsieur Vavin,” she said.

“Of course you won’t . . . read them.”

“You said this was confidential, right? Is there anything else?”

“Let’s hope not. When my meeting’s over, I’ll call you. We should talk.”

He hung up before she could remind him of the system-design overhaul René ached to do.

“RENÉ?” AIMÉE SHOULDERED her cell phone, left arm holding Stella, her right hand clicking away on the keyboard.

His voice mail answered.

Great. Firewalls were his
métier;
this job really should be his. She saved her work on a backup disc and sent a copy of the completed program to Regnault, as usual. Her laptop clear, she checked the firewall herself. She had started going through each protection system when her cell phone rang.

“René?”

“What have you found out, Leduc?” Morbier asked.

The last person she wanted to talk to. A click came over the line—someone was calling her . . . René? Vavin?

“I’ve got another call, Morbier, and I’m swamped,” she said, irritated. “Real work.”

“That can wait,” Morbier said. “I can’t. Have you run across Krzysztof Linski?”

Her fingers tightened. Stella moved and Aimée propped the baby on her hip.

“You there, Leduc?”

“Why?”

“He’s been taped on video carrying bottle bombs at the demonstration.”

She hadn’t caught that on Claude’s tapes. But she’d been too busy in his arms on the leather sofa to watch the video again.

“What’s that got to do with the student Orla Thiers?”

But she now knew—Krzysztof, Orla, and Nelie were radicals.

“He’s at it again. There’s another bomb scare at the l’Institut du Monde Arabe.”

“How do you know it’s him?”

“Nelie Landrou’s a suspect,” Morbier said, ignoring her question.“What aren’t you saying, Leduc? You owe me.”

She stared down at Stella. Was her mother a bomber?

“Too easy, Morbier. Simplistic. How can you fall for that?”

“Eh?”

“It’s a setup. Orla and Nelie were taking part in a roadblock of trucks at La Hague’s nuclear fuel processing site. . . . MondeFocus has disowned Krzysztof: they say he’s a loose cannon and a right-wing plant.”

Stella opened her mouth, her pink gums glistening. The key to understanding what was going on was Stella. Aimée had to find Nelie . . . make a deal, get the lowdown on Krzysztof, before doing anything else. Then she’d decide what to tell Morbier.

But to get Morbier off her back she’d have to tell him something more. “I checked Krzysztof’s room, a
chambre de bonne.
He’s gone, disappeared, sleeping bag and all.”

“So?”

“Think outside the box, Morbier. Orla’s murder could—”

“I try. We get witness reports all the time.”

“Meaning?” What wasn’t he telling her?

“The good news: your local secondhand goods dealer claims a
clochard,
an old woman
,
saw her being killed. The bad news: we don’t know how reliable she is. She talks to an imaginary sister and thinks it’s 1942.”

“The
brocanteur
on rue des Deux Ponts?”

He grunted. She scribbled that on the back of a data report; she would check out this information later. Far-fetched . . . but who knew?

“Back to the point. Why would he set off bombs at a peace march and let himself be videoed carrying them? It doesn’t make sense.”

“I’ll make sure to ask him once he’s behind bars.”

He hung up.

She checked her voice mail and found a terse message from Vavin telling her to meet him at his office at once. She couldn’t bring the baby with her; she had to do something with Stella.

AIMÉE HANDED THE taxi driver an extra twenty francs.“Mind waiting?”

He grinned. “Take your time.”

Her back ached as she climbed the red-carpeted stairs of the building, Stella in her arms, and baby bag dangling from her shoulders.

“Quite the modern
maman,
Aimée,” Martine said, opening the door. “Juggling everything in designer wear.”

She looked down at her agnès b. black dress, the closest thing at hand without spit-up, which she’d grabbed to wear to her meeting. “The babysitter’s here?”

Martine nodded. “The location of tonight’s reception has been changed.”

“Due to the bomb scare?”

“Can’t have all those sheikhs and oil execs in danger, can they? I’ll call you later when I know it.” Martine showed her to a luxurious children’s bedroom decorated with Babar-theme murals, bunk beds against the walls, and Legos strewn on the floor. She introduced Aimée to Mathilde: tight jeans, big sweater, and gap-toothed smile.

“What a beauty,” Mathilde said. “May I hold her?”

Aimée removed her finger from the hot, wet little mouth and handed Stella to Mathilde. “I’m sure you’re experienced,” she said, half to reassure herself.

Her last view was of the flopping pink bunny-eared cap. All the way down the stairs, she could still feel Stella’s warmth in her arms.

“MONSIEUR VAVIN LEFT THIS FOR YOU,” said the smiling receptionist on the ground floor of the Regnault offices.

“I don’t understand. Isn’t he here?” Aimée asked.

The receptionist shrugged. “I’m sure whatever you need to know is all there. He’s been called to a meeting.”

Called to some meeting and she’d gone through hoops rushing here!

She walked to the tall glass window. She could see a few demonstrators standing outside with banners saying, STOP OIL POLLUTION . . . NO AGREEMENT!

Inside the envelope was a piece of crisp white paper with 41 Quai d’Anjou written on it in Vavin’s script.

Her hand trembled. The address was only a block and a half from her building. Why hadn’t he told her to meet him there?

“
Pardonnez-moi,
when did Monsieur Vavin leave?”

“I didn’t see him go out.”

“Merci.”

She walked past the bomb-removal squad truck parked on the pavement near l’Institut du Monde Arabe. Several Kevlar-suited men stood around, eyes narrowed at passersby.

“False alarm, eh?” she asked one of the women filing back into the building.

“Can’t be too careful,” the woman said.

“True. What happened?”

“A librarian found a backpack left in the library,” she said.

The
flics
were jumpy. It made them trigger-happy and dangerous.

FORTY-ONE QUAI D’ANJOU was the address of an upscale antique shop. A buzzer went off as she entered it. Her grandfather had haunted the Drouot auction galleries, scouring the sales for bargains. Her cluttered apartment was testimony to his hobby. She lived surrounded by antiques, his “finds.”

She noticed a hefty price tag on a Sèvres porcelain figurine. Not her type of bargain at all. The shop contained château-sized armoires, stone statues, marble busts on faux fireplace mantels, and delicate Louis XIV desks. But it held no clients.

“Bonjour,”
said a middle-aged man with a receding hairline. A smell of espresso clung to him. His eyes flickered as he sized her up, estimating the cost of her dress. Not couture but a good label. No way he’d know it came from the rack at her favorite secondhand stall in the Porte de Vanves flea market.