by Cara Black
Drum and bass with a few sampled jazz riffs drifted from somewhere. She followed the beat into another cavern where a mixed crowd lay sprawled on sofas or danced with closed eyes.
The man unpacking his coffin box—a hard plastic carry case for turntables—nodded at her question. “DJ Ketlogic, a chill-room man for sure,” he said. “Good trance mix.”
She smiled, as if she understood what he meant. “Where is he?”
“You missed him.”
BACK IN MONTMARTRE she found a third club. At least she could take off the fake hair and stuff it in her bag now. Anything that didn’t kill you made you stronger. Wasn’t that what they said?
She entered the smoke-filled club now pulsing with techno located in a once elegant hotel particulier with high ceilings. The yawning marble fireplace was piled with alternative newspapers. There was a tarnished fin de siècle mirror above it and a theatre space up the stone stairs, so worn they had almost melted.
“DJ Ketlogic spinning tonight?” she asked.
“Check the bar,” said a man with a shaved head and dead brown eyes.
Lucien himself stood there by the brass-handled beer pulls. Her cell phone vibrated in her pocket. Just when she’d found Lucien.
“Allô?” she said, impatient.
“Aimée,” Saj said. “You had a good idea. I burrowed around and discovered a connection between the central listening center at Les Invalides and the Big Ears.”
“You did?” Never mind how—Saj had taken her idea and run with it. And found a connection! “Go on, Saj,” she said, watching Lucien gather up his music case.
“They’re monitoring Montmartre from a flat in the quartier, right there! Sounds like a sweet setup. Cozy, they just ordered Chinese takeout. Bet they’ll hear us tomorrow or whenever when they decrypt this.”
“Where?” she asked.
“Sixteen, rue Nicollet. Watch out.”
“Superbe, Saj.”
She’d better get there before they shut it down. But, having finally found Lucien, she couldn’t just leave empty-handed. As if he sensed her presence, he turned. His black eyes glittered in the dim light of the bar as he looked her up and down.
“Your usual attire?”
She’d forgotten her goth outfit. No wonder people had given her a wide berth in the Metro.
“Makes life interesting,” she said. She moved toward him and took his arm.
“Like to live on the edge, don’t you?” he said.
“They’ve mounted an operation and you’re it,” she said in his ear. “I’m supposed to turn you in. I’ll have to unless you guide me to Petru or help me find him.”
“You just don’t give up, do you?”
“If I do they’ll land you like a fat fish. Tonight, tomorrow, or the next day. Your choice.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know where the salaud went.”
“Right now, I believe you. But you can help me find him. Let’s catch a taxi.”
THE STEEP stairs of rue Nicollet, a dark narrow seam on the less fashionable side of Sacré Coeur, loomed overhead. Strains of African music floated from an open window. Green plastic garbage containers stood by a gate on the steps; tree branches cast sticklike shadows over number 16’s small walled courtyard. Before Aimée could ask Lucien to wait, she heard groaning in the shadows. Human moans. Embarrassed, she wondered if they’d stumbled on an amorous couple. Or . . . the groaning escalated . . . were they the sounds of someone in pain?
She skirted the garbage containers and stood on the dark wet pavement leading to a back building. A figure huddled against the rear wall. She shone her penlight on it to reveal a man, his black leather coat torn, bleeding onto the brown, sodden leaves. Petru.
“Salaud, bastardo,” Lucien swore, followed by more words in Corsican she couldn’t understand. He’d pulled out a knife and thrust it at the shaking Petru.
“Stop!” She never thought she’d protect this mec but now she pulled at Lucien’s arm. “Wait, I have to talk to him.”
“It’s going down now,” gasped a white-faced Petru. “The guns, the rocket launchers. I have to tell them. . . .”
“Tell the DST?”
He nodded, slumping further. His face creased in pain.
So Petru was an informer for the DST.
“Liar, you framed me,” Lucien accused, shaking Aimée off.
“Why did you pay Cloclo?” Aimée asked.
“To keep tabs on you,” Petru gasped. “What you found out. I played along, trying to find the real villain, but the DST thinks it’s you, Lucien. I have to tell them. . . .”
“Who’s behind it?” She knelt, ripped off the hem of her black net dress, and used it to stanch Petru’s leg wound. Lights blazed in an upstairs flat. Her cell phone vibrated in her pocket once again but she ignored it. She heard doors slam, footsteps. The DST. Not the folks she’d care to meet on these dark stairs.
“Who, Petru?”
His eyelids fluttered. “Conari’s site . . . the hospital . . . tunnel.”
Conari . . . the hospital. Think, she had to think. She pulled Lucien back.
“Give me half an hour before you tell them, do you understand?” But Petru’s eyes had closed, his head slumped forward.
“I’ll take care of him,” Lucien said, elbowing her aside.
“The DST will take care of you if we don’t leave now,” she said, alarmed.
Comprehension dawned in his eyes.
“Quick!” She ran up the steps two at a time, panting and wishing to God she hadn’t gained that kilo. When she reached the summit by an école maternelle, she heard Lucien behind her.
Her cell phone vibrated again. She caught her breath and hit Voice Mail. Two calls, both of them just static, then someone breathing. A heavy breather. Then the sound of the phone crashing on the floor and “Nurse, the patient . . .,” then a buzz.
Her heart jumped. Was Laure trying to phone her? She steadied her shaking hands and hit Call Back.
“Oui?” said a low voice.
“It’s Aimée Leduc, I have several messages on my phone.”
“Our patient, Laure Rousseau, is agitated. It seems she’s trying to get a message to you. She’s able to use a keyboard.”
Was Laure OK? Trying to communicate with her?
In the background Aimée heard a garbled noise.
“She can’t speak, but she can tap letters and numbers on a keyboard.”
“What has she said—I mean, tapped?” Aimée asked, wishing the nurse would hurry.
“Your name, number, and what looks like, ‘Remember . . . men saying Breton.’ That’s all.”
“Men on the roof? Ask her if it was the men on the roof.
Please, nurse.”
Aimée heard the nurse ask.
“She blinked yes.”
Laure had remembered something from the roof.
“Does she mean Bretonneau, the hospital?”
“She looks tired—”
“Please, it’s vital. Ask her,” Aimée said, trying not to shout.
“Yes. She tapped yes.”
“Tell Laure I’m en route.”
She stuck her cell phone in her pocket.
“Is Conari behind it?” Lucien asked.
“Things point to him but I’m not sure.” She had doubts. Yet he could use Lucien’s music contract to launder arms money. He had Corsican contacts and a construction company. But his ties to the government, evidenced by the man from the Ministry they’d seen with him at the church, confused her.
“Let’s find out.”
TOO BAD she hadn’t looked closer at the construction trucks parked inside the Hôpital Bretonneau courtyard. “Conari Ltd.” was painted on them. It all fit together. The place had been vacant for six years, since 1989, according to the demolition permit on the wall. The year Jubert said her father had been given a contract to work on the stolen arms case.
She had been careless and now it would cost her. Again. No time to think of that. She had to get inside. Th
ey climbed over the locked gate, past the squat, which was dark and partly boarded up. She punched in Morbier’s number.
Busy.
She had to reach him. Tried again. Gravel crunched from a side building.
She tried another number.
“René? No secrets, right? I need your help.”
“Aimée?” he said, his voice sleepy.
“Call Morbier, keep trying to get him to alert the flics, not the DST. . . . Only flics, you understand?”
“What? Why?”
“I’m at the Hôpital Bretonneau in Montmartre, by the cemetery,” she said, breathing fast. “There’s an Armata Corsa arms cache underneath it, somewhere in the tunnel past the squat. No DST or RG. Make sure Morbier understands. Just the flics.”
“Mon Dieu,” René said. “Don’t tell me you’re there!”
She heard a clinking, like keys, over the phone.
“Hold on,” he said, awake now. “Wait right where you are until I get hold of Morbier, Aimée.”
“I can’t. I have to settle some business.”
“Business. You’re crazy! Does it have anything to do with clearing Laure?”
“Everything. Jacques’s killers are inside. I promised her I’d nail them. One more thing. Call Chez Ammad, the bar on rue Veron, and ask for the bricklayer, Theo. Find out from him which day Dumpsters by his building site on rue André Antoine are emptied.”
“Eh, a Theo . . .?”
“Please, René, right now!”
She clicked off before he could protest further.
In the shadows, Lucien pulled her close. She could see the mist of his breath in the cold air. He cupped her chin with his warm hands. A silhouette of black curls ringed his face.
“What did you mean? Is Conari inside?” he asked.
“He’ll use your contract as a way to launder money from gun sales,” she said. “He’s been providing arms, for a price, to those who made bomb threats under the guise of the Corsican Separatist movement.”
Lucien’s grip stiffened. “How can you be sure?”
“It’s a theory; you have to test it, eh, like a scientist? Use the empirical method and find out.”
In this instance, barge right in and hope to God her hunch was right. At least partly right. Whoever handled the stolen arms had to be stopped. She figured Jacques had been trying to do so. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have involved Laure.
Clouds obscured the moon; a single street lamp glowed over the cemetery wall. Cold air cloaked her legs. In the rafters above them, a nest of pigeons fluttered and cooed, disturbed by their noise.
“I need a sign,” he said.
“What? You’re worried about the evil eye?”
Before he could answer, she kissed him hard. Long. Her lips melting on his. Responding, his arms crushed her to him.
She pulled back and caught her breath. “Will that do?”
Silence except for the backfire of a car.
“For now.”
Did she hear amusement in his voice?
“Over there,” Lucien said, pointing to a crumbling brick building, a diffused light now radiating through the barred windows. “Careful, there’s someone there.”
She saw the orange tip of a cigarette and nodded. They crept toward the building’s sagging brick pavilion, careful to step around the gravel and wood piled by the trucks. Lucien had hitched his music case onto his back. He edged ahead. She heard a loud thump and an ouf, as someone expelled air and crumpled.
Lucien had caught the mec from behind, sat him down, and ground out his cigarette.
“Nice touch,” she said. Testing a hunch with a strong guy at her side wasn’t a bad idea, though she’d never admit it to him.
Only one guard? Why not more? Unless the rest . . . .
“You have a plan?” he asked.
She nodded. “We take them by surprise. Figure out where the arms shipments leave from and barricade it.”
Lucien shifted the scuffed metal door, slid it open, and she followed him inside the half-gutted building, past concrete mixers and old hospital gurneys turned on their sides. She flashed her penlight around them. No holes or openings leading to a tunnel. Just broken light fixtures, piles of crumbled lath and plaster, an old crucifix tilted against the remnant of a sagging green wall. Had she got it wrong?
She kept going, past exposed brick and arched iron beams. Saw a yellowish glow ahead. Plastic construction tape labeled DANGER WORK SITE UNSAFE STRUCTURE hung from wooden sawhorses.
She reached for her spray can of Mace and with her other hand picked up a metal rod. And felt herself sinking. “Lucien!” she called. But the only answer was the cracking of floor boards and the swoosh of shifting grains of sand. Under her feet, the floor was tilting, crumbling, throwing her off balance. Petrified, she grabbed for something, anything, as the floor gave way under her. Her hands came back covered with grit and tangled in an electric cord. And then she was dangling in cold air, swinging, her knees hitting against heaps of dull white stones. She heard the loud rumbling of a generator and saw the hewed-gypsum-walled cavern floor far below.
Terror paralysed her. Her hands slid; she couldn’t hold on. She smacked against a conical mound and grabbed at plaster that flaked under her fingernails.
Bumping and clutching at rough ridges and crumbling, gouged surfaces, she slid several meters to a subterranean dirt floor. Scattered gypsum mounds gave it a lunar-landscape look. Dizzied, she gazed up to see the layers of Fontainebleau sand and glistening travertine, packed sandwichlike over the compressed off-white and yellowish pinnacle of gypsum she’d slid down.
She’d landed in an old quarry under the hospital, part of the galleries webbing the underground that had been mined to build Sacré Coeur. There was not much to commend the sturdiness of their foundations to those living overhead in buildings resting on them. Amazing that Sacré Coeur didn’t tumble on its head.
Pounding came from the other side of the huge white flaky mound.
Where was Lucien?
Earsplitting blasts from a generator had masked her descent. On all fours, covered in caked white gypsum, she crawled around the mound, crouched behind rolls of abandoned chain-link fence and hollow metal poles, and then gasped.
A stone’s throw away, men in camouflage fatigues, Eastern European by the look of them, stacked ammunition and dull gray machine guns in metal boxes emblazoned with the slogan ARIEL, SPARKLING LAVAGE POUR TOUTES LES VÊTEMENTS!
Like the washing-machine detergent box on Zette’s table. The killers’ calling card? Worry about that later. She had to stop them. But how?
To the side of the cratered gypsum quarry were split, rotted wood coffins, hoes, shovels, and a forklift. A storage area for grave diggers and their equipment from the adjoining Mont-martre cemetery. Gruesome. The men, intent on loading the boxes, ignored them.
A small open-platform train car sat on tracks leading to a tunnel. She figured the tunnel snaked under the street and went to the cemetery. If she could short out the wires connected to the generator’s battery she’d plunge the cavern into darkness. That would stop the men and allow her to escape through the tunnel. At least, she’d have a shot.
Fear coursed through her. Several feet away from her stood the throbbing industrial generator with rusted wires protruding from it. Cans with funnels were lined up next to it; it ran on gasoline. Even with the men engrossed in their work, she’d have little time to play with the wires. Or to flip the circuit breaker she saw, protected in black housing on the control panel.
She felt in her pocket for a lighter. In the worst-case scenario, she’d knock the gasoline cans over and . . . no, that would be stupid. Live ammunition boxes were stacked by the Ariel cartons!
What could she do? She eyed the corroded metal sprockets and debris in her escape path, memorizing her route. If she got that far!
The generator had a revolving fan, its blades encased in a rusted tan metal frame to cool the exposed motor. She had an idea. She scrabbled her hands ar
ound to find something, anything, long enough for what she needed. Found it.
The generator’s noise muffled shouts and swearing in Corsican. She saw Lucien, his arms behind him, thrown to the ground, then shoved behind large metal cable spools. She peered around the side of the generator. Conari, his shirt bloodstained, sat behind the forklift, tied up. She couldn’t make out another figure partially obscured by Lucien. Wait! His shoes. She knew those shoes.
Someone walked toward the generator. A hand leaned down to pick up a gas can. She had to do it now.
With all her might, she shoved a long metal pipe across the dirt, cramming it into the revolving fan. There was a deafening squealing of shredding metal jamming the motor. Then a grinding and crunching, emitting a shower of sparks and spitting shards of metal as the motor ate the pipe. A hail of metal shrapnel rained off the rail car. The man was screaming.
The light wavered. The generator coughed and screeched to a halt, plunging the cavern into darkness. Her whole body tingled and shook. There were shouts and more screams of pain. Twenty seconds had passed but it felt like twenty minutes. Then, a sickening odor of burning oil from the generator. So rank she could taste it. A voice whimpered in pain.
“What happened? Idiots, go to the backup generator!”
Beams of flashlights swept the grayish white smoke-filled haze. She heard an echoing loudspeaker, incomprehensible words. The flics? Morbier? Then short staccato bursts, the thuds of bullets. Mon Dieu. Lucien was exposed to a rain of bullets! She ducked and saw the shoes, running over the gravel toward the tunnel.
He was getting away! She struggled to her feet, coughing, her ears ringing, as she grasped the rolled-up chain-link fence for support.
She caught herself, then ran, hoping she’d memorized a clear path, and took off down the tunnel, following the train tracks. Footsteps pounding ahead guided her. The frigid tunnel narrowed. And then there were no more footsteps.
