by Cara Black
“This isn’t smuggling Fabergé eggs, antique icons, or fake Lee jeans,” she said. “Uranium and radiation kill people. Horribly.”
“Commodities,” he said. “They’re called commodities.”
“So you know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
“I like that.”
“Oscar Wilde said it first.”
“But you’re wrong,” said Malraux. “I know the price and the value.”
Malraux’s tone, chillingly matter-of-fact, filled her with disgust and fear.
“It’s a business,” he said. “Like any other.”
“But Josiane found out, didn’t she? Somehow Vincent owed you. In return he let you use his e-mail account.”
She heard him sigh. “That part I’m sorry for,” he said, his voice softening, “I never wanted to hurt her. And if you hadn’t got in the way . . .”
“Me?” As if it were her fault?
“I was trying to talk Josiane out of writing her story. Make her listen to reason. This was the last shipment.”
It was always the last shipment, the last time, the last throw of the dice.
“Years ago, we were lovers,” he said. “But we were married to other people at the time. You know, regret lodged in my heart. Buried deep. Then when we met again after all those years at an Opéra benefit . . . it was like we’d never been apart.”
Startled, Aimée listened. Had he been at least a little in love with Josiane? Had she fallen for him again, then discovered what he’d done? And paid with her life?
“I’m not a killer.”
“So how do you explain Mathieu?”
“He tried to stop me tonight; he’d grown a conscience.”
“Maybe over something else,” she said. “But I don’t believe he knew what you really were doing. You’d planned it all. From someone in your set you heard of the Beast of Bastille’s release.”
“My cousin’s married to his lawyer, Verges.”
Of course.
“So you staged a copycat murder and Vaduz conveniently died before he could deny murdering Josiane. All to conceal the fact that you had the uranium, sheathed in lead, hidden in the drawers of furniture.”
“Mademoiselle, you’ve got something under that messy head of hair after all.”
Now she wanted to punch him. But she had to get close enough first. Stay patient, keep him talking. Keep him talking until she could figure a way out.
She kept feeling around with her hands, away from Mathieu. Poor, sad Mathieu.
“I didn’t understand why Mathieu dealt with you,” she said. “But he had to. You had the sales connections.”
“And now I have the pieta dura. Mathieu tried to keep the real estate developers at bay so he could keep his atelier open,” said Malraux. “It’s over. He fought a losing battle. The smart choice would have been for him to join the winner.”
Her hands touched a large, cold, ceramic jug . . . beaded with chill liquid. Drinking water.
“But it’s so ingenious,” she said. “These antique pieces all have secret compartments, hidden places and false fronts, pillars that pull out. They’re so heavy anyway, adding sheets of lead wouldn’t matter.”
“Please know, that night, when I had you round the neck,” he said. “I couldn’t do it. You’re attractive, you know . . .”
She doubted that he had spared her deliberately. He made her sick.
“Then people came,” he said. “I heard Josiane run towards the atelier.”
The big work table crashed against her. Tools clattered onto the floor. Over Mathieu’s body?
She wondered if the lights were on? Malraux must have covered the windows. The atelier would have shades or wooden shutters. Mozart’s piano étude soared now. He must have turned up the volume . . . easier to kill her that way.
Where was her Beretta?
“I’ve dealt with this scientist for years,” said Malraux, his voice patient now. She heard him moving, hammering things. Shoving things across the floor. “We met when he wanted to sell some of his family icons. Later, his friends’ families’ icons. Then the country’s power shifted. This scientist liked heading a nuclear submarine plant, having a country dacha and driving a Lada. But the Soviet Union fell and there was no more gas for the Lada or food on the table. But he still has access to the top grade stuff . . . not orphaned uranium that was lost, stolen or abandoned, or spent nuclear fuel. He suggested it to me, he has the contacts here. All I did was arrange for transport. That fool Dragos thought he could double-cross me. Greedy. Look what happened.”
“Dead from radiation sickness.” She shook her head.
“People want my product. Finding buyers presents no problem,” he said. “It’s like in the war. My mother had paintings and art for sale to the highest bidder. Who didn’t? That was, anyone who wanted to survive. The Oberstampführer dabbled in art. And in Maman. How else could she have kept the business? While Papa dabbled in everyone and everything. Clothilde was his mistress once.”
Perhaps that was why she’d pointed Aimée at the wrong person.
“Where’s Lucas?”
No answer. She heard rubbing and scraping. Tried to visualize where she was. Not far away from the heater. But were the lights on . . . was he watching her closely? Or was he more attentive to his uranium? Then her hand hit a pole . . . a lamp? It felt hot.
Now she had a plan. She had to keep him talking and get him to touch her.
“No one deals in the art world wearing white gloves.” A snicker. “Only the wealthy own art. The ones with power. They used to say if there were no Jews, there’d be no art collectors. Alors, before the war, it was true. In art, one trades with those in power. Let’s face it. You need bread you go to the boulangerie. To pass something down in the family, you go first to the art dealer, then the stockbroker. Nowadays they buy cars, computers, bigger houses—but the best investment, besides diamonds, is art. Look how it endures.”
She shuddered at his tone. He sounded as if he spoke about differences of investment opinion, not weapons grade enriched uranium capable of killing and irradiating a whole chunk of some city.
Lights blipped across her eyes . . . crinkled then waved. She steadied herself against the table.
“Don’t get any ideas,” he said.
“It’s my eyes . . . they make me dizzy.”
“Don’t worry, that won’t matter soon.”
“What are you doing?”
Of course, he’d kill her.
“None of your business.”
She heard him swearing, slamming drawers.
“So Dragos skimmed some uranium off the top?”
She felt the hard rungs of a chair whack her ribs. A cracking, searing pain shot up her side. Then again.
Try to stay upright. Keep him talking, keep his attention away from her.
“But Mathieu’s a craftsman . . .”
“Mathieu’s father participated, too. And his father. Half the art world steals from the other half. Over and over. Skip a generation or two and the original owner steals it back. You think Leonardo da Vinci’s work stays in one family? Look at the Comte de Breuve.”
The water cooler jug was on the stand. Heavy.
“I thought you dealt in art because . . .”
“I’m passionate about it?” he interrupted, his educated formal French gone. “I hate old things. They smell. Ever since I could crawl, we’ve had decaying, musty pieces built or painted by dead people everywhere. I’m alive. I don’t want to be chained to the expressions of someone who died four hundred years ago.”
“So it’s all a front?”
“Front? People see what they want to see. The hôtel partic-ulier . . . no real choice there. If I sold it, taxes would cost me eighty percent of the profit on the sale of the building.”
She clung to the lamp pole for support. Gasped. Her ribs felt as if they were broken.
“Everything’s protected by historical decree. The furniture goes with the place, I
can’t even sell it. The oil paintings are blistered, the lacquered furniture peeling, and I don’t have the money for repairs. It costs next to nothing to stay there if I use it for a gallery/showroom like my parents did. But in my wing, everything comes from Ikea and Conran. Plastic—that hated word—I love it.”
She felt the base of the lamp.
“You know you’re wrong about Vaduz,” he volunteered His footsteps were closer. She heard him grunting and pushing. Something inching along on the floor. And that tar smell.
His shampoo. He couldn’t be much more than an arm’s length away.
“But I knew Vaduz didn’t attack me,” she said.
She lurched against the porcelain water cooler. It cracked and shattered. Water sprayed and flooded over the sloped floor, pooling toward the heater.
“Salope. . .you’ve got my tuxedo sopping wet!”
She whammed the lamp full force in the direction of his voice. Her ribs jabbed like knives against her skin. As the glass bulb shattered, she felt him recoil. But she didn’t want that.
She thrust the lamp pole forward, whacking him again, keeping the exposed socket toward him. She felt him trying to get it away. But it connected with something metallic on his wrist. A bracelet? Or his cufflinks? He yelled as the alternating current traveled up his right hand. Shook and tried to get free. She held the pole as long as she could. He went rigid. She heard a faint low buzz, barely audible over the music.
And then water dripped on her and she let go of the pole.
SOMETHING BEEPED. Layers of unconsciousness peeled away, slowly, like veils of fog. She felt around for the phone in her pocket.
“Allô?”
“You’re a Catholic, aren’t you Leduc?” said Bellan.
Echoing sounds came from the background.
Her brain felt fuzzy, her mouth even more. Little twitches of light ran across her eyelids.
“Made my First Communion,” she said.
“Bon . . . where would you hide something in a chapel?”
“Under the holy water font.” It was the first thing that came into her mind. “Sometimes they have a donation box in the bottom. But if it’s uranium you’re looking for, there’s some right here. Bodies, too.”
“Where?”
“Mathieu’s atelier. Easy to find. We probably glow in the dark.”
She heard moaning and someone stirring.
“Better hurry, someone’s waking up,” she said. “I wish I could tell you who it is.”
Sunday Afternoon
BELLAN EMPTIED THE WHISKEY flask down the toilet, pulled his jacket off the hook in the dormitory, and left. In the Métro, he fingered the folded pamphlet for parents he’d picked up at the Mairie. He climbed the Montgallet Métro stairs and almost turned back. Non, keep going, he told himself.
Place de Fontenay, in the shadowed twilight, was crowded with children returning home from lessons and couples going out. Clusters of discount computer shops in nineteenth-century storefronts lined the street. The old, faded lettering tapisserie was visible under a sign reading TEKNOWARE. Bells pealed from a distant church.
Bellan saw the Jardin de Reuilly, a vast open green space with its state-of-the-art covered indoor pool. The girls would love it; Monique could start swimming lessons.
Bellan paused at the door of 11, rue Montgallet, under the sign Services Sociaux Assoc de parents d’enfants déficients men-taux. Three cigarettes later, he still paced in the doorway.
Would it matter to Marie if he went in? Would she believe him? And what would a meeting of blathering, self-involved parents with Down syndrome children tell him that he didn’t know? That he didn’t feel already? Who needed a moan and groan session . . . he got enough of that at the Commissairiat with all the staff cuts.
He turned to leave and bumped into a middle-aged man, out of breath, who held the hand of a young girl. A Down syndrome girl who was laughing.
“Excuse us, we’re late,” he said. “The soccer game ran into overtime.”
Bellan noticed the girl’s striped jersey, black shorts, muddy soccer cleats, and socks. And her flushed face, wreathed in smiles.
“Who won?”
“My daughter Arlette’s team. She’s the goalie,” he said, beaming. “On to the quarterfinals!’
Arlette hugged her father, then reached out her mud-spattered palm to Bellan.
“Well done,” he said, shaking her hand.
“After you, monsieur,” the man said, reaching for the door. “We don’t want to make you late, too.”
Bellan’s hand twisted in his pocket. He couldn’t do what Marie or anyone wanted him to. Only what his heart told him to. And for that he had to take the first step.
“I’m already late. Merci,” Bellan said. “But I’m here.” He took a deep breath and went in.
Sunday Evening
AIMÉE STROKED MILES DAVIS. His wet nose nudged her neck and his dogtags tinkled over the hospital bed.
“I think you have a princess complex,” said René, a shadowy figure beside her.
“Why?” She felt her taped-up ribs. Smelled roses somewhere near her. A glowing rectangular blur of white passed in the distance. A nurse?
“In pre-op you said some funny things under anesthesia.”
She froze. “Mon dieu, what did I say?”
She heard him laughing.
“Of course, it’s all the opposite,” she said, on the defensive. Had she mentioned Guy? Stupid, that would go nowhere. “Everyone babbles the opposite of what they really think. Thanks for the roses,” she said, hoping to cover her embarrassment.
“Don’t thank me, the card is signed Guy,” he said. “You said something about losing your crown.”
Crown? Oh no. Her father had always called her his princess.
“But I couldn’t find a crown so I brought you this instead.”
She felt something long and slim pressed in her hand. It shone and gleamed, like a dancing flicker of stars. Distorted but steady. She began to focus. Her dizziness had disappeared. “A wand . . . to make your dreams come true.”
She could see it now. She grinned. “They already have.” In more ways than one, she thought. “You sent Vincent’s file to the Proc.”
Miles Davis responded with a resounding bark.
And a gust from the Seine blew in the hospital window, shifting the sheets, freshening the air, a foretaste of a mild winter.
*60 to 65 degrees Fahrenheit.
*At a conversion rate of seven francs to one dollar, this was a price of $10,000,000.
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
PARIS OCTOBER, 1994
Monday Evening
Monday Night
Later Monday night
Tuesday, 1:00 A.M.
Later
Tuesday
Tuesday night
Tuesday Evening
Wednesday Noon
Wednesday Afternoon
Wednesday
Wednesday late afternoon
Wednesday
Wednesday Noon
Wednesday Afternoon
Wednesday Night
Wednesday Evening
Thursday Morning
Thursday Morning
Thursday Afternoon
Thursday Late Afternoon
Thursday Evening
Friday Morning
Friday
Friday
Friday Afternoon
Friday Afternoon
Saturday
Saturday
Saturday Evening
Saturday Night
Saturday Night
Sunday Afternoon
Sunday Evening
th friends