by Cara Black
“You mean Tatyana, the blonde who hired your brother, don’t you?” Battling her rising nausea, she realized one of the voices she’d just heard outside in the stable was familiar. A Serbian accent. Not the flics. Her throat tightened.
“No. Tall, thin.” A snort of laughter. “Tatyana owes me my brother’s funeral money. More.” A smile spread over Goran’s face. “Big connections with a rich man, she told me, nice commission.”
No wonder he suddenly oozed cockiness. He hadn’t called the Serbs off. Dumb to believe him. “You lied to me. Bad move, Goran.”
From the corner of her eye, she caught his hand creeping under the straw to the pitchfork. She pulled a horse blanket from the stall over him. Instead of grabbing the pitchfork, he tossed the blanket aside, lunging forward to grab her arm. The move slowed him down, put him off balance for the seconds she needed. She kicked dust in his eyes, sidestepped him, then kicked his ankle. Hard. He landed on his back with an ouff. She cocked the Beretta’s hammer.
“Want me to shoot your toes first, or your knees?”
“Non, non.” Sweat broke out on his forehead. He rubbed his watering eyes, which kept darting toward the stall door—looking for his backup.
“Now you’re an accomplice to murder and robbery, and I’ll be sure to implicate your friends.”
“Good luck, bitch.”
“No luck involved.” She reached up to the alarm system box. Pulled it.
Silence. No piercing shrieks. Merde.
Only blinking red lights. A silent alarm designed to avoid frightening the horses? She hoped so.
At the half-door she turned. “What made you remember the woman who got out of the taxi?”
“Reminded me of you, bitch.”
This is what she’d expected him to say, but bile rose in her throat nonetheless. But she couldn’t think about that now. She grabbed a riding helmet from the wall and strapped it on. Panic filled her as she crouched down behind hay bales and shooed off buzzing flies.
Goran was shouting something in Serbian. She heard approaching footsteps and banging stall doors. Any moment now, they’d discover her.
On her left, a stable hand led out the last horse by the reins. Straightening up, and shielded by the horse’s body, she kept pace with its front legs as the Serb thugs passed by the stalls.
She couldn’t count on the silent alarm working. Once clear, she hurried through the side stable and found the fire alarm box. Broke the glass and pulled the switch. Loud whoops blasted in the stable and barn. Horses neighed in the exercise ring.
“Where’s the fire?” the stable hand shouted at her.
“No fire. Terrorists. Lock down the stable.”
“Aren’t you with the Red Cross?”
“Undercover.” His mouth dropped open. “No time for explanations. Tell the team it’s the Serbs. Give this to the vet.” She handed him the autopsy. “Seems Goran ripped you high and dry.”
By the time she made it to the bus stop, fire engines and unmarked cars were whizzing toward the stables. She took the first bus that stopped. Concentrated on breathing deep, the window beside her open to the pollen of the chestnut trees. The rest faded in and out, passing in a blur. Nerves, the residual effects of the drugs, and the revelation of her mother warred in her system.
She changed buses and boarded one in the direction Denfert-Rochereau. Why couldn’t the driver go faster? She had to get back to the office. Somewhere ahead there had to be the Métro station.
From the window, she saw a van pull abreast of the bus, honking at straggling schoolchildren on the zebra-striped crosswalk. A white Renault van with temporary license plates, sporting a chrome muffler held to the bumper with wire.
And then it all came back to her—the dark lane, Saj honking at the white van with its bumper trailing on the cobbles. That’s what she couldn’t remember, what Goran heard but couldn’t see. The driver had stopped to reattach the dragging muffler so he wouldn’t be noticed or given a ticket.
Aimée had to get off the bus. She rushed toward the back doors, which were closing. She wedged herself through and got a mouthful of exhaust as the bus took off.
Worried, she looked around for the van. Traffic surged ahead at the green light. Where had it gone so fast?
The pavement shifted like sand under her feet. Passersby scurried around her. Didn’t they feel this shifting, this rumbling from the Métro trains below? Or were the underground quarry tunnels fissuring, cracking open, the streets opening to sinkholes?
Blood rushed to her head. She put one foot in front of her, yet she stood stuck in the same place, under the globed street lamp glinting in the sun. Why hadn’t anyone noticed? Why was she sinking to the pavement? Slipping into darkness.…
AIMÉE OPENED HER eyes. Sunlight streamed through shutter slats, warming her toes. She lay curled on soft pigskin leather—a toffee-colored divan—luscious. She stretched.
Then it hit her—the white van.
“You’re pale, breathing shallow.” A young woman with short red hair à la gamine and tortoise-shell glasses felt her pulse. “Eaten today, Mademoiselle?”
“But I have to catch.…” She tried to sit up. Her elbows slipped and her legs didn’t cooperate. The tang of old leather-bound books and paper hovered in the warm air.
Where in the world …? A ticking wooden ormolu clock on the wall read 1:20 P.M. Twenty or thirty minutes had gone by. The van was long gone by now. Hopeless.
“Desolée, but I don’t know where I am.” She shook her head. Felt a wave of dizziness. “Or how I got here.”
“You fainted in front of the Observatoire’s side entrance,” the woman said. “A teacher on a school field trip brought you into my office.”
Embarrassed, Aimée looked at the woman’s name tag. Doctor Sylvie Taitbout.
“Desolée, doctor,” she said.
“I’m just the PhD kind. Call me Sylvie,” she said, smiling. “I study black holes between the stars.”
Aimée became aware of the posters of planets and galaxies lining the walls. The notebooks piled on the desk beside framed family photos. “You’re an astronomer.”
“Guilty,” she smiled. “I research planetary nebulae in the optical regions of external galaxies—finding tools to understand the late stellar evolution in varying galactic environments. That kind of stuff.” Her mouth turned serious. “Ecoutes, you are exhibiting the symptoms my sister had—anemia compounded by stress. Unpleasant combo. Serious, too. Let me ring your doctor.”
Children’s voices drifted in from the window, along with jasmine scents and humid air.
“Thanks for your concern, but I feel better already,” Aimée said. She had to get going. “My blood sugar gets low. Just need some air.”
“Up to you,” Sylvie said, but she handed Aimée a grapefruit juice from her bag. And a banana. “I insist.”
“Merci.”
“Have your doctor run tests,” Sylvie said. “Does anemia run in your family? Any history with your mother?”
A pang hit her. This woman probably took for granted that all Parisian mothers take Sunday afternoon walks in the Luxembourg Gardens arm in arm with their husbands after the midday roast chicken—a classic déjeuner de famille. Well, not Aimée’s. “No history to speak of.”
Sylvie took off her glasses to clean them, revealing small birdlike eyes. “Mothers don’t tell you everything.”
So true. In her case, nothing. No road map. During the lycée, she’d observed Martine’s mother and secretly recorded her observations in a notebook. Like they did in biology class, cultivating nuclei in a petri dish and recording reactions and behaviors. She made an effort to decipher this species down to each detail—from Martine’s mother’s tweed beige jackets to her effortless soufflés, from her warm living room cluttered with bright pillows and books to the way she wiped her toddler’s runny nose while reminding the girls with a smile to say “merci” at the boulangerie.
“Is everything all right?” Sylvie asked. “Anything on
your mind?”
Sylvie seemed like the type of counselor the flics should have assigned to her the other night after the accident. Aimée knew she should take better care of herself. Why had she quit yoga? But without René to insist.…
“Been under more stress lately?”
Apart from her best friend’s defection to America, Saj’s injury, the murder of an old man who’d known her long-gone mother, a stolen Modigliani, death threats from Serbs, being attacked in her office and almost drowned in a bucket.…
“A little more than usual,” Aimée admitted.
And just when she’d stumbled on the van, she’d lost it again. Her chance to find the painting. Her mother, ever elusive, a vague shadow who loomed in the background.
“Try to relax.”
With people out to torture her and only a few hours left? Aimée sat up with mounting dread and scrambled for her boots.
“You’ve been so kind,” she said, standing with a wobble and pulling down her Sonia Rykiel tunic. “But I must go.…”
“Not before you share my tartine and I see you can function. We’ll go to the garden.”
Too weak to argue, Aimée nodded. She and Sylvie sat on a bench in the garden bordered by a gravel drive. An islet of peace bounded by green hedges and old stonework fronting the Observatoire, a blackened limestone-like château punctuated with a rounded verdigris metal globe roof, which dwarfed the trees. “When the king ordered the Observatoire built, this was countryside,” Sylvie told her. “Far from the lights of Paris and perfect for the telescopes. By 1900 the street gaslights rendered them useless. Today we measure and calculate the heavens with computers.”
“Vraiment?” Yet, didn’t numerical equations and statistics neglect the allure of the night sky, of wishing upon a star?
Aimée munched the crisp tartine slathered with Brie, pear slices, and cornichons. She felt color returning to her cheeks. It had been stupid to forget to eat.
“Loaded up?” Sylvie shouted to someone behind the hedge on the gravel drive. It was woman in a hoodie and jeans, loading file boxes into the side door of a van. Aimée noticed how the woman kept her head down. Noticed the white Renault van with a temporary plate. The grapefruit juice in her hand trembled.
But how many new white vans drove in Paris?
“She’ll hit traffic. Running late as usual,” Sylvie said.
“Who’s that?” Aimée asked.
“Morgane delivers our instruments. Receives our air-shipped data drives.”
“You use a service from Orly?”
“The van belongs to the Observatoire.”
Could this be the one?
“So it’s kept here at night.” Yuri’s place was in the quartier, only three Métro stations away.
“Why?”
Aimée shrugged. “Guess you’ve got a big budget.”
“Think so? Morgane’s only part-time. They’re cutting back on everything, even research hours.” Sylvie glanced at her watch. “Desolée,” she said, standing, “I’ve got an appointment measuring a black hole.” She smiled. “Take care of yourself.”
Morgane spoke on a cell phone, her gaze fixed on Aimée. A frisson went up her spine. Had she gone paranoid again? Or did this tingling mean something?
Paranoid or not, she wrote down the front license plate number with her kohl eye pencil. She’d need to get closer to see the bumper. Before she could make it to the driveway, the engine turned over, gravel spit, and she saw the muffler wired to the bumper as it took off.
She’d found it—the white van that had pulled in front of them on Villa d’Alésia, the one Goran noticed circling the block. By the time she ran back to the bench and got Dombasle on the phone, the van had gone.
“This might be nothing, but.…” Aimée said, hesitating.
“Anything to do with the Modigliani interests me,” Dombasle prompted.
“Could you check for any traffic video surveillance installed on rue d’Alésia?”
“Mind telling me what I’d be looking for?”
“A white Renault van, license 750825693, belonging to the Observatoire, that could have circled Villa d’Alésia and rue de Châtillon the night of the robbery at, say, eight P.M.?”
“I’d need to call in favors,” he said, the interest gone from his voice. “You’re saying it’s important?”
“I suspect it’s the van that was used in the robbery.” And she needed them off her back, but she kept that to herself. Hadn’t Luebet addressed his message to M … Morgane? “Maybe Luebet was behind this. If so, Morgane’s the woman to talk to.”
“Several witness statements mention a white van. One of those statements has your name on it.” Pause. “What haven’t you told me?”
“It’s complicated,” she said. “But I think she broke into my office.”
“Think or know?”
“The only sure things in life are death and taxes, Raphael,” she said. “They blindfolded me and held my head under water.”
“But Luebet’s dead, and according to his message.…”
She couldn’t be sure if Luebet’s team had found the painting, and it had long disappeared. But she needed to light a fire under Dombasle. “His team’s still searching,” she interrupted. “You’d put it past them to kill Yuri? Alors, they gave me twenty-four hours to find the painting.”
There, she admitted it. Hadn’t wanted to, but she needed his help.
“So that’s why you came to me,” he said. “No goodwill involved.”
Playing hurt all of a sudden? Hadn’t he’d drafted her for a sting with a crooked antiquaire? A ploy she was more and more skeptical about.
“Raphael, didn’t you tell me art thieves were up your alley and homicide up la Crim’s?”
She’d burned her bridges with Morbier, who had deserted her. Couldn’t expect Saj to run at full speed. If Raphael didn’t cooperate, she didn’t know who else to ask. Her options narrowed to zero. “Someone threatened me. Can’t you check this out? Isn’t this your job?”
“Morgane’s known to us, that’s if she’s the same one,” he said. “A Morgane Tulle came up flagged in the file. Luebet’s former employee who served time.”
The connection. “Does she work at the Observatoire now?”
“You want an answer off the top of my head?”
She brightened. “But you’ll follow up?”
“Meet me at thirty four rue Delambre at six P.M.” He clicked off.
She felt a tremor of relief—this should lessen her chance of torture—but it still didn’t help her find the Modigliani. Or her mother.
AIMÉE TOOK A taxi, had it circle rue du Louvre three times. Satisfied no one was following, she overtipped the driver. Always good insurance for rainy-night taxi karma.
Back in the office, she popped open a Badoit and did some neck rolls. Better. She thumbed the report Saj had culled from details on the oligarch’s dealings in Gazprom, the now privatized Ukraine petroleum giant.
“Bereskova took a fiscal nosedive into concrete last year but somehow reinvented himself, see?” Saj said, from his cross-legged position on the tatami. “Look at page eight. Seems he made himself indispensable to major players in the past few months.”
“They call it krysha—rub my back big-time, I’ll rub yours. Any more details?” She needed more. Something smelled wrong.
Saj readjusted his neck brace. “That’s as far as I got.”
“Didn’t you work with that Russian hacker, René’s friend, for a while?”
“Rasputin,” he said. “The wild man.”
A living Internet legend, Rasputin snuck into a missile engine testing facility north of Moscow with his hacker pack. They breached military security through a hole in the fence of a factory dating back to the Soviet era—still producing engines for Russia’s space and military programs.
The Kremlin discovered Rasputin’s photos of the Cold War-era facility with giant turbines, tunnels, tubes, Soviet emblems, and a bomb shelter. And his penetration of the
missile system mainframe. Rasputin claimed his aim was to increase awareness over security.
“The man knows no fear,” Saj said.
“So pick his brain,” she said.
“Good idea.” With ginger movements, he picked up his shoulder bag. “My acupuncturist squeezed me in, do you mind?”
She’d prefer to hash ideas out with him. But every time he turned, she noticed his body tighten.
“Bien sûr,” she said. “I hope it helps.”
“Before I forget, thanks for dealing with the Serb. You got my back. Desolé, I shouldn’t have doubted you.”
She’d called from the taxi and recounted what happened in the stables on the way back. “I pitied Goran—a refugee from a war-torn country, an exiled doctor reduced to shoveling horse muck. His brother’s death devastated him. The aggressors were victims once.” She stared at Saj. “But then I wasn’t so sure.”
“Talk about karma. You gave him a chance, showed compassion, Aimée.” Saj shrugged, then adjusted his neck brace yet again. “Ever thought the whole thing was a lie told by a mercenary or a war criminal?”
She thought of Goran’s anguish, so palpable it had raised the hair on her arms. “But if you’d heard him cry.…”
“Going soft, Aimée? You?”
“Soft as in not shooting his toes?” She’d wanted to.
Saj shook his head. “Alors, this circle of samsara, c’est fini,” he said. “Thank God.”
She wished she felt the same.
“But the van, Saj.…”
“You alerted the art flic, didn’t you?” he said. “Let him do his job. I’ll alarm the door on my way out.”
What more could she do right now but assuage her guilt and pull her weight? She’d review reports and ink the two new computer security contracts. A ray of light shone in the accounting: Leduc Detective was floating on a cushion this month, and would continue into the next. Made for a change.
Aimée sipped the Badoit, thumbed the printouts Maxence had left on Yuri Volodya. Apart from his Trotskyist leanings in the seventies, nothing interesting. Looked at the names on her to-do list and let them simmer.
She removed Piotr Volodya’s letters from the safe. About to scan and copy them, she remembered Marevna’s boss’s interruption and their missed appointment last night.