by Cara Black
“God help her,” René gasped.
Her heart reeled. “Mireille?”
In the wavering candlelight she saw a painted face, made-up eyes, dark red mouth. Frozen features. A wig. A cruel caricature of Mireille. A string of black beads and a bottle of rum on the floor. Some vodou rite to torture Mireille?
She gasped with relief. “It’s a mannequin, René.”
From the recesses of her mind, she dredged up a memory. The elite forces case training video enactment. A supposed victim was shown, tied up like bait on a hook, as well as the ensuing slaughter when a rescue was attempted.
“René!” She whispered. “Stop!”
“What?”
“A setup. It could be booby-trapped . . . a bomb.”
The sound of crunching gravel came from near the arch. Someone was there. A small red dot shone for a moment, the unmistakable infrared dot of a night-vision high-powered rifle. Did vodou rituals involve high-powered rifles?
Then there was a rustling in the corner. The dim candle-light revealed an approaching figure, the bulk of a big man.
“Get down.” She pushed René back against the wall, where they crouched.
Not much time. A minute or two at most until he reached them. She took René’s hands, stared into his face, and whispered, “Listen and do what I say.” She scooped up gravel from the ground, putting it in his hand. “See that red light coming from behind the column? It’s a rifle scope. I’d guess we surprised those mecs and they’re wondering who we are.”
The rot of mildew and old stone odors grew stronger.
René gripped her fingers, his face almost touching hers. “You mean they expected Mireille to show up here? But why?”
“For God’s sake, this place was in tonight’s paper,” she said. “Whoever’s after Mireille knows she’s superstitious and believes in these things. What else makes sense? But where’s the encampment?”
The rest of her words were drowned out in sharp clucking, scrabbling noises, and a whacking sound that echoed. And a chicken ran across the packed-earth floor in front of them.
Aimée’s yellow light beam caught it. A headless chicken, its severed neck spurting blood, staggered in a drunken circle of death before it fell, out of view.
Bile rose in Aimée’s stomach. She pulled the Swiss Army knife from her bag. “Toss the gravel over there, René,” she said, indicating a wall in the opposite direction.
“Who’s. . . ?” A low voice echoed off the stone behind her. “Aimée?”
She turned to see Mireille at the end of the tunnel.
“You’re here?” Mireille’s voice wavered.
“And you?”
“The traffickers promised me my papers,” Mireille inter-rupted
They’d set a trap to lure Mireille inside, to shoot her. She had to warn her . . . stop her.
“Non, run! It’s a trap!” Aimée shouted. “Get out, Mireille!”
The crack of rifle shots filled Aimée’s ears. Bullets peppered the limestone. Then there was darkness. She heard re-treating footsteps.
“Halt! Security!” came a loud voice. And a figure in a blue uniform carrying a bobbing flashlight appeared.
Aimée ran down the tunnel past the dead chicken. Zigzagging, she made it halfway to the arch and then dove onto dank foliage and dirt.
No Mireille.
Wednesday Night
LÉONIE THREADED HER way across the crowded Institut Oceanographique’s evening reception, looking for Jérôme Castaing. He’d requested that they meet here at the “Water Initiative Programs in the Third World” reception. Léonie finally caught a glimpse of Castaing among the well-dressed crowd.
Chatting under the crystal chandelier, well-preserved wives in cocktail dresses, whose husbands worked for nongovernmental organizations, drank aperitifs. Ministry fonctionaires in red ties clustered with aid-organization officials, engrossed in their conversations. Expensive perfume competed with the odor of Sterno from the hot platters of hors d’oeuvres. How could she and Jérôme talk here?
Jérôme bowed out of the group around him and edged toward the Institut’s lobby. Léonie followed suit, nodding to officials of the International Monetary Fund, until she found her path blocked by a waiter bearing a tray of small foie gras-coated toast squares.
Léonie felt his gaze before she looked up to see Royet, a World Bank official. Trim, fortyish, with prematurely white hair, he was watching her. Disconcerted, she smiled. Royet raised his aperitif glass as if in salute and returned her smile.
“We have to stop meeting like this, Madame Léonie.” Royet winked before kissing her on both cheeks. “My wife will become jealous.” He had a fondness for World Bank female interns, so he enjoyed a well-deserved reputation as a roué, which he played to the hilt. His wife put up with his indiscretions, main-taining “an eighteenth-century outlook,” he liked to say.
“There’s a way around our problems, non?” Royet said to Léonie. He kept a wide smile on his face as he leaned closer to whisper in her ear, “I think you know what I mean.”
She wished she did. Royet’s job consisted of ironing out creases in the World Bank’s image. Her hands went to her neck for her juju, but it was no longer there.
“It’s . . . how could we put it?” She searched for a noncom-mittal phrase that trade delegations and NGO’s used all the time. “Under consideration.”
“Stronger than consideration, I hope,” he said, his smile forced. Royet stepped back. “You’re ravishing, as always, Madame Léonie,” he said, his voice louder. He handed her a glass from the tray of a passing waiter. “A toast to your health.”
Little did he know. But she did feel better tonight, strength flowing through her, apart from the unsteadiness in her legs that meant she needed to rely on the damn cane. She was strong enough to deal with Castaing.
“We need to talk,” Royet said. “Tomorrow?”
She nodded, accepted the drink, and clinked her glass against Royet’s. She exchanged small talk with an earnest IMF statistician until she could excuse herself.
Out in the foyer, Jérôme paced on the creamy marble floor.
“Let me help you, Madame Léonie.” Jérôme held open the wire-cage elevator door.
The elevator, a red-velvet-lined gold grilled cell from the last century, waited. In it they would be secure from being overheard, she supposed.
But she was wrong. Jérôme put his finger over his mouth as the elevator creaked upward. She leaned on her cane for sup-port, hating to appear weak in front of him.
The elevator shuddered to a halt. And then they entered another chandelier-lit hall. A couple stood entwined near the marble columns. Jérôme opened a double door and suddenly they were standing inside the balcony of a grand amphitheater used for lectures. Ornate turn-of-the-century plaster friezes framed a ceiling of leaded-glass panels. A whaling-boat mural took up the back wall. Rows of wooden benches descended like waves toward the stage.
Jérôme shut the door and peered over the balcony. All the seats were empty.
“Nice of you to show up, Léonie. Give me the file.”
“When you speak, I hear the cold, demanding voice of your father,” said Léonie.
Jérôme blinked, then recovered. “That’s rich, considering how well you did off him.”
“But Jérôme, you’re not an embittered old man like he was,” she said. “What’s your excuse?”
“Papa?” Jérôme’s mouth pursed in disgust. “You wanted him to forgive and forget the fact that the tonton macoutes blinded him in one eye?”
“And he’s taken it out on us ever since,” Léonie said. Any information she’d been prepared to give him was no longer going to be available.
“Quit taking a high moral stance.” Jérôme took off his black-framed glasses and wiped them with a handkerchief. Then he replaced the glasses, adjusting them behind his ears, each action taken with studied deliberation. “Just give me the file.”
Business as usual, like his father.
“I need more time, Jérôme.”
“Time is what we don’t have. Delivery problems, Léonie?” he said. “Unusual for you. I assumed you’d have this under control.”
No need for him to remind her. But more underlay his words. She wished she knew what it was.
“Of course I do, but what’s the hurry?” Léonie said.
A door opened; footsteps sounded. The couple from the foyer peered in. “Excuse us,” they said. They beat a quick retreat.
“Hurry? With Benoît’s death, the entire proposal’s in jeopardy,” said Jérôme in a matter-of-fact tone.
He’d avoided the word “murder.” She leaned heavily on her cane, a sinking feeling in her stomach. Darquin, the guard, had died before she could talk to him. She shook her head. “Then we all stand to lose. . . .” She let her words trail off and sagged against the burled-wood paneled wall.
But Jérôme didn’t look worried. Or at least he hid fear well.
“Stall the committee, Jérôme,” she told him. “Throw a wrench into the procedures. I don’t know how, but do what-ever you usually do. Refer to deterioration of the physical evidence . . . it’s a scientific report, they’ll understand that. Diminish its importance.”
“Not this time, Léonie.” He gave a tight smile.
“Has something else happened, Jérôme?”
“Certain information’s disappeared.”
A surprise. She hated surprises like she hated snakes. If only this weakness wasn’t hampering her. She should have planned for the worst, had a backup scheme.
“What information?”
“From our company laboratory in Port-au-Prince,” Jérôme said.
Jérôme’s fiefdom. He talked about control, but he couldn’t even grease the proper palms in his own firm! The mandatory bribe to security, the ministry, the military . . . the list went on. It wasn’t only the price of doing business; it was the only way the country worked these days. The only way the electricity functioned, the grain market opened, the water flowed. As the saying went, “A little that’s bad makes a lot of good happen.” Didn’t he understand? His father had. Remarkably well for a blanc—and a Frenchman.
“Run damage control,” she said. “It’s Haiti, it’s your own firm. No one knows about your loss on this end.”
“But Benoît’s contact had already shipped samples here,” he said. “There was a leak.”
This put a new slant on everything.
“You’re implicated, Léonie. So it’s in your interest to locate those samples, as well as Benoît’s report,” Jérôme said, his small eyes behind his designer frames scrutinizing her like a lab specimen.
“Me?” Perspiration beaded her upper lip. More important things were weighing her down. “Non, Jérôme. Edouard suspects.” She took a breath, summoned her strength, and fixed her gaze on Jérôme. “He broke into my safe.”
Jérôme’s mouth tightened. She had his attention now.
“This complicates things,” he said.
More than he knew.
“Edouard’s bent on exposing corruption. He’s a political idealist. He stole the bank statements. Now I’m up against the wall.”
“A shame that he got involved,” Jérôme said. “Idealists shouldn’t play politics; they should play with themselves.”
Jérôme was cunning, like his father. He’d have his antennae out; he wouldn’t rely only on her. Breathe, she told her-self. She had to breathe, and think.
“Find the samples and this file, Léonie. I’ll handle your idealist,” he told her.
For a horrible moment, she wondered if he’d taken care of Benoît.
“We all have secrets, Léonie,” Jérôme said. “Especially you. Once you were Duvalier’s favorite.”
“Old news, Jérôme. No one cares these days,” she said.
He shrugged. “Things could get sticky for you.”
She saw her ten years of work in the trade delegation doomed. Her projects: aid for microbusinesses, small-farmer initiatives, the infant-toddler milk program . . . all vital, all jeopardized now. Her body ached.
Her interest was Haiti; but foremost with Jérôme, like his father, was his company.
Now she realized that under Jérôme’s veneer of calm, he was scared. The contents of Benoît’s report—and now these samples—must endanger his company.
“Explain to me what makes these samples so important,” she said. “What did Benoît plan on doing with them?”
“He’d demand a bigger payoff, Léonie. Which you people do so well.”
He lied. She knew it in her bones. He still hadn’t given her a real explanation.
“That’s all you need to know,” Jérôme said.
So it was simple: she had to find Benoît’s samples and his file. Find out what Castaing feared and use it herself. She couldn’t count on Castaing to help Haiti.
“Then I have no other choice,” she said. “Will you honor your commitment to the ongoing projects?”
The vein in Jérôme’s neck pulsed. “The meeting is the day after tomorrow. If you don’t get the samples and file to me before then, Léonie, there’s nothing to negotiate. No projects. If I go down, the whole trade delegation goes with me,” Jérôme said. “You’ll no longer be able to act as a front for Duvalier’s bank accounts.”
As if Edouard hadn’t taken care of that already. But she couldn’t let Jérôme stall the pending aid projects. With the last breath in her body, if necessary, she’d see it through. But she’d let him think he held the cards.
“Consider it done, Jérôme,” she said.
“Done? Only when it’s all in my hands, Léonie.” He opened the door. “I’ll leave after you.”
Leaning on her cane, she walked out. Opening the elevator’s accordion grill door, she reached inside and pushed the ground-floor button. But instead of entering, Léonie just closed the gate. As the elevator descended, she stood behind the column, where the couple had stood earlier.
Jérôme emerged a moment later. He noted the lit elevator button, scanned the hall, and pulled out his cell phone. Only his polished black shoes beating a tattoo on the marble floor broke the silence.
“Ah, cherie,” he said, his voice softened. “I miss you. We’ll meet later.” Then there was something she couldn’t catch.
He punched in another number on his cell phone. “Tell me good news,” he said.
A pause.
“Imbecile!” he barked. “Keep looking for her. Don’t stop until you find her. Comprends?”
Wednesday Night
AIMÉE CRAWLED UNDER the Roman bleachers on her hands and knees, her fishnet stockings catching in the twigs and dirt. Dim light from the sputtering candles cast a yellow glow in the arcade. She felt the hard, rounded leather toe of a man’s shoe.
Her heart pounded. René? Dead? Please, God, no.
“I took out the guard by mistake, Aimée.” René’s voice sounded strained.
A click, and then René’s face appeared in the beam of her penlight. Beyond René she made out a stocky body sprawled on the floor and heard loud moans as a man struggled to come to.
Big mistake.
“Are you all right, René?”
She reached out to René. Her palms came back sticky and wet. Blood. And then her beam showed a trail of blood drop-lets on the stone.
“You’ve been shot, René!” She blamed herself for letting him come. What the hell had she been thinking? “Where are you hurt?”
“We have to get out of here,” René said.
She leaned down, placing her arm around his shoulder, try-ing to control the shaking of her hands. Crawling, shielded by the walls, they reached the hole in the fence and got to their feet. There was no sign of the shooters.
René stumbled. She grabbed his shoulder. “We can make it, René. Just a bit farther.”
She hoped she was right.
Aimée stared across the open-air arena. Spotlights focused on the dirt where old men played petanque on warm days. The s
oft cooing of pigeons reverberated off the limestone. Nodding plane tree branches shifted in the wind, the only movement in the otherwise deserted arena. It was a long way to the car.
René wavered and almost lost his balance again. Then she shone her flashlight on an embossed metal manhole cover. Ajar. Most were cemented down, but not this one. That’s how the shooters must have escaped. Gone to ground after the security guard appeared and Mireille vanished.
She couldn’t envision René managing the steep steps in his current condition. And moving him, injured, was the worst thing to do. Light flicked on in the construction shed. A siren wailed.
Now they had no choice.
She bent down. “Get on my back, René.”
“Aimée, I can do this.”
“You’re losing blood, René.”
The siren sounded closer now. “You’re not going to carry me!”
“Like there’s a choice? Climb on, René.”
She felt his weight settle against her back, his hands clasp her shoulders, and she stood.
“Hold on!”
René let out an involuntary gasp.
Panting, she made her feet move, compensating for René’s weight with each step. And she felt every cigarette she’d ever smoked. Now lights flooded the Roman arena behind them.
René tensed on her back. She heard his labored breathing. She prayed they could reach the car before the flics inter-cepted them.
At the gravel path she kept to the tree shadows, staggering but moving as fast as she could. The narrow street ahead lay in shadow. By the time she’d relocked the gate and reached René’s Citroën, she was exhausted.
She gunned the engine and tore down the narrow street without headlights. René’s face was plastered against the win-dow, the rays of the streetlights they passed flickering over him.
A sick feeling filled her. Mireille had disappeared, and René was wounded, seemingly in bad shape.
“Pull over here,” René said, the color drained from his face.
“Try to hold on,” Aimée said. She clutched the steering wheel, downshifting with her other white-knuckled hand. “Just a few more minutes to the hospital. My friend Lucien works in Emergency.”