Murder at the Lanterne Rouge

by Cara Black

  SHE LEFT THE warm vent, confident no one would follow her.

  She kept to the narrow side streets below Place de la République. She felt invisible. No one looked twice at a clochard shuffling along in a Tibetan hat and moth-eaten raccoon coat—more fragrant now after a spritz of Chanel No. 5.

  She hit Martine’s number on her cell phone. Martine answered on the first ring.

  “About time, Aimée,” she said. “When can I meet Meizi?”

  “Bad news, I’m afraid,” she said, her chest tightening. That awful taste of guilt clutched the back of her throat.

  “What now, Aimée?”

  She took a breath and filled Martine in as she walked.

  “Dead? Meizi’s dead? Poor René.” Martine exhaled. A cough. “Not to sound mercenary, but it shoots down my exposé,” she said. “Libération’s interested in a three-part series documenting conditions, Aimée. But for that I need a connection in the sweatshops. People who will talk to me. Open doors. Proof.”

  Aimée’s heart fell. Martine couldn’t pull out now.

  “She’s not the only one, Martine.”

  “Get real, Aimée. It’s a closed world. They live in fear, held hostage by their families in China. Who’d talk to me?”

  Aimée had to make her understand. And she didn’t have time. “I found Meizi chained, Martine,” she said. “Treated worse than a dog. The flics snared a few snakeheads to ante up on their taxes.”

  Pause.

  “No one cares about the women or the men living ten to a room, sleeping under the machines,” Aimée said. “Who’s fighting for them? Or for the unnamed dead in paupers’ graves at Ivry. I sent Prévost proof, he just doesn’t know it yet.”

  Another pause.

  “But Prévost has connections at Libération,” Aimée continued.

  Martine let out a phfft. “Proving what?”

  She had no idea. “I met him there on the roof, stunning view,” she said. “You figure it out.”

  A longer pause.

  “I doubt he was renewing his subscription, Martine,” she said.

  “So you’d like me to take on the Ministry of Labor with a possible ally at the newspaper—some flic you met on a rooftop?”

  Aimée gripped the phone in her gloved hand. “Prizes for investigative journalism don’t come from fluff pieces,” she said. “Got a pencil?”

  Pause. “Why do I feel I’ll regret this?”

  “You won’t.” She gave Martine the addresses, the refuge at the Chinese evangelical church, Nina’s name. “Now anything stopping you, Martine?”

  A longer pause. “Just my car. I totalled it yesterday. Gilles threw a fit.”

  Aimeé sucked in her breath. “You okay?”

  “Shaken up.” Aimée heard the jingle of keys. “But I’ll take Gilles’s Range Rover. Safer.”

  Sunday, 11:30 P.M.

  AIMÉE USED HER security access to gain entry to the Musée des Arts et Métiers. Vardet, the security guard, nodded from his guardroom.

  “Ah, Mademoiselle, un express? Fresh, too. Join me before I do rounds.”

  Just what she needed. “You’re a lifesaver, Monsieur.”

  He poured her a steaming demitasse. Added a trickle of eau-de-vie. “Let me add un fortifiant, as we say in Lyon.”

  A Lyonnais, of course.

  “Gorgeous country.” Vardet’s eyes misted. “I miss it. The Rhône gurgling past.”

  Perhaps he’d had a little too much eau-de-vie already.

  She popped another Doliprane and sipped the espresso laced with pear liquor. Heaven. Vardet pointed out his grandchildren in photos. His old-fashioned alarm clock rang. “Time for my rounds.”

  UNDER THE GOTHIC nave, Aimée connected her laptop to the museum’s desktop and logged on. Thank God for the space heater. She scrolled the museum’s archaic database. It was hidden here somewhere.

  Impatient, she raced over the keys, scrolling through the documents she’d digitized. Nothing. She, René, and Saj had gone over all of these.

  Stymied, she stared at her screen. Think, think like Samour would.

  Go back to the source. The file Saj had enhanced.

  She hit Saj’s number on her phone. “Saj, tell me this, if I were Samour, where would I hide something in the museum files? Somewhere in plain sight, like on Coulade’s screen saver?”

  “I downloaded Stenwiz onto your laptop,” Saj said. His voice crackled. Static buzzed on the line. “Use that. It’s the program I used to crack the trebuchet on …”

  The rest ended in fuzz. Then a sharp crack of thunder overhead. She jumped, almost knocking her laptop over. A rain of shots. Ducking, she held her breath until she realized it was hail pebbling the plastic sheeting.

  Before the power went out again, she opened Stenwiz. Then she realized what she was missing. She’d gone in chronological order, digitizing and searching from the oldest documents. This time, she scrolled the museum’s database from the most recent item, and after twenty minutes found a nineteenth-century doc, the largest taking up one gigabyte of memory. She searched in earnest. Scrolling, opening, reading, and closing a good fifty years. Then she found it.

  The trebuchet matching Coulade’s screen saver. Of course!

  Aimée ran the Stenwiz program, used the key Saj sent and followed his attached instructions. Five long minutes later, her screen filled with black-and-gold Latin script, sinuous and slanted. A complete version of the alchemical formula in all its medieval glory. Attached was a page of algorithms in tight script, with Pascal Samour’s signature at the bottom.

  She gasped. Pascal had rehidden it where it had lain for centuries. And then added his fiber-optic adaption.

  She compressed the file, entered Saj’s address, punched send, and prayed the Ethernet cooperated.

  The sounds of creaking and shifting in the building mounted. What sounded like whispers came from the adjoining chapel. The wind again? She stifled her unease and focused on her screen. Like before, she heard a high-pitched whine from a distant fuse box. And again, the building plunged into darkness.

  Her desktop computer screen went black. The only light came from her green laptop screen and the chapel’s stained-glass window’s rose-and-blue glow. Ethereal and unnerving. The warmth faded from the heater. Not a good sign. Neither was the fact that her laptop blinked “On Reserve Battery” again. Had Saj received the file? In a hurry, she loaded her laptop into her bag, buttoned Hippolyte’s coat over her Chanel dress, and ran across the old chapel for the exit.

  Her penlight beam traced a thin yellow line over the dust, the uneven stone floor, and the metal mushroom she recognized as the base of a crane. Past the excavations for Foucault’s pendulum. Threading her way past the scaffolding bars and more machines and cables, she reached the vestibule.

  “Allo? Monsieur Vardet? Sécurité?”

  No answer.

  Had he forgotten her? She shivered, hearing the wind droning outside. Insistent and mounting.

  Her penlight found the dark, empty security post. Behind the thick glass slits, she saw the swirling hail, the piled ice bank outside the door. A storm, all right.

  She hit the buzzer and pushed at the small exit door in the massive portal. Not even a budge. Of course, the door operated electrically. Where was Vardet? No doubt he’d alerted whomever one alerted about a power outage and was busy dealing with that. But this meant she had to tramp clear across the torn-up museum to the far exit in the old refectory, now the library.

  Her footsteps echoed and the wind reverberated like a chant. She pulled her bag higher up on her shoulder and felt her way along the pitted stone wall, shining her penlight on the floor. She narrowly avoided the old, dusty glass display cases, empty and forlorn, in the long corridor.

  But it wasn’t the wind; chanting came from somewhere ahead in the dark. The hair rose on the back of her neck. The ghosts of old monks?

  “Allo? Someone there?” Her voice echoed.

  She turned left and continued in the direction of t
he chanting. Wouldn’t the students studying late be in the same predicament as she was? The chanting sounds grew. Choral practice? But this late at night?

  She found herself in a humid vaulted corridor, and almost walked into an ancient wooden door with rusted hinges and grimy metal studs. She lifted the hinge handle and parted the velvet drapery. Candles flickered in holders on the bookcases, on the reading tables. Her eyes adjusted from the darkness to see seven or so figures in hooded black robes gathered around a table, chanting in what sounded like Latin. Metallic odors wafted from a glass globe in front of them.

  Good God, had she walked into a ritualistic cabal, some ancient occult rite? Or stepped into a Knights Templar ritual like those depicted in the medieval paintings she’d cataloged? Her nose itched from the candle smoke and she sneezed.

  The chanting stopped, the last low echo rising in the vaulted Gothic refectory.

  “Who’s there?”

  She swallowed hard and almost dropped her laptop bag. “Excusez-moi, the power’s out in the museum … and I thought the door here would …”

  “Open from here?” said a brown-haired man. He smiled, his face illuminated by a candle, and approached her. “Alors, if the electricity’s out, we’re all stuck. Might need to spend the night here.”

  Not in her lifetime. Not with him and these robed figures. They looked like grim reapers to her. All they needed were scythes.

  “Time enough for us to get to know you,” he said, with a wink.

  Fat chance. “Look, I work here,” she said.

  “You don’t look like a construction worker,” he said, sniffing. “Interesting coat. You sure the raccoon’s dead?”

  “Digital inventory archive,” she said, impatient. “But who are you?”

  By now the robes had come off, and surrounding her were young men in pinstripe suits. The candlelight flickered over their faces. “Gadz’Arts,” one of them said as if assuming she’d understand.

  Like Pascal Samour, Jean-Luc, and de Voule, but a few years younger. “What’s going on?”

  “One of our traditions,” the brown-haired one said, as if chanting in robes were commonplace. “We’re recent Conservatoire graduates, but part of a long history. One of our customs. Many think them arcane and silly, but we’ve been here since 1789, so to speak.”

  With their robes off in the flickering candlelight, they looked like any three-piece suits in the nearby Bourse bars.

  He grinned. “We’re trained technical engineers, I’m afraid. This meeting, well, it’s what we Gadz’Arts have done for centuries, nothing so exotic as the Freemasons.” He turned to one of the others, now on his cell phone. “Or so I’ve heard.”

  “If you’re engineers, you can figure a way out, non?”

  The one with the phone nodded. “Bad news. The hail’s knocked out the grid for several streets.”

  Great. “But with your technical savvy, I’d imagine you know how to jimmy the electrical door lock.”

  “Why?” the brown-haired one said.

  She had no intention of spending the night here with these … whatever they were.

  “I’m late,” she said, wishing she’d come up with something more original. Part of her hesitated, held back from mentioning Jean-Luc.

  The men exchanged glances.

  “Or do I need to learn the secret handshake?”

  “Follow us.”

  “To where?”

  “The tunnel to the street exit.” Two of them moved carved chairs aside, revealing a coved door that clicked open on a spring latch. Beyond it, narrow steps wound down to a subterranean tunnel. Vaulted and dry.

  “But how do you know about this?” She didn’t like this plan. On the other hand, she wanted to get out of here.

  “Part of our initiation rites,” the smiling brown-haired man said. “After you.”

  The tunnel followed the refectory layout above. The men carried candles, illuminating the dirt ground, the blackened stone archways.

  “We’re concluding our ritual,” one of them said.

  Filing through one cavern, each of the men deposited something from their pockets in a human skull. She backed up against the wall.

  “Your turn.”

  “I don’t think so.” But before she could turn, he’d pushed her and slammed an old oak door she hadn’t noticed in the shadows. She heard clinking metal as the door locked.

  Stupid again! “What the hell! Let me out!”

  Laughter. “Part of our rites, Mademoiselle.”

  “Rites? Some prank? You’re sick.”

  “Non, we expected you.”

  Expected her? In rising panic, she pounded on the door.

  Then stopped and listened. Nothing. She turned her penlight to the human skull. She shuddered. Inside were wooden matchsticks, written all over with miniscule black script.

  Mademoiselle Samoukashian’s words came back to her: the cruel medieval rites of hazing. An overcoat hung dripping on the dirt. A camel-hair coat. Like the one worn by the man darting in the street, the man who’d attacked her.

  Her head ached. She had to get out of here. Her penlight battery would last only so long. She inserted her double-sided lock pick and jiggled. The door opened. Thank God centuries-old locks had simple mechanisms.

  Meizi had been run down before her eyes, both of them targets. She’d discovered Morbier to be a traître, her mother likely dead. The clueless DST was on her tail for a lead to her mother, or maybe for Samour’s formula. But they weren’t the only ones.

  Footsteps pounded behind her in the dirt.

  She ran through the tunnel’s forks and twists, trying to visualize what lay above.

  She came to a bricked-up wall. Nowhere to go.

  Her fingers scrabbled inside her bag for a tool, a weapon. Only the lock pick.

  “Are you lost?”

  She knew that voice. And in that moment, all the puzzle pieces fit. Her lip trembled. She should have put it together before. But after the attack … Revulsion took over. Now she was trapped. But let him win? No way. She fought the shaking in her legs, her hands. She had to talk her way out of here. “Thank God, Jean-Luc. The power’s out, the Gadz’Arts said—”

  “And they were right,” Jean-Luc said. A strong flashlight beam blinded her. Her blood ran cold. Cornered like a rat, no way out and the killer in front of her.

  “You expected me, Jean-Luc?” Her hand gripped the lock pick in her bag. She slid it up her sleeve. “So you know I just found the document Samour stole from you.”

  “Bien sûr,” he said, his voice soaked up by the densely packed earth. She couldn’t see him behind the flashlight beam. “We can’t have you interrupting our ritual, you know. That’s not allowed.”

  “My mistake. I need to show you this, upstairs.” She tried to sound more confident than she felt with her back to the wall. “There’s more light, still some power in my laptop,” she said, trying to buy time.

  “I told them I’d deal with you,” he said.

  Like he dealt with Pascal? Her heels hit the wall, nowhere to go, no way to see him. Did he have a gun?

  Her breath came in short spurts.

  Jean-Luc had wanted to steal the formula from Pascal Samour, not the other way around. He was desperate to jump ahead in fiber optics. Why hadn’t she put it together? How could she have ignored the obvious signs? She was furious with herself.

  “You don’t understand,” Jean-Luc said. “Pascal didn’t follow rules. Never had. He wouldn’t listen. I caged him up, like we’d always done. But he’d changed.”

  Caged him? So for once Pascal stood up to him, refused to act the doormat. And paid.

  “As his Mentu, his mentor, you tried, didn’t you?” she said.

  “You found the backup he promised me, like I knew you would,” he said, his tone matter-of-fact.

  “Promised you?” She had to keep talking. “But you told me he stole this.”

  How much longer until he attacked her? Here, vulnerable, with the light blinding
her as the car’s headlights had blinded Meizi.

  “C’est vrai, but I’m the only one who ever listened to Pascal.”

  “Becquerel believed in him.” Then it hit her. “But you took care of Becquerel,” Aimée said, taking a guess. “Smothered him with a pillow in the nursing home, didn’t you?”

  “That shouldn’t have happened.” His bittersweet tone surprised her. “We’re trained engineers, not killers.”

  “But Pascal was brilliant,” she said. “He discovered the ancient stained-glass formula and applied the concept to the principles of fiber optics.” She was perspiring in the coat.

  “So simple, when you think about it. The greatest discoveries are. The rest, so unnecessary.” Jean-Luc’s voice dropped, almost sad now. “I listened to Pascal, I was the only one.”

  “Wrong again. The DST listened,” she said. “He worked for them.”

  “The DST? Too late to the party.” His voice hardened. “The Chinese military offered me a contract. It’s the Year of the Tiger, auspicious.”

  “Chinese? Was Meizi involved?”

  He snorted. “A sweatshop girl? But convenient for me. Who’d care about an illegal immigrant like her but Pascal? The bleeding-heart Communist.”

  Anger filled her. The pompous ass. Meizi had been an unknowing pawn in his game. It made her sick. He’d planned it to the last detail.

  “With your technical know-how, you worked the plastic wrap machine like a snap,” she said, her high heel working the dirt. “Yet you made a mistake. You were surprised when Clodo appeared. You dropped your cell phone.”

  “Who?”

  “Don’t tell me you forgot the homeless man you pushed onto the Métro tracks?”

  “Vermin,” Jean-Luc spat. “He stank.”

  “But Clodo sold your phone. Now the flics have it.”

  He didn’t have to know Clodo replaced the SIM card.

  Close humid air mixed with the wet fur smells from Hippolyte’s coat. She heard the patter of crumbling dirt.

  “Now you’ll put down the laptop,” he said.

  She crouched with the laptop bag. One hand behind it, fingers scrabbling for clumps of dirt. The dense air in this narrow tunnel and the ragged, stinking fur nauseated her.