by Cara Black
“Over there. She’s up in the tree.”
Chloé’s face flashed in front of her eyes. Those trusting grey-blue eyes. She needed a mother, and not one in prison—which is where Aimée would be if this homme from the ministry caught up with her. If she was lucky. Summoning every bit of her strength, Aimée grabbed the highest branch, hoisted her weight and swung her legs over to the wall ledge.
On the other side of the wall, a dark, quiet street. With no time to think or prepare for the impact, she jumped, aiming for the roof of a truck parked on the sidewalk, hoping she’d only end up with a few broken limbs.
She landed, her legs buckling and her body crunching the metal. She slid and slipped down the dust- and leaf-covered windshield. Her jacket caught on the wipers, and she felt her sleeve tear. Nothing hurt. Yet. Moments later, she climbed off the truck’s hood and ran.
At the end of the street, she saw the distinctive cat’s eye headlights of René’s Citroën DS. Any moment now, they’d catch sight of her, realize where she’d gone. She pumped her legs. Panted as her rib cramped. Taking a breath hurt. Go, she had to keep going.
The Citroën’s front passenger door swung open. She jumped in and René took off, gunning the engine, before she could shut the door.
“Did I see that right—you slid down the windshield of a bakery truck?” René took a sharp turn onto rue Vaneau. Braked and swerved, avoiding a truck.
“Well, I didn’t have the keys to get in, did I?” She panted, catching her breath. “Get the hell out of here, René.”
“Why did I ask?” René turned on the police scanner clipped under the dashboard.
Her rib throbbed. “Anyone behind us?”
René checked the rearview mirror. “Not yet.”
“There’s a cover-up, René. Drina told me.”
“And I had my palm read,” he said.
Monday, Midnight
TWO FIGURES HUDDLED in the shadows on a bench on the Champ de Mars, the Eiffel Tower glimmering yellow-orange through the trees behind them. Low-lying mist shrouded the deserted park’s gravel paths.
“There’s a little trouble.”
“More than a little trouble on both ends.” Tesla lowered his voice. “The big mouth’s going to print with his tell-all memoir.”
“That’s my problem, I’ve handled that. Everything’s under control.” The other man pulled his coat collar up against the chill. “You need to take care of your end.”
Tesla turned, his gaze sweeping the gravel path. “Don’t worry.”
“Do I need to remind you?”
Tesla shook his head.
“We’ve dealt with these things before, haven’t we? Or have you lost your touch?”
“That was years ago, I don’t do that now.”
“Then you’d prefer Larco and my people to handle it?”
“Shhh, no names.”
“He gets overexcited. You know what I mean, non?”
Tesla punched the bench.
“Is that a no or a yes?”
Tesla’s shoulders heaved. Why, why hadn’t he refused years ago? “Just kill me now.”
“So you want our friend to …?”
“Non, Fifi.” Tesla sighed. “Like always, you win.”
Monday, Midnight
AIMÉE WALKED INTO her salon, patting Chloé’s back after feeding her, a clean burp cloth over her shoulder. “Alerted the troops, René?”
“Media’s on board.” René sat on the recamier, his laptop beside him, his cell phone to his ear. Candles flickered on the sideboard.
Chloé burped loud and long. “Et voilà, ma puce. Back to sleep.”
René gave Chloé an approving goodnight kiss.
After tucking Chloé in with the hand-crocheted blanket, Dussolier’s gift, Aimée rejoined René, sitting cross-legged on the floor.
“I’ve informed Le Parisien and three other tabloids with twenty-four–seven on-call paparazzi.” He glanced at the time. “Any moment now the news hounds will arrive to catch Uncle Radu’s Gypsies wailing at the clinic, the final goodbye,” said René. “It’ll be a circus, all right.”
Aimée could just see it.
“Martine’s on board,” she said. “She’s pitching all her contacts. Her angle is going to be calling out the Ministry of Health, the medical issues, the implications with the hospital boards.” She leaned back and stretched. Bad idea. Her rib hurt and she climbed onto the couch. “She’s even going to tap her contact at Le Monde.”
They’d filled each other in while Aimée took notes in her Moleskine—René’s visit to La Bouteille, Radu’s reactions, the fortune-teller; Aimée’s hunt for Madame Uzes and trip to the clinique; Drina’s last words. They had hashed out the implications over green tea—someone very high-profile seemed ready to do anything to prevent a scandal. But what scandal?
René had come up with a strategy to bring Radu Constantin into the mix and alert the media, which could create a safety net of sorts around them. Everything was in place. But there were still so many things Aimée didn’t understand.
“One thing bothers me, René,” she said, pulling out Chloé’s teething biscuits from between the cushions she’d sat on. “Nicu was dead to the family. But I saw Radu and Nicu arguing at Hôpital Laennec. They didn’t look estranged.” She paused. “How did Radu react to the news Nicu had been murdered?”
“He was hurt, shocked. I saw it in his eyes,” said René. “Guilty, you’re thinking? The Constantin clan shunned Djanka for having a half-gadjo baby while her husband was in prison. Maybe after she died that shame was transferred to the child and the sister, who raised him?” René sipped his green tea. “Or maybe Radu only pretended. Maybe he sent them into hiding, fostered the idea of a feud, to protect them. Weren’t they afraid Djanka’s killer was still after them?”
“True,” she said, “and apparently he was. I wonder if there’s anything in this?”
She showed René the Romany words and phrases the nurse had written down in Drina’s last moments. It wasn’t much to go on.
“Even if it’s translated, Aimée, this won’t tell us the men’s identity,” said René. “Tesla, Fifi … Drina only used their code names.”
True again. She hated to admit it, but she had nothing.
She needed to read all her notes over again. Pore over each detail, check and recheck. See if there were any coincidences. The necessary tedious side of investigation.
But that thought shook something loose in her memory. “Wait a minute,” she said. She opened her laptop and pulled up one of the 1978 issues of Libération that she’d had Maxence scan from her father’s file. “Look, René.” She enlarged the article on the suicide of a député at Assemblée Nationale. “Notice the suicide’s name?”
“Pascal? That’s a leap.” René paused, shaking his head. “How many tens of thousands of men named Pascal were there in Paris in 1978?”
“But the fortune-teller told you Djanka’s lover’s death forced Drina and Nicu into hiding.”
“Et alors? How can you connect that to this député named Pascal? It’s not even a coincidence—you’re pulling names out of an old newspaper.”
She disagreed. Especially since the newspaper had come from her father’s file. “Let’s just check, non?”
“Going to communicate with ghosts now?”
“Grand-père kept every Paris Match for the last fifty years before he died,” she said. Scandals, love affairs, real news—it was all there in Paris Match. “It’s bound to be in here.”
“What’s bound to be in there?”
But she’d gone to the library, moved the wooden library ladder, climbed up to scan the dusty shelves. On the top shelf, she found four weekly issues from April 1978.
She dusted them off with her scarf, stepped down, and brought them back to René, plopping down on the recamier next to him to thumb through them.
She checked the index of an issue with a still-young Johnny Hallyday on the cover. Page 34.
“Where are t
hose photos, René?”
René rolled his neck. “Back in the envelope by your laptop.”
But she didn’t want to handle that envelope, couldn’t bear to touch it again. So much dried blood. Nicu’s blood.
“What’s the matter?” he said, noticing her look.
“It’s my fault, René. If I hadn’t …” She paused. “But I did. For what? In the end, Nicu died for nothing. I found Drina, but her message was too cryptic. It did nothing to help solve my father’s murder.”
Or to lessen this feeling that she’d jumped from hot coals into the flame.
Feeling hopeless, Aimée rubbed her aching shoulder. Chloé had gained weight.
René reached for the envelope. “You’re tired. Me too. We’ll go over this tomorrow,” René said, setting the photos on the table.
But if she didn’t check now, it would bother her all night. She turned to the article on Pascal Leseur, an up-and-coming député. Pascal’s funeral was splashed through Paris Match’s society section in agonizing photographic detail. Photos of his apartment, the grief-stricken family on the steps of Saint-Roch Church, the small cortege to the cemetery in the Berry, the family estate and cemetery. There was one photo of Pascal Leseur, taken when he was a baby. Bizarrely, there was not a single photo of him as an adult.
“It was a long shot, Aimée. You tried.”
So tired, she felt so tired. It had all suddenly hit her: Nicu, Drina. A great sadness filled her. She sank back against the sofa.
“But,” said René, his eyes on his laptop screen, “according to the ministry database, his brother Roland holds office in D’Orsay, the same one Pascal did before becoming the youngest député in the Assemblée Nationale.”
She was too tired to worry about it anymore tonight. The next moment, her eyes drooped closed.
René draped Chloé’s wool baby blanket over her shoulders. Kissed her forehead. But she was oblivious.
Tuesday Morning
SINCE THE DAY Françoise slammed the door on him twenty years ago, Roland Leseur had spoken to her only once: at the UNESCO reception celebrating one of her ambassador husband’s postings fifteen years ago. Yet he thought of her every day.
He’d kept up with her movements all this time: from embassy to embassy, the return from Venezuela, her husband’s funeral, the family townhouse on the Champ de Mars, her new grandchild, the fact that she shopped at the markets on rue Cler every Tuesday.
Today, like clockwork, she emerged from the family-owned fromagerie, La Fermette, with her straw basket. Her step was that of the young woman he remembered.
From the corner of rue Saint-Dominique he watched her exchange a bonjour with the fruit seller, then stop at the florist’s and emerge with a bouquet of violet-blue delphiniums. He remembered how the color matched her eyes.
How often had he stood in line outside that cheese shop? Debated, trembling, whether to approach her. To smell whether she still wore the same parfum, l’Heure Bleue by Guerlain.
All the women he’d tried to forget her with paled beside Françoise.
He’d heard nothing yet from his lawyer, who was examining the article for defamation and libel. It was only a matter of time, he knew, before the story came out. He’d do anything to keep it quiet, but how long could that last? Sooner or later, the past would resurface. Françoise needed to be warned. No declarations of love or attempts at happily ever after—he simply had to protect her.
As he watched, she turned back on rue Cler. Forgotten a purchase? But a moment later she turned right and was swallowed up by the throngs on rue de Grenelle. He hurried, cursing himself for not finding the courage to grab the opportunity. At broad, tree-lined Avenue Bosquet, where the Tour Eiffel’s iron latticework poked above the zinc-roofed buildings, he missed the traffic light and got caught behind a bus in the crosswalk. By the time it had passed, her khaki trench coat and trailing scarf had disappeared in the crowd.
Determined now, he ran through the bus’s diesel fumes, dodged taxis and made it to the other side with horns blaring around him. He knew where she was going—home—but she usually went down rue Saint-Dominique. He pumped his legs, but there was no sign of her on the pavement. Where could she have gone?
He poked his head into the café, the cobbler. Not a trace.
Passing narrow rue du Gros Caillou, a sleepy passage of low buildings that had once been workshops and housing for construction workers building the Tour Eiffel, Roland heard laughter.
“Merci, Madame,” said a smiling woman on the doorstep of a framing atelier. It was Françoise, holding a square wrapped in brown paper.
The next moment she’d taken off down the street.
Roland ran after her, and finally got the courage to call, “Françoise, Françoise!”
She turned at the crook of the street, where it bent left like an elbow. Her smile was edged with confusion. Her face was older—yes, his too. But apart from the few wrinkles and the fact that her thick hair that pulled back from her face was now a lustrous winter white, the twenty years didn’t show. Premature white hair aged most women, but on Françoise it highlighted her sculpted cheekbones and unlined face.
“Roland?” She dropped her basket, scattering cheese and delphiniums in the cobblestoned gutter. Her mouth quivered.
“Désolé, I didn’t mean to surprise you, but …” He tore his eyes away from her face. Picked up her things. Wiped them off on his trousers.
“Didn’t we agree never …?”
“You’re in danger, Françoise.”
She leaned down and their fingers brushed over a tomato. Hers were warm.
“Danger? Melodrama doesn’t become you, Roland. You know about Gerard’s death, I’m sure.”
A long, painful illness. She had nursed her husband herself, while still taking care of their daughter, who had been deaf since childhood.
“My life’s on an even course now,” Françoise said. “Not that you’ve asked. My daughter’s receiving treatment in London and now my oldest daughter’s child—”
“I want to protect you.” Roland took her hands. “And them.”
“Protect? From what?” Her shoulders stiffened. “What in God’s name, Roland, have you let out of the bag?”
More like tried to keep in the bag. “Pascal, us … I had to warn you.”
“This is all a ruse,” she said. “What you really want to know is whether Gerard knew of our affair. Whether your brother betrayed you to his best friend.”
He’d always wondered. “Alors, when you refused to see me, what else could I think, Françoise?”
“Naïve, you always were naïve, Roland.” She sighed. Pulled her hands from his and brushed back her hair. The sun slanted down on them, casting a shadow from a lantern like a black print on the limestone. The deserted street echoed with her ringing phone. She looked at the display. “I’m late. But yes, your saint of a brother told my husband about us. He couldn’t keep his mouth shut, especially when he’d been drinking.” She noticed the look on his face and sighed. “You still idolize Pascal after all these years, don’t you, Roland?”
“I still think of you every day after all these years,” he blurted out. “I loved you, still love you, Françoise.”
Françoise turned away. Shook her head as if to shake his words away, then combed her fingers through her hair. Like she always used to do after making love. He remembered the arch of her back, how velvet soft and warm her skin felt. The familiar gesture made him ache inside.
“For years I’ve kept my promise, never intruded into your life, only watched from afar.”
“So you had me under surveillance? What, waiting for your chance to swoop in?” The left side of her face was shadowed by the hanging ginkgo branch from a street-facing garden. “You’re a dreamer, Roland. Wake up. Whatever happened between us … that’s ancient history.”
Roland waved her words away. “Françoise, listen to me. I’m here because I need to warn you. What if Pascal didn’t commit suicide?”
�
��You’re implying someone murdered Pascal? But there was an autopsy, a cause of death. Autoerotic asphyxiation, wasn’t it? But the papers were paid to keep it quiet.”
How could she think that?
“After the cremation, the autopsy report disappeared. My father wouldn’t talk about it.”
“Murder? I don’t believe it.” Françoise shook her head. “For once open your eyes, Roland. Pascal couldn’t face the repercussions of what he had done, the blowback that was about to level his career, et …” Her voice tailed off. “Désolée.”
Roland’s hand shook. “Françoise, I did things, things I shouldn’t have.”
“No more than anyone else, I’m sure,” she said. “You’re still trying to protect Pascal, but he played politics, made enemies by the dozen. It caught up with him, and he took the easy way out. Why is this all coming up now? What’s changed at the ministry?”
This wasn’t going how he’d expected. Why wasn’t she taking it seriously? “You mean who cares now, Françoise?” His voice rose. Someone above slammed the shutters on their window. He took a breath. “Someone who stands to gain something. That’s who.” He showed her the Libération proof sheet.
“Always playing Pascal’s pawn,” she said, looking at the sheet. Her hand shook. “Your brother with a Gypsy lover, blackmailing the higher-ups, bribes disguised as delegation junkets? Amazing how Pascal can still stir up the merde even from beyond the grave.” She shifted the basket on her arm. “Don’t let them use you.”
“But Gerard’s mentioned here, too,” said Roland. “You need to know things will come out—things people will do anything to cover up.”
Françoise sighed. “It’ll be squashed before it can reach the press as usual. Stay out of it. Don’t bother on my account, Roland. What you call protection, I call guilt.”
Tuesday Morning
AIMÉE ROSE AT 6 A.M. with Chloé, and despite minor diaper leakage, by 8 A.M. they had walked Miles Davis and bought a copy of Le Parisien at the café tabac. And she’d drunk two double espressos. If only she could ingest sleep in demitasse-sized shots throughout the day, she might survive.