Murder at the Lanterne Rouge ali-12

by Cara Black

  The cold gray outside made her think of the approaching gray monochrome of February. A month of beating rain and the highest rate of suicides. Around the corner she passed Le Monde diplomatique, the leftist intello monthly lodged in an old dairy. A remnant of the village the quartier was until the seventies demolition and tower blocks.

  But the zinc counter at the café hadn’t changed in years. The milk steamer whooshed, the steam radiator hissed. She hung her coat up on the rack.

  “Un express, s’il vous plaît.”

  The girl with thick black eyeliner behind the counter put down her Marie Claire magazine and nodded.

  From the side alcove the news blared on the télé—World Cup fever for the national team, Les Bleus, overtaking the ongoing five-month-old Princess Di investigation. Then, a brief bulletin concerning the street closures that would clog northeast Paris on Monday, and the hospital workers protest in the morning. What else was new?

  No mention of the Pascal Samour homicide.

  Aimée studied the remembrance book pages and picked out the name of the one graduate in Pascal’s year. Tristan de Voule of Solas Energie. More approachable, she figured, than the older directors of megaconglomerates. She’d start with him.

  The girl served Aimée’s espresso and went back to reading Marie Claire.

  After some dialing, she found no Tristan de Voule listed, but directory assistance connected her to Solas Energie.

  Then a twenty-four, seven answering service. After being routed through two receptionists, she reached his administrative assistant.

  “Monsieur de Voule’s in the field,” said the assistant. “His schedule is booked all week.”

  Great. A busy engineer or head honcho working on the weekend. She thought fast.

  “A pity. I’m calling on behalf of the tribute we’re setting up in Professor Becquerel’s name. He attended the memorial and expressed interest in contributing.”

  “I’ll relay the message, Mademoiselle.”

  “Of course, but he told me how he looked up to the professor.” She scrambled for something more convincing. “Wanted to do a more personal tribute. But I’ve misplaced his cell phone number.”

  Pause.

  “Last Wednesday at the memorial here at the Conservatoire,” Aimée continued. “You know how close the Gadz’Arts grow to their mentors.”

  “I’m not allowed to give out his number. Company policy.”

  No doubt the admin fielded calls for donations all the time.

  “I understand.” She had to persist. “But you could take mine. It’s close to his heart, he told me. 06 38 35 15 78. Before tonight, if possible.”

  A little sigh. “Bon. I’ll pass on your number, Mademoiselle.”

  She stirred her espresso and read. Alphonse Becquerel, a descendent of Henri, the physicist who shared the Nobel Prize with Marie and Pierre Curie. Devoted himself to light and optics, mostly in corporate research labs connected with technology. A pioneer in communications systems.

  She got little from this bare-bones description. More emphasis seemed placed on his leadership of student organizations. In his later years he’d taught one high-level class on theories in relative connectivity.

  Whatever that meant, she thought. But René would know.

  She hit René’s number on her speed dial. Only voice mail. Why didn’t he answer?

  She glanced at her Tintin watch. If she hurried she’d make her meeting with Prévost. Her cell phone trilled.

  “René, where are you?”

  Pause. Grinding metal sounded in the background.

  “Excusez-moi, but I thought … I’m calling concerning Professor Becquerel?” said a deep voice. “A mistake …”

  Stupid. She hadn’t thought he’d return her call so soon, if at all. Instead of preparing a story to elicit info about Pascal, she’d flubbed it. She’d have to salvage this.

  “Pas du tout, Monsieur de Voule,” she said. “Forgive me for not checking my caller ID.”

  “I’m not sure I remember you at the Memorial. Did we meet?” he said. Polite, cautious, and smart.

  No way around this but to plunge right in. And stretch the truth.

  “I worked with Pascal Samour volunteering at the museum.” A little lie.

  Scraping noises. A long pause.

  “I don’t understand, Mademoiselle.”

  “Matter of fact, I still do. But his murder—”

  “Murder?” She heard shock in his tone.

  “You didn’t know? But as Gadz’Arts, his classmate, I thought …”

  A sigh. “It’s complicated. Pascal’s not on the Gadz’Arts list. No wonder he didn’t attend the memorial. But why call me?”

  “Now I don’t understand,” she said. “A list?”

  A snort. “I’m a crapaud, a toad. Not that I bought into the traditions, just enough to get by. Pascal never did. So he’s unofficial. An HU.”

  “Which means?”

  Pause.

  “The Mentus, upperclassmen, enlisted cadres to prove themselves. If you resisted, you’d be labeled ‘outside the factory,’ hors usinage, HU, like Pascal. Me, I did the minimum, a crapaud, so I made the list.”

  “Pascal’s not part of the family, then?” She sipped her espresso, trying to understand.

  “That’s one way to put it,” he said. “This lore goes so far back.” He gave a little sigh. “Ritualistic traditions passed on in a mysterious booklet with arcane symbols, mystical directions. We were pressured to wake up before dawn, wear long robes, learn chants.” His tone was embarrassed. Almost apologetic. “Exerting constant pressure on us until our class coalesced into a unit, a cohesive mold.”

  Not a system Pascal seemed to have fit into. “Sounds like the military,” she said.

  “Cadres were coached to do the dirty work. ‘Killers.’ ”

  Her breath caught. “Killers?”

  The girl behind the counter peered up from her Marie Claire. Aimée turned away.

  “I mean, it was perfect preparation for the cutthroat corporate world. Daring each other to man up, take risks,” he said. “Prove they’re worthy, part of the group. This notion of group loyalty and camaraderie through shared suffering. Ridiculous when you think about it.”

  Pause. The clanking and shouting of men came from the background.

  “I’m sorry about Pascal,” de Voule said. “He looked up to Becquerel. A mentor, even to HU.”

  “Outcasts like Pascal?”

  “Look, I’m at a work site with heavy machinery lined up.”

  “Pascal confided his project to Becquerel,” she said quickly. “But I think it links to the contract we’re working on for his department. Can you think how Becquerel would have been involved?”

  “Beats me, Mademoiselle,” de Voule said. “The professor looked toward the future. He was a visionary. Foresaw computing systems, communication networks, fiber optics years ago.”

  She grabbed her brown lip liner and wrote “communications networks, fiber optics” on a serviette.

  “One more thing. His friend Jean-Luc Narzac, a fellow classmate, you know him, of course?”

  Pause.

  “Narzac? Haven’t seen him in several years.” De Voule’s tone had changed. “The team’s waiting for me, Mademoiselle.”

  He’d shut down.

  “May I just ask what you do, what your company does?”

  “Solar energy.” Pause. “I tried to recruit Samour, a brilliant research analyst and engineer. But he never cared for an office, four walls.”

  “He liked them rounded, Monsieur,” she said. “He lived in a tower, did you know that?”

  “I’m sorry.” Another pause. “But I can see him living in a tower, now that you say that. A visionary much in the mold of Becquerel. Both seeing the roots of tomorrow in the science of the past. I can picture him living in a fourteenth-century tower.”

  Now she was alert. “Fourteenth century?”

  “Samour was obsessed with the fourteenth century,” de
Voule said. “It was his passion, studying arts and sciences from that period. According to him, no one’s ever invented anything new since then. Was going to set out and prove it, or so he said when I offered him a job. It’s my company, I told him, you could make your own hours. But he followed his own path.”

  “His great-aunt said the same thing,” Aimée said. “Becquerel knew what he was working on, but with his death …” She paused. “Did Pascal have enemies?”

  Her phone clicked. Another call. She ignored it.

  “Look, it’s terrible. But I don’t know. Sorry if I’m not helpful.” She sensed there was more he wanted to say.

  “Au contraire, you’ve told me a lot. If there’s anything else that comes up for you, you’ve got my contact number.”

  She slapped five francs on the counter and listened to the message. Mademoiselle Samoukashian, and she sounded afraid.

  AT THE APARTMENT door, Mademoiselle Samoukashian took one look at Aimée’s raised Swiss Army knife and stepped back. “Overreacting, Mademoielle?”

  “You sounded worried, you stressed urgency,” Aimée said. “Has something happened?”

  “In the kitchen,” she said, “but put that away first.”

  Aimée slipped the knife in her purse. A high, warbled bleeping, like birdsong, came from the high-end laptop.

  An e-mail received.

  Mademoiselle Samoukashian blinked and sat down. “That’s from Pascal.” She pointed to the screen. “His e-mail signal. I’ve gotten two of them today.”

  “You’re sure?” Aimée asked, startled.

  She nodded.

  Pascal kept busy for a man on the slab at the morgue. A coldness spread in her stomach. “And you didn’t open them?”

  “I wanted to show you.”

  Seating herself on the stool, Aimée stared at the address: Pascal@wanadoo.fr.

  There was an attachment. A virus, a sick joke? Or had someone hacked his account already? She’d view the message before deleting it.

  If something has happened to me, give this to Becquerel. He can lead you in the right direction.

  But Becquerel was dead.

  “I just asked one of Pascal’s Gadz’Arts classmates about Becquerel.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing.” Aimée pulled out her cell phone. “I’ll need to confer with my partner.”

  Mademoiselle Samoukashian nodded, her gaze glued to the screen.

  René answered on the first ring.

  “Any idea how Pascal could e-mail his great-aunt with an attachment a moment ago?”

  Pause. “He had a dead man switch on his computer account,” René said. “Common practice for nerds to store secrets in encrypted files. Each time you log in, it resets the clock. But if you don’t log in within a certain period of time, it sends an e-mail. Then deletes files, if he programmed it that way. No telling how long ago he set this up.”

  “So he could have programmed this a week ago, two weeks ago?”

  She heard the clicking of keys in the background

  “Shoot it to me right now with the attachment. Hurry.”

  She typed in René’s address. Hit FORWARD and said a little prayer. “Done.”

  René sucked in his breath. “Let me find a program to figure this out.”

  “How long, René?”

  “An hour, a day. Call you back.” He clicked off.

  Aimée looked up. “I have to go.”

  “You’ll find who murdered Pascal?” The old woman’s voice quavered.

  Determined now, she nodded. “Count on it, Mademoiselle Samoukashian.”

  Sunday, 9 A.M.

  RENÉ RUBBED HIS shoulders. Two hours of endless configurations spent over Samour’s decrypted attachment and he still couldn’t get a grip on it.

  At least he’d left Meizi safe at the hotel.

  And his hip ache had subsided to a dull throb once he’d borrowed the portable heater from Luigi’s travel agency down the hall.

  Aimée’s mahogany desk was piled with samples of their new security prospectus. Hadn’t she promised to come in? And why hadn’t she updated him on the museum?

  Saj sat monitoring the spyware installed on Coulade’s computer.

  “Any activity?”

  Saj shook his head. “Not so far. I’m also trawling Coulade’s desktop files. Nothing interesting pops out.”

  “What do you make of this, Saj?”

  Saj’s sandalwood prayer-bead bracelet clacked as he peered over René’s laptop. “Hmmm … I’m hungry.”

  “That’s all you can say, Saj?”

  “A recipe.” Saj handed him a battered takeout menu. “Which reminds me, feel like ordering in?” Saj stretched his tanned arms high over his six-foot frame, cracked his neck. His billowing white muslin Indian shirt blocked René’s view. How could he wear almost nothing in January?

  René stared at his screen, at the reams of code from Samour’s attachment. A cipher.

  “Say that again.”

  “We had sushi yesterday,” Saj said. “What about the new South Indian vegan?”

  “No, I mean recipe.”

  “See those interesting code breaks?” Saj pointed to the flat lines of script.

  His curiosity piqued, René highlighted a section of the attachment that he’d already pored over several times. “You mean this?”

  “Think of it in 3-D. Add dimension.”

  René slotted in a disc. Hit the icon to open the program. “Like this?”

  A raised bed of points and concave lines appeared.

  Saj shook his head. “Try a line separation.”

  Excited, René scrolled down and hit another key.

  The script aligned to borders and line breaks.

  “Reminds me of my grandmother’s recipe book,” Saj said, pulling up a chair. “Those configuration symbols start each line.”

  Symbols. “Meaning what?”

  “I’d say they represent numbers, quantity, or measurements, René. Symbols grouped in those kinds of configurations often indicate Roman numerals.” Saj nodded, pulling a scarf around his shoulders. “Or medieval drams and weights, I’d guess here.”

  “Say fourteenth century?”

  “Why not?”

  René grabbed the takeout menu. “Order anything you want, Saj. We’ve got a long day ahead of us.”

  Sunday, 10:00 A.M.

  “OFFICER PRÉVOST, s’il vous plaît,” Aimée said to the blue-uniformed flic on duty. The commissariat on rue Louis Blanc had been designed by Gustave Eiffel, and its corners needed dusting.

  “Mademoiselle Leduc?” said the fresh-faced recruit who’d missed a spot shaving his chin. He opened a file and slid a typed procès-verbal form across the high counter. “Routine, please sign and date your statement, s’il vous plaît.”

  “But we had an appointment,” she said. She’d counted on worming the surveillance info out of Prévost. He’d promised her.

  “You’re late. He left for a meeting.”

  Merde!

  Aimée scanned the typed up statement, noting the case number and file with a pen on her palm. Reading her statement, her mind went back to the snow dusting the plastic on Pascal’s unseeing eyes, the chunks of his flesh gnawed by rats. Her attack last night.

  “Prévost?” an officer was saying on the phone from the other end of the reception counter. Her ears perked up. “He’s on call today. Out to early lunch.”

  Meeting, my foot, she thought. He’d avoided her.

  She scribbled her name. Pushed the statement back to the officer. Smiled.

  “I’m starving.” She rubbed her stomach. “Know a good place around here?”

  The flic paused in thought. A challenge for him, she could tell, a new graduate from the police academy who’d been transferred to Paris and no doubt ate in the police canteen in the basement.

  He shrugged.

  “But flics know the best places to eat,” she said, pushing it.

  “Some of the older ones talk about a cassoulet p
lace on Quai de Valmy. But I don’t know.”

  She winked. “Merci.”

  Several blocks down rue Louis Blanc she saw the red awning of a bistro, Chez Pépé, cuisine de Bourgogne. Definitely a place for cassoulet. She hoped to God that Prévost ate here. Not a moment later she recognized his sparse hair, that raincoat ducking out the door. She revved into second gear and, her luck still holding, found a narrow space to wedge her scooter into, next to the zebra crosswalk.

  To find Prévost and a parking place—the gods were smiling on her. She set her helmet in the carrier, edged sideways between the cars to the sidewalk, and stepped into melted slush up to her ankle. Another pair of boots, vintage Fendis, ruined.

  Prévost stood in Chez Pépé’s doorway, speaking on his cell phone and gesturing with his free hand. Before she reached him, he clicked his phone shut and went back inside.

  A moment later Prévost shot out the doorway again, keys in hand. He unlocked the door of an unmarked Peugeot, started the engine.

  The gods had stopped smiling.

  She ran back to her scooter, wedged it out, and prayed Prévost hadn’t made the traffic light. She gunned the scooter down the quai until she saw the Peugeot ahead. A bus cut in front of her. By the time she reached the next intersection, the Peugeot had pulled ahead. She punched the handlebars in frustration. As the light turned green, she popped into first gear and caught up with Prévost.

  The threatening clouds chose this moment to open up. Rain pelted the canal’s surface. Blinking rain away, she followed Prévost for fifteen wet minutes until he parked on narrow rue du Pont au Choux.

  Next to the maroon storefront of Tartaix Métaux Outillage, the commercial metal shop, Prévost pushed open a wormholed faded-green door. She parked her scooter on the pavement, propped it up on the kickstand. Rain dripped from her shoulders. She shivered and ran across the street.

  But the door shut behind him. Did he live here?

  Instead of waiting in the deserted street for Prévost to emerge, she entered Tartaix Métaux’s glass-paned doors. The shop’s interior appeared unchanged from how she remembered it from childhood visits with her grandfather: the floor-to-ceiling drawers, long wooden counters reminding her of a bistro, a sales wicket resembling the old Métro ticket booths piled with catalogs.