Murder on the Ile Saint-Louis

by Cara Black

  René asked, “What’s the matter?”

  Her face paled. “Everything or nothing.” She took latex gloves from a drawer, slit the envelope, and shook it. A page torn from a magazine fell onto the table. It displayed a crossword puzzle filled in with smeared ink. The capital letters ran off the page.

  Aimée recognized it as the back page of Mots Croisés, the weekly crossword magazine sold at street kiosks. Underneath the puzzle were words printed in the same scrawling block letters: WAIT ONE MORE DAY. HER MOTHER BEGS YOU TO TELL NO ONE, OR THEY’LL KILL HER, ME, TOO. HER LIFE AND THE BABY’S ARE IN DANGER, DON’T CONTACT THE FLICS, OR TELL ANYONE.

  Aimée’s hands trembled.

  Kill her, me, too. The shaky letters recalled old penmanship books from the thirties. She wondered what she should do . . . could do.

  “You believe this?” René asked. But she saw fear in René’s eyes, too.

  “Do I have a choice?”

  Her buzzer sounded. Nelie? She ran to the open window to gaze below. Morbier, her godfather, who was a commissaire, stood on the cobblestones. Alone.

  “Leduc, thought I’d stop by for a cup of coffee,” he shouted up. A cloud passed over and briefly shadowed his corduroy jacket with its leather patches on the sleeves, his salt-and-pepper hair, his basset-hound drooping eyes.

  He hadn’t “stopped by” in five years.

  “What’s the occasion?”

  ”Invite me up. As I was in the quartier . . .”

  In the quartier . . . an interesting way to put it. No doubt he had been called in to investigate Orla’s death.

  The last thing she needed, Morbier up here with the baby. “Un moment, Morbier. There’s plaster and stucco all over. I’ll come down, we’ll go to lunch. My treat.”

  She ducked back inside. “Can you give Stella a bottle, René . . . please. Watch her for a little bit.”

  “Again?”

  “She’s so good. Never a peep from her.”

  And then Stella contradicted her by crying. Aimée picked her up, patted her back. The cries subsided.

  “She likes to be held, René, that’s all.”

  “But Regnault’s firewalls need more protection . . .” She heard the doubt in his voice.

  “Program the new safeguards while she drinks the bottle. When I get back I’ll handle the rest.” She had to get his mind off her predicament and on to work. “Vavin assured me he’d propose our new package to his boss. Count on his support.”

  René looked undecided.

  “You saw the note. Morbier’s fishing. But I have to find out what he knows. Please, René!”

  She thrust Stella into his hands.

  “Do I have a choice?” he asked.

  She grabbed her bag.

  AIMÉE WILLED HER shaking hands under the red-and-white-checked oilcloth to be still. She’d steered Morbier to the bistro around the corner. It had a dark seventeenth-century timbered ceiling and a stone fireplace big enough to walk into. Now the fireplace held a gas heater piled with menus.

  “Still remodeling your apartment, Leduc? Business must be good.”

  Morbier stored information, compartmentalized it in a way that put a database to shame. Old style and with the human touch, better than any profiler could do with a computer.

  “Good? The ancient gas lines in the ceiling are still live; that was our latest setback.” She had to divert him and get him off the track. Then maybe she could discover what he knew. “Every time they drill a hole I end up in the bank manager’s office. Asking for credit.”

  She reached for the bread basket at the same time he did. Their hands touched. Age spots she’d never noticed showed near his knuckles.

  And not for the first time she wished that their relationship had been different. Or that she could share things with him as she had with her father. But five years ago that had changed.

  “So, Morbier, you’re hobnobbing here with the nobility and just dropped in to visit me?”

  “That’s me all over.” Morbier grinned. A dyed-in-the wool Socialist, Morbier had lived until the year before in the working-class slice of Bastille he’d grown up in, in the same fourth-floor walk-up apartment over the old metal foundry he’d been born in.

  “The special looks good.” He gestured in the direction of the blackboard and raised two fingers at the man behind the counter.

  “Oui, Commissaire, two specials.”

  Morbier tucked the napkin into his collar. Sniffed and cocked his eyebrow. “New perfume?”

  Eau de baby, instead of her usual Chanel No. 5. “I’m trying new fragrances,” she said. She looked down, noticed a clump of clotted formula on her blouse, and flicked it off. “Last time you ‘stopped by’ was for Papa’s funeral.”

  The pitiful affair she’d organized with his colleagues and neighbors in attendance. Flics, the baker, the priest recounting Pernod-fueled stories until dawn smeared the sky. Reminiscences hadn’t brought him back. The wake remained hazy but the hangover had hardened her resolve. She’d quit criminal work.

  Morbier blinked, caught off guard. A rare occurrence.

  “That long?” Morbier said. “Well, Ile Saint-Louis is my turf, too, Leduc.” No need to remind her he was a commissaire in the fourth arrondissement who worked at the Préfecture one day a week, keeping the nature of his duties there close to his chest. “The Brigade Fluviale found a female student in the Seine by Pont de Sully early this morning.”

  “I’m sorry for her family,” she said. “A suicide?”

  “You’re local, Leduc. Trouble’s never far behind you. I wonder if you saw anything?”

  Now he was getting to the real reason he was here.

  “You’re asking me for help?”

  A good flic baited hooks, and sometimes got a bite. That’s how it worked. She’d have to give him something to find out what he knew. “A student?” She leaned back as if in thought. “Not many can afford to live here. Mais non, there’s a women’s hostel.”

  “We know about that.”

  They’d worked fast. Unusual. They had discovered Orla’s identity, but how had they traced Nelie to the hostel so quickly?

  “So she lived in the hostel . . . then you know more than I do.”

  “She—I don’t know where she lived.” He shrugged. “Her friend’s hostel laundry receipt was found in her pocket.”

  “Who is she?”

  “More important, what’s her angle? That’s where I hoped you’d help.”

  That didn’t make sense. Unless Morbier knew Aimée had already been at the hostel.

  “Me? Don’t you even know her name?”

  “Orla Thiers. It’s her friend at the hostel, Nelie Landrou, we’re interested in now. She was involved in a theft from a nuclear fuel processing site in La Hague.” He retucked his napkin into his collar. “She’s on the wanted list.”

  “What?”

  “That’s all I can say.”

  Wanted. No wonder she was hiding.

  Wanted like Aimée’s own mother, a seventies radical, who’d disappeared years before, gone into hiding, or on the lam. Only Aimée’s mother had been imprisoned, then deported, before she vanished. The only trace of her mother she had discovered years later was a letter in a faded envelope with a blurred U.S. postmark. Her hand clenched and unclenched.

  “Leduc? You with me?”

  She had to control her nerves.

  “Does that strike a chord? Hit close to home?”

  Cruel, he would hurt her deeply and then feign ignorance.

  “Students stealing nuclear secrets, Morbier? Unlikely.”

  “Did I say that, Leduc?”

  Or maybe he was casting a wide net, unsure. Fishing.

  “Wait a minute—was she one of those MondeFocus protesters at l’Institut du Monde Arabe? The article in Le Parisien stated the CRS beat up the demonstrators.”

  “Those reporters . . . climbing the wrong tree as usual, Leduc. No truth to that report.”

  If she believed that, she’d b
elieve the earth was flat.

  “Do you deny that students were beaten?” She tore the dark crust off the bread and chewed.

  Morbier shook his head. “Their permit was revoked, the CRS found weapons, warned the crowd twice, did their job. Only one was hospitalized. But they never approached the Seine.”

  “Only one? Guess that makes it OK.”

  “The brigadier’s been called on the carpet by the minister. He’s chewing nails, insisting the CRS was set up.” Morbier tore off a hunk of bread. “I think he’s right.”

  “How’s that, Morbier? Sounds to me like you’re toeing the party line.”

  A bowl of steaming mussels in garlic butter broth with a side order of crisp golden fried potatoes appeared.

  She wouldn’t let him wiggle off the hook. “The CRS squeals when its brutality’s exposed.”

  “Who said they’re ballerinas?” His thick eyebrows rose up his forehead. “The brigadier is Ciel’s kid, Viktor, the one who used to chew his lip so it bled. Remember?”

  She did. Remembered a fifteen-year-old Viktor’s short woolen pants and thin white legs as he delivered his father’s lunch to the Commissariat. He’d been teased mercilessly. An odd choice for the CRS, or was the agency getting in touch with its sensitive side?

  Morbier speared a mussel. “Because of Alstrom’s high profile, the CRS was careful to adhere to regulations. They did everything by the book. Last thing they’d do would be throw a body in the Seine.”

  “Face it, Morbier, they’d deny it anyway.”

  “You’re interested in ecology, global warming, and all that kind of thing?”

  Where did that come from?

  “I recycle,” she said, going along with him. “The haze of pollution clinging over La Défense bothers me as much as the next person. What’s the connection?”

  “There’s more to it, Leduc.”

  Her shoulders tensed. The baby? She tried for a casual tone. “Like what?”

  He set his fork and knife down on the tablecloth and pulled out a pack of unfiltered Gauloises. He lit one with a wooden match.

  “It’s about cooking a wolf, Leduc.” He blew smoke out the sides of his mouth.

  One week, three days, four hours, and thirteen minutes since she’d quit. Not counting, was she? She pulled a pack of stop-smoking patches from her bag, stuck one under her blouse.

  “A wolf?”

  He set his burning cigarette in the Ricard ashtray, deep in thought, his fingers on his lip, removing a flake of tobacco.

  She stared at Morbier over the steaming plate of mussels. He’d gone mystic . . . cryptic remarks, first about ecology, then wolves. “Getting philosophical in your advancing years, eh?”

  He cupped the cigarette, ignoring her comment. “Winter of 1943, the wolves in the countryside outside Paris descended on the Bois de Vincennes.”

  “Wolves in Paris? Not since the Romans. Tell me another one, Morbier.”

  “Aaah, but the wolves were starving, they smelled fresh meat. The zoo animals, the city’s pigeons and cats were, let’s say, depleted.”

  She’d heard those stories. Rationing during the Occupation had reduced Parisians to hunting what lived in the city.

  “We heard them howling at night and my father kept saying wolf tasted like venison. We hadn’t had meat on the table for a year. Hungry, we were hungry for that taste.”

  She waited, tapping her fork. Morbier never talked about his childhood or his life, for that matter. “There’s a point to this story, I gather.”

  “I figured you’d skin a wolf like a rabbit. Concocted plans with my schoolmates. But when I asked my father, ‘How do you cook a wolf?’ he paused and grinned. ‘First,’ he said, ‘you have to catch the wolf.’”

  “The moral escapes me, Morbier.” She forked a succulent parsley-laden mussel into her mouth.

  “Sounds like there’s a wolf out there.” He stubbed the cigarette out. “We heard it; now we’ve got to catch it.”

  “We?”

  “You said you’re into environmental issues, non?”

  Sharp as ever. All this time he’d been leading her where he wanted her to go and she’d thought he’d lost it.

  “Right now, Morbier, I’m into a boring and highly lucrative system administration contract with a network just aching for a rehaul.” And minding a baby who spit up, pooped, and cried at the most inopportune times. But she kept that to herself. “My contractor’s always sticking out his hand for money.”

  “How many tight spots have I pried you from, eh?”

  His influence, albeit exerted with reluctance, had helped her more than once. And his tone had changed. Deepened.

  “What are you saying Morbier?”

  Morbier leaned back, tenting his fingers. “Get involved with saving the ecology of the planet. Sniff around 38 Quai d’Orléans.”

  “But that’s . . .

  “Two blocks away, the MondeFocus office,” he interrupted. “In your backyard.”

  She had planned on questioning the organizers at MondeFocus. Yet if she gave in without a fight, Morbier would be suspicious.

  She wanted to trust him, to confide in him. But he withheld things from her, doling out information sparingly. And he had kept his distance since her father’s death.

  “Don’t you have undercover cops for that?”

  “Not like you.”

  “Meaning?”

  “You can worm your way in and find a connection we’d never think of. I’ve seen you do it before.”

  Was Morbier complimenting her?

  “Should I take that as a compliment?”

  “I’d consider it to be repayment for some favors, Leduc.”

  Her thoughts flashed to the man with the tire iron in the park close to Pont de Sully, the footsteps following her.

  A wolf. Maybe he was right.

  AIMÉE PAID FOR lunch, said good-bye to Morbier on the corner, and with misgivings walked through the pelting rain. The carved wooden door of Saint-Louis-en-l’Ile stood open, and she took shelter in the church.

  The dark vestibule was hung with heavy velvet curtains to keep out drafts. They opened to the rear nave and marble holy water font. Flickering shadows and an aroma of wax came from the votive candles. The ribbed struts of the vaulted ceiling had witnessed Jean Racine’s baptism and the time Henri Landru, the belle époque–era serial killer, had spent as a choirboy.

  She nodded to the restorer in overalls who was testing the organ pipes, hitting D notes that reverberated in the air, then faded away.

  She dipped her fingertips in the ice-cold water, crossed herself, and murmured a prayer for her mother, as she had ever since she was eight years old, when her grandfather brought her here every Sunday. But years of earnest Sunday devotions and her little confessions apologizing for whatever she’d done wrong hadn’t brought her mother back.

  Aimée had watched the Dassaults in the pew ahead of them—the father in his Sunday suit; Madame Dassault’s arms filled with an infant; Jeanette and Lise, her classmates, nudging each other and pretending to sing. After mass, Monsieur Dassault and her grandfather would stop at the pâtisserie for the tarte they’d carry home in a small white box tied with ribbon. Monsieur Dassault, Jeanette, and Lise would return to their waiting midday meal and Aimée and her grandfather to a long table with charcuterie tidbits or a cassoulet her father had prepared the night before, if he wasn’t on duty. Most Sundays, she remembered, he was. Afterward, the rest of Sunday was spent at a cinéma on one of the grand boulevards. A voyage to other worlds, lost in a celluloid fantasy. Her grandfather and father had done their best.

  Aimée would hear the Dassaults through an open window. Once Lise had knocked, inviting her and her grandfather for birthday cake. Entering their apartment had been like visiting another world. Beaming, Madame Dassault had hugged her infant and helped Lise fill a bag with party favors, and welcomed Aimée. Monsieur Dassault had set up the domino table, and for a time she had felt as if she were part of this family, a re
al family. Not an outsider.

  But afterward, from the open windows, she’d heard the harsh tone of Madame Dassault’s voice escalating to screams, then slaps and crying. At school the next day, Lise had bruises on her arms and swollen cheeks. She’d never been the same laughing tease.

  Even seemingly perfect families had secrets.

  A deep chord issued from the organ, startling her and bringing her back to the cold air, the stiffness in her knees, and the knowledge that she couldn’t take care of this baby.

  She had to reject her wish to become the mother she’d wanted to have. Life didn’t work like that.

  She stood, brushed off her knees, and wended her way past the pews toward the confessional, a dark, vaulted wooden closet reeking of holy water and damp. Inside, she pulled out her cell phone and punched in Serge’s number at the lab. He’d have the autopsy results by now.

  “Serge?”

  “Sorry, we’re backed up, Aimée.” She heard water running. “I’ve never figured out why warm weather brings out the psychos and suicides.”

  The whine of a saw erupted in the background. She cringed. A bone-cutting saw.

  “What did you discover about Orla Thiers?”

  “So you know her name,” he said. “The bruise joined a laceration behind her hairline.”

  “But you said the bruise could have come from hitting her head as she fell . . . wait a minute. You’re saying there was a blow to the head before submersion?”

  “A skull fracture as evidenced by the pooling of blood over her brain. That indicates a blow to the head prior to death.”

  A door shut. Footsteps echoed. There was a clinking sound, then a long pause.

  “This machine coffee tastes like river water,” Serge said, disgusted. “The canteen sandwich is a slab of dry Gruyère between pieces of stale baguette.”

  She figured Serge had changed the subject because someone had come in.

  “Who eats four star every day, Serge?” She heard him chewing. “Can’t you talk somewhere else?”

  Echoing footsteps. The sound of a door slamming shut.

  “It’s quieter here in the hallway,” he said. “Have to grab lunch while I can.”