by Cara Black
“An angel tell you from on high?”
“Smells like a ripe Roquefort,” she said, the flic phrase for corruption.
Jojo raised his arm and shrugged as if to say small-fry. He rocked on his heels. A nervous habit of his, she remembered. “You should know that we found a procès-verbal from 1978 signed by your father in this Nicu Constantin’s pocket. A document that should have stayed in-house—tu comprends? I was going to call you.” He glanced out the office window. “You don’t want that getting out, Aimée.”
Had Drina been keeping this procès-verbal in her notebook? Or had Nicu found this with his birth certificate?
“I don’t understand,” she said, but she had her suspicions, and wanted him to spell it out. “Why? Nineteen seventy-eight, that’s twenty-odd years ago. And it looks like a copy. Why would that procès-verbal matter now?”
“Back in 1978, a woman named Djanka Constantin, whom we have learned was this boy Nicu’s mother, was murdered. Your father furnished the homicide-investigation file to the victim’s family. That didn’t fly, then or now.” Jojo paused. “That’s why it matters.”
It sounded like Jojo was turning this back on her father. Again. But she had to keep pressing him.
“Alors, Jojo, what’s your investigation turned up apart from that?”
“What’s it to you, Aimée?”
“This all goes back to who killed Papa, Jojo,” she said. “And you know Nicu’s homicide wasn’t a hate crime.”
“I do?” Jojo’s phone console lit up. Jojo sighed, his shirt straining.
“His uncle, Roland Leseur, from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, got knifed the same way on the Champ de Mars last night.”
“That’s news to me,” he said, looking away.
“And that Thomas Dussollier’s investigating? That’s news to you, too?”
Jojo shook his head. “Non, we’re in contact,” he said, lowering his voice. “I’m working on it, compris?”
So Dussollier had acted on her request.
“It’s like walking on eggshells, Aimée. If I’m not careful, everything cracks.”
So not like walking on eggshells at all then, Aimée wanted to say, since they crack whether you’re careful or not.
Jojo shrugged. “Nicu had a juvenile record but he’d gone Evangelical, the Gypsy version.”
Accepted to pursue religious studies at the Sorbonne. Guilt welled up in her stomach. But she needed to hear Jojo’s version. “Evangelical, a Bible type?”
“If they haven’t found God, they’re robbing apartments while the owners visit their country châteaux,” said Jojo, “or winching out ATMs with their Mercedes SUVs—those are the ones I see in here. My ‘guests.’”
“No surprise your ‘guests’ like to float in the crème de la crème’s quartier, Jojo. Rich pickings. Yet as you said, none of that fits Nicu’s profile—not these days, anyway.”
Jojo rubbed his neck. “Zut, I’m just following the préfecture’s directives—trying to solve this thing. There’s intense media pressure—unheard-of demonstrations near l’Hôtel Matignon, Sciences Po students staging a sit-down at the mairie.” He rocked again on his feet. “A pain in the neck. And now protests at the Ministry of Health bringing traffic to a standstill.”
“Jojo, that’s classic—when isn’t there a protest bringing traffic to a standstill?”
Bravo, Martine—she must have managed to seed accusations against the Ministry of Health with the right contacts at Le Monde. And Rose was rallying the students with her petition. They had been marginalized during their lifetimes, but no one could ignore Drina or Nicu in death.
Small consolation, but something. And maybe a safety net for Aimée. Enough outcry might force a deeper investigation into Nicu’s murder.
The officer from reception knocked on the office window. Gestured for Jojo to pick up the phone.
“Alors, take that procès-verbal, Aimée. It’s got no bearing anyway, but la maison”—he meant the préfecture—“will play by the rules and order an investigation. You cleared your father’s name; why get muck on it?” He picked up the phone. “Leave the door open on your way out, s’il te plaît.” As he started to turn his back on her, he pointed to the yellowed envelope on his desk. “Don’t forget that.”
It was addressed to Madame Constantin, in what she recognized as her father’s faded handwriting. The sight of it seized her heart in a choke hold.
Inside was a copy of the same procès-verbal on Djanka’s homicide she’d found in her father’s files, minus the crime-scene photos.
BUT AS SOON as she came out of the commissariat, it came flooding back. The memory was ten years old, but she felt it as clearly as if she were reliving it—the twisted, burned metal of the fence around the column in Place Vendôme, her papa’s melted watch, the blackened van door gaping open on the cobbles.
Her ringing phone brought her back to the street she was standing on, to the pigeon pecking near her feet. Her father’s loss went back to being to a dull ache that never went away.
“Aimée, we’re at the park,” said Babette. “Chloé’s having a big day. Her first tooth’s almost here. She’ll sleep like a log this afternoon.”
Sounded like Babette had it all under control, thank God. The perfect nanny, ready to take her Wednesday afternoon off.
“Put Chloé on,” she said.
“Un moment, Aimée.”
Sounds of gurgling on the line.
“Ça va, ma puce? I hear that tooth’s about to peek out.”
More gurgling. Her breath caught at the image of the little rosebud mouth. Babette’s voice. “Wet diaper. Need to change it. We’re near the slide. See you at the park?”
“I’m on the way, Babette.”
Aimée hurried up the Métro stairs at Sully–Morland in the sunshine. Ahead on her right nestled a vestige of the Bastille prison in the wedge-shaped square Henri-Galli. Daffodils blossomed around the lichen-encrusted stone tower base. Spring was here.
Across the quai lay Île Saint-Louis. Children’s laughter drifted, the khaki-green Seine rippled. The fragrance of blossoming chestnut trees overlay the diesel fumes from the Number 67 bus. She headed into the square and the play structures inside.
She pictured Chloé and Gabrielle by the slide, Babette pulling out their snacks and juice from a baby bag on the stroller. Pictured taking Chloé home to play with Miles Davis, a long nap.
But neither Chloé nor Gabrielle were by the slide. She jumped at a sudden, loud buzz: a hard hat wearing earphones was using a chainsaw to cut branches off a fallen tree trunk behind a barricade. Sawdust flecks fluttered in the air.
Parents were packing up, enticing toddlers off swings. The irritating whine of the saw was prompting an exodus. At the far end of the park, Babette was reaching down to settle Gabrielle in her baby backpack. Aimée started to wave but realized Chloé’s stroller wasn’t there. Nor was Chloé in Babette’s other arm. Where was she? Alarmed, she looked around.
Melac and Donatine sat on a bench by the Ping-Pong table, Chloé beside them in her stroller. What was Babette thinking? Livid now, she stomped across the sandy gravel toward them. Babette had strict instructions … and that snake Melac had somehow talked her into handing Chloé over?
She’d give Melac and Donatine more than a piece of her mind. She got caught behind two women, who obstructed her view, then a boy riding his bike wove in between them, blocking her way.
Furious now, she contemplated getting that expensive lawyer, who’d done nothing for her so far, on the line to issue a restraining order against these two. Calm down, she needed to calm down before she made a scene at the park.
All of a sudden, she heard screeching brakes as the boy’s bike skidded. Gravel sprayed, hitting her calf, as the boy swerved to avoid a dog on the path. He veered, lost control and crashed into the flimsy barricade around the fallen tree.
Right where Chloé had been sitting in her stroller. Panic hit her. She broke into a run before she could think, be
fore she could scream a warning to Melac, who was headed toward the garbage can with a diaper. The barricade collapsed against the hard hat, knocking him forward with the chain saw. Mon Dieu, the saw, Chloé’s stroller! Screaming, she was screaming now. “Chloé! Watch out! Chloé, my baby!”
Donatine, who was sitting on the bench opening a juice carton, looked up when she heard Aimée’s screams. In a split second, registering the danger, she shoved Chloé’s stroller. But the brakes locked, frozen in place. Time slowed as Aimée saw the chain saw flying through the air toward Chloé’s yellow bunny cap. Nothing to stop it. Aimée’s heart pounded in her chest. “Non, non!” How could this happen?
Donatine bounded off the bench, batting her arms at the saw blade and knocking the stroller over.
A sickening whine. A scream. Chloé’s cries. Melac was running and shouting, “Oh, mon Dieu!” It all happened so fast: Melac grabbed and switched off the grinding saw, pulled Donatine off Chloé’s upset stroller. She heard Chloé’s cries and it tore her heart.
Blood dripped from Donatine’s sweater, the torn flesh of her arm. Melac whipped Chloé from the stroller.
“Is Chloé all right?” Donatine gasped.
In Melac’s arms, Chloé’s tear-stained face broke out into a smile.
LATER, AFTER DONATINE was loaded into the ambulance, Aimée persuaded the attendant to let her in for a moment. Bandaged and connected to an IV, a pale-faced Donatine sat propped on the stretcher. “Chloé’s safe, thank God. I’m so sorry. We pressured Babette … I crossed the line.”
Aimée nodded. “Still, if you hadn’t done what you did, Donatine—thrown yourself in the way …” said Aimée, taking her hand. Her throat caught.
“This was our fault. How terrible it would have been if …” Donatine erupted in tears. “We put Chloé in danger. I didn’t have the maternal instincts to protect her. Destroyed any trust we wanted to build, any hope for custody. Alors. Please forgive us. Me.”
“Mais non, what are you saying, Donatine?” Aimée shook her head. “All right, you made a mistake. But your quick reaction saved Chloé. Accidents happen. Freak ones.”
Melac, holding Chloé in his arms, joined them. Chloé drooled and fussed. “I think she needs her maman,” said a shaken Melac, a lost look on his face. Chloé mewled, gumming his finger. “Oww.” Melac winced and pulled out his finger.
That’s my girl.
Aimée managed a grin. “I think your daughter just bit you with her first tooth.”
Once Chloé was back in her arms, safe and warm, she nuzzled her ear. “I can see Chloé would be safe with you.”
Melac looked at Donatine and then back at Aimée. “I’ll go with whatever you want, Aimée. But please, it’s important I recognize her, put my name on her birth certificate. She’s my daughter. Legally it’ll give her protection, benefits if something happens to me. The rest, you decide.”
Aimée thought back to Nicu’s birth certificate, wondering whether having Pascal Leseur’s name on there would have changed Nicu’s life.
“Then let’s forget the lawyers, Melac,” she said. “Work things out ourselves.”
Aimée reached out for Donatine. She couldn’t quite hug her yet, but she squeezed her bruised hand.
IN HER APARTMENT, Aimée settled a freshly changed Chloé on the duvet and kicked off her heels, about to join her for a nap. Miles Davis’s ears perked up.
“What’s up, Miles Davis?”
He scampered off the bed and beelined it to her desk. Yelped. A low beeping came from her answering machine, which she’d turned down so as not to wake Chloé at night.
The red light blinked. A message. She hit PLAY.
“If you want to keep Chloé safe and unhurt,” said a robotic voice, “forget Gerard Delavigne. Burn everything. We’ll know.” Click. Left fifteen minutes ago, according to the time stamp.
Her heart hammered. She ran barefoot to the kitchen and parted the curtains. Below, a man leaned on the quai wall, smoking and watching her door. A blue van sat parked. The blue van she’d seen before Nicu was knifed at the Métro. It hadn’t been there half an hour ago, when they’d returned from the park. Or had it? Her hands shook.
Priorities. She had ignored the warnings, the risks, the bodies piling up. And now they were threatening Chloé. She had to think for this little person with the bunny-ear cap.
Something Morbier had told her long ago came back to her—that her mother hadn’t abandoned Aimée as a child; she had left to protect her. Maybe it was true. Could Aimée do the same? Was that a choice she had forced herself to make?
This threat galvanized her into action, her adrenaline coursing. She had to end this. Even if she burned the documents like they asked, even if she and Chloé were safe for today, there’d still be tomorrow or next week. Good God, they’d parked outside her door.
She knew what she had to do. Within five minutes, she’d made two calls and packed up her laptop and essentials for Chloé. Time to travel light.
“Let’s go, Miles Davis.”
He cocked his ears.
“Chloé and I are taking a vacation. You too, with your favorite concierge.” She donned her leather jacket and put a sleeping Chloé in the sling looped over her shoulder.
At Madame Cachou’s, she handed over Miles Davis’s leash. For once the busybody nodded, no questions asked. “Why, it’s just like this spy thriller I’m reading. Espionage, double agents—I’ll keep a look out.”
“You do that, Madame Cachou. But first go talk to that man smoking over there. Keep him occupied. And keep Miles Davis safe.”
Across the courtyard, at Gabrielle’s house, Benoît answered the door. He was wearing an apron over jeans and nothing else. Impressive abs.
Flustered, she looked away. Wonderful smells drifted from the kitchen—cilantro, mint, citrus, coconut. She wanted to lick the wooden spoon in his hand.
“More pot-au-feu? It was delicious, by the way.”
Lame. She sounded like a schoolgirl. But there was no time to worry about that now.
“Lemongrass soup,” he said. “I heard what happened at the park,” he said. “Babette’s so sorry over what happened. She’s gutted.”
“I know.” Aimée cut him off, cradling Chloé in the sling. “I need a favor. It’s vital, or I wouldn’t ask.”
He nodded, giving her his full attention.
“If anyone, I mean anyone, asks, you don’t know where we’ve gone. When we’re coming back. Can you do that?”
“So it’s true, what I’ve noticed.”
He probably figured her for a paranoid neurotic, based on each of their encounters. “Look, if you could—”
“Say that you’ve probably taken your baby out of the country, non?” He handed her a set of keys. His warm fingers rested on hers, then gripped them. The heat of his hand spread up her wrist like fire.
Down, girl.
“Use my sister’s back carriage door downstairs,” he said. “Leave them on the ledge.”
MICHOU, RENÉ’S TRANSVESTITE neighbor, opened the door and grinned, still in his show makeup. “You brought my sweet pea!” Michou waved them inside. “An emergency, you said, always an emergency with you, ma chérie. Zut, I came straight from rehearsal at the club.”
While Michou removed his makeup, Aimée put a yawning Chloé down for a nap. Later, over a cafetière full of coffee, Aimée explained in detail.
“Chloé won’t be out of my sight, Aimée.” Michou, a former merchant seaman, held his own and more in a fight. “Or Viard’s, when I have a show. He’s earned his black belt.” Michou gave a big smile. “I’m so proud.”
“You two still in the honeymoon stage?”
Michou’s lover, Viard, who directed a crime lab, had moved in after they’d been together for three years. Aimée had introduced them.
Michou rubbed the stubble on his cheek and sighed. “Now we’ve got a bébé to take care of. Wonderful.” He paused, arching a plucked eyebrow. “Does René know?”
She shook
her head. “Not yet.” She needed to keep him out of danger. “I owe you, Michou.” Aimée downed the last of her coffee. “Got to go.” She hoped Michou hadn’t noticed how much her hands were shaking.
“Be careful, ma chérie.” His big hands, with purple lacquered nails, closed around hers. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
Wednesday Evening
“REMINDS ME OF when we used to do our homework here after school, Aimée, remember?”
Martine made a face at Aimée over her aunt’s desk, which was tucked in a closet-sized office in back of the nineteenth-century linen shop on rue du Bac.
“Only we’ve got laptops instead of pencils, Martine,” she said. On her screen was a Leduc proposal she was preparing to return to Maxence. Open beside her was Gerard Delavigne’s blue folder, containing the list of names. She’d spent several hours researching them, hoping to trace all the names on the list. But so far her digital search of an outdated police database had only revealed that several on the list were deceased, several others in the police nursing home outside of Paris—in gagaland.
Martine’s Le Monde contact’s archives had turned up Blauet, the former police commissaire, who’d retired to Martinique in 1985 and ran a fishing-boat business. Her phone call reached the canned, impersonal recording on Blauet’s answering machine. She’d come up with what she hoped was a plausible story for a police reunion and left him a message with her inquiry. It was a risk, but she decided to leave him the fax number for Martine’s aunt’s shop. All she could do was keep trying.
The bell on the shop door rang as it opened.
Martine’s aunt, all in black YSL and as chic as ever, poked her head into the office. “Mes filles, watch the shop for me like good girls, yes?”
“Oui, Tante Cybile.” Martine stood and kissed her aunt’s cheeks. After she left, Martine burst into laughter. “Her cinq-à-sept amant; they get younger and younger.”
Aimée wished she had Cybile’s luck. A vision of Benoît’s abs floated in front of her eyes, the warm touch of his hand. She shoved it aside.