Murder on the Ile Saint-Louis

by Cara Black

  “Let’s hope not. When my meeting’s over, I’ll call you. We should talk.”

  He hung up before she could remind him of the system-design overhaul René ached to do.

  “RENÉ?” AIMÉE SHOULDERED her cell phone, left arm holding Stella, her right hand clicking away on the keyboard.

  His voice mail answered.

  Great. Firewalls were his métier; this job really should be his. She saved her work on a backup disc and sent a copy of the completed program to Regnault, as usual. Her laptop clear, she checked the firewall herself. She had started going through each protection system when her cell phone rang.

  “René?”

  “What have you found out, Leduc?” Morbier asked.

  The last person she wanted to talk to. A click came over the line—someone was calling her . . . René? Vavin?

  “I’ve got another call, Morbier, and I’m swamped,” she said, irritated. “Real work.”

  “That can wait,” Morbier said. “I can’t. Have you run across Krzysztof Linski?”

  Her fingers tightened. Stella moved and Aimée propped the baby on her hip.

  “You there, Leduc?”

  “Why?”

  “He’s been taped on video carrying bottle bombs at the demonstration.”

  She hadn’t caught that on Claude’s tapes. But she’d been too busy in his arms on the leather sofa to watch the video again.

  “What’s that got to do with the student Orla Thiers?”

  But she now knew—Krzysztof, Orla, and Nelie were radicals.

  “He’s at it again. There’s another bomb scare at the l’Institut du Monde Arabe.”

  “How do you know it’s him?”

  “Nelie Landrou’s a suspect,” Morbier said, ignoring her question.“What aren’t you saying, Leduc? You owe me.”

  She stared down at Stella. Was her mother a bomber?

  “Too easy, Morbier. Simplistic. How can you fall for that?”

  “Eh?”

  “It’s a setup. Orla and Nelie were taking part in a roadblock of trucks at La Hague’s nuclear fuel processing site. . . . MondeFocus has disowned Krzysztof: they say he’s a loose cannon and a right-wing plant.”

  Stella opened her mouth, her pink gums glistening. The key to understanding what was going on was Stella. Aimée had to find Nelie . . . make a deal, get the lowdown on Krzysztof, before doing anything else. Then she’d decide what to tell Morbier.

  But to get Morbier off her back she’d have to tell him something more. “I checked Krzysztof’s room, a chambre de bonne. He’s gone, disappeared, sleeping bag and all.”

  “So?”

  “Think outside the box, Morbier. Orla’s murder could—”

  “I try. We get witness reports all the time.”

  “Meaning?” What wasn’t he telling her?

  “The good news: your local secondhand goods dealer claims a clochard, an old woman, saw her being killed. The bad news: we don’t know how reliable she is. She talks to an imaginary sister and thinks it’s 1942.”

  “The brocanteur on rue des Deux Ponts?”

  He grunted. She scribbled that on the back of a data report; she would check out this information later. Far-fetched . . . but who knew?

  “Back to the point. Why would he set off bombs at a peace march and let himself be videoed carrying them? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “I’ll make sure to ask him once he’s behind bars.”

  He hung up.

  She checked her voice mail and found a terse message from Vavin telling her to meet him at his office at once. She couldn’t bring the baby with her; she had to do something with Stella.

  AIMÉE HANDED THE taxi driver an extra twenty francs.“Mind waiting?”

  He grinned. “Take your time.”

  Her back ached as she climbed the red-carpeted stairs of the building, Stella in her arms, and baby bag dangling from her shoulders.

  “Quite the modern maman, Aimée,” Martine said, opening the door. “Juggling everything in designer wear.”

  She looked down at her agnès b. black dress, the closest thing at hand without spit-up, which she’d grabbed to wear to her meeting. “The babysitter’s here?”

  Martine nodded. “The location of tonight’s reception has been changed.”

  “Due to the bomb scare?”

  “Can’t have all those sheikhs and oil execs in danger, can they? I’ll call you later when I know it.” Martine showed her to a luxurious children’s bedroom decorated with Babar-theme murals, bunk beds against the walls, and Legos strewn on the floor. She introduced Aimée to Mathilde: tight jeans, big sweater, and gap-toothed smile.

  “What a beauty,” Mathilde said. “May I hold her?”

  Aimée removed her finger from the hot, wet little mouth and handed Stella to Mathilde. “I’m sure you’re experienced,” she said, half to reassure herself.

  Her last view was of the flopping pink bunny-eared cap. All the way down the stairs, she could still feel Stella’s warmth in her arms.

  “MONSIEUR VAVIN LEFT THIS FOR YOU,” said the smiling receptionist on the ground floor of the Regnault offices.

  “I don’t understand. Isn’t he here?” Aimée asked.

  The receptionist shrugged. “I’m sure whatever you need to know is all there. He’s been called to a meeting.”

  Called to some meeting and she’d gone through hoops rushing here!

  She walked to the tall glass window. She could see a few demonstrators standing outside with banners saying, STOP OIL POLLUTION . . . NO AGREEMENT!

  Inside the envelope was a piece of crisp white paper with 41 Quai d’Anjou written on it in Vavin’s script.

  Her hand trembled. The address was only a block and a half from her building. Why hadn’t he told her to meet him there?

  “Pardonnez-moi, when did Monsieur Vavin leave?”

  “I didn’t see him go out.”

  “Merci.”

  She walked past the bomb-removal squad truck parked on the pavement near l’Institut du Monde Arabe. Several Kevlar-suited men stood around, eyes narrowed at passersby.

  “False alarm, eh?” she asked one of the women filing back into the building.

  “Can’t be too careful,” the woman said.

  “True. What happened?”

  “A librarian found a backpack left in the library,” she said.

  The flics were jumpy. It made them trigger-happy and dangerous.

  FORTY-ONE QUAI D’ANJOU was the address of an upscale antique shop. A buzzer went off as she entered it. Her grandfather had haunted the Drouot auction galleries, scouring the sales for bargains. Her cluttered apartment was testimony to his hobby. She lived surrounded by antiques, his “finds.”

  She noticed a hefty price tag on a Sèvres porcelain figurine. Not her type of bargain at all. The shop contained château-sized armoires, stone statues, marble busts on faux fireplace mantels, and delicate Louis XIV desks. But it held no clients.

  “Bonjour,” said a middle-aged man with a receding hairline. A smell of espresso clung to him. His eyes flickered as he sized her up, estimating the cost of her dress. Not couture but a good label. No way he’d know it came from the rack at her favorite secondhand stall in the Porte de Vanves flea market.

  “Mademoiselle, how can I help you?” he asked with a smile.

  “I’m meeting Monsieur Vavin. Perhaps he’s here . . . in back?”

  “Non, Mademoiselle,” he said.

  “I’ll wait if you don’t mind.”

  But he has already left, Mademoiselle,” he told her. “

  She was going around in circles. She should have ignored Vavin’s message and kept working.

  “Did he leave any word for me?”

  “He left in a hurry, that’s all I know.”

  “Where did he go?”

  The man shrugged. “He’s a client but I don’t keep track of his movements.”

  “A client?”

  “Such good taste.” The man’s face brightened. He�
��d thought of another sales tactic. “Mademoiselle, are you interested in antique children’s toys, like Monsieur Vavin is? This is a delightful nineteenth-century rocking horse.” He gestured to a miniature horse with a horsehair mane and leather reins, its white paint peeling.

  “It’s just ornamental, isn’t it?” she asked. It was so small that she doubted a child could ride it.

  “Monsieur Vavin’s daughter rides one very like it, he tells me. It’s been repainted, of course. Monsieur Vavin’s very particular. He never buys plastic or mass-market toys for her. He wants her to appreciate craft and tradition.”

  She let him ramble on, her mind elsewhere. Vavin might have stepped out to buy cigarettes, talk on his cell phone, or for a myriad other reasons. She’d wait.

  “ . . . the MondeFocus petition . . . ,” the man was saying.

  Her ears perked up. “Pardon, Monsieur, what did you say?”

  “Not that I’m against the environment, you understand,” he said. “I signed her petition. Monsieur Vavin explained how important it is.”

  “Today?”

  He tapped his forehead. “A few weeks ago.”

  Her mind raced. “Monsieur Vavin came here together with a woman who had a MondeFocus petition?” She had an idea. “Was it about oil pollution?”

  “Saving the whales, I believe,” he said. “So important.”

  She pulled out the photo. “Do you recognize her in this group?”

  He peered closer. “So polite. Oui, that’s her.”

  Nelie Landrou.

  “When she visited the shop, was she pregnant?”

  He stuck his arms out and linked them in a big circle. “Like this.”

  The door opened to a rush of traffic noise from the quai. She looked up. Instead of Vavin, a couple had entered, triggering a buzzer.

  “Monsieur, which way did Monsieur Vavin go?” she asked.

  “If you’ll excuse me . . .”

  “Through your glass windows you can see the quai. Did he go left or right?”

  The man stuck his thumb to the right. “Aaah, Madame et Monsieur Renaud, so good to see you. That cloisonné vase has your name on it.” He’d already forgotten Aimée as he scurried toward the couple.

  Vavin, the Regnault publicity head, and a pregnant Nelie, a MondeFocus activist . . . together?

  She stood outside on the quai. The gunmetal gray sky threatened rain. She tried Vavin’s number. No answer or message. Then why had he summoned her here?

  A BATEAU-MOUCHE PASSED under the supports of Pont Marie more slowly than usual because of the rising level of the Seine. The slap of water against the stone mingled with the blaring horn of a taxi. Cars, unable to use the flooded road on other bank, crossed the bridge at a snail’s pace. Fliers advertising neighboring Théâtre de L’Ile Saint-Louis performances were caught up in the wind; they swirled around her ankles. She grabbed a handful, meaning to bring them back to the theatre. Inside the building, she set them down in a corner stacked with theatre notices and more fliers. She saw a pile of MondeFocus report pamphlets, identical to the one she’d found in Krzysztof’s room and noticed in Vavin’s office. She’d better check this out.

  Her footsteps echoed in the damp tunnel-like passage that led to a seventeenth-century courtyard like that of her own building. The theatre proper and rehearsal studios were upstairs. She climbed a switchback series of neo-Gothic wood-railed steps and heard a voice coming through a window that opened onto the courtyard. The words themselves were in old formal French.

  I find that everything goes wrong in our world; that nobody knows his duty, what he’s doing, or what he ought to be doing, and that outside of mealtimes . . . the rest of the day is spent in useless quarrels. . . . It’s one unending warfare.

  She recognized lines from Voltaire’s Candide. Valid then and today.

  Loath to interrupt the rehearsal, the first drops of rain pattering in the vacant courtyard, and with nowhere else to stand but the dank hallway, she entered the small theatre. Red crushed-velvet curtains were halfway drawn. The brightly lit stage was bare except for a throne-like wooden chair and a woman mopping the scuffed black-painted floor planks, humming, her bucket beside her.

  “Madame, are any of the crew about?”

  The woman looked up, squinting into the darkness beyond the stage lights. She pointed. “Rehearsal.”

  “Merci, I’ll wait.” Aimée pulled up a corner of the dust sheet that covered a seat, glad to take a rest, even in the cramped velvet chaise designed in the nineteenth century for a less statuesque person. She put her feet up, rubbed her calves. Checked her voice mail. No message from Vavin or René.

  The woman finished mopping and left. Aimée tried Vavin again. No answer. She let the cell phone ring.

  In the middle of a yawn, she heard a digitized ring-tone version of “Frère Jacques” from the stage. Then an ear-piercing scream made her sit up. It was followed by another, higher pitched.

  She ran down the aisle and up the side steps leading backstage. The white-faced cleaning woman leaned, heaving, against an electrician’s stage-light panel.

  “Are you hurt?”

  A salvo of Portuguese erupted from the woman’s mouth. She crossed herself. “Maria Madonna” was all Aimée could make out as the shaking woman pointed to the partly open door of a broom closet.

  A stout security guard arrived, red faced and panting. The ring tone was repeated. It was closer now.

  “Not another mouse! Xaviera, I told you last time, old buildings have them,” said the guard. Catching Aimée’s glance, he rolled his eyes. “Answer your phone, Xaviera!”

  The cleaning woman’s hands were trembling, her eyes wide with terror.

  “Non . . . telefono de mi . . . non ai . . . non telefon.”

  No phone, that much Aimée understood. She stepped over the fallen mop and opened the broom-closet door wider. The annoying ring tone was repeated.

  Vavin’s trouser-clad legs sprawled. His head was turned away and slumped onto his shoulder. The brooms and a tin pail were overturned next to him inside the closet.

  “Monsieur Vavin?” she said. She knelt and gripped his shoulders. “Can you hear me?”

  His body slid forward, limp. He was not conscious. She took his head in her hands, turned it to face her. His eyes stared up at her, lifeless. Then she saw the clotted blood on his temple and glimpsed the cell phone in his hand. No wonder he hadn’t answered it.

  “Nom de Dieu!” the guard gasped, knocking over a bucket and spilling ammoniated suds over the wooden floor.

  “Quick! Get help.” Aimée grabbed the guard’s arm and they laid Vavin flat on the suds-soaked planks.

  Xaviera backed away, crossing herself.

  Vavin’s phone tumbled to the floor. Aimée hit a button to stop the ringing and thrust the phone at Xaviera. ”Call 17 . . . call the ambulance!”

  Vavin’s eyes seemed to stare at her. Watching her, he was watching her. The guard cleared Vavin’s mouth of spittle, began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

  Aimée tried to steady herself. Her fingers on Vavin’s wrist confirmed that he was not even cold. His fists were clenched.

  “How long has he been here? Did you see him come in?”

  Xaviera shook her head. “I non . . . non see him.”

  No pulse. Lifeless.

  Aimée looked around the barren backstage; there was no place for the attacker to hide. She didn’t remember seeing anyone else in the theatre.

  The guard said, “He’s gone,” and reached for his walkie-talkie.

  She’d been too late. She wondered what he’d wanted to tell her. He’d left the message an hour and a half ago. Why had he asked her to meet him at the antique store?

  To see Nelie? But a few weeks had passed since Nelie had accompanied Vavin there.

  She heard the static of the guard’s walkie-talkie. Her eye rested on the photo of a child amid the soaked clutter spilling from Vavin’s briefcase onto the floor. A happy little girl sitting on a rocking horse.r />
  The guard got to his feet.

  Something glinted among the broom bristles. A key ring. One she remembered Vavin pocketing in his office. Had the killer, searching through Vavin’s briefcase, missed it? Or had Vavin tried to hide the keys? She had to deflect the guard’s attention.

  “Did you check in the wings?” she asked him.

  As he turned, she reached down and clutched the keys, dropped them into her pocket, and stood. She backed into the velvet curtain, then made for the stage stairs.

  “Attendez, you know him, don’t you?” the guard asked.

  He was sharp, just her luck.

  “Hold on,” he called out.

  And wait for the flics and a trip to the Commissariat to give a statement that would reveal her connection to Vavin? Not on her life. She had to work fast, use her sysadmin access, and read his e-mail before the firm turned it over to the police. She wanted to search his office before whoever did this got there first.

  He’d wanted to tell her something. And was murdered before he could.

  More crackling sounds came from the walkie-talkie. The guard spoke into it.

  The implications spiraled, spinning in her head. Vavin’s knowledge of Nelie, his desperation concerning a co-worker’s e-mail, and the meeting, the fact that he was her boss . . . she’d mull that over later. Right now she had to leave.

  “I’ll show them the way,” she said, edging down the steps.

  “The location’s been radioed in. What’s your name?”

  But she was already striding up the aisle. “Non, it will be quicker if I guide them.”

  “Wait,” he barked.

  Xaviera’s sobbing and the guard’s shouts telling her to stop echoed in the empty theatre.

  SHE RAN DOWN THE stairs, colliding with a man in a black turtleneck sweater who held a folded-back script. Irritation knit his brows.

  “Pardon me.”

  The hall was full of people; conversations buzzed all around her.

  “Point me to the restroom, please?” she asked him.

  “Down there.”

  She rushed past him down the stairs to the street level, realizing she smelled of ammonia. The door to the ladies’ room was locked. The mens’ room door, too.