by Cara Black
“Only one way to find out,” Aimée said.
They divided up the work.
Her contact in the forensics unit at the préfecture was on a break. She left him a message. She couldn’t bring him the Orangina bottles until she had Mirko’s fingerprints to compare them to anyway.
Her old lycée classmate at the Paris school rectorate, Nina, answered on the second ring. “What now, Aimée? I’m going en vacances and wasn’t even going to answer.”
“Then good thing I caught you. Here’s what I need.”
Nina clucked her tongue and took down Mirko’s particulars. Aimée was trying to find his family’s old address in Paris.
“Don’t ever make it simple, do you?” said Nina. “Those archives are in the cellar.” A sigh. “Same as before?”
“Exactement,” said Aimée. “And for you?”
Nina told her. That gave her two hours.
She didn’t know how the address would help, but anything to flesh out the little she knew. She was still waiting on Bartok’s return call.
“Instead of spinning our wheels,” said Saj, “can’t Jean-Marie speak up, say he’s seen this Mirko? With a second sighting, they’ve got to take action, right? Demand a file with fingerprints.”
René nodded. “You would think—”
“That’s missing the point.” Aimée stood. “Suzanne reported, and look what happened to her. There’s no actual proof that Isabelle’s death wasn’t an accident unless we connect Mirko’s fingerprints to those on the Orangina bottle. If that’s even possible.” She fanned herself with a sushi takeout menu. Hit the switch on the ceiling fan. “But it would be proof Mirko’s alive,” she said. “That’s what Suzanne needs. That’s our goal. And under the war crimes statute, his ICTY case would be reactivated, and he’d be arrested here in France.”
“She’s right. We do this on our own,” said Jean-Marie. She’d supplied him with water to hydrate him before he could hydrate himself with the Polish vodka. His leg was propped on the recamier by the ICTY reports. “We need solid evidence. After the scandal of Karadžić getting away, the French military prefers to stay hands off.”
Saj pulled out a second laptop from his bag. “Say we get Mirko’s fingerprints, and there’s no match. Then what?”
“We’ll go from there, Saj. Step-by-step,” Aimée said. “Jean-Marie felt someone watching him. The whole thing smells, down to the setup at Closerie des Lilas. Whatever’s going on . . . it’s real. In the meantime, Jean-Marie, do you recognize either of these people?”
She’d pulled out the printed-out photos of the man by the Maréchal Ney statue and the woman at the pay phone. Now she taped them to the whiteboard.
“Spooks.” Jean-Marie nodded. “These two came around at my debriefing. Types like these get involved when they want to cover up.”
Aimée’s stomach churned. She saw alarm cross René’s face. “Alors, politics? Not our field,” said René.
“Think of Suzanne,” she said. “I need to figure out if this Mirko’s alive. She’ll be the one to turn him over.”
Jean-Marie nodded again. “I’m with you. They’re not. And better face it that you’re in the equation now.”
She chewed her lip.
They all returned to work. Jean-Marie used the extra laptop. René rewatched the bank’s CCTV feed of the café. “I feel like I’m stuck in a Georges Perec novel,” he said.
“You read too much, René,” she said. “Another thriller?” René loved detective novels.
“You’re kidding, right?” said René. “Perec wrote this whole book sitting in Saint Sulpice cafés, on the bench by the church, a stone’s throw from that café tabac. It’s nothing but three days of chronicling everything passing by.”
“Sounds like a page-turner,” said Jean-Marie.
“Fascinating,” said René, ignoring Jean-Marie’s sarcasm. “Perec took note of everything—old ladies, children holding their mothers’ hands, the numbers of buses passing, the trucks making deliveries.”
“What about the dogs?” Jean-Marie said.
“Mais oui, even the dogs.”
“So a stakeout novel?” said Aimée.
“A novella,” René said.
“I don’t get the point,” she said.
“There is no point,” he said. “It’s literary.”
She thought for a moment. “How’s what you’re seeing now different from what Perec chronicled?”
“That was twenty years ago,” said René. “Now people talk on cell phones; clothing styles are different. Buses still go the same routes, but the Métro runs quicker.”
Aimée paused at the whiteboard. “Say that again.”
“The Métro runs quicker.” René looked up. “Now trains arrive every minute or so, but back then—”
“Non, not that. Cell phones.” Of course. She put down the marker and joined René by his terminal. “Play the feed again.”
He ran the short clip they’d edited it down to.
“Watch Suzanne,” she said. “She’s holding something, I assume her phone. Then she stops; people pass; she’s turned. Like she’s gotten a call or message.”
René went back, sped the tape up. “Here?” René had eyes like a hawk.
“Exactemente. Now rewind . . .”
“It’s digital, Aimée,” he said.
“Right. Go back. Check for any passersby on a phone.” She stared. “Alors, there’s a heating and cooling service truck that wasn’t there earlier.”
René played it further. “A serviceman goes in. Comes right out. Then he lugs a ladder around the corner. Gone.”
Aimée paused to think. To recall details. Overhead the fan stirred the warm air from the window open on to rue du Louvre.
“That’s right,” she said. “I remember when I went in there on Tuesday night someone was working on the fan unit above the tabac shelves. On a ladder.”
“Look, Aimée,” René said. “The serviceman’s coming out the front door without the ladder. How?”
“Show me again.”
René did, slowing the clip to view it frame-by-frame.
“So here he leaves the truck with his ladder.” René’s finger pointed at the screen. “Doesn’t go in the café door. Three and a half minutes later, he emerges out the front without the ladder. Where’d it go?”
Aimée and René looked at each other.
“There must be a side door to the café tabac,” she said. “The ladder must have blocked it when I was there.”
“That’s what I remembered,” said Jean-Marie. “I thought you could enter the tabac via rue du Vieux Colombier.”
So Mirko could have come and gone via the other street.
“I got a hit.” Saj hunched in front of his screen. “Lojane, Macedonia, 1993, a drunk driving charge. Mirko was arrested, and they took his prints.”
Aimée’s jaw dropped. “Don’t tell me you just hacked into Interpol? Europol?”
Saj winked at René.
“Pas du tout.” René shrugged. “Don’t we always tell you, Aimée, simple is best?”
She sat cross-legged on Saj’s tatami mat. “What’s this? Greek? I can’t read this.”
“Serbia’s in official control of the Serb-Macedonian border,” said Saj. “Lojane’s the border town.”
Jean-Marie nodded. “Infamous for a people-smuggling network for people trying to get into the EU. A network stretching from Thessaloníki to Scandinavia.”
Saj had pulled up an arrest record. “Lojane’s records came through our band of brothers.”
Hacker speak for white hats—the good hackers.
“Brilliant, Saj,” said Aimée. Now to butter up her connection at the préfecture. “I need Metallica tickets, René. Front row.”
René tugged his goatee. Clicked his keyboard.
“We’re in luck. They’re touring in September.”
That would have to do.
She couldn’t enter the préfecture with a police bulletin out on her. Couldn’t beg for Morbier’s help as she’d done in the past. So with Mirko’s Macedonian arrest file burned on a CD and a bag full of Orangina bottles, she made her first stop: the morgue.
Serge met her in the off-white-and-green lounge on the morgue’s lower floor. A place where family members waited to view their loved ones. It reeked of despair and pine air freshener. The second time she’d been here this week.
He looked around furtively to see if anyone was listening. “You want me to plant evidence, Aimée?”
“Not yet.”
A pained expression crept over Serge’s face.
“Maybe not at all,” she said, with a reassuring smile. “I need to know if any fingerprints on these Orangina bottles match the ones on the arrest record on this CD.”
“Seventeen bottles? Do you know how much work that takes?”
“An hour tops for my contact in the fingerprint lab at the préfecture. It’s direct comparison, like slicing butter. Either a fingerprint matches or it doesn’t.”
Serge looked behind him. “That’s assuming clear prints show on the bottles.”
True. So many ifs. “It’s what we’ve got to work with, Serge. Alors, we both know things get in the wrong file. Evidence mislabeled. It happens. Maybe the right Orangina bottle has been in the wrong file.”
“I won’t break the law.”
The prints on the bottle had to go through the police system to show chain of custody. Authenticity. There was nothing official connecting the bottles with Isabelle Ideler’s death right then, and if their true chain of custody were known, they would be inadmissible as evidence. She needed Serge to bend the rules for her if she was going to get the law on Mirko.
“We’ll figure it out, Serge.”
“If the prints match, is my ruling on Isabelle’s death as accidental going to be challenged?” he asked.
Aimée twirled a strand of hair from her wig. “Anaphylactic shock killed Isabelle. No challenge there.” She took a deep breath. “But if his prints show on the bottle, that’s all I need to force an investigation into a supposedly dead man who might be alive and engineering murders.”
Serge hesitated. “Alors, I’m jammed. You know how it goes.”
She’d give him a script. “You say the Orangina bottles arrived late and are now thought to contain evidence pertaining to another case. You insist they be checked against the prints on the CD. Put Loïc Bellan’s name on it, and then bingo, you are top of the class. If Bellan questions you, just say, ‘The report lists you in the chain of command.’ Simple.” She tugged Serge’s sleeve. “The man’s a Serbian criminal wanted by The Hague for crimes against humanity. A sealed indictment gets reactivated if there’s proof he’s alive.” She leaned closer. “Serge, if he’s the same man, he raped eight-year-old girls. Murdered them and threw them in a pit.”
Serge’s eyes bulged behind his thick lenses.
“We need proof. That’s all.”
Serge took off his glasses. Wiped the lenses with the edge of his lab coat. “You trust your contact in fingerprinting to keep his mouth shut, Aimée?”
“With these I do.” She flashed the receipt for the tickets for the Metallica concert. “He adores heavy metal. He’s helped me before.”
“I’m not sure, Aimée.”
“Did I forget to mention babysitting the twins on your upcoming anniversary?”
“You mean for a long weekend? It’s a special anniversary.”
She groaned inside. Envisioned making the twins run laps in Bois de Vincennes to exhaust them. As if anything could.
“Done,” she said.
Serge took the disc and the bag of bottles, taking another furtive look around the lounge.
On her way out, Aimée dialed her fingerprint contact’s number. “We’re on. He’s ready.”
She hoped to God this brought answers. She couldn’t pinpoint why, but she believed Pauline. Her habits fit a frugal school guardienne on a fixed income. Just forget the seeing-dead-people thing—just as long as the collected Orangina bottle came through.
On her scooter, she climbed the heights of Belleville, passed Saint-Fargeau Métro, and parked on rue du Groupe Manouchian. If they pertained to any school in Paris, from école maternelle to university, even going back a century or more, the records existed here at the rectorate.
The homeless man who’d made the back doorway of the rectorate his abode sat reading. Everyone in the quarter knew him as Flaubert since he read Madame Bovary front to back every six months. Had done so for at least the last ten years. He frequented the soup kitchen line; locals left him blankets; staff at the rectorate gave him odd jobs. Once a professor of literature? An academic? He had a story, like all those without a home.
“Bonjour, Flaubert,” said Aimée.
He looked up from his mattress in the doorway. A groomed beard, sandals, and the overcoat he always wore. She imagined he kept most of his life in the bulging pockets.
Even in this heat.
“You’re here for a pickup, mademoiselle?”
“Oui, Flaubert.”
Flaubert handed her the manila envelope.
“Any message?” he said.
“Tell Nina it’s taken care of,” said Aimée, slipping him a fifty-franc note. “She’ll understand.”
Nina had a restraining order against her ex, but it didn’t stop him from sending harassing emails, trolling her online. Aimée had blocked the ex’s email account for good. Slashed his credit score as an added thank-you.
In the shade of the kiosk by the Métro, she opened the envelope. Inside were smudged photocopied pages.
Mirko Vladić had attended the école élémentaire at 42 rue Madame. The street Charlotte lived on. A beige-and-salmon-brick school a stone’s throw from Jardin du Luxembourg.
Shaken, Aimée read further.
His father had been a construction worker; his mother a concierge; domiciled at the building that employed her, 3 rue Palatine. The short block crossing rue Servandoni, Erich Kayser’s street.
Was Mirko back “home”?
Her phone trilled. A number she didn’t know.
“It’s Bartok. I meet you. Now.”
Bartok met her at Odéon under Danton’s statue, a popular meeting place. Dove-grey pigeons fanned their tails, their white V markings creating a random beauty on the street. In summer, even the rats with wings looked beaux.
“Monsieur Bartok, if you can help me—”
“I know what you want,” he interrupted. Checked his phone. “Let’s walk and talk. I’ve got a work site to check.”
He didn’t look back. He expected her to follow.
She caught up as he crossed the crowd in line for the cinema.
“My name is good,” said Bartok. He was short, stocky, and muscular. “My people are good. My work is good, and clients trust me.” He paused, and she almost ran into him. “You know how hard such a thing is?”
She figured that was a rhetorical question.
“Hard for anyone. But for an émigré like me, even harder.” He was walking fast. “It takes time to build trust. Fifteen years I’m here. When I first come, I sleep in a friend’s bar in the storeroom. I learn my French at the counter, do any job I could. Thank God I’m good with my hands. Now I employ good people, do good work. So good I’ve remodeled six of the bars in Saint-Germain and am contracted for three more. I work like dog, have different teams who I train and inspect every day. I work, but . . .”
A truck passed, clattering on the street.
Bartok continued. “In Croatia, there’s no work, no buildings left, and no money to rebuild. Here, this country give me a new life.” He paused at a red light. “I have choice
when I arrive, you know. Steal and live the old way or a chance for a different life. That’s what I tell my team. I take you on. You must prove to me you’re serious.”
She realized he was talking about Mirko.
“In other words, Mirko wasn’t serious,” she said.
“Listen,” he said, his thick, calloused fingers motioning her forward. “Not a good one to know. Mirko brings bura, we say, a bad wind.”
“‘A bad wind’? How’s that?”
“A lot of young guys are like that. Like me, once. I give him a job, show him. A chance, you know, like I had.”
Aimée’s pulse picked up. “Recently?”
He shrugged. Took out a bandanna and wiped his forehead. “Three, no, maybe four years ago. I haven’t seen him since.”
That would have been 1996 or ’95. A dead end.
“Have you heard if he’s back in Paris?” she asked.
“If he was, I don’t want to know,” said Bartok, checking his phone again. “But Professor Olgan, he say I should talk with you. That’s it. I talk to you.”
She felt desperate, sensing there were things he hadn’t told her. A silver cross hung from a chain amid Bartok’s dark chest hair. “Did you find Mirko at Cathédrale Saint-Volodymyr, that place where men search for work?”
“Mais non, he is a friend of a cousin . . . like that kind of connection.”
“I don’t understand. If he’s a Serb and you’re Croat . . .”
“It’s complicated.”
Everything was complicated lately.
“Simplify it for me, Bartok.”
“Simple? You want simple? Where I come from, nothing’s simple. My father’s Croat from Hungary, okay? My mother’s a Serbian born in Croatia. My brother married a Bosniak. You understand?”