Murder in Belleville ali-2

by Cara Black

  Aimée turned her head away; she still couldn’t look. She hurried to Mikimoto, where she stepped into the high-ceilinged foyer lined with mirrored doors. She was glad to be off the street, away from the painful memories and with a purpose. How Sylvie and Eugénie connected was what she hoped to find out at Mikimoto.

  “Mademoiselle, do you have an appointment?” the blond coiffed receptionist asked, looking Aimée up and down.

  Aimée smoothed her skirt and smiled at her. “Monsieur Roberge at two o’clock,” she said.

  “Let me confirm,” the receptionist said with an intake of breath that brooked no argument and was meant to reveal how busy she was at the same time. Her glossy coral-manicured nails clicked over the keyboard, consulting her computer screen.

  Aimée wondered why she couldn’t just check an appointment book—-even in this part of Paris she doubted that too many sheikhs or billionaires beat down the door to purchase rare pearls at the same time.

  Her idea of jewelry shopping was bargaining at the antique stalls in the Porte de Vanves flea market. She rifled through her Hermes bag and touched the pearl she’d stuffed in the small plastic bag. It felt bumpy and cold.

  “You may go up,” the receptionist said.

  Aimée mounted the stairs to Roberge’s upper floor office.

  “Bonjour, Mademoiselle.”

  Pierre Roberge stood and greeted her. A tall man, his bony shoulders were hunched, giving him a stooped look. Aimée figured him to be in his sixties, and with a good toupee. He smiled and motioned for her to sit down. The plush Aubusson carpet absorbed her footsteps. Roberge’s tall gilt-edged office windows overlooked the Ritz Hotel and the verdigris statue atop the Vendome column.

  “Thank you for seeing me, Monsieur Roberge, on such short notice.”

  Below, a fleet of chauffeured Mercedes waited by the entrance of a bank so discreet that no name was posted out front. Aimée shifted in the little gold chair to avoid the view.

  “To be honest, Mademoiselle Leduc, I was intrigued by your call,” Roberge said fitting the jeweler’s loupe over his eye. He adjusted the thin halogen lamp and donned a pair of white gloves.

  She set the odd-shaped pearl, fat and tumescent-looking, on the black velvet tray.

  Roberge sat forward and peered closely.

  “Mikimoto is renowned for cultured pearls, Mademoiselle,” he said. “Unlike these.”

  “Monsieur Roberge, I was told you are a pearl expert. I appreciate your kindness,” she said. “I hope I haven’t wasted your time.”

  Politeness would prevent him from agreeing with her even if she had.

  He turned the pearl, luminescent under the light, in his gloved hand.

  She studied the framed Provencal landscapes ringing the room. Impressionist by the look of them, less known but original. She figured everything in the room was authentic except her story.

  “Les maudites,” he murmured. The damned.

  What did he mean by that?

  “Comment?” Aimée asked.

  “Forgive me,” he said.

  Roberge’s voice had grown tight, she noticed, his tone more clipped.

  “That’s the term we use,” Roberge said. “May I ask where you obtained this pearl?”

  Irritated, Aimée wondered why he’d started posing questions. Instead she smiled and crossed her legs.

  “All in good time, Monsieur Roberge,” she said. “I’d like your impressions. Tell me what you think first.”

  “To be honest, Mademoiselle,” he said, fingering the pearl once more before setting it down on the black velvet, “the value diminished once this piece was removed from the setting.”

  She kept her surprise in check and nodded. “And the setting—?”

  “But you’re a thief,” he interrupted, “you should know.”

  “Hold on, Monsieur!” she said, alarmed. “I didn’t steal this.”

  “Security will deal with you,” he said, reaching for the phone.

  Alarmed, Aimée stood up, putting her hand on his glove. “Why do you think this is stolen?”

  He didn’t answer.

  She saw his eyes flicker with fear, but she kept her hand on his.

  “You know whom the pearl belongs to, don’t you, Monsieur Roberge?”

  “I’m an old man,” he said. He blinked so much that his jeweler’s loupe fell on the velvet. “Don’t threaten me.”

  “Tell me who it belongs to, Monsieur Roberge,” she said, perching on his desk. “And I’ll take my hand off yours and tell you who I really am.”

  He looked unsure.

  She let go, fished in her bag, and pulled out her ID. “I’m a private investigator, Monsieur Roberge.”

  He stared at it, his jaw set and stubborn. Maybe he didn’t like the unflattering photo on it.

  “From what I’ve discovered so far, Monsieur, my next stop will be the morgue.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She stood up and walked to the tall window. But after staring at the Place Vendôme, she didn’t have the heart to tell him the truth. Thinking back to Madame Visse’s conversation about Eugénie, she had to be sure of the dead woman’s identity.

  “I believe the woman who owned this could be there,” she said, and turned to him. “Your information might help me avoid that process. Her toe tag will probably say Yvette, what the flics label unknown dead females. A number will be penciled next to that indicating the order in which her corpse was delivered.”

  “So she’s dead?” he asked.

  “A woman’s been murdered,” she said. “I’ve been hired to find her killer, but her identity is unclear. I just want to know if this pearl belonged to her.”

  “Mademoiselle Leduc, you could have told me this before. However, we are under no obligation to provide confidential details to you.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “However, I told you who I was. It’s your turn.”

  Roberge stared out the window, his eyes reflected sadness. “Tiens. I don’t normally perform appraisals or commissions for the money,” he said. “When something exquisite crosses my path, I find joy in sculpting and weaving the piece to highlight the beauty. With Biwa pearls, its simple. Set off their uniqueness.” He paused. “Not hard to do.”

  His Gallic evasiveness bothered her.

  “Why won’t you tell me her name?”

  Silence. She kept her steady gaze on him.

  “I only pay attention to the work.” He shook his head. “I am a craftsman. When the piece speaks to me, I listen.”

  Aimée reasoned that few patrons would argue with Roberge’s dictum after that speech, impassioned but spoken with an honesty she rarely heard.

  “Are you trying to protect her, Monsieur?” Aimée asked. “She’s beyond caring, I’m afraid.”

  Outside, shadows cast by the column lengthened across the Place.

  “She came to me with loose pearls in a jumble,” he said. “There were four, an unlucky number for Japanese. I suspected their origin. But when I examined them I knew.”

  “Knew what, Monsieur?”

  And why did that unlucky number mean anything, she wanted to ask, but she held her tongue. Maybe he was trying to tell her in his own convoluted way.

  “Les maudites are the last natural pearls gathered from Lake Biwa,” he said. He set the jeweler’s loupe down on his desk. “No more exist. At least none we know of. Now they’re cultured in mass freshwater farms nearby. But it’s not the same. Connoisseurs know this.”

  “Why the term mandites?

  Roberge’s forehead wrinkled. “Luck evades the possessors, you might say. Fortunes shift and change.”

  Like the Hope diamond, she thought. Many believed a curse followed the owners. Aimée paused; another angle occured to her. Had Sylvie been killed for the pearl?

  “Won’t you help me?” she asked.

  He shrugged.

  Aimée leaned forward and stared at Roberge.

  “Japanese numerology has its own rules.” He gave a thin smile.
“Mademoiselle, the pysche is not an exact science like your science of criminology.”

  She stood up. “So you’re saying rich people are superstitious?”

  “More so than most,” he said. “And Sylvie Coudray belonged to that category.”

  At last! Without missing a beat, Aimée sat down. “Tell me about Sylvie.”

  “I never asked about her bank account,” he said. “Or her profession.”

  “According to my client, it was the oldest one in the world,” Aimée said. “But I’d guess that could be said for a portion of your clientele.”

  “My services don’t require accounting,” he said. “But Sylvie loved good things. Especially pearls. And against her flawless skin …” He let the sentence dangle.

  Had Roberge secretly desired Sylvie? Or had they been intime?

  “She had a good heart,” he said.

  A whore with a heart of gold—such a cliche!

  “She came to me several years ago with a single strand of black pearls,” Roberge said. “Of the kind I’d seen only once before. After my credentials were established, she let me restring them. An honor.”

  “Did she mention a woman, Eugénie? Or perhaps bring her?”

  “Always alone,” he said. “Sylvie had a rare appreciation of beauty. Something shared by so few people. I will miss her.”

  Aimée could see in his eyes that he would.

  “Where did she obtain such pieces, Monsieur? Surely you wondered, non?

  “At first. But that’s not my business. As I told you,” he said. “Beauty attracts beauty. A pearl’s essence is of life—a once living coral, ossified into a grain of sand, enveloped and loved by the oyster and reborn as a pearl. An irritant transformed. Like Sylvie.”

  “Like Sylvie?” she asked.

  Roberge waxed poetic concerning pearls, but she hadn’t seen the connection to a highly paid mistress. A murdered mistress, she reminded herself.

  Roberge didn’t answer. His gaze riveted on the pearl still lying on the black velvet, he seemed lost in thought.

  “Monsieur Roberge, I’m not sure I follow you,” she said, trying to coax him to speak.

  “Pearls are to the ocean’s geology as gems are to the igneous strata in the earth.”

  “How does that relate to Sylvie, Monsieur?”

  “We only talked of pearls. And such discussions we had,” he said, his tone wistful.

  “How does Sylvie remind you of pearls?”

  “A rare woman is like that,” he said and shrugged. “What more can I say?”

  His desk buzzer sounded. “Your next appointment’s arrived, Monsieur Roberge,” the clipped voice of the receptionist announced.

  Aimée left. She doubted Sylvie had been murdered for her pearls, but experience had taught her not to discount anything. Most of all, she wondered why it had happened in Belleville.

  As she passed through Place Vendôme on the way back, she felt different. As if she was pursuing justice as her father would have, but in her own way. Step by painful step. And for the first time in a long time, she remembered her father’s laugh with dry eyes.

  She’d be floundering in the dark, until she saw the police report of the explosion. Time for answers. Her next stop was the morgue.

  YOUSSEFA PULLED THE BLACK chador over her head. The long draping wool felt hot and heavy. She found it ironic, having worn one rarely in Oran, she wore it almost every day in Paris. But it made the perfect cover. Too bad it couldn’t disguise her limp.

  Youssefa prayed Eugénie would show up this time. She had to. Everything depended on it. Over and over in her mind Youssefa replayed Eugénie’s instructions: Meet Monday in the grotto at Pare des Buttes Chaumont. But Eugénie hadn’t showed. Failing that, the back-up plan had been to meet at the Pare de Belleville summit same time on Tuesday.

  If only Eugénie would use a cell phone, she thought. But Eugénie didn’t trust them. She told Youssefa the encrypted channels weren’t secure; France Telecom just liked everyone to think they were.

  Youssefa shivered in the doorway, scanning rue Crespin du Gast. France was so cold. Did the sun ever shine? She waited for the old woman walking her well-clipped terrier to pass. Then Youssefa followed the narrow street, clutching her packet tightly.

  She kept her head down, passing the chanting protesters in front of the church.

  “The AFL protests for your rights, mon arrde” a dreadlocked young man said thrusting a flyer into her hand. “Take one. Come to our vigil.”

  Youssefa scurried by, afraid to touch it. Where she came from, such protesters would have been mowed down like wheat before the harvester.

  Keep to yourself, Eugénie had instructed. Trust no one.

  At the Pare de Belleville summit, the Paris skyline, dimmed in fog, was lost on Youssefa. She paced rue Piat, which crowned the park. No Eugénie. Fear mounted inside her.

  Three hours later her sense of dread turned to despair. Youssefa had been in Paris only five days. Her contact, Eugénie, was gone. The link severed—she’d be next.

  INSIDE THE CHURCH BERNARD paused under mullioned windows catching and refracting the green light. The whites of people’s eyes caught the gleam from dripping wax candles. Murmured conversations echoed off vaulting pillars supporting the nave.

  Bernard’s credentials were checked at the damp vestibule door by a woman wearing a yellow Mali cloth headress. A thumbed copy of Frantz Fanon’s book, The Wretched of die Earth, was crooked under her arm. Beyond her Bernard saw mattresses lined along the Gothic stone walls.

  “Mustafa Hamid represents us,” she said. Her other arm swept over the wooden pews where children played and men lay on mattresses. “We speak as one. As French people, not as beurs,” she said, using the word applied to second-generation North Africans, French born. Beur, the masculine form of butter, was used in verlan, the language developed in the suburban housing projects.

  Doomed already, Bernard thought. The ministry had a plane waiting for these immigrants of Algerian and African descent, without papers.

  Under the nave the uneven mosaic tiles were covered with muddy footprints. The glass-framed paintings of saints reflected sputtering votive candles and blue gas burners with huge pots simmering on them. The scent of melted wax and the sweat of many bodies hung over the pews.

  Appalled, Bernard realized the church had by necessity become a day-care center and campground for the hunger strikers. If the French press described this scene, the whole cause would backfire on these people. Even as a lapsed Catholic, he knew church sanctity struck a chord with Christians—fallen-away Catholics most of all. And the real issue of the hunger strikers would tumble aside.

  He felt an insistent tug on his trouser and looked down. A bug-eyed toddler, no taller than his knees and with a runny nose, was pulling himself up. His diaper hung loose, his small chest labored under a skimpy shirt. It was food stained and not warm enough for this dank church, Bernard thought, feeling the chill radiating from the stone. The toddler let go and took a few lurching steps, then crumpled, landing upright with a surprised smile on his face.

  “Akim’s first steps, Monsieur,” said a chador-clad woman. At least he thought those words came from behind the black mask. He turned around to see a dark-eyed young woman, with a scarf tied around her face, addressing him.

  “I speak for his mother, who may not address you without her husband,” she said bending down and helping Akim.

  Akim grinned and pointed at Bernard.

  A salvo of Arabic erupted behind the chador. The young woman nodded. “His mother asks, Monsieur, if you could please help her. Akim was born in Paris but not she or his father. They are political refugees from an oppressive regime.”

  More torrents poured forth, and the young woman bent forward to listen.

  “If they are forced to go back, they face prison and Akim an orphanage. He has”—she stumbled in French—"how do you say it?—un coeur fragil, a weak heart.”

  Bernard wished he could back out the way he c
ame in, pretend he never heard this story and find safety behind his Regency office desk overlooking the Elysee Palace. But he couldn’t. He stood rooted to the spot.

  Akim crawled over to Bernard’s leg and started the laborious process of standing again.

  “Monsieur, Amnesty International isn’t allowed to visit prisons in their country,” she said, looking up, her dark pupils reflecting the flickering votive candlelight. “His mother begs you to help them. Akim is their only child to survive infancy.”

  Bernard couldn’t avoid Akim, who clung to his trouser legs. Maybe he could help, he thought, find Akim a decent children’s home with a medical facility. And then he saw the line forming behind the mother, stretching from the nave along the full length of the church.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “They all want to tell you their story,” the young woman said. “Akim’s family is… comment?” she searched for the words. “How do you say, the tip of the iceberg?”

  Bernard wanted to tell her it didn’t matter anyway. Everyone had to leave. He wished he were made of the stone that lay below his feet.

  “Mademoiselle, I’m representing the Ministry of the Interior. I don’t make the decrees, but I’m here to speak with Mustafa Hamid,” he said, trying to affect a sincere tone. “We have much to discuss.”

  He heard little Akim’s whimper as he was shown the way to Hamid. Suddenly Bernard was transported to his own childhood, trudging knee-deep through the charred timbers of the souk, stung by the blowing sand, and smelling seared flesh. His feet so heavy and tired, the waiting boat at the port so far away, the sky stainless steel, and the wind whistling through the barbed wire.

  “Bonjour, Directeur Berge,” said Walid, a bearded man, interrupting his thoughts. “Come this way. Mustafa Hamid wishes to present demands to the ministry. Reasonable and just.”

  “I’m here to open negotiations,” Bernard said.

  “Meet our terms,” he said. “I’m sure time, stress, and police power will be saved.”

  Tuesday Afternoon

  “NO STIFFS SINCE LAST Saturday,” the morgue attendant told Aimée, stifling a yawn.