Murder on the Champ de Mars

by Cara Black

  Aimée put Chloé in the high chair adjoining Gabrielle’s. Two peas in a pod—one with light brown hair, one blonde.

  “ ‘Don’t sugar the strawberries,’ my mother used to say,” Babette said as Aimée set down Chloé’s baby bag—biscuits, diapers, clothes and milk she’d pumped for tonight.

  “My grandmother did too,” said Aimée, catching the meaning behind the saying. “Is there a problem?” Already? It was only the first day of their arrangement. Babette had babysat for Aimée before and Chloé had loved her. Aimée dreaded a search for a new caregiver; this would have been so convenient and reasonable.

  “Can you pick Chloé up by five on Fridays?” Babette said. “I’m taking a class. Just until June.”

  Aimée breathed a silent sigh of relief. That was all. “Bien sûr.” She’d have to write that down. “Hope you brought extra bottles for tonight, just in case,” said Babette.

  Aimée nodded. “If surveillance runs late, I’ll call.”

  She nuzzled Chloé, inhaling her freshly powdered baby smell. “I’d like to stay and play with you, ma puce.”

  “Maman’s off to work,” said Babette, lifting Chloé’s fist to wave. Aimée kissed her once more and left, riding out a powerful stab of regret.

  In the courtyard she replayed Nicu’s voice mail. Chilling. Could he have been calling from the hospital? She tried the number for the hospital’s reception, and they put her on hold, then requested she call back after rounds. Great.

  Her scooter was still in the shop, and wouldn’t be ready for another fifteen minutes, so she stopped at the corner café.

  “Un express double,” she said to Fantine, the Normandaise wife of the owner’s son, who helped out from time to time.

  Fantine knocked the coffee grounds into the bin with several loud thumps and switched on the espresso machine. “Need an extra jolt? Powder not enough for you this morning?”

  The street term for cocaine. Where did that come from?

  Fantine pointed to her nose. Aimée rubbed the tip and her finger came back white. Babette had forgotten to tell her.

  “Baby powder, Fantine.” She smelled her fingers: Chloé’s sweet baby smell. A pang hit her.

  “Alors, you’ve lost weight. Look tired these days.”

  “It’s called having a six-month-old,” she said.

  Aimée pulled out her LeClerc compact to touch up her face. Her dark-circle disaster needed more than quick first aid. At this rate she’d need to buy concealer wholesale and spackle it on.

  “So Chloé’s with a babysitter today? That Babette?”

  Why did she always forget what a village it was here? And Fantine was nosey for a Normandaise—unlike the majority of those phlegmatic apple growers, notorious for their closed lips.

  Fantine slid the steaming demitasse over the counter. “C’est dur, by yourself and all,” she said as Aimée stirred sugar lumps into the espresso. “Your ex—the ex-flic, that one—he was going on about it last night. Said you kicked him out of the christening.”

  Aimée dropped the spoon. Hot brown spatters flecked her wrist. She licked them off.

  “He stopped for a drink with his new woman,” said Fantine, wiping the counter. Her small eyes gleamed. The gossip queen. Playing a part in what she saw as the soap opera that was Aimée’s life. “That red-haired nurse.”

  Aimée winced thinking of Donatine’s greedy arms holding Chloé.

  “Sounds merveilleux, their farm in Brittany, sharing custody.”

  So Melac had hatched a plan, goaded on by Donatine. Hadn’t Morbier said he’d heard things about her?

  Fantine was watching Aimée for a reaction. She’d be damned if she gave her the satisfaction.

  “So they like Brittany, eh?” Aimée smiled, her knuckles clenched below the counter.

  “The only crime there is poaching, the air’s clean and great for children, Donatine kept saying.”

  They were on a first-name basis, it seemed.

  “Did they ask you about me, Fantine?”

  She shrugged. “Eh bien, you know me.” Fantine ran her forefinger across her mouth as if zipping it. “Melac helped my brother with that fiasco a while ago. Kept it quiet. But I keep clients’ confidences.”

  Like hell she did. Aimée was about to tell her off when the Stella Artois deliveryman interrupted and Fantine disappeared down into the cellar.

  Talk about a gossip—suggesting she coked up before work, looked too tired to handle her baby. All fodder for Melac. But Aimée couldn’t let it get under her skin. She downed her espresso, slid some francs across the counter and pulled out the lawyer’s information. As she left the café to head toward the garage, she punched in the number Morbier had written down. Only an answering service.

  Merde. She left a message for the lawyer, then another for René at Leduc Detective confirming their scheduled lunch meeting with a potential client—a lucrative one he had been salivating over. She had to keep the accounts and René happy. Couldn’t let the search for this Gypsy derail her priorities.

  Let Morbier think she’d listened to him.

  Last night after she’d tucked Chloé into her crib, she’d made notes in her red Moleskine notebook, trying to come up with a plan. Right now she only had Nicu to go on, but he hadn’t said much and his message worried her.

  “Installed a new spark plug,” said her mechanic at the garage on the tip of Île Saint-Louis when she returned the loaner. “You’re good to go.” He always said that.

  “Merci.”

  Opening the scooter’s seat, she took out her leather gloves and pulled them on against the morning chill. She walked her scooter over one-way Pont de Sully to the Left Bank, then keyed the scooter’s ignition and drove along the river. She watched the long quai change names, growing posher as she passed through the arrondissements: from de la Tournelle to de Montebello in the 5th, to des Grands Augustins and de Conti in the 6th and Voltaire in the 7th, then Anatole France, until it became the quai d’Orsay alongside l’Assemblée Nationale; and further on, the not-so-secret Centre d’Écoute, the wiretapping center.

  Always start from the target’s last known location—a dictum drilled into her by her father. She’d see if she could find Nicu, and while she was there, she would check for possible witnesses to Drina’s abduction.

  Taking the long way round to the rear of Hôpital Laennec, she reached the ambulance entrance off rue Vaneau connected via Impasse Oudinot. Off the narrow allée in the hospital grounds were tucked small blossoming courtyard gardens where patients in wheelchairs soaked up the chance sunshine. An ambulance was parked with its doors open, a gurney being lifted out. The wheeled legs clicked into place, and Aimée heard rubber tires bump over the damp cobbles. She parked her scooter.

  The ambulance attendant, a woman, closed the van’s back doors. Her arms were muscular in her white uniform, her short reddish hair pinned back.

  “Bonjour.” Aimée flipped open her father’s police ID, which she had doctored with her photo and name. “I’m following up on last night’s patient abduction. You might have answered questions already …”

  “Moi? No one talked to me.”

  Aimée seethed. The flics on top of it, as usual.

  “But I heard. Terrible,” said Lana, which Aimée had read on her badge. “Matter of fact, it must have happened on our shift.”

  Good, a talker.

  “Can you run down your timeline from last night? We know two patients were discharged …” Merde, what term had the receptionist used? “… inter-hospital. May I see your log?”

  “Inside.”

  In a cubbyhole of an office, which they reached by Gothiclike stone stairs, Lana pointed to an open binder. “Voilà. Last night at eight oh five P.M. Monsieur Dracquet was taken to Résidence Sans Souci, a fancy name for the nursing home we’re partnered with in Montrouge. Then at eight-forty, Mademoiselle Ribera was taken to Hôpital Lariboisière.”

  “Is that usual?” Aimée asked. “I mean late-night transfers to oth
er medical facilities?”

  “Depends.” Lana shrugged. “If the nursing homes get behind on paperwork, they might only be able to accept transfers late in the day. Or if a patient has an early-morning procedure, which was the case with that old spinster Mademoiselle Ribera.”

  That didn’t interest Aimée, but it did show Lana’s observation skills.

  “Did you notice anything out of the ordinary last night?” she asked, pretending to consult notes in her red Moleskine. “An orderly hanging around, for example?”

  Lana looked at the log and thought. “We kept the gates open, that’s right, because of the two transfers. Other than that, the quartier’s quiet as a tomb at night. Alors, with all the ministries, embassies and you lot patrolling …”

  She paused.

  “Go on, Lana. You thought of something, didn’t you?”

  “It’s nothing. We see them all the time.”

  “See what?”

  “Like I said, nothing, but …”

  Spit it out, Aimée wanted to say.

  “There was a black car blocking the impasse egress onto rue Vaneau.”

  “Wait a minute, you mean blocking the ambulance exit?”

  “I had to honk, which we don’t usually have to do.”

  “Black. You’re sure? Not a brown Mercedes?”

  Lana tapped her short-nailed index finger on the log as if trying to jog her memory. “Black, tinted windows, anonymous looking. That’s right,” she said. “Rue Vaneau’s a one-way street, it’s quiet and that rarely happens, that’s all.”

  “Did you see the driver, or do you remember anything distinctive?”

  “I wish I had. Désolée. I’m working a double shift since last night.” Lana was waving to someone in the courtyard. “That’s my boyfriend, Naftali.” She grinned. “Eighty-five years old, a charmer with a pacemaker. I call him my boyfriend to keep my husband on his toes.”

  “And what time did you honk at the car?”

  Lana pointed to the log. “Eight forty P.M., when I left with the old spinster.”

  The timing fit with Drina’s abduction.

  “Merci,” Aimée said. “Does your boyfriend’s room overlook the allée?”

  “Try asking him. His hearing’s gone, but he sees like a hawk.”

  NAFTALI, ONE FOR the ladies despite his wheelchair and his pacemaker, gestured her to sit close to him when she introduced herself. He had thick, snow-white hair, charcoal brows and bright green, watering eyes. He grabbed her hand and winked. “Let’s make Lana jealous.”

  Aimée grinned and planted a kiss on his leathery cheek. His hearing seemed fine. “Only if you tell me what you saw last night.”

  “Saw? I saw everything. I don’t sleep much.” Naftali noticed her look. “Like a lot of old people, you’re thinking.”

  “Lack of beauty sleep hasn’t harmed your looks, Naftali,” she said, squeezing his hand. She realized that one of his green eyes never moved. A glass eye. Great.

  “Ah, Mademoiselle, you are as charmante as my first wife, Rosa, may the Lord take good care of her,” he said, beating a gnarled fist against his heart. “But an old fart like me, I haven’t had a full eight hours since before the camps.”

  A faded tattoo of a number showed on his inner arm, below the rolled-up sleeve of his robe. A survivor.

  “It was the screaming, you see …” Naftali’s words trailed in the air, and Aimée braced herself for another sad story of the dark times, as her grandfather had called the German occupation.

  “That woman screaming in Romany,” Naftali was saying. “I know, because I speak a little Romany myself.”

  She moved closer. “Last night, you mean?”

  His good, watery eye looked far away.

  “In my day the manouches—les Tziganes, les Roms, les Sintis, les Ziganers, les gens du voyage, whatever you call them—lived in des roulottes.”

  “You mean wagons with wheels? Caravans, trailers?”

  “C’est ça.” He nodded. “Back then, during the war, whole families of nomades were rounded up by the French Vichy gendarmerie and put into some flimsy barracks at Montreuil-Bellay, in the Loire Valley,” he said. “Me too—I got caught in Nantes along with a bunch of Republican Spaniards escaping Franco, white Russians and clochards.”

  She squeezed Naftali’s hand. Hoped this led somewhere.

  “They branded us asocial types, misfits, and administered the camp under a 1940 décret signed by the last president of the Troisième République,” he said. “The Nazis could have taken notes: electrified barbed wire, no heat or sanitation. The camp was stuck in a field, no trees. Nothing but dirt and mud in the winter.”

  “That’s how you picked up some Romany, Naftali?” she said, gently trying to steer him back on track.

  “I had to keep my mind active,” he said. “Or I’d give up.”

  “So what did you hear? Can you tell me about last night, Naftali? Could you understand?”

  “Les manouches live in the moment. Incredible people.” Naftali sighed and shook his head. “They sang. They shared food, the little they had. I’ll never forget that. Or their loyalty. Only a quarter survived the extermination camps the Germans sent them to. Les manouches call it Porajmos—the devouring. But who even talks about them? It’s always about us Jews.”

  A male nurse approached. “Naftali, time for your tête-à-tête with Doctor Sonia.”

  Naftali smiled, his mood broken. “Zut! But what do I have to complain about, eh? My doctor’s blonde, thirty-two, legs like Bardot.

  “But what did you hear last night, Naftali?”

  “Ah, the bird flies into the house.”

  Riddles, the man spoke in riddles. But she had to keep prodding if he’d heard Drina last night.

  “Mais didn’t you say you heard the woman screaming in Romany? What was she saying?”

  He shrugged his frail shoulders. “At first I thought I’d dreamed hearing that, but I don’t sleep much.”

  The nurse leaned over, listening as he tucked Naftali’s blanket into the wheelchair.

  “Can you remember anything you heard, Naftali?”

  “Scratch a manouche and you’ll find superstition,” he said, patting her hand, then letting it go. A deeper sigh. “When the crows in the field circled close, les manouches shooed them away, yelling to scare off the spirits. To them, a bird flying into the house brought death.”

  How did that make sense? Naftali’s attention caught on the scudding clouds overhead as the nurse bent to release the wheelchair brake.

  “Naftali, please try to remember,” she said, touching his thin, blue-veined wrist. “A manouche woman was abducted from Ward C last night. I think you heard her. It’s important.”

  “You mean a kidnapping?” He raised his shrunken left shoulder and leaned on the chair’s armrest. “She was screaming about the birds, and that the boy needs to know … what was it? The … non, that’s it … the boy Nicu needs to know the truth.”

  “CONFIDENTIALITY PRECLUDES MY discussing a patient or their treatment,” said a young doctor. A different one.

  Aimée set down her oversized Jackie O sunglasses on the desk in his office in the hospital. “But the patient’s missing, Doctor. She was pulled off a hemodialysis machine. Every hour is crucial.”

  He checked his files. “I don’t see her chart.”

  This wasn’t working. She’d try another way in—stretch the truth. “Drina Constantin’s grief-stricken son, Nicu, hired me to find his mother.”

  “Hired you?”

  She slipped her Leduc Detective card over the desk, which was piled high with reports. “Abductions and kidnapping are my forte.” She paused. “Have you seen him this morning?”

  “No visitors allowed in the morning, Mademoiselle.”

  Where was Nicu? What could she say next?

  “You wouldn’t want your hospital’s negligence pointed out, its credentials called into question.”

  He snorted. “You’re threatening the Laennec, a hospita
l that’s closing next year, Mademoiselle—” He looked at the card. “—Leduc? Confer with the police in charge of the investigation, not me.”

  As helpful as the reception staff.

  “But Drina Constantin’s life’s in danger,” she said. “Time is of the essence. How long can she last without hemodialysis?”

  “Not for me to say.” He shook his head. “Doctor Estienne, the attending physician last night, has gone off shift. Look, I shouldn’t be talking to you.” His pager bleeped.

  “We know the abduction occurred during shift change.”

  “Again, I’m not the one to talk to. Doctor Estienne was in charge.”

  He looked at his watch. She had to stall, to get something from him. A knock came from the open door—a trio of interns stood there, charts in hand.

  “We’re ready, Doctor.”

  “Time for my rounds.”

  He stood up. Now she’d lost him. One last try.

  “Look, I spoke with Doctor Estienne last night, after the abduction.” True. “He stressed the hospital staff would help in any way possible.” Not so true. “He’s more than concerned.” Another lie.

  He paused in the doorway. “Talk to Marie Fourcy, our public-health liaison.” As Aimée joined him at the door, he beckoned to a small-boned black-haired woman with an aquiline nose who was talking to staff in the hallway. The woman, who reminded Aimée of a sparrow, broke off from the group and joined them.

  The young doctor hurried away as soon as he had introduced the two women and explained Aimée’s concerns.

  “We’ve sent an alert to all facilities in the system for Drina Constantin,” Marie said, repeating the party line back in the doctor’s office. “As soon as she shows up, we’ll be notified.”

  Aimée wondered what the chances of that were. “Have you spoken with her son, Nicu?”

  “Her son? I haven’t seen him, Mademoiselle.” Marie glanced at the reports on the desk. “But from what the flics told me, you’ll get nothing out of him, unless it’s something he wants you to know. People like him send people like you in circles.”

  No sympathy there. But Aimée’d get nowhere fast if she accused Marie of prejudice. She’d have to try something else.