by Cara Black
A man in a suit was speaking. “As outlined in our presentation, clients should connect with solar companies like ours via infrastructures with up-to-date fiber optics …”
Weren’t solar and fiber optics two different things? Her eyes began to glaze until she saw his name tag: Rimmel, Solas Energie. De Voule, the Gadz’Arts she spoken with on the phone, headed the company.
“Excusez-moi, Monsieur.” She smiled, stepping into the group. “That’s like connecting apples and oranges, non?”
He took in her leather pants, faux fur coat. “If you interns bothered to attend our presentation, the correlation would be obvious.” A sneer appeared on his long, pale face.
Intern? Thank God the concealer had masked the shadows under her eyes. She’d buy it by the kilo.
“Who do you work with, Mademoiselle?”
She thought quickly. “Jean-Luc at Bouygues,” she said. “Have you seen him?”
“The symposium’s finished for today,” he said dismissively.
His condescending air rankled, yet who better to ask about fiber optics than one in the business? “I’m assembling a marketing proposal for a fiber-optics campaign, Monsieur. I’d like to get a handle on it. Maybe you could elaborate?”
His sneer relaxed. He seemed the type who enjoyed imparting his expertise.
“Third World countries, without existing infrastructure, can put fiber optics in place immediately without expensive adaptations to outdated and often malfunctioning systems,” he said, flicking lint off his tweed jacket.
Patronizing, too.
“The goal would be to provide renewable energy coordinating with a basic delivery infrastructure,” he said. “The horse with the buggy.”
A young engineer type nodded. “Brilliant. Basket the services.”
“And corner the million-franc market,” said an older professor type next to her. “However, given the unstable politics and the issues you outlined, cost-wise that makes coordination inefficient.”
“At present, but …”
Her eye wandered to a tall man who’d entered the room and gestured to Rimmel. She could only make out part of his name tag, but he was from Solas Energie. He appeared to be in a hurry. She followed him outside to the drafty corridor.
“Monsieur?”
He turned. Tall, wide-shouldered, late twenties with a shock of reddish-brown hair parted to the side. And she deciphered his name tag illuminated in the light.
“So we meet, Monsieur de Voule,” she said, handing him her card. “I’m Aimée Leduc. We spoke on the phone concerning Pascal Samour.”
His forehead crunched in thought as he read her card. “A detective? But you said you worked at the Conservatoire …”
“True on both accounts, Monsieur.” Behind him on poster board was the list of symposium meetings. “Your firm stands to make millions in Third World countries.…”
He blinked. Swapped his briefcase from one hand to the other, glanced at his watch.
“So do many others,” he said. “Everyone here, in point of fact.”
“But you specialize in solar energy,” she said. “What do fiber optics have to do with you?”
“For example, Mademoiselle, installing a solar-energy harvester in the middle of the Sahara or Gobi Desert sounds obvious. Free sunlight, immense profits. Yet an isolated energy source does little in the grand scheme, makes no sense if you can’t connect with a delivery system down the road. My firm found out the hard way.” He gave a little shrug. “We’re trying to convince telecommunications to band this together or it’s not worth the investment development.”
“Meaning?”
“Unless dramatic developments in fiber optics make it economically feasible for China or African countries to build and maintain telecommunication systems, it’s a moot point. No one likes to hear that here.”
Money. Did it all come down to money?
She tried a hunch. “So how was your classmate Samour connected to fiber optics?”
“I’m confused. Weren’t you concerned with a fourteenth-century document? Some pie-in-the-sky dream of Pascal’s?”
He’d avoided her question.
“He was murdered, Monsieur de Voule. I’m looking at all angles.”
“You’re implying what?”
“I found pieces, but not how they fit into the puzzle,” she said. “Weren’t you just away on a work site?”
He nodded. “Going back tomorrow. But I need to meet with staff at this event. And if you’ll excuse me …”
She couldn’t let him leave like that. “Hear me out for one minute, please.”
“You’re trying to tie in Pascal’s murder somehow, aren’t you?” De Voule said, his tone exasperated.
“If Samour discovered an economically feasible fiber optic and manufactured it cheaply, who’d want it?”
“Apart from corrupt governments, the military, and politicians who pocket UN subsidies for grain and health services?”
Hmm, not so much money there after all, she thought. “So you think his murder’s personal?”
“I don’t know.”
“He confided in Becquerel,” she said. “But with his death, that leads nowhere.”
He looked stricken. “That led you to me.” A small sigh. Rimmel’s tapping foot echoed in the corridor, and de Voule looked up. “Desolé, Pascal and I were close in school, but it’s been several years. I’ve got an appointment.”
“His great-aunt said that Becquerel mentored him.”
De Voule paused. “Petite Madame Samoukashian?”
“She hired me. You know her?”
“Best soup in the world.” Memories flooded his eyes. “They presented her with the Légion d’honneur for her work in the Resistance, you know. But she refused it.”
“She was a résistante?” Aimée knew but wanted to draw him out.
“A hero,” he said. “She ran a clandestine safehouse network in the Arts et Métiers.”
Aimée thought back to her feisty nut-brown eyes, the determination in her thin shoulders.
De Voule shrugged. “But she said she wouldn’t accept until the government acknowledged the role her cousin Manouchian, the Armenian poet in the Affiche Rouge, played during the Occupation. And until they reburied the group with honors, since the Germans executed them and dumped them in a mass grave.”
Surprised, Aimée took de Voule’s sleeve. “Pascal meant everything to her. She believes his murder is due to a project he was working on. We found material relating to fiber optics. Can’t you think back? Anything would help.”
He shrugged.
“Your classmate Jean-Luc thinks otherwise.”
He shook his head. “Jean-Luc and Pascal didn’t get along. Well, except when Pascal could help Jean-Luc.”
Before she could press him, Rimmel took his arm and they left. She pondered his last comment. Spite? But he seemed honest and revered Pascal’s aunt.
The rooms in the cloister had emptied. Feeling chilled, she wanted to warm up and go over Pascal’s laptop with René. She paused to pull her coat around her, then tried Jean-Luc’s number.
A phone trilled somewhere. The ring tone, a techno beat, escalated, echoing in the vaulted stone corridor. Pleasantly surprised, she followed it to the sacristy.
“Desolé, Aimée, I’m late,” Jean-Luc said. “Where are you?”
“Right here.” She smiled, waved to him and headed to the sacristy bar. “I could use a drink right now instead of dinner.”
“I apologize.” She noticed his flushed cheeks, the rapid rising of his chest under his suit jacket. “But how did you find me?” His eyebrows rose on his forehead.
“No apology necessary,” she said, uncorking a dense red Burgundy and pouring two glasses. She glanced at the label. Not cheap. “We couldn’t talk at a crowded bistro, anyway. They suggested I’d find you here.”
She handed him a glass, determined to relax him. Probe for information and check it against de Voule’s words. She clinked his glass. “Sal
ut.” She let him take a sip. Then another. “Symposium overload or work issues?”
“Department miscommunication,” he said, a tired edge to his voice. “Nothing I can’t handle. But I’m still new at this.”
“You’re not trying to avoid me?” She gave a little laugh. “Look, I wouldn’t want you to feel I’m hounding you. You’re so busy …”
“Not at all.” A crease worried Jean-Luc’s brow. “Now that I’ve listened to Pascal’s message, it’s adding up. But not in a good way.”
Alert, she poured more Burgundy in his glass.
“I feel terrible,” he said.
Aimée tried to look understanding. “Something bothered you in Pascal’s message, didn’t it?”
“That’s just it, it’s my fault. He needed my help.”
“Needed your help?”
De Voule said it had been the other way around. Which one told the truth? Which should she believe?
Jean-Luc sipped. Pushed his blond hair back. “A month, non, six weeks ago, they promoted me to division head. A new division concerned with logistics. In telecommunications that translates to nuts and bolts, infrastructure, systems placement …” He took a breath. “I’m boring you, desolé. Here I am still talking work after the all-day symposium.”
“A fiber-optics division, that’s what you’re getting to, non?” Aimée took a linen napkin and set the bottle on it.
Jean-Luc blinked. “How did you know?”
She pointed to the fiber-optics symposium banner.
“Alors, I’ll cut to the chase,” he said. “Added responsibility, and one I qualified for, but of course I’m learning as I go. My team’s brilliant.”
“Composed of fellow Gadz’Arts?”
He gave a brief nod. “That’s where Pascal came in,” Jean-Luc said. “He visited me at my office several weeks ago. Turns out he worked on a fiber-optic formula and wanted my advice.”
The connection. Aimée willed her fingers to remain steady on her glass.
“Anything specific you can tell me?”
Jean-Luc shook his head. “Pascal caught me between meetings. A five-minute conversation.” He shrugged. “To play fair, I couldn’t reveal the company’s plans. I can’t say I understood all the projects we’d undertaken. That’s why I attend these symposiums, to get up to speed.”
“That’s it?” Aimée felt hope slipping away.
“Three days ago, he begged me to meet at his office,” Jean-Luc said. “But I’d just gotten back from our new lab in Strasbourg. Then Friday night he left the message, excited, saying he’d found something, a fourteenth-century technique that could be the missing fiber-optic link. He needed to show me, show me before …” His lip trembled.
“Please go on, if you can,” she said, hating to push him. “Before what?”
He nodded. “He said, ‘before they find out what I’ve done,’ almost as if he’d stolen something.”
“You’re sure?” Yet according to the DST, Pascal worked for the security of the country.
“But I don’t know who or what.” He squeezed her hand, then let go. Large, tapered fingers, worn fingernails. Even as department head he’d said he still did the dirty work. “Then this afternoon.” He downed his wine, his brow furrowing. “I couldn’t find reports in my briefcase for today’s presentation. Gone. My secretary checked, but I hadn’t left them at the office.”
He shot her a troubled look.
“Vital reports?” Aimée asked.
“Topics relating to our presentation,” Jean-Luc continued. “We’re on the cusp of discoveries in fiber optics. But of course, no detailed specifics. We’re sharing the current trends with the participants.” His phone vibrated. He glanced and ignored it. “It’s like a knife in my heart. I can’t believe Pascal would have taken the reports from my office. I don’t want to believe it. But if I’d met him Friday, defused the situation, convinced him to own up or …” Pause. “But I’m projecting.”
Had Pascal stolen reports? She needed to think about this new spin.
“I’m still not understanding how this links,” she said. “Was he obsessed with the project?”
“A geek, you mean?” Jean-Luc’s tone changed, verging on sarcastic.
Realizing she’d struck a sore point, she shrugged. “I’m quoting your fellow Gadz’Arts, de Voule.”
“We’re all geeks, some of us more obviously than others,” he said. “Fascinated by engineering and the arcane.” He shook his head, almost apologetic now. “No one wanted to date mecs like us in engineering school.”
So he spoke from experience? Had he in his youth resembled Pascal: glasses, wild hair, a distracted and bookish look? If so, he’d changed. Pascal hadn’t.
“Vraiment? You?” She’d ease a smile onto his face. Get him to talk. Reveal more about Pascal. Learn what she didn’t know, why he suggested Pascal stole. “More like a catch, I’d say.”
He grinned. “And you?”
“Me?” He turned the tables in a neat switch.
“So you’re taken, Aimée?”
By a man married to a job he couldn’t talk about? Who might never have a weekend free but asked her to go with him to Martinique?
“Relationships? I don’t get them.” She shrugged.
“But I can tell,” he said. “Alors, give me credit for trying.”
He hadn’t tried very hard. And his being department head of a conglomerate, not bad boy enough for her.
“Weren’t de Voule and Pascal outsiders?” Aimée asked, persisting. “De Voule said you and Pascal butted heads. That you used him. How do you explain that?”
“Crapaud! You believe de Voule? Consider the source.” Jean-Luc downed his wine. “Alors, de Voule inherited his father’s company. Lucky for him. A mediocre engineer, a passable technician who paid lip service to our traditions to bolster his credentials. His firm’s in financial trouble. Their ministry project defunded. Yet he thinks himself too good for a Gadz’Arts, can you imagine?”
“Yet Pascal didn’t buy into any of it, did he?”
“We knew where we stood with him.”
She poured more wine. The bottle was almost empty. “Did you use Pascal?”
“Moi? The other way around. I felt sorry for Pascal. These flashes of brilliance he had, with no discipline to follow through. His scattershot approach. We were so different from each other, but I understood him. His obsessive tendencies from a solitary childhood. Like my own. Now I hate to think he repaid me by …”
“Stealing reports? Is that what you’re implying?”
“I hope to God not.” He glanced again at his cell phone, worried. For a moment vulnerable. “Another work crisis.”
Overwhelmed by responsibility. She could relate to that.
“Forgive me, but I need to go over tomorrow’s project.” He gathered his overcoat from the rack. A camel-hair coat. It was one of several similar coats on the rack, but her stomach went cold. And she remembered the man darting in front of the car. The thread in her fingernail after the attack. “That’s your coat?” Had it been him? Her throat caught.
He snorted in disgust. “Can you believe that?” He pointed to a grease stain. “A brand new coat—I only just bought it this afternoon. Dirty. Teaches me not to shop the sales again.”
“Today?” A tingle in her ankles rose up her legs.
“Before my seminar. A new coat, to make a good impression. And look.” He shrugged for a moment like a little boy.
Relief flooded her. It couldn’t have been him.
“Look, if my reports surface in Samour’s files, will you tell me? Keep it between us? No need to implicate Pascal now.”
Not to mention keeping his company ignorant of this. But she understood.
Jean-Luc kissed her on both cheeks. Lingering kisses, and then he’d gone. She wanted him to be wrong about Pascal. Very wrong.
Sunday, 7 P.M.
AIMÉE STOOD AT Café des Puys, running her chipped rouge-noir pinkie over the zinc counter. What she wouldn’
t give for that cigarette in her bag.
One drag. That’s all.
Anxiety settled over her mind as she wondered about the DST’s agenda, their claim to Pascal, de Voule’s firm’s financial trouble, Jean-Luc’s intimation that Pascal stole his fiber-optics report. They each had different reasons for lying. Who to believe?
Just as she was about to reach for the pack the blonde had given her, the waiter slid an espresso in front of her. So instead, she took sugar cubes from the bowl. No chocolate on the demitasse saucer this time. No instructions either.
“Monsieur, un chocolat?”
“All out,” he said, without looking up.
Alors, she’d appeared as instructed. Done her part. Foolish to think the DST could lead to her mother. Secret meetings, games, all smoke and mirrors. She’d promised Mademoiselle Samoukashian she’d find Pascal’s murderer. But she still hadn’t connected the pieces, or found out who murdered him. Or why.
Tired, she downed the espresso, slapped five francs on the counter. The next time the DST made contact, she’d tell them where to go. About to leave, she glanced up. In the café mirror her gaze caught that of the man sitting in the back.
Sacault. Same brown suit. A matching brown wool muffler. Color coordinated as usual. She sat down across from him. “Glad you’re here. Makes it easy to say adieu.”
“Don’t you have news for me?”
She set down the tiny GPS tracker she’d found under her scooter’s headlamp. “Your surveillance techniques don’t impress or protect me. Nor do your old recycled surveillance reports,” she said. “After meeting the blonde last night, I was attacked. Consider me done.”
Sacault slid a gift-wrapped box with a blue bow across the marble-topped table. “Open it.”
Presents, a three-star resto tomorrow … bizarre goings-on. “But it’s not my birthday.”
“Pretend.”
“You’re good at that.” She stared at him. “Like that supposed five-year-old surveillance report on my mother. Posted on a website that disappeared before I could track it. Or how you altered the date.” She shook her head, shoved the gift back at him. “Quit gaming me.”