by Rob Swigart
Lisa paused at the threshold. “I don’t know that term,” she said. “Médecin légiste.”
“The médecin légiste is the – I believe you would say medical examiner? He will determine cause of death, and whether a crime was committed. He will do the autopsy.”
“Is that really necessary?” To cut up Raimond’s body like so much meat! She tried to keep the horror from her voice.
Hugo dipped his head. “I’m sure you know it is customary in cases of violence.”
The floor just inside the door was littered with wood chips and dust. A fan-shaped spray crossed the precious Sarouk to the bookcase opposite. Some of the spines of his beloved leather-bound sets bristled with splinters.
The stocky policeman said, “Please be careful of the dust.”
She stepped into the room. Dr. Foix’s desk, with its high gallery, looked at first glance the same as always. She didn’t want to see him, so she turned her gaze away. Along the right wall floor to ceiling bookcases filled the space on either side of the window looking onto the court behind the building. Its dark crimson drapes were closed. No light leaked in, which meant the outside shutters were also closed. The glass doors that protected his valuable rare editions were open and several books were scattered on the floor. One was his 1744 edition of Hesiod’s Theogony, an Italian translation by Conte Gianrinaldo Carli. “Someone pulled these out.”
“It would seem so.”
“Not a love of literature, I suppose. They were looking for something?”
He tipped his head.
“You know Victor Hugo once lived just down the street?” she murmured irrelevantly, staring at the books. “At number 30, when he was young.” She straightened abruptly. “Why am I here, Captain Hugo?” Her voice trailed off and she put her hand to her forehead. Not again! Not now! A wave of nausea swept through her, and, for just a moment, she forgot who she was.
When she opened her eyes again the policeman was leading her to a small love seat near the bedroom door. “Please sit, Mademoiselle,” he began. “As I said, Foix left instructions. And your name….”
My name is Lisa Emmer, she told herself. I live at 35, Rue de l’Esperance. I’m thirty-two years old. She took a deep breath. “Yes, I know, the acrostic.” She looked up at him. “But it may not refer to me at all. It could just as well stand for ‘Elmer Aims’ or ‘Real Mimes!’ And even if it does point to me, and even if you had my home address, I don’t see how you knew I was going to take the Metro at Corvisart. You were waiting for me. How did you know?”
“We are the police, Mademoiselle.”
“No!” She stood and with an effort controlled her tremor. “That’s not good enough, Captain Hugo. Someone knew where to find me. You knew where to find me. I want some real answers.”
“The banker, Mademoiselle, had instructions, as I told you.”
“Écoutez, Capitaine Hugo.” She switched to formal French. “This is not real. You knew I would be there. Why would Raimond give my name to this banker…?”
The memory of her sense that meeting Foix the first time was not an accident rose up and she stopped. “What’s going on?” she asked softly.
Captain Hugo interrupted, gesturing toward the door. “Please, Mademoiselle. If you feel up to it, we need you to look.”
She took a deep breath. “Of course Raimond knew I had a meeting this morning with the foundation. It’s logical.” She tried a smile. “All right.”
From the doorway she could see the back of Foix’s desk and the silver railing of the gallery. “The cupid on the left looks wrong.” She pointed. “Something’s happened to it.” She scarcely noticed the other two men in the room.
“Yes,” Hugo agreed solemnly. “A wild shot, apparently. It does give us some idea of the killer’s state of mind and a chance to determine where the gun was when he or she fired it.”
She looked at him curiously. “He or she?”
“We must consider all possibilities,” he said dryly. “All we can say now is that one shot went wild, ricocheted off the cupid and hit the glass of the window behind the desk, glass that, by the way, is triple-paned and bulletproof, unusual for a professor of Greek, wouldn’t you say?”
Lisa stared. “No, I wouldn’t say since I have no idea what you’re talking about. Bulletproof glass?”
“Ah, well, never mind; this is Paris, after all. To continue, a wild shot suggests either carelessness or tension, n’est-ce pas? And we know the shots were angled down, so the killer must have been about your height. Or perhaps a little taller,” he added.
She stepped over the debris and advanced toward the desk until she could see Foix’s head lying against the back in his chair as if he had fallen asleep. His eyes, behind the rimless lenses of his glasses, were closed. The dark spot in the middle of his forehead seemed innocuous enough, like the decorative red or black painted bindi some south Asians affected. It seemed such a small sign to mark the end of a man’s life.
A short, plump man was bent over Foix’s body, hands clasped behind his back. He straightened as she approached. He had dark hair slicked forward and a dapper moustache. His brown eyes regarded her sympathetically. “I am Dr. Viètes,” he said in soft, British-French accented English, taking her hand between his and pressing it warmly. “I am sorry, Miss Emmer. I understand the deceased was a close friend.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Yes, he was.”
Though Viètes’ eyes were touched by his sympathetic smile she wondered if the médecin légiste hadn’t put special emphasis on the word friend. Did the police suspect she and Foix were lovers? That she had shot him in some kind of jealous fit? She dismissed the thought as soon as it arose. This was absurd. She was just being paranoid. It was the shock. A familiar state rose up inside her, a desperate separation from the physical world. It had been building since Hugo had apprehended her on the platform at Corvisart.
She took a step forward and then staggered back. Hugo caught her elbow again. “His throat,” she said in a thick voice.
“Come, sit.” He guided her to a small sofa.
She sat and leaned on her elbows, pressing her thumbs to her temples, fighting the rising feeling of unreality, the waves of darkness flowing up from the carpet under her feet. She regarded the pattern, the weave of reds, blues, and greens without really seeing. She coaxed a voice from deep in her mind: Come on, you can handle this.
Hugo was at her side. “I’m sorry…,” he began.
She held up a hand. “No, I’ll be all right. It’s the shock. So much blood…”
She looked up and her gaze landed on the third man in the room, a tall, thin figure with white hair combed up into a wave, standing by the bookcases near the desk. He wore a dark suit of some shiny material, perhaps polyester, perhaps silk, so he was either very poor or very important. One hand was in the side pocket of his suit jacket, the other elbow resting on a shelf. Lisa examined him, carefully avoiding looking at the body behind the desk.
“This is the banker I told you about,” Hugo said.
She forced all her attention on this new person. She could take in Raimond’s death later. So, the banker? Definitely not polyester, then. “What bank, monsieur?” She heard how strangled her voice sounded, and sat up with an effort. Her tight expression softened as she warmed to him. A banker was something ordinary, safe.
His long face twitched. It might have been the premonition of a smile coming to the pouches under his eyes, the prominent cheekbones, and the sunken hollows under them, but the expression faded away as if it had never existed. “A private bank, Mademoiselle.”
Already the darkness was receding and she could see the silk shimmer of his jacket; she could sense Viètes behind her, feel Hugo’s presence at her side. Reality was returned, isolated from the desolation that waited nearby. She would mourn later. “Private?” she said.
“Very.” He produced a card from the side pocket, as if he had been holding it just for her. “Allow me to present myself.”
She
read A. Rossignol. A phone number, the only other information, suggested a location just across the river in the First Arrondissement.
She stared at the card. It was thick and beige, the name and number deeply embossed in a simple serif font. It spoke strongly of understatement and the self-effacing manner of an extremely powerful man who had no need of publicity. This was the important personage Hugo had said was above suspicion, yet here he was at the murder scene. He was the first to know, and was certainly tall enough to aim a gun down at the dead man. He lived or worked nearby.
The name seemed familiar: it meant nightingale in French, an old family name, no doubt. Perhaps the name of someone she had met along the way, a butcher or mailman. A name learned, filed and forgotten.
“Monsieur Rossignol.” She dipped her head and tucked the card into her bag.
The banker cleared his throat. “We have some things to discuss, Mademoiselle Emmer.” He pronounced her name in the American manner.
“What could we possibly…”
He interrupted. “Now is not the time, of course. Dr. Foix made arrangements. They are of some importance.”
“Important for me?”
Again the faint intimation of a smile touched his long face. “They do not concern the police, who are now in need of your aide. Please call me this morning at your earliest convenience. I must do some things before we talk.” He bowed to her and shook hands with Hugo. Then he stepped very carefully over the debris by the door and was gone.
Hugo had been waiting patiently. He took her elbow again in a way that was becoming irritatingly patronizing. “I would like you to look over the desk, if you don’t mind.”
Two things rested on the gray leather. The list of composers, written in his elegant script, was crushed against the side of the gallery. Now that she could see the original writing she thought Foix must have scrawled a little more hastily than usual. Still, there was nothing much out of the ordinary about that and she remained silent.
The second item was a copy of Turner’s Greek Papyri. This was pushed back against the lowest bank of small drawers. The dead man’s hand lay palm down on the desk, as if he had just let go of the book, or were just reaching for it.
“May I?” Lisa asked, reaching for the thin leather-bound volume.
Hugo shook his head and handed her a pair of gloves. “In case the killer touched it,” he said, but his voice expressed his doubts. This killer wouldn’t leave prints.
She put on the gloves. There were bloodstains on the cover. Avoiding them, she turned it back. The endpaper and flyleaf were stuck together. She carefully pulled them apart. The blood, dried black, let go reluctantly. The two surfaces held mirror images of what Foix had drawn in his own blood.
“What is it?” Hugo asked.
A smeared vertical line bisected a circle inside a triangle:
Lisa frowned. “Some kind of corporate logo?”
“I’ll have someone check. But he was a professor, wasn’t he, not a businessman?”
“Retired professor,” Lisa said. “He stopped teaching long ago, though he still writes an occasional article on Hesiod.”
“So this logo would belong to what corporation?
She shook her head. “It may not be a logo, for all I know. It could be a couple of superimposed Greek letters. After all, it’s drawn in a book on Greek papyri. Or it could be some kind of alchemical combination of circle, triangle and line, symbols of the masculine, feminine, and individual principals.”
“Yes?”
“Then again, a triangle is a D in Greek, a Delta. A circle with a line through it is the letter Phi. So this could mean Delta-Phi, perhaps, a fraternity. Though I have no idea why Raimond would have drawn it in this book. He’s not the sort of man who would belong to a fraternity, and besides the letters shouldn’t be superimposed like that…”
“So it doesn’t mean anything to you? You said you study old writing. He drew this in his own blood. He left the acrostic list for you, unless he meant that you…” He stopped and scratched his temple. “Well, as I said, we must consider all possibilities.”
“So I am a suspect?”
“I wouldn’t say that, not just yet. Of course, he left your name and he did draw this. It all must mean something.”
“Of course it means something! He wasn’t a fool, nor did he suffer fools. He wouldn’t do anything idly, either, and certainly not when he was dying. I just don’t know what. You brought me here, Captain Hugo, you and M. Rossignol. Do you know why? I don’t.”
There was an awkward silence, after which Hugo merely said, “Well, please think about it.”
6.
“How long?” the Prior General barked, pacing back and forth before the barred window. Intermittent rain spattered against the glass and obscured the village across the river.
Defago shifted from foot to foot. The opulence of the room unnerved him as much as the Prior General, who was, after all, fifteen years his junior. At the same time, the wait for Brother Cedric’s follow-up report had been difficult, and now that he had received it he just wanted to sink into the deep white cushions of the leather couch, take a handful of the pistachios from the cloisonné bowl on the pear-wood coffee table, shell them slowly, and savor them one by one. Despite the success of this long-planned operation he yearned to let go of the tension he felt since receiving the report. He cleared his throat. “Brother Cedric says the policeman arrived with the woman at eight thirty-two.” His French was lightly flavored with the accent of Languedoc in the south.
“Yes? And now it’s well after nine.”
The Prior General’s name was Gabriel Lacatuchi. Back in Rumania when he was a boy it had been Mestere-Lacatuchi, but his family had dropped the ‘Mestere’ when they emigrated to America. The name meant ‘makers of locks,’ revealing an ancient family profession. He often felt it was more than appropriate, and that it was one of the reasons he was so scrupulously organized, so punctual, so impatient.
He turned back from the window. “Who is she and why did it take so long?”
“There were some technical problems, nothing serious, but there was some delay. Now we know she is Lisa Emmer, an American, one of Foix’s students a few years ago. She does research at the Institut de Papyrologie de la Sorbonne, reading ostraka from the Egyptian desert, Greek stuff, yes, but nothing threatening. She’s written articles on daily life in a Roman military camp. I have someone looking into it, but the odds are she’s harmless.”
“Odds!” Lacatuchi stared once more out the window, idly scratching his neck under his double chin. Rain swept across the water and rattled the glass again, then moved on, leaving shreds of fog and cloud. The village appeared in the gaps. “No one in this affair is harmless,” he added, more thoughtfully. “We can’t afford loose ends. Find out where she lives, who she sees, what she knows. If Foix communicated anything to her, anything at all, about the Order, she must be neutralized.”
“Yes, Prior General.” Defago hesitated. “There’s something else.”
With a sigh Lacatuchi walked to the desk, a massive, if anonymous, modern monster. “This was supposed to be clean, Brother Defago.” He placed his palms on the empty surface and leaned forward. “A simple burglary, a man surprised at his desk.”
“It appears Foix may have left some kind of message. Not for the girl, someone else.” Defago looked yearningly at the couch, then straightened. No time for weakness. They were so close.
Lacatuchi merely lifted an eyebrow. The effect was terrifying.
“We can’t be certain.” Defago added, wondering where the Prior General got his power. He himself had never commanded such fear, except from Sister Teresa. Of course, though few knew it, Lacatuchi was a powerful man. The very secrecy of his influence made it all the more appalling. “The apartment is well shielded, better than we anticipated. The transmission from our bug is distorted and fragmentary but Cedric caught a few words. Does Rossignol mean anything?”
The Prior General’s eyes vanished
for a moment in their folds of fat. “Nightingale.”
“It’s a name.”
“Whose name?”
“A banker.”
“Banker?” Lacatuchi sat down with a grunt and leaned his elbows on the surface of the desk. After a long moment of contemplation he mused, as if thinking out loud, “Bankers are money men, Defago. Bean counters. People who oversee investments.”
“We believe he has another name, one better known, perhaps.”
“No doubt,” the Prior General said dryly. “Perhaps you should learn it. Bankers are sometimes confidants, and then they’re like doctors, or lawyers, Brother Defago. They know things. Sometimes those are things they should not know. Dangerous things.” He looked up at the plain white acoustic tiles of the ceiling without really seeing them, rubbing his jowls thoughtfully. “These, this banker and this woman, look more and more like loose ends.” He slapped his palms on the blank surface of the desk. “Loose ends!”
“I’ll take care of it,” Defago murmured, retreating from the room to call Sister Teresa, code name Tisiphone.
7.
Antoine Rossignol strode purposefully up the Rue des St. Pères and over the Carrousel Bridge, passing between the Louvre and the garden. He scarcely glanced at the glass pyramid with its mobs of tourists waiting to get into the museum. He preferred instead to contemplate the rose colored marble of Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, the first marker of the Grand Axe de Paris, the great line running west from the Louvre to the big modern open square of the Great Arch of la Défense, passing on the way through the Obelisque of Luxor at Place de la Concorde and the Arc de Triomphe.
Today though he scarcely noticed it. Past the museum he turned left and made his way to the Rue d’Argenteuil. At a building near the bend he tapped a door code, pausing for a moment to look both ways before pushing the door open. He climbed four flights of stairs to a small, unmarked office.
A man with short blond hair was seated behind a mahogany desk near the window holding a yellow highlighter over a bound report. The eyes in his open face were startlingly blue. He looked up as Rossignol entered and said, “Something’s happened.” The digital clock on his desk read 9:29.
