by Cara Black
“So Drina disappeared between the time the doctor medicated her, an hour or so ago, and when we entered the ward.” She scanned the courtyard through the glass doors. “Would your uncle lie?”
“Him? He lies for a living,” said Nicu.
“I mean to you,” she said. “Could he have taken her and then pretended he’d just arrived? Would he throw a fit to deflect suspicion?”
“My uncle’s a lot of things, but he’s no body snatcher,” said Nicu. “Tradition insists if we can’t bring the dying one back home, we bring the family to the dying one. You heard him.” His worn sneaker tapped on the linoleum. “We observe rituals, seek forgiveness for any wrongs committed. That’s why my uncle came. Maybe he wanted to settle something before she passed to the next life.”
Sounded like woo-woo to her. But what question did Nicu think might have been on his uncle’s mind? “What do you mean?” she asked.
“My uncle and the rest of the family were estranged from my mother. Long story.”
Aimée let that go for now. “Can you remember the last thing she told you?”
His dark eyes fixed on hers. “Tonight she was passing in and out of consciousness. At lucid moments she kept saying the gadjo had found her, that he was back.”
“Gadjo?” The second time Aimée had heard that word.
“You. Outsiders.” He fingered his bag strap. “And she kept saying your name. She tossed and turned, begging me to find you so she could let go, let her spirit travel.”
Did the woman have a guilty conscience? Aimée believed what he was telling her. And that he knew more. “What else, Nicu?”
He hesitated. “It didn’t make sense.”
Aimée’s tongue caught in her throat. She forced her mouth to open, to form words. “What didn’t make sense? Did she tell you about my father’s killer?”
Nicu shook his head. “I didn’t understand.”
“Tell me exactly what she told you.”
“Her words came out garbled.” He looked out the window at the sky, the few stars poking out between puffs of cloud. She saw his face shutting down again, as she’d seen it do before. Direct questions had only gotten her so far. “Look,” he said finally, “she begged me to find you. That’s all I know.”
“To tell me who killed my father,” she said. “Right? To make it right after all these years?” When he didn’t respond, she asked, “Why now, after all this time?”
He chewed his lip. “I don’t know. Désolé.”
She was frustrated, but she sensed that if Nicu had more to say, he would tell her in due time. However, he might be unaware of how much he knew.
Her father always told her that informers required maintenance. They came at a cost—the cost of withholding incriminating evidence from your colleagues on the force, of looking the other way or providing favors to keep them delivering. Sometimes all three.
“I believe you,” she said, trying another tack. “I think she was one of my father’s informants.” She tried to keep the question out of her voice.
Nicu shrugged. He didn’t deny it.
“You would have noticed things, I imagine. Little things. Maybe her behavior was different after my father’s visits.” Nicu averted his gaze. “But he trusted her, Nicu. Offered our help. He knew she kept her promises. That’s what she’s trying to do now.”
Another shrug. Somehow she had to break through his anguish, the shock. She scanned the lobby—a few nurses, murmured conversations.
“The gadjo she talked about,” she said, probing. “Who could she have meant? Maybe you’d seen him before? Can you remember?”
Again no response.
“I want to find her before it’s too late,” she said. “But I need your help. Give me something to work with. Who knows she’s here, who did she last see, where does she live?”
She sensed a stillness in him. Thinking, or shutting down? She couldn’t tell.
“You came to my house, asked for my help. You insisted I come here,” she said. “Why don’t you trust me now?”
He looked up. “She kept saying the gadjo’s back, that he had found her,” said Nicu. “His murderer had found her. And in her next breath, your father’s name.”
Aimée shivered.
“Do you have any idea who she could have meant? Have you noticed any new people around, or why she’d be at risk?”
At first she thought he had shut down again, wasn’t going to answer, but then he suddenly said, “Recently … I’ve felt like we’ve been followed a few times.”
“Followed? By whom?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. I just … I could tell. Someone has been watching. A man.”
Two uniformed flics had arrived and were speaking to the security guard in the hospital lobby. The guard pointed to Nicu. All she knew was that she had to figure out what had happened—to Drina, and to her father. How, she didn’t know.
Aimée palmed her card into Nicu’s shaking hand. “We need to talk, but not now. Call me after you talk to the flics.” Nicu chewed his lip. “Can you do that?”
He nodded.
The two flics were working their way past orderlies toward Nicu.
Aimée kept her head down, got in step with a passing nurse and slipped out of the lobby and back down the corridor. Keeping to the wall, she reached Ward C.
The crumpled white sheets showed where a body had lain. Under the hospital bed, she noticed a blue ankle sock on the floor by the machines’ dangling tubes. No other sign of a struggle.
A ball of dread was forming in her stomach. She fought off that old flashback again—but once more her mind flooded with images of her father’s charred remains after the explosion on the blackened pavers of Place Vendôme. And now, just like then, she was arriving too late.
OUT IN THE corridor, she hurried away from the nurses’ station and to the emergency exit. She wrapped her scarf around her palm to avoid leaving fingerprints, and then covered her ear with her other hand and pushed the bar, waiting for the alarm’s shriek to blast.
Silence, except for the nighttime trilling of a starling outside in the shadow-blurred hedge. Looking up she saw snipped wire sticking out from behind the exit sign above the door. Fat lot of good the security did here.
Her shoulders tightened. The abductor had known exactly what he or she was doing. Aimée followed the dark alleyway between buildings until she found herself under a narrow canopy of trees that led to one of the ancient courtyards adjoining the hospital wings. The tall trees rustled in the rising wind. At the far end, the courtyard opened to a narrow paved lane. Aimée quickened her step as an ambulance drove by, bathing her in a flashing blue light. When she reached the lane, she saw that it led to the open gates of the emergency entrance beyond.
She could barely make it out in the dark, but because she was looking for it, she spotted an empty wheelchair shoved into the bushes at the end of the walkway. She felt around its smooth metal frame, its padded arm rests, under the cushion. Nothing. She leaned down into the bushes, running her hands over the rubber wheels and metal spokes, until her fingernail caught on a piece of cloth wedged between the wheel and its guard. Tugged until she heard a rip as it came free. Half of a blue ankle sock, a match for the one under Drina’s hospital bed.
Sunday, 10 P.M.
“FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, Mademoiselle Aimée?” said Martin, an old informer of her father’s, as he gazed at the photo Nicu had given her. Martin adjusted his large tortoiseshell glasses on his nose. Dyed charcoal hair, skin too taut and unwrinkled for his age. Martin, she suspected, had had some work done since they’d last met.
Calculating roughly based on what she was wearing in the picture, Aimée had narrowed down the year Nicu’s photo was taken to 1984. “Your father, bless his soul, had so much hair then. Bien sûr, I had more hair, too, Mademoiselle Aimée. We all did.”
Martin had never forgotten her father, who’d helped him get out of prison before he’d served his full sentence. Aimée never asked for details. Martin had a mas
s said in her father’s name and put flowers on his grave every year on November 1st, Toussaint, All Saints’ Day.
She tapped her freshly lacquered “terabyte taupe” nails on the wood tabletop. They sat in Martin’s “office,” the only place he took appointments: on the red leather banquette in the back room at Le Drugstore on the Champs-Élysées. He would dispense his knowledge in his own good time. And for a price.
“Merci, François,” said Martin to the waiter in a black vest and long white apron who served Aimée a steaming chocolat chaud, its deep mocha color pierced by a dollop of crème.
“Forgive me for missing Chloé’s christening,” Martin said. “But I’m getting over un rhume; wouldn’t want to spread germs to the little one.”
She slid her latest photo of Chloé over the table. “Six months old, mostly sleeping through the night. She has a fondness for puréed aubergine. Go figure.”
Martin blew a kiss at the photo. A wide grin broke his pock-cratered cheeks. “Qu’elle est belle!”
“The onesie you sent her is her favorite,” said Aimée.
His eyes softened behind the large lenses. “Your father’s looking down on her.”
If only, she thought. Maybe he was. How many times in the past few months had she imagined him, a proud grand-père, pushing the stroller beside her in the Jardin du Luxembourg? Or the two of them strolling arm in arm on the quai, Chloé on her hip?
Move on. She needed to move on. But Nicu had brought it all back, and she had a promise to keep.
Le Drugstore’s mirrors reflected a Manet-like scene of blurred streetlamps on the Champs-Élysées and tree branches bent in the wind. Aimée and Martin shared the back room with only one other couple. François hummed to himself, drying glasses at the counter. Cigarette smoke spiraled from Martin’s unfiltered Gauloise. Aimée tried to stifle her craving: she couldn’t risk a nicotine patch since she still nursed Chloé. Sixteen months and two days without a cigarette, and she still wanted to tear the Gauloise from his hand.
Martin had no cell phone; he arranged appointments from his “nerve center”—using the pay phone in the lounge downstairs by the WC. Four rings followed by two alerted the toilet attendant, la dame pipi, to an incoming request for Martin. He received his clients upstairs at his reserved table. His clientele ranged from ex-cons and gang leaders to prominent officials. A conduit for both sides, he bought, sold and bartered information. His expertise and contacts were too valuable for even the flics to compromise. Still, he’d told her once, he had the phone swept for bugs daily.
En route to Le Drugstore, she’d called Morbier for help, but her call had gone to voice mail. Elusive as always, screening his calls. No doubt out celebrating Chloé’s christening sans her in a restaurant and couldn’t hear the phone ringing. Or maybe he’d been angry with her for stopping on the curb with Nicu, delaying the party, or for making a scene with Melac, and planned on chewing her out later in private. Knowing Morbier, though, she figured on the latter.
Niceties over, Martin raised an eyebrow meaningfully at François, who nodded—they would not be disturbed. Martin leaned forward.
“You made an appointment, Mademoiselle Aimée?” Martin had given her fifteen minutes, his usual. And she couldn’t leave René babysitting all night.
She gathered her courage. Martin never liked speaking about her father’s death. “An informer of my father’s, Drina Constantin, a Gypsy with a small son, remember her?”
Martin’s eyes were hidden behind his thick lenses and the smoke from the Gauloise. “My memory’s not that good, Mademoiselle Aimée.”
“You’re too modest, Martin.” His knowledge of the underworld was encyclopedic. And if he didn’t know something, he knew someone who did. “Think back to 1984.”
“Let’s say I was otherwise occupied at that time.”
In prison.
“D’accord.” Aimée bit her lip. “I think Drina Constantin knows who killed Papa.”
She watched Martin. Looked for a movement, a flicker of his eyes behind those framed glasses. But his eyes were as still as the glass they looked through.
But then Martin heard bigger secrets than that every night.
“Et alors?” he said.
“An hour and a half ago, Drina Constantin disappeared from Hôpital Laennec. Poof, gone.” She told Martin the little she knew. “The woman can’t walk, she’s dying.”
“A Gypsy scam, Mademoiselle Aimée,” he said, relaxing against the back of the seat. Like tout le monde, Martin distrusted Gypsies. “These Romany scam artists have been flooding the country these last ten years. The Roma keep to themselves—they would never really bring an outsider into a family matter.”
That much she’d witnessed from Uncle Radu’s reaction. Martin had raised a sliver of doubt in her mind.
“You watch, someone is going to ask you for money—expensive medical treatments for your papa’s old informer.”
Her stomach twisted. Could Martin be right? Could that be why they’d brought her into this, exploited her vulnerability, her obsession with her father’s death? A classic scam. Could she have been so naïve? But no—she shook off the prejudice and doubt that came to her so easily. These were people, suffering people, not scammers. Her gut instinct told her to trust Nicu, that he didn’t lie about his mother’s message. She believed that the woman had been abducted by someone who wished to keep her silent. What if other lives were in danger?
“Distrust goes both ways; to them we’re the outsiders,” she said, putting down her cup. “I was skeptical at first, too. But the woman’s got terminal cancer, and someone pulled her off a hemodialysis machine. The doctor was alarmed; I heard more than concern in the staff’s voices. Whatever happened to her, it wasn’t Drina’s choice, and I need to help her.”
Martin tapped ash off his Gauloise, unimpressed. “So her son contacts you, out of the blue, after all these years, now that she’s dying?”
Aimée raised her hand to stop him. “Arrête, Martin. Her son’s terrified. I need to find her. Look at this picture again. Do you know anything about this woman?” She put Nicu’s photo down by the ashtray containing his smoldering cigarette. Took a sip of her chocolat chaud, giving him a long moment to think.
“Eh bien, I remember that coat your father’s wearing. Ça fait vraiment longtemps. Memories.”
Something had clicked, she could tell.
“Think, Martin,” she said. “Did Papa talk about a manouche, using her in an operation?”
A drag on his cigarette, a puff of exhaled smoke. “You’re sure this Drina informed for him?”
She couldn’t think of any other explanation, given her father’s open offer of help on the back of his business card. And that Nicu had known her address. And that it felt like something her papa would do.
Aimée nodded and set down her cup. She scooped the lace of foam off the rim. Licked her spoon.
“There are five or six manouche families all the rest are related to. Gens du voyage clans.” Martin stared at the photo. “Do you know if she belonged to the Marseille branch, or Avignon, or Berry or those in Essonne?”
She shrugged.
“That’s important—there might be territorial rivalries, an old feud,” said Martin. “She could come from Montreuil, in the suburbs, or from the few smattered in the nineteenth arrondissement, or maybe north of Porte de Saint-Ouen. Or have ties to the Evangelical Protestant Gypsies clustered in Essonne.”
Aimée remembered Essonne, thirty minutes on the train from Paris, with its patches of farmland, horses, a medieval church she’d visited on a school trip and enclaves of gens du voyage.
“Does she live in an encampment? Or travel, move around?”
“I don’t know.” She wanted to kick herself for not asking Nicu more—insisting he tell her where they lived, how they survived. Then she remembered Drina’s ID. “She worked in the markets. That’s all I know. Can you help me find her, Martin?” she said. “Where do I look next?”
His face was
still impassive, but she knew she had engaged him. “Who steals a dying Gypsy from a hospital other than her own clan?”
Under the table she pressed the envelope containing the francs she’d withdrawn from the ATM into his lap. “A gadjo who wants to keep a secret and cover up the past.”
SHE EXITED THE Métro at Pont Marie, her collar up against the wind blowing off the Seine, and crossed the bridge to Île Saint-Louis. Lights gleamed in her third-floor window on quai d’Anjou. Had Chloé woken up? Was she hungry?
By the time Aimée’d run up the worn marble stairs two at a time and unlocked the tall, carved door, all she could think about was that sneeze of Chloé’s this morning. A full-blown cold now? Or worse?
She tossed her jacket and bag on the hall escritoire. “Is Chloé all right, René?”
But instead of René, it was Morbier who stood at the kitchen stove by the boiling kettle. Steam fogged the window overlooking the quai.
“Shhh. She’s asleep.” He wiped his nose with a handkerchief. “René enjoyed a little too much champagne, so when I came back to see you, I sent him home in a taxi. Shame about the celebration.” Morbier pointed to a cup. “Join me for a tisane?”
Her jaw dropped. “Since when do you drink herbal tea?”
“Jeanne sticks the tea bags in my pocket,” he said, pulling one out. Miles Davis looked up hopefully from beside his water dish, wagging his tail.
Morbier had trimmed down, visited the barber, even wore matching socks these days. His new squeeze had accomplished miracles. He handed Aimée a cup.
“Your hands feel like ice, Morbier,” she said.
“Cold hands, warm heart,” he said, not missing a beat.
She was braced for an onslaught, but she felt too tired to deal with his disapproval after the church scene. It all streamed back: the shock of Melac’s arrival; the flicker of joy she’d felt turning into humiliation when she realized he’d brought his new woman; the creeping fear of watching that woman hold her daughter; Melac’s talk of custody and lawyers—it all swirled in her head. How dare he threaten her? Why couldn’t he … but she didn’t even know what she wanted from him anymore. Once she’d hoped he could be a father for the occasional weekend, but he’d disappeared from her life, and she’d shut the door on him. He hadn’t come knocking until now. Her outrage bubbled up again; she wanted to kick something.