by LJ Ross
Looking around the darkening streets, Gregory realised they were driving in the opposite direction to the Trente-Six, and had entered an area of Paris he didn’t recognise.
“Isn’t Police Headquarters on the other side of the river?”
“Yes, but I need to pay one last visit,” Durand said. “It shouldn’t take long.”
He didn’t elaborate, so Gregory decided to sit back and enjoy the ride.
“I’m interested to know why Camille started talking today,” he murmured. “Why this morning, and not yesterday morning? I cut her medication, but she hadn’t consistently been under heavy sedation before then. There were opportunities for her to talk, if she had wanted to.”
“She remembers nothing of the attack, then?”
Gregory looked across at the inspector, whose face was cast in shadow.
“Nothing whatsoever, and I didn’t press her on it. She was distressed by her inability to remember simple things—like her name—and I needed to be very careful with her. It’s short-sighted to try to force the memories to return because it could put back her recovery.”
Durand was ever the optimist.
“All the same, she’s talking again. That’s what we hoped for—perhaps more will follow.”
“I hope so,” Gregory said. “For her sake, I hope so too.”
* * *
The Asian Quarter of Paris was known as Petite Asie or Triangle de Choisy—a triangular district whose boundary lines were the Avenue de Choisy, the Avenue d’Ivry and the Boulevard Masséna in the 13th Arrondissement. It was the main cultural and commercial centre for the Chinese, Cambodian, Laotian and Vietnamese communities in Paris but, unlike ‘Chinatown’ in London or New York, Gregory could see none of the architecture that would usually serve as a physical embodiment of the area’s heritage. Instead, there were a number of seventies high-rise towers known collectively as Les Olympiades and a few Buddhist temples dotted here and there, but that was about it.
Inspector Durand slowed his car to a crawl until he found something that could loosely be described as a parking space, then did his usual ‘bump and grind’ manoeuvre to edge the Citröen into a space not far from the Olympiades.
“Shall I stay in the car?” Gregory asked, and Durand sized him up with a critical eye.
“No, I think you’ll be fine,” he said. “But your briefcase will be safer locked in the boot.”
Once that task was complete, Durand led the way across a long esplanade running through the middle of the residential towers, leading to a large market area covered by a purpose-built pergola in the middle that was teeming with people.
“In England, the markets close around this time in the afternoon,” Gregory remarked. “Here, it seems like they’re only just setting up.”
They passed tables laden with spices and roasted duck, and his stomach rumbled—a timely reminder that he hadn’t eaten in several hours.
“It’s an evening market,” Durand told him. “There’s another one in the car park around the corner.”
They continued through the esplanade, inhaling its colourful atmosphere until they reached a road at the end.
“I take it we’re here because you’ve got a lead on a forger,” Gregory said. “I thought you’d bring another officer, in case you need to search the place?”
“When I come to Les Olympiades, I come alone,” Durand said. “The person you’re about to meet is one of my informants, and has been for years. She’s seventy-one, has four children and nine grandchildren—and she owns several expensive homes around the city, but prefers to live here, where she feels most comfortable.”
He paused meaningfully.
“She also happens to be one of the best forgers in Europe.”
“Isn’t that the kind of thing the police normally like to prosecute?”
“Ordinarily, yes, but Wendy Li is a special case. She knows everybody, and information tends to flow through her. She shares valuable information with us, and, in exchange, we allow her to carry on with her sideline.”
They’d reached the entrance to a small shopping centre, whose colourful neon signage was flickering into life as the sun fell behind the concrete skyline.
“What’s Wendy’s main line of work?” Gregory asked.
Durand tapped the side of his nose and made directly for the escalator once they were inside the shopping mall. As they rode it up to the next floor, Gregory cast his eye around the shops filled with everything from rice cookers to tiny alarm clocks in the shape of Chairman Mao.
Eventually, they stopped in front of a nail and beauty salon by the name of Lotus Nails.
“Just one thing before we go in, mon ami. Wendy likes to tell the future. I figure…it’s mostly bullshit, but sometimes, what she says, it comes true.”
Gregory smiled.
“Is this the ‘valuable information’ she gives you, Mathis? I thought the French police had more sophisticated methods of detection.”
Durand gave a short laugh.
“We take what we can get,” he said, and pushed open the door.
CHAPTER 15
The interior of Lotus Nails was long and narrow, with a bank of tables along one side and a bank of hair washing stations along the other, all of which were occupied. A large television set played music videos from the nineties, and Gregory watched a group of women dancing in perfect time to a song he couldn’t hear.
“Où est Wendy?” Durand enquired of one of the nail technicians, who glanced furtively at the pair of them and then nodded towards the back of the shop.
Even to the most inexperienced eye, the two men looked very out of place in their surroundings, and yet nobody gave them a second glance as they made their way towards the back of the room.
Durand pushed open a door marked ‘PRIVÉ’, and they stepped inside a break room containing the smallest kitchenette Gregory had ever seen, plus a single armchair upon which a young woman was seated scrolling through social media on her phone. Considering she was nowhere near the age bracket of the woman they were looking for, Gregory assumed Wendy Li wasn’t in the office.
But he was wrong.
The girl looked at Durand, then at Gregory—and then, seemingly satisfied, keyed in a swift text message on her phone and vacated the chair.
Durand murmured a word of thanks and tugged the chair away from the wall, so he could access the very corner of the room, whereupon he located the edge of a panel that served as a fake wall and had been wallpapered to match the rest. He applied a bit of pressure and, sure enough, the wall shifted before their very eyes.
Gregory followed Durand into another anteroom, this time covered with shelves and shelves of counterfeit designer goods ranging from handbags to suitcases, watches to ski gear.
But there were no people.
“Through here,” Durand said, and pushed back a rail of fake Burberry trench coats to reveal yet another panel cut into the wall.
“It’s like a labyrinth,” Gregory murmured.
“This is the last one,” Durand said, and disappeared behind the coats.
* * *
In contrast to the shop front, Wendy Li’s private office was supremely high tech.
Gregory had imagined it to be a dark, dank sort of place—worthy of dark deeds, he supposed—but he was surprised to find himself inside a well-lit room painted a sunny shade of yellow, accented with plenty of red and gold. Artificial plants brightened the windowless space and an efficient heating/cooling system kept the ambient temperature steady. Three professional architect’s drawing tables had been set up, only two of which were presently occupied: one, by a skinny young man who looked up when they entered, then returned to whatever intricate task he was engaged in, and the other by a tiny, bird-like woman wearing an enormous beehive wig. Her face was a mass of tiny folds and crinkles, offset by sharp brown eyes which measured them both above a pair of half-moon spectacles.
“Qui c’est?” she said, in a booming voice which belied her slight frame.
“You trust him?”
Durand turned to Gregory with a thoughtful expression.
“For now,” he said, with the ghost of a smile.
Wendy let out a peal of laughter and crooked a finger to beckon him forward. Gregory glanced at Durand and raised an eyebrow, receiving a nod from the other man that it was safe to proceed. There were various weapons stashed around the room, but if Wendy wanted to inflict any real harm, she’d have done it already.
Probably.
Gregory approached the tall desk where she was seated, leaving a cautious distance between them. At Southmoor, he’d worked with many patients over the age of sixty and had never found them to be lacking in either the means or inclination to fight, if the mood struck them; consequently, he took a non-discriminatory view of things like old age and proceeded with caution.
Up close, the wrinkles on Wendy Li’s face were even more pronounced, and deep crevices fanned out at either side of her eyes, which were presently narrowed as she studied him with a fixed intensity he found vaguely unnerving.
“Hand,” she demanded.
“Pardon?”
“Your hand,” she said. “Give it to me.”
She held out her own, with its network of veins and fine, papery skin, and waited. Gregory thought he heard Durand chuckle beneath his breath, and realised this must be the fortune-telling he had spoken of earlier. There were many more important things they could be doing, but he scarcely had time to voice the thought before she snatched up his right hand and tugged him closer.
As she bent over to study the lines of skin and bone, Gregory watched the beehive wobble precariously atop her head and wondered if it would be impolite to steady it.
“Long life,” she pronounced, suddenly.
Was it ridiculous to feel relieved?
“I don’t—"
“Quiet,” she snapped, and Gregory felt a strong, unexpected urge to laugh. He wondered what Bill Douglas would say about the interlude, and imagined it would be something along the lines of her being adept at reading minute social ‘tells’, or body language indicators.
“Shadows,” she murmured. “Many shadows.”
Gregory’s smile faded, and he began to withdraw his hand, but she held it firm.
“Logic… wisdom…” she muttered, tracing a finger over his skin. “But much pain. So much pain.”
“I think that’s enough.”
She looked at him above the semicircles of her glasses.
“You’ve known fear,” she said quietly. “You’ve faced it before, and will do it again, many times. You hold much pain in your hands, and in your heart; some that is your own and some that belongs to others. Remember, boy, when I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.”
Gregory said nothing, and suddenly she dropped his hand and slid from her stool. They watched her cross the room to where she’d left her handbag on a long bench. She began to root around its contents until she let out a small sound of satisfaction and grasped something in her wiry fist.
She turned back to Alex and unfurled her fingers to reveal a small piece of brass shaped like a calabash, with a square hole in the middle. It was inscribed in Mandarin and suspended from a thin piece of leather.
“Take it,” she said, and pressed the charm into his hand.
“What is it?” he asked, feeling the weight in his palm. “What does the writing say?”
“Lei Ting talisman,” she said. “It asks Leigong, God of Thunder, to expel ghosts and evil spirits. Keep it close to your heart, and she will trouble you no more.”
Gregory stared into her dark eyes and felt the small hairs on the back of his neck rise, one by one.
She couldn’t know.
She had no way of knowing.
“What makes you think—” He swallowed a sudden constriction in his throat and tried again. “What makes you think I need to ward off evil spirits?”
“Because she’s with us, here, in this room,” the old woman replied softly.
* * *
Durand watched the blood drain from Gregory’s face, and stepped forward.
“That’s enough ghost stories for today,” he said. “We need to know if you’ve done anything for this woman.”
He drew out the stock picture of Camille for her to examine, but Wendy drew on a pair of nitrile gloves before she would touch it.
She might be old, but she was no fool.
“Perhaps I have seen her,” she said, after a brief glance. “This is the girl from the papers.”
Durand nodded.
“You know her?”
Wendy pursed her lips.
“Anti-terror police were sniffing around here the other week, Mathis. They wanted to know if I created some passports they seized at the border.”
Durand gave a light shrug.
“And? Did you?”
She was offended.
“You think I would create such amateurish work?”
Durand held up his hands.
“I had to ask,” he said. “What do you want me to do about it?”
“Stop them coming around,” she said, perching herself back on her high stool. “It’s bad for business.”
“The deal is that we won’t prosecute you,” Durand said mildly. “I never agreed to protect you.”
She reached inside her shirt to pull a packet of menthol cigarettes from her bra, where she preferred to keep them.
“I’ve told you many things, Mathis,” she said. “Many important things.”
He nodded.
“It’s been a fair exchange,” he agreed. “Which is why I know you’re going to tell us about the woman in that photograph.”
She flicked a gold lighter and inhaled deeply, looking between the pair of them.
“If the girl changed her name, her identity, maybe it was for good reason,” she said. “Not all who come to me are bad people.”
“Maybe so,” Gregory said, having recovered himself. “But it isn’t just that she can’t remember who she was. She can’t remember who she is now. She has no family, nobody to care for her. She’s alone without memories to sustain her. I’m trying to help her, not expose her.”
Wendy’s eyes flicked over his serious face and then she gave a satisfied nod.
“She came to me. Two weeks ago, maybe three.”
Durand smiled.
“And? What can you tell us about her?”
In answer, she spoke over her shoulder to the young man who worked silently in the corner of the room. He roused himself and began to search one of the tall filing cabinets set against the back wall.
“My grandson,” she supplied. “Young, but he has a good eye.”
Presently, he handed a slim file to her and returned to his task.
Wendy flipped open a file with no name, only a passport-sized photograph of Camille Duquette pinned to the front beside the date it was taken.
“I remember faces, not names,” she said, answering Gregory’s unspoken question. “Camille, aged nineteen.”
She chuckled and gave them a knowing look.
“The girl was twenty-four,” she said. “But some of them ask to shave off a few years. I obliged her.”
The two men exchanged a look of surprise. The woman they’d come to know as Camille Duquette could easily pass for nineteen.
“Can I see?”
Durand made to reach for the file, but Wendy held it out of reach.
“You know I never contaminate my files,” she said. “Besides, there isn’t much to know about this one. She told me nothing of her past, only what she wanted for her future.”
Disappointment was palpable on the air.
“What?” Durand demanded. “You know our agreement—”
“I gave you my word and I’ve kept it,” she shot back. “See for yourself.”
She held open the file so they could see, and it was scant on details
, telling them no more than they’d already learned from Camille’s employment file at Maison Leroux.
“She could not afford the full service,” Wendy deigned to tell them. “I told her, she would have no social security number, or tax reference, but I gave her what I could. It was enough for the short term.”
They spent a few minutes discussing the finer details, where they learned that Camille’s new identity card had come from a legitimate, as yet unassigned batch of stolen government cards, which accounted for their apparent authenticity.
“What about the bank account?”
Wendy shook her head.
“Banks are more difficult than in the old days,” she said, ruefully. “I don’t dabble there any longer.”
Durand made a mental note to ask Camille’s bank about how she was able to open an account on the basis of a forged identity card and a borrowed address.
“What was she like?” Gregory asked. “Tell me how you found her.”
Wendy smiled slowly.
“Beautiful girl, tortured soul,” she said simply. “I couldn’t read her palm.”
The memory of it seemed to trouble her, because she frowned and stabbed the butt of her cigarette into a small porcelain tray.
“Why not?”
Gregory told himself he didn’t believe in any hocus pocus; that it was nothing more than transference and heightened perception, but he still wanted to know why the old woman hadn’t been able to use either faculty to gain an insight into the young woman who had come knocking at her door.
“Camille was a girl who knew what she wanted,” Wendy said.
She shrugged.
“Confident, a little arrogant, maybe…and, when I looked into her eyes, it was like looking into a mirror. Nothing behind them, only my own reflection.”
Gregory thought of his dream the previous evening and shivered again.
“How did she know to come here?” Durand asked. “You don’t advertise.”
“It’s not so hard, if you speak to the right people,” she argued. “But…in this case, she came to me by referral.”
“Who brought her?”
Wendy didn’t answer, and reached for the photograph of Camille again.