Murder in Passy

by Cara Black

  “He’s got Robbé.”

  Aimée’s heart sank. She was in over her head. All their heads. For a moment she weighed working with Valois and informing the EPIGN, people she didn’t trust farther than her little finger.

  But doing that would link Irati to ETA, the kidnapping, Agustino’s murder, the stolen documents. A barbed-wire tangle of complications. And might get her no further toward finding the murderer or the princess.

  “What does he want?”

  “He called Robbé ‘insurance.’” Irati folded her arms over her chest, rocked. “You see, he told me if talked to anyone, or someone followed me.… ”

  “So you’d get further implicated?” She held the shiny blue virgin passport. “ETA ettaras robbed the Imprimerie Nationale van, killed a flic. They kept their stash at Agustino’s. I found this in his atelier.”

  “I don’t know. That’s all he said. I heard Robbé shouting. A scream.”

  She covered her face with shaking hands.

  Aimée’s new phone trilled. She went into the salon to take the call. The bird, quiet for the moment, pecked at the cuttle bone in the cage.

  “See anything, René?”

  “I hear something on rue Copernic,” he said. “The car door’s opening.”

  Her heart jumped.

  “Dim image, distorted pixels,” said René. “All sepia, dark. The streetlight’s far away. Talking. No response. I think it’s a cell phone conversation. But the viewfinder’s out of range, just catches dark movement … wait, like an arm reaching into the car.”

  “Can you make out words?”

  All of a sudden the bird burst into a shrill “Leaves of Autumn” refrain.

  “Wait, I heard the same voice two minutes earlier on the street. I’m recording so I can clean up the audio … now a damn truck.… ”

  “But he’s in the car? Driving away?”

  “Non. A head, but I can’t make it out.… Who’s singing in the background?”

  “A damn parrot,” she said. “Call me back.”

  Frustrated, she wanted to kick the bird’s cage and ruffle more than his feathers. Instead, she covered his cage with the cloth; silence reigned, apart from Irati’s muffled sobbing.

  “Irati, tell him the truth,” she said. “You’re being watched, trailed. Would he want you to lead them right to him? What does he want from you?”

  Irati averted her eyes. She was keeping something back.

  “Do you want Robbé alive?”

  She nodded. “I don’t have any other choice but to do what he says.”

  “We all have choices. Just not necessarily the ones we want.”

  “Easy for you to say.”

  “The EPIGN want me to work for them. I can easily lean out the window and say, ‘Up here.’ Should I? They’re a trained elite assault unit that tallies the enemy body count as success and victims as collateral damage. Otherwise, by yourself, you’re depending on this man who killed your mother and Agustino.”

  “How do you know he killed Maman? Why?”

  “I know Morbier didn’t. He was meeting an informer on the Paris outskirts.” She expelled air from her mouth. “Cooperating with Txili gives neither Robbé nor the princess a shot in hell of living more than an hour and a half.”

  Aimée took the encryption manual from her bag, thumbed to the blank back page.

  “So, three choices: the big boys with big toys, or you on your own playing to Txili’s drum, or me,” she said. “Me, I guarantee you’ll have a shot. Maybe just one, but that’s more than zero. So you choose, Irati.”

  “You think they’re dead no matter what, don’t you?”

  “Going by the statistics so far, a wise assumption.”

  Irati’s face crinkled in pain.

  “What’s the point now? He’ll get to us. I know it. Robbé’s diabetic. His insulin—”

  “Do you have it?” Aimée interrupted.

  Irati’s head bobbed. “I always carry extra for him, in case.”

  Aimée pushed the damp hair from Irati’s tear-stained face.

  “Then we have to get it to him, n’est-ce pas?” she said. “It’s a good bargaining tool. I have an idea. Do you want to hear it?”

  Irati wiped her face with her sleeve, nodded.

  Aimée took her pencil and started writing.

  “First you’ll tell him this,” she said, “but in your own words.”

  Irati stared at Aimée’s encryption manual. Nodded again.

  Now she had her.

  “After that, you’ll tell me about Robbé.”

  * * *

  MADAME DE BOUCHER made a tsk-tsk sound. “I saw the scum. Time for you to escape.”

  Madame stood at the hall armoire, one hand on her ebony walking stick, her other selecting a coat for Irati. She took a seventies belted checked-wool coat—never worn, by the look of it. Sniffed. “A little mothball odor. Not bad.” She handed it to Irati with an Hermès scarf.

  “This way,” Madame de Boucher said. “We used it during the war.”

  Hadn’t been used since, Aimée figured from the rotting timbers, speckled mold, and dirt-filmed broken glass in the back stairs. Madame opened a cobwebbed cupboard, tapped her walking-stick tip inside. Creaking and groaning, the cupboard moved to reveal a blacked-over skylight. “I keep it oiled. Les Fritz never found this. Good thing, eh, you never know.”

  Oiled for more than fifty years. Amazing.

  “Too bad it didn’t save my brother. Aaah, but that’s another story.”

  Aimée twisted the handle and pushed. The slanted skylight gave a centimeter. “Harder,” Madame said.

  Using her knee, she wedged it open enough to squeeze through. Cold night air and pigeon feathers met her.

  “Follow along the roof line to the last building.”

  “And then?”

  “Find the blacked-out skylight, wedge it open with this.” Madame handed Irati a hammer, then tied the Hermès scarf around Irati’s head. “Bon courage.”

  Aimée’d need more than that, considering the slick blue roof tiles, a multi-story drop, and a shaking Irati.

  She handed Irati the end of her tied scarves. “Hold on. Don’t look down. No matter what.”

  Algae-scented wind from the Seine gusted over her skin, making her lapels fly up. Beyond lay a vista of glittering pinprick lights as she crawled, edging along the narrow rooftop. Caked pigeon droppings, crackling twig birds’ nests, and crumbling brick came back on her fingers. She took deep breaths, cold air slicing into her lungs, her gaze focused on the next rooftop. Then the next, inching her way forward along the narrow ridge.

  Skittering stucco clumps slid down the roof tiles. She had to keep breathing, keep going, aiming for the dark misted outline of the last roof. Trying to imagine a young Madame de Boucher doing this.

  “Almost there, Irati.”

  No answer. She tugged the scarf and felt the slack.

  “Irati?” She turned her head.

  A mistake.

  Her foot slipped. She scrabbled her fingers over the damp tiles. Her hands and knees were coated with dirt, and she couldn’t get a good grip. She felt a sliver of panic, then saw Irati’s outstretched hand. But too late. She slid down the slick roof.

  Frantic, she reached out for something, anything, and caught a metal bar. Grabbing it with all her might, she held on and dug her pointed toes into a metal rim.

  Her slide halted; she took a breath. The distant reverberation in the sky grew louder, turning into the thupt of a helicopter. Closer and closer. The sweeping searchlight of the helicopter illuminated the stair-step chimney pots on the roofs of houses on the next street.

  Any minute, the search beam would catch them like flies on the roof.

  “Hurry, Irati, keep going.”

  Gritting her teeth, she pulled herself up by the edge of the tiles and metal bar to the other roof. Thank god the Doliprane had kicked in. With each breath, her heart thumped. So did her bag against her hip. An insistent trill was coming from i
t. Her phone.

  She saw a cracked, blackened skylight with its broken wood frame before her. Irati had forced it open. Aimée climbed down, her shoulders heaving, reaching an old iron walkway surrounding a cathedral-ceilinged atelier.

  “Let’s go, Aimée.”

  She reached for her phone, finding that René had left a message. That could wait. She punched in a number.

  “What are you doing?” Irati’s feet clattered down the spiral staircase ahead. “Calling our taxi.”

  * * *

  “WHERE TO NOW?” said the taxi driver.

  “Down avenue Mozart a few blocks,” she said. “We’ll let my friend off during the red light, then keep going, compris?”

  “You’re not the first passenger to ask that, ‘Monsieur,’” he said. “Mind if I smoke a cigar?”

  “Go ahead.”

  He lit up, puffing on a cigar, sending sweet acrid fumes around the car. Then it hit her. The cigarillo box in the car, the burning cigarillo. “Txili smoked cigarillos, non?”

  Bars of light and shadow alternated on Irati’s tight-lipped face in the speeding taxi.

  “Coughing, and he still smoked,” said Irati. She patted the insulin kit in Aimée’s pocket. “You remember that Robbé needs this shot now.”

  “Don’t worry. And you?”

  Irati unfolded the sheet torn from Aimée’s encryption manual, her big eyes wide with fear. “What if Txili … ?”

  “No ifs. At first he’ll refuse and give you a hard time. But he’ll give in. He has to. Just keep to the plan we discussed.”

  “The plan, of course.” Irati spoke as if convincing herself.“What’s Plan B?”

  “Plan B?”

  “Our backup plan. You said we had a plan B.”

  She did? At the corner, Aimée saw the light turning yellow. She put Sebastian’s key ring in Irati’s shaking hands.

  “Stay in the apartment, Irati. Wait for my call.”

  “But what’s our Plan B?” Irati insisted.

  She had to come up with something.

  “Go on the laptop: password GUIMARD. Do a search for Txili, Basque, and ETA sabotage. Get background.”

  Irati jumped out. Her seventies coat flashed among the parked bicycles on the pavement. The light turned green, and then Irati disappeared through the doorway.

  Aimée put in her earbuds and hit CALLBACK. “Catch his face, René?”

  “Why didn’t you answer?”

  “My hands were full.… ” Little did he know.

  “You missed him.”

  Merde.

  “He spoke with three men,” René said. “All of them grunting and hauling bags from the Mercedes trunk.”

  “To where?”

  “Looks like across the street, but on the map I don’t see any buildings, any address. Just a dark spot.”

  “But that’s the reservoir.” They were hauling the Imprimerie Nationale stash beneath the reservoir. Their backup location, after Agustino’s atelier. Where they’d keep the princess. And she’d stood right in front of it. Hadn’t she seen the workers in the café, the waiter complaining there were more of them?

  “René, hack into the Eau de Paris site. Access the Passy reservoir architectural plans,” she said. “I need to know the layout in five minutes.”

  She leaned forward in the taxi. “Place Victor Hugo. Same café and wait, s’il vous plaît.”

  By the time the taxi let her off, René had informed her he’d entered the Eau de Paris logistics plan.

  She ran, her earbud cord bouncing, down rue Copernic, keeping to the wall lining the reservoir. Getting closer, she saw no one at the Mercedes. She crossed the street. Tried the car doors, the trunk. Locked.

  What to do but wait? She didn’t have long. Voices, footsteps came from behind the green metal door notched in the wall next to the EAU DE PARIS sign. The circular NO PARKING DAY AND NIGHT sign blinked. Scraping noises. She hunched down behind a Fiat not a yard away.

  “Talk to me, René,” she whispered. “I hear them inside.”

  “Still searching, Aimée. Stands to reason one of them works there,” René said.

  “More than one, René. How many levels in the reservoir?”

  “Looks like it’s several stories high, with a vaulted underground containing the valves and the control station,” he said. “Built by Belgrand, the ‘father of our sewers,’ in 1868. On top are three uncovered pools. There are five in all, fed from the Seine and Montsouris reservoir, non potable water used to wash streets and for the parks.”

  She wished he’d quit the history lesson.

  “So how can I get in?”

  More scuffling inside the green metal door that must lead to the interior, the underground, the pools.

  “Attends un moment,” René said, “the plans take time to load.”

  She heard a man’s low voice, accompanied by the scraping of metal on stone. The green door opened. A dim figure in overalls scanned the street and darted past the Fiat in front of her.

  Now or never.

  She ran and slipped inside before the door closed.

  A dark cobbled alley with an old-fashioned gatehouse stood to her right. Potted geraniums on the steps. Voices. The orange glow of a cigarette tip down the alley. The smell of water. She slipped behind a planter trailing ivy on the gatekeeper’s wall, crouched under the window shutter, hit MUTE on her phone.

  Waiting. They were waiting. The green door scraped open. “Merde . . . forgot to lock it,” the man in overalls muttered.

  His back to her, he inserted a round key, locking the door. She saw a bag under his other arm, the neck of a wine bottle peeking out.

  Now inside, how would she get out? Sharp narrow green metal prongs stretched above the door, along the wall. But she’d worry about that later.

  Then he disappeared in the dark. She heard a long belch, his footsteps stumbling on the cobbles. “Zut. …“

  The rest she couldn’t hear. Drinking. Thank god for small mercies; it would dull his reaction time.

  She kept to the shadows, guided by his footsteps. Ahead lay a lighted cobbled space fronted by a second green metal double door, cove-shaped, built into the stone wall. Brown leaves rustled in the overhanging tree. An Eau de Paris van was parked on the side.

  She turned off MUTE on her cell. “I’m in. The gatehouse is behind me. There’s a door in a wall. Talk to me, René.”

  “Looks like a control center inside, a matrix of water pipes on the second level,” said René. “Minimal workforce, according to this. Most of the control’s automated, runs itself.”

  “Where’s the storage?” That’s where they’d hide the stash, keep the princess.

  “I see A1 and A2 maintenance facilities at ground level, tunnel A; that’s the first left.”

  She’d start there. “And a back exit?” He told her before she hung up. But first she had to get in. Now one of the coved doors stood ajar. Light slanted over the cobbles as the three figures René had mentioned pulled something over their heads. One checked his watch, murmured into a cell phone, and clicked it shut.

  Work helmets? she wondered, kneeling behind the van. Then she recognized the black ski masks. Her hand shook. She caught her bag just before she dropped it.

  She stilled her shaking hand in her pocket. On the bright side, if they were hiding their identities, the princess must still be alive: they hadn’t killed her. Yet.

  Forty-five minutes to go.

  She made out a long row of lights like a seam, punctuating a vaulted stone ceiling trailing down a tunnel.

  Two of the men entered it. The other paced outside under the tree branches, checking his phone. Of course, she realized, there would be no phone reception inside. Bad news; she couldn’t keep in contact with René. But neither could Txili call from within. He’d wait nearby, negotiating with the father. He’d use Robbé somehow to offer proof that the princess was alive. That’s where Irati came in.

  She tried the van door. Locked. She needed a distraction. She
felt around. No loose gravel. Just a hose reel mounted on a bracket in the stone. She crawled, inching forward to reach for the nozzle and turn the spigot handle.

  The mec stood under the branches, drinking from the bottle every so often. She counted on that delaying his reaction time. She turned the spigot handle as hard as she could, heard a slight rumble but saw not a drip. She’d have to let the pressure build up.

  She pulled back behind the van, waited until he took another swig, grabbed the hose nozzle, unscrewed it, and aimed. The force of the cold water blast sent him, stumbling, against the wall. “Oie … what the?” he shouted. She directed the spray against his arms. Then he slipped and the bottle fell.

  If she didn’t work fast, the others would hear—if they hadn’t already. With her other hand, she grabbed the bottle and hit him over the head. Then again.

  She screwed the nozzle to reduce the water flow to a trickle. Reached for the key ring and cell phone in his pocket. She dried off the phone with her sleeve. Punched in René’s number. Busy.

  Merde.

  She couldn’t wait. Inside the tunnel, she veered to the left, passing a series of coved vaulted arches. Moist cool drafts of air hit her face. Then she heard screams.

  Wednesday Night

  “MY RANK CARRIES privileges, eh, Pollard?”

  Morbier jerked his thumb at the warden’s desk in the dimly lit room, smaller by half than his office in the Commissariat. A subterranean room, dank and pervaded by the wet-wool smell in the adjoining coatroom. Part of le Dépôt’s underground warren leading to the Tribunal. A place he’d avoided at all costs until now.

  “Rank?” Pollard, the police union lawyer, shot him a grim smile and motioned to the wood bench as he took the chair. “Count yourself blessed I noticed my name on your IGS docket hearing tomorrow. No notification came to me, an unusual IGS sabotage tactic.” Middle-aged, with thinning blond hair and a suit jacket straining at the middle, Pollard set his briefcase on the stone floor. “My brother-in-law let me ‘borrow’ his desk. ‘Unofficially,’ like everything you and I say here.”

  Tomorrow. He couldn’t stand another night, much less another day, down here.

  “Rumor’s circulating that you’re uncooperative, Morbier.” Pollard removed his wire-framed glasses, studied them, then wiped the right lens with a tissue. “Quite a handful. And at your age.”