by Cara Black
“What do you want, Donatine?”
Besides my baby.
“Melac’s determined to reach a custody arrangement. Instead of tearing Chloé’s life apart, let’s discuss this together.”
Together? A stranger, a desperate woman unable to have a child and glomming onto Aimée’s? She’d neatly inserted herself into the equation again.
“Isn’t it up to Melac to try to make things right with me?”
Why are you here instead of him?
“This doesn’t have to go the legal route, Aimée. I tried to persuade him that you’d listen to reason, want the best for Chloé.”
Fear flared up her spine. This Donatine spelled more than trouble. Determined, intent, single-minded—Aimée could relate.
Be smart for once.
Think, think. In less than six months, the woman had met and married Melac, who had been on the rebound and gutted after his daughter’s death.
Yesterday, life had been good apart from puréed carrot spit-up on her shoulder; then Melac had barged in with a barren wife, claiming rights to Chloé. No leg to stand on, she’d thought, but now she wasn’t so sure. Then Nicu and her father’s murder resurfaced … all at once.
“Aimée? Aimée?”
She came back to her damp courtyard and this grasping woman as she felt a package shoved into her hand.
“I don’t want your gifts,” she said. “Or for you to contact me again, Donatine.”
“Then I’m sorry, Aimée. I wanted you to understand. I was hoping we could avoid the difficult route,” she said. As she left, she added, “It’s not my gift, but one from a Monsieur Dussolier. I found it under your mailbox.”
Monday, Late Afternoon
RENÉ LOCKED THE Citroën’s door and trudged up the cobbled passage, cursing the humidity under his breath. He winced at every step on the uneven, rain-slicked cobbles. Damn dysplasia flared up every wet spring. This season was the worst yet.
A baby’s cry pierced his thoughts. Chloé? Brought back to earth, he turned around and saw a man soothing a little bundle in a stroller, tucking in a blanket.
Little Chloé took his breath away. The first time she’d clutched his thumb with her tiny fist, she stole his heart. All he wanted to do was protect this tiny thing, hold her and hear her gurgles. When she spat up banana on his new suit, he’d worn it like a badge of fatherhood. At the dry cleaner’s, pride filled him when the owner smiled knowingly. “Ah, babysitting your goddaughter, Monsieur Friant? Nothing to fear—we’re used to this kind of thing. I’ll have your jacket looking like new tomorrow.”
So many recollections of his childhood had surfaced in his mind—normal, according to the American parenting book: your new baby brings up primordial instincts and memories that you relive to relate to your growing infant. He kept a baby book for Chloé, as the American book suggested—even gave one to Aimée for Chloé’s milestones: her first real smile that didn’t come from gas, when she took a bottle instead of the breast, her first solid food.
A car horn blared in his ear. He almost jumped out of his skin. Stupid, he’d been daydreaming in the middle of the street.
He should forget these feelings, move on with his own life instead of helping Aimée live hers. But much as he tried, he couldn’t get past them. Like his feelings for Aimée, which she’d never reciprocate. He was nothing but a best friend to her. And now the godfather of her child. Her child with damned Melac.
By the time he found Cirque Gitane in the large lot up the hill behind Place de Clichy, his hip was throbbing. The large blue circus tent took up more than half of the empty lot. Caravans were parked, surrounded by wall remnants from a Paris long past, lines of washing flapping between them in the breeze. The odor from a steaming pile of fresh horse manure made it feel, for a moment, like a countryside fair. The long, unsmiling look he got from a middle-aged manouche, who stood smoking and polishing the fender of a Mercedes, didn’t make him feel welcome.
Why had he agreed to Aimée’s plea to search out the Gypsies? But he knew why—between her guilt over Nicu’s murder and this loyalty to her father’s old promise, she’d risk getting herself into even more dangerous situations. Not if he could help it. And he relished the challenge of this Drina puzzle—if he could solve it, maybe Aimée would stop being so distracted and get back on track.
René made his way through the caravans. The smells of cheap oil and frying onions emanated from one of the small caravans gathered around the Cirque Gitane tent. Two young boys with curly black hair ran around yelling, playing tag. A young woman wearing a pink jogging suit and a red scarf barked something at them. The boys, ragged pant cuffs trailing on the wet dirt, laughed. She filled a pail with water from the outdoor water tap, a green metal robinet by a wall.
“Excusez-moi,” he said. “I’m looking for Radu Constantin.”
The two boys smiled at him and he was sure he saw them eyeing his cuff links. Little thieves. He pulled up his arms before they could get at them.
“Shouldn’t you be helping your mother?” he growled and shook them off.
The woman barked at them again. In a flash they ran away, laughing, and she disappeared inside the open flap of the circus tent with her heavy pail. René followed.
Sawdust, the wheeze from an accordion—he felt immediately sucked in by the intimate draw of the big top. He remembered Saturday afternoons from his childhood, the first time he’d ever seen a grown-up man like him. The man had had a red nose and frizzy yellow hair, and he kept tripping over his big shoes, to the audience’s delight. Terrified, René had hidden behind his mother. Would he end up a clown?
Now, he shivered in fascination. Colored lights masked the seediness, disguised the ratty curtains. He watched a rehearsal in full swing: candelabra-lit ringside violins and accordion players, trapeze artists, acrobats twisting like snakes, fire jugglers, tightrope walkers glistening with sweat, the clacking hooves of the dancing goat—it felt all so familiar, and it took him back to those small-tent Gypsy circuses in the countryside.
“You’re looking for me?” A man in his shirtsleeves, wearing a fedora, rings on every finger, took René’s arm and steered him outside onto the jagged cobbles.
“Radu Constantin?”
He nodded, his dark, unsmiling eyes taking the measure of René. “Auditions ended last week. Who told you to come here?”
Dwarves and circuses again. René’s anger mounted. What did Drina and the old murder of Djanka have to do with Aimée’s father’s death?—that was the real question. Spitting mad now, he’d had enough. He pulled out his Leduc Detective card.
“Let me get to the point, Monsieur Constantin,” he said. “How does your sister Djanka’s murder twenty years ago connect to Drina’s abduction?” He lifted the photo and shoved it in the man’s face. “Nicu dragged my partner, Aimée, into this. Now I want answers.”
Radu Constantin stepped back, startled. Gravel crunched under his feet. “That busybody he brought to the hospital—that gadji—I knew she’d cause trouble.”
Lines of washing whipped in the wind, an eerie echo traveling between the caravans. From inside the big top came the whine of violins. “We perform tonight. I’m busy.”
“Twenty years ago, Aimée’s father investigated Djanka’s murder.” René ad-libbed before Constantin could interrupt him. “After her sister’s death, Drina raised Nicu as her own. But in the hospital yesterday, on her deathbed, she told Nicu about his real mother. Showed him his birth certificate.” René hated lying, but this followed close to the truth. As much as he figured it would.
“How’s this your business? Anybody’s business but ours?” Radu Constantin shouted.
René knew he had to keep going. “Drina said she had a secret to tell Aimée about her father’s murder. Phutt, before she could—she’s abducted.”
“What craziness comes out of your mouth?” Radu’s dark eyes flashed. “My sister Drina is … how you say …” He searched for the word. “Like at the airport, in transit. Her soul
’s not at rest. Leave it alone. We take care of things our way.”
“But Drina’s missing, gone, non?” Exasperated, René wanted this man to see reason. “Now, with Nicu’s murder …”
Radu Constantin suddenly put his hands over his face. Rocked back and forth. Then he lifted his hands up to the sky, folded, as though in prayer.
René sighed. “I’m so sorry.”
Radu hadn’t known.
A few seconds later Radu seemed to come back down to earth and looked at René. “He’s not family,” he said dully.
René’s brain stalled. These disparate events Aimée seemed hell-bent on connecting jumped all over the place. Yet if he didn’t press and learn more while Radu Constantin stood towering over him in a black cloud of anger and despair, when would he? “You mean his real mother, Djanka, or Aurélie, wasn’t family? Was Nicu’s father a non-manouche? Pascal?”
“Leave us alone.” Radu Constantin motioned to the middle-aged man René had seen polishing his fender before. The man set his rag down in a pail, lit another cigarette as Radu disappeared back into the tent. Shrugged.
“You heard, let’s go.”
“Is he always like this?” René asked the man, whose cigarette was hanging out of the corner of his mouth.
“I just married into the family,” he said, the reek of alcohol coming from his pores. Glinting blond stubble on his chin and blond hair slicked back, he looked like the odd man out in this group. He stuck a pack of matches in his pocket and walked toward René and motioned him down the alley.
For one who hit the bottle so early in the day, his feet were steady on the cobbles. Still, that didn’t exactly make him a reliable source of information.
“I feel terrible about spilling what happened to Nicu,” said René. “But I don’t understand him. Or his reaction. We only want to help, can’t he see that?”
“Forget getting anything out of them, believe me.” The man was turning into a conversationalist.
“I’m an outsider, eh? They’re not going to talk to me, they’d rather let a poor woman die while they handle it on their own, c’est-ça?”
“Don’t try to figure them out. Not healthy.”
René bristled. “Doesn’t he care that his nephew was murdered this morning?” René knew Radu did care—he’d seen the emotion rocking him. But he wanted details.
The mec chucked his still-burning cigarette into the running gutter. René heard a thupt. “Feuds round here can go back generations.”
René stood at the corner, the sky oyster-grey beyond the mansard windows lining narrow Passage de Clichy. The mec ducked in a doorway to light another cigarette. His gaze darted down the passage. Satisfied no one was on the lookout, he leaned forward.
“Drina’s sister was shunned. Went by Aurélie and slept with a gadjo—a non-manouche.”
“This Pascal, Nicu’s father … Where is he?”
A quick shrug. “No idea. They threw her out.” Engulfed in the mec’s smoke and red-wine fumes, René wished for a big gust of wind. A tornado. “That’s what happened to the sister. Never mentioned. She’s dead to them. Her kid, too.”
Not according to what Aimée had seen. René tried to digest this.
And then, without warning, the mec strode away. René ran up the street as fast as his throbbing hip let him.
“Wait, Monsieur …?”
The mec kept going.
“Monsieur? Monsieur?”
Before he hit the corner of Passage de Clichy, the mec turned.
“They’re cursed.”
Monday, Early Evening
“WHERE ARE YOU, Aimée? I need to load the equipment,” Maxence said on the phone. “The reception starts in half an hour, it’s an early one tonight. I need more setup time for surveillance.”
Merde! She might have ruined the surveillance job because of her chat with goddamn Donatine. No time even to open Dussolier’s gift for Chloé.
“In a taxi, I’ve got my laptop now.” The rain had stopped, thank God. “My scooter’s parked by the office. Meet me downstairs at the curb.”
“Quoi?” he said. “Do you still have to change? It’s a diplomatic event this evening. Proper attire and all.”
“Bring me what’s hanging in front of the back office armoire,” she said. “Make sure it goes with the pearls in my desk drawer.”
Ten minutes later, down on rue du Louvre, Maxence stuffed his surveillance equipment in the Vespa’s rear storage unit. He unscrewed the baby seat, clipped and bungee-corded it to the back, climbed on and held the clothes hanger with one hand while Aimée roared off.
Aimée changed while Maxence set up. After an hour at the party, she and Maxence had what they needed: recordings of the comte’s sister-in-law’s conversations and photos of the guests she’d hobnobbed with—a Spanish attaché (her current lover) and the Belgian CEO of a rival to the comte’s family firm. Aimée could only speculate at this point on whether the comte’s sister-in-law or any other family members were passing on insider knowledge of his engineering firm. The comte feared plans for a hostile takeover of the family business. Their surveillance work entailed furnishing documentation to the comte and letting him decipher their evidence. Things were looking up—if “up” meant finding out your sister-in-law might be scheming against you.
The fading apricot twilight glowed over the Pont Neuf. Aimée could just make out a pale quarter moon, like a fingernail, half obscured by a nest of low clouds hanging above rue du Louvre’s jagged rooftops.
Maxence hefted his equipment from the scooter’s case onto the pavement.
“The sister-in-law looks good for the saboteur,” he said. “But I wouldn’t rule out the vicomte from yesterday afternoon. His nastiness quotient matches hers.”
She nodded, her mind elsewhere. Throughout the surveillance she’d struggled to focus on the job. Tried not to think about Nicu’s half-open eyes, his mumbled last words as the Métro rumbled overhead. Her hands covered in his blood.
“Tomorrow night we can look forward to the comte’s cousin, more seamy goings-on,” said Maxence.
She shouldered the rest of the equipment. “I’ll take this upstairs.” Time to check Leduc Detective’s virus scans. And to change her clothes.
Ten minutes later, after checking the virus scans and setting the system to run the next cycle, she changed out of her Chanel. Back into her black leather pants, high tops, and, from the armoire, a ribbed, metallic, Lurex Gaultier tee Shouldn’t René have checked in with a progress report on la Bouteille by now? She switched her phone back on and noticed the message from Madame Uzes. Hit callback. Busy. She tried René. Busy.
Didn’t either of them respect call-waiting?
Almost twenty-two hours since Drina’s abduction. Delirium would be developing.
Madame Uzes had left her address on the message. Should Aimée just hop on the scooter and talk to her in person? Checking, rechecking and following up—no matter how small the detail—was what investigating was all about, as her father had drilled into her. Les petites choses—the little things that added up. But she’d promised Morbier to stay out of it.
Morbier’s phone went to voice mail.
She couldn’t twiddle her thumbs waiting while the woman’s life ebbed away. She knew the odds were against her, but if any chance existed of saving this woman after she caused the death of her son—or nephew—and finding out who killed her father at the same time, she had to pursue it. There was more at stake than Aimée understood.
She grabbed her vintage beaded clutch—faster than reloading her big bag—keys and leather jacket before she changed her mind.
LEAFY BRANCHES HUNG below the lights on the boulevard, sending speckled shadows over the cobbles. Lush foliage smells filled the 7th, the greenest arrondissement in Paris with its squares, parks and gardens, public and private.
She parked her scooter at Madame Uzes’s address, a stone Haussmann building the color of butterscotch with several stories of identical wrought-iron balconies on
Avenue Constant Coquelin, a misnomer for the one-block dead-end street.
Aimée pressed the buzzer. No answer. She pressed it again.
“Oui?” A young girl’s voice.
“Madame Uzes, s’il te plaît,” she said.
“Who’s this?” the girl said.
Aimée leaned closer to the speaker and took out her Moleskine. “Aimée Leduc. She left me a message. The priest at Saint-François-Xavier referred me—”
The door buzzed open. “Fourth floor, left.”
Not needing the exercise for once—since she’d been nursing Chloé, her pants slid off her hips—Aimée took the shaking elevator up. She reapplied Chanel red to her lips, blotted them with a café napkin and dabbed the napkin to her cheeks for color.
On the landing outside the apartment door stood a group of older women in a flurry of cheek kissing. No mistaking the hovering scent of Joy by Patou, one of the most expensive perfumes in the world. Or the uniform whitish-blonde coifs these women wore, each of them sporting a discreet fleur-de-lis, with a ministerial emblem or two pinned on the lapels of their cashmere jackets. This was the domain of generals’ and ministers’ wives, a rare breed that existed only in the quartier surrounding the École Militaire and les Invalides. Très “ancien régime” types who exuded an understated elegance that money couldn’t buy.
Not her crowd. Now or ever. Yet these women—not one under sixty—freshly maquillées, coutured and coiffed, earned her grudging respect.
Every last one of them turned the full beam of their attention on her, the outsider in their midst, as she clutched her scooter helmet and vintage bag. She felt like a counterfeit in the land of Hermès.
“Pardonnez-moi, I’m looking for Madame Uzes,” she said. “Désolée …”
“The tradesmen’s entrance is round the back,” said a voice from the crowd.
Welcoming, too. The wrong day to leave the Birkin at home. Yet her success depended on playing to their noblesse-oblige instincts.
“Mademoiselle, you’re looking for Belle, my niece?” said a woman in the apartment doorway, her white-blonde hair pulled back in a chignon. Chic and soigné. “We’re all Uzes in the apartment—confusing, I know.”