by Cara Black
“Marie, can you help me understand some things here? I don’t get why Nicu would have brought his mother to this hospital unless they lived in the quartier.”
“Gypsies, here in the seventh? With the prime minister?”
She’d wondered that too.
Marie rubbed her brow. “Bien sûr, we maintain our public ward, as all hospitals do. Laennec was founded as a hospital for incurables.” Marie shrugged. “My job’s coordinating public health outreach,” she said, by rote, it seemed to Aimée. “The more integrated and assimilated manouches are musicians or those working the markets.”
Markets. She remembered Drina Constantin’s market-vendor ID from last night.
“I need Drina Constantin’s address.”
“I can’t give you that, of course,” Marie said. “Her son hasn’t given it to you? I’m not surprised. Even the integrated Gypsies take off in a moment. Roaming’s in their blood.”
Some public-health liaison this Marie was. “The alarm wires to the back fire-exit door of Ward C were severed last night,” Aimée said, pretending to consult her Moleskine, which she’d opened to her to-do list. “One of Drina’s socks was found beside a wheelchair that had been abandoned near the emergency entrance at the back of the hospital. It’s clear that Drina Constantin was abducted by someone familiar with the ward layout, someone who blended in.” Or anyone who had cased out the hospital and its slipshod security, but she bit her tongue. “If that doesn’t point to staff, Marie …”
“Haven’t you consulted the flics? They questioned the staff who were on duty last night,” she said. “Each of them has accounted for their whereabouts last night pre- and post-shift.”
Yet no one had questioned Lana the ambulance driver.
“So how did the abductor get in?” Someone had probably watered the plants, as her father would say—bribery. “Perhaps a wad of francs to an orderly to disconnect the alarm? Maybe even to bring the patient out to the ambulance alley?”
“I personally vouch for the three orderlies on duty last night.” Marie’s small eyes narrowed. “One of my husband’s cousins; the other two have worked here ten, fifteen years and will retire when we close.”
Alors, Aimée thought: if it wasn’t a paid-off hospital employee, then a keen observer.
Behind Marie’s head a hospital directory was pasted on the wall by a list labeled USEFUL NUMBERS. That gave her an idea.
“Here’s my card,” said Aimée.
Professional courtesy demanded that Marie give hers in return. Didn’t it? Marie made no move.
“May I have your card in case I need to reach you?”
“Désolée, I’m all out.”
Liar. One was stuck above her head on the corkboard.
“Consult the flics if you have any further questions,” Marie said, an arch tone in her voice. She showed Aimée to the hall, closing the office door behind them. “I’ve got a meeting.”
So far she’d gotten little: Naftali overhearing Drina’s shouting about birds, and Nicu needing to know the truth; Lana’s recollection of a black car with tinted windows.
Aimée followed several paces behind Marie until she entered a ward; as soon as she did, Aimée backtracked down the hallway and slipped back into the office, praying the woman wouldn’t return. Standing behind the door for cover, Aimée took Marie’s card from the corkboard and consulted the wall directory, then on the desk phone dialed 09, the extension for Admissions.
“I’m Marie Fourcy, calling from Doctor Estienne’s Ward C station. We’re unable to locate a patient’s records. Drina Constantin. Can you give me her contact information?”
“You’ve got the files,” the admissions clerk said.
Great. “Her chart’s missing, that’s the problem.”
“Your problem. We processed the patient yesterday upon admission and sent the records down to you at … eighteen hundred hours.”
She had to get something. Thought back to Nicu pulling out the market work permit. “Bon, what’s the patient’s address?”
“Address? You should have it.”
“But of course you’ve kept a copy in Admissions, non?”
A sigh. “When the messenger comes I’ll send it …”
“Merci beaucoup,” Aimée interrupted. Noises came from the hall. The rubber wheels of a trolley, approaching voices—merde! Couldn’t the woman just hurry up and cooperate? “But the flics in the hallway want her address.”
“This is their second request.” Her voice rose in irritation. “I’ve got to process pending admissions, I told them.”
Aimée heard footsteps outside the door. “Bon, just give me an address so I can keep them happy.”
“Attendez,” she said. “There’s a pile here to go through.”
The footsteps came closer.
“Voilà. Thirty-nine Boulevard des Invalides.”
“Merci.”
“What are you doing here?” asked a nurse.
Aimée hung up the phone as noiselessly as she could and turned around. Managed a shrug. “Stupid me, I left my sunglasses on the doctor’s desk.”
A moment later she’d escaped into the corridor, not looking back.
WITH AN IDEA forming in her mind, she headed to the service rooms she’d noticed. The laundry steam seeped through a wall vent. She followed the ramp through swinging doors labeled LAVERIE and UNIFORM PICKUP.
Inside she saw lockers and canvas carts heaped with soiled sheets. Detergent and stale coffee smells wafted from a table in the corner with a cafetière on it. She could hear loud voices from the changing room for male staff.
Aimée reached for a staff newsletter on the table by the coffee stains. “Excusez-moi,” she called into the locker area. “I’m with Department of Requisition checking on stock. Reports have reached us about thefts in staff locker rooms and in the laundry.”
“Tell me about it,” said a man who stuck his head out. “Lost my windbreaker, my uniform, even my ID.”
She nodded, controlled her excitement. “As recently as last night or today?”
He shrugged. “I come back to work today after two days off, my locker’s been cleaned out and I have no uniform. It’s making me late for my shift. Why don’t you people investigate?”
“Oh, I will,” she said.
HER PHONE VIBRATED in her pocket. A number she didn’t recognize. Nicu, finally!
But it was the lawyer’s secretary calling to book her appointment. “She has an opening tomorrow afternoon.”
“Nothing sooner?”
“Call it lucky a client cancelled and I can fit you in, Mademoiselle.”
“D’accord, merci.” Aimée scratched the details into her Moleskine. “My baby’s biological father is making custody claims.”
“Oh, she knows.”
She did? “But how?”
“The commissaire,” said the secretary. “Just to alert you, the biological father’s attorney has contacted Maître Benosh.”
Aimée’s heart dropped. Already? “But I’m just making the appointment. How could he know?”
“You’ll need to confer with Maître Benosh.”
What was Melac plottng?
“Tell her he hasn’t recognized his daughter. His name’s not on the birth certificate.”
“That’s another thing,” the secretary said. “Maître Benosh requests you bring your daughter’s birth certificate and livret de famille.”
And hand them over to Melac’s lawyer? No way. “I don’t understand. I’m her client. Isn’t she supposed to work for me?”
“The paperwork’s standard. Again, you’ll need to discuss the details with Maître Benosh,” said the secretary. “Or do you want to cancel?”
Torn, she paced. Her fingers gripped the cell phone so tight in anger she almost cancelled the appointment then and there. But she needed a lawyer, fast—and Morbier said this lawyer was the best. She knew better than to ignore a tip from the commissaire.
“Keep the appointment,” she said, her i
nsides churning.
“Maître Benosh insists that you have no contact with the biological father before your appointment.” The phone clicked off.
Her cold hands clamped together in fear. Melac meant business.
Then her phone rang again—Nicu this time. Within a minute she had arranged a meeting and headed to her scooter. Her hands were shaking. For now she had to put Melac aside, stuff down her fear of custody over Chloé. She could deal with this. Couldn’t she?
And a dying woman who’d begged to see her about her father’s murder—missing. She noticed the time on the wall clock as she left the building: 9:40 A.M. Drina had been missing for more than twelve hours.
AIMÉE PARKED HER scooter on the curb outside side La Pagode, where she’d arranged to meet Nicu. La Pagode, a rose-colored nineteenth-century Japanese pagoda, had been built by the director of Le Bon Marché as a “folly” for his wife. A few months later, the wife left him for a chauffeur.
Now La Pagode was an art-house cinema with ivy trailing the walls. Drooping willows canopied the tea tables nestled in the Japanese garden. It lay quiet and deserted, apart from Michel, the projectionist, who waved to her while sweeping the lobby. Maïs, the house cat, slinked past the pair of ceramic dragons guarding the stained-glass door to the cinema.
Nicu wasn’t there. She tried to take deep breaths under the paulownia tree’s curved branches. Did her best not to worry that Melac was running more than one step ahead of her. This jardin de rêves, an exquisite jewel of the Japonisme craze that had swept that epoch’s haute bourgeoisie, had been her haunt during maternity leave. She’d brought Chloé in a sling on her chest to two o’clock matinees and a silent-film festival with accompanying piano. Music put her baby to sleep, even in a theater.
Wistfulness filled her. Her mind went back to drinking green tea in the garden as Chloé gummed a teething biscuit, entranced by a butterfly hovering over a stone lantern. A faded memory of coming here years ago with her mother floated through her mind.
She’d fight Melac if it took everything she had.
And then she remembered, this was her first day back in the office. Time to quit daydreaming. No way she’d make it to Leduc Detective in fifteen minutes to open up. Merde! But she could handle it, couldn’t she? Still plenty of time to prepare for the late lunch meeting. She called the office and left Maxence a message that she would be working from home until the lunch meeting with René. But where was Nicu?
Nicu’s voice jolted her out of her thoughts. He was wearing the jeans and hoodie from last night; dark circles pooled under his eyes.
“Over here,” she said, pulling out a chair for him.
Nicu sat down. “The flics tried to frame me for murdering my mother, accused me of performing a mercy killing. Set me up as the suspect, showed me a body in the morgue. It looked like an eighty-year-old woman, and they claimed she’d been found with Drina’s chart.”
Planting evidence on a corpse. Incompetence or desperation? In either case, worse than she’d thought. The flics would never find Drina in time.
She checked her Tintin watch. More than thirteen hours since Drina’s abduction.
“Listen, Nicu.” She recounted what she’d discovered last night: the alarm wires that had been cut on the hospital’s exit door, Drina’s sock lodged in the spoke of a wheelchair by the ambulance alley, the ambulance driver who had observed a dark car blocking the allée, Naftali hearing a woman screaming in Romany, the theft of a staff uniform from the locker room.
“Et alors?” said Nicu, his voice thick. “The flics do nothing.”
“That’s the work of a pro, Nicu.” She took Nicu’s shaking hand over the tea table. “Who was Drina frightened of? Who can you think of?”
“I don’t know.”
Nicu, no more than a kid, was in shock.
She had to reel him in, get him to focus. “You need to think. We don’t have much time, Nicu,” she said. If Drina was even alive. “That man you said had been following you. Can you remember anything? Clothing, an accent, tattoos?”
He rubbed his eyes, distracted. “Maman kept jabbering.”
“Jabbering what?”
“I don’t know,” said Nicu, his lip quivering. “ ‘Sister,’ she kept saying. Her sister, maybe?”
“Her sister, your aunt?” Aimée asked. “Where is she?”
“Passed on a long time ago. Death’s a taboo, we don’t speak of the dead. But she said she couldn’t meet God without telling me …”
Exasperated, she tried to get him back on track. “Think back to the person who was following you, Nicu.”
“The gadjo came back, she said. He came back. That’s all.”
The metal garden chair bit into her spine. She took a deep breath to calm herself, then coughed at the mingling smells of fetid drain and drifting pollen. Think, she had to think how to investigate from here. “Nicu, we’ll start with Drina’s apartment on Boulevard des Invalides. Go from there.” And look for what? But she had to start somewhere.
He looked at her blankly.
“Apartment? Maman lives in a caravan in Avignon. She only comes to Paris sometimes, to do the market.”
“So what’s the address she used at the hospital, on Boulevard des Invalides? Your place?”
“Moi? No. No idea. I crash at the artist squat under Pont Alexandre III,” he said. “But I know the atelier she uses to repair cane chairs. I could take you there.”
Now it made sense. At almost every street market, manouches could be found hawking services to re-cane chairs, a disappearing art.
Every minute counted. “What are we waiting for? You’ve got the key?”
He pulled a key chain from his pocket.
“My scooter’s out front,” she said.
She waved goodbye to Michel. With Nicu sitting behind her, she eased off the brake, nosed the scooter onto the street and took off. The quartier was quiet. In the words of Martine’s tante, who owned a shop on rue du Bac, behind these walls, entre cour et jardin, lay secrets big and small.
Aimée hoped the atelier held some hint as to Drina’s whereabouts; she needed to find her before it was too late to learn anything about her father’s killer.
Nicu directed her past the modernist UNESCO building, the grounds of the École Militaire and the enclave of antique shops known as Village Suisse. After Avenue de la Motte-Piquet, she wove among traffic on crowded Boulevard de Grenelle under the overhead struts of the elevated Métro, which rumbled above them. Line 6, her favorite line, with its uninterrupted view of the Tour Eiffel.
Following Nicu’s directions, she turned in to Passage Sécurité, a narrow lane of one- and two-story buildings off the broad boulevard. At one end of the lane stood a tall housing block, at the other the grey rivet-dotted Métro structure. On the crumbling stucco wall below the blue sign reading VOIE PRIVÉE, a rusting metal sign said PLOMBERIE, CHAUFFAGE.
“Here.” Nicu jumped off and inserted a key into the padlock on the grey wooden double door of a small warehouse with butterscotch stucco. Bits of torn newspaper flew through the alley—giving it the abandoned feel of a wind tunnel. She shivered. Not a place she’d choose to frequent.
Inside the musty, skylit atelier was a scene of chaos. Cane chairs overturned, metal tools and empty paint cans littering the cracked concrete floor. The place had been trashed. Pillows slit open, down feathers clumped and matted in a wet corner. Someone had been searching for something. It was the work of a pro.
And it sickened her. Nicu had gone to the back courette, a postage stamp–sized courtyard. Aimée saw a white camper van parked there, its door open.
Her breath caught. Could Drina be hiding here, or even be here as a captive? She reached in her bag for her Swiss Army knife, flicked the blade open. “Watch out, Nicu.”
But Nicu came back, shaking his head. “How could they do this?” he said, a stricken look on his face.
Aimée closed her knife. “More importantly, Nicu, why?” she said. “What were they looking for?�
��
Inside the small caravan, pots and pans, blankets and clothes littered the floor. The cooktop had been overturned, and a bottle of vinegar broken, leaving a dry residue and a tangy odor. The built-in seat and covers had been slashed with a knife.
Nicu picked up a wooden toy wagon that fit in his palm. He spun the small wheels, which were decorated with a metal band. “She loved these. I carved them for her. The old Gypsy wagons, les roulottes.”
“Nicu, if your mother had something that proved who murdered my father, where would she have hidden it?”
Nicu’s shoulders were shaking. “Face it. She’s … passed.” He shook his head. “I thought I’d know, feel her departure. What does it matter now?”
Was he right? Had she been beaten to the finish by the man who murdered her papa—again?
“We don’t know that. Until we find her, we search. Think, Nicu. Where else would she hide something?”
He gave a shake of his head.
“Don’t you at least want to try your best? How can you give up any hope of helping her?” She wanted to mobilize him. But this kid was in shock, his mother likely dead. Pity mingled with her determination. “I’m sorry, Nicu, but please try to think of where she’d keep money, valuables.”
“Bon,” he said, catching her urgency. “At the market she’d keep her cash and account books in the caravan. She’d customized it.” He went back into the atelier and returned with a screwdriver, which he used to start unscrewing one of the caravan’s outside panels. Nothing inside. He tried the next one. “This could take a while, Aimée.”
He was focused now. No good her standing here wasting time.
“I’ll ask around in the café, the shops, see if anyone noticed anything. Call me.”
“There’s no phone here. And I don’t have a cell.”
She remembered seeing a phone booth, rare enough these days, half a block away under the elevated Métro. “Use the phone at the Métro.” From her wallet she took out a phone card. “Plenty of credit left.”
The heating-system shop next door was shuttered. At the corner café, she caught the waiter’s attention amid loud shouts directed at the horse races on the télé screen overhead. A shrug when she asked about Drina, the atelier. More shrugs from men at the counter. The produce-shop owner, stocking only tomatoes, shook his head. She glanced at her phone. No call from Nicu yet. Up and down the block she’d gotten the same story—no one had seen anything, no one had heard anything. No one wanted to get involved with a Gypsy.
