by Cara Black
She opened the exit door to a slit of light in an alley.
Aimée grabbed her arm. “Please, when did you last see Karine?”
Lili hesitated. “They were supposed to borrow my place that afternoon. They went to a hotel instead. That’s the last I heard. Karine doesn’t answer her phone.”
“That’s helpful, Lili, more than you know. Write down Karine’s number, and I’ll try to trace it.”
“I didn’t keep it. Anyway, it’s dead. I think Karine is, too.”
“Or afraid and hiding from whoever killed Marcus.”
Why wasn’t there a flicker of hope in Lili’s eyes? She knew something. Aimée let go of her arm.
“Where would she hide, Lili?”
“Her family left. I don’t know.”
Of course she knew. And now Aimée knew how to find out.
“I have to get back to work.” Lili turned to leave.
“Wait, Lili! Which hotel?”
“Near Butte-aux-Cailles, a small one. On rue des Cinq Diamants, I think.” She paused. The sun’s pale glow caught on her jade bracelet. “If you follow me or come around again, they’ll know.”
Aimée pressed a card into Lili’s hand. She’d written Éric Besson’s number on the back, too, in case. “Trust me. Call if you hear from Karine.”
Lili stepped out, and the door closed behind her.
Aimée strolled back to the ticket booth. “The young woman who sat by me forgot this . . .”
Aimée showed the clerk a small agenda she’d bought and hadn’t used yet.
“She’s late twenties, Asian. I just thought you’d remember her.” A shot in the dark.
“Oh, Lili,” the clerk said. “She’s our pianist for Wednesday matinees.”
“This looks important—she might need it.”
“That’s so kind of you. She works at the pâtisserie Bánh Tân Tân. Leave it there. Or if she’s already done for the day, I think she just lives upstairs above the bakery.”
Aimée left the theater and called Maxence. “Ready for another mission?”
“Ready and waiting.” Maxence’s voice rose in excitement.
She told him to take petty cash for a taxi and mapped out his assignment. Then she rang Babette. “Will I still make bath time?”
“Chloé’s asleep. Pooped out after bébé swim and the park.”
Now Aimée felt guilty. “Can you stay a bit longer?”
After making arrangements with Babette, she headed for the hotel.
The two-star hotel was the only hotel on rue des Cinq Diamants, the street of five diamonds. Aimée saw no trace of any diamonds. At least she’d snagged the photo from the pastry shop wall and could question the hotel staff about the trio.
The hotel staff consisted of a middle-aged woman with black roots showing in her dyed red hair, which was mostly covered by a hijab. She sat behind the tiny reception counter massaging her bare ankle. Arabic music played from a thirties-era Bakelite radio. For a two-star hotel, or even a five-star, the place’s rectangular lobby looked spotless. A bottle of nail lacquer emitted a stringent alcohol aroma.
Aimée flashed her faux police ID.
“You’re new,” said the woman. “Haven’t seen you before.”
“Brigade spéciales, undercover,” she said, making it up as she went along.
Without a murmur, the woman turned the livre d’or—the hotel register—around for Aimée to view. “Be my guest.” A smile with several gold teeth.
Aimée flipped back to the date Marcus disappeared. Ran her chipped fingernails up the signatures. Found it.
“Do you recognize this couple?” Aimée covered Lili’s face and showed the woman the photo from the pâtisserie wall of fame.
A nod.
“Can you tell me what you remember about them?”
“I do manicures. Professional. You want one?”
Was the woman offering her something else beside a manicure? Information?
Her nails definitely needed it. And she guessed this was the way to get this woman to talk. “How much?”
“Fifty francs,” said the woman. “You choose the color. Extras are ten francs.”
Aimée nodded and sat in the second chair in the small space behind the reception counter. “What kind of extras can I get?”
“I can tell you about how I clean rooms and how messy that one was.”
Not a direct bribe from a policewoman. But a payment for information—servis compris. That worked.
“I’d like the extras,” Aimée said. “All of them.”
Aimée set her phone on her lap, putting aside her worry about Maxence and his mission, and focused on the woman, who introduced herself as Amal.
Amal’s father-in-law’s father had bought the hotel, which was still in the family. Perfect cooperation with the flics, toujours, but Aimée’s was a new face. During the war, Amal’s father-in-law’s father had printed papers, documents, for Jews. Even once hid a family in the attic. Interesting, Aimée thought, that an Arab family had hidden a Jewish family.
She brought their conversation back to Marcus and Karine.
“The boy registered,” Amal said. “The girl went up.”
“Did anyone else go to their hotel room?”
“Not that I saw.” She thought. “Attendez, I do remember a water pipe burst next door. The plumber’s crew had to work in our courtyard.”
Easy to slip inside.
“But you remember the couple well?” Aimée asked.
“So young. Sweet. Most of our clients are in their sixties, pensioners who live here.” Amal sighed. “Laid off from the factories and nowhere else to live. My husband was a boy when they demolished the sugar refinery in the seventies. Such huge rats running up the streets, they paid him for every rat he caught.”
Aimée suppressed a shiver.
More prodding got Amal talking about the room’s condition. “A mess, completely torn up.”
Had it been searched?
“May I see the room?” Aimée asked.
After the promise of more francs for this extra “extra,” Amal agreed. As Aimée’s Bordeaux-red fingernails dried, Amal led her across the small courtyard and up a switchback of stairs. This had probably once been a workers’ hotel, simple and unadorned.
Number 210 held a double bed, a blue duvet, a reproduction painting of the Seine at night, a desk, and chair. Basic. Clean.
Aimée checked the desk—opened the drawers, ran her hands along the spindle legs—and behind the mirror’s beveled edges. No dust. Doubted she’d find anything of value here—especially after two weeks, a thorough cleaning, and probably a police search. Just as she was about to give up, her index finger encountered something sticky. Alert, she got down on her hands and knees. But it was just a cobweb thread. Using her penlight, she searched under the bed. Not even a dust ball. Disappointed, almost dizzy, she stood again. She’d hoped to find something to make this worthwhile.
“Amal, did you see anything out of the ordinary that day? Hear noises?”
“L’amour.” She shrugged. “They acted like rock stars . . . you know, tearing the room apart.”
Nothing. What had Aimée expected after several weeks? She sat on the bed, scanned the room again. The view from the window overlooked rue des Cinq Diamants. Across from her was a graffiti mural by Miss Tyk, the rebel tagger who had achieved iconic status and was now a cause célèbre in the art world.
“We want no trouble,” Amal said. “We keep a good name in the quartier—clean, discreet. If things get out of hand, our policy is tell the flics.”
In a way, she had.
“Merci, Amal. We’ll keep this between us. Great manicure.” Aimée handed her a card with an alias and the phone number for her answering service. “If you, or your family, remember anything else, give me a call.”<
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Maxence’s call came as Aimée hiked up the steep cobbled street in Butte-aux-Cailles, “hill of quails.” A maze, this hilltop neighborhood, like an eighteenth-century village, with some passages only wide enough for a cart.
“Reporting in on my surveillance mission, Aimée.” Maxence’s voice almost squeaked with excitement.
“D’accord, Maxence, see anything?”
Late-season yellow roses, swollen with their last blossoms, tumbled over a crumbling stone wall and perfumed the night air. Shadows from the streetlights filtered through the tree branches.
“Lili, the one you described, locked up the pâtisserie ten minutes ago. She entered a door around the corner at number fifty-three. A light’s on now in the room above it.”
“Anyone else?”
“Not yet. I’m standing in a doorway. Wait . . . A girl’s gone in . . . Can’t see her face . . . Non, now I can see. She looks half-Asian.”
Karine.
What better place to hide than in Chinatown?
“I’m en route,” she told Maxence.
She ran, waving at a taxi up at the corner.
Maxence huddled in the doorway. He was wearing a John Lennon cap and khaki fatigue jacket. “Should I call the flics?”
Catching her breath, Aimée panted, “The last ones to call.”
She scanned the layout of the building and dimly lit, narrow street. A few men stood smoking by the closed hardware shop. She and Maxence couldn’t stand here long before getting noticed.
“Call a taxi,” she said, rummaging for the lock pick set she kept in her blush case, which was somewhere in the bowels of her bag. “Have it wait on the corner.”
Maxence’s eyes bulged.
“But first you’ll shield me at the door, okay?”
With Maxence standing behind her, she started in on the lock of the door of the two-story building that backed the pâtisserie.
A scooter putted by, and Maxence jumped. Her fingers slipped. She took a deep breath. “Relax, Maxence,” she said. Tried again, concentrating. After inserting the tension wrench, she jiggled the Z-shaped pick to move the pins. She heard the lock click. “Follow the plan, okay?”
Once inside, she shone her penlight beam through a musty corridor, followed it to a postage-stamp sized courtyard lined by garbage bins. Steamy vapor came from pipe vents from the bakery’s oven.
She had to act quick. Another corridor ended in stairs up to the rooms over the bakery. Her collar stuck to her neck in the humidity. She listened for voices, heard a low murmur. For the second time, she used the tension wrench and jiggled the Z-shaped pick. Seconds later, she was inside.
Two women were standing in the stifling attic room, which was packed to the gills with hanging clothes and permeated by baking odors and cheap scent.
“Karine?” Aimée asked.
Karine, her cheeks hollower than they’d been in the photo, ran and crouched in the corner, looking terrorized. Lili grabbed a kitchen knife.
“Get out,” said Lili. “I told you not to follow me.”
Stupid again. Why had Aimée rushed this, put them on the defensive?
“Put the knife down, Lili.” Aimée lifted her hands. Willed her voice to calm. “I’m unarmed. Won’t touch either of you. Karine, I’m Aimée, a friend of Marcus’s uncle Éric. He needs to know what happened.”
Lili lowered the knife but didn’t let go.
Karine looked ready to spring for the window.
“Karine, there’s a taxi waiting at the corner. I’ll get you to safety.”
“She’s better off here,” Lili spat. “Whoever you really are.”
“A detective, as I told you. Please try to understand. Marcus’s uncle deserves to know what happened. And other people are in danger because of what was stolen.”
“Who is in danger?” Karine demanded.
“There was very sensitive information in the book they stole. But you know that. Look, the police are claiming Marcus was a druggie and that you . . .” Aimée knelt down to look Karine in the eye. “They’re claiming you’re a prostitute.”
“What?” said Karine.
“Look for yourself. It’s here in the police report. Page six.” As she took the police report from her bag, she pressed the on button on her digital recorder as quietly as she could. She opened the folder and paged through so Karine and Lili could see. Aimée watched Lili from the corner of her eye. Saw her set down the knife. Took an inner breath of relief.
Karine’s dark eyes narrowed in anger. “All lies. Marcus and I had been dating for a month.”
“It smells like a cover-up,” Aimée said. “The investigation’s shoddy. Someone has another agenda.”
“What do you mean, ‘agenda’?” Lili asked.
“I’m guessing someone involved in the police investigation wants the notebook,” Aimée said. “Do you know where it is?”
Karine’s expression was unreadable. “What notebook?”
“Marcus promised his uncle he would deliver a notebook,” Aimée said.
Karine shook her head. “I don’t know anything about a notebook.”
“Who came to the hotel room?”
Karine’s jaw trembled. “I don’t know.” She burst into tears, mumbled something to Lili in what must have been Khmer.
“What? Tell me so I understand.”
“Leave her alone,” said Lili. “I told you, they rented a hotel room. All of a sudden someone came in . . . Karine hid under the covers but heard a man threatening Marcus.”
Aimée turned to Karine. “You saw him, didn’t you? Describe him.”
“They drugged me. I came to as a taxi let me out at Parc de Choisy. I ran. Haven’t stopped.”
Karine was terrified; Aimée believed that much. But was Karine part of a setup? “Why didn’t you come forward?”
A bitter laugh. “You’re kidding, right? In our neighborhood, we don’t go to the flics. It brings more trouble.”
In every neighborhood, Aimée thought, but she kept her mouth shut. “You’re putting your own life at risk, but that’s your call,” she said. “Where did the notebook go?”
Again, tears. “What notebook?”
Did she really not know? Aimée couldn’t tell.
Karine rubbed her eyes. “The man kept asking, ‘Where is it?’ but I didn’t know what he was talking about. Marcus was a big kid, always hiding things. He had all kinds of stashes.”
“Stashes? Like drug stashes?” Had the kid sold dope after all? “Did he deal? Some kind of side business?”
“Marcus, drugs?” Karine said. Lili snorted, and Karine shook her head. “His uncle Éric spent a fortune on collectible fantasy merchandise, role-playing game things. Marcus pilfered stuff sometimes. His uncle never noticed. He’d hide it in the quartier—it was like a game to him. Then if his uncle didn’t miss it, he’d sell it. There’s a market for that, but it’s so stupid.”
“Where would he hide things?”
“I never knew or cared where.”
“Then you owe Marcus’s uncle the truth.” Aimée pulled out her phone. “My job’s done. You need to tell him.”
Karine wiped her tears away and seemed to gather herself. “Wait, I need a cigarette.” She stood, checking the pockets of her trench coat.
“Me, too,” said Aimée, going to the door, wishing it weren’t true. She needed to alert Maxence. She noticed a missed call from Babette on her phone. It was later than she’d realized. “I’ll come outside with you.”
But Karine didn’t follow her. Lightening-quick, Karine dashed to the bathroom and slammed the door behind her. Aimée rushed after her, rattling the old door handle until it finally turned open. The window was open, and Karine was gone.
Footsteps raced over the adjoining roof. Aimée stuck her head out the window in time to see a flash of Karine�
�s trench coat as she shimmied down a pipe to the courtyard.
“Merde.” She speed-dialed Maxence. “Karine’s escaped out the bathroom window over the roof. She’s wearing a trench coat.” She hung up and faced Lili. “Where’s she gone?”
“Like I’d tell you if I knew.” Lili put her face in her hands.
Aimée surveyed the room more closely. A carryall and a handbag sat in the corner.
“Karine’s just a kid,” Lili said. She was crying. “She needed my help. She begged me to let her stay. Now look what you’ve done. I never should have trusted you.”
Aimée had never wanted to get involved with this. Fed up now, she wanted to forget this whole thing. Why should she keep trying to help a stubborn kid who wouldn’t listen? She needed to get home; Babette was on overtime. What could she even find out now?
Where the notebook was.
Aimée grabbed the handbag and ran out of the apartment, down the stairs, and across the courtyard. Out in the narrow street, there was no sign of Maxence or Karine. Around the corner, she found Maxence sprawled on the cobbles, his face bleeding.
“Oh my God . . .” she said. “What happened?”
“I saw her!” Maxence said. “But she jumped on a scooter—it was waiting for her. Then someone tripped me.”
She helped him up. “You all right?”
Maxence grinned despite the cut on his face. “Didn’t get the license plate but caught a leopard tattoo on the scooter driver’s arm.” He noticed the handbag. “Hers?”
Aimée opened it to check. “She won’t get far without it.”
In the taxi, she called Éric’s number.
“I found her, Éric,” she said, thumbing through the handbag’s contents: a thin coin purse, a wadded-up fifty-franc note, a Métro pass in plastic chained to the zipper handle. Makeup and cosmetic samples. Change of underwear. A leaflet in Khmer from a takeout.
No cell phone. No ID.
“Then I lost her,” she said.
Deflated, Aimée stared at the Seine from her balcony, wondering if she’d really tried hard enough to catch Karine.
Yet she’d made good on her word and then some. She’d tracked Karine down. Asked for the truth, tried to help and get her to safety.
