Murder at the Lanterne Rouge

by Cara Black

  “Pascal’s bag?” Aimée asked.

  Mademoiselle Samoukashian gave a tired shake of her head. “Force of habit.” Her gaze looked faraway.

  What did that mean? But if this belonged to Pascal, she wanted to examine it.

  “May I look?” she said, not waiting for a reply.

  Aimée’s hand came back with a carnet of Métro tickets, a Eurostar ticket to London, a wad of francs. This put a new spin on Pascal’s murder, only she didn’t know how.

  “Pascal planned a trip?” Maybe escape with Meizi?

  Mademoiselle Samoukashian shrugged. “That’s my middle-of-the-night bag,” she said. “Pascal bought it for me. The ticket’s got my name on it, if you notice. Also shoes, a change of clothes. We always kept a bag ready. You never knew when they would come. If we’d be warned in time.”

  Aimée stared at this little woman. “You prepared for roundups? But the Occupation’s over, Mademoiselle.”

  “Not for some of us.”

  Aimée’s heart churned. And it made sense.

  Aimée kissed the woman’s paper-thin cheeks, a smell of Papier d’Arménie clinging to her. “No wonder Pascal loved you so much.”

  Saturday, 8 A.M.

  “YOU’RE POPULAR, CLODO,” said the volunteer at the Salvation Army shelter desk. “A flic left you a message. Someone else, too.”

  Clodo stiffened. Already? January bit with cold teeth if the flics wanted to talk to him. He needed to get the hell out of here.

  Clodo waved his blistered hand. “I’ll let my agent handle them.” His lungs burned, his eyes teared. He needed something warmer to wear.

  He rooted in the clothes donations pile, grabbing a scarf. Pink and thick cashmere. He wrapped it around his neck.

  “Hot enough water in the showers today, Clodo?”

  Always a new volunteer. Kids who knew nothing about the streets. Or life.

  “Not bad,” said Clodo.

  Time to move. Once a week he came to this shelter in the east exit of the closed old Métro station. A shower, a meal, clothes, a warm place. But he hated the questions, the checking up. A few years ago, the city let the homeless sleep in alcoves on the platforms when the thermometer hit four degrees centigrade. Not anymore.

  The volunteer refused to be put off. “The flic said it’s important, Clodo.”

  As if he wanted to talk to a flic, after last night.

  The salauds kicked him out from his spot on the stairs, which had been covered and dry. They’d questioned him about the mec the rats feasted on. Clodo, he minded his own business. Had to survive, didn’t he? He learned that in the war.

  A racking cough overtook him. Damn lungs.

  The kid pointed to the nursing station. “Get your cough checked out, Clodo.”

  Like hell he would. He needed a drink. “Lend me some fric, eh. My cough syrup’s ready at the pharmacy.”

  “You know we can’t do that.” The kid looked away. “But I can check on beds tonight in the Bastille shelter.”

  Damn do-gooder. He needed a drink. He snorted and mounted the stairs to Boulevard Saint-Martin.

  Later he’d sleep in the old ghost station. He knew the subterranean web of tunnels like the holes in his shoes. Had slept there during the air raids in the war, while the British bombed the train supply depots. People forgot that. They forgot how once neighbors, shopkeepers, postmen, and bourgeois families all huddled together in the deep stations—République, Temple, Arts et Métiers, and Saint-Martin, the ghost station. They forgot how the aerial bombing reverberations rained powder over their faces. The terror.

  But he didn’t forget. He didn’t forget his parents, either. Communists, rounded up the day his Aunt Marguerite took him to the doctor for his seven-year-old checkup. They’ll come back, she’d said. But they didn’t. She worked nights playing the accordion and singing at the dance hall on the Grands Boulevards. He’d go to the shelter with Madame Tulette, the concierge.

  “Watch where you’re walking, old man.” In the sea of passersby, a man in a suit jostled Clodo into a half-frozen puddle. The pavement rumbled and warm gusts shot up through the grill from the Métro running below. He leaned against the kiosk to catch his breath. Horns blared.

  He remembered his aunt coming home at dawn with a tired smile and a package of butter, bread, a tied length of saucisson. The contents varied. Sometimes he’d meet a soldier in the bathroom on the landing. Green-gray uniforms with lightning bolts; then, after la Libération, the uniforms were blue with stars.

  One day he’d found an envelope with money from his aunt on the kitchen table. “Getting married in Canada. Will write from Quebec.” But she didn’t. After la Libération he found his parents’ names on a deportation list of Jewish Communists.

  Seized by another fit of coughing, he grabbed at the magazine rack. The kiosk vendor raised his fist. “Buy a paper or move on.”

  “Who reads that shit anymore, eh?” he snarled back, pulling his frayed fur coat tighter and shuffling away.

  He anticipated snow. The chill air sliced his lungs as he breathed. Just as it had that other January—under another cloud-frosted sky—when he’d quit school.

  Old Madame Tulette’s son ran the silversmith’s courtyard atelier and gave him odd jobs. He worked when he wanted. The years went by; les Chinois moved in and took over the building. The pain went to his legs, the women he slept with didn’t invite him home as often, and he ended up on the streets. Not that he minded a bottle of wine under a roof of stars in the summer, or the shelters in winter, like during the war. But nowadays his joints ached. His perfect spot on the alley steps—layered with cardboard, newspapers, and blankets—was ruined.

  “Clodo? Got wax in your ears? Can’t you hear me, Clodo?”

  The blue-uniformed flic shook his shoulder. “Why don’t you tell me what you saw last night.”

  “You kicked me out, remember?”

  “We took you to a warm shelter. Let’s talk at the café. Try to remember, eh? You must have heard something, seen a Chinese girl. Help me, won’t you?”

  Help him, and get wrapped in plastic?

  Like the other one?

  Clodo lifted his bag and joined the flic at the zinc counter. “Order me a café crème. I need the WC.”

  And by the WC, he slipped out the back exit.

  Saturday, 9 A.M.

  DOWN IN THE passage, Aimée fought the urge to light a cigarette. The pack of crumpled Gauloises lay, like a talisman, in the bottom of her bag. Just knowing its proximity reassured her, gave her the power to choose to smoke or not. She inhaled the crisp, cold air and exhaled, her breath like smoke.

  She hit René’s number on her cell phone. “The bags aren’t the only faux things in the shop, René,” Aimée said, unfurling her scarf. “The Wus aren’t the Wus.”

  René cleared his throat. “Try making sense, Aimée.”

  “Visualize the new Monsieur Wu I met: middle-aged, shorter, speaks good French, with an attitude.”

  “New?”

  She recounted what happened in the luggage shop. “Smelled bad, René. He’d prepared.”

  “And you bought it?”

  She rooted for her gloves. “Hard to dispute after he showed me his business license, permit and ledger showing he’s owned the shop since 1995.”

  “But he could have hidden the real Wus. Maybe he waited until after you left. Hurt them.”

  “I checked everywhere,” she said. “There was nothing in back, just storage. So I took his fingerprints. My contact in the crime-scene unit will run the prints to find out his real identity.”

  Silence.

  “Alors, what if he’s the real deal?” she said. “For argument’s sake, René, suppose the Wus we met are as faux as my leopard coat?”

  Pause.

  “I’ll get back to you when I find something on Ching Wao.”

  He hung up.

  A taxi idled on rue Beaubourg and she hailed it.

  “FNAC at Bastille,” she said to the driver. />
  He hit the meter. “Shopping in those crowds?”

  “Just the ticket window, five minutes. Then 36 Quai des Orfèvres.”

  AIMÉE HATED WAITING in the dark bowels of the prefecture by the crime-scene unit. Its bunker-like underground atmosphere was reinforced by narrow corridors, dim lighting, and serious uniformed law enforcement rushing in and out, carrying on hushed conversations under oppressively low ceilings.

  Beside her, a glass case displayed the history of French criminology techniques. Notably those of Alphonse Bertillon, a police officer and biometrics researcher who—according to the placard in the case—created anthropometry, the identification system using photos and physical measurements to identify criminals. He was the first person in the world to use fingerprints to solve a crime—right here, in 1902, in the small, glassed laboratory, so the sign boasted. She’d researched Bertillon in a premed course and realized today they’d call him a racial profiler.

  “Aimée, I’m fitting you in.” Benoit, sporting Levi’s under his lab coat, gestured her down the hall. A lank lock of brown hair fell across his forehead and pockmarked cheeks. “I was just about to lift prints off a batch of counterfeit francs.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “Call me an optimist.”

  “Then call this slicing butter, Benoit.”

  He opened the lab door. Glanced around. Then motioned her inside. “Remind me why I’m helping you. Again.”

  “Can you spell M-O-T-L-E-Y C-R-U-E?”

  His eyes popped. “You got the tickets?”

  Scalper prices for a sold-out show at the new Stade de France next month had emptied her worn Vuitton wallet. And then some.

  “For you, Benoit, the best. Front stage section in arena seating.”

  “We’ll rock the place.”

  “Better you than me.” Not her type of music.

  The green-walled laboratory, small by some standards, housed up-to-date forensic fingerprint wonder machines, many of them British.

  “Tell me you got a good set of latents.”

  She held out her rouge-noir nail polish bottle. “At least he held the whole thing in his hand.”

  “Position it for me the way your perp did.”

  She donned a set of blue plastic surgical gloves from the box on the counter. Careful not to smudge the bottle, she showed him, shaping her hand around the baggie.

  He got to work dusting the glass surface with powder.

  Nothing. Her heart dropped.

  “Patience.” Benoit redusted from another pot, then flipped on a blue light. “For you, Aimée, the works. Any idea what he’d been touching before?”

  She thought back. “Plastic bags and synthetic materials.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Those faux designer bags. Fuchsia, if that helps. The shop counter, a ledger written with a ballpoint pen.”

  He pulled a swing-arm magnifier over the bag, studied it. “Voilà. Micro traces of blue ink, I’d say, in the index fingerprint ridges. A little smudged on the thumb whorl.”

  “You’ll run them now?” she said. “I need the works, Benoit.”

  He shrugged. “I’ll need some help.”

  “That’s on you.” She held up the tickets. “But this guarantees you a hot date.” Now she knew what it looked like when fingerprint techs salivated. “By the works, bien sûr you’ll include the police database registry listing all cartes de séjour and pending applications, business permits and licenses.”

  Government bureaucrats loved paper. Logged applications, maintained files, registries and databanks. Any official request or form left a paper trail. Even the objets trouvés, or lost-and-found, had ledgers corresponding with police reports dating back over a hundred years. And that was just in the on-site storeroom.

  “So how soon …?”

  “You’re in luck.” He snorted. “Demontellan’s playing the piano now.”

  Playing the piano, the old term used for checking fingerprint files.

  “He’s the best,” Benoit said. “Knows the cards by heart.”

  Her heart fell. “Don’t tell me you still match prints manually?”

  “We use three match systems in total. More than the cowboys, the Brits, or Interpol.”

  Thorough. No doubt he could do more. It never hurt to ask.

  “Impressive.” She wrote down Meizi’s name in the spilled, white fingerprint powder. “Run this name while you’re at it, eh?”

  Benoit pushed his hair behind his ears. Winced.

  She waved the tickets, still in the FNAC ticket envelope, until he nodded.

  “This way.”

  “WE GOT A HIT. Now I call this synchronicity,” said Demontellan. “My wife bought her bag in one of those places. A faux Fendi, whatever that means.” Reddish-pink keloid scars ribbed what had once been Demontellan’s ear and trailed down his neck into his shirt collar. A victim of the bombing, a few years earlier, in the Saint-Michel RER station, he’d been luckier than the others on the train. Demontellan wore thick-lensed, seventies-style glasses. His magnified eyes reminded her of an unblinking mackerel. His index finger stabbed a file labeled Wu, Feng, age 29.

  He opened it to the record within. Domiciled Ivry, owner of Lucky Luggage, rue au Maire.

  “But he’s not twenty-nine years old,” Aimée said loudly to Demontellan’s ruined ear.

  “Don’t shout,” he said. “My hearing’s superb.”

  “Desolée,” she said, abashed, averting her gaze from the painful-looking scar tissue.

  “Everyone does that at first,” he grinned. “Bet my hearing’s better than yours. I’m bionic. Cochlear implants.”

  Not knowing whether to laugh or applaud, she shrugged. “We’re all special, Demontellan. Any photo of him?”

  “For that let’s take a little stroll.” He led her to a bank of metal file cabinets, chose the W section, and pulled open a drawer at shoulder height. Oatmeal-colored fingerprint cards, filed by surname, stretched before her, some with worn, dog-eared edges, others crisp.

  “My father used these,” she said, amazed.

  “For cross verification purposes, and individuals not entered into the main system, it does the job. Zut, I can match a card’s prints faster than anyone can boot up, log in, enter the system, and search a database.”

  She nodded.

  “That’s if we had a current computer database,” he grinned. “Alors, the Brigade Criminelle still types reports on Remingtons.”

  Archaic, like everything else at 36 Quai des Orfèvres.

  “Plus I know the smell. I sniff better with these.”

  For any good flic, it came down to the nose. One’s sense of smell developed over years, illustrating Oscar Wilde’s aphorism, “Nothing worth knowing can be taught.” A good flic could pull out a detail cataloged in the recesses of his mind. A name or an address cross-referenced to a memory, a whisper in a bar from an informer. The methodical, painstaking accumulation of details—piecing them together, building evidence, a case.

  Computers didn’t do that.

  “W. Woo. Wu.” Pause. “Here we go.” Demontellan pulled out three cards. “Wu, Meizi, age 36; Wu, Feng, age 29; and Wu, Jui, age 30.”

  Aimée stared at the cards. None of the photos matched Meizi or her parents. What in hell was going on here?

  “Demontellan, I suggest you route these to Prévost at the commissariat in the third.”

  “Think I do magic, too?”

  She grinned. “You could head the report, ‘Question of identity regarding witnesses and suspect in the homicide case reported last night.” And conclude that the identity is inconsistent with fingerprints on file.”

  “Did Prévost request this?”

  “He should have,” she said. “But I’m sure you’ll craft it so he thinks one of his men did. Cite a paperwork request lost in the shuffle. I’m sure you know how to word it.”

  Demontellan took off his glasses and wiped them with a handkerchief. “You must hold something over that boy.�
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  “And he must hold something bigger over you,” she said.

  Demontellan gave a knowing smile. “It’s evened out.” He paused. “That help you?”

  “The more I dig, the deeper the hole.” Her finger traced the stiff edge of the Meizi Wu card. “Proving no one is who they say. But this gets me no closer to finding Meizi Wu.”

  He jerked his thumb toward his desk. “Benoit left you a file. On the house, he said.”

  She thumbed through photocopied business licenses, carte de séjour applications, work permits. All faux Wus. Ching Wao probably drove a Mercedes with the proceeds.

  Disappointed, she picked up her bag from Demontellan’s desk, and saw that a paper had slipped out.

  A national museum employment application for a maintenance position at the Musée des Arts et Métiers. The application was for a Wu, Meizi, dated two weeks earlier, and listing as a reference Pascal Samour, faculty department head at CNAM.

  Her heart raced. Pascal Samour had given Meizi a recommendation. While Demontellan was photocopying the application and fingerprint cards, Aimée checked the in-box on his desk.

  Two current reports from Prévost’s division. Taking advantage of Demontellan’s turned back, she scanned the contents. And almost whistled.

  “Merci, Demontellan,” she said. “Get creative with Prévost. He needs the mental stimulation.”

  Saturday, 10 A.M.

  “NEW SPARK PLUGS, oil change. Your scooter will run like a dream, Aimée,” said Zaco, wiping his greasy hands on his overalls at her local garage on the Île Saint-Louis.

  Zaco told her the same thing last month. Her secondhand pink Vespa, Italian and temperamental, broke down with annoying regularity.

  “Merci, Zaco.” She knotted the cashmere scarf around her neck, donned her leather gloves, hit the kick-starter, and headed over Pont de Sully. She wove her scooter through the narrow backstreets to her office. The wrought-iron balconies cast long shadows in the gray winter light. She longed for the sun, even a glimmer.