Murder in Belleville (2000)

by Cara Black

  “Sebastien, why don’t you warm up with some Calvados?” she said. “Or help yourself to vin rouge.”

  “And you?”

  “Calvados, please, I need a toasty think-drink.”

  He poured them both large shots of the amber apple brandy. Tongues of light danced from the dim chandelier.

  “Salut.” They toasted each other.

  Computer applications clicked across her computer screen, a greenish light haloing her terminal.

  “I’ve got a long night ahead of me,” she said.

  He grinned, glancing at his watch. “I hope I do too.”

  Early Friday Morning

  DAWN CREPT WITH TINY footsteps over the Seine. Aimee watched rose slashes paint the cloudless sky. Below her window the black iron boat moorings on quai d’Anjou glistened, beaded by last night’s rain.

  She remembered her father, in his old bathrobe, making coffee on mornings like these. He’d throw on a raincoat, nip around the corner to the boulangerie, and bring home warm, buttery croissants. They’d stand at the counter, the Seine glittering below them, and talk. Talk about a case, the price of dry cleaning, or a film she’d seen—all the small threads of life’s fabric, a fabric she’d lost when her father died.

  Tired but jubilant, she’d matched 80 percent of the gray paper. Enough to know these were Sylvie’s bank statements from an account at Credit Lyonnais. Finding a pattern to her withdrawals, her spending, and her habits would take time. Miles Davis stirred on her lap.

  “Alors, furball,” she said. “Time for your walk and for me to clear my head.”

  She hit Save, then Print. Her printer whirred into action. For backup she copied it to her hard drive and made a disk for Rend.

  She slipped Miles Davis’s tartan plaid sweater over his head. In the hallway she grabbed her faux-leopard fur and laced her red hightops. Forget the fashion police this early in the morning.

  With her laptop in her bag, she and Miles Davis scampered over the grooves worn in the marble steps. By the time they reached the quai, the sky had lightened to a faint lick of blue.

  YELLOW-AND-BLUE PROVENCAL curtains softened the stark lines of the stainless-steel terminals in this Internet cafe.

  “Fifty francs per hour,” said the lavender-scented woman owner to Aimee, setting down her cigarette.

  According to Rene, for hide-and-seek on the Web the best location was a cafe ceehair, cybercafe She got to work with Miles Davis settled by her feet, sipping a bowl of water. After logging onto their computer, she accessed a university address in Teheran, from there she logged onto another address in Azerbaijan and worked her way, via Helsinki, to Barclays Bank in London.

  As Edwina Pedley, a Barclays Bank alias she’d used before, Aimee accessed the Credit Lyonnais accounts page in Paris. She typed in Sylvie’s account number. The screen immediately came up “Password Required.” Aimee sat back, feeling a glimmer of hope. Now, she knew, as she’d suspected from the bank receipts she’d pieced together, Sylvie banked on-line.

  Guessing and trying passwords would be futile since banks generally tripped an alarm after four attempts, thereby freezing entry to the account. Aimee sipped her grand cafe crime and downloaded a password encryption program from the Web. By the time the program decrypted Sylvie’s password, she’d finished her second croissant.

  Beur was Sylvie’s password.

  She remembered in the street slang verlan, beur inversed became erabe, or what was pronounced as “Arabe.”

  Puzzled, Aimee hit Save.

  Arabe.

  Aimee accessed Sylvie’s account. She saw that Sylvie’s withdrawals and an active carte bancaire hadn’t disturbed the five-figure balance in her account.

  More puzzled, Aimee sat back in the cafe chair. A woman with a fondness for Prada shoes and Mikimoto pearls should have a healthier bank balance. More like in the six-figure category.

  Around her early-morning cafe” life buzzed: the whine of the espresso machine steaming milk, the delivery man heaving plastic crates of bottles onto the tiled cafe floor.

  She signed out of the decryption program, printed out Sylvie’s Credit Lyonnais balance, then paid for her coffee. What had Montaigne said … then she remembered: “So it happens as it does with cages: the birds without try desperately to get in, and those within try desperately to get out.”

  The access word beur stuck in her mind. She also had to figure out why Sylvie Coudray had used that apartment building. The Fichier still hadn’t ID’d Sylvie or discovered her primary residence, but she’d have to ask Rene to try again.

  SHE STOPPED at her neighborhood bibliotheque and began checking the database for beur. Every entry that wasn’t culinary came up cross-referenced with Algeria. She searched microfiche files for articles on Algeria. An avalanche of current articles existed.

  Overwhelmed, she sat back and patted Miles Davis on her lap. Could the current events in some way have affected Sylvie?

  She refined her search, narrowing articles to recent ones, and found an editorial from he Monde dated the week before:

  Algeria plunged into violence in early 1992 as the regime—headed by the military—cancelled a general election in which the FIS, a fundamentalist group, took a commanding lead. The FIS was banned shortly after the polls were scrapped. Much of the fighting was fueled by ‘les Barbes,’ evangelical preachers, so named for their long beards and adherence to Islamic traditions. The FIS countryside support and the agitation of returned ‘beurs’ from France with patriotic leanings stimulated the continuing unstable political climate.

  Aimee thought of les Barbes whom she’d seen in front of a mosque in Belleville. Engrossed, she read further:

  More than 50,000 people—rebels, civilians, and members of government forces—have been killed, according to Western estimates. The military, plagued with budgetary problems since few countries venture to buy oil and fill the coffers of an unstable country, has wrested control only to lose it periodically. Without the arms, unnamed government sources say, the military’s ability to enforce order is in jeopardy. Massacres of villagers in the countryside remain commonplace.

  She leaned back in the creaking library chair, chewed a paper clip, and thought. She knew the reputation of the network of North African immigrants, the Maghrebins, in Belleville.

  Ruthless.

  She remembered an incident where a pute and her pimp strayed out of their territory into a housing project off rue de Belleville. They hadn’t lived to regret it.

  She wondered what connection Sylvie, a minister’s mistress acting as Eugenie in Belleville, could have. What had Anais said? Sylvie was “sorry the situation had escalated.” A chilling thought occurred to her. Instead of an illicit affair, could Sylvie have been referring to something else? Did it have to do with the Arabes who’d hung around her place… the hand of Fat’ma … had she upset someone in the Maghreb system … had they come after her?

  Aimee hunched forward, chewed the paper clip some more. She also wished she’d found the laptop.

  These thoughts were a leap, but worth exploring.

  Outside the wind whipped the budding branches as they thumped the rain-spattered glass.

  A Maghrebin would know. Not that any one of them would tell her.

  Another thought bothered her: Why hadn’t Anais returned her calls?

  She pulled out the paper and punched in the phone number 01 43 76 89, written above the smudged name Youssef.

  “May I talk with Youssef?”

  Someone shouted in Arabic and hung up.

  Friday Midday

  BACK IN HER APARTMENT, Aimee’s cell phone trilled in her pocket. If it was Yves, she’d let him know how busy she’d been.

  “Allo, oui?” she said, in what she hoped came off as hurried yet casual.

  “Leduc,” Morbier said. “How about lunch?”

  “Lunch?” she asked, spilling Miles Davis’s milk on her counter.

  “Cafe Kouris,” Morbier said. She could hear klaxons beeping in the dis
tance.

  “Where’s that?”

  “Near the market on boulevard de Belleville,” he said. “By the fromagerie and beside the plastic shoes.”

  Why was he so friendly all of a sudden?

  He hung up before she could ask him what time.

  “RENE, ANY luck on the Fichier findings about Sylvie aka Eugenie?” she’d written on a Post-it, stuck it on the floppy disk with Sylvie’s bank discoveries, and left it in Rene’s mailbox. In his hallway mirror, she swiped Chanel red across her lips, brushed on mascara, and pinched her cheeks.

  She took the Metro to meet Morbier. On the way she thought about Sylvie’s bank account, the expensive Prada shoes, and the Lake Biwa pearl. None of them seemed to fit with a lifestyle in a condemned building, the Maghrebins, the hand of Fat’ma, or Hamid’s group. But her instinct told her that they meshed. How and why were the questions.

  Aimee blinked in the sunlight as she emerged from the Metro. The sun wavered, then retreated behind a steel gray cloud shrouding Belleville.

  Friday, market day, found a densely packed strip of stands on the long pedestrian islands, stretching from Menilmontant through Couronnes to Belleville Metro. Fruit and vegetable sellers and poissoniers carrying fish from Marseilles and Brittany mingled with merchants selling children’s clothing, pocketknives, ornate Egyptian teapots, and hair ornaments.

  The unmistakable squawking of chickens sounded in her ear. Aromas of fresh mint wafted. Hawkers cried “Viens! viens!” thrusting samples of glistening Spanish melons, a thimble of pistachios, or fifty-franc Piaget lookalikes at shoppers.

  The humanity varied as much as the products, Aimee thought. Nearby was the home of the French Communist Party. She passed bas Belleville, once housing the proletariat francais—a working-class bastion—now home to crumbling serrurerie metal factories, partially bricked up. Their graffitied walls were surrounded by teenagers pushing strollers speaking a patois of Arabic and verlan.

  A certain charm remained, and Aimee liked that. The charm of an old world, when life moved slower and residents had time for each other, spending most of their lives in the quartier. Narrow winding passages, cafes of former epoques patinaed by grime, hidden courtyards, and overgrown gardens of small dilapidated villas tucked on the hillsides existed until the dreaded permis de demolir brought the wrecking ball. The steep staircases, joining one street to another, resembled those of Montmartre, their scrolled metal balustrades worn and chipped in places.

  Ahead of her, Aimee marveled at how two piano movers carried a piano up five steep and narrow floors to an apartment hardly wider than two Citroens nose to nose.

  She wondered how Sylvie/Eugenie fit into the melange that swelled the boulevard: the Tunisian Jewish bakery where a line formed while old women who ran the nearby hammam conversed with one and all from their curbside cafe tables, the occasional roller blader weaving in and out of the crowd, the Asian men unloading garments from their sliding-door Renault vans, the Syrian butchers with their white coats stained bloody pink, the tall ebony Senegalese man in flowing white tunic, crocheted prayer hat, and blue jogging shoes with a sport bag filled with date branches, a well-coiffed French matron tugging a wheeled shopping cart, a short one-eyed Arabe man who hawked shopping bags hanging from his arms, and the watchful men in front of the Abou Bakr Mosque near the Metro.

  By the time she reached that part of the boulevard, the vegetable stands were being dismantled and crates repacked. Honey drenched cigar-shaped pastries beckoned her from a Lebanese stall but she resisted. The stench of ordure rose from the cobbles.

  Aimee heard the whine of Arabe music—the same tune from before. She shuddered: She’d heard it right before the explosion.

  She scanned the corner. The trouble with car bombs was that they were impossible to see. She willed herself to relax; it wouldn’t make sense for an Arabe to bomb an Arabe quartier. For a moment she felt ashamed; she was thinking like a flic.

  MORBIER SAT at a cafe table under a white awning where rue des Maronites met the boulevard. Parked motorscooters lined the curb.

  He sat smoking, fingers wrapped around a glass of vin rouge, his posture unnaturally erect due to the body brace. Normally his favorite pose was leaning back in a swivel chair at the commissariat, feet up on his cluttered desk and barking orders on the phone while chain-smoking. He still chain-smoked, and his socks were mismatched, but the suspenders were slack. He’d lost weight, she noticed. For once his wool pants stayed up on his belly without help. Sitting there he guarded his cigarette from the wind, cupping it in his palm like a street mec.

  “What’s so important, Morbier?” she said, sitting down.

  “Besides keeping me company?” he asked.

  She eyed the carafe of wine and extra glass.

  He poured her a glass, raised his, and said, “Salut.”

  Gesturing toward the boulevard, he said, “I hate to think that this is what retirees do—take a walk, go to market, prepare the midday meal, visit the girlfriend, stop in the square for an aperitif. Next day, they do it all over again. The golden years!” His mouth turned down in disgust.

  For a career flic like Morbier, this kind of leisure was like a slow death. Wasn’t he too old for le demon de midi—the midlife crisis?

  “Forget about retiring,” she said. He’d recited this litany whenever he’d been injured or on leave and didn’t know what to do with himself.

  “Morbier, soon as the brace comes off you’ll be back in the saddle.” She looked at her Tintin watch, which had stopped. “I’m curious about why you invited me to lunch.”

  “All in good time,” he said, sipping his wine. “Since you’re here, notice that mec over there?”

  She followed his arm and saw a short middle-aged man with mouse brown hair and prominent nose in a blue work coat. He stood in front of a tabac.

  “You mean the man in the crowd,” she said. “The one I’d never notice or think twice about?”

  He shrugged. “We call them Pierres, these market thieves. He’s been shadowing his mark for a good while now, weaving, ducking, and helping load the poor sucker’s van. Of course that was after he’d eyed the cashbox under the driver’s seat.”

  “What are you going to do about it, Morbier?”

  Morbier’s eyes lit up.

  “Leduc, you’re going to go and whisper in the mec’s ear how my eyesight is perfect and it’s trained on him.”

  She shrugged. “If it puts you in a good mood and makes you feel useful, it will be my plaisir” she said and stood. She knew this was Morbier’s form of manipulation—he’d make her “work” for any information he shared with her. It was just his way.

  And she wanted to humor him. There was something unsettling about seeing him in the brace and alone with a carafe at the table.

  A hoarse voice bellowed, “Get your burgundy onions!” and a crisp wind scattered leaves in a whirlwind dance. She had the sad thought that the only person Morbier cared about—Mouna—was gone now. And her father too …

  She offered “Pierre” a cigarette. His eyes narrowed, but he accepted. She took him aside and gestured across the way toward Morbier, who winked and smiled. Aimee bent down and whispered in Pierre’s ear, trying not to laugh at the look of alarm spreading on his face. His eyes widened, then he tipped his beret to Morbier and disappeared around the corner.

  “Pierre’s a quick learner,” she said to Morbier on her return.

  “They usually are,” Morbier said, lighting a cigarette from a glowing butt in the Ricard ashtray.

  She motioned to the waiter. “Un cafe, s’il vous plait.”

  “Red wine’s better for your heart,” he said, pouring himself another glass. “I’ve already bailed you out, Leduc.”

  Her shoulders slumped. Was he just going to warn her off? Had she wasted her time?

  “Look, Morbier—”

  “Didn’t I?”

  “And I appreciate that.” Without skipping a beat she kept talking. “You called me.”

 
; There was a long pause.

  “You want to know about the plastique,” he said. “So do I.”

  She kept her surprise in check with an effort. How did Morbier know?

  “That’s news to me, Morbier,” she said. “I stay away from the stuff. It gives me nightmares.”

  Another pause.

  “You, of all people,” she said, “should know that.”

  “My vertebrae are out of whack, Leduc,” Morbier said finally. “Every single one.”

  Disconcerted, she’d never heard him admit to a physical problem. Why was he ignoring what she said? He knew her fear of explosives. Had he gone soft, dragging her here on a ruse, needing some sympathy?

  “I am sorry,” she said and meant it. “How can I help?”

  “Help me catch a big fish,” he said.

  Her eyes widened.

  “Tiens, Leduc, you asked if you could help.”

  “What’s going on?” she asked. Was he going to feed her a tidbit to whet her appetite, then warn her off again?

  “Leduc, you’re sniffing around,” he said. “It’s not my business if a minister’s wife hired you—but if you want to nail the plastique source, lead me to it.”

  She dropped her spoon, splashing a bit of coffee on the table. She was aware of the waiter wiping the table with a damp cloth and a muttered tsfc.

  “Now I have your full attention, I see,” Morbier said.

  A warning vibrated in her.

  “My God, Morbier, I’m not undercover,” she said. “The fundamentalists are fanatics—why ask me?”

  “Who said anything about fundamentalists?” He didn’t wait for her reply. “Call me psychic,” he said, lighting a cigarette. “But you’ve been out of kilter since your moped ride.”

  She couldn’t meet Morbier’s eyes. Her heart beat quicker. He didn’t know everything—but he knew she was involved.

  “Humor an old man, eh?” he said. “Think of it this way: You might feel better about the past if you deal with this.”

  “Forget it,” she said, throwing ten francs on the table.