Murder in Saint Germain

by Cara Black

  “Bosniak?”

  “Muslim background, born in Bosnia. My family, you know, it’s like so many mixed families in my village. We never care. But then Tito dies. The politicians come.” Bartok gave a long sigh. “Neighbors turn on neighbors, Bosnians and Serbs who grow up together. How can they stir such hate when the mosques and churches are right next to each other?” He shook his head. “We marry each other; no cultural divides until Milošević, his greed, his myth of Greater Serbia. But then all the stockades; the UN food workers black-market, you know; they put the profit in their pockets.”

  Jean-Marie had said as much.

  “Most people, like us, we never want this senseless fighting.”

  “So you’re saying, you give Balkan men a chance for a job . . .”

  He nodded. “And it works or doesn’t. Mirko didn’t.”

  “How?”

  He paused. Diesel exhaust from a bus filled her throat. The light turned green, and he took off. She ran to keep up with him.

  “Like how you say . . . place-holding?”

  “Holding a place in what way, Bartok?”

  They’d reached the half circle in front of the Odéon-Théâtre. A cat stretched on the tiles of the resto La Méditerranée under Cocteau’s logo.

  “I mean, it’s cover, you know. Right away I understand he’s connected.”

  Bartok’s phone rang. And then he was speaking in a language she didn’t understand and hurrying back the way they came.

  She scurried after him, checking her own phone. Melac had left a message saying to meet in the park in half an hour. She heard Chloé’s cooing in the background, and her heart warmed.

  So glad she was only ten minutes away.

  Bartok turned down rue Monsieur-le-Prince. She found him in the first café on the left at the counter, still on his phone, beckoning her inside. Nicotine-stained walls, a browned mirror with business cards stuck to it behind the counter, and a sleeping corgi sprawled sausage-like on the chipped tile. The place looked like those cafés she remembered accompanying her father to as a little girl. A place where he knew the owners, followed up a clue as she drank chocolat chaud.

  Bartok had ordered an espresso, its steam coiling above the zinc counter. The older woman behind the bar had a helmet of tight grey curls, the type of cat-eye glasses that were popular in the sixties, a cigarette hanging from her mouth, and a questioning look in her eyes.

  “I’ll have the same,” said Aimée. “Merci.”

  Bartok slipped his phone into his pocket. “Désolé, supplies didn’t arrive; burst water pipe; the joists full of rot . . .” He sipped. “There’s always something.”

  “Who’s Mirko connected to?”

  An old fan blew hot air. The corgi snorted awake, opening his big brown eyes. A second later closed them again.

  “He’s protected,” Bartok said. “Everywhere it’s the same. You’re connected, and then you’re protected.”

  His words resonated with what she’d heard from Jean-Marie.

  “It’s all about who you know, who you can help, who can help you down the rue.”

  “Getting favors owed to you, you mean?”

  He lifted his shoulders. He’d gotten the Gallic shrug down perfectly. “Or it’s what you know that someone needs, or what you hold over them. Mademoiselle, I don’t read you as naïve.”

  “Maybe I’m confused as to why a Serbian war criminal’s protected,” she said. Downed the espresso.

  Bartok threw down a five-franc coin. Leaned forward to kiss the woman behind the bar on both cheeks. “Louise, if I weren’t married . . .”

  She grinned. “You’d wine and dine my daughter, if I had one. Go with God, Bartok, and my disposal valve’s clogged when you have time.”

  They stood outside in the shade of la Maison d’Auguste Comte, a museum and former home of the positivist philosopher, Aimée remembered from a school trip.

  Bartok took her hand. His calluses rubbed her thumb. “No one accuses me of being intellectual—me, I never finish school. But I read people, mademoiselle. Have to. Developed that thing in my gut and go by what it tells me. Sometimes, I just know.”

  There was more; she knew it.

  “After Mirko was with me two days, I knew. Bad news.”

  “Did you ever hear where he went?”

  Bartok let go of her hand. Looked both ways. “You never heard this from me. In fact, you never heard this, okay?”

  “I promise.”

  He leaned closer as if the walls had ears.

  “He was in arms, munitions from Dravić. A man whose father was Ustaše.” He said it close to a whisper.

  “Ustaše?”

  “Ustaše were the fascist, nationalist Nazi Croats during the war. They run their own concentration camps. Their Jasenovac complex was a hell.”

  “But what does that have to do with Mirko?”

  “The father’s dead. Last year Dravić, the son, an arms dealer, dies in a shootout in Kotor. Those are the kind of people Mirko is connected to, comprends?”

  “You’re saying that Mirko had connections with a big-deal Croatian arms dealer. Maybe took over his business?”

  He sucked in air. “More or less.”

  Could this relate to Mirko’s ties to the elusive Gourmelon? The mistake? Protected, but by whom?

  “Bartok, one more question, please. Do you remember him as a thinker, a planner, or more of a thug, unsophisticated?”

  A siren wailed in the distance.

  “Eh, that’s a long time ago,” Bartok said.

  “But Mirko made an impression on you. Didn’t you say you can read people?”

  Bartok shrugged. “Street-smart, that’s what I remember. Nondescript yet savvy. I’d say he is all of these. I think he use working with me as a cover, then move on. When I hear who he is connected to, it make sense. Make me glad he moves on.”

  She walked and thought. Walking cleared her head and helped the pieces settle. Sometimes even fit them together.

  From Bartok, she’d gleaned . . . what? That Mirko had had connections to arms dealers—that he’d been protected. Things she’d already known.

  Right now she needed to check in with the office before she met Melac and Chloé at the park.

  René answered. “Nothing new so far. What about you?”

  “Can you put me on speakerphone?”

  She updated them on her visit to the rectorate and her talk with Bartok.

  “So Mirko knew the area,” said René, his voice tinny, “spoke passable French.”

  “I’m looking up the arms dealer, Dravić.” Saj’s voice came over the line.

  Jean-Marie piped in. “When Robert returns my call, I’ll ask him if he knows of Dravić.”

  “Ask him why your team would be targeted here in Paris. Why now? We don’t know if someone else is behind Mirko. All we have are questions.”

  No answers.

  “Attends,” said René. “He had the opportunity and the means. He knows the quartier. That’s if he’s alive. Maybe it’s a simple case of revenge. Wipe your team off the earth because you hunted him down and saw proof of his crimes?”

  “But he was reported dead,” said Saj. “Why risk being discovered to come back here?”

  There was more to it, and she didn’t know what.

  “Gourmelon, Mirko’s contact, who engineered Karadžić’s escape and facilitated murky arms deals . . . According to Robert, he’s gone to ground,” said Jean-Marie. “Alors, as Saj says, why would Mirko chance it if he were alive?”

  And how long would the fingerprints take?

  They were no further than before.

  A click indicating another call. Serge with good news? Or Serge apologetic that he’d reconsidered, gotten cold feet, gotten called to another case? She could imagine a hundred scenarios.

/>   “I’ll call you back,” she said.

  But it was an unknown number. She glimpsed Chloé across the gravel path at the Jardin de la Roseraie sandboxes. Her heart melted, as it always did. She waved. Melac, in the sandbox with Chloé, looked up, took Chloé’s chubby fist, and together they waved back.

  She wanted to ignore her phone. Wanted to join them and play in the sand. Share ice cream with Chloé and her father. They formed a slice of heaven in her line of vision.

  The phone stopped ringing.

  It rang again immediately. She couldn’t ignore it. Maybe she should have.

  “Oui?” she said.

  “Okay, mystery woman, I asked myself why you wore a disguise and wig in the hottest part of the day,” said Loïc Bellan, “and why la Proc has it in for you.”

  Of all people. Of all times.

  “I can’t talk now, Bellan,” she said.

  “Then a professor at the Beaux-Arts is hospitalized, the directrice steps down, and la Proc takes an interest in my investigation.”

  “What investigation?”

  “A Hague war crimes investigator’s defenestration on rue Servandoni.”

  Erich Kayser. Her blood ran cold. She remembered Bellan talking to the woman in the framing shop.

  Now it made sense. The fact that he worked in DGI now meant he was part of counterterrorism and the “big boy” investigation near le Sénat. And who knew what else? He was looking for her. Join the crowd, she almost said.

  Perspiration collected behind her shaking knees.

  “Lo and behold, I get some good news,” said Bellan. “Some fingerprints arrive in my email, and zip, it’s an auto-generated match to someone I don’t even know.”

  So Serge and her contact had made good on what she’d asked them to do. A brief second of relief. Had the fingerprints on one of the Orangina bottles matched Mirko’s?

  “Et alors?” she said.

  “Why do I think it’s got you all over it?” he said. “I think you should tell me the story, and I need to listen.”

  “You give me too much credit, Bellan.”

  But now she’d need him for this plan to work.

  Chloé sent sand flying with her shovel. Melac wiped his eyes, brushed the sand off Chloé.

  “Aimée, Aimée,” Loïc Bellan was saying. “Talk to me, please.”

  Chloé’s little cries erupted as Melac lifted her up.

  “Is that . . . Jean-Claude’s grandchild I hear?” Bellan asked.

  If only Jean-Claude could have seen her. Aimée pushed that thought aside. “Bellan, tell me whom the fingerprints belonged to.”

  “You’ll make it worth my while?”

  She tapped her sandaled toe. “I’m waiting.”

  “Tedsolovic Nowak.”

  Her shoulders sagged with disappointment. “Who?”

  “You might know him by one of his other names, Mirko Vladić.”

  Alive. Mirko was alive. She made her legs move. “I’ll call you later.”

  “Non, non, meet me at your office in ten minutes.”

  “Make it forty if you want to land a big fish.”

  Fifteen minutes later she’d given Chloé a bottle, hummed a lullaby, and pushed the stroller until her little coos turned into snores.

  “Why don’t we walk through the garden?” Melac suggested. His sunglasses hid his eyes.

  “I’ve got to rush back to work.”

  “What? I planned this afternoon since you said—”

  “Complications came up, Melac. Désolée.”

  She parked the stroller by the sandbox. Set the brake with her toe. Her gaze caught on a drawing in the sand—the outline of a mouse wearing a crown drawn in deft strokes. Familiar. Oh so familiar.

  The story she’d loved as a child—Emil, the mouse who lived in the Louvre.

  But Emil wasn’t from a children’s book.

  Now the realization came crashing down on her. Why Melac’s mother had seemed so familiar to her—the woman hadn’t resembled Melac. Aimée’s mouth dried; her stomach was queasy. If she’d paid attention, she should have recognized her despite the makeup, disguise, wig. The odd accent. Put it together.

  The bile rose in her stomach and she almost threw up.

  Emil, the story her mother had made up and illustrated with drawings. Just for her. The mother who’d abandoned her.

  And it stunned her like a punch in the chest.

  She spun around. Saw the woman sitting on the bench in the shade of the roses. She looked thin, unwell under the makeup.

  “I thought you’d . . .” Aimée’s breath caught.

  Her mother.

  “Why now?” Aimée took a breath, sat down.

  “I wanted to see Chloé, touch her. Like you, I wish Jean-Claude could have seen his granddaughter.”

  All Aimée’s childhood pain welled up—nights looking out the window hoping her mother would walk across the bridge. Aimée wanted to hurt her, make her pay.

  But she’d never been this close to her mother since she was eight years old. Caught that whiff of muguet, lily of the valley, the same fragrance she remembered her mother wearing. Something shifted inside of Aimée.

  “Selfish of me, I know,” said her mother.

  She felt sorry for this woman—imagined her life as lonely on the run. How sad to think of all she’d missed.

  “I’ll never leave Chloé, ever,” Aimée said. “Not like you left me.”

  A downward flick of the eyes, and then her mother’s gaze met hers straight on.

  “Your father taught you the important things in life. Me, I discovered them too late.” Sydney reached over to touch Aimée’s arm lightly. “Or have I?”

  “You want in on our life?” Aimée wanted to pull back. Couldn’t. “What right do you have? Why lie? Make him lie for you?”

  Melac, the liar, was pushing the stroller toward the fountain. Giving them time alone?

  “Don’t blame him,” Sydney said. “It’s safer this way, incognito. I explained the situation. He agreed.”

  “What are you talking about?” Aimée asked.

  “Morbier’s dying. No one can protect you anymore except Melac.”

  “Protect me from what?”

  “Think of Chloé, Aimée.”

  She pulled away. Anger battled with tears. “You’re still wanted. Up to your old tricks. Don’t pull me into this. I won’t play the victim.”

  “For years, I’ve kept you out of this.” That accented voice stirred a strange sense of familiarity inside Aimée. “But I know things about the Hand, those in power who murdered your father.”

  Hadn’t Aimée taken care of them? Caught and exposed them? “But it was Morbier.”

  “You really should pay attention, Amy.” The American way she said “Amy” made Aimée feel eight years old. “It’s bigger than that. So much bigger.”

  Her skin crawled. “So that’s whose been watching me?”

  Alert, Sydney sat forward, pulled out her cell phone. “Who do you mean?”

  “Don’t play with me.”

  Sydney murmured something into her phone as she scanned the garden. Stood. “You’ve been followed. But not by anyone interested in me.”

  Mirko.

  Aimée looked over her shoulder.

  Green, dappled leaves; couples strolling; children.

  Sydney slipped something into Aimée’s hand. “Read it, and destroy.”

  “Like I should believe anything you say?”

  A click came from Sydney’s bag. The unmistakable snick of a pistol’s safety sliding off.

  “A gun in your handbag?”

  “We need to work together on this, Amy,” she said. “Call Melac, and tell him to take Chloé to that address. Find a taxi in front of le Sénat and lose your tail.”

&nbs
p; “And you?” Her voice choked. She couldn’t help it.

  “We pretend this never happened.”

  Aimée felt a warm hand on hers. A squeeze.

  Sydney disappeared behind the trees. Leaving, as she always did. Aimée’s hand trembled as she punched in Melac’s number.

  “Listen, I’ve been followed,” she said.

  She told Melac what to do.

  For once, he didn’t argue.

  “I don’t know who’s following me, but there’s a chance he knows Suzanne’s place.”

  “What?”

  “Explanations later. I’ll meet you as soon as I get things for Chloé.” She gave him the address on the paper, the door code, memorizing them as she recited them. “This is safest.”

  “For now,” said Melac and hung up.

  •••

  She took the path along the back of the Musée du Luxembourg, her heart almost thudding out of her chest. She forced herself to keep a steady pace, tagging along close behind a couple and then mingling among the people at the narrow exit on the side of the museum.

  No taxis.

  She pulled out the card she’d gotten from Monsieur Poncelet, her taxi driver from the other day, and called him. She joined a group assembling for a guided tour, tried to blend in, and kept her eye on rue de Vaugirard.

  A Taxi Bleu.

  “Good thing I had a fare nearby,” Poncelet said. “Life treating you better today?”

  A murderous Serbian war criminal on the loose and out for her blood, her daughter’s safety to worry about? Not to mention her deadbeat spy mother turning up out of the blue?

  “It’s complicated.” She slipped two hundred-franc notes by the gearbox. “You’re going to lose whoever’s trailing me. He might be in a car, or on a bicycle—maybe on foot.”

  “You mean a tag team, like when the flics trade off to avoid suspicion?”

  He watched too much télé.

  “Close enough,” she said. “No chase scenes, though.”

  She outlined her plan. The hot air whipped in through the rolled-down window. “So keep your meter off. I’m engaging you for a couple of hours. D’accord?”

  “À votre service.” He fiddled with the meter. “I’ll tell my boss it jammed.”

  The artists’ squat, a graffitied, pitted stone hôtel particulier, had avoided the wrecking ball. Not for much longer, Aimée figured, in this desired chunk of real estate. Hôtel de Choiseul-Praslin, built by an aristocrat on the old road to Versailles, had become the National Savings Bank, then a postal museum that was later taken over by artist squatters. Great parties, Aimée remembered.