by Cara Black
The disco, a former theatre, hadn’t changed except for the DJ names on the posters. She’d never heard of any of them. A new generation and it made her feel old.
“He’s waiting for me in the office.”
“No one’s up there, Madame,” she said. “Only the cleaning crew comes in this early.”
“And you’re so efficient. He couldn’t run the place without you.” She tried to step around the woman towards the stairs.
“No one’s allowed upstairs.”
“Chut!” Aimée pressed her finger over her Chanel red lips. “Let’s keep this between us. Woman to woman.” Aimée pointed to her stomach. “His wife doesn’t know yet. But she’ll understand, I tell him. All the nights he spends away, here with me.”
The young cleaning woman blinked. “Raoul?” She pointed to the color photos of staff on the wall. “That Raoul?” A balding, fifty-something man in thick glasses squinted at the camera. He wore a floral shirt.
“L’amour.” Aimée sighed.
The woman shrugged. Aimée took the stairs two at a time and knocked on the office door. No answer. It was locked. “Bonjour, chéri, it’s me,” she said loudly, for the benefit of the cleaning woman.
With her lock-pick set, she inserted an upper and lower prong into the door lock and toggled. A moment later she turned the handle. A dark, empty office.
She hit the lights. Desk, posters of Johnny Hallyday and Depeche Mode, a brocade chaise in need of reupholstering.
No Zazie.
No closet, no back room. She wanted to kick the legs off the ugly chaise. Stupid to go along with Zacharié’s idea, to think that this Raoul would lock the girls up in an office, with the resto so close by. But he’d been so sure, so adamant that Raoul was key.
Key.
The desk’s third drawer yielded to her lock-pick. Paper clips, business cards, and three sets of color-coded and labeled key rings: yellow backstage door, red stage entrance, blue lighting loft.
She took all three. Picked up the yellow-handled flashlight from the desk and noticed a receipt under it. Bottled water, toilet paper, apples from the nearby Monoprix—the receipt was dated last night. She stuffed it in her pocket. Parched, she twisted the cap off the Evian bottle from her purse and drank in the hot, airless room.
She had to find something else, something more, and quick—before the cleaning woman got curious or Raoul showed up. She opened and went through every drawer again—there were only three—then lifted the faded Turkish throw rug, peeked behind the posters, emptied the metal-wire trash bin. Vacuuming sounds came from the stairway. As she was about to give up, her eye caught on something red tangled in the bottom of the overturned trash bin.
A red tassel. Like the one on Zazie’s backpack zipper. Like the one she’d already found in the de Mombert apartment.
Her pulse raced.
Outside in the hallway she studied the evacuation diagram required in every building for the fire brigade.
She hit Zacharié’s number. Let it ring once. Clicked off then rang again.
“Oui?”
“I’ve got Raoul’s keys. Meet me at the backstage entrance.”
“Where’s that?”
“Rue Pigalle.” She clicked off.
The closed resto dining room, converted from one half of the old theatre stage, sported retro decor with a splash of old polished silver and fifties turquoise glass. More branché, catering to the bourgeoises-bohèmes rather than the rockers downstairs.
The back stairs from the kitchen led down to a door. She tried six keys from the red key ring before she got the right one.
She stepped out onto a dim, sloping stage, passed the DJ apparatus—turntables, microphones. At the backstage door, she let Zacharié in.
“Find them?”
“Just this.” She showed him the red tassel. “It’s Zazie’s.”
“Marie-Jo has one, too.”
“How would you know?” she said. “You’ve been in prison.”
“Think we didn’t communicate? That I don’t know what’s going on with my daughter?” His gaze swept the seats, the balcony. “We wrote each other every week. She sent photos. She had a backpack with a tassel like that.”
“So they were here,” Aimée said. “We’ve got three options: backstage, stage entrance, lighting loft.”
“Lighting,” said Zacharié without skipping a beat.
“Why?”
“You said you’d trust me.”
She nodded.
“Raoul’s in charge of lighting.” He took the flashlight and headed toward the spiral staircase on the right. “Stay down here.”
She hiked up the waistband on her leather pants. She hated heights. “Like hell I will.”
THE HIGH CATWALK, rimmed with colored gel-filter spotlights, swayed like a tightrope, making her feel like she was on a high-wire act with no safety harness or net. Only a top rail, thin metal planks and a toeboard between her and the orchestra pit below—and the whole outfit in serious need of welding.
She snuck a glance down at the stage. Big mistake. Dizzy, she grabbed the narrow rail, made her feet move, shuffling one forward after the other. Every breath of the hot, dense air was a struggle.
Under the rafters nested a cockpit-like glassed-in booth. When she followed Zacharié inside, it turned out to be larger than it appeared. More hot, stale air, a flat console with toggle switches and buttons, an overflowing ashtray. An empty bottle of Ricard sat on the unswept wood floor.
Raoul’s lighting nest in the eaves stifled her. She gasped, finding it hard to breathe. Zacharié cursed and kicked the stool over. “I know Raoul’s got them. Give me the keys. I’ll search backstage, under the orchestra pit.”
She’d climbed up this high—she was going to spend longer than one minute examining it. And catch her breath before the long way down. “Impatient type, eh?” She took the flashlight from him. Shone it on wall shelving filled with plugs, odd bulbs and tools. “The color’s different here.”
“Et alors?” He’d turned and headed to the walkway. “There’s no time to waste. They’re in danger.”
Her frustration mounted. “Quit the runaround. What kind of danger?”
Zacharié’s lips pursed. She could see the conflict behind his eyes. “You don’t want to know. If not for yourself, think of that baby inside you.”
His words sent a shiver down her neck.
She played the flashlight over the shelves once more, more carefully. This time, the beam revealed a chalk mark, faint and smudged, but distinctive: an X.
Her throat caught. She’d seen that chalk X in the park. Zazie’s sign. “That’s from Zazie.”
“You’re sure?”
“Help me move these shelves aside.”
That done, they saw a light-colored plywood sheet, hung at the side with hinges, like a door. A door no bigger than a suitcase.
He pulled back the hinged door, then propped it back with a power strip. Going onto her knees, she studied the crawl space. The air was even denser than in the stifling lighting booth. But if Zazie was here …
She hunched down and crawled. Her hands pressed against swags of dank velvet, and cobwebs clung to her damp arms.
She emerged on her knees into a stale, musty room. Bright mid-morning sunlight seeped through the closed shutters and softened the dust-swaddled edges of a Second Empire-style salon.
“Zazie? Where are you?” Her voice echoed off the high boiserie-molded ceilings.
The place looked deserted. Had they walked into some kind of museum?
Disappointed, she strode past a stuffed ostrich, framed paintings and a writing desk piled with old letters bound with ribbon. She walked over to a mirrored dressing table covered in perfume bottles and ivory-backed hairbrushes and picked up a gold lipstick case. Ruby-colored lipstick inside with a cloying sweet scent.
How long ago had it been abandoned? Like something from a Proust novel, from another era. A past long gone, frozen in time.
She and Z
acharié searched every nook and cranny from the enamel, claw-footed bathtub to the large brick-and-iron coal furnace in the kitchen. She checked the walk-in pantry and found a yellow matchbox and a portrait of Maréchal Pétain.
Dust everywhere. Patches disturbed on the kitchen floor, the carpet in the salon. Random or a sign?
“No one has lived here for a while,” Zacharié said, wiping his finger over piles of yellowed newspapers dated 1940.
“We’ve missed something,” she said. She paced through the rooms. In the library she noticed more mashed footsteps in the dust on the faded carpet. Behind a gilded chair she discovered a six-pack of water bottles and some toilet roll—the only evidence of the modern day.
Frustrated, she leaned against the wall. “They’ve been here. Look.” She pulled out the Monoprix receipts. “Bought yesterday.”
Alarm filled his eyes. “Then we’re too late. He’s moved them.”
“Who’s he?”
“Better you don’t know.”
“Quit playing games. You’ve got what this man wants, right? Your daughter’s the pawn for it. And Zazie.” She leaned against the bookcase. “Why don’t you call the shots? Threaten to expose whatever he doesn’t want exposed?”
It seemed simple to her.
“I can’t.”
“Or won’t? Got a better idea?” She shook her head. The man had told her nothing, expected her to just go along with him. “I don’t care what the hell you’ve done. But quit keeping me in the dark. Tell me what else he’s holding over you.”
“That’s unimportant. Just say he knows too much.”
“I’m guessing you do, too,” she said, putting it together. “He, whoever he is, hired you.”
He blinked, clutched her arm. “Shut up.”
But she wouldn’t. She’d hit a nerve.
“He kidnapped your daughter to keep you on task. But Zazie got involved. So give me the information.”
Zacharié nodded. Hung his head. “He killed my partners. I was next. But I escaped.”
Shivers went up her arms. And that was the man who had Zazie?
“We can’t trust him. He’s desperate,” said Zacharié. His jaw quivered. “He’s killed already to keep people silent. The girls’ lives are at stake.”
Zazie held by a sadistic criminal—a man who kills to make sure no witnesses survive? Fear clamped her stomach. Breathe, she had to breathe in this hot, dense air and figure this out.
“What do you have that’s so important? State secrets, blackmail?”
“Something like that.” He jangled the key rings. “But he won’t get what he wants until I find Marie-Jo.”
“What does that mean?”
But he’d turned to go back through the crawl. “Coming?”
Instinct told her not to leave yet. Something spoke to her here, and she didn’t know what. Her father always said to listen to the crime scene. Let it speak to you. Didn’t old Second Empire buildings feature concealed alcoves, secret built-ins? Nooks to hide trysts from the inconvenient arrival of les domestiques or the spouse? She remembered that from some de Maupassant story.
The carpet’s dust was most displaced in front of a bookcase full of worn leather volumes. She ran her hands over the bookcase’s period molding and came back with sooty fingers. Nothing. Her fingers traced the ridges and burls in the bookcase’s wooden interior. She rose on her tiptoes to reach the high shelf, her bump pressing on the volumes below.
Something shifted. She felt a book give way against her stomach—the dark maroon leather Bible. The bookcase moved, sliding back to reveal a chamber. She gasped and took a step inside.
Perspiration-laced used air and darkness greeted her. “Hand me the flashlight!” she called.
No answer. No Zacharié. Impatient, he’d gone.
She pulled out her mini-flashlight from her bag. The beam wasn’t as strong as the other would have been, but it illuminated a round, vault-like room with peeling wallpaper. She saw pink toenails peeking out from behind a box—a bare foot with a chain around its ankle. She leaned down. A girl, her mouth duct-taped, squinted into the glare. Matted black hair plastered with sweat to her forehead. She wore a tank top and jeans.
“Marie-Jo?”
She nodded. Her chained feet thumped the floor.
Aimée took out her Swiss Army knife. “I’ll get you out of here. Where’s Zazie?”
Her feet thumped again. Moaning came from next to Marie-Jo. Aimée followed the sound with the beam, catching on curly red hair and Zazie’s flushed face.
“Zazie!” Her pulse raced. Good God, she was alive. “Hold on, this will sting.” She ripped the tape off Marie-Jo’s mouth, then Zazie’s. “Thank God … please tell me you’re okay,” she said, working to free their bound wrists from the duct tape.
Marie-Jo spit. “Thirsty.”
“I knew you’d … you’d find me.” Zazie’s lips quivered. She reached up and hugged Aimée tight the moment her wrists were free. Her shoulders shook.
“Good job on the chalk mark, Zazie,” she said. She pulled a bottle of water out of her bag for them to share. Her shirt, soaked in perspiration, clung to her back. “Now to get you two out.”
“That man checks us every three hours,” said Zazie. “We timed him. He drinks, but—”
“What’s with the bad hair, a wig?” Marie-Jo interrupted.
“Her disguise,” said Zazie, admiration in her puffy eyes. “She’s got tons of them. Nice pants. Your tummy’s bigger, Aimée.”
So much for designer maternity clothes. She felt like a whale, swimming in her own sweat.
“We have to hurry.” Aimée went to work with her lock-pick set on the padlock chaining them. Two minutes later they were free and struggling to stand. “Can you walk?”
“Of course we can,” Zazie said, but she hobbled and gripped the wall.
“Lean on me,” Aimée said.
She tried not to wince as Zazie grabbed her wounded shoulder. Dense, engulfing heat made her knees wobble. The damn wig was sticking to her scalp.
“What is this place, besides a time capsule?” Aimée said.
“Some old lady escaped to Nice during the war, that man said.” Zazie pointed to an oil portrait covered with dust. “This was her great-aunt’s place. She was some kind of lorette.”
Courtesans who lived around Notre-Dame de Lorette Church at the turn of the century—nicknamed lorettes—were often installed in flats by wealthy lovers.
“The old lady never came back, so no one knows this place, that man kept saying on his phone,” said Zazie. “They’d never find us. The front door’s bolted.”
Her stitches smarted. They had to get out. Quick.
“He’s due anytime,” said Zazie. Her voice quivered. “He comes in through that crawlspace. Drunk.”
Great. If he was armed she couldn’t risk a confrontation with the girls.
“Then we’ll find another way out.”
Places like this always had servants’ back stairs. “Let’s try the back.” With one of Aimée’s arms around each of the girls, they made halting progress to the kitchen. The back-stair door held a rusted padlock. Her lock picks worked no magic on rust.
“Where’s my papa?” Marie-Jo said suddenly.
“Explanations later.” Right now, she had to prioritize getting them to safety. In a kitchen drawer she found a cobwebbed meat mallet. “Here, take a swing and bust the lock.”
But Marie-Jo didn’t move. “My papa told you where we were. Where is he?”
Of all times. The girl was as stubborn and impatient as her father. “He wants you safe, Marie-Jo. We need to get out before …”
“What aren’t you telling me?” The hollow-cheeked girl was a bundle of nerves. “That man will hurt Papa when he finds us gone.”
“She’s right, Aimée,” said Zazie, but she took the mallet and swung.
If only the impatient salaud had waited instead of searching in the theatre. “He’s got a plan,” she said, improvising. “We meet h
im after I get you to safety.”
The bolt broke under Zazie’s repeated whacks. “Now shove it open,” Aimée said. “Go!”
But the door didn’t budge. It must be bolted or barred from the other side.
“We’re running out of time,” said Zazie. “He’s late already.”
Aimée pulled out her cell phone and hit Zacharié’s number. If only he were there to help them force the door. No answer.
Aimée thought quickly. “I’m going back through that secret passage to find your father,” she told the girls. “You need to push the kitchen table and those cupboards to block the door. Meanwhile keep shoving that back door. Let no one in, do you hear me?”
“Why can’t we go with you?”
“And risk you running into Raoul? And whoever else might come with him? Stay here.”
“But my papa—” said Marie-Jo.
“He’ll be all right if you do exactly what I say.”
“Like I believe you?” Tears ran down Marie-Jo’s face, and she tried to push past Aimée. “The man’s going to kill him.”
Aimée caught her arm and held her back. Damn teenager. She was right.
“But you believe me, right, Zazie?” Aimée said, her glare making it clear Zazie should back her up.
Wide-eyed, Zazie nodded.
Taking no chances, Aimée pulled the Beretta from her bag, loaded a cartridge. She tried René’s number. Busy. Next she tried Saj.
“About time, Aimée,” said Saj, his voice raised. “René’s been—”
“I’ve found Zazie,” she interrupted. “Right now we need to escape. I need backup. Jump in a taxi.”
Saj choked. “Location?”
She stared through the grime covering the kitchen window to try to see what was outside. A small concrete courtyard with trash bins five floors down. No balcony, not even a railing with flowerpot geraniums. No way out from here.
“Look for a courtyard exit, on the east side of rue Pigalle, maybe two doors down from the rue Pierre Fontaine corner,” she said. “This apartment wall’s flush with Le Bus Palladium’s lighting booth.”