by Cara Black
Aimée watched the awning of the Closerie des Lilas through her palm-sized mother-of-pearl opera glasses, a nineteenth-century pair her grandfather had found at auction. From her vantage point across the street and behind a plane tree, she made out bicyclists, a family walking toward the Jardin du Luxembourg, tourists in sun hats consulting maps.
No Suzanne.
At 1:59 a man in a nondescript light fabric suit approached Maréchal Ney’s statue. Lingered reading the plaque. At 2 p.m. he consulted his watch. Just then a waiter in a long white apron, one of the maître d’s crew, appeared and handed the man Aimée’s note. All according to plan.
Her digital camera’s zoom lens caught his face as he looked up. She snapped a photo. He followed the waiter into the Closerie des Lilas.
She hit Saj’s number on her cell phone.
“Saj, please tell me the nanny cam’s running and you see something.”
“Hmm . . . black and white floor tiles, a pay phone.”
Thank God. The camera was working. A small relief filled her.
“Record it, and if anyone comes in, get a freeze-frame of their face and print, okay?” she said.
“Oops, a lady’s stepped up to the phone.”
Suzanne.
Aimée pulled out the burner phone Suzanne had given her. It rang in her hand.
Aimée counted to three and answered. “Suzanne?”
“I have a message from Suzanne.”
Fear danced up her spine. “Who is this?”
“Suzanne said to deliver it in person.”
“Where’s Suzanne?”
“Hospital, but you know that. This happens face-to-face. No phone, no email.”
“Write your message and leave it with the maître d’.” Aimée hung up.
Saturday Afternoon
Saj met Aimée on the bench in the rose-brick courtyard of the Institut Catholique de Paris on rue d’Assas. She’d picked this spot for its proximity to Saj’s upcoming meeting. His blond dreadlocks were tied back under a bandanna. His laptop whirred as he downloaded her digital camera’s photos of the man.
“It was a double-team,” she said. “He handed off to a woman waiting inside.”
She’d checked the photos of the woman that Saj had printed out from the nanny cam. No one Aimée knew. Or who matched the staff photos Saj had pulled up from the ICTY website. Then again, an agent operating in the shadows wouldn’t merit their salt if their image got out.
“René’s got a new software program for facial recognition,” said Saj. “The trick’s finding the correct database to compare the images to. I’ll work on that back at the office.”
Edouard’s call came at the arranged time.
“Mademoiselle Aimée, I’m afraid no reservations were made.”
Disappointed, she thanked him and hung up.
“The double-team didn’t play,” she said. “No message from Suzanne.”
Saj looked up. “A setup?”
“Looks that way. Ministry intelligence in some form.”
Aimée glanced around. Students. A priest.
She had the feeling she was being followed. And not for the first time since Suzanne had sought her out. Lax security on her part? She’d changed in the school’s religious-studies wing restroom, removed her wig, donned her Jackie O sunglasses.
She moved closer to Saj on the bench. “Jean-Marie, the wounded one with a prosthetic, might recognize either the man or woman.”
“How’s that?”
She explained Mirko’s links to Hervé Gourmelon, a French agent. Rumors of arms deals. How meetings with the fugitive Karadžić caused a scandal.
“Why don’t Jean-Marie or Suzanne go public on this?”
“Maybe Suzanne tried. It’s not that simple, Saj. It stinks.”
“You’re telling me.” He lifted his arms and stretched, his eyes scanning the courtyard. He’d caught her wariness.
Laughter came from a group of students clustered by a poster about summer seminars. Everything felt normal apart from the shiver up her neck.
Saj fingered his rosewood prayer bead bracelet, then reached in his messenger bag. Slipped a printout into her bag. “A little more on Mirko.”
“Brilliant. Now can you see what you can dig up on a military attaché named Robert something. Jean-Marie’s old advisor. Lives near him.”
Saj nodded. “What am I looking for?”
“More about their mission. Any connections to arms dealers. There’s someone involved who is powerful enough to plant lies in the media.”
“Don’t ask for much, do you?”
“I don’t need any more surprises,” she said.
“You’re stressed. Those knots in your neck, your tight shoulders—how about a massage?”
Why not?
“Beats a cigarette,” she said.
His large hands kneaded her shoulders. “Breathe, Aimée. From your diaphragm, like this. Now. You’re all knotted up.” He leaned forward and whispered in her ear. “What’s with the eyes on us? I feel it, too. You picked this site at random, non?”
Her mind clicked over the possibilities—Mirko? The flics? She’d been so careful, hadn’t she?
“Not sure.” The knobs of tension she carried in her shoulders melted under Saj’s fingers. Her gaze flicked up to the mounted cameras at each end of the courtyard. “Think you can worm your way into the good graces of the receptionist?” She gestured to the laughing, long-haired blonde receptionist standing in the doorway across the courtyard. Aimée recognized the woman from when she’d taken a web security seminar here two years ago. “Ooze some of your charm, and inspire her to play back the last fifteen minutes of their video surveillance system footage. If anyone looks out of place or suspicious, get her to print out a few frames. Think you can do that and still make your client meeting?”
Saj winked. “Old school. I like that.” He stood, shouldering his Indian cloth bag. “I’ll call.”
Saturday Afternoon
Pauline crossed her ankles on the bench beside Charlotte.
“A red crayon?” Some of the wax caught under Pauline’s thumbnail. She sniffed. “Don’t you have anything else?”
Charlotte crinkled her brow. “Isabelle’s clothes, her bag, everything’s been returned to her brother. My little boy told me Isabelle drew him a picture with this crayon.”
Charlotte’s right hand shook holding a half-torn drawing.
Pauline took the drawing, held it to her chest, and closed her eyes. Sometimes the visitations took time. Sometimes they never happened.
“Pauline, did you really mean I couldn’t have prevented Isabelle’s accident?”
Pauline waved her silent. She needed stillness for the energy to settle. Charlotte’s bounced around in electric sparks.
An image flickered—fat drops of rain were pelting. Isabelle in her lime sundress running for shelter. The man running after her. The man catching her.
“The man . . .” Pauline trailed off.
“What man? Who?”
“The man spilled Orangina on her dress. He’s holding her arms . . .”
“What else?”
“If you want more, you must still your emotions, harness the energy,” said Pauline, standing. “Please stay here. I must feel this alone.”
The minute Pauline walked away toward the apiary, Charlotte rooted through her bag. That young woman—where was her card? What was her name? Charlotte found it, grabbed her cell phone, and dialed Aimée’s number.
Saturday Afternoon
“She’s a clairvoyant caretaker at the school across the street?” Aimée strolled with Charlotte under the allée of arching chestnut trees.
“Pauline calls it having visitations.”
The clank of boules rose from the sandy pit as they passed, and resounding shouts came from the
players. Several men in short-sleeve shirts wiped their foreheads with bandannas.
“You mean she sees dead people,” Aimée said. “Does she charge?”
Charlotte bristled. “It’s not what you think.”
“What do I think, Charlotte?” Aimée tried to control her crankiness. Almost breaking her neck to rush here in the traffic, Charlotte insisting it was an emergency, and all for this? A psychic old-lady con artist?
“She refuses even a centime,” Charlotte insisted. “It’s what the spirits ask her to do, she says. I begged her, Aimée. She didn’t want to. And she says Isabelle wasn’t alone when she died.”
Aimée stopped on the gravel path. “Who was with her?”
“Pauline saw a man spill Orangina on her.”
She thought of Serge’s autopsy report, and goosebumps rose on her arms.
By the nineteenth-century apiary, a sixtyish woman with short, brushed-back, greying hair stood with her hands in her smock coat pockets. A woman you wouldn’t look twice at, Aimée thought, noticing the pouches under her eyes, how tired she looked.
“It happened here,” Pauline said. “Isabelle knew him.”
Charlotte took Pauline’s arm. “Who was he?”
“My legs swell in the heat,” said Pauline. “Doing this takes it out of me. I need to sit down.”
Aimée followed them to the concrete steps of the Art Nouveau building where the beekeeping classes were held. Children ran up and down the path, their parents calling after them.
“Can you describe him, Pauline?” Aimée asked.
Pauline fanned away a fly. “A cap, with a brim.”
Aimée pulled out Mirko’s photo. “Does he look familiar?”
Pauline lifted the readers hanging from a chain around her neck. Bees droned. “Not the mustache.”
But the man she’d seen the other night sported a mustache. A fake one?
Now the important question. “Did he spill something on Isabelle’s dress?” Aimée asked.
“Orangina.”
Aimée controlled her shiver. “Is that a guess, Pauline? How could you tell?”
“Mais I recycle glass at school.”
“Désolée, I don’t understand.”
“I know an Orangina bottle when I see one,” she said. “Monday, just before the storm, I was reading my union’s rehousing notice on that bench. There.” She pointed. “I saw the man in the cap. He had an Orangina bottle. He must have been waiting for her. The sky opened; it started to pour. Thunder cracked. Whistles blew. The garden was closing. I was leaving, and I passed the girl hurrying through the gate.”
Anything the woman was saying she could be making up on the spot, or she could have rewritten her memories to feel important—that happened with witnesses all the time. It was only her knowledge of the Orangina that made Aimée wonder if she could get more.
“I’ve seen this man.” Charlotte’s finger tapped the photo so hard it fell from Aimée’s hand to the gravel.
She picked it up. “Where, Charlotte? Why do you remember him?”
Charlotte’s brow furrowed. “I’m trying to think.”
Had Mirko cased and surveilled the street, their apartment, watching to come up with a plan to take out Isabelle? Aimée turned to Pauline, whose face was flushed. Forget all the woo-woo. The woman might have actually seen something.
“So you saw this man and Isabelle together?” Aimée asked. “It’s important, Pauline.”
Pauline’s eyes fluttered. She got to her feet. “I don’t see anymore. I’m tired.”
Aimée looked around, noticed a trash bin under the sign pointing to the pépinière, the nursery with espaliered pear and apple trees. She calculated the distance from the hedge where Isabelle’s body was discovered to the bin—only a few meters. Close.
“Alors, do you remember if he threw the Orangina in the trash bin?” Aimée asked.
Pauline rubbed her forehead. “The guards’ whistle sounded; they were closing the park because of the rainstorm . . . So I came back on Tuesday after the park reopened.”
“You came back? For what?”
“To recycle. I collect glass, and Pilou picks it up from me every week.”
The frugal gardienne made extra by taking recyclables out of the bins in the park.
“You took the Orangina bottle?” Aimée asked.
The crime-scene technicians had assumed Isabelle’s death was an accident, so there’d have been no collecting of evidence. The discarded Orangina bottle would have still been there.
Aimée grabbed Pauline’s arm. “Can you show me your recycling? If it’s still there, we’d have fingerprints.”
“Pilou comes Saturdays. Maybe he’s already gone . . .”
“Then let’s hurry.”
They rushed out the gate and up rue d’Assas to the school’s courtyard. The bin was empty.
“Too late. He’s gone,” Pauline said.
“Where does he go?” Aimée asked.
“His truck’s just up the street. There.”
A faded yellow postal truck, bags bungee-corded on the roof, paused at the stop sign at rue Vavin.
Merde. “Call him,” Aimée said.
“Like he has a phone,” Pauline said.
Aimée took off running. Her sandals pounded the hot pavement. The light turned green.
She burst across the zebra crossing, just avoiding a screeching Peugeot. The driver leaned out the window and swore. “Idiote! I almost killed you.”
Aimée had been an idiote all right. Why hadn’t she remembered the Orangina Serge mentioned in the autopsy report? If—and a big “if”—Mirko existed and if he had—another “if”—held the Orangina bottle long enough to leave fingerprints . . .
Her legs pumped.
If so, she’d have the one solid piece of evidence in this shaky story of visitations, a ghost.
A lot of ifs.
She sprinted with her last bit of energy up rue Vavin, crossing rue Notre Dame des Champs. She spied the old postal truck double-parked by the tiny triangular place, a wedge of trees and benches.
A hunched-over man with grey hair rummaged through the trash bin by the green metal Wallace fountain.
“Pilou?” she gasped.
He looked up. Smiled a toothless grin.
“How much for Pauline’s glass recycling bag?”
Without a moment’s hesitation, he shot back, “Two hundred francs. I’ll throw in her metal bag, too.”
“Okay, two hundred but only the Orangina bottles.” She panted, catching her breath. “Keep the rest.”
She called Charlotte, asked her to stop at the pharmacie. Twenty minutes later the three of them, all wearing latex gloves, had separated out the bottles.
Seventeen Orangina bottles were in the scruffy old Monoprix bag Pilou had thrown in “on the house.” Aimée dialed Jean-Marie’s new number and arranged to meet him.
On rue de Nesle, she pulled up on her scooter, the bottle bag bungeed in her straw basket. “Let’s go, Jean-Marie.”
“You drive a pink scooter.” Jean-Marie shook his head.
“No time to worry about your image, Jean-Marie.”
“Forget it. Not even if I could get my prosthesis over the seat.”
What, pink wasn’t his color? The tall, muscle-bound ex-soldier filled out his jogging suit; she didn’t think she could force him to get on.
“I’ve carried shopping, laptops, wiretapping equipment, and my eight-month-old daughter, who didn’t complain. Now get on.”
“I’m not your daughter, so don’t talk to me like that.”
She wanted to explode. But she read the fear in his eyes and remembered what the physical therapist had said. Jean-Marie preferred to stay close to home.
She grinned at Jean-Marie. “My office is right there.” Pointed. “J
ust over the Pont Neuf. We’ll make it in two minutes. I have photos from the Closerie des Lilas to show you. I’ll be able to explain everything in privacy. There’s an espresso machine.”
“Espresso makes me jumpy.”
As if he wasn’t already? “Tisane, green tea, whatever you’d like. I’ll send you back in a taxi.”
“No way. Not a good idea.”
He turned. She saw his shopping bag, a Żubrówka bottle peeking out.
“Bring that with you,” she said. “Listen, Suzanne’s in trouble—both of you are. And I might have Mirko’s fingerprint.”
“He’s alive?”
“I’ll know if you help me. And we can’t do it here. Please.”
Jean-Marie blinked. His voice changed. “You need a database to compare prints to.”
The next minute he’d gripped her shoulder wedged himself on her cracked leather seat. “I’ll ride sidesaddle. We shift our weight and lean into the turns, or we’ll go heads up.”
Aimée revved the handlebars, took the corner, and roared down rue de Nevers.
•••
In the office, Aimée handed Jean-Marie the Hague documents Suzanne had given her. Together they skimmed the contents of Erich Kayser’s report. Saj was printing out what he’d found on DGSE in Bosnia, NATO’s movements in Foča, and their ICTY team.
Not much. And no luck, Saj reported, with the Institut Catholique courtyard. The CCTV was down.
“There are two options,” said Saj. “We can try ICTY—I have a contact in their IT department and can see if he can dig deep and rustle up Mirko’s file. It may or may not contain his fingerprints. The other option is hacking into Interpol, but that’s only relevant if he’s wanted internationally, not just in Bosnia.”
“There’s a third option,” said Jean-Marie. “The Belgrade office. I spent six months there in tactical support, and Robert’s got connections there, too.”
“Robert?” said René, who was working at his terminal, his shirt collar loosened.
“Robert Guedilen, my old colleague, the fixer on our team. He’s been after me to beef up his report anyway. I’ll call him.”
“Let’s not forget France and Belgium,” said René. “Mirko lived there from . . . Hold on.” He scanned a document on his screen. “Born in Zagreb in 1963, family entry into France, 1973, as émigrés—he was ten, so unlikely to have fingerprints on file from then. Then, 1975, the family moved to Brussels. Belgian customs exit records show 1977. He’d have been twelve to fourteen there—possible someone printed him, although unlikely.” René opened another window on his screen. “We could look for juvenile delinquency reports if there were any. But would they contain fingerprints?”