Murder in the Palais Royal

by Cara Black

  Back at her desk, she checked for messages and found one.

  “Sophie from Cybermatrice returning your call. No hard feelings, I hope, but we got the Ophatrix contract. That’s what this is about, right? I’m dating the coordinator, FYI. Better luck next time.” Then, a click.

  Talk about rubbing it in. René had offered the same terms to Ophatrix; but if Sophie “dated” the coordinator, no wonder she’d obtained the contract. But if Sophie slept her way into contracts, she wouldn’t have to threaten René, much less injure him.

  His cell phone. Why hadn’t she thought of trying that before? She could speak to him directly and find out where— and how—he was. She hit René’s number.

  A moment later, she heard its distinctive Chopin sonata ringtone. René’s cell phone was still on his desk under some papers. Disappointed, she clicked off. Her phone rang the very next second.

  “Aimée,” Saj said, his voice hesitant. It was their permanent part-time hacker. “You’re in New York?”

  “I cancelled my trip. I’m in the office.” She sensed something in Saj’s voice. “What’s wrong, Saj?”

  “What’s right? The flics questioned me this afternoon. Why didn’t you tell me René had been shot?”

  “Forgive me, Saj,” she said. “I’ve had no sleep. I spent the night at the hospital, and then with the police. And the flics suspect me of shooting René.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “If only I were.” And she told him all, from the beginning.

  “Can you think of any disgruntled client, or jealous hacker, who may have it in for René?”

  “René’s diplomatic,” Saj said. “He’s professional with clients and respected among hackers, Aimée.”

  “I know.” Was he implying that she wasn’t?

  There was a pause.

  “I’m monitoring the daily updates and pursuing the Nadil-lac investigation as planned,” Saj said. “But Nadillac’s keeping tight; it’s like shaving an egg.”

  She couldn’t worry about that. Right now, she needed Saj’s help. Apart from René, no one hacked computer systems better.

  “Delve into our bank account,” she said. “There’s been a wire transfer to us of a hundred thousand francs. A mistake, I’m sure,” she said. “Use our access code. 09AS876. No fancy footwork, keep it low-key, and sniff the site. I’m waiting for the bank manager’s explanation.”

  “I’ll try.”

  The distance in his voice bothered her. “Don’t you think I’m upset? René’s right lung was punctured. If only I’d taken the bullet instead.”

  “Things don’t look good, Aimée.”

  “Tell me about it, Saj. I need your help right now so I can find who shot him and why.”

  “Aimée, René’s blood is still staining the floor,” Saj said. “I saw it today. I can’t enter the office any more.”

  The sight of the reddish-brown stain where René had fallen made her stomach churn too. The crime-scene tape was still draped over René’s chair.

  “Can’t you get the woman who cleans at night to remove it?” Saj asked.

  “Véro?” She considered. “Why didn’t I think of her? She was working last night; she may have seen something.”

  “The flics will have questioned her,” Saj said.

  If so, Melac hadn’t mentioned it. But she hadn’t seen the report. Maybe she was clutching at straws, but right now that’s all she had.

  After he hung, up, a bad feeling dogged her. Did Saj doubt her?

  She grabbed her leather coat, knotted the wool scarf around her neck, and ran down the stairs.

  * * *

  AIMÉE PEERED INTO the ground-floor concierge’s loge.

  “Véro?”

  But it was Anna, the building concierge, a short Portuguese woman, who frowned back. Her black hair, streaked with premature gray, was pulled back from her lined face. “Véro’s off tonight.”

  Aimée clenched her fist in disappointment. In the small loge, Anna’s two young children argued about whose turn it was to feed the caged parakeet in the window.

  “Véro worked last night, non?”

  Anna shrugged and consulted a sheet on the wall. “It says so here. Not my responsibility; my job starts in the morning.”

  “Do you have Véro’s number?”

  Another shrug. “She works sometimes for her sister at another job.”

  “What’s her sister’s number?”

  “It’s here somewhere. Hold on.” Aimée heard the children’s shouts, then the parakeet’s feathers flew in the air as birdseed sprayed on the floor.

  Before she could ask her to hurry, Anna had rescued the squealing parakeet in the cage.

  Aimée scanned the sheet on the wall herself, found Véro’s number, wrote it on her palm with an eyeliner pencil, and closed the door.

  * * *

  THERE WAS NO answer on Véro’s cell phone, so she left a message. Hunger gnawed at her. If the woman was asleep or had gone to her other job, she’d grab something to eat, then go back to the office and hope it wouldn’t take hours before Véro returned her call. But by the time she’d paid the man at the charcuterie on rue du Louvre and clutched her takeout, her phone was vibrating in her pocket.

  “Aimée, I’m sorry,” Véro’s voice boomed over the line. “I should have called you.”

  She pictured the dark-haired thirtyish Véro, a woman with pulsating energy, a sure touch at cleaning and the gleam mistress of crystal chandeliers: “Vinegar, that’s my secret.”

  Might she have information about René?

  “Let’s meet, Véro.”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t. I’m subbing at my sister’s job tonight.”

  Blocked at every turn, Aimée thought.

  “What time’s your break?”

  Look, I meant to drop the letter at your office, I’ll bring it “tomorrow.”

  “What letter, Véro?”

  She heard voices, then the roar of a machine. “My supervisor. Got to go, Aimée.”

  “Forget the letter. Haven’t you heard? René was shot last night, in our office.”

  She heard Véro’s gasp. “Nom de Dieu. Let me ask the supervisor to switch my break.”

  “Where are you, Véro?”

  “Just five minutes away from you. Hurry.”

  “Eh?”

  “Porte de l’Oratoire. The Louvre’s staff entrance, on rue de Rivoli.”

  * * *

  AIMÉE STOOD AT the inconspicuous staff entrance of the Louvre. There was nothing to indicate that more than a thousand employees filed through this stone-framed doorway, day and night, into the offices, galleries, and fifteen kilometers of corridors under the Louvre. Curators, museum admin staff, historians, archeologists, electricians, guards, glaziers, exhibition hangers, carpenters, cleaners, and chefs. Like a small contained city, the Louvre operated its own medical center, staff cafeteria, gym, painting and sculpture restoration studio, and library. Plus three hundred thousand works of art, not all of them displayed.

  A guard ground out his cigarette on the gravel of the walkway, then shoved it into the drain with his shoe. She couldn’t count the many times her grandfather had taken her here to visit his friend, Donnac, a guard. Donnac would sit her on his knee in the narrow guardroom while sharing a bottle with her grandfather. But she didn’t recognize this guard.

  “Lost, Mademoiselle?” the guard asked. “You’ll find the main entrance near the Pyramid at the center of the Napoléon courtyard.”

  “Non, Monsieur. I’m meeting Véro. She’s on her break.”

  His eyes narrowed. “No one told me.”

  Times had changed.

  “Véro forgot her dinner.” Aimée held up the charcuterie bag.

  A woman, dark-haired, a shorter version of Véro in a mustard-colored cleaning smock, appeared, breathless, at the door. She shot Aimée a look.

  “Véro’s not on break yet,” she said. “Et voilà. Véro—my sister—would forget her head if it weren’t on her neck.”


  “Then you can take this for her,” the guard said, blocking the door.

  All this for nothing?

  Véro’s sister took the charcuterie bag and pecked Aimée on both cheeks. “Got time for a coffee? We’ve got a new machine.” She rolled her eyes. “Better brown piss.”

  “You need to clear visitors beforehand, Sylvie,” the guard said.

  “Alors, Renutti, let me offer her a coffee. It’s the least I can do after she made this trip.”

  He shrugged. “Like I said, visitors need authorization.”

  “But Donnac never had a problem,” Aimée said.

  “Donnac retired. Rules have been tightened up. We have new security directives.”

  A small Corot and medieval sculpture had been stolen in broad daylight recently.

  She handed the guard her ID, her card from Leduc Detective Privé. “My office is just there on rue du Louvre.” She stuck fifty francs in the guard’s jacket pocket. “Something for your trouble, Monsieur.” They didn’t make much and an imminent guard’s strike loomed.

  He glanced around the courtyard. “Leduc? I knew one. We called him Le Vieux, tall, thick moustache, broad shoulders.”

  And warm arms that held her when she’d been bitten by a dachshund in the park. Who took her to piano lessons; then for a hot chocolate afterward.

  “My grand-père.”

  The guard drew a breath. “Just this once. Don’t ask me again.”

  Inside, Sylvie pointed her toward the staff locker room. When Renutti looked away, she pulled Aimée’s hand down the hall. Several pairs of rollerblades waited near the lockers. “Put these on.”

  “Now?” She’d skated as a child, but never rollerbladed.

  “How else do you think we navigate this place in a hurry? Véro’s waxing in the Sully East wing and I’m in the other. I have to get back.”

  Aimée slipped off her boots, wedged her feet in the roller-blade boots, and laced them up. Wobbling, gripping the wall, she followed Sylvie into a dank corridor threaded with ventilation pipes under the Louvre.

  Soon she was taking long glides to maintain her balance and keep up with Sylvie. Flying. Cold stone-scented air hit her face; her calf muscles strained with each glide. The whooshing of their rollerblades competed with beeping from a motorized baggage-carrier-like cart with a flashing orange light.

  She wanted to talk to Véro, not exercise in the long cold corridors under the Louvre.

  A sharp right! Double doors. Another corridor leading to the sculpture and restoration studios. Four workmen in short blue jackets wheeled an open wooden crate containing a massive painting. Riding by, she glanced at the painting, a Madonna, her enigmatic smile distorted by the crackled and peeling patina of the wooden panel on which she had been portrayed.

  “Quick, up here.” Sylvie pointed to a narrow wooden stairway that twisted like a corkscrew. Aimée unlaced her skates and looked up, but before she could ask any more questions, Sylvie had glided away with a whoosh.

  At the top, winded, Aimée caught her breath, then pushed open the door. She found herself in a long gallery under a skylight, facing floor-to-ceiling paintings. It was deserted except for Véro, in a mustard-yellow smock, and her waxer machine. Crackling sounds came from the walkie-talkie clipped to her hip.

  “We won’t be disturbed here for a few minutes. And they won’t mind.” Véro jerked her thumb at walls filled with what Aimée assumed were Italian Renaissance masters, by the signs, of the School of Raphael.

  “The supervisor wouldn’t switch my break,” Véro said. The waxer thrummed as it crossed the herring-bone-patterned wood floor.

  “How’s Monsieur René? I feel terrible.”

  “He’s stable,” Aimée said. “But haven’t the flics questioned you?”

  Véro’s eyes crinkled. “Why would they?”

  And then, keeping pace with the waxer, Aimée told Véro what had happened.

  Véro’s eyes widened. “But you wouldn’t shoot Monsieur René. I’m so sorry, Aimée.”

  “Think back to last night, Véro. It’s important. What do you remember?”

  “You mean this?” She pulled a folded envelope from her jeans pocket, addressed to “Aimée Leduc.”

  A letter from the shooter? Before she could open it, a voice came from the walkie-talkie.

  “Véro, have you finished the east gallery?”

  “Oui, Monsieur,” she said. Véro tugged at Aimée’s sleeve.

  “Shhh . . . walk with me as I work. The supervisor will return and check.” Véro continued pushing the waxer, leaving a gleaming sheen on the floor. “Hurry.”

  Aimée kept pace with Véro, who was now heading into the next gallery and another wing. Greco-Roman marble statues stood poised on pedestals, as if caught in flight.

  “Who gave this to you, Véro?”

  “Your office door was shut,” Véro said. ”After I finished mopping, I did the other floors. Mondays I only do touch-ups, two hours max. A young woman buzzed the door. She wanted to give this to you. But when I said you’d gone, she didn’t want to leave it in the mailbox or for the concierge.”

  “Was she wearing a raincoat and a motorcycle helmet?”

  Véro shook her head. “Pitiful, I thought. She was shaking, nervous. Upset, I could tell. Not even a warm coat, just a thin sweater. Young, too, a small washed-out blonde.”

  Aimée wondered who this could be.

  “But René was working; didn’t she ask for him?”

  “Vraiment? The office looked dark, so I thought only those Italians were upstairs. They made enough noise! She gave this to me. Told me to put it in your hands.”

  “What time was this, Véro?”

  Véro kept the waxer moving back and forth on the parquet floor. “Say nine or so. I left before ten.”

  So Véro wouldn’t have seen the shooter. A shame, given her powers of observation.

  But Aimée still didn’t understand one thing. “Why did she give it to you, Véro? After all, I don’t often see you.”

  “Anna, your concierge, alors, she’s not on top of things, to tell you the truth. She loses mail, I’ve seen her forget things. The girl seemed nervous, distressed, so I said I knew you.” Véro shrugged. “I went to work here after that, put the letter in my pocket, and forgot it. I slept all day until they called this afternoon and woke me up. I rushed over here to work. Now that my sister has gotten me on the call roster, I have to come when they call. If you miss once, they don’t try you again.” Her eyes crinkled.

  The walkie-talkie squawked. “Véro, I don’t see your machine in the east wing.”

  “That supervisor’s checking up on me. A real salaud!”

  Footsteps echoed in the long gallery. “You better go, Aimée.”

  “Merci, Véro. How can I get out of here?”

  “Go out the Richelieu wing; there’s a reception tonight,”

  Véro said. “They check who comes in, not who leaves.”

  And with the letter burning a hole in her pocket, Aimée sneaked out behind two revelers leaving early.

  * * *

  “ENCLOSED FIND YOUR visiting hour confirmation to visit prisoner #1387 Nicolas Evry Tuesday 4 p.m. Bring this confirmation with you to La Santé Prison, visitor entrance rue Jean Dolent.”

  With a start, she recognized the name. Nicolas, the neo-Nazi member of Les Blancs Nationaux, who had torched the Marais synagogue. Four years ago, her testimony had put him in prison.

  A scribbled note had been added: “Nicolas must talk to you. It’s vital. You’re in danger.”

  No signature.

  In danger? Did this involve René? Her mind spun, wondering why Nicolas needed to meet her. And why now? He must be up for parole.

  Had a threat meant for her been enacted with René as its victim?

  Yet a woman wearing a raincoat and helmet like hers had shot René. That was not a coincidence.

  The appointment at La Santé had been scheduled for today. She’d already missed it.

&
nbsp; As she walked down the quai, fatigue weighted her shoulders. She crossed the Pont Marie, veiled in mist, to Ile Saint-Louis.

  In her building courtyard, Chloë wheeled a green garbage bin by the pear tree, bumping and scraping the stone wall as she tugged it forward.

  “Alors, you’re giving the concierge ideas, Chloë,” she said. “That’s her job.”

  “Madame Cachou’s bursitis acted up.” Chloë smiled. Her round glasses and the thin metal curlers in her hair gave her an old-fashioned look. Yet Aimée figured she was only in her late twenties. “It’s no problem helping her out. I walked Miles Davis earlier.”

  Madame Cachou’s bursitis flared up on a consistent basis these days, Aimée thought. More often than not, at the evening trash collection. Or had she grown too cynical?

  “Merci, Chloë, don’t mind me.” Her body ached and she didn’t relish the climb to her empty apartment.

  Chloë gave a low whistle as she shoved the garbage bin in place. “Talk about a hunk, Aimée!”

  She meant Mathieu. Chloë had lent her the Elle article. Of course she wanted to know how their dinner turned out.

  “Him? I found out he’s married with a kid. Next time I’ll put nettles in his Speedos.”

  Chloë gave her a hug. “Quel dommage.”

  Chloë taught adult literacy and worked part-time at Gilbert, the used-textbook annex on Boulevard Saint Michel. She scraped by and referred to her fifth-floor sublet garret as “romantic” and “living an adventure.” Aimée wanted to hear her verdict after a bone-chilling winter in this seventeenth-century building with temperamental heating.

  “So it’s like they say, Aimée? That all the good ones get married, eh?”

  “Good? A centimeter less and he’d be a girl.”

  “Bazar Hotel de Ville’s the new place for meeting men.”

  Chloë waited.

  “A department store?”

  “In the hardware section.” Chloë nodded. “It’s the place on Friday nights.”

  Over tool sets? Not her scene.

  Chloë paused on the black-and-white-tiled entry hall outside Aimée’s apartment. “What’s the matter, Aimée?”

  Not intending to, she opened up, telling Chloë what had happened as they mounted the stairs. It eased her to confide in someone. She had always confided in Martine, her best friend since the lycée.