by Cara Black
“Only if you promise me that the hospital ethics article on Drina gets traction. Raises questions, an investigation.”
“Don’t worry. He owes me a favor. Big time.”
“Look at these, Martine.”
Martine loosened her apron, leaned over the kitchen counter as Aimée spread out the photo and the old Paris Match. “See the Leseur château, those distinctive funeral urns? You’ll notice the same urns in this little family scene.”
“Et alors?”
“I’d say the Assemblée Nationale député Pascal Leseur fathered the Gypsy boy, Nicu, who Drina raised.” Aimée pointed to the names written below—Djanka, Nicholás and Pascal.
“That’s all the proof you’ve got?”
She gave Martine a brief rundown. “It’s all heating up. Haven’t you heard any rumors lately?”
“Ancient history, Aimée.” Martine studied the photos, tapping her spoon on the dish. “But interesting history. There’s a tell-all memoir by a former minister’s young boyfriend that got pulled, I heard. First there was going to be a Libé exposé, then there’s not, then a few copies appeared on someone’s desk anonymously.”
“What’s the connection?” She could tell something had clicked in Martine’s mind.
“In our business that means we all know the story exists, but no one can use or quote it. But as you know, Pascal Leseur’s dead and so are most of the other people involved.”
“Pascal Leseur’s mentioned?”
Martine nodded then wiped her mouth.
“And a Monsieur X. It’s news for a day, then phfft, over. I haven’t read it. That’s from my connection at Le Monde.” Martine gave a knowing nod. “Alors, Leseur’s in the memoir, but again, it was twenty years ago—who cares now?”
Hadn’t Thiely almost said the same thing? Advised her to leave it alone?
Well, she cared. “Drina was abducted and Nicu murdered because someone wanted them silenced. Someone high up. So memoir or not, this story is still hot. And Drina was trying to tell me with her last words that Djanka’s murderer killed my father, Martine. Pascal Leseur’s linked to this.”
“All happening here in the most chic and exclusive quartier of Paris?” Martine’s voice dripped with sarcasm. “Très discret and full of the elite—why, even the Monoprix tucks its sign out of sight.”
“There’s a Monoprix in the seventh?”
“I’m quoting Yves Saint Laurent; he lives around the block from it.”
“If YSL shops at Monoprix, then …” Words failed her.
“But you could have hit the mark, Aimée. After all, this might be a chichi quartier, but it’s home to ministries, and we all know there’s nothing more seedy than what goes on behind politician’s doors.” Martine crinkled her nose. “That special odeur de corruption.”
Aimée’s phone vibrated in her bag. René.
“All good with de Brosselet, René?”
A horn blared in the background. “We need to meet.” She heard the stress in René’s voice. “Maxence is with me.”
“Can’t it wait?”
“De Brosselet accepted the proposal, and he’s ready to sign contracts. Before he changes his mind I need your approval.” René sounded nervous like he always did before closing a deal. “Now, Aimée.”
“Attends.” She put her hand over the receiver. “Anywhere here René and I can take a few minutes in private?”
“On one condition.”
What now? “Join your cooking class? Use all my free time to start taking Italian classes with you?”
“Promise me you’ll make an effort with Gianni’s cousin.”
“If I can stay awake.”
Martine pointed to a window above. “Good. The room directly above this one’s free—my Italian lesson starts in half an hour. Use it till then.”
THE TALL-CEILINGED CLASSROOM was lined by cases of Italian books and large windows whose frames were carved with wreaths of oak and laurel. An adjoining salon, with mirrors on every wall and a tromp l’oeil mural of a blue sky and clouds painted on the ceiling, contained a life-sized statue of the Marquis de Galliffet.
“Can anyone listen in on us here?” Maxence asked, looking around. His leather boots creaked on the herringbone wood floor.
“Doubt it,” Aimée said. “Just don’t speak Italian. Where’s René?”
“Parking.” Maxence set the printout on the teacher’s oak desk. “Here’s the meteorological report you requested. Scattered showers around ten P.M. on the night of April twenty-first, 1978, then again around one A.M. on the twenty-second. The dew forms roughly an hour before sunrise. So say five A.M.”
Given the dew on Djanka’s hair and her damp but not soaked clothes, she must have been dumped in the moat at les Invalides between 1 A.M. and 5 A.M. Aimée knew her father must have figured that out. She felt like she was late to the party. Twenty years too late.
She sifted the information in her mind, fixed on the fact that the military had been denied the right to investigate—unless they’d hushed it up themselves. But why? And who’d trump the Ministry of Defense? No one in her address book.
She sat down on the teacher’s desk. Thought.
The classroom’s radiator hissed. A feeble sputter of heat blew out and then died.
“Look, Aimée, according to this Paris Match article,” said Maxence, pointing to her copy, “Pascal Leseur’s suicide was discovered by the cleaning lady on the morning of April twenty-second. The same day Djanka was found strangled in the moat at the École Militaire.”
“I know. And it must connect.” Aimée mulled. Buttoned her tuxedo jacket up and wished she was back in the inviting warmth of the cooking-class kitchen.
“Alors?” said René, putting down his briefcase and joining them.
Aimée filled him in on what they had learned.
“But this Pascal Leseur committed suicide,” René said, stabbing the Paris Match page with his forefinger.
“If Djanka’s the mother of his child, I’d say the fact that they were both discovered dead on the same day is more than a coincidence.”
“And if Leseur’s suicide wasn’t a suicide, and they were both murdered … Good luck proving that twenty years after the fact.” René wiped a fallen almond leaf off his lapel. It drifted, twisting in the sunlight, to the hardwood floor. “We’ve got work to do, Aimée.”
“But this matters, René. It mattered enough that they pulled my father off the case. Even the military were denied an investigation on their own turf.”
“Says who?” René snorted in disgust. “They hush stuff all the time.”
“No denying that. But my former riding instructor has no reason to lie. I believe him. And Drina was trying to tell me that it’s the reason my father was murdered ten years later. And now one other innocent person has been killed, poor Nicu Constantin. That means it matters to someone, René; that someone still thinks it can be proved twenty years later, and is afraid of what will happen if it is. And I’ll find out who.”
René opened his case, shaking his head. “You call that a connection?”
“Big players,” said Maxence, nodding. “You think someone took out two hits twenty years ago and has been trying to cover them up ever since?”
“You’re on the right path, Maxence,” Aimée said. “Say Leseur, an up-and-coming politician, was the target, Djanka a secondary target, or maybe killed because she was a witness … Years later, something surfaces, my father makes the connection to an old case …”
Maxence interrupted, excited. “So whoever they are, they need to cover up the murders again, so they take him out.” He smiled, brushed his long bangs to the side. Noticed Aimée’s wince. “I’m so sorry, I meant …” The alarm on his watch suddenly played a techno version of “Strawberry Fields Forever.” “Oops, got class. Meet you later, Aimée. I’ll set up the surveillance equipment for tonight’s reception—it’s an early one.”
What a jewel Maxence was.
“Before I forget,” he a
dded, “de Brosselet left this for you.”
From his backpack Maxence pulled out a mottled-gris pigskin Villeroi Frères bag. Soft as butter. Her heart fluttered. “I guess he liked the diaper service tip.”
“At least there’s some good news,” said René, spreading out the contract pages. He handed her his Montblanc pen. “Sign here.”
As Maxence left, the open door let in a flurry of cold air. The repeated notes of a piano being tuned in the adjoining salon were momentarily louder and clearer until the door closed again.
As she placed the cap back on the pen, there was something niggling at her, just out of reach. What had she been trying to remember? Something she’d meant to make a note of before. Something to do with manouches? Why hadn’t she written it down instead of relying on her bébé-addled brain? “René, what do they call people from that region where you went for a healer?”
He’d once tried a guérisseur, a healer, in the countryside for his hip dysplasia.
“Peasants? A step below provincials? Superstitious dullards who go in for witchcraft?”
“Quit le snobisme, René.” She handed his pen back to him. “I mean what are the natives called?”
“Ah, you mean cross-eyed inbreds? Otherwise known as les Berrichons.”
“That’s it, René. They’re Berrichons. From the Berry.” Now she’d remembered what she’d been chasing—Djanka’s autopsy. “The dental records used to identify Djanka Constantin were sent from the Berry.”
“What’s this got to do with the price of butter, Aimée?” said René, returning his Montblanc to his jacket’s inner breast pocket. “Nobody cares about the Berry, not even les Berrichons. Everybody who can get out, does.” He took a copy of Le Figaro from his briefcase and slapped it on the desk. “Look at this, rumors of a shake-up at the quai d’Orsay involving a ministry official from le Berry. They even make it into the government. See?”
“By ministry official you mean Roland Leseur, brother of Pascal. Nicu’s uncle. That’s the connection.” She pointed to the photo in Paris Match and the “family” with the matching urns.
René shook his head. “Et alors?”
The computer on the teacher’s desk, a chrome affair, yielded to her guest-user request. A moment later she’d navigated to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs site.
“It says the Leseur father was awarded the Légion d’honneur for his Resistance work in the Berry.” Was that the Leseur connection to les manouches? Did it go back to the roundups and the camps? She scanned the site further, saw that it listed the ministry’s official conferences and meeting schedules.
She glanced at her Tintin watch. 12:30 P.M. She logged off the classroom computer.
“If Roland Leseur won’t call me back, I’ll go to him.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Could you work on translating Drina’s Romany? I’ll call you later.”
René stuck the signed contract in his briefcase. “Maurice saw a blue van on rue du Louvre this morning. Promise me you’ll be careful, Aimée. If only for Chloé’s sake.”
She nodded, a shiver rising up her neck.
MARTINE MET HER in the salon by the statue of the Marquis de Galliffet. After a two-minute huddle, she ran down the marble steps, armed with Martine’s new press pass. On rue de Varenne, beside the plaque stating that the American writer Edith Wharton had lived here, she hailed a taxi.
“Quai d’Orsay,” she said. No one bothered to call it the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The taxi driver, a mustached man of about sixty, peered at her in the rearview mirror. “Which entrance?”
“Press entrance, s’il vous plaît.”
AIMÉE FLASHED MARTINE’S badge and got through security without a hitch at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But when she arrived at the press briefing it was already coming to an end. Chairs scraped back and a microphone whined like a siren, making her cover her ears. Several officials, identifiable by the ministry “uniform” of navy blue suit, blue shirt and red tie, filed down the few steps from the dais.
She recognized Roland Leseur from his photo in Le Figaro: mid forties, tall, black hair shot through with silver, long face, prominent nose. He spoke to an AFP reporter while a photographer stood by. Aimée caught a few phrases. “As we outlined in the briefing, those Roma, citizens of Romania, Albania and Bulgaria …” She lost the thread as someone pushed in front of her—a reporter and a technician from RTL, the radio network. “We’re working on agreements with these countries, among others in Eastern Europe, who’ve proved extremely helpful. The Roma situation differs from that of the manouches born in France …”
“How can you make that claim, even while native manouches are being resettled like immigrés? The protesters on the Champ de Mars …”
She didn’t hear the answer. By the time she caught up with the reporters, Leseur had disappeared.
“Where’s the next briefing?”
“Briefing? The minister and his cronies went to play squash.” The RTL reporter laughed. He wore round, owl-like brown glasses and a wool jacket with elbow patches. He ran his gaze over her legs. “New to the pack, eh?”
She nodded. “I need more for my story.”
“Good luck with that. They’re off to the sports center to flex their muscles for one another.”
“Sports center?”
“Talk about green,” he said, happy to lord it over her. “Under the Assemblée Nationale. Off-limits to us. But if you wait outside for a few hours, they’ll deign to recycle what they’ve already spewed out, and you’ll get points from your editor for persistence.”
Like she had the time for that?
But she smiled. “Guess I’ve got to learn the ropes; I appreciate the tip.”
He sidled closer. “Plenty of time for a drink. What do you say? By the way, I’m Allert de Riemer.”
By the time they’d reached the café across the street, she had a plan.
“Un cocktail?”
“This early?”
She nodded. “But come on, there’s not really a sports club under the Assemblée Nationale, right in the Palais Bourbon. You’re joking, right?”
“Don’t believe me then.”
“You mean the ministers just walk across the quai in their gym shorts?”
Allert smirked. “There’s an underground walkway. They don’t even come up for air. Normal people’s air.”
“Some kind of tunnel?”
“Used to be a Nazi bunker, part of the ammunitions storage carved out of the old Palais Bourbon wine cellars.”
She grinned, switching to her full-on flirt. “Be nice, don’t tease a newbie. You were a beginner once, too.”
“I bought you a cocktail, didn’t I? What could get nicer than that?”
He leaned in. His hot garlic breath hit her ear.
“If you’re so nice, where’s the entrance to this Nazi bunker?” asked Aimée.
“Rez-de-chausée, make a left at Talleyrand.”
She hit the VIBRATE button on her phone. “Oops, my editor. Be right back.”
He pulled her close. She tried not to breathe in. Wished she could plug her nose. “I’ll be waiting, big eyes.”
“You do that.”
Out on the pavement, she stood with the smokers, her phone to her ear, and grinned at him. A moment later she’d edged out of view behind an old couple walking a labrador. She crossed the pavement and reentered the ministry. One minute later she’d found the marble bust of a lush-wigged Talleyrand. The man got around.
She stuck the press pass in her pocket, pulled out her clear-framed glasses and the soft leather Villeroi bag that almost melted under her touch. Folded the file with the Paris Match under her arm, put her phone to her ear and joined several people going into a door.
A guard was checking security passes. Merde! She mingled, talking intently and in a low voice into her phone, which she’d put on mute. Moved forward with the crowd.
“Pass, Mademoiselle?”
She
looked down at her chest. “Mon Dieu, must have left it on my desk. Upstairs. Pardonnez-moi.” She spoke into the dead phone. “Un moment, Monsieur Leseur.” She cupped the phone with her hand as if to muffle the words to the speaker on the other end. “Monsieur Leseur needs his file right now. Can I just bring it to him?”
The guard motioned for her to wait.
“Oui, Monsieur, you mean le ministre needs it?” she said in a loud voice, back into the phone. “But I forgot my pass, and I’m hoping this nice gentleman will …”
People behind her shuffled their feet. A few coughed. Even the guard was annoyed at the line.
He waved her through.
She followed the two women ahead of her with their heads bent in conversation. Halogen light strips illuminated the coved stone walls of the surprisingly broad tunnel. A young buck, messenger bag strapped around his chest, wheeled by on his trottinette, a silver metal kick scooter, his Converse-clad foot pushing off the ground with a rhythmic cheut. A warren, this place, with tunnels branching off right and left, signposted for the cafeteria, the Assemblée Nationale.
She kept her eyes peeled for Leseur, thought up a story. Ahead of her she saw a sign reading: ASCAN. ASSOCIATION SPORTIVE ET CULTURELLE DE L’ASSEMBLÉE NATIONALE. OPEN TO DÉPUTÉS, ASSISTANTS ET FONCTIONNAIRES DE L’ASSEMBLÉE, AUX FONCTIONNAIRES ET AGENTS PUBLICS DE L’ADMINISTRATION.
And then in small letters it read: AND OUTSIDERS.
Well, she qualified as an outsider. So did any member of the public—that’s if anyone could find this place. Didn’t she pay their salaries with her taxes? Time she collected.
“Bonjour.” She smiled at the young woman at the desk. “Désolée to bother you, but it’s urgent. I have a time-sensitive file for Monsieur Leseur. Please notify him—he’s on the squash court.”
“Monsieur Leseur? Non.”
“But I was told—”
“Escrime. The fencing court.” She picked up the phone. “A file regarding …?”
A swordsman. If she got his ear, it would only be for a few minutes. “From the press briefing. He’ll understand.”
The woman at the desk nodded. “Go ahead to the old arsenal.”
