by Cara Black
He shook his head again. “I’ve seen it before. Suicide d’amour, a love affair gone wrong, depression. No one to talk to.” Serge read further. “Where was her mother, her aunt? That’s what’s so sad. She’s like any twenty-something you see on the street: lace camisole, espadrilles, jeans.”
Her ears pricked up. “Jeans? What kind?”
“Hmmm . . . Lick, some designer brand my wife wears.”
“That’s all?”
He riffled through the pages of the preliminary report. “It says here that she wore earrings . . . beaded. No, my mistake. No beads on the earrings, sorry. Blue beads were embroidered on the jean cuffs.”
Like the ones on the denim jacket? Aimée’s pulse raced. There it was, the link she had sensed.
“Look, Aimée, I’ve done you a favor, and I haven’t asked you any questions, but what’s this woman to you?”
“A baby was left in my courtyard. Someone called me and begged me to protect her.” She pulled the plastic bag from her backpack. “Look, Serge, this denim jacket is embroidered with blue beads; it was wrapped around the baby.”
Serge stared. “Et alors?”
She controlled her apprehension. “What if these beads match the ones on the cuffs of the jeans?”
Serge’s beeper, pinned to the lapel of his white lab coat, vibrated.
“Can’t you check, Serge?”
“Aimée, you’re asking me to wade in deep water for a few beads,” he said. “And I’m late.”
“If the beads don’t match, no one will be the wiser,” she said. “But if they do . . .”
“Why would I stick my neck out?”
Feelings in her bones didn’t count with the flics. She couldn’t involve them until she knew positively that the beads were identical.
“Ballet tickets, Serge. Opening night. Isn’t your anniversary coming up?”
His wife loved ballet.
“Eh? You could get tickets?”
With enough francs and her friend at the FNAC ticket office, she could. She nodded. Across the foyer she saw the mec she’d noticed in the viewing cubicle mounting the stairs, then entering the restroom. She had to talk to him.
“You’ll inform me of the autopsy findings when you get them, Serge?”
He took the plastic bag with the denim jacket from her. Nodded.
“Of course, you’ll babysit the twins,” Serge said. “We’d make an evening of it, dinner . . .”
“Don’t press your luck, Serge.”
BELOW THE STERN gaze of Pasteur, Aimée tapped her fingers on the blue plastic chair. She’d checked with Michou; still no word. She was waiting to question the mec, who she could have sworn had recognized the corpse. The woman might have been the baby’s mother.
She’d formulated her questions by the time he emerged from the restroom.
Typical student attire: Levi’s, hooded sweatshirt. He had a thin face with a jutting jaw, sharp nose, and sallow complexion. A crowd of blue-uniformed flics paused in the foyer, blocking her view, and by the time they’d moved on, he was gone.
Hurry, she had to hurry, to catch him before he reached the Metro or hopped on a bus and disappeared.
She saw him, already half a block ahead of her, crossing Pont Morland, and she ran to catch up with him. Below her, the anchored houseboats creaked, shifting in the rising Seine. She finally drew level with him, gravel crunching under her heels, two blocks further on, on Quai Henri IV.
“Excuse me, I need to speak with you,” Aimée said, gasping for breath.
His eyes darted behind her as he fussed with the zipper of his hooded jacket. Eyes that were red rimmed and bloodshot. Had he been crying?
“Why?”
“I’m sorry but in the morgue—”
“Who are you?” He shifted his feet.
Young, no more than twenty, she thought. “Aimée Leduc,” she introduced herself. “Did you know . . . the victim?”
“Know her?” He averted his face. “My cousin’s missing, but that wasn’t her.” His agitation was noticeable as he zipped and unzipped his sweatshirt. There was a slight compression of syllables at the ends of his words. Was he a foreign student perhaps?
“You saw the article in the paper. Are you sure this woman wasn’t your cousin?”
He backed away. “Yes.”
She handed him her card.
“‘Leduc Detective, Computer Security?’” He stiffened. “What do you want?”
“Didn’t you recognize her?”
“As I told the flic, I didn’t know her.”
“Non, you said your cousin was missing.”
And she even doubted that. She wished he’d stand still. A bundle of nerves, this one.
“Please, I’m not a flic, but I need to establish her identity. It’s vital.”
He broke into a run. She sprinted and finally caught him by his sleeve. Ahead, an old man scattered bread crumbs to a flock of seagulls by the bouquiniste, the old secondhand bookseller’s stand.
“Maybe I can help you,” she said, panting and clutching his arm.
“A computer detective can help me with what?”
He pulled away, knocking her shoulder bag to the ground. The papers in the Regnault file spilled onto the pavement.
“Sorry. Look, I’m in a hurry.” He bent down, picked them up, and then stared at the pages he held, before slowly handing them back to her.
She caught his sleeve before he could take off again.
“If you’re illegal, that’s not my business. But if you know her identity, that is my business.”
Instead of showing fear at the intimation that he might be an illegal immigrant, he bristled. “I’m an émigré; I have been granted political asylum. But the manipulations of ministries and business here are just as bad as it was under the Communists. You call this a corporate economy, but it’s all the same.”
What was with the political jargon? Though he had a point.
“Tell me her name, tell me where she lived.”
A bus crossed Pont de Sully, slowing into the bustop on their right.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
How could she reach this stubborn kid? She wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake him. Two nearby matrons holding shopping bags paused in their conversation and moved away from her.
She stepped closer to him, so close she could see small beads of perspiration on his brow.
“You work for them! I’ve seen the names in your papers,” he accused her. And he took off, jumping into the rear door of the bus before it took off.
Them? Regnault? What was going on? He knew something. But she couldn’t chase him on the bus. She had another idea. He wouldn’t get away so easily next time.
BACK AT THE MORGUE, Aimée spoke to an older man with a handlebar mustache who sat at the reception center. Behind him were shelves of files and a barred cage in which a bright green parrot perched. Since the morgue’s reception floor wasn’t a sterile environment and due to Ravic’s seniority he managed to bring his feathered pride and joy to work. “Ça va, Ravic?” she asked. “Pirandello got any new languages under his beak?”
Ravic grinned. “Esperanto—he took to it like his mother tongue.”
His claw-footed wonder had won prizes, even talked on an RTL radio pet show once.
“Do me a favor, Ravic. Let me see the visitors’ log.”
“Eh? Didn’t you sign in?”
Of course she had; she’d had to show her ID. The student would have done so, too.
She leaned closer over the chipped Formica counter. “It’s embarrassing. I just saw an old friend, but I’ve forgotten his name.”
Ravic, one of her father’s old poker crowd, smoothed his mustache between his thumb and forefinger. “Regulations, Mademoiselle Aimée. I can’t.”
“Of course, I understand. But you could just slide the book across.” She flashed a big smile, lowering her voice. “We’re meeting for coffee and I feel stupid.”
“A chip off the old bl
ock, like they say,” he said. “I’d like to, eh, but I’m sorry.”
Ravic had aged little in the five years since she’d last seen him. She wondered how her father would have looked, had he lived.
“If I let you, everyone else and their mothers will want to . . .”
“Ravic, no one has to know.” She grinned, wishing he’d relent. A line had formed behind her; someone cleared his throat. “Just turn the log a little more to the right so I can read his name. That’s all.”
He glanced over his shoulder. “For old time’s sake then.” Ravic slid the register in front of her. There was a blue scrawl under her signature but it was undecipherable.
She thought hard. She’d shown her ID; he would have had to do so as well.
“Ravic, it’s not legible,” she said. “Remember anything from his ID?”
“A student card, that’s all,” he said. “I’m sorry, Mademoiselle Aimée.” He raised his hand to beckon to the person in line behind her.
She had to persist, couldn’t leave without something. Ravic had been a formidable poker player; he always remembered all the cards that had been played.
“You need to see an ID with an address,” she said. “Remember anything from this one?”
He scratched his cheek. “Polish?” Then he shook his head. “I’m not sure. So many people came today.”
“That looks like an L at the beginning and it ends with an I,” she persisted.
“Maybe it’s a Polish name,” he said.
She took a guess. “Lives near the Sorbonne or he used to.”
“That’s right. Rue d’Ulm.” He grinned. “My wife’s father worked on rue d’Ulm, I remembered thinking that.”
She pointed to the scrawl. “Look again, Ravic. Does anything jog your memory?”
He shrugged. She heard shuffling. A long line stretched behind her now. He didn’t remember. Disappointed, she turned as an irritated woman edged in front of her.
“Aha . . . that actress,” Ravic said. “Sounded like that actress.”
She paused and looked back. “Which actress . . . You said it sounded Polish.”
“Rhymes with Nastassja Kinski.”
“You mean Linski?”
He winked. “Got it in one.”
KRZYSZTOF LINSKI WAS the name she’d found listed in the phone directory at an address on rue d’Ulm. He lived in a sand-colored stone building near the Panthéon, a few doors down from the Institut Curie and the Lebanese Maronite Church. The ground floor contained a bar/pub with posters advertising heavy metal and rockadelic nights. Bordering the nearby Sorbonne, this was a student area, the Latin Quarter. The building had no elevator but there was a flight of wide red-carpeted stairs with oiled wood banisters, leading to apartments containing lawyers’ and psychiatrists’ offices. The staircase narrowed to bare wooden steps as it reached the sixth floor, which held a row of chambres de bonnes, former maids’ rooms.
Typical cramped student accommodations. Hovels was more descriptive, she thought. A shared hall toilet; the odor of mildew coming from the dirt-ingrained corners. Peeling floral wallpaper illuminated by a grime-encrusted skylight that let in only a sliver of light. Dust motes drifted in it and she sneezed. The chords of an amplified electric guitar reverberated from down the hall.
She knocked on the third door. No answer. Knocked again.
“Krzysztof Linski?”
The guitar drowned out her voice, her knocks. Either Krzysztof hadn’t returned yet or he was ignoring the raps on his door. His attitude had become belligerent; she doubted he’d welcome her. She’d have to convince him to trust her, open up.
The guitar stopped, someone swore. She heard footsteps below, slapping on the stairs.
A red-haired, pale-faced tall scarecrow of a mec edged past her and inserted a key into the lock on Krzysztof’s door.
She thought fast. “So you’re Krzy’s roommate.”
He nodded.
“I’m supposed to meet him.”
He shrugged.
Unsociable, and no conversationalist. Or was he mute?
“Mind if I wait?”
“Suit yourself.” He actually spoke as he started to shut the door.
“Inside?” She didn’t wait for an answer.
Once she was inside she realized the problem. The attic room wasn’t much bigger than a closet. Two people standing in it would touch shoulders. She hoped the mec wasn’t about to change his clothes.
Orange crates with slats for shelves supported piled textbooks and a Polish-French dictionary. On one side of the tiny room there was a sleeping bag crumpled on a Japanese straw futon. The mec stooped; still his shoulders touched the sloping wood ceiling. She could imagine him sticking his head out the skylight, like a giraffe, to breathe. A pair of black denims and a tuxedo under plastic wrapping hung from the rafters. Perhaps Krzysztof moonlighted as a waiter at fancy restaurants or catered affairs as many students did. She filed that thought away for later.
The mec set his backpack on the floor, sat down cross-legged, and pulled his damp sweater over his head, then started on his T-shirt.
“Sorry, I’ll turn around . . .”
In answer, he pulled closed a little curtain suspended on shower hooks—like those in the sleeper compartments of trains—for privacy. His welcoming skills rivaled his conversation for charm.
The small corkboard on the opposite wall, pinned thickly with photos, ticket stubs and fliers, caught her attention. She looked closer. Photos of a demonstration, Krzysztof carrying the banner of MondeFocus, groups of young people handing out leaflets clustered around a pillar that she recalled; it belonged to the Panthéon.
No one she recognized. Another dead end. She glanced at her Tintin watch.
“Any idea when Krzysztof will get back?”
“Not anytime soon,” the mec said from behind the curtain.
“Why’s that?”
“His stuff’s gone. Guess he forgot to tell you.”
“But the tuxedo?”
“He hated that tuxedo.”
Done a runner. Lost him. Again.
As she was about to stand up, she saw several MondeFocus pamphlets stuck halfway into a dictionary. She’d take one, get the address, and ask around for him there. She coughed to cover her actions as she slid a leaflet out.
A photo fell to the floor. A group shot of student types sitting in front of the Panthéon. And then her heart skipped a beat. She saw the dead girl—straw blonde hair, wearing jeans and a denim jacket, a serious expression on her face. Sitting next to her were Krzysztof, two other women, and two men. But the blonde girl didn’t look pregnant.
The curtain was pulled back. “Jealous type, aren’t you?” he said.
She thought quickly. When caught, brazen it out. And pointed to the blonde girl. “Then she is his girlfriend!”
“What else?”
“For me, eh, it’s casual.” She shrugged. “I met Krzysztof two days ago,” she said, improvising. “But he owes me two hundred francs. Do you know his friends or where he hangs out?”
“You know him a day longer than me.” He shrugged. “No clue.”
This one was really helpful!
All the way down the stairs she thought of Krzysztof’s look of recognition as he saw the dead woman’s face, his reaction to the pages of the Regnault files that he’d picked up and scanned, his parting shot, “You work for them.” It all tied together . . . but she didn’t know how.
She caught the bus, sat in the rear, and turned the photo over. “Orla, Nelie, me, Brigitte, MondeFocus antinuke” was the inscription, but there was no date.
So Orla was the blonde woman in the morgue, his girlfriend, and both were involved with MondeFocus. Strange that he’d refused to identify his girlfriend. Then she wondered if the dead woman might have been the mother of his child. And why would Orla have telephoned her for help and entrusted her infant to Aimée? But now that she had the MondeFocus address, she had someplace to start.
Aimée debated c
alling the flics and dropping the information she had so far into their hands. But she knew what they’d say. No proof this Orla was the mother or Krzysztof, the father. Why wouldn’t the dead woman have left the baby with Kryzsztof if he was the father? She decided to postpone making any decision until she received the results of the autopsy. First she had to go shopping.
SHE STARED AT the Monoprix aisle crowded with diapers, formula, teething rings, bibs, nonirritant soap . . . endless. How could tiny babies require all this? Every package bore labels color coded to age and weight. Endless varieties of formula, including soy and lactose-free. A large display printed with symptoms and arrows cross-referenced photos of homeopathic herbs for diaper rash, floral remedies for colic, a veritable rainbow of products for ages zero to five; it resembled the duty-free brochure on an Air France 747. Her mind balked; she was overwhelmed. Unless it was for shoes, shopping wasn’t her forte.
Did it have to be this complicated, did she need to take courses? In Madagascar, women squatted by thatched huts, letting their diaperless babies do their business in the white sand, then rubbed them with coconut oil. No vast crowded Monoprix aisle for them.
Her hand brushed a booklet, Using a Pacifier or Not . . . the Hidden Traumas. Here was a new world, new worries . . . pacifier trauma?
She had to get a grip; it couldn’t be that difficult. She looked for the newborns section, figuring the baby weighed less than five kilos, like her laptop. But she stood devastated by the array of baby wipes, scented and unscented; shampoos; vitamins. She would need hours to read the labels, to compare and match them to the baby’s skin condition and digestive disposition. She didn’t have that kind of time; she had work to do—a body that had been found in the Seine to identify, her security programming assignment to complete . . .
She needed a method to bring order out of confusion.
Within three minutes she’d located several women with infants. One held a baby in a carrier across her chest, its pink knit cap with rabbit ears poking up, who looked the right size. She trailed the woman to the baby aisle. Every time the woman selected an item from the shelf and put it in her cart, Aimée followed suit.
