by Cara Black
All conjecture. What had the notebook contained to make it so important, so incriminating?
Had someone killed Clémence for it? And had Nicolas been murdered in prison? Anyone could be silenced for a price.
She thought hard, trying to put the facts she had together: Nicolas’s ravings she’d attributed to paranoia; that “they” were all in on it, he had “proof ” and “they think you know who paid me off.” Saddened, she remembered Clémence saying “It was big.” And, what might make it more important, that Nicolas always seemed to have money. And Clémence’s last words haunted her: “Nicolas said you were the one to make this right.”
Back in the main room, the sunlight warmed the floor beneath Aimée’s feet. From the open skylight came the chirp of birds.
“Didn’t Clémence ever mention Nicolas’s notebook? Did you see it?”
“Beats me.” Dita chewed her lip.
“What about her papers, any bank statements? Did she pay you rent by check?”
“Cash.”
“Anything else?”
Dita shook her head.
Aimée didn’t want to leave but didn’t know what else to ask Dita. She didn’t have enough to take to the flics.
If only she’d found the notebook.
Dita lit another cigarette. She inhaled, sending a stream of smoke in the sunlight. “She missed Toulouse. Still a provincial.” Dita dabbed an eye and shrugged.
Disappointed, Aimée picked up her bag.
Again she felt she was overlooking something. Something staring her in the face. She’d make one more try.
“Clémence was pregnant, with a new life to look forward to,” Aimée said. “Her murder’s not a robbery gone wrong. It’s over the contents of Nicolas’s notebook. But I can’t prove that, since it’s gone. Clémence wanted me to see it. Her ex was murdered and I can’t prove that either, Dita.”
Dita stared back at her, saying nothing.
She’d hoped to find something here. Anything. “Any chance Clémence kept things in storage, you know, in a locker in your cellar?”
“In storage?” Dita hesitated. “There’s a bunch of old things down there. I haven’t checked for ages.”
Aimée stopped in mid-step, noticing a ring of long, antiquated keys sitting on a shelf of books. “They look just like the ones to my cellar.” She picked up the key ring. “You won’t mind if I take a look?”
“I doubt you’ll find anything but dust and my old ski parkas,” Dita said. “But why not? If you do find something, I’ll have to send it to her mother.”
Dita shoved aside one of the Voici magazines on the floor with her foot. “I never read these.” She tossed it in the trash, then gave Aimée a questioning look. “You don’t suspect Carco, do you?”
Aimée shook her head.
“You want to find this notebook.”
“If I’m lucky.”
“You think it would lead to her murderer?” Dita’s voice held interest now.
“It’s a start,” Aimée said.
“The door’s off the foyer. Go left. Down the stairs to #34.”
* * *
AIMÉE PULLED THE string of the hanging lightbulb. A dim light illuminated the beaten dirt floor of the cellar. The humid air smelled of stone and earth. The skitter of something in the corner sent chills up her arms.
Rats.
The faded number 34 showed above a padlock. She forced herself to step over rat turds and turn the key.
The water-stained wooden door creaked open, revealing a narrow storage space, like a medieval cell. Mildew! She pulled her penlight from her bag. Several cardboard boxes, a few stacked clear plastic bins.
No footprints, due to the packed earth floor. She couldn’t tell if anyone had been here recently. Still, there might be something to be found within.
She stuck the penlight in her mouth and got to work. The plastic bins held sweaters, a ski jacket, last season’s winter coats, and rollerblades. More Dita’s style than Clémence’s.
One of the cardboard boxes, its flaps folded closed, contained photograph albums. She held the penlight closer. An adolescent Dita with a mohawk, circa late eighties. The next album was of a portfolio of head shots from Dita’s theatrical makeup academy.
She tried the box underneath, hoping this one was Clémence’s. An old Cuisinart mixer, never used by the look of it, and old recipe books from the fifties, like the ones Aimée’s grandmother used: standard French cuisine with tips on preparing the perfect Bechamel sauce.
Another dead-end—and in a foul, dim, smelly cave. Disappointed, she faced the fact Clémence’s killer must have Nicolas’s notebook. The “proof ” was gone. With shaking hands, she closed up the boxes. Who wanted the notebook enough to kill for it? Whoever had followed her to the Métro last night knew Clémence had had an appointment with someone. And if they’d seen Aimée, how long until they found her?
She kicked the dirt. Shoved the boxes back into the corner. And heard a ting.
A metal pipe? The boxes were stuck and wouldn’t budge. She shone her penlight against the back wall, revealing worn stone and crumbling stucco, and a mauve metal bon- bon tin, round, lettered in gold P’tits Quinquins—Confiserie Lilleoise.
Her favorite bonbons from Lille. Garrel, the sergeant at her father’s Commissariat, had given her a tin of P’tits Quinquins one Christmas. She’d been ten years old, and she remembered the excitement of twisting open the red crinkling cellophane to reveal the flat, milky sweets, each stamped with a picture of a mother leaning over an infant. The fruit essence melted in her mouth. How Garrel had teased her, insisting that she sing the refrain from the lullaby Quinquins.
She unscrewed the top of the tin. Instead of bonbons, she found a plastic laminated Carte d’Etudiant, dated 1993, with the scrawled signature of Nicolas Evry. His photo showed reddish hair shaved to a stubble, a fuller face, but the same intense deep-set eyes.
Her heart thumping, she searched through the tin’s contents for Nicolas’s notebook. A bookstore receipt for a textbook from Gibert on the Left Bank, the 1993 summer schedule of Cours Carnot, a classe préparatoire of high-level study courses preparing students for the second year concours, the rigorous entrance exam for the École des Hautes Etudes Commerciales, the elite business school. She whistled under her breath. That was one of the Grandes Écoles and chose only a hundred or so from the thousands who applied to take the concours. This préparatoire, unlike the usual ones, charged a hefty tuition fee. Even to get this far, Nicolas would have had to have studied day and night, supported by his family, no doubt.
She saw a list of study groups; an advanced economics group was circled. His lycée report card bore the high marks of 20. A smart boy, an industrious student. She fingered a junior naval scout badge from Brittany, worn and tarnished.
She wondered what had changed Nicolas from a candidate aiming for the École des Hautes Etudes Commerciales, whose alumni included ministers, an IMF president, and CEO’s of the top forty French companies, into a skinhead.
Underneath a paper with his scrawl “My Insurance” was a brown leather volume.
His notebook . . . at last! She peered closer and saw worn Hebrew letters on the binding. What was this?
She opened the yellowed, much-thumbed pages. On the frontispiece were written two names in dark blue ink: Elzbieta and Karlosch Ficowska, and an address in Bialystock. Inside were pages and pages of Hebrew. Was it a prayer book?
What in the world did this mean? Why had Nicolas, convicted for torching a synagogue, kept this in what looked like his childhood treasure box? A trophy from the synagogue burning, she wondered. Somehow it didn’t fit.
Nicolas must have entrusted the book to Clémence for safekeeping, his “insurance.”
She’d figure out what it meant later. Right now the dusty air and the scratching of the rats were getting to her. Her arms ached from shoving boxes. Last night’s sprint to the Métro had taken its toll on her legs. She stood, wishing she was in better shape.
<
br /> If she didn’t hurry, she’d be late for the tax-office appointment.
She put the Quinquin tin in her bag. No one would ever miss it, she thought, saddened.
Back upstairs, Aimée handed Dita the key.
“Any luck?”
“No notebook.”
Dita lowered her gaze. “The flics called.”
“Oh?”
“They want me to identify Clémence’s body.” She put her hand to her mouth. “Her only family’s an uncle, but he’s in prison. After all, she had no mother. I had no idea.” Dita shook her head. “But I thought about what you said.”
Dita reached for another tissue. Blew her nose.
“You remember something, Dita?”
“Nicolas—” her throat caught and she burst into tears.
“Oui?” She hated to push, but if she didn’t . . . . “Did Clémence mention why she stopped visiting him? Anything?”
“Bitter, maybe.” Dita shrugged. “It wasn’t anything Clémence ever said, but just a feeling.”
“Nicolas was bitter?”
“Just that one time. Alors, Clémence had turned a page in her life and left him behind. But she intimated that when it was new and fresh, they’d hobnobbed with aristos. She thought she had a good catch. But everyone dropped him, I guess.”
Aimée thought back to the Cours Carnot preparation, the pathway to the École des Hautes Etudes Commerciales. Had his study mates forgotten him?
Dita’s brow creased. “Non. That came out wrong. I don’t mean Clémence liked the high and mighty types. He did, but wasn’t he some kind of skinhead, an Aryan supremacist?” She shrugged.
Aimée turned, her gaze catching on the trash can.
And then it hit her. “Didn’t you say you never read Voici?”
Dita nodded. “Clémence must have gotten them for the train.”
Aimée took one of the issues of the weekly tabloid out of the can. The cover photo showed a Monaco princess caught topless on some beach, with strategic portions blacked out. “Do you mind?”
“Go ahead. I’m throwing them out.” Dita paused. “Do me a favor?”
Aimée nodded.
“The flics treat Clémence’s murder like nothing, just another blight on the quartier. A danger to the haute bourgeoisie living here. But you’re different. Please nail the bastard who did this.”
Aimée stuffed the Voici copies into her bag.
“Count on it, Dita.”
* * *
NEARING THE TAX office located in a cul-de-sac off rue Saint-Hyacinthe, once a seventeenth-century convent, still recognizable by its massive arched doorway, Aimée realized that she’d left the tax statement in the printer. No way she’d ever make it to her apartment and back within fifteen minutes.
But Chloë didn’t teach until noon. After a few rings, she reached Chloë on her cell phone.
“Chloë,” she said. “There’s a laptop tuneup in it for you if you bring me the tax form I forgot.”
“My laptop’s beyond redemption, Aimée.” A big yawn came over the line.
“Then keep my blue leather jacket you borrowed,” Aimée said.
“A Sonia Rykiel?” Chloë said. “I couldn’t take that, Aimée. I wouldn’t feel right.”
“Please, Chloë, the financial flics don’t like me already.”
“But where are you?”
“Place de la Madeleine.”
“Alors, you’re close to Ladurée.”
Aimée scouted the line coming out of Ladurée’s Second Empire front door. “Then say chocolate macaroons in fifteen minutes, corner of rue Saint-Honoré?”
“Make that an assortment in one of those precious little boxes they have,” said Chloë, sounding more awake.
Aimée groaned silently. “Done.”
Aimée made another call and reached the rabbi’s extension, only to hear his assistant reply that he was conducting a service. She left him a message, crossing her fingers that it would reach him in time. Then she took out another traveler’s check.
Fifteen minutes later, Aimée handed the signature chartreuse Ladurée box of macaroons, perfectly tied with a ribbon, to Chloë.
“You should forget things more often, Aimée.” Chloë smiled. She wore a purple sweater, green skirt, pink scarf, and round red-framed eyeglasses.
Almost a match for the assorted flavored macaroons inside.
“Kidding, Aimée. Girlfriends help each other out. We’ll share.” Chloë looked contrite. “You in trouble?”
“More if I don’t hurry.”
“Can I help?” Chloë shot her a worried look.
“You’ve already saved my life.” She kissed Chloë on both cheeks, then ran down rue Saint-Honoré, her insides churning; she was late. In the building, brown particle-board desks and partitions gave the place a temporary feeling. She wandered for ten minutes before she’d located the right desk.
“I am sorry I’m late, Monsieur,” she said with a wide smile. “I got confused.”
“You’re not the first to say that, Mademoiselle Leduc,” Fres-sard replied. He returned her smile. “Sit down.” He was in his early thirties, she guessed. He sat on an ergonomic swivel chair before a computer screen. A glare reflected on his frameless glasses from the overhanging fluorescent light.
Aimée sat across from Fressard in a space that had once been high-ceilinged. Now, perforated gypsum-board ceiling squares, at odds with last-century plaster medallions visible in the sculpted walls, shrank the room. This chop job on a seventeenth-century hôtel particulier had resulted in a warren of anonymous cubicles, without style or attention to the barely visible exquisite period detail and trompe l’oeil murals.
She’d debated how to play this.
“I’m here to cooperate, Monsieur Fressard,” she said.
“We’ll just go over a few things,” he replied. On his desk she saw a framed family photo, wife and yellow-sun-dressed toddler; a Smurf coffee cup; a Marseille team soccer poster tacked on his partition. Most of the front-line financial examiners were family men, sympathetic, cultivating a “we can work this out” attitude. Which usually succeeded. Most people called in didn’t want to ponder the other option. The examiners adhered to a rigid code of ethics precluding bribery. Every week, the rumor went, the fisc officers met with the full staff and examined their personal financial records.
“Should I have brought my other tax statements or bank reports?” She slapped her forehead; her elbow knocked one of his files over. “Désolée, I’m so nervous. I’ve only got last year’s. Should I go and get them?”
He gave her a wide smile. “No need.”
She stuck her bag on his desk in the space she’d inadvertently made. “This isn’t like me.” She pulled out her lipstick tube. “I even forgot to put on lipstick. Silly me, this color’s wrong.” She took out another tube, Chanel Red, and applied it.
“We’re here to take the mystery out of all those numbers.” Another big smile. “That’s what I like to say. And I’m here to help you.”
“Wonderful. I’m not good in the math department. I need all the help I can get.” She set her lipstick down on his desk. “Does this mean you’re auditing me?”
“It hasn’t come to that.”
Yet, she thought.
“Let’s look at what’s going on, explore your banking history. What do you say? We’ll chat a few minutes and take the mystery away.”
Did he talk this way to his toddler? Maybe it worked on her. Ivas Fressard play the good guy to gain her confidence, before another bureaucrat or financial flic went in for the kill?
“Any chance of a coffee?” She looked around, but all she saw were cubicles and more cubicles. And he didn’t offer to get her one.
“The coffee machine’s down the hall,” he said. “Go ahead.”
“May I get you one?”
“Non, merci.”
She grabbed her bag, took a few steps, and then came back. “Sorry, which way?”
“Let me show you,” he s
aid.
And by the time he’d clicked a few keys on his keyboard to shut down his computer, she’d slid the other lipstick tube under a file on his desk. He walked her across the room and pointed her in the right direction.
At the coffee machine, she took one sip of the espress, winced, and threw it in the trash. In the restroom, she checked each stall. Empty.
From her bag she pulled out the wire attached to a cigarette-pack-sized CCU, a high-quality video recorder. It fit into her pocket. The professional lipstick camera, used by Deauville casinos to spot cheaters, produced broadcast-quality video from a micro video head.
Nervously, she clicked RECORD. It worked. Then she turned it off. Now all she had left to do was to connect the lipstick camera to the wire running from her sleeve, get the angle right, and appear more confused, if possible, than she felt. Not difficult.
Back at Fressard’s cubicle, she sat, put her bag on his desk, and leaned forward.
“Feel better?” he asked.
Not as good as she would if she could capture the image on his screen containing her file. But she nodded.
“I’ve pulled up your credit and financial history.”
She gulped. Would every franc and centime she’d ever fudged appear?
“We’re financial examiners here, not the enforcement arm.
Please relax.”
No doubt it was worse than she’d imagined.
“It’s this wire deposit that caused us to take a look, Mademoiselle. A significant amount.”
She bit her lip. “From where?” She leaned closer, hoping he’d turn the screen so she could see.
“The funds originate in Luxembourg,” he said. “We’d like an explanation.”
“So would I,” she said. “I’m in the dark here. We have no business or clients in Luxembourg.” She paused. “Can you show me the data?”
“The information I have is what you have also,” he said.
He lied. He had a lot more pulled up on that screen than what she had access to. Just as Saj had warned. She found the wire from the video recorder, inserted it into the lipstick camera concealed on his desk, and nodded. She brushed her pocket, pressing the RECORD button.
