Murder in Clichy

by Cara Black

  Startled, Aimée noticed the grins on the men’s faces as they smacked tiles down on the wooden table.

  “You mean she wore street clothes?”

  “Sure, she wore street clothes. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

  “Eh, Quoc,” the man next to him grinned, “you mean she’s too pretty?”

  He shook his head. “She reminded me of that café actress in the sixties, the one who sang the French go-go songs in Chinese and Vietnamese.” He winked at the man next to him. “You remember, eh?”

  “Sorry, I don’t understand,” Aimée said.

  “Are you saying she’s not a nun?”

  “I’m not saying anything. Not many nuns here,” Quoc told her. “Only old ones.”

  “But she could have come from another temple, n’est-ce pas?”

  Quoc lit a cigarette from a burning stub in the ashtray, a Vietnamese brand, lapsed into Vietnamese and shuffled the white tiles, ignoring her.

  What about Priest Tet, who ran the meditation sessions, Aimée wondered. Would he be more helpful?

  “Do you have the priest’s residence telephone number?”

  “Priest Tet?”

  She nodded and he wrote it down on a piece of paper.

  “That’s all I know.” He refused to answer any more questions.

  She made her way back to the street. Bone-chilling fog swirled around her legs as she ran for the late night bus. If Linh was petitioning the International Court of Justice for her imprisoned brother, she wouldn’t necessarily wear her nun’s robes all the time. But Quoc’s words disturbed her. She telephoned the Cao Dai priest’s residence.

  “Forgive me for calling so late but I need to speak with Linh,” she asked. “The nun who helped me with meditation.”

  “Nuns? No one here now,” Priest Tet said. “Not many nuns practice at our temple. Try Joinville-le-Pont,” he said. “They can help you.”

  But at the Joinville-le-Pont Pagoda there was only an eighty-six-year-old nun who knew of no Linh or any other Cao Dai nuns in Paris. Unease filled Aimée. Where was Linh?

  In the taxi back to the Clichy hotel, yellow lights reflected on the wet pavement in Place de Clichy. A line snaked out of the only tabac open at this hour. She called Martine.

  “Martine, how’s your guest?”

  “Asleep,” she said, her husky voice tired. “I checked. Tomorrow, I work at home and will keep my eye on her.”

  “I’ll owe you double if you check out the Gulf of Tonkin’s untapped oil sources, and who looks like the leader in obtaining oil drilling rights.”

  “You’re kidding, right, Aimée?”

  “And those rumors that Olf’s an unofficial arm of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”

  “My piece on the European Commission’s in revision,” Martine said, “and I have to fact check twice before tomorrow’s deadline.”

  Martine wrote investigative freelance for AFP—Agence France Presse—and Reuters now, too. She enjoyed it more than her editorship at Le Figaro or the doomed magazine Diva she’d spearheaded for a brief two issues, until Aimée had discovered her backer was financing Diva with laundered arms money.

  “Nose around. You’ve got contacts in that world,” Aimée said. “There’s a Dom Pérignon with your name on it. Isn’t Gilles’s birthday soon?”

  “A magnum of Dom Pérignon, did you say?”

  Aimée groaned. Quick, Martine was quick.

  “And those petits fours from Fauchon that he loves.”

  “Deep background, Martine.”

  She heard Martine yawn. “D’accord, the usual.”

  Saturday Morning

  NADÈGE BLINKED. LIGHT CAME through the shutter’s slits and wavered across the floor. Her bag had vanished, her jewelry, and the old lady, too. She felt sore, itchy, and cold.

  The old woman had slipped something into that liquid. Like something she’d heard making the rounds of clubs. A tasteless, odorless substance men put in women’s drinks, knocking them out and causing them to forget what happened after. But her head felt clear though she remembered drinking and no more.

  Footsteps sounded below.

  Had the old woman returned?

  The wormholed armoire lay open, papers and old clothes strewn around. But her body wouldn’t cooperate. She rolled over and was face to face with the smudged baseboard.

  “Where did she put it?” a loud voice was saying. “Thadée owes me.”

  What did they mean? Thadée’s stash? Or the old key she’d found? But it had gone with her bag. And she hadn’t known what it opened. Her plans for flight had gone up in smoke.

  Nadège crawled, her muscles protesting, and gripped the edge of the armoire. She must get inside, hide under piles of clothes. But she felt so tired. Her hand loosened, fell.

  “Where the hell did she go?”

  Nadège knew that voice. The Bonbon King. Panic gripped her. She owed him. She forced her legs, made them crawl. Somehow she got inside, curled into an embryonic position, pulled an old crocheted shawl over her, and closed the armoire door halfway. Like she’d hidden when she was small and her parents fought, trying to drown out her father’s accusations and her mother’s tears. But she never could.

  Only her grand-mère’s warm arms that rocked her, and her inexhaustible supply of ginger candy, had made it better. For awhile.

  Several men argued in the doorway. “We find her, grab the kid—”

  One of them kicked the bedstead, then the old desk, splintering it to pieces. Nadège shuddered. He’d smash the armoire next.

  Saturday Morning

  THE VANILLA-HUED LIGHT, UNUSUALLY clear for November, haloed René’s head. Aimée blinked and opened her eyes wider. Everything fell into place. There was no fogginess or blurring. She breathed a sigh of relief and smelled something wonderful.

  But where were they?

  And then she remembered their Clichy hotel room.

  “Your espresso’s getting cold,” René said.

  “Merci.” She sat up, untangling her purple fishnets and Moroccan shirt.

  “You mumbled something last night about running a virus check on the Olf account and duplicating log entries and emails before a meeting with de Lussigny later,” he said. “I’m printing them out now.”

  “Fantastique. And good morning to you, partner.” She smiled, stirring two lumps of brown sugar into her cup. “How do you feel?”

  “The mattress came with the hotel in 1830,” he said, jerking his thumb toward the bed. ”But after the hard earth in the air raid shelter, I loved it.”

  “We can’t go back to the office.”

  “Or my apartment,” he said. “Saj got us some new cell phones. He’s bringing my scanner later. Look at you. Nice outfit.”

  She grimaced, checking the stitches on her arm. “Perfect for escaping through garbage chutes, playing in heavy metal bands, and also for attending elegant soirées.”

  René swallowed his espresso the wrong way and choked. “Going to tell me about it?”

  Aimée handed René a napkin and told him about Regnier’s suspension, her encounter with Blondel and Pleyet, Sophie, and the old Chinese grand-mère. She didn’t mention meeting de Lussigny.

  “Blondel? How’s he involved?”

  “Thadée owed Blondel; his henchman Jacky made my skin crawl,” she said. “Gassot’s hiding. Afraid. But I don’t know why. And I’m no closer to the jade. I need to discover Pleyet’s motive and what exactly the Circle Line is.”

  “Aimée, if Pleyet once worked with Regnier,” René said, “stands to reason they’re in this together now.”

  “But Pleyet intimated he’s surveilling Regnier,” she said. “And somehow, I buy it. He didn’t have to reveal himself last night. Or tell me about the past.”

  René hit SAVE on his laptop.

  “You mean about the Place Vendôme surveillance? He could be leading you on. But how is that relevant? What you need to discover is who had the jade originally. Then you can question them.”

&nb
sp; Good point! But so far she’d run into dead ends and silence.

  “I e-mailed Thadée’s files here. Can you look them over? The Drouot won’t release the name of the consignor,” she said. “It’s in data storage on the île de la Jatte. What’s important is, who wants it now? That should point to who killed for it.”

  René rubbed his bandaged wrist. She noticed his right leg propped on the chair and pillows below his hip.

  “Are you with me on this, René?”

  He shrugged.

  “No choice,” he said. “But be careful.”

  She switched on her laptop.

  “This might help,” she said. “I’ve got four digits of Lars’s password. If we get the rest, we can crack the Circle Line.”

  And figure out why the Circle Line was looking for the jade.

  She heard a knock on the door. “Who’s there?”

  “Didn’t you say you needed a hacker?” someone asked.

  She opened the door.

  Saj stood there in flowing Indian pants and wool Nepalese sweater.

  “Perfect timing,” she said. “Got a challenge for you two.”

  He rubbed his hands together, taking in the three computers. “My pleasure.”

  She typed in the digits she’d written on her palm.

  “There’s four of the twelve numbers Lars entered,” she said. “I need the complete password. Want to try a brute force attack?”

  René shook his head. “A brute force attack with every possible combination of letters, numbers, and symbols to try and duplicate a password? That could take two days. Aren’t we in a hurry?”

  “What about a dictionnaire attack?” asked Saj. “Try common words found in a dictionnaire starting with pets’ names or others commonly used in passwords.”

  “Most ministries use heavily encrypted passwords,” Aimée said. “Like we do. Changing them constantly.”

  But in this socialist system, with the endemic work overloads, she knew little time was spent on such safety procedures.

  “Lars’s system, I figure, like all the ministries, uses a stored ‘hash’ of the password in a file,” she said.

  “Right,” said René. “One-way encryption uses a common algorithm which manipulates the password.”

  “But breaking a twelve-digit or letter password could take a whole day,” Saj said, sitting down. “If we use two computers, it will take less time, of course.

  “Bon, you’ve got this under control. I’ve got to follow someone,” Aimée said, pulling on her coat.

  “Not one of those mecs.”

  “An old Chinese grand-mère,” Aimée said. “A Cao Dai member. We should have a lot in common.”

  THE OLD grand-mère dropped Michel off at the nearby école maternelle and Aimée followed her. The Asian woman, her padded silk jacket flapping in the wind, walked with a quick step across busy Place de Clichy. She paused at the Vietnamese restaurant, fronted by a flashy aquarium proclaiming CATCH OF THE DAY. Gunmetal gray storm clouds bracketed the last slice of blue sky.

  Now was her chance.

  “Quelle surprise, Madame!” Aimée smiled. “Why, I’m just going in for lunch. May I invite you to join me?”

  The woman backed away in surprise, fear in her eyes.

  “Eat at home,” she said.

  But a group of black-suited Asian businessman, their voices raised in singsong Vietnamese, blocked her way. The skies opened, pelting down hail, slivers of ice, which bounced on the cracked pavement.

  “Quick, you’ll get wet. Please, be my guest,” Aimée said, steering her inside. Flustered, the woman was herded forward by the smiling maître d’hôtel. With a flourish, he showed them to a table in the well-lit restaurant and proferred menus. Once this had been an old style workers’ bouillon canteen, Aimée thought, noticing balconies several floors high, all filled with tables.

  A fragrant pot of jasmine tea appeared on the table with two celadon green cups.

  “Please,” Aimée said, reaching for the cup and pouring the tea.

  “Merci,” the old woman replied, her manners taking over. “But I must go.”

  Out of the corner of Aimée’s eye, she saw people huddled in the doorways in Place de Clichy, shielding themselves from the hail with their umbrellas.

  “Of course. Drink some tea and go when the hail stops. Right now, it’s too dangerous; you might slip on the pavement.”

  Cornered, the woman nodded. Despite her slight build, Aimée imagined a rod of steel in her backbone. She was strong, like the bamboo which swayed in the wind but clung with tenaciousness rooted in rock.

  “My name’s Aimée Leduc, I know Monsieur de Lussigny through business,” she said, desperate to establish familiarity. “He told me his father died last month. So sorry to hear that. And now, his brother-in-law is gone, too!”

  The woman clasped her cup and took a single sip. Perhaps this was a good sign. From around them came the orders shouted by the waiters.

  “And so sad for you, I’m sure,” she said. “Madame . . . ?”

  “Madame Nguyen. I live in France long time,” she said. “Know Métro very good. I take Métro home.”

  Try anything, Aimée told herself, to get this woman to stay and talk.

  “Madame Ngyuen. You look too young to have a grandson! He’s just a boy you take care of, isn’t he?”

  A smile escaped the woman. She displayed a full set of white-capped teeth. “My great-grandson. Michel, good boy.”

  “I can’t believe that,” Aimée said, hoping she wasn’t laying it on too thick. “Impossible!”

  “Possible. My granddaughter his mother,” Madame Ngyuen said, nodding.

  “You help her,” Aimée said. “She’s lucky!”

  “I raise her, too.” There was an enigmatic expression on her face.

  “But how? Non, you have so much energy, like a young woman.”

  She nodded. “More energy in my country.”

  “So your granddaughter works . . . ?”

  “Nadège. She stays somewhere else.”

  Nadège. The other name Thadée had uttered.

  “How can I find her?”

  “Don’t know. I take care of Michel now.”

  “Of course, but—”

  “Gone,” she shook her head. “In Indochina I run big house with servants, all day, and raise five children, too. Dead, all dead now.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Aimée said. “Did that happen here, or in Indochina?”

  “Indochina, long time ago,” she said.

  “I’m practicing meditation at the Cao Dai Temple,” Aimée said. “Trying to. The nun Linh helps me. But I’m sure you know her, non?”

  Madame Nguyen’s eyes narrowed. “Eh, what you mean?”

  “I mean Linh’s so helpful. Do you know the nun I’m referring to?”

  “No temple. Pray at home.”

  Disappointed, Aimée tried another tack. She remembered the few Vietnamese words she’d learned. “Má,” she said. She hoped it was close to the Vietnamese word for mother.

  “Inflection wrong,” Madame Nguyen said, shaking her head. “Listen, ‘ma’ can mean ghost, má mother, mà because, rice seedling, tomb or horse.”

  “What’s the word for dragon?”

  Madame Ngyuen looked away. “You nice French lady. Not like most gweilo.”

  “Gweilo?”

  “ ‘White devil,’ but meant in nice way,” she said.

  “Isn’t that Cantonese?”

  Madame Nguyen nodded. Her black hair shone. She wore no ornament this time, just a tight bun, with small jade dots in her long lobes.

  “Indochina all China once,” she said. Shrugged. “Rape and rule like all conquerors. We kick Mandarins out in tenth century. People stay.”

  This could be an opening, Aimée thought.

  “They looted emperor’s tombs, didn’t they?” she said, eager to keep the woman talking. She pulled out the auction catalogue page. “And stole things like this. Or was it the French?”

&nb
sp; Aimée saw her companion shrink back against the leather banquette.

  “Do you recognize this treasure? Weren’t the Cao Dai guarding it?”

  No answer. Madame Nguyen still stared at the photo of the jade figures.

  “Take your order now?” a waiter asked.

  Madame Nguyen shook her head.

  “Give us a few more minutes, please,” Aimée said.

  The waiter shook his head and walked away.

  “Thadée gave me this before he was murdered.” Aimée leaned closer and showed her the disk she held in the palm of her hand. “But I don’t understand why. You said the dragon symbolizes—”

  “He give you this?”

  Aimée nodded.

  “Don’t understand.”

  For a moment, Aimée thought she saw fear in the old woman’s eyes.

  “Neither do I, Madame Nguyen,” she said.

  “No good. Belong to Vietnam.”

  “The Cao Dai nun, Linh, wants to thank the man who saved her father’s life at Dien Bien Phu.”

  Madame Nguyen said something in Vietnamese.

  “What’s that?” Aimée asked.

  “Hiêú,” she nodded. “Filial respect. Confucian way. Not like him, the owner’s warlord uncle.” Her face crinkled in disgust. “Warlord, steal land.”

  Aimée stared. “You mean the owner of this restaurant?”

  “No respect for emperor.”

  Aimée knew the deposed Vietnamese Emperor Bao Dai had lived in French exile since the 1950s. She remembered that much from studying for the History section of the Bac. Did this relate to the looting of the emperor’s tomb?

  “Could the owner’s uncle have looted a tomb in Dien Bien Phu?”

  “Grave robbers never change.”

  A cell phone beeped somewhere under the table.

  Madame Nguyen pulled out the smallest cell phone Aimée had ever seen.

  “Oui . . . allô,” she said. She blinked several times as she listened, the lines around her mouth tightening.

  Bad news?

  Madame Nguyen stood. “Must go. Michel have school trip earlier. Must go.”

  “Let me find you a taxi,” Aimée said, rising and laying some francs on the table.

  Outside, by some karma Aimée figured she or Madame Nguyen had earned, a taxi idled at the stand. She helped the old woman inside. “Take my card; I’m trying to find this jade. Perhaps you may be able to help me.”