by Cara Black
His hand trembled for an instant on the ice-coated railing.
“I think you saw something,” she said.
“You’re not a flic.”
“I told you, I’m a private detective,” she said. “Someone framed my friend but I’m going to get her off.”
“That’s what this is about?” His fingers relaxed.
She nodded. “I found Jacques Gagnard, dying, on the snow-covered roof. His heart still responded, his eyes blinked.” She looked down at a hole in a patch of gray snow. “He tried to tell me something. His eyes communicated. It’s hard to describe.”
The flics had dismissed it as a dying person’s involuntary response. Why was she telling him this? She should shut up, ask the questions.
Lucien rubbed his arms and leaned on the railing. “They gunned down my grandfather in the village. He bled to death under a chestnut tree,” he said, his voice low. “It took a long time. I sat with him as the shadows lengthened. A dragonfly fluttered, attracted to the blood on his chest. His three fingers moved . . . and moved . . . my brother told me I imagined it. I was young.” He paused, rubbed the growth of stubble on his cheek. “A week later my uncle found the murderers, three of them, hiding in a lemon grove.”
He shrugged. “I still see the branches swollen with fruit, lemons fallen split and pulped on the dirt, their citrus scent mingled with the metallic tang of blood. Revenge, that I would have taken, an obligation to my grandfather. . . .”
His eyes seemed faraway. He spoke hesitantly yet he was confiding something deeply felt. No stranger had ever spoken to her like this—by turns intimate, sarcastic, then sad.
She was sure he knew more than he was telling about Jacques Gagnard.
“Let’s try again. Tell me what happened. Why weren’t you questioned at the party?”
He turned away, his face in shadow.
“You need my help, musician. Assuming you’ve told me the truth.”
“Revenge, that’s in my culture. I helped you, didn’t I? Let it go. I’ll get by on my own.”
“With the CRS roaming everywhere? There’s probably an alert out on you already if you’re a member of Armata Corsa.”
“Not me. Not anymore. You are misinformed. I play music. That’s what I do.”
“How do I know you weren’t working with Petru? You could have killed Jacques Gagnard, and set another flic up, then double-crossed Petru. And maybe that’s why he’s after you.”
Was that hurt in his eyes?
“I’m sick of this,” he said. “I’ve never fired a gun in my life. You’ve got the wrong person.”
“Convince me.”
“Few have a code. Honor.” He leaned close to her; his breath touched her face. “Should I trust you?”
“Why not? Who else can you trust?” she said. “I’m interested in neither your political nor nonpolitical views. My friend’s in a coma. She’d never shoot her partner. All I care about is clearing her.”
He studied her. Deciding.
Bon, she’d say it the way he’d understand. “That’s my code, Lucien.”
So he told her what happened: Félix, the party, the woman, and how he’d forgotten his ID and had to sneak away. She remembered the list of party participants who had been interviewed. There were no Corsican names.
She nodded. “Now try again. Tell me everything you saw. Tell me what you left out.”
“Left out?” He closed his eyes. Thought. “An old man came out to walk his dog. And I saw light,” he said. “A flickering light, escaping from holes in the ground.”
“You mean the construction site? Here?” she asked, excited.
She pulled out her diagram.
She pointed and he nodded.
“After the shot, I heard breaking glass.”
The skylight. Their escape.
“The fence around the construction is low there. I saw the lights.”
It made sense. She remembered seeing the glowing tip of a cigarette on the ground. She’d wondered where those damp footprints had led. Now she knew; they hadn’t gone out into the street, but down somewhere in the construction site.
“What’s in your backpack?”
He blinked in surprise. Then gave her a wide smile and leaned his leather-clad elbows on the railing. “Search it. Be my guest. I have nothing to hide.”
She ignored his mocking gaze, his long legs. “Why don’t you show me?”
He pulled out his wooden music case, unlatched it.
“My cetera,” he said lifting out the wooden instrument. The bowed wood face was smooth and worn from playing, the strings new. “A traditional instrument, our variation of a lute.”
From his case rose the scent of bergamot and was that currant? Non, deep and dense, more like a dark fig.
“Our tradition makes music out of everyday life; it’s music with its feet on the ground.”
She’d heard a Corsican polyphonic chorus coming from the church around her corner one evening, and stood, transfixed. Ancient, yet timeless, resonating somewhere deep within.
He plucked his cetera. The high melodic notes carried on the crisp air, evoking another world, another time.
A couple, arm in arm on the ice, paused and listened.
He laid the instrument back in the case with care.
“You don’t trust me, do you?” he said. “Because I’m Corsican.”
“As long as we help each other, I do,” Aimée said.
“More Corsicans live in France than in all of Corsica. It’s a diaspora. There are villages with only twenty people left, old peo- ple. Mountains cover eighty-five percent of the island. Rich Parisians come for vacation eager to imbibe nature, wine, and organic honey.” Sarcasm layered his voice. “But haven’t you heard, we’re integrated now? Pasqua is the Minister of the Interior; that model, the one for Marianne, is Corsican; even the quay by the Préfecture’s named after Corsica.”
“Did Petru know Jacques Gagnard? Or did you?” she asked, keeping her voice even with effort.
He shook his head, but he turned away and she couldn’t read his face. There was a thick roll of paper in the back pocket of his backpack.
Plans, copies of blueprints for targeted buildings?
“What’s that?” she asked warily.
“My once-brilliant career,” he said. “Ruined by the Separatists.”
He unfolded the thick sheets. SOUNDWERX was engraved on the top of the pages.
“They forgot the Isadore after Lucien,” he said. “Close enough; Lucien Sarti. A contract that will never be executed.”
Her cold hands dropped her penlight and the contents of her bag spilled out in the slushlike snow: sand from the Brittany beach, her kohl eye pencil, Nicorette patches, worn Vuitton wallet, dated Hôtel Dieu pass to Laure’s ward, well-thumbed cryptography manual, the holy card from her father’s funeral, a black leather neck cord with a knotted silver teardrop pendant, a worn Indian take-out menu, and her cell phone. She dried the items off with her gloves and scooped them back inside.
Lucien had picked up the penlight. “You’re one of those career types, live for your work? Don’t clean house, eh. Bet you don’t even cook.”
Aimée felt her cheeks burn. Was it so obvious? As Guy had observed, making espresso was her only culinary skill?
“Restos were invented to eat in, weren’t they?” she said, taking the penlight, shining it on the thick document.
“‘Multipackaging,’ ‘tape and vinyl,’ ‘promotional materials,’ ‘SOUNDWERX label,’ ‘large venues,’” she read from the contract. “Impressive. Talk about hitting the big time.”
“Not anymore,” he said. “Petru put a spoke in that wheel.”
”Why?”
“Who knows? I met him once, then the second time with you.”
“It doesn’t make sense. You must be hiding something.”
He stared, his dark eyes plumbing her.
“The flics want to talk with you about the bomb planted near the Mairie of the eighteenth arr
ondissement,” she said, taking a guess.
He flinched. She figured her comment had hit home. She backed away from him, hitching her damp bag onto her shoulder.
“Are you going to inform on me?”
“I’ve got a better idea, musician. We’re going to find Petru.”
Thursday Night
NATHALIE GAGNARD’S DAMP SWEATER clung to her. Her hand came back wet from touching her cheeks. She was crying, and she hadn’t even realized it.
Light from the streetlamp slanted through her half-closed shutters and checkered the sisal mat under her bare feet. In her apartment, once a ballroom—a quarter of it, anyway—clung the dense odor of white chrysanthemums for Jacques’s funeral service. They lay in the sink, needing water, still wrapped in green paper. The body of the man she ached for would repose in a steel morgue drawer until the ground dried out enough for a grave to be dug. The flowers could wait.
The phone rang next to her.
“Madame Gagnard, Officer Rassac calling,” said a voice she recognized. “Please accept our condolences. We’ve taken up a collection for the funeral. The way we think Jacques would like it.” Pause. “We hope you’ll agree.”
Had they made arrangements for Jacques’s funeral without consulting her? As the ex-wife, she wasn’t even a proper widow nor would she be entitled to his pension. She scrabbled for her cigarettes, found the packet, and lit one.
“Madame Gagnard?”
She exhaled; a gray wisp of smoke trailed into the room.
“So you’ve managed everything.” She bit back the rest.
There was a pause. “We wanted to make things easier, you know. The men . . . ,” he paused again, cleared his throat. “We wanted to relieve you of this unexpected burden.”
Her tears flowed, accompanied by sobs she couldn’t control.
“Do whatever you want.” She hung up, ashamed. They knew she had no money.
If only Jacques had been able to keep his hands off the machines. The gambling fever was a curse. Their debts mounted, they’d pay off one loan shark, then Jacques would gamble again and get in debt to another.
She ground out her cigarette in the full ashtray. A few months ago he’d joined a program on his own, tried to quit, surprising her. He’d told her he was quitting for himself, it was something he had to do. She hadn’t asked him why, just thanked the stars. And then, last week, those telltale shining eyes, that fevered look. Right away she knew. He’d gone back to the machines.
Mounting excitement, pills, big plans, a coup, he said, that would make all their debts disappear. Like every big idea he’d had, it backfired. And this time, it took him with it.
Her heart heaved. Jacques’s tousled hair, the way he’d tickled her under her knees, how he’d made her purr beneath the sheets. Life with him had been a joy—on good days.
She grabbed the half-empty bottle of Ambien pills and curled her legs under her on the couch. She longed for oblivion. To forget. She thumbed open the horoscope page in Marie Claire, as she did every month, and scanned the advice under her sign, a Scorpion, drawn biting its lethal tail.
Jacques had said she embodied Scorpio’s dark, jealous nature and secretiveness. And despite his free spirit, he’d seemed to like it during their five years of marriage. Opposites attract, wasn’t that the saying?
Under Scorpio’s Feelings Forecast she read: Venus rising indicates time for reflection. The same for dreams. Take time, ponder, the answers will come. A warm-colored sun illuminates your journey.
Answers will come? Already, as she’d told the reporter, that bitch was in custody. The little harpy with her cleft lip, like the upper lip of a hare, a sign still regarded in her Breton village as the malicious act of an elf or fairy. Old sayings and beliefs still held sway in the countryside. Hadn’t her mother refused to let her pregnant sister cross in front of a rabbit for fear of miscarriage?
That Laure was cursed and transmitted the curse to others around her. Nathalie known it the moment she’d laid on eyes on her.
Nathalie’s fist balled, knocking the pills over, sprinkling them across the floor. How many had she taken tonight? The doctor said two would dull the edge of anxiety. Two?
She’d vowed to Jacques she’d never go back on the street. She’d given her word. Did it matter now?
Jacques, fresh from the military in Corsica, and new to the police force, had found her. She would never forget that bitter February evening. The flics were making a routine sweep of rue Joubert; she was just a few months into The Life. At the Commissariat he’d grinned, handing her hot coffee and offering her a seat in his warm cubicle. He’d treated her like a human being and winked, offering her a “cousine’s” job, which was what they called informers. He’d promised her better things and, to his credit, later he had made an honest woman of her. She owed her life to him.
And it had been sweet, especially those last few days. Talking with him every day, sometimes twice, his saying he needed her, that only she could help him, and it would all work out. He’d leave the force, they’d settle in Saint Raphael, buy that little bistro. But now, it was all over, all due to that jealous whiner.
Proof? Why did they need more than Laure’s smoking gun? Those juges d’instructions got more fussy every day; soon, as Jacques had said, they’d need to video a crime before anyone got nailed.
What had Jacques put away, the night she came home early? Groggy, she reached down for the pills, picked them up one by one, put some back in the bottle, and took two more. Or was it three more?
Little was left to comfort her. Most days her only interactions were at work or with the cashier at Casino, the market, who lived downstairs. Her life had been mechanical and soulless since Jacques had left. And now he was gone for good.
The Marie Claire fell to the floor. Her muscles had relaxed. The walls glazed before her eyes, a hazy aura of vanilla light came through the window from the street. Hadn’t her horoscope indicated a colored sun . . .?
Thursday Night
“ I’M SORRY, I’M THE only one here,” said Félix Conari’s housekeeper. “Petru? I haven’t seen him. Madame and Monsieur are out.”
“Please,” Aimée said. “I must reach Monsieur Conari.”
“Monsieur Conari?” said the flustered housekeeper. “He’s gone straight from the airport to services at Eglise Saint-Pierre de Montmartre. That’s all I know.”
“Merci,” Aimée said, clicking off her cell phone.
“I have a gig,” Lucien said.
“First, let’s go to church,” she said.
THE TAXI stopped on rue Saint-Rustique, the oldest street in Montmartre, wide enough, she imagined, for a twelfth-century cart. She handed the driver thirty francs. “Keep the change,” she said, hoping to earn late-night taxi karma, and he grinned.
A gutter ran down the middle of the street, like an inverted seam, leading to Eglise Saint-Pierre, a church built on the site of Roman temples to Mars and Mercury. In the fifth century, an abbey, later the birthplace of the Jesuit order, had stood here. Now it was the oldest chapel in Paris. During the Revolution, it had been a telegraph station. In the Franco-Prussian War, a Prussian munitions depot. At the time of the Commune, a fortress against the Communards and starving masses who were reduced to hunting rats.
The bronze sculpted Italian doors stood open, revealing a candle-lit medieval stone chapel. A small crowd was leaving the mass. The courtyard, usually crowded with tourists, lay deserted this winter night.
The musk of incense made her nose itch. Their footsteps echoed as they passed the statue of Marie Thérèse of Montmartre and walked toward the columns crowned by sculpted leaves.
Félix Conari was shaking hands with the priest, clasping them within his own. A gray-haired man wearing a dark suit, red tie, and blue shirt, the uniform of Ministry types, stood next to him. His was a face she’d seen often in the paper next to that of the Minister of the Interior.
Church and state. Bad partners. She didn’t like it.
She cau
ght Conari’s eye. If he was surprised, he didn’t show it. A few moments later, he excused himself and joined them.
“Forgive me, Monsieur Conari, but your housekeeper—”
“My wife didn’t tell you? Aaah, I forgot she’s at a reception, but it’s good you found me.” Conari put his arm around Lucien. “Ça va, Lucien?”
Lucien gave a hesitant nod.
“We celebrated the annual memorial mass for my sister. Come, let’s talk outside,” Conari said. His silk tie was rumpled, his eyes tired and red. Near the pillar, he picked up his brown overcoat, which was resting on a folded suitbag with an Air France luggage tag.
Outside the church, which was overshadowed by Sacré Coeur, he buttoned his coat and steered them to the adjacent cemetery gate. Mist topped the summit of rue du Mont-Cenis, the street that was once the ancient pilgrim route.
“We must clear up this misunderstanding, Lucien,” said Félix.
The dark cemetery, with a sign saying it was open once a year, revealed sinking sarcophagi pitched at drunken angles. Druids, Romans, medieval men, they were all under here, somewhere.
“How can we reach Petru?” Aimée asked.
“He was supposed to meet me at the airport.”
“Two hours ago he threatened us.”
“I haven’t seen him since Monday,” Conari said. “I don’t understand.”
He seemed as lost as she felt. She’d thought Conari would have answers. She’d been clutching at connections, grasping at straws driven by a feeling in her gut, unsubstantiated by anything more than an overheard conversation in Corsican, Zette’s body hanging from the WC door, a nine-year-old’s observations from the roof, lights in a construction site at night, and a sour taste in her mouth about Ludovic Jubert.
“Félix, what’s going on?” Lucien asked.
Conari gave a deep sigh. “I’m concerned, too,” he said. “Petru hasn’t returned my calls.”
“Petru tried to incriminate me. And he’s been following me.”
“You’re serious? He threatened you, Lucien?” Conari shook his head. “Petru’s a hothead, he gets out of line sometimes. But this sickens me.”
“Out of line, Félix?” Lucien said. “He planted information at the recording studio to tie me to the terrorists and then alerted the police.”