Murder at the Lanterne Rouge

by Cara Black

  Diesel fumes lingered like a fog in the narrow canyon of street between the blackened stone facades. Aimée walked along the medieval gutter, a worn groove puddled with melted slush, down a passage to the next street. Here, roll-down aluminum shuttered the shop fronts. The old, faded sign of a printing press appeared above a wall plaque commemorating a member of the French Resistance, Henri Chevessier, shot by the Germans in 1943. A lone pigeon pecked at soggy bread crumbs near a drain. A forgotten islet of quiet.

  Rusted metal filagree covered the dusty glass in the water-stained door. Aimée located No. 14 and read the nameplate. Samour/Samoukashian lived on the third floor. A married couple? Dread filled her as she thought of a grieving widow.

  She kept her leather gloves on as she climbed the steep, unheated steps. Chipped plaster, scuffed baseboards, and sagging landings in between floors in the old tenement testified to the passing of centuries. Her breath frosted in the air. She needed to swim more laps in the pool and forego macaroons, she realized, breathless.

  The third-floor door stood ajar. Alarm bells sounded in her head. She wished she had her Beretta, but it was home in her spoon drawer. Then smells of frying garlic reached her. Her stomach growled.

  “Allô?”

  “Entrez,” a woman’s quavering voice answered. Polished honey-wood floors gleamed under the high, dark-beamed ceiling. Oil portraits and landscapes hung on the whitewashed walls over fragrant pots of paperwhite narcissus. Not what she’d expected. The man had an exquisite apartment. Like a page out of Elle Déco in the “Makeover—what you can do to a historic flat” section.

  “MADAME, excusez-moi.”

  “It’s Mademoiselle,” said the quavering voice. “Come to the kitchen.”

  Aimée followed the paprika and garlic smells down the hall. Warmth emanated from the toasty floor. She wanted to take off her wet boots and go barefoot.

  A tiny, trim woman, with hair as white as the blooming narcissus, chopped carrots and swept perfect orange circles into a bowl. Leeks and greens tumbled from a string shopping bag on the wooden table.

  “My knees.” The woman looked up. Sharp brown eyes in an unlined face, a small scar running under her chin. She set down the knife and rubbed her hands on an apron with what looked like scientific equations printed on it. “At eighty, I only do the stairs twice a day now—not like before.”

  Aimée blinked. She felt winded at one go.

  “I’ve told you flics, I’m tired of questions,” the old woman said. “So if you don’t have answers, quit wasting my time.”

  “I’m sorry, but you don’t understand, Mademoiselle Samour …”

  “It’s Mademoiselle Samoukashian, can’t you people remember?”

  Aimée handed the woman a card. “But I’m not a flic. I’m a private detective.”

  Interest sparked in the woman’s brown eyes.

  “Then sit down. Café turc?”

  Turkish coffee? Aimée nodded. “Merci. Please accept my condolences.”

  The woman turned her back on her.

  “That doesn’t bring my great-nephew back.”

  Nothing would. At a loss, Aimée hesitated. She needed to plow on and find out what she could.

  The little woman slipped the chopped carrots into a longhandled brass pot of boiling water, then adjusted the blue flame. “Drumming up business? But you don’t look like an ambulance chaser. Why visit me?”

  A sharp-eyed old bird who got to the point, this octogenarian. Aimée draped her leather coat on the thatched cane chair and sat, unbuttoning her vintage checked-wool Chanel jacket, a church bazaar find.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” she offered again, the words sounding trite. She took a breath and continued. “But I presumed Pascal Samour lived here.”

  “Then you saw my address on Pascal’s old student library card, like the flics did.” She nodded. “Bon, I figured you were smarter than you look.”

  Aimée dropped her bag, but caught it in time before her mascara, encryption manual, and nail polish scattered across the warm floor.

  “Pascal lives … lived near Square du Temple,” said Mademoiselle Samoukashian. “He taught at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers.” The engineering school a few blocks away.

  “I saw … found his body last night.”

  “But how is it a detective just happens to find his body?”

  Aimée couldn’t let the old bird intimidate her. She had to find out why Pascal had Meizi’s photo in his wallet.

  “That’s why I’m here, Mademoiselle,” she said.

  Mademoiselle Samoukashian handed Aimée a Limoges demitasse and saucer. Into it she poured frothing brown liquid, then crowned the coffee with a lip of foam. “Armenian style, with cardamom.”

  “Merci.”

  The old woman uncovered a plate of crescent rolls smelling of apricot. “Dziranamahig. We’re Armenian, Mademoiselle,” she said. “My grandparents sought refuge here from the Turkish genocide. And then we were only rounded up again here during the war, that time by French police. Since the last war, I don’t trust the flics. And I don’t trust them now. Neither did Pascal.”

  The war? “But that was fifty years ago.”

  “More. I’m hoping you’re better at math than that.” She shook her head. “Drink. Then I read your grinds. Then we see.”

  See what, Aimée wondered.

  “Please, first hear me out,” Aimée said, determined to leave out the horrific details. “Last night, my partner and I were eating dinner nearby in Chinatown when an old woman came into the resto shouting about a murder. We followed the crowd behind the luggage shop, and your … and we found Pascal. Everyone ran away, but I picked up his wallet to learn his identity. There was nothing in it but his library card.”

  “That’s all you know?” Sadness pooled in Mademoiselle Samoukashian’s eyes.

  “Meizi Wu’s picture was on the back of his card.” Aimée took a sip. “Can you tell me about their relationship? Anything you know about Meizi?”

  “Ask her.”

  “Meizi’s disappeared.”

  She nodded, matter of fact. “Bien sur, she’s illegal, terrified.”

  Like a steamroller, this little woman. “So you know Meizi?”

  “Never heard of her. But that’s most everyone in this slice of the quartier. Alors, it never changes—immigrants, illegals. Roundups just like in ’42.”

  “Roundups?” Was she really comparing Chinese sweatshop workers today to French Jews deported to extermination camps?

  “I know the feeling. Hunted, hiding, moving all the time.”

  Surprised, Aimée leaned forward. “You do?”

  “I was part of the Resistance, you know,” the old woman said. “History forgot us: immigrants, political exiles, Communists. A ragtag bunch of Poles, Jews, Hungarians, Italians. Guerilla fighters. Our last names and politics didn’t fit in with de Gaulle’s myth of la grande Résistance Française. My cousin Manouchian, the Armenian poet, led thirty successful attacks against occupying Germans. But do schoolchildren learn this?” She shook her head. “His group was betrayed, branded as criminals by the Vichy collaborators—you’ve heard of the infamous Affiche Rouge poster? Those were the Communist Resistants. And they were all executed. No one talks about it.”

  So the old woman related to Chinese illegals. Did she know Meizi? Was she trying to protect her, hide information?

  “Meizi must feel so alone. Lost.”

  “But there are always places to hide, to meld into the woodwork, like we did.” Mademoiselle Samoukashian shrugged, her eyes far away. “Pascal was a funny boy. Sweet but odd.”

  From the sound of it, the woman would tell the story in her own way. Aimée needed to be patient. She took a sip of coffee, a thick mixture like silt with a cardamom aftertaste.

  “His parents had him late in life,” Mademoiselle said, glancing back at the pot before continuing. “My nephew, his father, was held in a Siberian POW camp until the sixties. Never was the same, but don�
�t get me started. Pascal’s mother died from TB in a sanatorium.” She shrugged. “He came to live with me until he passed the exams for Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Arts et Métiers.”

  The prestigious grande école of technical engineering. “Quite an accomplishment,” Aimée said, wondering how this fit in.

  “But Pascal still lives … lived nearby. Always fixed this, took care of that.” Mademoiselle waved her hand around.

  Aimée took in the recessed halogen lighting, felt the warmth from the floor, surveyed the high-tech console of buttons labeled Heat 1, Hall, Boiler.

  “Pascal did all this. You’ve noticed, eh?”

  And lusted for a renovation like this for her own seventeenth-century flat. Right now Aimée would settle for consistent heat in their office.

  “Beautiful and innovative,” Aimée said, noticing the high-tech chrome laptop, a model that their part-time hacker Saj kept mentioning. The woman was more tech-savvy than most people half her age. “I imagine, a small repayment for devoting yourself to his upbringing.”

  She snorted. “Not so much. No one called me the nurturing type, but I provided. I managed stage sets at Théâtre de la Gaité Lyrique, the wardrobe. Pascal used to play back stage sometimes, but he grew up across the square in the Musée des Arts et Métiers. After school I’d find him there. The machines, gadgets stimulated his mind. Too much.”

  Aimée turned this over. “By that you mean …?”

  “He loved making ‘inventions.’ Obsessed.” The old woman rolled her eyes affectionately. “Following the beat of a different drummer, as they say. Never played in the park with the other boys. He told me, when he was still a boy, that one day he’d work at the Musée. Because the Musée still kept alive the spirit of science, art, and invention of the medieval guilds that built the cathedrals. Can you imagine a teenage boy saying that?”

  Mademoiselle Samoukashian gave a little shrug, sipped her Turkish coffee.

  “Yet as a youngster he wore the dunce hat in the corner of the classroom, a tête de Turc.”

  Aimée nodded. “Me, too, for daydreaming.” She took another sip. But she wondered at the point of this fable. What agenda lay behind this, other than reminiscing about her murdered great-nephew? Maybe this woman just needed to vent. “But what an accomplishment, that Pascal entered a grande école,” she said.

  “Mais oui, but only after two years of competitive prep to pass the mathématique supérieur,” Mademoiselle Samoukashian said, a hint of pride in her voice. “Another exam with a technology component for Arts et Métiers. Of the two thousand who pass the test, they accept six hundred.”

  “Sounds grueling.” She was painting a picture of Pascal, Aimée realized.

  “It was only the beginning!” she scoffed. “Then, a grande école. Before his first year, their assignments included figuring out how to write verses of Gothic script on matchsticks with a Rotring pen nib. He needed a magnifying glass to even see what he was writing, never mind figure out how to write it.” She shook her head. “The bizutage, the ritual hazing, got worse in his first year. A strange group, if you ask me. Medieval.”

  Aimée needed to steer this back to Meizi. “Mademoiselle, the investigating flics suspect Chinese in your nephew’s murder.”

  “You’re the detective,” she said without skipping a beat. “You found his body. What do you think?”

  Aimée had thought a lot of things, all related to Meizi. Hoped to God she wasn’t involved in his murder. Thoughts, like air, came cheap. “That’s not my job. I’m looking for Meizi.”

  “Pascal never drank, hated gambling. He was so shy and awkward around women,” said Mademoiselle Samoukashian. “No Chinese would kill him. No one here, young or old, trusts the flics. Alors, he spent all his free time volunteering at the Musée.”

  Whatever his involvement with Meizi, he had kept it from his great-aunt. Aimée had a thought. “Mademoiselle, with Pascal’s grande école credentials, I wouldn’t have thought he’d teach at an engineering trade school. Couldn’t he have had any job he wanted?”

  Mademoiselle Samoukashian bristled, her eyes sparkling with anger. “Aimed higher, you mean. Command a top salary. Serve and sup with the elite.”

  Aimée wanted to kick herself. Tactless again. “Desolée, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

  “Of course you did.” She shrugged. “You’re not the first. Blame my Bolshie upbringing, but Pascal did me proud. He wanted everyone to benefit, not just a sliver of the top crust.”

  Mademoiselle Samoukashian took Aimée’s demitasse, studied the dregs coating the sides. Nodded.

  “I see a road. A long road. A wall, rounded like a tower. You are going to see a person. A place.”

  Foreseeing such a vague future in coffee grinds, Aimée thought, was less than helpful.

  “Weren’t you the one in the paper?” Mademoiselle Samoukashian said suddenly. “A kidnapping, murder case before Christmas?”

  Aimée cringed at the memory—her godfather, Morbier, had been a suspect in his girlfriend’s murder; then there were the high-profile repercussions of recovering a Spanish princess who had been kidnapped by Basque terrorists. Aimée had hated the reporters besieging the office, the new flood of calls for help from distraught families of murder victims. She had promised herself all that was over. She’d never do criminal work again. And she’d kept that promise for all of a month.

  “My firm does computer security,” she said.

  “But you’re also a licensed private detective,” Mademoiselle said, looking at Aimée’s card. “According to this.”

  Aimée could learn nothing else here. She stood, slid her arms in her coat sleeves, and took a step toward the old woman. “Wonderful café, Mademoiselle.”

  “But this woman, this Meizi, you said there’s a connection to Pascal?”

  Aimée nodded, hoping this had jogged her memory. “Maybe you remember something Pascal said?”

  Mademoiselle Samoukashian clamped Aimée’s hand in an iron grip. “But you’re looking for her. You think she saw who murdered my Pascal.”

  “I don’t know,” Aimée said.

  “God shouldn’t let a child die before his parents,” Mademoiselle Samoukashian said, her voice small. “But I don’t qualify; I just raised him.”

  Aimée leaned down and hugged her where she sat in her thatched chair, felt the thin shoulders, the heaving chest of this tough little old woman. Like her own grandfather, who’d stepped in to help raise her when her mother left. He’d pitched in when Aimée’s father was on a stakeout, taken her to piano lessons, the auction gallery, supervised her homework.

  When Aimée looked up, she saw tears pooled in those dark brown eyes. A look of despair.

  “I don’t trust the flics,” Mademoiselle Samoukashian said. “Won’t you help me?”

  “I’d like to, but …”

  “How much?” She reached under the piled napkins, pulled out a rubber-banded wad of francs. “Never mind, take it,” she said, and thrust it into Aimée’s hand.

  “Mademoiselle, I can’t take your money.”

  “My rainy-day money? What good’s it to me now? You’re already on the case.” She squeezed Aimée’s hand. “Find who murdered him.”

  Aimée looked away, torn. How could she investigate the murder for this old woman when her best friend’s girlfriend might be the culprit? A bad feeling seeped in her bones. She was fraught with worry that she’d find Meizi involved.

  “I can’t guarantee you satisfaction. Or that we’ll find his murderer. These cases … you don’t want to know.”

  “Pascal was murdered behind a building, and I don’t want to know?” The old woman leaned toward her, her eyes sharp. “I want justice.”

  “I’m truly sorry, but …” She paused. Pascal could have had a double life. Better to save his great-aunt from knowing. “Unless there’s something pointing to—”

  “But he was afraid.”

  Aimée blinked. “Afraid? You must tell the flics.” />
  “You think I didn’t? Did they want to listen to an old woman, clouded by grief, ranting about his project?”

  “What project?”

  “I don’t know, but he kept a safety deposit box. In the Crédit Mutuel on rue Réaumur.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “A month ago, he told me if anything happened to him—his words—to open the safety deposit box.” Mademoiselle Samoukashian rose. “Of course, this Meizi’s hiding and scared. You find her, discover what she knows. I’ve got an appointment with the bank manager to open the safety deposit box today. Then I’ll show you.”

  Aimée’s heart tugged. She felt for this old woman.

  “Don’t do this for me, please. Do it for my Pascal.”

  Aimée’s mind went back to the plastic-wrapped body dotted with snowflakes. That mouth opened in a silent scream. Those eyes frozen in terror.

  She nodded. “No promises, Mademoiselle, but …” She hesitated. “Call me and we’ll meet.”

  In the hallway, Aimée paused, loath to leave this grieving woman, her warm and inviting apartment.

  Mademoiselle Samoukashian took her black purse from the coat rack by the door. She opened her wallet, a Fendi knockoff, and rifled through photos. “Here’s Pascal in the school play. Oh, here’s a science project based on a Knights Templar gadget. This one was taken at graduation.”

  Saddened, Aimée glanced at the thumbed and faded schoolboy photos, the progression as Pascal grew up.

  “The Arts et Métiers campus at Cluny,” Mademoiselle Samoukashian said, flashing a photo of a group of young men on the ramparts of a castle. “Horrible place, in a medieval abbey. He hated it there,” she said. “Let me give you one. So much better to remember him by than …” Her voice trailed off and she handed Aimée a photo of Pascal, wearing glasses, standing in what appeared to be his office. The Pascal Aimée preferred to visualize: big eyes, wild red hair, smiling.

  “Oui, merci.”

  A green carry-all bag hung under a jacket from the coat rack. Faux reptile, just like one she’d seen in the luggage shop. Her heart skipped. Here was a connection to Meizi.