Murder in the Palais Royal

by Cara Black

  “Aimée, they bugged the office, your phone, your apartment,” René said. “There’s a flic outside my door.”

  Her heart thumped.

  “René, are you all right? Where are you?” Her words raced. “Melac refuses to tell me anything.”

  “Just listen.”

  “But your surgery. How are you feeling?”

  “Aimée, I’ve got one minute. Can you listen for once?”

  She swallowed. “Of course.”

  “Write this down.”

  She scrabbled for a pen on Luigi’s desk. Found one with green ink. “Go ahead.”

  “2-0122-7389. The wire deposit originated in Luxembourg, then was routed to Switzerland—”

  “Then to the Caymans,” she interrupted.

  “How do you know?”

  “Saj wrote that in the dust.”

  “Keeping the office clean, as usual.” René snorted. “Tracfin’s investigation stopped at the Caymans. Follow the money. Write this down: a Lichtenstein account, number 7894-8334.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Guess who?”

  “I thought you were in a hurry, René?”

  “You can blame it on our friend Nadillac,” René said.

  Amazed, she fell back in the chair. “You mean he put up a hundred and fifty thousand francs just to discredit me?”

  “By linking you to money-launderers, he’d invalidate your testimony and save millions for his firm,” René said. “After receiving our report of his sabotage, the last thing his firm wanted was to let it be known. It would have shown the leaks in their system. So they ‘encouraged’ him to route company money via a wire transfer to you from hot spots on Tracfin’s blacklist. Then, big surprise. The money’s all back in his firm now, like it never left. He covered his tracks. Who’d check a brief discrepancy in his firm’s accounts, he figured. Who was to know, eh? The firm never lost the money, but now we’re involved in a money-laundering investigation.”

  A master of his metier, René astounded her sometimes.

  “Expose Nadillac, Aimée.”

  “With my teeth? How can I? They took our computers, René. My money says Tracfin’s analyzing them now.”

  “And it’s impossible for me to break into their internal system unless I’m on site.”

  But, courtesy of Léo, she could.

  “No problem, partner. I can.”

  “How?” It was René’s turn to be surprised. “Never mind.

  Get to it. Now, Aimée!”

  Then the peal of a church bell rang in the background.

  “Watch out, Aimée. Be careful.”

  She heard laughter, “. . . fresh forest mushrooms folded in the omelet. Next time dinner’s my treat. . . .” Was René standing outside? A door shut, she heard footsteps; the church bell was muffled now. She heard more footsteps.

  “Monsieur René! You’re late again for pool exercise therapy.”

  “I miss you, partner,” she said, but René had clicked off.

  She ran to the window, opening it to the sound of the pealing church bells of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, the former parish church of kings, at the nearby Louvre. A Romanesque, Renaissance, and Gothic mixture, painted by Monet. She heard those bells every evening, the same infamous ringing that had signaled the sixteenth-century Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of the Huguenots.

  And not three blocks away.

  René had given her a clue to his location. Close to the church, a clinic or hospital big enough to have a pool, near a café or resto. She pulled open the drawers in Luigi’s desk, pulled out the Yellow Pages. She found only one clinic in the first arrondissement, Clinique du Louvre on rue des Prêtres Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois. Samaritaine, the art deco department store, stood at the end of the block. An advertisement listed the clinic’s special services as orthopedic therapy and hydrotherapy.

  He’d been almost a cobblestone’s throw away the whole time.

  On Luigi’s phone, a high-end digital console affair, she dialed the contact number she had obtained from Léo Frot.

  The phone was picked up on the first ring.

  “Monsieur Ritoux, please,” she said.

  “Who’s calling?”

  “It concerns a confidential matter,” she said. “I need to speak with him right away.”

  “Please identify yourself and the matter this concerns.”

  And have him file it away?

  The phone’s digital display flashed the number she’d called.

  She trusted no one. She would only speak with Ritoux.

  “It’s vital, Monsieur,” she said. “He’s unaware of important documentation. I want to deliver it.”

  “This office isn’t open to the public. We have no contact with individuals.”

  We’ll see about that, she thought, reading an address which had popped up in the digital display. Tracfin showed up as being in the ninth arrondissement. Nice feature! She’d have to get one of these phones.

  “Funny. I thought in the government you served the public.”

  She hung up and ran back to her office. There was no time to search it for bugs. With her penlight, she grabbed an outfit from her disguises in the back armoire, stuffed it in her bag, away from any prying camera. Five minutes later, in the hall bathroom, she’d changed into an express delivery uniform. She checked her Tintin watch. She had to hurry.

  * * *

  THE TAXI LET her off in the mist on narrow rue de la Tour des Dames.

  She buzzed the intercom near the gate. “Express for a Monsieur Ritoux, from Bercy.”

  “Eh? This time of night?” She heard the clearing of a throat.

  Maybe she’d woken the guard up.

  “I just do what I’m told,” she said, “and it’s cold out here.”

  Getting inside depended on speed, on not giving the guard time to think about following procedures.

  The gate buzzed open. The guard, in his forties, a bear-like man, stretched his arms over his head. “Bercy always informs me if they’re sending a delivery.”

  Before he called and checked, she had to get inside Ritoux’s office.

  “It’s urgent,” she said, walking fast. “Which floor?”

  “Alors, Mademoiselle, since when do they use female messengers?” He blocked her way.

  Merde! Now she’d have to distract his attention She stopped. “Do you have a problem with that?”

  “Show me ID and the envoy slip,” he said, alert now, a grin spreading over his face.

  Envoy slip?

  “So you think we should still be barefoot, in the kitchen with babies, eh?”

  “Hold on.” He extended his pawlike hands in mock surprise. “Just following procedure. Where’s Philippe?”

  The usual messenger, or a trick question?

  “Like I know?” For the second time today, she flashed her retouched father’s police ID with her photo pasted on it. “A last-minute directive from the minister’s office, requiring Monsieur Ritoux’s response.”

  “Still, I need the envoy slip to sign you in.”

  She shrugged, glanced at her watch, then his name tag. “It’s your neck, Boulet, not mine. Don’t you get it? Classified documents, covert operation, that’s why they use us, not the regular messenger. Safer.”

  “What?” Boulet looked uneasy now.

  She said, “You’d better hurry, since the minister’s waiting for Ritoux’s response.”

  “Second floor,” he said. “Third office door.”

  She ran, perspiration dampening her collar. Her bluff would last only so long.

  In a doorway on the second floor, she shimmied out of the jumpsuit she’d worn, putting it in her bag. Then she smoothed down her pencil skirt, buttoned her blouse up to the collar, smoothed back her hair, and put on tortoise-shell-framed glasses again.

  She knocked, opened the door, and strode through an office reception area. Deserted.

  “Monsieur Ritoux?”

  A man poked his head out of an office. “Didn
’t we request those files half an hour ago? What’s with you people?”

  She shrugged.

  “Junior clerks! Glad I don’t work downstairs any more.” He glared. “What are you waiting for? Ritoux’s steaming.”

  She backed up. “I’m new.”

  “That’s the problem downstairs, you’re all green and know nothing. End of the hall,” he said. “The big door. Even you can’t miss it. Tell him I’m coming too.”

  A big door, all right. Massive and wood-paneled. She paused to take stock of the building. Tracfin was housed in an old mansion, and Ritoux, by the look of it, had the master suite.

  She squared her shoulders. Knocked and stepped inside.

  Another reception area with a desk. Empty, but an open office door loomed on the right. She opened a drawer, took out some Tracfin correspondence, and put the letters on top of the notes she’d made of René’s information.

  Gritting her teeth, she walked inside the inner office.

  “Sorry to take so long,” she said, smiling. “We had issues with filing procedures.”

  A few heads looked up.

  “Monsieur Ritoux, excusez-moi, but we think you should see this.”

  A man with oversized seventies-style frame glasses, wearing suspenders, cocked his head.

  “But who are you?”

  “I’m new, from downstairs, a junior clerk. Our team found this data. It came from a confidential informant relating to a case . . . well, it doesn’t give the case number.”

  He hit SAVE on his desktop computer. “Where’s Despaille?”

  “En route, Monsieur.” She hoped Despaille was the impatient man who’d directed her this way. “Here, Monsieur Ritoux.”

  She set the file down, opened it, and pulled her numerical notations out.

  “What does this mean?”

  He had garlic breath.

  “A wire transfer from this account was moved five times. We found it significant that the transferred funds landed right back where they had originated.”

  Ritoux shoved his glasses onto his forehead and squinted, scrutinizing the paper. “Who’s working on the . . .” he paused, reading the numbers . . . “the flagged wire transfer from Luxembourg and the SAR report we discussed tonight?”

  “Over here, Monsieur Ritoux,” said a man working on a laptop. “We questioned the employee, that long-haired hippie.”

  “Him . . . that one? Then get him in here to explain this!”

  Saj? Aimée tried to melt into the woodwork.

  “Distribute the updates, Mademoiselle,” he said. “That’s your job, remember? Besides sniffing around with your team.”

  “Of course, Monsieur.”

  She consulted the file in her hands and tried to look efficient, but she knew she had to get out of here fast and somehow warn Saj.

  “Where’s the 2134 Bursar’s Report?” said a man at her elbow.

  What could she do? Flustered, she riffled through the papers. “2134? But they put in the 2130. Can you believe it? Let me get the right one.”

  She backed out of the room and into the reception area, turned, and bumped into a man, his tie loosened, his shirt sleeves rolled up. Saj stood behind him.

  She froze. Saj stared at her. “What in the . . . ?”

  “Monsieur Ritoux,” she interrupted, her adrenalin kicking in, “needs this man to explain the information he’s just received about a wire transfer routed five times from a Luxembourg bank account and then back again according to information provided by a confidential informant.”

  The man shook his head. “What’s that to me?”

  She dropped the file, spilling papers all over the floor, and kneeled to pick them up. Saj kneeled, too. They only had a second.

  “It’s Nadillac’s scam,” she said in an undertone. “The money’s all back home.”

  “Understood,” said Saj.

  Saj handed Aimée the papers he’d picked up, with a wink.

  * * *

  A COUPLE WERE getting out of a taxi at the end of the street. She couldn’t believe her luck. “Clinique du Louvre, s’il vous plaît,” she said to the taxi driver.

  She knew Saj could handle himself. With the account numbers René had furnished, he’d get out of Tracfin in an hour. Or less, knowing Saj. Maybe they’d even hire Saj to do the backdoor work they couldn’t.

  She’d known deep in her bones that her mother had no part of this. Just Morbier, and his suspicions. She felt vindicated.

  In the rearview mirror, she noticed a taxi following them, turning left when they did. A few blocks later, it stayed a car length behind as her driver weaved into rue Montmartre, then past Les Halles.

  Not good, with the Clinique du Louvre only a few blocks away. She couldn’t lead whoever was tailing her to René’s location. It would be smarter to get her old backup laptop from the armoire at home, feed Miles Davis, then figure out where to go next.

  She reached over the seat and handed the taxi driver fifty francs. “Make a right up there. See?” She pointed to a clump of trees and parked cars.

  He nodded.

  “Then speed up and finish the ride without me. But don’t go near the original destination. Compris?”

  He nodded again. “Like in that old Lino Ventura movie?”

  “That’s right.”

  She crouched on the floor. As the taxi veered right, she hit the left back door handle and heaved herself out, covering her chest with her arms. She rolled over the sharp cobbles, feeling each one, and ended up on fallen branches. She waited until the car following her receded down the street.

  Nothing broken, but there were oil stains on her skirt and dirt under her fingernails and an ache in her ribs. She walked toward the red Métro sign, rubbing her side. But the Métro gate was shut. The strike!

  She punched in Morbier’s number. Only a message. She swallowed her pride.

  “Morbier? Pick up if you’re home. Can Miles Davis and I borrow your couch tonight?”

  A beep and the message ended. She waited. Then the phone buzzed.

  * * *

  SHE BREATHED I N the musty air of her dark apartment. A faint rose fragrance came from the dining room, the only remnant of her dinner with Mathieu four nights ago.

  “Miles Davis?”

  There was no answering scamper of paws across the wood floor.

  Usually, Madame Cachou walked him at night and brought him back. But considering Madame’s bursitis, she figured Chloë might have helped her out tonight. She didn’t want to switch on the light, which would activate the cameras the flics had mounted in her apartment.

  In her bedroom, she rooted in her armoire and found the old backup laptop and grabbed her stovepipe jeans and a vintage YSL black-and-white polka-dot silk spaghetti strap top. It was the first thing to come to hand, but better than her oil-stained blouse.

  She was still on the run, from whom she didn’t know. Gabrielle, Olivier, and Roland de la Pecheray had been carted off for questioning at the Brigade Criminelle. She’d discovered that Nadillac had moved the money to discredit her. But none of them had had anything to do with René’s shooting. Perplexed, she realized that she was no further than before in finding out who had tried to kill him.

  Think. She had to think and put together the facts she had. Someone had set this all up with painstaking thoroughness. A woman her height, in clothes like hers, who could get into this building. Chloë? But Chloë was her friend. That was silly.

  The only woman unaccounted for was Nicolas’s sister, Maud. But she’d been committed to a mental institution in Lille.

  She wiggled into her tight jeans, stuck the phone in her back pocket, and stepped into black stilettos. On her way out, she took Miles Davis’s horsemeat from the fridge, stuck that, too, in her bag, and grabbed her black military-style wool coat for warmth.

  Chloë must have returned from walking Miles Davis and, noticing the dark apartment, taken him upstairs. Thoughtful as usual. She envisioned a cup of tea from Chloë’s ever-full teapot, a
place to sit down and think.

  She had to go upstairs to check, if only to put her mind at rest and to pick up Miles Davis. She felt guilty even suspecting Chloë.

  The stairs creaked, narrowing as she reached the fifth floor where the chambres de bonnes, the maids’ rooms, were located. She heard the droning of a radio, a speech broken by intermittent applause. She recognized Jean-Marie Le Pen’s voice, the distinctive haranguing tone of his call to “Keep France for the French.”

  As she was about to knock, she saw the chinks of light around the edges of the doorframe and smelled gas. Her smile faded.

  “Chloë?”

  Miles Davis’s yelp answered her.

  The door wasn’t locked. Aimée stepped inside.

  Miles Davis was chained to the open skylight of the attic room. As he jumped on his hind legs, his yelp turned into a keening whine.

  Each time he jumped, the chain attached to his collar choked him.

  “What in the world?” She dropped her bag, rushed over and lifted Miles Davis up. She loosened the chain digging into his furry neck and held him close. His tongue licked her face all over; his leash trailed on the floor.

  Then the door slammed shut behind her. The deadbolt clicked into place.

  Chloë faced her, wearing a demure navy blue suit and perfect navy pumps, like an Air France hostess. Tortoiseshell glasses rested on her nose. A different person confronted Aimée.

  “I’m disappointed, Aimée,” Chloë said. “I warned you about Mathieu, as your friend. But did you listen? Non.”

  Aimée scanned the room, and her gaze fell on the beige crocodile loafers peeking out from under the bed. The ones worn by the woman in the security video. Shoes she’d never be caught dead in.

  “You shot René and framed me,” she accused Chloë.

  She’d believed that Chloë was a friend, confided in her, entrusted her with Miles Davis.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  Suitcases sat by the door; a pile of clothes was heaped on the bed. Chloë was moving out.

  “I studied you. Every detail. Now it’s your turn,” Chloë said. “You have to suffer.”

  Aimée backed away. Something crackled under her feet. A cellophane candy wrapper. She recognized those red candy wrappers. P’tits Quinquins from Lille.

  And finally it made sense.