by Cara Black
“What does he look like?”
“Like any punk with money. Gold around the neck. Stylish hair and clothes.”
Now to the important part.
“Did you hear a shot, Cloclo?”
She shook her head. “I was working, chérie.”
“See anything?”
“Like I said.” She rolled her mascaraed eyes. “Working. But the good-looker walked up from Pigalle and stood in the doorway, you know where the street divides?” She drained her glass.
Aimée pictured the view from Cloclo’s station and the spot where Sarti had stood. If he came from Pigalle, would he have had time to kill Jacques and attack Laure? What about the other mec?
“Here’s my number,” Aimée said, handing Cloclo a card. “Call me the next time you see the Corsican. Night or day. There are more francs in it for you.”
Wednesday Evening
LUCIEN CLIMBED THE WORN stairs leading to avenue Junot, his lungs constricting in the bitter chill. It was a steep staircase dotted by infrequent old-fashioned green metal street lamps, like those in his village. Except for the ice and biting wind, he might have been home. His pulse raced despite disappointment. The recording engineer had greeted him at the studio door with a long face, informing him that he was sorry but the session had been cancelled and telling him to go to 63, rue Lepic, and up the stairs.
Lucien figured Félix was en route to some meeting and would meet him there to break the bad news that SOUNDWERX had reneged on the deal.
Nice! He didn’t even have a decent winter coat. And the flics were on the prowl for him. And he still didn’t have the rent.
Wild aromatic herbs grew out of the old walls, their scent mingling with that of the wet, seeping earth. The stair summit leveled off to worn stones tented by elder, ash, and sycamore branches. A gypsum rock taller than he blocked the path. Fernlike ailanthus branches spread from the crumbling stone wall, their rain-glistening leaves catching the light of the half-moon. He tripped over a raised cobblestone. A rustling in the bushes, and then speckled blackbirds and magpies swooped upward, leaving brown fluttering leaves in their wake.
A wild place in the heart of Paris. He hadn’t known one existed.
Ahead, he saw a dark-coated figure under a street lamp, eyes shining under her mauve knitted cap. Slim and lithe, he’d know her anywhere.
“Marie-Dominique!”
Had she been persuaded by Félix to await his arrival to coat the bitter pill?
“Over here, Lucien.” She motioned to where wild fig branches and cedar trees interlaced.
“What a spot to meet, Marie-Dominique,” he said. Puffs of frost filled the air between them.
“It’s the maquis of Montmartre. It reminds me of home.” She pointed with her black-leather-gloved finger past the stalks of a garliclike herb. “I discovered it. Wonderful, non? An old woman told me her grandmother’s farm had been here. There used to be watering troughs for the animals over there.”
All Lucien saw were dark stones and underbrush.
“These old walls were part of the mill that ground wheat for flour.”
Lucien stepped over the brush and saw the shadowy arms of a windmill looming behind the stone wall. Hidden.
“There were dozens of mills here once,” she said. “Now only two remain.”
The pinprick lights of Paris below shone like fireflies caught in a net of ferns. In the stillness, the dark, her rose scent drifted toward him. He wanted to fold her in his arms.
“You’re in danger, Lucien.” Her voice had changed.
“I know. It seems I’m an object of police scrutiny.” Longing filled him despite his earlier disappointment. Just seeing her alone made his skin tingle.
“Them, too? I found out that Petru has planted Armata Corsa propaganda at the studio,” she said, “and arranged for the police to arrest you!”
“Petru?”
“He works for us, but he’s involved in something else. I left Félix a message to warn him that Petru’s trying to sabotage you.”
“I don’t understand.”
Marie-Dominique stepped back, doubt showing on her face.y “Am I wrong? That group, the one you and your friends joined— ?”
Félix. Now Marie-Dominique. He was tired of this. “I signed up and went to one meeting with my brother and friends. As I told you. How can you think I’d be part of something that’s not even a political movement anymore? They’re gangsters! They extort protection money and graffiti the tête de Maure all over to make the bombings appear to be political.” He kicked a loose, cracked pavement stone that clattered into the bushes. “The true Separatists want to free Corsica, but not like that.”
She looked away. He clutched her arm. “I should know. Luca, my little brother, worked construction on the military base until the union went on strike and shut it down.”
“Quit that old talk, Lucien. It’s always the same!”
“The same?” He had to make her understand. “Luca forgot his tool kit and went back to retrieve it. The gangsters, the so-called “union,” thought he’d crossed the picket line. The next day they delivered his body to my mother. What was left of it.”
He trembled, trying to forget the bloody image of a mutilated Luca with a tête de Maure painted on his chest.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” she said.
“I had signed up in a drunken moment of idealism. How wrong I was.” He kicked a clod of dirt with his toe. “Nothing will stop them or those developers who are gutting the coast, ruining the land—”
“So you’re blaming Félix now?” Her eyes flashed.
“I spoke of the developers who are ruining the land.” His feet crunched the ice between the cobbles. “What does he have to do with that?”
“As if you didn’t know. His military contracts, the development he’s involved in . . . why he’s there right now. There’s been another crisis with the Ministry contract. He’s doing the best he can for the island.”
The best?
“I didn’t know. You’ve changed, Marie-Dominique. I once thought . . .” He paused. He snapped an elder twig between his fingers. He couldn’t bottle it up any longer. “I never understood. Now I’ve figured it out. Your hotheaded cousin Giano saw us in the cave and made trouble. So your family sent you to Paris to make a match with Félix.”
“I prevented the vendetta.”
“The vendetta?” She sounded like his mother. “It’s changed. Young people don’t care; they hate the rivalries and killings. I should have spoken up, explained to your father. Or maybe the vendetta is just an excuse. You agreed to marry a rich man. Maybe you really wanted the good life. But Félix? An old roué?” He wanted to bite his tongue. He hadn’t meant to say that.
“How can you attack Félix?” she said, hurt in her eyes.
“Someone who’s trying to help you . . . your career. But, as always, you lash out with no regard for anyone else’s feelings.”
Shame and anger filled Lucien. Had he gotten it all wrong? Conflicted, he looked down. His legs didn’t seem to work. He was torn, paralyzed. He should go, he knew.
“That’s the one thing I miss, the scent of the maquis,” he told her.
“‘The maquis has no eyes but sees everything,’” Marie-Dominique reminded him.
Did it see inside him? Did she?
“I’m late for my next job,” Lucien said, finally making his legs move.
Her face was in shadow.
“You’re still a terrible liar, Lucien.”
She edged past him. Stopped. Stood on the stairs, her wool coat glistening with drops of rain in the light of the street lamp. Her back to him, her gloved hands shaking. “You don’t understand.”
And then he finally realized. For her, he’d just been a fling. A flirtation, easily gotten over.
“You have no ears to hear what I’m saying,” Marie-Dominique said.
She’d changed. Hardened. Where was his Marie-Dominique with the sand-dusted feet and olive-oil-stained hands?
&n
bsp; Her heels clicked down the stone steps and when he looked, she’d already turned the corner.
LUCIEN PULLED his coat collar higher and stared at the fingers of mist floating over the buildings below. He was cold and alone, the murmur of Paris below him. He should be recording right now, but Félix was in Corsica, the flics and this Petru were in league against him, and Marie-Dominique had left him again. As they said, a life could fall apart in seconds. And his had.
Bad luck dogged him. His grand-mère would call it “the evil eye.” Superstition, all superstition. He believed in science, empiricism. Still, the image of the old mazzera came to him, “the witch” they called her in the village. She was supposed to know how to lift curses.
He saw the piercing topaz eyes in her lined face, her black shawl redolent of the herbs she used, the tarnished silver cross and amulets she wore around her neck. He’d still been in short pants, sleeping on the platform in the attic under the skylight when he’d visited her. A rash had covered his palms and he’d tried to hide them under his school desk. The older boy he had asked to whittle him a slingshot saw them and ridiculed him: “Leper.”
Desperate to rid himself of the rash, he’d walked through the mazzera’s open door. The one-room stone house smelled of smoke and pork grease. Smoked sausages and cured hams on strings hung in rows from the wood beams. The old crone, huddled by the wood-burning stove with its chipped enamel coffee pot, looked up.
“Petit, you’ve come to buy my sanglier?” she asked in a curious high-pitched voice.
She cured and smoked the best wild boar sausages in the village.
“N-not exactly,” he stammered.
Her eyes, like a young woman’s, penetrated the smoky haze.
“Non, of course not. You need my help,” she said. “Come here. Show me your hands.”
Surprised, he stepped forward, past the sleeping dog curled at her feet.
He lifted his palms, his eyes down, and showed her. “Maman’s tried ointments, olive-oil soap, but nothing works.”
“You want it to go away and your friends to stop making fun of you.”
How did she know? He nodded, shifting his sandaled feet on the uneven wood floorboards.
“It’s a sign, petit. Ask yourself why.”
Perplexed, he backed away. “You’re supposed . . .”
“I see things.” Her voice crackled and the dog thumped its tail. “You’ve forgotten a promise, haven’t you?”
A promise? Hadn’t he fed the chickens this morning?
“I mean forgotten what you know deep inside. So the spirits have sent you a reminder.”
She made the sign of the cross over his forehead and chest three times, murmuring words in some language he didn’t understand. Latin sounding. “Every night for three nights look into the sky and ask your ancestors’ help.” She poured herbs and boar fat into a small mortar and ground them with a pestle into a foul-smelling brown paste.
“Smear this on your palms afterward,” she said. “Three nights, don’t forget.”
He reached in his pocket and pulled out a tied clump of sage he’d gathered in the maquis. He handed it to her.
“Merci, good boy,” she said. “You honor the customs.”
For three nights, staring at the glistening stars, he’d crossed himself. Thought hard. The promise he’d made to his grandfather to carry on the family music tradition came back to him. As he applied the awful paste, his dead grandfather’s face floated above him.
The fourth day he’d sat at his school desk and had seen that his rash had gone. And so had the older boy. “Moved to Bonifacio,” his teacher said. Slingshot and all.
He never knew if the vile paste or his exhortations or both had worked.
But he had no mazzera to lift this curse now. He scattered a handful of bread crumbs for the blackbirds perched on a leafless sycamore branch and made his way down the steps.
Late Wednesday Evening
“BONSOIR,” AIMÉE SAID. “Lucien Sarti, s’il vous plaît.”
“Who’s calling?” a woman asked.
“Aimée Leduc.”
“He’s gone. Left a few days ago.”
What could she say now? Think fast.
“Doesn’t he work at a club? I’m Félix Conari’s associate. There is a big snag with his music contract,” she said. “I must contact him.”
Pause. A sizzling sound came over the phone. Was the woman cooking?
“Give me your number. If he calls . . .”
“06 57 89 42. Please, as soon as possible.”
She clicked off. A hungry musician should bite at that. She hoped so.
A moment later her phone vibrated in her pocket. Hungry all right.
“Allô?”
“Sorry to call you so late. Yann Marant here,” a voice said, loud conversation buzzing in the background. “I just finished work, but I found something, although maybe it’s nothing, to do with your investigation.”
A break, finally?
“Can we meet? My phone’s acting up,” she said.
“Café Noctambule,” he said. “It’s noisy but I’m unfamiliar with the area.”
No problem.” “
YANN S TOOD in the Café Noctambule, a dive with seventies-era smoky mirrors on the walls. On the small stage, a bouffant-haired man crooned chansons. The place was packed and couples revolved to the accordion and the beat of the snare drum.
Yann waved. “Over here.”
Next to him, two women argued, snarling at each other like cats in an alley. A smallish mild-mannered-looking man grinned at their show.
Yann covered his ears. “I’m sorry, no place to talk here. Hungry?”
Aimée nodded. She couldn’t remember when she’d last eaten.
A few doors away, they found a cigarette-box-sized bistro, five tables crowded into a dark room with a coal-burning stove. Warm as toast, but full. Reluctant to leave, Aimée suggested that they stand at the zinc counter and order a jambon-beurre.
“I appreciate your calling, Yann. Anything might help.”
“Now I feel silly. I read too many suspense thrillers,” he said, twisting his hands. “It’s probably nothing, but you said . . .”
“Go ahead.” She hoped she hadn’t made the trip for nothing. Patience, she had to have more patience.
Despite Yann’s wrinkled black pants and loosened ponytail, he exuded more appeal than most computer geeks she knew. And was better looking. Had he really recalled some vital detail or was he using this as an excuse to meet? But the warm bistro held more allure than her cold, empty apartment.
“Tonight, after I left Félix’s, I threw a water bottle into the construction’s Dumpster, the one parked in front of the building being renovated,” Yann said. “Everything fell out, a mess. I know it’s forbidden but, well, I scooped it up, climbed up to throw . . .” He paused. “Sorry to bore you, you’ll think I dive Dumpsters at night but I don’t.”
“Bon appétit,” said the white-aproned bistro owner, setting a plate of ham and buttered baguette sandwiches in front of them.
“Please continue,” she said, taking a bite. As crumbs from the bread crust fell, she caught them in her palm.
“Trying to make space, that’s when I found these.” He reached into his pocket, set down several crumpled, blurred black-and-white photocopied papers smelling of plaster dust, and smoothed them out. They showed hand-drawn floor plans with thick arrows and Xs inked in. “I figured these came from the site, and I was about to throw them back when I noticed this.”
Curious, she leaned forward, following his finger. A diagram bore a notation: rue du Mont-Cenis and rue Ordener.
“So there is a building at the intersection of these streets,” she said. “But this isn’t a blueprint. What is it?”
“That’s what I wondered. With all these Separatist bombings . . . well, perhaps I’m reading too much into this.” He exhaled. “Sorry, at least I feel better. But stupid. Forgive me? Maybe it was kind of an excuse to meet you again.”
A small smile played at the edges of his mouth. “I don’t know many people here.”
She returned his smile but her mind focused on the diagram.
He folded the papers. “Now you’ll think I’m a nerd, joined at the hip to my computer. And you’re right.”
“Wait, Yann,” she said, pulling out her pocket map and thumbing it open to the Eighteenth Arrondissement.
“The Mairie is on that corner,” she said, her voice rising. The City Hall was the only building at that location. “May I see that diagram again?” Her heart beat faster.
Along the side, in smaller script, was written: (2) 18:00 change (1) 23:00 change. Arrows pointed to the symbols for entrances. She thought back to the newspaper, the article describing bomb threats to an unnamed government building.
She stared closer. “It could mean that two guards man the main entrance until the 18:00 shift change, then one guard takes over.”
Yann blinked several times. “Who would leave such incriminating papers in a Dumpster?”
“Exactement,” she said. “But they could be old plans, outdated, and their implication forgotten.”
She chewed on the baguette, thinking.
“I guess it doesn’t link to that flic’s murder,” Yann said, his face reddening. “Real life’s not like a thriller where it all connects.”
Was he right?
She studied the diagram more closely. Saw Atlas, the name of an alarm company, an X on what appeared to be a service entrance. More Xs on rue du Mont-Cenis. The placement of a car or truck bomb?
She should direct Yann to turn the diagrams over to the authorities. Stay out of it. Not dirty her hands with the Ministry’s military wing. They’d clamp down on this so fast. Just thinking of dealing with the security sector made her palms sweat. She should . . . but did she ever do what she should?
Turning over information wasn’t her style. Yet information given might earn a favor in return. That’s how they operated.
“If this diagram’s for real, it would be criminal not to report it,” she said, deciding to take a gamble. “Mind if I show this to a contact at DST?”
“The terrorist brigade? Of course not,” he said. “You don’t think—”