by Cara Black
“Figured it out, have you?”
She nodded. “Léo was guilt ridden for years. After his dear Marie dies, he wants do the right thing, expose the corruption—can’t summon courage until Pierre kicks the bucket. But meanwhile, he’s dying.”
She stuck the notebook back in the Monoprix bag.
“Léo’s old school, detail oriented, a precise accountant, as we see,” she said. “He’d have kept the actual invoices, bank statements, receipts—I don’t know what—separate. He’d have backed up his entries and confession.”
“Safest place is a bank. To keep it secure in a vault, non? An accountant would do that.”
“True, he would have hidden this proof. But think of his generation, his experience. This was a man who survived a POW camp, the type who tried to escape. He would have picked someplace basic, elemental. A place someone could find without a key, a place you wouldn’t need a password for . . .”
“Alors, Leduc, so where are the bank statements and receipts for his entries?”
“Maybe he didn’t have time . . . was trying to . . .” She remembered Madame Livarot saying Léo came back to the Gobelins before he died. Aimée had been meaning to get back there and poke around. What had happened to that idea?
Getting locked up by the flics, Elodie’s kidnapping, the burner phone threats—zut—that’s what had happened.
Merde. She should have carved out the time.
Somehow.
Paging through Leo’s confession, Morbier snorted. “Moi, I could have written this fiction, a cheap novella sob story without meat on the bone.”
Aimée released the wheelchair’s brake, gritted her teeth.
“We need spoons,” she said.
René grunted as he piled Morbier’s wheelchair in the back seat of his car. His trunk was jam packed with computer equipment. Aimée paced in the tiny courtyard behind Ahmed’s shop, waiting for la Proc to answer her phone. Ring . . . ring . . . Then a series of clicks as her call transferred.
In as few words as possible, she summed up her request.
“You’re asking me to meet you on a Friday, my day off, Mademoiselle Leduc?” said Madame la Procureure, Edith Mesnard. In the background the clang of a pot, the metal flick as la Proc lit a cigarette, an inhale. “I’m not on call. Refer this to the duty procurer.”
“But I trust you, Madame la Proc. Plus you like adventure,” she said.
“Doing your best to intrigue me, mademoiselle?”
“I hope it’s working. This will rock la république.”
“My grandson’s coming for family lunch. That’s enough to rock my world today.”
Great.
“The on-call procurers wouldn’t be Lederer, Finchot, or Masile?” Aimée asked.
She heard a door close in the background. Quiet.
“How do you happen to have those names, mademoiselle?”
“If any of them are on duty, that’s a problem.”
“Quit the vague innuendos. What problem, and why?”
“The Hand.”
“Not all this again. Didn’t you wreak enough havoc?”
“I hate disturbing your day off, but you need to see this, Madame la Proc.”
“Sounds un peu dramatique.”
Aimée had to make her understand. “A young man died attempting to get this into your hands. Long story, but I have something that was meant for you. For your safekeeping.”
A pause. “Deliver whatever it is to me at le Tribunal’s intake office. Thirty minutes.” She paused. “Not my office.”
Morbier sighed. “You’re sure about this, Leduc?”
She’d set the Monoprix bag with Léo’s notebook in it on his lap. He sat in René’s front seat, a blanket over his legs.
“Got any other ideas?” She looked at her Tintin watch. “You need to hurry. You know what to say.”
A cell phone in his hand began to ring. “It’s Melac with something to tell you,” Morbier said after answering.
Her pulse jumped. “Has something happened?”
Forget wasting breath on recriminations; she needed to hear Chloé. She grabbed the phone.
“Melac, what’s happened?” she said into it. “Where’s Chloé?”
“Chloé’s happy,” said Melac before she could get more questions in. “Loves the garden here, entranced by the butterflies. She needs a diaper change.”
The sounds of splashing water—a fountain? And then the dulcet baby tones she would have recognized anywhere. Her heart juddered. “Let me talk to her.”
Melac laughed. “It’s Maman, Chloé.”
“Bonjour, ma puce,” she said, trying to keep calm.
Gurgling noises. Chloé’s soft, sweet laugh. Relief flooded through Aimée.
Safe. Her baby was safe. “Maman’s taking care of one more thing. Then—”
Melac’s voice cut in. “You found the damn thing, Aimée. Let the people whose job it is do what they should have been doing all along.”
“Can I talk to my . . . mother?” It still felt strange to say that. How her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. But she needed to apologize. To take the first step and start to deal with this ghost in her psyche.
Pause. “Sydney’s out. She’ll call you back.”
Gone. Again.
“Take the train up here . . . Join us.”
He thought her part was over.
But it wasn’t.
“I’ve got one more thing to do,” she said.
She handed Morbier back the phone. “No room for me, so I’ll take a taxi and meet you at le Tribunal,” she said. René turned the key in the ignition. She followed Ahmed as he opened the shop’s back courtyard gates to the street and guided René out of the narrow space.
Watched as René pulled out.
She could do this, couldn’t she? Had to do this. No choice.
She hailed a taxi and, instead of following them to le Tribunal, told the driver, “Les Gobelins, the back entrance at rue Berbier du Mets.” On the way, she pulled off the wig and unbuttoned the nurse’s uniform. “Keep your eyes on the road,” she told the taxi driver watching her in the rearview mirror, “or forget your tip.”
Beyond the high wall at the Gobelins’s back door, she could hear the gardeners’ rakes and warbling birdsong. The sun’s rays warmed the back of her neck. She passed the place where she’d shoved Cyril against the wall, where the flics had shown up and taken her to the commissariat. Now she pictured the small garden, the hedged path where she’d chased Cyril, the dye works and chapel behind.
“Excusez-moi, messieurs,” she shouted through the back door. After several attempts, she finally got one of the gardeners’ attention. The metal back door scraped open.
“This is not an entrance, mademoiselle. Go around to the front for the museum.”
She smiled. Determined to make her concocted story work. Showing a bit of leg wouldn’t hurt.
“My friend Olivia, the weaver, forgot a silk thread pattern,” she began, borrowing the name of the crying girl from the concierge loge. She promised to be in and out in five minutes—Olivia was desperate, blah blah—and finally promised to meet the gardener for an apéro later, traded phone numbers, assured him how thankful Olivia would be. And voilà, she found herself inside by the chapel.
The atelier complex hummed. She peeked inside the glinting windows of the weaving studio, then entered. Again, that smell of linen, the shushing sounds of wooden bobbins trailing silk threads through the heddle strands, the little clacks of the ivory-handled combs tamping down the warp. Weavers concentrated on the glowing colors on their massive looms. Madame Livarot’s work desk was vacant.
“Looking for Madame Livarot again?”
The woman who’d pinned her hair up with a chopstick sat at a high-warp loom.
“Oui, have I missed her
?”
“Retired.”
“Just like that?”
A shrug. “She’s a funny one.”
“Zut, but of course she left instructions for me,” said Aimée, making it up as she went along. “The information regarding Léo Solomon’s bequest in his wife Marie’s name.”
Another shrug. “At the office, maybe?”
She made a show of consulting her Moleskine, thumbing the pages. “Ah no, it’s about Léo Solomon’s old apartment. She’d arranged for me to view it. We’re planning a photo shoot, getting some history for the bequest.”
“No idea, desolée. His old apartment’s getting remodeled. See.” She pointed a wooden bobbin. “There’s someone going in the door of that building. Check with her.”
Aimée recognized Olivia, the crying young woman with love troubles from the gardien loge.
“Merci.”
Aimée crossed the cobbles again, her ankle starting to throb. Olivia had disappeared. Aimée remembered Léo’s apartment was on the third floor. Thick plastic sheeting covered the doorway and the old stone pavers of the landing. Inside, she found buckets of plaster half-dry, mixing sticks at half-mast. Old wood beams were stacked against the window, and everything smelled like paint. The rooms were gutted to the dark timbers and stone. The oak floorboards had been ripped up, exposing the crossbeams.
Nothing here.
Where had Olivia gone? She knew Madame Livarot and could shed some light, couldn’t she?
Aimée passed the plaster buckets and made her way downstairs, following the cool flagstones of the corridor to the cellar door. A wooden door pitted with age stood under a delicate Gothic-style lintel festooned with carved stone leaves.
A damp chill assailed her as she picked her way down the stone steps to the cellar. She took out her penlight and shone it. Rat turds.
She shivered, avoiding them and keeping close to the wall.
The corridor was half stone, half packed dirt—a huge underground storage space of vaulted stone with boxes upon boxes piled high. Aimée scanned the boxes for any kind of labels. In the rear, she saw old wooden ones marked with black writing.
“What are you doing here?”
Olivia stood loading boxes onto a hand truck. Dim socket lights hung from metal hooks, giving the cellar an eerie glow.
“Madame Livarot directed me to locate Léo Solomon’s documents,” she said. “It’s important to find them. Something to do with his wife’s bequest; I’m not sure of the details.” Not a complete lie. “I’m so glad you’re here. I don’t know where to start.”
“Wait, you were here the other day,” said Olivia, a sheen of perspiration on her upper lip. “But who are you?”
Aimée pulled out a card from her collection. “Aimée Leduc. My firm’s handling Léo Solomon’s legal matters. I’m here to pick up his documents—”
“Madame Livarot never told me anything about you or this,” Olivia interrupted.
“Forgot? Other things on her mind? Didn’t she just retire?” Aimée sensed something else going on here.
“Why would she send you and me both?” Olivia said suspiciously.
She was hiding something. Aiming for casual, Aimée smoothed down her pantsuit jacket. “Where did Madame Livarot tell you to look, Olivia?”
“How do you know my name?”
Stupid. “I’m not checking up on you.”
“Sounds like it. Sounds like you’re snooping around in things that don’t concern you.”
“Can you help me, Olivia?”
“I’m calling security.”
Not this again. She needed to enlist Olivia’s aid. “I’m here to fulfill Léo Solomon’s promise to his wife—Madame Livarot’s dear friend. Didn’t Madame Livarot keep his things hidden because of her loyalty to Marie?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Aimée saw it now. The old wooden wine box with faded black letters. She could just make out stalag iii-c.
Before Olivia could stop her, Aimée hurried over and moved the boxes on top of it to the packed-earth floor. Musty scents filled her nose.
“What are you doing?” Olivia asked.
Aimée started to pry the old hinges off with her Swiss Army knife so she could move the wooden lid.
“Olivia, Léo Solomon wanted his papers in the right hands. He wanted to do the right thing. Those were his last wishes.”
“You’re lying!”
“Madame Livarot cared for Léo. Wouldn’t she want his last wishes carried out? To make sure the truth comes out?”
“What truth?”
Aimée wedged the lid off. More musty scents.
She shone her penlight.
Empty.
Dismayed, she shook her head. No proof.
“See, you’re crazy,” Olivia said.
“I’m too late.” Aimée’s shoulders sagged in disappointment.
Olivia joined her. Sniffed. “That’s so bizarre. All the boxes I found were empty, too.”
Empty. Aimée wanted to kick something.
“Poor Madame Livarot,” said Olivia. “She called me this morning and said she’d retired. Just like that. Asked me to bring up the old boxes. She was so positive Marie’s things would be down here. There’s nothing.”
The timing of Madame Livarot’s sudden retirement, sending Olivia for “Marie’s things”—this meant something.
“The bequest isn’t even here,” Olivia said. “Old Léo was so adamant about it. It was all so weird . . . He came a few days before he died and begged Madame Livarot to take care of the donation.”
“Donation of what, Olivia?”
“Why, the spoons; he wanted her to donate his collection of spoons,” said Olivia. “I thought he’d lost his marbles.”
Aimée shoved each of the other wooden boxes with her foot. All empty except the last one. A metallic shaking.
She knelt down in the dirt and pried the lid off. The box emitted a smell of oxidized metal. Inside were twenty or thirty dented aluminum spoons, rusted with age. Léo’s memory box.
She imagined how the POWs had moved earth spoonful by spoonful in the freezing camp.
How Pierre had saved Leo’s skin, and Léo had paid for it the rest of his life. Now even in death, Pierre and the Hand won.
She shined her penlight wildly around the area, flashing it left and right, up and down. That was when she noticed the dirt. Reddish and packed in a distinct square under where the box had been.
She grabbed a rusting spoon, the flakes coming off in her hand, and started digging.
“What’s the matter with you?” Olivia asked.
“Grab a spoon, Olivia. Please help me.”
“You’re as crazy as the old man.”
“Léo’s secret’s buried here.”
Aimée’s phone trilled. She hit the answer button, put it on speakerphone so she could keep digging.
Maxence’s voice sounded far away. “Where are you, Aimée?”
Winded, she took a breath. Fine reddish dirt powdered the cuffs of her shirt, trailing up the jacket’s silk-lined sleeves. “Underneath Gobelins.”
“The burner phone rang. Should I answer?”
“Only if you can pinpoint where it’s coming from.”
“I’m trying. Hang up. I’ll call back.”
Olivia, now curious, joined in digging. The spoons scraped the dirt slowly into a mound. Deeper and deeper, small progress with each scoop. Aimée’s spoon hit something hard, and the handle broke off.
“I heard that,” said Olivia. “There’s something there.”
“Careful,” Aimée said, now scooping the dirt up with her bare hands. Dust rose in the close air.
Her fingers felt the outlines of a box. Breathing hard, she pulled, maneuvering it as Olivia scraped away the excess dirt.
Again, Aimée’s phone rang. She wiped her brow, hit speakerphone.
“Any luck, Maxence?” she said, keeping to her efforts with Olivia, tugging and pulling. Sweat dripped down her back. Finally they pulled out a grey metal file box.
“You’re by rue de Croulebarbe?” Maxence’s voice sounded tinny.
She tried jimmying the file’s lock, which had rusted shut, with her knifepoint. Tried again. Not a budge.
Then stood and kicked it.
“Did you hear me, Aimée?” Maxence said.
The rusted lock gave way and sagged.
“Could you trace it, Maxence?” she asked.
Garbled noises.
Aimée lifted the lid to a plethora of documents neatly ordered by file tabs: bank accounts, investments, trust management, employees, receipts, annual fees, offshore. Thick sections for each.
She opened the employee file. Scanned the beginning of the alphabet. Saw Éric Besson’s firm. Her jaw dropped.
“Aimée . . . there’s a problem,” Maxence said.
“I’ll say there’s a problem,” Aimée said. “Besson’s—”
“The caller’s near you,” interrupted Maxence.
She stiffened. Reached for her Swiss Army knife with her free hand. “Olivia?” She’d been so intent on reading the file she’d forgotten about Olivia.
No answer.
Aimée slapped the file back inside the box, had almost made it to her feet when an arm encircled her neck in a choke lock. She gasped, trying to breathe. Trying to jab at the attacker with her knife.
Her hands were grabbed, her wrists flex-cuffed behind her. Plastic bit into her skin. Her knife was whisked out of her hand, and she found herself unceremoniously plopped on the dirt. Dust swirling over the borrowed Ungaro pantsuit.
Her chin quivered as she looked up. Her eyes brimmed with tears. “You? And you let me do all the work.”
Xavier shrugged, grinding her cell phone to bits with his heel. “Not a gentlemanly thing to do. Apologies.”
“Where’s Olivia?”
“Unconscious. She’ll live, if you behave.”
It all made sense now. He’d cozied up to René, who’d sung his praises. Brilliant. Gets things done. A fixer. The puzzle pieces fit. A perverted puzzle.
“Doubt it,” Aimée said. “The fixer leaves no traces.”
