AL05 - Murder in Clichy al-5

by Cara Black

  AL05 - Murder in Clichy

  ( Aimee Leduc - 5 )

  Cara Black

  Praise for the Aimée Leduc series:

  “The buzz . . . is partly about her heroine’s hip, next-generation, cutting-edge investigations and partly about Paris, a setting of unrivaled charm.”—Houston Chronicle

  “If the cobblestones could talk, they might tell a tale as haunting as the one Cara Black spins.” —The New York Times Book Review

  “Will have readers on pins and needles.”—San Francisco Chronicle

  “One of the best new writers in the field today.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Conveys vividly those layers of history that make the stones of Paris sing for so many of us.”—Chicago Tribune

  “With its sights, sounds, and colorful past, it’s a particularly eventful and involving Paris visit.”—Los Angeles Times

  Spirited Aimée Leduc, a private investigator based in Paris, has been introduced to the Cao Dai temple by her partner, René, who urges her to learn to meditate as a counterbalance to her frenetic lifestyle. A Vietnamese nun asks her for a favor—to hand over a check and bring a package back to the temple. But this act of kindness ends in a stranger’s death and leaves her with a bullet wound in the arm, a check for 50,000 francs and a trove of ancient jade artifacts whose provenance is a mystery.

  The French secret service, a group of veterans of the war in Indochina, some wealthy ex-colonials, and contending international oil companies all claim the jade. They will stop at nothing to gain possession of it. And the nun has disappeared.

  Aimée has promised to avoid danger, but it continues to seek her out.

  MURDER

  in CLICHY

  Cara Black

  ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

  Murder in the Marais

  Murder in Belleville

  Murder in the Sentier

  Murder in the Bastille

  Copyright © 2005 by Cara Black

  All rights reserved.

  Published by

  Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Dedicated to all the ghosts,

  past and present.

  My heartfelt thanks go to so many for their patience and knowledge to fan the spark into a fire!

  Deep appreciation goes to Li He, Chinese Department, Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; Musée Cernuschi, Paris; Dr. Terri Haddix, MD, Renee Slon, RN, Dr. Jan Gurley MD, and to Béatrice Trang, a huge debt; Carla Chemouni, who made it happen; Thiên Ly Buu Tòa and the Cao Dai Temple, the lady in Vientiane, Barbara Serenella, Marion, Warren, Bill, Don Cannon, on computer patrol, Erick Gilbert; Grace Loh, Jean Satzer, Dot Edwards, Barbara McHugh. In Paris, the generosity, wisdom and esprit de mes amies: Anne-Françoise Delbègue for her warmth, Sarah Tarille toujours, la Tunisienne; Gilles Fouquet his excitement, Jean-Damien his support, and Chris. For Jim Frey who spurs me forward, Linda Allen who holds my shakey hands and Laura Hruska who guides them with sure ones. My son Tate Shusei and always, Jun.

  “The true heroes stay anonymous . . .”

  —overheard in the Paris Métro

  “. . . there is always something absent that torments me.”

  —Camille Claudel, sculptress, in a letter to Rodin.

  NOTE:

  The Clichy quarter referred to in this work

  is the area surrounding Place de Clichy, not the suburb.

  PARIS NOVEMBER 1994

  Tuesday

  IN THE STOREFRONT CAO Dai temple under the red lanterns, her foot asleep, pins and needles up and down her legs, Aimée Leduc struggled to keep her spine straight, thumb and pinky together, in the half-lotus position. Her partner René, a dwarf, sat with a look of total concentration, in perfect Lotus posture, in the men’s section. But Aimée’s brain flashed with lines of computer code and throbbed with an ache for an espresso. No blank slate of tranquility for her with sirens hee-hawing on the quai and the Seine fog curling over the skylight. As the blue-robed priest struck the gong, the sigh of relief she exhaled mingled with the mindful breaths and musk of incense surrounding her.

  “Three weeks, René,” she muttered, “and I still can’t meditate!”

  She’d tried and failed breathing exercises, a new practice she’d begun with René Friant, her business partner, after her optic nerve had been damaged the previous month during an assault. It had seemed like a good time to begin to live healthily.

  The ten or eleven women in yoga pants, from the nearby Université de Paris, grabbed their books and headed for the door. Ripe fruit scents from the tiered altar offerings clung to the velvet curtains that kept out the cold. The swish of a broom wielded by Quoc, the temple custodian, an older Vietnamese man, filled the foyer.

  “Mindfulness,” René said, rolling up his meditation mat, “think of it like that. Try to concentrate. Don’t give up, Aimée.”

  René was right, of course. But the calmness and tranquility she sought remained as elusive as a wisp of smoke, even though her bouts of blurry vision had receded. She had her sight now, most of the time.

  From the rear came Linh, a slender Vietnamese nun, in a Mandarin collared white ao dai tunic with matching trousers, smiling, her palms together in greeting. Middle-aged, her black hair in a bun, crows feet lines fanned from her eyes as she smiled.

  “Forgive me, we’ve worked on this before,” Linh said, an undertone of sibilance just perceptible in her accented French. “Next time, Aimée, be open to the divining board; that’s a form of meditation.”

  Like a large wooden ouija board, the divining board stood near the all-seeing divine eye, the Cao Dai’s symbol, a huge globelike eyeball suspended over the altar. Mediums used it to communicate with the spirit world in séances and in prayers to a pantheon of divine beings, including the Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tzu, and Jesus Christ. Crystal candelabras, brass drum bowls, yin and yang symbols, and peacock feathers adorned side altars.

  “Merci, Linh,” she said, grateful for help from the nun she’d met only last week.

  Pictures of Victor Hugo and Sun Yat-sen lined the walls. They were venerated as saints in this esoteric sect, whose philosophy was a potpourri of Hinduism, Christianity, Taoism, Islam, and Buddhism. A sign reading VAN GIAO NHAT LY, meaning “All religions have the same reason,” faced her. Aimée inhaled the peacefulness of the small, makeshift temple, wishing that tranquility would stay with her.

  She paused with René at the table littered with leaflets describing meditation courses and a solicitation for signatures to a petition.

  “We’re hoping to build a real temple,” Linh said, watching Aimée. “Our lands were confiscated in Vietnam. Members of our sect were executed.”

  “We’d like to help, of course,” Aimée said, after signing. “I’ll pass around your petition.”

  “But there’s something more important,” Linh said. Her face crinkled in worry; there was a slight tremor in her eyelids. “Your application says you have a detective agency. Can you contact someone for us?”

  “On a good day we contact encryptions, viruses, and hackers invading computer systems,” René said, grinning.

  Linh pulled a creased paper from her sleeve. “What about this man?”

  Aimée saw the scribbled name Thadée Baret; no address, just the 17th arrondissement, and a phone number.

  “He’s sympathetic . . . he helps our cause. Can you give him something from me?”

  “As I said, we want to help,” Aimée said. “But Linh, you don’t need us to telephone him or to meet him . . .”

  “Politics,” Linh interrupted, shaking her head. “My father was a judge years ago in Saigon. The regime denounced him and blacklisted our family, which still r
emains under surveillance. My younger brother’s in prison for ‘political dissent.’ His children have been denied visits to him. Even here, in Paris, they watch me.”

  Watch her?

  “Please understand,” Aimée said, wariness intruding. “I want to help, but what our firm does is computer security.”

  “How much?”

  “Non, Linh, it’s not a question of money, it’s simply not my field,” Aimée said, feeling awkward. Linh had helped her, a novice, in her struggle with meditation, and now. . . .

  “But I read about you . . . how you found a killer in the Bastille while you were blind.”

  Embarrassed, Aimée wished the newspaper articles had never appeared.

  “It’s complicated . . .” Linh continued, eyelids once more fluttering nervously.

  “In what way?” Aimée said. The meditation room was becoming chilly.

  Linh pulled an envelope from her robe and said, “In my country we suffer anonymous denunciations by a network of informers, detentions without trial. Priests and nuns from our sect, or anyone with a political agenda that could threaten the government, live in fear. Please, just give him this from me.”

  Aimée tried to catch René’s eye, but he’d bent down to tie his shoes.

  “I’m new to Paris,” Linh continued, twisting the amber prayer beads on her wrist. “Mostly I fund-raise at Cao Dai meditation seminars. And I am petitioning the International Court of Justice and Amnesty International for my brother’s release.”

  “Doesn’t that conflict with your vocation?”

  “Not at all,” she said. “As the Dalai Lama says, ‘There are many paths all leading to the same place.’ My mission and our practice glide together.”

  Aimée heard sincerity in Linh’s voice. But corporate security was the bread and butter of Leduc Detective. After last month’s incident when she’d been assaulted, she’d vowed to steer clear of anything else.

  “Think of it as our donation, Linh,” René said. He gestured to the envelope. “May I take this? We will deliver it for you, gladly.”

  Surprised, Aimée shot René a look.

  “No problem,” René continued, “we’ll make the phone call . . .”

  “And you will arrange to give this envelope to him? He will have something for me.” Linh put her palms together again, a gesture of greeting and farewell.

  René returned her gesture. “We will try.”

  * * *

  “WHY GET us involved, René?” Aimée asked as soon as they were outside on the narrow street, lychee seeds crackling under their feet. She hitched her bag onto her leather-clad shoulder. “Trying to earn good karma?”

  René pulled on a Burberry raincoat, tailored to his height. In the weak afternoon light a flurry of windswept brown leaves and Chinese candy wrappers swirled from the gutter. “What’s a half-hour to meet this man, Baret, to give him this envelope? Et alors, you’re going to the seventeenth to check on the Olf project anyway. And a little good karma wouldn’t hurt, would it?”

  She nodded. Maybe he was right. All she ever did was over-tip taxi drivers, hoping to earn late rainy night taxi karma.

  Apart from the oasis of the nearby Buddhist temple, in the midst of a mind-numbing sea of concrete tower block buildings, in this polyglot quartier of Vietnamese, Chinese, Laotians, and Cambodians, the thirteenth arrondissement had little charm. It was impersonal, its gray uniformity punctuated only by bright red Vietnamese pho noodle restos, Asian video shops, and hairdressers’ salons.

  She paused at the bus stop by Armée du Salut, the ferroconcrete Salvation Army building, designed by Le Corbusier: a treasure trove of cheap, used armoires.

  “See you back at the office, René,” she said, and caught the bus.

  RAIN PATTERED on the windows as dusk descended over Avenue de Wagram. The chic quartier, off one of the streets radiating from the Arc de Triomphe, lay in the seventeenth arrondissement. Hopeful, Aimée wound the black wool scarf around her neck, signed in, and mounted the stairs spiraling up to Olf’s state-of-the-art corporate headquarters, located in a wood-paneled hôtel particulier. A mixture of steel and curved aqua glass-walled offices constituted the mansion’s top two floors.

  But the project management staff dealing with her proposal had left for a trade show outside Paris. A wasted trip! She wrote a note and left it in the chef des opérations box.

  Downstairs, the concierge’s post was vacant. Where was the security man she’d seen? Shadows from the pillars crisscrossed the black and white floor. As she wrote her initials by her name on the sign-out log, the timed lights shut off.

  In the darkness, she felt her way, her boot heels echoing on the tile, her shoulders tight with apprehension. She sniffed. Only the smell of cold stone and floor wax.

  Then a rustling and the click of a door closing.

  Is someone there?” she called. “

  Silence.

  She felt a frisson of fear. And for a moment it was as if she were blind again, groping in darkness, her only guide sounds, odors, and the currents in the air. Panicked, holding her breath, she kept going and felt the cold, smooth marble of a pillar. Seeing the dim glow of the streetlight, she let out a sigh of relief.

  With a quick step, she made her way through the door to the street. She looked back but saw no one following her. A few blocks away, she turned into rue de Lévis, glad of the bustling street market marking the tony quartier.

  In the chill dusk, horns beeped. “Crevettes, un kilo!” shouted a fishmonger standing by the tubs of bright pink shrimp, frost framing his words in the evening air. Lighted stalls with every kind of cheese and produce filled the narrow pedestrian rue, an old Roman road once used by Jeanne d’Arc and her army. Shoppers jostled Aimée on the rain-slicked pavement.

  She punched in Thadée Baret’s number on her cell phone which rang and rang. She was about to hang up when someone answered.

  “Allô? ”

  “Monsieur Thadée Baret?”

  “Un moment. ”

  She heard what sounded like the télé, the whoosh of an espresso machine in the background.

  “Oui?” A man asked, “Who’s this?”

  “Aimée Leduc here. I’m trying to reach Thadée Baret. The nun Linh gave me this number.

  “About time,” said the man, urgently. “I’m Thadée. You have something for me?” His suspicion had vanished.

  “An envelope, we should meet . . .”

  “How long will it take you to get here?” he interrupted.

  “Where’s here?”

  “Near Place de Clichy.” He spoke fast. His breath came over the phone in gasps.

  “Say ten minutes, by the Métro. But can’t we meet at my office?” Aimée asked.

  “No. Come here. Stand in front of the boulangerie,” he said. “Across from Sainte Marie des Batignolles church.”

  Odd. But she knew it was a crowded, busy place. It should be safe. Easy to melt away in the crowd if this man turned out to be even more strange than he sounded.

  “How will I know . . . ?” she began.

  “I’ll find you.”

  Why all the mystery? she wanted to ask. But he’d hung up.

  She knew Clichy, the less-chic part of the many-faced seventeenth, a district containing two worlds: Aristocrats with de la before their name, whose children attended the local école primaire and later ENA, school of the elite, before nabbing a government post. And immigrants with -ski, akela, or khabib at the end of their names, destined for the short BAC exam, a trade school, and a factory job. The seventeenth was an arrondisse- ment of elegant consulates and the best closet-size Turkish kebab shops this side of the Seine. Now, noticing the Mercedes parked between trucks on the street, Aimée became aware of a newer cross-section of moneyed bourgeoisie and hip médiathèques added to the traditional working-class population of Clichy.

  Clichy? Only a few called it Clichy these days: the flics, kids, and old gangsters who’d gone to the Gaumont cinema palace and thought it was classy
. It was the area Henry Miller had tramped through, fringing the Place de Clichy, with its Boulevard des Batignolles and its boules players and narrow streets. Nowadays, the kids who sold drugs called Clichy and its boulevard bleeding into Pigalle their place of business. From the chic Avenue de Wagram and Arc de Triomphe quartier to the double wide Boulevard Pereire, nicknamed the maréchaux, lined with foreign sex workers, the seventeenth now held something for everyone.

  Aimée ascended the Place de Clichy Métro steps, slipping on her leather gloves against the chill November wind. Late afternoon commuters surged around her. Darkness descended before six this time of year. The Café Wepler, a Wehrmacht soldiers’ canteen during the German Occupation—(earlier immortalized in Vuillard’s painting)—glowed in the dusk. Its awning sheltered a stall displaying Brittany oysters on ice to passersby.

  She rushed to a taxi stand, anxious to get her errand over with. But Place de Clichy traffic was at a standstill. Klaxons honked and the Number 95 bus shot diesel exhaust at the Maréchal Moncey monument, commemorating peasants who defended Paris at the end of a Napoleonic campaign. She gave up on a taxi, left the busy Place fronted by cinemas and brasseries, and hurried through the narrow Clichy streets.

  She passed la Fourche, the fork, that divided the quartier into the “good” seventeenth and the “bad.” More than in any other part of Paris, the architect Haussman had stamped his signature here in the last century. The image the world thought of as Paris: broad tree-lined boulevards riven by the classic gray stone five-storied buildings with metal filigreed balconies and chimney pots like organ pipes on the rooftiles.

  She reached Batignolles Park with its rolling lawns and black swans gliding across the small lake. The fretwork of plane trees, puddles, and clumps of wet leaves faced real estate offices and antique shops. A gunmetal sky threatened; she hoped Thadée Baret wouldn’t be late. Beyond lay the derelict train yards, part of the 19th century ceinture, the railway belt circling Paris. Their walls were bright with silver graffiti.