Murder on the Champ de Mars

by Cara Black

  NUMBER 39 BOULEVARD des Invalides, the address from Drina’s hospital record, stood three stories high opposite the nineteenth-century Saint-François-Xavier Church, amid the green stretches of Place du Président Mithouard. This was the stomping ground of France’s titled families, and it oozed privilege. Pas mal, she thought.

  Drina Constantin had given this as her address. A friend’s place, maybe? Where she received mail? Worth a try. And if she came up with zero, she’d figure the next thing out from there.

  One of the tall, dark-green double doors yielded to her touch. She found herself in a covered porte cochère with a directory listing the names of priests and one monsignor. No listing of Constantin.

  She strode over the moss-veined cobbled courtyard to look for the concierge. There was only an office of the nearby Lycée Victor Duruy Christian youth association with a FERMÉ sign in the window. Frustrated, she turned to leave. Just then, she heard a scraping noise from behind what she had assumed was a wall covered in thick wisteria. Looking more closely, she realized it was a fence, and from behind it was coming the scratching of dirt accompanied by a grunt.

  “Il y a quelqu’un?” She entered a gate and followed the gravel path into a garden the likes of which were not often seen in Paris. Stone walls splotched with white and yellow lichen enclosed a profusion of budding plants, red-button flowers, a weeping willow, trellised vines.

  “Dump that in the compost pile.” A man’s voice.

  A man with a white-collared black shirt that looked like a priest’s, tucked into Levi’s, poked his head up from a bed of large, yellow-petalled daisies. Perspiration beaded his flushed face.

  “Excusez-moi, Monsieur le curé, but a woman named Drina Constantin listed this as her address.”

  He shook his head. “Just us black frocks here at the rectory.”

  Rectory? Drina had given a false address. A dead end.

  An enticing minty floral scent filled her nose. She’d love to have a garden like this for Chloé to play in. Dream on. But there still might be a clue here, something to point her toward the next place. “Perhaps she worked for you. Does that name ring a bell?”

  “Constantin? No one here by that name.”

  No need to complicate the story she told to the priest. “It’s vital that I find someone who might know her—and she did give this address, after all. Can I talk to your concierge, the staff?”

  “Madame Olivera’s in Portugal. She does everything; we’re a bit lost without her.”

  Bees buzzed in the hedge; a butterfly alighted on a budding jasmine vine.

  She racked her brains for anything that could link Drina to a rectory. With so few leads, she couldn’t afford to miss a single thing. Then Nicu’s uncle’s words came to her: “ ‘Another one of your Christian do-gooders, eh Nicu?’ ”

  “Does Saint-François-Xavier do charity work?” she asked, clutching at a straw. “Sponsor programs for the needy? Maybe that’s the connection.”

  “Hmm, our Christian society volunteers with upkeep of the church,” he said. “They started this garden—quite something, all plants with the theme of our Lord.” He put down the hoe and pointed with pride. “Those silver seedpods under the flowering purple look like coins, which is why the plant is called ‘the pope’s money,’ monnaie du pape.” He grinned. “Those red cascade spindle trees over there we call bonnets de prêtre, ‘priest’s caps’—the branches provide charcoal for drawing. And of course there are the bonnet daisies, these pâquerettes, for our Easter altar.”

  Fascinating, but she didn’t have time for the religious meanings of flowers. This Père had tried to be helpful, but he hadn’t given her anything yet, and she could tell he wanted to get back to the garden.

  “How about any outreach to Gypsies, les manouches?”

  He picked up his hoe. “Mais oui, we work with the Christian Helping Hands program. Through them, we hire les manouches to re-cane our prie-Dieu prayer kneelers, repair the rattan chairs. We’ve got a church full of old things, you know. Even a mural of the Tintoretto school.”

  Finally. Her persistence had paid off.

  “How can I contact these manouches, Father?”

  He grinned, wiped his perspiring face. “I’m just the gardener today.” He lifted a pile of weeds into the wheelbarrow. “Madame Uzes runs that Christian Helping Hands program. She’ll know.” The priest fished a card from his wallet. “Here’s her number. She handles manouche programs. Talk to her.”

  Walking back toward her scooter, she dialed the number for Madame Uzes, only to hear it ring and ring. Didn’t the woman have voice mail? As she was about to hang up, a recording came on and she left a message.

  On top of everything else she found a traffic citation stuck to her speedometer dial. Merde! She hadn’t noticed the stenciled white letters CCDM, designating a ministry parking spot. Fuming, she stuck the ticket in the seat compartment with all the others.

  Two nuns crossed the street in front of her, their blue habits flying as they hunched against the wind. Aimée released her scooter brake and took off, veering right. The sun fought through the clouds, scattering patches of light over the gold dome of Napoléon’s tomb at les Invalides.

  Sun and clouds, bright and dark, like the feelings warring inside her. Every few minutes she checked her rearview mirror for a van, worried that it was following her now. That she’d been seen. Nothing. Think, she needed to think this through. Told herself anyone doing a hit on Nicu would be long gone.

  At the stoplight she reached for the Moleskine in her bag and came back with a tiny white onesie. She thought of Chloé’s mushroom nose, how it crinkled when she laughed. A twinge of guilt hit her, so sharp it twisted her stomach. She didn’t want the dark side of life anymore; she was done, really done, with criminal investigation. Yet her father’s promise bound her—and now, so did Nicu’s murder.

  One thing at a time. Prioritize.

  Her phone rang. Babette’s number. Panic flooded her—an accident in the high chair, or had Chloé’s sneeze turned into pneumonia because that window had been left open last night?

  Calm down. “Oui, Babette?”

  “Morning nap time, just turning off my phone and letting you know,” said Babette. “New mothers get anxious. If you can’t get through, it’s because the girls are napping, d’accord?”

  Aimée felt sheepish. “Thank you for calling, Babette.” Aimée could hear the tension in her own voice.

  “First-day-back jitters, eh?” said Babette.

  Little did Babette know.

  “WATCH OUT, AIMÉE,” called Maurice, the vendor at the kiosk on rue du Louvre. He pointed to the dog dump on the pavement.

  Missing it with a quick step, she grinned. “Merci.” Thought for a moment. “I need eyes on the street. Interested?”

  “As in … detective work?” Maurice’s eyes widened. An Algerian War vet, he’d lost an arm but still stacked his stock of newspapers and magazines faster than someone half his age.

  “If any blue van lingers or parks here,” she said, sticking a fifty-franc note in his pocket, “you let me know, d’accord?”

  Maurice raised his one arm, touched his brow and saluted. “At your service.”

  Inside the grilled door of the Leduc Detective building, she slipped on the wet tiled floor. Caught herself just in time. Madame Fortuna, the new Portuguese concierge, was kneeling, rag in hand, soaping the stairs.

  On the elevator ride to her office she thought of her next step, where to look for missing pieces of Drina’s puzzle. Her mind went to her father’s files in the cellar, causing her to turn straight back around.

  “Bonjour, Madame,” she said to the kneeling concierge. “I need the key to the cellar.”

  “ ’Scuse, non comprends.”

  A hard worker, this concierge, but her French left much to be desired. Aimée mimed turning a key in the lock and pointed to the cellar door.

  Two minutes later she was descending into the bowels of 18 rue du Louvre, glad for the c
oncierge’s spare set of keys. She hadn’t been down here in years and never remembered where René kept their copy.

  Years ago, when her grandfather had left the Sûreté, he’d formed Leduc Detective and made a name for himself as a private investigator. Later, Papa, forced out of the police, had joined him and never looked back. Their history, the legacy they had left her—a detective agency in its third generation—gave her an enormous sense of pride and a mostly empty bank account.

  In the cellar she hit the old porcelain light switch. A bare bulb shone on several taped-up cardboard boxes, an old army-green metal file cabinet of her grandfather’s and two orange Plexiglas chairs circa the seventies. Not much.

  She hoped to find anything at all on Drina Constantin—an informer dossier, maybe an old address. It would be a start.

  The smell of old paper and tobacco from her grandfather’s cherry pipe hit her when she opened the metal file. The folders here were dated from the late thirties to the late eighties. She’d personally dated and labeled all these boxes after transcribing their contents. But if there’d ever been a file on Drina Constantin, it was gone.

  Another dead end. Disappointed, she wanted to get out of the damp packed-earth cellar. She thumbed one last time through all the yellowed dossiers inked with her father’s spidery black handwriting. Wedged at the back of the drawer was a thick pile of newspapers. With one hand she pushed them to the side; with her other she felt around behind them. The brittle, yellowed newspapers, editions of Libération, crackled, the edges nibbled by silverfish. She glanced at the dates: 1978.

  Shivering in the cellar’s dampness, she put the newspapers in an empty cardboard box, lugged it up the stairs and locked the arched wooden door behind her.

  On the ground floor, the rez-de-chaussée, Madame Fortuna was still working away at the stairs, so Aimée took the wire-cage elevator. It was just big enough to accommodate herself and the box.

  Again the elevator wheezed up to the third floor. She hit the entry code at Leduc Detective’s frosted-glass door and entered. She hung up her bag and her coat, noticing the cloth diapers stacked on the layette. Had she ordered these?

  Maxence looked up from his desk, which adjoined René’s. He wore his usual attire: Beatle boots, black turtleneck and stovepipe denims. He took off his headphones and swiped his bangs from his eyes.

  “Welcome back. What are you doing here?”

  “This.” She plopped the box on her desk and wiped her brow; the office radiator had gone into overdrive, giving off a summery heat. It either worked overtime or not at all. The nineteenth-century woodwork on the high ceiling and the marble fireplace—the repository for their shredder—shimmered in the pale midday light.

  “Thought you were working from home until your lunch meeting with René,” Maxence said. “Two minutes ago I faxed you three contracts René needs you to look at right away.”

  Great.

  “He’s with a client, awaiting your response.” Maxence handed her the originals.

  Aimée scanned the contracts. “What’s with the diapers?” She pointed toward the corner with the crib, high chair and mobiles that now decorated René’s desk.

  “René thought better safe than sorry.”

  René thought of everything. Not for the first time, she wondered if his inner parent ruled their lives too much. A vase of fragrant white freesias and a welcome-back card sat on her desk.

  “Sweet, Maxence. Thank you,” she said.

  “René’s idea.” He winked. “I guess all your telecommuting and last night’s surveillance didn’t count.”

  She sat at her desk under the framed original of her grandfather’s detective license and a photo of her father. It felt good to be home.

  “How’s the vicomte’s tracker feed?”

  “Incriminating. I transcribed his itinerary and bolded the juicy locations.” Maxence smiled. “Invoice updated and on your desk.”

  Already? A whiz kid worth his weight in the dark chocolate he consumed—a provision of his paid internship.

  She flipped through his paperwork—at this rate they’d need at least two more evenings of surveillance. Another big, fat check awaited. It never ceased to amaze her how members of the same family nipped and bit each other’s heels.

  She read through the contracts as quickly and carefully as she could, signed two and circled a clause on the third. “Tell René this needs more clarification.”

  While Maxence turned back to his work, she spread a plastic bag on her desk and the newspapers on top of it, and got to work.

  The 1978 Libérations chronicled the news of the day: Jacques Brel’s death; the birth of the first test-tube baby; President Giscard d’Estaing’s “close” friendship with the President of the Central African Republic Jean-Bédel Bokassa, who’d proclaimed himself emperor; in Tehran, the shah of Iran fleeing the country after a year of protest; ex-légionnaire Bob Denard and his mercenaries staging a coup in the Comoros islands; some whiffs of scandal relating to an Assemblée Nationale député’s suicide.

  “Que c’est ancien,” said Maxence, looking admiringly at the culture section she had open. He wiggled his non-existent hips, shot one arm in the air. “Le Travolta.” Saturday Night Fever had been playing in the cinemas.

  The silverfish had damaged the edges, but tucked between the back pages was a plastic folder whose contents were pristine.

  Could she be imagining it, or did it smell like her father? His pine cologne? How she missed him.

  Her insides twisted. It all came back to her again—the reek of secrets surrounding his death in the bombing, the silence of those she’d thought of as his friends and colleagues. She had tried to put it behind her for so many years, but she had failed. Now she knew the only way to get over it was to find out.

  She thumbed through the contents of the plastic folder, the pages covered in his familiar scrawl.

  A 1978 procès-verbal, her father’s signature at the bottom. The police report consisted of a witness statement from a military cadet, from an equine detachment, detailing his discovery of a body, female, in the grassy moat surrounding les Invalides early on the morning of April 22, 1978. A homicide.

  Why hadn’t this file been with his others?

  Attached to it was a grainy photo of the crime scene, the body covered with plastic, only the victim’s black hair visible, twisted and matted in the grass. A diagram showed the position of the body, in the grassy walled ditch at the right corner below the small square Santiago-du-Chili. Above it was a row of cannons, and beyond, the familiar dome of les Invalides, Napoléon’s tomb. Good God, she’d passed by there today, gone past les Invalides hundreds of times; it was a busy thoroughfare. She shivered, imagining such a violent death at this iconic monument.

  The victim, listed as sans domicile fixe, had been identified two months later by dental records obtained from the Berry region. A Djanka Constantin. She grabbed the edge of her desk. Nicu’s birth mother had been murdered only a year after he was born.

  She had to concentrate, put these pieces together. In the course of the investigation into the homicide of Djanka Constantin, her father would have questioned Drina, a family member, most likely, maybe a sister or cousin.

  Further digging in the plastic file revealed a Leduc Detective in-house case memo from 1985, labeled NORLAND, GEORGES: a missing person’s investigation. Reading it, she discovered standard surveillance findings of an operation conducted over a week in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés quartier—seemingly unrelated, until she spotted a dated list of sightings of Georges Norland at the market. A note on the list read de la part de Drina de ma liste de tonton. The proof Drina worked for him. He’d put Drina on a tonton liste—an “uncle list,” a way the flics paid their informers and protected them, like “uncles,” from others on the force. But by 1985 he was long out of the force. It was significant that he’d kept Drina on a private payroll as his informer.

  Of course, her father had brought Christmas gifts, like a tonton, to show how mu
ch he valued her, to keep those ties strong. But informer perks went beyond money. Could informing have won Drina security—for herself or those close to her—maybe even for the mysterious child, Nicu?

  And what would Drina Constantin know about who was behind the explosion that killed Jean-Claude Leduc?

  Noon. Fifteen hours since Drina’s abduction.

  Cold prickles ran up Aimée’s spine.

  She turned back to the file and came up with an autopsy report. Djanka Constantin had been twenty-four years old; she had no known belongings. She had died by strangulation.

  Next was a photocopy of what looked like a torn drink receipt that had been recovered from the victim’s pocket. She peered at the letters and made out a name: LA BOUTEILLE AUX PUCES.

  “Maxence, see what you can find on La Bouteille aux Puces,” she said. “Whether it’s a bar, a resto or a shop.”

  Maxence leaned back. “But it’s famous, Aimée. It’s a club in Saint-Ouen. Le temple du jazz manouche. It’s totally iconic.”

  “Vraiment?” she said, puzzled. “Thought you liked the Beatles?”

  “Les Beatles, le jazz, I love it all. Why do you think I moved here? Quebec has no music scene.” Maxence ruffled his mop top with his fingers, excited. “Django Reinhardt played La Bouteille aux Puces all the time with the Quintette du Hot Club. It’s been around for, like, sixty years.”

  Aimée thought back to the area by the flea market. From her childhood she remembered the Gypsy encampments, bidonvilles—it had been a shantytown before the Stade de France was erected last year.

  “Can you do some digging? See if the club had any police troubles circa 1978?” she asked.

  “On it.”

  She could make it there and back before her late lunch meeting with René. Aimée pulled out her plan de Paris, found the Métro stop closest to the flea market at Porte de Clignancourt. “I need to get going,” she said.

  “Call and check that La Bouteille’s open first, Aimée.” He dropped his notes on her desk. “Couldn’t find much.”

  The voice recording at La Bouteille aux Puces gave their hours as 2 P.M. to 2 A.M.